He called it “Utopia,” a Greek word which means “ there is no such place”.

Jorge Luis Borges

Borges’s preoccupation with reconstructing a vanished place, a bygone Buenos Aires whose spectrality is becoming overwhelmingly abstract, runs parallel to the possibility of hypothesising self-contained imaginary worlds whose order partly echoes the arbitrary order of our own world, but which are not as lumbered with empirical reality. The writer incorporates the specificity and uniqueness of place into his next projects and becomes an adept abstractor at constructing imaginary worlds. Fascinated by the dizzying potential of culture, he builds these worlds out of linguistic and literary potentials, out of reading and interpretation (where reading is often allegorical), out of a literary and philosophical system of quotations, out of ‘what if’ fabrications, and closed systems of thought which he then makes leak endlessly, imploding their points of closure, foregrounding them as intellectual aporias of the west. Reality is transformed into a sign, a text, while categories such as time, space, causality, morality, become temporary constructs to play with, the Western cultural tradition, an object –a forever provisional object- to be skewed, parodically prolonged, turned inside out, deconstructed ‘for the untruths concealed in all presumed truths’ as Merryl puts it. But how is an imaginary place conceived? How, indeed, is place conceived? Borges´s idea of place is interwoven with textual reality. Texts cannot be disentangled from reality, the conjunction of place and text giving way to an infinitely complex reality where myth and oral tradition become other texts to be written. In this respect, and in relationship to ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ which appears in Fictions, the history of utopia is apposite.

Although expressions of utopian speculation form part of our cosmogonies, including Greek classical culture –Hesiod’s Golden Age-, the Bible and Roman antiquity, it is with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) that the invention of a new literary genre takes place, earlier literary utopias being explicitly Christian. More’s Utopia was influenced by the accounts of Americo Vespucci’s voyages and the New World, and the dissemination of the word ‘utopia’ as an idea coincides with the discovery and exploration of America (both North America and South America become the locus of descriptions of the earthly paradise), later giving way to questions about the relationship between colonialism and utopianism. Utopia became a tool for colonisation. During the exploration of the New World, the regeneration of Christian society was at the heart of utopianism, the search for Eden continued, the New World becoming not only a site where a new projection of utopian ideals took place, but also an unexplored land that had to be subjugated, for it could very well be the territory of the Devil. If early travel writing is suffused by the mythologies of its time, the utopian tradition and imaginary travelogues are in turn inflected by early travel writing, making of all these genres a curious mixture of fact, fiction, prejudice and reforming impulses, while prefiguring the need to strive for a ‘scientific method’ to describe races and cultures, which will find its tentative realisation in ethnography.

The textual tradition of inventing imaginary places where the possible and the impossible meet, travelogues describing unexplored lands (many of which would later be used to promote, advance and justify colonialism) and this new utopian genre resulting from the popularity of More’s Utopia, led to a textual proliferation of imaginary voyages, imaginary societies that suggested the relativity of social customs, even imaginary places where women had equal status to men. Amongst these imaginary travelogues, Defoe´s Robinson Crusoe (1719), a solitary utopia based on Alexander Selkirk, who lived alone on one of the uninhabited Juan Fernandez Islands in the Pacific for five years (1704-9), and Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, a satire on contemporary society and institutions in the form of a fantastic tale of travels in imaginary lands, have come to form part of the Western collective imagination.

Borges was profoundly aware of the literary tradition of imaginary travelogues, of Gnostic heretical movements and their theories about the origins of the universe. He was also profoundly aware of the relationship between utopia and colonialism, master narratives and totalitarianism. It could be said that the imaginary place called Tlön is a perverse composite cosmology, a heretical narrative deploying theories about the universe which echo and skew those of the Western tradition (a Gnostic example of such skewing is one of the schools in Tlön which affirms that ‘the history of the universe –and in it, our lives and every faintest details of our lives- is the handwriting of a subordinate god trying to communicate with a demon’), while also being what could be considered a postmodern narrative, that is to say, a narrative where grand and petit narratives are seen in their historicity as relative, incomplete, temporary and even absurd.

