“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

“The Garden of Forking Paths”

“The Lottery in Babylon”
Presenter: Abdullah Zubair
M.S English Literature (Postmodern fiction)
 Jorge Luis Borges
• Jorge Luis Borges, (born August 24, 1899, Buenos Aires, Argentina—died June 14,
1986, Geneva, Switzerland), Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer whose
works became classics of 20th-century world literature.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
• The narrator of the story (Borges) came to know about the the land of
Uqbar from his friend Bioy Casares.
• Bioy recalled reading in an encyclopedia about an old gnostic writer from
the land of Uqbar who had written about mirrors being abominable
because they cause men to multiply in number.
• Borges and his friend Bioy tried to locate the article about Uqbar in
encyclopedia, but they didn’t find it. But next day Bioy contacts Borges
on phone to tell him that he has managed to find the article and passage,
and Borges asks to see it.
• After reading the encyclopedia, Borges found that the land of Uqbar lies somewhere in Iraq or
Minor Asia (Modern day Turkey).
• The literature of Uqbar was entirely fantastical.
• The legends in the Uqbar’s literature refers to the Tlön (another planet).
• Two years later, an old friend of Borges’ father, Herbert Ashe, dies, soon after receiving a
package of a book. Borges comes into possession of this book, which is none other than an
encyclopedia of Tlön.
• On the first page is an inscription which reads, Orbis Tertius. This is the eleventh volume of a
much larger encyclopedia, but Borges is unable to locate any of the other volumes in any library
or from any bookseller in America or Europe.
 Analysis…
• The planet of Tlön does not exist, even in the story itself: it is a fiction
within a fiction.
• It is a hoax invented by a secret society in the nineteenth century, with
more and more details and artefacts related to Tlön being gradually
‘released’ into the world to add credence to the idea of the planet’s
existence.
• The narrator concludes that Tlön was invented as a vast hoax, probably
involving a secret society of intellectuals.
• Tlön, he learns, is a world with ‘transparent tigers’ and ‘towers of blood’.
He also learns that the inhabitants of Tlön are all idealists in their
philosophy: their language contains no nouns because objects in and of
themselves cannot be said to have existence.
• The only academic discipline they have on planet Tlön is psychology,
because everything in the world is perceived by the mind, rather than
having independent existence.
• There were many school of thoughts having their philosophies on Tlön;
• One of them negates about the idea of time, arguing that the present is
indefinite since we only perceive things directly in the present moment
(and the past has no reality other than as a memory experienced during the
present).
• Another school of thought on Tlön argues that while we are asleep,
another version of us is awake somewhere else, and so every man is
actually two men.
• A church of Tlön posits that anyone who repeats a line from Shakespeare
is William Shakespeare in that moment.
• The people of Tlön have no concept of plagiarism, and most books are
unsigned when they’re published: it’s as if everyone has written them.
• The letter found among the possessions of the late Herbert Ashe, reveals
that the members of this secret society includes George Berkeley in
seventeenth century who invented the country of Uqbar and created
history for it.
• Then, in the nineteenth century, a millionaire named Ezra Buckley had taken up the
project, but found it lacked ambition, and so a whole planet, Tlön, had been invented
too. It was Buckley who had decreed that an encyclopedia of this imaginary planet
should be written.
• The encyclopedia was written by three hundred men and then translated into one of
the fictional languages of Uqbar.
• The members of this hoax was called Orbis Tertius.
• One of the men who worked on this translation was Herbert Ashe, and this explains
why the book was found among his possessions when he died.
 Analysis…
• The people of Tlön believe that nothing exists outside of their perception
of it; curiously, they are right, since their world is nothing more than a
fiction, and so when Borges the narrator (and we, as readers) are told of
the details of Tlön, such as its ‘transparent tigers and towers of blood’,
these ‘things’ do exist only in our subjective imaginations, rather than in
physical reality.
