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351
necessarily a species of critical analysis. Instead of writing novels, he
pretends that they already exist: he therefore offers only resume
and commentary. Sometimes confining himself to specific books, as
in his essay on "The Approach to Al-Mu-tasim" (a novel ascribed
to a Bombay lawyer named Mir Bahadur Ali), he can also invent
whole canons by fictitious authors, as in "An Examination of the
Works of Herbert Quain," which begins with some wonderfully ac–
curate parody of Leavisite literary invective. And the parody of
literary creation extends even to books that -do exist, as in "Pierre
Menard, Author of the
Quixote."
Parody of creation cannot go
further, except for blank pages, than the pretension that a work of
creation does exist when it doesn't or the claim that a classic belongs
to anyone who cares later to imagine that he wrote it. One of his
most ambitious pieces is "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Written in
the manner of a geographic history, and thus a literary parody to
begin with,
it
describes an unknown planet with "its architectures and
quarrells, with the terror of its mythologies and the uproar of its
languages, its emperors and seas, its minerals and birds and fish, its
algebra and fire, its theological and metaphysical controversies." This
invention of a new world is a little like Swift, closer to Kafka, and
a preparation for Pynchon's Tristero system in
The Crying of Lot 49
and for the West Campus of Barth's
Giles Goat-Boy.
Like these invented worlds and systems, the TlOn of Borges'
story is apparently the work of a cabalistic -group of astronomers,
biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, mathematicians,
moralists, painters and geometricians, all under the supervision of
"an unknown genius." When a reporter from the Nashville, Tennes–
see
America'n
chances upon the forty-volume
First Encyclopedia of
Tlon
in a Memphis library, where
it
was probably planted by an
agent of the cabal,
The
international press infinitely proclaimed the "find." Manuals,
anthologies, summaries, literal versions, authorized re-editions and
pirated editions of the Greatest Work of Man flooded and still
flood the earth. 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 TWn, to the minute