Although according to the narrator Tlön’s topography and zoology seem to have caught the popular imagination, he prefers to describe Tlön’s cultural system: ‘I might be so bold as to beg a few moments to outline its conception of the universe’. In ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, a world, a planet, emerges out of an extreme idealist textual world created by a secret society whose members included George Berkeley whose philosophy is apposite, if not to our world, undoubtedly to Tlön, since it categorically denies the existence of anything beyond our perception of it. David Hume, for whom we cannot know the world directly, is invoked with multiple irony: ‘Hume declared for all time that while Berkeley’s arguments admit not the slightest refutation, they inspire not the slightest conviction. That pronouncement is entirely true with respect to the earth, entirely false with respect to Tlön’. What is true here might be false elsewhere, and vice-versa. The relativity of values, systems of thought and preconceptions of our own world are thus posited at the moment of the reader’s entry into Tlön. Relativity becomes a key concept governing Borges’s reading of the history of imaginary places, reminding us that our world, our perception of it, need not be what it is, that it could be something else.

‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, a tale structured according to the Chinese box principle, emerges out of the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopaedia that produces an interesting quotation from one of Borges’s friends, Bioy Casares, thus introducing the first blurring between fiction and ‘reality’ (the inclusion of a real person in this text, Bioy Casares, is not unique. Other characters from this side of the mirror that are initially concerned with the hypothetical reality of Tlön are mostly real writers and poets from Borges’s time, in fact, they are Borges’s friends, many of whom would have been recognised by contemporary readers: Xul Solar, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Drieu La Rochelle). Bioy Casares, as we have seen a writer of fantastic literature who often collaborated with Borges in literary projects (anthologies about detective stories, anthologies of fantastic literature, short stories jointly written under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq) mentions Uqbar in the context of a literary project that in retrospect shares affinities with the project related in this story, thus creating the possibility that the real writers and poets mentioned subsequently may be part of the secret society that invents an imaginary planet. Bioy Casares ‘remembered a saying by one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar: Mirrors and copulation are abominable for they multiply the number of mankind’, a memorable quotation of Gnostic flavour that, according to Bioy Casares, comes from The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia and which once traced, reads: ‘For one of those Gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are hateful because they multiply and proclaim it’

This first reference to Uqbar appears in the volume XXVI of a pirate encyclopaedia, The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, a belated literal re-printing of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (a signifier of the almighty and optimistic power of British imperialism, as well as a Western signifier of class distinction), the volume Bioy Casares owns containing an extra number of pages where the reference to Uqbar is found. If the pirate edition might refer to the history of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, since it first reached the United States in the form of a pirated edition in 1790, the unique volume Casares owns is generous in its geography, for it actually includes an extra place: Uqbar. Uqbar means in Arabic ‘the greatest’. Uqbar’s geographical setting is somewhere in Iraq, in Asia Minor, pointing through geography to radical cultural otherness (religious difference, a different system of writing, a historical inheritance at odds with that of the West), as well as to a signifier of the Orient, which in Borges’s subjective atlas would point to the Arabian Nights (the Orient as a European invention), and imply an awareness of a history of literature that coincides with a map of cultural imperialism where the other –and here, Argentina would be included- has no place. The insertion of this imaginary place is thus not only ludic, but subversive and critical in its logic. The discovery of Uqbar comes about through the uncanny conjunction of a mirror and this volume. A mirror duplicates a world, while an encyclopaedia attempts to translate it in its totality into words and images; to translate the whole world into a textual world. The encyclopaedia, a source of authority, is undermined in its claims to veracity, therefore putting the encyclopaedia as a project into question. The discovery of Uqbar comes about through a mirror that leads into fatherhood, linearity and the misery of successive order, and an encyclopaedia, an attempt at totalising knowledge about empirical reality that we take to be truthful. The implication here would be not only that such an attempt might have gaps, might be suspect in its totalisation of knowledge or might be open to unlimited adding up, but that it could also have imaginary additions, the conjunction of mirror, paternity and totalising knowledge pointing to a patriarchal transmission of knowledge, the transmission of knowledge disseminated by this text. The encyclopaedia article tells us that Uqbar itself has invented two imaginary regions called Mlejnas and Tlön. However, we only hear about Tlön. The extra article about an unheard-of land propels the story’s characters into a search for further information: scrupulous atlases, catalogues, annals from geographical societies, travelogues, history books, their indices, libraries from Europe and from the whole of America, the search for Uqbar begins.

