Everything about Tl N Uqbar Orbis Tertius totally explained
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 was published in
1961.
In the story, an encyclopedia article about a mysterious country called
Uqbar is the first indication of
Orbis Tertius, a massive conspiracy of intellectuals to imagine (and thereby create) a world:
Tlön. Relatively long for Borges (approximately 5,600 words), the story is a work of
speculative fiction. One of the major themes of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is that ideas ultimately manifest themselves in the physical world and the story is generally viewed as a
parabolic discussion of
Berkeleian idealism — and to some degree as a protest against
totalitarianism.
"Tlön, Uqbar..." has the structure of a
detective fiction set in a world going mad. Although the story is quite short, it makes allusions 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
language,
epistemology, and
literary criticism.
Plot summary
» In the following summary, statements refer to the world within the story, not to the real world. Consequently, historical personages may have actions attributed to them that they didn't take in the real world. Their real-world aspects are discussed in the following section.
In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", an encyclopedia article about a mysterious country called
Uqbar is the first indication of
Orbis Tertius, a massive conspiracy of intellectuals to imagine (and thereby create) a world:
Tlön. In the course of the story, the narrator encounters increasingly substantive artifacts of Orbis Tertius and of Tlön; by the end of the story,
Earth is becoming Tlön.
The story unfolds as a first-person narrative by a fictive version of Borges himself. Events and facts are revealed roughly in the order that the narrator becomes aware of them, or becomes aware of their relevance. The bulk of the story is from the point of view of 1940, the year the story was written and published. A postscript is from the point of view of the same narrator, anachronistically writing in 1947. The timing of events in Borges's first-person story is approximately from 1935 to 1947; the plot concerns events going back as far as the early 17th century and culminating in 1947.
In the story, Uqbar initially appears to be an obscure region of
Iraq or of
Asia Minor. In casual conversation with Borges,
Bioy Casares recalls that a heresiarch (leader of a
heretical sect) in Uqbar had declared that "mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men." Borges, impressed with the "memorable" sentence, asks for its source. Bioy Casares refers him to an encyclopedia article on Uqbar in the
Anglo-American Cyclopedia, described as "a literal if inadequate reprint of the
Encyclopædia Britannica of 1902." It emerges that Uqbar is mentioned only in the closing pages of a single volume of the
Anglo-American Cyclopedia, and that the pages describing Uqbar appear in some copies of the work, but not in others.
Borges, the narrator, is led through a bibliographical maze attempting to verify the reality or unreality of Uqbar. He is particularly drawn to a statement in the encyclopedia article that "…the literature of Uqbar… never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön."
A brief and naturalistic aside about Borges's father's friend Herbert Ashe leads to the story of Borges inheriting a much more substantial related artifact (one of several increasingly substantial and surprising artifacts that are to appear in the course of the story): the apparent eleventh volume of an encyclopedia devoted to Tlön. The volume has, in two places, "a blue oval stamp with the inscription:
Orbis Tertius."
At this point, the story of Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius expands beyond the circle of Borges and his immediate friends and acquaintances, as scholars such as
Néstor Ibarra discuss whether this volume could have been written in isolation or whether it necessarily implies the existence of a complete encyclopedia about Tlön. The proposal emerges to attempt to reconstruct the entire
history,
culture, and even
languages of that world.
This leads to an extended discussion of the languages, the philosophy and, in particular, the
epistemology of Tlön, which forms the central focus of the story. Appropriately, the people of the multiply imaginary Tlön — a fictional construct within a fictional story — hold an extreme form of
Berkeleian idealism, denying the reality of the 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 languages of Tlön lacks
nouns. Its central units are "impersonal
verbs qualified by monosyllabic
suffixes or
prefixes which have the force of
adverbs." Borges offers us, for what would be our own "The moon rose above the water" a Tlönic equivalent:
hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, meaning literally "Upward behind the onstreaming it mooned." (Andrew Hurley, one of Borges's 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 of Tlön, "the basic unit isn't the verb, but the monosyllabic
adjective," which, in combinations of two or more, are noun-forming: "moon" becomes "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky." conceived in the early 17th century, and numbering Berkeley among its members. (Although the society is part of Borges's fiction, Berkeley and other named members are real historical figures.) The narrator learns that as the society's work began, it became clear that a single generation wasn't sufficient to articulate the entire country of Uqbar. Each master therefore agreed to elect a disciple who would carry on his work and also perpetuate this hereditary arrangement. However, there was no further trace of this society until, two centuries later, one of its disciples was the fictional Ezra Buckley. Buckley was an eccentric
Memphis, Tennessee millionaire who scoffed at the modest scale of the sect's undertaking. He proposed instead the invention of a planet, Tlön, with certain provisos: that the project be kept secret, that an
encyclopedia of the imaginary planet of Tlön be written, and that the whole scheme "have no truck with that impostor
Jesus Christ" Material reality may be subject to reshaping by ideas, but apparently it isn't entirely without resistance).
While the fictional Borges and his academic colleagues pursue their interesting speculations about the epistemology, language, and literature of Tlön, the rest of the world gradually learns about the project and begins to adopt the Tlönic culture, an extreme case of ideas affecting reality. In the epilogue set in 1947, Earth is in the process of becoming Tlön. The fictional Borges is appalled by this turn of events, an element in the story that critics
Emir Rodríguez Monegal and
Alastair Reid argue is to be read as a metaphor for the
totalitarianism already sweeping across Europe at the time of the story's writing. Their remark seems only a small extrapolation from a passage toward the end of the story:
» "Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoever which gave the appearance of order —
dialectical materialism,
anti-Semitism,
Nazism — was enough to fascinate men. Why not fall under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet? Useless to reply that reality, too is ordered."
