"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a short story by the 20th-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published in the Argentine journal Sur, May 1940. The "postscript" dated 1947 is intended to be anachronistic, set seven years in the future. The first English-language translation of the story, by James E. Irby, was published in 1961 in New World Writing N° 18. In 1962 it was included in the short story collection Labyrinths (New Directions), the first collection of Borges' works published in English.

Told in a first-person narrative, the story focuses on the author's discovery of the mysterious and possibly fictional country of Uqbar and its legend of Tlön, a mythical world whose inhabitants believe a form of subjective idealism, denying the reality of objects and nouns, as well as Orbis Tertius, the secret organization that created both fictional locations. Relatively long for Borges (approximately 5,600 words), the story is a work of speculative fiction.

The story alludes to many leading intellectual figures both in Argentina and in the world at large, and takes up a number of themes more typical of a novel of ideas. Most of the ideas engaged are in the areas of metaphysics, language, epistemology, and literary criticism.

Summary

The reportage unfolds as a first-person narrative and contains many references (see below) to real people, locations, literary works and philosophical concepts, besides some fictional or ambiguous ones. It is divided into two parts and a postscript. Events and facts are revealed roughly in the order that the narrator becomes aware of them or their relevance. The timing of events in Borges's story is approximately from 1935 to 1947; the plot concerns events going back as far as the early 17th century and culminating in the postscript, set in 1947.

Part one

Borges and his friend and collaborator, Adolfo Bioy Casares, are developing their next book in a country house near Buenos Aires, in 1940. In an observation, Bioy quotes that "mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men", a saying by a heresiarch of a land named Uqbar. Borges, impressed with the "memorable" sentence, asks for its source. Bioy replies that he read it in the chapter about Uqbar of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, "a literal if inadequate reprint" of the 1902 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica. They check the book and are unable to find the said chapter, to Bioy's surprise. The two then search for the name 'Uqbar' in numerous atlases and other encyclopedias, trying different alternative spellings, to no avail.

The following day, Bioy tells Borges he has found the chapter they were looking for in a different reprint of the same encyclopedia. The chapter, although brief and full of names unfamiliar to Borges and Bioy, entices their curiosity. It describes Uqbar as an obscure region, located in Iraq or Asia Minor, with an all-fantastic literature taking place in the mythical worlds of Mlejnas and Tlön. Afterwards, they keep searching for Uqbar in other sources, but are unable to find any mention.

Part two

The engineer Herbert Ashe, an English friend of Borges' father with a peculiar interest in duodecimal systems, dies of an aneurysm rupture. Borges inherits a packet containing a book, which was left by Ashe in a pub. That book is revealed to be the eleventh volume of an English-language encyclopedia entirely devoted to Tlön, one of the worlds in which Uqbar's legends are set. The book contains two oval blue stamps with the words Orbis Tertius inscribed in blue. From that point, as Borges reads the tome, part two comprehensively describes and discusses Tlön's culture, history, languages and philosophy.

The people of the imaginary Tlön hold an extreme form of Berkeley's subjective idealism, denying the reality of the material world. Their world is understood "not as a concurrence of objects in space, but as a heterogeneous series of independent acts." One of the imagined language families of Tlön lacks nouns, being centered instead in impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic adverbial affixes. Borges lists a Tlönic equivalent of "The moon rose above the water": hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, meaning literally "upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned." (Andrew Hurley, one of Borges' translators, wrote a fiction in which he says that the words "axaxaxas mlö" "can only be pronounced as the author's cruel, mocking laughter".) In another language family of Tlön, "the basic unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective", which in combinations of two or more forms nouns: "moon" becomes "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky". The new Orbis Tertius, composed of three hundred collaborators, proceeds to conclude the final volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. An explanation of Uqbar is not explicitly given in the story.

By 1942, Tlönian objects began to inexplicably appear in the real world. One of the first instances in which this occurs is when Princess Faucigny Lucinge received, via mail, a vibrating compass with a Tlönian scripture. Another instance is witnessed by Borges himself: a drunk man, shortly after dying, dropped coins among which a small but extremely heavy shining metal cone appeared. It is suggested that these occurrences may have been forgeries, but yet products of a secret science and technology.

