Reading for class this week, I kept thinking of the wonderful story fragment “On Exactitude in Science” by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. In that story, Borges creates a made-up “discovered” text written by a made-up author from the 17th century reviewing the goings-on of a fictional and unnamed Empire. With me so far? The text describes the cartographic mania of that society that culminates in a map of the Empire at a scale of 1:1. We’ll talk about this at the beginning of class, but here’s the short story/fragment in full:
On Exactitude in Science
… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658
Borges, J. L. 1998. On exactitude in science. P. 325, In, Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (Trans. Hurley, H.) Penguin Books.