As the story ends, Borges is focused on an obsession of his own: a translation of Sir
Thomas Browne's
Urn Burial into Spanish. Arguably it's no more important than Tlön, but it's at least of this world.
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
idealism of
George Berkeley is viewed as
common sense and "the doctrine of materialism" is considered a heresy, a scandal, and a paradox ["Tlön...",p.117]. Through describing the languages of Tlön, the story also plays with 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 returns 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, perhaps best known for questioning whether a tree falling unobserved in the forest makes a sound. (Berkeley, an
Anglican bishop, resolved that question to his own satisfaction by saying that there's a sound because
God is always there to hear it.) 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 Berkeleian idealism
without God passes for common sense. The Tlönian view 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' 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 doesn't 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're 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
The story also anticipates, in miniature, several key formal ideas that were later played out in the works of
Vladimir Nabokov. At one point Borges has
Adolfo Bioy Casares propose to "writ[e] a
novel in the first person, using a narrator who omitted or corrupted what happened and who ran into various contradictions," which arguably anticipates the strategy of Nabokov's
Lolita (1955) and precisely anticipates the strategy of his
Pale Fire (1962). At the same time, Earth's obsession with Tlön in Borges's story anticipates the central conceit of Nabokov's (1969), where the narrator's world has a similar obsession with Terra. In both works, the people of the narrator's world become obsessed with an imaginary world (Tlön/Terra) to the point of being more interested in that fiction than in their own lives. The parallel isn't perfect: in Borges's story, the narrator's world is essentially our own world, and Tlön is a fiction that gradually intrudes upon it; in Nabokov's novel, the narrator's world is a
parallel world and Terra is our Earth, misperceived as a place of almost uniform peace and happiness.
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.
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
While this might seem quite enough material for any short story, "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've an "unnerving" and "grotesque" mirror reflecting the room, a "literal if inadequate" (and presumably plagiarized) reproduction of the
Encyclopedia 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've stone mirrors;
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 don't possess";
A fictional entry about Uqbar stood unchallenged for some time on Wikipedia.
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 isn't 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 Encyclopaedia, 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's 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.
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're 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 dissolves the illusion.
The land of Uqbar is fictional from the point of view of the world of the story. The supposed Anglo-American Cyclopaedia article on Uqbar proves, within the story, to be a fictitious entry.
Mlejnas, and Tlön as it's 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
Although the culture of Uqbar described by Borges is fictional, there are two real places with similar names. These are:
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 (ca. 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.
‘Uqbâr in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria; the minarets of the latter's area might relate to the "obelisks" of Uqbar in the story.
See Uqbar for further details and for references.
While there's no equally clear referent for Tlön, the unusual consonant cluster tl- at the beginning of a word does exist in the Berber language (for example in the place name Tlemcen) and in Maghrebi Arabic. Berber is spoken in parts of Algeria (including the M'zab valley), home to one of the referents for Uqbar. One possible source for Tlön is the Polish name for the element oxygen: tlen, which is derived from the verb 'tlić' = to smoulder, to glow.
"Orbis Tertius", Latin for "third world", "third circle", or "third territory" doesn't appear to be a geographic reference, nor does there seem to be any relation to the third circle of Dante's hell, which was reserved for gluttons. One possible interpretation is that it's a reference to the Earth's orbit around the Sun, which is third after Mercury and Venus.
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, "khaldun" is Mongolian for "mountain", while "tsai" in Chinese is "cabbage" or "green and leafy".
Other places named in the story — Khorasan, Armenia, and Erzerum in the Middle East, and various locations in Europe and the Americas — are real. The Axa Delta, mentioned in the same context as Tsai Khaldun, appears to be fictional.
Real and fictional people
Listed here in order of their appearance in the story:
Adolfo Bioy Casares — non-fictional, Argentine fiction-writer, a friend and frequent collaborator of Borges.
Smerdis — The story refers in passing to "the impostor, Smerdis the Magician". In the story, his catalogues include Silas Haslam's History of the Land Called Uqbar.
Silas Haslam — Believed to be entirely fictional. "Haslam" was Borges's maternal grandmother's maiden name. However, Haslam's "General History of Labyrinths" has been cited twice in reputable, peer-reviewed scientific literature: in "Complexity of two-dimensional patterns", by Kristian Lindgren, Christopher Moore, and Mats Nordahl (published in the June 1998 edition of the Journal of Statistical Physics) and "Order parameter equations for front transitions: Nonuniformly curved fronts," by A. Hagberg and E. Meron (published in the November 15, 1998 issue of Physica D).
Johannes Valentinus Andreä — 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 — best known for his autobiographical works Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Lake Reminiscences.
Baruch Spinoza — 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 presumably refers to philosopher Hans Vaihinger, 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 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, 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.
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 as of 2006.
Uqbar is the name of an instance of the encyclopedia-building game Lexicon, based on Borges's work.
Inspiration for 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 so-far undeciphered 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 the "Tlön, Uqbar ..." project, thus suggesting that the short story inspired the perpetrator(s).
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: A Misty Story (also spelled without the umlaut) is a 1999 Dutch point-and-click adventure game in which Tlön is an alternate realm. Due to a bug, the player can never get to Tlön, so the game is impossible to complete. In this way, the Tlön of the game resembles the Tlön of Borges in that neither really exists. Also telling is the allegation that the lead designer's favorite writer is Borges.Further Information
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