Borges's short stories were what showed me the way: how, with exquisite legerdemain, to fuse the literary, the philosophic and the anecdotal. The brevity of "On Exactitude in Science" isn't really the point – or, rather, it's the entire point: this is a story that is itself a homologue of that which it describes, being a map of a reality that is at once the same size and far, far larger. In truth, all fiction should aspire to this condition: an attempt to achieve the truly veridical. That such an enterprise has been hijacked by the cod-disciplines of "naturalism" and "realism" is only a function of ideological constraint – constraints that Borges's tale deliriously break.
I like the way this story makes a flat declaration – in the manner of Kafka – not sugaring the pill of suspension of disbelief, only taking it as a given: either you believe in the truth of there being a map coextensive with the territory it depicts, or you don't. End of story. It also has an acute wistfulness about it – the ragged tatters of the abandoned map, the lapse into ignorance of the populace, these are evoked by mere clauses, with no need for tedious circumscription or proviso. You travel the entire emotional arc within a couple of minutes, and are left puzzling over Borges's attribution … and that's surely the way he intended it.
