LOUIS A. SASS
109
understand all aspects of the universe in the light of a single one. And in
Tlon, reality does in fact seem to depend on mind for its very existence,
as can be gleaned from the doorway that disappeared as soon as it was no
longer visited, or, conversely, from the ruins of an amphitheater that
continued to exist only because of the presence of some birds and a horse.
In Tlon the only truly scandalous philosophy is that of materialism, whose
assumptions about substance and the continuity of existence are found to
be incomprehensible if not completely ridiculous. It would seem that the
people of Tlon accept the deconstruction of causality first carried out by
Nietzsche and later taken up by postmodernists such as Paul de Man, with
its replacement of material by psychological sequence. To them, writes
Borges, the "perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of
the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that
produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas."
There can be little doubt that the land of Tlon, where not truth or
verisimilitude but only the astounding is respected, where all philosophy
is viewed as a branch of fantastic literature, is a projection of certain atti–
tudes of its real author, Borges - whose own tastes ran to Poe, H . G .
Wells, and the philosophies ofBerkeley and Schopenhauer. But it is a se–
rious mistake to understand the story of Tlon as a simple celebration of
relativism and idealism, as what Derrida once called "the joyous affirma–
tion .. . of a world ... without truth, and without origin which is of–
fered to an active interpretation." The story's ending, which might even
be read as a prophecy of the corning ascendancy of postmodernism, makes
it clear that Borges maintains critical distance from the subjectivism and
fictionalism of Tlon, and that he cannot so easily dispense with his own
nostalgic attachment to the certainties of realism and common sense.
Borges describes how, around 1944, discovery of the full set of the
Encyclopedia of Tion
precipitated such widespread fascination with Tlon
and its ways that the world was soon flooded with editions of and com–
mentaries on this "Greatest Work of Man." People were enchanted by
"the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet," entranced by this
labyrinth which at least is "a labyrinth devised by man, a labyrinth des–
tined to be deciphered by men." Indeed, it seems that reality itself
yearned to yield and did yield to this new order whose appeal Borges
compares, significantly enough, to those very absolutisms - including di–
alectical materialism and other totalitarian ideologies - with which rela–
tivism and fictionalism have been wont to contrast themselves. Unlike the
postmodern champions of the philosophy of as-if, Borges does not fail to
see that fictionalism or self-conscious subjectivism can be as dogmatic and
metaphysical as are the more obvious absolutisms - and that they are, per–
haps, as likely to offer a potentially dangerous and ultimately enervating
