Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
" Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius " of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges is a news. It was published for the first time by the Argentinian newspaper On in May 1940. The postface gone back to 1947 in fact is post-dated by the author.
In this text, an article of encyclopedia about a mysterious country called Uqbar delivers a first trace of the existence of Orbis Tertius, a massive conspiracy of intellectuals to create an imaginary world: Tlön. It is one of the longest news of Jorge Luis Borges, with approximately 5.600 words. One of the main themes of " Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is that the ideas appear itself in the real-world; the history is often regarded as a parabola of the idealism of Berkeley - and to a certain extent, like a protest against the Totalitarisme.
" Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" with the structure of a police fiction being held in a world become insane. The short form used by the author does not prevent it referring to many intellectual figures of foreground, and from treating many topics generally approached in the novel of ideas, in particular about the language, of epistemology and literary criticism.
__TOC Note: all the references of pagination refer to the work published at folio.
Summary
After the discovery of the article " Uqbar" of l
The history is written with the first nobody by the double of Jorge Luis Borges in the fiction. The facts concerning the world of Tlön are revealed as the narrator takes note of it. The new one was written in 1940, and all the narration is done on this date (except for the postface which is wrongfully gone back to 1947), but the events which arrive to the narrator unroll roughly of 1935 to 1947; finally, the company aiming at creating Tlön starts at the beginning of the XVIIe century, to be completed in 1947.
At the beginning of the history, Uqbar seems to be a moved back area of Iraq or minor Asia. During a conversation with Bioy Casares, Borges learns that hérésiarque (founder of a Hérésie) of Uqbar had declared " that infamous mirrors and the copulation, since they multiplied the number of the hommes". Impressed by this sentence, Borges requires to know the source of it, and Bioy Casares returns it to l
To determine if Uqbar or not really exists, the narrator must pass by a bibliographical labyrinth. In its search, it refers in particular to an assertion present in the encyclopedic article on Uqbar: " The literature of Uqbar never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary areas of Mlajnas and Tlön".
A friend of the father of Borges, Herbert Ashe, gives him invaluable indications about an other delivers: the eleventh volume of an encyclopedia devoted to Tlön. In two places, volume is marked " of an oval plug and blue carrying the inscription Orbis Tertius ".
At this stage, the history of Tlön, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius exceeds the circle of the friends and knowledge close to Borges; academics as Nestor Ibarra wonder whether volume in question were written separately or if it implies necessarily the existence of a complete encyclopedia. The protagonists come from there to suppose that there were an attempt at total rebuilding of the history, culture and languages of the world of Tlön.
Developed topics
Philosophical topics
Through the Fiction and the fantastic one, this news explores several philosophical topics. Borges tries in particular to imagine a world, Tlön, in which the idealism of Berkeley is regarded as self-explanatory, whereas the doctrines of the materialism are seen like a heresy, a scandal and a paradox. By describing the languages of Tlön, the history also exploits the epistemological question following: how the language can have an influence on the thoughts? The news develops also several metaphors on the way in which the ideas influence reality. This last topic is initially explored astutely by describing so desired objects which they materialized by the force of imagination, but darkens then when fascination for Tlön starts to distract people the attention paid to terrestrial reality.The major part of the new draft of the idealism of George Berkeley, probably more known to be itself asked whether a tree falling into the forest without witness produces a sound (Berkeley, a bishop Anglican, satisfied answer which it made, informant that there is a sound, since God is touujours to hear it there). The philosophy of Berkeley privileges perceptions on any other notion of the thing in oneself. Kant showed Berkeley to so go far he refused all Objectivité.
In the imaginary world of Tlön, an excessive idealism berkeleyen and without God seems to go from oneself. The approach tlönienne regards perceptions as essential and refuses the existence of a subjacent reality. At the end of the principal part of the news, immediately before the postscript, Borges this reasoning to its logical point of rupture pushes by imagining that “Sometimes, of the birds, a horse, saved the ruins of an amphitheater” (p. 26) while continuing to perceive them. In addition to the opinion concerning the philosophy of Berkeley, this aspect, among others, can be seen as a comment on the capacity which have the ideas to influence reality. For example, in Tlön, of the objects called to hrönir (p. 24) can appear when two person distinct discover “the same” object lost in two different places.
Borges imagines Tlönen working on its side to solve the problem of the Solipsisme by holding the following reasoning: if all the people are actually aspects of only one being, then perhaps that the universe is coherent only because one individual sees it in a coherent way. This is indeed an approximate vision of God berkeleyen: perhaps it is not omnipotent, but it centralizes all perceptions which actually take place.
This news is not the only work in which Borges treats idealism of Berkeley, and with the Phénoménologie. Phenomenology, theory philosophical of the 20th century, privileges the psychic phenomena on the physical phenomena and puts between paranthèses objective reality as being impossible to know. In the world of Tlön, as in the test of Borges New refutation of time (1947), it is mentioned a “negation of space, time, and ego individual”, as comment on it Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reed in their notes with Borges, a reader . This prospect does not drive back simply objective reality, but also parcels out it in its successive moments. Even the continuity of ego is called in question.
When Borges writes that “the metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek the truth nor even probability: they seek the astonishment. They judge that the Métaphysique is a branch of fantastic littéraure. ” (p. 20), one can see it is as a very early anticipator of the Relativisme which underlines some Post-modernism, is as a snook with those which take metaphysics with too much serious.