It is a vain search.

The story then jumps into a second part where we are introduced to Herbert Ashe, an Englishman who has worked in Brazil, a doubly spectral character as the description and his surname indicates, whose variations in mathematical thought, carried out for a Norwegian, invite the reader to a reflection on mathematics as yet another convenient fiction, a model, an invention rather than a universal given (implying by default that scientific models are speculative fictions too). He is a character whose eccentricity includes an interest in gauchos, where gauchos stand for the Argentinean tradition, a cultural other to the West Herbert Ashe stands for- as he might also stand for a whole tradition of writers of British descent who wrote about Argentina, such as the Anglo-Creole William Henry Hudson and Cunninghame Grahame. It is Herbert Ashe, an Englishman suffering from unreality, who leaves when he dies A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön. Vol XI, on which there is an inscription: Orbis Tertius (although Orbis Tertius translates as Third World, the latter did not have the meaning it has nowadays, Orbis Tertius pointing rather to the necessity of a space beyond binary oppositions). The night of nights is the night when prayers are answered, it is a night of self-revelation (‘Better is the Night of Qadr than a thousand months’) , it is the night when Scheherazade tells her own story, a night that points to story-telling as a survival tool to delay execution. The narrator’s joy in finding this volume (perhaps we should talk about the jouissance of the epistemophiliac) is compared hyperbolically to the night of nights, vertigo being a recurrent adjective in Borges’s oeuvre accompanying epiphanic moments related to the finding of impossible objects:

I began to leaf through it and suddenly I experienced a slight, astonished sense of dizziness that I shall not describe, since this is not the story of my emotions but of Uqbar and Tlön and Orbis Tertius. (On one particular Islamic night, which is called the Night of Nights, the secret portals of the heavens open wide and the water in the water jars is sweeter than on other nights; if those gates had opened as I sat there, I would not have felt what I was feeling that evening.) (…) I now held in my hands a vast and systematic fragment of the entire history of an unknown planet.

Islam and therefore the Orient is thus invoked again. The volume’s 1001 pages insist on Oriental textuality. Perhaps the rest of the volumes could be reconstructed by a generation of Tlönists, a possibility which triggers the question as to who might have written this volume: ‘Who, singular or plural, invented Tlön? The plural is, I suppose, inevitable, since the hypothesis of a single inventor-some infinite Leibniz working in obscurity and self-effacement-has been unanimously discarded. It is conjectured that this ‘brave new world’ is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, (…) The plan is so vast that the contribution of each writer is infinitesimal’

This brave new world, which refers to Aldous Huxley’s novel of the same title, advances the invention of Tlön as ultimately dystopian, whilst the complexity of the volume points to a collective endeavour which can undoubtedly be identified as the history of idealist philosophy, here referred to parodically as a secret society of astronomers.

The volume the spectral Herbert Ashe leaves behind tells us about Tlön, that is to say, an imaginary region invented by Uqbar, on which Uqbar bases its fantastic literature. Thus it is a volume about Uqbar’s literary space. Tlön, as a proper name, has a distinctive Nordic flavour. In a world ordered alphabetically, such as that of the encyclopaedia which unites the almighty disparate giving way to extraordinary juxtapositions, Uqbar comes after Upsala (a city in Sweden), creating a continuity between north and south. In fact, by inserting north (Tlön) into south (Uqbar), Borges echoes a similar continuity and creates an impossible object which perhaps could be read as a superimposition of consciousness and the unconscious, or in Borges’s world, of the space of dream and that of vigil, all of us being Tlönians when asleep.

In his concise description of Tlön’s language, Borges seems to be placing the avant-garde within a nutshell. The logic of Tlön’s language is reminiscent of a mixture of how Chinese ideograms function, the English tradition of nonsense poetry (Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll), and it could also be seen as both a celebration and a parody of the poetic language of the avant-garde, in particular as a parody of Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce, a novel which pushes literary experimentation to extremes and which Borges dismissively reviewed at the time as a series of puns which Lewis Carroll and Jules Laforgue had already carried out with better luck. The Argentinean visual artist Xul Solar, a close friend of Borges’s who was also adept at similar linguistic inventions, appears in this story as a translator of Tlön’s language.

