On Exactitude in Science

"On Exactitude in Science" or "On Rigor in Science" (the original Spanish-language title is "Del rigor en la ciencia") is a one-paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges, about the map/territory relation, written in the form of a literary forgery.

Plot

The story elaborates on a concept in Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno Concluded: a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile." One of Carroll's characters notes some practical difficulties with this map and states that "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."

The Borges story, credited fictionally as a quotation from "Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658", imagines an empire where the science of cartography becomes so exact that only a map on the same scale as the empire itself will suffice. "[S]ucceeding Generations… came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome... In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar..."^[1]

Publication history

The story was first published in the March 1946 edition of Los Anales de Buenos Aires, año 1, no. 3 as part of a piece called "Museo" under the name B. Lynch Davis, a joint pseudonym of Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares; that piece credited it as the work of "Suarez Miranda". It was collected later that year in the 1946 second Argentinian edition of Borges's Historia Universal de la Infamia (A Universal History of Infamy).^[2] The names "B. Lynch Davis" and "Suarez Miranda" would be combined later that year to form another pseudonym, B. Suarez Lynch, under which Borges and Bioy Casares published Un modelo para la muerte, a collection of detective fiction.^[2]

Notes

1. ^ J. L. Borges, "A Universal History of Infamy" (translated by Norman Thomas de Giovanni), Penguin Books, London, 1975. ISBN 0-14-003959-7.
2. ^ ^{a b} (Spanish) Bibliografía cronológica de la obra de Jorge Luis Borges: 1946, Annick Louis, 13 June 1996. Accessed 7 December 2006.

External links

The story is readily available in its entirety online:

• Translation by Andrew Hurley
• Another translation by Norman Thomas de Giovanni. This is the translation quoted above.
• Spanish Audio "On Rigor in Science"