Jorge Luis Borges, "On Exactitude in Science"

filing cabinets & Orcs' swords

“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.”

When I was in high school — and ambitious as only those who have never written anything longer than a five-paragraph essay can be ambitious — I came up with what seemed to me a great innovation. Rather than write novels, I was going to write entire historical archives: fictional newspapers, fictional encyclopedias, fictional travel guides. Instead of bringing home three hundred page paperbacks, my readers would bring home filing cabinets. 

What this fantasy was about, I think — aside from a profound misunderstanding of how publishing works — was an inkling that the best part of the literary act takes place in the reader’s mind. John Cheever could set the words of “The Swimmer” down on paper, but they only became animate (scented with chlorine, accompanied by the muffled knocking of ice in a glass) in the private room of my imagination; without me they were specks on paper. The made-up-encyclopedia idea seemed to me the logical extension of this realization. A writer could drop the narrating function entirely — just hand over a newspaper article and a blurred photograph and watch a world bloom in the eager reader’s mind.

Jorge Luis Borges, it turns out, beat me to it by about fifty years. And he did it without forcing you to find a place on your bookshelf for a filing cabinet. His stories traffic in non-existent academic journals, invented countries, imagined languages. The best example of his peculiar genius — or anyway the one with the greatest density of mind-detonating force per word — is “On Exactitude in Science.”

I’ve been thinking about this one-paragraph short story, on and off, for twenty years. Summarizing it might take longer than retyping it, but nevertheless: it’s about a long-ago empire where the art of map-making advanced to the point of absurdity. A map of the empire was the size of a province; a map of a province was the size of a city. But the map-makers still weren’t satisfied. So they decided to make a kind of ultra-map, one that would never be outdone. They made a map of the empire in which no detail was omitted — it was a perfect one-to-one correspondence; you couldn’t unroll it without covering the empire completely. 

It takes Borges four sentences to establish all this — he’s taken us from Huh, that’s kind of a dry title to Oh my God, what a fascinating and inevitable turn for that civilization to have taken in the time it usually takes an author to thank his agent.

And Borges has only one sentence left! Imagine, at this point, being Borges. There you are at your desk in Buenos Aires. You’ve created this Lewis Carroll sequence of events, you’ve cast it as an excerpt from a history written in 1658 (perfecting your antique capitalizations, honing your proclamatory diction). And now you’ve somehow got to make it pay off. What if, you think, the map… just kept getting bigger? Or what if… the cartographers destroyed their creation?

This is the point at which most writers find themselves developing a mad urge to color-code the folders in their Gmail inboxes.

But not Borges. Instead he leans forward and writes: In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars…

And you, or anyway I, feel your inner world being shifted by the most unassuming of levers. The map, this ridiculous Looney Tunes thing, is inhabited. How insane! How perfect! And how rich, in the sense that soil is rich. I remember the lecture hall in which I was sitting when I first read this story, and how I stared out into the space of the room at this point, my mind tumbling with undergraduate thoughts: we DO live in a map, really, because the way we talk is copied from the way TV shows talk, which was of course copied from…

But before I could formulate any of this, Borges had moved on. A decorous semicolon, and then: in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. Story over. Class dismissed. Borges doesn’t let his mind-blowing conceit — Who did you say was living in the map?? — hold the floor for even an entire sentence. He places a bomb beneath your chair, then slips out the back of the lecture hall.

And it’s this superhuman restraint, almost as much as his creativity, that makes Borges the best fantasy writer of all time. Most fantasy writing talks too much and stands too close. It will not let us go until we know every goddamn thing about the flora and fauna of its imaginary world. Borges, whose flora and fauna might actually be worth going on about, makes no such mistake. He hides his inventiveness within fictional scholarly disputes; he tucks his brilliance into footnotes. He stands back from the reader, like an old world sommelier. Did I reorient your mental axis? How silly of me. My sincerest apologies. If he were to rewrite The Lord of the Rings, you get the feeling, he would (a) do it in six pages, and (b) tell it from the perspective of the clerk in charge of procuring the metal that goes into the Orcs’ swords.

It’s easy, as a writer, to fall into the trap of Borges’ mythical map-makers: to imagine that if only you could render this or that area with sufficient precision, then your world would come to life. Borges knew better. He was, apparently, such a fan of Robert Louis Stevenson that he didn’t even like to let other authors’ books touch Stevenson’s on the shelf, so he knew the iron law of pirate stories. A fragment of a map, poking raggedly out of the sand, sets the heart racing in a way that no pristine and un-torn map ever could, however precise.