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"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 and Adolfo Bioy Casares, written in the form of a literary forgery.
Plot
The story elaborates on a conceit 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/Casares story, credited falsely 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. "Succeeding 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..." *
Publication history
The story was first published in the March 1946 edition of Los Anales de Buenos Aires, año 1, no. 3 under the pseudonym B. Lynch Davis, and was collected later that year in the 1946 second Argentinian edition of Borges's Historia Universal de la Infamia (A Universal History of Infamy). * 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.
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; it is published in A Universal History of Infamy (ISBN 0140039597).
"On Exactitude in Science"