“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges’

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JORGE LUIS BORGES was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. Borges was taught at home until the age of 11, bilingual, reading Shakespeare in English at the age of twelve. The family lived in a large house with an English library of over one thousand volumes; Borges would later remark that "if I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library." His father gave up practicing law due to the failing eyesight that would eventually afflict his son. 

SUMMARY

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, is a short, satirical story about centres on the discovery of the fantastic world of Tlön. Created by a “secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians…” Tlon is fashioned for the purpose of replacing the known world.

THEMES

Question:  In what ways does Borges deploy irony, satire and other comic modes in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius?

 Themes: Totalitarianism/ Nazism/ Language/Time / Satire/ Irony

When the existence of Tlön becomes public knowledge, Borges’ nameless narrator observes, “Almost immediately reality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order- dialectal materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism – was sufficient to entrance the minds of men.” (42) The story exposes human susceptibility to order and totalitarian structures, in this case the world’s susceptibility to the new, fantastical, Idealistic world of Tlön, which is in turn translated to the very real entrancement of the world under the spell of Fascism during World War II.

Borges exposes the characteristic order of totalitarian systems by imbuing them with ironic paradoxes. Although the world of Tlön is eagerly embraced by the real world as a Utopia for its order, in Swift-like humour, Borges points out little details; such as the difficulties of telling time because “the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory.” (34) As well as the uncertainty of language, when he explains, “The language of Tlön resists the formation of this paradox; most people don’t even understand it.” (35) Thus it becomes clear to us that Borges is mocking the human need for order by presenting Tlön as a dystopia, far from the ordered, ideal world that people first perceive.

Further Reading

Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.  

Clark, John R. “Idealism and Dystopia in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” , The International Fiction Review (1995): 74-79.

Kristal, Efrain. Invisible Work: Borges and Translations. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002.

Reid, Alistair. “Jorge Luis Borges: Mapmaker of Imaginary Worlds” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), Vol. 10, No. 5 (Winter, 1986): 142-147.