"On Exactitude in Science", or "On Rigor in Science" (Spanish: "Del rigor en la ciencia") is a one-paragraphshort story by Argentine writerJorge Luis Borges.
The story,credited fictionally as a quotation from "Suárez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV,Lérida, 1658", describes an empire wherecartography becomes so exact that only a map on the same scale as the empire itself will suffice. Later generations come to disregard the map, however, and as it decays, so does the land and society beneath it.[1]
The story was first published in the March 1946 edition ofLos Anales de Buenos Aires as part of a piece called "Museo" credited to "B. Lynch Davis", a joint pseudonym of Borges andAdolfo Bioy Casares. It was collected later that year in the 1946 second Argentinian edition of Borges'Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy).[2]
The story is no longer included in current Spanish editions of theHistoria universal de la infamia, as since 1961 it has appeared as part of Borges' collectionEl hacedor.[3]
The names "B. Lynch Davis" and "Suárez Miranda" would be combined later in 1946 to form another pseudonym, B. Suárez Lynch, under which Borges and Bioy Casares publishedUn modelo para la muerte, a collection of detective fiction.[2]
"On Exactitude in Science" elaborates on a concept inLewis Carroll'sSylvie 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."[4]
"What a useful thing a pocket-map is!" I remarked.
"That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What doyou consider thelargest map that would be really useful?"
"About six inches to the mile."
"Onlysix inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried ahundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of amile to the mile!"
"Have you used it much?" I enquired.
"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
Italian writerUmberto Eco expanded upon the theme, quoting the story as the epigraph for his short story "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1", collected in hisHow to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays.[4][5]
French philosopherJean Baudrillard cited "On Exactitude in Science" as a predecessor to his concept ofhyperreality in his 1981 treatiseSimulacra and Simulation.[6]
James C. Scott's bookSeeing Like a State includes an epigraph quoting "On Exactitude in Science" but attributing the quote to the fictional writer Suárez Miranda rather than to Borges.[7]
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)He attributes this text to Suárez Miranda'sViajes de varones prudentes (1658). As far as I know, however, this book was never written and its author did not exist. Nevertheless, the text Scott quotes does exist but only as part of a slightly longer fictional story written by Jorge Luis Borges titled "On Exactitude in Science." (A footnote in the following chapter reveals that Scott has not read this story, but he knows through a colleague that Borges wrote one about maps.)