Tlön, Uqbar, Old Roads
February 26, 2008
On this re-reading of some short stories by Borges it occurred to me that he deserves to be included as an Old Roads author. This recognition usually goes to writers who describe and imagine actual present or past worlds. We like reality here. But Borges lavishes so much care and attention on imaginary worlds that he gains a place.
For example, the short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Uqbar is an imaginary country, missing from most encyclopedias but mysteriously present in some editions. The literature of this imaginary country centers around Tlön—an imaginary world for an imagined country. Borges goes on to imagine the alternative worldview held by denizens of Tlön, complete with a description of their odd use of language and thoroughly idealistic habit of perception. Finally Borges delights in the intrusion of this imagined world into the real world: "Almost immediately, reality 'caved in' at more than one point." The fantasy of Tlön suddenly takes its place among other fictional systems that human beings have devised.. and which they live by. Our terrible desire for order and symmety..
OK, but despite Borges' swipe at fictions such as "dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism" he is not really on the attack against importing imaginary worlds. One could say that he welcomes nothing more. It is here that I began to perceive how closely his imaginary projects aligned with what we do at Old Roads. Next term I will be teaching a course on the religion of ancient Egypt.. and what I love about ancient Egypt is exactly the strangeness of its thought. Our bodies and the natural world, life and death, wisdom and the ordering of chaos are all present.. but in studying ancient Egypt there is this feeling we are stepping out onto another planet. The short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" reminds us that any imagined world is liable to intrude on our present world. The work of the scholar and the fantasist come awfully close to being the same thing.
I am tempted to pass over his gnostic notions about all writing emanating from a single intelligence.. with the result that the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights can be read as coming from a single author. We need more attention as to the ways reading changes and de-historifies a work.. but to take that as a reading program is to, well, get lost in a library.. when our goal should be to think clearly and understand the way culture narrows and guides perception and creative expression. But this all depends on how far one wants to take Borges.. and I think it is perfectly possible to let him shine a light—through fantastic creations and wide claims—on the power of the human imagination. Read this way (how could Borges ever complain about the way he is read?) his work becomes a restatement of that Shelleyan principle: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
