amusing literary quests

[pynchonoid]

"The World Will Be Tlön": Mapping the Fantastic onto
the Virtual 
Darren Tofts 
Swinburne University of Technology 

[...] Borges defiantly teases the readers' desire to
believe in the reality of the discovered world,
secure, as they are, in their assured, known world
outside-text. He tests, in other words, the extent to
which readers are prepared to forestall their exit
strategy, to explore the outer limits of credulity to
do with this previously unknown world. After all, all
the reference points in the story are verifiably
factual, such as the Brazilian hotel, Las Delicias, in
which Herbert Ashe is sent the mysterious First
Encylopaedia of Tlön, or the narrator's companion,
Adolfo Bioy Cesares, the person who brings the
troubling issue of Uqbar to his attention, in reality
one of Borges's closest friends and literary
collaborators. Borges's style is clearly
documentary-like in approach: prudent, well
researched, and sound, with very few literary
flourishes or overt metafictional moments. Indeed, it
is more accurate to call "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
an essay rather than a fiction, reading, as it does,
with the impersonal, measured factuality of the
encyclopedia entry. In the hands of an essayist
documenting the conceit of Tlön, Borges's methods of
persuasion--or are they in fact forms of
evidence?--are compelling. In reflecting on one of the
theories of time subscribed to by the inhabitants of
Tlön, for example, he notes that "it reasons that the
present is indefinite, that the future has no reality
other than as a present hope, that the past has no
reality other than as a present memory" (34).
Furthermore, he notes, in a footnote, that this
question had detained the attention of the great
Bertrand Russell, who supposed "that the planet has
been created a few minutes ago, furnished with a
humanity that 'remembers' an illusory past" (34). He
identifies the reference as The Analysis of Mind,
1921, page 159. You can pursue the citation if you
like, but take it from me, it is not bogus. 

21.	This is one of the many troubling moments in which
information from outside-text corroborates the
collaborative, invented world of Borges's fiction.
That is, facets of this grand guignol can be chased
down as referential points in our own world. We can
confirm these references from scholarly sources, such
as The Analysis of Mind, or volume 13 of the writings
of Thomas De Quincey. [...] 

22.	Events became more intense as I moved deeper into
the vertigo of writing about Tlön. On reading the
Melbourne The Age Saturday Extra on the 20th of April
2002, it was with a mixture of fascination and alarm
that I came across an account of a little-known visit
to Melbourne by Borges in the late Autumn of 1938.
[...] 

continues:
<http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/13.2tofts.html>



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