Another Chinese box is opened up when we are told about the literature of the northern hemisphere of Tlön. In North Tlönian literature, objects can be conjured up and dissolved according to poetic necessities, as indeed they are conjured up and dissolved on this side of the mirror, either through the intermediary zone of the arts or the private and hallucinatory realm of hope and desire. There are famous poems composed of a single word (as in the one-word poems composed in the short story ‘Undr’). Nobody in Tlön believes in the reality of substantives. Paradoxically, this scepticism produces their endless proliferation. Given that Tlönians don’t believe in causality, it seems a substantial contradiction that its classic culture should comprehend only one discipline, that of psychology, where causes are offered as explanations of effects. However, for Tlönian psychology one should read Berkeleyan psychology, since they see connections between a given cause and effect as an association of ideas, the consequence being that ‘reality’ and its disappearance are continuous rather than mutually exclusive: the second you leave the room in which you are reading these words, the room disappears, only reappearing when you enter it again by leaving another room which in turn disappears, and so on: ‘the people of that planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes that occur not in space but rather successively, in time (...). Or to put it another way: space is not conceived as having duration in time’. If for Berkeley the world consists of nothing but minds and ideas, if ordinary objects are collections of ideas and the only realities are mental perceptions, an exacerbation of this vision would indeed be that space does not exist when is not perceived. The paradox of Tlön’s is that in order for space to exist, time would have to be continuous, or else it would only exist when time exists, and thus the existence of space would depend on a kind of chance encounter.

As with Berkeley, Tlön’s total idealism invalidates science. However, sciences (and by sciences Borges means both sciences and philosophies) proliferate in the same paradoxical way that nouns do. In Tlön, philosophy is a mere dialectical game, indeed, a game of seduction through estrangement, akin to Bacon’s vindication of knowledge through wonder, which is parallel to Borges’s aim of causing perplexity: ‘The metaphysicians of Tlon seek no truth, or even plausibility-they seek to amaze, astound. In their view, metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy. They know that a system is naught but the subordination of all aspects of the universe to one of those aspects-any of them’ In a footnote, Borges refers to Russell’s The Analysis of Mind (1912), thus making Tlönians and Russell contemporary, and suggesting that his parody and celebration of idealism is to be read in relationship to contemporary philosophy, where theories might also be valued or at least noticed according to their ability to puzzle. If in idealism, matter does not exist independently of mind, then it follows that in Tlön materialism should be inconceivable, a heresy as renowned as our Eleatic paradoxes where the belief in the reality of movement is contested. A series of materialist and thus heretical theories serve as a pretext to illustrate the ancient debate of materialism versus idealism at the core of Western philosophy. If materialism is a paradox that cannot be formulated in Tlönian language (the structure of language determining what can be thought, as systems of thought determine what we see) what Borges seems to be saying with Heisenberg is that there is an objective uncertainty, that what is observed: ‘is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning’. And to loop the loop, that indeed any method of questioning would be exposed in turn to the limitations and excesses of language.

The literature of Uqbar is limited to the fantastic, Tlön’s metaphysics being allegedly a branch of fantastic literature. This incorporation or reading of metaphysics into fantastic literature emerges from the ‘reality’ of Tlön whose assumptions are from the point of view of our own world those of idealism. Uqbar’s literary space, and here another Chinese box opens up, tells us about Tlön’s literary space. In Tlön, the subject of knowledge is one and eternal. All literary works are attributed to a single entity, authors being the whimsical invention of literary critics, and plagiarism not existing as a concept given that there is only one author, atemporal and anonymous. If Tlön’s take on authorship reminds us that ancient epics do not have authors in the modern of the sense of the world, it also foretells the death of the author in terms of the dissolution of individual identity in favour of a new emphasis on intertextuality, whilst positing an anonymous narrative magma that resembles the transcendental idea of God as the creator of all things and only genuine originating source. Exceedingly conceptual, Tlön’s literary space parallels Borges’s well-known fascination with arts combinatoria, the theme of a novel which deploys every possibility contained in a plot being present in some of his best-known stories. The novels of Tlön are based on a single plot which runs through every imaginable permutation, reminding us of the Chinese emperor Ts’ui Pên’s novel which dominates ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (as in Tlön’s novels, it is not clear how these permutations are organised in the text), as well as Herbert Quain’s novel April March which is based on regressive ramifications to which we are even given a diagram. We must remember here similar contemporary endeavours such as those carried out by the mathematician and poet Raymond Queneau. In fact, some of Borges’s characters fit perfectly Queneau's notion of the ‘fou littéraire’, whilst Queneau’s Exercices de style (1947) (a simple story told in ninety-nine different ways) and Cent mille milliard de poèmes (1961) (a book of ten sonnets each of whose fourteen lines is on a separate strip, enabling one thousand and fourteen different poems to be read) would be the norm in Tlön’s literary space.

