Beverley Yuen: Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” begins with a philosophical debate between the narrator, Jorge Borges, and Bioy Casares about how one would go about creating “a first-person novel whose narrator would omit or distort things and engage in all sorts of contradictions, so that a few of the book’s readers – a very few – might divine the horrifying or banal truth” (Borges, p. 68). Though seemingly irrelevant to the story once focus has shifted to the mirrors epigram and encyclopedia involving Uqbar, this quick conversational debate epitomizes the idea of magical realism and foreshadows the significance of this reading, revealing how, like magical realism, things will become omitted, distorted, or contradicted in order to reveal new and possibly horrifying truths. Soon after, Borges is fascinated by the eerie monstrosity of mirrors to which Casares responds with an incarnation of an Uqbarian thought: “mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind” (Borges, p. 68). Being intrigued by this unique idea, Borges attempts to learn more about the Uqbar and the saying; however, this becomes a difficult task as the article about Uqbar that Casares previously referred to does not exist, at least, it did not at first. While looking in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia for the article about Uqbar, the two men could not find it in either Volume XLVI or XLVII, which were the two volumes that should have contained the article according to alphabetical order. In Buenos Aires, Casares found the article oddly in Volume XLVI of another copy of the encyclopedia. Both of the books used were The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia and both volumes read were Volume XLVI, and yet only the second copy contained the article on Uqbar. This strange occurrence perhaps introduces the ubiquitous magical realist binary of real and imaginary, intertwining it with the philosophical issue of existence. The missing pages about Uqbar existed in the second copy but oddly not the first. Should this question the existence of the country of Uqbar? Is it real? Is it imaginary? Did the reality and perception of these two men alter in order to feed their hunt, their curiosity, their quest to find this possibly imagined world? The full epigram is revealed to be: “for one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are hateful because they multiply and proclaim it” (Borges, p. 69). This idea questions not the existence of Uqbar but the existence of our world, the world we know as real, proposing that our world is nothing but an illusion, and mirrors and fatherhood only reinforce this deception as they, for generations, continue to define it as such. Mirrors reflect this false impression from person to person, while fathers pass their delusions onto their children, making us question whether or not the world we live in is real or actually an illusion labeled as “real” as a result of other people telling us so. Do we exist or are we a part of someone else’s illusion or fantasy?

While reading through the article about Uqbar, Borges can across “one memorable feature: the article said that the literature of Uqbar was a literature of fantasy, and that its epic and legends never referred to reality but rather to the two imaginary realms of Mle’Khnas and Tlon…” (Borges, p. 70). This statement further envelops this real/imaginary concept as it contradicts the previous epigram, stating that Uqbar might be a fantasy as well; a part of the imaginary realm or world of Tlon. Presented first as an imaginary world, Tlon slowly evolves into reality. Borges discovers a book of his father’s friend titled, The First Encyclopedia of Tlon. Vol XL. Hlaer to Jangr, which is “a vast and systematic fragment of the entire history of an unknown planet, with its architectures and its playing cards, the horror of its mythologies and the murmur of it tongues, its emperors and its seas, its minerals and its birds and fishes, its algebra and its fire, its theological and metaphysical controversies” (Borges, p. 71). This one book, filled with the inner workings of the land of Tlon, provides a systematic shape of Tlon, which makes it seem all the more real. “At first it was thought that Tlon was a mere chaos, an irresponsible act of imaginative license; today we know it is a cosmos, and that the innermost laws that govern it have been formulated, however provisionally so” (Borges. P. 72).

An important feature within the Tlon society is this binary of definite and indefinite within its language, its philosophies, and its thought processes. In contrast to the world we live in where everything is definite, the people of Tlon believe that the world is indefinite in which everything flows freely. “The world is not an amalgam of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts – the world is successive, temporal, but not spatial” (Borges, p. 73), meaning the world is not a place made up of many singular objects put together but continual indefinite acts of people and objects. This exemplifies the language of Tlon, where there are no nouns but verb/adverb phrases; where there are no verbs but adjectives strung together to form nouns and describe objects. In both instances, the focus is not just on one but on many, flowing and acting together. “There are things composed of two terms, one visual and the other auditory: the color of the rising sun and the distant caw of a bird. There are things composed of many: the sun and water against the swimmer’s breast, the vague shimmering pink one sees when one’s eyes are closed, the sensation of being swept along by a river” (Borges, p. 73). These processes involved in language with combining verbs and objects are “virtually infinite” (Borges, p. 73) and there are “almost countless numbers of [systems of thoughts]” (Borges, p. 74). Even the philosophies of Tlon are filled with obscure ideas revolving around definite and indefinite. “One of the schools of philosophy on Tlon goes as far as to deny the existence of time; it argues that the present is undefined and indefinite, the future has no reality except as present hope, and the past has no reality except as present recollection” (Borges, p. 74), showing that even time is indefinite and that the past and future are only unlimited extensions of the present. The result of the Tlon philosophy of materialism suggests that “there is but a single subject; that indivisible subject is every being in the universe, and the beings of the universe are the organs and masks of the deity” (Borges, p. 76), essentially meaning that even a single subject is a universal infinite, manifesting in many different forms or representing many other beings. Even the arithmetic of Tlon holds “the notion of indefinite numbers” (Borges, p. 76). “The people of Tlon are taught that the act of counting modifies the amount counted, turning indefinites into definite” (Borges, p. 76). This idea of indefinites sets the world of Tlon apart from all the other worlds.

As the reading progresses and then concludes, the readers are taken back to this concept of real and imaginary when this world of Tlon transcends reality, becoming more than an imagined planet created by the intellectual society of Orbis Tertius. The intellectual men of Orbis Tertius created this secret society in order to prove they could create their own world. One of them “did not believe in God, yet he wanted to prove to the nonexistence God that mortals could conceive and shape a world” (Borges, p. 79). Tlon illustrates a kind of secular/religious binary in which the men of Orbis Tertius prove that even mere mortals can be on the same level as the so-called God, transcending the cemented idea that God is the creator of worlds; of life; of people. Although Tlon began as a quest to prove the power of men against God, Borges discovers this imaginary world has become more than ever expected. Among the belongings of a princess laid a compass, where “the letters on its dial belonged to one of the alphabets of Tlon” (Borges, p. 79-80). In another instance, Borges noticed an odd metal cone that was unlike anything he had ever witnessed before. “[He] held it for a few minutes in the palm of [his] hands; [he recalled] that its weight was unbearable, and that even after someone took it from [him], the sensation of terrible heaviness endured” (Borges, p. 80), and not long after he realized that “those small, incredibly heavy cones (made of metal not of this world) are an image of the deity in certain Tlonian religions” (Borges, p. 80). A few objects of the Tlon world are slowly penetrating the imaginary line into reality. Eventually the story comes to a point where “already Tlon’s ‘primitive language’ has filtered into our schools; already the teaching of Tlon’s harmonious history has obliterated the history that governed [many] childhood[s]” (Borges, p. 81), and soon “French and English and mere Spanish will disappear from the earth. The world will be Tlon” (Borges, p. 81).