• Borges’ story is thus a fiction within a fiction, a mirror facing another
mirror.
 Cont…
• Borges mentions George Berkeley, often known as ‘Bishop Berkeley’. This Irish
philosopher is best-known for his theory of subjective idealism, which is often
summarized as ‘if a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody to hear it, does it make a
sound?’ (Berkeley’s answer would be ‘no’, since things only exist when they are
perceived by humans.)
• For Berkeley, and for the inhabitants of Tlön, matter, or material substance – that is, real
physical ‘stuff’ – doesn’t exist, but is merely an idea perceived by the mind.
• The people of Tlön are fictional, so paradoxically, they are right (even though they don’t
exist): their world does only exist as a set of perceptions, perceived by Borges and by us
through the pages of his story.
• Then, in around 1944, all forty volumes of the encyclopedia of Tlön were
found in a Memphis library; Borges suspects that they have been placed
there by members of Orbis Tertius and were meant to be discovered.
• Borges believes that one day, the hundred volumes of the second version
of the encyclopedia will be ‘found’.
• The whole world has assimilated the ideas of Tlön and these ideas have
changed many fields of science.
 Analysis…
• And this, in the last analysis, is the great theme of Borges’ story: the blend
of fantasy and reality.
• It is a theme which we find in many of his other stories, too; For
Example: “The Circular Ruins” and “The Immortal”.
The Garden of Forking Paths
• A Chinese agent or spy, Yu Tsun, is the narrator of the story.
• He wrote this story as a confession as he waits for his execution for spying for the
Germans during First World War.
• Yu Tsun has discovered that the ring from which he operates has infiltrated by
enemy and there is no possible way to be in direct contact with Germans (such as
telephone) and give them information.
• So, he opted the old-fashioned way and escape and is on the run from the Richard
Madden.
• Yu travels to the house of a man named, Stephen Albert, who he doesn’t
even know.
• Yu has plucked the man’s name from the phone book, because it was the
same as the crucial item of information he has discovered (the name of
the town that is the location of a British artillery park in France).
• As he travels to the man’s house, Yu reflects upon his grandfather, who
withdrew from public life in order to write a novel and to construct a
labyrinth.
• But when he arrived at the stranger’s (Stephen Albert) door, he was surprised to
know that this stranger seems to have been expecting him.
• Stephen Albert was a Chinese Scholar of all things.
• Albert takes Yu for a walk around the ‘garden of forking paths’ outside the house.
• While going back in the house Albert tell Yu about his grandfather.
• He tells Yu that his grandfather, Ts’ui Pen, never managed to finish the novel he
planned to write, but when he died, he left behind a draft containing all the
various possible plot lines and discarded ideas.
• Ts’ui Pen leave a note declaring that he leaves the draft for ‘several futures’ and
referring to the abandoned novel as “The Garden of Forking Paths”.
• From this clue, Albert realized that the novel was the labyrinth Ts’ui Pen had
sought to construct: the novel and the labyrinth were, in fact, one and the same.
• Basically, the novel appeared like an abandoned draft with lots of considered and
rejected plot developments, this was deliberate: rather than have a protagonist
choose one path and reject the others, he wanted to explore the idea of a
protagonist being able to choose all possible ways forward, simultaneously. It is
thus a novel in which every possible course of action plays out.
• No sooner has Yu learnt – and struggled to digest – this revelation than Richard
Madden, the man who is on his trail, appears, and Yu realizes the game is up.
• He shoots and kills Albert, knowing that news of the man’s murder, and Yu’s
involvement in it, will reach the Germans, who will realize that Yu is
communicating to them the location of the artillery park: the town of Albert, in
France.
• Yu ends his narrative by confirming that, because the town of Albert has just been
bombed, he knows the Germans got his ‘message’.
 Analysis…
• ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ contains, then, two ‘gardens of forking
paths’: a literal one (the one found in the garden of Stephen Albert) and a
figurative one (Ts’ui Pen’s novel).