By 1944, all forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön have been discovered and published in a library in Memphis, Tennessee. The material becomes accessible worldwide and immensely influential on Earth's culture, science and languages. By the time Borges concludes the story, presumably in 1947, the world is gradually becoming Tlön. Borges then turns to an obsession of his own: a translation of Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial into Spanish.

Major themes

Philosophical themes

Through the vehicle of fantasy or speculative fiction, this story playfully explores several philosophical questions and themes. These include, above all, an effort by Borges to imagine a world (Tlön) where the 18th century philosophical subjective idealism of George Berkeley is viewed as common sense and "the doctrine of materialism" is considered a heresy, a scandal, and a paradox. Through describing the languages of Tlön, the story also plays with the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (also called "linguistic relativism")—the epistemological question of how language influences what thoughts are possible. The story also contains several metaphors for the way ideas influence reality. This last theme is first explored cleverly, by way of describing physical objects being willed into existence by the force of imagination, but later turns darker, as fascination with the idea of Tlön begins to distract people from paying adequate attention to the reality of Earth.

Much of the story engages with the philosophical idealism of George Berkeley, who questioned whether it is possible to say that a thing exists if it is not being perceived. (Berkeley, a philosopher and, later, a bishop in the Protestant Church of Ireland, resolved that question to his own satisfaction by saying that the omnipresent perception of God ensures that objects continue to exist outside of personal or human perception.) Berkeley's philosophy privileges perceptions over any notion of the "thing in itself." Immanuel Kant accused Berkeley of going so far as to deny objective reality.

In the imagined world of Tlön, an exaggerated Berkeleyan idealism without God passes for common sense. The Tlönian recognizes perceptions as primary and denies the existence of any underlying reality. At the end of the main portion of the story, immediately before the postscript, Borges stretches this toward its logical breaking point by imagining that, "Occasionally a few birds, a horse perhaps, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater" by continuing to perceive it. Besides commenting on Berkeley's philosophy, this and other aspects of Borges's story can be taken as a commentary on the ability of ideas to influence reality. For example, in Tlön there are objects known as hrönir This worldview does not merely "bracket off" objective reality, but also parcels it separately into all its successive moments. Even the continuity of the individual self is open to question.

When Borges writes "The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth or even an approximation to it: they are after a kind of amazement. They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature," he can be seen either as anticipating the extreme relativism that underlies some postmodernism or simply as taking a swipe at those who take metaphysics too seriously.

Literary themes

In the context of the imagined world of Tlön, Borges describes a school of literary criticism that arbitrarily assumes that two works are by the same person and, based on that, deduces things about the imagined author. This is similar to the ending of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", in which Borges's narrator suggests that a new perspective can be opened by treating a book as though it were written by a different author.

The story also plays with the theme of the love of books in general, and of encyclopedias and atlases in particular—books that are each themselves, in some sense, a world.

Like many of Borges's works, the story challenges the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. It mentions several quite real historical human beings (himself, his friend Bioy Casares, Thomas de Quincey, et al.) but often attributes fictional aspects to them; the story also contains many fictional characters and others whose factuality may be open to question.

Other themes

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" also engages a number of other related themes. The story begins and ends with issues of reflection, replication, and reproduction—both perfect and imperfect—and the related issue of the power of language and ideas to make or remake the world.

At the start of the story, we have an "unnerving" and "grotesque" mirror reflecting the room, a "literal if inadequate" (and presumably plagiarized) reproduction of the Encyclopædia Britannica, an apt misquotation by Bioy Casares, and the issue of whether one should be able to trust whether the various copies of a single book will have the same content. At the end Borges is working on a "tentative translation" of an English-language work into Spanish, while the power of the ideas of "a scattered dynasty of solitaries" remakes the world in the image of Tlön.

