108
PARTISAN REVIEW
vertigo, the queasy thrill of
deja
vu,
uncanniness, awe and amazement, the
euphoria and nausea of weightlessness . Truer, more full-blooded
emotions - love, hate, sadness, and simple joy - are debarred, for these
require grounding in the lived body, in a feeling of connection with real
objects and living human beings, and in a sense of finitude, of finality, and
of risk.
Jorge Luis Borges's famous short story, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,"
contains a fanciful, allegorical evocation of the kind of existence post–
modern culture may be bringing about and which postmodern psycho–
analysis may be encouraging. This story has sometimes been viewed as a
sort of quintessential postmodernist text, not only exemplifying the major
themes of Borges's own work but celebrating relativism and fictionalism
more generally. Quintessentially Borgesian it may be, but its attitude to–
ward the ideologies associated with postmodernism is certainly more am–
bivalent than such a reading suggests.
Borges identifies himself as the narrator of "Tlon, Uqbar," and in the
story he tells of how this individual, the Borges within the fiction, learned
from a volume of a mysterious encyclopedia about the entire history of an
unknown planet:
. .. with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its
mythologies and murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its
seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish , with its algebra and its
fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy.
The world of Tlon is exotic in a very special way, however, for it is
really a kind of solipsistic or Berkeleyan world, a place where there is only
one discipline, psychology, where the inhabitants conceive of the uni–
verse as a series of mental processes and of thought as "a perfect synonym
for the cosmos." Not only is this land
inhabited
by subjective idealists, it
was also
created
by subjective idealists. As the narrator soon learns, the
whole world ofTlon was dreamed up by a secret fraternity ofhermeticists
and nihilists who dedicated themselves to demonstrating "that mortal man
was capable of conceiving a world" and who therefore created the
First
Encyclopedia
of
11on.
Tlon is an extreme reflection of the subjectivism central in so much
of postmodernism, with its relativist, fictionalist, and idealist tendencies.
This is the same subjectivism that has come to pervade the contemporary
psychoanalytic avant-garde, where storytelling is given primacy over
seeking out the past. We find it also in writers such as Thomas Pynchon,
Jacques Derrida, and their epigones, for whom no philosophy can be
more than a dialectical game, a philosophy of as-if that attempts, vainly, to
