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"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a short story by the 20th century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published in the Argentine journal ''Sur'', May 1940. The "postscript" dated 1947 is intended to be anachronistic, set seven years in the future. The first English-language translation of the story was published in 1961. In the story, an encyclopedia article about a mysterious country called ''Uqbar'' is the first indication of a massive conspiracy of intellectuals to imagine (and thereby create) a world known as ''Tlön''. Relatively long for Borges (approximately 5,600 words), the story is a work of speculative fiction. One of the major themes of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is that ideas ultimately manifest themselves in the physical world and the story is generally viewed as a parabolic discussion of Berkeleyan idealism — and to some degree as a protest against totalitarianism. Although the story is quite short, it makes allusions to many leading intellectual figures both in Argentina and in the world at large, and takes up a number of themes more typical of a novel of ideas. Most of the ideas engaged are in the areas of language, epistemology, and literary criticism. ==Summary== In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", an encyclopedia article about a mysterious country called ''Uqbar'' is the first indication of a massive conspiracy of intellectuals to imagine (and thereby create) a world: ''Tlön'', a fabled world or region with its own physical and metaphysical laws in which the epics and legends of Uqbar literature are set. In the course of the story, the narrator encounters increasingly substantive artifacts of Tlön; by the end of the story, Earth is becoming Tlön. The story unfolds as a first-person narrative by a fictive version of Borges himself. Events and facts are revealed roughly in the order that the narrator becomes aware of them, or becomes aware of their relevance. The bulk of the story is from the point of view of 1940, the year the story was written and published. A postscript is from the point of view of the same narrator, anachronistically writing in 1947. The timing of events in Borges's first-person story is approximately from 1935 to 1947; the plot concerns events going back as far as the early 17th century and culminating in 1947. In the story, Uqbar initially appears to be an obscure region of Iraq or of Asia Minor. In casual conversation with Borges, Bioy Casares recalls that a heresiarch (leader of a heretical sect) in Uqbar had declared that "mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men." Borges, impressed with the "memorable" sentence, asks for its source. Bioy Casares refers him to an encyclopedia article on Uqbar in the ''Anglo-American Cyclopaedia'', described as "a literal if inadequate reprint of the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' of 1902."〔"Tlön...", p.112〕 It emerges that Uqbar is mentioned only in the closing pages of a single volume of the ''Anglo-American Cyclopaedia'', and that the pages describing Uqbar appear in some copies of the work, but not in others. Borges, the narrator, is led through a bibliographical maze attempting to verify the reality or unreality of Uqbar. He is particularly drawn to a statement in the encyclopedia article that "...the literature of Uqbar... never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön."〔"Tlön...", p.113〕 A brief and naturalistic aside about Borges's father's friend Herbert Ashe leads to the story of Borges inheriting a much more substantial related artifact (one of several increasingly substantial and surprising artifacts that are to appear in the course of the story): the apparent eleventh volume of an encyclopedia devoted to Tlön. The volume has, in two places, "a blue oval stamp with the inscription: ''Orbis Tertius''."〔"Tlön...", p.114〕 At this point, the story of Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius expands beyond the circle of Borges and his immediate friends and acquaintances, as scholars such as Ezequiel Martínez Estrada discuss whether this volume could have been written in isolation or whether it necessarily implies the existence of a complete encyclopedia about Tlön. The proposal emerges to attempt to reconstruct the entire history, culture, and even languages of that world. This leads to an extended discussion of the languages, the philosophy and, in particular, the epistemology of Tlön, which forms the central focus of the story. Appropriately, the people of the imaginary Tlön — a fictional construct within a fictional story — hold an extreme form of Berkeleyan idealism, denying the reality of the world. Their world is understood "not as a concurrence of objects in space, but as a heterogeneous series of independent acts."〔"Tlön…", p.115〕 One of the imagined languages of Tlön lacks nouns. Its central units are "impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes which have the force of adverbs." Borges lists a Tlönic equivalent of "The moon rose above the water": ''hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö'', meaning literally "Upward behind the onstreaming it mooned". (Andrew Hurley, one of Borges's translators, wrote a fiction in which he says that the words "axaxaxas mlö" "can only be pronounced as the author's cruel, mocking laughter".