Christopher Chen on Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

Christopher Chen (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Drama) joins Michael Kelleher to talk about the eternally fascinating Jorge Luis Borges story, “”Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Timelines slip, worlds collide, and Borges’s lasting impact is felt.

For a full episode transcript, click here.

*

Reading list: 

“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges • Italo Calvino • Rosicrucianism • Caught by Christopher Chen • Borges, Between History and Eternity by Hernán Díaz

*
From the episode:

Christopher Chen:

This is kind of something that I think Borges inspired in me, especially this short story, just this idea of: is there a way to capture the whole of reality, of what is real, in a single work—which I believe Borges kind of does in these 15 pages. And you know, the nature of the universe that he almost expresses in this imaginary planet of Tlön is a world of infinite complexity, of infinite possibility. The literature of Tlön is all of a single author and it’s all of a single story that contains all other stories in the universe. So it’s just this idea that nothing is more important than anything else. Everything is extremely interrelated and contextual to such a degree and that’s kind of how reality is constructed. So kind of taking that grand thesis to my own plays, the challenge then becomes, you know, how do you express a reality that is never fixed, that is always transient, that’s always interconnected, where one truth always has its antithesis, and always is contextual within a larger system that is operating under the surface.

And so Borges taught me that it s possible to express this nature of reality—if again, you find the right kind of container or narrative, that can explicitly address it. And so, that, um, kind of pointed me towards a structure that, on one larger level, each scene is the antithesis of the scene that came before. Each scene negates the reality of the scene that came before. And even within individual scenes, characters start to change and morph. They aren’t fixed.

Characters realities within scenes start to shift. so It’s kind of, you know, like thinking of creative ways to express this philosophy of the transient nature of, of reality.