“‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’: Fascist Idealism”, 2024-12-01 (; similar):
The truth is that it longed to yield. 10 years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet?
Yes, I’ve always read the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” this way as well. Jorge Luis Borges may have not been interested in politics in his fiction overtly, but he had strong political opinions & politics was interested in him, and he clashed repeatedly with the Peronists (who would fire him from the library in 1946) and repeatedly criticizes fascism and anti-Semites in his nonfiction especially, and when he was writing this in 1939/194084ya, obviously all of this was quite imminent and topical.
So I take “Tlön” as being an exploration of the Idealism idea, where Borges puts his own ironic twist on it: the (dialectical) beliefs of the communistic idealists of Tlön turn out to be true, on a certain level, because sufficiently-compelling ideas & totalizing ideologies can invest in true epistemic closure and make their claims true. In that way, ‘perception’ becomes ‘reality’. Only that which the ideology or state can perceive is real, and everyone is required to see like a state. (As much as he loved Idealism & Platonism, Borges always seemed to accept them only on a literary level, as applying to fiction and literature—there is indeed ‘Man’ in fiction, but there is not an actual Man in a Platonic region of forms, there is only a term ‘man’ we nominalistically apply to entities as convenient.)
That is, idealism is correct, in a sense, and the artifacts of Tlön become real because the savants of the conspiracy ‘perceive’ them (in their minds) and create them. And as Tlön takes over the world and gains power, it gains more realness and more of its artifacts come into existence—or people just lie about them or pretend they exist and falsify documents to accord with the new party line, and doublethink their way to ‘seeing’ the new labyrinthine reality forged by their fellow humans. (For a nonfiction treatment, see his ”L’Illusion Comique”.)
One might say that hrönir, especially, are a savage Orwellian parody of how things go in totalitarian dictatorships:
It is hard to believe that they have been systematically produced for only about a hundred years, but that is what Volume 11 tells us. The first attempts were unsuccessful, but the modus operandi is worth recalling: The warden of one of the state prisons informed his prisoners that there were certain tombs in the ancient bed of a nearby river, and he promised that anyone who brought in an important find would be set free. For months before the excavation, the inmates were shown photographs of what they were going to discover. That first attempt proved that hope and greed can be inhibiting; after a week’s work with pick and shovel, the only hrön unearthed was a rusty wheel, dated some time later than the date of the experiment. The experiment was kept secret, but was repeated afterward at 4 high schools. In 3 of them, the failure was virtually complete; in the 4th (where the principal happened to die during the early excavations), the students unearthed—or produced—a gold mask, an archaic sword, two or 3 clay amphorae, and the verdigris’d and mutilated torso of a king with an inscription on the chest that has yet to be deciphered. Thus it was discovered that no witnesses who were aware of the experimental nature of the search could be allowed near the site… Group research projects produce conflicting finds; now individual, virtually spur-of-the-moment projects are preferred. The systematic production of hrönir (says Volume 11) has been of invaluable aid to archaeologists, making it possible not only to interrogate but even to modify the past, which is now no less plastic, no less malleable than the future.
In a totalitarian dictatorship, the future is whatever the leadership envisions it to be, and the present as well; but with enough effort, so too can the past can be created as the leadership see fits.
This description of the experiments with the prisoners could as easily be set in Stalinist Russia or Maoist China, where the real story is that on the 4th try, after turning up only the equivalent of fishing for a muddy boot, everyone has figured out that, to satisfy the decrees from above and ‘discover’ artifacts corresponding to the propaganda they have been fed, they need to buy or forge some ancient artifacts of unconvincing antiquity (and so no counter-revolutionary skeptics can be permitted near) and that is how hrönir are discovered. The same way Lysenko manufactured agricultural miracles or innumerable falsifications like ‘learn from Dazhai’ became official policy, doubted only on pain of death.
Those who disagree and wish to maintain their integrity, can only retreat into quietism or ‘internal exile’, and spend their time on esoteric topics with as little political relevance as possible and avoid even publishing (except as samizdat), and let “a scattered dynasty of recluses take over”, as it is too late to stop the Tlön revolution, and “the [whole] world [will] be Tlön”.