Ulysses and the rhetoric of cartography

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2003 by Jon Hegglund

The fact that the years of the Ordnance Survey mapping encompass the great famine of the 1840s draws attention to the historical contingency of the image of Ireland presented in the six-inch maps. By the time the survey was completed, many of the earlier maps were no longer accurate, owing to changes of landscape brought about by the famine. Cottages, estates, and even villages were deserted; networks of incomplete "famine roads" were built as public works projects; and larger metropolitan areas such as Dublin and Cork swelled with new public buildings, including workhouses for the waves of destitute immigrants from the countryside. Yet, the geography of the Ordnance Survey served as the template for virtually all professionally produced maps until well after independence. Eavan Boland's 1994 poem "That the Science of Cartography is Limited" speaks about the "famine roads" built at the behest of the survey but frequently never completed and, therefore, never worthy of a place on the map. Boland's poem introduces a register of space that commingles the history of the starving Irish peasants with the homogenous, timeless space of cartography, a space that can only be recognized by its cartographic absence: "the line which says woodland and cries hunger / ... will not be there" (8). Imperial cartography is not merely a "limited" science but one whose conventions obscure histories of struggle and inequity. The Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland, according to Boland's poem, literally erases history from the map. The aesthetics of presence embodied in the maps thus compensates for the necessary absences, fissures, and blind spots in the imperial archive. The mass of visual detail helped to cover over the specific choices of represented objects and the transience of topographical features that had changed over the history of the survey, rendering an ever-changing cultural space as a permanent and naturalized landscape. It is this cartographic illusion of presence and permanence that Joyce interrogates in the narrative remappings of Ulysses.

Mapping coincidence

I have learnt to arrange things in such a way that they become easy to survey and to judge.

--James Joyce, on the benefits of a Jesuit education

(qtd. in Ellmann, James Joyce 27)

Following Frank Budgen's characterization of Joyce as a writer-cum-mapmaker, scholars and critics of Ulysses have delighted in reading the novel through the lens of geography, producing maps, itineraries, and surveys of the "real-world" Dublin to which the text endlessly refers. These critics, however, seldom question the status of the map as a means of representing space; they presume that the map acts as a mirror of nature rather than a culturally determined representation. Two studies in particular make extensive use of maps: Clive Hart and Leo Knuth's Topographical Guide and Michael Seidel's Epic Geography. The former is less a work of criticism than a survey in its own right: its primary purpose is to provide a catalog of the places mentioned in Ulysses. Included with the text are several maps drawn at different scales ranging from a national projection of Ireland to an architectural diagram of 7 Eccles Street. While Hart and Knuth do comment on Joyce's aesthetic transformation of geographical knowledge, they do not question the "factual" status of Thom's Almanac or the accompanying Ordnance Survey maps. Seidel's study has a more ambitious aim: to compare the geography of Joyce's Dublin to the classical Mediterranean geography of the Odyssey. While Seidel's study also suggests the aesthetic dimensions of geographical knowledge, it too accords an objective quality to the map; much of its substance is devoted to explicating the maps that compare the space of chapters in Ulysses with their corresponding episodes of the Odyssey. Both studies ultimately rely on an aesthetic of presence similar to that established by the Ordnance Survey maps: the cartographic space of Ireland is a self-evident representation of reality, which Joyce reworks into fiction in order to give his text a similar aura of presence and facticity. In the following section, I will argue the opposite claim for "Wandering Rocks" in particular: that Joyce invokes the precision of cartography to draw attention to its absences, opacities, and representational failures. In doing so, the chapter sets up an oscillation between a surveying gaze and a situated perspective to show the inherent limitations of both map and narrative in providing a true account of geographical space.