After a hiatus of two centuries, the persecuted brotherhood was reborn in America. In about 1824, in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the members spoke to the millionaire ascetic Ezra Buckley. Disdainfully, Buckley heard the man out, then laughed at the modest scope of the project. In America it was absurd to invent a country, he said, and he suggested they invent a whole planet. To this gigantic idea he added another, the child of his nihilism10—that of keeping the enormous undertaking secret. At that time, the Encyclopædia Britannica was in print in all its twenty volumes; Buckley proposed a similar encyclopaedia of the imaginary planet. He would bequeath the society his gold-bearing mountain ranges, his navigable rivers, his plains trodden by the steer and the buffalo, his slaves, his brothels, and his dollars—all on one condition: that “The work will make no pact with the impostor Jesus Christ.” Buckley did not believe in God, but he wanted to prove to the non-existent God that mortal men were capable of conceiving a world. Buckley was poisoned in Baton Rouge, in 1828; in 1914, the society sent its collaborators, who numbered three hundred, the final volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. The publication was private; its forty volumes (the vastest work ever undertaken by men) would be the basis of another edition, more detailed and compiled not in English but in one or other of Tlön’s languages. This emended description of an imaginary world was provisionally called Orbis Tertius, and one of its modest lesser gods was Herbert Ashe, whether as an agent of Gunnar Erfjord or as a member of the society I do not know. That he received a copy of Volume XI of the work would seem to suggest the latter.
But what of the other volumes? From about 1942, events followed each other thick and fast. I remember one of the first of these with singular clarity, and I believe I felt something of its premonitory nature. The incident took place in a flat in Laprida Street, over the way from a high bright balcony that faced the setting sun. The Princess de Faucigny Lucinge’s silver dinner service had arrived from Poitiers. Out of the vast depths of a chest adorned with seals from all over the globe came a stream of fine ware—silver from Utrecht and Paris chased with heraldic fauna, a samovar. Among these items—with the barely perceptible flutter of a sleeping bird—a compass quivered mysteriously. The princess did not recognize it. The blue needle yearned for magnetic north; the metal case was concave; the letters on the compass rose came from one of the alphabets of Tlön.
This was the first intrusion of the imaginary world into the real world. A chance occurrence that still troubles me led to my also being a witness to the second. It took place some months later, in the Cuchilla Negra, in a country saloon belonging to a Brazilian. Enrique Amorim and I were on our way back from Sant’Anna. The river Tacuarembó had risen, forcing us to risk—and to survive—the place’s primitive hospitality. In a big room cluttered with barrels and leather hides, the saloon-keeper supplied us with a couple of creaking cots. We lay down, but the drunkenness of an unseen neighbour, who veered back and forth from incomprehensible insults to snatches of milonga—or, at least, to snatches of one particular milonga—did not allow us to sleep until dawn. As may be imagined, we attributed his persistent shouting to the proprietor’s fiery rum. At daybreak, the man lay dead in the corridor. The roughness of his voice had fooled us—he was a youth. In his drunken state, a handful of coins had come loose from his wide leather belt, as had a cone of gleaming metal the size of a dice. A boy tried without success to pick up the cone. A man barely managed it. I held the object in the palm of my hand for a minute or so. I remember that it was intolerably heavy and that after I laid it aside its weightiness stayed with me. I also remember the perfect circle it left imprinted in my flesh. The evidence of a very small object that was at the same time very heavy left me with a disagreeable feeling of revulsion and fear. One of the locals suggested that we throw it into the fast-moving river; Amorim bought the cone for a few pesos. Nobody knew anything about the dead man except that “he was from the Brazilian border.” In certain religions of Tlön, small and extremely heavy cones made of a metal that is not of this planet represent the godhead.