Literary topics
The news also anticipates certain way of many concept-keys developed later in works of Vladimir Nabokov. With one moment, Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares discuss “realization novel with first nobody, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and would fall into various contradictions” (p. 11), which can be seen like a precedent with the technique employed by Nabokov in Lolita (1955), and even more certainly in pale Feu (1962). In addition, terrestrial obsession for Tlön will be a reference for the central concept of Nabokov in Ada or the heat (1969), in which the narrator pareillement is pareillement obsessed by Terra. In the two books, the characters of the told world become obsessed by an imaginary world (Tlön/Terra) so much so that they are interested by this fiction than by their own lives. The parallel is not absolute: in the news of Borges, the narrator proceeds primarily of our world, and Tlön is a fiction which is introduced gradually in him; in the novel of Nabokov, the world of the narrator is universe parallel and Terra is our ground, perceived wrongly like a place of almost uniform peaces and happiness.In the context of the imaginary world of Tlön, Borges describes a school of Critique arts person which claims arbitrarily that two works are same author, and being based on this assertion, in deduced from the characteristics on the imagined author.
New draft also of the topic of the love in the books, the Encyclopedia S and the atlas in particular - books which are to some extent worlds in themselves.
As much of other works of Borges, the history pushes back the limits separating the fiction from reality. It mentions several real people (Borges itself, its friend Bioy Casares, Thomas de Quincey, etc), but often equips them with fictitious attributes; and the news also contains several fictitious characters, and others for which one can put the question.
Other topics
Although that can seem sufficient for a news, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius also leans on other topics. The history starts and finishes on the problems of the reflection, duplication and the reproduction - supplements as well as incomplete - and the neighbouring problem which is the capacity of the language and the ideas on the modelling of the world.
At the beginning of the history, we are in the presence of a mirror which offers a disconcerting and absurd vision to us world, a version “literal, but also tiresome” (and probably plagiarized) of the Encyclopædia Britannica , a quotation approximate but adapted on behalf of Bioy Casares, and the question of knowing if one can suppose that the various copies of the same book have the same contents (p. 13). At the end, Borges works with a “undecided translation” of a work of Browne in Spanish, while the capacity of the ideas of “a dispersed dynasty of recluses” remakes the world with the image of Tlön (p. 30).
We cross throughout the news, successively: stone mirrors (p. 13), the idea to rebuild an imaginary world founded on only one book (p. 14), the analogy between this encyclopedia and a “cosmos” controlled by “intimate laws” (p. 17), a vision of the world into which the usual concepts of thing are rejected, but where “the ideal objects, convened and dissolved in one moment, according to the poetic needs abound” (p. 19), the universe designed like “the text that produced a god subordinate to get along with a demon” or as “these cryptographies in which all the symbols do not have the same value” (p. 21), of the to hrönir , counterparts of objects called to exist by ignorance or the hope, and at which one finds in “those of eleventh purity of lines that the originals do not have” (p. 25), and the will of Ezra Buckley “to show with non-existent God that the mortals are able to design a world” (p. 27).
Reality and fiction in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Real and fictional characters
The characters of the news appear in this list, by order of appearance in the account:
-
Adolfo Bioy Casares is a real character, Argentinian, friendly writer and collaborator of Borges to many recoveries.
- Smerdis ; it is refers to " Smerdis impostor the magicien". After the death of truth Smerdis (wire of Cyrus Large the, emperor Persian, a magus of the name of Gaumata had managed to usurp the throne while being made pass for him during several months.
- Justus Perthes, which lived at the XVIIIe century, is the founder of a German publisher which bears its name; in fact, as that is specified in the news, the atlases which it published do not mention Uqbar.
- Carl Ritter was one of the founders of the contemporary geography. Borges raises that Uqbar is absent from cartographic index Erdkunde established by Ritter.
- Bernard Quaritch was a bookseller who lived at the XIXe century in London. Its bookstore always exists and bears its name. In the account, its catalogs mention the History off the Land called Uqbar of Sils Haslam.
- Silas Haslam is most probably a character of fiction. Several elements tend to show it: " Haslam" was the name of young girl of the grandmother of Borges, and a note informs us that Haslam is the author of a General History off Labyrinths - but the labyrinths are a recurrent theme of the work of Borges.
- Johann Valentine Andreae is a German theologist, author of Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459 ( chemical Mariage of the Christian Rosicrucian brotherhood ), one of the three works founders of the movement rosicrucian, but which written forever the Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen über das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien ( Remarques of importance about the country of Ukkbar, in minor Asia ) that Borges allots to him in the news.
- Thomas de Quincey, known for its autobiographical account, the Confessions of an eater of opium , quoted in the news because it would have frequently referred to Johann Valentine Andreae.
- Carlos Mastronardi, Argentinian writer, member of the group Martín Fierro (also called Florida group), near of Borges. In the news, he discovers a specimen of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia which does not mention Uqbar.
- Herbert Ashe, undoubtedly a character of fiction, inspired by one or the other of the English friends of the father of Borges.
- Nestor Ibarra, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle has all three really existed, and is described whereas they discuss off discovered volume XI of the First Encyclopedia Tlön . Ibarra is an Argentinian poet (who in particular translated Borges into French); Estrada is the author, inter alia, of Muerte there transfiguración of Martín Fierro ( Mort and transfiguration of Martín Fierro ), an important bearing work of critiquel on the major work of the Argentinian literature at the 19th century. Drieu La Rochelle was one of the rare foreign contributors to the Argentinian review On , in which Borges wrote regularly.
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