〔Andrew Hurley, (The Zahir and I ), The Garden of Forking Paths, part of TheModernWorld.com. Accessed 3 August 2006.〕) In another language of Tlön, "the basic unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective," which, in combinations of two or more, are noun-forming: "moon" becomes "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky."〔 In a world where there are no nouns — or where nouns are composites of other parts of speech, created and discarded according to a whim — and no ''things'', most of Western philosophy becomes impossible. Without nouns about which to state propositions, there can be no ''a priori'' deductive reasoning from first principles. Without history, there can be no teleology (showing a divine purpose playing itself out in the world). If there can be no such thing as observing the same object at different times,〔 there is no possibility of ''a posteriori'' inductive reasoning (generalizing from experience). Ontology — the philosophy of what it means to ''be'' — is an alien concept. Tlön is a world of Berkeleyan idealism with one critical omission: it lacks the omnipresent, perceiving deity on whom Berkeley relied as a point of view demanding an internally consistent world. This infinitely mutable world is tempting to a playful intellect, and its "transparent tigers and ... towers of blood"〔 appeal to baser minds, but a Tlönic world view requires denying most of what would normally be considered common sense reality. In the anachronistic postscript, the narrator and the world have learned, through the emergence of a letter, that Uqbar and Tlön are invented places, the work of a "benevolent secret society"〔"Tlön…", p.120〕 conceived in the early 17th century, and numbering Berkeley among its members. (Although the society is part of Borges's fiction, Berkeley and other named members are real historical figures.) The narrator learns that as the society's work began, it became clear that a single generation wasn't sufficient to articulate the entire country of Uqbar. Each master therefore agreed to elect a disciple who would carry on his work and also perpetuate this hereditary arrangement. However, there was no further trace of this society until, two centuries later, one of its disciples was the fictional Ezra Buckley. Buckley was an eccentric Memphis, Tennessee millionaire who scoffed at the modest scale of the sect's undertaking. He proposed instead the invention of a planet, Tlön, with certain provisos: that the project be kept secret, that an encyclopedia of the imaginary planet of Tlön be written, and that the whole scheme "have no truck with that impostor Jesus Christ"〔 (and therefore none with Berkeley's God). The date of Buckley's involvement is 1824. In the early 1940s — still in the future at the time Borges wrote the story — the Tlönic project has ceased to be a secret, and is beginning to disseminate its own universe. Beginning "about 1942", in what at first appears a magical turn, objects from Tlön begin to appear in the real world. While we are later led to see them as forgeries, they still must be the projects of a secret science and technology. Once the full, forty-volume ''First Encyclopaedia of Tlön'' is found in Memphis, the idea of Tlön begins unstoppably to take over and eradicate the existing cultures of the real world. (As an aside, the eleventh volume of this full encyclopedia is not quite the same as the earlier, isolated eleventh volume: it lacks such "improbable features" as "the multiplying of the ''hrönir''." "It is probable," writes Borges, "that these erasures were in keeping with the plan of projecting a world which would not be too incompatible with the real world."〔"Tlön…", p.121〕 Material reality may be subject to reshaping by ideas, but apparently it is not entirely without resistance). "Orbis Tertius" is the provisional name of a revision—a more detailed edition—of the forty-volume encyclopedia, being created by the "benevolent secret society" in one of the languages of Tlön. While the fictional Borges and his academic colleagues pursue their interesting speculations about the epistemology, language, and literature of Tlön, the rest of the world gradually learns about the project and begins to adopt the Tlönic culture, an extreme case of ideas affecting reality. In the epilogue set in 1947, Earth is in the process of becoming Tlön. The fictional Borges is appalled by this turn of events, an element in the story that critics Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Alastair Reid〔''"Tlön…"'', p.347–8〕 argue is to be read as a metaphor for the totalitarianism already sweeping across Europe at the time of the story's writing. Their remark seems only a small extrapolation from a passage toward the end of the story: As the story ends, Borges is focused on an obsession of his own: a translation of Sir Thomas Browne's ''Urn Burial'' into Spanish. Arguably it is no more important than Tlön, but it is at least of his world. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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