“En el mundo no puede haber dos cosas iguales”:
Borges, the Virtuality Continuum, and Mixed Reality in “Del rigor en la ciencia” (1946) and “Parábola del palacio” (1960)
Grid Render, Pixabay, Image by Pete Linforth, August 10, 2015, Pixabay.
Jorge Luis Borges’ story “Del rigor en la ciencia” narrates how the creation of the map of an empire becomes so exact and precise that the mapped landscape of that empire eventually usurps the role of the original landscape as the real landscape. At the end, the original landscape recovers its status of the real, and the mapped landscape becomes ruins: “las Generaciones Siguientes,” Borges writes, “entendieron que ese dilatado Mapa era Inútil y no sin Impiedad lo entregaron a las Inclemencias del Sol y los Inviernos. En los desiertos del Oeste perduran despedazadas Ruinas del Mapa” (El hacedor 144).
“Del rigor en la ciencia” depicts a double process: on one hand, that which of the mapped landscape crossing the border between the real and the non-real where the latter becomes the former, and vice versa. On the other hand, a process of restoration of those borders between what is real and non-real. In this twofold process, science, so exact and rigorous, can both blur and recompose those borders if needed and, more importantly, question if those borders actually exist since they are continuously trespassed—a theme that Borges also uses in stories like “Funes el memorioso” (1942), where memory overlaps with reality, and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940), where objects go beyond their own possibilities, their own reality. The acknowledgment of a porosity between those real and non-real (and from which borders and separations are imposed, but constantly disrupted) ties up in the belief on the possibility of (and a fear towards) that such porosity will allow, somewhere and somehow, to turn upside down the assumed-as-natural position of each concept in the continuum of realness/non-realness. When it is said that “las Generaciones Siguientes entendieron que ese dilatado Mapa era Inútil y no sin Impiedad lo entregaron a las Inclemencias del Sol y los Inviernos” (El hacedor 144), what we have is the awareness of an entanglement, rather than separation, of realities to which the instauration of borders has become inefficient.
Similar ideas can be found in the tale “Parábola del palacio.” There a poet, invited by the Yellow Emperor to his palace, recites a poem at the end of a tour through the rooms of the mansion. The Emperor realizes that the poem depicts with meticulous, unsettling precision his palace, accusing the poet of having stolen it, then killing him: “el Emperador exclamó: ¡Me has arrebatado el palacio!, y la espada de hierro del verdugo segó la vida del poeta” (El hacedor 57). Like in “Del rigor en la ciencia,” in “Parábola del palacio” the real regains its dominant role as the real, temporarily lost because of the poem––a reinstatement of the real as a form of restored order that Beatriz Sarlo sees as a recurring idea in Borges’ oeuvre: the quest of the “imposition of a principle of order” against the construction of new orders, which Borges sought through his writings, proposing a “literary invention of the past” after social and political changes occurred in Argentina during the 1920s and the 1930s, and where “immigration, multilingualism [and] the social unrest which followed the crisis of 1929 seemed together to spell the end of criollo hegemony over [Argentinian] culture and society” (Sarlo 54).
Despite the “victory” [my quotes] of the real over the non-real in “Del rigor en la ciencia,” and “Parábola del palacio” (and therefore the victory of the imposition of borders), I am interested here on the acknowledgment of the entanglement of several realities that, in some moment (mediated by the map, and the poem), have become one in what is an influence of European romanticism in Borges regarding the idea of unity. The question is therefore if those realities (the reality that, on one hand, is considered by the people of the empire and by the Yellow Emperor as the real and, on the other hand, the simulated reality created by the map and the poem) exist as two realities or, instead, as partial realities of the same reality.
