Ulysses and the rhetoric of cartography

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2003 by Jon Hegglund

To accomplish this, the Ordnance Survey chose a scale and a style that would suggest both scientific austerity and aesthetic pleasure. Put another way, the Ireland of the Ordnance Survey is both familiar and foreign, a comforting image of a recognizable English spatiality and an object of ethnographic otherness.

At six inches to the mile--the smallest scale at which property lines could still be clearly drawn--the maps present sufficient detail to suggest a sort of aerial landscape painting rather than the abstract grids, lines, and points common on smaller-scale maps. At such a large scale, the Ordnance Survey etches a placid, idyllic topography whose visual specificity creates a convincing portrait of an ordered and peaceful nation under the guiding hand of a benevolent colonial administration. In particular, the map's emphasis on Ascendancy manor houses projects a kind of unionist geography in which the picturesque countryside is given shape and order by the individual estates. In a detail of the map of County Kilkenny, for example, estate houses are rendered in great detail, with trees, hedgerows, and gardens indicated on the map along with the houses of the estate. In such panels, the breach between a strictly topographical map and a map of a socially inscribed landscape becomes clear. Along with features such as mountains, streams, and fields, the houses themselves are presented with the man-made details of landscape and architecture, such as shrubs and garden pathways. The geography of the Ascendancy manor house is made to seem natural and timeless. Estate names are also prominently displayed on the map, further naturalizing the Ascendancy class as a quasi-topographical feature of the land itself. By including the details of estate grounds and field borders, the maps suggest the placid, picturesque realism of a Constable painting more than the abstract symbols of post-Enlightenment scientific cartography. The head of the survey in Ireland, Thomas Larcom, acknowledged the artful quality of the survey, though he identified its aims with a different genre. The survey, Larcom wrote, would provide a "full-face portrait of the land" of Ireland (qtd. in Andrews, History 1). Moreover, as Mary Hamer points out, landowners could control representations of their own property: "Landowners were allowed to be the sole source of authority for the name of their demesnes and were allowed to define their own demesne boundaries" (197). Just as members of the gentry frequently commissioned portraits that would flatter the patron, so could members of the Ascendancy "author" the image of their own lands within the "objective" conventions of cartographic representation. As part landscape painting, part portraiture, the maps evoke a topography fixed forever in time, thus repressing the chaotic historical circumstances of Ireland during the years of the map's production from 1826 to 1852. In the Ordnance Survey maps, a unionist Ireland is captured in amber, portrayed in an imaginary moment of idyllic peace and ordered stability under the beneficent hand of British rule.