The Book of Fantasy

by Jorge Luis Borges

  Things duplicate themselves in Tlön. They tend at the same time to efface themselves, to lose their detail when people forget them. The classic example is that of a stone threshold which lasted as long as it was visited by a beggar, and which faded from sight on his death. Occasionally, a few birds, a horse perhaps, have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre. (1940. Saito Oriental.)

  Postscript. 1947. I reprint the foregoing article just as it appeared in The Book of Fantasy, 1940, omitting no more than some figures of speech, and a kind of burlesque summing up, which now strikes me as frivolous. So many things have happened since that date. . . . I will confine myself to putting them down.

  In March, 1941, a manuscript letter by Gunnar Erfjord came to light in a volume of Hinton, which had belonged to Herbert Ashe. The envelope bore the postmark of Ouro Preto. The letter cleared up entirely the mystery of Tlön. The text of it confirmed Martínez Estrada’s thesis. The elaborate story began one night in Lucerne or London, in the early seventeenth century. A benevolent secret society (which counted Dalgarno and, later, George Berkeley among its members) came together to invent a country. The first tentative plan gave prominence to ‘hermetic studies’, philanthropy, and the cabala. Andreä’s curious book dates from that first period. At the end of some years of conventicles and premature syntheses, they realized that a single generation was not long enough in which to define a country. They made a resolution that each one of the master-scholars involved should elect a disciple to carry on the work. That hereditary arrangement prevailed; and after a hiatus of two centuries, the persecuted brotherhood reappeared in America. About 1824, in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the members had a conversation with the millionaire ascetic, Ezra Buckley. Buckley listened with some disdain as the other men talked, and then burst out laughing at the modesty of the project. He declared that in America it was absurd to invent a country, and proposed the invention of a whole planet. To this gigantic idea, he added another, born of his own nihilism[*]—that of keeping the enormous project a secret. The twenty volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were then in circulation; Buckley suggested a systematic encyclopedia of the imaginary planet. He would leave the society his mountain ranges with their gold fields, his navigable rivers, his prairies where bull and bison roamed, his Negroes, his brothels, and his dollars, on one condition: ‘The work will have no truck with the imposter Jesus Christ.’ Buckley did not believe in God, but nevertheless wished to demonstrate to the nonexistent God that mortal men were capable of conceiving a world. Buckley was poisoned in Baton Rouge in 1828; in 1914, the society forwarded to its collaborators, three hundred in number, the final volume of the First Encyclopaedia of Tlön. The edition was secret; the forty volumes which comprised it (the work was vaster than any previously undertaken by men) were to be the basis for another work, more detailed, and this time written, not in English, but in some one of the languages of Tlön. This review of an illusory world was called, provisionally, Orbis Tertius, and one of its minor demiurges was Herbert Ashe, whether as an agent of Gunnar Erfjord, or as a full associate, I do not know. The fact that he received a copy of the eleventh volume would favour the second view. But what about the others? About 1942, events began to speed up. I recall with distinct clarity one of the first, and I seem to have felt something of its premonitory character. It occurred in an apartment on the Calle Laprida, facing a high open balcony which looked to the west. From Poitiers, the Princess of Faucigny Lucinge had received her silver table service. Out of the recesses of a crate, stamped all over with international markings, fine immobile pieces were emerging—silver plate from Utrecht and Paris, with hard heraldic fauna, a samovar. Amongst them, trembling faintly, just perceptibly, like a sleeping bird, was a magnetic compass. It shivered mysteriously. The princess did not recognize it. The blue needle longed for magnetic north. The metal case was concave. The letters on the dial corresponded to those of one of the alphabets of Tlön. Such was the first intrusion of the fantastic world into the real one. A disturbing accident brought it about that I was also witness to the second. It happened some months afterwards in a grocery store belonging to a Brazilian, in Cuçhilla Negra. Amorim and I were on our way back from Sant’Anna. A sudden rising of the Tacuarembó river compelled us to test (and to suffer patiently) the rudimentary hospitality of the general store. The grocer set up some creaking cots for us in a large room, cluttered with barrels and wineskins. We went to bed, but were kept from sleeping until dawn by the drunkenness of an invisible neighbour, who alternated between shouting indecipherable abuse and singing snatches of milongas, or rather, snatches of the same milonga. As might be supposed, we attributed this insistent uproar to the fiery rum of the proprietor. . . At dawn, the man lay dead in the corridor. The coarseness of his voice had deceived us; he was a young boy. In his delirium, he had spilled a few coins and a shining metal cone, of the diameter of a die, from his heavy gaucho belt. A serving lad tried to pick up this cone—in vain. It was scarcely possible for a man to lift it. I held it in my hand for some minutes. I remember that it was intolerably heavy, and that after putting it down, its oppression remained. I also remember the precise circle it marked in my flesh. This manifestation of an object which was so tiny and at the same time so heavy left me with an unpleasant sense of abhorrence and fear. A countryman proposed that it be thrown into the rushing river. Amorim acquired if for a few pesos. No one knew anything of the dead man, only that ‘he came from the frontier’. Those small and extremely heavy cones, made of a metal which does not exist in this world, are images of divinity in certain religions in Tlön.

