Literary Invention and the Cartographic Imagination: Early Modern to Late Modern 9004427112, 9789004427112

Table of contents :
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
1 About This Book
Works Cited
Chapter 1 The Poet, Voyager, and Cartographer Are ‘of Imagination All Compact’: Crossing the Borders of Early Modern Poetry and Cartography
1 Poets’ Fancies
2 The Rise of an Idol
3 Dreams of Omnipotence
4 The Image Is Multiplied
Works Cited
Chapter 2 Fragmented Body versus Cartographic Representation: The Early Modern Subject and the Marlovian Transgressors
Works Cited
Chapter 3 Marcus the Magnificent: Closure and Resolution in Joël Dicker’s The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair
Acknowledgements
Works Cited
Chapter 4 ‘To Deploy an Errant Eye’: Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘Early Modern’ Fantasia
1
2
3
4
5
6
Works Cited
Chapter 5 The Mapping of Empire in Hilary Davies’ ‘Imperium’
Works Cited
Chapter 6 Mapping and Unmapping the World: Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky versus Unmapping Memory. Looking for Hildegard of Bingen by Desmond Graham
Works Cited
Chapter 7 Charting Milan in Central Asia: Lombard Maps and Asian Toponymy in Luciano Erba’s Poetry
1 Introduction
2 A City of Mist. Mapping Milan in the Poetry of Luciano Erba
3 A Lattice of Arabesques. The Carpet in the Poetry of Luciano Erba
4 Persian Carpets as Maps for Orientation in Milan and Lombardy
Works Cited
Chapter 8 A ‘Monolithic Map/ of We Know Not What’: Alec Finlay’s Chorographic Poetics
1
2
3
Works Cited
Chapter 9 Unseeable Maps: The Experience of Space in the Blind Walk Performance
1 The Map of Sounds
2 Walk with Me
3 Do You See What I Mean?
4 The Map of Multisensory Experience
5 Deep Map
6 Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 10 Maps, Literature, and Law’s Idiocy: Literary Tropes as Incentive, Ground and Veil for Taking the Commons
1 From Centralization to Ecological Territorialisation
2 Literary Tropes Working as an Incentive to Gain and Claim Land
3 From Incentive to Ground: Making Legal Personhood Feel Natural
4 Law’s Idiocy: The Map as Ficta Persona and the Veil of Irresponsibility
Works Cited
Chapter 11 Mapping the Sacramental: Inner Circle by Jerzy Peterkiewicz
1 Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 12 Camino (Hyper)Real: California’s Cartographic Imaginations
1 On Immutable Mobiles and Maps as ‘Knowledge as Power’
2 El Camino (Hyper)Real
3 Missions in California – Reminder
4 Alternative Native Cartography
5 Vertically Downwards, Gleaning
6 We Are the Land
7 In the Footsteps of the Ancestors
8 Conclusion
Works Cited
Index of Authors and Works

Citation preview

Literary Invention and the Cartographic Imagination

Spatial Practices an interdisciplinary series in cultural history, geography and literature General Editor Christoph Ehland (Universität Paderborn) Editorial Board Christine Berberich (University of Portsmouth) Jonathan Bordo (Trent University) Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz (University of Leipzig) Catrin Gersdorf (University of Würzburg) Peter Merriman (Aberystwyth University) Christoph Singer (Universität Innsbruck) Merle Tönnies (Universität Paderborn) Cornelia Wächter (Universität Dresden) Advisory Board Blake Fitzpatrick (Ryerson University) Flavio Gregori (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) Margaret Olin (Yale University) Andrew Sanders (University of Durham) Mihaela Irimia (University of Bucharest) Founding Editors Robert Burden Stephan Kohl Former Series Editor Chris Thurgar-​Dawson

volume 38 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​spat

Literary Invention and the Cartographic Imagination Early Modern to Late Modern Edited by

Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfreys

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Carte du royaume d’Amour, first published in Recueil des pièces en prose les plus agréables de ce temps, in 1659, and attributed to Tristan L’Hermite. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Szuba, Monika, editor. | Wolfreys, Julian, 1958- editor. Title: Literary invention and the cartographic imagination : early modern to late modern / edited by Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfreys. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2022] | Series: Spatial practices : an interdisciplinary series in cultural history, geography and literature, 1871-689X ; volume 38 | Includes index. | Summary: “Literary Invention and the Cartographic Imagination: Early Modern to Late Modern is a wide-ranging, inter- and transdisciplinary approach grounded in the twin rigors of theory and history, which, through close readings of authors from Edmund Spenser to Olga Tokarczuk, and through considered discussions of the ideologies of walking and mapping, in performance art and cultural representation, assesses and analyses the significance of maps to literary texts, and which examines the ways in which the literary maps imaginary and real worlds. Together, the essays demonstrate convincingly the close relationship between text, map and culture”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022029815 (print) | LCCN 2022029816 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004427112 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004520288 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Maps in literature. | Cartography in literature. | Literature, Modern–History and criticism. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Essays. Classification: LCC PN56. M265 L57 2022 (print) | LCC PN56. M265 (ebook) | DDC 809/.9332–dc23/eng/20220824 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029815 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029816 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: ‘Brill.’ See and download: brill.com/brill-​typeface. issn 1871-​6 89x isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 2711-​2 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 2028-​8 (e-​book) Copyright 2022 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents  List of Figures vii  Notes on Contributors viii Introduction 1 Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfreys 1  The Poet, Voyager, and Cartographer Are ‘of Imagination All Compact’ Crossing the Borders of Early Modern Poetry and Cartography 25 Małgorzata Grzegorzewska 2  Fragmented Body versus Cartographic Representation The Early Modern Subject and the Marlovian Transgressors 49 Klaudia Łączyńska 3  Marcus the Magnificent Closure and Resolution in Joël Dicker’s The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair 68 Tom Ue 4  ‘To Deploy an Errant Eye’ Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘Early Modern’ Fantasia 79 Julian Wolfreys 5  The Mapping of Empire in Hilary Davies’ ‘Imperium’ 99 Jean Ward 6  Mapping and Unmapping the World Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky versus Unmapping Memory. Looking for Hildegard of Bingen by Desmond Graham 117 Olga Kubińska and Wojciech Kubiński 7  Charting Milan in Central Asia Lombard Maps and Asian Toponymy in Luciano Erba’s Poetry 137 Samuele Fioravanti 8  A ‘Monolithic Map/​of We Know Not What’ Alec Finlay’s Chorographic Poetics 160 Monika Szuba

vi Contents 9  Unseeable Maps The Experience of Space in the Blind Walk Performance 177 Izabela Zawadzka 10  Maps, Literature, and Law’s Idiocy Literary Tropes as Incentive, Ground and Veil for Taking the Commons 195 Frans-​Willem Korsten 11  Mapping the Sacramental Inner Circle by Jerzy Peterkiewicz 222 Aleksandra Słyszewska 12  Camino (Hyper)Real California’s Cartographic Imaginations 237 Grzegorz Welizarowicz  Index of Authors and Works 277

Figures 3.1  Dicker and director Jean-​Jacques Annaud on the set of Harry Quebert Affair (2018). Credit: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios 76 6.1  Places in southern Germany connected with Hildegard of Bingen as evoked in Graham’s poems. (Courtesy Jacek Urbański, gis Center University of Gdańsk) 130 6.2  Places in northern England connected with Hildegard of Bingen as evoked in Graham’s poems. (Courtesy Jacek Urbański, gis Center University of Gdańsk) darmc Scholarly Data Series 2013–​5: M McCormick et al. –​Roman Road Network (version 2008) 131 10.1 and 10.2  Map of Holland in Cosmographei oder Beschreibung aller Länder and in Theatrum orbis terrarium ( first copperplate) 199 10.3 and 10.4  Map of Holland Theatrum orbis terrarium ( first copperplate) and map of Holland in Theatrum orbis terrarium (second copperplate) 200 10 5  Visualisation of compass rose and calipper (by the author) 201 10.6  ‘Provisional concept plan and proposal serving the diking of the big water lakes’; the lake of Haarlem milled dry 204 10.7  Detail from Leeghwater, ‘Provisional concept plan and proposal with the aim of diking of the big water lakes’ showing poem and the lion subduing the wolf 205 10.8  Science unveiling nature in the frontispiece to Gerard Blasius, Anatome Animalium, 1681 209 10.9  Chart of several famous polders made by P. van der Keere and L.J. Sinck and published by Hondius in 1633; de Beemster is at the right above 214 12.1  1915 Automobile Club of Southern California strip map showing the route of El Camino Real from San Diego to Los Angeles. Courtesy of the Automobile Club of Southern California Archives 256 12.2  1915 Automobile Club of Southern California strip map showing the route of El Camino Real from San Luis Obispo to San Rafael. Courtesy of the Automobile Club of Southern California Archives 257 12.3  ‘Historic El Camino Real. The king’s highway in California.’ Official California Mission Trails Association card. Published by Hubert A. Lowman. Public Domain 258 12.4  The ‘Mission Bell Marker’ interactive map. Discontinued California Department of Transportation Livability website. Screenshot by the author, January 22, 2018 262

Notes on Contributors Samuele Fioravanti is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea. He obtained his Master’s degree in Contemporary Italian Literature from the University of Milan and received his Ph.D. in Italian Contemporary Poetry from the University of Genoa, Italy. Following a brief visit as a doctoral researcher at the University of Warsaw, Poland, he was Visiting Professor at the University of Granada, Spain, for three years. He regularly teaches Introduction to Contemporary Italian Poetry for the postgraduate master course MasterBook at the iulm University in Milan and works as an editor for the italian publisher San Marco dei Giustiniani. Małgorzata Grzegorzewska is Professor of Literature in the Faculty of ‘Artes Liberales,’ University of Warsaw. Her work explores the connections among literature, philosophy and theology. Her extensive publications on Shakespeare and English metaphysical poetry include Herbert and Post-​Phenomenology: A Gift for Our Times (2016) and a study in Polish of religious themes in Shakespeare’s plays (Teologie Szekspira, 2018). Her most recent book focuses on the conversation between religion and literature in the work of T. S. Eliot (Eliot’s Christianity in a Contemporary Perspective, 2021). She is the co-​editor, with Mark Burrows and Jean Ward, of Poetic Revelations. Word Made Flesh Made Word (Routledge 2017), a collection of critical essays in the Power of the Word series. Frans-​Willem Korsten holds the Chair by special appointment ‘Literature and society’ at the Erasmus School of Philosophy, and is associate professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (lucas). He has published monographs on the Dutch baroque, theatricality and sovereignty, such as A Dutch Republican Baroque (Amsterdam 2017), and published extensively on the relation between literature, art, capitalism and law. He was responsible for the nwo internationalization program ‘Precarity and Post-​Autonomia: The Global Heritage,’ together with Joost de Bloois and Monica Janssen (Amsterdam, Utrecht). With Kornee van der Haven, Karel Vanhaesebrouck, and Inger Leemans (Ghent, Amsterdam, Brussels) he was part of a program funded by nwo/​f wo under the acronym itemp: ‘Imagineering Techniques in the Early Modern Period’ –​a program that focused on representations of violence. Together with Sara Pola, Bram Ieven, and Sybille Lammes, from Leiden, he is part of an nwo funded program

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entitled ‘Playing Politics: Media Platforms, Making Worlds.’ Together with Yasco Horsman and Tessa de Zeeuw (Leiden) he is working on justice and the role of literature and art at the limits of the law. His latest publication in this context was Art as an Interface of Law and Justice: Affirmation, Disturbance, Disruption (Hart 2021). Olga Kubińska is a researcher and translator; she is also Associate Professor at the University of Gdańsk. She is Head of Tanslation Studies Department in English Division. She is the author of the monograph Przybyłem tu, by umrzeć [I have come here to die] (Gdańsk 2013) and the editor of Retoryka umierania. Angielskie mowy pożegnalne doby Tudorów i Stuartów [Rhetoric of Dying: English Dying Speeches of the Tudor and Stuart Times] (słowo/​obraz terytoria 2016), and co-​editor of the Polish edition of Margaret Cavendish, Świat Blasku [The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish] (Gdańsk, 2019). Co-​ editor (with Wojciech Kubiński) of the series Przekładając nieprzekładalne [Translating the Untranslatable] since 2000; co-​editor (with Artur Blaim) of the series ‘Bibliotheca Utopiana’ since 2018. At present, her research embraces contemporary British literature, Holocaust literature and utopian studies. Wojciech Kubiński is a researcher, translator and Professor Emeritus at the University of Gdańsk and The State University of Applied Sciences in Elbląg. He published several books, inter alia, Reflexivization in English and Polish. An Arc Pair Grammar Analysis (Tübingen 1987); In Search of a Frame of Mind. An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Linguistics. Coauthors: Roman Kalisz and Andrzej Buller (Gdańsk 1996); Word order in English and Polish. On the statement of linearization patterns in Cognitive Grammar (Gdańsk 1999); Obrazowanie a komunikacja. Gramatyka kognitywna wobec analizy dyskursu (Gdańsk 2014). Co-​editor (with Olga Kubińska) of the series Przekładając nieprzekładalne [Translating the Untranslatable]. Klaudia Łączyńska is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of ‘Artes Liberales’ at Warsaw University, where she teaches early modern and modern English drama, seventeenth-​ century literature and culture and literary theory. Her research interests include early modern poetry and drama, Early Modern Rhetoric and Philosophy of Language. She has published a monograph on Andrew Marvell’s poetry and the first Polish translation of Andrew Marvell’s country house poem Upon Appleton House.

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Aleksandra Słyszewska is an Assistant Professor at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. She specializes in 20th-​century English literature, with particular focus on religious aspect in novels. She is also interested in the presence of Christian framework in contemporary narratives by women. Some of her publications in the field include Sacrament and the English Catholic Novel (2021), ‘Artful theology: Sara Maitland’s Stations of the Cross’ (2016) and ‘“New wine in new bottles”: Some Aspects of the Twentieth-​Century English Catholic Novel’ (2016). Monika Szuba is Professor at the the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Gdańsk. Her research is concerned with Scottish and English modern and contemporary literature informed by environmental humanities, with particular interest in phenomenology. She is the author of Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World: Burnside, Jamie, Robertson and White (Edinburgh University Press 2019), editor of Boundless Scotland: Space in Scottish Fiction (Gdańsk University Press 2015), and co-​editor with Julian Wolfreys of The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature (Palgrave 2019) and Reading Victorian Literature: Essays in Honour of J. Hillis Miller (Edinburgh University Press 2019). Tom Ue is Assistant Professor in Literature and Science at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Gissing, Shakespeare, and the Life of Writing (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming) and George Gissing (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming); the editor of George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming); and an editor of the journal Global Nineteenth-​Century Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2022-​ present). Ue has held the prestigious Frederick Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship and he is an Honorary Research Associate at University College London. Jean Ward is a graduate of St Anne’s College, Oxford. She has lived in Poland since 1988 and since 1995 has taught English language and literature at the Institute of English and American Studies of Gdańsk University. She is the Head of the Department of Literary Studies in English and specialises in twentieth-​century poetry. Her doctoral thesis, published in Polish in 2001, included a discussion of the poetic relationship between T. S. Eliot and Tadeusz Różewicz which led her to an interest in the way that religious questions and religious experience make themselves felt in poetry. Her study Christian Poetry in the Post-​Christian Day: Geoffrey Hill, R. S. Thomas, Elizabeth Jennings (Peter Lang 2009) developed

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from this interest, which more recently has come to include especially the work of David Jones and Kevin Hart. She contributed chapters on Jones’ In Parenthesis to Poetic Revelations: Word Made Flesh Made Word. Vol iii, The Power of the Word (Routledge 2017), which she also co-​edited, and to David Jones: A Christian Modernist? (Brill 2018). Her work with Gdańsk University Press includes two collections of essays conceived, co-​edited and co-​authored by her: one in Polish on Eliot’s poetry (2015) and one in English on metaphysical aspects of Polish poetry (Striking the Chords of Spirit and Flesh in Polish Poetry. A Serendipity, 2016). She co-​edited, with introduction, a Polish translation of Michael Edwards’ study Towards a Christian Poetics (2017) by Monika Szuba. Her latest monograph, The Between-​Space of Translation: Literary Sketches (Gdańsk University Press, 2020) is the fruit of her long-​standing interest in and experience of Polish-​English literary relations and draws in the majority of the poets in both languages who have been important to her. Grzegorz Welizarowicz is Assistant Professor at the Department of American Studies, Institute of English and American Studies, Faculty of Languages, University of Gdańsk. He also teaches at the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw. In 2021 he was nominated the Brown Scholar at the History Department Valdosta State University, USA. He is the founding member of the International Border Studies Center at the University of Gdansk, the chair of the Border Studies Group at the English and American Studies Institute at ug. In 2017 he founded Border Seminar, a biannual international. His scholarly interests include Chicano and African American Theater, Latinx Southwestern literature, American music, American Indian philosophy, Polish-​ American literature, California public memory. He was twice a Fulbright scholar at the Theater Departments at the University of California San Diego and the University of California Santa Barbara. His publications include ’Junipero Serra’s Canonization or Eurocentric Heteronomy;’ ’American Indian Epistemology in Deborah A. Miranda’s Bad Indians;’ ‘Feel like a Gringo: Transnational Consciousness in Los Angeles Punk Rock Songs.’ Julian Wolfreys is an independent scholar, poet, novelist and musician. He has authored and edited over fifty academic works of criticism and theory, focusing on the nineteenth century, modernism, urban literature, and literary theory, with a particular focus on the work of Jacques Derrida.

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Izabela Zawadzka is a theatre researcher and manager of culture, as well as being a doctoral student at the Department of Theatre and Drama of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her academic interest focuses on walking performances and museal performances. She has curated several walking performances, and in addition has been a co-​curator, researcher of city audiosphere and performative city actions, as well as being author and leader of numerous workshops.

Introduction Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfreys That we read am map is not in question. How we read one is another matter. A map is a silent yet eloquent language, the traces of which, defying the linear logics of other forms of textual representation and discourse nonetheless await our efforts to decipher. A map is a two-​dimensional representation of real space, and of the relations between places, obviously. It is pictorial but it is not necessarily representational in any simple mimetic manner. The map, though written and read, is not therefore, to insist on this point, a linear text—​again, obviously. It is graphic, in that it is as much drawn as it is written, it has pictorial and written elements, it relies on symbols, signs, and other cartographic, calligraphic and logographic marks. As the collaborators to this volume demonstrate in the interplay between word and image, discursive and graphic structure—​neither of which is wholly separable—​we approach the reading of maps seeking information, knowledge, directions, imagined adventure (which may become real), or with a sense of interest approaching wonder. Also, as the authors gathered here show us, writing about and around the idea of the map involves a sensitivity to the poetics of mapping, an empathy with the projection of place through discursive textuality in a (somewhat, more or less) linear form. There is, beyond the purely functional or practical aspect of a map, the invitation to enchantment, which has the opportunity to take place as an event of reading and translation. The ‘locale’ (as Jane Bennett translates ‘milieu’ in what is already a translation and which, yet, is not at the same time in Deleuze and Guattari) is ‘alive with movement and change—​and how could it not be, given the shimmering, shimmying’1 motion that is imminent in the image. Though Bennett is writing of the enchanting properties of sonority as these are explored by Deleuze and Guattari, her registration of ineluctable motion that is of and in the world, is also that which the map maps beyond the specificity of locale, and which the term ‘milieu’ promises to release as so much more. And it is this quality, as well as the need to ground human action, and give form and context to narrative and its characters, that engages poets and novelists;

1 Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, And Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 167.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004520288_002

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and why they turn to the textual ‘mapping’ of what become ‘romantic things,’ to borrow a title of Mary Jacobus’s.2 Maps then hold and stage, or perform worlds that are at least part fiction and part real, or as Thomas Hardy has it, part real, part dream, to recall his ‘mapping’ of the imagined county of Wessex. And of course, Hardy both imagined the cartography and geology in his representations of the world in his fictions and drew for his readers a map of the place named ‘Wessex,’ a map which, today, still appears in editions of his novels. The map is, quite starkly and directly, a mapping in a double sense. On the one hand it is a coded representation as well as a presentation intended to aid and inform, to direct and orient. On the other hand, the map is also an epistemological code that charts, forgive the pun, the human intervention in, and act of transition from ‘nature’ to ‘culture.’ Neither of these terms are absolute or separable. ‘Nature’ is as much a construct as ‘culture.’ There is no simple ‘there’ to ‘nature’ which we, as reflective, cognizant beings merely observe from a ‘here’ we call consciousness. We are in and yet somehow separable, partly, from the there, and we determine the ‘there’ of the world in which we exist through the unnatural naming of part of that world as ‘nature.’ At the same time, we strive to control what we have named and so determined, and this is the function of the map. Writing about maps in literature is a way of undoing that simple binary and the anthropocene power invested in such binarisms; writing, in prose, in poetry, of maps and mapping, and using words as well as images to ‘map’ brings back the act to displace the object that the map is seen to be, and which we read in more or less unreflective and utilitarian ways. The map is let us say, or at least the act of mapping, the presentation of constellated phenomena translated into a decipherable form that, more or less, pretends to an approximation of reality, therefore, even though it pretends either to be an intercessional mediation foregrounding a construction by God or human Reason. Whether favour the Cartesian, theological option, or the Kantian rational explanation of the idea of ‘Nature.’ We can no longer see ‘nature’ or the natural as soon as we accept the idea of the map and the act of mapping.3 Speaking of Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-​Ponty remarks 2 Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Jacobus’ study turns to the Romantic in both narrow and broad senses, ranging wonderfully across both Romantic poetry and modern philosophical discourse. Jacobus’ work plays off a number of iterable tropes, less than concepts, more than mere things, which magically engage in a play between the subject and phenomena. 3 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, compiled, with notes by Dominique Séglard, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 36.

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that ‘what guides Bergson when he posits the universe of images is the content of perceptive experience: the thing [in the case of this immediate argument, ‘Nature’] offers itself as a preliminary, primordial, anterior to all perception, like a landscape that is already before us and just as we see it afterword.’ Yet, for all that, as Wisława Szymborska tells us in her final poem, maps lie—​or at least, they lie to the extent that they admit that there is no primordial, anterior ‘thing’; the map ‘takes part in the things,’ to borrow from Merleau-​Ponty again.4 The map is thus arguably the most immediate mediation, not to sound too paradoxical, of human perception, and at the same time, demonstrates how humans regard and function in the world, how Being orients itself. Fiction, poetry, travel writing, ‘nature’ essays: all make more immediate the mediation and metaphorization, the tropological work that is imminent in maps and mapping; in doing so they draw out and so explain why mapping is such a fundamental process belonging to Being, to ‘who we are.’ Hardy was not alone in drawing the map for inclusion in his novels, of his imagined West Country of England. Thomas Moore drew the map of Utopia, to accompany his text, in an effort to imagine the unimaginable. J. R. R. Tolkien felt the need to map Middle Earth, as well as invent its histories. Bruno Schulz famously opens ‘The Street of Crocodiles’ with an enticing, and again enchanting memory of a map, kept in the bottom drawer of the narrator’s father’s desk. Thus there are maps, and then narratives or poems speaking of maps and mapping. The novelist and poet is, as both writer and reader, drawn to other acts of reading and writing beyond their immediate domain. Reading a map is one thing; reading a writing that is, in turn, already, a reading of a map quite another. All of which is immediately obvious, patently without question. When writers—​poets or novelists—​draw maps to accompany their writings, it is as if they cannot wait for their readers to realise the imagined worlds they construct; or perhaps more generously, as if they want to aid in the realisation of the reader’s enchantment, bringing into view what would only become clear during the time of reading. Making a map suggests an anxiety on the part of the writer. There are though, many other writers who refer to maps, imagine maps, intimate maps in their poems or novels, who choose to let their readers do the work of mapping, guided by the potential for a visual corollary that words might make possible. In this, there is a play between the boundless play of polyvalence—​every map can in principle be read in a different manner by every reader of that map, and every map made of the same place can differ in its aesthetic and ideological 4 Merleau-​Ponty, 55.

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interests and agenda in what it includes, makes visible, excludes, leaves out of the picture—​and the gradual corralling of signification—​every text, however avant-​garde or abstract wants to generate specific meanings. Whether this happens of course is not guaranteed. The text can no more be controlled by the author in what is read, than one can make the sun shine on a rainy day. What both the map (thought as a series of marks and traces that can be reiterated, altered, given different form, or in effect translated) and the literary text present us with fundamentally is a constellation, arrangements of tropes peculiar to their discourses. Though singular in form—​the map is not the novel—​each form is a text and a discourse comprised of marks that through repetition and iterability are comprehensible as figural motifs, forms analogous with, or, actually, tropes. And, as Paul de Man observes of the trope: ‘the trope is not a derived, marginal, or aberrant form of language but the linguistic paradigm par excellence. The figurative structure is not one linguistic mode among others but what characterizes language as such.’5 The trope is fundamental to any act of writing in order for it to be comprehensible. Thus while reading a map might be a different act than reading a novel or poem, at least in a somewhat straightforward understanding, the difference is one of degree rather than kind. To clarify this statement, we might turn back to de Man for a definition of text, thought beyond the narrow limits of the written publication (novel, poetry, non-​fiction prose), which again, seems obvious but is worth recalling nevertheless: ‘We call text any entity that can be considered from such a double perspective: as a generative, open-​ended, non-​referential grammatical system and as a figural system closed off by a transcendental signification that subverts the grammatical code to which the text owes its existence.’6 Again, it is worth noting that this is unremarkable inasmuch as it is accepted by many academic readers to be obviously the case. (There are, and will always be some, for whom such a statement errs on the side of heresy.) But the restatement of the obvious from which this introduction begins and sets off seems a necessary means of acknowledging what the contributors to the present volume share in their careful, detailed analyses that come together to present comprehensive interdisciplinary critical study of the relationship between maps, literary form, and cultural identity from the early modern period to the present. To recall an earlier point, at least since Thomas Moore published Utopia in 1516, books and maps have been frequently connected, some inextricably so. Whether the map is of a fictional location—​More’s Utopia, Tolkien’s 5 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 105. 6 De Man, 270.

Introduction

5

Middle Earth, the imaginatively conceived opening credits of hbo’s rendering of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones novels—​, or whether the map included, presented, or represented in a book more or less directly is of a real location, however stylized—​as in the early modern maps reproduced in Olga Tokarczuk’s Bieguni /​Flights (2007 /​2017)—​forms of diagrammatic representation of place are indispensable to the imagination. Every period produces its own acts of literary mapping, often with very specific cultural and ideological purposes. In Erewhon (1872) Samuel Butler—​ whose work was to influence Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—​invented the land named by the title (the title being an anagram of ‘nowhere,’ as is well known), based on his own experience of New Zealand where he worked for a period of four years as a sheep farmer. Butler produced the novel as satirical polemic for the purpose of satirising British cultural mores in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In The Fixed Period, Anthony Trollope’s 1882 satirical dystopian fiction about compulsory euthanasia, the author reinvented New Zealand as the Republic of Britannula; and Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote Flatland, a third satire set in a mapped two-​dimensional world constructed from and determined by geometric figures. As might be imagined then, and as many readers will doubtless concur (even as many more will doubtless disagree), naming and figuring place, orienting oneself and one’s readers through attention to those aspects that serve to constitute the map and the topography of a locale, region, country, world, in the service of projecting imaginary and real landscapes in order to give ground to narrative and conceptual significance, is a fundamental aspect of imaginative literature. But that aspect is not restricted to fiction, drama or poetry. In every example, wholly fictive or imagined, or otherwise in the form of a reimagined or invented ‘reality,’ mapping serves a critical purpose, engaging with cultural, ideological and historical concerns. Even the most ‘fantastic’ of literary works is, in some measure, a response to, commentary on, and mediation of its political, cultural, and epistemological contexts. If we understand that ‘there are bodies and there are places,’ then also, moreso, as Edward S. Casey argues, ‘there are bodies-​as-​places.’7 The map makes a body of place, even as it presents the potentiality for the body-​in-​place, even if this does remain implicit, imminent. The literary in its narrative or poetic work of allowing ‘access to some form of spatial representation or mapping … necessary for spatial orientation and direction’ serves to embed ‘space “in” the agent, in the creature

7 Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 323.

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that moves or acts.’8 In this, the literary reveals to us what we already know and what we do, even if we are, most of the time, sublimely unreflective on the processes of cognition and perception, of mapping and orienting that we engage in constantly as we walk the world. For the literary returns to us the often unreflective ‘agency’ that the map takes for granted, or pretends—​and so ‘lies’ to recall Szymborska—​is not there. The literary then, just is the deconstruction of mapping, and it unveils the manner in which our ‘[a]‌gency draws on both the immediate and “direct” access to space given in location or position and on [simultaneously] the mediated or “indirect” access given through the representation or map.’9 The implications of such a provocation are many, not least that close reading is essential for any discourse aiming toward a critical cartography. To unpack this a little, consider what one does in opening a paper map, or calling up a map on a screen. It has to be remembered that, as a combination of the pictorial, the graphic, and the written—​textual in the narrow sense of that word (meaning just an alphabetic or other mode of writing)—​the phenomenon that is the map is a form of text in a broader sense. This distinction between narrow and broad is important. For while a map is a mode of representation intended to orient the subject, and while its form of textuality appears non-​linear, non-​hierarchical, this inscribed space denoting given concrete and physical places requires that we immediately read closely in the surface textures, its lines, intersections, figures, arrangements, and so forth. If literary studies has witnessed a spatial and cartographic turn, this is because critics have sought, according to their training, to apprehend that which is always already implicitly hidden on the surface of every literary text; which is to say that no literary narrative and all the conventions pertaining thereunto ever occurs in a contextless vacuum. Literary texts produce, generate, mediate, represent and interpret worlds, whether those worlds are the rooms of a house, the streets of a city, or some putative ‘natural’ landscape. One of the real joys of reading literature is this access to place and the mapping in which it implicitly engages; the difference being that when one opens a map on a screen, or unfolds or unrolls a map made of paper, one has to orient and so discern, and trace routes, departure and arrival points. This process is an act of making the narrative of the self in the landscape; or, in other words, the reader of the map becomes a literary producer. Reading a novel would seem to be a more passive affair, but as we know from Barthes onwards, there are scripts that require acts 8 Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, Second Ed., Foreword Edward S. Casey (London: Routledge, 2018), 50. 9 Malpas, 51.

Introduction

7

of engagement, of making a route, and so orienting oneself in a different fashion, but placing oneself, albeit as a spectre, in the world of the novel. This is not to say that the acts of reading a map and reading a novel or a poem are not marked by fundamental difference, but if literary theory has taught us anything, it is that the textual field is irreducible to one form, and the many forms that textuality takes are complex maps requiring a sustained involvement in the mapping that is a necessary condition of engaging with any textual form. Consider for example the following remark on the part of Anne Whiston Spirn: ‘Like the aboriginal dreaming paths, the path at Stourhead links a series of landmarks or signs that tell stories connecting the present with the past.… runes and white arbors … are shared stories of past and present …. Territory is established by the limits of the processes which create it.’10 She goes on in the same passage to conclude, this being perhaps the most significant point regarding the necessary understanding of the relationship between reading literary texts and reading maps as texts, that ‘[p]‌aths, boundaries, and gateways are conditions, not things, spatial patterns defined by processes. Paths are places of movement, boundaries limits to movement, gateways places of passage and exchange. A path [like a narrative] is maintained by movement. Once a process ceases, space becomes a shell of past practices.’ This clearly and undeniably phenomenological understanding ‘maps out’ if you will the relationship between a literary work and a map-​text, as this is grounded by Spirn in the reading of place and how place has to be in motion in order for it to have significance. Finish or close a novel and it is no longer a text, merely a book, an object, narrative is a condition of reading. Open a map and process comes into play, albeit at an initial ‘theoretical’ level, which one then puts in to practice, having acquired a reading by becoming the subject of that text. Every point on a map is in principle a potential textual marker for the reading of a story; every detail in a novel is a narrative marker that in principle functions to map out a world in which, according to the conditions of the reading, that map comes alive, albeit in a phantasmic and phenomenal sense (as Virginia Woolf understood in her essay on ‘Street Haunting’). To explore this theoretical landscape further, consider the following remark of Jeff Malpas’ cited necessarily in extenso: The very idea of narrative carries an important connection to place. Places are given shape and identity through the narratives that belong to

10

Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 119.

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them, although since narrative, or perhaps we should say ‘stories,’ grow around places like weeds in an untended garden, so one must take care to attend the differences between narratives, and to the possibility that some have merely a superficial connection to the places, and so also the lives, with which they are associated. The narratives that matter cannot be mere inventions or fancies but must rather be integral to and constitutive of that to which they also belong—​in much the same way as a certain geology, ecology or topography are integral to and constitutive of a locality or region. The narratives that belong to a place—​or a life—​are thus part of its very fabric and structure, and coming to know and understand that place is thus a matter of differentiating between the narratives that belong to it, that are written into its tracks and contours, from those that are impositions upon it. If the narrative is indeed the place of knowledge—​that in which it finds a home—​it cannot nonetheless be taken for granted.11 Allow us to parse this, to extract a map, so to speak, from the terrain of Malpas’ prose. As soon as the cartographer begins to draw, choices are made in both how and what the map will represent, will refigure and so present. Not everything that there is, is there. In this, the analogy between mapping and narrating are made plain. The ‘very idea’ of narrative is there at the beginning of every map; the elements that go into mapping are, themselves, those elements that tell the story of place. Maps, like narratives, ‘grow’ around places, as do weeds. A road on a map may well suggest a more or less direct route but this is only to discern a path, a linear narrative if you will, from within, and coming to gain significance from the rhizomatic surround, which is itself the discerned structure imposed on, and taken from unstructured reality. And as a road on a map is integral to understanding and so orienting one’s place in a landscape, so too do the lines of narrative produce structures ‘integral to and constitutive of’ the spaces they map and to which they give a place within which narrative takes place. Here a remark of Tim Ingold’s is instructive in amplifying Malpas’ insights in the present context of this introduction and book: ‘There are lines in the landscape because every landscape is forged in movement, and because this movement leaves material traces along the manifold paths of its proceeding. To perceive these lines is not to see things as they are but to see the directions along which things are moving. It is to see their grains, textures and flows, not 11

Jeff Malpas, ‘“Where Hegel Meets the Chinese Gulls”: Place, Work and World,’ in Jeff Malpas and Kenneth White, The Fundamental Field: Thought, Poetics, World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 71–​127; 91–​92.

Introduction

9

their layout or their formal envelopes. We perceive,’ Ingold continues, ‘the smudge of graphite on paper as a line because we see the way it is going, and it is no different with the furrow, the cloud and the reed.’12 This is surely central to Malpas’ argument: it is no different. There is no difference (and yet there is always already différance!) because the line, the grain, the texture, the flow, the narrative: all are ‘part of’ the ‘very fabric and structure’ of the world (to recall Malpas), whether that world is fictive or existent. To understand is ‘thus a matter of differentiating’ as Malpas has it; or we would say, just reading, reading being that deconstruction that takes place in the face of the undifferentiated, with its powers of interpretation, translation and analysis. The contributions to this present volume thus aim to draw out these processes always already at work in the ‘mapping’ of the literary that we call presentation, representation, the performative, and so forth, as it reads, interprets, translates, reconfigures the idea of the map. Despite the diversity of texts, periods, and interests, philosophical, theoretical, and formal to be found in the chapters gathered here, all our contributors share that interest that constitutes and so drives the principal concern of the present volume: which is to say, the often intimately intertwined double focus on textuality and the literary uses of the map, of mapping, of the idea, as well as the artefact that we call a map. Mapping is a phenomenon of literary production, implicitly or explicitly. In engaging with this shared interest, the contributors help to propound the ‘complex character of the spatiality that is already evident’ in the map; this is a complexity that shows how the ‘structures [and relationships, the histories, and entwinings] at issue are not reducible to single elements, but typically involves the interplay within a duality or multiplicity of elements.’13 More than this, through the careful reading of the literary, the poetic, and the poetics of mapping, maps, presentation, staging, Darstellung, and so forth, the authors of the various essays collected here illuminate for the reader the notion of allocentric space, of the map as not merely that place where the individual comes to master the things of the world, or to have governance over the ‘there’ we call ‘Nature.’ Instead, the essays eloquently and patiently show and enact how the engagement between subject and place through the idea of the map produces, sympathetically, with imagination, wonder, and empathy in the world of the ‘allocentric space …. [A]‌space organized around a salient feature or features of the environment …. [thereby making it possible to] configure the larger space … as that extends beyond [our] immediate perceptual and

12 Tim Ingold, Correspondences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), 169; emphases added. 13 Malpas, Place and Experience, 51.

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agential capacities.’14 Where the map ends, the literary, the textual begin—​ and, therefore, enchantment, the enchantment that is always already at work in the constellated image that the map simply is. For the map, any map, exists in order to be read, to be interpretated, translated into routes, paths, directions, and all those other spatial figures that are the tropical work of narratives to pursue. What we take for granted about literature, the idea of the map invites us to learn once again, as if from a beginning from which we, like the characters in novels, plays, poems, depart, taking a journey of exploration, and so of understanding in a sometimes planned, sometimes rhizomatic, often aleatory, or seemingly aleatory manner. But which, however random our divagations become or however closely we stick to the chosen path, according to the marks that engage our interest, leads to a different knowledge, a knowledge of the difference that the textuality of maps embody. 1

About This Book

Beginning with the Early Modern Period in the first chapter, Małgorzata Grzegorzewska discusses the symbolic dimension of early modern maps, exploring the connections between early modern cartography and poetic imagination. Taking her clues from Edmund Spenser’s cartographic imagery in the Faery Queene and Sir Philip Sidney’s comments on the fecundity of poetic fancy in his Defence of Poetry, Grzegorzewska argues that Renaissance maps participated in colonial discourse by fostering the desire for the unknown. Crossing the border between poetry and cartography, she traces parallels between poets’ imaginary journeys and the changing poetics of the map: from the Christian allegory of the medieval mappaemundi to the secular theology of Renaissance specula orbis terrarum. She argues that colonial cartography mingled plain facts with idealized visions of the new worlds first desired and then discovered, or rather ‘invented,’ by the European settlers. The pleasure of seeing the world represented on a map could then be converted into the profit of further conquests and exploration. The language of early modern maps was neither plain, nor faithful to reality. The seductive eloquence of these cartographic mirrors of the world can be interpreted in terms of Jean-​Luc Marion’s concept of the idol, which in Marion’s philosophy denotes a specific mode of viewing objects. Marion does not contend that the idol is a false god—​this is what John Calvin had in mind when he 14

Malpas, 57.

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accused human imagination of replacing the worship of the true God with an abominable cult of man-​made idols—​but that it is an image which faithfully reflects the onlooker’s desires. In other words, the idol ‘results from the gaze that aims at it’ and forms a mirror reflecting that gaze which has called it into being. Grzegorzewska argues in this context that early modern maps reflected the gaze of the surveyor and functioned as a tool of enchantment. The persuasive force of such maps resembled the allure of the poet’s tales of adventure. This theoretical discussion is followed by an in-​depth analysis of the ‘world on worlds’ invoked in the poems of John Donne and Andrew Marvell. On the one hand, these poets refer to the totality and stability of the map; on the other, they pinpoint the map’s affinity with disruptive desires. Donne’s ‘Love’s Progress’ is a parody of the romance narrative of discovery and adventure. His ‘Good Morrow’ reminds us that maps, which in the early modern period served as significant instruments of possession and power, were not immune from the threat of subversion and fragmentation. Donne’s reference to manifold ‘worlds’ stands in contrast with the postulated entirety of the map. Last but not least, Grzegorzewska suggests that in Marvell’s ‘On a Drop of Dew’ the reader may find a dim reflection of the cartographic idol. The drop of dew, which ‘in itself encloses’ a greater heaven, can be viewed as an equivalent of the celestial globe. The biblical allusion to ‘manna’s sacred dew’ in the conclusion of the poem, fraught with the anxiety of separation and death, reminds us that the cartographer’s gaze turns the represented reality into a ‘congealed’ and dead abstraction. In ‘Fragmented Body versus Cartographic Representation: The Early Modern Subject and the Marlovian Transgressors,’ Klaudia Łączyńska studies complex discursive interplay of cartography and anatomy in the Renaissance literary imagination to see if these multiple associations can be traced in Christopher Marlowe’s plays. Laying aside the well-​documented fact of the playwright’s ‘geographic literacy,’ the author focuses on the way a map may serve Marlovian characters to construct coherent identity. The author proposes to look at a map as a figurative means of representation that help make sense of the fragmented experience of the restless early modern subject. The connection between the exploration of the world and the discovery of human body provides the ground for an analysis of possible role of the map in the figurative (self)representation of the Marlovian transgressors, Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus. In the Renaissance theatre a map could be either a prop or a metaphor. When compared to the theatre the world was primarily perceived as the scene of human actions, either repetitive and insignificant (as Macbeth tells us), or potent and heroic (as Tamburlaine would have it). At the same time, as the world expanded, so did the imaginary space of the theatre, which made Sir

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Philip Sidney complain about the abuse of classical unities in the contemporary drama. The playwrights became fond of presenting catalogues of rapidly changing settings and characters constantly on the move, which, according to the courtier-​poet, must have produced a sense of confusion. According to Łączyńska, Sidney’s critique is not only a sign of his reverence to the classical model but equally of his fear of chaos and fragmentation in the early modern expanding world. In this context, Christopher Marlowe’s plays offer an insight into early modern anxieties, as they are among the first to challenge so radically the classical unities in their attempt to represent global movement within the confines of the stage. Marlowe’s work has often been read in the light of the contemporary interest in travel and cartography, where Tamburlaine’s famous speech referring to the map would be interpreted primarily as an expression of his hubristic and insatiable desire for conquest. Łączyńska argues that in Marlowe’s plays this desire, which provokes in his characters restlessness and incessant movement, is concomitant with a growing anxiety of fragmentary experience, which seems to be most emphatically represented by the fragmented body of Doctor Faustus scattered upon the stage. Faustus’s renunciation of the scholastic summa, followed by his random traveling through fast changing settings, which provides him with motley scraps of experience rather than with the desired picture of the whole, results in the literal disintegration of his body. Łączyńska suggests that the early modern cartography, which became a new method of framing and organising the expanding world and the growing domain of human activity, may also help to make sense of the fragmented experience of the restless subject. Focussing on Joel Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, Tom Ue considers mapping in relation to tropes of closure and resolution. The New York Times has hailed Swiss writer Joël Dicker amongst the ‘literary wunderkinder.’15 His second novel, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (2012), has been translated into 40 languages, and it has sold five million copies worldwide. Notwithstanding its critical and commercial success, Harry Quebert Affair has received inadequate scholarly attention. Tom Ue’s chapter offers a corrective. In the first half of this paper, Ue attends to some recent developments in literary map studies, particularly as they pertain to detective fiction. Ue reveals how mapping provides us with a lens for approaching Dicker’s novel, and how it manifests in geographical, historical, and literary senses. The

15

Chelsea Cain, ‘Publish or Perish,’ New York Times, June 6, 2014, https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​ 2014/​06/​08/​books/​rev​iew/​the-​truth-​about-​the-​harry-​queb​ert-​aff​air-​by-​joel-​dic​ker.html.

Introduction

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novel’s crux rests on a geographical impossibility: the car of Deborah Cooper’s murderer and Nola Kellergan’s abductor had apparently eluded the police and vanished. In fact, Travis Dawn and Chief Pratt had carried out the crimes, and they had given false reports. Dicker manipulates the novel’s chronology. If, on the one hand, he follows a well-​established tradition by showing how the writer Marcus Goldman’s artistic autonomy is compromised by a capitalistic publishing industry, then, on the other, the book we are reading is digressive and lengthy, exceeding 600 pages. Indeed, the epilogue unfolds two years after the investigation had culminated and Marcus’ book about Nola had appeared. We do well to attend to Dicker’s literary project: Marcus’ is motivated, at least initially, by his desire to exonerate his friend Harry Quebert, who was in a relationship with Nola. Marcus’ follow-​up, the book we are reading, affords reparation, and the writer-​turn-​detective regains our trust by diligently reporting his mistakes. In the second half of the chapter, an interview conducted in 2018, Ue discusses with Dicker his creative process for the novel; its adaptation into a ten-​part television series (2018), directed by César Award winner Jean-​Jacques Annaud and starring Patrick Dempsey, Ben Schnetzer, Damon Wayans Jr., and Kristine Froseth; and the process of arriving at closure both for Dicker and for his characters. Dicker’s process is by no means straightforward. ‘Once I had finished the manuscript,’ he says, or I thought I had finished, I worked diligently to balance out the two time periods. I ended up writing 30 different versions! For me, it was important that the two periods have equal weight in the novel, and that the readers understand how the events of 1975 still had repercussions on the characters’ lives 30 years later. Dicker describes the importance of setting to his project and how he breathes life to its people: ‘The town of Somerset is a character in itself, and I strived to give all the other characters their own interesting facets as well. Without the murder, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair would be a story about life in a small New England town and the deep relationships amongst its inhabitants.’ Ue’s chapter advances scholarship by examining how mapping helps us understand the novel, by illuminating Dicker’s creative vision, and by suggesting fresh approaches to maps in detective fiction. In the fourth chapter, ‘“To deploy an errant eye”: Olga Tocarczuk’s ‘Early Modern’ Fantasia,’ Julian Wolfreys considers Flights, by Tokarczuk, and the novel’s indebtedness to ideas of mapping. ‘The English usage of the term “map” in its modern technical sense as a two-​dimensional graphic representation

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of the earth’s surface dates at least to 1527,’ observes Henry S. Turner, in the introduction to his article, ‘Literature and Mapping in Early Modern England, 1520–​1688.’[1]‌While Turner goes on to say that the ‘primary meaning’ of ‘map’ appears only ‘infrequently in poetry and drama throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ (Turner 412), in France, Tom Conley reveals in An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France, usage in literary production was much more prevalent, if not commonplace.[2] Writers and cartographers, Conley notes, ‘create forms in which their own invention and construction, indeed the very perceptions and sensation that give rise to them, are folded into their execution and remain integral to their effects.’ (Conley 4) One aspect of the French engagement is that, ‘a sense of space and place [is invented, as Conley describes it] because it calls for a heightened consciousness of prehension, that is, of contact with the ambient world in such a way that unforeseen or hitherto unknown relations are made from the experience of things seen and heard in ways that bring forward an uncommon and often passing sense of where and what we are in the world’ (4–​5). Olga Tokarczuk’s award winning novel Flights, is a novel that revels in how ‘the perceiving organ with the ambient world precipitates an intensity of sensation and perception.’ (Conley 5) In this experimental text, composed of long and short narratives, personal observations about travel, moving through space, the transience of the event of transport and its many chance encounters or opportunities for experiencing differently, or the strangeness of the self becoming other in different contexts from those habitually encountered through encounter with an estranging terrain, we read how ‘events can be said to be what yield the perception of space and of how that perception takes “place.”’ (Conley 5) And this, in turn leads to the ‘invention’ (in the sense used by Conley of finding what was there all along but which had passed unnoticed) of modes of mapping the world in relation to the self. Additionally, and in order to offer a cartographic, but also imaginative materiality to her text, Tokarczuk includes a dozen maps and topographical drawings, taken from The Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps, and most of which predate the 20th century.[3]‌At the same time, other ‘maps’ are considered by Tokarczuk, ‘maps’ that develop simultaneously with the cartographic interests of Early Modern culture and society: maps of the body, focussed principally through the story of Dutch anatomist, Philip Verheyen. Thus, as Wolfreys explores in this chapter, Tokarczuk engages not in a postmodern, but essentially an ‘early modern’ fantasia—​a thing composed of a mixture of different forms and styles—​in her sustained meditation on the subject’s phenomenological prehension of the world, in which perception and sensation are registered equally through the various narratives, and in which, as Conley puts it, the subject touches upon

Introduction

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and is touched by ‘the ambient world in such a way that unforeseen or hitherto unknown relations are made from the experience of things seen and heard in ways that bring forward an uncommon and often passing sense of where and what we are in the world’ (Conley 4). In the chapter entitled ‘The Mapping of Empire in Hilary Davies’ “Imperium”,’ Jean Ward provides a close reading of a long poem by the Anglo-​Welsh writer Hilary Davies, ‘Imperium,’ published in 2005 in a collection of the same name. While critical cartographers are sometimes suspicious of the use of cartographical metaphors in literary scholarship, the author believes that their application is helpful in reading this poem. Although ‘Imperium’ contains few references to actual maps, the poet’s treatment of space involves a form of ‘mapping’ which the reader is required to trace. Ward contends that the mental mapping of (historical) space by the poet and reader corresponds to a still more metaphorical mapping process, one in which symbols of national glory and heroism are shuffled into unexpected positions on a canvas where quite other symbols are foregrounded. ‘Imperium’ is based on carefully researched historical sources, and though it is entirely without dates, it looks at the British Empire around the turn of the nineteenth century from different spatial standpoints which are linked in various ways with the life of one of the Empire’s maritime heroes. However, many of the places, events and people plotted on to Davies’ ‘map’ are not ones whose connection with the history of the British Empire is well-​known, while the stories of more recognizable people and events are told from unexpected perspectives and in a kind of detail which defamiliarizes them. Crucially, instead of focusing on Horatio Nelson’s great naval victory at Trafalgar, ‘Imperium’ draws attention to some distinctly unheroic aspects of his earlier life and career. The probing light cast on Nelson is simultaneously cast on the British Empire; not for nothing does the poet remind the reader, in the concluding section, of Marlow’s remark, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, that London, the imperial centre, ‘also has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ Ward argues that through its Latin title, the poem places the British empire in questioning relation, not only to another particular though earlier one (the Roman), but also to the whole concept expressed by the word imperium. The poem begins and ends in the Thames estuary, but the cumulative effect of its various revisionist ‘mapping’ strategies is to displace Greenwich’s ‘dead meridian’ (l.32) from the metaphorical centre. Ward argues that while it seems to be Nelson’s story which threads its way through the poem, two other figures, an anonymous ‘prentice sawyer’ and a foundry worker named David Davies, are afforded distinctions which are denied to him. The sections of ‘Imperium’ in which these figures appear have their own separate titles, singled out by

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italics; and they are indeed the only people in the poem to appear in any of its titles, which otherwise identify only spatial locations. Each of them is allowed to speak in his own words, and their way of speaking has lyrical qualities which are not to be found in other parts of ‘Imperium.’ By subtly distinguishing and honouring two unknown figures, the poet upturns the social order that condemns them to a place among the many anonymous ‘men like insects /​Day and night beneath the chimneys’ of the iron foundry (iv, ll. 36–​37). If anything is a landmark on Davies’ new ‘map,’ then, it is not Greenwich, where Nelson’s body was brought to lie in state. Startlingly, it might instead be Golgotha. For there are echoes of the Passion in the lament of the prentice sawyer which might point towards the Cross as the true omphalos of the world. In Ward’s reading of ‘Imperium,’ a distant reminder is evoked of a map from an entirely different age: the Hereford Mappa Mundi. In ‘Mapping and Unmapping the World: Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky versus Unmapping Memory. Looking for Hildegard of Bingen by Desmond Graham,’ Olga and Wojciech Kubiński discuss the relations between literature and cartography on the basis of a juxtaposition of two texts: a collection of narratives by Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands. Fifty Islands I have not Visited and Never Will, and a collection of poems by Desmond Graham Unmapping Memory. Looking for Hildegard of Bingen. The discussion is situated against the background of diverse theoretical notions (developed by Massey, Tuan, Nora, Rose, Lefebvre) pertaining to interconnections of space, place, time and gender within geographic and cartographic domains. An intriguing exemplification of these issues is offered in a quotation from the Heart of Darkness by Conrad. The dominating motif dominating in traditional cartography is patriarchally defined masculinity (Rose). The authors attempt to demonstrate how this masculinity may be subverted in two radically different ways by geographically entrenched (albeit in different modes) literary texts. Judith Schalansky carefully frames a precise geographical grid which she fills with details in order to provide scaffoldings for her narratives. She occasionally demonstrates the ideological underpinnings of the her texts (e.g. the postcolonial backbone of the Tikopia story in which the island is presented from the vantage point of a newcomer/​observer). For Schalansky maps are a crucial element of all her narratives. Desmond Graham chooses a markedly different stance. He foregoes any attempt to use geographical coordinates to provide orientation in his depiction of the world of Hildegard of Bingen, an imposing medieval forerunner of feminism. Hildegard, involved in numerous activities in different spheres of life within a patriarchal context in which women were totally subjugated, successfully uses rhetoric to undermine her subservience. In his poems Graham presents Hildegard through his own fleeting and certainly unmapped sensory perceptions of places which she had once visited.

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Schalansky stakes out her world of islands which she would never personally visit by specifying an objective geographical grid around which she weaves her narratives. Graham fills with minute details sensory images of places whose geographical or historical references had been deliberately erased. Paradoxically, both stances irrevocably at odds lead to a similar effect: subversion of male dominated, patriarchal limitations of women’s mobility. In his chapter, titled ‘Charting Milan in Central Asia: Lombard Maps and Asian Toponymy in Luciano Erba’s Poetry,’ Samuele Fioravanti focuses on the superimposition of Central Asian toponynmy onto Northern Italy in a selection of poems. Fioravanti proposes to read Erba’s five texts as an attempt of poetical micro-​cartography based on Grounded Theory, a qualitative methodology aiming to the representation of space as experienced by people in loco. The method involves the collection and categorization of qualitative data (place names, orientation tools, metaphors and other rhetorical devices) toward enabling an alternative map of Lombardy to emerge. The Italian poet Luciano Erba (Milan 1922–​2010) has often portrayed the impalpable Milan at the end of the twentieth century in terms of a fading cityscape, a spectral city with an aura. Erba’s Lombardy is a space carved from the mist, out of which recurring dreams and near fading memories flicker. Fioravanti screens the orientation tools in Erba’s poems and analyses Central Asian toponyms inscribed within the Po plain, in order to map the vanishing network of reminiscences and longings that Erba follows throughout the city of Milan. Applying an imaginary cartography to Lombardy, the poet navigates the Po Valley as if it was in Turkestan or Iran. Thus he generates the unedited image of an Italy of caravans with different paths lined up on the Milano-​Bukhara axis, adhering to each other like the carpet to the parquet (in a poem titled Dasein), like the cloth arabesques to the fugue of tiles in the metro station (Quartine del tempo libero), like the roots of the Asian flowers to the alpine subsoil (Il roccolo) and like the racecourse clay to the grassy mounds of Takla Makan (Tombeau). Erba redraws the Lombard soil: he duly applies to Milan, Lombardy and the Alps a semi-​invisible layer and traces a map of Central Asia on it as if it were an arabesque. The aim of the author in this chapter is to collect place names (Bukhara, Tabriz, Shiraz, Shirwan, Tajikistan and the Taklamakan Desert) to chart the fictitious caravan routes Erba draws in Northern Italy using Persian and Turkic landmarks. The author then reaches the conclusion that Persian rugs work as devices suitable for finding one’s way in Northern Italy, via the superimposition of foreign toponymy, specifically in three main contexts. 1) The use of the carpet as a navigator during moments of confusion in the phenomenal world,

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the overwriting of the desert of Takla Makan onto the San Siro racecourse in Milan, 3) the transplant of a signalling structure typical of Central Asia into the alpine valleys. Fioravanti deals with the limits of literary mapping and the visualization of spatial uncertainty in fiction, categorized in five sources: the freedom of the author, the vagueness of certain geographical concepts, the different ways that readers interpret the geographical information found in literary texts, and finally the fact that most cartographic visualization are too rigid to represent the sort of fuzzy geographies that many literary works contain. However an additional source of spatial uncertainty might be added to this list as the production of literary maps can also serve to complicate—​rather than resolve—​ the literary geographies embedded within the text. This chapter focuses mainly on such an approach. The first section engages with a study of Lombard geography in Erba’s poetry, reconstructing the landscape of Caleppio and the Po Valley, describing different districts of Milan and their topography, finally analyzing the rhetorical devices Erba employs to display spatial representations in his poems through the juxtaposition of everyday objects. The second section concentrates on the transformation of common items into unexpected tools for orientation throughout Erba’s oeuvre. The main focus will be the metaphor of the Persian rug as a map: a scale model to access a sort of evanescent Milan, hidden under the membrane of the Asian toponymy stretched over Northern Italy. In ‘A “Monolithic Map/​of We Know Not What”: Alec Finlay’s Chorographic Poetics,’ Monika Szuba, begins by considering how, in 2010 Alec Finlay together with Ken Cockburn set out on a journey on foot through Scotland, guided by Matsuo Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North). Their responses to the encountered landscapes were gathered in a volume titled The Road North (2014). The choice of a non-​Western text to serve as a guide on the journey through Scotland demonstrates, Szuba argues, an attempt to introduce a non-​Eurocentric perspective. Stepping over temporal and geographical limits, Finlay and Cockburn entered in a dialogue with the seventeenth-​century text, offering a phenomenological mapping of place focused on corporeal experience and blending in elements of cultural and historical survey of the land. In his work, Finlay frequently maps the terrain with his feet, feeling his way through place in detailed itineraries. One of his recent projects involves ‘a place-​aware mapping of the Upper Teviot watershed,’ or walking along a tributary of the River Tweed in the Scottish Borders and creating texts and drawings of tributaries. Exploring the relationship between language and landscape, Finlay does not strive for fixed meanings, but concerns himself with

Introduction

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the dissemination of sense, which is illustrated by his use of tanzaku, or ‘place-​ name translation.’ His place writing and sited projects become moveable maps focused on ‘place-​awareness.’ As he jettisons systematic representation, Finlay challenges the view that the perception of place is stable, demonstrating that any ‘monolithic map’ is too large to apprehend and that sense making is a dynamic process which occurs constantly on location. The chapter continues by exploring ways in which Finlay’s work combines mapping and ecopoetics, discussing in the process how his work, concerned with chorography, which focuses on small regions and specific locations, entwines language and topography. Finally, following J. Hillis Miller’s statement that ‘Landscape “as such” is never given, only one or another of the ways to map it’ (Topographies, 1995), Szuba argues that in his numerous collaborative projects, Finlay proposes open texts onto which are mapped various consciousnesses. In ‘Unseeable maps: The Experience of Space in the Blind Walk Performance,’ Izabela Zawadzka uses walking performances to show how a map can be an embodied performative event. As Zawadzka understands, the map goes beyond the visual representation of space. The chapter introduces the category of a map to the area of performative arts, pointing to events which using the act of walking embody the map itself. It creates the althernative model of experienced but non-​visual map. The author, basing on the research of Karen O’Rourke, John Brian Harley, Mark Juvan, Denis Cosgrove, shows how the imagination of a walker can become a tool for creating unseeable maps. The term implemented by Zawadzka is differentiated from the invisible map. In both cases the author understand the map as a construction created in the imagination of the users. It is embodied by the walkers themselves. The author analyzes two methods of exploring the city, which activate multiple senses of walkers, allowing them to create an individual experience based map. The first case study focuses on the works of The World Soundscape Project led by Raymond Murray Schafer. Implementing the category of soundscape and referring to the research of urban audiosphere, the author describes the audiowalks around Salzburg, Stuttgart and London, pointing out how different tools can be used for creating sound maps. She indicates how the invisible and unnoticed spheres of a city life can be marked on the map and then pass to the walkers /​users to be re-​created (or re-​walked). In the second case she describes the blind walk Do you see what I mean? created by the French group Projet in Situ. The performance is an embodied experience of the city itself which in a surprising form redefines the observations taken from the sound studies. During the piece blindfolded walker is led by one of the volunteers who somehow know the city the performance take place in (was born, lives or

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studies there). The narration of the guide with the experience of the blind walk create the conditions for changing the perspective to look at the urban space. In both multisensory walks, the author finds situational tools for playing with urban space, activating the sensitivity to the location on which the walker is traveling. Transforming a place in a walker’s imagination is, according to the author, an action close to deep mapping described by Mike Pearson and Michael Schanks. Zawadzka shows how individual and collective memory work together to create a palimpsest map of the city, impossible to write, but with the potential to recreate it in motion. Turning the reader’s attention to Holland, in his chapter, Frans-​Willem Korsten starts with a historical moment in which mapping was technologically propelled and intensified to such an extent that the world, or worlds, were reconfigured in a way that would facilitate their becoming part of legal spheres. Before moving to the legal issue, the chapter first focuses on this historical moment, in the late 16th, early 17th century, by comparing three maps of the Dutch province of Holland, one from Cosmographei oder Beschreibung aller Länder (published in different versions between the 1550s and 1580s) and two in Theatrum orbis terrarium (published between the 1570s and 1610s). With regard to the latter, Korsten looks at two different versions (the first and second print). Historically aligned with one another, the maps al show a growing skill, and sense, of control. Thus they illustrate here how a particular or situated position came to be presented more and more as, somehow, objective. The mediating in-​between is a sphere. With the devices of calliper and compass, by means of both focused and framing focalization, the world came to be captured in a theatrical sphere, as the title of the second atlas, Theatre of the Sphere of the Earth, suggests. The chapter then moves to one of the consequences of this intensifying mapping technology and growing control, by considering how in the province of Holland, which consisted for most of its territory in big lakes, mapping was used in the service of dry-​milling the lakes. Whereas this may seem to be a technological issue only, it was in fact a process of appropriation that changed what used to be commons into mapped and registered private property. What used to be common waters became parcels of land that asked for cultivation and could be rented out to those who did not have the money to buy the newly created lands but were god enough to work them. In this process, mapping technologies were much helped, or even propelled, by literary works that would rhetorically affect audiences by describing the work of nature as violent and destructive. This called for a response that could counter the so-​called violence with the more powerful force of technology. Two animals were opposed in this context: the water-​wolf, gnawing away at the lands, and the Dutch lion

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who could destroy the other animal with a sweep of its tail, as a metaphor for the strength of windmill technology. The literary, or rhetorical tools used to reconfigure waters and lands helped people to conceive of the world in terms of a novel kind of ficta persona, a fictive person: the legal person—​and by implication legal non-​persons. This part of the chapter looks at the ways in which nature was reconfigured, or conceptually remapped, as an object of control and dissection. Allegory is at work, for instance, when nature is compared to a queen, carrying a staff and ruling the animals of her kingdom. Personification is at work when animals are given faces that show a distinct satisfaction with their being subject to this queen. Anthropomorphism is at work when nature is no longer compared to a person, but becomes one. Meanwhile, human beings are brought to analyse and dissect nature in a process of knowing, and knowing more and more. In terms of grounding an order, the fact that nature is given a face and turned into a person makes it possible to define nature legally as something to be claimed and taken as property. Almost paradoxically, this turns the appropriation of nature into something natural—​as if between man and nature all interactions are not principally different from the average traffic between persons. This brings Korsten to the final step, where he contends that the ability to consider nature in terms of, or within the sphere of a legal order depends by and large on two techniques: one literary or rhetorical, defining natural entities as persons; one cartographical, capturing natural entities as well-​defined shapes within a well-​defined sphere. Anthropomorphism is the pivot, here, where mapping and literature coincide with legal order. Carefully arranged, artistically prepared, imagined and mapped ‘private’ spheres within which maneuverable legal puppets are allowed to play their role, have much helped to eliminate natural life worlds. As such they are an excellent example of how people can be driven on the basis of restricted or vectorised affective span. In this process of restriction and vectorization, the dynamic between maps and fictae personae, both literary and legal figures, has played a decisive role. In the penultimate chapter, ‘Mapping the Sacramental: Inner Circle by Jerzy Peterkiewicz,’ the principal focus of the chapter is Inner Circle, structurally complex and exceptionally imaginary novel by Polish émigré writer Jerzy Peterkiewicz. The essay attempts to analyze aspects of the novel that ground the presented reality in very concrete, physical circumstances, with particular attention to specific and recognizable geographical locations, such as London and its Circle Line tube depicted in the part entitled ‘Underground.’ In other parts of the novel, Peterkiewicz organizes spaces by foregrounding elements of the setting that, due to their vertical positioning, stand out from the flat landscape, such as signposts and ‘hygienic boxes’ that furnish the futuristic

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world in ‘Surface.’ Finally, in ‘Sky,’ attention is drawn to natural elements of landscape, most notably trees, which connect the presented post-​lapsarian world to its original form and destiny. A particularly important element of the narrative in all the three parts is spatial dislocation, constant movement that is either forced upon or chosen by the characters, and which necessitates vital changes in their perception of the world, others and themselves. Guided by natural landmarks, artificial points of orientation and warning signs, they leave familiar places, or escape oppressive surroundings. Paradoxically, they eventually arrive at places which they vaguely recognize, or feel strong attachment to. Their exile, journey into the unknown, becomes a sudden, unintended return. Carefully directing the characters’ movements, as well as referring to specific places and locations, allows Peterkiewicz to draw a map—​perhaps not in strictly geographical terms, since each part actually takes place in different time and place in the history of mankind, but a map of human origins, history and future, all connected and intertwined, taking the shape of a circle involving creation, the fall and redemption. Such presentation is possible mainly due to the sacramental framework employed in the story. The idea that physical objects and places acquire spiritual, transformative meaning offers new opportunities in ascribing meaning to spaces and locations, and Peterkiewicz makes use of these opportunities to combine past and future, the physical and the spiritual, the human and the divine. The essay’s contribution to the volume thus lies primarily in adding not only cultural and symbolic, but also religious aspect of shaping spaces in literary fiction. Christian framework, notably sacraments of the Catholic church, as well as the importance of constant dislocation, change and re-​discovery they involve, are at the center of Peterkiewicz’s story and make it an interesting case of ‘mapping’ the sacramental in literature. In his essay ‘Camino (Hyper)Real: California’s Cartographic Imaginations’ Grzegorz Welizarowicz offers an analysis of the famous Camino Real trail in California. The author argues that for more than a century and until quite recently the trail linking twenty-​one Spanish missions functioned as the dominant historical and ideological paradigm of the state enacting its pedagogy through cartography and public space interventions. Building on Homi Bhabha’s argument that postcolonial criticism must critically engage the apparatus of representation as a strategy for deconstructing the hegemonic ‘normality’ and heeding Graham Huggan’s call for ‘interdiscursive’ analysis Welizarowicz first reviews Bruno Latour’s theory of ‘immutable mobiles’ and J.B. Harley’s model of the map as a medium of power and, importantly in the context of a settler colonial state, of deontological alleviation to

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apply then their terminology in his study of when, how and to what ends the Camino Real trail came into existence. Welizarowicz proposes that the idea of the trail as a signifier of California’s ‘ancient’ history came about through a combination of various interests and imaginaries at the close of the nineteenth century and that it should be appropriately seen in the context of what Eric Hobsbawm calls the ‘invented traditions’ or, after Erika Doss, America’s ‘memorial mania.’ He links the appearance of the ‘New Mission System’ with literary images from Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona (1884) and argues that they can be read as fictional predecessors to the project of placing the famous Mission Bell Markers (mbm) alongside California’s federal, state and local roads. Drawing on Phoebe Kropp’s research he reminds us that the markers’ ubiquitous presence has little to do with actual history of the missions. Rather, they were turn-​of-​the-​century products of negotiation of various agendas of regional lobbyists and the emergent leisure class. To illustrate how the idea of the trail was promoted over the course of a century examples of three different maps of El Camino Real are studied up close. The examples reveal how successive maps applied various representational strategies to ideologically narrativize history and promote the founding myth of California which holds that the state’s beginnings at the missions were nothing but glorious. Contrasting this with the actual historical accounts which offer a much different and unequivocally tragic version of the founding moments the author, drawing on Jean Baudrillard, proposes to call the trail El Camino (Hyper)Real and argues that the project’s sponsors like Harrie Forbes or Charles Fletcher Lummis deserve the titles of the founders of the American simulacrum. In the last section of the essay the author proposes to think of alternative mappings drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s reformulation of imagination as action and social practice. Examples of such mappings are taken from three texts by California Indigenous authors (a story, drama and a travel log). Welizarowicz suggests that the Native authors engender imaginary maps unlike the immutable mobiles, and which can only be understood in relation to Indigenous epistemology and sense of implacement. The argument is that these mappings are motivated by an ethical imperative of making whole what the settler colonial state through its ideological practices, i.e. maps of El Camino and the mbm has worked to suppress, break, destroy. The author draws attention to the fact that despite the 2015 canonization of Junípero Serra, the founder of the mission system, California’s recent policy, as exemplified by the 2019 apology issued by the Governor Gavin Newsom to the state’s Native peoples, suggests that perhaps a more inclusive and multidirectional map of California and a new founding mythology are being developed.

