Reading notebook: Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"

"Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten 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. It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws -- I translate: inhuman laws -- which we never quite grasp. Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth to be deciphered by men."

Key words: mirror, reality, labyrinth, idealism

Summary: The narrator discovers, over a period of time, first a (possibly) fabricated country -- as described in encyclopedia articles -- then an entire planet (likewise described, with its own set of encyclopedias, not merely articles). As the story progresses, more is uncovered, more is described, and more is written -- a proliferation of text -- until, in the end, "reality" is overtaken by representation, and the representation itself dictates what will be "reality."

Initial response: I find the segment about "cause and effect" being read instead as "association of ideas" very interesting. This is, after all, the function of narrative: to convince the reader to confuse "association of ideas" (a cloud on the horizon, a burning field, a half-smoked cigarette) with "cause and effect," since, within the story, nothing really causes anything else -- it is all an artifice, all structured such that the association of ideas masquerades as cause and effect (and thus produces a story). It seems to me that this is just one more way that Borges blends the boundaries between representation and reality in the story.