  Here I conclude the personal part of my narrative. The rest, when it is not in their hopes or their fears, is at least in the memories of all my readers. It is enough to recall or to mention subsequent events, in as few words as possible; that concave basin which is the collective memory will furnish the wherewithal to enrich or amplify them. About 1944, a reporter from the Nashville, Tennessee, American uncovered, in a Memphis library, the forty volumes of the First Encyclopaedia of Tlön. Even now it is uncertain whether this discovery was accidental, or whether the directors of the still nebulous Orbis Tertius condoned it. The second alternative is more likely. Some of the more improbable features of the eleventh volume (for example, the multiplying of the hrönir) had been either removed or modified in the Memphis copy. It is reasonable to suppose that these erasures were in keeping with the plan of projecting a world which would not be too incompatible with the real world. The dissemination of objects from Tlön throughout various countries would complement that plan. . .[*] The fact is that the international Press overwhelmingly hailed the ‘find’. Manuals, anthologies, summaries, literal versions, authorized reprints, and pirated editions of the Master Work of Man poured and continue to pour out into the world. Almost immediately, reality gave ground on more than one point. The truth is that it hankered to give ground. Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoever which gave the appearance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was enough to fascinate men. Why not fall under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet? Useless to reply that reality, too, is ordered. It may be so, but in accordance with divine laws—I translate: inhuman laws—which we will never completely perceive. Tlön may be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth plotted by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

  Contact with Tlön and the ways of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels. Now, the conjectural ‘primitive language’ of Tlön has found its way into the schools. Now, the teaching of its harmonious history, full of stirring episodes, has obliterated the history which dominated my childhood. Now, in all memories, a fictitious past occupies the place of any other. We know nothing about it with any certainty, not even that it is false. Numismatics, pharmacology, and archaeology have been revised. I gather that biology and mathematics are awaiting their avatar
. . . A scattered dynasty of solitaries has changed the face of the world. Its task continues. If our foresight is not mistaken, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön.

  Then, English, French, and mere Spanish will disappear from this planet. The world will be Tlön. I take no notice. I go on revising, in the quiet of the days in the hotel at Androgue, a tentative translation into Spanish, in the style of Quevedo, which I do not intend to see published, of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial.

  Odin

  They say that an old man arrived one night, wrapped in a dark cloak, with the brim of his hat down over his eyes, at the court of Olaf Tryggvason, which had been converted to the new faith. The king asked him if he could do anything; the stranger replied that he could play the harp and tell stories. He played old tunes on the harp, he talked about Gudrun and Gunnar and, finally, he told of the birth of Odin. He said that the three Parcae came and that the first two promised much happiness, but the third said angrily, ‘The child shall live no longer than the candle which burns at his side.’ His parents then blew out the candle so that Odin shouldn’t die. Olaf Tryggvason didn’t believe the story; the stranger insisted that it was true, took out a candle and lit it. As they were watching it burn, the man said it was late and that he must go. When the candle had burned itself out, they went searching for him. A few steps from the king’s house, Odin had died.

  JORGE LUIS BORGES and DELIA INGENIEROS

  The Golden Kite,

  The Silver Wind

  Ray Bradbury (born 1920), American writer of fantasy and science fiction, began writing for cheap genre magazines in the 1940s, but developed a poetic, evocative style that is evident in collections such as Dark Carnival (1947), The October Country (1955) and The Martian Chronicles (1950), as well as in novels like Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953).

  ‘In the shape of a pig?’ cried the Mandarin.

  ‘In the shape of a pig,’ said the messenger, and departed.

  ‘Oh, what an evil day in an evil year,’ cried the Mandarin. ‘The town of Kwan-Si, beyond the hill, was very small in my childhood. Now it has grown so large that at last they are building a wall.’

  ‘But why should a wall two miles away make my good father sad and angry all within the hour?’ asked his daughter quietly.

  ‘They build their wall,’ said the Mandarin, ‘in the shape of a pig! Do you see? Our own city wall is built in the shape of an orange. That pig will devour us, greedily!’

  ‘Ah.’

  They both sat thinking.

  Life was full of symbols and omens. Demons lurked everywhere, Death swam in the wetness of an eye, the turn of a gull’s wing meant rain, a fan held so, the tilt of a roof, and, yes, even a city wall was of immense importance. Travellers and tourists, caravans, musicians, artists, coming upon these two towns, equally judging the portents, would say, ‘The city shaped like an orange? No! I will enter the city shaped like a pig and prosper, eating all, growing fat with good luck and prosperity!’

