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Collected Fictions
Borges Stories - M.R. 2013
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Discussion - Week One - Borges - Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
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Perhaps all artists come from Tlön, or at least the artists are the ones conscious of their Tlönist heritage. I find this one of Borges' most difficult stories perhaps because it's less of a "story" suggesting a series of ideas than the ideas without much of a story or even much of a character, even Ashe is barely drawn. ("My father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.") The coda in 1947 (which Wiki reminds me is set in the future at the time of the writing) suggests a plot that isn't actually realized.
But Tlön is VERY Borges, and in a way a perfect introduction: the impossibility of escaping solipsism, the playing with imaginary books, the philosophical paradoxes (here referencing the real philosophical paradoxes of Zeno of Elea), the sometimes quite real scholarship, the academic hand in glove with the absurd, the humor.
I read once, I don't remember the source, that Borges said he an idea for a book(s) and then realized it would be much easier to pretend it was already written and refer to it than actually write it. This was a perfect solution to the expression of his sensibility.
"...it's transparent tigers and fountains of blood scarcely deserve the unwavering attention of all men." That's really a lovely and very funny line, he gets his images and at the same time is playing with scholarly or critical attitudes.
Although I couldn't help wonder how transparent tigers are studied. It would seem they would be the most dangerous of predators. :-)
Mod
...they're studied by transparent biologists, of course!
One place where my thoughts went during the story was the current unreliability of online texts. Winston from 1984 had the job of changing history and news stories whenever the government found it convenient to do so. With online articles and blogs, text can easily be changed, but how would we know? Without a hard copy, how reliable is electronic information?
Of course in the Tlön story, the characters have a physical copy with pages about Uqbar, but the other copies they have access to do not have the added pages. Here it's easier to conclude that there was physical manipulation of a single copy of the encyclopedia. With online information, who knows how many versions are out in cyberspace?
I think the greater difficult for Borges would still be the difficulty of the reader's consciousness and the enormous power it has (cf. "Pierre Menard").Tlön is a metaphor for the imagination at work. It may be more than that, of course. But I think it's at least that.
Having reread this, I find I like it a lot more this time. I think what put me off, at first, was the fact that it is dry, and that it seems undeveloped. But now it seems that what I first objected to may in fact be the strength of the work.Borges correctly deduced, perhaps, that this could not be more effectively presented by developing it further. Yet, the ideas within it do not deserve to be discarded because they don't lead to a more developed text.
Meanwhile, the writer has wit. But the work doesn't shout.
At first reading, I think I was heavily under the influence of Raymond Queneau, who is more entertaining, so I wasn't in the right frame of mind for this... maybe. I'll probably say more later, just rambling on break time at work. Cheers.
It's funny, but I always feel like Borges was a postmodernist fifty years before the moniker developed. Maybe because of that lens, I read this story as a critique of Western culture. He specifically mentions "The Americas and Europe" when discussing the world in which they search for answers.The key figures in the Orbis Tertius are those who have fallen victim to the "ever progressing" modern project. Berkeley leads the charge, despite having "lost" to Hume.
On Tlon, they have concepts that seem unreachable and others that seem self-evident. However, they're radically different than those concepts that seem so to Western culture. It seems to me that the notion of building on reason and science to the pinnacle of truth is made to look silly when it becomes evident that a human-authored work is being rapidly adopted over what was previously believed to be "absolute" and "natural."
Basically, it seems like a really spooky story about the social construction of reality.
Or maybe I'm just a sociologist in a book club, haha.
If it's a critique, what's being criticized?I think -- as I do sometimes of Borges -- it's a form of stand up comedy on the human condition.
Western arrogance at having access to absolute, natural truths.It may well be both a commentary on the human condition and the relevant aspects of contemporary society. In the latter case, he's critiquing the "modern project," the gall of claiming to have verified absolute reality, and the notion of a quest towards a pinnacle of knowledge. Basically, all of the jazz that Enlightenment philosophers discussed, age of reason philosophers developed, and modern discourse on the philosophy of science has made common.
Mod
Like believing atlases are complete until you discover 4 pages about Uqbar, and then realize the atlases are not complete. A fun mind-game the creators of Tlön came up with.
Z proposed the idea of reading "hoax novels" over in the suggestions for 2014 discussion earlier today. I think this short story fits the theme.
Jim wrote: "Alex wrote: " the gall of claiming to have verified absolute reality.."Like believing atlases are complete until you discover 4 pages about Uqbar, and then realize the atlases are not complete. A..."
Exactly. And yes, it certainly seems to fit. Stories about fake books are always entertaining because they make me wish the books were real so that I could read them, haha. Like Lovecraft and the Necronomicon.
