“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is one of Jorge Luis Borges’ many meditations on the postulation of reality. As is common in Borges, this meditation simultaneously inhabits a variety of genres. It is an academic satire that takes philosophical idealism to its chilling reductio ad absurdum. It is a formal experiment, a piece of fiction written as a note to a nonexistent book. It is a call to attention against totalitarianism in the overall sense that the “horrible or banal reality”¹ of Tlönism is the ultimate totalitarianism. Borges’ sternly comic fantasy is held up by a rigid system of artifices. These artifices both focus themselves inward to form a discrete reality and send tendrils outside the limits of the story.

One of the techniques that Borges uses is the repetition of numerical motifs. The narrator discovers the eleventh volume of A First Encyclopedia of Tlön and refers to a “heresiarca del undésimo siglo.” (Emphasis mine.) This Onceno Tomo contains 1001 pages; this number reflects the Book of One Thousand Nights and a Night, a key Borges touchstone to which the narrator later refers. “Eleventh volume” and “eleventh century” also mirror the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1911. Borges frequently returned to the 1911 Britannica, which he purchased with his prize money when took second place in the 1929 Municipal Literary Convention.² (The numbers 11 and 1001 are also palindromes; we could multiply interpretations and associations almost ad infinitum.)

These symmetries are not “meaningful” in the normal sense. They are not “significant” in the manner of crude Freudian symbols or “shocking” in the manner of the ultraist metaphors of Borges’ youth. The 1001 pages of the Onceno Tomo neither “are” nor “represent” the 1001 nights in the same way that a sword “represents” a phallus or a man with a rifle “is” a streetcar. They are, however, significant. These repetitions and reflections form a sort of organic artifice, a music of chance, an aesthetic order.

The two eyes, four limbs, and axially located genitals of a man do not “represent” the two eyes, four limbs, and axially located genitals of a dog, or vice versa. They are parallel yet differing results of the same natural or divine processes; one could call them variations on a theme. Perhaps the same is true of Borges’s use of patterning.

In one way, these patterns give the fictional world “una aparencia de orden” — just as does Tlön. Borges uses the same fictional techniques that he attributes to the Tlönistas; perhaps it would be more realistic to say that he attributes his own techniques to his creations. Borges not only simulates an order — as do even the most realistic and naturalistic fiction writers — but also includes the simulation of an order in his simulation. This is also an order, but one of a different kind. Ironically, this higher form of fictional order is called the structure en abîme,

which is at the same time a narrrative structure, a trope and a spatial model. The structure en abîme is another extraordinary example of what I have called a philosophical narrative situation: it poses a philosophical question (about infinity or infinite periodic repetitions) in terms of visual representation or in terms of a pattern for plots. It leads to what Bioy Casares, apropos of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, describes as a metaphysical fiction. The structure en abîme also engages with a topic of Western classical philosophy, the principle of identity, and it troubles us in a waqy that no other conceptual pattern does, because it asserts, to a degree, the superiority of images over reality.³

The same techniques that Borges uses to create verisimilitude also unhinge and deform the sense of reality. The structure en abîme is a dizzying example of the way that words can imply the existence of the impossible. The sense of order created by repeated motifs is just a bit too orderly to qualify as “realistic” literature. In “La postulación de la realidad,” Borges hypothesized that “la imprecisión es tolerable o verosímil en la literatura, porque a ella propendemos siempre en la realidad.” Similarly, rigorously ordered fiction is often seen as “unrealistic.” Paul Auster has said that “there’s a widely held notion that novels shouldn’t stretch the imagination too far. Anything that appears ‘implausible’ is necessarily taken to be forced, artificial, ‘unrealistic.’ […Critics] are so immersed in the conventions of so-called realistic fiction that their sense of reality has been distorted.”⁴ By pushing the limits of what is acceptable in fiction, Borges reawakens the reader. Far from being escapist, Borges’s fiction helps restore the critical faculty necessary to properly judge “reality.”