This concludes the personal part of my story. The rest exists in the memory—when not in the hopes and fears—of all my readers. I shall simply record the following events in a few words and let mankind’s collective memory enrich or amplify them. In about 1944, a researcher working for The American, a Nashville newspaper, found buried in a Memphis library the forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Even today it is a matter of dispute as to whether the discovery was accidental or whether the directors of the still nebulous Orbis Tertius arranged it. The latter is likely. Some of the less credible bits of Volume XI (for example, the proliferation of hrönir) have been eliminated or played down in the Memphis copies. It may reasonably be supposed that the suppressed material was part of a plan to introduce a world that was not overly incompatible with the real world. The distribution of objects from Tlön to different countries contributed to the plan.11 In the event, the international press kept the “find” in the public eye. Handbooks, anthologies, digests, facsimiles, authorized and pirated reprintings of the Greatest Work of Man flooded and continue to flood the world. Almost at once, the real world gave way in more than one area. The truth is that it was longing to give way. Ten years ago, any symmetrical scheme with an appearance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was enough to hold mankind in thrall. Why not submit to Tlön, to the immense, meticulous evidence of an ordered planet? It is useless to reply that the real world too is ordered. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws—that is, non-human laws—that we shall never comprehend. Tlön may be a labyrinth, but a labyrinth contrived by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.
Contact and familiarity with Tlön have brought about the deterioration of our world. Mesmerized by that planet’s discipline, we forget—and go on forgetting—that theirs is the discipline of chess players, not of angels. Tlön’s putative “primitive language” has now found its way into our schools; the teaching of its harmonious history, so full of stirring episodes, has obliterated the history that presided over my childhood; in our memories a fictitious past has now replaced our past, of which we know nothing for certain—not even that it is false. Numismatics, pharmacology, and archaeology have all been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics too await their avatars. A far-flung dynasty of isolated individuals has changed the face of the earth. Their task goes on. If our forecasts are not mistaken, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.
Then English, French, and mere Spanish will disappear from this planet. Our world will be Tlön. All this means nothing to me; here in the quiet of the Hotel Adrogué I spend my days polishing a tentative translation in Quevedo’s style—which I do not propose to publish—of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne-Buriall.
The Approach to
al-Mu’tasim
Philip Guedalla informs us that the novel The Approach to al-Mu’tasim by the Bombay barrister Mir Bahadur Ali “is a rather uneasy combination of those Islamic allegories which never fail to impress their own translators, and of that brand of detective stories which inevitably outdoes even Dr. Watson and heightens the horror of human life as it is found in the most respectable boardinghouses of Brighton.” Before him, Mr. Cecil Roberts had blasted Bahadur’s book for “its unaccountable double influence of Wilkie Collins and of the famed twelfth-century Persian, Ferid Eddin Attar”—a simple enough observation which Guedalla merely parrots, though in a more angry jargon. Essentially, both reviewers are in agreement, pointing out the book’s detective-story mechanism and its undercurrent of mysticism. This hybridization may lead us to suspect a certain kinship with Chesterton; we shall presently find out, however, that no such affinity exists.
The first edition of The Approach to al-Mu’tasim appeared in Bombay toward the end of 1932. The paper on which the volume was issued, I am told, was almost newsprint; the jacket announced to the purchaser that the
book was the first detective novel to be written by a native of Bombay City. Within a few months, four printings of a thousand copies each were sold out. The Bombay Quarterly Review, the Bombay Gazette, the Calcutta Review, the Hindustani Review (of Allahabad), and the Calcutta Englishman all sang its praises. Bahadur then brought out an illustrated edition, which he retitled The Conversation with the Man Called al-Mu’tasim and rather beautifully subtitled A Game with Shifting Mirrors. This is the edition which Victor Gollancz has just reissued in London, with a foreword by Dorothy L. Sayers and the omission—perhaps merciful—of the illustrations. It is this edition that I have at hand; I have not been able to obtain a copy of the earlier one, which I surmise may be a better book. I am led to this suspicion by an appendix summarizing the differences between the 1932 and the 1934 editions. Before attempting a discussion of the novel, it might be well to give some idea of the general plot.
