Sunday, March 12, 2006
Borges, you lying fuck!
Recent headlines have cast the veracity of certain authors into question, but writers have been scribbling lies and creating elaborate untruths for a long time. Take Jorge Luis Borges, whose short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is one of my faves. (I even made a link for it in the column to the left.) In the story, a narrator finds a copy of "A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Vol. XI." which describes a fictional world; the book is a product of a secret society perpetrating an elaborate, multi-generational ruse. I just learned of Umberto Eco's refutation of Borges' story, which asserts that Borges himself was part of the ruse to keep circulating information about Tlön. Here's the clever part; by writing and publishing his story, Borges assured that any further discoveries of Tlön documents would be regarded as poor Borges imitations.
Even Eco had it wrong, though; the truth is, There Is No Borges.
Recent headlines have cast the veracity of certain authors into question, but writers have been scribbling lies and creating elaborate untruths for a long time. Take Jorge Luis Borges, whose short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is one of my faves. (I even made a link for it in the column to the left.) In the story, a narrator finds a copy of "A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Vol. XI." which describes a fictional world; the book is a product of a secret society perpetrating an elaborate, multi-generational ruse. I just learned of Umberto Eco's refutation of Borges' story, which asserts that Borges himself was part of the ruse to keep circulating information about Tlön. Here's the clever part; by writing and publishing his story, Borges assured that any further discoveries of Tlön documents would be regarded as poor Borges imitations.
Even Eco had it wrong, though; the truth is, There Is No Borges.
# posted by toner_low @ 1:41 PM 