  The Mandarin wept. ‘All is lost! These symbols and signs terrify. Our city will come on evil days.’

  ‘Then,’ said the daughter, ‘call in your stonemasons and temple builders. I will whisper from behind the silken screen and you will know the words.’

  The old man clapped his hands despairingly. ‘Ho, stonemasons! Ho, builders of towns and palaces!’

  The men who knew marble and granite and onyx and quartz came quickly. The Mandarin faced them most uneasily, himself waiting for a whisper from the silken screen behind his throne. At last the whisper came.

  ‘I have called you here,’ said the whisper.

  ‘I have called you here,’ said the Mandarin aloud, ‘because our city is shaped like an orange, and the vile city of Kwan-Si has this day shaped theirs like a ravenous pig——’

  Here the stonemasons groaned and wept. Death rattled his cane in the outer courtyard. Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.

  ‘And so,’ said the whisper, said the Mandarin, ‘you raisers of walls must go bearing trowels and rocks and change the shape of our city!’

  The architects and masons gasped. The Mandarin himself gasped at what he had said. The whisper whispered. The Mandarin went on: ‘And you will change our walls into a club which may beat the pig and drive it off!’

  The stonemasons rose up, shouting. Even the Mandarin delighted at the words from his mouth, applauded, stood down from his throne. ‘Quick!’ he cried. ‘To work!’

  When his men had gone, smiling and bustling, the Mandarin turned with great love to the silken screen. ‘Daughter,’ he whispered, ‘I will embrace you.’ There was no reply. He stepped around the screen, and she was gone.

  Such modesty, he thought. She had slipped away and left me with a triumph, as if it were mine.

  The news spread through the city; the mandarin was acclaimed. Everyone carried stone to the walls. Fireworks were set off and the demons of death and poverty did not linger, as all worked together. At the end of the month the wall had been changed. It was now a mighty bludgeon with which to drive pigs, boars, even lions, far away. The Mandarin slept like a happy fox every night. ‘I would like to see the Mandarin of Kwan-Si when the news is learned. Such pandemonium and hysteria; he will likely throw himself from a mountain! A little more of that wine, oh Daughter-who-thinks-like-a-son.’

  But the pleasure was like a winter flower; it died swiftly. That very afternoon the messenger rushed into the courtroom. ‘Oh, Mandarin, disease, early sorrow, avalanches, grasshopper plagues, and poisoned well water!’

  The Mandarin trembled.

  ‘The town of Kwan-Si,’ said the messenger, ‘which was built like a pig and which animal we drove away by changing our walls to a mighty stick, has now turned triumph to winter ashes. They have built their city’s walls like a great bonfire to burn our stick!’

  The Mandarin’s heart sickened within him, like an autumn fruit upon an ancient tree.‘Oh, gods! Travelers will spurn us. Tradesmen, reading the symbols, will turn from the stick, so easily destroyed, to the fire, which conquers all!’

  ‘No,’ said a whisper like a snowflake from behind the silken screen.

  ‘No,’ said the startled Mandarin.

  ‘Tell my stonemasons,’ said the whisper that was a falling drop of rain, ‘to build our walls in the shape of a shining lake.’

  The mandarin said this aloud, his heart warmed.

  ‘And with this lake of water,’ said the whisper and the old man, ‘we will quench the fire and put it out forever!’

  The city turned out in joy to learn that once again they had been saved by the magnificent Emperor of ideas. They ran to the walls and built them nearer to this new vision, singing, not as loudly as before, of course, for they were tired, and not as quickly, for since it had taken a month to build the wall the first time, they had had to neglect business and crops and therefore were somewhat weaker and poorer.

  There then followed a succession of horrible and wonderful days, one in another like a nest of frightening boxes.

  ‘Oh, Emperor,’ cried the messenger, ‘Kwan-Si has rebuilt their walls to resemble a mouth with which to drink all our lake!’

  ‘Then,’ said the Emperor, standing very close to his silken screen, ‘build our walls like a needle to sew up that mouth!’

  ‘Emperor!’ screamed the messenger. ‘They make their walls like a sword to break your needle!’

  The Emperor held, trembling, to the silken screen. ‘Then shift the stones to form a scabbard to sheathe that sword!’

  ‘Mercy,’ wept the messenger the following morn, ‘they have worked all night and shaped their walls like lightning which will explode and destroy that sheath!’

  Sickness spread in the city like a pack of evil dogs. Shops closed. The population, working now steadily for endless months upon the changing of the walls, resembled Death himself, clattering his white bones like musical instruments
in the wind. Funerals began to appear in the streets, though it was the middle of summer, a time when all should be tending and harvesting. The Mandarin fell so ill that he had his bed drawn up by the silken screen and there he lay, miserably giving his architectural orders. The voice behind the screen was weak now, too, and faint, like the wind in the eaves.