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Works Cited

Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, And Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Cain, Chelsea. “Publish or Perish,” New York Times, June 6, 2014, https://​www.nyti​mes .com/​2014/​06/​08/​books/​rev​iew/​the-​truth-​about-​the-​harry-​queb​ert-​aff​air-​by-​joel -​dic​ker.html. de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. Ingold, Tim. Correspondences. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021. Jacobus, Mary. Romantic Things: A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Malpas, Jeff. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Second Ed., Foreword Edward S. Casey. London: Routledge, 2018. Malpas, Jeff. ‘“Where Hegel Meets the Chinese Gulls”: Place, Work and World, in Jeff Malpas and Kenneth White, The Fundamental Field: Thought, Poetics, World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, compiled, with notes by Dominique Séglard, trans. Robert Vallier. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Whiston Spirn, Anne. The Language of Landscape. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.

chapter 1

The Poet, Voyager, and Cartographer Are ‘of Imagination All Compact’ Crossing the Borders of Early Modern Poetry and Cartography Małgorzata Grzegorzewska In the introduction to the Second Book of The Faerie Queene, the poet predicts that some readers may censure his narrative as wasted effort. Poetic fiction –​ they will probably say –​has no basis in the real world; instead it is a poisoned fruit of the imagination, that ‘perpetual forge of idols’ (idolorum fabricam), as John Calvin authoritatively deemed it.1 The apparent addressee of Spenser’s apology was the Queen, who surely did not share the Calvinists’ prejudice against images and imagination; but perhaps the person the poet was really addressing was himself. Indeed, perhaps the apology is actually an argument with the poet’s Protestant conscience, which accused him of trespassing into the forbidden realm of licentious romance, where mutinous fancy and foul deceit reign supreme: Right well I know most mighty Soueraine, That all this famous antique history, Of some th’aboundance of an idle braine, Will judged be, and painted forgery, Rather then matter of iust memory, Sith none, that breatheth liuing aire, does know, Where is that happy land of Faery … (ii.1)2 The terms ‘idle brain’ and ‘painted forgery’ smack strongly of the Calvinist attacks on literary fiction as having no connection with honest everyday hard work or the plain truth of Scripture.3 The poet’s involvement in deceitful 1 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953), vol. 1, 97 (1.11.8). 2 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, in: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). All quotations from Faerie Queene refer to this edition. 3 Cf. Małgorzata Grzegorzewska, The Medicine of Cherries. English Renaissance Theories of Poetry (Warszawa: Institute of English Studies, 2003), 128–​129.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004520288_003

26 Grzegorzewska illusion is immediately linked with the sin of sloth: and although the phrase ‘idle brain’ refers in the first place to lunatic imagination –​just as the adjective ‘antique,’ qualifying ‘history,’ seems to entail punning on ‘ancient’ and ‘antic,’ i.e. ludicrous or absurd –​Spenser deliberately strikes a note which resonates with the common accusation that poetic fiction draws people away from profitable occupations; and in consequence may lead to anarchy, dissipation and debauchery. Moreover, in the quoted stanza the word ‘idle’ stands next to ‘abundance,’ which may be connected with spendthrift extravagance. Poetic imagination is then contrasted with the exercise of the ‘just,’ that is both accurate and morally correct, memory. Last but not least, we are also reminded that poetry can only yield ‘painted’ –​beautiful but false –​artefacts. In brief, poets are ‘forgers’ of reality when they address things which have not been verified by the actual experience of any human being: ‘Sith none, that breatheth liuing aire, does know, /​Where is that happy land of Faery.’ Nobody has ever been to the land of Faery; no cartographer has drawn a map of this magic realm. Yet ironically enough, all readers of the Faerie Queene immediately realise that this ‘happy land’ which the poet brings forth in his work proves to be nearer to them than they might ever suspect. The ideal realm instantly emerges from the mist of non-​existence to be seen by the mind’s keen eye; it is engendered in the ‘here and now’ of the recipient’s imagination, as she or he engage in the process of construing the meaning of the text. The reasons why I find Spencer’s ingenious comment on the power of poetic fancy relevant for our reflection on early modern maps; and the relation to poetic imagination, which are twofold. First, I wish to highlight the symbolic and mythopoeic aspect of early modern cartography. In the light of what Spenser says, we are entitled to construe cartographic image as a promise or foreshadowing of discovery, rather than a remembrance of an accomplished journey; an irresistible incentive to explore, rather an account of past voyages; not only a text, which makes some unknown reality familiar, but also a pretext, which never ceases to announce the arrival of the unknown. Secondly, I wish to recall the role of maps in the era of European colonial expansion. Crossing the border between poetry and cartography, I shall look both at the poets’ maps and the changing poetics of the map: from the Christian allegory of the medieval mappaemundi to the secularized theology of seventeenth century specula orbis terrarum. I interpret early modern maps in terms of what Jean-​Luc Marion has called the idol. Marion does not contend that the idol is a false god –​this is what Calvin had in mind when he accused the imagination of replacing true worship with an abominable cult of man-​made idols –​but an image of god suited to human notions. We may say that in Marion’s philosophy the idol denotes a specific mode of viewing objects; in other words, the idol

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‘results from the gaze that aims at it’ and forms a mirror reflecting that gaze which has called it into being. I suggest that we can treat early modern maps as such idols: they seem to reflect the gaze of the surveyor and function as a tool of enchantment, in a manner reminiscent of the romantic allure of the poet’s tales of adventure. In the last section of this chapter, I turn to the images of ‘world on worlds’ invoked in the poems of John Donne and Andrew Marvell, suggestive of the pending fragmentation of the cartographers’ magic mirrors. 1

Poets’ Fancies

The author of the Faerie Queene reiterates the objections raised in his times by the opponents of poetry only in order to show that he is perfectly capable of defending poetic fiction. Not only can he turn his liabilities into resources that will work in his favour, but he argues in this same context that the same poetic imagination which nurtured medieval quest narratives also served as a stimulus for the conquest and colonization of the newly discovered regions. In the following stanzas, he hails the prospects of the vast expanses of the New World, whose exploration –​described as the discoverers’ ‘hardy enterprize’ –​ is deemed economically useful, provided of course travelling is distinguished from pointless wandering, or even worse, forbidden vagrancy: But let that man with better sence aduise, That of the world least part is red: And dayly how through hardy enterprize, Many great Regions are discouered, Which to late age were neuer mentioned. Who euer heard of th’Indian Peru? Or who in venturous vessel measured The Amazons huge riuers now found true? Or fruitfullest Virginia who did euer vew? Yet all these were, where no man did them know Yet haue from wisest ages hidden beene: And later times things more vnknowne shall show, Why then should witlesse man so much misweene That nothing is, but that which he hath seene? (ii.2–​3) The mention of Peru and Virginia in the quoted passage draws our attention to those parts of the world which can be identified with ‘the unknown, or

28 Grzegorzewska hardly known, wonderland of discovery and romance,’ a space ‘where monsters dwelt and miracles were common.’4 The poet endeavours to convince his readers that knights errant of the sea do not loiter or dilly-​dally with dragons, but ‘read’ the newly discovered lands as if they were pages in a familiar tale of romance, so that others can ‘write’ them down in their charts. In this way, Spenser presents the proposition which in the 20th century became a commonplace standpoint of post-​colonial studies: one where the New World had been a poets’ dream before it became a fact. Paradoxically, he finds this insight deeply reasonable (in fact more endowed with ‘better sense’ than the myopic vision of a ‘witlese man’ whose understanding is bound to what he has seen, touched, smelled and tasted), pointing to the determining influence of poetic imagination on the era of Great Discoveries. Spenser’s claims are perfectly consistent with the tenor of Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry. ‘Peerless poets,’ Sidney argues in this work, have an advantage over historians. The latter were ‘tied’ to ‘what was,’ to ‘the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things;’ therefore the historian’s examples entailed ‘no necessary consequence’ and history was ‘a less fruitful doctrine’ than poetry. Furthermore, the poet-​courtier highlighted the importance of the visual appeal of poetry: For as in outward things, to a man that had never seen an elephant or a rhinoceros, who should tell him most exquisitely all their shapes, colour, bigness, and particular marks, or of a gorgeous palace the architecture, with declaring the full beauties might well make the hearer able to repeat, as it were by rote, all he had heard, yet should never satisfy his inward conceits with being witness to itself of a true lively knowledge: but the same man, as soon as he might see those beasts well painted, or the house well in model, should straightways grow, without need of any description, to a judicial comprehending of them: so no doubt the philosopher with his learned definition –​be it of virtue, vices, matters of public policy or private government –​replenisheth the memory with many infallible grounds of wisdom, which notwithstanding, lie dark before the imaginative and judging power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of Poesy.5

4 D. J. Rogers, ‘Voyages and Exploration: Geography: Maps,’ in: Shakespeare’s England. An Account of the Life and Manners of his Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), vol. 1, 170–​172. 5 Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or the Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 90.

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The quoted passage advertises the persuasive usefulness of verbal images. Sidney envisages poetry as an instrument of education and a means of leading readers out of the dark cave of ignorance and prompting them to set out on journeys of adventure and discovery (the English word ‘education’ derives from Latin educare, which means ‘to mould,’ and educere, ‘to lead out’ or ‘draw forth’). According to this account, the poetic imagination stimulates the active life, encourages adventure, and prompts exploration. Spenser’s defence of poetry, quoted at the beginning of this section, implied exactly the same beneficial influence of poetic fiction. The poet’s aim in writing the Faerie Queene was, as he himself asserted, to ‘fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and noble discipline,’6 and this task involved shaping readers’ desires. The evocation of Amazon’s ‘huge rivers,’ of Peru, known for its rich mines, and of Virginia, noted for its tobacco plantations, served the purpose of promoting English involvement in the rapidly developing colonial enterprise. Borrowing from Shakespeare, we may claim that the unspoken assumption of Spenser’s apology amounted to the belief that ‘the poet, the voyager and the cartographer are of imagination all compact.’7 Spenser was surely aware of the connection between the magic looking-​ glass of the map and the poetics of desire when he made the second reference to Peru in Canto iii of the Third Book of his Faery Queene. In the following passage we are reminded of how Britomart falls in love with the mirror image (a shadow) of a man she has not seen in her life, and we hear her nurse’s advice to her that she seek help from the maker of the mirror. If read through the lens of early modern cartography, the passage reveals the poet’s appreciation of the magic which can take one as far as an Africa inhabited by the descendants of Abraham’s son, Ishmael,8 or even farther afield … to the New World itself epitomised by the West Indies and Peru: At last she her auisd, that he, which made That mirrhour, wherein the sicke Damosell So straungely vewed her straunge louers shade, To weet, the learned Merlin, well could tell, Vnder what coast of heauen the man did dwell, 6 Spenser, Faerie Queene, 407. 7 I am alluding here to a line from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘The lunatic, the lover and the poet /​Are of imagination all compact.’ (5.1.7–​8) 8 Ishmael was Isaac’s older half-​brother born of a slave woman, Hagar. ‘Africk Ishmael’ seems to indicate Muslims identified with the descendants of Ishmael, ‘robbed’ of his birthright by the younger Isaac. (cf. Marc Shell, ‘The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice,’ The Kenyon Review 1 (4), Autumn 1979, 68).

30 Grzegorzewska And by what meanes his loue might best be wrought: For though beyond the Africk Ismaell, Or th’Indian Peru he were, she thought Him forth through infinite endeuour to haue sought. (iii.6) Britomart’s love begins when she sees her ‘strange lover’s shade’ in a magic mirror. Early modern maps, like Britomart’s looking glass, also seduced readers with the shadowy figures of ‘strange lands’ and allegorical representation of the continents. The New World, in the beginning viewed ‘in a glass, darkly,’ was indeed pursued through ‘infinite endeauor’ and found under Heaven’s remotest coast.9 The progressivist rhetoric of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians: now we see ‘as in a glass darkly, but then face to face,’ which shapes Spenser’s understanding of poetic allegory served also as a groundwork for early modern travel narratives and Renaissance mapmaking alike. They were determined by what we may call a secularized version of Christian providentialism: these maps were not only records of accomplished exploration, not only records of surveying the land, but they also fore-​saw (this is a native English equivalent of the Latin providere) and predicted, i.e. fore-​said (another loan translation for the Latin predicere) future worlds. Spenser’s text abounds not only in biblical echoes, which in turn illuminate the soteriological aspirations of the cartographic project, but also in the traces of Renaissance texts, which prove equally relevant for an understanding of the alliance between the poet and the mapmaker. The vertical orientation of the quoted stanza, signalled by the mention of ‘the coast of heaven,’ makes us first turn our eyes up, and then down, when we are invited to imagine people living in an unknown land, on some remote coast of the terrestrial globe. This brings to mind Shakespeare’s celebrated praise of the poetic imagination: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (5.1.12–​17) 9 I am referring here both to the well-​known passage from ‘St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians:’ ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face’ (13:12) and to this biblical allusion in the title of William Boelhower’s seminal study of the Western culture of the map, Through a Glass, Darkly. Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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Spenser, though, may have borrowed his image directly from Shakespeare’s source, namely Cesare Ripa’s emblematic figure of poetic fury: A brisk young Beau, of a ruddy Complexion, crown’d with Laurel; bound about with Ivy; in a writing Posture, but turning his Head backward towards Heaven. The Wings declare the quickness of his Phansie, which soars aloft, and carries an Encomium with it, which still remains fresh and green, as the Laurel and the Ivy intimate: Looking upwards, the Ideas of Supernatural Things, which he writes down.10 The original Italian text of Ripa’s emblem furthermore allows us to establish the connection between the poet and the cartographer, since it says that poetic ideas are put down ‘in carte,’ which can either be translated as: ‘on the page’ or: “in a chart (a map).’ The relevant fragment of the Italian original accompanying the picture reads: Platone disse, que si muove la mente de’ Poeti per divin Furore, col’quale formano molte volte nell’idea imagini di cosi supernaturali, le quali notate da loro in carte.11 Spenser’s project of ‘poetic geography,’ derived from the Platonic concept of creativity, thus coincides with the ideological background of the early modern map: the poet ‘bodies forth’ unknown territories, fantastic beasts and strange people, whereas the cartographer endows the poet’s dreams with ‘a local habitation and a name’ inscribed in a map. At the same time, however, his narrative does not allow us to forget the provisional and unfinished character of the cartographic image. His vision of the map seems both encouraging and alarming, especially when he bids us remember ‘that of the world least part is read.’ Blank spaces wait for new discoverers. No map can be reduced to the verisimilitude of the actual space and the reminder of accomplished surveys; each is like a poem, envisaging further travels, promising new adventures, foreboding possible failures. The map deals with the probable and even the (un)foreseeable, as much as it pertains to the factual. Instead of bringing reassurance only, the map therefore reminds us of the unknown, other ‘worlds’ beyond its scope or below its surface. A shadow of apprehension and scepticism always followed in the footsteps of the daring, self-​confident and hopeful Renaissance subject who ventured to view the entire world from afar and from on high.

10 11

Cesare Ripa, Iconologia or Moral Emblems (London 1709; online: https://​arch​ive.org/​deta​ ils/​ico​nolo​giao​rmor​a00r​ipa/​page/​n7), fig. 132. Access 31.01.2022. Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Venetia, 1645), 234.

32 Grzegorzewska Reading early modern maps, we should therefore look for the implied authors of these thick cartographic textures, contrived of words, images, and lines. I am speaking here about the image of the early modern cartographer as it was inscribed in his work. Most early modern mapmakers performed the dual role of Icarus and Daedalus. Each of them was a young, enthusiastic daydreamer and ‘experiencer,’ driven by curiosity, ambition, and a lust for life, whilst also being a fully matured, accomplished craftsman. 2

The Rise of an Idol

Spenser’s cartographic metaphors remind us that early modern maps served as tools of persuasion, combining aesthetic delight with profitable occupation. Fanciful cartouches, richly decorated borders and fantastic miniature scenes depicting strange animals and exotic plants and illustrating the customs of the people who inhabited the newly discovered lands, all of which were laid inside the contours of the charted world, were clear evidence that mapmakers also recognized the rhetorical articulateness and symbolic resourcefulness of the map. Looking at the early modern map, it is impossible to separate its ‘scientific’ or factual content from its ‘epideictic eloquence.’12 Likewise, Sidney’s focus on connecting abstract notions with particular examples may apply to the juxtaposition of two orders of the early modern map: geometrical abstraction expressed in lines, angles and measurements, on the one hand, and aesthetic appeal of the cartographic image, on the other. Early modern romances of exploration and discovery –​either included in poets’ tales or drawn on the margins of the map –​were, however, hardly innocent dreams. The claim that America sprang from the fecund imagination of its European discoverers not only worked in favour of poetic fiction, but also erased its pre-​Columbian history and disposed of the indigenous people of this continent. In this way, poets participated in the ‘radical act of removal’ of the native people of America and the substitution of European fictional narratives for the aboriginal history.13 Whatever the Europeans ‘remembered,’ ‘dreamt about’ or ‘imagined’ replaced the collective memory of the native inhabitants of the newly discovered continents; this remembering supplanted the indigenous stories of those people which articulated their beliefs. 12

Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing. Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century; qtd. in Stephen Bann, ‘The Truth in Mapping,,’ in: The Inventions of History. Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 200. 13 Boelhower, Through a Glass Darkly, 47.

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The main agents of the lasting alliance of Western culture and the empire were early modern mapmakers, but poets like Spenser and Sidney, despite the refinement and gracefulness of their allegories and theoretical arguments, also had their share in this colonial endeavour. William Boelhower described as follows the effects of such an alliance using the example of the cartographic representations of America: Armed with mathematics and Euclidean geometry, the colonist ordered concrete reality according to an abstract system, ordered it, that is, into a homothetic model, which, once reproduced on a map, could be taken in a single space. Only on this basis could the earth appear as an indivisible and undifferentiated whole. Obviously this uniform global space is an artificial construct, but used as a cultural gesture, as a tool of colonization, the multiple local spaces of the Indian became simply insignificant.14 Over the course of time, the images inserted in early modern maps gave way to a geometric, stable and fixed abstraction set in the realm of an a-​temporal ideal, which conveyed the European desire to control the entire globe and cement the power dynamics of the early modern world. Although the practice of distinguishing the decorative and the scientific phase in the history of mapmaking is a valid means of describing the general trend in the evolution of cartographic conventions, it certainly fails to account for the ways in which art and science, imagination and intellectual discipline coexisted throughout the long modernity of cartography.15 The line, the written word and the image constitute the three principal ‘dialects’ of the language of cartography. The language of the map has no vocal equivalent: no sighs, cries, stammering or hesitant pause which are part and parcel of human speech ever disturb the charted perfection of the cartographer’s work. The cartographic image retains its gripping power long after the ‘delightful mystery’ of the primordial, the Edenic romance of discovery and adventure, has been lost and forgotten. The fulfilment of dreams seems close at hand and stands in plain view; yet at the same time in order to achieve this same fulfilment, one must go far away, indeed, to the world’s end. In this way, the map encompasses both the actual and the possible; it speaks of the emergent reality: that which is and that which as yet has not been discovered, or which we have not yet experienced. In this sense, all maps produced in the 14 Boelhower, Through a Glass Darkly, 51. 15 David Woodward, ‘Introduction,’ in: Art and Cartography. Six Historical Essays, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 2.

34 Grzegorzewska age of Great Discoveries placed the viewer ‘on the threshold of wonder,’ juxtaposing the reassurance of science with apprehensive expectation and troubled yearning for the unknown; melding the epiphanic moment of discovery, the evanescence of the lived experience set in a concrete time and space, and the permanence of its apparently universal, objective representation. In other words, we are bound to remember that the geometric, a-​temporal design of the map as we know it today, is rooted in the early modern fall into history and mutability. The development of map-​making entailed also the enframing of a three-​ dimensional space in the flatness of the painting. Both painting and cartography are means of structuring and representing space. They articulate the difference between the knowing subject and the represented object; but at the same time they encourage the reader to take into account the uneasy connection between the subject-​matter and the purpose (another sense of the word ‘object’) of representation. They are selective and they inevitably privilege a specific point of view: a specific kind of cartographic projection or, in the case of a one-​point perspective drawing a single vanishing point usually opposite the viewer’s eye where all lines converge. This point of convergence seems to point to something behind the painting, into the illusory ‘depth’ just as the eye of the invisible observer is situated ‘outside’ the represented reality, the object of his examination, i.e. that which is ‘thrown before him.’ Metaphors such as ‘interpretative gaze’16 or ‘theoretical eye,’17 common in cartographic criticism, thus imply the presence of an audience who may watch, construe and theorise topographic scenery.18 Therefore early modern cartographic images could indeed be called a ‘theatre of the world,’ theatrum orbis terrarum, whose stage was observed by the readers of these maps. At the same time, the increasing accuracy of cartographic measurement and representation was consistent with the emergent myth of the map’s objectivity, enhanced by an association of maps with mirrors and mirror reflections. Thus another cartographic metaphor, equating the map with a mirror, speculum orbis terrarum, endorsed the veracity of the map. Invoking Svetlana Alpers’s seminal observation about Dutch Renaissance painting, we may say

16

William Boelhower, ‘Inventing America. A Model of Cartographic Semiosis,’ Word and Image 4.2 (1988): 455–​497 1988, 479. 17 Boelhower, Through a Glass Darkly, 52. 18 Cf. Małgorzata Grzegorzewska, ‘Rewriting Early Modern Maps: Cartography and Post-​ colonial Critical Practice,’ in: Mosaic of Words. Essays on the American and Canadian Literary Imagination in Memory of Professor Nancy Burke, ed. Agata Preis-​Smith et. al. (Warszawa, Institute of English Studies, 2006) 155.

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that ‘the formidable sense of the map as a flat surface (akin to the reflection in the mirror) on which words along with objects can be replicated or inscribed’ clearly suggested that a map could be ‘construed’ like any other text: read and re-​read like a page in a book of adventurous aspect.19 In the long run, however, mapmaking and the same sense of adventure became more and more estranged from each other, as the romance of the New Land met its end when the map became an idol which, in addition to depicting the world, served the purpose of arresting the viewer’s eye. I am alluding here to Jean-​Luc Marion’s concept of an idol as a phenomenon which shapes the looking subject in such a way that one is transfigured by the object which one has deified. The philosopher uses highly poetic language so as to explain this transformation of an observer into an ardent follower of a god of his own making: In order for an idol to appear and, fixedly, draw the attention of a gaze, the reflection of a stable mirror must accommodate it. Instead of the gaze floating on ‘the sea, the sea perpetually renewed,’ it must present itself in a mirror, a gaze as mortally immobile as coagulated blood: ‘the sun drowned in its blood which coagulates’ (Baudelaire). In order that the idol might fix it, the gaze must first freeze. … When the gaze freezes, its aim settles … and hence the not-​aimed-​at disappears. The idolatrous gaze exercises no criticism of its idol.20 In other words, the idol is an object of wonder but precludes wandering (‘the not aimed at’); the enchantment it stimulates is so total, so absolute, that no space is left for hesitation or doubt. It is so totally determined, so purposeful and thoroughgoing, that nothing is left to chance. The idolatrous gaze allows no external realm; the eye fixed on the map becomes the true centre of the world. Instead of being a mirror of the world, the map was thus transformed into a mirror whose surface captured and reflected the surveyor’s gaze. It thus performed a double role: it represented the charted territory and evoked the invisible, vigilant gaze of the surveyor.

19 Alpers, The Art of Describing, xxv. 20 Jean-​Luc Marion, God without Being. Hors-​Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2012), 13.

36 Grzegorzewska 3

Dreams of Omnipotence

The voyagers’ manner of depicting the newly discovered lands was clearly determined by this voiceless appeal of the map. The ideological agenda of early modern maps stood in sharp contrast with the message encoded in medieval mappaemundi, whose design entailed God’s absolute sovereignty over time and space. Another name used for these maps, i.e. T-​O maps, referred to their circular shape and the representation of three known continents: Asia, Europe and Africa. The lines dividing the continents formed the letter ‘T,’ as in the Tau Cross, which in patristic and medieval times was universally used as a symbol of Christianity.21 Thus the overall design of medieval maps oriented, like the architecture of Christian churches, to the east, embodied the belief in Christ, represented by the sun, and viewed as ‘the place of the Shekinah, the true throne of the living God.’22 The medieval map of the world was therefore both an illustration of the cosmic element in the Christian religion and a visual equivalent of the Church and the Christian temple. It depicted the inhabited world (oikumene) as a temple of God and humankind as ecclesia, the mystical body of Christ. Evelyn Edson writes: Its [mappamundi] went far beyond the purely physical representation of space that we assume to be the function of a map today. Instead, the meaning of space was its ambitious programme. We see the same sweeping conception in the astronomical diagrams of the same period. Not content to show merely the earth with the planets, sun, and moon revolving around it, they include the ascending levels of the heavens as far as God Himself, as well as correspondences of time, the intervals of musical harmony, the qualities of matter, the humours of the human body, and the stages of the human life. There seems to be no limit to the layers of meaning in the material universe.23 The theological message was communicated, for instance, by the makers of the Ebstorf map (ca. 1234) which shows the three known continents within the

21 22 23

Jonathan T. Lanman, ‘The Religious Symbolism of the ‘T’ in T-​O Maps,’ Cartographica. The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualisation, vol. 18, no. 4 (1981), pp. 18–​22. Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press 2000), p. 68. Evelyn Edson, The World Map 1300–​1492. The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 31–​32.

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body of a crucified Christ. His head is in the east, his hands mark the southern and northern limits, whereas His feet are set in Gibraltar. Notably, His navel marks the location of Jerusalem, which now becomes an equivalent of the Greek omphalos. To venture beyond the limits of this map involved mortal danger, tantamount as it was to voluntary excommunication; as the one who travelled beyond the limits of the known world left the body of Christ behind. A slightly different version of the same warning was conveyed in the map from Hereford (ca. 1300). The four golden letters in Lombardic script attached to the inner circle of this map spell m.o.r.s, as if to remind us that the world is environed by death. This does not mean, however, that medieval mappaemundi discouraged people from travelling. They simply served a different purpose and communicated a different message: their readers were reminded of the fact that there was no life beyond Christ and no redemption outside His Church. Instead of functioning as instruments of knowledge which open the door to power, they preached about the Son of God who died on the Cross in order to redeem humankind. The mapmaker, then, played the role of a priest who, together with the entire congregation, faced the altar raised in the East and presided over a liturgy which determined the direction of our human earthly pilgrimage, from here and now to eternity and totality. Medieval T-​O maps were meant to show the itinerary of this universal journey. In the beginning of the early modern period mappaemundi were replaced by the maps oriented to the north. At first glance, it may appear that the change was dictated by pragmatic reasons in the age of Great Discoveries. The importance of orienting maps towards the north reflected the need of seafarers to navigate with the help of their compasses which pointed to the magnetic north. Such a simple common-​sense explanation fails to account, however, for the complex symbolic implications of this shift. They have been carefully analysed by Susan Conklin Akbari, who in the Idols of the East claims that ‘the transition from east to north marks a transition from the primacy of the sacred object to the primacy of the seeing subject;’ i.e. the explorer and surveyor of the land.24 Taking this observation one step further, we may point to this Cartesian subject’s transformation into a worshipper of the cartographic idol; a Blakean event which took place in the temple of his mind. The providential view of the world was replaced in the early modern period by a man-​made political theology of the map. Medieval mappaemundi presented the world as an indivisible

24

Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East. European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 110–​1450 (Ithaca and London: Cornel University Press, 2009), 50.

38 Grzegorzewska whole only because it was God’s creation (‘Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made’ J 1:3). In contrast, in early modern maps the totality of representation showed the world which humans were ‘united’ by the breadth of their suffocating embrace.25 Medieval maps portrayed the world as the temple of God and Christ’s Cross; early modern maps present a temple with golden calves where countless human beings are sacrificed. Colonial ideology did not dispense with the anagogical dimension of medieval allegory, but instead of advocating patience in awaiting the advent of the New Jerusalem, it fostered the desire to set off for undiscovered lands in a quest for a new Heaven and a new Earth. Colonial narratives of this period mingled plain facts with a foreshadowing of another reality, first desired, then discovered; and, last but not least, invented or recreated, both in the sense of being made anew and being made new, by the European settlers. The making of a new heaven and a new earth resounded with echoes of Revelations. We may even claim that the map’s a-​temporality entailed the making of a new eschatology, almost as if the map delivered the world from the perspective of flux and thus appeared to speak from the perspective of the end of time. The minor disclaimer ‘as if,’ however, remains crucial for a proper understanding of the ambiguous semiotics of the cartographic image and its incorporation of the future moment. The Christian theology of medieval mappaemundi was thus recovered in a secularized –​and hubristic –​guise by the early modern map, informed was as it was by the demand for wholeness (possibly equatable here with holiness) coupled with an audacious dream of transcendence. The new cartographic image entailed the presence of a ‘synoptic and omniscient, intellectually detached’ Apollonian gaze, below which the earth is surface or film.26 Instead, the idol of the map became a new instrument of enchantment. Whoever looked at a map in the age of Great Discoveries could feel like a king or the custodian of a treasure who kept watch over his land and sea, while at the same time securing his property rights. If I may anachronistically borrow lines from a late 18th century poem about the sailor, Alexander Selkirk, each early modern maps

25

26

I am referring to Andrew Marvell’s satirical portrayal of Great Discoveries in his country house poem, Upon Appleton House, where the poet compares the hubris of his contemporaries to the failed attempt at building the tower of Babel: ‘What need of all this Marble Crust, /​T’impark the wanton Mote of Dust, /​That thinks by Breadth the World t’unite /​ Though the First Builders Failed in Height?’ (stanza iii, ll. 5–​8) Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye. A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in Western Imagination (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 2.

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advertises the sovereignty the subject, who proudly announces: ‘I am monarch of all I survey; /​My right there is none to dispute /​From the centre all around to the sea /​I am lord of the fowl and the brute’ (ll.1–​4).27 The is the voice of the transcendental ‘I,’ viewing the entire world from its privileged and ever-​ constant vantage point. The early modern map is not simply an truthful representation of the land, but a mirror of the surveyor’s eagle eye: contemplating the world from above, looking down on the earth from Daedal’s perspective, watching and guarding hills, valleys and plains, as indicated by the Latin supervidere and Old French sorveoir. The map –​one of the idols of the early modern world –​fixes and reflects that gaze encompassing both the terrestrial and celestial globes. Like a poet, the cartographer is free to ignore ‘the particular truth of things’ –​to recall Sidney’s phrase –​such as the changing attire of hills and valleys in different seasons of the year, the motion and murmur of the sea waves, the accompaniment of birds’ songs. Disclosure, which is another meaning of the most common Greek noun denoting truth, aletheia, is not the cartographer’s only goal. Instead, he strives to grasp ‘the general reason of things,’ turning the phenomenal reality into a timeless abstraction. What is at stake then, is precisely appropriating the theological message of T-​O map and usurping divine omniscience. The early modern mapmaker cast himself in the role of a demigod. 4

The Image Is Multiplied

John Donne laid bare the inherent hubris of early modern cartography when, in the First Anniversary, he announced that ‘of meridians and parallels /​Man hath weav’d out a net, and this net throwne /​Upon the heavens /​And now they are his own’ (ll. 279–​280).28 The following lines in the same poem give us further insight into the understanding of the motifs behind the project of mapping the world. People are unwilling to undertake the demanding journey which would lead them up to God and mindless of the sacrifice of the Son who descended to save them. This is why they strive to pull divinity down on earth: ‘Loth to go up the hill, or labour thus /​To go to heaven, we make heaven come to us. /​We spur, we rein the stars, and in their race /​They’re diversely content to obey our pace.’ (ll. 281–​284) In Donne’s account, the New 27 28

William Cowper, ‘The Solitude of Alexander Silkirk.’ https://​www.bartl​eby.com/​106/​160 .html. Access 30.01.2022. John Donne, The Complete Poems, ed. Robin Robbins (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2010). All further quotations from Donne’s poetry refer to this edition.

40 Grzegorzewska Philosophy and the map’s scientific rationale thus becomes associated with reason’s dark opposite: human wayward ambition, greed, and lust. The inherent tension between the assumed totality and stability of the map and its affinity with disruptive desires –​including erotic phantasies –​ is brought is made explicit in John Donne’s audaciously erotic elegy ‘Love’s Progress.’ The poem is not an account of any single love conquest, but suggests possible undertakings in the realm of love and discusses the advantage of one route over another. The speaker tells all fellow-​explorers of female bodies how to reach quickly the most ‘desired place.’ (l.39) He dissuades them from looking for Cupid in the sky and, instead, focuses on earthly treasures, advocating the exploration of the nether regions: underground caves, rich mines and mysterious potholes. Journeying, asserts Donne, must have a purpose, ‘a right true end;’ (l. 2) and he shamelessly equates it with the fulfilment of carnal lust in a manner that is ingenuously suggestive and at the same time embarrassingly transparent: Search every sphere And firmament, our Cupid is not there; He’s an infernal God, and underground With Pluto dwells, where gold and fire abound: Men to such gods their sacrificing coals Did not in altars lay, but pits and holes. (ll.27–​32) The bawdy undertone of the last line is reinforced by the use of the preposition ‘in altars,’ instead of ‘on altars,’ followed by the equally suggestive ‘pits and holes.’ Rich mines await the traveller who is clever enough to choose a shorter way and start at her feet, moving straight northwards, that is going up. Otherwise he risks being ensnared and manacled by her wavy hair; be shipwrecked caused by her angry look; be delayed by the ‘remora’ of her ‘cleaving’ tongue which lives in a delightful creek rich with ‘pearls;’ (ll.57–​58) her teeth (it was believed that remoras, also called suckerfish because of their distinctive dorsal fins which enable them to attach to larger fish or boats, could hold a ship); be tempted to loiter in the ‘Hellespont’ separating the twin cities of ‘Sestos and Abydos,’ her breasts (l.60–​61); or remain in another hairy ‘forest’ which guards passage to her ‘India’ (l.69), meaning of course Western Indies noted for their mines of silver and gold. The woman’s body is thus an entire world, but also a map of the world wherein the speaker refers to her nose and her cheek: The nose, like to the first meridian, runs Not ’twixt an east and west, but ’twixt two suns;

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It leaves a cheek, a rosy hemisphere, On either side, and then directs us where Upon Islands Fortunate we fall … (ll.47–​50) The foot, bearing some resemblance with ‘that part’ which the explorer is after, is also called a ‘map,’ but the poet hastens to warn the reader not to mistake it for the real goal of his enterprise: ‘lovely enough to stop, but not stay at’ (l.76). His real object is hidden under the name which signifies material gain: ‘Rich Nature hath in women wisely made /​Two purses, and their mouth aversely laid’ (ll.91–​92, emphasis added). The juxtaposition of lust (connoted by ‘fire’) with money (‘gold’) is now enhanced by the double meaning of women’s ‘purses.’ Moreover, this bold reflection on the symmetry of female bodies prepares the ground for the conclusion of the poem, which crushes us with its vulgar scatology: whoever does not follow the speaker’s advice, ‘his error is a great, /​as who by clyster gave the stomach meet.’ (ll.95–​96. If we assume that ‘Love’s Progress’ is a parody of the romance narrative of discovery and adventure, we shall also note that Donne’s mistress plays the role of an evil enchantress, akin to Homer’s Circe, Spenser’s Acrasia, or Milton’s preeminent Eve. Gross ambiguity is of course part and parcel of erotic poetry, but in Donne’s elegy it is additionally connected with the ambivalence of the cartographic image which by his times had lost its primeval innocence and became associated with the ruthless pursuit of material gain. At the same time, the poem entails a joke on Petrarchan blason, enumerating the physical attributes of female body compared to jewels, celestial bodies and geographic wonders of the world. The ultimate effect is unsettling rather than reassuring: the playful references to the mistress’s feet, her breasts compared to the Greek cities, Sestos and Abydos and her two rich ‘purses’ point to the inherent duality of erotic poetry which juxtaposes love with lust and desire with derision. The two suns which shine in the face of the beloved over the ‘hemispheres’ of her cheeks, which suggests a dizzying dissociation of poetic imagination; the falling apart of the Platonic One which stood over the many, and the rise of manifold ‘worlds.’ Exactly the same image of many ‘worlds’ returns in Donne’s other poem, ‘The Good Morrow,’ but this time we move in the opposite direction: leaving the legendary ‘Seven Sleepers’ den’ (l.4) and obscure caves, where ignorant youths ‘suck’ on ‘country pleasures,’ (l.3) we come to the dazzling light of true love. Erotic love proves to be nothing else but an imperfect foreshadowing of this ideal union of souls. The thrill of accomplished conquests loses importance when it is contrasted with this unique, revelatory moment, as

42 Grzegorzewska the speaker openly admits in the last lines of the opening stanza: ‘If ever any beauty I did see /​Which I desired, and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee.’ Being an old hand in love, he is nevertheless surprised by the unparalleled novelty and overwhelming fullness of the present experience, for which he lacks accurate expression: ‘’Twas so: but this, all pleasures fancies be.’ (emphasis added) The overabundance of this amazing phenomenon can only be rendered by contrasting it with its imperfect, dim shadows. Accordingly, the title not only welcomes the beginning of the day, but may also denote a moment of awakening or spiritual illumination in a sudden shaft of light rising in the east. Whereas ‘Love’s Progress’ deals mainly with travels and discovery, here the progress comes to an end, and time stands still. Whereas the elegy focused on the compelling force of desire, ‘The Good Morrow’ celebrates the epiphany of love. The speaker states that he cares little for the conquest of the earth as long as he is together with the woman he loves; instead of reading maps, he himself becomes a mirror of her entire world: constant, clear, truthful. The following lines are based on the contrast between the wish to discover distant lands and the loving proximity of two human beings: Let sea-​discoverers to new worlds have gone, Let maps to others worlds on worlds have shown,` Let us possess one world, each hath one and is one. (ll.12–​14) This dismissal of ‘others’ whose ‘worlds on worlds have shown’ (a beautiful example of an involuted, inward bent metaphor) is then followed by a mention of the lovers’ bedroom, transformed into a map of the world. Each of them sees himself reflected in the eyes of the other, so each is a map of the other’s world. This all-​embracing unity is encoded in the overall design of the poem composed of three stanzas, seven lines each: three times seven is suggestive of divinity and the seven days of creation. An ingenious wordplay on the homophonic pair ‘eye-​I’ and the exchange of personal pronouns my-​thine-​ thine-​mine highlights the importance of the mutual bond. At the same time, it reminds us that a map is also a significant instrument of possession: My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And true plain hearts do in the faces rest, Where can we find two better hemispheres, Without sharp north, without declining west? (ll.15–​21) Bathed in the light of the rising sun, the lovers contemplate each other’s presence; the speaker actually says that they ‘watch’ each other, as if each of the

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was ‘some watchers of the skies /​When a new planet swims into his ken,’ if we may borrow this apposite simile from John Keats’ poem, or a heedful surveyor, ‘stout Cortez,’ perhaps, staring with his ‘eagle eyes’ on a new found land. Moreover, they seem to experience the same sense of a ‘wild surmise,’ enticing guesswork, which Keats also mentions in his celebrated sonnet. Although they already know each other better than any time before, there still remains something mysterious and unknown about this encounter of two souls, something which makes the lovers wander at and about their peerless discovery. The speaker describes the ideal world ‘without sharp north, without declining west.’ Does he deceive himself into thinking that his love ill not be affected either by suffering or death? ‘Sharp north’ may be connected with the man’s ascending, north-​bound movement in ‘Love’s Progress;’ ‘declining west,’ which seems a clear reference to death, here may also bring to mind ‘little death,’ denoting orgasm. The danger of shipwreck, so pervasive in the narrative of ‘Love’s Progress,’ here gives way to the reassurance of ‘plain,’ pure heart –​with the possible pun on the flat field, as opposed to a rough sea –​and the last word in this line, ‘rest,’ accords with the atmosphere of delightful peace. The hearts ‘rest,’ that is remain, in the faces of the lovers, which is another proof of their affections’ constancy, firmness and truthfulness. The glassy surface of the eye forms a mirror which reflects the face –​and the heart –​of another person. In this way, the poem combines the eastward orientation of medieval mappaemundi with the knowledge of the early modern ‘cordiform,’ i.e. heart-​shaped, double-​spherical projection. The maps a-​temporal design seems to corroborate the speaker’s claim that spiritual love transcends the realm of mutability: ‘If our two loves be one, or, thou and I /​Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die’ (ll.20–​21). At the same time, however, it is precisely these last two lines that surprise us with a possible pun on orgasmic death, and the allusion to the subsidence of erection (‘slacken’). When we follow this line of thought, the fleshly idiom of the concluding couplet proves to contradict the safe abstraction of the cartographic mirror. Also, the entire conceit built on the analogy between a loving couple and a cordiform map of the world turns out to be a doubtful reassurance, because instead of an ideal unity, it reveals the inherent duplicity (maybe even multiplicity) of hearts and faces; of worlds and peoples. Each face is doubled in the opposite pair of eyes, and if one could delve deeper, one might see a mirror within a mirror, i.e. the reflection of one’s eyes in the eyes of another. The attempt to reveal the ideal One hidden behind its manifold manifestations, which was the informing principle of all metaphysical poetry, once again achieves in Donne’s poetry the opposite effect. In the end, we are bound to conclude that there are as many ‘worlds’ as maps of the world, and

44 Grzegorzewska each map –​each cartographic idol –​reflects another in an incessant recession of ‘the real.’ Consequently, the poem confronts us with ‘dizzying possibility of seeing two different views of the world at once.’29 The vertigo effect threatens the stability of Donne’s heart-​shaped map. I wish to conclude this discussion with the mention of a poem by Andrew Marvell, who was fifty years Donne’s junior, and whose poetic meditation ‘On a Drop of Dew’ bears clear resemblance to Donne’s sophisticated conceits. This poem is the real tour de force of Marvell’s skill, but its connection with the language of cartography is by far less obvious than was the case of Donne’s ‘Good Morrow.’ I will argue, however, that can be equally relevant and stimulating when we wish to delve deeper into the striking affinity between imagination, poetics of desire and early modern maps of the world. The opening lines of the poem invite us to contemplate the celestial globe enclosed in the dew’s ‘little globe’s extent:’ See how the orient dew, Shed from the bosom of the morn Into the blowing roses, Yet careless of its mansion new; For the clear region where ’twas born Round in itself incloses: And in its little globe’s extent, Frames as it can its native element. … Could it within the human flower be seen, Rememb’ring still its former height Shuns the swart leaves and blossoms green; And, recollecting its own light, Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express The greater Heaven in an heaven less. (ll. 1–​8; 21–​26)30 The language of the poem defamiliarizes phenomenal reality: in Marvell’s chiaroscuro image, the leaves of a rose-​bush are swarthy, rose petals green, and only the verb ‘to shun,’ denoting the drop’s reluctance to engage with material reality, chimes with sunshine and light. Viewed in the light of this description, 29 30

Douglas Trevor, ‘Mapping the Celestial in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Writings of John Donne,’ in: Shakespeare and Donne: Generic Hybrids and Cultural Imagery, ed. Judith H. Anderson and Jennifer C. Vaught (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 124. Andrew Marvell, Poems, ed. Nigel Smith (London and New York: Pearson Longman, 2003). All further quotations from Donne’s poetry refer to this edition.

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the drop is not only a precious gem, a pearl of orient, but first and foremost a convex mirror which ‘frames,’ i.e. encompasses the celestial sphere. The image of ‘a greater heaven’ expressed in ‘an heaven less’ can also be interpreted as a standard example of Renaissance analogical thinking, which portrayed the human being (here: human soul) as the world in miniature. The concept of ‘the smaller units’ comprehending within themselves ‘the great rhythm of the whole’ is common to Platonic philosophy and Christian faith.31 Both these traditions speak also, albeit not in the same manner, of the great ‘arc from exitus to reditus, the transit of all creatures from a divine origin back to a divine end,’32 from misfortunate separation or the Fall to the anticipated return and hoped-​ for Redemption. The ‘little globe,’ which the drop is, expresses this longing, while at the same time the speaker stresses the inherent limits of the drop’s endeavour: ‘frames as it can its native element.’ Marvell conflates the Platonic and Christian motifs in his poem. The mirror metaphor makes it possible to connect the drop, a visual image of the human soul, with the biblical narrative of Adam and Eve as being created in ‘the image and likeness of God,’ while at the same time the drop is described as a mirror reflection (a map?) of heaven, speculum orbis coelestium, and also as a rational creature contemplating divinity and reflecting on the world of ideas or the spiritual realm. The drop of dew, which is ‘shed from the bosom of the morn,’ attempts to forge an image of the pristine world whence it came: ‘And in its little globe’s extent, /​Frames as it can its native element.’ This task involves an exercise of memory, or anamnesis, that is an un-​forgetting of the drop’s ‘first world,’ which is a Platonic world of ideas rather than a Christian Paradise; in other words, we are witnesses to the drop’s ‘remembering still its former height’ and “recollecting its own light.’ The verbs ‘to remember’ and ‘to recollect’ combine the two senses, in which the drop attempts to regain the lost perfection: the faculty of memory serves to piece together the dismembered body, and bring together, re-​collect the dispersed fragments, so that the world is seen once again as whole and therefore holy. Yet in the last lines of the poem, Marvell takes another sudden turn and surprises us with the recollection of divine manna frozen, ‘congealessd,’ by the cold of the night in the desert (l. 39):

31 Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, 29. 32 Marie-​Dominique Chenu, ‘Le plan de la Somme Thelogique de Saint Thomas.’ Revue Thomiste 47 (1939). Qtd. in Mark D. Jordan “Structure,’ in: The Cambridge Companion to Summa Theologiae, ed. Philip Cosker and Denys Turner (Cambridge: cup, 2016), 34.

46 Grzegorzewska Such did the manna’s sacred dew distill, White and entire, though congealed and chill, Congealed on earth: but does, dissolving run, Into the glories of th’almighty sun. (ll.37–​40) This apparently odd intrusion of the biblical motif makes perfect sense as soon as the narrative of Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness is connected with the description of the dew’s earthly ‘exile.’ Since the number of lines in this poem corresponds with the forty years of Israelite’s sojourn in the desert, we are entitled to say that the he map at the back of the poem shows the way to the Promised Land. Moreover, the very last line of the poem implies that the New Testament has already provided us with the fulfilment of God’s promise, when Marvell points to the Son of God, the Redeemer, punning on the phrase ‘almighty sun.’ Incidentally, this subtle hint at the Incarnation in a poem which seems an ingenious appropriation of Stephen Hawkins’ Jesuit book of emblems, Partheneia sacra (1633),33 turns the entire Platonic narrative of the poem upside down. Like Donne’s ‘The Good Morrow,’ ‘On a Drop of Dew’ ventures into the realm of timeless abstractions, but the speaker in this poem cannot escape the constraints of embodied existence. In Marvell’s poem this turn is marked by the mention of mortal flesh, pale and cold after death, and ‘congealed’ or coagulated blood. Showing the drop of dew which is simultaneously a globe, an eye, and a tear ‘shed from the bosom of the morn,’ Marvell may have had in mind the scientists’ efforts to enclose heaven and earth in the limited space of the terrestrial and celestial globes respectively. The early modern map sought to present the world it in its pristine, indivisible entirety. On the other hand, however, the constant quivering of the dew droplets described in the poem –​and depicted by the varying length of lines –​seems to indicate the turbulent nature of the cartographer’s endeavours. When we recall in this context the argument presented by Susan Conklin Akbari concerning the change from medieval mappaemundi, oriented with the east at the top, to early modern maps facing north, we may take the liberty of illustrating the critic’s claim with the poet’s image of the ‘orient’ dewdrop rolling down and landing on earth. Down here, it ‘slights’ gorgeous rose petals, ‘gazing back upon the skies’ (l.11). So the drop of dew stands for an eye which looks back on the sky, that is remembers it, while simultaneously responding to the invisible eyebeam from above. The speaker in the poem is only a witness to this silent exchanges of glances, and the drop’s 33

Stephen Hawkins, Partheneia Sacra: Or the Mysterious and Delicious Garden of the Sacred Parthenes (London 1633).

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tearful longing, which may be contrasted with the human surveyor’s hubristic gaze. We may thus say that Marvell’s poem is not only an elegy on the lost Platonic ideal, but it also reminds us how heaven and earth ‘congealed’ under the cartographer’s gaze. The idol of the map, specululm orbis terrarium, reflecting its maker’s ambition, pride and lust for power, foreshadowed the end of a colourful romance. But although present day maps contain no eye-​catching images of grotesque beasts and feigned monsters, pretending to rely on plain sense alone, we still use them to foster hopes of possible future journeys. In all likelihood, we shall never cease to do so …

Works Cited

Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. London: John Murray, 1983. Bann, Stephen. ‘The Truth in Mapping.’ In The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past, 200–​ 220. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990. Boelhower, William. ‘Inventing America. A Model of Cartographic Semiosis.’ Word and Image 4.2 (1988): 455–​497. Boelhower, William. Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Translated by Henry Beveridge. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953. Chenu, Marie-​Dominique. ‘Le plan de la Somme Thelogique de Saint Thomas.’ Revue Thomiste 47 (1939): 93–​107. Conklin Akbari, Suzanne. Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 110–​1450. Ithaca and London: Cornel University Press, 2009. Cowper, William. ‘The Solitude of Alexander Silkirk.’ https://​www.bartl​eby.com/​106/​ 160.html. Cosgrove, Denis. Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in Western Imagination. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Donne, John. The Complete Poems. Ed. Robin Robbins. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2010. Edson, Evelyn. The World Map 1300–​1492. The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Grzegorzewska, Małgorzata. ‘Rewriting Early Modern Maps: Cartography and Post-​ colonial Critical Practice.’ In Mosaic of Words. Essays on the American and Canadian Literary Imagination in Memory of Professor Nancy Burke. Ed. Agata Preis-​Smith et. al., 149–​160. Warszawa, Institute of English Studies, 2006.

48 Grzegorzewska Grzegorzewska, Małgorzata. The Medicine of Cherries. English Renaissance Theories of Poetry. Warszawa: Institute of English Studies, 2003. Hawkins, Henry. Partheneia Sacra. Or the mysterious and delicious garden of the sacred Parthenes symbolically set forth and enriched with pious deuises and emblemes for the entertainment of deuout souls … http://​ name.umdl.umich.edu/​A02823.0001.001. Jordan, Mark D. ‘Structure.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Summa Theologiae. Ed. Philip Cosker and Denys Turner, 34–​47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Ptress, 2016. Lanman, Jonathan T. ‘The Religious Symbolism of the ‘T’ in T-​O Maps.’ Cartographica. The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualisation, vol. 18, no. 4 (1981): 18–​22. Marion, Jean-​Luc. God without Being: Hors-​Texte. Trans. Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2012. Marvell, Andrew. Poems. Ed. Nigel Smith. London and New York: Pearson Longman, 2003. Ratzinger, Joseph. The Spirit of the Liturgy. Translated by John Saward. San Francisco: Ignatius Press 2000. Rogers, D. J. ‘Voyages and Exploration: Geography: Maps.’ In Shakespeare’s England: an Account of the Life and Manners of his Age. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932. Ripa, Cesare. Iconologia or Moral Emblems. London 1709. https://​arch​ive.org/​deta​ils/​ ico​nolo​giao​rmor​a00r​ipa/​page/​n7. Ripa, Cesare. Iconologia. Venetia 1645. Sidney, Philip. An Apology for Poetry or the Defence of Poesy. Ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, revised by R. W. Maslen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. Abigail Rokinson-​Woodall. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Shell, Marc. ‘The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice.’ The Kenyon Review 1 (4), Autumn 1979, 68: 65–​92. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. In Poetical Works. Ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Trevor, Douglas. ‘Mapping the Celestial in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Writings of John Donne.’ In Shakespeare and Donne: Generic Hybrids and Cultural Imagery. Ed. Judith H. Anderson and Jennifer C. Vaught, 111–​132. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Woodward, David. ‘Introduction.’ In Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays. Ed. David Woodward, 1–​9. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

chapter 2

Fragmented Body versus Cartographic Representation

The Early Modern Subject and the Marlovian Transgressors Klaudia Łączyńska The title of Abraham Ortelius’s collection of maps has often been invoked as evidence of the existence of a rhetorical link between theatre and cartography in the early modern discourse. As John Gillies writes, ‘the theater was linked to the discourse of ‘cosmography’ via the topos of theatrum mundi, whereas atlases –​from Ortelius’s Theatum Orbis Terrarum (1570) –​were generically ‘theatres of the world.’1 At the same time, recalling the famous stage design for the morality play The Castle of Perseverance, Gillies draws our attention to the change that occurred between the way a map was used in the medieval theatre and on the Elizabethan stage. While ‘stage and map tend to collapse into each other in the medieval period, they become sharply distinct in the sixteenth century,’ when the link between cartography and theatrical practice becomes ‘essentially rhetorical.’2 In other words, the oriented stage design of the morality play, like the oriented T-​O maps, inscribed the theatrum of human actions in the theological pattern of redemption; whereas, in the early modern theatre, a map is referred to or represented either literally (e.g. as a prop), or figuratively. However, the rhetorical interplay between theatre and the world seems more complex and its significance depends very much on the focus of comparison. If, with Gillies, we turn to the topos of theatrum mundi as a source of a discursive link between theatre and cosmography, the figurative effect of the connection will rather be a pessimistic and reductive vision of the world and humanity. Thus, when, in Shakespeare, Jacques says that ‘all the world’s a stage,/​And all the men and women merely players,’ or when Macbeth compares life to a brief performance of a clumsy actor, they reduce the world to the scene of human actions which are perceived here as repetitive, mechanical, determined and insignificant. By contrast, Ortelius’s presentation of the world 1 John Gillies, Introduction. ‘Elizabethan Drama and the Cartographization of Space,’ Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Associated University Press, 1998), 22–​23. 2 Gillies, Introduction, 24.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004520288_004

50 Łączyńska as theatre, i.e. as a setting of human activity, implies agency, discovery, conquest and hegemony. Hence, like the Pascalian man positioned between the two infinities, the Renaissance coupling of world and stage or map and stage seems poised between the sense of determinism and insignificance, on the one hand, and the exultation over discovery and potency, on the other. To the complex discursive interplay between theatre and cartography, I will add here a third element –​that of the early modern anatomy of human body, which, as Valerie Traub claims, was often associated with cartography ‘by virtue of the discourse of discovery which subtends them both,’3 as well as with the theatre due to ‘the striking architectural and spectatorial affinities between London playhouses and continental and English anatomy theatres.’4 Those multiple discursive associations will be discussed in order to show the role they might have played in Christopher Marlowe’s tragedies, which, according to critics, were ‘among the first to confront the dramaturgical challenges of presenting global movement in the small and fixed space of the stage.’5 I will try to answer the question how the notion of the early modern cartography, which became a new method of framing and organising the expanding world, might have shaped the identity of the early modern subject whose ambition, curiosity, restlessness and fragmented experience constitute the core of Marlowe’s plays. What the Elizabethan theatre shares with the Renaissance explorers is definitely attraction to movement and expansion. It seems to proclaim its own plus ultra credo by frequently changing settings and going beyond the boundaries of the classical unities. For Sir Philip Sidney, that would be one of serious deficiencies of the contemporary drama. Unlike puritanical Gosson, who expressed in the first place his strong moral reservations about the theatre, Sidney, in his Apology for Poetry, complains about its artistic shortcomings: For it is faulty both in place and time; the two necessary companions of all corporal actions. For where the stage should always represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it, should bee both by Aristotle’s precept and common reason, but one day, there is both many days and many places, inartificially imagined. (…) you shall have Asia on the one side, and Afric of the other, and so many other under-​kingdoms,

3 Valerie Traub, ‘The Nature of Norms in Early Modern England: Anatomy, Cartography, King Lear,’ South Central Review 26, no. 1/​2, Shakespeare & Science (Spring-​Summer, 2009): 45. 4 Traub, ‘The Nature of Norms,’ 42–​43. 5 William H. Sherman, ‘Travel and Trade,’ in Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 114.

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that the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived.6 Against classical ideal as much as against common reason, dramatic action of an Elizabethan play moves from place to place, from one kingdom to another, across the seas and continents, spanning months, years or decades. These are ‘gross absurdities,’ Sidney grumbles; at the same time, he admits that the theatre has effective means to overcome temporal or spatial confusion (‘the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is’). Indeed, the Elizabethan theatre had ‘power to imitate any place,’ as Stephen Greenblatt observed; yet this quality produced a side effect which was ‘the essential meaninglessness of theatrical space.’7 What fuels Sidney’s critique of the contemporary stage is ostensibly a humanist’s reverential adherence to the classical model. A playwright should know that ‘a Tragedy is tied to the laws of Poesy, and not of History,’ and he should be aware of ‘the difference betwixt reporting and representing.’8 Moreover, what the great poet seems to underscore is sheer impossibility and irrationality of the contemporary stage practice; there are things that cannot be shown, yet they can be told: ‘I may speak (though I am here) of Peru, and in speech digress from that to the description of Calicut; but in action I cannot represent it without Pacolet’s horse.’9 As John Gillies puts it succinctly, ‘chorography could not be directly translated into choreography. It could only hope to be represented at a verbal remove through the convention of “reported action.”’10 However, if chorography cannot be translated into choreography, mapping and sequencing must coexist in the theatre which combines the art of space with the art of time; and, it seems, what regulates that coexistence is ‘the laws of Poesy’ which Sidney tries to defend. The unity of space and the unity of time are the guarantee of the unity of action. Not only is the tragedy ‘tied to the laws od Poesy,’ but it seems crucial to the classicist poet that in the theatre the laws of poetry come before and regulate the laws of history as much as the laws of geography. Notwithstanding Sidney’s classicist and pragmatic motivation, the impressive catalogue of rapidly changing settings with which he illustrates the abuse

6

Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: w.w. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001), 356. 7 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-​Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 195. 8 Sidney, An Apology, 357. 9 Sidney, An Apology, 357. 10 Gillies, ‘Introduction,’ 20.

