It’s been just over a month since I first posted this, and some stuff has happened, so here’s an update.

First, I posted about this on reddit, and two users ended up talking a bit about what might be going on. /u/FoxPanda32 wonders if it could just be a translation error, and /u/TheTwoLabyrinths speculates that the entire thing could be made up. “I know my friend once pranked a friend by editing a footballer’s wiki to include fictional information about a music album he had recorded,” he writes. FoxPanda32 agrees that it’s a possibility, but adds that “it is a strange prank if it is.”

Then, on the morning of April 4th, the entire New Media section of the wikipedia article, the place where we started, was removed. Maybe because of my bringing attention to it, maybe not. I’m not taking credit for it. Then, 6 days later, it was re-added by someone else. I have not edited the article myself, I don’t really feel comfortable with doing that. Anyway, the article is now back to the way it was when I found it.

Then, last weekend, a question appeared in my askbox:

“I’m Najwa, a character from Pamela Sacred’s The Passengers (TVC). I’m the one who wrote La Voie de l'ange, the continuation of Anne Frank’s diary. In a strange twist of fate, the character I resuscitated wrote a short story of her own in which I drown or dream of drowning, not exactly sure. I’ve since been stuck in limbo. Don’t know what happen to Pam either. Maybe someone killed her too. With no one writing, our universe is evanescing. Even bots can’t find us – Pls do something – Najwa Nilufar”

I responded with:

“Hi Najwa! Thank you so much for contacting me! Googling your name, I was finally able to find the site I was looking for in my previous post - it’s episodia.org, which, according to whois, is in fact owned by someone named Pamela Sacred! This is exciting for me, it feels like I’ve finally caught my white whale or something! I’ve only skimmed the surface of the website, but it certainly looks interesting, and I’ll dive in soon. Also, your story sounds very intriguing. It all feels very Borgesian - with characters exerting control over their authors and whatnot. And now, having a character from a piece of metafiction reach out to me in real life, it feels like the logic of magical realism is collapsing into reality. This has given me a lot to think about, and I’ll probably write up a proper blogpost-thing in a day or two. For now, I’ll leave it at this: The internet is really weird.”

So, there it is. The source of the mystery was not a prank or a mistranslation, but simply bad search engine optimization. Now, you could still wonder about how this obscure piece of internet art ended up on wikipedia, especially from a Chinese IP, but that’s not what I’m interested in here. Instead, I want to expand upon what I mentioned in my response to the ask: the ways in which this entire situation feels Borgesian (i.e, similar to the work of Jorge Luis Borges, kingpin of the magic realist genre).

My search for Pamela Sacred’s work feels strangely similar to the outline of Borges’ short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. It’s the story of Borges and his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares finding a mysterious entry in an encyclopedia, telling them about Uqbar, an obscure region in the middle east. According to the encyclopedia, the literature of Uqbar “never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön.” Intrigued, Borges and Casares search through “atlases, catalogs, annuals of geographical societies, travelers’ and historians’ memoirs,” but cannot find Uqbar mentioned anywhere else. Years later, Borges inherits a book from a deceased family friend, and it turns out to be the eleventh volume of the Encyclopedia of Tlön, the fictional land from Uqbar. Borges reads through it and learns about the workings of the Tlönian world (which is all very very interesting, but not relevant to this post. Go read the story for yourself!). Later, Borges learns that both Uqbar and Tlön were invented by a secret society that set out to create an entire world. The society, after years of work by hundreds of collaborators, wrote The Encycopedia of Tlön, and by one way or another a mention of Uqbar had ended up in the encyclopedia Borges and Casares started with.

From finding a weird mention of a story-within-a-story in an encyclopedia, to not finding it anywhere else, to finally finding what you’re looking for in the form of another encyclopedia (Pamela Sacred’s The Passengers / Venetian Cell takes the form of a wiki), you must admit that my experience and Borges’ story bear at least a passing resemblance. And some of the things they have in common - the search for a mysterious text, a weird relationship between fiction and reality, etc - can also be found in many other magic realist stories. For example, Carlos Ruis Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind tells the story of a man’s obsessive search for information about the obscure author Julián Carax after finding one of his works in a secret library of forgotten books. Or another example: in Gabriel García Márquez’ classic 100 Years of Solitude, the last living member of the Buendía family, Aureliano, tries for several years to decode an unreadable manuscript that has been around for generations in the family. The mysterious text, when finally translated and decoded by Aureliano, turns out to tell the entire story of the Buendía family, ending with Aureliano himself reading it. Keep this last example in your mind for later.