Along the way we have stone mirrors; the idea of reconstructing an entire encyclopedia of an imaginary world based on a single volume; the analogy of that encyclopedia to a "cosmos" governed by "strict laws"; hrönir, duplicates of objects called into existence by ignorance or hope, and where "those of the eleventh degree have a purity of form that the originals do not possess";

As a result, simply finding a reference to a person or place from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in a context seemingly unrelated to Borges's story is not enough to be confident that the person or place is real. See, for example, the discussion below of the character Silas Haslam.

There in fact exists an Anglo-American Encyclopedia, which is a plagiarism, differently paginated, of the tenth edition of the Encyclopedia, and in which the 46th volume is TOT-UPS, ending on p. 917 with Upsala, and followed by Ural–Altaic in the next volume; Uqbar would fall in between. In the 11th edition of the Britannica, Borges's favorite, there is an article in between these on "Ur"; which may, in some sense, therefore be Uqbar. Different articles in the 11th edition mention that Ur, as the name of a city, means simply "the city", and that Ur is also the aurochs, or the evil god of the Mandaeans. Borges may be punning on the sense of "primaeval" here with his repeated use of Ursprache, or on the story's own definition of "ur" in one of Tlön's languages as "a thing produced by suggestion, an object elicited by hope".

Levels of reality

There are several levels of reality (or unreality) in the story:

  • Most (but not all) of the people mentioned in the story are real, but the events in which they are involved are mostly fictional, as are some of the works attributed to them. This is discussed in detail in the section below on real and fictional people.
  • The main portion of the story is a fiction set in a naturalistic world; in the postscript, magical elements have entered the narrator's world. The main portion could certainly be seen as a false document; the postscript may dissolve the illusion.
  • Mlejnas, and Tlön as it is first introduced, are fictional from the point of view of Uqbar. In the course of the story, Tlön becomes more and more "real": first it moves from being a fiction of Uqbar to being a fiction of the narrator's own naturalistic world, then it begins (first as idea and then physically) taking over that world, to the point of finally threatening to annihilate normal reality.

Real and fictional places

thumb|300px|Possible location of Uqbar

Uqbar in the story is doubly fictional: even within the world of the story it turns out to be a fictional place. The fictitious entry described in the story furnishes deliberately meager indications of Uqbar's location: "Of the fourteen names which figured in the geographical part, we only recognized three – Khorasan, Armenia, Erzerum – interpolated in the text in an ambiguous way." Armenia and Erzerum lie in the eastern highlands of Asia Minor (in and near modern Turkey, perhaps corresponding to Urartu), while Khorasan is in northeastern Iran, though there is also a Horasan in eastern Turkey. However, it was said to have cited an equally nonexistent German-titled book – Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen über das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien ("Legible and valuable observations about the land of Uqbar in Asia Minor") – whose title claims unambiguously that Uqbar was in Asia Minor.

The boundaries of Uqbar were described using equally nonexistent reference points; for instance, "the lowlands of Tsai Khaldun and the Axa Delta marked the southern frontier". This would suggest that the rivers of Borges' Uqbar should rise in highlands to the north; in fact, the mountainous highlands of eastern Turkey are where not one but two Zab Rivers rise, the Great Zab and the Lesser Zab. They run a couple of hundred miles south into the Tigris.

The only points of Uqbar's history mentioned relate to religion, literature, and craft. It was described as the home of a noted heresiarch, and the scene of religious persecutions directed against the orthodox in the thirteenth century; fleeing the latter, its orthodox believers built obelisks in their southerly place of exile, and made mirrors – seen by the heresiarch as abominable – of stone. Crucially for the story, Uqbar's "epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön."

Although the culture of Uqbar described by Borges is fictional, there are two real places with similar names. These are:

  1. The medieval city of ‘Ukbarâ on the left bank of the Tigris between Samarra and Baghdad in what is now Iraq. This city was home to the great Islamic grammarian, philologist, and religious scholar Al-‘Ukbarî (c. 1143–1219) – who was blind, like Borges's father and like Borges himself was later to become – and to two notable early Jewish/Karaite "heresiarchs" (see above), leaders of Karaite movements opposed to Anan ben David, Ishmael al-Ukbari and Meshwi al-Ukbari, mentioned in the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1901–1906.
  2. ‘Uqbâr in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria; the minarets of the latter's area might relate to the "obelisks" of Uqbar in the story.