If a plot is a series of decisions, to run through every possibility of a plot overrides Western canonical and traditional notions of literary coherence, while making the Tlönian canon into a straightjacket as dogmatic as that of traditional Western narratives. In the same vein, philosophical works are seen as incomplete unless they contain their thesis and antithesis: ‘A book that does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete’. Identity and time function in a discontinuous way, objects being present only if the subject’s gaze is present. Things only exist if they can be perceived in real time, otherwise they cease to exist, the sustained identity of things in time being as debatable as the sustained identity of people, an idea illustrated by the parable of lost coins and pain sufferers. Tlön’s idea of space and time reminds us not only of Berkeley’s philosophy but also of Bergson’s opposition to the chronometric or spatial time used by science and his proposal for a time apprehended by intuition, an inner or lived time. Thus there are only autonomous particulars, an undefined plurality of sciences proliferates, and absolute fragmentation points to the dissolution of truth as absolute. There is no place for master narratives. And so, Tlönian literary space does indeed constitute a familiar landscape, deduced from absolute relativism, our postmodern landscape.

In Tlön, thought has the same status as reality, hypothetical objects produced by thought becoming the concrete materialisations of realised desire. Given that perception is moulded by expectations, objects can materialise as a result of expectations. The objects produced by thought are called hrönir, whilst the objects that materialise out of hope are called ur. If ‘hrönir’ has a distinctive Nordic flavour as a name, ‘Ur’ was an ancient Sumerian city in Southern Iraq, and thus the naming of these objects is full of spatial irony, for the Nordic name is identified with thought, while the southern one is equated with an earlier and more primordial impulse: hope. Both ‘hrönirs’ and ‘urs’ disappear when they are forgotten. If these mirage objects might echo how perception is entangled with desire, how desire can materialise objects, in the story their presence is highly satirical of idealism, though this satire is partly dissolved by the fact that archaeological finds might indeed modify received histories, since its artefacts are non-existent until perceived by the archaeologist. An interesting exploration of a parallel hallucinatory phenomena is put forward in Solaris by Stanislav Lem. Tarkovsky's film of the same title focuses on the materialisation of intense mental objects, usually people that have left a ghostly trace within the characters’ psyches.

In a further Chinese box strategy, we are told that everything we have just read about Tlön is a reproduction from an article printed in an Anthology of Fantastic Literature. It is not mentioned who authored this article. However, we are told that this article is one of the first intrusions of Tlön into so-called reality and it is the narrator who reproduces this article. The research that brings Tlön into existence has been sagaciously interpreted by Claudio Canaparo as a reflection on the writing of history where writing, even historical writing, cannot be separated from a fictional impulse: ‘making use of histories in books, library visits and descriptions of close readings, Borges produces a primitive but essential form of the historiographical reflection as a narrative form. (…) Historiography in its form and scope does not constitute a ‘logical’ and plausible narrative but a creative and open one. Historiography is an invention, not only in the sense of constituting an account, a story, a récit, but also in the sense of inventiveness as a faculty of imagination and exercise of φαντασια’

Buenos Aires, Iraq, Asia Minor, Norway, Upsala, Brazil, England, Memphis, Uruguay, Paris, Nashville, New York, Salto Oriental, Norfolk, these are the countries and cities that appear in this story, a geographical itinerary where the peripheral predominates, perhaps pointing to a return of the repressed where the peripheral will decentralise centres, as indeed has happened with postcolonial literature. Or perhaps pointing to the fact that although Tlönians might be emplaced, they ultimately belong to a deterritorialised space, that Tlönians form a vast international network, since the boundaries of literature (fantastic literature), are not national, literature ultimately having no boundaries, literature being porous to writing beyond the boundaries which nations need in order to construct themselves.

