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kleenexwomanI haven't been posting my essays for school lately because I don't think they've been all that great. Acceptable, sure (I'm getting good grades), but I have to admit I've been sleepwalking through some of them. This one is different, and I'm actually impressed with myself again.
The story this analyzes is here. The essay explaining the theory I used to analyze it is here.
The Death of the Author in the Textual World of Tlön
In his short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Jorge Luis Borges examines the implications of taking Roland Barthes’ theory of the “death of the author” to a literal and extreme conclusion by creating a work of fiction that denies the existence of an author not only for itself, but for all readers who are affected by its meta-fictional world. This creation through text works on several different levels: the level of the literary and philosophical tradition of the world which it describes, the level of the text’s plain existence, and at last, the level of the acceptance of its described world by the population of the “real” world as real.
The literary world of Tlön seems to have taken Barthes’ theory to heart as a matter of cultural tradition. Barthes argues that the model of criticism in which “the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it” (Barthes, 143) is an obsolete one, and posits a way of reading texts in which “the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent” (Barthes, 145). The dominant philosophy of Tlön posits that “The world…is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts” (Borges, 8); this idea, applied to literature, has led to a practice in which works are considered to be completely independent of the authors who wrote them. In Tlön, “it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous” (Borges, 13). By creating the idea of this anonymous author, the world of Tlön has in effect abolished the presence of the author altogether. Without the particulars of “the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions” (Barthes, 143) to guide an interpretation of the text in an autobiographical direction, there can be no author-centric reading. A featureless and unknowable author has the same practical effect on the text as the existence of no author at all.
Barthes’ recitation of writers who have “attempted to loosen” the “sway of the Author” (Barthes, 143) puts certain Tlönic practices of literary criticism squarely in line with other traditions of textual authorcide. He mentions Proust’s dedication to “the task of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtlization, the relation between the writer and his characters…by putting his life into his novel…he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model” (Barthes, 144). But Barthes’ example is only a reversal; because of the precedent of authorship set in the literary world Barthes describes, the author must have necessarily existed before his work, which emerged from him, in order to allow his life to emerge from the novel. It is precisely the reverse in Tlön, where the non-existence of the author is taken for granted. As Barthes’ ideal model is to have the reader create the text through the work, so do the critics of Tlön create the author through the work by “select[ing] two dissimilar works—the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say—[and] attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de letters” (Borges, 13). Here, the relationship of the reader to the text created by the juxtaposition of two works actually creates the illusion of a single author, emerging from the text itself.
The realm of Tlön itself is a text, a fiction constructed to be mistaken for an account of reality. The nature of this literary deception denies the existence of an author, of an entity whose “person…life…tastes…passions” (Barthes, 143) shapes the ideas of the work. Indeed, the pseudorealistic mapping of a world demands the excision of these things from the text, creating a work in which “the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression) traces a field without origin” (Barthes, 146). The “origin” in this case holds a double meaning; not only does Tlön have no origin in the ideas or vision of “a lone inventor—an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly” (Borges, 7) to create it, but it has no origin in the material world off which the words describing it can be based.
The hypothesis for its authorial origin is set forth as being “the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers” (Borges, 8), each of whose “contribution is infinitesimal” (ibid.). Because of its compound origin, each article, book, and map that purports to describe Tlön depends on the ideas contained in each other scrap of evidence of its existence to be coherent. The relationships between these pieces of Tlön are what makes the whole of its existence more than “a mere chaos and irresponsible license of the imagination” (ibid.). The interpreter of this text cannot depend on the idea of an author to discover a common thread running through each piece, but must create the connections and context for themselves. It is true that Tlön is “a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally” (ibid.); however, those very laws cannot have been formulated by the nonexistent single author, but by the reader or collective readers. The understanding of Tlön both as a world and as a work depends on the assumption posited by Barthes that there is no author; to assume the existence of a “single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God)” (Barthes, 146) of Tlön is to ensure that the reader will be able to find no meaning at all.
The treatment of the nonexistent author and the primacy of the reader in Tlön’s literary world mirrors the way the existence of Tlön as a text depends on the nonexistence of the author and the primacy of the reader. So must the existence of Tlön as a material world, or as a literal existence accepted by the material world, mirror the way the existence of the author in Tlönic literature depends on the creation of the author by the reader. For in creating the world of Tlön and its devotion to the subjective reading of reality, Borges, the thousands of anonymous scholars hired to flesh out the world, and the reader who creates the connections that bind the world together are complicit in creating a text as world, and a world from text.