52 Łączyńska of the unities seems also permeated with an anxiety of fragmentation and loss of coherence in the early modern expanding world. As Sherman points out, ‘Renaissance dramatists offered a troubling sense of the shifting borders of the early modern world, and of the ways in which identities were destabilized by travel.’11 The Elizabethan theatre, with its whimsical attitude to space and its presentation of characters constantly on the move, seems to have mixed that anxiety with the exultation over the achievements of new geography and cartography which would be involved in the projects of expansion, conquest and exploitation. While the medieval mappamundi marked a limited scope and clear orientation of human activity, the expanding world of new geography would become the site of the subject’s ‘dis-​oriented’ movement and his relentless pursuits. New maps worked powerfully upon the imagination of the early modern man, offering a sense of vast expanse and desire of exploration. ‘Maps could bring vast spaces into small rooms, and distant or long-​dead people before one’s eyes.’ Although, as Sherman noticed, ‘surprisingly few maps appear as props in Renaissance plays, they often influence playwrights’ sense of space and the locations, or dislocations of their characters.’12 If new geography and the contemporary interest in cartography may be held responsible for the apparent spatial and temporal irrationality of the Elizabethan theatre (about which Sidney complained), its ‘dis-​unities,’ the dislocation of its characters and a general anxiety of fragmentation and discontinuity of experience, cartographic models could also provide Renaissance writers with a discursive means of responding to that experience. A new map might have fuelled an astounding vision of great expanse to be explored, but we should not forget that it served primarily as a means of framing and organising the expanding domain of human activity. This structuring and unifying role of mapmaking in the times of great geographical discoveries has been discussed by William Boelhower: The adventure of discovering and exploring America implies physical and cognitive mobility across an open series of heterogeneous spaces, by which the European subject attempted to weave a unified discourse. This type of combinatory logic defines the structural desire behind both Euro-​ American culture building and cartographic activity.13

11 12 13

Sherman, ‘Travel and Trade,’ 115. Sherman, ‘Travel and Trade,’ 114. William Boelhower, ‘Inventing America: the Culture of the Map,’ Revue Française d’Études Américaines 36 (1988): 213.

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As Boelhower persuades, we should ‘study the map not so much as the representation of space but as a space of representation.’14 Would it be possible then to think of a map also as a figurative means of representing man –​of framing, organising and making sense of the fragmented experience of the restless early modern subject? At the end of the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century, man still perceived himself as a microcosm closely related by analogy and mutual influences with the greater macrocosm. Nor could the discoveries, either of new lands or of the interior of human body, quickly change that mode of thinking. According to Jonathan Sawday, it was the Cartesian invention of the mechanical body, rather than Vesalius’s monumental study, that consigned to oblivion the traditional analogy: Guiding the followers of Vesalius was the belief that the human body expressed in miniature the divine workmanship of God, and that its form corresponded to the greater form of the macrocosm. Such ideas did not vanish overnight, to be replaced by the clear light of Cartesian rationality.15 Apparently, the traditional correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm seems to be already questioned by John Donne in his fourth Meditation, when he says that ‘it is too little to call man a little world,’ because ‘as the whole world hath nothing, to which something in man doth not answer, so hath man many pieces of which the whole world hath no representation.’16 Yet the way he maps the world upon human body re-​enacts the well-​established analogy: If all the veins in our bodies were extended to rivers, and all the sinews to veins of mines, and all the muscles that lie upon one another, to hills, and all the bones to quarries and stones, and all other pieces to the proportion of those which correspond to them in the world, the air would be too little for this orb of man to move in, the firmament would be but enough for this star.17

14 15

Boelhower, ‘Inventing America,’ 213. Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 23. 16 John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Death’s Duel, Vintage Spiritual Classics (New York: A Division of Random House, 1999), 19. 17 Donne, Devotions, 19.

54 Łączyńska It is the scale that seems to be reversed here, while the correspondence itself is not abolished. What is of particular interest, however, is the way the new science of anatomy informs Donne’s vision of the body’s interior, and how the language of that science overlaps with the discourse of cartographic representation. As Sawday observes, before the early modern anatomists became disinterested scientists who would unravel the mechanistic structure of the body, they felt more like discoverers of new lands, explorers or cartographers: ‘The body was territory, an (as yet) undiscovered country, a location which demanded from its explorers skills which seemed analogous to those displayed by the heroic voyagers across the terrestrial globe.’18 The discourse of discovery and exploration pervaded the language of anatomical description, and the new discursive link entered the metaphorical repertoire of poetry where it coexisted for a time with the more familiar and traditional microcosm-​macrocosm analogy. Moreover, in poetry, the correspondence could work both ways. Thus, the body, and most typically female body, was presented as a land to be discovered and colonised by man, as in Donne’s famous Elegy xix, where he calls his mistress his America –​the new-​ found land he wants to appropriate.19 Or, vice versa, the ‘sick world’ becomes a body that undergoes dissection, so that its corruption and its ‘infirmities’ may come to view, as in Donne’s ‘Anatomie of the World.’20 The New Philosophy, even though it called ‘all in doubt,’ nonetheless, provided poets with an impressive rhetorical repertoire which they often combined with the images drawn from the traditional world picture. ‘Yoking together’ the ‘sublunary’ sphere of the Ptolemaic system with the Copernican ‘moving of the earth,’ John Donne would probably appear a perfect ‘bricoleur’ in the eyes of the structuralist poetics. But the choice of elements with which the poet maps his experience, however random and indiscriminate it may seem, may reveal something about the way the early modern subject responded to the fast changing world and his or her place in it. The discourse of poetry reveals the modes of knowing, which would be intricately linked to the way of the subject’s being in the world. Thus, we return to the question of how the notion of a map might have been employed by poets as a discursive means of knowing oneself and construing

18 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 23. 19 Notably, in this poem, John Donne praises the beauty of his mistress using blazon –​a conventional device of Petrarchan love poetry, which performs a kind of metaphorical ‘dissection’ of female body. 20 John Donne, Poetical Works, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 209.

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the subject’s identity. Could a map serve as a mirror in which one could see a coherent picture of oneself? This will be the central question in my analysis of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays as compared with his Doctor Faustus, where I should focus primarily on the role of the map that is brought before Tamburlaine the moment he is about to die. That map, as I will try to demonstrate, allows the hero to organise his experience and construe a coherent identity –​the privilege which seems to have been denied to Doctor Faustus. However, before I turn to Marlowe’s plays, where the link between cartography and self seems to be but an emergent concept, it seems convenient to first demonstrate how that correspondence works as a fully-​fledged metaphor in a later poem, and what interpretative problems it might pose. Again John Donne serves as an invaluable source of figurative repertoire. In his ‘Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse,’ written shortly before the poet’s death, the speaker compares his aching body stretched upon the bed to a flat map of the earth: Whilst my Physitians by their love are growne  Cosmographers, and I their Mapp, who lie Flat on this bed, that by them may be showne  That this is my South-​west discoverie   Per fretum febris, by these streights to die I joy, that in these straits, I see my West;   For though their currents yeeld returne to none, What shall my West hurt me? As West and East   In all flatt Maps (and I am one) are one,   So death doth touch the Resurrection.21 As Jonathan Sawday perceptively observes, ‘if, at any point, it is possible to trace the language of the body’s interior pressing upon subjective experience, then that point must be reached when the body’s presence is signalled through discomfort and pain.’22 In Donne’s poem, the language of the body combines with that of cartography in the subject’s response to the acute sense of the approaching death. What links the two discourses in the poem is the play on homophones or homonyms such as ‘streights,’ ‘straits,’ and the Latin ‘fretum.’

21 Donne, Poetical Works, 336. 22 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 32.

56 Łączyńska But the word which most clearly binds the map and the body is the adjective ‘flat,’ as it qualifies both; first it refers to the body and then, by association, to the map, as this is ‘I (…) who lie flat.’ Only in the following stanza does this connotation become the denotation of the fixed locution –​‘flat Maps.’ By analogy, the physicians who bend over the body are metaphorically identified with cartographers who bend over a flat map. However, that analogy is not innocuous, as it reduces the physicians to insensitive, dispassionate observers. When compared to cosmographers, they seem dissociated from the humane and remedial quality their profession should involve. For cartographers a map is a source of knowledge or an object of contemplation;23 by analogy, the physicians in Donne’s poem bend over the body to demonstrate (‘that by them may be showne’) rather than to cure. For them, the patient’s body becomes an object of study; like a map, it is a ‘container’ of knowledge. This may still seem very different from the Cartesian mechanistic concept of human body, but the discourse of cartography, analogous with that of anatomy, seems to rhetorically transport the sick patient from a deathbed to a dissection slab (that would stand in the centre of the contemporary anatomical theatres). Unlike the physician, the anatomist-​cartographer examines the body in order to turn what is individual, particular, varying and fragmentary into a concept that is general and universal; which is the essential condition of scientific ‘knowing.’ As Valerie Traub claims, in the early modern medical science, ‘the anatomical specimen becomes a universalized body, one whose individuality, particularity, and difference are subordinated to the creation of an abstract, common humanity.’24 How different the deathbed scene of ‘Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse’ is from the image of ‘virtuous men pass[ing] mildly away,’ that we know from Donne’s ‘Valediction: forbidding mourning,’ where friends and family gather round a dying man not to look at the body but to hear the breath which ‘goes now.’ To be able to hear his breath, they must draw very close to the man, rather than bend over him, which points to the essential difference between the empathy of hearing and the scientific distance and superiority of looking. Thus, in ‘Hymn to God my God, in my sicknesse,’ the physicians become scientists who look in order to learn, and the scene resembles more the Anatomy

23

24

See Lucia Nuti’s very persuasive discussion of the emblematic and contemplative dimension of Ortelius’s atlas, which according to her, is created by the combination of the visual element with text. Lucia Nuti, ‘The World Map as an Emblem: Abraham Ortelius and the Stoic Contemplation,’ Imago Mundi 55 (2003): 38–​55. Traub, ‘The Nature of Norms,’ 57.

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Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, rather than is an expression of loving concern about a dying man. The indifference of this scientific scrutiny seems to prompt the speaker to turn figuratively in the following stanza from the new cartography-​cum-​ ­anatomy to the medieval T-​O map where there is inscribed the history of creation, fall and redemption, and where ‘Paradise and Calvarie,/​Christs Crosse, and Adams tree’ stand in one place. The unity threatened by the ‘dissecting’ gaze of the physicians is thus restored in the vision of Christ as the Second Adam, to whom the poet turns in face of affliction and death. In Donne’s poem, the speaking I seems split into the I that is the map and the I that looks at the map, and they seem to occupy different dimensions created in the poem. The body-​map lies flat, extended in space, an object of study of the scientists, while the I who looks at that map seems to locate himself both in the temporal and the transcendental, the promise of which he can see in the map. Human life is a one direction finite voyage, as ‘theire currents yeeld returne to none,’ but the map shows that the voyage continues where West meets East and where ‘death doth touch the Ressurection.’ The poem forms a kind of epistemological palimpsest, as the central cartographic metaphor oscillates between the temporality and objectivity of new science and the traditional picture of the world as revelation of divine truth. Between these two modes of knowing there stands the early modern subject –​athirst for knowledge that would give them hegemony over the world, but also dislocated and ‘dis-​oriented’ as the firm epistemological foundations gradually dissolve. Such are the heroes of Christopher Marlowe’s plays –​ambitious overreachers, audaciously crossing both the physical and mental boundaries of the traditional framework, for whom the world seems not enough. The playwright, ‘drawn to the idea of physical movement,’ as Greenblatt writes,25 and, apparently, heedless of Philip Sidney’s critique, makes his transgressive characters move from place to place, at the same time, introducing a tremendous variety of fast changing settings. As Lisa Hopkins observes, ‘in [Marlowe’s] hands, indeed, the Elizabethan stage expanded to offer imaginative representations of areas it had never before visited.’26 Tamburlaine’s belligerent restlessness, that makes him stir even in his deathbed, corresponds with Faustus’s random sightseeing. With these two characters the audience move around the globe, be that on foot, in a chariot, or on a dragon’s back. However fantastic

25 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-​Fashioning, 194. 26 Lisa Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 107.

58 Łączyńska these travels and locations may have seemed to the contemporary audience, Marlowe’s plays have also been credited with great geographic specificity and meticulous accuracy. Since the publication of Ethel Seaton’s groundbreaking study, in which she demonstrated persuasively that Marlowe must have used Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum when writing his Tamburlaine plays,27 his dramatic work has frequently been read in the light of the emergence of new geography; critics have listed the exotic place names and mapped the itineraries of the characters’ travels. However, my concern here is not what Gillies calls ‘geographic literacy in the drama,’28 but the question how that knowledge might be translated into the character’s self-​knowledge, when a map (literally present or figuratively invoked) becomes an object of contemplation. When Marlowe’s Tamburlaine asks for a map of the world at the moment he is about to leave it, this seems to combine cartography with death in a manner similar to Donne’s comparison discussed above. However, in his sickness, Tamburlaine does not become a ‘patient’ –​the word suggests endurance of pain and affliction without discontent, suffering without complaint (oed). On the contrary, the superhero rebels against the attention his afflicted body draws to his human nature and mortality: ‘Shall sickness prove me now to be a man,/​That have been term’d the terror of the world?’ (2 Tamburlaine, v.iii.44–​45);29 he is ready to take arms against gods, whom he accuses of plotting against his health: ‘Come, let us march against the powers of heaven,/​And set black streamers in the firmament,/​To signify the slaughter of the gods’ (2 Tamburlaine, v.iii.48–​50). He seems to perceive himself as equal with gods, and is, indeed, presented so by others, when, in a lengthy monologue in Part One, his mighty person is compared by Menaphon to a Titan: Of stature tall, and straightly fashioned Like his desire, lift upwards and divine. So large of limbs, his joints so strongly knit, Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear Old Atlas’ burden. 1 Tamburlaine, ii.i.7–​11

27 28 29

Ethel Seaton, ‘Marlowe’s Map,’ Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 10 (1924): 13–​35. Gillies, ‘Introduction,’ 21. Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972). All quotations form Marlowe’s plays are from this edition. Henceforth I will refer to act, scene and line numbers in parentheses.

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What seems of particular interest in this description of Tamburlaine, considering the aspiration that drives all his actions, is Menaphon’s double reference to cosmography. First, he compares the Scythian shepherd to Atlas condemned to hold up the celestial spheres upon his mighty shoulders –​ although for Tamburlaine the possession of the world never seems a burden. Second, Menaphon claims that the ‘fiery circles’ of the hero’s eyes ‘bear encompassed/​A heaven of heavenly bodies in their spheres, /​That guides his steps and actions to the throne’ (1 Tamburlaine, ii.ii.15–​17). The reflection of heavenly or earthly sphere in one’s eyes would serve John Donne as a metaphor of intimacy and self-​sufficiency of the lovers’ little world (as in ‘The good-​ morrow’). For Marlowe, that becomes an image of Tamburlaine’s grandeur; it is as if the hero had a map of heavens reflected in his eyes which guides him towards his greatness. Tamburlaine never seems so dissociated from his mighty body to look at it as if it were a flat map, or an object of scientific scrutiny. On the contrary, as Menaphone’s description implies, there is a close connection between Tamburlaine’s strong upright stature and his ‘up-​lifted’ aspiring spirit. Only when the enfeebled body seems unable to keep pace with the indomitable spirit, does the hero refer to the traditional dualistic concept of body and soul in the dying speech addressed to his sons: But, sons, this subject not of force enough, To hold the fiery spirit it contains, Must part, imparting his impressions By equal portions into both your breasts; My flesh, divided in your precious shapes, Shall still retain my spirit, though I die, And live in all your seeds immortally 2 Tamburlaine, v.iii.169–​175

Although he thinks of his body in terms of a ‘container’ for his spirit, yet he emphasises the essential link between the two entities, as it is the flesh with the spirit that he believes he has imparted to the ‘precious shapes’ of his offspring. Thus, Tamburlaine’s perception of his body and spirit does not seem to depart considerably from the contemporary pre-​Cartesian notion of the relationship between body and soul. As Sawday points out: In the west, prior to the ‘new science’ of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the body’s interior could not be understood without recourse to an analysis of that which gave its materiality significance –​the

60 Łączyńska essence contained within the body. To consider the body in isolation was not merely difficult but, strictly speaking, impossible, since the body’s primary function, it was held, was to act as a vessel of containment for the more significant feature of the soul.30 Nor is Tamburlaine’s reference to his progeny as a guarantee of the ‘immortality’ of his great self in the world in any way original; we can find the same concept as the central rhetorical device of the first seventeen sonnets in Shakespeare’s sequence. What seems unusual, however, in the way Tamburlaine says goodbye to the world is the peculiar sense of immortality that he envisages in the map that is brought to him so that he could see, as he claims, ‘how much/​Is left for me to conquer all the world’ (2 Tamburlaine, v.iii.124–​125). Apparently, what the sight of the map at first inspires is the memory of past exploits, rather than the promise of continuity: Here I began to march towards Persia, Along Armenia and the Caspian Sea, And thence unto Bithynia, where I took The Turk and his great empress prisoners. Then march’d I into Egypt and Arabia; And here, not far from Alexandria, Whereas the Terrene and the Red Sea meet, being distant less than full a hundred leagues, I meant to cut a channel to them both, That men might quickly sail to India. From thence to Nubia near Borno lake, And so along the Aethiopian sea, Cutting the tropic line of Capricorn, I conquer’d all as far as Zanzibar. Then, by the northern part of Africa, I came at last to Graecia, and from thence To Asia, where I stay against my will; Which is from Scythia, where I first began, Backward and forwards near five thousand leagues 2 Tamburlaine, v.iii.127–​145

30 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 16.

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Only then does Tamburlaine’s eye turn from the itinerary of his past conquests westward to the lands open to future exploits, and he addresses these words directly to his sons, from whom he expects the fulfilment of his worldly aspirations: Look here, my boys; see what a world of ground Lies westward from the midst of Cancer’s line Unto the rising of this earthly globe, Whereas the sun, declining from our sight, Begins the day with our Antipodes! And shall I die, and this unconquered? Lo, here, my sons, are all the golden mines, Inestimable drugs and precious stones, More worth than Asia and the world beside; And from th’Antarctic Pole eastward behold As much more land, which never was descried, Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright As all the lamps that beautify the sky! And shall I die, and this unconquered? Here, lovely boys; what death forbids my life, That let your lives command in spite of death. 2 Tamburlaine, v.iii.146–​161)

We cannot but agree with Lisa Hopkins, who notices that in this part of Tamburlaine’s speech ‘Marlowe’s thoughts clearly turn to America.’31 ‘A glance at Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum,’ she continues, ‘enables us to track the trajectory of Tamburlaine’s thought very precisely here and makes it quite clear that it is to South America that his thoughts are turning, both on account of its own ‘Inestimable drugs and precious stones’ and also because Ortelius shows it as offering virtually a land passage to the still undiscovered southern continent, which is what really fires Tamburlaine’s imagination;’32 and, it should be added, this is also what fired the imagination of the Renaissance explorers. That again points primarily to the cartographic ‘literacy’ which has been the focus of many studies of Marlowe’s plays, and which cannot be denied; however, this line of interpretation does not seem to exhaust the significance of Tamburlaine’s cartographic scrutiny at the end of the play.

31 Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe, 94. 32 Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe, 95.

62 Łączyńska When Tamburlaine looks at the map, what he perceives is not only a representation of the lands he has subdued or would still desire to possess; as he traces the itinerary of his adventures, he also endows his eventful life with a sense of a story. A random sequence of brutal conquests enacted throughout the play, the fragmented experience of the subject, is now plotted upon a map, becoming thus a coherent picture, where an itinerary across the lands designates the timeline of human life. Space and time overlap, in a manner not very much unlike what we have seen in John Donne’s later poem. When we say ‘a story of Tamburlaine’s life’ this might imply that the time inscribed upon the map is only that of the hero’s past. However, the speech also includes the present moment as well as it extends into the future. Tamburlaine’s persistent repetition of the deictic pointer ‘here’ (five times in the quoted speech) gestures towards the physical presence of the map –​ it is its ‘here and now’ upon which he maps his past, which now becomes inscribed in a pattern that transcends the hero’s life, as he also projects the future conquests upon the map. A ‘cartographic’ emplotment,33 which seems to make sense of the subject’s life, of his past, becomes also a promise of the future, as next to the lands that have been subdued there lies a vast territory still to be conquered. This is Tamburlaine’s secularised sense of transcendence, a secular eschatology, that is offered by the map upon which his ‘here’ becomes transformed into ‘hereafter.’ Its secular character becomes even more conspicuous, when we consider Tamburlaine’s glance westward, not only literally, as Lisa Hopkins suggests, but also symbolically, as opposite to that direction where tends a medieval oriented map, and where the eyes of a believer should turn at the moment of death; which is also where John Donne looks in his ‘Hymn.’ In this context, it seems worth recalling an interesting interpretation of a map as ‘an analogy for predicting or modeling a future outcome’ presented by John Gillies. He quotes Shakespeare’s Richard iii’s words ‘I see (as in a map) the end of all’ (ii.iv.54) drawing our attention to the common practice of providing the Elizabethan players (who only knew their individual parts and their cues) with the general overview of the play’s plot that was hung up backstage.34 As the critic argues, the word plot was often used interchangeably with its more obsolete cognate word plat,35 which apart from other meanings could

33 34 35

I refer to the term introduced by Hayden White in his seminal essay ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.’ Gillies, ‘Introduction,’ 27–​28. Gillies, Introduction, 28.

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refer to: ‘a ground plan of a building or of an area of land; a map;’ ‘an outline, a sketch, a general description; a synopsis; an introduction;’ ‘a plan of action, a method, a scheme, a stratagem,’ or ‘the plot of a novel, poem, play, etc.’ (oed). Thus, as Gillies concludes, Whether one thinks of a plot as a model of space or as a model of an action yet to unfold in time, one is thinking of a schematic arrangement (whether of images or words) whereby some object or process is seized and outlined from the vantage of a particular telos or purpose or end. Significantly, it is just this teleological aspect of mapping that is uppermost in all figurative uses of map and its variants.36 This seems to corroborate to my claim that Marlowe may have used the map at the end of the second part of Tamburlaine the Great not only as a fashionable prop that would draw the audience’s attention to the contemporary cartographic interests, but primarily as a means of providing his hero with a visual representation of his life’s achievement, a mirror image of the conqueror, in which he would see his past, present and future inscribed in a coherent pattern offering him a sense of fulfilment and transcendence. Admittedly, Tamburlaine’s dying speech may also be read as an expression of despair of a greedy tyrant rather than his belief in any form of immortality. It is possible to interpret the monologue in terms of a clash between the superhero’s covetous impulses and the ultimate realisation of his own mortality. His baffled and incredulous: ‘And shall I die, and this unconquered?’ coupled with the final ‘For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die,’ where emphasis would fall upon ‘must,’ would thus constitute a morality-​play-​like exhortation about human frailty and the inevitability of death. Thus, at the end of his life, it would dawn on Tamburlaine that he is only a human whose limited lifespan does not allow to possess the whole world. However, in the overall context of the two long plays staging daring exploits of the commanding spirit and imperial appetites of the character larger than life, such a reductive moral does not seem convincing at all. Especially as Tamburlaine does not so much despair of his imminent death, as he pities his friends and the world that they would be deprived of his greatness: ‘my soul doth weep to see /​Your sweet desires deprived my company’ (2 Tamburlaine, v.iii.248–​249). I would argue that there is no despair in ‘shall I die, and this unconquered,’ as long as ‘what death forbids’ might still be achieved and completed ‘in spite of death.’ 36

Gillies, Introduction, 28.

64 Łączyńska A similar vision of an overall pattern that would allow the character to die in peace is not offered to the tragic hero in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, which I propose to read as a tragedy of a man who has lost, or rather wilfully discarded, a clear epistemological frame that would make sense of his fragmented experience. When Faustus rejects the traditional scholastic frame of knowledge, which he sums up in his opening monologue, he gloats about the expectation of knowledge that magic and the pact with the devil seem to promise. Unlike his long and painstaking studies in the liberal arts crowned with the doctorate in theology, the ‘necromantic books’ he now turns to promise ‘a world of profit and delight,/​Of power, of honour, of omnipotence’ (Doctor Faustus, i.i.52–​53). At first, Faustus seems to admit to similar imperial aspirations that guided Tamburlaine’s actions: (…) I’ll be great emperor of the world, And make a bridge through the air To pass the ocean. With a band of men I’ll join the hills that bind the Affrick shore, And make that country continent to Spain, And both contributory to my crown. Doctor Faustus, i.iii.104–​109

Like Tamburlaine, not only does Faustus want to possess the world, but he also wishes to physically change its geographical features by joining two continents, just as the Scythian shepherd wanted to dig a water passage between the two seas (as we know, the latter project has turned out far more realistic). Moreover, like Tamburlaine, and like Renaissance explorers in general, Faustus thinks of new lands primarily in terms of exploiting their riches, as he plans to command spirits to fetch for him whatever he would wish: I’ll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, And search all corners of the new-​found world For pleasant fruits and princely delicates. Doctor Faustus, i.i.81–​84

However, unlike Tamburlaine, who seems to have fulfilled, if not all, then at least a considerable portion of his grand desires, Doctor Faustus becomes merely a trickster catering for the whims of the great. As Lisa Hopkins observes:

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When he achieves power, he does little that is evil –​the horse courser was warned, and the Old Man assures us that his soul is safe –​and some things which the audience is likely to have approved of, such as gratifying a pregnant woman and humbling the Pope.37 Notably, neither does he do anything that is truly great. We may assume that the reason why he fails to achieve what he really desired is the time limit that the contract sets upon his life, which imposes upon his knowledge and power the same quality of being finite; in the same way, death seems to have put paid to Tamburlaine’s exploits. However, the main cause of Faustus’s failure in terms of worldly achievements seems to me the fact that, unlike Tamburlaine, who is primarily the man of action, Faustus remains the man of speculation, even though he seems to have discarded the speculative knowledge of the past. It is Mephistopheles and his devils that perform most of actions, while Faustus admits at some point that he would now ‘live in speculation of this art/​Till Mephistopheles return again’ (Doctor Faustus, i.iii.113–​114). Admittedly, owing to the contract with the devil, the compass of Faustus’s travels is much greater than the territory conquered by Tamburlaine: He views the clouds, the planets, and the stars, The tropic, zones, and quarters of the sky, From the bright circle of the horned moon, Even to the hight of Primum Mobile. And whirling round with this circumference, Within the concave compass of the pole, From east to west his dragons swiftly glide (…) He now is gone to prove Cosmography, That measures coasts and kingdoms of the earth Doctor Faustus, iii.i.7–​21

Faustus’s bird’s eye or rather space-​ship’s view of the earth and planets apparently resembles Tamburlaine’s overview of his conquests marked upon a map. However, Faustus’s vision may be a full view of the world but it is not a representation of it, and thus it cannot be perceived in terms of new epistemological frame that would make sense of his extraordinary experience. Unlike the contemporary map, the perspective offered to Faustus does not organise the

37 Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe, 137.

66 Łączyńska world into a coherent pattern. On the contrary, what he has seen produces a sense of relativity and loss of proportion: So high our dragons soared into the air, That looking down, the earth appeared to me No bigger than my hand in quantity Doctor Faustus, iii.i.71–​73

That sense of relativity and indeterminacy is first signalled by Mephistopheles’s answer to Faustus’s question about the location of hell –​‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it’ (Doctor Faustus, i.iii.76). Relativity and lack of aim characterise the hero’s further random travelling through fast changing settings, which provides him with motley scraps of experience rather than with the desired picture of the whole that would ‘resolve [him] of all ambiguities,’ as he originally wished. That sense of fragmented experience seems reflected in the literal disintegration of Doctor Faustus’s body at the end of the play. That scene is chiefly interpreted, again with the morality play perspective in mind, as a type of punitive dismemberment. However, some elements of a similar fragmentation of the body appear earlier in the play, when Benvolio cuts Faustus’s false head (iv.iii), or when the clowns pull away his leg (iv.v), which can also be interpreted as gradual loss of corporal integrity foreshadowing the ultimate disintegration of the body. The epistemological coherence which the hero pawned at the beginning of the play in hope of exceptional returns in divine knowledge and omnipotence, and which used to provide a frame for his earlier academic pursuits, is now gone, and no other frame seems to have been provided in its place. Without a firm ‘theoretical’ structure he cannot make sense of his fragmented experience –​ the disintegration of the world picture is reflected in the dismemberment of the body. Why does Tamburlaine die peacefully, reconciled to the world and himself, while desperate shrieks of Doctor Faustus and the sight of his ‘mangled limbs’ fill his friends and the audience with horror? Certainly, Tamburlaine’s unrestrained appetite, wanton violence and divine-​like potency he dresses himself in are not less hubristic than Faustus’s ‘forward wit’ and aspiration to forbidden knowledge. However, as I tried to demonstrate, the ultimate dreadful fall of Doctor Faustus is not only a result of practising more than ‘heavenly power permits,’ but also an effect and a reflection of the loss of epistemological frame which would contain and order the fragmented experience of the subject of Marlowe’s tragedy. By contrast, the other Marlovian transgressor, Tamburlaine,

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is allowed to see a coherent representation of his past, present and potential future in a map which offers structure and meaning to his restless life.

Works Cited

Boelhower, William. ‘Inventing America: the Culture of the Map.’ Revue Française d’Études Américaines 36 (1988): 211–​224. Donne, John. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Death’s Duel. Vintage Spiritual Classics. New York: A Division of Random House, 1999. Donne, John. Poetical Works. Ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Gillies, John. Introduction. ‘Elizabethan Drama and the Cartographization of Space.’ In Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama. Ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan, 19–​45. London: Associated University Press, 1998. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-​Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980. Hopkins, Lisa. Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays. Ed. J. B. Steane. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972. Nuti, Lucia. ‘The World Map as an Emblem: Abraham Ortelius and the Stoic Contemplation.’ Imago Mundi 55 (2003): 38–​55. Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Seaton, Ethel. ‘Marlowe’s Map.’ Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 10 (1924): 13–​35. Sherman, William H. ‘Travel and Trade.’ In Companion to Renaissance Drama. Edited by Arthur Kinney, 109–​120. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Sidney, Philip. An Apology for Poetry. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 326–​362. New York: w.w. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. Traub, Valerie. ‘The Nature of Norms in Early Modern England: Anatomy, Cartography, King Lear.’ South Central Review 26, no. 1/​2, Shakespeare & Science (Spring-​Summer, 2009): 42–​81. White, Hayden. ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.’ In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 1712–​1729. New York: w.w. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001.

chapter 3

Marcus the Magnificent

Closure and Resolution in Joël Dicker’s The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair Tom Ue In his influential essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict,’ W. H. Auden remarks on the desirability, in detective fiction, of ‘maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time):’ ‘Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-​like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder.’1 Maps and illustrations seem always to have been a part of detective fiction. According to Philip L. Scowcroft, the practice of incorporating such materials was at its height in the Golden Age period, between the World Wars.2 Yet, as Thomas Vranken writes, it ‘has roots that stretch back much further, almost to the initial emergence of the genre itself.’3 Recent studies by Vranken (2017) and Sally Bushell (2020) have examined how maps operate, exploring their capacities both to reveal and to conceal. As the latter argues, in her excellent monograph Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text, ‘The map is presented (denotatively) as if it is a straightforward part of the scientific, objective and logical superstructure of the detective’s method, yet it frequently turns out (connotatively) to participate in human acts of deception against detective or reader, or both.’4 Bushell elaborates:

1 As Marcus reminisces about his schooldays, we learn how he gained the nickname ‘Marcus the Magnificent,’ and how his reputation at Felton High School ‘was … fortuitous to begin with and then deliberately orchestrated.’ Joël Dicker, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, translated by Sam Taylor (London: MacLehose Press-​Quercus Publishing Ltd, 2014), 52. W. H. Auden, ‘The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict,’ Harper’s Magazine (May 1948): 408; original emphasis. 2 Philip L. Scowcroft, ‘Maps, Plans and Diagrams in the Detective Fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers and Others,’ Sidelights on Sayers 15 (October 1985): 28, jstor. 3 Thomas Vranken, ‘“Look at This Map”: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Use of Diegetic Illustrations in The Return of Sherlock Holmes,’ Clues: A Journal of Detection 35, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 29, ProQuest. 4 Sally Bushell, Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 127.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004520288_005

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The map in detective fiction is able to manipulate through its perceived authority, neutrality and objectivism. The primary message it projects is that you can trust it. In a literary form that is fundamentally concerned with who can or cannot be trusted, and with the search for truth amidst many lies, this is no small claim. At the same time, however, whilst its function may vary, the map always possesses a doubled identity. This may manifest itself in terms of which way it faces (a doubled audience within and beyond the text) or in terms of the layers of meaning it conveys, or both (a doubled doubleness).5 Maps, as Leslie Edwards suggests, have the propensity to play the roles of ‘pattern conveyors, works of art expressing culture and emotion, invaluable tools, promoters of deception, jarringly incomplete betrayers of our trust, and imaginative works providing fun and escape.’6 In this chapter, I take, as a test case, Joël Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (2012). This novel follows the writer Marcus Goldman as he labours over a follow-​up to his immensely successful first book and as he investigates Nola Kellergan’s murder. Fifteen-​ year-​old Nola had vanished in 1975; and in 2008, her body was discovered in the yard of Marcus’ mentor, the professor and highly successful novelist Harry Quebert—​along with the typed manuscript of his magnum opus The Origin of Evil. If, at first, Marcus’ project is driven by his desire to exonerate his friend, who was in a relationship with Nola, then Harry Quebert Affair proceeds to show how her disappearance and Marcus’ investigations affect the entire community of Somerset, New Hampshire. Dicker’s second novel has now been translated into 40 languages and it has sold over five million copies worldwide. The book earned the Goncourt des Lycéens prize in France, and it was adapted into a 10-​part television mini-​series by the legendary director Jean-​ Jacques Annaud (2018). In the first half of this paper, I argue for the centrality of mapping as a lens for approaching this novel, demonstrating how it manifests in geographical, historical, and literary senses. In the second half, Dicker and I discuss his writing process for Harry Quebert Affair, its adaptation for television, and the challenges of arriving at closure. This paper advances scholarship by showing some ways in which the novel is structured around maps, by

5 Bushell, Reading and Mapping Fiction, 162–​63. 6 Leslie Edwards, ‘Maps in Detective Fiction,’ in Atlas of Crime: Mapping the Criminal Landscape, ed. Linda S. Turnbull, Elaine Hallisey Hendrix, and Borden D. Dent (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 2000), 204.

70 Ue shedding light on Dicker’s creative vision, and by suggesting fresh approaches to maps in detective fiction.7 The crux of Harry Quebert Affair relies on a geographical impossibility. In the novel’s early stages, Travis Dawn, a junior police officer at the time of Nola’s disappearance and now Somerset’s chief of police, recounts Deborah Cooper’s report of Nola being chased by a man. Travis arrived at the scene to find a piece of red fabric, and he called Chief Pratt for backup. Together, they uncovered more evidence—​blood, hairs, and fabric—​before they heard, from Cooper’s house, the sound of a gunshot. During their investigation, Cooper had called the station again to say that Nola had sought refuge at her home. When Travis and Pratt got there, they found Cooper dead and Nola gone. Travis’ account foregrounds what has remained an unsolved mystery: Cooper’s murderer and Nola’s abductor had taken Nola to their car, which a sheriff’s deputy identifies as a black Chevrolet Monte Carlo; nevertheless, it successfully evaded capture. Neither Travis nor Chief Pratt had answers, though the vehicle’s make and model had led them to suspect Quebert. As the latter explains: Several things tipped us off. Particularly the way the car chase went: It suggested that the murderer was somebody local. He had to have known the area perfectly in order to disappear like that with every police car in the country on his tail. And then there was that black Monte Carlo. As you probably guessed, we made a list of all the people in the area owning that particular model. The only one not to have an alibi was Quebert.8 Familiarity with the lay of the land and the state of the roads do not, in themselves, explain how the car escaped and what happened to it, and this gap gathers new meanings both at the level of narrative and at the level of story. Marcus imaginatively returns to, and recreates, this chase in significant detail (see, for instance, pages 347–​48 and 604–​05); and this car misleads the writer-​ turn-​detective and his ally Sergeant Perry Gahalowood in their investigations. In fact, Travis and Chief Pratt had carried out, and had tried to cover up, Nola’s 7 For two illuminating studies of maps and literature, see Huw Lewis-​Jones’ The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands and John Sutherland’s Literary Landscapes: Charting the Real-​Life Settings of the World’s Favourite Fiction. The former brings together a number of creative writers’ reflections on the place of maps in their fiction, while the latter demonstrates the value of approaching literature geographically. Huw Lewis-​Jones, ed., The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018). John Sutherland, gen. ed. Literary Landscapes: Charting the Real-​Life Settings of the World’s Favourite Fiction (London: Modern Books-​Elwin Street Productions Limited, 2018). 8 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 105.

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and Cooper’s murders. Travis drove the car, and Chief Pratt pretended to pursue him while giving false positions on the radio. The novel incorporates other kinds of ambiguities. Its construction seems to oscillate between the time of Nola’s murder and the time of Marcus’ investigations thirty-​three years later. In fact, the novel is all about time. Marcus is in a race to deliver a new manuscript. Roy Barnaski, the head of Marcus’ publisher, Schmid & Hanson, actively chases him: in January 2008, he gives Marcus six months to deliver this book to save his career. Marcus’ agent Douglas translates Roy’s offer for him and for us: ‘Barnaski is going apeshit. Do you know what’ll happen if you don’t deliver in June? He’ll sue the shit out of you. They’ll take all your money, and you’ll have to wave goodbye to this beautiful life of yours. This cool apartment, those fine Italian shoes, your Range Rover … they’ll take it all.’9 When Marcus becomes involved in Quebert’s case, Roy is content to replace their agreement with a new and more lucrative one because a book on Quebert by Marcus promises to sell more copies: ‘I can provide you with ghostwriters, you know, to speed the process along. And it doesn’t have to be great literature—​people just want to know what Quebert did with that girl. Just give us the facts—​with some suspense and some sleazy details, and a little sex, of course.’10 When Marcus refuses the offer of a million-​dollar advance, Roy makes clear that he has no choice. Marcus’ and Douglas’ conversations regarding the possibility of writing a good book under tight deadlines and the challenges to artistic autonomy brought on by capitalism would be familiar to readers of George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). The agent’s insistence is distinctly Milvainian: ‘But this is the way it is today! Writers who hang around in a daydream waiting for inspiration to come … all that is in the past! Everyone wants your book, even without your having written a single word of it, because everybody wants to know the truth. And they want it now. There’s a narrow window of opportunity. This fall, there’s the election …’11 Roy finally threatens 9 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 26. 10 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 112. 11 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 113. See, for comparison, how Jasper Milvain distinguishes himself from his friend Edwin Reardon in the early pages of New Grub Street: He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won’t make concessions, or rather, he can’t make them; he can’t supply the market …. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. George Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. Stephen Arata (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2007), 56. See also my discussion of the cultures of writing in New Grub Street in Tom Ue, ‘Endless

72 Ue Marcus with a fifteen million dollar lawsuit. Marcus is to deliver his book before the end of August so that it would appear before election fever dominates public interest. Notwithstanding the quick turnover and how it impedes Marcus from following up on an important clue that he had uncovered in his interviews with Quebert, Harry Quebert Affair, the novel we are reading, is all about writing slowly: it is digressive and lengthy, exceeding 600 pages. In fact, the epilogue unfolds in 17 October 2010, two years after Marcus’ investigations had culminated and his book about Nola had appeared, and when he is empowered with greater command of both the story and the narrative. The more prominent geographical and temporal senses of mapping here may spur us to overlook the literary aspects of Dicker’s project, particularly his innovations with form. Consider, for instance, the novel’s use of repetition. The shortage of advances in plot development in such episodes invites the reader’s contemplation, and it closely mimics the process of (re)visiting a crime scene. The novel opens on ‘The Day of the Disappearance,’ with Cooper’s and Travis’ telephone conversation: this account, we will learn hundreds of pages later, comes from a direct transcript in the police report.12 Dicker goes on to employ the literary technique of analepsis to move us slightly into the future: ‘The news story that would shock the town of Somerset, New Hampshire, began with this phone call. On that day, Nola Kellergan, a fifteen-​year-​old local girl, disappeared. No trace of her could be found.’13 Yet the novel’s ordering of events belies simplistic cause-​and-​effect relationships: the ‘Prologue’ that immediately follows this account takes us to October 2008, two weeks after the publication of Marcus’ book and when Nola’s case had apparently been solved: ‘My book was the talk of the town. I could no longer walk the streets of Manhattan in peace.’14 If we (and Marcus) are now assured of his success, as both writer and detective, he was less certain only months before: the next section takes us to early 2008, when he ‘was seized by a terrible case of writer’s block—​a common affliction, I am told, for writers who have enjoyed sudden, meteoric success.’15 More germane to the argument that I am making, the novel catches Circling, Perpetual Beginning,’ [On New Grub Street by George Gissing] in My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice, ed. Annette R. Federico (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2020), 231–​46; and in Tom Ue, ‘Moral Perfectionism, Optatives, and the Inky Line in Besant’s All in a Garden Fair and Gissing’s New Grub Street,’ in Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform, ed. Kevin A. Morrison (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 205–​23. 12 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 11, 344. 13 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 11. 14 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 15. 15 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 19.

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up to October 2008: over 400 pages later, we find the first paragraph of the Prologue repeated word-​for-​word.16 Following the book’s release and Marcus’ two-​week promotional tour, Gahalowood sends Marcus a photograph of Nola’s mother’s headstone, which reveals that she had died six years prior to Nola’s disappearance, and before their family had moved to Somerset. Nola’s mother could not, as Marcus had been led to believe, have been responsible for her beatings, and this new finding reopens Marcus’ and Gahalowood’s investigation and undermines their credibility. A trick was played on Marcus—​Quebert had wanted Marcus’ book to fail and he surmised that no one would take it seriously when they discover the mistake—​and this deception was passed onto us.17 The original suspect for Nola’s murder, Luther Caleb, is revealed to be red-​herring. Marcus discovers Quebert to be a fraud and that his greatest hit was really written by Luther. Marcus must make reparation for the significant damage caused by himself and by his mentor by writing another book, one that acknowledges their failings. When Gahalowood laughs at how Quebert’s book The Seagulls of Somerset is now being identified as Luther’s, and so Quebert is deprived of credit for his book just as he had once robbed Luther of his, Marcus replies: ‘The police are not the only ones who can dispense justice, Sergeant.’18 Marcus’ frame of reference may be restricted to authorship, yet this conversation exposes how his project seeks to rectify injustices. Closure and resolution, as we see here, are connected, yet at times mutually exclusive. Marcus’ book on Nola is motivated by his attempt to discover the truth. His follow-​up, the one that we are reading, affords reparation, and Marcus regains our trust by diligently reporting his mistakes. Quebert tells Marcus in their final meeting: ‘Finish your book. The book about me—​you have to finish it. You know the truth, and now you need to tell it to the world. The truth will set us all free. Write the truth about the Harry Quebert affair. Free me from the evil that has plagued me for thirty-​ three years. This is the last thing I’ll ask of you.’19 The novel’s conceit is not that Marcus achieves more than his mentor—​Quebert’s book The Seagulls of Somerset was lauded as ‘a must-​read new novel,’ and so his literary achievements are significant—​but what Marcus learns.20 He willingly owns up to his faults, something Quebert preaches but can never do. Marcus goes so far as to rectify the pain that he had caused Ernie Pinkas, the helpful librarian, by giving 16 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 503–​04. 17 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 607. 18 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 614. 19 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 608–​09. 20 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 614.

74 Ue him the pride of first place in his book’s acknowledgements.21 The remainder of this paper contains an interview that I conducted with Dicker in 2018. In it, we discuss Harry Quebert Affair, following its successful adaptation for television. Dicker, the author of six novels, has been ranked by the New York Times amongst the ‘literary wunderkinder.’22







tu: The real time of The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is set during the 2008 US Elections. Why set the novel then? jd: Simply because I started writing The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair in 2010, and this time period was fresh in my memory! Looking back, I’m happy that I chose that period because it was an optimistic time in American history. tu: What kinds of research did you do? jd: The research for Quebert was mostly in my memory. At that point in my life, I had spent almost every summer in the USA and the novel was an opportunity for me to share my dear childhood memories of New England. tu: Essentially, the novel relates two stories: Marcus’ rise to magnificence with his second book, and the investigations surrounding Nola’s death. How do you find balance between the two? jd: Once I had finished the manuscript, or I thought I had finished, I worked diligently to balance out the two time periods. I ended up writing 30 different versions! For me, it was important that the two periods have equal weight in the novel, and that the readers understand how the events of 1975 still had repercussions on the characters’ lives 30 years later. This is something that Jean-​Jacques Annaud handled expertly in the mini-​series: the viewer glides effortlessly between the two periods. And Patrick Dempsey was a real professional to endure the five-​hour makeup sessions to age him that were required for the role! tu: Marcus’ novel is digressive, and Roy is perhaps right in observing: ‘You always have a lead, Goldman. But it never actually leads anywhere!’23 What is the impetus behind this literary project? jd: The impetus behind writing The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair? It’s easy: I wanted to challenge myself to write an ambitious

21 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 619. 22 Chelsea Cain, ‘Publish or Perish,’ New York Times, June 6, 2014, https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​ 2014/​06/​08/​books/​rev​iew/​the-​truth-​about-​the-​harry-​queb​ert-​aff​air-​by-​joel-​dic​ker.html. 23 Dicker, Harry Quebert Affair, 562.

Marcus the Magnificent



tu:



jd: tu:



jd:



tu:



jd:



tu:



jd:



tu:



jd:

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novel, one that the reader could get lost in. My first novel, Les derniers jours de nos pères (2010), was historical fiction, and this time I wanted to try something different. Have you thought about leaving the killer unknown by the story’s end? You mean, not revealing who the killer was? No! That would be cruel! Along with the murder, there are many other crimes and injustices, including the brutality towards Luther Caleb. What made you focus on the killing? Nola’s murder drives the story along, for sure. However, I would like to think that even if you removed the murder, there would still be a novel there. The town of Somerset is a character in itself, and I strived to give all the other characters their own interesting facets as well. Without the murder, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair would be a story about life in a small New England town and the deep relationships amongst its inhabitants. One of the many strengths of the novel is its capacity to make us care about the minor characters. Jenny Quinn gets as much attention as Nola. What made you decide to give so much weight to all of these backstories and to tell the story of a town? A town is a collection of its inhabitants. Every person is impregnated by the presence and actions of the people surrounding them, and for that reason, Jenny Quinn was as important as Nola. No person is an island! In the light of the work’s focus on the life of writing, I ought to ask: are there any autobiographical elements? Are the thirty-​one rules for writing that Quebert imparts to Marcus ones that you practice? When the book came out in 2012, and I was the same age as Marcus, I got this question a lot! The answer is ‘No.’ Apart from enjoying running, Marcus and I have nothing in common and the novel is not autobiographical. Now several years later, I’m much older than Marcus, and I don’t get this question as much. And no, I don’t follow those rules. The United States has a culture of ‘creative writing,’ which is taught in universities. I come from a culture that doesn’t teach the skill of creative writing, so I had no rules or traditions to follow. I see that you have a cameo in the television series! Tell us about that experience. It was fantastic! I loved every minute of it, and I am grateful that Jean-​ Jacques Annaud tolerated a neophyte actor like myself on set (see Figure 3.1).

76 Ue

­f igure 3.1  Dicker and director Jean-​Jacques Annaud on the set of Harry Quebert Affair (2018). credit: metro goldwyn mayer studios.







tu: Are the characters as you imagined them? jd: It’s incredible! Of course, I had a vision in my own head of how the characters were, but each reader sees the characters with his or her own eyes. Seeing how Jean-​Jacques Annaud imagined them showed me that we shared the same vision. I was blown away! tu: Did you learn anything new about them? jd: I would say that what I learned from the experience was more how hard actors work to portray a certain personality. Their art comes from their versatility and capacity to impersonate, by their expressions and by their gestures—​not just the words they have to say but the souls behind the words. tu: In what ways is the publishing world similar and/​or different from what you described? jd: In my experience, the publishing world is friendlier than what I portrayed in The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair! Maybe I’m just lucky …. tu: Victims multiply and reputations are damaged as Marcus, the police, and/​or Marcus’ publisher make(s) snap judgments. Are they going too far?

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jd: In today’s world, or even back in 2008, mistakes are no longer easily forgiven or forgotten. We are all very quick to accuse, or make judgments. I don’t know if this is good or bad for society, but it’s the way we operate now. tu: Marcus’ narrative seems so transparent—​he leaves in scenes that show him unfavourably—​but are there things that he might be leaving out? What are some that you thought of? jd: I agree! It’s for that reason that I wrote The Baltimore Boys (2015), also featuring Marcus Goldman. I felt like, at the end of The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, we still didn’t understand much about Marcus and why he made certain decisions. I wanted to delve into his childhood and see what gave him the personality that he has. tu: Quebert tells Marcus that a good book is one that we are sorry to have finished. Were you sorry to finish Harry Quebert Affair, the novel and now the series? jd: I was sad to finish writing The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, as I had to say goodbye to the characters. It’s like putting a small child on the school bus and waving goodbye as they start life without you. They’re on their own and you hope that they will fly. With the television series, I was simply excited to share it with the world! It was a completely different feeling. tu: What is next for you? jd: 2018 was unforgettable: the tv series and the publication of my latest novel La disparition de Stephanie Mailer (2018) in many countries. I’m not sure what 2019 holds for me but one thing is sure: I am going to slow down for a couple of months this winter. It’s been a busy year!

Acknowledgements

I count myself lucky to have worked with Julian Wolfreys and Monika Szuba multiple times, and I am grateful to them for their ongoing support. I thank Joël Dicker, Katya Ellis, and Corinna Zifko; and Lindsay McNiff and Dalhousie University Libraries for their help. My scholarship has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through an Insight Development Grant.

78 Ue

Works Cited

Annaud, Jean-​Jacques, dir. The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, featuring Patrick Dempsey, Ben Schnetzer, Damon Wayans Jr., and Kristine Froseth. Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, 2018. Auden, W. H. ‘The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict.’ Harper’s Magazine (May 1948): 406-​12. Bushell, Sally. Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Cain, Chelsea. ‘Publish or Perish.’ New York Times, June 6, 2014. https://​www.nyti​mes .com/​2014/​06/​08/​books/​rev​iew/​the-​truth-​about-​the-​harry-​queb​ert-​aff​air-​by-​joel -​dic​ker.html. Dicker, Joël. The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. Translated by Sam Taylor. London: MacLehose Press-​Quercus Publishing Ltd, 2014. Edwards, Leslie. ‘Maps in Detective Fiction.’ In Atlas of Crime: Mapping the Criminal Landscape. Ed. Linda S. Turnbull, Elaine Hallisey Hendrix, and Borden D. Dent, 199–​ 207. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 2000. Gissing, George. New Grub Street, Ed. Stephen Arata. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2007. Lewis-​Jones, Huw, ed. The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. Scowcroft, Philip L. ‘Maps, Plans and Diagrams in the Detective Fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers and Others.’ Sidelights on Sayers 15 (October 1985): 28–​32. jstor. Sutherland, John, gen. ed. Literary Landscapes: Charting the Real-​Life Settings of the World’s Favourite Fiction. London: Modern Books-​Elwin Street Productions Limited, 2018. Ue, Tom. ‘Endless Circling, Perpetual Beginning’ [On New Grub Street by George Gissing]. In My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice. Ed. Annette R. Federico, 231–​46. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2020. Ue, Tom. ‘Moral Perfectionism, Optatives, and the Inky Line in Besant’s All in a Garden Fair and Gissing’s New Grub Street.’ In Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform. Ed. Kevin A. Morrison, 205–​23. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. Vranken, Thomas. ‘‘Look at This Map’: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Use of Diegetic Illustrations in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.’ Clues: A Journal of Detection 35, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 29–​39. ProQuest.

chapter 4

‘To Deploy an Errant Eye’

Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘Early Modern’ Fantasia Julian Wolfreys

1

‘The English usage of the term “map” in its modern technical sense as a two-​ dimensional graphic representation of the earth’s surface dates at least to 1527,’ observes Henry S. Turner, in the introduction to his article, ‘Literature and Mapping in Early Modern England, 1520–​1688.’(Turner, 412) While Turner goes on to say that the ‘primary meaning’ of ‘map’ appears only ‘infrequently in poetry and drama throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ (Turner 412), in France, Tom Conley reveals in An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France (from which comes part of my title), usage in literary production was much more prevalent, if not commonplace. (Conley, 1–​27) Writers and cartographers, Conley notes, ‘create forms in which their own invention and construction, indeed the very perceptions and sensation that give rise to them, are folded into their execution and remain integral to their effects.’ (Conley 4) One aspect of the French engagement is that, ‘a sense of space and place [is invented, as Conley describes it] because it calls for a heightened consciousness of prehension, that is, of contact with the ambient world in such a way that unforeseen or hitherto unknown relations are made from the experience of things seen and heard in ways that bring forward an uncommon and often passing sense of where and what we are in the world’ (4–​5). Olga Tokarczuk’s award winning novel Bieguni,1 (2007) translated as Flights, is a novel that revels in how ‘the perceiving organ with the ambient world precipitates an intensity of sensation and perception.’ (Conley 5) One might argue that this precipitation of intensity comes down to four questions in conjunction, first posed by Samuel Beckett in the fourth of his Texts for Nothing: ‘Where 1 As Kapka Kassobova writes in The Guardian, the original title ‘is the key to the book, much more so than the freely rendered “flights”…. The bieguni, or wanderers, are an obscure and possibly fictional Slavic sect who have rejected life for an existence of constant movement…’ (The Guardian, Sat 3 June, 2017; https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2017/​jun/​03/​flig​hts -​by-​olga-​tokarc​zuk-​rev​iew accessed January 20, 2019).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004520288_006

80 Wolfreys would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me?’ (Beckett, 114) In this experimental text, composed of long and short narratives, personal observations about travel, moving through space, the transience of the event of transport and its many chance encounters or opportunities for experiencing differently, or the strangeness of the self becoming other in different contexts from those habitually encountered through encounter with an estranging terrain, we read how ‘events can be said to be what yield the perception of space and of how that perception takes “place.”’ (Conley 5) And this, in turn leads to the ‘invention’ (in the sense used by Conley of finding what was there all along but which had passed unnoticed) of modes of mapping the world in relation to the self. In Flights, the self is realised through the act of writing that traces the motions of the self as other. In this, the tracing becomes a double mapping for Tokarczuk: on the one hand, the place is defined, through a form of cartographic picaresque; on the other hand, the self comes to be mapped, not separately from, but in a nearly coterminous double writing of place and self, this being in turn replicated in the act of reading. Additionally, and in order to offer a cartographic, but also imaginative materiality to her text, Tokarczuk includes a dozen maps and topographical drawings, taken from The Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps, and most of which predate the 20th century. (Tokarczuk 2017; Roojen, 2007) The inclusion of the images makes an important point: maps are text also, forms of writing, as many are now happy to concede. Importantly though, and particularly in the context of the novel, the map-​as-​text is not to be read in a linear fashion. There is no one direction, one mode of access to a map. At the same time, other ‘maps’ are considered by Tokarczuk, ‘maps’ that develop simultaneously with the cartographic interests of Early Modern culture and society: maps of the body, focussed principally through the story of Dutch anatomist, Philip Verheyen. Thus, as I shall explore in this chapter, Tokarczuk engages not in a postmodern, but what I would like to term, hopefully not too fancifully, an ‘early modern’ fantasia—​a thing composed of a mixture of different forms and styles. To give this greater specificity: Tokarczuk’s narratives range from the seventeenth to the twenty-​first centuries. In this they share an epistemology—​allowing for cultural and historical difference—​that is markedly ‘early modern’ in its genesis, a genesis that the novel grows beyond but never leaves behind—​as the adult first-​person narrator grows beyond the first-​person memory-​narration of the child of the first episode. Each episode tells a chorographic tale of a specific place, but does so in a phenomenological manner, the self’s perception of place serving to map both local region and the self in situ. In this, Flights presents the reader with a temporal map of the (early) modern subject discovering

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and tracing the world as it discovers itself, in philosophy, psychology, anatomy and the literary. Here is the staging of an epoch marked by movement, travel, and multiple forms of revelation and invention. Of course, I am not suggesting that one should read Flights as if it were an early modern textual production. Rather, the novel inhabits a way of understanding the world that shares its perceptual and phenomenological orientations with the early modern understanding of the relation between writing and the map, as Tom Conley argues in his study of the connections between poetry and topography in Early Modern France. In Tokarczuk’s sustained meditation on the subject’s phenomenological prehension of the world, perception and sensation are registered equally through the various narratives; as Conley puts it, the subject touches upon and is touched by ‘the ambient world in such a way that unforeseen or hitherto unknown relations are made from the experience of things seen and heard in ways that bring forward an uncommon and often passing sense of where and what we are in the world.’ (Conley 4) These ‘unforeseen or hitherto unknown relations’ may well be emblematic or apparently exemplary expressions of the experience of the self in modernity. But at the same time, as those maps Tokarczuk includes tell the reader, as soon as there is travel, as soon as there is mapping, we are modern, we are not yet beyond modernity, if modernity might be provisionally defined by the historical range of the narratives comprising the novel, from the 17th to the 21st centuries; early modernity still informs, inhabits and in some cases haunts our modernity, whether that modernity is defined as being in part belonging to the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, for example. We are in the world. We are the world.

2

In one of her final poems, ‘Map,’(2014, 36–​39)2 written shortly before her death at the age of 88 in 2012, Wisława Szymborska meditated on the condition of 2 The following is my own translation of the poem with additional notes interwoven: Flat like a table, \ On which it is located. \ [The idea of location clearly does double service here, referring at once to the place on the table and an act of mapping.] \ Nothing moves under it, \ And seeks no outlet. \ [‘Outlet’ translates ‘ujścia,’ which can mean ‘mouth.’ The sense would suggest Szymborska wishes to suggest the mouth of a river perhaps.] \ Over it—​my human breath \ Creates no vortices of air \ [I have chosen ‘vortices’ as the stronger translation than Clare Kavanagh’s ‘stirring’ for its ability to suggest eddies, currents, and other forms of fluidity.] \ Leaving its entire surface \ Unperturbed. \ Its lowlands, valleys are always green, \ Highlands, mountains, gold and brown, \ The seas, oceans a friendly blue \ Along the torn edges [of

82 Wolfreys the map. A map is flat, nothing moves, there is no change, oceans are blue, valleys green. Everything is graspable with the naked eye. All the living and all the dead are there, east, west, north, south. Borders are marked but not so as to be intrusive, almost as if they were irrelevant; and in fact Szymborska accuses borders of being hesitant, of vacillating, as if uncertain whether or not they should exist. As a summation of these features and details, Szymborska confesses that she likes maps precisely because what they represent is not necessarily truthful. Maps are a fiction and bear little resemblance to reality, whether in the present or at any moment in the past. What resemblance there is in the cartographic representation is of the most provisional, the sketchiest. Certain borders may have moved in 1772, 1793, 1795, 1918, and 1945, to take a few examples, but those pen strokes will not convey, indeed seal up in their inscription, the historical details and events that caused the redrawing of national boundaries. Yet at the same time, the event, whether for the witness or the the shore] \ [Szymborska uses the phrase ‘rozdzieranych brzegach’ for the coastlines and, as Kavanagh translates it, ‘tattered shores.’.’ I have retained the more abrupt and somewhat more literal ‘torn edges’ to suggest, once more, the doubleness inherent in Szymborska’s writing, a play between literal and metaphorical, between the jagged or tattered shores and torn edges of the map.] \ Everything here is small, accessible, and close. \ I can press volcanoes with the tips of my nails, \ Stroke the poles without thick gloves, \ [Szymborska uses the word ‘bieguny’ for ‘poles’; Tokarczuk’s word is something of a nonce word but echoes with, is part palimpsest of the Polish word. Jennifer Croft, translator into English of Tokarczuk’s novel, remarks in an interview in Scroll that \ The original title of the novel is Bieguni, which comes from a Slavic root that means “to run”. But the word in Polish is a strange one—​not a word people use, though they would recognise the root. The word “runners” in English is much more prosaic, much less evocative. I chose a word I thought would accurately reflect Olga’s tendency throughout her work to create networks of associations, a tactic that is especially important in a book like this one, where fragments may appear at first glance to be disconnected from one another, yet in reality they’re linked conceptually as well as though subterranean formal bonds, including the resurgence in different sections of related words. “Flights” suggests plane travel, imagination (“flights of fancy”), fleeing (which is closer to the original Polish title), etc. \ The Polish ‘biegun’ (also a Polish surname) refers to the poles, north and south, static markers, but can also be used as the word for the curved support on which a rocking chair or cradle sits and which enables either to rock back and forth. However, Tokarczuk plays on the synonym ‘pole’ /​ ‘Pole’; the conceit is that the Polish people are at once the ‘still point of the turning world’ as T. S Eliot observes in ‘Burnt Norton’ ( from Four Quartets] and also a nomadic, diasporic people whose lines of flight map the world differently in their innumerable trajectories.] \ I can in one glance \ Embrace every desert \ Together with the current of the nearby river. \ Forests are marked with a few trees, \ Between which it would be difficult to steal. \ In the east and west \ Above and below the equator—​\ Sewing silence like poppy seeds \ And in every black grain \ People live. \ Mass graves and sudden ruins \ Are not in this picture. \ The borders of countries are barely visible, \ As if they vacillated—​to be or not to be. \ I like maps because they lie. \ Because they do not give access to the vicious truth. \ Because generously, with good humour, \ They spread a world on my table \ Not of this world.

