The Fictions of Borges · Map
The Map of the Empire
The College of Cartographers
A map of the Empire whose size was the size of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it — later abandoned to the sun and the winters, in the deserts, inhabited by animals and beggars.
The Encyclopaedia of Tlön describes a planet until the planet begins. The Map of the Empire describes the Empire until the description is thrown away.
A map at 1:1 is the dream of every catalogue, and the death of one. There is no scale left, no selection, no shelf. The object and the record occupy the same ground, which is a way of saying that the record has ceased to be useful. Borges gives the ruin to animals and beggars, which is kinder than giving it to librarians. We would have tried to fold it.
Suárez Miranda is Cide Hamete’s cousin: a named source for a paragraph that is the whole work. Carroll did it as a joke about maps. Borges did it as a joke about science, which is to say about the wish to leave nothing out. This library’s 150-entry rule is the opposite wish. The Map is what happens if we fail.
On the readability rating. The fragment is the work. There is no map to unroll. The deserts, he says, still have scraps.
In-world history
Borges prints it as a quotation from a seventeenth-century travel book that does not exist, by a Suárez Miranda who does not exist. In the Empire, the cartographers, dissatisfied with every smaller map, produce a 1:1. The following generation, less addicted to the study of cartography, see that the vast map is useless and deliver it to the elements. In the deserts, tattered ruins of the map are still to be found. Lewis Carroll had a similar joke in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. Borges filed it as science.
Why it matters
The smallest complete Borges, and the catalogue's purest non-book. A representation so perfect it replaces the thing, then dies, and the thing does not notice.
Appearances
- On Exactitude in Science (1946) — Jorge Luis Borges "Del rigor en la ciencia", a fragment attributed to Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, book IV, chapter XIV, Lérida, 1658
Connected volumes
- Related to A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön · The Fictions of Borges
- Related to The Book of Sand · The Fictions of Borges
- Related to The Plan · Foucault's Pendulum
Also from this world
- The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim · Novel
- April March · Novel
- The Book of Sand · Impossible object
- Den hemlige Frälsaren · Theology
- A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön · Encyclopaedia
- The Garden of Forking Paths · Labyrinth novel
- The God of the Labyrinth · Detective novel
- Pierre Menard's Quixote · Novel
Catalogue record
- Category
- Map
- World
- The Fictions of Borges
- Imagined by
- Jorge Luis Borges
- First appearance
- "Del rigor en la ciencia", Los Anales de Buenos Aires, March 1946
- Readability
- Described
Sources
- Jorge Luis Borges, "Del rigor en la ciencia", Los Anales de Buenos Aires, March 1946; collected in El hacedor (1960). Attributed there to Suárez Miranda, 1658.
- Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), the map of the mile to the mile, which Borges is condensing.
Added by house · last checked 2026-09-06