Ulysses and the rhetoric of cartography

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2003 by Jon Hegglund

The form of cartography encodes these assumptions: once data enters into the form of the map, it instantaneously acquires the aura of fact and "reality." Yet Harley reminds us that the map's apparent factuality is a by-product of its rhetoric: "The steps in making a map--selection, omission, simplification, classification, the creation of hierarchies, and 'symbolization'--are all inherently rhetorical" (11). Recent studies in both critical geography and postcolonial theory have uncovered the complex power/knowledge relations that inhere within the rhetoric of mapping, leading to a reassessment of cartography in general and imperial cartography in particular. As Harley points out, much of the scientific rhetoric of post-Enlightenment cartography was used to maintain systems of state and imperial domination. "In modern Western society," he writes, "maps quickly became crucial to the maintenance of state power--to its boundaries, to its commerce, to its internal administration, to control of populations, and to its military strength" (12). To "state power" might be added "imperial conquest," as cartography also created knowledge used for the subjugation and administration of aboriginal populations and colonial territories. Writing of British imperial cartography in particular, Matthew Edney points out that "maps came to define the empire itself, to give it territorial integrity and its basic existence" (2). Maps were not merely neutral representations of imperial territory; by submitting these territories to the common language of latitude and longitude, they forced the heterogeneity and chaos of far-flung colonial places into a seamless graticule of abstract, instrumentalized space. (5)

While debate continues about if and when Ireland was a "legitimate" colony of the British Empire, (6) it is clear that the comprehensive mapping of Ireland by the British Ordnance Survey from 1826 to 1852 was a part of a larger British imperative to consolidate systematic control of its colonial possessions through the conversion of physical territory into archival knowledge. Along with the contemporaneous Great Trigonometrical Survey of India and subsequent surveys of East Africa, the Irish Survey, as it came to be called, aimed to create a definitive map of a colonial space, wiping away all vestiges of the haphazard, local geographies of towns, estates, and counties. The survey succeeded to the extent that the maps produced remained the "official" maps of Ireland until well after independence. Most mass-produced maps from the 1850s until the 1920s were derived from the survey, including those appended to the 1904 edition of Alexander Thom's Irish Almanac and Official Directory, the legendary source of the topographical detail of Ulysses. (7) While the maps of Dublin in Thom's Almanac may seem neutral and unproblematically factual, the cartographic archive from which Joyce derives the Dublin of Ulysses is unquestionably an imperial mapping of a colonial space. Moreover, while Joyce was drafting much of the novel, Dublin was a colonial battleground whose geography was being rapidly and violently transformed through revolutionary uprising and civil war. The possibility that much of Dublin might "suddenly disappear" was not mere speculation; much of the city was in fact destroyed between the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the establishment of the Free State in 1922. As Duffy has shown, Joyce was well aware of the cataclysmic events taking place in Ireland as he wrote his book on the Continent (12-18). Although Budgen's mythologizing account shows Joyce in the guise of the detached, scientific cartographer presiding masterfully over geographical space, I argue instead that Joyce's use of cartographic method signaled an inquiry into the imperial production of knowledge as much as it worked to establish his credentials as a high modernist auteur.