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reader after the fact, is about a certain taking place, as Szymborska’s poem maps out for the reader, even as her reading of the map is presented in the place of a map we cannot see. Szymborska’s poem plays out that which Tom Conley reads in Early Modern French poems: ‘Events can be said to be what yield the perception of space and of how that perception takes “place,”’ remarks Conley. (Conley 5) ‘If, in the age when the idiolect of semiotics had been integral to critical consciousness,’ he continues, ‘space had been called the “discursive practice of place” (de Certeau 1990), the art of reading and seeing could be understood along a similar line ….’ (Conley 5) The design is to let events take place in the areas between verbal and visual forms that belong to a common ground of poetry and cartography. … before the viewer’s eyes the representation of places in books and atlases extends to include the time and space of their perception. In this way correlated maps and poems continue to be “events” of an order in which their sensate qualities precede the languages that make them communicable. conley 5

If as Conley suggests in his compelling analogy between mapping and the perception of place on the one hand, and reading and seeing on the other, then Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘design’ in Flights is both to ‘let events take place …’ as these belong to a ‘common ground’ of, if not poetry, then certainly a poetics of perception and, with that a perception of the motions in and of the human body and the human subject, which at the same time are also, analogous and simultaneous with fundamental questions of cartography. While bieguni remins untranslatable, ‘flights’ names the motions of the eye and of perception, and so the taking place and the ‘becoming-​map’ in and by which so much of the novel is intricately entangled. As Tokarczuk observes toward the end of the novel, ‘[t]‌he next specimen consisted of a brain and peripheral nerves perfectly arranged on a white surface. You could easily mistake that red design on its white background for a metro map.’ (406) Thus, while Szymborska’s poem presents the fictive nature of maps, it remains at a passive remove from the flat surface below the gaze on the table. Tokarczuk’s novel asks and so explores what it means to be looking at the map, what it means to be in the map one is observing, and what it means to make the map through one’s perception and motions, in the events of travel and motion that take place—​both in the self and through the self’s corporeal involvement with space and the temporality of spatial traversal connected to the particularities of place.

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3

Preceding the lines just cited, from the section3 titled ‘Final Timetable,’ Tokarczuk’s narrator begins by speaking of pilgrimages that aim ‘at some other pilgrim’ (404). The particular pilgrim in this example is ‘embedded in Plexiglass’ or ‘plastinated.’ (404) In these displays the bodies’ muscles, ligaments, tendons, organs and nerves are displayed ‘in fluid so as to make their three-​dimensional networks stand out’ (406; emphasis added), all of which, arrives the conclusion, ‘gave us access to altogether unexpected points of view.’ (407) The use of the term ‘network’ is of significance. As the narrator announces in the brief section titled ‘Network State,’ I am a citizen of a network state …. [o]‌ccupied with moving around in various directions …. Just a few years ago on the screen of my phone at the inadvertent crossing of some now totally invisible or conventional border, the exotic names of foreign networks would register.’ (329–​ 30) The subject is thus defined by such virtual networking. The relationship between the map and the body is clearly presented, as is the sense of journey required in order to find oneself taking an unexpected perspective, awakening to a new perception or at least to find invented a perception that was there all along but which had not been considered or revealed. The title in English, Flights thus announces the motion that underlies the event of the subject’s mapping; a mapping on the one hand of the world through traversal and travel, and a mapping, on the other hand, of the self, as the subject realises itself through altered perception of the other. In French, the title is rendered as Les Pérégrins, the cover being the first illustration from the novel, a ‘comparative overview of important rivers’ as the novel’s index has it, which line drawings resemble nerves, arteries, veins or ganglia (414).4 Drawn from the noun pérégrinations (travels or, indeed, peregrinations, voyages, the Cambridge French-​English Dictionary informs us, of an ‘incessant’ nature, and from the Latin meaning specifically to travel abroad), the French title ‘invents’ a nomadic people as Tokarczuk does with her original title. Peregination has about it a sense of wandering, of travel without a particular purpose or goal, of aleatory wandering. Such people are everywhere in the book, always moving, not necessarily of the same nation, but in being in transit are active in mapping and becoming figures of a map’s lines of flight. If, as Conley comments, the aim 3 Does Flights have chapters, as such, given the design of the book in multiple narratives, many of which run in different times, and not a few of which have protagonists not connected to the narrator? 4 In German, the title is translated as Unrast, or ‘restlessness,’ which may itself be a response to the Slavic root signifying runners, to which Jennifer Croft alludes. See n.5, above.

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of the early modern writer in engaging with the idea of mapping is to produce ‘topographies of sensation and experience’ (Conley 201), then this also is Tokarczuk’s aim. It goes to the heart of all aspects of her project in Flights, from the variations in title across languages, to the various ‘records’ of sensation and experience, so many acts of bearing witness to the idea and experience of the self, mapping and becoming-​map that the 116 episodes register, from first-​ person5 to various third-​person protagonists, some fictional (Kunicki), some real (Philip Verheyen, Ludwika Jędrzewicz), and across borders, countries, places and different times from the 17th to the 21st centuries. While Kapka Kassabova observes correctly in a review for the Guardian that the ‘fragment-​chapters in this fascinating novel of fragments’ is a novel from the beginning of ‘wilful deracination’ that starts for the first-​person narrator in childhood and has at its deracinated pseudo-​centre (or myth of origin) the ‘obscure and possibly fictional Slavic sect,’ the Bieguni of the title, there is also to this a countersignature. (The Guardian, June 03, 2017) That is written in the anatomical, the corporeal on which the novel meditates throughout. For the self, a network state all its own is both a system of endless motion that remains in place, a ‘map’ that is itself a topography of sensation and experience, to recall Conley’s phrase. The map and the self thus present two apparently contradictory or paradoxical states: a stasis of representation and the potential for motion, travel, wandering and flight as much as lines of flight. The territory (of the map, the self) deterritorialises itself from the moment that it is mapped out. Deconstruction, as some will be aware and if there is such a thing, takes place therefore ahead of any consciousness. It does not await the conscious action of ‘deconstructing’ but rather is always already ‘in deconstruction’ as soon as the map (of the self, of the country, the world, the territory) takes place, as an event and as the registration or attestation of bearing witness to a moment—​which of course has gone, is already passed by the time the representation is completed.

4

Bieguni names and is a name. It fixes provisionally an identity for a collective always in motion, the historical ‘truth’ of which cannot be proven. It presents itself as a name, a form of location that resists translation, as if it were a town

5 It seems a not unreasonable question to ask whether every first-​person narrator is the same, or if connected to what extent becoming other in the act of each and every narration?

86 Wolfreys or region on an impossible map, which simultaneously might be encountered anywhere, as in the moment in the encounter with a mysterious shrouded woman about halfway through the novel. The map that is the novel is disturbingly deracinated from within, and as part of its own ‘identity’ or ‘being.’ To what extent then might one ask if the novel, taken as a whole and in the face of its 116 fragmentary episodes—​and it is not certain that we can call them fragments, the very word an attempt to calm, to fix, to impose and absolute order epistemologically that does not necessarily exist, save for the arbitrariness of the cover that transforms text to book—​is available to a wandering reading, an aleatory approach to experiencing its narrative, to travel and so read differently across the text? To be sure, particular narratives break off only to be taken up again, as in the example of the character Kunicki, whose wife and child go missing while on vacation, Dr Blau, or Josefine Soliman’s letters entreating the Francis I, Emperor of Austria, to return the body of her father, given over to taxidermy and kept on display on his death. (Kunicki’s narrative is given in three episodes, two titled Water, and one Earth (30–​38 39–​59, 338–​ 67; Josefine Soliman’s letters: 147–​50, 171–​73, 268–​272; Dr Blau’s tale is given in two episodes, 132–​47, 150–​70) This is not the only example of ordered, if interrupted narrative. But other episodes are self-​contained, and can, arguably, be displaced, replaced by any of the other episodes, without significant transformation of the experience of reading. The novel, like a map, refuses linearity, encourages the aleatory, even as it predicates from the start the impossibility of motion. The novel begins conventionally enough, in childhood with an episode titled Jestem /​Here I Am /​Je Suis /​Ich bin (depending on one’s language): I’m a few years old. I’m sitting on the window sill, …. Out the window the courtyard is empty …. The worst part is the stillness, visible, dense … That evening is the limit of the world, and I’ve just happened upon it, by accident, while playing, not in search of anything …. I’m a few years old. I’m sitting on the window sill …. I’d like to leave, but there’s nowhere to go. My own presence is the only thing with a distinct outline now, an outline that quivers and undulates …. And all of a sudden I know: there’s nothing anyone can do now, here I am. (7–​8) Fixed and framed, the child announces the impossibility of action. Being is here at the edge, the limit, liminally poised, trapped. One might say it is all over as soon as it begins, save for that undulation and quivering which is silently registered in the present tense, a tense that, every time the book is opened, says ‘here I am,’ or just Jestem, ‘I am,’ as the Polish presents the image, or indeed, je

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suis, as it is given in the French translation and ich bin in German. The cogito is inescapable. But this does not mean that it is frozen, fixed, as an unchanging being. The use of present tense attests to this; it continues beyond its confine. Even as that ‘I’ announces its being held in place, with every reader the I returns in an ever-​present line of flight, across the limits of a self, across the borders of languages. But then as the title of the subsequent episode tells us there is a ‘world in your head.’ (8) The reader thus finds herself caught between fixity and mobility, quivering and undulating as that first narrator puts it. At the conclusion of the novel, the final episode is titled ‘Boarding,’ another present tense narrative concerning another liminal space or non-​place,6 an airport, specifically the departure lounge, and the boarding tunnel onto the plane. Again, the reader is addressed by a first person, anonymous narrator, though the opening paragraph describing a middle-​aged man might initially mislead one into believing this to be a third-​person episode. (408) The man, unaware that he is being observed, takes out a notebook, and following suit, the narrator does the same: ‘[s]‌o I also get out my notebook and start to write about this man writing down. Chances are he’s now writing: “Woman writing something down. She’s taken off her shoes and placed her backpack at her feet …”’ (408) These are the actions the first-​person narrator has observed in the middle-​aged male traveller. Thus, the image, of the perceiver perceived, and the possibility of a reciprocal and iterated act—​the one writing of the other writing of the one as other—​are both at the same time open and closed. They map the relationship of gazes in an act of writing that maps out the scene. Indeed, there is in this act of writing, the writing of which constructs a figural turn, an intertwined helix a ‘virtual middle between nonidentical interfaces.’ (Gasché 1987, xi) Of course, writing is what is staged and what takes place, happening as an event here (and there), undermining any single authoritative position, classical point of view or perspective, and at the same time, inscribing in narrative a chiasm, a gap ‘that, for reading, becomes tangible at the heart of the chiasm.’(Gasché, xxvi) This gap is invented so as to offer others the possibility of writing: ‘Don’t be shy, I think to the rest, all waiting for our gate to open—​take your notebooks out too, and write.… We don’t let on we’re looking at each other …we will simply write each other down, … we will reciprocally transform each other into letters and initials … phrases and pages.’ The shifts in personal pronoun—​he, his, I you, we—​with the motion from present to future tense allied to the act of writing, effect the opposite of Flights’ opening

6 On the non-​place and its role in ‘supermodernity,’ see Marc Augé, Non-​Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995).

88 Wolfreys passages. For, if there ‘[Here] I am’ seemed rigidly Cartesian in its voice, its presence, Tokarczuk opens this out in the concluding episode. We, the readers, the passengers, are poised, rather than trapped; we, they, are suspended in the moment, framed in the realisation of the liminal site on the verge of departure, with ‘a kind of promise that perhaps we will be born anew now, this time in the right time and the right place.’ (408–​10) It might be proposed therefore that Flights is in one sense a map of becoming. As a book is at once a static, fixed object, so a text is mobile, always, in being read, in the process of becoming other. Hence, Flights is not simply or even just a map of the narrator’s becoming from childhood to adulthood, from a sense of inescapability to one of constant migration, the novel charts for many people a movement away from the rigidity of subjectivity to a presentation of the self as belonging to a flow, the subject’s borders being redrawn constantly. The personal pronoun thus names a point, a co-​ordinate on a map or trajectory. Yet, as the proper name indicates the point is also a movement. Although the self feels, or can perceive itself as being caught, in that it is always with itself, there appears to be no way out. The figure of “I” presents particular problems for the narration of migration and motion, charting and becoming. Here is Andrzej Warminski summarizing Hölderlin’s critique of Fichte’s absolute ‘“I”’ … since an absolute ‘I’ would have to contain all reality—​it is all and outside of it is nothing—​there is no object for such an ‘I’; but an ‘I,’ a consciousness, without an object is unthinkable, an ‘I’ must have an object, even if it is only I myself who is that object (and therefore limited and therefore not absolute). In short, if it is an ‘I,’ it cannot be absolute, and if it is absolute, it cannot be an ‘I,’ for to say ‘I’ always means the self-​division of the ‘I’ against itself, a self-​exteriorization of the ‘I’ in an other in which it may recognize itself. warminski, 5

Although Tokarczuk’s childlike, Cartesian ‘I’ has a sense of being framed, captured, inescapably there, the adult narrator who concludes the final episode, in her shifts from ‘he’ to ‘I’ to ‘you’ to ‘we’ apprehends in a present tense tending toward an unending future that is not certain, the possibility of figuring all reality by implication, but not directly. Flights refutes the ‘absolute “I”.’ It does so not only through the transformation of the ‘I,’ but also in dividing the ‘I,’ marking that seemingly paradoxical self-​division. This is presented in the narration of the Biegun woman, who speaks to Annushka, herself a runaway in Moscow, who walks out on her sedentary life, in the episode ‘What the Shrouded Runaway was Saying.’ (266–​268; Croft uses

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the figure of the runaway here to translate the Polish episode title, which is ‘Co mówila zakutana biegunica’: ‘what the Biegun [woman] was saying.’) Annushka has encountered the shrouded woman before and finally speaks with her at Kiyevsky Station in Moscow. These are the words heard by Annushka: Sway, go on, move. That’s the only way to get away from him. He who rules the world has no power over movement and knows that our body in motion is holy, and only then can you escape him, once you’ve taken off. He reigns over all that is still and frozen, everything that’s passive and inert. So go, sway, walk, run, take flight … (266) The apparent paradox is explained by a cessation of flight, and also the efforts to stay passage by others: Whoever pauses will be petrified, whoever stops, pinned like an insect, his heart pierced by a wooden needle, his hands and feet drilled through and pinned into the threshold and the ceiling. […] What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time’s passage …. Institutions and offices, stamps, newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, election results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others. What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes …. Move. Get going. (267–​268) The language of self and map is a language of becoming fixed and mapping lines of flight, simultaneously. There is always a dialogic tension between the one and the other. Language is specifically that which draws the taking place, the ‘between’ that the self experiences in relation to flight and stasis. This connection is made clear in a later episode, when the first-​person narrator meets a woman originally from Poland who has apparently forgotten most of her ‘first’ language: Far away from home, at a video rental shop, rummaging around the shelves, I swear in Polish. And suddenly a small woman … stops beside me and speaks awkwardly in my language: ‘Is that Polish? Do you speak Polish? Good day.’ Unfortunately, this ends her stock of Polish sentences.

90 Wolfreys And now she tells me in English that she came her when she was seventeen, with her parents; here she shows off the Polish word for ‘mummy.’ Then to my embarrassment, she then begins to cry, points to her forearm, and talks about blood, that this is where her whole soul is, that her blood is Polish.… She says she married a Hungarian and forgot her Polish.… It is difficult for me to believe that you can forget the7 language, thanks to which the maps of the world have been sketched. (333; translation modified) The reader could be forgiven for pursuing a strong reading here, whether reading in translation or what is called the ‘original,’ Polish. The implication concerning forgotten language is that, locally, the language shared by the narrator and the small woman of about fifty years of age, is Polish, however little remains for the woman. That national linguistic form might be read as the language of maps, the language ‘thanks to which the maps of the world have been sketched.’ However, the narrator’s incredulous response is also available to the reader as imagining the impossibility of loss of something as fundamental as what each of us calls our language, the language into which we enter, and primarily speak regardless of other languages we may subsequently learn. To push the double reading a little further, it is as if there were to be imagined an an ur-​language, archē-​original, ontologically foundational in its mythopoetic status simultaneously responsible for self-​reflexion and perception and for its fundamental role in staging, mapping, presenting the world. Allowing for the double reading presents an aporia, a double bind: on the one hand, language is ‘national;’ on the other, language has no boundaries, capable of encompassing and sketching all the representations and presentations of the world in cartographic form. Language—​as such—​crosses the very borders it inscribes, shifting from local tongue to local tongue as it does so. As Adam Zagajewski argues at the conclusion of his essay ‘Writing in Polish,’ ‘does it finally matter what language we write in? Can’t any language, properly used, open the road, to poetry, the world? …. His quest’s witnesses are neither passport offices nor university grammarians …’(Zagajewski, 198) Tokarczuk’s narrator in Flights speaks on behalf of, and for ‘others … that great tumult of dead voices, … [struggling] to see into the future’; what she expresses seems ‘at times not to be part of any language’ (Zagajewski, 198).

7 In Polish there are no definite articles. Therefore, ‘the language’ as it is given in the translation, is just ‘language.’ This might be read as making universal the relation between language and mapping, even though the narrator is responding to someone who has lost their Polish.

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5

What I have noted about tensions, oppositions and a dialogic impulse in Tokarczuk has already been noted by other critics. Sławomir Iwasiów observes of her fiction in general that most of the worlds created by Tokarczuk involve narratives of small, quotidian narratives that touch on the mythical and timeless, and are constructed on the opposition between movement and stillness as the fundamental principles of energies of her fictional universe. (Iwasiów, 2019) The quasi-​family of motifs or tropes of the journey, nomadism, voyaging, has also been noted by Kinga Siatkowska-​Callebat. (Siatkowska-​Callebat, 131–​ 44) Of Tokarczuk’s varied and heterogeneous voyagers, Siatkowska-​ Callebat observes—​drawing on Zygmunt Baumann’s work—​that the reasons why they travel appear so implausible that the journey is the mere pretext for movement; however, where they are going, or the reasons for going, she continues, are relatively unimportant. (Siatkowska-​Callebat, 135) It is not, she observes, arriving that is significant. Rather it is to find oneself in a non-​place, Siatkowska-​Callebat citing at this point Marc Augé on public spaces where we remain anonymous. The point for such nomadism is to provide an opportunity to disappear, become anonymous, not known by anyone, to escape. (Siatkowska-​Callebat, 138) That all such motion is important in the construction of Tokarczuk’s narratives is undeniable. However, it is not necessarily just the governing narrative figure or a figure for all narrative in general. Iwasiów, noting that the novelist’s characters are people on the margins of the map, whose experiences, presented fragmentarily, as so many threads, addresses ontological and phenomenological problems concerning what is called reality, which, like the ‘I’ is not a totality, not a complete representation. (Iwasiów, 15), What, he continues, is at the side of the road is what attracts our attention, while we observe, with Tokarczuk’s characters how the world changes so rapidly, and that only movement keeps one from evil, as the Bieguni had believed (Iwasiów, 15). However, there is no journey if it is not observed; what early modern chorographers and travellers understood implicitly, Tokarczuk foregrounds. The narrator-​observer—​not dissimilar from Szymborska’s ‘I’ in the poem ‘Map’—​is always there, above the surface,8 tracing the lines of flight, observing and following in the wake of the planes that are traversed by the bodies that in their movement, memories, and words constitute the fragments of place that each

8 On the motif of the observer, and the transformative nature of perspective and perception, see Katarzyna Kantner (2015, 182).

92 Wolfreys episode maps. Observation, perception, tracing: these make the map that is the locale of narrative fragment, which in turn stages the experience of the subject who inhabits that world, an experience simulated for, and supplemented in the act of reading. Thus, the subject-​position brings to the idea of the map an all-​ important temporal dimension, as does narrative itself: ‘A necessarily temporal art form, narrative gives vivid shape and materiality to that which is absent from conventional maps: the textures, rhythmic complexities and uneven progressions of temporal movement.’ (Barrows, 151) This unevenness is performed by the fragmentary and iterative, broken, and discontinuous surge of multiple subject positions and movements of becoming found in the many episodes of Flights. Tokarczuk explores obsessively the ‘compatibilities between literature’s chronometric imaginary and cartographic practices,’9 without seeking any reconciliation of the tension between motion and stillness or ‘the tension between poetical and rational constructions of spatial relations’ and narrative. (Barrows, 153) Mapping arises then as an experience of temporality and interaction, communication concerned with communication. Modern day part-​time nomads, backpackers pose to one another what Tokarczuk calls travel questions. Through this process of mutual and reciprocal interrogation, vertical and horizontal axes are produced, the backpackers ‘able to create something like a coordinates system,’ by which they situate ‘one another on that map.’ (64) In opposition to the mendacious authority of ‘the map’ (that is to say, an official cartographic projection), there are private, personal, and counterintuitive maps produced by the subject that give agency rather than taking that away: ‘If something hurts me, I erase it from my mental map,’ observes Tokarczuk’s narrator: ‘Places where I stumbled, fell, where I as struck down … such places are simply not there any longer. This means I’ve got rid of several big cities and one whole province’ (103). Such sites of erasure are now ‘non-​existent places,’ while the subject has become ‘an eye that moves like a spectre in a ghost town’ (103). The narrator-​observer’s counter-​map escapes notice because it apprehends the ‘phantom nature of these places’ in contradistinction to the materiality of place, where those who are ‘stuck, poor things’ are ‘all erased’ (104) as a result of their being fixed. There is no one counterintuitive map of course. It is impossible to constitute a straightforward dialectic between authority and opposition, the official and the unsanctioned. For every subject the map is singular:

9 Barrows, 151.

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Athens he knew like the inside of his pocket, though not (needless to say) the city they’d just set sail from—​that one, truth be told, did not interest him in the slightest—​but rather the old Athens, from the times of, let’s say, Pericles, and their map was overlaid onto today’s layout, rendering the present one spectral, unreal. (385) There are therefore ‘maps of the world, … this internal and the external world’ that ‘drawn up’ and ‘once glimpsed, irradiated the mind, etching into it the primary—​the fundamental—​lines and planes’ (188), and these date back to 1542, or 1689 for example (188). Filip Verheven (or Philip Verheyen), anatomist and surgeon provided one such map of the internal world of the human body in his Corporis Humani Anatomiae. According to the narrator of the episode ‘Letters to the Amputated Leg,’ (214–​219) Verheven left after his death numerous notes, ‘intended as an aide-​mémoire,’ in which ‘one sees in them the record of a kind of journey to an unknown land and an attempt to sketch out its map;’ (214) part of which map in turn becomes part of a plastinated brain at an exhibition, more than 300 years later: ‘The next specimen consisted of a brain and peripheral nerves perfectly arranged on a white surface. You could easily mistake the red design on its white background for a metro map.’ (406) Indeed, as Tokarczuk ventriloquizes Verheven, ‘I’ve spent my life travelling, into my own body, into my own amputated limb. I’ve prepared the most accurate maps.’ (219) Then there are those internal maps that serve memory, allowing the subject to apprehend the experience of place: ‘Record in his mind on a map all the equipment in the lab, every little bottle, the location of each of the tools.’ (166) The work of vision and the mind are inextricable from mapping of any kind. There is no map without the subject, as obvious as this may sound: ‘in the final analysis, everything becomes the object of vision. Sensations and passions become figures, produced always in the same way—​through the projection of points …. all of these maps amount to nothing more than different pages of one and the same atlas.’ (Arsić, 29) Developing a close reading across a number of texts by René Descartes, Branka Arsić (just cited) illustrates the manner in which for the philosopher, the understanding of vision, gaze, mind and world reveals how mapping is a fundamental human sensory process. (Descartes, 106)10 The visual sign, she continues, ‘possesses the symbolic function of evoking the signified without any resemblance to it,’ quoting Foucault in support, who observes that ‘[i]‌t is characteristic that the first example of a sign given by

10

Also referred to by Arsić are Descartes’ essays on ‘Optics’ and ‘The World, or Treatise on Light,’ both of which are in Vol. i of The Philosophical Writings.

94 Wolfreys the Logique de Port-​Royal is not the word, nor the cry, nor the symbol, but the spatial and graphic representation—​the drawing as map or picture.’ The map therefore is ‘not simply an image, but’ a descriptive drawing insofar as ‘description,’ for the geography of the seventeenth century, ceases to signify the verbal power of words, ceases to be a rhetorical mans, and obtains instead the meaning of the sense of the image drawn through inscribing …. In short, the map can appear as the first example of the sign because it is the effect of the same procedure through which the visible inscribes its drawing upon the eye.… Every map emerges as an imitation of the actions of light [on the eye]. arsić, 25–​26

Through the eye the ‘self-​mapping of the visible unfolds;’ (Arsić, 26) it is this work that Tokarczuk effects, inviting us to see the world, and ourselves, our motions through it, with a radical difference figured by the idea of the map and the lines of flight that perform it. Every episode of Flights presents ‘the story of the story, and not the story of the visible …. everything, including feelings and passions, will be subjected’ while we remain in the epoch of the Cartesian schema, ‘to the work of this cartographic art.’ (Arsić, 29) So, the narrator grows as her comprehension of the world grows, through a comparison of maps, of rivers, their relative lengths, the Oder being a ‘country viscountess at the court of the Amazon Queen.’ (8, 11) Dr Blau on the other hand, reflects on how we get nowhere, ‘movement an illusion, all of us travelling in place’ (136). This awareness comes as a result of seeing the map presented on the back of an airline seat, on which ‘the small shape of the plane … traversed at a turtle’s pace …. It even seemed that the map had been designed by Zenon the Cartographer.’ (136) Mapping is therefore relative, each eye seeing differently. Though this is not the place to explore the question of gender, it might be noticed that flights, motion, openness, fleeing: all such figures tend more toward the women of the novel rather than the men. Women map so as to move on, men so as to reassure themselves that they are going nowhere. As a result, Filip Verheven, having spent his life ‘travelling … prepar[ing] the most accurate maps,’ nevertheless can only ‘ask myself this question: what have I been looking for?’ (219) If it is true that ‘nothing cures melancholy like looking at maps,’ (214) perhaps this is truer for Tokarczuk’s women than it is for her men. Thus it is for example that while Kunicki, desperate to find his wife and child, who have apparently disappeared while on holiday, searches increasingly frantically, driving around the island they are visiting and navigating by a map, his wife simply chooses to wander off, disappear temporarily

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into a map of her own making, invisible to her husband. It is only when he tips the contents of his wife’s purse out, his ‘eyes attentively’ taking in ‘their constellations, positions, the directions they point in, the shapes they make’ that he begins to grasp an alternative map: ‘Their connection to him is obvious, the very fact that he is looking at them important, the fact that he sees them a great mystery.’ (57) The ineluctable demand of the dualism between a Cartesian cogito and a counter-​Cartesian deterritorialization remains as a flux throughout the text. We witness in Blau, Kunicki, Verheven and others, ‘why every map provokes the passion of wonder—​the passion of careful consideration,’ (Arsić, 29) even if answers are withheld, meaning impossible to gain. But through such characters, Tokarczuk gives the reader access to a ‘“wild,” and “raw” visibility. This invisible, hidden visibility [of the world], irregular and disordered’ …. presents through narratives of flight, observation and reflection, a ‘visibility that escapes and runs, that cannot be inscribed in any chart … forever a terra incognita.’ (Arsić, 30)

6

In a remark that sounds as if it might have been taken from Tokarczuk, from In the Metro, Marc Augé observes that ‘subway lines, like lifelines on the hand, meet and cross—​not only on the map where the interlacing of their multicolor routes unwinds and is set in place, but in everyone’s lives and minds.’ (Augé, 6) From Pericles, Copernicus or Vesalius, to Kunicki, Dr Blau, or any of the other twenty-​first century protagonists, the map is always simultaneously this multiplicity of forms and formations. literal and figural, internal and external, and irreducible to any one form, the question being how the subject sees and remembers, whether one takes the ‘frog’s perspective’ or the bird’s eye view.’ (184) Maps of airports take the latter view, but in doing so come to resemble hieratic forms of writing and other inscriptions such as ‘Nazca Lines’ or ‘an enormous hieroglyphic’ (184–​85). Also, the short episode ‘Map of Greece’ describes the map, when examined ‘closely’ resembles for the narrator ‘a great Tao made of water and earth,’ the Peloponnese resembling in the narrator’s eye ‘a great maternal hand, not a human one, that is dipping into the water to check if the temperature is right for a bath.’ (372) For Kunicki, water stains on walls make ‘maps of countries he can’t recognize, he can’t name.’ (339) Furthermore, not only does the cartographic trope take in perspective, view, perception, the internal or external, the self and the world, it also traces a line of flight through memory and the temporal. In Tokarczuk’s comprehension, the idea of the map is not a concept, and neither is it an intermediary between

96 Wolfreys concept and image. It is a figure that grounded in experience is, like narrative lines, ‘traces of the things themselves,’ much as our memories are, which ‘perceptible to the eye and readable on sight [are] incorporated into knowledge and in some way doubles the world of experience with a visible world of curves, surfaces, diagrams, … [transposing] properties into figures.’ (Valéry, 99) Thus understood, the work of mapping in Flights may be read as belonging to what Sylviane Agacinski describes as ‘a kind of modern thinking freed from dualism.’ (Agacinski, 99) Indeed, as I have already argued, the line of flight, the trajectory of Flights is one that frees the subject through charting its relationship to mapping from epistemological dualism. Every episode, fragment of a chorographic map, in ‘constituting a material memory of movements’ functions in two ways. On the one hand, as ‘material trace,’ the episode-​text ‘serves to supplement’ in a performative manner ‘the subjective recollection of [the narrating subject’s] old experiences.’ (Agacinski, 89) On the other hand, ‘memory is also freed from its responsibilities by externalizing itself in the support materials.’ (Agacinski, 89) Yet the self, the subject remains, even as mnemotechnic trace of itself as other ‘I.’ For, Tokarczuk’s episodic maps are both expressions of cartographic memory (the affirmation that all memory is as cartographic as it is temporal) and memories of the experience of place, coming to take place when the self is no longer there, when the self has become something other than the self it was in that place. Such a map is not only ‘a map of geography’ it is ‘something like a BwO [Body without Organs].’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 164) The apparent randomness ‘embodied’ (as it were) by the episodic nature of Flights suggests it is both map and tracing, whereby the former is defined apropos the rhizome by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari by an orientation ‘toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map … fosters connections between fields …. The map is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 12) However, in being also a series of narratives, the novel is also a serial, if quasi-​arbitrary collocation and concatenation of traces of the self mapping the self, not as person, known and fixed, but—​and this is crucial to understanding how and why Tokarczuk writes in Flights and so engages in the various flights of the episodes across the centuries and countries of the novel—​but as a ‘thisness,’ a haeccity, finding itself in tracing itself in the memory of site. To realise this as part of Tokarczuk’s project is to apprehend how the term ‘subject’ will no longer suffice. Each figure approximating the human animal, including the ‘I’ of the narrator-​effect consists, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, ‘entirely of relations of movement and rest ….’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 261) In Olga Tokarczuk, ‘everything is in terms of’ flights. (Deleuze and Guattari, 261)

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Or, as Deleuze and Guattari also insist, ‘Language is a map;’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 77) a book is not ‘an image of the world,… the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a a reterritorialization of the book which in turn deterritorializes itself [as text and] in the world.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 11) Tokarczuk engages with such a de/​re/​deterritorialization in each of her characters’ struggles within the Cartesian paradigm. Furthermore, every narrator, every protagonist in Flights is both observer mapping on him-​ or herself the place, the world, and all the non-​places in between the fixed locations of official maps, and at the same time each narrator and protagonist is his or her ‘own line of flight.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 11) As the narrator of the final episode of Flights shows and urges us, we must ‘write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 11) Tokarczuk realises the agency in such lines of flight in all their intersecting singularity, which together form ‘so many “transformative multiplicities”… overturning the very codes that structure’11 the form we call inadequately the novel. If we have followed Tokarczuk’s lines of flight, we find ourselves where we were, but mapped forever differently.

Works Cited

Agacinski, Sylviane. Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia. Trans. Jody Gladding New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Arsić, Branka. The Passive Eye: Gaze and Subjectivity in Berkeley (via Beckett). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Augé, Marc. Non-​Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso: 1995. Augé, Marc. In the Metro. Trans., int. and Afterword Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Barrows, Adam. Literature, and Cartography After the Spatial Turn: The Chronometric Imaginary. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Beckett, Samuel. Texts for Nothing. In The Complete Short Prose, 1929–​1989. Ed. and int. S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1995. 100–​54. Conley, Tom. An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. de Certeau, Michel. 1990.

11

Deleuze and Guattari, 11.

98 Wolfreys Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. and int., Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Descartes, René. ‘Treatise on Man.’ In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. i. Trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Gasché, Rodolph. ‘Reading Chiasms: An Introduction.’ In Andrzej Warminski. Readings in Interpretation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. xi–​x xvi. Iwasiów, Sławomir. ‘“Celem mojej pielgrzymki jest zawsze inny pielgrzym”: Podróż w prozie Olgi Tokarczuk.’ http://​fraza.univ.rzes​zow.pl/​tek​sty_​nauk​owe/​Slawo​mir -​Iwas​iow-​Podr​oze-​Olgi-​Tokarc​zuk.pdf Accessed 24 February, 2019. Kantner, Katarzyna. ‘Kim jest autor? Literatura jako gra I wróżba (Koncepcja autorstwa Olgi Tokarczuk).’ Tekstualia, 3:42 (2015): 179–​88. Kassobova, Kapka. The Guardian, Sat., 3 June, 2017; https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​ books/​2017/​03/​flig​hts-​by-​olgato​karc​zuk-​rev​iew accessed January 20 2019. Siatkowska-​Callebat, Kinga. ‘Nomades post-​modernes ou les post-​voyageurs? Lae conception du voyage dans la fiction polonaise au début du XXIe siècle : Olga Tokarczuk, Andrzej Stasiuk, Joanna Bator.’ In Recherches & Travaux, 89 (2016) : 131–​44. Szymborska, Wisława. ‘Map.’ In Enough /​ Wystarczy. Trans. Clare Cavanagh. Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5. 2014, 36–​39. Tokarczuk, Olga. Bieguni. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2007. Translated as Flights. Trans. Jennifer Croft. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017. Turner, Henry S. ‘Literature and Mapping in Early Modern England, 1520–​1688.’ In David Woodward, ed. The History of Cartography. Vol.3 Pt. 1. Cartography in the European Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 412–​26. Valéry, Paul. Léonard et les philosophes. In Œuvres complètes. Paris : Gallimard, 1957. Vol. i, 1266. Van Roojen, Pepin. The Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps. Amsterdam. Pepin Press, 2007. Warminski, Andrzej. Readings in Interpretation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Zagajewski, Adam. ‘Writing in Polish..’ In Zagajewski, Defence of Ardor: Essays. Trans. Clare Cavanaugh. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2004. 191–​98.

chapter 5

The Mapping of Empire in Hilary Davies’ ‘Imperium’ Jean Ward One does not need to be a historian of cartography to be aware that a map is not a neutral, objective representation of any given space, but the result of choices made by the mapmaker. Whether the map in question is a digital one or a traditional paper one, there are implicit assumptions behind even the most innocuous decisions as to what is included and what not. A free tourist map for hotel guests, for example, will mark the places that are assumed to be important for the visitor, and thus will project a certain idea of who that visitor is. Is it someone who will want to know where the nearest fitness centre is? Is it someone who will care whether there are any places of worship in the vicinity? Is it someone who can be tempted into expensive shopping? What features of the cityscape are considered to be worth marking? If it is a larger scale map of a country –​which places of settlement are marked? How large do they have to be to merit a mention? Is size the only criterion? And so on and so on. Questions like these are the particular province of critical cartographers and have been investigated extensively, especially since the last quarter of the twentieth century. But thinking about maps in this way has a usefulness outside that professional field. The considerations I have mentioned relate to maps in the literal sense, but they also help to explain why metaphors based on maps and mapping are so deeply embedded in everyday discourse. We speak, for instance, about ‘mapping out’ a piece of work; about ‘charting’ a public figure’s rise to prominence; about going into ‘uncharted waters’ or ‘unmapped territory,’ to describe experiences not previously encountered (see Sara Wheeler’s discussion Off the Map). We say that something is ‘on the map’ or off it; and we talk about ‘putting somewhere on the map,’ meaning drawing attention to a location of some kind that formerly has not been remarked as worthy of it. In the last case, the mental ‘re-​mapping’ activity constitutes a proposal for a more or less radical revision of cultural assumptions. I intend to use these ideas to support a close reading of a long poem by Hilary Davies, entitled ‘Imperium,’ published in 2005 in a collection of the same name. While some scholars are critical of what they consider vague

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100 Ward figurative uses of cartographical terms by literary critics (see e.g. Rossetto),1 I believe that their use in discussing this poem is justified. Based on carefully researched historical sources, ‘Imperium’ looks at the British Empire around the turn of the nineteenth century from different spatial standpoints which are linked in various ways with the life of one of that Empire’s heroes, Horatio Nelson –​though he is named directly only once. The poem contains few references to actual maps,2 but in her treatment of space, Davies carries out ‘a form of mapping or a cartographic activity,’ (Tally, 21, see also Rybicka, 36) an activity which is also required in some sense of the reader (see Rybicka, 37). I contend that the mental mapping of (historical) space by the poet and reader corresponds to a still more metaphorical mapping process, one in which symbols of national glory and heroism, Nelson in particular, are shuffled into unexpected positions on a canvas where quite other symbols are foregrounded. As a result, not only Nelson and not only the British Empire, but the idea of empire in general, is subjected to re-​assessment. In an experiment carried out by Marie-​Laure Ryan, a group of high-​school students was asked to produce a drawing of the spatial relations they envisaged in their head in their reading of a short story by Gabriel Garcia Márquez. This was of course a narrative text; but ‘Imperium’ has a narrative element, and it might in an analogous way be possible to articulate the model of its topography that the reader creates mentally in reading it. In this cognitive mapping process, some assumptions that lie behind the pre-​existing ‘maps’ we carry in our heads, not only of territory, but also, metaphorically, of history and culture, may be called into question. The poem ‘puts things on the map’ that were, so to speak, not there before, and perhaps removes, reduces or obscures the things that were. This process begins with places; but it goes beyond them to involve historical events; areas of knowledge; people. We might say that the text of ‘Imperium’ creates a certain kind of ‘mental map’ of the British Empire in Napoleonic times; but it is not altogether like the ones that history has bequeathed to us. Implicitly, it points to the arbitrariness, or possibly the agenda, behind the choices made by both literal and metaphorical mapmakers. To illustrate this, let us take a look at the following quite random list of names and vocabulary items taken from the poem: The Kingdom of the Two 1 Rossetto criticizes ‘the long superficial engagement of literary scholars with the cartographic lexicon’ (513). She concedes, however, that even ‘misleading’ applications of cartographical concepts by literary critics may be illuminating for cartographers (518). 2 In Part I, ‘charts’ are included in a list of various navigational tools and aids (l. 63). Charts are also mentioned in a similar way in Part vi (ll. 47, 93).

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Sicilies; Caracciolo; Fonseca; a polacco; a lighterman; Overy Staithe; Burnham Thorpe; Merthyr Tydfil; Redoutable. The reader who is able to identify the referents corresponding to these items or to connect them in any way with the title of the poem is probably in possession of some knowledge which is not exactly common, except perhaps in some of the places named in the list. Whereas if, instead of these items, the list contained, for instance, Trafalgar Square, Nelson’s Column or hms Victory, the chances are that many readers would have quite a clear sense of the world and time with which the poem is associated. The implication, from the very first part of ‘Imperium,’ is that the British Empire might be described from quite different points of view than the one represented by those emblematic names. To read the poem is then to become involved in a process of discovery and re-​discovery, of ‘mapping’ and ‘re-​mapping.’ In the opening section of ‘Imperium,’ entitled ‘Kent: Chatham Docks,’ words like ‘ratlines,’ (l. 12) ‘topgallant’ (l. 15) or ‘futtock’ (l. 29) are drawn from a highly specialist vocabulary which could only be assumed in a reader who knows in fine detail the world of shipbuilding and sailing ships. Despite the cover image chosen for the volume, Turner’s painting of the Battle of Trafalgar, it is only gradually that the reference in the poem to the age of sail becomes clear, for the scenes depicted in Part i give us an insider’s perspective on a world whose minutiae and differentiations (‘sandglass, leadlines,’ l. 63) are too specialized for the outsider to discern. Similarly, the person who looks down, presumably, from what popular imagination knows as the crow’s nest (though it is not named as such), knows something about the building of British sailing ships that is probably not very common knowledge: that their timber came from faraway places, ‘Memel, Riga, Stettin,’ evoked by the smell of ‘leaf mould of the Baltic’ when the doors of the ‘seasoning sheds’ are opened (ll. 21–​22). It is not until we come to the mention of the ‘cat-​o’-​nine-​tails’ in the subsection of Part i entitled The Prentice-​Sawyer’s Lament that the poem calls on an easily recognizable, almost stereotypical symbol of the British Navy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and not until the last, short line of Part i, ‘We join Hood,’ (l. 76) that a name is introduced which might enable the reader to fix the poem’s time setting more precisely, and identify the person speaking in the section’s final lines. For although Chatham Docks is the place from which hms Victory was floated in 1765, and where a twelve-​year-​old boy called Horatio Nelson arrived in 1771 to join his uncle’s ship the Raisonable, there is no mention of this in the poem. When an ‘I’-​figure appears for the first time in ‘Imperium,’ it is clearly identified not with Nelson, but with an anonymous ‘prentice sawyer.’

102 Ward Thus the very first poem of the sequence establishes the principle that operates throughout: whether considered with reference to people or places, events or areas of expertise, the focus is on what is ‘off the map.’ In geographical terms, it is often rather out-​of-​the-​way places that feature, like the Norfolk villages Overy Staithe and Burnham Thorpe, where Horatio Nelson was born, or the Welsh town of Merthyr Tydfil, which had an importance to the British Empire in the time of the Napoleonic Wars that few probably realize. Many more well-​known places are not included, or are presented with a degree of local detail that reveals how little the reader really knows them, or from a perspective that is unfamiliar. This is illustrated even by the first poem of the sequence, where some of the places pinpointed on the Medway, such as Gillingham, Hoo church and Pynam, are probably only recognizable by someone with a very close knowledge of the locality. Similar things can be said of the poet’s treatment of places on the Thames Estuary in Part xiv, the final section. Landmarks on the route to Greenwich are named with minute precision, as if it is being navigated by a sailing ship: Cliffe, Greenhythe, Gravesend (ll. 1–​2), then Purfleet ‘to await the tide.’ (l. 5) Once it turns, ‘the arsenal’s great guns /​At Woolwich’ (ll. 19–​20) and the ‘ribcages’ (l. 22) of future naval vessels at Blackwall come into view. By adopting this defamiliarizing perspective, the poem encourages the reader to sail in imagination along this waterway at the heart of the British Empire –​noticing at the same time the symbolic implications of some of its features, which suggest the military operations that sustain that empire. The fact that the ‘map’ drawn in this closing section of the poem, though it corresponds in many ways with the terrain as it is known today, relates to another time, is made clear by the reference to the Isle of Dogs by an earlier, less-​known name: the isle of dykes (l. 28). Part xii of the poem affords another example of such historical geography. It imagines a journey made, we may infer, by Emma Hamilton by horse-​drawn carriage through the streets of London from Piccadilly to Holborn, with a child she planned to leave at the Foundling Hospital. The stages of the journey are so precisely described that we could follow them on a map: Piccadilly, Haymarket, Whitehall, Strand … But again, it would not be exactly the map that we would recognize today. There would be no Nelson’s Column at the centre of Trafalgar Square, because Hamilton’s journey takes place in a London from which that landmark is missing, apparently around four years before the Battle of Trafalgar. Nelson is not yet the hero of that Battle, though he is the hero of the Battle of the Nile, a celebrity of his time whose affair with Emma Hamilton is at odds with his now very public image. The story in this part of the poem is told by Hamilton and might therefore not

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be fair in its judgment of Nelson, but still it places their relationship in a rather dubious light. Hamilton has decided to hand over one twin child ‘to the mercy of the metropolis’ (l. 15) in order to avoid ‘a too scandalous parade’ (l. 5) of their domestic circumstances. After all, as she at least imagines, Nelson seems only to want one child, and that for perhaps selfish reasons: ‘To give him in his middle age a spyglass to the future.’ (l. 8) The foundling hospital ‘stands’ at Fleet ditch (l. 39); and the look of this part of London in ‘Imperium’ more recalls its description in Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad than it does the elegant street of Central London today. Davies’ description speaks of ‘how butchers empty lights /​And entrails into this trickle’ (ll. 34–​35) and of ‘cabbage tops, starved dogs, mildewed potatoes’ (l. 38) passed on the way to the hospital; hardly a very different scene from Pope’s account of ‘where Fleet-​ditch with disemboguing streams /​Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames /​The king of dykes! than whom no sluice of mud /​ with deeper sable blots the silver flood’ (Book the Second, ll. 247–​250). On the one hand, the features of Hamilton’s journey (if not necessarily the fact of it) are historically accurate; on the other, the streets of London at the turn of the nineteenth century, like so many of the poem’s ‘gravity centres’ (see Piatti et al, 181), symbolically suggest the dark underside of Empire, with which Nelson is implicitly associated. If ‘Imperium’ is regarded as a metaphorical ‘map,’ then in terms of the places it draws attention to, it is at once both very wide-​ranging and at times extremely detailed. On the one hand we have those filthy streets of Britain’s capital city and the sleepy backwater villages of North Norfolk (ii); on the other, we find a mention of Chesapeake Bay and Bengal, for instance (xiv), or of ‘our Indian colonies’ (v, l. 33), suggesting the distant reaches of the British Empire. It is as if the poet were ‘homing in’ on certain locations, creating a ‘map’ of a kind that was impossible before the days of digital technology and geographical information systems. Furthermore, many of the particular places on which she ‘zooms in’ would be considered too insignificant to feature on any actual map of the time that pretended to take in the vast scope of the Empire.3 Perhaps, then, it might be more appropriate to liken ‘Imperium’ to a Google Earth globe than to a traditional paper map. The poem moves in and out from a perspective that takes in not only the rivers of north and South America (ii, l.29), but even Arctic and Antarctic (ii, l, 26), to a kind of ‘street view’ in which we see the cobbles of Piccadilly and Haymarket (xii, l. 17), or the ‘cockleboats’ and ‘skerries’ on the waterways where Nelson learned to love boats (ii, l. 25). For this is not the dry kind of map in which locations are 3 See, for example, https://​www.themap​arch​ive.com/​prod​uct/​the-​brit​ish-​emp​ire-​in-​1800.

104 Ward merely denoted and remain as it were inert, but one which constantly brings them into relationship with other places, and by so doing implicitly questions some of the assumptions that lie behind conceptions of empire and images of imperial heroes. Let us consider this further in relation to Part ii of the poem, ‘Norfolk: Burnham Thorpe,’ which alludes to the village where Horatio Nelson was born. It contains a ravishingly evocative depiction of the Norfolk coast, with its ‘web of water,’ (ii, l. 1) ‘silk rain’ (l. 11) and ‘huge horizons;’ (l. 14) and with its lovingly named flora and fauna –​vetch, saxifrage, curlew, tern, eelgrass (ll. 1, 24, 26, 28). The poem is sympathetic here in its envisioning of the young Nelson (though he is not named) sensing the ‘sempiternal tug and flow’ (l. 17) of the tides, hearing the call of the sea, wondering where everything comes from and where it goes to, only dimly aware of far-​away rivers in unknown countries, ‘St Lawrence, Hudson, Rio San Juan.’ (l. 29) There is an innocence in this depiction of the future Admiral as a boy, one of many ‘Children raising their butterfly nets forever /​On the grass’ (ll. 7–​8) or ‘Bowling cartwheels down the dunes.’ (l. 22) If C.A. Bayly is correct, the nadir of the British Empire would roughly correspond with the time of Nelson’s boyhood, whereas the Napoleonic Wars, in which Nelson was to play a prominent naval role, enabled Britain to ‘consolidate a new Empire which was to provide the foundations of her world dominance in the Victorian age.’ (Bayly, 66) There might be a hint of this future development in Part ii of ‘Imperium,’ in its faint echo of a poem written in the mid-​ nineteenth century: Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach.’ But though written in the heyday of the expanding British Empire, that poem is an emblem not of pride but of disillusionment, in which the world proves to be not the child’s ‘land of dreams,’ (l. 31) as perhaps we might describe the Burnham Thorpe depicted in ‘Imperium,’ but merely ‘a darkling plain /​Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, /​Where ignorant armies clash by night.’ (ll. 35–​37) Hence the invitation in ‘Imperium’ to ‘Open this window /​And hang into the stinging air,’ (ll. 14–​15) echoing the invitation in ‘Dover Beach’ (‘Come to the window, sweet is the night-​air!’ l. 6), overlays the innocent excitement of Nelson’s boyhood with a suggestion of coming disillusionment amid the prosperity of the British Empire that Nelson would help to build. In a more obviously sinister way, in the final section of ‘Imperium’ referred to above, entitled ‘The Thames Estuary: Greenwich,’ the mention of ‘Laskars and Tonkinmen shivering in the sleet,’ (xiv, l. 14) far from their warm home, reminds the reader of what human misery lies behind this busy scene of ships loading and unloading. ‘Rum, saltpetre, sugar cane;’ (l. 9) ‘coffee, porcelain for London’s boudoirs;’ (l. 12) and in between, a synecdochic reference to the shameful trade on which all this prosperity is based: ‘the sickly scent /​Of

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bound humanity seeping from her hold.’ (ll. 10–​11) As the poem ‘homed in’ in Part ii on the time and place of Nelson’s boyhood, here it homes in on the time and place of the return of his body to England after the Battle of Trafalgar, with unmistakeable indications of all that a later age would recognize as unconscionable in the British Empire’s history. It is clear from these examples that history is inextricably intertwined with geography in ‘Imperium.’ So far, it is the geographical aspect of this intertwining which has been the main focus of the discussion. Let us now transfer our attention to the historical aspect. In Davies’ ‘mapping’ of historical events, the same principle appears to be at work as governs the selection of places on the poem’s geographical ‘map.’ It is not the French but the lesser-​known Neapolitan Revolution which is highlighted, for instance, while the story of more recognizable events is told from unexpected perspectives and in a kind of detail which somehow renders them strange and unknown. The Battle of Trafalgar, central to the Nelson story, is displaced by its presentation from the point of view of the French marksman aboard the Redoutable, not of Nelson aboard the Victory (Part xiii). It is also overshadowed by the infinitely greater attention paid to Nelson’s involvement with the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In treating of this involvement, Davies gives the French Revolution only a passing sidelong glance, via an abstruse reference to Marie Antoinette. She may be a kind of ghost presence in ‘Imperium,’ but she is not identified by name. Instead, she is invoked in Part vii by a reference to ‘A white-​haired sister’s /​Head remembered.’ (ll. 18–​19) Folklore has it that Marie Antoinette’s hair turned suddenly white when she was captured in her flight from the French revolutionaries; but this fragment of popular knowledge is distanced by its being ‘remembered’ by a less well-​known sister: Maria Carolina, the Queen of Naples (though she also is not mentioned by name, but only by her title). It was this sister who encouraged the brutal crushing of another, short-​lived and perhaps largely forgotten revolution, in Naples in 1799. Thus the events connected with the fall of the French monarchy are displaced, and attention is focused instead on those in another part of Europe –​in which, crucially, Nelson was directly, and disreputably, involved. Although he is not named, Nelson is identifiable by the titles that Emma Hamilton thought should have been bestowed on him: ‘Marquis Nile and Viscount Pyramid’ (vii, l.12) (see Herold, 124). It is to this person that the Queen of Naples addresses her order to show ‘Severity like your monarch’s to the Irish’ (l. 16) in punishing the rebels, and to treat ‘especially the females /​ … without pity.’ Nelson did indeed carry out these instructions ruthlessly, and was condemned by his biographer Robert Southey, among others, for doing so, as we shall discuss below. But the recommendation by Maria Carolina that

106 Ward he equal the severity of his own monarch’s treatment of the Irish suggests to the reader that it was the British Empire itself, in its dealings much closer to its centre, which provided the standard for the cruelty that Nelson showed. As this example illustrates, the historical ‘gravity centres’ of ‘Imperium,’ like its geographical ones, form a nexus in which Nelson and the British Empire are always implicated –​usually dishonourably. From the perspective of his famously memorable death at Trafalgar, as the leader whose spectacular courage, imagination and leadership brought about the greatest victory in British naval history; as the figure that tops the column in the focal square in London that bears the name of this victory; as the hero taken, for example by the narrator of C. S. Forester’s The African Queen, to be ‘the greatest soldier and the greatest sailor the world has ever seen’ (126) –​from this perspective, it is perhaps difficult to recover the complex figure of Nelson as he was known in his own time. While Nelson inspired enormous devotion in his men and was hero-​worshipped for some of his naval exploits in the course of his career, his abandonment of his wife and his ménage à trois with Lord and Lady Hamilton were not admired; and even Southey, who so often praised his nobility of character and sense of honour, protested against the cruelty of his execution of Francesco Carraciolo, Admiral of the Navy of the Neapolitan Republic. Davies draws on this biographer’s detailed description of this event to recover a damning piece of Nelson’s own history, and of the history of the British Navy which he represents, which his victory and death at the Battle of Trafalgar might have obscured. Southey makes it clear that in his view, the trial and execution of Carraciolo were unfair. By carefully detailing the course of events, he reveals not only that the Admiral was given no opportunity to prepare any defence against the accusations brought against him, having been ‘legally in arrest’ for scarcely an hour before his trial (153), but also that his execution was ordered by Nelson for five o’ clock on the same day as his arrest and only five hours after the end of the trial. The account of the order given by Nelson is chilling: Carraciolo was to be executed ‘on board the Sicilian frigate La Minerve, by hanging him at the fore-​yard-​arm till sunset, when the body was to be cut down and thrown into the sea.’ (153) When the condemned man appealed for a second trial, ‘Nelson made answer, that the prisoner had been fairly tried by the officers of his own country, and he could not interfere, forgetting that if he felt himself justified in ordering the trial and the execution, no human being could ever have questioned the propriety of his interfering on the side of mercy.’ (153) Caracciolo’s subsequent appeal that he might at least be shot rather than be forced to suffer the disgrace of hanging fell on equally deaf ears. Southey reports that ‘a faithful historian is called upon to pronounce a severe and unqualified condemnation of

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Nelson’s conduct [emphasis added].’ (154) Similar condemnation is extended to Lady Hamilton, who instead of putting in a good word for the unfortunate Caracciolo, came to watch his execution, ‘forget[ting] what was due to the character of her sex, as well of her country.’ (154) Certainly there is a suggestion that Nelson acted partly under her influence, but for Southey, giving in to ‘an infatuated attachment’ (154) is not so much an excuse as a further reason for censure. To add to all this, Southey does not spare Nelson’s reputation in his description of how this story ended. Instead, he provides the reader of his Life with a full account of the ghoulish events that followed the execution: The body was carried out to a considerable distance, and sunk in the bay, with three double-​headed shot, weighing two hundred and fifty pounds, tied to its legs. Between two and three weeks afterwards, when the king [Ferdinand iv] was on board the Foudroyant, a Neapolitan fisherman came to the ship, and solemnly declared that Caracciolo had risen from the bottom of the sea, and was coming as fast as he could to Naples, swimming half out of the water. Such an account was listened to like a tale of idle credulity. The day being fair, Nelson, to please the king, stood out to sea; but the ship had not proceeded far before a body was distinctly seen, upright in the water, and approaching them. It was soon recognized to be, indeed, the corpse of Caracciolo, which had risen and floated, while the great weights attached to the legs kept the body in a position like that of a living man. A fact so extraordinary astonished the king, and perhaps excited some feeling of superstitious fear akin to regret. He gave permission for the body to be taken on shore and receive Christian burial. southey 154–​155

In ‘Imperium,’ the account of these events appears in Part x, entitled ‘The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies: Naples Harbour.’ By this stage of the poem, it is abundantly clear that ‘Imperium’ incorporates a variety of voices. However, the speech of different people is not always marked out by punctuation, which makes it particularly noteworthy that Part x opens with inverted commas. The reader becomes clearly conscious here that there is a governing narratorial voice that disclaims responsibility for the quoted words. The two questions that open Part x, ‘The Prince Caracciolo asks for clemency? /​What outrage to propriety is this?’ (ll. 1–​2), are presented as those of someone other than the person telling the story, so that a gap opens up between them and this narrating voice. Their speaker is evidently the Nelson known from Southey’s biography, though his name is not given; and by the narratorial distancing device of direct

108 Ward speech, he is allowed to condemn himself out of his own mouth (as indeed he also does in Southey’s biography, on whose details and wording Davies draws). He concludes his rant as follows: No: he hangs as a common felon from the foreyard arm. This is my direction: no indulgence, no firing squad To confer legitimacy or status, no stay to allow Him to compose his mind, and, when it’s done, His body cut down, weighted, and thrown into the sea. (ll. 26–​30) A further distancing from Nelson’s conduct is achieved in ‘Imperium’ by the sequence that follows, which describes the cruelty of the mob’s revenge on the Neapolitan revolutionaries as they are led to the scaffold on the mainland, in the Piazza del Mercato (vii, l. 7) in Naples. A deeply troubling passage describes the hanging of Fonseca, a no less appalling affair than the execution of Caracciolo. There is no sparing of the repulsive details, many of them attested by historians (see Giglioli, 349–​353): dwarves ‘caper on her shoulders as she strangulates.’ (l. 49) Nelson’s responsibility for this particular execution was indirect; but Davies implies his involvement in it by the couplet which ends Part x. Separated by a line space from the account of Fonseca’s hanging, these lines, recalling the macabre story told by Southey, present a stark reminder of the execution for which Nelson was certainly directly responsible: Out in the bay, Caracciolo bears upright through the waters, His sockets staring at a transfixed king. Yet another element in Davies’ strategy in the presentation of these events, and Nelson’s part in them, is the order in which she tells them in relation to other parts of his story. The immediately preceding part of the poem refers to something that historically came later, some months after the execution of Caracciolo. It shows a person ‘At Sea: Off Monte Christi,’ writing to his lover Emma, whom he calls his ‘wife before God’ (ix, l. 12) and whom he anticipates seeing again ‘tomorrow’ (l. 17). His declaration, ‘no love is like mine towards you’ (ix, l. 18), sounds as if animated by the deepest and most honest feeling.4 We find no mention in Part iv of the fact, known from history, that the person speaking has a wife who is not Emma, and no hint that the person addressed

4 The passionate tone, with the repeated ‘Emma, Emma,’ (l. 11) accords with that of Nelson’s letters to Lady Hamilton, in which the writer seems to take delight in repeating her name.

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has a husband (Sir William Hamilton, Ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples). It is not this knowledge which compromises the expression of love, but the position of the declaration in the poem. It follows a description, in Part viii, by a disgusted observer (‘an Englishman,’ l. 8) of the vulgar absurdity of the palace in Palermo to which Nelson had brought the King and Queen of Naples, along with ‘his ambassador’s moll,’ (l. 28) and to which he is now returning. The observer is revolted by this woman’s shameless cruelty –​even hardened sailors ‘blenched to see her kiss the Turkish sword /​Foul with Jacobin blood’ (ll. 35–​36) –​and by her increasingly impudent, arrogant sway over Nelson. He watches with contempt as she grows ‘Every day fatter and more incongruous than a bullock.’ (l. 30) Though the love-​letter belongs to a time which historically came later than the execution of the Neapolitan rebels, it is recounted in the poem before those shocking events are detailed. The result is to cast over the account of Nelson’s brutality in Naples the additionally contemptible shadow of his ‘infatuated attachment’ (Southey, 154) to a woman presented by the observer in Palermo as repulsive. As I have mentioned, Nelson is not directly named in the poem’s account of events in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In an interview for the Royal Literary Fund, asked by Julia Copus who the central figure of ‘Imperium’ is, Davies does not say that it actually is Nelson; instead she says it is ‘a figure like Nelson [emphasis added].’ However, the reader who follows closely Davies’ ‘mapping’ of places and events will surely want to protest that the poem is at least partly about Nelson himself; it is a questioning of his status as one of Britain’s greatest national heroes. It tells, in disguised but recognizable form, the story not just of his public but also of his personal life, revealing the way that they intertwined and pointing to some aspects of his conduct which sit very uncomfortably with the heroic legend. Nelson’s Column is conspicuously absent from the poem, as we saw in discussing the ‘map’ of London’s streets in Part xii. Davies’ treatment of the Neapolitan Revolution, which is one of the poem’s most important historical ‘gravity centres,’ might well make the reader wonder whether the Column should ever have been raised. Since the publication of Imperium, there have been calls for it actually to be removed5 –​for 5 In 2017 the journalist Afua Hirsch wrote a provocative article for The Guardian entitled ‘Toppling statues? Here’s why Nelson’s column should be next..’ Three years later, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, The Nelson Society attempted to refute the tenets of Hirsch’s article in a position statement on the question of Nelson’s attitude to the slave trade, declaring that there were no grounds at all to support the journalist’s allegations. However, this defence does not read particularly convincingly. Even C.A. Bayly’s Atlas of the British Empire, published in 1989 and hence in a time still largely innocent of such debates, notes that Nelson was ‘among the most vigorous opponents of William Wilberforce.’ (83)

110 Ward reasons also not ignored in the poem. Nelson’s acceptance of the slave trade is suggested indirectly in connection with other of the poem’s unusual historical-​ geographical foci. One of these is Merthyr Tydfil at the time of a visit really made by Nelson, to the Cyfarthfa ironworks in 1802 (Part iv). This is the one section of the poem in which Nelson is actually named. Though the slave-​trade is not directly mentioned here, its spectre haunts the place of the visit, since it was a former owner of slave-​trading ships who in 1765 bought the land on the bank of the River Taff from which the coal would come for the Cyfarthfa furnaces (‘The Melting Pot’). Even earlier in ‘Imperium,’ in the immediately preceding part of the poem, the same spectre has also appeared. The unnamed writer of a letter to the Admiralty in Whitehall commends his services on the basis of previous ‘exertions, in the name of country, /​When stationed on the Leeward Isles.’ (iii, ll. 1–​2) Evidently this writer is not someone who asks himself any moral questions about the sources of Britain’s wealth; he defends ‘those products /​Rightfully won from our plantations.’ (ll. 5–​6) There is sufficient detail, in the reference to finding it ‘perplexing’ that his ‘letters /​Offering service’ to the Admiralty ‘meet with no answer,’ (ll. 14–​15) to link this with the real experience of Nelson, who did indeed find it difficult to get another commission after his time ‘stationed on the Leeward Isles.’ It was here, on the island of Nevis –​headquarters of the slave trade in the West Indies –​that he met his wife, the wealthy widow of a plantation owner. In the interview with Julia Copus referred to above, Davies says that the ‘figure like Nelson’ represents ‘Imperium himself.’ Through this figure the poet is enabled to show many aspects of the Empire’s functioning: how it treats women, ‘how it treats its children, how it treats its sailors, its men, how it treats those that it dominates, even how it treats its chefs.’ Many times in this discussion of ‘Imperium’ it has been shown that Nelson and the British Empire are inextricably bound together in all of the poem’s geographical-​historical ‘gravity centres.’ Undoubtedly this is true with regard to the question of the slave trade. However, the matter of Nelson’s, and the British Empire’s, involvement in that trade is only obliquely addressed in ‘Imperium.’ Still obliquely, but perhaps somewhat more obviously, the poem draws attention to the issue of oppressed groups closer to the heart of the empire. In Part i, in Chatham Dockyard, where the great sailing ships are built, the prentice sawyer calls out ‘O Lord have mercy on us,’ complaining that it is ‘Upon my back the wooden walls are built.’ (i, l. 45) In Part iv, the foundry worker David Davies from Merthyr Tydfil tells of similarly painful work, the ‘hot work’ (l. 28) of making guns. Thus, though ‘Imperium’ contains some disturbing reminders of the shameful trade in which the British Empire was involved, it also suggests that

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the people ‘on whose backs’ that empire was built were not only those in faraway colonies, but also the ordinary workers of the dockyards and foundries, with their ‘women gone rotten from dragging coal trolleys.’ (iii, l. 43) It is perhaps one of Nelson’s few saving graces in the poem that he seems to recognize this (unless his words are to be taken as a mere propaganda stunt): David Davies remembers his saying, ‘You’re the Titans of the battleground, /​My heartsmiths, dragons of the wooden walls.’ (ll. 57–​58) David Davies speaks, innocently, of the ‘fine treat’ (l. 45) of Nelson’s visit, when ‘the Guests and Crayshays’ (the families who really did own the Cyfarthfa ironworks) ‘did fireworks up in their parklands /​And those that weren’t working could go in and watch.’ (ll. 45–​47) His recollection ‘We got cake, too, and extra measures of beer for each family’ (l. 48) seems to provide a faint reminiscence of Marie Antoinette, even before Part vii calls this figure more evidently to mind. For the consort of the last King of France is legendarily, though according to Antonia Fraser entirely unjustly, supposed to have suggested ‘Let them eat cake’ when told of the hunger of the Paris poor (Fraser xv). The echo in the foundry worker’s words is surely not accidental: for behind his account of the celebrations for Nelson’s visit the reader senses another, narratorial voice questioning the workings of an almost feudal class system, in which the oppression of one group by another seems as obvious as it was in the French Empire with which the British Empire was engaged at the time in a power struggle. The reference to ‘the nightly burning mountain’ and the ‘back-​to-​back houses’ in the place ‘where the salmon used to rise’ (ll. 40–​42) hints at the pitiful devastation of a landscape and way of life, the price paid to fuel the foundries that made Nelson’s favourite cannon balls. In the interview mentioned above, Copus asks whether ‘Imperium’ has a central consciousness in the manner of Tiresias in Eliot’s The Waste Land, or the river in Alice Oswald’s poem Dart. If there is a voice, or consciousness, behind all the many voices that can be heard in the poem, it is that questioning overall ‘narrator,’ ironically distanced from the quoted voices, who ‘homes in’ on little-​known places and events, bringing them into unfamiliar and uncomfortable association, probing not only the life and legend of one particular imperial hero, but also the nature of the British Empire and the nature of empire in general. This process goes on throughout the poem, until it returns at the end to a setting very close to that of the beginning: the Thames Estuary and Greenwich, where the body of Nelson was finally rowed in December 1805 to lie in state in the Painted Hall of the Royal Naval College before being taken in ceremonious procession along the Thames to the funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral.