“Del rigor en la ciencia” is used (though not mentioned) by Jean Baudrillard in his essay “The Precession of Simulacra” to discuss his notion of the hyperreal. Unlike in Borges’ stories, in the hyperreal the simulated landscape becomes the reference of the real landscape, appearing, as a consequence, the precession of the simulacra. In that precession of simulacra,
[t]he territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory––precession of simulacra––that engenders the territory […] 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. (Simulacra and Simulation 1)
The acknowledgement of these ruins of the real landscape in the hyperreal serves Baudrillard to argue that we live in a progressively mediated world, composed of simulations and simulacra, where the former “are intended to represent or copy objects or systems,” and the latter “are simulations with no corresponding original” (Haar & McFarlane 256).
With his coinage of the hyperreal, Baudrillard conceives of contemporary society as one “in which simulacra shape the human life world and pretense at a reference to reality is no longer required” (256). According to Haar & Mcfarlane, this sees virtual reality (VR) technology “as the acceleration of the destruction of the real by its hyperreal double” (256). In that sense, it may be said that both “Del rigor en la ciencia” and “Parábola del palacio” are, despite the triumph of the real over the map/simulation/non-real, literary expressions of issues related to virtual worlds. To be more precise, in their acknowledgement of an entanglement of several realities, they depict the so-called “virtuality continuum” (VC) proposed by Milgram and Kishino to discuss “the mixture of classes of objects presented in any particular display situation,” from real environments to virtual environments, and where the notion of mixed reality (MR) is located (“A Taxonomy” 3). “Del rigor en la ciencia” and “Parábola del palacio” are thus literary expressions of the emerging technologies of augmented/extended/mixed/virtual reality since they describe with precision the uncanny of considering where a reality ends and another starts.
Figure 1: MR and VC, adapted from Milgram and Kishino (1994), p.3.
In this virtual continuum, real and virtual environments exist separated, but not isolated because they are the extremes of a continuity where a scenario of virtuality-less (i.e., reality) transitions to a scenario of reality-less, or virtual reality (VR) via a series of in-between scenarios like augmented reality (AR) and augmented virtuality (AV). They all together compose a scenario of mixed reality (MR), which is exactly the scenario that Borges describes in “Del rigor en la ciencia” and “Parábola del palacio.” Yet while in Borges’s stories there is a tension between two orders/realities where the triumph of one implies the destruction of the other in what is an idea also present, for example, in El informe de Brodie (Sarlo 86), that triumph is presented as a destructive imposition without which it is not possible to erase what ultimately becomes the key point of VC and MR: that it is unclear when we leave one scenario for another because we live in hybrid landscapes where, even in the cases of real environment or VR, we cannot fully say that we are free from the entanglement between the virtual and the non-virtual, free from what is real and what is simulated, or if that simulation is more real than the real itself. Interestingly, the end of “Parábola del palacio” summarizes the core of MR and the VC, even though there is this call by Borges for defending borders where one reality dominates the other. For when it is told that “[e]n el mundo no puede haber dos cosas iguales” (El hacedor 57), it is implied that realities do not exist isolated; only as part of the same reality where the imposition of borders often implies tragic consequences.
About the Author
Mario Sanchez Gumiel. B.A. in Geography (Autonomous University of Madrid, 2004), M.A. in Spanish (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2014) and M.A. in Language, Literature and Translation (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2016). Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in Romance Languages and Literatures (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor), where he also teaches Spanish. His research focuses on the intersection of science fiction, utopía and posthumanism in Spanish modernist literature. His research interests are film, television, digital media, kiosk literature of Silver Age Spain, Soanish as a Second Language and Spanish in/and Asia. He has worked in television as an archivist and video editor. He is a certified professor of Spanish and DELE examiner by Cervantes Institute.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. U of Michigan P, 1981, pp. 1-42.
Borges, Jorge Luis. El hacedor. Alianza Emecé, 1972.
Haar Rebecca & Anna McFarlane. “Simulation and Simulacra.” The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, edited by Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy & Lars Schmeink. Routledge, 2020, pp. 255-62.
Milgram, Paul and Kishino, Fumio. “A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays.” IECE Transactions on Information and Systems. 1994, pp. 1-15.
Sarlo, Beatriz. A Writer on the Edge. Verso, 2006.