Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
- Expenditure (esp. edition cited )
- Secondary literature
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a story by Jorge Luis Borges from the band fictions (Spanish Ficciones )
The story takes place in the year of 1940 and the narrative horizon goes to 1935; However, the events described go further back to the 17th century. At the narrative a postscript is added, in which the narrator claims to have written it in 1947, although it originated simultaneously with the main narrative. It is - as well as the numerous footnotes - part of Borges ' literary credentials strategy that supports the principle of fictitious source that determines the narrative considerably.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius reported as Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares discover his friend in a single edition of the Anglo -American Encyclopedia an entry under the title Uqbar. In no other reference work - neither in other editions of the Encyclopedia or in other encyclopedias or atlases - you will find the Uqbar called country. The two friends speculate about the origin of this encyclopedia article. This article is the first track of " Orbis Tertius ", a massive conspiracy of intellectuals, a world called " Tlön " devise. Here, the earth also changed: in the course of the story the narrator encounter more and more artifacts from Tlön and Orbis Tertius, at the end of the earth will be Tlön. The reader witnesses the reality of the story changed again and again. The apparent reality of the beginning turns into fiction, which in turn is exposed as fiction, which she seems to influence the real world. Accordingly, the Borges character is to be interpreted as narrator times and times as an author. Playing with these levels is the appeal of this story, typical of Borges ' fantastic realism: reality and fiction penetrate each other. The life of its own, which confers Borges fictional literary works, is a supporting theme in the story as in the whole band.
The narrative is generally regarded as an allegory (or parody ) viewed on the philosophical idealism - one of its main themes is how ideas manifest themselves in the physical world. To a certain extent, it is also a protest against totalitarianism.
" Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius " has the structure of a detective story set in a world gone mad. Although it is a short story, it is full of allusions to intellectual positions in Argentina and around the world and takes a number of topics such as philosophy of language, epistemology and literary criticism.
Concise History
" Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius " follows a first-person narrator, is a fictionalized version of Borges himself. At the beginning Uqbar seems to be an obscure region of Iraq or in Asia Minor. In a conversation with Borges explains Bioy Casares, he remembered that a heresiarch ( leader of a heretical sect ) had declared that " mirrors and copulation are abominable because they multiply the number of people. " Borges, impressed by this sentence, asks for its source. Bioy Casares is an encyclopedia article on Uqbar in the " Anglo - American Cyclopedia " to. This is a reprint of the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1902. It turns out that the article on Uqbar is only found in some copies of the work.
Borges reads the article in more detail, noting that geographical indications are very misty in the article and the size of the area is explained only with mountains and rivers of the region itself. Especially a note struck him in the portion of the literature that this never would refer to reality, but on the Imaginative Mlejnas and Tlön.
After a short, realistic discourse on Herbert Ashe, an engineer of the Southern Railways, a friend of his father, we find Borges with a more important and more surprising object from its heritage: a book in large octavo, the eleventh volume of an encyclopedia of Tlön. On the first page and a cover sheet of tissue paper a blue oval with the inscription " Orbis Tertius " is printed.
At this point, the story goes beyond Borges and his circle of friends. The conjecture, if there exist several volumes of this encyclopedia (on which the opinions are divided ), leads to the consideration, to reconstruct the missing volumes and thus history, culture and languages Tlon.
This is followed by a longer treatise on the languages , philosophy, and especially the epistemology of Tlön, which forms the main part of the story. The inhabitants of Tlön hanging on an extreme form of Berkeleyschem idealism, which denies the reality of the world. The world is not a clash of objects in space for them; it is a heterogeneous sequence of unrelated acts. It is successively in time, not space.
One of imaginary languages of Tlön knows no nouns: there are impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes adverbial type. So there is no word for " moon ", but could be a verb that you " mondieren " with " moons " or translate. The tlönische equivalent of the sentence " The moon rose above the river on " is Hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, which literally reads: Empor life behind it flow Mondet. In Spanish, the sentence reads: Upa tras perfluyue Luno and Borges adds also an English translation: Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned. (One can probably assume that Borges " present someone's bare bottom ", the double meaning of the English " to moon " (ie ) was aware of ). In another language Tlon turn the base is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective with the noun is formed by the accumulation of adjectives. One does not say "moon ", but luftighell on dark round or orange sky translucent.
In a world without nouns and thus without "things" is impossible, a large part of Western philosophy. Without Nouns there can be no deductive derivations from first principles a priori and no teleology, indicating progression of things. It is in this concept also impossible to observe the same thing at different times, so there is no inductive conclusions a posteriori ( generalization from experience). In short: Tlön is a world Berkeleian idealism, but with one important difference. In Berkeley, even God guarantees a self-consistent world. In this infinitely malleable world of "Common Sense" is overridden, even if simpler minds delight in its transparent tigers and towers of blood.
In anachronistic postscript, the narrator and the world to know by the appearance of a letter, that Uqbar and Tlön are invented places that were invented by a secret and benevolent society in the early 17th century, whose members also belonged to George Berkeley. Over time, it became clear to them that one generation is not enough to invent a country like Uqbar. Each master had a student chose, was to continue his work in his knowledge discipline. However, the next tracks in the Company until two hundred years later at the ( fictional) multi-millionaire Ezra Buckley from Memphis ( Tennessee), who with a fraternity brother has a 1824 interview. He makes fun of the modesty of the plan funny: In America it was absurd to try to invent a country. He therefore proposes the invention of a planet. The conditions for this are writing an encyclopedia, a breach of confidentiality and that no alliance with the " charlatan Jesus Christ " (and therefore not with the God of Berkeley ) will be discussed.
In the early 1940s (at the time of writing the story so still in the future ), the project ceases to be a mystery and the real world begins to decompose. " Around 1942, " start " tlönische " objects in the world to emerge, which are the product of a mysterious science and technology. The full forty -volume " Encyclopedia of Tlön " is found in Memphis. However, the eleventh band is slightly different than the eleventh volume of the narrator: Some too implausible details are removed or mitigated to represent a "world that too not incompatible with the real" is.
In the end, the reality is in full resolution and the current culture of the world gives way to the culture of Tlön. The narrator Borges is pleased with this development. He formulated this in a twist that suggests that the acquisition of ideas Tlon is also a metaphor for it at the time of writing the history ereignende spread of totalitarian ideas in Europe: " Ten years ago, handed each a semblance of order -inspiring symmetry - dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism - completely out to beguile the people. How should you do not submit to Tlön, to the meticulous and comprehensive palpably an orderly planet? Needless to reply that the reality is ordered. "
Effect story
Borges' story is reflected in Karlheinz Essl's String Quartet upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned (2001) where the composer is trying to make in analogy to the original language Tlön'schen a musical discourse without melodic formulations.