112 Ward It is notable that ‘Imperium’ depicts not the ‘Grand River Procession’ on January 8, 1806 from Greenwich to Nelson’s funeral, but the journey to Greenwich. In this depiction, no mention is made of the lurid story of how Nelson’s body was preserved in alcohol so as to try and ensure that it did not decompose during the three months of its voyage from Trafalgar to London. For this is the grandeur of empire returning to its heart. In its concluding two lines, ‘In on the tide rushes empire /​Life-​chord to Europe’s dark heart,’ (xiv, ll. 37–​38) the poem unmistakably recalls Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, whose story begins (or ends) in almost exactly the place where ‘Imperium’ concludes: in the Thames estuary. Here Marlow, aboard the Nellie, ‘wait[s]‌for the turn of the tide,’ (27) just as in ‘Imperium’ they wait at Purfleet for the Thames to ‘lift herself upon the Atlantic.’ (xiv, l. 16) It is here that Marlow, as he looks out from the Nellie at London’s ‘brooding gloom’ (27) –​a repeated motif of the opening paragraphs of the novella –​ remarks: ‘And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ (Conrad, 29) When the main narrator of Heart of Darkness mentions some of ‘the great knights-​errant of the sea’ who have set out from London, carrying ‘the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires,’ (29) Nelson is not included in the list, though Conrad evidently admired him, speaking in the concluding paragraphs of The Mirror of the Sea of his ‘passionate and gentle greatness’ as an emblem of ‘the national spirit,’ ‘exalt[ing] the glory of our nation.’ (329) ‘Imperium,’ however, follows the lead not from this, but from the remark in Heart of Darkness which it echoes in its final two lines, countering visions of ‘national spirit,’ ‘great men’ and national glory with its image of London as ‘Europe’s dark heart.’ It is an ironic, sad voice which reports at the end of ‘Imperium’ on the ‘stilts of slime’ (xiv, l. 28) along the waterfront and on the ‘anvils /​Chorusing out God’s offices: wealth and toil.’ (ll. 29–​30) And it is an ironic, bitterly and terrifyingly experienced voice which says of the place where the rowing stops: ‘This is the dead meridian of the world, /​Measure which puts us at the centre of all that is.’ (ll. 32–​33) Before his funeral, Nelson’s body, as I have mentioned, lay in state in the Painted Hall at Greenwich. But in the poem we pass beyond this focus on the one particular person who was Britain’s greatest naval hero to contemplate something both more general and utterly terrifying in its abandonment of the human and personal: ‘Massive /​The territories hang in painted halls.’ (ll. 34–​ 35) The verb ‘hang’ suggests tapestries or paintings –​but really the Old Royal Naval College has only one Painted Hall, and it is not hung with tapestries. Instead, the walls and ceiling themselves are painted with allegorical and mythological celebrations of the British monarchy and British naval power. In

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‘Imperium,’ then, both the plural form and the lower-​case letters of ‘painted halls’ are significant. They open out the perspective of the poem, so that the forges and anvils along the waterfront become (perhaps with a nod, not for the first time in the poem, to William Blake) the timeless and terrible symbols, not just of one empire, but of all the dirt, exploitation, violence and arrogance of imperium in general. ‘O Britannia, o gentes,’ the third line from the end of the poem (l. 36), suggests this conflation. In the interview with Julia Copus mentioned earlier, Davies talks about the enormous amount of research that went into the writing of ‘Imperium:’ histories of the British Navy, where materials were sourced from, naval vocabulary of the period, how the Navy was fed, how punishment was meted out, Nelson’s Letters, memoirs from the period, biographies of Lady Hamilton, European history of the time, history of the Two Sicilies, and so on and so on. The reader who treats the poem seriously needs to follow the lines of this research, too, plotting a mental ‘map’ of the times and possibly revising his or her own conceptions. Yet ‘Imperium’ frustrates any easy identification of the events and people referred to in the poem, so that the reader is forced into a kind of detective activity, following up abstruse clues like that of Marie Antoinette’s white hair. Events are not presented in their historical order, creating a no doubt deliberate sense of bewilderment in the reader as to who is fighting whom and to what purpose. Dates are not given; the name Lord Nelson is mentioned only once in the whole poem; his lover is referred to only by her first name, Emma. Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, who might possibly be recognized by those who followed the re-​visiting of the failed Neapolitan revolution around its 200th anniversary in 1999, appears only as Fonseca. Davies, it seems, does not want the process of historical ‘re-​mapping’ to be easy for the reader. In concluding this chapter, I shall consider why this might be. I have already suggested that Davies wants the reader not only to follow her defamiliarizing ‘mapping’ of the life of Nelson against the background of the British Empire in his time, but also to look beyond it to the idea of empire in general. Both those ends are served by not making the identification of people and events too easy. But there may be another end that is served by Davies’ method. To see this, we need to return to the foundry worker and the prentice sawyer and take account of the fact that many distinctions are afforded to them which are not afforded to any other figure in ‘Imperium,’ despite the fact that it seems to be Nelson’s story, not theirs, which threads its way through the poem. The sections of ‘Imperium’ in which they appear have their own separate titles, singled out by italics, within the whole: The Prentice Sawyer’s Lament in Part i and David Davies, foundry worker (Part iv). What is more, they are the only people in the poem to appear in any of its titles, which otherwise

114 Ward identify only spatial locations. Each of them is allowed to speak in his own words, rather than being spoken about; indeed, as mentioned earlier, the prentice sawyer is the first ‘I’-​figure to appear in the poem. Their way of speaking has lyrical qualities which are not to be found in other parts of ‘Imperium.’ The Prentice Sawyer’s Lament even has stanzaic structure, a refrain (O Lord have mercy on us) and a regular pattern of end-​rhyme. David Davies’ colloquial dialect, though different from the speech of the prentice sawyer, has an equally poetic quality to it: as if these ordinary people are endowed with a gift of speech that the powerful do not possess. By subtly distinguishing and honouring two unknown figures, the poet upturns the social order that condemns them to a place among the many anonymous ‘men like insects /​Day and night beneath the chimneys.’ (iv, ll. 36–​37) There is one other way, however, in which these two figures seem to me to be importantly linked. To make this clear, I must refer to another poet, one much admired by Hilary Davies, who like her was an Anglo-​Welsh Londoner, and who has much else in common with her, including an interest in ships and shipbuilding: David Jones. In the Preface to his book-​length poem The Anathemata (1952), Jones asks this rather startling test question: ‘If the poet writes the word ‘wood,’ what are the chances that the Wood of the Cross will be evoked?’ (23) Jones felt, at the time of writing, that the answer to this question was probably ‘none,’ and took this to be a sign of the way that language has, so to speak, ‘lost its memory.’ It is worth pondering then the fact that in ‘Imperium,’ published half a century later, ‘the poet,’ in this case Hilary Davies, has written the word ‘wood’ –​twice, repeating the phrase ‘the wooden walls,’ once in Part I and once in Part iv, to refer to the ships that both the prentice sawyer and the foundry worker by painful labour help to build and equip. We read in ‘The Prentice Sawyer’s Lament:’ Stand here: learn how the blood runs into pain, Arms up and back, up, back, until the muscles Are their own cat-​o-​nine-​tails trained O Lord, have mercy on us. (i ll. 35–​38) This image of suffering draws into itself both the sawyer and the sailor flogged at sea and unites them both in an image of the crucified Christ, so that the ‘wooden walls’ built on the back of the prentice sawyer cannot but evoke ‘the Wood of the Cross.’ I would argue that it may be this which is at the heart of the poem’s vision, and which helps to explain why Davies does not make the identification of Nelson and the British Empire obvious. Through its Latin title, the poem places

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that empire in questioning relation, not only to another particular though earlier one (the Roman), but also to the whole concept expressed by the word imperium. But by the end of the poem, the cumulative effect of its revisionist strategies, including the withholding of dates, is to create a ‘map’ on which the chief landmark and orientation point is not Greenwich’s ‘dead meridian,’ (l.32) nor indeed any other omphalos that the proud spirit of imperialism might care to make its ‘centre of all that is.’ (l. 33) Instead, it is –​the Cross, with which the suffering of the anonymous, oppressed and overlooked is associated. A daring aspect of Davies’s poem, then, may be, finally, to evoke a subtle reminder of the medieval Hereford Mappa Mundi, in which Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, with the Crucifixion figured immediately above it, are at the exact centre of the map (Brotton, 56–​58).

Works Cited

Davies, Hilary. Imperium. London: Enitharmon Press, 2005. Arnold, Matthew. ‘Dover Beach.’ A Book of English Poetry, collected by G.B. Harrison. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950. Bayly, C.A, ed. Atlas of the British Empire. London/​New York: Hamlyn Publishing Group 1989. https://​arch​ive.org/​deta​ils/​atl​asof​brit​ishe​m00c​aba/​page/​n7/​mode/​2up. Accessed 31.01.2022. Brotton, Jerry. Great Maps: The World’s Masterpieces Explored and Explained. London etc.: Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2014. https://​arch​ive.org/​deta​ils/​great-​maps-​the -​ wor ​ l ds- ​ m aste ​ r pic​ e cs-​ explo​ red-​ a nd-​ explai​ n ed- ​ j erry- ​ b rot ​ ton- ​ 2 014. Accessed 31.01.2022. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Conrad, Joseph. The Mirror of the Sea. Internet Archive Ebook digitalized from the 1906 Harper edition. https://​arch​ive.org/​deta​ils/​mirror​ofse​a00c​onr/​page/​n5/​mode/​2up? view=​thea​ter. Accessed 1.08.2022. Cross, Alan. ‘Nelson and the Slave Trade: A Position Statement by The Nelson Society.’ 15th June, 2020. https://​nel​son-​soci​ety.com/​nel​son-​and-​the-​slave-​trade-​a-​posit​ion -​statem​ent-​by-​the-​nel​son-​soci​ety/​. Accessed 31.01.2022. Davies, Hilary. Interview with Julia Copus. Royal Literary Fund Writers Aloud series. 14 December, 2018. https://​www.rlf.org.uk/​showc​ase/​wa_​ep​isod​e47. Accessed 31.01.2022. Forester, C.S. The African Queen. London: Penguin, 1969. Fraser, Antonia. Marie Antoinette. London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 2001. Giglioli, Constance H.D. Naples in 1799: An Account of the Revolution of 1799 and of the Rise and Fall of the Parthenopean Republic. London: John Murray, 1903.

116 Ward Herold, J. Christopher. Bonaparte in Egypt. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Hirsch, Afua. ‘Toppling statues? Here’s why Nelson’s column should be next.’ The Guardian, 22 August, 2017. https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​commen​tisf​ree/​2017/​aug/​ 22/​toppl​ing-​stat​ues-​nels​ons-​col​umn-​sho​uld-​be-​next-​slav​ery. Accessed 31.01.2022. Jones, David. The Anathemata. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. ‘The Melting Pot. The Heritage and Culture of Merthyr Tydfil.’ 14 December, 2018. https://​www.mert​hyr-​hist​ory.com. Accessed 31.01.2022. Nelson, Horatio. The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, vol. 1, 1814. Project Gutenberg Ebook. https://​www.gutenb​erg.org/​ebo​oks/​15469. Accessed 31.01.2022. Piatti, Barbara, Hans Rudolf Bär, Anne-​Kathrin Reuschel, Lorenz Hurni, William Cartwright. ‘Mapping Literature: Towards a Geography of Fiction.’ In Cartography and Art. Ed. William Cartwright, Georg Gartner, Antje Lehn. Springer 2009. Pope, Alexander. The Dunciad. First published 1728. https://​arch​ive.org/​deta​ils/​dun​ ciad​with​note​s00p​ope. Accessed 31.01.2022. Rossetto, Tania. ‘Theorizing maps with literature.’ Progress in Human Geography 2014, Vol. 38 (4) 513–​530. doi: 10.1177/​0309132513510587 phg.sagepub.com. Ryan, Marie-​ Laure. ‘Cognitive maps and the construction of narrative space.’ In: Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed D. Herman. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003, 214–​242. Rybicka, Elżbieta. ‘Maps: From Metaphor to Critical Topography.’ Teksty Drugie 2015:2, Visual Literacy 29–​48. Trans. Jan Szelągiewicz. Southey, Robert. The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson. London: j.m. Dent and Co., 1906. First published 1814. https://​arch​ive.org/​deta​ils/​cu319​2402​7919​160. Accessed 31.01.2022. Tally, Robert T. Spatiality. London: Routledge, 2012. The British Empire in 1800. The Map Archive. https://​www.themap​arch​ive.com/​prod​ uct/​the-​brit​ish-​emp​ire-​in-​1800/​. Accessed 31.01.2022. Wheeler, Sara. A Point of View: Off the Map. bbc Radio 4, 18 December, 2020. https://​ www.bbc.co.uk/​sou​nds/​play/​m000q​8pj. Accessed 31.01.2022.

chapter 6

Mapping and Unmapping the World

Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky versus Unmapping Memory. Looking for Hildegard of Bingen by Desmond Graham Olga Kubińska and Wojciech Kubiński I almost found her four hundred years away and sea and land between us where a small tower grew and another tower atop it

desmond graham, Unmapping Memory. Looking for Hildegard of Bingen

Poetry has a long spatio-​temporal history and its links with cartography are equally protracted. Burkhardt Wolf traces the history of literary cartography on the basis of the literary maps of the voyages of Odysseus1 but the liaison between literature –​including prose fiction, drama or poetry –​and mapping, cartography or atlases also has a long history, adopting different forms, either multimodal or focused on the verbal mode, such as travel literature or travel writing. Maps, with their intimate and long-​lasting consanguinity with literature, seem to be a mode of writing, of circumscribing the relations between the world of ‘first space’ and its literary representations. In turn, mapping, when juxtaposed with cartography, harmonizes with contemporary literary research, particularly of the feminist persuasion.2 Indeed, it seems that it was the feminist and gender approach to research on geography, cartography, space and place –​both in historical, diachronic perspective and (post)modernistic 1 Burkhardt Wolf, ‘Muses of Cartography: Charting Odysseus from Homer to Joyce,’ trans. E.A. Beeson, in Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories, Genre, ed. Anders Engberg Pedersen (Cambridge, Mass., London, UK: mit Press, 2017), 143–​172. 2 Monika Glosowitz, ‘Mapowanie sieci. Przyczynek do poetyckiej kartografii feministycznej,’ in Mapy świata, mapy ciała. Geografia i cielesność w literaturze, ed. Aleksandra Jastrzębska, (Kraków: Libron & Authors, 2014), 34.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004520288_008

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mode –​which underscored the role of space and geography in fashioning the patriarchal order in the Western hemisphere over the ages, as well as in the discernment of masculinist patterns in the social space of the most recent times. The research of Doreen Massey seems to be crucial here since it emphasizes the already noted above ‘interconnectedness of space, place and gender […] within geography.’ In her study on the role of women in shaping social aspect of space, or ‘patriarchal gender relations,’ she tried to analyse the attempts made by women to subvert these relations and to initiate moves aimed at their obliteration. Furthermore, while considering the social and gender relations in space in the selected regions of the United Kingdom, Massey opted for a strongly anti-​essentialist approach, i.e. ‘variable construction of gender relations in different local/​cultural space/​places;’ as both spaces and places are gendered and ‘reflect and affect the ways in which gender is constructed and understood.’3 In addition, the ‘cartographic turn,’ although also a relatively fresh development with roots in the twentieth century,4 by definition ‘translated’ a three and four-​dimensional world into a two-​dimensional sheet and contributed to the perception or rather the illusion of cognition of the world (space) in terms of a process, a continuum unfolding in time, thereby combining space and time. In this context it should not be forgotten that researchers defined relations between time and space in different ways, either highlighting or, conversely, subverting the dichotomy between fluctuating time (process) and constant space (stasis), for place and space are not stable notions, impervious to any redefinition; on the contrary, they undergo constant modification, participating in an ongoing debate, either localizing or instigating it. But reflections on space were not always unfolding in the context of time. Tuan’s approach emphasizes that space ‘allows movement [….] place is pauses; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.’5 Tuan assessed the impact of individual human experience (intellectual and emotional) on the process of thinking as being much stronger than the social aspect of space. He stressed the necessity to recognize the influence of sensory perceptions on feelings related to space, and at the same time acknowledged the possibility for individual achievement of ‘a sense of direction’ via 3 Cf. Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 2001 (1994)), 178, 187. 4 Anders Engberg Pedersen, ed., Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories, Genre (Cambridge, Mass., London, England: mit Press, 2017), 3. 5 Yi-​Fu Tuan, Space and Place. The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1977 (2008)), 6.

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relocation from place to place.6 Pierre Nora, while appreciating the social function of place, glorified its potential –​social and historical –​to shape ‘places of memory’ and their role in the construction of collective memory, as well as in the provocation and appeasement of ideological conflicts.7 It seems essential to note here that Tuan’s Space and Place was first published in 1977, i.e. before the sociological turn in the humanities; Massey in For Space, published three decades later, proposes a reconceptualization of the notion of space as a dynamic phenomenon subject to constant change. Massey claims that this notion had been too often taken for granted as simply ‘imagination of space as a surface on which we are placed.’ Yet, she does not postulate a fundamental revolution in thinking but rather proposes to rethink ‘the obvious,’ i.e. ‘the imagination of the imagination of the spatial and the imagination of the political,’ or the separation of abstract space as a function of time (in history) from ‘meaningful, lived and everyday’ place. Instead, Massey proposes to assume that space is a ‘product of interrelations […] the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity […] always in process, as never a closed system.’ And simultaneously, she rejects the thesis of the predictability of the future and its inevitability; however, this is not tantamount to an adoption of the premise of the replicability of a continuum of development and progress. Hence, the thesis of space as a ‘product of relations,’ and simultaneous necessity of its ‘multiplicity.’ Massey rejects the Foucauldian notion of space as ‘the dead, the fixed,’ instead adopting the perspective borrowed from sociology of space as ‘the space and places through which, in the negotiation of relations within multiplicities, the social is constructed.’8 Such juxtaposition of the phenomena of place and space perceived as notions which are ambiguous, un-​fixed, ‘alive,’ impinging on the thinking about the individual, about social, political, ideological relations –​both in terms of a reflection of these discussions and active participation in them –​facilitates the analysis of literary texts in a manner parallel to the way it defines both of these notions, localizing them relative to history and geography. Thus, the tradition of linking literature, maps and space has an old provenance, albeit from the very outset it was marked by an apprehension of a fundamental inadequacy of maps as a determinant of correlates essential for the characters, for the addressees. However, even before the final demise of the colonial and postcolonial mapping of the world, in one of the most poignant 6 Tuan, Space and Place, 12. 7 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire.’ Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7–​24, http://​www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​2928​520. 8 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: sage, 2008), 7, 10, 8, 10–​11, 11, 13.

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literary intimations that such correlates could be determined, with a simultaneous subversion of the faith in achieving this aim, Marlowe from the Heart of Darkness speculates: Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, 'When I grow up I will go there.' The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven't been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour's off. [emphasis is ours –​owk]9 Marlowe in this short account outlines both spatio-​temporal relations –​end of nineteenth century (time of childhood) and the complementary nature of the world functioning within spatial relations (non-​blank vs. ‘blank spaces on the earth’) and temporal relations then-​now (‘when I was a little chap’ vs. ‘I will go there,’ vs. ‘I shall not try. The glamour’s off’). The collision of the urge to know, to mark out new points on the map, with the spell-​breaking of the very process of cognition seems to subvert not only the relationship of the world with its graphical representation, but also the relationship between the map reader and the world, of which the map is a representation. Hence, the map is both a promise and its rejection, since reaching complementary –​relative to those on the maps –​points offers disenchantment, not fulfilment. Consequently, what is subverted here is the trust in the map as a representation. In defence against this phenomenon we may resort to the opinion formulated by Glosowitz that the metaphor of cartography ‘recouped within the philosophy of feminism,’ may yet demobilize ‘the danger of colonial politics’10 but a residue of distrust towards the map remains. Geography, cartography has never been gender neutral. While Marlowe –​a white male –​could easily talk about his boyhood dreams to become a cartographer (this is, after all, what the desire to fill out empty spaces on maps boils down to), and about the disappointments associated with the fulfilment of such desires, for women cartography had for a long time been a ‘hostile domain’ from which they had been excluded. As feminist researchers noted

9 10

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: A Joseph Contrad Trilogy (My Books Classics, 2019), Kindle. Monika Glosowitz, ‘Mapowanie sieci,’ 34.

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only three decades ago, exclusion of women from the domain of geography directly impinges on ‘what counts as legitimate geographical knowledge and who can produce such knowledge.’11 Women had long been excluded from geographical societies, their academic contributions were rarely published in geographical periodicals, and their role as cartographers had been neglected. Cartography was one of those areas marked by ‘masculinity.’ Even when at the end of the twentieth century the number of women involved in cartography increased, Rose nevertheless claimed that ‘both men and women are caught in a complex series of (historically and geographically specific) discursive positions, relations and practices.’ From this perspective Marlowe, penetrating Africa in his journeys, was guided by the coordinates of Kurtz’s masculinity –​conquest, subjugation and appropriation of space (utilising in the endeavour both ivory and local women). And even if we accept after Rose that not every man, i.e. white heterosexual male, will in an equal measure satisfy the requirement of ‘specific geographical masculinities’12 nor will each attempt undertaken by men or women to fit into ‘discursive positions’ by overcoming the requirement of masculinity, be a neutral event. Such is the case of Atlas of Remote Islands. Fifty Island I have not visited and never will by Judith Schalansky.13 It seems that in the globalized world cognition and experiencing of space through mapping expresses a profound longing for the anchoring of the individual in spatio-​temporal points of reference, scaled through maps. We encounter precisely such a paradoxical (since it is à rebours) fulfilment of this longing in the recent (at least relative to the Heart of Darkness) graphic narrative by Schalansky, her literary debut as a multimodal author, for Schalansky is the author of the text, illustrations and the graphic design. Atlas is a representation of the perception of literature as an atlas: ‘All the islands in this atlas are depicted on a scale of 1: 125000’ and 1: 200000 in the case of the Pocket Atlas. Schalansky notices a direct correlation between the first and the second space, that is the literary space of her cartographic narration. Maps are referential, they are closely linked with points in the first space, and these, in turn, are anchored in historical time through political events, ideology and anthropology of space. In the Introduction Schalansky declares:

11 Cf. Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography. The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 9. 12 Rose, Feminism and Geography, 16, 19. 13 Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands. Fifty Islands I have not visited and never will, transl. Christine Lo. (New York: Penguin Random House USA, 2010).

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The first atlas in my life was called Atlas für jedermann (Everyman’s Atlas). I didn’t realize then that my atlas –​like every other –​was committed to an ideology. Its ideology was clear from its map of the world, carefully positioned on a double-​page spread so that the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic fell on two separate pages. On this map there was no wall dividing the two German countries, no Iron Curtain; indeed, there was the blinding white, impassable edge of the page. That, in turn, the provisional nature of the gdr was depicted by the mysterious letters sbz (Sowjetische Besatzungszone, ‘Soviet-​occupied territory’) in the atlases used in West German schools was something I found out later […] Ever since then, I have not trusted political world maps. […] They grow out of date quickly and give barely any information apart from who is currently running which scrap of colour.14 Declared distrust for political maps (boundaries, names, demarcation lines, place names subject to ideological strictures) does not affect the structure of the Atlas: each and every island represented here is rendered as precisely as the cartographic grids. Apart from the already emphasized standardization of the map scales, presented on the odd pages and marked by basic reference points (visual-​textual notation), on the even pages we find consistent verbal-​visual notation which includes graphically arranged data and reference points: the name, the location, the population, the distances to selected points in space and time. The spatial and temporal axes are disciplined: they are indicated by a yellow broken line: ‘12˚ 18’ S /​168˚ 50’ E Tikopia Santa Cruz Islands (Solomonen Islands) 4.7 km2 I 1,200 inhabitants,’ the spatial data: ‘210 km from Vanikoro, 1100 km from Fiji and 154 km from Takuu’ corresponds visually with temporal data: ‘1606 discovered by Pedro Fernández de Quirós; 1928/​29 Raymond Firth’s first held expedition, Dec. 2002 devastated by Cyclone Zoe.’15 The anthropological dimension of the notation locates space in the culture of human civilization; Schalansky presents a strongly ideologized notation, observations are carried out from a European-​centred perspective: here we encounter a mode of sociology of space: the narrative marks out points of reference by specifying types of breeding or farming, as well as the rules for survival on the Island. Furthermore, the Atlas, unlike Pocket Atlas, seems to constitute an autoreferential microworld: just as one page must contain the 14

Judith Schalansky, Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands. Fifty Islands I have not visited and never will. Trans. Christine Lo (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 13. 15 Schalansky, Pocket Atlas, 206.

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whole memory of the Island, i.e. it must fit into the allocated space, so the Island must accommodate at the most 1200 inhabitants: the production of space is self-​contained: ‘The newborn is laid on its face to suffocate. There are no funerals for these children: they have not participated in life on Tikopia.’16 Political affiliations, i.e. assignment of each island to a specific country, ideological and gender affiliations, do not shield the Atlas from the already mentioned distrust. Referentiality of the narration was sufficiently strong to facilitate the hypertextual mediatization of the Atlas. Available in the Net is A Companion Guide to Atlas of Remote Islands. The Hypertext is available in a printed version after prior editing of the cover, and may serve as a supplement to Schalansky’s Atlas, reinforcing its ‘referential claims’ and, consequently, the maps and the legend referring to ‘the first space.’ Hence, a similar correspondence between literature, literary non-​fiction, hypertext and the first space resulted in a new dimension and orderliness. This, however, did not free the narration from extratextual (and inevitably subjective) verification. Selection of data is open to anthropological analysis, but it may also lead to the question whether it has been really liberated from postcolonial readings. Perception of the islands, of the traditions of their inhabitants, political affiliations (an unpopulated Raoul Island, which constitutes a territory administered by New Zealand), is perceived exclusively as a space of colonization: the only ten inhabitants of the island are employees of the Department of Conservation (doc) sent for year-​long stays on the island, during which they are backed up by volunteers coming for shorter stretches of time. The ontological status of the island is construed exclusively through a doc advertisement aimed at recruiting volunteers, an ad which represents the perspective of a stranger –​a force colonizing the alien space, prepared for brutal collisions with an alien environment: ‘Applications can be sent to: Department of Conservation, po Box 474, Warkworth, New Zealand.’ In consequence, a message potentially capable of bringing alien space closer to the outsiders, becomes an exponent of colonial rules imposed by an outside authority and may only indirectly address internal reference points: ‘[…] an unusual subtropical ecosystem […] The area is actively volcanic […] The terrain is very steep and rugged,’ the data are, however, presented exclusively in reference to an external observer, invading the alien space. Consequently, construction of the world is represented in the text via contrasts relative to the observers’ own experience (‘unusual,’ ‘challenges to living,’ ‘volunteers must be cautiously adventurous’).17

16 Schalansky, Pocket Atlas, 209. 17 Schalansky, Pocket Atlas, 192–​193.

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The mores of Tikopia, ostensibly presented in an objective manner, are really sifted through a postcolonial grid which imposes on the description the perspective of a newcomer/​observer. Without doubt, Atlas is an emanation of the conviction about the usefulness of maps and mapping in the construction of meanings pertaining to the physical world, meanings rooted in falsifiable data –​correlates provided by physical geography, history and politics. A rather different approach to the relation between literature and history is proposed by Desmond Graham in his newest, twelfth collection of poetry Unmapping Memory. Looking for Hildegard of Bingen: I claim no originality or novelty in wishing to pursue her. I come late and unimportantly onto the scene mapped out in detail by historians, theologians, musicologists, feminists and other dedicated scholars. My purpose and, with it of course, my defence, is that if my poems bring the reader once more to a well-​known story, that would be good; if they introduce the reader to an unknown story, that may be even better.18 Such declaration would be significant in the context of the referentiality of the eponymous heroine of the cycle who evokes feministic anchoring, particularly since the historical Hildegard was characterized by noteworthy social and ideological ‘activism,’ especially prone to be interpreted in feminist categories. Her native territory, precise geographical reference points and temporality –​ close affiliation to the hegemonistic ideology of the time –​all the more so situate her in the context of feminist philosophy. Furthermore, the introduction imposes on the readers reflections over both time and space. Hildegard –​a historical figure and not mere representation –​was, after all, a ‘woman of the Church,’ she lived in the years 1098–​1179, and only as late as in 2012 her ‘life after life’ found its culmination in church annals. Her canonization process, initiated in the thirteenth century, was finally concluded by the decree of pope Benedict xvi in 2012, which extended her cult to the whole Roman Catholic Church. Declaration of her status as the doctor of the Church took an equal amount of time in its brewing; before her this high title was bestowed on only three other women: St. Catherine of Siena 1347–​1380, St. Theresa of Ávila 1515–​ 1582 and St. Thérèse of Lisieux 1873–​1897.19

18 19

Desmond Graham, Introduction to Unmapping Memory: Looking for Hildegard of Bingen, (forthcoming). Christopher Rengers, Fr. O.F.M. Cap. and Matthew E. Bunson, K.H.S., The 35 Doctors of the Church (Charlotte, North Carolina: tan Books, 2014).

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In historical categories the figure of Hildegard functions on numerous temporal levels, towering over one thousand years of Europe’s history: it seems to span the beginnings of the second and third millennium of Christianity. Consequently, via the references to the institutional Church, the variety of religious activities, it explores different levels of spatial reference –​the geographical, social and historical spaces of Christianity in Europe. An additional hypertext is provided by virtual space: ‘More recently she has become an icon of New Age Catholicism, and an increasingly visible presence on the World Wide Web.’20 Hildegard’s activities, which encompassed purely religious concerns, mystical writings, letters, musical compositions, religious dramas –​miracle play Ordo Virutum, apocalyptic writings –​Scivias, other theological and medical texts –​Liber simplicis medicinae, suggest a wide range of intellectual pursuits indicating the direction in which the search for Hildegard of Bingen should proceed. Geographically, or indeed cartographically –​it clearly demarcates points in space –​either through documented voyages, points on the map of Europe marking locations of abbeys visited by Hildegard. Voyages in order to deliver sermons, letters to prelates, bishops and other Church officials –​together they plot out a cartographic grid of Christian Europe. Born in Bermersheim bei Azey, as a child she moved to the convent of St. Disibod, only to move later to a new monastery which she had founded near Rupertsberg opposite Bingen (now the Abbey of St. Hildegard). She taught at Mainz, Wertheim, Kitzingen, Ebrach, Bamberg (along the river Main); in later years she taught at Metz and Krauftal and Trier; yet later she lectured in Boppard, Andernach, Siegburg, Werden, Cologne, only to teach during her last voyage in Swabia, namely in Roden-​kirchen, Mulbronn, Hirsau, Kirchheimbolangen, Zweifalten.21 The import and authority of women in medieval society was curbed by numerous limitations imposed on them by the patriarchal vision of the world sustained through overlapping lay and Church centres of power. The recognition of the power of women in the Middle Ages, and this pertains also to Hildegard, was from our perspective, as numerous authors observed, conditioned by today’s process of the erasure of women’s potential to shape the world, a process rooted in our contemporary modes of the perception of the past. Classen claims that ‘using highly traditional lenses determined by patriarchy, as if all expressions of powerful men also signify the total subjugation 20 Maud Burnett McInerney, Hildegard of Bingen. A Book of Essays (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1998), Kindle. 21 Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom. St. Hildegard’s theology of the feminine (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), Kindle.

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of women,’22 while Bitel protests against ‘modern construction of history’ –​ she rules as methodologically unsound to accept ‘what the tribal historians wrote, although we know that they forgot to bring along their women.’23 This caveat is salient for it assumes the necessity of the critical reading of structural representations (literary, historical) of the role of women and of the feminist reconceptualizations of female characters in the Middle Ages. In the case of Hildegard it is clearly manifest that by introducing into her discourse a vertical dimension, i.e. her professed mystical, unmediated relationship with God, she controlled her own role in medieval society. Her travels, correspondence, sermonizing, construction of material exponents of accessible space, i.e. the establishment of new religious institutions, would have been impossible if the horizontal vector responsible for the male domination in the world of medieval culture had not been intersected with the vertical vector, creating a direct, devoid of male mediation, relationship with God. Hildegard claimed she was a ‘vessel’ into which the word of God was poured, giving her the position of one who could correspond with bishops and popes, who could admonish them, who could transcend the limits officially imposed on women in the Middle Ages. Hildegard, functioning within the public space as prioress, philosopher and theologian, resorted to rhetorical devices which allowed her to delimit the domain accessible to her as a woman, a domain otherwise dominated by the power relations among patriarchal clergy and laity. The letters which she wrote served to expand the available domain.24 Analysing Hildegarde’s correspondence with Bernard of Clairvaux, Classen highlights the role of dexterity in the employed rhetorical strategies within which Hildegard raised the subject of her visions in a manner which would embrace their diversity and emphasize the hesitancy about the degree in which these visions could be communicated publicly. Employment of conventional description of one’s own mystical experiences also testified to Hildegard’s dexterity: as Classen states on the basis of Milem’s (2002) study of Master Eckhard, ‘Hildegard’s inability to formulate her mystical experiences was common among all medieval mystics.’25 Petroff, 22

Albrecht Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 108. 23 Lisa M. Bitel, Women in Early Medieval Europe, 400–​1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 268, cited in Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice, 109. 24 Joan M. Ferrante, To the Glory of her Sex. Women’s Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 10–​35, cited in Albrecht Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 112. 25 Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice, 114.

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by acknowledging that Hildegard’s mysticism was at the fountainhead of her assumed position of authority, states that only this allowed her to refashion the very heart of her world by establishing new religious congregations, by erecting new hospitals, by composing her sequences and hymns, while Bynum concludes that mysticism ‘lies at the heart of medieval gender debates.’26 Such regulation of power relations is closely connected with Lefebvre’s analysis of the management of space understood in Cartesian terms. ‘Cartesian notion of space as absolute, infinite res extensa, a divine property which may be grasped in a single act of intuition because of its homogeneous (isotropic) character.’27 Although Lefebvre refers to capitalism and he develops the notion of hegemony in accordance with the principles established by Gramsci for relations between the bourgeoisie and the working class, earlier feudal power relations are also realized in a vertical, hegemonistic order of management of space and a variety of places in the medieval world. Regulation of power was closely connected with regulation of spatial relations, entering also the chthonic level, for instance in connection with legal regulation and legal legitimization of burial procedures. Such regulation of space by hegemonic authority and Hildegard’s techniques of executing power in space management –​hence the inscription of her rights in ‘translating’ space into place and vice versa –​is clearly demonstrated in Hildegard’s conflict with prelates from Mainz provoked by her decision to bury on the consecrated grounds of Mount St. Rupert the body of an excommunicated gentleman, since she claimed that he had received absolution before his death. In consequence an interdict was imposed on Mount St. Rupert convent, followed by an exchange of letters between Hildegard, representatives of the archbishop (prelates) of Mainz and the archbishop himself. Hildegard refused to exhume the body, concealed the burial site and managed to have the interdict lifted. The nuns found its imposition burdensome since it barred them from participating in church liturgy, from accepting communion and even singing in the choir.28 This dispute from 1178, on the one hand, may be interpreted in terms of theology and power relations, on the other, it inscribes itself in the organization of the space of power and

26 Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 116; Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption. Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 191, both cited in Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice, 116. 27 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-​Smith (Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1998), 14. 28 Joseph, L Baird, ed., The Personal Correspondence of Hildegard of Bingen, trans. Jospeh L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Kindle.

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social space as envisaged by Henri Lefebvre. As has already been mentioned, theological debates on death in state of grace or state of sin from the vantage point of space regulation boil down precisely to spatial relations: the right to determine consecutive topographic correlates in the space administered by hegemonic authority and manipulation of these correlates by virtue of their ideological dimension –​Hildegard by concealing the place of burial moved the dispute with the hegemonic authority to a different level: the subject of the debate had been hidden, and so, paradoxically, it had become more visible. The repercussions from Hildegard’s superiors, in turn, boiled down to emphasizing their hegemony through their refusal to allow the nuns to demarcate temporal correlates of power –​by imposing their interdict on Hildegard’s convent the prelates barred the nuns from participating in religious services, but also from indulging in prayer and music, hence they concealed –​in silence –​metaphorical determinants of temporal order in the nuns’ spatial organization, through the absence of anticipated sounds realized in time. Both sides in the dispute mapped power through an erasure of its correlates, spatial and temporal. This is cartography in absentia, with the notable exception of letters circulating between Hildegard and the prelates or Hildegard and the archbishop of Mainz, and the convent, by concealing the exact place of internment, was itself erased via the unproduced in time sounds. In the case of a representation of a historical figure, closely connected with geography and social space of a given region –​here: Southern Germany –​the dangers are multifarious: the biography of Hildegard of Bingen is by definition a ‘map’ of this space –​subsequent points/​places on the map are referenced through the points of her biography. Assessing the nature of space from the viewpoint of a geographer, Lawton emphasizes the fundamental significance of spatial organization for geography, along with an equally important recognition of the scale of study: ‘Inter-​relationships in geographical studies operate […] over a complex range of spatial, locational and temporal factors.’29 Recognition of space as a cultural experience is strongly individualized and dependent on a plethora of factors: ‘The varying individual experience of space, place and time owes much to acquired learning. […] knowledge of places, awareness of space and perception of spatial order –​both life-​space and social-​space –​is built over time and in the context of shared cultural experience.’30

29 30

Richard Lawton, ‘Space, Place and Time,’ Geography 68, no. 3 (1983): 196 https://​www.jstor .org/​sta​ble/​40570​691. Lawton, ‘Space, Place and Time,’ 195.

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Graham’s literary pursuits, which trace a path demarcated by points of reference, in turn, determined by the biography of a nonfictional character, yield nonobvious effects, also for the reason that the region historically associated with Hildegard –​at least in historical-​literary categories –​unlike many other regions in Europe (e.g. the region of Lake Lucerne evoked by Piatti) does not belong to the ‘gravitational centre or crossroads on the European map of literature.’31 In spite of that, the focus on the landscape constitutes an important element of the geopoetics of contemporary poetry, though it falls short of Piatti’s definition of geography of literature. The unusualness of Graham’s cycle is demonstrated most forcefully in his attempt to create a ‘literary cartography’ of Germany, much along the lines of Barbara Piatti’s project in which she strives to construct a ‘literary cartography’ of Switzerland; the mere decision of ‘expelling’ geographical names beyond the page of the main text constitutes in itself an act of defamiliarization, for it focalizes not the name as a geographical determinant of place, not a point to be visualised on a map, but ‘an act of direct experiencing of a place’: its name, its reaction with ‘first space/​first place’ is only a pretext for the fashioning out of the act of original cognition –​of sensory perception –​the essence of a text. Ergo: literature does not celebrate its status as a manifestation of ‘literary cartography,’ but instead focuses on the act of cognition as such. Consequently, poems from the cycle Unmapping Memory offer an answer to Piatti’s question about the essence of the interaction between fictional spaces and real spaces, or geospace, or ‘first space’ and particularly to the question ‘How meticulously does fictional text refer to the given section in real space –​numerically or rather in a defamiliarizing way, superimposing and thereby redefining and shifting fictive and existing elements?’32 In this context the process of spatialization, of turning to landscape –​ ergo: space –​by Graham may seem to be a provocation. Spatial turn has earned its well deserved place among geographers, sociologists and literary scholars but what could be its function in the semantics of a poetic cycle? There is clearly an analogy here with the creation and recreation of maps –​literary, within literature and via literary texts. Graham negotiates relations between reference points within fictional-​literary space, or, perhaps, even: spatio-​ temporality, multidimensionality of a universe created within the poetic cycle, through their juxtaposition with points established in extratextual reality. It 31 Barbara Piatti, ‘Literary Cartography: Mapping as Method,’ in Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories, Genre, ed. Anders Engberg Pedersen (Cambridge, Mass., London, UK: mit Press), 45. 32 Piatti, ‘Literary Cartography,’ 46.

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­f igure 6.1  Places in southern Germany connected with Hildegard of Bingen as evoked in Graham’s poems. courtesy jacek urbański, gis center university of gdańsk.

could have been conjectured that such negotiations between mimesis and representation are after all nothing new in literature, which is by definition suspended between the reality of an extra-​fictional world and that of its internal

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­f igure 6.2  Places in northern England connected with Hildegard of Bingen as evoked in Graham’s poems. courtesy jacek urbański, gis center university of gdańsk) darmc scholarly data series 2013–​5 : m mccormick et al. –​ roman road network (version 2008).

world, its entanglements, ideology, axiology and the subtle tension between the moving observer and the nature he perceives, if it had not been for the consistent altercation with cultural practices to which the history of the heroine had been (perhaps, still is?) subjected. Having been for centuries mapped in her own negotiations –​with her identity, self-​identification, objectification in her bio-​and necrography, Hildegard of Bingen has not been free from her own entanglements in history and ideology, which plotted out multidimensional cultural maps of southern Germany (Figure 6.1).

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For, if space is tantamount to limitlessness and freedom and therefore potentially new experiences, possibilities of formulating new questions and pursuing new answers, of locating new places of ‘security and stability,’33 then one of the ways in which space translates into places is through the maps which domesticate space, stabilize it through correlates, through reference points –​geographical but also cultural. While medieval ‘reading’ of time, which ‘punctuates the journey of man towards God,’ where space, like time, lies in the sphere of liturgy, today’s postcolonial order underwrites a ‘copresence of diversity, but now in the silence of God.’34 And such is the logic of Graham’s poetic cycle: it produces space through a sojourn of the observer toward a landscape, road, microphenomena of nature and culture, which bind the past –​‘I almost found her /​four hundred years away’ –​with today’s perceptions. Thus, and only thus, and not through surviving documents or chronicled historical events, will Graham attempt to locate his reference points. Rejection of history, ideology, acceptance of the ‘silence of God’ is, however, neither naïve nor antagonistic –​it allows the reader to extract experiences from existing cultural matrices, transacting a reconstruction of one’s own experiencing anew of historical (temporal) phenomena inherent in the landscape. The map of wanderings reflected in the poems is clearly more constrained than the map of the peregrinations of historical Hildegard, but the poems are not a matrix of a ‘pilgrimage along trails,’ an atlas, a travelogue or guidebook. Furthermore, they avoid hypertextual readings, as if the author was quite satisfied with such limited access to constrained space of a few dozens of square miles in south Germany and northern England (the latter never visited by Hildegard personally) (Figure 6.2). This is a consistent and premeditated strategy thanks to which via the application of the principles of geocriticism Unmapping Memory seems to break through the colonial reading of space –​not only does it accept ‘the silence of God’ as a component of extratextual reality, but also it dislodges politics from the depicted space. Man in Graham’s poems operates within micro-​reality and is not subject to the dictates of major historical processes. Such ‘pied piping’ of literature out of history has not escaped a critic’s attention in reference to Graham’s first volume of poetry, The Lie of Horizons, where the commentator, Sinead Garrigan, stresses that the author translates ‘historical and geographic generalizations into ahistorical and local exceptions.’ She, furthermore, stipulates that in these poems an essential component is that of ‘characterizing national fears and prejudices by perceiving them through the 33 Tuan, Space and Place, 6. 34 Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism. Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Kindle.

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eyes of the cultural outsider.’35 A similar interpretation is proposed in the context of Graham’s ‘Polish poems’ written over a period of twenty five years. In accordance with the subtitle of the cycle –​‘Western commentator’ –​Graham takes up the role of a chronicler of a city-​state, its mythologized space, but also places precisely located in its geography and history: ‘The city comprises not only urbanized space and infrastructure. Time is imposed on space. […] The narration of Graham’s poems constructs a patchwork of light and darkness, of negotiated gray points […] of recouped memory.’36 The collection Unmapping Memory targets much more, beyond the mere ahistoricity of the earlier volume and the historicity of A Gdansk Sketchbook. The Hildegard poems attempt to subvert the cultural matrix imposed as a result of schooled knowledge on the perception of a historical figure. For, if space is tantamount to limitlessness and freedom and therefore potentially new experiences, possibilities of formulating new questions and pursuing new answers, of locating new places of ‘security and stability,’37 then one of the ways in which space translates into places is through the maps which domesticate space, stabilize it through correlates, through reference points –​geographical but also cultural. Graham, by moving all geographical references outside his main text –​the place names appear only in the table of contents, a characteristic cartographic legend –​finds an alternative territorially-​temporal perspective: he transforms place into space. Points stabilizing space remain unanchored, and if they are anchored, it is in the ‘here and now.’ where the present time is extracted from the paraphernalia of modernity. Instead, there is an attempt to inscribe perception into the phenomenological attentivity of the nineteenth century flâneur, but also to identify the described world of Hildegard’s footsteps with the world of literature. If the map colonizes the world, imposing on it temporal and spatial constraints –​Graham’s poems decolonize it by erasing political and ideological correlates from the process of perception of the visited places, extracted from readings through religious or historical matrices. Consequently, Graham offers us a path leading to Hildegard which foregoes conventional historical, geographical, religious and political mappings and instead immerses the reader in private and unmappable (or, at the most, only marginally mappable via the table of contents) body of private perceptions and sensations sifted through the grid of individual imagination. As he states in Introduction: 35

Sinéad Garrigan, review of The Lie of Horizons, by Desmond Graham, Oxford Poetry 7, no. 2 (1993): 24–​27. 36 Olga Kubińska, ‘“Zachodni komentator”: Poetycka kronika Trójmiasta w wierszach Desmonda Grahama,’ Topos 100, no.3 (2008): 124–​125. 37 Tuan, Space and Place, 6.

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The process here will look for the untaken hints and intimations in our own poor memory or, with gratitude, peer into or study with slow intent, the great labours of others. As a sequence of poems, it will naturally also look by using as our helpers, our nose, our ears and our fingers as well as our eyes; it will try to make as much use of our mistaken directions and false-​turns as of any which seem surprisingly right.38 The only constraints are the pages of the book, which simultaneously constitute the only limit imposed on the mind: ‘the mind /​in twists and curls /​invisible /​between the borders/​of a page.’ Graham’s ‘borders of a page’ evoke the political metaphor used in the first ‘ideological’ atlas of Schalansky, in which the political boundary –​between West Germany and eastern gdr –​has been hidden by the formatting of the atlas, which led the writer to the rejection of political construction, of ideologized map with a political demarcation of space. Paradoxically, such distrust of political boundaries is what Graham and Schalansky have in common. Schalansky, transgressing the limitations imposed on women by the ‘­masculinity’ of traditional cartography, carefully stakes out the geographical coordinates of her islands and from the maps proceeds to historical anecdote. As Massey claims, ‘The limitation of women’s mobility, in terms both of identity and space, has been in some cultural contexts a crucial means of ­subordination.’39 Schalansky, without resorting to physical mobility (a mobility anyhow largely limited by a childhood spent in the political reality of East Germany), managed to shape both her own identity and the social space via the art of cartography. Graham, a white male poet, deliberately erasing any references to geographical or historical context, inevitably marked by the masculinity of Church history, liberated Hildegard from these ramifications, locating her instead within his own fleeting sensations in spaces her presence might have shaped a millenium earlier.

Works Cited

Baird, Joseph, L., ed. The Personal Correspondence of Hildegard of Bingen. Translated by Jospeh L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. [Kindle Edition].

38 Graham, Unmapping Memory. 39 Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 179.

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Barrows, Adam. Time, Literature, and Cartography After the Spatial Turn. The Chronometric Imaginary. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Bitel, Lisa M. Women in Early Medieval Europe, 400–​1100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption. Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Classen, Albrecht. The Power of a Woman’s Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness: A Joseph Contrad Trilogy. My Books Classics, 2019. Kindle. Ferrante, Joan M. To the Glory of her Sex. Women’s Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997. Garrigan, Sinéad. ‘Desmond Graham: The Lie of Horizons.’ Oxford Poetry 7, no. 2 (1993): 24–​27. Glosowitz, Monika. ‘Mapowanie sieci. Przyczynek do poetyckiej kartografii feministycznej.’ In Mapy świata, mapy ciała. Geografia i cielesność w literaturze, ed. Aleksandra Jastrzębska, 33–​41. Kraków: Libron & Authors, 2014. Graham, Desmond. The Lie of Horizons. Bridgend: Seren, 1993. Graham, Desmond. Gdański Szkicownik. Wiersze polskie 1984–​ 2008/​ A Gdańsk Sketchbook. Polish poems 1984–​2008. Translated by Olga and Wojciech Kubinski. Gdańsk: European Centre for Solidarity, 2009. Graham, Desmond. Unmapping Memory. Looking for Hildegard of Bingen. Forthcoming. Jastrzębska, Aleksandra, ed. Mapy świata, mapy ciała. Geografia i cielesność w literaturze. Kraków: Libron & Authors, 2014. Kubińska, Olga. ‘‘Zachodni komentator.’ Poetycka kronika Trójmiasta w wierszach Desmonda Grahama.’ Topos 100, no.3 (2008): 122–​129. Lawton, R. ‘Space, Place and Time.’ Geography 68, np. 3 (1983): 193–​207. https://​www .jstor.org/​sta​ble/​40570​691. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-​Smith. Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1998. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minnesota: University of Minneaopolis Press, 2001 (1994). Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: sage, 2008 (2005). McCormick, Michael, Guoping Huang, Giovanni Zambotti and Jessica Lavash. ‘Roman Road Network (version 2008).’ Harvard Dataverse, V1, 2013. https://​doi.org/​10.7910/​ DVN/​TI0​KAU. McInerney, Maud Burnett. Hildegard of Bingen. A Book of Essays. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998. Kindle. Milem, Bruce. The Unspoken Word. Negative Theology in Meister Eckhart’s German Sermons. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2002.

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Newman, Barbara. Sister of Wisdom. St. Hildegard’s theology of the feminine. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Kindle. Nora, Pierre. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire.’ Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7–​24. http://​www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​2928​520. Pedersen, Anders Engberg, ed. Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories, Genre. Cambridge, Mass., London, England: mit Press, 2017. Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda. Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Piatti, Barbara. ‘Literary Cartography: Mapping as Method.’ In Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories, Genre, edited by Anders Engberg Pedersen, 45–​72. Cambridge, Mass., London, UK: mit Press, 2017. Richardson, Bill. ‘Mapping the Literary Text: Spatio-​Cultural Theory and Practice.’ Philosophy and Literature 42, no. 1 (2018): 67–​ 80. https://​doi.org/​10.1353/​ phl.2018.0003. Rengers. Fr. Christopher, O.F.M. Cap. and Matthew E. Bunson, K.H.S. The 35 Doctors of the Church. Charlotte, North Carolina: tan Books, 2014. Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography. The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Rossetto, Tania. ‘Theorizing maps with literature.’ Progress in Human Geography 38, no. 4 (2014): 513–​530. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​03091​3251​3510​587. Schalansky, Judith. Atlas of Remote Islands. Fifty Islands I have not visited and never will. Translated by Christine Lo.: New York: Penguin Random House USA, 2010. Schalansky, Judith. Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands. Fifty Islands I have not visited and never will. Translated by Christine Lo. London: Penguin Books, 2011. Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-​and-​imagined places. Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Soja, Edward W. ‘Taking space personally.’ In The Spatial Turn. Interdisciplinary perspectives, edited by Barney Warf and Santa Arias, 11–​ 35. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Tuan, Yi-​Fu. Space and Place. The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1977 (2008). Westphal, Bertrand. Geocriticism. Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Kindle. Wolf, Burkhardt. ‘Muses of Cartography: Charting Odysseus from Homer to Joyce.’ Translated by E.A. Beeson. In Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories, Genre, ed. Anders Engberg Pedersen, 143–​172. Cambridge, Mass., London, UK: mit Press, 2017.

chapter 7

Charting Milan in Central Asia

Lombard Maps and Asian Toponymy in Luciano Erba’s Poetry Samuele Fioravanti 1

Introduction

Prior to becoming the trigger of the Italian economic miracle,1 Milan was for the poet Ugo Foscolo both the horrid ‘city of manure’ and the indolent Paneropoli, the listless capital of cream.2 In the novels La vita agra and La vita intensa, Milan has made bitter Luciano Bianciardi’s days3 and industrious Massimo Bontempelli’s hours4 in an extensive network of random encounters within itineraries timed with meticulous fastidiousness.5 Alberto Savinio, brother of the famous metaphysical painter Giorgio De Chirico, described the typical atmosphere of the Lombard capital, olfactory sub specie, talking of the smell of burned wood, exhaled by chimneys and guarded by the fog,6 a smell that over the years would become so dear to Stendhal that the same Milan still seems ‘to naturally create Stendhalians[…], Milan Stendhalises people with the same ease with which the seaside tans us.’7 Luciano Erba (Milan 1922–​2010), ‘pure-​blood Milanese poet,’8 has often portrayed the impalpable Milan at the end of the twentieth century in terms of a faded metropolis, a spectral city with an aura. More precisely, Erba’s Milan is a space carved from the mist, out of which recurring dreams and near fading memories flicker. It is a city that appears all the more insubstantial and 1 John Foot (ed.), Milan since the Miracle. City, Culture and Identity, (Oxford: Berg, 2001). 2 Bruno Toppan, Cités réelles et cités mythiques chez Foscolo, in: De Florence à Venise: études en l’honneur de Christian Bec, edited by Levi, François; Ossola, Carlo, Parigi: Presses de l’Université Paris-​Sorbonne, 2006, 459 n.24. 3 Luciano Bianciardi, La vita agra, Milan: Rizzoli, 1962. 4 Massimo Bontempelli, La vita intensa. Romanzo dei romanzi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1920. 5 Fulvia Airoldi Namer, ‘La Vita intensa di Massimo Bontempelli, ovvero l’invenzione di Massimo attore narrato e narrante (seconda parte).’ In Italogramma 2 (2012): italogramma. elte.hu/​wp-​content/​files/​Fulvia_​Airoldi_​Namer _​Bontempelli_​La_​vita_​intensa2_​0.pdf. 6 Alberto Savinio, Ascolto il tuo cuore, città, Milan: Bompiani, 1944, 296. 7 Savinio, Ascolto…, 163. 8 Giancarlo Borri, ‘A Luciano Erba il Premio Librex Guggenheim –​E. Montale.’ In Controcampo 16, n. 10 (1989), 9–​12.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004520288_009

138 Fioravanti evanescent in places where it would seem most stereotypic, a metropolis of vain hopes and unfruitful expectations. I am thinking in particular of the via Pagano viaduct near Parco Sempione (‘I only know how to wait on the overpass’)9 and of the Castello Sforzesco (‘The kids who left in the morning /​[…] in silence now sit on the trolleybus /​swift to arrive at the terminus /​and they remake the dream that Milan /​has azure valleys beyond the Castle’).10 In order to map the vanishing network of reminiscences and longings within the city of Milan, the poet applies an imaginary cartography to Lombardy, by referring toponyms of Central Asia to the region around Milan. Thus he navigate the Po Valley as if it was in Turkestan or Iran. The aim of this chapter is to screen such place names (Bukhara, Tabriz, Shiraz, Shirwan, Tajikistan and the Taklamakan Desert) to chart the fictitious caravan routes Erba draws in Northern Italy using Persian and Turkic landmarks. The first section engages with a study of Lombard geography in Erba’s poetry, reconstructing the landscape of Caleppio and the Po Valley, describing different districts of Milan and their topography, finally analyzing the rhetorical devices Erba employs to display spatial representations in his poems through the juxtaposition of everyday objects. The second section concentrates on the transformation of common items into unexpected tools for orientation throughout Erba’s oeuvre. The main focus will be the metaphor of the Persian rug as a map: a scale model to access a sort of evanescent Milan, hidden under the membrane of the Asian toponymy stretched over Northern Italy. 2

A City of Mist. Mapping Milan in the Poetry of Luciano Erba

The most clearly Milanese place, among Erba’s verses, are the inner courtyards of the traditional case di ringhiera: courtyards and walkways besieged by fog or shaded in remembrance, which however retain nothing of the Milan gardens rued by Lucrezia Warren Smith in Mrs Dalloway, but rather they assume ghostly semblances and seem to be guardians of a secret to which you can draw on, as Alberto Savinio already believed, only via the olfactory tract. Autunno a Milano11 Anche in città fanno fuochi di stoppie 9 Luciano Erba, Le contraddizioni, Milan: Quaderni di Orfeo, 2007, 13. 10 Luciano Erba, Il male minore, Milan: Mondadori, 1960, 22. 11 Erba, Il male minore, 20: Autumn in Milan: In the city as well someone sets fire to the straw stubble, beyond the barriers where the cargo trains arrive. In a courtyard you smelt

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oltre la barriera dove arrivano i merci. In un cortile hai sentore di terra e di radici ti attristi col naso a mezz’aria sul tuo inutile fiuto d’indiano. Awarded the Librex-​Guggenheim-​Montale Prize, the most prestigious Italian recognition dedicated to poetry, for the collection L’ippopotamo,12 Luciano Erba was one of the most set aside protagonists in the renewal of Italian poetry after the Second World War.13 His slender collections of poems are made long interpreters of that Lombard Line theorized as poetry in re,14 poetry that aims to obliterate the emphatic expression of feeling and replace it with an injection of dazzling objects, vividly described, in the body of the text. To this first phase, impregnated with a precise sentiment of places (the Lombard countryside and the Lake District between Italy and Switzerland), a second season follows of a minimalist approach that aims at the ‘essentiality, a sort of mental stop of the conscience in a far away and thus anonymous place’ with ‘an ever stricter selection of poetic elements beside an increasingly intransigent meditative aspect.’15 Both before and after the change, Erba describes Milan and objects scattered around the Padana countryside with a series of images from almost pungent visual evidence, which however does not generate any effect of clarification.16 On the contrary, the individual figures show their absolute autonomy from any preconceived framework of signification, as well as from every play on symbolic references,17 they are filled with self but are only signs that mark themselves.18

a scent of loam and roots, you feel sad –​raising your nose to the air –​for your useless Indian sniff. 12 Luciano Erba, L’ippopotamo, Turni: Einaudi, 1989, translated in English by Ann Snodgrass, The Hippopotamus, Oakville (Canada): Guernica, 2003. 13 Lawrence R. Smith, The New Italian Poetry. 1945 to Present. A Bilingual Anthology, Berkley-​ Los Angeles-​London: University of California Press, 1981, 27. 14 Luciano Anceschi, Linea lombarda, Varese: Editrice Magenta, 1952 and Giorgio Luzzi, Poeti della Linea lombarda. 1952–​1985, Melzo: Cens, 1987. 15 Stefano Crespi, ‘‘‘Un metafisico tranviere ci abbraccia fuori città.’’’ In Il Sole 24 ore, 12 luglio 1987, 19. 16 Enrico Testa, Dopo la lirica. Poeti italiani 1960–​2000, Turin: Einaudi, 2005, 117. 17 Testa, Dopo la lirica, 118. 18 Luciano Erba, Françoise, Brescia: Il Farfegno, 1982.

140 Fioravanti This sensitive vividness of things, their graphic vividness, strengthens where the poet doubts more intensely of himself and of the phenomenal world.19 The more striking objects look, the fuzzier is actual space perception. The tactile sensuality for objects punctuates a poetic discourse that tends to typical continuum of memorial evocation,20 nevertheless Erba does not rely on the intercession of symbolic objects that move in the past, like the Proustian madeleine, or that protect him, like the famous Montalian ivory mouse of Dora Markus. The onset of involuntary memory in Proust activates a recovery of the ‘time subtracted to the duration,’21 but Proustian recovery is addressed to the constant metaphorization of sensations through the persistent invention of laws designed to make decipherable experiences-​to-​come through experiences-​ already-​come. It is a sort of ‘unexhausted cognitive tension.’22 No process of gnosiological order animates instead Erba’s attempts at memorial recovery: the poet confines himself to the observation of what he has lost with the distance with which one contemplates a mystery. And his poetry is precisely a device constructed to document not the moment lived (which is by now unobtainable) but the loss of that specific moment in a specific place. Erba’s texts are used to measure the distance between the present instant, in which his verses are printed on the paper, and the by now unrecoverable time-​space conditions represented by the emanation of a known scent or by the unexpected presence of a brilliantly coloured object in the Lombard fog. Irreversibilità23 Fu più di un grido: Coglili col gambo lungo! ranuncoli doppi, ranuncoli gialli dove il fiume rinasce

19

Stefano Agosti, ‘Considerazioni aggiuntive sulla poesia di Luciano Erba.’ In Testo 33, n. 64 (2012), 23. 20 Pappalardo La Rosa, Franco, Il poeta nel ‘‘‘labirinto’’’: Luciano Erba, in Il filo e il labirinto. Gatto –​Caproni –​Erba, Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1997, 102. 21 Stefano Agosti, Poesia italiana contemporanea, Milan: Bompiani, 1995, 91. 22 Agosti, Poesia italiana contemporanea, 91. 23 Erba, L’ippopotamo, 50, translated by Snodgrass, The Hippopotamus, 61: Irreversibility: It was more than a cry: gather the long-​stemmed! /​There were doubled buttercups, yellow buttercups /​where the river appears /​on the bank that you walk on between two waters. /​More than a cry and other dawns /​when the very rare diamond /​bleeds into April’s vapors /​on the sleep of a new city. /​Wait for me! /​You’re already deep within the hazelnut grove. (Translated: Snodgrass 2003: 93).

