For those of you who have been, like me, filling your days with things unrelated to blogging, I want to give an extra chance to appreciate the story that Charles has selected..and since this week is Thanksgiving, and I'll be busy all day Tuesday-Thursday making good things to eat and feeding the stoves, I decided to extend the reading through next week. Charles, I'm so sorry all this delay had to fall on your story.
If you haven't wandered over to Charles 'dropbox' yet to download the file, do so! The story is fascinating. I think we have a lot to discuss her (I'll post a Subject for discussion when Yarrow isn't being quite so distracting).
So let's get back on track folks!
Heh, I was just coming over here to get the party started. I like this story a lot, though I'm not totally sure how to approach talking about it. It doesn't have, for example, a sympathetic character or a lot of emotional content (even the guy who founds the Tlon encyclopedia is kind of a Thomas Sutpen-esque jerk, and in any case not followed too closely, and the narrator and his friends are not "warm" characters so much as "talky" ones [and even their talk is mostly summary]). It's nothing like "Chrysanthemums," but it's still a great story & one that's doing something completely different. . . or . . . is it?? (probably).
ReplyDeleteAnyway, it's not about the characters in it, so my usual approach of saying, "THAT ONE GUY, POOR GUY; I LOVE HIM!!" is not going to fly here. I can say, "Let's all go to Tlon!" but that's not really to the point, either.
My favorite thing about Tlon is not that it is itself a hron, but that it includes a tradition of literary criticism in which the critic pretends two very different works are really by the same person and then invents a person who could have written them both. It's Planet Borges. I want to move there and start my new career as a literary critic immediately.
If, as Laura says, Tlon is Planet Borges then the following quote seems to sum up the motive behind his story: "The metaphysicians of Tlon seek not truth, or even plausibility - they seek to amaze, astound." And while I can imagine a situation where I could get behind that statement I don't think this was it. A story with no plot, little to no character development, and devoid of most of the trappings of what we consider "literature" has to work harder than most to capture its audience and I felt that this one took too much for granted. But that being said, Charles I would really like to hear your take, because, as seen in the "Chrysanthemums" discussion, I have been known to miss the point every now and then ;).
ReplyDelete-Seth
Can we define "Hron" I still can't?
ReplyDeleteHmm, Masha. I can try, but I'm not sure I'll get it quite right. It seemed to me that in Tlon, a mind could actualize an object by searching for it. The hron would be the object thus actualized. Not the object originally searched for, but a copy of it based on expectation.
ReplyDeleteFascinating sci-fi... quite a head rush, too, with being written in academic prose. From a worldbuilding-geek perspective, I loved the depth and range of it--philosophies, theologies, physical sciences, linguistics, etc. Unfortunately, I'm just a worldbuilding geek and not a philosopher, so I kept feeling like something was meant by the different set of laws under which Tlon operated, but I couldn't guess what.
I had a little more trouble with the suspension of disbelief when he talked about the omnipresence of conversation about it, but again, that's the geek talking. The way he described Tlon intruding into our world was very well done, though, and flavored with a little bit of quality horror to boot.
Must run and finish fixing dinner now... will be back later to see where discussion goes. Can't wait to hear from Charles.
Thanks Jenna!
ReplyDeleteI think that might be part of my trouble with it...I'm not so into the worldbuilding alone. I felt like the story should have been background notes or a smaller bit of something larger and fuller. It reminded me of Lovecraft a bit though, and that was delightful..I used to have such a thing for Lovecraft. I am also really looking forward to hearing from Charles!
I agree that the way Tlon seeps into our world had the flavor of horror, and I really liked that aspect..I want to know more about how, and why it does..not everything about how and why, but more..
Hey Masha,
ReplyDeleteO.K., so on terms, we have two terms at the end of the Salto Oriental story just before the postscript -- the hrön and the ur. Here's the best I can make of it: Hrönir are duplicate objects produced by the effort to find something that had been lost -- two people are searching for the same thing; one finds it, but never tells the other that she found it, so the other keeps looking -- and finds another of the same thing. The duplicate is the hrön.
An ur is another kind of object which is created by the effort of seeking it, but whereas hrönir are created by the effort of seeking something that had a lost predecessor, the ur is something produced by seeking without any determinate past model -- "the thing produced by suggestion, the object brought forth by hope" (78).
