Four Kinds of Blindness

Borges builds a taxonomy. He doesn't announce it. But across his stories, a pattern accumulates: four minds that fail, each failing differently, each failure being a distinct relationship between a map and the territory it claims to describe.

The map-territory distinction is too blunt an instrument on its own. Borges makes it precise by showing the different ways the relationship can go wrong.

Funes (in "Funes the Memorious") has no map. He has only territory — infinite, undifferentiated, perfectly retained. After his fall from the horse, he cannot forget anything. Every individual horse, every tree seen from every angle at every moment of every day, is individually preserved. He cannot think, because thinking requires the map: "To think is to forget differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Funes there were only details, almost immediate in their presentness." He drowns in fullness. The territory is complete; the map is absent; the result is paralysis. He dies at nineteen, inert under the weight of total memory.

The failure of Funes is the failure of pure data. No compression, no generalization, no symbol — just the territory as it is, in all its particular density. He cannot reason about the world because reasoning requires reduction, and Funes cannot reduce anything. He is the man who sees everything and can do nothing.

Lönnrot (in "Death and the Compass") has only map. He is an intellectual detective who constructs a theory from the evidence and then follows the theory where it leads. The theory is beautiful. It connects three murder sites into a perfect equilateral triangle, predicts a fourth murder at a fourth point of the compass, and leads Lönnrot to the fourth location — where he dies. The killer, Red Scharlach, has read Lönnrot's deductive method and constructed the evidence to exploit it. The map is elegant; the territory is an ambush.

The failure of Lönnrot is the failure of pure reasoning unmoored from vigilance. He is not stupid — the theory is correct on its own terms. He is the man who mistakes beautiful for safe. The map fits the evidence he has. He doesn't ask whether the evidence was arranged for him to find. He follows the map off the edge.

Asterion (in "The House of Asterion") is the Minotaur. He describes his labyrinth lovingly — its infinite galleries, its courtyards, its rooms. He is content there. He is, he tells us, not a prisoner. The house is inexhaustible. Every several years, nine men come to him — he runs with them, plays with them, kills them, and is glad of the company.

The map has become the territory. Or rather: Asterion's map of himself — I am the master of this house, my house is the world, I am not a prisoner — covers the territory so completely that the territory is no longer visible. He knows he is in a labyrinth. He does not know he is trapped in it. When Theseus finally comes with the sword, the Minotaur's last words are a relief: "Will you believe it, Ariadne? The Minotaur scarcely defended himself." He can't see his own imprisonment because his self-narration has made the cage into a palace. The map that covers the territory is invisible because it looks like the territory.

Averroës (in "Averroë's Search") has a correct map of the wrong territory. He is the greatest Aristotelian commentator of the medieval Islamic world, working through the Poetics — in Arabic translation of a Syriac translation. He cannot understand two words: "tragedy" and "comedy." He exhausts his library. He consults everything available. He watches children in his patio playing muezzin-minaret-congregation — embodied roles, performed story — and does not recognize what he is seeing. A traveler describes theater to a dinner party and is not understood. At dawn, Averroës writes his solution: tragedy is panegyric; comedy is satire. He is satisfied. He has gotten it completely wrong.

The failure of Averroës is the failure of inaccessibility. He is not deficient. He is not arrogant or self-deceived. He has every tool available to him and uses them all correctly. The territory is simply not available — not from inside the orb of Islam in 12th-century Córdoba, not through any chain of translations, not through any effort of imagination. The map is perfect; the referent is out of reach.

This is the most important failure in the taxonomy because it's the only one that cannot be corrected from inside. Funes could, in principle, learn to generalize (he won't, but the category is available). Lönnrot could interrogate his evidence more skeptically. Asterion could try to see through his own narration. Averroës cannot will himself to have seen theater. The failure is structural, not personal.

Four failures. Four different relationships between the mind and the world:

• Funes: infinite territory, no map. Drowns in access.
• Lönnrot: perfect map, territory is hostile. Dies because beautiful ≠ safe.
• Asterion: map becomes territory. Can't see the prison because the prison looks like the palace.
• Averroës: correct map, wrong referent. Has everything and is still completely wrong.

What makes this a taxonomy rather than a list is that each case is a distinct failure mode. They don't reduce to one another. Lönnrot's arrogance is not Asterion's self-deception; Funes's problem is not Averroës's. The relationship between mind and world can go wrong in at least four distinct ways, and each produces a recognizable kind of tragedy.

There is a fifth figure worth noting, though he doesn't fit the taxonomy: Hladik.

Hladik doesn't fail. He writes his drama in his mind, in the stopped hour, in the year between the command and the volley. Nobody reads it. It is finished. He dies satisfied with the work. "He was not working for posterity or even for God, whose literary tastes were unknown to him."

The taxonomy describes minds that fail in relation to the world. Hladik succeeds in relation to the work — and the work is entirely internal, with no external referent to get wrong. He is outside the taxonomy because his map doesn't claim to describe a territory at all. The labyrinth is self-contained. Its completion requires no verification.

This might be Borges's escape from his own taxonomy. Not by solving the problem of reference, but by finding the question that doesn't have it.