John Hicks: Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges shows his journey into discovering life from a different perspective. Borges and his friend Bioy Casares began to read Volume XLVI of the Anglo- American Cyclopaedia. On Page 69 it says, “For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism,” meaning the explanation for everything the universe and the world may actually be flawed. Borges wants people to understand what he has read in Uqbar and relate it to the world we live in, not just looking at everything from such a narrow perspective. On page 70 Borges says, “…Uqbar was a literature of fantasy, and that its epics and legends never referred to reality but rather to the two imaginary realms of Mle’khans and Tlon…” Uqbar describes this world where thought processes are different and the world isn’t seen as reality but rather two lands of imaginary places.

Borges’ father was good friends with a man by the name of Herbert Ashe who was “afflicted with unreality” (Page 70). When Ashe passed away, Borges had known him for eight years. When he passed a package was left for him, which Borges began to read. To his disbelief the books in the package discussed Uqbar and Tlon and Orbis Tertius. On page 71 Borges says, “…now fate had set before me something much more precious and painstaking. I now held in my hands a vast and systematic fragment of the entire history of an unknown planet.” This unknown planet was everything he had read about two years early in the Anglo- American Cyclopaedia.
Borges brings in the concept of magical realism between places and time. Though someone may think they are in a certain time period they may be in another, and likewise with a place. On Page 74 it says, “One of the schools of philosophy on Tlon goes so far as to deny the existence of time…” This statement also corresponds to Magical Realism because in Magical Realism time does not exist either. Everything in the future is not predetermined. The present time is undefined and the future does not exist yet because it has not happened.

On Pages 72-73 Borges says, “For the people of Tlon, the world is not an amalgam of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous serious of independent acts—the world is successive, temporal, but not spatial.” Meaning occurrences happen in life in some type of sequence but it is never through space. On the bottom of page 73 he says, “I have said that the people of that planet conceive the universe as a series of metal processes that occur not in space but rather successively, in time.” Once again it is shows how processes don’t ever happen though space but do through time. Space is not seen has having a duration of time, thus is will never count as time. Metaphysicians study the nature of being, existence, and time and space. In Tlon the metaphysicians look deeply into fantasy. On page 74 it says, “The metaphysicians of Tlon seek not truth, or even plausibility—they seek to amaze, astound. In their view, metaphysics is a branch of literature of fantasy.” Tlon shows the concept of Magical realism through the binaries between fantasy and reality. It is like Tlon is constantly in a fantasy, like on page 74 when one of the philosophies explains that “while we sleep here, we are awake somewhere else, so that every man is in fact two men.” If this were to be true, which man’s life would be the reality and which mans would be the fantasy?

Tlon’s geometry is made up of visual and tactile. Tactile geometry is subordinate to the visual. Visual geometry claims that as one’s body moves through space, it modifies the shapes that surround it. This corresponds with the idea of Magical Realism because it is viewing the world from a different perspective. Some people may just think bodies are bodies but if they look deeper into the concept they may realize that a body does modify the shapes that surround it.