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sull’argine si cammina tra due acque. Più di un grido e altre albe quando il diamante assai raro sanguina nei vapori di aprile sul sonno di una nuova città. Aspettami! Ti sei allontanato tra i noccioli. Smells and colours in short are the survivors of a continuous erosion that the mist exerts on the skin of the city. In A caccia di immagini,24 the poem is conceived as a ‘network of words’ wherein the effects of the loss are to be deposited and ‘imprisoned,’ ‘the many images’ that escape the eye and that are the traces of an irreparable removal. However image and memory do not produce true compensation, much less of the Proustian type;25 they limit themselves to documenting the loss. Hence the Lombard fog becomes a sort of immense archives where each lived moment is deposited invisibly and each place is preserved in an evanescent form, almost as if the memory were vapour. Visita a Caleppio26 […] Tempo e luogo? Ma forse un novembre di vino e di castagne; lontano, nel silenzio della bassa, un landò nero passa oltre le rogge, lievi calessi accarezzano le strade già indurite dal freddo. Gli antenati? […] dunque nel novero degli eventi improbabili niente è proprio impossibile, perfino ritrovarti, confonderci tutti in questo mare di nebbia nelle risaie.

24 25

Erba, Le contraddizioni, 7. Gilberto Lonardi, ‘Le schegge di Erba, regno dell’effimero. Da trent’anni il più incantevole colorista cittadino.’ In L’Arena, 5th of March 1984, 3. 26 Erba, L’ippopotamo, 30: A visit to Caleppio: ‘Time and place? Then imagine /​a November of chestnuts and wine /​while far away in the silence of the plain /​a black buggy passed /​light gigs brushing the streets /​already hardened by the cold. Perhaps ancestors? /​[…] therefore in the many improbable events /​nothing is truly impossible, not even /​finding you father, just as everything merges /​in the sea of fog over miles of fields of rice.’

142 Fioravanti The Milan Erba prefers is not only a half-​empty city but also dematerialized: a city in which volumes lose weight and consistency until they become chromatic blotches, scents or mere shadows. Space becomes bidimensional: the city seems nothing more than a representation of the city itself. In Tramonto in città, dated 1942 but published in the last section of the Remi in barca,27 ‘le rotaie tra file di case /​son vuote di ruote [durante] il tramonto in città’ (there are no wheels on the rails between the houses during the sunset in the city); however the representation of metropolitan emptiness (that is the lack of means of transport) exploits graphic-​etymological expedients thanks to which the wheels (ruote), while absent from the scene, are nevertheless emphasized by the internal rhyme (ruote-​vuote) and they are inscribed in the etymology of the word ‘rotaie’ (rails). In the same way the trams that seem to vanish from the urban landscape are inscribed in the word ‘tram-​onto’ (sunset), almost as if they were hidden in the sound of the waning sun. In short, it is about trolley bus-​shadows, virtually present in the rumble of the words precisely where only city emptiness seemed to be. Nothing is there, but everything can be read into the space as if on a chart. Tramonto in città is preceded, in the same collection, by Non approfondire, a single stanza of six verses in which the absence of vehicles favours once more the apparition of a shadow and the overwriting of a vacuous and indeterminate space on the outer ring roads of Milan, which thus transmutes into an unlimited elsewhere, terrifying since it is boundless, impossible to travel in a finite time and therefore an appointed place for non-​meeting. Non approfondire28 Si dice che il sogno abiti nei dintorni dell’infinito ti ho sognata stanotte su un viale senza vetture, solo platani grigi viali in curva, viali in città eri infinitamente lontana. The high density of etymological figures in a few verses (sogno-​sognata, viale-​ viali-​ viali, infinito-​ infinitamente) expresses a precise scheme: within the 27 Luciano Erba, Remi in barca, Milan: Mondadori, 2006, 64. 28 Erba, Remi in barca, 66: Do not look into: They say that the dream inhabits in the vicinity of the Infinite; I dreamt of you last night, you were in an avenue without vehicles, only gray plane trees –​turning avenues, city avenues–​: you were infinitely far.

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segment sogno-​sognata (dream-​dreamt), therefore inside the oneiric space, the infinite and the pronoun in the second person (ti/​you) appear. The area of the city, carved out by the polyptoton of viale-​viali/​avenue-​avenues, seems entirely inscribed in the domain of infinite distances so that dreaming the city, even more than living it, is considered to be the gateway to a further, more authentic reality which lies behind the visible world, almost as if it were hidden by the curtain of fog that the dream manages to rip. Quale Milano?29 La cartolina tra i raggi della ruota imitava un suono di motore quando in via xx Settembre si scendeva dal Parco in bicicletta: perché a Milano, per biliardo che sia vi sono strade in salita e in discesa più frequenti nei sogni e nei ricordi specie se legate a un primo incontro a un saluto guantato di viola. The sensitive aspect of things -​the colour of the glove, the sound of the postcard between the spokes -​is always most vivid for Erba. The objects appear crisp and subjugated in the face of the insecure and hypersensitive gaze of the character in whom the poet usually depicts himself. But the colour of the glove and the sound of the postcard serve to activate memory and dream, so they work as thresholds to a memorial Milan and an oneiric Milan, perceived as if it were more authentic than the phenomenic one. It is not always easy for Erba to distinguish between a sensible world and a hypothetical world, otherworldly so to speak, which he calls altrove (elsewhere) and that it would sometimes be possible to glimpse in the dematerialized Milan of remembrance or of dreams. Looking at objects of common use, Erba struggles to discern whether they are only mere physical conglomerates or if the perception of colours and scents is testimony of a truer and authentic world of ours, hidden behind the fog and vaguely intuited. 29 Erba, L’ippopotamo, 52: Which Milan?: The postcard, when inserted between the spokes of the wheel, imitated the sound of an engine, as we we went down from the Park by bike in via xx Settembre: because, in Milan, for billiards there are roads running up and downhill, which are more frequent in dreams and memories, especiallyif related to a first meeting of a purple-​gloved salute.

144 Fioravanti Thus Luciano Erba’s Milan becomes a dubitative capital of false appearances, where it is impossible to determine if whichever objects we come across on a daily basis are only volumes in the space or decipherable symbols of an otherworldly elsewhere which barely shows through. A fortunate Italian tradition, which dates back at least to the poetry of Pascoli, retraces precisely in the most ordinary of things concrete instruments designed to produce some epiphany: the revelation of the metaphysical substance of the perceptible world or at least the generation of a dream-​symbol that favours regression to childhood and produces a sense of protection.30 Erba on the other hand is too guarded and watchful to indulge himself in an authentic regression. In his descriptions in verse the ‘details are too precisely located between the haphazard and the symbolic, neither one nor the other.’31 Milan therefore appears as a compact collection of whatever objects and marginal spaces that peep out as flickering apparitions from a wall of mist. The urban edges and valueless things are redeemed only by a strong sensitive vividness that is once more expressed through the olfactory tract. Mailand32 bastava per farci ridere la fabbrica italiana di ghiaccio artificiale ma accadeva in certe domeniche di mezza stagione di grandi nuvole che erano più vaste del cielo quando al varietà chi sceglievo, si fa per dire era sempre la ballerina di terza fila nascosta tra le pieghe dei velari 30 31 32

Carlo Di Lieto, Il romanzo familiare del Pascoli. Delitto, «passsione’. e delirio, Naples: Guida, 2008, 20. Peter Robinson, The Poetry of Luciano Erba, introduction for Luciano Erba, The Greener Meadow. Selected Poems, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, 2. Luciano Erba, Il nastro di Moebius, Milan: Mondadori, 1980, 129: Mailand: the artificial ice factory was enough to make us laugh. It used to happen on certain chill spring-​like Sundays, with huge clouds, vaster than the sky, as I’ve always been choosing the most hidden dancer in the variety show, seen through the creases of the curtains, up and down during the parade. I imagined taking her to the outskirts, where the houses are new, the sidewalk granite is brighter under the light of the moon and the cuts of the blocks are sharper. I waved at her and retained a scent of recently tanned leather from her cheap fur. The truth was that I heavily smelt krapfens and kipfelns, -​while back home-​, red jump seats and yellow-​black trams -​while I went up the stairs without the lift-​, petty people and petty Europe.

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nell’alterno su e giù della parata immaginavo di accompagnarla in periferia tra case nuove dove nella sere di luna è più lucente il granito dei marciapiedi e si fa acuto il taglio degli isolati la salutavo, della sua pelliccia a buon mercato mi restava un odore di pelle appena conciata verità era che mi portavo addosso rientrando un greve odore di krapfen e di kipfeln di strapuntini rossi e di tram gialloneri salivo le scale senza ascensore di piccola gente, di piccola europa Also in describing the neighbourhoods to the south of the city centre, characterized by the Art Nouveau social housing in via Solari, the aroma of coffee draws the observer toward peripheral fringes of Milan that seem to fade in the West, towards Turin and the French border. Quartiere Solari33 Milano ha tramonti rosso oro. Un punto di vista come un altro erano gli orti di periferia dopo i casoni della «Umanitaria». Tra siepi di sambuco e alcuni uscioli fatti di latta e di imposte sconnesse, l’odore di una fabbrica di caffè si univa al lontano sentore delle fonderie. Per quella ruggine che regnava invisibile per quel sole che scendeva più vasto

33

Luciano Erba, Il cerchio aperto, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1983, 33: Quartiere Solari: ‘Milan has burnished sunsets. /​One view was like another: /​suburban gardens beyond /​the big, ugly homes of the Umanitaria. /​Between the elder hedges /​and some small tin doors and unhinged shutters, the smell of a coffee factory merged /​with that of the far-​away foundries. /​With all that invisible rust, /​with all that voluminous dusk /​over Piedmont, France –​who knows where –​/​I seemed to be in Europe. /​My mother knew perfectly well /​I wouldn’t be near her for long /​and yet she was smiling /​before a background of dahlias and purple carnations’ (Translated Snodgrass 2003: 33).

146 Fioravanti in Piemonte in Francia chissà dove mi pareva di essere in Europa; mia madre sapeva benissimo che non le sarei stato a lungo vicino eppure sorrideva su uno sfondo di dalie e di viole ciocche. The olfactory sensation returns in the form of a vague hint of coffee in the air also in an article published by Erba in the Italian edition of ‘ad. Architectural Digest,’ where the poet describes the terrace of his own home, in south-​west Milan, as ‘a clearinghouse at the frontiers of I,’ a fringe where person and city negotiate their relations again by means of the poet’s sensitive impressions (especially sight and smell).34 Erba seems assailed by essentially compositional questions: he is particularly interested in the displaying of the masses in space, that is to say the positions that things and bodies assume in the city arena during misty days, when visibility is very low. To train the eye, he uses a simple exercise. Il formaggio35 Sarà bene parlando di un mio modo di abitare nel mondo del presente (un sistema spaziale dove scambio forma e corpo con quanto mi sta attorno con le cose alle quali vado incontro per vivere in loro e loro in me) sarà bene riveli che tal modo di stare vicino al quotidiano mi fu chiaro ab initio una mattina avevo fame, era tempo di guerra da parte a parte guardavo nei buchi

34

Luciano Erba, ‘La casa, la vita. Alle frontiere dell’io.’ In ad. Architectural Digest. Le più belle case del mondo 13, n. 149 (October 1993), 20–​22. 35 Erba, L’ippopotamo, 19: Cheese: ‘When it comes to the way I inhabit the present world (a spatial system where I exchange shape and mass with anything around me, things I bump into, to live within them as they live within me) when it comes to the way I inhabit, I must reveal that I learnt to get closer to the everyday ab initio, a certain morning. I was hungry, it was during the war, I was peeking through the holes of a slice of cheese. I felt so absorbed, like being on this side and the other at the same time.’

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di una fetta sottile di formaggio così assorto mi sentivo rapito ed ero un po’ di qua e un po’ di là. Things for Erba -​the bargain fur, uneven taxes, a slice of cheese -​oscillate between being mere objects or allusions to an elsewhere hidden behind the mist, in a sort of over-​transcendent world.36 In this way also the page on which the poem is printed does not configure as a transparent opening inside which can be relived in a naive way memories or feelings, but only a writing which attempts to document the loss of time-​space spent and the trace of this loss left imprinted on the skin of the sensitive world. 3

A Lattice of Arabesques. The Carpet in the Poetry of Luciano Erba

Erba uses descriptions of places and objects as sudden chromatic rips in the foggy city (‘the sudden eruptions of blue in the darkness’).37 Stefano Agosti (1995) talks of images-​screen38 that never become pure and simple symbols (‘it is not a symbol of what you think’).39 Erba’s descriptions of objects are not mere symbols because the poet aims to always give back to the reader the warm safety of concrete things: the smell, colour and position in space. The «berrettucio di lana vergine /​bianco grigio e marrone» (virgin wool cap, white gray and brown) in Richiudendo un baule,40 to give an example, is not only a symbol of a specific place because, to unleash the memory, it must be exactly that precise cap bought on the Sioux reserve, that one there and not another, ‘as if the cap had closed within itself a portion of life that should not be lost, destroyed or shelved.’41 It is not a symbol because it is above all a document, a testimony of the lived. How can one keep track of the moment that will be irretrievably lost? How can one have a confirmation that far places really exist somewhere out there? Erba proposes: through things, not through symbols. In short, things become

36

Sergio Pautasso, ‘Oggetto-​simbolo. Plaquettes poetiche di Luciano Erba.’ In Il Giornale dei libri, 18th of March 1984, 4. 37 Erba, L’ippopotamo, 43. 38 Stefano Agosti, Poesia italiana contemporanea, Milan: Bompiani, 1995. 39 Erba, Il cerchio aperto, 17–​19. 40 Erba, L’ippopotamo, 14. 41 Dante Maffia, ‘Il cerchio aperto di Luciano Erba.’ In Il cittadino di Puglia, 21st of June 1986, 9.

148 Fioravanti so vivid in poetry when they are memories of time-​space materialized in an object, traces survived until the present, therefore incarnation and allegory of grounded experience. The cap purchased on the Sioux reserve and forgotten at the bottom of a trunk for years is a document tumbled down to here: a piece made and finished of another place that has endured in the infinite vicissitudes of marginal moments and now testifies the distance. Richiudendo un baule42 Quel berrettuccio di lana vergine bianco grigio e marrone comprato in un folto di abeti da un’indiana della riserva Sioux (starà bene alla seconda bambina […]) anni dopo lo ritrovo in fondo a un baule di un’umida casa di campagna. Neppure messo una volta sembra ora un passato di castagne quasi un mont-​blanc, ma seduto. E dire che l’indiana aveva sorriso accarezzato il cavallo e che il sole tra gli alberi … Ma addio Montagne Rocciose hand knitted original article! Erba replaces profusion of sentiment with sensitive vividness. It is the intense sensations (the colour of the cap, the smile of the girl, the sun behind the tree) which unleash a sense of loss: from one side the impression that places experienced are now lost and on the other the hope that there exists an authentic reality beyond the phenomenal world. Sensitive intensity would be only the outer film of a genuine world, truer and more profound but unattainable, wherein time should not be lost and places should not be far but always remain accessible. 42 Erba, L’ippopotamo, 14: Relatching a Trunk: ‘I found that stupid white, gray and brown cap of virgin wool bought from the Sioux Indian at the reservation in a clump of firs (it would look on my second child with almond eyes) years later in the bottom of a trunk in a dump country house. Never worn, it seems now a chestnut pie, a seated mont-​blanc. Even if the indian girl smiled, caressed the horse and the sun through the branches… Goodby Rocky Mountains, “hand knitted original article!”’

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In the collection L’ipotesi circense, the loss before the visible world is originated by the sight of a carpet spread on a floor at home. Dasein43 L’essere perentorio (dasein?) del tappeto o di un listello di parquet mi fa dopo un po’ pensare al nulla quasi stessi leggendo, anzi assai meglio, i detti di un saggio tibetano: un nulla di pelle, direi un brivido che fa chiudere gli occhi, per vedere su creste e cornici di monti andare come se non andassero i treni, o me stesso con un cappello di paglia che pedalo diretto al mercato in sella a una bicicletta da donna: una strada un po’ bianca un po’ piana esserci, allora? The carpet does not have a strictly symbolic value because it does not want to mean something: rather it acquires an instrumental value the moment in which it is used as the stimulus for meditation and for remembrance. The carpet is a tool for orientation. It is a concrete and useful object: it serves to compose and decompose the poet’s personal habitat, his lived experience and his anxieties. It is a map to guide in the misty void of Milan, the space of nothingness (‘nulla’) and thrill (‘brivido’). In this respect, Stefano Prandi distinguishes between Erba’s poetry of objects of and that of Montale, identifying the first with a programmatic absence of any symbolic intent.44 Erba’s objects would therefore be aligned as sumptuous fragments that strikingly indicate

43

44

Luciano Erba, L’ipotesi circense, Milan: Garzanti, 1995, 29: ‘Dasein: The peremptory Being-​ there (Dasein) of the rug or a parquet flooring baton makes me think about Nothing, after a while, almost as if I were reading, indeed much better, the sayings of a Tibetan sage: the nothingness of the skin, I would say a thrill, that closes my eyes to look over the crests and the frames of the mountains, to move forward as if the trains could no longer go or I were cycling to the market, wearing a straw hat, on a bike designed for women, in a street half white and half plain. To be-​there, then?’ Stefano Prandi, Uno sguardo ‘nei dintorni del nulla’.: la poesia di Luciano Erba, preface to Luciano Erba, Poesie 1951–​2002, Milan: Mondadori, 2002, ix.

150 Fioravanti the opacity, unconsciousness of the world for which only a partial and insufficient way of access is provided. The Dasein carpet is not decrypted in its design, instead it is used as if it could provide a series of indications to read (‘almost as if I were reading, indeed much better, /​the sayings of a Tibetan sage’). The carpet on the parquet outlines a metaphorical map with which Erba tries to orient himself in a Milan, for the city appears to be a labyrinth of false appearances and voids, between rails without trams and courtyards inhabited by shadows. Milano da sera a mattina45 Le nuvole hanno smesso di piovere sta per ricominciare la serai cortili avranno voci più chiarela luna compie un giro in più. La felicità vive a notte nel sognodella città labirinto un monte in periferia un vagone abbandonato sulle rotaie. In a coeval text, another Asian carpet appears, this time suspended on the city skyline, again in correspondence with a sense of confusion and anxiety. Bukara Tabriz Shiraz Shirwan46 Succede nei momenti di sconforto di veder galleggiare dei colori: fili di trame ancora incerte appaiono a mezz’aria un po’ lontano sospesi tra nubi sfilacciate, danno l’idea di un tessuto

45

Luciano Erba, Poesie 1951–​2002, edited by Stefano Prandi, Milan: Mondadori, 2002, 345. Milan from the evening to day time: It is not raining anymore, despite of the clouds, and the evening is about to restart again. The courtyards will have clearer voices and the moon completes one more turn. Happiness lives during night dreams in the city labyrinth, a mountain in the outskirts, an abandoned carriage on the railways. 46 Erba, Poesie, 340: Bukara Tabriz Shiraz Shirwan: Sometimes it happens, when one feels discouraged, to see colours floating: uncertain weave threads appear in mid-​air a bit further, hanging among frayed clouds, they remind of a fabric, a flying carpet spreading out in the wind, waiting in the blue over the roofs.

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un tappeto volante steso al vento che attende nell’azzurro sopra i tetti. This is obviously a Persian carpet, as the four toponyms of the title correspond to the cities and regions distributed among the present Azerbaijan, Iran and Uzbekistan. The fact that the toponyms also identify equally as many types of traditional Persian carpets transforms Erba’s text into a sort of visual poem: the arabesques of carpets that ‘appear in mid-​air’ in the fourth verse can be identified with the letters of the same title that is suspended above the text, just as the fabrics are suspended above the roofs. The names of the cities would thus be the names of Persian traditional rugs, typefaces would represent the geometric patterns on the surface of the fabric. Bukara Tabriz Shiraz Shirwan is not the only title geographically located in Erba’s oeuvre. A general mapping would show a predilection for the places Erba has lived in (Milan, Swiss Alps, France and the United States). Erba seems to conduct a completely asystematic reflection between text and territory. He investigates the ways in which a poem can transform the paper into a page (that is to say into an organized space for communication) and, at the same time, a description can convert any location into a habitat (that is to say into an organized space for human interaction). The faculty to read a sheet of paper or a rug for Erba coincides with the ability to read a landscape. It is in fact our gaze that turns into a text endowed with sense both things and ordinary places, through the possibilities unleashed by memory or meditation induced precisely by the objects that the poet observes within the space. This reflection was specifically discussed in the already cited Quale Milano?, where the roads uphill and downhill appear to be ‘more frequent in dreams and in memories’ which invest the poet when he hears the sound of the postcard inserted between the bicycle spokes, almost as if the visible world was just an excuse to explore the places of memory and oneiric activity. Therefore, the Persian rugs and fabrics of the poem Bukara Tabriz Shiraz Shirwan appear suspended over the city in moments of discouragement because they become more useful than ever precisely in these contexts: they are tools for finding one’s way in the labyrinthine city described in Milan da sera a mattina. 4

Persian Carpets as Maps for Orientation in Milan and Lombardy

Among the experiments effected by Erba in order to orient himself in Milan, three are of particular interest as they set out a personal, if small, etiquette for effective interaction with the city.

152 Fioravanti Quartine del tempo libero47 […] Appoggiati i gomiti sul davanzale ascoltare le saracinesche della seramentre gli alberi si fanno più scuri e arrivano i segnali della cena. Accavallate le gambe stando in poltrona numerare arabeschi di una stoffa persiana seduto su una panca tra passeggeri contare piastrelle della metropolitana. New reference to Persian fabric precedes, in an explicit parallelism, the mention of the Milan underground network: it is the reverse of it. The Persian arabesques therefore lend themselves to the same reading as the Dasein and Bukara Tabriz Shiraz Shirwan carpets: they draw a path that can be travelled with a glance before entering the metro, just as you do with a map. The presence of the city of Bukara in Italian literature is not isolated, since it appears with the name of Albracca in the Renaissance poems Orlando Innamorato and Orlando Furioso; however, Erba seems to overwrite the Asian caravan routes onto the Milan cartography until they coincide. The Persian arabesques work as mapping tools in order to draw an abstract model of Milan. In recalling the horse racing at San Siro, Erba sees in the Racecourse rings a «cartiglio mentale» on which the toponyms of Eastern Turkestan are engraved. Tombeau48 Non so qual nome nel Turkestan orientale diano a certi rialzi del terreno dominanti la steppa ed il deserto. 47 Luciano Erba, L’altra metà, Genoa: San Marco dei Giustiniani, 2004, 23: Leisure Stanzas: After leaning the elbows on the windowsill, listen to the evening shutters while trees get darker and dinner time signs pop up. After crossing the legs, while seated on an armchair, count the arabesques on a Persian fabric. When seated on a bench between the passengers, count the tiles in the Metro. 48 Erba, Il nastro di Moebius, 133: Tombeau: ‘I do not know how do they call certain mound of earth in eastern Turkestan, high on the steppe and the desert. I wish that one of those green and brown mounds were the Attalo’s and Gabbro’s tumulus!, two noble horses I used to bet on at the races in San Siro, many times, never winners yet successfully gambled on in a competition in 1940. That is my personal scroll, a green twine of wait, expectation and gran gallop. Tomorrow it will be no more than a rusted sign (tin-​sound-​like in the wind) and you, you eternal grassy humps of the Takla Makan!’

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Che un dosso di questi, verdebruno sia il tumulo di Attalo e di Gabbro! due cavalli di nobile ascendenza seguiti alle corse di San Siro più volte scommessi, mai arrivati ma alfine giocati con successo, accoppiati a una corsa nel ’40. Mio cartiglio mentale, verde intreccio d’attesa speranza e gran galop, domani insegna rugginosa (al vento un suon di latta) e voi eterni erbosi spalti del Takla Makan! If cartography and dream are therefore equivalent, in Erba’s imagination, the geography of Central Asia can easily settle in northern Italy and replace alpine paths with the routes of the Silk Road. Milan passes effortlessly from European metropolis to Asian city of caravans, as happens to «fiori di altissimo stelo /​di petali azzurri» (flowers of the highest stem /​of light blue petals) transplanted from Transoxiana to the alpine lands of Lombardy. Il roccolo49 […] Che se poi volete saperne di più andate a trovare il Pfarrer Johann Hämmerle che in una certa valle delle Alpi coltiva fiori di altissimo stelo di petali azzurri e stellati: devo dire che il miele delle sue api ha un sapore sui generis Pare che questi fiori (ma chi si fida poi dei preti) siano stati trapiantati da non so qual pianoro dell’Asia Centrale.

49 Erba, L’ippopotamo, 12:Bird Trap: ‘If sometimes I look up priestrs /​it’s a question of equilibrium. /​I’d say here it’s a matter of colors: /​green-​cornmeal-​black. /​If you want to know more /​go find Pfarrer Johann Hammerle /​who lives in a certain valley of the Alps /​and grows long-​stemmed flowers /​with blue, star-​shaped petals. /​I have to admit the honey of his bees has an incomparable taste. /​it seems these flowers /​(but then who believes priests?) /​were transplanted from who-​knows-​which plateau of Central Asia’ (Translated: Snodgrass 2003: 26).

154 Fioravanti The framing of the poetry flows simply from the alpine valleys to Asian steppes, places seem to overlap almost as if they were interchangeable. In the description of the flowers, the combination of structural elements such as the long stems (but Erba writes ‘very tall stems’) and decorative elements (petali stellati/​star-​shaped petals) also echoes one of the most characteristic landmarks of Islamic architecture in Central Asia. The tall solitary minarets, along the desert caravan routes (Ettinghausen Grabar 2005: 302–​3), furnished with blue domes and abstract star-​shaped decorations just like the long-​stemmed flowers with blue, star-​shaped petals of the poem Il roccolo. It is plausible that these towers have a double role as defensive structures, i. e. watchtowers, and above all as signals for the merchants (Hill 2003: 262). Even the great minaret of Kalayan, dating back to 1127, at Bukara would have been the lighthouse that announced to travellers they were approaching the oasis town along the impervious caravan routes.50 It is therefore another device suitable for finding one’s way that Erba withdraws from the Asian world of Persian culture to transplant it in Northern Italy in a floral form, with his usual emphasis on the sensitive qualities (colour of the petals, the taste of honey, its position in space). The superimposition of Lombardy and Turkestan then proceeds along three lines: 1) The use of the carpet as an orientation device during moments of confusion in the phenomenal world (Bukara Tabriz Shiraz, Dasein), but also the use of the Persian fabrics as maps of the Milan metro system (Quartine del tempo libero), 2) The overwriting of the desert of Takla Makan onto the San Siro racecourse, Milan (Tombeau), 3) The transplant of a signalling structure typical of Central Asia into the alpine valleys (Il roccolo). Approaching Erba’s five texts generates an Asian micro-​cartography inscribed within the confines of the Po plain and produces the unedited image of an Italy of caravans in which the different parts are lined up on the Milano-​Bukhara axis and adhere to each other like the carpet to the parquet (Dasein), like the cloth arabesques to the fugue of tiles in the metro (Quartine del tempo libero), like the roots of the Asian flowers to the alpine subsoil (Il roccolo) and like the racecourse clay to the grassy mounds of Takla Makan (Tombeau). Erba redraws the Lombard soil: he

50

Richard Ettinghausen; Oleg, Grabar, Arte y arquitectura del Islam 650–​1250, Spanish trans. Eugenia Martin y Gloria Mengual, (original ed. The Art and Architecture of Islam 650–​1250, 1987), Madrid: Ediciones Catedra, 2005, 305.

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duly applies to Milan, Lombardy and the Alps a semi-​invisible layer and traces a map of Central Asia on it as if it were an arabesque. The author’s note to Tombeau confirms the arbitrariness of Erba’s choice: «The Takla Makan is a vast expanse of desert between the right bank of the river Tarim and the northern spurs of Kuen Lun, in Sinkiang or Eastern Turkestan. From the reports of many nineteenth century travellers the presence of any vegetation in Takla Makan would appear to be excluded; however with regard to the wilderness of Ala Chan, to the east of Takla Makan, General Prjevalski wrote: ‘Végetation n’exist qu’au bord des rares sources at aux limites extremes’ (Notes de voyage, Société de géographie de Saint.Pétersbourg)».51 The grassy burial mound that Luciano Erba had located in his Milan race-​course caravan is ultimately the fruit of literary suggestion. The poet applies an imaginary cartography to Lombardy as if it were a membrane that stretches over Italian territory. And so the Bukara carpets are a map of a phantom Milan, city of dreams or of remembrance. Reuschel and Hurni have noted that ‘there are no less than five sources of uncertainty that one must confront when mapping fictional spaces: the freedom of the author, the vagueness of certain geographical concepts, the different ways that readers interpret the geographical information found in literary texts, and finally the fact that most forms or cartographic visualization are too rigid to represent the sort of fuzzy geographies that many literary works contain.’52 According to Barbara Piatti, however, ‘an additional source of spatial uncertainty might be added to this list as the production of a literary map can also serves to complicate –​rather than resolve –​the literary geographies embedded within the text.’53 Piatti proposes the example of the unfinished novel America by Kafka, but within the framework of the texts relating to Central Asia perhaps the most relevant novel is The Other Side by Alfred Kubin, set in the fantastic city of Pearl, located in Bukhara. Kubin’s creation, which incidentally was one of Kafka’s models, is the reverse of that attempted by Erba. Kubin tells the story of an artist invited by a childhood friend, the multimillionaire Patera, to relocate to Pearl, capital of an empire founded by him. The town appears to be constantly immersed in a twilight atmosphere, like the Milan described by Luciano Erba, but despite being in Central Asia it has 51 Erba, Il nastro di Moebius, 142. 52 Anne-​Kathrin Reuschel,; Lorenz Hurni, ‘Mapping Literature: Visualization of Spatial Uncertainty in Fiction.’ In The Cartographic Journal 48, n. 4 (2011), 289–​290. 53 Piatti, Barbara, Mapping Fiction. In Literary Mapping in the Digital Age, edited by David Cooper, Christopher Donaldson and Patricia Murrieta-​ Flores, London-​ New York: Routledge, 2016, 90.

156 Fioravanti the appearance of an old European city where one can only bring in old, used, technologically obsolete objects, that induce strange recurring dreams in the protagonist. Pearl is ultimately a city of dreams and memory no less than the Lombard metropolis that Erba portrayed in his poem Quale Milano? David Bodenhamer points out that in literature ‘space alone is an abstraction; it is always occupied space, or place, that draws our attention. And like time, place exists not simply in a material world but also in memory, imagination and experience.’54 We would expect therefore to witness not only the transformation of Milan into a trading post along the Silk Route, but also of the poet himself into a wandering shepherd of Central Asia, whose archetype would moreover be one of the most famous protagonists of Italian poetry: that of Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia by Giacomo Leopardi. And the conversion of Erba into a Persian shepherd will in fact occur in Milan in 1998. Tagiko55 In città ci si abitua, dicono a non vedere le stelle a trascurare la luna a non accorgersi dei segni del cielo ma riflesso nella vetrina lungo il corso tra una banca e un negozio di scarpe vedo un volto che avrei potuto avere di pastore errante, di tagiko e allora è tutt’uno domandarmi se rannuvola e si alza un po’ di vento chi sentirà la prima goccia di pioggia al quartiere delle case d’epoca? sarà il sarto? il postino? di qui passo ad altre domande sul destino. 54 55

David Bodenhamer, Making the Invisible Visible: Place, Spatial Stories and Deep Maps. In Literary Mapping in the Digital Age, edited by David Cooper; Christopher Donaldson; Patricia Murrieta-​Flores, London-​New York: Routledge, 2016, 210–​211. Luciano Erba, Negli spazi intermedi, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1998, 15: Tajik: ‘They say one can get used not to see the stars, in the city, to neglect the moon and be unaware of the signs of the sky. But when I see my own reflection on a shopwindow in the avenue, between a bank and a shoes store, I see a face I could have had, the face of a wandering shepherd, of a tajik man. Then I start asking myself who will perceive the first drop of the rain when it gets cloudy and windy in the old houses neighborhood? Will he be the tailor? The postman? Hence I move towards other questions about destiny.’

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Once again the metamorphosis is triggered by a visual sensation that compensates for metropolitan confusion. Erba reacts to the invisibility of the moon and the stars, due to the overwhelming urban lighting, by glimpsing an alternative in the reflection of a shop window. His face appears to him then as an engraving on the glass’s surface, almost as if it were an impressed motif on a facade of Milan ‘between a bank and a store.’ It is particularly indicative that Erba draws his cartography of the Silk Road precisely in the more clearly recognizable Milan: the avenues, the racecourse, the underground network and the background of the Alps to the north. In short, he imposes a form of articulated double toponymy so they assume a double identity after being mapped into poetry. Right in the heart of this Milan of caravans, a few steps from the famous Teatro alla Scala, the Poldi Pezzoli Museum preserves the precious Carpet of Tigers. The typical Persian rug design with a small central golden medallion is surrounded by a symmetrical pattern occupying the center of the field with a second wider medallion and finally animals and vegetation displayed in circumferences around the epicenter of the composition. The succession of the medallions and the circles resemble the glaring circular form of Milan layout, described since the medieval age as a hoop (‘Questa città ha forma circolare, a modo di un cerchio. Tale mirabile rotondità è il segno della perfezione,’ Bonvesin de la Riva De magnalibus Mediolani, 1288). The space of the rug covered with animals, plants and trees seem to correspond to the fields, the rivers and the plans outside of the city, in the Po Valley till the Alps. Hence the Carpet of tigers could be read as an abstract map of Milan, indeed. The splendid example of sixteenth century arabesqued Persian fabric is a contemporary of the Madonna of the carpet painted by Vincenzo Foppa for the sacristy of Santa Maria in Brera and today conserved in the Pinacoteca di Brera. The fresco was painted with lime and is therefore characterized by a diffused opacity from which only the visual quality of the rug stand out –​the red and the thickness of the warp –​resting on the parapet of a window from which the Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus look out. The perspective adopted by Foppa is viewed from below upwards, as if the observer could only catch a glimpse of the space of the heavenly elsewhere from which the Madonna leans out. The space of otherness, the other-​world, is then screened by a Persian carpet whose geometric pattern is imposed from the top downwards toward the eye of the spectator as it appeared in the eyes of the poet suspended above the roofs of the city in the poem Bukara Tabriz Shirwan Shiraz. The image painted by Foppa was indeed such an icon, during the xvi century, that it was copied and reproduced almost identical by another Renainscence painter, Ambrogio Bergognone, in the Certosa di Pavia monastery, South of Milan. The analysis

158 Fioravanti of Persian rugs and fabrics outline an unusual representation of Milan, as Luciano Erba acts as a second Foppa’s epigone and aims to depict the carpet as a gateway to a deeper reality and the city itself as a passageway to the elsewhere (l’altrove). In Erba’s Persian texts, Milan appears as a fluid inter-​place (‘spazio intermedio’),56 an urban oasis along the Silk Road in Central Asia, instead of a metropolis in the Po Valley. Even the construction and the arrangement of paratexts such as titles (Bukara Tabriz Shiraz Shirwan) and footnotes (Tombeau) transmogrify the pages themselves into visual devices to shape a map of modern day Milan as a rug. Erba collects similarities between Northern Italy and Turkestan, Lombardy and the Caspian Region, drawing a bird’s eye view image of Milan as a crossroad where actual topography and virtual literary mapping interplay with each other.

Works Cited

Agosti, Stefano, Poesia italiana contemporanea, Milan: Bompiani, 1995, 89–​103. Agosti, Stefano, ‘Considerazioni aggiuntive sulla poesia di Luciano Erba.’ In Testo 33, n. 64 (2012), 22–​25. Airoldi Namer, Fulvia, ‘La Vita intensa di Massimo Bontempelli, ovvero l’invenzione di Massimo attore narrato e narrante (seconda parte).’ In Italogramma 2 (2012): italogramma.elte.hu/​wp-​content/​files/​Fulvia_​Airoldi_​Namer_​Bontempelli_​La_​vita_​ intensa2_​0.pdf. Anceschi, Luciano, Linea lombarda, Varese: Editrice Magenta, 1952. Bianciardi, Luciano, La vita agra, Milan: Rizzoli, 1962. Bodenhamer, David, Making the Invisible Visible: Place, Spatial Stories and Deep Maps. In Literary Mapping in the Digital Age, edited by David Cooper; Christopher Donaldson; Patricia Murrieta-​Flores, London-​New York: Routledge, 2016, 207–​220. Bontempelli, Massimo, La vita intensa. Romanzo dei romanzi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1920. Borri, Giancarlo, ‘A Luciano Erba il Premio Librex Guggenheim –​E. Montale.’ In Controcampo 16, n. 10 (1989), 9–​12. Crespi, Stefano, ‘Un metafisico tranviere ci abbraccia fuori città.’ In Il Sole 24 ore, 12 luglio 1987, 19. Di Lieto, Carlo, Il romanzo familiare del Pascoli. Delitto, «passsione» e delirio, Naples: Guida, 2008. Erba, Luciano, Il male minore, Milan: Mondadori, 1960.

56 Erba, L’ippopotamo, 53.

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Erba, Luciano, Il nastro di Moebius, Milan: Mondadori, 1980. Erba, Luciano, Françoise, Brescia: Il Farfegno, 1982. Erba, Luciano, Il cerchio aperto, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1983. Erba, Luciano L’ippopotamo, Turin: Einaudi, 1989, translated in english by Ann Snodgrass, The Hippopotamus, Oakville (Canada): Guernica, 2003. Erba, Luciano, ‘La casa, la vita. Alle frontiere dell’io.’ In ad. Architectural Digest. Le più belle case del mondo 13, n. 149 (October 1993), 20–​22. Erba, Luciano, Negli spazi intermedi. Poesie ’96-​’98, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1998. Erba, Luciano, Poesie 1951–​2002, edited by Stefano Prandi, Milan: Mondadori, 2002. Erba, Luciano, L’altra metà, Genoa: Edizioni San Marco dei Giustiniani, 2004. Erba, Luciano, Le contraddizioni, Milan: Quaderni di Orfeo, 2007. Ettinghausen, Richard; Grabar Oleg, Arte y arquitectura del Islam 650–​1250, spanish trans. Eugenia Martin y Gloria Mengual, (original ed. The Art and Architecture of Islam 650–​1250, 1987), Madrid: Ediciones Catedra, 2005. Foot, John (ed.), Milan since the Miracle. City, Culture and Identity, Oxford: Berg, 2001. Lonardi, Gilberto, ‘Le schegge di Erba, regno dell’effimero. Da trent’anni il più incantevole colorista cittadino.’ In L’Arena, 5th of March 1984, 3. Luzzi, Giorgio, Poeti della Linea lombarda. 1952–​1985, Melzo: Cens, 1987. Maffia, Dante, ‘Il cerchio aperto di Luciano Erba.’ In Il cittadino di Puglia, 21st of June 1986, 9. Pappalardo La Rosa, Franco, Il poeta nel ‘labirinto’: Luciano Erba, in Il filo e il labirinto. Gatto –​Caproni –​Erba, Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1997. Piatti, Barbara, Mapping Fiction. In Literary Mapping in the Digital Age, edited by David Cooper, Christopher Donaldson and Patricia Murrieta-​Flores, London-​New York: Routledge, 2016, 88–​100. Pautasso, Sergio, ‘Oggetto-​simbolo. Plaquettes poetiche di Luciano Erba.’ In Il Giornale dei libri, 18th of March 1984, 4. Prandi, Stefano, Uno sguardo «nei dintorni del nulla»: la poesia di Luciano Erba, preface to: Erba Luciano, Poesie 1951–​2002, Mondadori, Milan, 2002, v–​xviii. Reuschel, Anne-​Kathrin; Hurni, Lorenz, ‘Mapping Literature: Visualization of Spatial Uncertainty in Fiction.’ In The Cartographic Journal 48, n. 4 (2011), 288–​292. Robinson, Peter, The Poetry of Luciano Erba, introduction for Luciano Erba, The Greener Meadow. Selected Poems, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Savinio, Alberto, Ascolto il tuo cuore, città, Milan: Bompiani, 1944. Smith, Lawrence R. The New Italian Poetry. 1945 to Present. A Bilingual Anthology, Berkley-​Los Angeles-​London: University of California Press, 1981. Testa, Enrico, Dopo la lirica. Poeti italiani 1960–​2000, Turin: Einaudi, 2005. Toppan, Bruno Cités réelles et cités mythiques chez Foscolo. In De Florence à Venise: études en l’honneur de Christian Bec, edited by François Levi and Carlo Ossola, Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-​Sorbonne, 2006, 449–​462.

chapter 8

A ‘Monolithic Map/​of We Know Not What’ Alec Finlay’s Chorographic Poetics Monika Szuba In 2010 Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn set out on a journey on foot through Scotland, guided by Matsuo Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North). Their responses to the encountered landscapes are gathered in a volume titled The Road North (2014).1 The choice of a non-​Western text to serve as a guide on the journey through Scotland demonstrates an attempt to introduce a non-​Eurocentric perspective. Stepping over temporal and geographical limits, Finlay and Cockburn enter into a dialogue with the seventeenth-​century text, offering a phenomenological mapping of place focused on corporeal experience and a blending in elements of cultural and historical survey of the land. In his work, Finlay frequently maps the terrain with his feet, feeling his way through place in detailed itineraries. One of his recent projects involves ‘a place-​aware mapping of the Upper Teviot watershed,’ or walking along a tributary of the River Tweed in the Scottish Borders and creating texts and drawings of tributaries. Exploring the relationship between language and landscape, Finlay does not strive for fixed meanings, but concerns himself with the dissemination of sense, which is illustrated by his use of tanzaku, or ‘place-​ name translation.’ His place writing and sited projects become moveable maps focused on ‘place-​awareness.’ As he jettisons systematic representation, Finlay challenges the view that the perception of place is stable, demonstrating that any ‘monolithic map’ is too large to apprehend and that sense making is a dynamic process which occurs constantly on location. The lines which serve as the first part of the title for this essay –​‘a monolithic map/​of we know not what’ (Finlay 2014, 51) –​foreground that which the map is not for the artist: a monolith, which suggests an entity too large and too regular, something unchangeable, devoid of differentiation in its whole. An embodiment of modernity, maps foreground the primacy of reason, they represent an obsession with quantification, and privilege sight over other senses; yet Finlay’s maps reverse that, offering a different approach. His work underlines 1 For other readings of The Road North, see Manfredi 2019 and Sanderson 2015.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004520288_010

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the primacy of physicality which involves other senses than mere vision, and so illustrate a point made by Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, who observes that ‘Sensory experience is unstable, and alien to natural perception, which we achieve with our whole body all at once, and which opens on a world of interacting senses’ (1962, 262). For the readers of his work, maps created in the open field enable complex interpretative practices. The ecopoetic maps made by Finlay do not form flat surfaces, yet they offer a survey of the territory not aimed at representation, which is not a superimposition of divisions. An attempt to read the landscape, they propose a response to and active engagement with place. Reading the ecopoetic maps, Alex Hodby argues that, ‘the breadth of Finlay’s approach to landscape and nature and his treatment of such themes as play, wounded nature, philosophical topography and genetic modification’ (2005, 6). Thus, Finlay’s ecopoetic maps combine the concreteness of experience and the abstraction of language, evoking locations through various means and allowing the reader to imagine the walk. Embedded in the landscape, Finlay’s art foregrounds body knowledge, experiencing the world corporeally rather than in an abstract fashion. Thus, his maps do not privilege vision but combine all senses, the artist immersed bodily in the landscape, immersing the viewer in a number of sensual ways. This essay aims to explore ways in which Finlay’s work combines mapping and ecopoetics, as suggested by my introduction. It will discuss how his various projects, concerned with chorography, which focuses on small regions and specific locations, entwines language and topography. It aims to explore the special function of the proper name as it occupies a prominent place in Finlay’s oeuvre. Finally, following J. Hillis Miller’s statement from Topographies that ‘Landscape “as such” is never given, [it is] only one or another of the ways to map it,’ it will argue that in his numerous collaborative projects, Finlay proposes open texts onto which are mapped various consciousnesses. His words may be taken to summarise his work, whereby ‘[p]‌eople are invited to interact with a world book and to take part in a wandering journey, which no individual will ever be able to complete in its entirety’ (Finlay 2005, 47).

1

Finlay’s work focuses on the self’s relation with the landscape, on Being-​in-​the-​ world, experienced corporeally through site-​specific installations and walking, a down-​to-​earth activity, which enables direct contact with the physical world. It creates a deeper sense of place, an awareness of local and regional as it incorporates small-​scale elements of the landscape which, when combined,

162 Szuba form a large, interconnected whole. Embodiment is an inextricable element of Finlay’s emplaced creations. To cite Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Our body and our perception always summon us to take as the centre of the world that environment with which they present us’ (1962, 333). Being in the landscape, walking through and responding to it in a poetic manner foregrounds the alignment of place, body and time. Imagining the context in which the reader receives his work affects the formal aspect of his work. As Finlay says, ‘A lot of the formal resolution comes from thinking how people will physically be when they experience it’ (Finlay 2014b, n.p., my emphasis). Thus, his work is a consideration of the corporeal experience of the landscape, the phenomenology of being. Composed of moveable maps, it captures the phenomenology of place and its changeable, fleeting nature. Embedded in place, making poetic cartographies, Finlay’s poems ‘focus on the temporal in terms of the momentary –​sensations, thoughts and feelings that emerge briefly and pass away,’ as Alice Tarbuck argues (2017, 18). His poems transcend the boundaries of page and assume the form of material objects: sound poetry, visual poetry, and found poetry practiced by Finlay traverse textual borders from and into the real landscapes, exploring the relations between the space of the page and place. By planting poems in the landscape in various media –​in the form of tanzaku, nest boxes, bee boles –​Finlay foregrounds the interconnectedness of text with place. Grounded in landscape, Finlay’s writing represents open field poetics (see Tarlo [2013] and Bloomfield [2013]), a term which refers both to the importance of locality and to Black Mountain poets,2 whose poetry celebrates an ‘open field,’ whereby the form of the poem responds to its content, being less constrained by conventional poetic forms, linked by the significance of breath and free verse. Essential to his poetic consciousness, the inclusiveness of form and its multidimensionality demonstrates ‘joint recognition of modes as well as joint occupation of spaces’ (Tarbuck 2017, 20), to use Tarbuck’s words. As mentioned above, Finlay creates in various forms and media, which include poetry, collage, sculpture and audio-​visual; the hybrid and interdisciplinary nature of his work, which includes poems, narrative text, maps, and drawings, foregrounds the multi-​ media approach to representation. Employing different media in the service of poetry enables Finlay to explore language as, ‘[o]‌nce you know how to play with it you own all its meanings’ (Finlay Three Rivers Crossword 2005, n.p.). His is a work imbued with playfulness but the playful aspect of his art does

2 This resemblance is perhaps no coincidence since it was Robert Creeley’s collection which brought Alec Finlay to poetry (Interview with Lilias Fraser 100).

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not avoid ethical questions concerning our being in the world but foregrounds them. Finlay’s ecologically aware work draws attention to ontological and epistemological aspects of being in the world. Finlay believes in art that is ‘a mixture of play and complexity –​questions and answers squashed into one’ (Finlay Three Rivers Crossword 2005, n.p.). I follow George Hart’s argument here that in works which focus on ‘textuality, verbal surface, and wordplay,’ ecologically aware authors focus on the treatment of ‘nature’ in literature as ‘a referent and a subject’ (Hart 2000, 315). In the context of Finlay’s work, it seems true that his engagement with landscape is ‘much more than simply formal playfulness; this aesthetic strategy constitutes a formally embodied investigation of environmental aesthetics and ethics,’ as Mandy Bloomfield puts it (2013, 122). Finlay underlines the communal nature of his work, emphasising the importance of ‘shared consciousness,’ as he calls it (Finlay 2014b, n.p.), which refers to reception but also, its collaborative conception. I shall briefly mention just a few of Finlay’s collaborative projects in this part of the essay in order to demonstrate a sample of the breadth of his artistic imagination. In 2008 Finlay’s collaboration with Jo Salter created Specimen Colony (2008), an open-​air installation of nest-​boxes painted in the colours of birds from foreign postage stamps, which refers to the connection held by Liverpool with the rest of the world by trade and migration. Working in another medium, sound, together with Chris Watson, Finlay realised Siren (2006), a field recording. Many works involve the audience, as for instance Avant-​Garde English Landscape and Some Versions of Landscape. A survey of artist projects in the landscape (1998–​2006) and there are also numerous projects involving renga, crosswords, and participative walks to which I shall return further in this essay. The multimedial, collaborative nature of Finlay’s work draws our attention to the relationality of space by ‘detotalizing’ it as ‘[s]‌pace becomes detotalized by virtue of its relational construction and because, being differentially understood and produced by different individuals, collectivities and societies, it can have no universal essence’ (Tilley 1994, 11). Interventions in the landscape such as tanzaku, nest boxes, bee boles, letterboxes and circular poems on the stamps demonstrate direct interaction and interconnection with place that goes beyond linguistic means as ‘spatial modes of organising materials … [offer] alternatives to “description”’ (Finlay 2012, 29). Abolishing straight lines, concrete poetry as practiced by Finlay represents ‘a new relation to syntax’ (Finlay 2012, 29), one that allows for introducing a more open, less conventional mode of reading. Poetic form matters for Finlay as it extends onto the reception of a work of art, ‘a formal quality that we might be able to recognize together’ (Finlay 2014b, n.p.). He gives as an example a circle poem, which becomes ‘a

164 Szuba space that we could both occupy, in looking at. We would have a relationship to it, and that might be a bit more confidently shared than a solipsistic, confessional poem, say’ (Finlay 2014b, n.p.). Finlay’s sparse, minimalistic style relies on pared down language, often presented in a non-​standard layout on the page or in the landscape. As Tony Williams notices, Finlay writes ‘fragile poems, using lineation to draw attention to the felicities and poky bits of language, leaving things unadorned, cutting away everything but the nub’ (2012, n.p.). Employing concrete or pattern poetry, which is ‘both visual and literary artvisual poetry’ (Higgins 1987, 3), Finlay foregrounds an organic relation between linguistic and non-​linguistic objects, creating poems which are to be perceived phenomenally, like the landscape, experienced through immersion in place. A recurrent practice, topological label/​text placement, refreshes language and makes the reader perceive it anew, yet it is not language that is at the forefront in Finlay’s work but the experience of being in the world. Through an interactive mapping of landscape, Finlay focuses on place-​awareness, which reveals dynamic relationships between various elements in space, highlighting connectivity, an interleaving between topography and self. In his book on the phenomenology of landscape, Christopher Tilley argues: A centred and meaningful space involves specific sets of linkages between the physical space of the non-​humanly created world, somatic states of the body, the mental space of cognition and representation and the space of movement, encounter and interaction between persons and between persons and the human and non-​human environment. Socially produced space combines the cognitive, the physical and the emotional into something that may be reproduced but is always open to transformation and change. A social space, rather than being uniform and forever the same, is constituted by differential densities of human experience, attachment and involvement. tilley 1994, 10–​11

By walking through and placing textual elements in the landscape, Finlay explores the interweaving of consciousness with the world, while emphasizing the intertextuality of any perception of that world as he examines examining layers of social and cultural significance of spaces. Interactions between human and non-​human environments, explored on the move, form the centre of many walking projects created by Finlay for whom walking is to ‘become habituated to the landscape, learning place-​names, reading the telltale signs that decode the texture of the land and its weather’ (Finlay 2018a, 150). In

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response to such work, critics have of course stressed the significance of walks in Finlay’s art practice. For instance, Andrew Sneddon suggests that pilgrimage is an important mode of response in Finlay’s interaction with other authors as it enables him ‘to see what they saw’ (2008, 6). Similarly, Alice Tarbuck and Simone Kotva argue that Finlay’s work is an example of non-​secular pilgrimage as a form present in environmental writing. Yet such emplacement through walking does not only foreground vision but also touch as, whereby sight possesses tactile qualities as Merleau-​Ponty notices: ‘My eye for me is a certain power of making contact with things’ (1962, 325). The palpability of sight highlights the corporeal intertwining of the self with the surrounding, binding them together. Finlay’s walks map the Scottish landscape, leaving paper and digital trails and thus they expand the concept of travel literature, they offering chorographic explorations of landscape and language. I wish to look briefly at some of them here. All were completed in collaboration with other people, all exist in various forms, which is a signature of Finlay’s work. In White Peak, Dark Peak which concerns the Peak District National Park (commissioned by re: place, Derbyshire Arts Development Group, 2009), Finlay proposes ‘an audio-​visual word-​map’ (Finlay 2010, n.p.), or a ‘combination of walking, letterboxing, Japanese renga and field-​recordings’ (Finlay 2010, n.p.), which contains specific directions and employs geolocation and qr code technology. This emplaced nature of the artwork (and most of Finlay’s art) is summarised in one of his short poems, ‘Kinder North,’ the final line of which –​‘words have no place outside what lasts’ –​foregrounds the inextricability of language and landscape. This embeddedness of words in place brings to mind what Finlay says in reference to his father’s, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s, work and which may be applied his own: ‘The poem belongs here because this is where the poet first heard the wind’ (Finlay 2012, 1). The form of the poems responds to place: in Finlay’s pattern poetry the shape of the words depict the subject, creating a typographical effect, imitating the shape of mountains. Such arrangement of letters on the page is an attempt to capture the view. Còmhlan Bheanntan/​A Company of Mountains (2013) is yet another journey project, in which Finlay combines poems, essays, photographs, and what he calls ‘word-​mntn’ drawings. The title is drawn from the first line of Sorley MacLean’s poem ‘Ceann Loch Aeoineart.’ Inspired by MacLean’s epic An Cuillithionn Finlay chose fourteen locations on the Isle of Skye, exploring cultural and historical aspects of place. The volume is preceded by a map of the island with numbered places, or vistas, which Finlay uses the word ‘conspectuses’ interchangeably. Originating from Latin and signifying ‘a sight,’

166 Szuba conspectus suggests an overall view of something, which justifies the book’s subtitle: 14 views of the Isle of Skye. In a long list of contributors, Finlay lists among the poets Meg Bateman, Thomas A Clark, and Roderick Watson, and also some who are dead: Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith. A ‘collaborative audio & visual word-​map’ (Finlay 2014c, n.p.), The Road North is a book published in 2014, preceded by a blog was completed during a journey undertaken by Finlay and Cockburn. The paper-​based version contains prose and poetic text, while the online version includes photographs and audio material, accompanied by an interactive map on which the reader may retrace the poets’ path: a contour of Scotland with clickable squares placed around it. The itinerary projected onto a map enables the reader to follow the numbers or explore the fifty-​three places at random. Departing on 16 May 2010, precisely 321 years after Bashō and Sora, Finlay and Cockburn pair places from a different geographical location and historical period. In the places which they visit they leave hokku-​labels, whereby hokku refers directly to Japanese literary tradition in which hokku were written as opening verses of haikai no renga, since Bashō also a separate poem. The hokku contains a seasonal word or phrase, and to reflect the poet’s current environment. Re-​ enacting Bashō’s journey and transposing it onto another time and place, Finlay and Cockburn find a relation to the original walk, the act of walking and paying attention to the landscape binds them across time and space, the hokku-​labels materially links them to place. In the book version of the walk, Finlay and Cockburn employ a series of questions and answers, which precede each section and each part of the journey, opening space and challenging the certainty of maps. ‘Walking as art,’ to use Rebecca Solnit’s phrase, is a new function of walking which has emerged since the 1960s (Solnit 2001, 267). A performance practice, walking can become a brief, ephemeral artwork, an invisible sculpture, a practice initiated by a British artist, Richard Long, who in Line Made by Walking (1967) created something that was ‘both more ambitious and more modest than conventional art: ambitious in scale, in making his mark upon the world itself, modest in that the gesture was such an ordinary one, and the resultant work was literally down to earth, underfoot’ (Solnit 2001, 267). In some way, Finlay’s practices are a continuation –​but also an expansion –​of Long’s practices and so the question Solnit, which asks about Long’s artwork is pertinent also in relation to Finlay: ‘the line was a residual trace, or a sculpture –​the line –​of which the photograph was documentation, or was the photograph the work of art, or all of these?’ (2001, 270). In Finlay’s work, the traces left in the landscape enter in dialogue on multiple platforms, the centre –​the locus –​ always being the place.

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In its focus on the local, walking leads us to the concept of chorography announced in the second part of the title of this essay. In its etymology, the word ‘chorography’ comes from two Greek words: khōros, meaning ‘place,’ and graphein, ‘to write.’ A term which comes from antiquity, returning in the early modern period, chorography signifies topographical literatures, place writing. Rather than understanding the concept as ‘writing about a country or region,’ Darrell J. Rohl argues that chorography translates graphia as ‘representation,’ and defines chorography as ‘the representation of space or place’ (2011, 1). After a period when chorographic writing flourished –​the seventeenth century –​ the term chorography was rarely used even though it was still practiced (Rohl 2011, 3) but nowadays landscape phenomenologists such as Christopher Tilley continue chorographic practice (Rohl 2011, 4). It is also continued by artists such as Alec Finlay, who is concerned with mapping place not only with reference to its geography but taking into consideration its history and culture. While spatio-​temporal, preoccupied with both place and time, chorographic writing decidedly puts place first yet temporality is a significant feature in its historical dimension, which enables chorography to reveal ‘the bidirectional connection of past and present through the medium of space, land, region or country’ (Rohl 2011, 6). One more feature of chorography makes it a suitable concept for the examination of Alec Finlay’s work, i.e. ‘an inherently multi-​media approach, including written description, multiple modes of visualization, and performance,’ which makes chorography ‘generative, or creative’ (Rohl 2011, 6).3 I use the concept of chorography in reference to Finlay’s projects to denote local geographies, place writing focused on a small part of the world rather than attempting to cover all of it, which work by ‘calling places into being, not just by naming topographic features, but by dramatizing in the process of revealing the landscape how they matter’ (Bossing 1999, 153 qtd in Rohl 2011, 6). What is more, emplaced literature focused on place awareness as practiced by Alec Finlay partly realises the concept of a ‘deep-​map,’ described by William Least Heat-​Moon in PrairyErth: (a Deep Map) (1991), reflecting on eighteenth-​century antiquarian approaches to place which included history, folklore, natural history and hearsay,’ aiming to capture ‘the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the factual and the fictional, the 3 Rohl describes the legacy of late seventeenth-​and early eighteenth-​century Scottish scholars such as Sir Robert Sibbald and Alexander Gordon and their chorographic practice (Rohl 2011, 7–​17).

168 Szuba discursive and the sensual, the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history’ (qtd in Rohl 2011, 5) and anything else pertaining to place. Etymologically, chorography contains an element which has proved philosophically fertile, germinating meanings: chora, or khōra, which designates place, site, locality. Originating from Plato’s Timaeus, chora has been employed by Julia Kristeva who, in Revolution in Poetic Language, underscores the difficulty in defining the concept, which remains forever ungraspable, as it ‘lends itself to phenomenological, spatial intuition, and gives rise to a geometry’ (Kristeva 2011, 25–​6) and is used ‘to denote an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases’ (Kristeva 1984, 25). As Kristeva argues ‘Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitively posited: as a result, one can situate the chora and, if necessary, lend it a topology, but one can never give it axiomatic form’ (Kristeva 1984, 26). Its elusive nature is also grasped by Derrida, who writes: this ‘thing’ that is nothing of that to which this ‘thing’ nonetheless seems to ‘give place’ –​without, however, this ‘thing’ ever giving anything: neither the ideal paradigms of things nor the copies that an insistent demiurge, the fixed idea before his eyes, inscribes in it. Insensible, impassible but without cruelty, inaccessible to rhetoric. Khōra discourages, it ‘is’ precisely what disarms efforts at persuasion … Neither sensible nor intelligible, neither metaphor nor literal designation, neither this nor that, both this and that, participating and not participating in the two terms of a couple, khōra –​also called ‘matrix’ or ‘nurse’. Prière d’insérer cited in Translator’s Note, xv–​x vi.

Chora is ‘analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm’ (Kristeva 2011, 26). Finlay’s chorographic works present or stage a space filled with voice and movement, and are an attempt to capture spaces in between, spaces ‘inaccessible to rhetoric,’ to show that landscape is. Ephemeral and provisional, chora is a clearing which reveals itself, opens to the truth of being, explored by Alec Finlay, whose work is ‘at the same time too dense and too fleeting: too connected with its place and procedures’ (Hodby 2005, 6). In order to survey the landscape, Finlay employs a ‘microtonal’ method, which involves ‘images of landscape, events, notes and conversations,’ or ‘a succession of small notes heard across a wide field –​a way of working that can animate the entire space without dominating one particular aspect of it’ (Hodby 2005, 6), as Alex Hodby puts it. These comments regard

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Finlay’s projects titled Avant-​Garde English Landscape and Some Versions of Landscape. A survey of artist projects in the landscape (1998–​2006).4 But equally could be used to describe a number of his other works. In these two projects, Finlay explores the space of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, using the existing sculptures as ‘navigational way-​points on a walk through the park’ (Finlay 2005, 24). The focus on ‘the kinetic rhythm,’ on moving through the landscape is reflected in such works as ‘a-​g el03 circlesthroughthepath,’ which proposes a walk, which connects seven letterboxes containing circle poems that map a route around Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which foreground the relation of landscape to thought through an imaginative use of language. As Finlay explains: Patterned poems –​compound, modified or animated forms –​ permutations that imitate nature and horticulture –​ mesostic poems which grow like plants –​ circle poems which turn an arc in time and have silence in their heart –​ grid poems made into sliding puzzles –​wordrawings. The wounds we make in nature return to mark us. Our healing is turning toward living. finlay 2005, 28

In an artwork numbered svol06 and titled ‘Mesostic herbarium’ –​naMes abe Stems abell wordS Their abelli branChes (Finlay 2015, 46) Finlay foregrounds the organic nature of text which can sprout letters in unexpected places. Names are intertwined with the vegetal world. As Finlay explains, ‘Mesostic herbarium is an archive and book of poems written on the names of flowers and trees. Some poems have been animated as wordwood, and others made into botanical name labels’ (2015, 46). Scattered around the world, wooden boxes, each containing a circle poem rubber stamp and ink pad are accompanied by guides published online, which highlights the openness of artwork and its interactive nature, forming an incomplete map. The intertwining of language and landscape is present in various works, particularly more recent ones such as minnmouth (2016), which ‘seeks a potential vocabulary that exceeds conventional ortography,’ offers the ‘sequence of detached sentences,’ which ‘proposes a fluxus, from poetic devices, sketching 4 As Finlay explains, the title of Some Versions of Landscape. A survey of artist projects in the landscape (1998–​2006) comes from William Empson’s critical study Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) and exhibitions devoted to English avant-​garde film-​makers: British Avant-​Garde Landscape Films (1975) and Perspectives on English Avant-​Garde Film (1978) (2005, 80).

