Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

The reportage unfolds as a first-person narrative and contains many references (see below) to real people, locations, literary works and philosophical concepts, besides some fictional or ambiguous ones.

Bioy replies that he had read it in the chapter about Uqbar of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, "a literal if inadequate reprint" of the 1902 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.

It describes Uqbar as an obscure region, located in Iraq or Asia Minor, with an all-fantastic literature taking place in the mythical worlds of Mlejnas and Tlön.

The engineer Herbert Ashe, an English friend of Borges' father with a peculiar interest in duodecimal systems, dies of an aneurysm rupture.

That book is revealed to be the eleventh volume of an English-language encyclopedia entirely devoted to Tlön, one of the worlds in which Uqbar's legends are set.

From that point, as Borges reads the tome, part two comprehensively describes and discusses Tlön's culture, history, languages and philosophy.

The people of the imaginary Tlön hold an extreme form of Berkeley's subjective idealism, denying the reality of the material world.

"[3] One of the imagined language families of Tlön lacks nouns, being centered instead in impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic adverbial affixes.

(Andrew Hurley, one of Borges' translators, wrote a fiction in which he says that the words "axaxaxas mlö" "can only be pronounced as the author's cruel, mocking laughter".

[4]) In another language family of Tlön, "the basic unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective", which in combinations of two or more forms nouns: "moon" becomes "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky".

[3] A dissident scholar of Tlön, going against the established philosophy and languages, tried to propound the theory of materialism, suggesting that a number of coins still existed after a man lost them and they could not be seen by anyone, "albeit in some secret way that we are forbidden to understand".

Another influence of that idealism is that, for about a hundred years, a class of duplicating, apparently atemporal objects called hrönir (singular hrön) have been produced in Tlön.

The American "eccentric" millionaire Ezra Buckley, one of the members of the restored sect, finds its undertaking too modest, proposing that their creation be of an entire world instead of just a country.

Another instance is witnessed by Borges himself: a drunk man, shortly after dying, dropped coins among which a small but extremely heavy shining metal cone appeared.

These include, above all, an effort by Borges to imagine a world (Tlön) where the 18th century philosophical subjective idealism of George Berkeley is viewed as common sense[6] and "the doctrine of materialism" is considered a heresy, a scandal, and a paradox.

This last theme is first explored cleverly, by way of describing physical objects being willed into existence by the force of imagination, but later turns darker, as fascination with the idea of Tlön begins to distract people from paying adequate attention to the reality of Earth.

At the end of the main portion of the story, immediately before the postscript, Borges stretches this toward its logical breaking point by imagining that, "Occasionally a few birds, a horse perhaps, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater" by continuing to perceive it.

At the start of the story, we have an "unnerving" and "grotesque" mirror reflecting the room, a "literal if inadequate" (and presumably plagiarized) reproduction of the Encyclopædia Britannica, an apt misquotation by Bioy Casares, and the issue of whether one should be able to trust whether the various copies of a single book will have the same content.

[12] Along the way we have stone mirrors;[13] the idea of reconstructing an entire encyclopedia of an imaginary world based on a single volume;[14] the analogy of that encyclopedia to a "cosmos" governed by "strict laws";[3] a worldview in which our normal notions of "thing" are rejected, but "ideal objects abound, invoked and dissolved momentarily, according to poetic necessity";[3] the universe conceived as "the handwriting of a minor god to communicate with a demon" or a "code system... in which not all symbols have meaning";[15] hrönir, duplicates of objects called into existence by ignorance or hope, and where "those of the eleventh degree have a purity of form that the originals do not possess";[8] and Ezra Buckley's wish "to demonstrate to a nonexistent God that mortal men were capable of conceiving a world."

The picture is further complicated by the fact that other authors (both in print and on the web) have chosen to join Borges in his game and write about one or another fictional aspect of this story either as if it were non-fiction or in a manner that could potentially confuse the unwary reader.

Borges may be punning on the sense of "primaeval" here with his repeated use of Ursprache,[17] or on the story's own definition of "ur" in one of Tlön's languages as "a thing produced by suggestion, an object elicited by hope".

The fictitious entry described in the story furnishes deliberately meager indications of Uqbar's location: "Of the fourteen names which figured in the geographical part, we only recognized three – Khorasan, Armenia, Erzerum – interpolated in the text in an ambiguous way."

The boundaries of Uqbar were described using equally nonexistent reference points; for instance, "the lowlands of Tsai Khaldun and the Axa Delta marked the southern frontier".

He was working in a local public library in Buenos Aires and had certain local fame as a translator of works from English, French, and German, and as an avant-garde poet and essayist (having published regularly in widely read Argentinian periodicals such as El Hogar, as well as in many smaller magazines, such as Victoria Ocampo's Sur, where "Tlön..." was originally published).

These ranged from "El espantoso redentor Lazarus Morell" ("The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell")—who promised liberty to slaves in the American South, but brought them only death—to "El incivil maestro de ceremonias Kotsuké no Suké" ("The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké"), the story of the central figure in the Japanese Tale of the 47 Ronin, also known as Kira Kozuke-no-Suke Yoshinaka.

Borges had also written a number of clever literary forgeries disguised as translations from authors such as Emanuel Swedenborg or from Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor.

(This situation was to change during the presidency of Juan Perón and the subsequent military governments, when many of Argentina's leading intellectuals went into exile, something that Borges and most of his circle did not contemplate.

Victoria Ocampo dedicated a large portion of the July 1942 issue of Sur to a "Reparation for Borges"; numerous leading writers and critics from Argentina and throughout the Spanish-speaking world contributed writings to the project, which probably brought his work as much attention as a prize would have.

Over the next few decades "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and Borges's other fiction from this period formed a key part of the body of work that put Latin America on the international literary map.