Lacanoodle

Sorry for no credit. Lmk if someone knows OP and I'll add a credit.

The narrative hinges on Borges's self-perception as a writer, underscoring the difference between the private self that cannot recognize his persona or public mask as a famous storyteller. The former insists that he has nothing to do with the task of writing, that only Borges alone imagines the stories and completes the work of setting them down on paper. His determined attempts to fight these claims are useless since he always loses to the celebrated author. Indeed, whatever he does to extricate himself from Borges becomes irrevocably tied to Borges. [Wikipedia]

• Borges's story raises many philosophical questions of Self and epistemology. Viewed through the analytic lens of Russell's knowledge by description, the story explores the interesting concept of knowledge of Self by description (as opposed to the more expected knowledge by acquaintance). This is emphasized by the mention of receiving Borges's mail and reading about Borges in a book.

Also, the distinction between persona and Self can be interpreted as a distinction between author and writer. The author would be analogous to the persona and Borges. The writer would be the Self and "I". Theoretically, the writer could be anyone, it just happens to be Borges. With this interpretation Borges is seen to be commenting on the cognitive differences between processing third person information and first person information.[Wikipedia]

• It implies that the author's creations may take on a life of their own, shaping literary traditions beyond Borges' original intentions or sense of self. I willingly admit that he has written a number of sound pages, but those pages will not save me, perhaps because the good in them no longer belongs to any individual, not even to that other man, but rather to language itself.

On a personal note: One reason this struck me was because at the point I first read this story I had come to a realisation that I had splintered my own identity. I grew up muslim in an extremist country. Here I'd be killed if I were to publicly confess I was an atheist, but I was bold enough to do so amongst friends early at college and received a death threat from an eavesdropper. Barring 10-15 people noone has ever known of my beliefs. As my identity grew beyond that point I split myself in 2. A politically correct public figure and my alternate identity.

I named this alternate identity Faust, Faust is an anarchist, Faust loves art and literature and philosophy. Faust may exist only in my head. Faust longs to escape.

I do not know where one identity ends and the other begins. I discover myself as I read and write and as I remain in solitude, my public self is no more than a facade which, despite being my nemesis manages to give me meaning. He's still friends with people who's beliefs I (faust) detest. My public persona is similarly vain.

Perhaps Spinoza was wrong, for I do not wish to be me. I wish to be Faust for once. For once in my life I want to experience being myself infront of a real human. For once I don't want to watch what I say and live in fear.

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and mag- nifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

• Using Literary Forgery: This is a fictional citation, claiming that the work is a quotation from “Viajes de varones prudentes”. Borges would often ask himself, and the reader, what fiction was, in this case giving a short story the form of a fragment from a much longer history. The same technique was used in The approach to Al'Mutassim.

• Scientific Precision: That they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. An overly-precise way of saying “they left it outside and it was ruined by the weather”. It’s possible that Borges is parodying the exactitude of scientific reportage.

• Simulacra and Simulation: Jean Baudrillard cites the short story as the "finest allegory of simulation" in his treatise Simulacra and Simulation, describing how "an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing", covering the very thing it was meant to represent. In this way the story contributed to developing the semiotic concept of the hyperreal. (Wikipedia)

• Map Making: Map-making has advanced rapidly alongside technology. The Mercator projection (1569) proved to be an important step forward in mapping a spherical globe onto a flat map, while satellite imagery (first used in 1946) meant that the world could be mapped from a perspective outside of itself. Satellite mapping has reached a remarkable level of progress. With, for example, Google Maps, we’ve reached a stage where it’s hard to imagine any more detail on our maps without them becoming extremely close to real life– as Borges’s map becomes. (Genius)

• In a way, this foreshadows our own obsession with virtuality paralleling reality: increasingly we want pictures of everything, not just descriptions, so that the lines between being and representation of being become increasingly blurred. There is an argument to be made so as to link this to hyperrealiatic art. The next map would actually be a cake.

• This story is so short that it can easily fit onto a small image with the text nice and readable. But then, is the image a point for point map of the story? Or is the story a map of the image?

• In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map. A powerful image: the life-sized map is in pieces throughout the deserts, its reality broken into small pieces.

Jean Baudrillard would make it even more potent, though, by flip-reversing the whole thing:

It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.

Simulacra and Simulation, p.4

Baudrillard’s contention was that the Map still existed, and that was what we now called reality, even though, ontologically speaking, it is merely a copy of reality. Reality itself exists in tatters throughout the map.

Baudrillard continues:

It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.

This was the inspiration for The Matrix, and its virtual-reality created by machines. (Tho the matrix a weak metaphor, it's a better metaphor for the cave in Platos works).

• I will be adding further links to analysis of this story.

"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 do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"

"About six inches to the mile."

"Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all ! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile 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."

from Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Chapter XI, London, 1895

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. 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.

—Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658