170 Szuba a history, part-​lost, part-​imagined, whose roots are bedded in the experimental analysis of wind’ (Finlay 2016, 5). What Finlay calls ‘tidal poetry,’ welds together language, sea waves and sand in an attempt to ‘counter petrolio, and forge a post-​carbon culture –​or, at least, devise a poetics for a drowned world’ (Finlay 2016, 5). Such elemental works are complemented with projects which focus on the vegetal world, including the ‘mesostic’ projects, emphasising the interchange between text and organic matter. In one such site-​specific artwork, titled I Hear Her Cry, ‘anagrammatic poem-​clues for The Oaks, Wellesley’ realised in 2012–​15, Finlay offers place-​aware work in a double sense as it focuses on types of trees as well as the literary heritage. Several poems are dedicated to American poets and thinkers such as Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, all of whom observed the vegetal world closely. In the epigraph coming from James Schuyler’s poem titled ‘October,’ the falling of leaves encapsulated in the American name for a season of ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’: ‘Fall has/​come: unpatterned, in/​the shedding leaves.’ The moment of leaves suddenly detaching itself from a branch and falling is captured in the enjambments severing the auxiliary verb from the main one and the preposition from the rest of the prepositional phrase. The beginning of Schuyler’s poem, three lines before the lines cited above create an image in which books are compared to leaves: ‘Books litter the bed,/​ leaves the lawn. It/​lightly rains.’ The final two lines of the poem reinforces this image: ‘The books/​of fall litter the bed,’ which further emphasises the intertwining of organic and textual matter, combining the irregularity of ‘unpatterned’ leaves with the order of language.

3

I Hear Her Cry includes poem-​clues, a device commonly employed by Finlay, which may be seen as a return to the beginnings of English poetry with Anglo-​ Saxon riddles. For Finlay, clues open up language and enable us to ‘know all the ways that a word can fit into the jigsaw of language’ (Finlay Three Rivers Crossword 2005, n.p.). Some of Finlay’s projects rely on puzzles, taking the form of ‘map-​word crosswords’ as in Three Rivers Crossword (2005), in which he follows the rivers Tyne, Tees and Wear to create a map of the North Eastern region of England. In an epigraph, Finlay cites William Empson’s words, who remarked in the 1930s that the fashion for ‘obscure poetry’ coincided with the fashion for crossword puzzles, claiming wittily that ‘this revival of interest in poetry, an old and natural thing, has got a bad name merely by failing to know itself and refusing to publish the answers’ (Finlay Three Rivers Crossword

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2005, n.p.). By placing clues in the landscape and encouraging readers to navigate them online in search for answers, Finlay creates a crossword map which includes words referring to place names in Latin, Old English and Norman language, flora and fauna found there and human-​made structures, proposing a linguistic mapping of landscapes and landmarks. Proper names, their function and meaning remain an important, recurrent theme in Finlay’s work. Considering various linguistic possibilities through the exploration of place words, Finlay draws our attention to the manner in which they are made to signify in the landscape, designating its elements. A question of convention, proper names are of cultural relevance, pointing to social geography and history: they have a spatial and temporal function. Thus, proper names are cultural constructs, they do not exist outside of a specific context; what is more, they mark propriety, conveying power. ‘The bruises of designation that scatter maps,’ place names are ‘invisible when confronted with the geological fact,’ as ‘the act of corroborating the empirical with its appellation is fraught with difficulties’ (Morrison 2013, n.p.), as Gavin Morrison writes in an essay ‘14 Views of the Isle of Skye,’ written for Còmhlan Bheanntan /​A Company of Mountains. These difficulties concern various aspects of naming the landscape, particularly in Scotland, where the linguistic past and present are complex, palimpsestic, where the clearances erased previous names, ‘even the burns and rivulets lost their denominations, lacking a populace to refer to them’ (Morrison 2013, n.p.). Morrison’s questions reverberate through Finlay’s work of mapping: ‘Is there an ethical imperative to reclaim these peaks’ and other topographical features’ earlier names? How far back does one need to go to find the “true” or “original” name?’ (Morrison 2013, n.p.). This is our, human concern, while ‘[t]‌he mountains remain stoically obstinate to this flurry of labelling; the names on the map are a moment in an historic continuum’ (Morrison 2013, n.p.). Indeed, the non-​ human world does not need names; proper names are our human invention, a gesture of appropriation we cannot seem to avoid. The inescapable inevitability of naming has been a subject of philosophical reflection, preoccupying such thinkers as John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell and Jacques Derrida. In Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke asks what the relation there is between names and descriptions, citing the example given by Mill in A System of Logic, who writes about Dartmouth, which supposedly stands for the mouth of the river Dart, based on which he claims that names have ‘denotation but not connotation’ (Kripke 1972, 26). However, Kripke disagrees with Mill, insisting that names do have a connotation to some people even if it is ‘not part of the meaning of the name “Dartmouth” that the town so named lies at the mouth of the Dart’ (1972, 26). Kripke, like Frege and Russell before him, assume a different position than Mill on this matter, arguing that ‘a proper

172 Szuba name, properly used, simply was a definite description abbreviated or disguised’ (Kripke 1972, 27). Derrida, who wrote extensively on the proper name,5 takes a different stance, focusing on the random nature of proper names: ‘The proper name, in its aleatoriness, should have no meaning and should spend itself in immediate reference. But the chance or the misery of its arbitrary character (always other in each case), is that its inscription in language always affects it with a potential for meaning’ (Derrida 1984, 118). For Derrida, the proper name is aleatory, random, depending on chance, arbitrariness being its most striking feature, yet, as he argues, ‘It becomes meaningful once again, of limited range, once it is reinvested with semantic content’ (Derrida 1984, 120). The proper name begins to signify once it is filled with meaningful content, thus resembling khōra, as Derrida points out in Prière d’insérer (Dutoit 1995, xv–​x vi). As a word serving to identify a referent in the world, the proper name is often believed to be unique but, as Julian Wolfreys notes, ‘There is a degree of play in the proper name between singularity and generality’ (1998, 18). As ‘there is a name behind the name –​/​there is a mountain beyond the mountain’ (ll. 6–​7) (a far-​off land). The problem with the proper name (or, perhaps, better: one of the problems with the proper name) is the hegemony of its written form as the proper name is ‘typical of the effect of writing-​power, of its ability to veil and unveil’ (Wolfreys 1998, 17). Once transcribed, placed on a map, the proper name announces itself, wielding the power which it is granted. The ambivalence of the proper name is explored by Finlay, having assumed an increasing significance in his recent work and resulting in a series of art projects and publications devoted to the consideration of place names6 as well as the relation between sign and referent, which has been shifted due to cultural and historical changes. Yet human history and culture do not always matter as ‘some place-​names record where the sun falls, some point to where/​ the rain puddles, and some where deer sleep’ (ll. 10–​11). The lines come from the opening poem from a far-​off land (2017), ‘Up the Noran Water and in by 5 See e.g. On the Name (1995), ‘The Battle of Proper Names’ in Of Grammatology (1997) and Signéponge/​Signsponge (1984). 6 One of Finlay’s works, th’ fleety wud (2017) is described as ‘a place-​aware mapping of the Upper Teviot watershed from the source at Teviot Stone to the Rule Water in the Scottish Borders. With a phylogenetic diagram and watershed map, place-​name translations’ (Finlay 2017, n.p.). Place names have a special significance in Scotland, as exemplified by the work of artists such as Finlay but also a society (Scottish Place-​Name Society) and a journal devoted to the subject (The Journal of Scottish Name Studies). Thomas A Clark offers a poetic exploration of place names in One Hundred Scottish Places (1999), which includes names translated from Scots and Gaelic into English.

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Inglismaddie …,’ the title of which refers to a traditional Scottish song based on Helen Cruikshank’s poem, ‘Shy Geordie’ from her first collection, Up The Noran Water (1934). One the first pages of a far-​off land, Finlay considers various facets of place names and their frequently paradoxical aspects. Thus a line ‘a place-​name can be a shelter’ (l. 21) is immediately followed by ‘a place-​ name can be a wall or gate preventing entry’ (l. 22). Incorporated by us and made intimate, some place names do not necessarily to belong on any maps as ‘there are names that have a place within us’ (l. 36). When they are lifted off the map, proper names may become endowed with ‘semantic content,’ a meaning unique for everyone. Conversely, as Finlay points out, ‘when we can no longer walk place-​names offer a path that leads/​into inaccessible landscapes’ (ll. 37–​8): a path opened up by a map. Finlay foregrounds the interweaving of human activity and nonhuman aspects of place as ‘[n]‌ames take root whenever people dwell, revealing flora and fauna according to the knowing eye of the farmer, stalker and forager’ (Finlay 2018a, 150). The passage comes from gathering (2018), the title of which refers to Martin Heidegger’s concept of the fourfold. Heidegger writes about the gathering of ‘earth, sky, mortals and gods’ (Heidegger 2013: 148), which are brought together in a ‘simple oneness of the four’ (Heidegger 2013: 148), suggesting an interconnectedness of things. Finlay’s book was inspired by Adam Watson, The Place Names of Upper Deeside (1984), which revises Gaelic names on the Ordnance Survey maps of the Cairngorms in Scotland.7 gathering is chorographic work –​which includes prose and poems, photographs, and references to many sources on place –​and a detailed depiction of the region, ‘a place-​aware guide’ (Finlay 2018a, 9), an ‘eco-​poetical guide’ (Finlay 2018b, n.p.) to Upper Deeside and the Cairngorms, concerned with the topographical features, with flora and fauna as well as remnants of culture in the form of shielings and decrepit dwellings. The book is divided into sections, each devoted to a different topographical features of landscapes such as paths, rivers, ‘lithophones and lookout stones,’ mountains and hills, among others that demonstrates the proliferation of elements of landscape. It opens with an epigraph taken from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘In the Sun:’ ‘Isn’t every region governed by a unique confluence of plants and animals, and isn’t every local name a cipher 7 As we may read on Ainmean-​Àite na h-​Alba/​Gaelic Place-​Names of Scotland website the problem with naming was officially acknowledged in 2000, when ‘the Ordnance Survey (os) recognised that some Gaelic place-​names on their maps were incorrect, and in some instances, inconsistent across their scales of mapping. This arose because most names of natural features were collected in the 19th century, with revision in line with the Gaelic spelling system of the late nineteen sixties and early seventies’ (2019, n.p.).

174 Szuba behind which flora and fauna meet for the first and last time?’ (2005, 664) This announces one of the main preoccupations of Finlay’s study: names given to a place are frequently a response to the vegetal and animal world found there. Throughout the many chapters, Finlay reflects on proper names, their past role and present significance, and their transfer between languages as ‘[t]he once known, the native, the Gaelic mountain, will all have had names before their “proper” ones’ (Finlay 2018a, 71), remembering that ‘[t]he experience of space is always shot through with temporalities, as spaces are always created, reproduced and transformed in relation to previously constructed spaces provided and established from the past’ (Tilley 1994, 11). The work of reproduction and transformation is expressed through circular poems containing place-​names (2018a, 55–​7, 111, 198), which revolve and turn towards being, to use Finlay’s expression. In conclusion, Finlay’s work shows how landscape is not a given, how it is not a stable, monolithic whole, but that there are various ways of mapping place, which is multi-​layered, and as a result of which respond to the ways in which landscape is protean, mutable, depending on the subject’s perception. These phenomenological maps, created both on the page and in situ, on the move, challenge the idea of a cartographic representation. Joining together various elements of the nonhuman world –​the ground, the vegetal and animal world, the Earth’s atmosphere –​Finlay creates ‘poésie en plein air’ (Finlay 2005, 47). Finlay’s chorographic, site-​specific artworks mapped directly onto the landscape, engage with place and uncovers meanings arising from immediate perception entwined with cultural memory contained in place names. A succinct description of renga then, one of the collaborative forms commonly used by Finlay, may serve to encapsulate his approach to being in the world in this conclusion, which in response to Finlay’s work must admit its own provisionality: that is ‘an art of listening and interpolation; a path that leads on and never ends’ (Finlay 2005, 44).

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2: 1931–​ 1934. Trans. Rodney Livingstone and Others. Ed. Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Bloomfield, Mandy. ‘Landscaping the page: British open-​field poetics and environmental aesthetics.’ Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2013, vol. 17, no. 2, 121–​136, .

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Cruickshank, Helen. Up the Noran Water and Other Scots Poems. London: Methuen, 1934. Derrida, Jacques. Singéponge/​Signsponge. Trans. Richard Rand. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. On the Name. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Dutoit, Thomas. ‘Translating the Name?’ ix–​xvi. In Jacques Derrida. On the Name. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Finlay, Alec and Ken Cockburn. The Road North. Bristol, Shearsman Books, 2014. Finlay, Alec and Ken Cockburn. The Road North. 2010–​11. . Finlay, Alec. Interview with Alec Finlay on Navigations. Animate Projects. . Finlay, Alec. Introduction. ‘Down to Earth but Close to Heaven.’ In Atoms of Delight. An Anthology of Scottish Haiku and Short Poems. Edinburgh: Pocketbooks, 2000. 17–​26. Finlay, Alec. a company of mountains. 14 Views on the Isle of Skye. Portree: Atlas Art, 2013. Finlay, Alec. a far-​off land. Edinburgh: morning star, 2017. Finlay, Alec. th’ fleety wud. Edinburgh: morning star, 2017. Finlay, Alec. gathering. Zürich: Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2018a. Alec Finlay; with Linda France, illustrations by Laurie Clark. Mesostic Remedy. Edinburgh: morning star, 2009. Finlay, Alec, ed. Atoms of Delight. An Anthology of Scottish Haiku and Short Poems. Edinburgh: Pocketbooks, 2000. Finlay, Ian Hamilton. Introduction. ‘Picking the Last Wild Flower.’ In Ian Hamilton Finley. Selections, edited by Alec Finlay, 1–​61. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. Finlay, Alec, and Hanna Tuulikki and Lucy Duncombe. minnmouth. Newhavem and North Light, Dunbar: morning star, 2016. Finlay, Alec and Alex Hodby, eds. Avant-​Garde English Landscape. Some Versions of Landscape. Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2005. Finlay, Alec and Andrew Sneddon. Transmission: HOST. Sheffield: Artwords Press, 2008. Finlay, Alec. Alec Finlay Blog. 2005 . Finlay, Alec. Interview with Alec Finlay on Navigations. London: Animate Projects, 2014b. . Finlay, Alec. Three Rivers Crosswords: A Cryptic Word-​ Map of the North-​ East. Edinburgh: morning star, 2005. Fraser, Lilias. Interview with Alec Finlay. Scottish Studies Review March 2001: 100–​109. Hart, George. ‘Postmodernist Nature/​Poetry: The Examle of Larry Eigner.’ In Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism. Eds. John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2000. 315–​332.

176 Szuba Heidegger, M. ‘Building Dwelling Thinking.’ In Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2013. 143–​159. Higgins, Dick. Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature. State University of New York Press, 1987. Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Manfredi, Camille. Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 1962. Morrison, Gavin. ‘14 Views of the Isle of Skye.’ 2013. . Rohl, Darrell J. ‘The chorographic tradition and seventeenth and eighteenth-​century Scottish antiquaries.’ Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011): 1–​18. Sanderson, Stewart. ‘Basho Borne on the Carrying Stream: the Word-​Mapping of Scotland and the Ecopoetics of Windpower in Alec Finlay’s The Road North and Skying.’ In Environmental and Ecological Readings: Nature, Human and Posthuman Dimensions in Scottish Literature & Arts (XVIII–​ XXIc.). Ed. Philippe Laplace. Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-​Comté, 2015. Tilley, Christopher. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments. Oxford: Berg, 1994. Tarbuck, Alice. ‘“A Stone Within”: Visual Poetry & Wellbeing in the work of Alec Finlay and Thomas A. Clark.’ Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 9:1 (2017): 3:1 29. Tarbuck, Alice and Simone Kotva. ‘The Non-​Secular Pilgrimage: Walking and Looking in Ken Cockburn and Alec Finlay’s The Road North.’ Critical Survey 29:1 (2017): 33 52. Tarlo, Harriet. ‘Open Field: Reading Field as Place and Poetics.’ Spatial Practices 15 (1 January 2013): pages. Williams, Tony. ‘Blog Review 15: Tony Williams Reviews Alec Finlay’s Be My Reader.’ Magma 72 (2012). . Accessed 19 Jan. 2019. Wolfreys, Julian, ed. The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

chapter 9

Unseeable Maps

The Experience of Space in the Blind Walk Performance Izabela Zawadzka The definition of a map states that it is ‘a diagrammatic representation of an area of land or sea showing physical features, cities, roads, etc.’ (Oxford Dictionary). The two most distinctive attributes of the map are its graphical form and the correlation between it and the area it refers to. According to this, both physicality and tangibility would be crucial when talking about maps. They show permanent elements of urban space: streets, bridges, rivers, green areas, and buildings. The more accurate and updated a map is, the better it is considered. However, maps do not need to represent only the material features of a city. Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life wrote that ‘the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered’ (de Certeau 2010, 96). In that scheme a map would be a piece of writing, a text noting the speakable aspects of the city. A map, as well as being a written text, would be a visual trace, hard evidence accessible to any user willing to get to know a city or a language. Walking is a performative act; the self-​creation of space. It is temporal; non-​ catchable. A map of walking in that sense would be a representation of something unseeable. It is impossible to see the route taken by walkers, to predict the next step they take.1 Karen O’Rourke in her Walking and Mapping (2016) specified that there are different kind of walks with a map, and among them there are walks with a map and no directions as well as walks with directions but without any map. In the latter case, a map will be a visual trace of the act of walking which is possible to record only after the walk itself. It’s a documentation of the route, a graphic depicting the fragile act of walking and not a representation of the space itself.

1 In this chapter, I use the term ‘a walker’ which comes from the discipline ‘walking performances’ (more about them in the part ‘Walk with me’). I understand ‘walkers’ as an inclusive category that covers people moving through the city (including also people with mobility impairment).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004520288_011

178 Zawadzka John Brian Harley noted that cartography is not making maps but interpreting the relations captured in them. As he claimed, maps are much more than only measurements and topography. They cannot be seen as ultimate sources of objective knowledge but should be considered as texts that could be read in a cultural context. Similar observations can be read in the publications of Marko Juvan, who sees the connection between geospace and culture, describing how they influence each other. Space cannot be fully explored without bodily experience which is documented with different techniques, and maps are only one of them (next to, e.g., video documentations, literature texts, and photos). According to that, another element can be added to Harley’s deconstruction of a map –​a map is not only a text to be read but also a text to be felt and experienced. In my chapter I will present two types of experiencing the city in untypical ways. Both of the analysed examples are projects focused on non-​visual aspects of the city; multisensory walks which activate senses beyond sight. Audio-​and blind-​walks, in their untypical forms, force us to rethink the map, which no longer will be understood as a representation of visual aspects of the city but more as a record of an experience of a walker. They also change the role of a map –​it is not possible to re-​walk or recreate the experience written in a map; it becomes only a tip (or, as O’Rourke said, a direction) for other experiences and explorations. 1

The Map of Sounds

Maps can also help expand the everyday experience. As Denis Cosgrove noted: The map is one of those instruments that serves to extend the capacities of the human body. Like the telescope or microscope, it allows us to see at scales impossible for the naked eye to see and without moving the physical body over space. The thematic map reveals the presence of phenomena that are beyond our normal bodily senses, as for example a trend surface map of property values or of air pollution. The map also has a powerful recursive quality, at once a memory device and a foundation for projective action. cosgrove 2008, 168

The map can help to intensify human senses and to focus on normally unseeable aspects of the city. There are fields that, even though possible to capture, are unnoticed in everyday life. One of those is sound. Passing cars; the steps of

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pedestrians; trams; street artists; people sitting in cafés. There is not a single thing in the world that does not produce a sound. Everyone is immersed in the soundscape, as well as co-​creating it. All of these issues are being intensely researched within the field of acoustic ecology. One of the most influential researchers in this field –​Raymond Murray Schafer, a Canadian musician, composer, and teacher –​has for decades been drawing attention to the issue of noise in everyday life. Being continuously surrounded by sounds, it is almost impossible to notice a single source of them. Living in the city has forced people to separate from sounds; has made us insensitive to them. This is natural protection against sensory overload. Schafer’s goal is to ‘direct the ear of the listener towards the new soundscape of contemporary life, to acquaint him with a vocabulary of sounds he may expect to hear both inside and outside concert halls’ (Schafer 1969, 3). He uses the term soundscape, which is the sound sphere perceived by someone’s senses. When a landscape is everything which can be seen in a specific area, a soundscape is understood as an acoustic version of that. For centuries painters, photographers, and filmmakers have been capturing landscapes –​accustoming their audiences to catching different perspectives and being aware of the beauty or ugliness of their surroundings. All of these matters, so obvious in visual arts, are still absent in thinking about sound. This was the main reason why Schafer began to research and describe the ecology of sound –​not only to observe the world of sounds, but also to knowingly create it. He said, ‘I am about to suggest that the time has come in the development of music when we will have to be concerned as much with the prevention of sounds as with their production. Observing the world sonograph the new music educator will encourage those sounds salubrious to human life and will rage against those inimical to it.’ (Schafer 1969, 4) Soundscape is not an independent area. It is constructed by humans and inhabited by them. It is our role to be responsible for creating it. It was Bernie Krause who divided the soundscape into three spheres and noticed that, besides naturally generated geophony (nonbiological but natural sounds as wind or rain) and biophony (sounds of animals and other living creatures), humans create the third –​anthrophony. Furthermore, there are only some types of sounds that are generated purposefully by people (electromechanical sounds, physiological ones such as talking, and controlled sounds such as music), and some others are purely incidental (the sounds of walking or clothes). In the 1960s in order to examine soundscapes, change or preserve them, and make people more aware of the audio-​sphere they live in, Schafer established The Soundscape Project, an educational and research group. It was formed in the late 1960s at Simon Fraser University in Canada. The members of the

180 Zawadzka Project fight against noise pollution by drawing attention to rapidly changing soundscapes. The World Soundscape Project published several reports on the situation of the soundscape in small villages as well as in large cities. After examining the soundscape of Vancouver, the members of the group decided to visit Europe and compare their observations with the materials collected on another continent. The aim of this trip was to document the soundscapes of villages in five different countries visited by the group: Sweden, Germany, Italy, France, and the UK. Eventually the journey resulted in two separate books. Five Village Soundscapes (1977) contains observations from the sites the group visited. Moreover, during the trip, all group members were asked by Schafer to keep a sound diary. It was interesting for him to see the differences in approach to the same soundscape. Some of the texts, chosen by Schafer, were published in a small booklet titled European Sound Diary (1977). It is not only the differences in observations that are interesting, but also the form of the notes. The World Soundscape Project had to find a way to create soundscape documentation, marking its temporality and capability. Some of them created texts, explaining how they responded to the surrounding soundscape and how they felt being immersed by it. There are also some photographs and sketches with notes. Besides the more traditional ways of describing sounds, The World Soundscape Project also created sound walks –​ maps with descriptions of where and how to go, what to see and –​more importantly –​what to listen to. Walks led the participants through city streets as well as guiding them through public buildings (like the Paris walk in the Louvre). The published form of the map suggests that this experience could be repeated by other walkers, who follow the instructions included in the map. However, the ephemeral character of the audiosphere is also depicted in the created maps. For a better understanding of this documentation method, I will describe three of these walks. The first of them was prepared during the visit to Salzburg. The map is sketched by hand and looks like a regular city plan in which the authors have marked seven stops. The walk begins in Getreidegasse 9, the birthplace of Mozart, and ends in the cemetery next to St Peter’s Abbey. The instructions are very strict –​the walker must start out at 5:40 pm and proceed according to the plan in order to finish the walk at 7 pm. Each stop includes a distinctive eigentone (a characteristic sound produced by objects): church bells; water in a fountain; a parking lot. The map draws the attention of the user to the sound marks of the city. It pinpoints the most vivid elements, constructing the soundscape of that part of Salzburg. The sound walk in Stuttgart has a similar assumption. There is a fragment of a typical city map with three streets (Königstrasse; Dorotheenstrasse;

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Eberhardstrasse) and the name of the market square on it. The map has been sketched by the author. There are fifteen stops along the walk, which should take one hour in total. The instruction for reading the map is more complicated and multi-​layered than the walk in Salzburg. The authors created a chart in which they categorised the types of sounds the walker should notice during the trip. There are five columns: humans; ambience and reverberation; electroacoustic; imagination; doors and transitions. Each line contains subsequent instructions for the walker, written in the appropriate column. For example, the walk begins at Point 1, which says: ‘Vendor’s stand at Planie and Königstrasse, southeast corner. Stand five metres from the Brezelkörble (or any other) vendor and wait until you can hear the vendor’s voice clearly.’ The instruction is written in the first column, thus categorised as ‘human sounds.’ Each note is connected to the following one by an arrow. When the arrow is full, the walkers should move on to another place, but when the sign is dotted it means that the walkers should stay in the same place but turn their attention to another source of sound. With all of these notes, the map resembles a treasure map more than a city plan. It is a game with the environment, a type of ‘paper chase’ where the sounds are the only markings in the field. It catches the complex experience of the soundscape, focusing the attention of the walker on different signals. At the same point different sounds could be heard –​it is only matter of attention. The last map deserving our attention shows the London sound walk. It does not resemble the two previous ones visually. Neither streets nor buildings are marked in the sketch. The central part of the drawing features the gate to Queen Mary’s Gardens, which is the location of the sound walk. The six stops of the walk are explained in a text, added to the graphic. It is a detailed instruction for the participant (including the suggested time and day for the walk), which enables participation in the walk. Without the text, the map would not provide enough information for the walkers, and without the map, the text would not be fully understandable. They complement one another. The map illustrates and describes the soundscape of the area. It consists of small pictures with interpretations of the sounds produced by them. At the bottom of the sketch, where the street is (according to the instruction, it is Marylebone Road), are marked humming cars with screeching tyres; ‘fuffching’ scooters and lorries. Going up, into the middle of the sketch, Regent Park Square is immersed in the sound of fluttering pigeons’ wings (with a small illustration of the bird next to it), rustling sandwich wrappers, and the quiet chatting of people with prams. The closer to Queen Mary’s Gardens, the more natural the sounds are. Even the author named the place directly in front of the gate to the Gardens, the ‘Threshold of Comfort’ (drawn lips and clomping shoes suggest that there are a lot of people talking and taking their dogs out walking). The

182 Zawadzka upper part of the drawing –​depicting Queen Mary’s Gardens themselves –​is full of natural noises: a rushing waterfall; chirping birds; spluttering fountains. All of this surrounded with the vvrming fuss of the park. The pleasure of taking that walk is not only in focusing on the unseeable aspects of the surroundings, but also in finding new names for the single sounds. The language which we precisely practice describing the visual space is not sufficient enough to talk about the audiosphere. The map gives readers an opportunity to confront their intuitions with those written down by the authors. All of the maps draw the walkers’ attention to the city’s sound-​sphere. All of them are complemented by texts, instructions for the participants so they may fully understand the soundscape. Each of the maps is different; however, all of them illustrate how complex and multi-​layered the examination of the audio-​ sphere is. The World Soundscape Project has experimented with the form of these maps, adding charts, texts, illustrations, and different descriptions of sounds, focusing the walkers’ attention on everyday sound-​objects. This type of audiowalk is interesting because of its non-​material character. The map represents ephemeral, elusive, and usually unnoticed features of the city. Marking them on the graph renders them visible. Because of the specificity of the audio-​sphere, the map cannot show what the soundscape looks like. It is impossible to catch this ephemeral phenomenon. Maps of sound walks in Salzburg and Stuttgart are based on the material elements of the city –​the sketches show the plans of streets and buildings so they are good points for orientation for the walker. Nevertheless, it is unsure whether or not the walker will find the sounds described in the text by following the map. The main goal of the map (creating a map of the audio-​sphere of the cities) may not be attained by the map user. On the other hand, the map of London’s sound walk –​in its visual layer –​is nothing like the regular map sketches of Salzburg or Stuttgart. It gives the walkers only the direction and encourages them to explore individually. The sounds of birds, cars, or the fountain may be heard by the walkers, or those sounds might not be available to them. It is also more flexible by giving the walker choices. Giving up on the regular map shape, the artistic sketch may be interpreted individually by each walker. This means that the map is no longer a precise instruction of where to go, but rather an invitation to experience listening to sounds. It’s a visual direction for an unseeable city sphere and –​at the same time –​a record of World Soundscape Project members’ sound experiences of the city in those particular moments. We could find here an analogy with the story told by Guy Debord in his ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,’ Debord mentions his friend who walked through the Harz region in Germany with a map of London in

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his hand. The aim of that exercise was to discover another motive for taking a walk in a city (other than tourism, sport, or shopping). The map is important in itself; the presented topography of the city (which makes a map a map) is irrelevant from that point of view. It is similar to the sound walk in London by The World Soundscape Project. Sounds go by rapidly, and the soundscape is not a sustainable environment. It is impossible to create a map that fully represents it. In such case the walk and audio-​sphere are crucial, not a map with pinpointed areas. Walking through a city embodies a map. Each time the walker uses the map of sound walks, they create new paths, observations, and notes. The map catches singular moments in the soundscape, almost impossible to be reheard or recreated. The main goal of this map is not to be a perfect representation of the existing situation, but rather to be a tool for individual experiments. 2

Walk with Me

The maps made by The World Soundscape Project present the problem of imbalance in the audio-​sphere in cities. One of Raymond Murray Schafer’s statements is to rethink the city, create sound-​friendly zones, preserve soundscapes, and arrange urban space responsibly. This is not possible without making citizens aware of the problem, and sound walks were one example of how to do this. By walking, the participants’ attention changes. They focus on the normally unnoticed aspects of the city they live in and, at the same time, create the space on other terms. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks write directly in their book Theatre/​Archaeology: Walking (…) is a spatial acting out, a kind of narrative, and the paths and places direct our choreography. This regular moving from one point to another is a kind of mapping, a kind of narrative understanding. pearson, shanks 2001, 138

The act of walking changes the perspective, embodying the map itself. Without the movement of the body in space, sound walk maps would remain only theoretical. It is only through reading them by taking the directed paths that makes the soundscapes present and noticeable. Nowadays the art of walking is a field of research in many different disciplines –​philosophy; sociology; nature studies. This common activity is becoming an important phenomenon described by many specialists. In one of the most acknowledged books on this

184 Zawadzka topic, Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit explains this interest in walking in the following way: While walking, the body and the mind can work together, so that thinking becomes almost a physical, rhythmic act –​so much for the Cartesian mind/​body divide. Spirituality and sexuality both enter in; the great walkers often move through both urban and rural places in the same way; and even past and present are brought together when you walk as the ancients did, or relive some event in history or your own life by retracing its route. solnit 2014, xv

Walking means being on the move, being in the here and now, as well as being conscious about both the past and future. Walkers inhabit a place; they bring it to life. Step by step they map out the tissue of places. Citing Edmund Husserl’s work, Solnit remarks that walking is an act enabling experiencing the unity of the body that is moving and is always ‘here’ in contradiction to ‘there,’ from where it comes and to where it goes (Solnit 2014, 27). Taking advantage of this specific situation, when awareness could be higher than usual, it is easier to focus on the space the walker is inhabiting. In fact, the act of walking and the soundscape are similar in their fragility. Both are uncatchable, changeable, and impossible to reduce to a map. A walking map is only documentation of the path taken by the walker, similarly as a soundscape map is only the capturing of some of the sounds in the space, heard at a particular time and possibly never repeated again. Sound walks are the combination of these two experiences, which are similar to one another in a few ways. The sound walks maps written by The World Soundscape Project were an experimental research method. Over subsequent decades, walking became more and more popular as part of theatre activity. Walking performances –​sometimes referred to by researchers as ‘pedestrian performances’ –​use walking as the key dramaturgical material. These theatrical events not only play with the city but also play the city itself. The first ideas of such performances are usually traced in the Situationist International’s city-​ games. The tools created by the Situationist (such as derive, detournement, or psycho-​geography) could be very useful in the analysis of modern walking performances, the aim of which is to change the perspective of experiencing public spaces. The sound maps created by Schafer’s team are the perfect example of another possible inspiration for this specific field of theatre. Re-​walking the routes marked in those maps is a way of performing them and, in that sense,

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the embodiment of the maps includes the two most important features of walking performances. First of all, they are theatrical in a more direct sense than walking itself. The division of roles in such performances is more blurred than in regular ones. The walker who performs a map is simultaneously an actor (can be observed by other passers-​by; follows the instructions of the author of the map/​director) and the viewer (they see and hear what the director wishes to present; observes other pedestrians and the city as part of the set design). The walker’s body is simultaneously a tool with which the city is mapped and a material without which the walk cannot proceed. Moreover, in most walking performances, it is suggested to take the trip individually. The lone walk creates an extraordinary situation giving the walker the opportunity to experience the space with full awareness. It also breaks the traditional theatre arrangement in which the audience is an anonymous group and can easily hide in a crowd. In individual walking performances, the participant is immersed in the event. It is a physical as well as an intellectual encounter, consciously using the potential of the walking, which enables this type of liaison. A perfect example of the walking performance that encourages participants to focus on the unseen features of a city is Do you see what I mean? –​a spectacle created by the French collective Projet in Situ. The premiere of the walk was organised in 2005 at the Théâtre du Merlan in Marseille. Afterwards, it was recreated six more times in different locations. Mostly the performance was produced for festivals: The Lyon Dance Biennale (France, 2008), the Festival TransAmériques in Montréal (Canada, 2010), Genève Festival Antigel (Switzerland, 2011), Vancouver PuSh Festival (Canada, 2013), and the Terni International Festival (Italy, 2014). Usually this was a specific group of participants, which included not only local audiences but also guests from different cities or countries, who came specifically for these events. The only exception was in 2012, when the Collective was invited by the district in Paris, France, to prepare the edition of the walk in Paris at the Parc de la Villette. This is important for understanding their special position in the walking performance, which can be treated as an unusual way of acquainting oneself with a new city. The aspect of tourist walks is inseparable from the understanding of the walk itself. The authors of the performance write about this walk: ‘Do You See What I Mean?’ is an individual blindfolded journey through a city, lasting 2.5 hours. An invitation to rediscover one’s physical states as an inhabitant of the city: to invent, observe, imagine and take possession of a different urban

186 Zawadzka environment, while being impaired of one sense (Technical rider for the performance). Owing to the fact that walking performances are strictly connected to individual experiences and based on the effective construction of the work, I will explain this specific theatre piece using the example of a walk I have experienced myself. I participated in Do you see what I mean? in 2014 during the Terni Festival and, like the majority of the participants of the performance, I did not know the city. The whole concept of this walk was to eliminate the visual experience and activate alternative senses to feel the space the participant is in. 3

Do You See What I Mean?

The performance started at caos (Centro Arti Opificio Siri), where the festival office was located. When I walked into the foyer there were around eight people there. Martial Chazallon and Martin Chaput (the founders of the Projet in Situ collective) welcomed us, handed out special blindfolds, and demonstrated the basic techniques for walking with closed eyes. These methods are used by guides working with visually impaired people. In order to walk safely, the walkers must hold guides just above their elbow and keep a distance of approximately half a step behind them. In this position the walker can feel the guide’s movements, feel the direction of the walk, and foresee possible surprises along the path (a change of direction of the walk; the slope of a street). The guide should also provide proper instructions for the blindfolded walker –​they warn the participant each time there is a slope, steps (with information about whether they are going up or down), or a narrow passage. After hearing these brief instructions, the participants were divided into pairs. Every 15 minutes, each pair was blindfolded by Chazallon and Chaput and led to a different room. The first steps with closed eyes were simple. The artists had won the trust of the participants, so it was not a problem to follow them, even blindfolded. In the second room each walker was introduced to a new guide. This was the person with whom the walker was to spend the next three hours without seeing anything. It was surprisingly difficult to get to know a total stranger without seeing their face. I usually base a first impression on sight, from how the person looks. When that possibility was blocked for the walkers, it was more difficult to build a relationship with the guide. The route also did not make it easy to build up that trust. For the first hundred or so metres after leaving the second room, I was guided through the

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courtyard of the caos. I knew that place; I had seen it before, participating in different events during the festival. Nevertheless, it was difficult to overcome the fear of being dependent on a stranger. A blindfolded walk is a challenge in itself –​to feel stability, to find a way of walking confidently. The first metres were a negotiation with the guide in order to find a common rhythm, the length of the steps, and confidence in this walk. All of that was destroyed a minute later, when we exited the caos gate. I recognised this immediately through the change in the soundscape –​the peaceful sounds of a park were drowned out by the blare of car engines. With closed eyes I had the feeling that the cars were driving very close to me and, without trust in the guide, I felt disturbingly unsafe. I lost my sense of direction as soon as I heard the cars. I had walked through Terni over a couple days, so I technically knew a few streets close to caos. Nevertheless, the strong physical reaction to the soundscape of the street behind the gates blurred the map I had drawn in my head since the beginning of the visit. Logical thinking was not so important when the body felt so intensely immersed in the soundscape. Such a change in perspective and experience also influenced the passage of time. The moments of the walk when we were close to passing cars or other loud sound sources had a stronger impact on the body, so it felt as if they lasted longer. This was obviously untrue, because there is a distinctive difference in the length of sound between passing a car and walking through a quiet street in the city centre. The lack of one sense made the others stronger but also changed the way of perceiving space and time. Over the next three hours, my guide led me through Terni, showing the different soundscapes of the city. However, the blindfolded journey activated not only my hearing but also the sense of touch and smell. The guide asked me to touch the bark of the trees growing along some alleys in the city; to place my hand under flowing water (it was probably some small drinking fountain). He led me through paved streets and grassy areas. We visited crowded and peaceful; sunny and shady areas. I had the opportunity to feel different types of space and observe the reaction of my body to each of them. During the blind walk the guide was not allowed to talk about the spaces we were in. I could not ask if the room or yard was big or small, high or low. The visual aspects of the surroundings were off topic. It was not a part of our conversation or an element constructing the narration of the performance. That lack of information isolated the walker from the space they were in. At the same time the guide was not silent. During my walk, we talked a lot about him and his life in Terni; about the city’s history and its culture. My guide was a student of economics at university in Terni, but he had not been born there.

188 Zawadzka He’d lived there for a couple of years and talked in an interesting way about the differences between this city and his hometown. There were also four stops during the journey, which activated other associations and enabled different experiences. We were walking along a paved street surrounded by talking and laughing passers-​by (maybe in the city centre?) when we entered a room. The entrance was situated just off the street but a couple of steps below street level. Inside I immediately felt the smell of print and new books; heard people nearby, skimming pages. I knew I was in a bookstore. However, when I asked the guide if the room was big or small, he said that he was not permitted to say anything about the space. The second stop was in a private home. We had a brief chat with the residents, who offered English tea and biscuits and, together, told me about their first meeting. It had been in London, which is why they played a Beatles vinyl while they prepared the refreshments. After we left the apartment, the guide took me to a space I could not recognise. After we entered, there was another change in the guidance. This time the walk concentrated on the sense of touch –​the guide there took my hand and led me through the space with my hand on the wall. When I was taken by my original guide and we left that space, he explained to me that it was a school for visually impaired people, and one of their students had been my guide through the space. The last stop was in a complex of buildings. First I was led to a large hall (I heard the echo of the steps and quiet whispering), where I was asked to take off my shoes. Then another guide took me and started performing dancing choreography with me. We moved smoothly on the dancing mat. Then we started walking through the space, slowly at first, then quicker and quicker until we began to run. This was a deeply physical experience of space and another person. After this series of moves, the dancer led me back to my original guide, with whom I walked into another room where a writing class was taking place. I listened to the reading out loud of some papers and had the opportunity to draw a sketch of the impression of that experience. In the last room, the guide thanked me for the journey and asked if I would like to see his face. I had the opportunity to refuse, but I was curious about whose voice and arm had led me through this strange city. 4

The Map of Multisensory Experience

After the performance I compared my experience to those of my colleagues who also participated in the walk. It turned out that each of us had walked

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a different route. Some of the actions and places were the same (the meeting with the dancer and the visually impaired person), but some were totally different. Projet in Situ explains that each of the routes was mapped by them in collaboration with the volunteers who guided the participants. Every walk created by the collective is preceded by an artistic residency and series of workshops with volunteers and dancers, which is why preparation takes about four weeks. Each walk is different in order to keep the individual experience unique. There are some permanent stages in each route: passing through a fairly dense urban area with stops in specific public places like a church, a shop (like the bookstore), an artisan workshop, a bar; a visit at the home of a resident who lives in the neighbourhood; a series of meetings: with a visually impaired person, with a dancer, and with a writer. To make this happen, the collective needs to map out the space for them to work in; to find stops with interesting soundscapes, residents willing to invite the walkers over, and shopkeepers or public institutions to agree to participate. Timing is also essential in this mapping process. Each walk takes approx. 2.5–​3 hours. This means that the stops also have to fit a specific timeframe. Remembering that participants cannot meet during their walks (visits at private apartments and at the school for visually impaired persons are individual; no one is there except for the walker and the guide), they must be well planned. This also means that the instruction for the guides is strict and not easily changeable. Each guide has a plan with marked possible routes and stops. It includes not only places but also precise timing for visiting each of them. Unlike the sound maps created by The World Soundscape Project, the maps for the guides are perfectly scheduled routes of experiences which immerse the walker. Simultaneously, alongside the official map created by the artists in collaboration with volunteers, there is another one, created individually by each walker. It is a walked map of senses and experiences. None of the participants see the routes they take, the places they enter, or the people they meet. A map of a blind walk consists of the experience itself more than the route walker. Do you see what I mean? was presented in Terni three days in a row. I have talked with other walkers to compare the paths we took. The specific walk also required a certain language. Where did you go after leaving caos? No one used the terms generally used in the description of a stroll, because no one remembered when they had turned left or right. These became useless. Even if we had a regular city plan, we would not have been able to draw the route we had taken. The map created by the walkers during the act of walking had a totally different character. Each of us remembered the specific experiences; smells; meetings. Those were the points marking the experience map of the blind walk.

190 Zawadzka It was of course impossible to re-​walk the route taken with the guide after returning to caos. Nevertheless, the experience map was a direction for exploring the city over and over and again. I was searching for the experiences I remembered from the walk. The specific scent of the bookstore; the echo of a ball bouncing against a wall; a water fountain close to some trees. With open eyes the soundscape seems totally different than during the blind walk, and I would probably fail to recognise the route without the guide and blindfold. In fact, this is not the main purpose of that experience map. The map created by a walker is the recording of a specific event, which will not recur again in the same shape. It is something blind walks and sound walks have in common. They are so deeply immersed in the soundscape that they are unrepeatable. And when the walker does not see the path, it is impossible to take the walk again along the exact same route. The soundscape is too changeable with too many potential variables to form the basic material of the map. The blindfolded map of the soundscape is very close to the psycho-​ geography described by Guy Debord, the founder of Situationists International, in ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’ (Balder, Mauro 2008, 23). Psycho-​geography was a tool used to fight against the banality of urban life; the thoughtless acceptance of the landscape people live in. Psycho-​geography assumes that certain urban spaces have an impact on the experiences and emotions of passers-​by. Debord believed that psycho-​geography could be consciously constructed by the architects, and in that way it could change the attitude and feelings of the citizens. In the blind walk, psycho-​geography was taken to another level. By eliminating the possibility of seeing the urban space, the experiences changed diametrically. The activation of other senses breaks down the wall of obviousness of the city. It also enables the walker to feel, in a different way, how the urban space activates concrete emotions and feelings. Walking on the soft grass; touching the gravelly bark of trees and the cold water from fountains triggered associations with nature, which is unexpected in the city centre. When blindfolded, that feeling of being surrounded by nature is stronger than with open eyes. It is enough to stand on a small fragment of grass in a relatively quiet soundscape to feel as if in a small forest. Only few more steps are enough to totally change one’s impression. Just around the corner, where we were surrounded by the cold walls of old buildings, standing on bumpy pavement, the perspective of being in a natural landscape disappeared. The blind walk renders those elements of psycho-​geography important to Guy Debord visible: the potential of change composed into the urban tissue and the multi-​layered experience of the city strictly connected to its planning.

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191

Deep Map

Aside from the experimental character of the map of experience, its important construction material is also the narration led by the guide. The walkers get to know places and the entire city through the perspective of their guides. Each of the volunteers guiding a blindfolded walker should be a resident of the city the walk is being held in, not only in order to be confident of the route the pair is taking, but also to enrich the walk with their own experiences, thoughts, and memories about particular places. The dramaturgy of the walk is not only based on the ‘here and now’ but also the ‘here and then.’ It is an attempt to create a full experience of the place also by activating the memory of the place –​ both individual (the memories of the guide directly connected with living in the city) and common (when they describe how the city and its entire community function on regular basis, besides the festival period). Even if the walker does not see a place, they can feel it and get to know it. The narration is an additional layer of experiencing a place. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks describe this type of increased attention to a place and performance simultaneously as a deep map: (…) the deep map attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of a place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the factual and the fictional, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place. pearson, shanks 20016, 64–​65

In other words, a deep map includes everything that could possibly be told about a place. It consists of both physical aspects of the space as well as memories connected to it. Its intensity makes it impossible to properly sketch it. It is only in the potential sphere. It is endless and growing with every space user. During the blind walk each of the walkers constructed another deep map. This was the effect of different guides leading the walkers; different stops and people met. My blind walk was a journey around the university city, quiet and friendly during the summer but with the strong potential to be full of life and young people during the academic year. This interpretation was inspired by the fact that my guide was a student of economics, residing in that city only because of his studies. He told me about parties with his friends, about streets full of life during the semester, and about the changes in soundscape with the beginning of the summer break. On the other hand I had a feeling that Terni

192 Zawadzka is a cultural city with a lot of possible activities. This was of course the impact of the festival period, but also of the route we took. The obligatory stops at the dance school and writing class gave the impression of being at the centre of cultural events. The talk with the guide extended that image to a description of active night life starting with the arrival of the students. Other walks, taken with different guides, were focused on the tourist life in Terni or life in Terni as an immigrant. The change in accents of the narration created different situations and different spaces. The maps created by the walkers were incomplete, because the walkers were also blindfolded. The lack of vision was in fact the reason enabling the deep mapping of the city. The soundscape triggered another level of sensitivity in the walkers, opened their minds, and activated an exceptional way of feeling space. 6

Conclusion

In this essay, I use the term unseeable map instead of invisible map. I see a difference between those two expressions. An invisible map is an imaginary construction of a non-​existing map representing the material aspects of the space. It is a potential map of a land, room, or building, which has all the features included in regular map, but for some reasons it has never been written. I can create an invisible map of my office, and without hesitation I can describe the way from the main entrance to my desk. However, there are some maps representing that space, prepared by specialists who designed the building. I have not seen those sketches, and I have not used them to create the alternative invisible version of the map. An unseeable map is something different, even if it also is a map constructed in the imagination of the walker. It is impossible, or almost impossible, to draw or sketch it. It does not have a potential physical representation as an invisible map. It is an imaginary construct based on mapping and experiencing a space. It is a map without precisely marked buildings, streets, rivers, or green areas. It is an individual map of experiences, emotions, or feelings connected with particular spaces. It traces the ephemeral feeling evoked in the performative act of walking. This unseeable map could mark out all of the features of places that are not noticed at all –​the soundscapes or psycho-​geography of the space; everything that could be understood as another dimension of the space. This aspect of feeling that the space is strongly connected to the Situationists’ idea of redefining space, playing with it, and fighting against the boredom of everyday life. The

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unseeable map could be understood as a treasure map of the city, with which the walkers search for valuable aspects of urban tissue, usually unnoticed because they are invisibly present in the everyday lives of the cities’ citizens. This kind of map is a text experienced by a walker. It is not a representation of city itself but a direction for further explorations. It engages senses other than sight and invites people to use a space in multisensory way. It gives an opportunity for individual discoveries, but it makes it impossible to easily re-​ experience the same ephemeral and changeable tissue of the city. Unseeable maps could also be a research method. They could be a tool for examining the specific aspects of space; a hint of how to discover them. Most importantly, none of these maps would exist without the act of moving. In order to read them, someone must walk them; otherwise the unseeable maps will be only potential action. The walker simultaneously becomes the director, researcher, and performer and, by examining the space, recreates it all over again.

Works Cited

Cosgrove, Denis. Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World. London: i.b.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2008. Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings. Ed. Bauder, Harald, Engel-​Di Mauro, Salvatore. Kelowna, Canada: Praxis, 2008. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Randall. Berkeley and Los Angeles. University of California Press, 2010. Harley, J., B. Deconstructing the Map. Evanston: Program of African Studies, Northwestern University no. 3/​1992, 10–​13. Juvan, Marko. From Spatial Turn to GIS-​Mapping of Literary Cultures, European Review, February 2015. Krause, Bernie. The Voice of Natural World. ted Talk, 15.7.2013, on-​line: https://​www .yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​uTbA-​mxo​858&ab_​chan​nel=​TED. Krause, Bernie. Anatomy of the Soundscape: Evolving Perspectives. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, Audio Engineering Society, January 2008. O’Rourke, Karen. Walking and Mapping. Artists as Cartographers. Cambridge: mit Press, 2016. Oxford Dictionary: https://​www.oxf​ordd​icti​onar​ies.com/​. Pearson, Mike, Shanks, Michael. Theatre/​Archaeology. London, New York: Routledge, 2001. Schafer, Raymond Murray. The New Soundscape. Scarborough, Ontario: Berandol Music Limited, 1969.

194 Zawadzka Schafer, Raymond Murray. European Sound Diary. Ed. R. Murray Schafer, World Soundscape Project, Canada. a.r.c. the Aesthetic Research Centre, 1977. Schafer, Raymond Murray. Five Village Soundscapes. Ed. R. Murray Schafer, World Soundscape Project, Canada. a.r.c. the Aesthetic Research Centre, 1977. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust. London: Granta Books, 2014.

chapter 10

Maps, Literature, and Law’s Idiocy

Literary Tropes as Incentive, Ground and Veil for Taking the Commons Frans-​Willem Korsten What we call land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man's institutions. To isolate it and form a market for it was perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors.

…

karl polyani, The Great Transformation, ‘Market and Nature,’ p. 187

…the greatness, but also the perplexity of laws in free societies is that they only tell what one should not, but never what one should do hannah arendt, Totalitarianism, p. 467

∵ 1

From Centralization to Ecological Territorialisation

Somewhere in the years 1537/​38 cartographer Jacob van Deventer made a map of the province of Holland in the Low Countries that would be the model of the representation of Holland in atlases for a century to come.1 As cartographer, Van Deventer was not a small player. He was the first to put the idea of trigonometry systematically into practice. As a result, his maps were remarkably accurate.2 It was no coincidence, then, that he first became an imperial 1 This chapter was written a couple of years ago and was at the basis, meanwhile, of a book chapter in a study entitled Art as an Interface of Law and Justice: Affirmation, Disturbance, Disruption (Bloomsbury: Hart Publishers, 2021). In the context of that study, the text was re-​ worked to fit in with the book’s systematic build-​up. So, there are substantial differences with the chapter as it is presented here. 2 It is still a matter of debate whether Van Deventer used the ideas of mathematician Gemma Frisius (1508–​1555) or whether it was the other way around. Be that is it may, Frisius was a figure in his own right. He not only described the principles of the camera obscura, but also got

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004520288_012

196 Korsten cartographer in the service of the Habsburg emperor Charles v, then a royal cartographer in the service of Philips ii. The latter was at the time sovereign of the Low Countries, and commissioned Van Deventer probably around 1558 to chart not only all the important Dutch cities but also their environments, obviously for political and military purposes.3 We cannot assume that King Philips was prescient, here, or already sensed coming the Dutch Uprising of 1568; nor could anyone have foreseen that after eighty years of war this would result in an officially recognized Dutch Republic –​in 1648 with the peace of Westphalia. Meanwhile, in the course of these eighty years of war, maps were crucial for the countless manoeuvres, battles, sieges, the taking and re-​taking of cities that would plague the Low Countries. Still, Van Deventer’s commission was first and foremost part of Philips’s attempts to centralize government, both politically and legally.4 In this context literature was a major player in the context of propaganda though not so much in relation to the dynamic of mapping per se. In the course of the same period, however, yet another battle was waged, in which literature and mapping were close allies. In the Low Countries, and especially in the provinces of Holland and Zeeland, waters were more of the essence than lands. For one, without the waters the Dutch would never have been able to win their war against Spain. Waters provided refuge for the so-​called sea-​beggars who would prove to be pivotal players in the uprising (Lunsford 2005). Waters formed an important battle ground, like when in 1588 the Spanish armies in Flanders were prevented to reach the Invincible Spanish armada waiting at sea to invade England. Then, key cities were protected by lands that could been inundated. Moreover, waterways were equally important as, or perhaps more important than, pathways for the transport of goods. Here, in the context of the more and more prospering Dutch economy and the

Gerardus Mercator as his pupil first and collaborator later, and Mercator would be responsible for what we still know as the Mercator projection. Frisius’ method of trigonometry was first formulated in a booklet entitled Libellus de locorum describendorum ratione, & de eorum distantijs inueniendis, nunquam ante hac visus from 1533: ‘A booklet about ways of describing places and to determine their distances that have never been seen.’ On all this, see Fernand Hallyn, Gemma Frisius, arpenteur de la terre et du ciel (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008). 3 W. Ahlers, ‘Jacob van Deventer, nieuwe ideeën en nieuwe vragen,’ Caert-​Thresoor 23 (2004): 59–​64. 2004, 59–​64; or Bram Vannieuwenhuyze and Jelle Lisson, ‘De stadsplannen van Jacob van Deventer: Een schitterende bron voor de stads-​en dorpsgeschiedenis’ Bladwijzer. Wegwijs met Heemkunde Vlaanderen, 4 (2012): 3–​16. 4 A central, codified law for the Low Countries (one of the first in Europe), entitled Criminal ordinance, was announced by Philip ii in 1570; see Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip ii (New York: Yale University Press, 2000).

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consequent need for fertile lands, maps would get a radically different connotation. In the context of especially Holland’s desires to gain land by removing waters, mapping came to serve ecological territorialisation.5 There is some truth in the saying ‘God created Earth, the Dutch created Holland.’ Yet hidden in this seemingly innocent phrase there are basic issues of authority, sovereignty and ecological domination. In this context mapping and literature were close allies –​and their dynamic was distinctly related to law. In the light of the relations of Holland with the waters, three different versions of maps based on Van Deventer’s original, stand out for their differences.6 Two of these are shown below. The first one was part of a German atlas from 1544 entitled Cosmographei oder Beschreibung aller Länder, that is: Cosmography or description of all lands. The map was made by Sebastian Münster, published in Basel by Heinrich Petri, and lastly reprinted in 1628.7 The following map, from 1570, appeared in Theatrum orbis terrarium or Theatre of the Sphere of the Earth. In this case, the first-​copper-​plate edition was compiled by Abraham Ortelius, and published in Antwerp by Gilles Coppens van Diest.8 It was last reprinted in 1612 and is considered to be the first true world atlas we have. Purely visually or formally speaking, the maps make a radically different impression, which must be the result of the fact that they express something differently. The waters on the first map are decisively disturbing or ‘wild’ in the light of the second map, with its calmer waters. On the first, the seas are fiercely zigzagging, visually much more agitated than the land. Or, waters that appear teeth-​like to the left have become more whirling, more fluid to the right, as a 5 Amongst the many studies about the situation, see especially Gerard van der Ven (ed.), Leefbaar laagland. Geschiedenis van de waterbeheersing en landaanwinning in Nederland (Utrecht: Matrijs, 2003); more recently: Siger Zeischka, Minerva in de polder-​Waterstaat en techniek in het Hoogheemraadschap van Rijnland 1500–​1856 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2008). Europe wide 95% of all lands that were milled dry can be found in the Netherlands; and half of all the polders in Europe; see https://​www.route​you.com/​nl-​nl/​locat​ion/​view/​47224​624/​ de-​beems​ter?topt​ext=​578​609. 6 The map made by Jacob van Deventer is originally from 1537/​38. The original was lost in World War ii, but there is a facsimile left; see Jacob van Deventer, Gewestkaarten van de Nederlanden door Jacob van Deventer, 1536–​1545 met een picturale weergave van alle kerken en kloosters. Introduction C. Koeman (Canaletto –​Alphen aan den Rijn, 1994). 7 The map shown here is based on the fifth, expanded reprint in 1550, but is taken from the 1578 reprint; see http://​bc.libr​ary.uu.nl/​nl/​kaar​ten-​van-​holl​and-​en-​utre​cht.html. Its official title is ‘Holand.’ 8 The map shown, of the first copper plate print, is taken from the 1572 reprint; see https://​www .zui​derz​eeco​llec​tie.nl/​obj​ect/​coll​ect/​Zuide​rzee​_​mus​eum-​6831. Its official title is: ‘Hollandiae antiquorum catthorum sedis nova descriptio, auctore Iacobo a Daventria.’

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­f igures 10.1 and 10.2  Map of Holland in Cosmographei oder Beschreibung aller Lländer and in Theatrum orbis terrarium ( first copperplate).

result of which the waters are more surrounding the lands than aimed at them. In the first version, moreover, the waters tend to be vaster or more pronounced than the lands, as if the Low Countries should rather be called High Waters. On the second version the turbulence of the waters appear to translate themselves to the lands, as if these are equally dynamic. Lands and waters are more intermingled as a consequence. Then compare the following two maps, below. The one to the right below is the same as the second one above (the version of the first copper plate). The map to the left below shows a print that used the second copper plate. Here, the waves that were depicted on the first plate were replaced by dots.9 As a result, the waters to the right are monotonous, as an equally distributed light blue surface of tranquil, silent waters.

9 The second plate version shown here is taken from the 1995 edition. For this version, and for the replacement of waves by dots, see https://​dsp​ace.libr​ary.uu.nl/​han​dle/​1874/​20401.

200 Korsten

­f igures 10.3 and 10.4  Map of Holland Theatrum orbis terrarium ( first copperplate) and map of Holland in Theatrum orbis terrarium (second copperplate).

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­f igure 10.5  Visualisation of compass rose and calipper (by the author).

Moreover, the two maps in comparison also highlight another contrast. On the map to the left, the waters of lakes and rivers have acquired a more strongly pronounced dark band, as if embodying a border or a limit. The result here is that the lands appear to be more secured, more networked as well, now the waters appear to be contained; they look more like functional waterways that connect the network of cities. One other effect of the seas’ appearance as remarkably tranquil on the left map is also that two instruments stand out more sharply, or more dominant: a compass rose, in the midst of the map, in the centre of the South Sea;’ and a calliper, in the upper left part. Cartographically ruled space finds an almost superfluous confirmation in the depiction of both, in their having a distinct connotation of a controlling gaze. With the compass rose it is as if we look into the human eye’s controlling iris; with the calliper it is as if we get this eye from the side, opening up to the world but also capturing it in a perspective. Both taken together are clear indices of the ‘cartographic gaze’ that was defined by John Pickles as follows: The cartographic gaze is dominated by a commitment to modelling a God’s-​eye view, what Donna Haraway (1991) called the ‘God-​trick.’ This

202 Korsten transcendental position is both the view from above, an elevated two-​ point perspective bird’s-​eye-​view, and an all seeing eye that views everywhere at the same time.10 In referring to Haraway (1991), Pickles is highlighting the tension between a particular or situated position, and a position that claims to be, somehow, objective. The representational in-​between, I want to argue, is a sphere. With the devices of calliper and compass, by means of both focused and framing focalization, the world is captured in a theatrical sphere, as the title of the atlas Theatre of the Sphere of the Earth, also suggests. Within a sphere its particularity is not traceable, whereas at the same time a sphere is intrinsically, always, a particular sphere. Moreover, despite the fact that compass rose and calliper are placed in the waters, they are obvious indices to fixed grounds on the basis of which these maps could be made so accurately. Or precisely because they are placed in the waters, they are indices to the ways in which these have now become dominated by ground. In this context, the contrast between the third map and the first, from the Cosmographie, could not be greater. So what is it, or what happened, that might explain how three maps that are based on the same model can appear so distinctly different over time in terms of their expression of form and of content and the different balance between waters and ground? 2

Literary Tropes Working as an Incentive to Gain and Claim Land

In the map from the Cosmographei, one dominating piece of blue in the province of Holland is a vast lake that nowadays no longer exists but borders on Amsterdam airport, Schiphol. The fact that this airport lies four meters below sea level is not immediately noticeable to the eye but the very name Schiphol is, historically speaking, telling. It might either mean: ships’ hell or ships’ hall. One explanation of the name is that it would indicate a place of dangerous waters that formerly made ships sink; it could also indicate a place where ships could find protection against dangerous winds. Its name, though, is more likely 10

Pickles, John, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-​Coded World (London/​ New York: Routledge, 2004), 80. See also Doug Specht and Anna Feigenbaum, ‘From Cartographic Gaze to Contestatory Cartographies.’ in Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age. eds. Pol Bargués-​Pedreny, David Chandler and Elena Simon (London: Routledge, 2018).