Mod
Or like Wallace's "Entertainment" or Danielewski's "Navidson Record" - ok, those are movies, but still...
The more I ponder this particular story, the more Borges becomes a proto-postmodernist.
Great examples. And I agree completely. Fractured reality that is all perspective. He talks in so much depth about subject positions and the construal of reality as a function of language. Foucault and Derrida would heartily agree.I think finding a postmodernist in the 30s lends credence to Bruno Latour's idea that we have never been modern and thus there is no such thing as postmodern, haha.
Mod
We'll be delving more into this territory with Pierre Menard during the week of April 29.
I haven't read that one lately, so I'm looking forward to it. A little Borges sprinkled in makes for a really great reading list. Glad I saw the Magical Realism thing pop up. I haven't had the heart to dive into some of the more intense selections given that I essentially read sociology and anthropology all day and tend towards low fantasy and cheap sci fi for escapism in the evenings haha.
Mod
As a sociologist, I think you're going to have a lot of fun with Grass' The Flounder.
Glad you're enjoying the Borges.
I've never heard of it, so I'll look forward to it. I'll do my damnedest to keep up with the reading.
Jim wrote: "Perhaps Borges comes from Tlön? "But Tlön is not a perfect world! If it were,the closing lines before the post script wouldn't read "Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater." Also,our real world slowly being taken over by Tlönian ideas wouldn't then seem so scary.
The writer has taken the idea of Berkeleian idealism to a nonsensical extreme,still it's a fascinating world esp. In terms of language & how changes in its structure essentially changes our perception of the world.
This is my first Borges & to encounter such a 'typical' dense story ( reads more like an essay,actually), is daunting to say the least. Looks like I'll first have to read the stories & then read on/about them!
DFW got it so right in his Borges essay: "Borges's stories are very different. They are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments†; they are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant logics. Above all, they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness...human thought, behavior and history are all the product of one big Mind, or are elements of an immense cabalistic Book that includes its own decoding. Biography-wise, then, we have a strange situation in which Borges's individual personality and circumstances matter only insofar as they lead him to create artworks in which such personal facts are held to be unreal."
I was thinking abt Scientology– isn't the same kind of a priviledged folks creating an alternate world of reality aura is there!?
Mod
I think scientology is filed under the Sci-fi genre...
I like the DFW quote. What book is the essay in?
This essay,sorry,story also read like an elite Sci-fi...It's from Wallace's NYT review of Borges' biography:
Borges on the Couch - Review
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/boo...
Wow, look away for a few minutes.But science DOESN'T claim to have verified absolute reality if such a thing and neither does philosophy of science. And we are well beyond the milestone discoveries of modern physics and the impossibility of making sense of the realities of quantum physics. This was the 40s.
In fact, the irony is that in going back to Berkeley he moves out of the mainstream which is really Hume to Kant and the impossibility of knowing the ding an sich, the thing in itself.
For Borges I think, and this will come up again, it is the teasing fact that we can never be sure we're beyond our own consciousness. It will come up again.
I should've said some branches. Logical positivism for instance certainly things that with sufficient falsification you can reach a point of de facto certainty. That's what the modern project is all about: progressing upwards towards that certainty. Plenty of philosophers of science disagree and I'm in that camp. Broad brushes are always risky, sorry for the misleading generalization!
"But science DOESN'T claim to have verified absolute reality"I didn't mean in the thematic sense,rather in the fantasy aspect of it– how he seems to be creating a new country,nay,a planet before our eyes.
I'm sure as we read ahead,we'll encounter many more philosophers & their philosophies– Borges' erudition is all over the page as a reader & that consequently makes him taxing as a writer.
Not necessarily philosophers but erudition everywhere and the particular problem of solipsism which is an artist's problem. Artists are, in a way, professional solipsists, they offer their "vision".
For those looking to get deeper into this story,there is this thesis :Tlön as hrön : metafiction and possible worlds in Jorge Luis Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/1234567...
I've downloaded it & meaning to read it by & by.
RE: Borges's biography being completely irrelevant to his storiesI've read the story a couple of years ago and rereading it the realization that shocked me most was that although Borges refers to and quotes a huge number of people, there is only one reference to a woman in the whole text,
The incident took place in a flat in Laprida Street, over the way from a high bright balcony that faced the setting sun. The Princess de Faucigny Lucinge's silver dinner service had arrived from Poitiers. Out of the vast depths of a chest adorned with seals from all over the globe came a stream of fine ware - silver from Utrecht and Paris chased with heraldic fauna, a samovar. Among these items - with the barely perceptible flutter of a sleeping bird - a compass quivered mysteriously. The princess did not recognize it. The blue needle yearned for magnetic north; the metal case was concave; the letters on the compass rose came from one of the alphabets of Tlön.
