Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius


"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a short story by the 20th-century Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published in the Argentinian 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.
Told in a first-person narrative, the story focuses on the author's discovery of the mysterious and apparently fictional world of Tlön, whose inhabitants believe a form of subjective idealism, denying the reality of objects, and speak in a language lacking nouns. Relatively long for Borges, the story is a work of speculative fiction.
The story alludes 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 metaphysics, language, epistemology, and literary criticism.

Summary

The story unfolds as a first-person narrative and contains many references to real people, places, literary works and philosophical concepts, besides some fictional or ambiguous ones. It is divided into two parts and a postscript. Events and facts are revealed roughly in the order that the narrator becomes aware of them or their relevance. The timing of events in Borges's story is approximately from 1935 to 1947; the plot concerns events going back as far as the early 17th century and culminating in the postscript, set in 1947.

Part one

Borges and his friend and collaborator, Adolfo Bioy Casares, are developing their next book in a country house near Buenos Aires, in 1940. In an observation, Bioy quotes that "mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of men" from a heresiarch of a land named Uqbar. Borges, impressed with the "memorable" sentence, asks for its source. Bioy replies that he had read it in the chapter about Uqbar of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, "a literal if inadequate reprint" of the 1902 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica. They check the book and are unable to find the said chapter, to Bioy's surprise. The two then search for the name 'Uqbar' in numerous atlases and other encyclopedias, trying different alternative name forms, to no avail.
The following day, Bioy tells Borges he has found the chapter they were looking for in a different reprint of the same encyclopedia. The chapter, although brief and full of names unfamiliar to Borges and Bioy, entices their curiosity. It describes Uqbar as an obscure region, located in Iraq or Asia Minor, with an all-fantastic literature taking place in the mythical worlds of Mlejnas and Tlön. Afterwards, they keep searching for Uqbar in other sources, but are unable to find any mention.

Part two

The engineer Herbert Ashe, an English friend of Borges' father with a peculiar interest in duodecimal, dies of an aneurysm rupture. Borges inherits a packet containing a book, which was left by Ashe in a pub. That book is revealed to be the eleventh volume of an English-language encyclopedia entirely devoted to Tlön, one of the worlds in which Uqbar's legends are set. The book contains two oval blue stamps with the words Orbis Tertius inscribed in blue. From that point, as Borges reads the tome, part two comprehensively describes and discusses Tlön's culture, history, languages and philosophy.
The people of the imaginary Tlön hold an extreme form of Berkeley's subjective 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 language families of Tlön lacks nouns, being centered instead in impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic adverbial affixes. Borges lists a Tlönic equivalent of "The moon rose above the water": hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, meaning literally "upward behind the onstreaming it mooned". In another language family of Tlön, "the basic unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective", which in combinations of two or more forms nouns: "moon" becomes "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky".
In a world where there are no nouns—or where nouns are composites of other parts of speech, created and discarded according to a whim—and no things, most of Western philosophy becomes impossible. Without nouns about which to state propositions, there can be no a priori deductive reasoning from first principles. Without history, there can be no teleology. If there can be no such thing as observing the same object at different times, there is no possibility of a posteriori inductive reasoning. Ontology—the philosophy of what it means to be—is an alien concept. Tlön is a world of Berkeleyan idealism with one critical omission: it lacks the omnipresent, perceiving deity on whom Berkeley relied as a point of view demanding an internally consistent world. This infinitely mutable world is tempting to a playful intellect, and its "transparent tigers and... towers of blood" appeal to baser minds, but a Tlönic world view requires denying most of what would normally be considered common sense reality.

