I love the way the first few stories in this section are constructed almost in the way Vonnegut constructs his novels- by creating made-up religions and different conditions of reality or unreality. The idea that without thinking about it we expect even fictional stories to adhere to or be based on our excepted and understood truths or environment is something I'd never really thought about. Borges explains his method best in the forward:
"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books- setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them."Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius reminds me so much of House of Leaves( a novel written around a novel that does not exist but is quoted from and references a great number of other books that do not exist) or Tolkien. It's interesting that the story ends with Borges commenting that the ideas and even objects of Tlon are becoming so accepted and integrated into the world of his story that eventually people will not know what history is truth and what history has been made up. Which I think could possibly refer to our acceptance of things like religious histories and ideologies as truth.
The extent to which Borges constructs a language and culture for the people of Tlon complete with epistemological and metaphysical theories is ridiculous and almost unbelievable. The solid paragraphs of made-up information and facts would be overwhelming if they weren't perfectly balanced by and suspended among these dazzling weightless descriptions or observations. His ability to write a sentence that embeds itself in my head so beautifully or resonates so incredibly with me reminds me of Marquez or Camus- it is incredibly dense but feels so personal.
*I'm sorry if this isn't the most coherent. I'm nursing a mean cold and my brain is fuzzy. I'll try to add to it, but I wanted to get something down before class.
Your reference to Tolkien when writing about Tlon is actually quite perceptive. Borges wrote the story after reading C. S. Lewis who, as you may know, was a close collaborator of Tolkien. The idea of artificial languages was borrowed by Borges from Lewis who was helped in developing them by Tolkien.
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