Spatiality and Conflicted Meanings in Borges's "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"

This paper examines issues of language, knowledge, and location in the story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges. There is a sense in which this story is fundamentally about the nature of language, and the story comments on ways in which human language articulates a relationship between knowledge itself and location. The basic premise is the challenge of establishing locations, commenting on them, and examining the nature of them. This process can be seen to be related to the search for a type of understanding, the possibility of which is always in doubt but which serves as motivation for action and endeavour, thus making possible the very notion of the availability of alternatives, of multiple paths, of a range of choices. In this way, a goal such as reaching the minotaur at the centre of a labyrinth is not only figured as being unattainable but is like the notion of a perfect translation or the production of a perfect utterance, a concept more fruitfully utilized as a spur to provoke us to think harder and to weigh up more options and possibilities, to strive towards goals and enhance achievements, rather than being seen as a state of idyllic verbal expression we should realistically aim for.