Ulysses and the rhetoric of cartography

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2003 by Jon Hegglund

      If that fellow was dropped in the middle of the Sahara, he'd sit,
      be God, and make a map of it.
                --John Joyce, on his young son James (qtd. in Ellmann,
                                                        James Joyce 28)

One of the long-standing truisms about Ulysses is that it offers a comprehensive and factually precise geography of Dublin on 16 June 1904. This idea, at least in part, originated from Joyce himself in his famous remark to Frank Budgen: "I want ... to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book." (qtd. in Budgen 69). With this comment, Joyce would have us believe that his book is as much an archive of geographical fact as it is a narrative of imaginative fiction. If the numbers of scholarly guides to "Joyce's Dublin" are any testimony, literary critics have not actively challenged this understanding of the novel. (1) Readers continue to accord Ulysses an epistemological authority akin to that of the map: the novel claims to present a totalizing representation of factual knowledge about a particular "real-world" physical space. Joyce seems to have been aware of the particular discursive power of cartography within a larger economy of knowledge, as the relationship between the topographical precision of Ulysses and the rhetoric of cartography is more than coincidental. As Budgen noted of the composition of the "Wandering Rocks" chapter of Ulysses, Joyce composed the chapter "with a map of Dublin before him on which were traced in red ink the paths of the Earl of Dudley and Father Conmee." Budgen continues: "To see Joyce at work on the 'Wandering Rocks' was to see ... a surveyor with theodolite and measuring chain" (124-25). Likening the precise spatial plotting of the chapter to the surveyor's practice of marking and measuring territory, Budgen draws our attention to the importance that Joyce placed on geographical accuracy in Ulysses. The novel's composition is elevated beyond mere imagination; in Budgen's description of the painstaking detail with which Joyce arranges interlocking narratives on a coherent grid of time and space, Joyce's writing is equated with the rigorous method and precision of scientific practice. The true modernist auteur, Budgen's account suggests, is no longer merely a writer fabricating stories from the stuff of imagination but a cartographer ordering the world according to the rigor and detachment of scientific observation.

My essay, however, questions the assumption that Joyce's reliance on mapping is merely a modernist aesthetic strategy designed to give his novel the legitimating weight of fact. While scholars have been all too eager to plot Ulysses onto a map of Dublin, none yet have remarked on the rhetoric of cartography that Joyce himself deployed in the composition of the novel. Two historical circumstances render this questioning especially relevant to an understanding of the cartographic rhetoric of Ulysses. First, the maps that Joyce used in the creation of Ulysses would have derived from the comprehensive British survey of Ireland taken during the early nineteenth century and thus would have represented Ireland through the spatial perspective of an imperial gaze. Second, while Joyce consulted maps of Dublin during the composition of the novel, the topography of Dublin was being violently altered by the events that led to the independence of Ireland in 1922. By drawing on the form of the map, therefore, the novel necessarily engages a specific cultural and political geography of Anglo-Irish relations.

How, then, should we read the importance of cartographic representation to Ulysses? In his remapping of Dublin on 16 June 1904, does Joyce reproduce the discourses of cartographic power that fixed Ireland as a static body of knowledge in the British imperial archive? Or does Ulysses, as critics such as Enda Duffy, Vincent Cheng, and Emer Nolan have argued, fly by the nets of imperial power to create a new version of postcolonial national community?

Such formulations of the question assume that the map always retains the traces of its production as an object of reification and domination; one can be either passively complicit or actively resistant to its production of space. My aim here, however, is neither to expose a covert imperial complicity in Joyce's writing nor to echo the many voices that have claimed Joyce as an exemplar of an Irish postcolonial perspective. (2) Rather, I would like to examine how Joyce reworks the form of the map so that it suggests neither imperialist domination nor postcolonial nationalist resistance, but rather a spatial complexity that cannot be reduced to either term. In spite of its dependence on the exactitude of cartography, Ulysses ultimately rejects the static logic of the map in favor of a more dynamic, open-ended view of space. Although the precision and detail of Joyce's topographies are frequently hailed as hallmarks of his modernism, the apparently precise representation of Dublin sets up a formal oscillation between the panoptic visual space of the map and the local knowledges of narrative, finally drawing attention to the absences inherent within each mode of representation. Cartography promises a surveying view, but this vantage is distant, abstract, and ahistorical. Narrative, conversely, can project individual movements through time and space but ultimately must rely on partial views and situated knowledges. Ulysses frequently represents spaces that hover between these two perspectives but cannot be resolved into either one.