Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
| "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" | |
|---|---|
| Author | Jorge Luis Borges |
| Country | Argentina |
| Language | Spanish |
| Genre(s) | Short story, philosophical fiction |
| Publisher | Sur |
| Publication date | May 1940 |
| Published in English | 1961 |
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a short story by the 20th-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published in the Argentine journal Sur, May 1940. The "postscript" dated 1947 is intended to be anachronistic, set seven years in the future. The first English-language translation of the story was published in 1961.
Told in a first-person narrative by Borges himself, the story focuses on the author's discovery of the doubly fictional world of Tlön, of which inhabitants are completely idealistic and live imaginative lives. Relatively long for Borges (approximately 5,600 words), the story is a work of speculative fiction. One of the major themes of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is that ideas ultimately manifest themselves in the physical world and the story is generally viewed as a parabolic discussion of Berkeleyan idealism, and to some degree as a protest against totalitarianism.
Although the story is quite short, it makes allusions to many leading intellectual figures both in Argentina and in the world at large, and takes up a number of themes more typical of a novel of ideas. Most of the ideas engaged are in the areas of language, epistemology, and literary criticism.
The story unfolds as a first-person narrative by the author and contains many references (see see below) to real people, places, literary works and philosophical and cultural concepts, besides some fictional or ambiguous ones which contribute to the plot development. It is divided into part one, part two, and a postscript. Events and facts are revealed roughly in the order that the narrator becomes aware of them or their relevance. The timing of events in Borges's first-person story is approximately from 1935 to 1947; the plot concerns events going back as far as the early 17th century and culminating in a postscript set in 1947.
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