Postscript

In the anachronistic postscript set in 1947, Borges remembers events that occurred in the last years.
In 1941, the world and the narrator have learned, through the emergence of a letter, about the true nature of Tlön. It goes that a "benevolent secret society" was formed "one night in Lucerne or in London", in the 17th century, and had Berkeley among its members. That group, a society of intellectuals named Orbis Tertius, studied "hermetic studies, philanthropy and the cabala", but its main purpose was to create a country: Uqbar. It gradually became clear that such work would have to be carried by numerous generations, so each master agreed to elect a disciple who would carry on his work to perpetuate an hereditary arrangement. The society is eventually persecuted, but reemerges in the United States in the following century. The American "eccentric" millionaire Ezra Buckley, one of the members of the restored sect, finds its undertaking too modest, proposing that their creation be of an entire world instead of just a country. He also adds that an entire encyclopedia about this world—named Tlön—must be written and that the whole scheme "have no truck with that impostor Jesus Christ". The new Orbis Tertius, composed of three hundred collaborators, proceeds to conclude the final volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. An explanation of Uqbar is not explicitly given in the story.
By 1942, Tlönian objects began to inexplicably appear in the real world. One of the first instances in which this occurs is when Princess Faucigny Lucinge received, via mail, a vibrating compass with a Tlönian scripture. Another instance is witnessed by Borges himself: a drunk man, shortly after dying, dropped coins among which a small but extremely heavy shining metal cone appeared. It is suggested that these occurrences may have been forgeries, but yet products of a secret science and technology.
By 1944, all forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön have been discovered and published in a library in Memphis. The material becomes accessible worldwide and immensely influential on Earth's culture, science and languages. By the time Borges concludes the story, presumably in 1947, the world is gradually becoming Tlön. Borges then turns to an obsession of his own: a translation of Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial into Spanish.

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 where the 18th century philosophical subjective idealism of George Berkeley is viewed as common sense and "the doctrine of materialism" is considered a heresy, a scandal, and a paradox. Through describing the languages of Tlön, the story also plays with the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis—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 turns 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, who questioned whether it is possible to say that a thing exists if it is not being perceived. 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 Berkeleyan idealism without God passes for common sense. The Tlönian 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's 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 that arise when two different people find the "same" lost object in different places.
Borges imagines a Tlönite working his way out of the problem of solipsism by reasoning that if all people are actually aspects of one being, then perhaps the universe is consistent because that one being is consistent in his imagining. This is, effectively, a near-reconstruction of the Berkeleyan God: perhaps not omnipresent, but bringing together all perceptions that do, indeed, occur.
This story is not the only place where Borges engages with Berkeleyan idealism. In the world of Tlön, as in Borges's essay New refutation of time, there is a "denial of space, time, and the individual I." This worldview does not 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 are 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

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. This is similar to the ending of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", in which Borges's narrator suggests that a new perspective can be opened by treating a book as though it were written by a different 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 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

"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 have an "unnerving" and "grotesque" mirror reflecting the room, a "literal if inadequate" reproduction of the Encyclopædia 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 have stone mirrors; the idea of reconstructing an entire encyclopedia of an imaginary world based on a single volume; the analogy of that encyclopedia to a "cosmos" governed by "strict laws"; a worldview in which our normal notions of "thing" are rejected, but "ideal objects abound, invoked and dissolved momentarily, according to poetic necessity"; the universe conceived as "the handwriting of a minor god to communicate with a demon" or a "code system... in which not all symbols have meaning"; 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 do not possess"; and Ezra Buckley's wish "to demonstrate to a nonexistent God that mortal men were capable of conceiving a world."
Borges also mentions in passing the duodecimal system. This ties into his description of Tlön's arithmetic, which emphasizes indefinite numbers, and holds that a number does not actually have any value or independent existence until it is counted/named. However, some may see the reference to the duodecimal system as inherently refuting of the changeability of things due to nomenclature—a number may be renamed under a different counting schema, but the underlying value will always remain the same.

Fact and fiction

It is by no means simple to sort out fact and fiction within this story. The picture is further complicated by the fact that other authors have chosen to join Borges in his game and write about one or another fictional aspect of this story either as if it were non-fiction or in a manner that could potentially confuse the unwary reader. Two online examples are the Italian-language website La Biblioteca di Uqbar, which treats Tlön itself as duly fictional, but writes as if the fictional Silas Haslam's entirely imaginary History of the Land Called Uqbar were a real work.
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 is not 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 Encyclopedia, 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 is 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, or on the story's own definition of "ur" in one of Tlön's languages as "a thing produced by suggestion, an object elicited by hope".