In Borges’ story, traces of Tlön begin to leak into the real world as the idea of Tlön spreads across the globe. In Tlön, the existence of material reality itself depends upon the reader interpreting reality. “Centuries and centuries of idealism [that have] not failed to influence reality” (Borges, 13) result in the creation of hrönir, objects created by expectation. Paradoxically, in the real world, belief in the real existence of Tlön and its ideal objects becomes so strong that readers of the texts of Tlön begin to accept its laws as their own, bringing hrönir into existence simultaneous with the existence of the reality that allows them to exist. This not only points to the strength of belief in Tlön, but to the existence of its interpretation among its readers as a collective vision rather than a series of individual readings. The juxtaposition of the necessity of the interpretive vision of the individual reader to realize the existence of a text and the collective vision of Tlön which allows its existence to affect the real world suggests that the effect of Tlön’s “manuals, anthologies, summaries, literal versions, authorized re-editions and pirated editions of the Greatest Work of Man [which] flooded and still flood the Earth” (Borges, 17), is not merely to create a fictional world in the minds of millions of readers, but to affect each reader by making their belief in the reality of the world of Tlön part of the text of Tlön itself. In the same way that “All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare” (Borges, 12), according to the Tlönic belief, all readers who accept Tlön as reality are part of Tlön itself.
This idea of the assimilation of the reader into the text is further literalized as the acceptance of Tlön as a real place begins to supercede belief in the real world. The readers of Tlön become blank slates on which to create Tlön itself; they are Barthes’ ideal reader who “is without history, biology, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted" (Barthes, 148). And yet, its continued existence depends on the belief of the readers, even as “life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred" (Barthes, 147).” In the creation of a real Tlön, the author is not only nameless and useless, but must be denied completely to keep up the charade; the reader who lives the text by interpreting it is “its source, its voice” (ibid.) because of their lack of belief in the existence of the author. Tlön is Barthes’ “future of writing” (Barthes, 148) made manifest.
Works Cited
Jorge Luis Borges. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Labyrinths. Yates & Irby. New York: Penguin Books, 1962.
Roland Barthes. "Death of the Author." A Barthes Reader. Susan Sontag, ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
The story this analyzes is here. The essay explaining the theory I used to analyze it is here.
The Death of the Author in the Textual World of Tlön
In his short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Jorge Luis Borges examines the implications of taking Roland Barthes’ theory of the “death of the author” to a literal and extreme conclusion by creating a work of fiction that denies the existence of an author not only for itself, but for all readers who are affected by its meta-fictional world. This creation through text works on several different levels: the level of the literary and philosophical tradition of the world which it describes, the level of the text’s plain existence, and at last, the level of the acceptance of its described world by the population of the “real” world as real.
The literary world of Tlön seems to have taken Barthes’ theory to heart as a matter of cultural tradition. Barthes argues that the model of criticism in which “the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it” (Barthes, 143) is an obsolete one, and posits a way of reading texts in which “the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent” (Barthes, 145). The dominant philosophy of Tlön posits that “The world…is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts” (Borges, 8); this idea, applied to literature, has led to a practice in which works are considered to be completely independent of the authors who wrote them. In Tlön, “it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous” (Borges, 13). By creating the idea of this anonymous author, the world of Tlön has in effect abolished the presence of the author altogether. Without the particulars of “the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions” (Barthes, 143) to guide an interpretation of the text in an autobiographical direction, there can be no author-centric reading. A featureless and unknowable author has the same practical effect on the text as the existence of no author at all.
Barthes’ recitation of writers who have “attempted to loosen” the “sway of the Author” (Barthes, 143) puts certain Tlönic practices of literary criticism squarely in line with other traditions of textual authorcide. He mentions Proust’s dedication to “the task of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtlization, the relation between the writer and his characters…by putting his life into his novel…he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model” (Barthes, 144). But Barthes’ example is only a reversal; because of the precedent of authorship set in the literary world Barthes describes, the author must have necessarily existed before his work, which emerged from him, in order to allow his life to emerge from the novel. It is precisely the reverse in Tlön, where the non-existence of the author is taken for granted. As Barthes’ ideal model is to have the reader create the text through the work, so do the critics of Tlön create the author through the work by “select[ing] two dissimilar works—the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say—[and] attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de letters” (Borges, 13). Here, the relationship of the reader to the text created by the juxtaposition of two works actually creates the illusion of a single author, emerging from the text itself.