Its central figure—whose name we are never told—is a law student in Bombay. Blasphemously, he disbelieves in the Islamic faith of his fathers, but on the tenth night of the moon of Muharram, he finds himself in the midst of a civil disorder between Muslims and Hindus. It is a night of drums and prayers. Among the mob of the heathen, the great paper canopies of the Muslim procession force their way. A hail of Hindu bricks flies down from a roof terrace. A knife is sunk into a belly. Someone—Muslim? Hindu?— dies and is trampled on. Three thousand men are fighting—stick against revolver, obscenity against curse, God the Indivisible against the many Gods. Instinctively, the student freethinker joins in the fighting. With his bare hands, he kills (or thinks he has killed) a Hindu. The Government police—mounted, thunderous, and barely awake—intervene, dealing impartial whiplashes. The student flees, almost under the legs of the horses, heading for the farthest ends of town. He crosses two sets of railroad tracks, or the same tracks twice. He scales the wall of an unkempt garden at one corner of which rises a circular tower. “A lean and evil mob of mooncoloured hounds” lunges at him from the black rosebushes. Pursued, he seeks refuge in the tower. He climbs an iron ladder—two or three rungs are missing—and on the fiat roof, which has a blackish pit in the middle, comes upon a squalid man in a squatting position, urinating vigorously by the light of the moon. The man confides to him that his profession is stealing gold teeth from the white-shrouded corpses that the Parsis leave on the roof of the tower. He says a number of other vile things and mentions, in passing, that fourteen nights have lapsed since he last cleansed himself with buffalo dung. He speaks with obvious anger of a band of horse thieves from Gujarat, “eaters of dogs and lizards—men, in short, as abominable as the two of us.” Day is dawning. In the air there is a low flight of well-fed vultures. The student, in utter exhaustion, lies down to sleep. When he wakes up, the sun is high overhead and the thief is gone. Gone also are a couple of Trichinopoly cigars and a few silver rupees. Threatened by the events of the night before, the student decides to lose himself somewhere within the bounds of India. He knows he has shown himself capable of killing an infidel, but not of knowing with certainty whether the Muslim is more justified in his beliefs than the infidel. The name of Gujarat haunts him, and also the name of a malka-sansi (a woman belonging to a caste of thieves) from Palanpur, many times favored by the curses and hatred of the despoiler of corpses. He reasons that the anger of a man so thoroughly vile is in itself a kind of praise. He resolves—though rather hopelessly—to find her. He prays and sets out slowly and deliberately on his long journey. So ends the novel’s second chapter.
It is hardly possible to outline here the involved adventures that befall him in the remaining nineteen. There is a baffling pullulation of dramatis personae, to say nothing of a biography that seems to exhaust the range of the human spirit (running from infamy to mathematical speculation) or of a pilgrimage that covers the vast geography of India. The story begun in Bombay moves on into the lowlands of Palanpur, lingers for an evening and a night before the stone gates of Bikaner, tells of the death of a blind astrologer in a sewer of Benares; the hero takes part in a conspiracy in a mazelike palace in Katmandu, prays and fornicates in the pestilential stench of the Machua Bazaar in Calcutta, sees the day born out of the sea from a law office in Madras, sees evenings die in the sea from a balcony in the state of Travancore, falters and kills in Indapur. The adventure closes its orbit of miles and years back in Bombay itself, only steps away from the garden of the “moon-coloured hounds.” The underlying plot is this: a man, the fugitive student freethinker we already know, falls among the lowest class of people and, in a kind of contest of evildoing, takes up their ways. All at once, with the wonder and terror of Robinson Crusoe upon discovering the footprint of a man in the sand, he becomes aware of a brief and sudden change in that world of ruthlessness—a certain tenderness, a moment of happiness, a forgiving silence in one of his loathsome companions. “It was as though a stranger, a third and more subtle person, had entered into the conversation.” The hero knows that the scoundrel with whom he is talking is quite incapable of this sudden turn; from this, he guesses that the man is echoing someone else, a friend, or the friend of a friend. Rethinking the problem, he arrives at the mysterious conclusion that “somewhere on the face of the earth is a man from whom this light has emanated; somewhere on the face of the earth there exists a man who is equal to this light.” The student decides to spend his life in search of him.
