In my dive into Jorge Luis Borges I have chosen to start with Ficciones and work my way through the book/collection from start to finish. That makes Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius the first story for me to ponder, and what a starting point it is! Here’s a link to the story, if you haven’t yet read it.

Sidebar Alert

If you were to ask me where to start with Borges, I would not recommend this story. It is longer than the majority of his works and it is downright hard to understand. Borges is never easy, but sometimes, he is just difficult. This is one of those times, in my opinion.

Part of his charm, for those who love Borges, is his genius and his ability to think up worlds (literally) that are beyond our baseline comprehension. We usually have to do work and learn something to come up to his level, because he is not preoccupied in the slightest with coming down to ours.

That means that sometimes he’s confusing to read. If confusion is an indication that you are about to learn, you can usually be confident that you’re about to learn after any first time read-through of a Borgean text. Because unless you are quite a genius yourself, you’ll probably need a 2nd or 3rd reading to begin feeling like you aren’t confused.

I’ve gone off this little one-time tangent — since this serves as our introduction to this author — to say that you should always consider rereading, especially with Borges. These stories are short, so take advantage of that and read them multiple times. Much like rewatching Forest Gump and discovering new ways Forest shook US history, you’ll catch something new each time you reread Borges. In the case of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, you might just catch the basic underlying plot!

A Tricky Plot

Yes, the plot of this story is pretty elusive. It’s written almost like a journal entry about a time the speaker (Borges) was talking with a friend (Argentine author, Bioy Casares) who quoted some obscure saying about mirrors — attributed to a heretic from a fictional country (Uqbar) that the 2 intellectuals then looked up and eventually found in a strange copy of an encyclopedia — leading to a later “entry” from the speaker about how his understanding of that fictional country’s literature has evolved after reading another encyclopedia about the fictional country’s fictional world (Tlön), in which all their mythology is situated, which leads to later “entry” from the speaker about how that highly developed fictional world within the fictional country was devised by a secret society (Orbis Tertius) of geniuses that is slowly revealing the ideas of said fictional world to the real world as part of an apparent scheme to change reality….. ummmmm………

Straightforward, eh? Just like mom’s bedtime stories. No? Wasn’t your mom a literary and philosophical savant who devoted her life to reading everything?

So yeah, if what I said above (which is a basic outline of the Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius) comes as any surprise to you, you’ll want to reread the story before we get to the fun part. I don’t want to waste too much time on summaries in this blog, beyond what is necessary, so I’ll assume a very general outline suffices, since you’ve no doubt read the text anyway…. If you haven’t, at least use Google to find summaries like this one.

Common Interpretations

What are we to make of this convoluted text? I think you could probably write about it for days, finding all sorts of meaning to derive from it. Indeed I would highly recommend googling Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and reading other commentaries (or other blog posts) about it. Even the story’s Wikipedia is very good, as it explains in detail the real world names Borges drops throughout. (Sidenote – Wikipedia is massively useful. Just double check the “facts” and don’t use it as a source in an academic paper. Use it as a tool for learning and obtaining credible sources.)

One could go deep down the rabbit hole, but I’ll try to keep my own ideas, and this post, as succinct as possible. First, it’s worth mentioning a couple established interpretations of the text.

There is an allegorical reading of this story which suggests that the work of Orbis Tertius, the Tlönification of reality, is a symbol for the way institutionalized religion forces its views on the world. This holds up particularly well when you consider that Tlönian artifacts begin appearing in the real world (beware the real vs. unreal motif of all Borgean works) in the same way that the Catholic Church and other religious institutions have discovered material religious artifacts that corroborate their ideas.

There is another philosophical reading that focuses on the subjective idealism of philosopher and bishop George Berkeley, who posited that there aren’t really objects in the world, so much as ideas and perceptions about objects. Tlön takes Berkeleyan idealism to an extreme and situates it as common sense, in the same way that objective materialism is something we accept as such, in reality.

If we were to describe a photo, we would tend to notice the objects in it as the main point. We probably wouldn’t immediately notice actions taking place or descriptions of objects as the central theme. A photo of a tree blowing in the wind would be just that (a tree), as opposed to “green, leafy, windy, bending.” It’s hard to even imagine that objectless description of such a photo, which is why the explanations of Tlönian thought are difficult to wrap our heads around.