• Just as Albert had to negotiate Ts’ui Pen’s ‘garden of forking paths’, Yu
Tsun physically navigates Albert’s garden of forking paths, and now we,
as readers, navigate Borges’ ‘Garden of Forking Paths’. And now you,
spectators, are navigating presentor navigation of Borges’ story, in the
kind of seemingly infinite wall-of-mirrors effect that is a key
characteristic of Borges’ work.
The Lottery in Babylon
• The narrator tells us about the lottery in the country of Babylon (the namesake of
the ancient Middle-Eastern region but, we assume, a distinct and fictional
country) which began centuries ago.
• Back then people used to enter in the lottery by paying copper coins and have a
chance to win silver coins.
• But soon this lottery developed into something more, because to make it more
appealing to human nature, people entering the lottery might either win a nice
prize or incur a fine.
• But soon the mysterious lottery company replaced the fine with
imprisonment. Those who had bought one of the unlucky tickets
would go to jail, simply for having the wrong ticket that had been
drawn at random. Soon, other punishments were introduced.
• The lower class who could not afford to enter in the lottery by buying
the ticket also wants to take part in it.
• The narrator states that the turning point was when a slave, without any money of
his own, stole someone’s lottery ticket, which just so happened to be one of the
unlucky tickets to be drawn, carrying the ‘prize’ of having one’s tongue burned.
• By chance, the law of the country introduced the punishment of tongue burn for
the stealing of lottery ticket.
• After this incident, the people of Babylon started believing that the lottery was not
just the random lottery, but instead it is the karma for the deeds done by one who
participates in the game in the form of reward or punishment.
• The Company become, in a sense, a state, because it had power over every single
citizen of Babylon because everyone was the participant in its lottery.
• The extreme of nice prizes and nasty prizes become more pronounced: at one end,
a lucky winner might be promoted to a high office in Babylon, while at the other
end, they might be killed.
• With the passage of time people started believing that the dependency of winning
or loosing in lottery was based on the fate of the individual.
• And because of this believe and fate of people in the company, the company
became more powerful and launched a propaganda to convince the population that
the company controls everything.
• And the Company, in turn, realized that the people had given them permission to
take over control of every aspect of daily life.
• The number of drawings in the lottery, which determined every outcome of every
citizen in Babylon, became ‘infinite’.
 Analysis…
• Rex Butler describes this story as an allegory of totalitarianism.
• Totalitarianism is a form of government that attempts to assert total
control over the lives of its citizens.
• An important point to keep in mind is that the Second World War was
raging when Borges wrote the story, with fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism
all on the rise; there was also political upheaval in Borges’ home country
of Argentina.
 Cont…
• But he also points out that it is the people of Babylon who encourage the
Company to take over every aspect of their daily lives; this has been
interpreted as a reflection of Borges’ (reputed) belief that the Argentinian
people were not ready for democracy when Borges wrote ‘The Lottery in
Babylon’.
• So, this story poses an important question about human nature that setting
aside totalitarian regimes, How much control do we have over our lives?
• And the things which we don’t have control over, are they merely a result
of a random chance, or someone else is pulling the strings?
 Cont…
• We humans don’t tend to like random chance: we want there to be a reason for
things that happen.
• If we experience good fortune, we want to believe it is because we did something
to deserve it: perhaps its karma paying us back for some good deed we did.
• Similarly, if something terrible happens, we don’t want to believe it was just bad
luck, but that someone was responsible, someone who perhaps, we feel, needs to
be held to account.
• Humans like to look for patterns, but we are also hard-wired to believe that
everything happens ‘for a reason’.
 Cont…
• The outcome of the lottery must be random, but entry into the lottery
is compulsory, suggesting that every aspect of everyone’s life is being
controlled.
• Another prominent Borgesian theme, that of the infinite, comes into
play as the Company extends its power and determines everything
through the lottery: the number of drawings becomes truly infinite.