The story’s outline is now plain: the untiring search for a human soul through the barely perceptible reflections cast by this soul in others—in the beginning, the faint trace of a smile or a single word; in the end, the differing and branching splendors of reason, of the imagination, and of righteousness. The nearer to al-Mu’tasim the men he examines are, the greater is their share of the divine, though it is understood that they are but mirrors. A mathematical analogy may be helpful here. Bahadur’s populous novel is an ascendant progression whose last term is the foreshadowed “man called al-Mu’tasim.” Al-Mu’tasim’s immediate predecessor is a Persian bookseller of striking happiness and politeness; the man before the bookseller, a saint. Finally, after many years, the student comes to a corridor “at whose end is a door and a cheap beaded curtain, and behind the curtain a shining light.” The student claps his hands once or twice and asks for al-Mu’tasim. A man’s voice—the unimaginable voice of al-Mu’tasim—prays him to enter. The student parts the curtain and steps forward. At this point the novel comes to its end.
If I am not mistaken, the proper handling of such a plot places the writer under two obligations. One, to abound richly in prophetic touches; the other, to make us feel that the person foreshadowed by these touches is more than a mere convention or phantom. Bahadur fulfills the first; how far he achieves the second, I wonder. In other words, the unheard and unseen al-Mu’tasim should leave us with the impression of a real character, not of a clutter of insipid superlatives. In the 1932 version, there are but few supernatural traces; “the man called al-Mu’tasim” is obviously a symbol, though certain personal traits are not lacking. Unfortunately, this literary good conduct did not last. In the 1934 version—the one I have read—the novel declines into allegory. Al-Mu’tasim is God and the hero’s various wanderings are in some way the journey of a soul on its ascending steps toward the divine union. There are a few regrettable details: a black Jew from Cochin speaks of al-Mu’tasim as having dark skin; a Christian describes him standing on a height with his arms spread open; a Red lama recalls him seated “like that image of yak butter that I modeled and worshiped in the monastery of Tachilhunpo.” These statements seem to suggest a single God who reconciles himself to the many varieties of mankind. In my opinion, the idea is not greatly exciting. I will not say the same of another idea—the hint that the Almighty is also in search of Someone, and that Someone of Someone above him (or Someone simply indispensable and equal), and so on to the End (or rather, Endlessness) of Time, or perhaps cyclically. Al-Mu’tasim (the name of that eighth Abbasid caliph who was victorious in eight battles, fathered
eight sons and eight daughters, left eight thousand slaves, and ruled for a period of eight years, eight moons, and eight days) means etymologically “The Seeker after Help.” In the 1932 version, the fact that the object of the pilgrimage was himself a pilgrim justified well enough the difficulty of finding him. The later version gives way to the quaint theology I have just spoken of. In the twentieth chapter, words attributed by the Persian bookseller to al-Mu’tasim are, perhaps, the mere heightening of others spoken by the hero; this and other hidden analogies may stand for the identity of the Seeker with the Sought. They may also stand for an influence of Man on the Divinity. Another chapter hints that al-Mu’tasim is the Hindu the student believes he has killed. Mir Bahadur Ali, as we have seen, cannot refrain from the grossest temptation of art—that of being a genius.
On reading over these pages, I fear I have not called sufficient attention to the book’s many virtues. It includes a number of fine distinctions. For example, a conversation in chapter nineteen in which one of the speakers, who is a friend of al-Mu’tasim, avoids pointing out the other man’s sophisms “in order not to be obviously in the right.”
It is considered admirable nowadays for a modern book to have its roots in an ancient one, since nobody (as Dr. Johnson said) likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The many but superficial contacts between Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey go on receiving—I shall never know why—the harebrained admiration of critics. The points of contact between Bahadur’s novel and the celebrated Parliament of Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, have awakened the no less mysterious approval of London, and even of Allahabad and Calcutta. As far as I can judge, the points of contact between the two works are not many. Other sources are present. Some inquisitor has listed certain analogies between the novel’s opening scene and Kipling’s story “On the City Wall.” Bahadur admits this, but argues that it would be highly abnormal if two descriptions of the tenth night of Muharram were quite unlike each other. Eliot, more to the point, is reminded of the seventy cantos of the unfinished allegory The Faerie Queene, in which the heroine, Gloriana, does not appear even once—a fault previously noted by Richard William Church (Spenser, 1879). With due humility, I suggest a distant and possible forerunner, the Jerusalem Kabbalist Isaac Luria, who in the sixteenth century advanced the notion that the soul of an ancestor or a master may, in order to comfort or instruct him, enter into the soul of someone who has suffered misfortune. Ibbür is the name given to this variety of metempsychosis.12
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