Tsai Khaldun is undoubtedly a tribute to the great historian Ibn Khaldun, who lived in Andalusia for a while; his history focuses on North Africa and was probably a major source for Borges. Additionally, "tsai" most likely comes from Turkish "çay" which is an uncommon word for river.

Real and fictional people

Listed here in order of their appearance in the story:

  • Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)—Author and first person narrator of the story.
  • Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999)—non-fictional, Argentinian fiction-writer, a friend and frequent collaborator of Borges.
  • An unnamed "heresiarch of Uqbar" is credited for the statement that "mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of men". This echoes Borges' own summary of the teachings of Al-Muqanna (d. ), a Persian prophet regarded by his orthodox Muslim contemporaries as a heresiarch. In the previously published short story collection A Universal History of Infamy, Borges wrote the following as part of a summary of his message: "The world we live in is a mistake, a clumsy parody. Mirrors and fatherhood, because they multiply and confirm the parody, are abominations."
  • Justus Perthes (1749–1816)—non-fictional, 18th century founder of a German publishing firm that bears his name; undoubtedly, the story is accurate in implying the firm's atlases do not mention Uqbar.
  • Carl Ritter (1779–1859)—one of the founders of modern geography. In the story, Borges notes the absence of any mention of Uqbar in Ritter's cartographic index Erdkunde. (In the story, only the surname is given.) In the story, his catalogues include Silas Haslam's History of the Land Called Uqbar.
  • Silas Haslam—Entirely fictional, but based on Borges' English ancestors. "Haslam" was Borges's paternal grandmother's maiden name.
  • Johannes Valentinus Andreä (1586–1654)—German theologian, and the real author of Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459 (Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz), one of the three founding works of the Rosicrucians, but not of the Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen über das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien (Readable and worthwhile remarks about the country of Ukkbar in Asia Minor) attributed to him in this story.
  • Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859)—best known for his autobiographical works Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Lake Reminiscences.
  • Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677)—Dutch / Portuguese Jewish philosopher, referred to in the story by his surname, and accurately paraphrased: "Spinoza attributes to his inexhaustible divinity the attributes of extension and of thought."
  • Similarly, the story's use of the German-language phrase Philosophie des Als Ob refers to philosopher Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933), whose book of this name (first edition: 1911) puts forward the notion that some human concepts are simply useful fictions.
  • The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno (490–430 BC) is accurately alluded to in the story for his paradoxes denying the possibility of motion, based on the indivisibility of time.
  • The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), as with Meinong, is acknowledged, in this case for his Parerga und Paralipomena, another member of the Martín Fierro group. At the beginning of the postscript to the story, a letter from Gunnar Erfjord clears up the mystery of the "benevolent secret society" that devised Tlön. He is presumably also the "Norwegian in Rio Grande do Sul" mentioned early in the story.

Influence on later works

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" has inspired a number of real-world projects:

  • "Prisoners of Uqbaristan", a short story by Chris Nakashima-Brown in which Borges himself appears, is heavily influenced by the philosophy of Tlön.
  • Codex Seraphinianus, a mock encyclopedia by Luigi Serafini, describes a surreal world entirely in drawings, an invented alphabet, and a fictional language.
  • Ummo, a hoax of more than one thousand pages of pictures and text in letter form, describes an extraterrestrial civilization and its contact with Earth. UFO researcher Jacques Vallée has specifically likened Ummo to "Tlön, Uqbar ...".
  • The Borges story directly inspired Grant Morrison's creation of the cancerous and fictional city of Orqwith in the DC Comics series Doom Patrol. In the comic book storyline, a group of intellectuals uses a tactile, braille-like language to create a black book describing the city of Orqwith. As people on different planets encounter the book, it infects their worlds, overcoming them in the way a malignant tumor would. Thus different sections of the planets are sliced off, only to be replaced with Orqwith.
  • Tlön is featured in the Marvel Comics series Secret Avengers by Ales Kot and Michael Walsh, as a chaotic dimension the villain M.O.D.O.K. plans to bring monstrosities from to destroy the Earth. A chain of people that created a communal mindspace based on negative emotions is used to open a gate to Tlön. The plan, ultimately carried by M.O.D.O.K.'s assistant Snapper, is thwarted by the Secret Avengers and M.O.D.O.K. himself. In the end of the storyline, one of the characters, a sentient bomb named Vladimir, is transported to Tlön, where he meets an unseen entity he initially identifies as "Jorg--" before being interrupted by the entity himself. The story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is explicitly referenced by characters that investigated Tlön.
  • In Ted Chiang's story The Lifecycle of Software Objects, one of the virtual worlds mentioned is called Orbis Tertius.

Several other projects have names derived from the story:

  • Axaxaxas mlö is the title of a fictional book mentioned in another Borges short story, "The Library of Babel".
  • hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, taken from the example of the Tlön language described in the story, is the title of a chamber music piece for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano by Colombian-American composer Diego Vega, which won the 2004 Colombian National Prize for Music Composition, awarded by the Colombian Ministry of Culture.
  • Orbis Tertius is the magazine of thinking and analysis (Revista de pensamiento y análisis) of the Universidad Camilo José Cela.
  • Tlön Uqbar, named after the Borges story, is a joint project of French industrial bands Internal Fusion and Désaccord Majeur. Their album La Bola Perdida was released in 1999 by the Dutch label Staalplaat.
  • Uqbar, named in honor of Borges's story, is a browser/reader for Project Gutenberg etexts, in pre-alpha .
  • Uqbar is the name of an instance of the encyclopedia-building game Lexicon, based on Borges's work.
  • Uqbar is the name of a planet in the game Mass Effect.
  • Tlon is the name of the company developing computing platform Urbit.

WG Sebald refers to Tlön and its philosophy repeatedly in his book The Rings of Saturn.

Trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær released the album Khmer on ECM in 1998 which includes the track "Tlön".

Notes

References

  • Rodríguez Monegal, Emir, and Alastair Reid (eds.). Borges, a Reader. New York: Dutton, 1981. .
  • Beatriz Sarlo's Borges: a Writer on the Edge provides an analysis of the story and a detailed reconstruction of its (often implicit) plot. However, Sarlo wrongly claims (in Chapter 5) that the historical figure of John Wilkins is an "invented character of one of Borges['s] essays".
  • Guía de lectura de Ficciones, de Jorge Luis Borges, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil. The list of real and fictional people above draws heavily on this Spanish-language reader's guide. (Accessed 26 November 2006.)
  • Andrew Hurley, "The Zahir and I", a fictional lecture delivered at the "Borges, Time, and the Millennium" conference, New York City, December 13, 1999. (Accessed 4 July 2006.)
  • Bernard Quaritch company website. (Accessed 4 July 2006.)
  • La alquimia del verbo: 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' de J.L. Borges y la Sociedad de la Rosa-Cruz. Article by Santiago Juan Navarro about Borges' story and the Rosicrucians. Published in Hispanófila 120 (1997): 67–80.

Bibliography

  • The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, Vol. VI "Mahk-Mid" (Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1991), pp. 790b-791a on Al-‘Ukbarî; Vol. X "T-U", page 435a for ‘Uqbâr in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria.
  • Ibn Khordâdhbeh, edited and translated into French by M. J. de Goeje (Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1889, in their series Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum) on the place ‘Ukbarâ.
  • The Jewish Encyclopedia article "Okbara and Okbarites" is simply a cross reference to their article "Meshwi al-‘Ukbari".
  • Isidore Singer and Isaac Broydé, Jewish Encyclopedia article on "Meshwi al-‘Ukbari"
  • "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is mentioned in a comparison of fictional languages from science-fiction stories at The Darmok Dictionary.