Ficciones: 1. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius Summary & Analysis

I.  One day, as the narrator dines with his friend Bioy Casares, the sight of a mirror reminds Bioy of a quote: “mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men.” Bioy claims it is a quote from a heretic of the country Uqbar. However, when Bioy attempts to show the narrator an encyclopedia entry on Uqbar, he is unable to find one. A few days later, Bioy finds an entry on Uqbar in another encyclopedia, so he brings it to the narrator. The men read it carefully together, finding it vague—the entry notes where Uqbar is, but all of the reference points are just as unrecognizable to Bioy and the narrator as Uqbar itself.

The encyclopedia entry also specifies that Uqbar’s literature and legends are purely fantastical, referring to two imaginary regions called Mlejnas and Tlön. Later, Borges and Bioy visit the National Library but are unable to find any information on Uqbar.

II. The narrator recalls an Englishman named Herbert Ashe, a late friend of his father’s. After Ashe’s death, the narrator finds a book that Ashe bought, entitled A First Encyclopedia of Tlön, Volume XI. The book makes references to other volumes of the Encyclopedia of Tlön. The narrator hopes to assemble scholars to recover and reconstruct the other volumes of the encyclopedia.

The narrator takes some time to tell the reader about the planet Tlön, which is one of the imaginary places upon which the people of Uqbar have apparently based their cultural stories. In Tlön, the narrator explains, people adhere to the philosophy that the human mind is the only real, or most real, thing. He references the (real-life) philosopher George Berkeley, who argued that things only exist when someone perceives them.

Borges explains the unique and complex nature of the language used on Tlön, which does not use nouns and instead uses verbs and adjectives as replacements. The narrator also says that psychology is the primary discipline of Tlön, and that all other disciplines are subordinate to it. He goes on to write that, as each state of mind is irreducible, any act of giving a name to any state of mind is a falsification. Thus, metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth: only amazement.

The narrator continues to explain the intellectual society and values of Tlön, including its conception of paradoxes, geometry, and literature. Regarding literature, the general philosophy is that all books are the work of a single author, and plagiarism therefore does not exist.

In a postscript dated 1947, the narrator notes that the story he has just told originally appeared as an article in the Anthology of Fantastic Literature. He writes that the former existence of a secret society from the 17th century was recently discovered. The society’s purpose was to devise of an entirely new country. It was this society—of which George Berkeley was a part—that created Uqbar. The secret society decided that, in order to establish the country it had in mind, its work would have to extend across multiple generations. The idea was for each of the most prominent members to appoint a single person to continue the work into the following generation. In this way, the society would carry on from generation to generation.

The secret society faced persecution, but it ultimately resurfaced some 200 hundred years later when, in 1824, one of its members made contact with a millionaire living in Memphis, Tennessee named Ezra Buckley. The member told Buckley about the creation of Uqbar, but Buckley insisted that the secret society wasn’t thinking big enough—the project shouldn’t be to create a country, but an entire planet. To that end, Buckley insisted that they should make a comprehensive, multi-volume encyclopedia of Tlön, and he offered the secret society his riches to help make this a possibility. The only condition, he said, was that  the project should have nothing to do with Christianity, as he wanted to prove that humans can envisage entire worlds on their own.

By 1942, objects from Tlön began to inexplicably appear in the real world. In one case, a princess finds a strange compass with a Tlönian marking amongst a collection of fine silverware. In another instance, the narrator himself encounters a Tlönian object in a hotel in South America—after hearing the hotel owner get in a fight with a rowdy young man, the narrator came down to see that the hotel owner killed the young man, whose pockets emptied when he fell to the ground. Among the coins the young man was carrying, the narrator found a very small metal cone that, despite its size, was extraordinarily heavy. This, he knew, was a divine totem in some areas of Tlön.

By 1944, Borges writes, all the remaining volumes of the encyclopedia of Tlön have been discovered. What’s more, these volumes have begun to greatly influence society. In fact, the ideas and concepts associated with Tlön have overtaken the way everyone on earth thinks, and the narrator believes that people are beginning to forget that these concepts were purposefully and strategically created by people, not by “angels” or some other divine force. The narrator predicts that, in the coming years, the world itself will become Tlön.