The object is completely ignored by Tlön, which is why something that is lost and then found is considered a duplication (hröns and urs) by its inhabitants. If I had “thin, black, to write” (a black ballpoint pen) and then I didn’t have it and then did again, there would be no reason to suppose that I didn’t have that series of action and description twice. There is no object in question, merely description and action x2, so it is conceivable to the Tlönian that a duplication has occurred.

I find this very hard to understand fully, but I think that’s part of the point. Borges has presented a world that is just on the cusp of what we could accept and it highlights our dependence on objective materialism that this extreme subjective idealism is so hard to even fathom.

I say this is a “philosophical reading” of the text, but Borges was reading Plato at 10 years old… most of his writing fits within the sub-genre of philosophical fiction. You’ll definitely stay very confused if you read him without that in mind. I find that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is very useful for understanding some of the drop-of-a-hat philosophy references he makes, which usually are keys to unlocking his stories.

My Thoughts

There’s much more to be said, I’m sure, for the various interpretations of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and plenty of springboards throughout from whence academics can and do jump, but the allegorical and philosophical leanings I referenced above both factor into my own understanding of the story.

I think that Borges is indeed alluding to what institutionalized religion represents in terms of how it affects popular thought, but I think it is probably a mistake to leave this work at being a strict religious critique or commentary. Rather, Borges elects a starting point within philosophy (not religious doctrine) in the form of Berkeleyan idealism and then creates his personal Illuminati (Orbis Tertius) around it. That’s not to say that this is a critique of the field of philosophy either. Instead, I think Borges is giving a warning about thought, whether propagated by religious, academic, philosophical, political, or whatever other figures.

Thought has a way of trickling down from thinkers and movements until it shapes the whole world. In that way, famous thinkers (often philosophers, but not always) do the work of Orbis Tertius in that their ideas spread and recreate “reality” in terms of what we accept it to be.

For example, Karl Marx had been dead for almost 40 years by the time the USSR was established. But his most famous work, from nearly 85 years prior to Soviet Russia’s inception, incubated within society and grew to radically change reality for several nations. Likewise, neither the Soviet nor the Nazi vision could have found their stride without the Utopian views about Progress put forth by an era of thinkers, even if they only factored in peripherally, in bastardized forms.

Those are glum examples, but it should be no surprise that thought trickles down into the masses at all levels. What you accept as reality is based on what you presume to be an innate understanding of facts that were once not facts, but ideas, hypotheses and theories. This holds true for religious intervention in your culture as well as other media of thought.

Your personal philosophies, which you take to be your own and which you see reflected and echoed in those around you, are not really yours, in a sense, and there’s a very good chance they would be different if you preceded some great thinker who has indirectly, yet very directly, influenced you.

The culmination of all those ideas trickling into you is your personal Orbis Tertius, shaping the thoughts you think you came up with, from the shadows. Maybe you can even see their artifacts — retroactively manufactured historical evidence that corroborates your ideas.

This is the terrifying revelation of the story. It’s not so much that Orbis Tertius might tarnish and eventually usurp reality with a clearly unreal alternative, but that it’s already doing just that! And to such a degree that an intellectual friend of Borges is already framing an ancient quote about a crude form of objective materialism (typically taken as common sense) as heretical! Because:

“Why not fall under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet?”

Borges, being maybe one of the greatest students of philosophy, would have been keenly aware of how the history of thought has changed and how it continues to change the world. If we take our mode of thinking as being intimately connected with reality itself — which is certainly the case being made by the suggestion that Tlön’s inhabitants experience reality very differently from us, based on their very different conceptions — then reality itself is in question so long as thought is in question. Can we trust that the real is really real if its basis (our thoughts about it) is in a constant state of flux?

Conclusion

And that, is Borges. Reality is always in question, and it will continue to be in mind-expanding and horrifying ways for the rest of Ficciones. Realness is a central theme with which Borges constantly and masterfully toys. And the beauty of it is that he presents his dreamlike bend on the real in such a way that the reader’s reality must bend as well.

Well, that’s my take on the first story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. There are a few things I didn’t get to and there are other things that I’m still trying to figure out. If you have any ideas, please feel free to share. I’m always open to discussion. Next (week, hopefully) I’ll be looking at the next story, the much shorter The Approach to Al-Mu’Tasim.

Thanks for reading!

C.W.