I'm not sure what to call Tlön in this -- I think L.'s definitely right to connect the way Tlön seeps into our world with the idea that Tlön itself is one of these objects-made-by-seeking. I'm not sure though whether I'd want to call Tlön a hrön or an ur. (On the one hand, at the start of the story, it was produced by searching for something lost -- the source of Bioy Casares's aphorism, and the pathways that spiral out of that search. On the other hand, by the end of the story, the contact with Tlön is explained by the long-running efforts of the Orbis Tertius world-builders, which sounds like an ur, a thing brought forth by suggestion, not by a search for something previously lost....) I don't know; thoughts?
Jenna,
ReplyDeleteYou write: The way he described Tlon intruding into our world was very well done, though, and flavored with a little bit of quality horror to boot.
Yes! I think this is a great point, and really important. I agree with Seth above that if you're looking for a concise expression of the motive behind creating Tlön itself, the line that "The metaphysicians of Tlon seek not truth, or even plausibility - they seek to amaze, astound." is really good as an expression of that. But I don't think the narrator of the story leaves us with a situation where you should want to get behind that programmatic statement. The narrator's closing notes are of horror and despair. ("Contact with Tlön, the habit of Tlön, has disintegrated this world. Spellbound by Tlön's rigor, humanity has forgotten, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels. . . . If my projections are correct, a hundred years from now . . . French and English and mere Spanish will disappear from the earth. The world will be Tlön." [81]) His only consolation is to hide in his hotel with a solitary project in the old languages which he never intends to publish.
I think Masha's comparison to Lovecraft is really apt in a way -- the horror of the ending is a sort of vertigo, seeking something perfectly mundane (just the source of a Gnostic aphorism about copulation and mirrors! just a mysteriously missing, or mysteriously inserted, encyclopedia article!) and finding yourself drawn further and further out until you're staring down into this sanity-destroying abyss at the end of your search. So I think about the beginning of the story a lot as re-read through the despair and horror of the ending -- what seems like a all-too-witty dinner conversation spins further and further out of control until the imaginary object being sought is ultimately devouring the world itself.
(I actually want to say it's this move in the postscript that makes "Tlön" something I can recognize as a story, and not just a thin frame around a satirical essay about philosophical controversies.)
But maybe here's the twist from the Lovecraftian sort of horror: in Lovecraft the abyss is a deeper reality found by looking beneath the superficial but false appearances of the everyday. In "Tlön" the abyss is not a deep reality being discovered but a deep unreality being summoned from fiction into existence -- that's being invented by the all-consuming effort to find out about it.
Masha: I think that might be part of my trouble with it...I'm not so into the worldbuilding alone. I felt like the story should have been background notes or a smaller bit of something larger and fuller.
ReplyDeleteI think this is part of the reason why I thought it'd be a good idea to look at the Foreword together with this story -- in particular the passage in the second paragraph where Borges talks about "the madness of composing vast books" and describes "Tlön" as an example of his procedure of "pretend[ing] that those books already exist, and offering[ing] a summary, a commentary on them" and of "writ[ing] notes on imaginary books." Of course that's just an explanation of what he's doing, not necessarily a justification of it; if it's deliberate that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
But on the other hand I also think it's interesting to think about the way that he deliberately and tightly confines the scope of what and how much he'll write in a story which is among other things itself a story about the potentially consuming allure of worldbuilding-for-the-sake-of-worldbuilding. (After all, Tlön first appears as the imaginary setting of all the fantasy literature of an imaginary country -- Uqbar; and at the end of the story it's the vast multigenerational project of a secret society of mad worldbuilders who have no apparent purpose but the imaginary world itself. So I think there's as much commentary on worldbuilding here as there is indulgence in it....)
Wow. Thanks Charles! I'm actually really glad you had us read the translation notes as well, it helped give a feel for the author and his motives. I sort of wish I could read the original, I wonder how translation altered the feel of the text..but I do like the idea of Objects-made-by-seeking..it gives such a magical feel to the world. Not necessarily a good magical feel, but a fascinating one. I think, after reading your responses that I wish I could have engaged more with this story.
ReplyDelete