A postscript from 1947 (Borges’s postscripts tend to be forward dated and as such used as a closing rethorical device within the original stories) documents the first intrusions of Tlönian objects into the empirical world. Otherness is channelled through otherness, as in sympathetic magic. The sudden intrusion of the fantastic into this world is channelled through a woman and a milonga-singing youth from the border, both subjects belonging to a different domain and functioning as mediators for objects from another world, as if borderline subjects were capable of producing borderline objects. If Tlön does not have ‘others’, borders might be the confused place where otherness can make its appearance. The Princess de Faucigny Lucingo (who also appears in ‘The Immortal’ as a repository of Joseph Cartaphilus’ manuscript, as well as being the only female presence within the story) is the beneficiary of one of the first Tlönian objects that slip into this side of the mirror, a compass inscribed with the Tlönian alphabet which points north. The tangible compass and the Tlönian alphabet thus point to a continuity between fiction and the everyday, between text and tangible reality which share common directional co-ordinates. The sudden appearance of a female character as a mediator between two worlds, highlights the absence of women in Tlön. Tlön is no woman’s land, it is monolithically male, the result of a devious reproductory process, as the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopaedia initially indicates. Perhaps in a Borgesian planet ruled by idealism, women simply have no place. In any case, Tlön seems to echo the historical absence of women from cultural discourse at the time. If the Princess de Faucigny Lucingo signals an intermediary zone, the milonga-singing youth from the border –both youth, milonga and border are figures of otherness- leaves on his death another of these Tlönian objects, an immensely heavy cone the size of a dice, an object of estrangement.

The postscript from 1947 also elucidates the mystery of Tlön: Tlön is an imaginary planet created by a benevolent secret society of intellectuals –in fact, this brave new world is thought up by a kind of male Alpha-Plus intelligentsia- that goes back to the seventeenth century, that is to say, to the time when Christian utopias and imaginary travelogues were at their height. This is also the time, according to Casey, when place was sacrificed to space and the abstract was mistaken for the concrete, as if there was an impulse towards the imaginary and the abstract that manifested itself in different ways. If during this time, both philosophy and physics submerged place entirely into space, it is indeed telling that Tlön is a textual space that although initially concrete, its tendency, as we shall see, is towards the absolute. In this respect, Borges’s essay ‘Pascal’ is apposite. After describing Pascal as a poet lost in time and space, he gives us the causes of such symptoms: ‘In time, because if the future and the past are infinite, there will not really be a when; in space, because if every being is equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, there will not be a where’. In other words, these are the aporias of absolute time and space that Pascal inherits from the seventeenth century. Tlön might do away with absolute space in favour of a space that is hyperbolically subjective, but its will to override singularities in the name of a uniform vision ends up echoing the monolithic nature of a space that is absolute.

If initially, the intention of this benevolent secret society is to construct an imaginary country, they soon understand that a generation cannot construct a country, countries come about through the creative efforts of various generations. The secret society re-emerges in North America, Memphis (Tennessee) during the nineteenth century, where Ezra Buckley, an American millionaire joins it as a patron, putting forth his opinions and conditions in exchange for the means with which to undertake such an enterprise. We know that North America invented itself as the land of freedom, as the embodiment of utopia from the beginning. The patron believes that ‘in America it was nonsense to invent a country-what they ought to do was invent a planet’ From our vantage point, where we have witnessed the invention of the American planet, the sentence uttered by Buckley may be read out of context as the registering of an imperialist project already underway. The imperialist undertones of such an enterprise are thus accentuated. Moreover, such a planet should be devoid of the figure of Christ, for, although Ezra Buckley does not believe in Christ, paradoxically ‘he wanted to prove to the nonexistent God that mortals could conceive and shape a world’ That is to say, this utopia will not be a Christian utopia, it will be a secular utopia, a utopia beyond good and evil, a utopia of fantastic literature which includes the history of metaphysics.