The realm of Tlön itself is a text, a fiction constructed to be mistaken for an account of reality. The nature of this literary deception denies the existence of an author, of an entity whose “person…life…tastes…passions” (Barthes, 143) shapes the ideas of the work. Indeed, the pseudorealistic mapping of a world demands the excision of these things from the text, creating a work in which “the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression) traces a field without origin” (Barthes, 146). The “origin” in this case holds a double meaning; not only does Tlön have no origin in the ideas or vision of “a lone inventor—an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly” (Borges, 7) to create it, but it has no origin in the material world off which the words describing it can be based.
The hypothesis for its authorial origin is set forth as being “the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers” (Borges, 8), each of whose “contribution is infinitesimal” (ibid.). Because of its compound origin, each article, book, and map that purports to describe Tlön depends on the ideas contained in each other scrap of evidence of its existence to be coherent. The relationships between these pieces of Tlön are what makes the whole of its existence more than “a mere chaos and irresponsible license of the imagination” (ibid.). The interpreter of this text cannot depend on the idea of an author to discover a common thread running through each piece, but must create the connections and context for themselves. It is true that Tlön is “a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally” (ibid.); however, those very laws cannot have been formulated by the nonexistent single author, but by the reader or collective readers. The understanding of Tlön both as a world and as a work depends on the assumption posited by Barthes that there is no author; to assume the existence of a “single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God)” (Barthes, 146) of Tlön is to ensure that the reader will be able to find no meaning at all.
The treatment of the nonexistent author and the primacy of the reader in Tlön’s literary world mirrors the way the existence of Tlön as a text depends on the nonexistence of the author and the primacy of the reader. So must the existence of Tlön as a material world, or as a literal existence accepted by the material world, mirror the way the existence of the author in Tlönic literature depends on the creation of the author by the reader. For in creating the world of Tlön and its devotion to the subjective reading of reality, Borges, the thousands of anonymous scholars hired to flesh out the world, and the reader who creates the connections that bind the world together are complicit in creating a text as world, and a world from text.
In Borges’ story, traces of Tlön begin to leak into the real world as the idea of Tlön spreads across the globe. In Tlön, the existence of material reality itself depends upon the reader interpreting reality. “Centuries and centuries of idealism [that have] not failed to influence reality” (Borges, 13) result in the creation of hrönir, objects created by expectation. Paradoxically, in the real world, belief in the real existence of Tlön and its ideal objects becomes so strong that readers of the texts of Tlön begin to accept its laws as their own, bringing hrönir into existence simultaneous with the existence of the reality that allows them to exist. This not only points to the strength of belief in Tlön, but to the existence of its interpretation among its readers as a collective vision rather than a series of individual readings. The juxtaposition of the necessity of the interpretive vision of the individual reader to realize the existence of a text and the collective vision of Tlön which allows its existence to affect the real world suggests that the effect of Tlön’s “manuals, anthologies, summaries, literal versions, authorized re-editions and pirated editions of the Greatest Work of Man [which] flooded and still flood the Earth” (Borges, 17), is not merely to create a fictional world in the minds of millions of readers, but to affect each reader by making their belief in the reality of the world of Tlön part of the text of Tlön itself. In the same way that “All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare” (Borges, 12), according to the Tlönic belief, all readers who accept Tlön as reality are part of Tlön itself.
This idea of the assimilation of the reader into the text is further literalized as the acceptance of Tlön as a real place begins to supercede belief in the real world. The readers of Tlön become blank slates on which to create Tlön itself; they are Barthes’ ideal reader who “is without history, biology, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted" (Barthes, 148). And yet, its continued existence depends on the belief of the readers, even as “life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred" (Barthes, 147).” In the creation of a real Tlön, the author is not only nameless and useless, but must be denied completely to keep up the charade; the reader who lives the text by interpreting it is “its source, its voice” (ibid.) because of their lack of belief in the existence of the author. Tlön is Barthes’ “future of writing” (Barthes, 148) made manifest.
Works Cited
Jorge Luis Borges. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Labyrinths. Yates & Irby. New York: Penguin Books, 1962.
Roland Barthes. "Death of the Author." A Barthes Reader. Susan Sontag, ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