Levels of reality

There are several levels of reality in the story:
Uqbar in the story is doubly fictional: even within the world of the story it turns out to be a fictional place. The fictitious entry described in the story furnishes deliberately meager indications of Uqbar's location: "Of the fourteen names which figured in the geographical part, we only recognized three – Khorasan, Armenia, Erzerum – interpolated in the text in an ambiguous way." Armenia and Erzerum lie in the eastern highlands of Asia Minor, while Khorasan is in northeastern Iran. However, it was said to have cited an equally nonexistent German-titled book – Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen über das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien – whose title claims unambiguously that Uqbar was in Asia Minor.
The boundaries of Uqbar were described using equally nonexistent reference points; for instance, "the lowlands of Tsai Khaldun and the Axa Delta marked the southern frontier". This would suggest that the rivers of Borges' Uqbar should rise in highlands to the north; in fact, the mountainous highlands of eastern Turkey are where not one but two Zab Rivers rise, the Great Zab and the Lesser Zab. They run a couple of hundred miles south into the Tigris.
The only points of Uqbar's history mentioned relate to religion, literature, and craft. It was described as the home of a noted heresiarch, and the scene of religious persecutions directed against the orthodox in the thirteenth century; fleeing the latter, its orthodox believers built obelisks in their southerly place of exile, and made mirrors – seen by the heresiarch as abominable – of stone. Crucially for the story, Uqbar's "epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön."
Although the culture of Uqbar described by Borges is fictional, there are two real places with similar names. These are:
  1. 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 – who was blind, like Borges's father and like Borges himself was later to become – and to two notable early Jewish/Karaite "heresiarchs", leaders of Karaite movements opposed to Anan ben David, Ishmael al-Ukbari and Meshwi al-Ukbari, mentioned in the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1901–1906.
  2. ‘Uqbâr in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria; the minarets of the latter's area might relate to the "obelisks" of Uqbar in the story.
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, "tsai" comes from the Mandarin Chinese word 菜, which refers to green leafy vegetables.
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:
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" formed part of a 1941 collection of stories called El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.
At the time he wrote "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in early 1940, Borges was little known outside of Argentina. He was working in a local public library in Buenos Aires, and had a certain local fame as a translator of works from English, French and German, and as an avant garde poet and essayist. In the previous two years he had been through a great deal: his father had died in 1938, and on Christmas Eve 1938, Borges himself had suffered a severe head wound in an accident; during treatment for that wound, he nearly died of a blood infection.
For some time before his father's death and his own accident, Borges had been drifting toward writing fiction. His Historia universal de la infamia, published in 1935, used a baroque writing style and the techniques of fiction to tell the stories of seven historical rogues. These ranged from "El espantoso redentor Lazarus Morell" —who promised liberty to slaves in the American South, but brought them only death—to "El incivil maestro de ceremonias Kotsuké no Suké", the story of the central figure in the Japanese Tale of the 47 Ronin, also known as Kira Kozuke-no-Suke Yoshinaka. Borges had also written a number of clever literary forgeries disguised as translations from authors such as Emanuel Swedenborg or from Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor. Recovering from his head wound and infection, Borges decided it was time to turn to the writing of fiction as such.
Several of these fictions, notably "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote", could only have been written by an experienced essayist. Both of these works apply Borges's essayistic style to largely imaginary subject matter. His massive erudition is as evident in these fictions as in any non-fictional essay in his body of works.
Buenos Aires was, at this time, a thriving intellectual center. While Europe was immersed in World War II, Argentina, and Buenos Aires in particular, flourished intellectually and artistically.
Borges's first volume of fiction failed to garner the literary prizes many in his circle expected for it. Victoria Ocampo dedicated a large portion of the July 1942 issue of Sur to a "Reparation for Borges"; numerous leading writers and critics from Argentina and throughout the Spanish-speaking world contributed writings to the project, which probably brought his work as much attention as a prize would have.
Over the next few decades "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and Borges's other fiction from this period formed a key part of the body of work that put Latin America on the international literary map. Borges was to become more widely known throughout the world as a writer of extremely original short stories than as a poet and essayist.

Publication history

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" originally appeared in Spanish in SUR in May 1940. The Spanish-language original was then published in book form in Antología de la Literatura Fantástica —December 1940—, then in Borges's 1941 collection El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan. That entire book was, in turn, included within Ficciones, a much-reprinted book.
The first published English-language translation was by James E. Irby. It appeared in the April 1961 issue of New World Writing. The following year, Irby's translation was included as the first piece in a diverse collection of Borges works entitled Labyrinths. Almost simultaneously, and independently, the piece was translated by Alastair Reid; Reid's version was published in 1962 as part of a collaborative English-language translation of the entirety of Ficciones. The Reid translation is reprinted in Borges, a Reader, p. 111–122. Quotations and page references in this article follow that translation.
It was a finalist for the Retro Hugo Award for Best Short Story from 1940. It is the first non-English work to be nominated in its original language rather than as a translation.

Influence on later works

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" has inspired a number of real-world projects:
Several other projects have names derived from the story:
WG Sebald refers to Tlön and its philosophy repeatedly in his book The Rings of Saturn.
Trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær released the album Khmer on ECM in 1998 which includes the track "Tlön".