The Construction of Fantastic Spaces: Tlön, Les Cités Obscures and the Cognitive Power of Fiction

Abstract

In this paper I will establish similarities between Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius” (“Tlön”) and the graphic novels Les Cités Obscures by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. “Tlön” is largely grounded in the ‘as if’ principle: ‘If idealism governs reality, then…’ The ‘as if’ allows Borges to disjoin and conjoin again, the result being an utopian world erected for epistemic purposes; it is in this ‘otherness’ that the explanatory power lies. The idea of describing thoroughly another world in Tlön fashion has been developed in Les Cités Obscures, a series of graphic novels produced since 1982 by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. Schuiten and Peeters lavishly use architectural décor for the setting of their stories. The city of Brussels, slightly displaced into Brüsel, appears in most of the albums. By means of extrapolating elements of the city’s rich architectural heritage, the authors have managed to create a universe of their own. The procedure is similar to schematic fictions: general types are deprived of unnecessary traits to make it easier to single out constituent elements. Like Tlön, Les Cités are a re-cognisable world. They direct our regard upon cultural practices, architectural styles and history by means of superimposing transparencies, a well-known method in which Borges excelled.