A pulpería in Cuchilla Negra and a metal not of this world

Abstract

The three first versions of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” published in 1940 and 1941 undergo small modifications until the text is finally established. The key to these changes lies in the beginning of the “Postscript - 1947”, anachronistic and anticipatory in 1940-1941 but by the end of 1947 an indistinguishable part of the fantastic historicity of the whole story. “Tlön” thus carries a changing and misleading bibliographical self-reference which puts its reading in abyss. In the cosmos of Tlön “a book that does not contain its counter-book is considered incomplete”. Borges’ story contains its own meta-story: it quotes itself as if it were another, adding a supplement where the imagined reality in the previous text invades that of the reading, de-realizing it as the Tlönian phantasmagoria becomes real. A thirdness is installed above the usual and well-known options of the present, destabilizing them. It was written: we are facing Orbis Tertius.