This kind of thing - stories where the real and the fictional melt together, stories about texts and reading, stories within stories, in short: metafiction - is kind of a staple of the magic realist genre. To pull a quote from the place where all of this started, the wikipedia page for magic realism, “[metafiction] is the tool paramount in the execution of a related and major magic realist phenomenon: textualization. This term defines two conditions—first, where a fictitious reader enters the story within a story while reading it, making us self-conscious of our status as readers—and secondly, where the textual world enters into the reader’s (our) world.” My story - searching for a mysterious, seemingly fictional, text, only to have a character from that text contact me in real life - sounds a lot like something that could fit the description of a metafictional magic realist story, right? Add to that the fact that The Passengers / Venetian Cell is a hypertext story - a narrative not told linearly in a book, but through a series of interwoven links, not dissimilar to the way we find information on the internet. See where I’m going with this? A series of hyperlinks leading a person on a search for a mysterious book could very well be a hypertextual magic realist narrative. In other words, my life took on the appearance of the very thing I was so obsessively searching for.

Let me repeat that: The characteristics of the thing I was searching for were also becoming the exact characteristics of my search. Instead of finding what I was looking for tucked away in some dark corner of the internet, I started finding it all around me in my everyday life. Even before Najwa reached out to me, I was becoming aware of this. It’s an extremely bizarre sensation.

Writer and performance artist Patrick Davison once wrote in a blogpost that “we come into contact with 3 main types of narratives in our lives”: Fiction, dreams, and life itself. “Each of these three modes of narrative has their own logics to it,” he writes, “BUT what about the cases where one mode imitates or resembles another? Fiction that reads exactly like real life, life that feels like a dream, or a dream so coherent it could have been a movie? Or the other way, those days when your life feels like something out of a novel, when a book reads like a dream, or when you’d swear that dream was ACTUALLY happening. I think the second loop is more uncanny/unsettling.” This uncanniness in finding the narrative style of fiction melting into real life perfectly describes what I’m trying to get at here. We often treat fiction as by definition not real, and thus completely the opposite of lived reality. So it’s always a strange sensation when the divide between the real and the fictional shatters, and the two worlds collapse in on one another. It reveals to us that just because something is fictional, doesn’t mean it’s not real.

Let’s return to what I said about 100 Years of Solitude. In the story, the book that Aureliano works hard to be able to read turns out to tell the history of his family, including himself. But 100 Years of Solitude is itself a history of Aureliano’s family - that is to say, the mysterious book within the book and the book itself both tell the exact same story. So, the passage where Aureliano reads about himself reading about himself becomes in a weird way also about the real-world reader reading about themselves. This makes the textual world enter into the reader’s world, or vice versa, on two levels. The textual world of the recently decoded manuscript enters into Aureliano’s reality, and Aureliano’s textual world enters into our reality. It feels oddly fitting that this is immediately followed by a tornado killing Aureliano and destroying his village, and the book ending (this is all literally on the last page), because there is definitely a sense of irreparable destruction here. I mean, how do you come back from obliterating the fourth wall like that? (As an aside: this could also be the reason that the thing that happens at the end of the video game Earthbound is specifically placed at the end, besides the fact that it’s a cool climax to the story.) This feeling of a complete collapse of dividing lines between narratives is comparable to the feeling of my metatextual search, I think. Only in my case, it wasn’t as simple as a fictional world breaking its fourth wall to acknowledge its audience, it was more like the opposite - a fictional narrative imposing itself on my lived reality.

If I knew more about literature and philosophy, I could probably write something way smarter about all this. I could maybe place The Passengers / Venetian Cell within larger literary trends. I could maybe better describe the frisson I’m rambling about in this post. I could maybe write about the allure of the metafictional in our age of alternative facts and fake news. But that’s not going to happen, at least not now. Instead, I just want to thank the writer(s?) of The Passengers / Venetian Cell and the people of wikipedia for making this weird thing happen to me. I love you all! And again, you can read Pamela Sacred’s work at episodia.org.

Also, the internet is really fucking weird.