Distorted Reflections of Reality in Borges' “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

Distorted Reflections of Reality in Borges' “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

In his essay “Avatars of the Tortoise,” Borges claims that art “requires visible unrealities” (Borges, 207). Of all the combinations of words that might resemble the universe, there are some stories that seem to be the real world in which we live. Yet however real we think these fictive worlds are, Borges argues that there are structural weaknesses that show them as false. Like the paradox of infinity, these “crevices of unreason” (Borges, 208) allow the reader to refute the existence of the world, or worlds, within the text. Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” can serve as an example of this creation and refutation of the fictive universe. Though Uqbar, Tlön, and Orbis Tertius are clearly the visible unrealities within the story, their presentation through a narrative device of magnified or distorted reflections allows them to become crevices of unreason, through which the “reality” in the story is shown to be equally fictional.

At the beginning of the story the narrator states that he owes “the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia” (Borges, 3), that is, to a reflection of language. This phrase is immediately reflected in a quote the narrator’s friend had found in an encyclopedia article on the imagined county of Uqbar, and then reflected again when we learn that his friend had misquoted the text: “The visible universe was an illusion… mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe” (Borges, 4). It seems characteristic of Borges that this quote within the story refers to the narrative device at work in the text as a whole. We are told that this quote is the only interesting passage in an otherwise boring, which is to say believable, article, fortuitously found in the back of a single copy of a reprint of another encyclopedia. Here we see the mechanism at work: the Anglo-American Cyclopedia is a reflection in which is found the unreasonable crevice of the additional pages. The pages on Uqbar are a reflection of a believable country in which is found the dubious quote. The quote is reflected in its misquote and in its peculiar significance is found the possibility of an imagined country. What might have been an otherwise realistic evening is now cast under the question of Uqbar’s existence.

One could imagine this movement of reflection and distortion being carried on to infinity, but it seems that Borges settles on three reflections as enough to convey the effect. This narrative device achieves a paradox similar to the argument of the third man presented in “Avatars of the Tortoise:” If two men are placed in an archetype, “one would have to postulate another archetype to include them all, and then a fourth…” (Borges, 203). By positing multiple fictional realities in his story, Borges manages to suggest that the number of possibly created worlds is endless; a set that includes and invades what seems to be the conventional reality.

Each of these visible unrealities is reflected and distorted from the one before, and even their manner of discovery functions through a similar telescopic mechanism. Tlön is first mentioned in the article on Uqbar as an example of the kind of literature from that imagined country, literature that “never referred to reality” (Borges, 5) but to other imaginary realms. However, beyond being just a reflection of the vaguely believable Uqbar, Tlön is magnified into a reality where the entire language, aesthetics, and philosophies are vastly different from our own. Similarly, the discovery of Tlön reflects that of Uqbar in being in an encyclopedia discovered by a friend. But what was a mere four-page article in a conventional encyclopedia has now become an entire volume in a set all related to the imaginary world, and what was Bioy Casares’ hazy recollection of Uqbar becomes the mysterious book mailed to Herbert Ashe after his death, and fortuitously discovered by the narrator.

We find another set of distorted reflections in Orbis Tertius, literally the third world created in the text. At first only referenced on a seal in the front of the Encylcopedia of Tlön, a letter from one of Herbert Ashe’s friends reveals that Orbis Tertius was created by the secret society who constructed Tlön, but was a whole planet written in one of the imaginary languages of that already imaginary country. Though little detail is given of this third world, besides that it is in a language consisting only of either verbs or adjectives, the device of distorted reflections used in the story might lead us to try and imagine a world infinitely more unlike our own than even Tlön.

It is at this point that reality breaks down in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Having been presented the first crevice of unreason in the form of Bioy’s misquote, the world in the story is now confronted with a potential infinity of counterfeit realities that threaten to enter into that world. As the narrator relates, artifacts from the imaginary Tlön make there way into the “real” world, followed by re-editions of the imaginary encyclopedia and the teaching of its languages and history in “real” schools. “The world will be Tlön” (Borges, 18), the narrator states, and in a world where such visible unrealities are able to exist from distorted reflections of reality, it is perhaps impossible for the universe to be anything but another fictional construction of language.



Works Cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and “Avatars of the Tortoise.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. Edit. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 2007. Pp. 3-18, 202-208

[I am posting this essay due to James Gyre's excited comments over this masterful story from Borges. Everyone please go out and read “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."]