Everyone is male, even the quotation in the first section says, 'Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they reproduce and multiply the planet'. Doesn't it make a lot more sense to say, 'mirrors and motherhood (or childbearing?) are abominable because they reproduce and multiply the planet'? I like to think that somebody writing today wouldn't presume that both the inventors and (earthly) researchers of Tlön are all male.
That struck me too, Andreea, the word "fatherhood." Of course, with an all male population, reproduction will be limited to mirrors. :-)
Di Giovanni's translation reads: "mirrors and copulation are abominable because they multiply the number of men." Again, men.
Mod
In Borges' time and pre-1970's, we can read "the number of men" as meaning "the number of humans" just as in Shakespeare, we would read "And one man in his time plays many parts," and translate as "one person". This was a longstanding convention throughout literature and not intended to slight women.
Even so, a cavalier translator can choose to update the text.
I agree with Jim on "men" as well as the long-standing use of "he" as neuter gender.However, I think "fatherhood" is bizarre. I think the logical word is "sex" or "copulation."
And I think a translator should be true to the text whenever possible. (Sometimes it's not because the way you say things in one language is simply not always possible in another -- or it loses power.)
Does anyone know what the original Spanish is?
Bill wrote: "Does anyone know what the original Spanish is?..."From the Spanish, where the narrator is recounting Casares quote followed by the original from the Encyclopedia:
Él había recordado: Copulation and mirrors are abominable. El texto de la Enciclopedia decía: Para uno de esos gnósticos, el visible universo era una ilusión o (más precisamente) un sofisma. Los espejos y la paternidad son abominables (mirrors and fatherhood are hateful) porque lo multiplican y lo divulgan.
The English translations of the two phrases are actually in the Spanish text. So no blaming the translators on this one.
Thanks, Whitney.It's certainly not an issue of translation.
I'm trying to remember Borges' stories which I haven't read in a while. But I don't think Borges' imagination is populated with women. Usually, I find this makes writing less interesting to me -- (my response to Hemingway's collection titled Men Without Women was so then who gives a damn) -- but I didn't have that reaction to Borges.
Bill wrote: "Thanks, Whitney.It's certainly not an issue of translation.
I'm trying to remember Borges stories which I haven't read in a while. But I don't think Borges imagination is populated with women. U..."
I'm a long time lover of Borges, but until this thread came up I'd never noticed the lack of women, something that would normally bother me as well. Probably because his stories are more about abstract ideas than characters, and because the characters at the center tend to be a narrator who seems to be a stand-in for the writer.
This is a man in a man's world. In many times and places, men have mostly stayed within the society of men, and women within the society of women, except in their social interactions relating to sex, romance, and within certain family interactions. Men have often spoken with men about "men's concerns," and women about "women's concerns." Meanwhile, in literature, for right or for wrong, when men and women share the page, it generally raises expectations of romantic, sexual or family relations. This story is not interested in romance, sex, or family as a theme, and refers to sexuality only in terms of the reproduction of self.From the perspective of a man, "fatherhood" is a better analogy to mirrors than "motherhood," or "parenthood." The male character can see the siring of a son as duplication of the self. Once the concept of gender is introduced, the analogy is strained, particularly as mirror images are most analogous to asexual reproduction.
Here's an adaptation, from W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. Sebald paraphrased the story in German and the words are from his English translator. At the end of the passage that led to the room where we were sitting, the author continues, hung an oval, half-fogged mirror that had a somewhat disquieting effect. We felt that this dumb witness was keeping a watch on us, and thus we discovered – discoveries of this kind are almost always made in the dead of night – that there is something sinister about mirrors. Bioy Casares then recalled the observation of one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar, that the disturbing thing about mirrors, and also the act of copulation, is that they multiply the number of human beings.
Bill wrote: "I agree with Jim on "men" as well as the long-standing use of "he" as neuter gender.However, I think "fatherhood" is bizarre. I think the logical word is "sex" or "copulation."
And I think a tra..."
Bill, Borges used the same idea in another story- talk abt being meta!
In the story Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv,from the collection A Universal History Of Inequity (1935),we come across these lines:
"The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it. Revulsion, disgust, is the fundamental virtue, and two rules of conduct (between which the Prophet left men free to choose) lead us to it: abstinence and utter licentiousness—
the indulgence of the flesh or the chastening of it."
Mod
Nice connection! I'll have to read this tonight
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Books mentioned in this topic
The Rings of Saturn (other topics)The Flounder (other topics)
The narrator and his friend discover a lost land in the pages of an old encyclopedia. Unable to find any further information, they abandon the search until they later discover a full volume of an encyclopedia from the imaginary planet Tlön. Various theories develop, but the truth remains out there, until…
Perhaps Borges comes from Tlön?