Abominable mirrors: #1940Club

#1940Club. Simon @ stuckinabook.com and Karen @ kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com

‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’
by Jorge Luis Borges,
in Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other Writings.
Translated from the Spanish by James E Irby.
Penguin Modern Classics, 1970 (1964).

The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.

As reportedly the longest of Borges’ short stories, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ is also one of his more philosophical and, indeed, fantastic. It describes the discovery of a previously unrecorded country called Uqbar, then its curious relationship to a place called Tlön and, further, the existence of something called Orbis Tertius.

In discussing the thinking of the Tlön metaphysicians Borges seems to be partly reiterating his own mode of thinking: philosophy is astounding, is fantastic, but he does it in a way which reflects his wonder, his reading, his imagination and his playfulness.

And I use the word ‘reflect’ quite deliberately because the author not only introduces the idea of a mirror at the very start but also aims, in the words of Hamlet, “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature” – the way we view our own world.

© C A Lovegrove

‘Tlön’ begins like a literary mystery redolent of, say, a ghost story by M R James which often opens with a scholar in a library: here a casual conversation between the narrator and a friend leads to an obscure volume of an encyclopaedia which asserts that “Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable”; but it happens to mention an equally obscure country called Uqbar. Situated somewhere in the region of Asia Minor, Uqbar boasts a national literature which is “one of fantasy”, a corpus which includes the invention of the imaginary world of Tlön.

The second section of the story hinges on the discovery of a tome, which discovery testified to the existence of a unique multi-volume Encyclopaedia of Tlön. Volume XI (HLAER – JANGR) focused inter alia on the peculiarities of Tlön’s languages: in the southern hemisphere the language contains no nouns but only impersonal verbs, their suffixes and prefixes acting as adverbs; in the north the unit is a monosyllabic adjective which acts as a metaphor.

It’s also revealed that the prevalent philosophy of Tlön is said to be a form of monism – that is, it is a subjective idealism that presumes the only reality is what one might personally perceive it to be. This philosophy may be illustrated by the way its inhabitants deny the reality of time, and therefore history. It proposes that (a) the present is indefinite; (b) the future has no reality other than as “a present hope”; (c) the past has no reality than as “a present memory”. The sense, I suppose, is of the perceiver being a rock in the midst of a boundless sea, or an astronomical body adrift in the infinity of space.

So much for Uqbar and Tlön; what of Orbis Tertius? In this short story published in 1940 is what represents for us a chronological impossibility, a Postscript dated 1947. In this, what is effectively a third part, we learn of the existence not only of a complete set of the Encyclopaedia of Tlön but also of a body or group which can translate as the Third Sphere or the Third World.

And this brings us back to mirrors and paternity because the concept of Orbis Tertius seems designed not just to reflect our own world but, in some sense, to generate our perception of it. I am reminded of the description of Earth as the Third Rock from the Sun, following on from Mercury and Venus; and knowing that the god Mercury was the divinity of words, of communication, and Venus the goddess not just of erotic love but of adoration, of veneration, I see planets, divinities, and the tripartite structure of Borges’ story as all analogous to the invention of Uqbar, Tlön and Orbis Tertius.

We, inhabitants of planet Earth, living in our individual continuous presents, are effectively and also simultaneously inhabitants of Tlön, which has mysteriously become Earth. “Tlön,” Borges divines, “is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.” We, both earthlings and Tlön-ites, wandering in the continuous present of our maze, can only hope to eventually arrive at some sort of destination where all will be revealed, where all will make sense, where we may all understand the universal language lost after Babel.

Impossible as it is to effectively summarise this very Borgesian piece, I shall merely conclude by emphasising what a tour de force this long short story is. Beginning with a conversation between two persons, the narrative gradually broadens out to encompass the whole world; its exact analogue is the set of mirrors Borges posits at the start of his discussion, mirrors which, placed opposite each other produce a near infinite number of images, inducing in the observer a discordant sense of what is real and what isn’t.

But that Borges essentially enjoyed writing this piece is made clear by his final comment – that he will continue revising “an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne’s Urn Burial“. To say he intends rendering Sir Thomas Browne’s meditation on graves and death in the style of Browne’s Baroque contemporary, the Spanish poet, wit and master of conceptismo Francisco de Quevedo, suggests we should take nothing of what Borges says at face value; for conceptismo is the employment of elaborate conceits, mannered metaphors and verbal paradoxes, all designed to dazzle and delight the audience.

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Selected reading

Rex Butler’s essay on the stories of Borges was more philosophical than I could fathom but insightful nevertheless. Surprisingly this story isn’t referenced in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places even though several other Borges stories are. I also detect faint echoes of Uqbar in Ul Qoma, one of the conurbations in China Miéville’s The City and the City. (Links below are either to my reviews or to online sources.)

• Rex Butler. Borges’ Short Stories. A Reader’s Guide. Continuum Books, 2010: 97-109
• Emma Cazabonne. 2021. Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Words and Peace.
• Alberto Manuel and Gianni Guadalupi. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Macmillan Publishing, 1980.
• China Miéville. 2009. The City and the City. Pan Books, 2010.
• Oliver Tearle. 2022. A Summary and Analysis of Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’. Interesting Literature.

https://wp.me/p7GrCV-19Q

In Bookforager’s picture prompts I’ve selected the books icon for this Borges narrative about a multi-volume encyclopaedia, following the pistol (for Jo Nesbø’s Midnight Sun), the tree (Astrid Lindgren’s Ronia the Robber’s Daughter) and the castle (Ivanhoe).

I’ve also read this short story for Karen and Simon’s #1940Club, a week-long celebration of writing published in that year.