Ulysses and the rhetoric of cartography

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2003 by Jon Hegglund

To establish its representational authority, however, cartography had to clear away the flotsam of heterogeneous, unsystematized knowledges, thus creating at least the effect of an archival tabula rasa. The ideal construction of archival knowledge as the inscription of data on an imaginary map depends on the a priori emptiness of the archive itself; that is, the map must be conceptually blank before information can be placed and ordered within its frame.

This emptiness is, of course, a fiction: it is impossible to locate a point of origin, either temporally or spatially, from which a coherent project of imperial archive building begins. Yet, as Michel Foucault argues, there must be some imaginary "ground zero" that enables the project of archive construction within a conceptual space, a point from which knowledge can emerge as a positive, categorizable entity. This "condition of reality" (127), as Foucault terms it, is both an essential premise to the existence of the archive and the fictive moment of origin from which scientific knowledge emerges. Although such "conditions of reality" are always illusory and retroactively constructed, the blank spaces on the map--the terrae incognitae--visibly suggested that archives were waiting to be compiled in spaces not yet explored. Imperial mapping thus worked within an economy of knowledge that privileged the blank map as a ground on which systematized knowledges could be inscribed. But such blankness, of course, never really existed. Like the adult Marlow musing on the map of Africa, the explorer always arrives after some prior knowledge has been established. Given the proximity of England to Ireland as well as Ireland's long-standing status as an internal colony of Great Britain, the fiction of Ireland's archival emptiness was perhaps even more difficult to maintain than in geographically distant colonies. Ireland was no unknown land; it had already been mapped many times over (by both English and Continental cartographers) before the Ordnance Survey began its efforts. (9) These efforts were not sanctioned by a state apparatus, however, and were not accomplished systematically, using the scientific method of triangulation. For the early nineteenth-century British cartographic establishment presiding over the newly incorporated Ireland, the motive for creating a comprehensive map based on trigonometric surveys was in a sense to cleanse the archive of its haphazard, variant, local knowledges and replace them with a homogenous, scientific informatics of the state.