This secret society has now the financial means to invent and promote –both through the mass media at the time and through the proliferation of academic knowledge- an imaginary planet, as well as to project its shadow over planet earth. A millionaire would not commission a modest archaeological find. And we have to remember that The Encyclopaedia Britannica in circulation at the time already had twenty volumes. Forty volumes of the First Encyclopaedia of Tlön are unearthed in Memphis! This First Encyclopaedia of Tlön will be the basis of a revision written this time in Tlönian, which would be called Orbis Tertius (therefore the volume Herbert Ashe leaves behind, implies that this revision is already taking place at the time the forty volumes are found). The press disseminates the finding. Tlönian becomes a colonising tool. The whole planet becomes Tlön:

Ten years ago, any symmetry, any system with an appearance of order-dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism-could spellbind and hipnotize mankind. How could the world not fall under the sway of Tlön, how could it not yield to the vast and minutely detailed evidence of an ordered planet? It would be futile to reply that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but orderly in accordance with divine laws (read: ‘inhuman laws’) that we can never manage to penetrate. Tlön may well be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth forged by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

Tlön becomes a space where violence is disguised as order, homogeneity, with its semblance of coherence, being another name for a totalitarian impulse as indicated by the comparison with dystopias such as Marxism and Nazism. Tlön becomes abstract space, that is to say, a violent space in so far as it discourages free thought. However, its intricacy has been devised by humans and its decipherment would thus be a task appropriate to humans, as opposed to the incommensurable nature of reality where the more we know about it, the more it becomes the tangible manifestation of the unknowable and the undecidable.

Utopias and dystopias have reflected the major social and intellectual movements of the early twentieth century, including Communism, Fascism and National Socialism. In 1929, Ideology and Utopia by Karl Mannheim was published. The edition of 1936 was widely read. The text argues that identifiable social groupings produce thought systems. The secret society intent on introducing an illusory world into reality seems just such an identifiable social grouping. Throughout Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius there is a web of references to the genre of utopia, to the fact that places might be imagined before they are built, that a text or model might precede a reality. Thus one of the names cited amongst the bibliography to Uqbar is that of Johannes Valentinus Andrea, author of Christianopolis, ‘a German theologian who in the early seventeeth century described an imaginary community, the Rosy Cross-which other men later founded, in imitation of his foredescription’ It is not surprising that the American millionaire Ezra Buckley should put forth the condition that, notwithstanding tradition, Christ should be left out. At the beginning of the story, Tlön is referred to as this ‘brave new world’. It is an allusion to Aldous Huxley’s novel of the same title where a utopia becomes a dystopia with time. The allusion to Huxley’s novel might anticipate to the knowing reader that Tlön, an imaginary world based on an idealist system of thought, will become a dystopian world. Indeed, it is the megalomaniac jump from inventing a country to inventing a planet that signals the passage from utopian impulse to imperialist might, a might embodied from the beginning by the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, which is a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, an attempt at totalising power through the attempt at a totalisation of knowledge based on imperialist might, a copy reproducing the ideological project of totalising knowledge, but expanding its territory: Britannica becomes Anglo-American.

Other references to the utopian tradition are to be found in Pierre Menard’s literary adventures in ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. Thus the references to the philosopher Ramón Llull, the socialist utopian Saint-Simon and Luc Durtain (who wanted the conquest of the world through images and visions) recall these authors’s quest for unity and their affinities with the idea of utopia. For Borges, a unified world, a rigid system of thought such as utopianism, is synonymous with totalitarianism. Purity, unity, blindness to diversity, are the very essence of the Tlönian project before it becomes an imperialist venture. Its perfect uniformity becomes totalitarianism: utopia fulfilled, even if it is an idealist utopia rather than a political one. Claude Lefort’s definition of totalitarianism as ‘a society instituted without divisions that assumes command over its organization, is self-reflective in all its parts, and permeated by the same project throughout’, could easily be applied both to utopia and to Tlön, Tlön's diversity being limited to a uniform idealist system which prevents non-idealist thoughts from being thought. A space that erases differences is intrinsically violent. Tlön has no outside because it has no borders against which to define itself. It is reminiscent of Kafka's bureaucracy. It is a topology that tries to absorb everything through its homogenizing force: it attempts to transform every space into its mirror image.

‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ also points to the fact that the appearance of order can be profoundly relative. It points above all to the historicity of our belief systems, to their fictionality, arbitrariness and ephemerality, to the potential coherent irrationality of thought, to the chaos in order and the order in chaos, to the fissures concealed by systematic thought. If its relativism reminds us of Gulliver’s Travels and its parody of scholarship in the island of Laputa (whose inhabitants are so wrapped up in cogitation about celestial bodies and mathematics, they need assistants to flap them into reality), the end of the story seems to land us in Crusoe’s Island, a possible island according to Daniel Defoe. Solitary stoicism and dream-like solitude are the narrator’s answer to the becoming Tlön of the world, a narrator who seems intent on escaping the new forces that control the world. The narrator is cocooned in a room of a hotel in Adrogué, a place of extreme importance for Borges (the hotel in Adrogué appears in other short stories: in ‘Death and the Compass’ it is transformed into the villa Triste-le-Roy and Alberto Manguel tells us that ‘here as a young man, he had spent a few happy summers with his family, reading; here, a desperately unhappy thirty-five-year old man, he attempted suicide on 25 August 1934’, an attempt that will appear in a story set in the future ‘25 August 1983’). The narrator ignores Tlön’s imperialism by devoting his time to a translation of Browne’s Urn-Burial – a series of Christian-Platonic meditations on mortality and its transcendence inspired by the discovery of a subterranean world in Norfolk. Escape, dream-like solitude, the solitary and modest space of classical literature, become the only habitable spaces to counter a project that coincides with the whole planet, the lack of boundaries becoming so unbearably oppressive that it becomes a nightmarish version similar to the map which extends over the whole territory it purports to represent.

In a world invaded by an idealist monolithic vision, isn’t the reality of literature more real than that of the outside world, in so far as it relates to the world of inner texture rather than to the world of calculation and control? But isn’t Tlön literature become reality, to the point that other literatures should be posited as a counterpoint? And if Tlön’s language is reminiscent of the historical avant-gardes, doesn’t the narrator’s decision to escape into classicism prefigure the postmodern? Isn’t Tlön the maximum expression of writing as a virtual space, in this case a space become ominous? And are we to believe the narrator in his indifference towards Tlön? Hasn’t he just disseminated Tlön by his tale, whilst recuperating classicism, putting forward a poetics that sums up Borges’s own poetics? Isn’t he an implausible narrator whose complicity is signalled by his continuous presence in the discovery of objects that refer to Tlön, as well as by the suspect chronology of events? Indeed, isn’t he the implausible narrator posited at the beginning of the story? Isn’t he a member of an international conspiracy who by such antics as creating imaginary worlds will have us believe this world is real? Is the dissemination of unreality a terrorist act? Is Baudrillard one of the recent members of this secret society? Doesn’t the narrator parody part of our philosophical tradition by telling us that Tlön has always been within us? Haven’t we witnessed by now more than a generation of Tlönians who problematise the notion of reality, many of whom are emplaced in post-colonial countries? Isn’t the world neither Uqbar nor Tlön, but more like Orbis Tertius (Third World), a space where boundaries between ‘reality’ and fiction are ultimately acknowledged as blurred, where in fact they are reversible, where nothing is what it seems, where belief is treated as fact, where totalitarianism is presented under the face of utopia? Is Tlön really an ordered planet? And if so, according to which concept of order? Does this melting-pot with ingredients from Berkeley, Leibniz, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Meinong, Bradley and Russell add up to an order? Are they not partly discordant texts? Is radical plurality the real order we are forever disavowing through a language that prevents certain thoughts from being thought? Or do order and disorder exist inside each other, cancelling each other out? Isn’t fantastic literature –and thus metaphysics- beyond the law of noncontradictions? Why is a place called Mlejnas invoked but not explored? What is it like? Is it a repressed knowledge? Could it be that as long as the space of Tlön’s accomplices is deterritorialised, the narrator was complicit with it, but once the whole project coincides with the whole planet, the lack of boundaries becomes so unbearably oppressive that it turns into dystopia writ large over the absent horizon? Given that imaginary places tend to be allegorical and the effects of allegory linger for long in the mind, aren’t imaginary places a necessary leap from which to look at the tangible world? Is there a conclusive ending to the story? Are not conclusions suspect, indeed convenient rhetorical devices that point to falsity since they are forever provisional? And does not Borges lead us precisely to the territory beyond the true and the false?