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derived from a low piece of wetland where one could come to chop wood,11 which would be a matter of the commons. In any case, the current airfield is located close to what were turbulent and treacherous waters or watery lands. These waters were reassuringly called a lake –​the Lake of Haarlem –​12 a vast lake separated from the North Sea by only a small ribbon of land; in reality less than ten kilometres. The lake stood in open contact, moreover, with the South Sea, which in turn was in open contact with the North Sea. In a distinct sense it was not a lake at all, then. It was an arm of the South Sea, reaching deep inland and almost isolating Amsterdam from the rest of Holland. Consequently, the call for its drainage could be heard stronger and stronger in the course of the seventeenth century, although it would take until 1849 before the process of ‘dry-​milling’ the lake would start (I find the English term ‘reclaiming’ inadequate, for reasons given below). Plans to remove the waters of the lake and turn the entire area into profitable lands, or polders, were proposed by the great water technician Jan Leeghwater (1575–​1650) in his three volume study Haarlemmermeerboeck (Book of the Lake of Haarlem) from 1641.13 Leeghwater had already made a name, not only because of his work as architect, patent holder of a diving bell in 1605 or his support in the conquering of the key city ‘s-​Hertogenbosch, but especially due to his innovative activities in dry milling the lakes of Beemster, Purmer, Wormer, Heer-​Hugowaard, Schermer and Starn (De Roever 1944).14 On the chart that proposed how the situation would be after the lake had been milled dry, a poem was placed up front.15 For the reader’s orientation in the context of the previously presented maps, the north is to the right here, as the compass rose right from the poem indicates (Amsterdam is, consequently, at the right below). The poem’s text, at the left below, is captured in an architectonic frame that stands out against the background of a situation that is truly new: there are now lands where there 11

For the history of the name of the place, see https://​nie​uws.schip​hol.nl/​waar-​komt-​de -​naam-​schip​hol-​vand​aan/​. 12 For this map see https://​beeldb​ank.rws.nl/​Medi​aObj​ect/​Deta​ils/​333​473. 13 Jan Adriaansz Leeghwater, ‘Haerlemmermeerboeck,’ en ‘Een kleine chronyke ende voorbereidinge van de afkomste ende ‘t vergroten van de dorpen van Graft en de Ryp.’ In C. van der Woude, Kronyck van Alckmaar (Alkmaar: K. ter Burg, 1973); original published in 1641; see https://​www.dbnl.org/​tekst/​leeg0​01ha​er01​_​01/​. 14 On the more general context of Leeghwater’s works, see Cordula Rooijendijk, Waterwolven: een geschiedenis van stormvloeden, dijkenbouwers en droogmakers (Amsterdam: Atlas, 2009). 15 The map can be found (and also be enlarged) at Fout! De hyperlinkverwijzing is ongeldig..

204 Korsten

­f igure 10.6  ‘Provisional concept plan and proposal serving the diking of the big water lakes’; the lake of Haarlem milled dry.

used to be a big lake. Historically, the only small lake that is visible on this map was already reassuringly surrounded by neatly organized polders that functioned as a hint to the big lake’s future. The poem was made by the Republic’s most influential author, its greatest playwright, satirist, and author of occasional poetry: Joost van den Vondel (1587–​1679). As can be seen also, on top of the frame two animals were battling one another. The two –​a lion and a wolf –​announced and illustrated the poem’s major theme. In the poem underneath the two battling animals, the symbol of the Dutch nation, the Lion, was then addressed as follows: to the lion of holland To be chasing foreign enemies to swipe your tail so bravely over Sea is vain, when your lung is consumed or is relentlessly wasted inside, and you, with a pained heart sigh and cough, and with vast clots spit woefully your rotting intestines out of your throat, into the waves.

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­f igure 10.7  Detail from Leeghwater, ‘Provisional concept plan and proposal with the aim of diking of the big water lakes’ showing poem and the lion subduing the wolf.

What is the gain in plundering East and West with your claw while this cruel Water Wolf is biting your heart who now aims to triumph over you before long Oh, Land Lion, time you wake up, and awake with your roar all moor peoples, the Kennemers, and Rhyneland’s old masters together with Amsterdammers as the Lion’s emergency force Let one smother with a dike this animal that plagues you Let the wind-​lord fly in with his wings of mills the fast wind-​lord knows how to charge the Water Wolf

206 Korsten in the sea from which he never grows tired gnawing on you Thus the Land Lion gains land, thus he draws gold from foam.16 The first lines hint metaphorically, by means of the clawing lion with its swiping tail, at Dutch privateers on the world seas –​earning money with the chartered, politically and legally commissioned taking of foreign ships. This lion is warned that his efforts may be in vain if its lungs are being wasted and consumed. This is why the lion should re-​direct its claws to the enemy residing in Holland’s lung, in a battle that could deliver equal profits, moreover. To this order, a pack animal has to be killed: the Water Wolf. The killing has to be done skilfully, using forces of nature that cost nothing and are at work non-​stop: the winds. Killing this animal is technically possible, by means of windmills and dikes. It is politically possible, if people come to concerted action. It is economically attractive, moreover, because there is the promise of profit. Watery foams that consist of nothing but bubbles that in the end will burst, can be turned into solid gold. As the poem makes clear by means of another metaphor, namely consumption, and the coughing of clots that comes with this disease, Holland was literally losing land –​indeed by clots. Its soil consisted of peat, and the waters would ‘eat it away’ non-​stop. In this context, the wolf, as a pack animal is brought in as a metaphor for a mass of water, the backs of hunting wolves resembling the heaving of waves. It is also brought in because of its mouth, with its formidable teeth. In the light of this, the depiction of the waters of the first map presented above acquire a distinct connotation: they are teeth-​like. The association between the two, water and wolf, is not idiosyncratic or anachronistic here, nor was the metaphor of the water wolf used by Vondel new. It

16

In the original: ‘Uyt-​heemse vyanden te sitten inde veeren /​Te slingeren den staart Grootmoedich over Zee, /​Is Ydel, als uw longh geslagen aen het Teeren, /​Inwendich vast vergaet en gy met herte wee /​Soo deerlyck Sucht en Kucht en Loost by Heele Brocken /​ Het rottende Ingewant te Keel uyt, inde Golff /​Wat Baet het met uw Klauw al t’Oost en West te Plocken /​Wat Baet het met uw Klauw al t’Oost en West te Plocken /​Na dien u Byt int Hart dees Wrede Water Wolff /​Nu uyt om over u Eerlangh te Triomferen /​O: lant Leeuw Waeck eens op, en Weck met eenen Schreeu /​Alt veen de Kennemaers, en Rynlants oude Heeren /​Met d’Amsterlanders, tot noothulp van hun Leeuw /​Men Sluyte met een Dyck dit dier, dat u Comt Plagen /​De Wintvorst Vlieger met syn Moole wieken toe /​De snelle Wintvorst weet den Water Wolff te Iagen /​In Zee, van waer hy u quam Knabblen nimmer Moe /​Zoo wint de Lant Leeuw Lant, soo puurt hy Gout uyt Schuym.’

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was well-​known and remained well-​known up until today.17 Accordingly, the formal expression of the waters on the first map connote teeth on the level of expression of content. That is: the water’s teeth, like that of a wolf eating its prey, were gnawing away the land. The metaphorical wind-​lord, sovereign to the windmills that drained the lakes, was its killing agent. Literature is functional, here, as a tool to animalize waters and to personify the wind. Moreover, it is functional to allegorize human beings as the noble sovereign of all animals: the lion. This lion, in turn, is then re-​personified as either the company of Dutch privateers or a collective body of Hollanders, who through their bravery, skills and techniques can make a profit. The literary play with animalization, personification, allegory and metaphor had a distinct rhetorical goal. The person who asked Vondel to make the poem, Leeghwater, was not a naïve actor. He was experienced in draining lakes and knew it asked considerable investments to claim the lands of such a vast lake. He also knew there were profitable fishing industries surrounding the lake that would oppose such an endeavour, or authorities that would point to the importance of waterways in their provisioning the big cities. So Leeghwater needed literature to prepare the grounds, to give people an incentive to set out on a risky path. Still, the sum total of what literature was doing, proved to be more fundamental. Animalization, personification, allegory or metaphor: they were all caught under the umbrella of anthropomorphism. The world proposed by Leeghwater and Vondel, in alliance, was caught in a theatrical sphere that was projected and framed by the human gaze and the human power to name. In this context a more fundamental form of personification was at stake. Just as the privateers needed their charters and papers, the endeavour of dry-​milling needed legally underpinned bodies and legally protected property. It served the transformation of the commons into private lands. In this context, literature not only served as an incentive, but it also helped people to conceive of the world in terms of a novel kind of ficta persona, a fictive person: the legal person –​and by implication legal non-​persons.

17

See the title of Cordula Rooijendijk’s study from 2008, Waterwolven: een geschiedenis van stormvloeden, dijkenbouwers en droogmakers, that is: ‘Water-​wolves: a history of storm floods, dike builders and dry millers’; also see Peter Vlasveld, ‘De waterwolf –​venster 16,’ De canon van Nederland; https://​www.canonv​anne​derl​and.nl/​nl/​page/​70699/​de-​ waterw​olf.

208 Korsten 3

From Incentive to Ground: Making Legal Personhood Feel Natural

On March 16th 2017 the New Zealand Whanagui river, after 150 years of protests and struggle, acquired legal personhood by an act of Parliament. Aboriginals felt the river, whom they named Te Awa Tupua, to be an ancestor. This implied a lineage and within the frame of modern legal order this could only be solved by giving the river legal personhood (Charpleix 2017, 19–​30). Within four days, Justices Rajeev Sharma and Alok Singh from the High Court of the Northern Indian state Uttarakhand followed suit, judging that the holy rivers Ganga and Yamuna were to have ‘the status of a legal person with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person.’18 In both cases, on the basis of felt injustices, natural entities were formally turned into persons, legal fictions. Consequently, all affective cultural and religious connotations that characterized natural entities now came to fall under a rule, with specific roles, within the limits set, so that one could formally, correctly, legally reason about them. In a distinct sense what aboriginals had felt in a world that was theirs was now brought into law’s sphere, a sphere that had enlarged its span by including rivers as legal persons. The in essence literary power to create a ficta persona is fundamental, here, to any legal power to give rights to natural entities. This power falls back on a form of thinking that considers and defines entities in terms of personhood. The ficta connotes on the one hand the etymological origin of fingere: to make. It concerns law’s brutal power to be able to turn anything into a person. It also connotes the element of fiction, however. The made person is real, legally speaking, but is not real like a natural person. This made, fictive personhood depends on two tropes: personification and anthropomorphism. The first gives entities some sort of a recognizable human face. The second replaces metaphor by giving something a name and, by consequence, identity. When a river is given legal personhood, for instance, it gets the face of a forefather: an instance of personification. At the same time that river is no longer compared to a person by means of metaphor, it becomes a person: an instance of anthropomorphism. The role of the latter in the legal system was central to a study by Barbara Johnson (1998). The legal dynamic of turning entities or things into persons did not, and does not, come out of the blue. It has its origin in the domain of literature and the arts. One paradigmatic example is this early modern picture:

18 See http://​www.live​law.in/​first-​india-​utta​rakh​and-​hc-​decla​res-​ganga-​yam​una-​riv​ers-​liv​ ing-​legal-​entit​ies/​.

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­f igure 10.8  Science unveiling nature in the frontispiece to Gerard Blasius, Anatome Animalium, 1681.

Although for Immanuel Kant the subscription to a statue of Isis that stated that Nature can never be unveiled was sublime, in this image the inexpressibly sublime is brought down to earth: nature is unveiled by an artificially enlightened figure. This enlightening figure and her act connote the scientific shift from early modern to modern. In this context Nature gets a face, becomes

210 Korsten a persona, a clearly female one as is indicated by four breasts. These can be read as metonymy, since multiple breasts are normal in animal species and through them mankind is contiguous with them. They can also function as metaphor, as when the four breasts aim to indicate abundant nourishment. Symbolically they may indicate monstrosity. Such monstrosity is then immediately countered by anthropomorphism, for nature gets not only a face and a name, she also, literally becomes a person.19 All this can be seen as a matter of art’s attempt to grasp, understand or sense the world by means of an enlarged affective span. Yet art and literature have an ambiguous, not to say perverse, potential, here. Enlarged affective span becomes restricted or limited or vectorised once it gets an expression in the making of descriptions, images, graphs or maps. This is what the figure to the right below hints at. Unlike the Cherub to the left, who is busying itself with dissection, the figure to the right appears to have been humanized. It has lost its wings and as a result resembles rather a grown up child, who both embodies man’s capacity to learn and man’s capacity to depict and represent what it has analysed and dissected. This child looks upward to both its object of dissection and depiction –​nature –​and to its great instructor, the figure of the sciences. The latter appears as a distinct prefiguration of the term Enlightenment here, due to the enlightening candle on her head. In her two hands she carries a scalpel (to the left) and a lens (to the right). Dissection and the grasping force of human gaze literally go hand in hand, then. The lens is not so much an instrument of enlarged affective span but of enlarged precision and focus.20 Meanwhile, we see the same literary processes at work in this image as in Vondel’s poem: personification, allegory and anthropomorphism. Allegory is at work when nature is compared to a queen, carrying a staff and ruling the animals of her kingdom. Personification is at work when all animals are given faces that show a distinct satisfaction with their being subject to this queen –​ with the usual suspect of course at work in the right above, where the snake is attacking a dragonfly. Anthropomorphism is at work when nature is no longer 19

20

On the origin and history of personified Nature, lactating the world, with multiple breasts, see Mechtold Modrsohn, Natura als Göttin im Mittelalter: Ikonographische Studien zu Darstellungen der personifizierten Natur. Acta humaniora (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1997) or Katharine, Prak ‘Nature in Person: Renaissance Allegories and Emblems.’ In The Moral Authority of Nature. Eds Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003): 50–​73. On the role of lenses in relation to knowledge production in the low countries, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

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compared to a person, but becomes one. Yet in this context we witness a pivotal shift from a literary or artistic incentive to a more fundamental operation of providing a distinct order with a ground. In terms of incentives, human beings are being propelled to analyse and dissect nature in a process of knowing, and knowing more and more. In terms of grounding an order, the fact that nature is given a face and turned into a person makes it possible to define nature legally as something to be claimed and taken as property. Almost paradoxically, this turns the appropriation of nature into, well, something natural –​as if between man and nature all interactions are not principally different from the average traffic between persons. This can be tested by looking at cases where entities are not turned into legal persons. Take a cute little animal that finds a precarious habitat in the southern tip of the province of Limburg, The Netherlands, where the soil consists of loess. This soil is what Cricetus cricetus needs to dig its corridors and build its nests. Cricetus cricetus is commonly known as the Eurasean hamster or common hamster. Unlike its Syrian, Russian or Chinese cousins it never really served as pet. It changed its habits due to human activity, still: it spread westward from Asia in following the development of large scale agriculture. In that context it came to be considered a farmland pest.21 Here a familiar animal popped up when looking for incentives to kill it. The Dutch name of this common hamster is Cornwolf or Wheatwolf, as if it hunts in packs, threatening not human life itself but its life support. The recurrent wolf-​metaphor tunes in well, more generally, with the fact that politics and law cannot deal with packs. Packs are considered demonic, as when one mogwai (evil spirit) turns into a pack of Gremlins when given water, or when hamsters looking for food become packs of wolves. As Richard Iveson explains: ‘The reason for this demonic propriety is that pack animals, in contrast to both the pet and the model, form a multiplicity that presupposes contagion rather than filiation and involutions rather than hereditary production and sexual reproduction.’ (Iveson 2013, 36) Iveson falls back on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, here, who contended that in terms of societal order, from a human perspective, any animal is pack-​like. And indeed, in defending and safeguarding order, politics and law work by means of lineage and hereditary production in chains of legal transference. In accordance, they work on the basis of individual legal persons, even if these are massive multinational corporations, or states. These entities, law will face by giving them a face, and for 21

The result is, in 2020, that the animal is on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (iucn) Red List of animals on the verge of extinction, see https://​www.iucn​redl​ ist.org.

212 Korsten these, law accepts responsibility. It will not, cannot do so for packs. So, the very distinction between individual person and pack has considerable consequence, again, for how things are allowed to affect us in the context of a status quo. Maps play an enormously important role in this respect. They too are in the business of giving face to things that previously did not have such a recognizable shape. For instance: fluid and moving waters are gone when fixed and framed polders have appeared instead. In this dynamic, and apparent as an index only in the shape of dikes surrounding the polders on the Leeghwater chart, maps also de-​face, or veil what should no longer be faced. Here as well, mapping works hand in hand with literature. 4

Law’s Idiocy: The Map as Ficta Persona and the Veil of Irresponsibility

A phrase like law’s idiocy might seem provoking. Still, its signs can be found anywhere. One aspect of law’s idiocy was symptomatically revealed in a recent interview with justice Stephen G. Breyer of the American Supreme Court, in which the liberal judge confessed that his favourite literary passage comes from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The protagonist finds himself on his decrepit boat, stranded in the midst of Congo, realizing that what he needs most is what can simply get his boat going again: rivets –​clinch bolts.22 Breyer’s confession may be indicative of a systemic tendency in law to solve things formally and practically. Tellingly, Breyer appears to have forgotten that rivets in Conrad’s novel allegorically indicate lies and ideological veils, the patching up of worlds that are falling apart. Yet for Breyer, rivets serve to get any system working again, if only to keep it together, even if it is basically wrong or perverse. Tellingly also, or rather paradigmatically, Breyer apparently considers the legal system as a boat, a machine, an apparatus, embodying a human order that is perhaps surrounded by a nature indifferent to it, but also nature then that is to be brought under the control of that machine. Nature, that is, has to be brought into law’s sphere, and as such has to be charted and mapped. Law is idiotic etymologically, with idios meaning: private, or own. To be sure, law appears under the guise of a public person, the sovereign state. Yet despite law’s public nature, with public considered as the opposite of private, its idiocy

22

Interview in a major Dutch newspaper by Guus Valk, ‘Dit is de man die Trump kan dwarsbomen,’ nrc-​Handelsblad, September 16, 2017.

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dominates since states depend on their particularity, their privacy in the sense of their being on their own, which makes their very sovereignty possible. No mistake, in the modern science of law there is no ultimate sovereign power, since the higher or highest law is not one of command but ‘merely founds the authority to command while simultaneously setting conditions for the legitimate use of that authority’ (Minkkinen 1999, 126) Still, this leaves us with a couple of problems with regard to, for instance, ecological issues. Law struggles with anything that transcends the limits of the state by means of which its conditions are set. And in that context, law shuns the logic of water and clings to a logic that depends on the axiomatic link between sovereignty, territory and land. So much is evident, for instance, in the first article of the wfd, the so-​called Water Framework Directive of the European Union, codified as 2000/​60/​e c. It dates from 23 October 2000 and it states: Water is not a commercial product like any other but, rather, a heritage which must be protected, defended and treated as such.23 The speaking subject is the EU’s authoritative body here; its agents act in protecting, defending and treating an object –​water. This is not a commercial product like any other, but by implication a product nevertheless: a heritage. This, in turn, is a term that is seemingly used neutrally but is gendered, still. Etymologically heritage is related to water’s counterpart, land: ‘heir; inheritance, ancestral estate, heirloom.’ As heritage, then, water becomes an object that is analytically taken apart, visualized, and legally framed as ground, which is indeed also how the Dutch Law on the protection of nature (Wnb), defines waters.24 In this context, a defining characteristic of both maps and law is that both eliminate all the senses except the visual one in order to be able to fictively frame, name and stage things (Aristodemou 2000). Law’s desire and necessity to work with limits and limitations are both a matter of script and imagineering, i.e. of technically defining something by means of a web of images. In the 23

24

directive 2000/​60/​e c of the european parliament and of the council of 23 October 2000 establishing a framework for Community action in the field of water policy, see http://​eur-​lex.eur​opa.eu/​legal-​cont​ent/​E N/​T XT/​P DF/​?uri=​C ELEX:020​00L0​060-​20141​ 120&qid=​148579​9311​727&from=​E N. Wnb, artikel 1.1.2: ‘In deze wet en de daarop rustende bepalingen wordt mede verstaan onder… –​ grond: wateren…’ That is: Law on the protection of nature, article 1.1.2, ‘In this law and the legal notices that define it the following is to be understood included:… –​ land/​ground: waters.’ See: https://​wet​ten.overh​eid.nl/​B WBR​0 037​5 52/​2019-​01-​01.

214 Korsten last decades juridical interactions between script and image have been studied intensively, the pivot being that law’s claim on superior reasoning based itself analytically on script and that, consequently, it feared the unruly, affective disturbance of troubling images. Despite the considerable insights that studies into this dynamic have produced, they have also tended to forget how visuality is used to train affect, in the legal domain, by eliminating other senses. If, for instance, nature is unveiled, she can be seen in the face, as a result of which she can be considered a person. Still, as an effect, the question of whether one could smell her, feel her, hear her, taste her, let alone intuit her is being short circuited. Such an restriction of full sensibility to the visual is characteristic for law’s tendency to affect things by taking them apart, cutting them up in manageable, individual entities. This is also a major characteristic of maps. Maps are not just representations with abstract, epistemological force, then; they affect people. Such an affective force can be traced when frightening waters are turned into land that are simultaneously and reassuringly reconfigured on the basis of a grid that works both on a cartographic and legal level, as is shown in the image below:

­f igure 10.9  Chart of several famous polders made by P. van der Keere and L.J. Sinck and published by Hondius in 1633; de Beemster is at the right above. Note: See https://​www.geheu​genv​anne​derl​and.nl/​nl/​geheu​gen/​view/​mini​ map?coll=​ngvn&ide​ntif​ier=​ZZM01:B000​768&pc=​.

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By means of a both mathematical and legal grid, commons are being cut up, divided into sellable or rentable parts that are private property. No mistake, although waters were not mapped as detailed as lands, this did not mean they were not considered in terms of some sort of custody. They would either belong to, or fall under the authority of, differing governing bodies, of counties, cities, and in individual cases even individuals. Apart from the latter, by and large the waters were public or common property. Yet the many endeavours to make polders out of waters turned this common entity into private, profitable property. This is why I consider the English verb ‘reclaiming,’ as a term that indicates the dry-​milling of lakes, to be inappropriate. The prefix re-​suggests that the land was already someone’s. Well, it was not. In their endeavour to mill the lakes dry, collectives of investors would need an ‘octrooi,’ a charter or concession, that would legally underpin their activities and would make sure that common property would change legally into private property, on the basis of a monopoly, once the lake had been turned into land (Zwet 2009). Charter and chart go hand in hand, here, and together they work back on the fears that Vondel’s poem was playing with, as if both charter and chart had been so lucky as to fend these off. Underpinned by charters, then, charts and maps serve to give lands the face of property –​much less frightening than a water wolf. Ecologically speaking, something else was at work, however. Through literature and mapping, predatory land-​taking was made possible aesthetically, ethically, politically, economically and legally. This implied a different distribution of responsibilities. Paradoxically, in the domain of law, such distribution of responsibilities was framed by legal scholar Scott Veitch in terms of law’s intrinsic irresponsibility (Veitch 2007). In Veitch’s reading, law acting in in the service of politics compulsively tries to make irresponsibility time and again appear reasonable as a result of which only parts of people’s affective potential are being selected, while at the same time their affective household is trained in a distinct way. In the case above, the water wolf may have been killed effectively, indeed providing others with considerable profits. As a result no one asks any more: ‘But what about the waters?’ A similar veiling of responsibility is at work in the following piece, also by Vondel, on a lake that unlike the lake of Haarlem was claimed and gained at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Beemster, which was milled dry between 1607 and 1612: the beemster The wind lord, to spawn the sorrow of Hollands virgin since she had been damaged and infringed by storm after storm, Clothed itself with wicks of mills and grinded, after much turning,

216 Korsten The Beemster into pasture, and discharged the lake into sea. The sun, surprised, saw the clay still briny from the waves, And dried them, and presented them with a festive cloth of green, Embroidered with flowers, abundance of leaves, harvest and spikes, And in decorating her hair cast it full of scents; The source of cream and butter sprang from her breasts Her fishy body became flesh, still virgin and fresh; The crown on her forehead pushed itself through clouds Like when luxury, on average, finds joy in height. Here the greyhound hunts game, here the chariot makes a pleasure trip, People dance, people dine, in the merchant’s wealthy quarter; Here the golden age is laughing in sweet lust bowers, Though not afraid of war, or of dangerous endeavours at sea. You may decorate Cypris, as she came to charm Cyprus, Yet I assure you that this goddess was born from the foam of the sea.25 The literary process may be familiar by now –​personification, allegory, anthropomorphism –​but something else might escape our attention as a consequence. The lake has been discharged into sea, that is the explicit part. As a result water has changed into pasture; also explicit. It is made abundantly clear what fruits, what goods, what riches, what luxury, what fun people can have now that the lands are up for the taking. It is even made explicit who did the taking: people from the ‘merchant’s wealthy quarter.’ A majority of actors is absent meanwhile: the farmers who did not and could not own the land they worked, but had to pay rent to the ones who had changed the commons into private property. 25

In the original: ‘De Beemster’: De Wintvorst, om den rouw van Hollands maagd te paeien, /​Vermits, door storm op storm, zij schade en inbreuk leê. /​Schoot molenwiecken aan, en maalde, na lang draeien, /​Den Beemster tot een beemd, en loosde ’t meir in zee. /​De zon verwondert, zag de klay nog brack van baren, /​En drooghdese af, en schonkse een groenen staatsiekeurs, /​Vol bloemen geborduurd, vol lovren, ooft, en airen; /​En, toiende heur haar, bestroide het vol geurs. /​De room en boterbron quam uit haar borsten springen, /​Het vissigh lijf wert vleesch, noch maagd en ongerept; /​Haar voorhoofts torenkroon quam door de wolken dringen: /​Gelijck gemeenlick weelde in hoogheit wellust schept. /​ Hier jaagt de windhont ’t wilt, hier rijt de koets uit spelen, /​Men danst, men banketteert, in ’s Koopmans rijke buurt. /​Hier lacht de goude tijt, in lieve lustprieelen, /​Die voor geen oorloogh schrikt, noch kiel op klippen stuurt. /​Verzier van Cypris, hoe zij Cypers quam bekoren: /​Ik weet, dat dees Godin uit zeeschuim is geboren.’ For an extensive interpretation of the poem, see Arie-​Jan Gelderblom, ‘Dichter bij een droogmakerij.’ Visies op Vondel na 300 jaar. Eds. E.K. Grootes and S.F. Witstein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979): 104–​117.

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And, it cannot be emphasized enough, again an individual person rises from the indistinct mass of waves: a virgin goddess that seems to be a rival to the classical goddess Aphrodite, prefiguration of Venus. Yet where the latter’s birth from foam is mythical (whether it is the foam of Uranos’ genitals or of the sea) here it is technological. It is through art, considered both in terms of technique and imagination, that a fictive person is created that covers up, veils, another ficta persona: the collective of merchants that was looking for manageable land. It is this land that needs to be protected, hence the perhaps strange line that emphasizes that all these wealthy people are not complacent. No, they are willing to take a risk (as any investor does) and they are willing to go to war to defend their property, if need be. In this case, then, the combined efforts of literature and cartography were that aesthetically, legally, and politically, waters came to affect people differently, for instance no longer as water but as property, and by implication heritage. The waters themselves, in their own right, have become an impalpable non-​person. In this context, legal riveting will not work in its dealing with ecological issues on the basis of (international) laws that are ‘soft’ because they miss the underpinning of the steel, sovereign state. It is law’s idiocy, that is to say its particularity, to consider nature in terms of a particular legal order. Law shows a compulsive tendency, here, since the 16th century, as the example of the dry-​milling of Dutch waters may illustrate. In summary: the ability to consider nature in terms of, or within the sphere of, a legal order depended by and large on two techniques: one literary, defining natural entities as persons and in terms of anthropomorphism; one cartographical, capturing natural entities as recognizable shapes within a well-​ defined sphere. As the examples given above show us, this is how it works then: 1.) Charters and charts or maps restrict the senses to the visual; 2.) they eliminate possible packs by either metaphorizing any pack into an imaginable, individual person or by de-​facing the pack; 3.) they close down the open potential of metaphor by anthropomorphism, for instance by turning any non-​human entity of interest into a person (again: a river that is granted legal personhood it is no longer compared to a person but becomes one); 4.) they do so from a fixed, grounded position: politically and geographically defined land –​that is: land defined as territory forms the stable circle from within which they argue;26 26

This is why in critical legal studies territory is studied for its ‘techniques of authorisation and grounding’; see Shaun McVeigh (ed.), Jurisprudence of Jurisdiction (Abingdon: Routledge-​ Cavendish, 2007), 5.

218 Korsten 5.)

from this fixed, grounded position, they project a sphere, which is more than a stage, for a sphere is something particular within which the visually, analytically isolated elements are placed. Now, it would be wrong to blame all this on the sciences, considered as totum pro parte for the mathematical and geographical operation of cartography. Such blame is implicitly at stake when, in an interview, Karen Barad, author of Meeting the Universe Halfway, reconsidered C.P. Snow’s ideas on the split between the humanities and the sciences, the so-​called two cultures, and then stated: … the entanglement of matter and meaning calls into question this set of dualisms that places nature on one side and culture on the other. And which separates off matters of fact from matters of concern (Bruno Latour) and matters of care (Maria Puig de la Bellacasa), and shifts them off to be dealt with by what we aptly call here in the States ‘separate academic divisions,’ whereby the division of labor is such that the natural sciences are assigned matters of fact and the humanities matters of concern, for example. barad 2012, no page number

There is a distinct hierarchy embodied in this division, which may explain why, for instance, the legal disciplines have tended to betray their alliance with the humanities in a desire to serve the masters of fact. At the same time, considering the humanities in terms of their being the realm of care or concern comes with its own arrogance, or shows a certain ignorance of the historical role that the humanities, paradigmatically embodied in literature and art, have played in turning the world into an issue of anthropomorphic figures. Anthropomorphism is the one major pivot where mapping and literature coincide with legal order. Carefully arranged, artistically prepared, imagined and mapped ‘private’ spheres within which manoeuvrable legal puppets are allowed to play their role, have much helped to eliminate natural life worlds. As such they are an excellent example of how people can be driven on the basis of restricted or vectorised affective span. In this process of restriction and vectorization, the dynamic between maps and fictae personae, both literary and legal figures, has played a decisive role.

Works Cited

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Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Aristodemou, Maria. Law and Literature: Journeys from Her to Eternity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Barad, Karen. ‘Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.’ Interviewed by Rick Dolphijn, Iris van der Tuin. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. New Metaphysics, Open Humanities Press, University of Michigan Library, (2012). http://​dx.doi.org/​10.3998/​ohp.11515​701.0001.001. Charpleix, Liz. ‘The Whanganui River as Te Awa Tupua: Place-​Based Law in a Legally Pluralistic Society.’ The Geographical Journal 184, no. 1 (2017): 19–​30. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1111/​geoj.12238. Deventer, Koeman, and Koeman, C. Gewestkaarten van de Nederlanden door Jacob van Deventer, 1536–​1545 : met een picturale weergave van alle kerken en kloosters. Maasland: Alphen aan den Rijn: Stichting tot Bevordering van de Uitgave van de Stadsplattegronden van Jacob van Deventer [etc.] ; Canaletto, 1994. directive 2000/​60/​e c of the european parliament and of the council of 23 October 2000 establishing a framework for Community action in the field of water policy (2000). https://​eur-​lex.eur​opa.eu/​legal-​cont​ent/​EN/​TXT/​PDF/​?uri =​CELEX:020​00L0​060-​20141​120&qid=​148579​9311​727&from=​EN. Gelderblom, Arie-​Jan. ‘Dichter Bij Een Droogmakerij.’ Essay. In Visies Op Vondel Na 300 Jaar. Ed. E. K. Grootes and S. F. Witstein, 104–​18. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. Van der Laegh, Willem, Jacob Bartelsz Veris, and Joost van den Vondel. ‘Kaart Met Een Ontwerp Voor De Bedijking Van De Haarlemmermeer, 1641, Willem Van Der Laegh, 1641.’ Map. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, n.d. Accessed February 3, 2022. http://​hdl.han​ dle.net/​10934/​RM0​001.COLL​ECT.463​635. Hallyn, Fernand. Gemma Frisius, arpenteur de la terre et du ciel. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008. Haraway, Donna J. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.’ In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, 1st ed. London, England: Routledge, 1991. Ives, Richard. ‘Deeply Ecological Deleuze and Guattari: Humanism’s Becoming-​ Animal.’ Humanimalia 4, no. 2 (2013): 34–​53. https://​doi.org/​10.52537/​huma​nima​ lia.9992. Johnson, Barbara. ‘Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law.’ Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10 (1998): 549–​73. Keere Sinck L. J., P. van der. 1633, ‘Kaart van Enkele Droogmakerijen in Noord-​Holland.’ Zuiderzeemuseum. Accessed February 3, 2022, https://​geheu​gen.delp​her.nl/​nl/​ geheu​gen/​view/​mini​map?coll=​ngvn&ide​ntif​ier=​ZZM01:B000​768&pc. Leeghwater, Jan Adriaansz. Haerlemmermeerboeck: Beschryvinge Wegens Het Bedyken En Droogmaken Van De Haarlemmer-​Meer. Amsterdam, NL, 1641. https://​www.dbnl .org/​tekst/​leeg0​01ha​er01​_​01/​colo​fon.php.

220 Korsten Live Law News Network. ‘A First In India: Uttarakhand HC Declares Ganga, Yamuna Rivers As Living Legal Entities [Read Judgment].’ Live Law News, March 20, 2017. https://​www.live​law.in/​first-​india-​utta​rakh​and-​hc-​decla​res-​ganga-​yam​una-​riv​ers -​liv​ing-​legal-​entit​ies/​. Lunsford, Virginia West. Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. McVeigh, Shaun. (ed.) Jurisprudence of Jurisdiction. Abingdon: Routledge-​Cavendish, 2007. Minkkinen, Panu. Thinking Without Desire: A First Philosophy of Law. Oxford: Hart Publish­ing, 1999. Modersohn, M. Natura als Göttin im Mittelalter: Ikonographische Studien zu Darstellungen der personifizierten Natur. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997. Münster, Sebastiaan. 1550, ‘Holand.’ Library Catalogue: Maps of the Netherlands and Dutch regions: Universiteit Utrecht, n.d. accessed February 3, 2022, https://​ obje​cts.libr​ary.uu.nl/​rea​der/​index.php?obj=​1874-​20396&lan=​en#page//​11/​01/​61/​ 110161131940​3882​4795​3488​5739​9463​2840​810.jpg/​mode/​1up. Ortelius, Abraham. (first copper plate), 1572, ‘Hollandiae Antiqvorvm Catt Horvm Sedis Nova Descriptio, Avctore Iacobo a Daventria.’ Zuiderzee Museum Enkhuizen, n.d. Accessed February 3, 2022, https://​obje​cts.libr​ary.uu.nl/​rea​der/​index.php?obj=​1874 -​20396&lan=​en#pageht​tps://​www.zui​derz​eeco​llec​tie.nl/​obj​ect/​coll​ect/​Zuide​rzee​ _​mus​eum-​6831/​11/​01/​61/​110161131940​3882​4795​3488​5739​9463​2840​810.jpg/​mode/​1up. Ortelius, Abraham. (second copper plate), 1575, ‘Hollandiae Antiquorum Catthorum Sedis Nova Descriptio, Auctore Iacobo a Daventria,’ Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, n.d. Accessed February 3, 2022, https://​obje​cts.libr​ary.uu.nl/​rea​der/​index .php?obj=​1874-​20401&lan=​en#page//​13/​36/​06/​133606831935​3986​7155​8559​0140​6418​ 7652​512.jpg/​mode/​1up. Parker, Geoffrey. The Grand Strategy of Philip ii. New York: Yale University Press, 2000. Pickles, John. A History Of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping And The Geo-​Coded World. London/​New York: Routledge, 2004. Prak, Katharine. ‘Nature in Person: Renaissance Allegories and Emblems.’ In The Moral Authority of Nature. Ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Roever, J.G. de. Jan Adriaenszoon Leeghwater : het leven en werk van een zeventiende-​ eeuws waterbouwkundige. Amsterdam: Ahrend, 1944. Rooijendijk, Cordula. Waterwolven: een geschiedenis van stormvloeden, dijkenbouwers en droogmakers. Amsterdam: Atlas, 2009. Specht, Doug And Anna Feigenbaum. ‘From Cartographic Gaze To Contestatory Cartographies.’ In Mapping And Politics In The Digital Age. Eds. Pol Bargués-​Pedreny, David Chandler And Elena Simon. London: Routledge, 2018.

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chapter 11

Mapping the Sacramental Inner Circle by Jerzy Peterkiewicz Aleksandra Słyszewska Throughout his lifetime, Jerzy Peterkiewicz earned a status of highly acclaimed English novelist as well as Polish poet and translator. He was called by Anthony Burgess ‘One of our most intelligent and original novelists’ (qtd. in Moskalowa 2020: 68). His prose, often experimental and stylistically impressive, was well-​ received in England,1 and yet his works seem largely unknown to a wider public, and he still remains a non-​canonical writer. Born in 1916 in Fabianki (in north central Poland), he fled the country on the outbreak of ii World War, traveled to France and later to England, where he graduated first from the University of St Andrews and then King’s College. For over 30 years he worked as a lecturer at the school of Slavonic and East European studies at London University. He published poetry, exclusively in Polish, and prose, exclusively in English –​which can be considered a great achievement, as on coming to England he did not know the language, and yet, upon publishing his first novel, he was congratulated on his proficient ‘treatment of the English language’ (Moskalowa 2020:66). He was deeply convinced that in exile the mother tongue should serve to create poetry, and that ‘Polish novelist addressing an émigré audience could not help but be parochial’ (Taylor-​Terlecka 2008). His interest in language, as well as his personal experience of exile and alienation in a foreign culture are reflected in his works and mark his unique style. He died in London in 2007. Peterkiewicz can be considered not only a non-​canonical writer, but also a writer who was constantly in-​between: between Polish and English culture and language, between poetry and prose, between his father’s peasant roots and his mother’s aristocratic origin,2 between individual and intimate moments and, on the other hand, universal human experience. At the heart of his literary endeavor lies the search for meaning, relevance and truth which the 1 The success of Peterkiewicz’s novels has been stressed by Cieplińska (2013) and Moskalowa (2020). 2 The influence of his early childhood on his literary work is visible particularly strongly in his first novel, The Knotted Cord, in which the author employs autobiographical elements.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004520288_013

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author himself recognized as rooted in ‘conflict with reality and longing for the ultimate sense of existence’ (Peterkiewicz 2002: 148; translation mine). Peterkiewicz was deeply convinced that this conflict has essentially and unavoidably religious character, and it is religious experience (or, more specifically, the experience of Roman Catholic tradition) that remains his most potent inspiration. In one of his essays, Peterkiewicz refers with criticism to different hostile ‘reactions to Catholic universalism’ and states that what strikes him the most about them is their ‘lack of faith in a human being, who is limited in the physical world, but also equipped in spiritual powers that transcend the world of the senses’ (Peterkiewicz 2002:158; translation mine). His strong belief in powerful spiritual potential of human beings is one of the key aspects in many of his novels, and the relationship between the physical and the spiritual constitutes a framework for the fictional world that he creates. Peterkiewicz has been repeatedly (and, it seems, inevitably) compared to Joseph Conrad due to his personal experience of exile and his successful accommodation into the English cultural and literary tradition,3 but in terms of style and subject matter his works seem more closely connected to the tradition of the English Catholic novel. He was a friend of Muriel Spark, who is considered one of the key modern authors who employed Catholic worldview in their works. Also, Peterkiewicz openly admitted his deep admiration for another Catholic writer, Evelyn Waugh, and claimed that his attachment ‘remained unaltered over the years [while] other literary allegiances couldn’t last’ (Peterkiewicz 1971:909). In her essay on Peterkiewicz’s work in the context of British Catholic novels, Katarzyna Cieplińska notices (after Jan Bielatowicz) a number of similarities between literary interests and inspirations of Peterkiewicz and prominent British Catholic authors, mainly Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc (Cieplińska 2013:79). Elements that are common for them include the introduction of supernatural events and characters, and the use of religious themes like conversion and life after death. Apart from these similarities, the fictional world that Peterkiewicz and other English ‘Catholic writers’4 create in their novels is also deeply sacramental.

3 See: Twardowski 1994, Jones 1953, Brown 1953. 4 It needs to be remembered that not all authors commonly associated as ‘Catholic’ approved of such label; while Evelyn Waugh seemed to openly embrace Catholic elements in his novels, Graham Greene preferred to see himself as ‘a writer who happens to be a Catholic’; and David Lodge considered himself to be ‘Agnostic Catholic’ (Bergonzi 1986). I do not know if Peterkiewicz was ever asked to take a stand on the matter, but his novels abound in Catholic images and themes, and his imagination, as I will try to show, is clearly sacramental.

224 Słyszewska What I mean by this is that the world depicted in novels such as Brighton Rock (1938) by Graham Greene, Brideshead Revisited (1945) by Evelyn Waugh, or Inner Circle (1966) by Jerzy Peterkiewicz reveals a peculiar relationship between the physical and the supernatural, between the human and the divine. The most important aspect of sacramental organisation of the fictional world is that the spiritual dimension is depicted as inherently present in physical, tangible elements. This attitude, which can also be called incarnational (that is, revealing God’s presence in His creation), is prominent in novels by Peterkiewicz, and Inner Circle, with its focus on physical surroundings and spaces, is the most notable example. As Rowan Williams indicates in his essay ‘Sacraments of the New Society,’ the essential feature of sacraments of the Catholic Church is the view of physical objects like water, wine or bread as vehicles with which to trace ‘a transition from one sort of reality to another,’ so that ‘a distinctive kind of new belonging can be realized’ (Williams 1996:90). This is exactly how Peterkiewicz creates the fictional world in Inner Circle where objects, characters, and most notably their surroundings, are rooted in concrete physical circumstances that a careful reader may easily recognize, but only to be transformed and to reveal their profound spiritual potential. Place-​relations seem crucial for Peterkiewicz, and he is interested both in their physical as well as spiritual properties, so that they allow the characters to access reality that transcends human possibilities. Like other Catholic writers, Peterkiewicz insists on the incarnational nature of the world in order to reveal the truth about human beings, their origin and destiny. Inner Circle occupies a particular place in Peterkiewicz’s oeuvre. The author himself admitted that the novel encapsulates the essence of his writing in terms of both structure and subject matter. Perhaps this is the reason why it actually differs from his other works, as it indicates more clearly that he was interested in the role of imagination rather than in employing a purely realistic mode of presentation (although traces of this attitude are also visible for instance in The Quick and the Dead). The structure of the novel reflects Peterkiewicz’s interest in numerology, as it includes three stories told alternately (in three parts) by three different narrators, and located in three different periods of time in the history of mankind. Part one, entitled ‘Sky,’ is a story sorrowfully delivered by Eve about her own and Adam’s life after the Fall, and her daily struggle with the world which is becoming more and more hostile and strikingly different from their original home, Paradise. The changes (and slow degradation that they inevitably bring) concern not only their closest surroundings, but also their offspring, and even themselves. Another part of the novel, entitled ‘Underground,’ is narrated by

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Patrick, a mentally dysfunctional boy living in modern London, who is obsessed with the Tube, and who compulsively visits the Inner Circle Line where he can travel for hours, never reaching the final station (as there is none). His disturbed point of view only indicates how impoverished human relationships have become, and it also reveals how deficient the world is without proper (that is, religious) perspective. The third section of the novel, ‘Surface,’ presents a futuristic vision of England, overcrowded to the point of suffocation, where people’s lives (that is, their memories, emotions and even bodily functions) are controlled by technological devices and the mysterious ‘Sky men.’ Unknowingly, inhabitants of this barren world crave for something that would nourish both their deformed bodies and degraded souls. The spatial organization in each of the three parts is carefully designed, and Peterkiewicz employs a highly diverse imagery to present three seemingly different stories, and draw three very different maps: of post-​Paradisiac garden (‘Sky’), of London’s Underground Inner Circle (‘Underground’), and of futuristic England (‘Surface’). The notion of a map seems relevant for the overall meaning of the story, as Peterkiewicz in his creation of spaces employs specific landmarks (natural, like trees, and man-​made, like underground stations or large ‘hygienic boxes’) that direct his characters, influence their movements and help them comprehend the world around them. At the same time, physical spaces also reflect the spiritual aspect of the world, and may provide the sense of security and belonging (and, on the other hand, the sense of loss and confusion). The characters’ travels reflect their search for values and identity, and Peterkiewicz in his novel insists that religious imagery is essential in the presentation of this process. The three stories, although seemingly different, are interconnected in a number of ways. One of the most vivid images that they all include is a tree. In ‘Sky’ trees bring memories of Paradise for Eve, and for Adam a tree becomes a sign of death; in ‘Underground’ the electric Tube installations are seen by the narrator as roots of trees, vaguely reminding him of a distant past and repeatedly drawing him to the tunnels; finally, a tree is a central image in ‘Surface,’ it becomes the characters’ final destination and plays pivotal role in the story, bringing death as well as new life. Apart from the shared imagery, the stories are also connected by characters (for instance, the character of Leeds, who is prominent in ‘Surface,’ is also presented in ‘Underground’ in the figure of Patrick’s deranged fellow traveler). Finally, what connects the stories is language that the characters use. The most notable example is the phrase ‘Our Father’ used by Adam to describe God, while Eve (resentful and much less trusting) prefers to call Him ‘the Sky Man;’ in ‘Underground’ Patrick, when he receives religious instruction in a school run by priests, in order to avoid

226 Słyszewska confusion with his own father refers to his teachers as ‘yes-​fathers’ and ‘no-​ fathers;’ finally, the inhabitants of ‘Surface’ use the name ‘skymen’ to describe mysterious creatures in charge of the domes which provide food and shelter. It can be argued that all these elements indicate a complex and dynamic relationship of the characters with the first (and original) father and creator, God. To Adam, God is still a beloved parent, while Eve sees Him as an enemy who brings destruction; Patrick, very vaguely sensing that the physical dimension is not all that the world has to offer, holds his biological father as the central figure in his life, and has a very disturbed picture of all other ‘fathers’ (spiritual as well as biological); finally, in ‘Sky’ the notion of a father (both heavenly and biological) is disregarded for a very long time, and only near the end of the novel, when one of the characters actually becomes a father, do they begin to sense that instead of some vague sky folk, there may be only one heavenly being that actually holds power in the world. However, the most prominent element that connects the three stories, and one which seems to govern the organization of space, is the image of a circle. It repeatedly emerges as central to Peterkiewicz’s fictional world, as it attracts and allures the characters, determines the direction of their movements, and defines their worldview. It contributes to the sense of safety, and marks places of intimacy and insight. I argue that the way Peterkiewicz employs the image of a circle suggests a profoundly sacramental character of his fictional world. The sacramental framework is manifested particularly strongly in references to the sacrament of the Eucharist which constitutes a unifying element of the Christian worldview, and its most vivid image is a circle of the Eucharistic Bread.5 It is the Eucharist that in the event of Christ mediates the presence of the spiritual in the physical, and allows the divine to meet, and transform, the human. The importance of the Eucharistic sacrifice and the importance of a close relationship between God and human beings is explored very vividly in ‘Sky.’ The narrator, Eve, comments on the changes which come as a result of the Fall, and which primarily consist in animals and plants growing wilder and more hostile: ‘[The Sky Man] will suffocate us with his plants, mushrooms and moss before the hooves of his multiplying beasts trample our breed this fertile mud’ (Peterkiewicz 1968:62). Her account is clearly marked with the sense of longing for Paradise, but also resentment, anger and growing alienation from the world that surrounds her, including her own children who abandon her to 5 The Christian custom of forming the host in the shape of a circle is deeply rooted in tradition of the Church, and reaches back as early as the 4th century, or possibly even earlier. See: New Advent Encyclopedia (http://​www.newadv​ent.org/​cat​hen/​074​89d.htm).

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live in distant corners of the world, and even Adam himself, who continues his mission and travels from place to place to look after God’s creation. She depicts Adam’s feeble and hopeless efforts to preserve the original communion with God and his repeated attempts to pass his knowledge about Him and the world to next generations. With particular attention she recalls the words of Adam concerning a sign that serves him to mark every human household built by themselves or their offspring: [Adam] began to speak about his ‘Our Father,’ the Sky Man, whose image sometimes appeared in the likeness of two circles, although there was yet another, and this third circle could not be understood by man until it became visible and until man broke it with his own weak hands. peterkiewicz 1968:61

The sign constitutes a symbolic representation of the whole history of salvation. The first two circles can be seen as depicting God and His original relationship with people, and a symbol of their original destiny, their special place among God’s creation.6 In the novel the sign of two circles serves not only to mark spaces inhabited by people, but also to distinguish those who are particularly chosen by God. In ‘Sky,’ one such person is depicted with particular care; Cain, Adam and Eve’s son who murdered his brother to win God’s favor, and as a punishment for his crime he and his family live in isolation on a secluded island, bears the mark of a circle on his forehead. Paradoxically, in spite of his sin, the presence of God in his life is more visible, and it clearly has a strong influence on those who meet him. Eve, for instance, is even more ashamed of her actions when facing her son, and states: ‘the fiery sign glared at me from Cain’s forehead like the Sky Man’s single eye’ (Peterkiewicz 1968:190). At the sight of Cain’s mark she feels uncomfortable and is full of guilt for all her faults. On the other hand, for Adam, who even after the Fall tries to maintain a close relationship with God and fulfils His will as closely as he can, in the moment of death it becomes a source of comfort, as Cain recollects his father’s last moments: ‘His lips came forward and he kissed my forehead –​here.’ Cain touched the Sky Man’s mark … ‘His kiss lingered. And my father said he was 6 The image of God as a circle has a long tradition, and seems to be encapsulated exceptionally well in an anonymous statement: ‘The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere’ (Liber xxiv philosophorum, ii 2).

228 Słyszewska drinking strength from the circle made by Our father on Cain’s forehead, and he thanked for being the bearer of the circle.’ peterkiewicz 1968:187

The constant presence of God in people’s lives, whose reminder takes the form of the two circles, in the novel is shown as complemented by the third circle symbolizing the coming of Christ, His visible and tangible presence on Earth, His humanity, sacrifice and death (brought by the ‘weak hands’ of men), as well as His sacramental presence in the form of ‘a circle,’ a small round shape of the Eucharistic bread. I argue that the image of a circle within a circle is the key to understand Peterkiewicz’s novel, as it is present in all three stories and connects them, so that they in fact become one narrative, a retelling of the story of the Fall and Redemption, which points to its importance in the modern world and suggests its relevance for the future of mankind. In ‘Sky,’ references to Christ’s redemptive death are notable also in the presentation of the motif of a tree. To Eve trees are a source of comfort, as they remember her before the Fall (and before, as she says, ‘the first crime broke the first circle’). They also symbolize the beginning of a new life, as each time she gives birth to a child she is tied to one of the trunks: I was hanging from a tree … Amo [her son] had strapped me with binds of twisted hair to the bough of an oak-​tree, and dug out, according to my wish, a hollow under the tree. And the hollow he had softened with green and yellow moss, so that the fall would be soft, from my womb into the soil. peterkiewicz 1968:119

For Adam, on the other hand, a tree becomes a place of death. Feeling that his body is growing weaker, he asks one of his sons, Cain, to tie him to a tree, with his arms stretched to heaven. In his case, the tree marks the end of life, but at the same time it entails a new beginning. In Peterkiewicz’s presentation of the modern world in ‘Underground,’ religious imagery becomes less apparent, but the role of religion and spirituality is still prominent. In this part Peterkiewicz employs different narrative technique, that is third-​person narration and free indirect speech, to present thoughts and actions of the protagonist and some of the characters. Patrick’s disturbed mind provides a dominating point of view, which additionally stresses how disrupted the image of God (and, by implication, human beings) is. One of the most straightforward statements on religion is delivered by Patrick’s father who compares religious upbringing to a mental breakdown,

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and claims that nowadays both are very common. Patrick is baptized, ‘just in case’ (Peterkiewicz 1968:47), only after he becomes a student in school run by priests, as there is a suspicion that his parents did not think of it before. When he is instructed by a priest (one of the ‘yes-​fathers’) before he receives the sacrament, he express his attachment to the ‘Catholic God’ solely on the basis of the size of His beard in paintings. In the boy’s disturbed mind religious rituals and practices eventually lead him to sainthood (so he can become like St. Patrick from a colored picture): ‘he became so pious that he could see words through the letters in some books and could guess numbers, too … Out of piety, or happiness maybe, Patrick became as plump as a puppy’ (Peterkiewicz 1968: 47). Throughout the story, his struggle to achieve sainthood is depicted simultaneously with his growing mental problems, and as the narrator states, ‘Patrick’s piety ascend[s]‌to a foul sublimation’ after he secretly visits the Circle Line (Peterkiewicz 1968:51). One of the most stable and reassuring elements in Patrick’s life are journeys that he takes to London’s underground. He compulsively returns to the Inner Circle line in a vague conviction that it holds a mystery he is able to reveal. He finds it comforting that the route is a closed circle, so that he can pass the same stations over and over again. At the same time, he is also aware of the existence of what he calls ‘the other underground’, a larger railroad circle, ‘the outer circle from Leeds to Durham, from Cardiff to Dover’ (Peterkiewicz 1968:179). Although he does not travel outside London, in his mind he draws a map of England, with a large railroad circle with a much smaller underground circle inside, and he recalls them both with a vague conviction that they are somehow related to his past, however distant, and future, however infinite. Additionally, the underground wires and various installations become, in Patrick’s mind, the roots of trees: ‘Thick cables and other things, crooked and coiled like tree roots in the park, accompanied Patrick on his way … Perhaps what he saw where the toes of park trees trying to wiggle deep into the earth’ (Peterkiewicz 1968: 93). References to the two railway circles, and the mysterious significance of trees create a context that enables the reader to recognize that, in fact, Patrick’s world is part of a larger story that involves the humanity’s past, present and future. Dover, the narrator of ‘Surface,’ slowly discloses the rules that govern people’s lives in a hopelessly overcrowded island, destroyed and devoid of vegetation, and depicts his closest companions, his coincidental ‘wives and brothers’ who seem to be under his care (Peterkiewicz 1968:11). He makes it very clear that they manage to stay together, and on their feet, not stamped upon by the ever pressing mass of people, only by holding hands and revolving in a circle. This human circle is also what keeps them sane, at least partly in charge of

230 Słyszewska their thoughts and memories; the place in the center of their circle remains empty unless one of them decides to rest there (with others still revolving). The circle is also a place where they can recollect their past lives and experience genuine emotions, as does one of Dover’s wives: September’s knees jerked, her whole body began to sag, although our circle was not yet in full motion … I had to risk letting her fall on to the ground in the middle … She was lying curled up, wriggling her hips and pounding her thighs … ‘It’s coming, I feel it. Tell me what I feel, tell.’ September dug her jaw into the earth and became rigid … ‘No, it’s not the child.’ My voice was calm. peterkiewicz 1968:13–​14

Memories and natural emotional reactions are denied to the inhabitants of the island, and suppressed by the technologically advanced hygienic boxes. The boxes constitute mysterious enclosed spaces that clearly stand out from the landscape as the only orientation points, and apparently serve to erase undesirable thoughts and reactions from people’s minds; they may be also responsible for controlling population growth, as when September’s fit starts, other characters want to rush her into the box. In this sterile world bearing children is not allowed and the survivors are only middle-​aged people who ‘are not allowed to see death’ (Peterkiewicz 1968: 32). It seems that the central point of the human circle that the characters create is reserved for what remains truly human in them, their distant memories, vague hopes and fears. As the action of the story progresses, the narrator and his companions leave the overcrowded and sterile terrain in search of a tree that was supposedly seen by an old man who is an exception to the age rule and who, as one of the characters says, ‘has forgotten to die’ (Peterkiewicz 1968: 21). The tree, the only sign of fertility in the barren landscape, is said to have been miraculously ‘born in the West under the open sky,’ and the members of the circle begin to search for it (Peterkiewicz 1968: 21). They struggle through the zone with growing difficulty, as they are deprived of food from the sky, the descending ‘food flakes’ provided in the area under technological control. When after a long and exhausting journey they cross the border marked by a warning sign ‘Place of execution,’ and manage to reach a small rocky island with the tree at its center, it turns out to be a place of death as well as the birth of new life, a place that will change them as well as bring to an end the world that they know. When they finally reach their destination, the tree (feeble and rather small) is offered a central, usually empty space in the human circle: ‘we moved in our habitual manner, the first, the second, the third round and within our

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encircled space which usually was empty, stood a tree’ (Peterkiewicz 1968: 82). Although it seems precious to them, some of the characters finally decide that it ‘deserves to be eaten alive’ (Peterkiewicz 1968: 82). The scene that follows resembles two central moments in the history of salvation presented in the Bible: tasting the forbidden fruit, as the initial effects of the ‘feast’ is sin (physical violence that leads to murder and uncontrollable lust), and on the other hand the Eucharistic sacrifice, as after eating the fruit some of the characters experience its benevolent influence (they undergo a substantial inner change, they realise their pitiful state and decide to take action to free themselves from the constraints imposed on them). In a Catholic understanding of the sacrament of the Eucharist, during consecration the Body of Christ who died on the cross to redeem sins becomes present in a small piece of bread and when it is received by people, it leads to their spiritual rejuvenation. Peterkiewicz presents a very similar process encapsulating life and death, and additionally he seems to stress certain correspondences between the Old Testament story of the original sin and the New Testament story of Christ’s sacrifice. The tree, although growing on an apparently barren rock, and stripped of its fruit, leaves and even thin branches, nevertheless manages to ‘bear fruit’. Firstly, one of the women becomes pregnant, which normally, with every aspect of life controlled by the ‘skymen,’ would be impossible. Secondly, two seeds that are left when the intruders finish their feast ‘give birth’ to new vegetation that transforms the barren landscape: The earth was hungry below its bare trampled surface … once the soil had swallowed the first seeds, it wanted to food to nourish them, it had to twist its own entrails, turn its skin inside out and devour the moist gravels in the sand. peterkiewicz 1968: 147

In the novel, the tree acquires a strong sacramental significance; like the Cross, it is both a source of death and a new life; like the Eucharist, it provides people with strength and growing self-​awareness. Consumed by the travelers, it awakens their minds and bodies. Apart from stressing the prominence of spaces that his characters inhabit, Peterkiewicz also shows how different changes in the world and in human minds can be reflected in language. In the story of Adam and Eve, words and names hold great power; Eve’s name is said to bring death to all living creatures, so that even her own children do not pronounce it. Also, Eve stresses the superiority of people over animals due to the ability to speak: ‘I despise

232 Słyszewska all the mute breed on land and in water’ (Peterkiewicz 1968: 59). However, the value of their speech gradually deteriorates; while Adam, as the name-​ giver appointed by God, has the ability to call things by their true names, Eve and her children start to invent their own names, and it seems that by doing so, they change the reality around them. Eve refuses to call one of her sons Abel, as it painfully reminds her of her murdered child, and instead calls him Amo (he becomes the father of her child and is eventually killed by apes); Abel/​Amo also takes the role of a name-​giver, and calls his daughter Irda (the girl later decides to abandon her mother and live with apes, losing the ability to use the language of her parents). On the other hand, the ape-​king (or, as Eve calls him, ‘ape-​man’), who learns to clumsily imitate human speech, gains strength and becomes disobedient to people, eventually killing one of them. In other parts of the novel, language seems to become more and more corrupt. In ‘Underground,’ when Patrick learns to read, he discovers that the text of the Genesis reveals to him a message of great spiritual value hidden between the lines, but the message eventually turns out to be nothing more than fowl images that his own imagination produces: Suddenly, there were more words, over the lines and below, trying to get in, and Patrick seemed to recognize them without any difficulty whatsoever … he proceeded to read about Adam teaching the cocks how to jump on the hens … and soon everybody copulated and pissed with everybody under the sun peterkiewicz 1968: 54–​56

The words that originally tell the story of Creation are degraded and their meaning becomes twisted. Centuries later, when a group of people struggle to survive in overcrowded and technologically-​controlled England, language loses its meaning even more, and the history of mankind is forgotten almost completely. Dover, the leader of the circle, admits that he has only accidentally become a name-​giver, and he is aware that even his own name does not signify anything, as old names of places are no longer valid. On the other hand, however, the characters sense that language can become a source of comfort and insight; for instance, Dover’s wives, Rain and September, repeatedly ask him to recite simple rhymes that use their names (one of them is ‘Remember, remember, your month is September’). They apparently help them to find peace in moments of crisis, and help them remember who they are. In all three parts of his novel, Peterkiewicz depicts the process of gradual corruption of language; the same process becomes central to Michael Edwards

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who, in a discussion7 of his book Towards a Christian Poetics elaborates on the connection between human and divine speech; Edwards argues that the Original Sin initiated the corruption of language which slowly loses its direct connection with the world (that is, with God’s creation). However, he also notices the potential of human language for revealing the truth about the world (and about God), so that the history of language as it is depicted in the Bible, and which involves a perfect creation and then corruption, leads to a final uplift (and, as the author also notices, is analogical to the history of salvation: Creation, the Fall and Resurrection). Peterkiewicz notices the same changes and, it seems, also believes in the power of language to transcend the physical and provide insight into the spiritual. 1

Conclusion

In his novel, Peterkiewicz combines three seemingly different worlds into one, coherent vision. He employs the image of a circle as the unifying element of his three narratives and offers a peculiar (and, it seems, deeply rooted in the Bible) overview of the history of mankind, from its creation, through the Fall and gradual rejection of God, to indication of a final return. His characters are clearly in search for guidance how to move safely through the unknown and often hostile terrain they inhabit (both in terms of space and values). To Eve the post-​paradisiac landscape is clearly unrecognizable: ‘Was I descending along my ancient path? There were no paths, no clusters of grass, no bushes, nothing but mud, dust and [the beasts’] dung smearing Eve’s feet’ (Peterkiewicz 1968: 199). She cannot find her place in this new world, torn between memories of her past happiness and her present misery. Apart from trees (that later also seem to become hostile), the only element that serves to provide orientation and comfort is the sign of the two circles. The same pattern organizes space for Patrick, who also repeatedly tries to find his way in a vaguely familiar setting, the Tube. At the same time, aware of his own peculiar limitations, he tries to find his place in the strange world that surrounds him, and finally states: ‘Nice to be a bit simple … It sort of goes with all those huge stupidities in the world’ (Peterkiewicz 1968: 182). Dover and his companions travel beyond the familiar zone to the unknown, moving in a circle, and at the same time they discover more and more about themselves and the world they inhabit: ‘We are all sharers of the same beginning, chosen perhaps by the child tree, perhaps tossed 7 The discussion took place in Gdańsk during the Between.Pomiędzy festival, on May 19th, 2018.

234 Słyszewska about by coincidence’ (Peterkiewicz 1968: 153). In the novel, spatial dislocation is closely connected to substantial changes that occur in the characters’ minds and have a lasting effect on how they perceive themselves and the world. Images that Peterkiewicz employs in the creation of the fictional world in Inner Circle are very complex and rich in meaning. The Old Testament story of the Original Sin and the Fall is retold from a new point of view, and the novel indicates how profoundly its implications affect humanity throughout its history. The further the story progresses, the more disturbed and degraded the world seems to be. Adam and Eve’s inability (as well as unwillingness) to maintain a close relationship with God results in their daughters willfully wedding the apes (or ‘treemen,’ as Eve calls them) and departing from the way of life that God originally intended for people; hundreds of years later in modern London, mentally unstable boy recognizes the remnants of ancient trees in the underground cables, and in his disturbed mind the words of the Genesis mingle with foul language found in adult books. Finally, in distant future, a group of deformed8 and apparently enslaved people, with no recognition of their own origin and history, unknowingly contributes to the collapse of the established world order and perhaps also unconsciously marks a new beginning for humanity. Peterkiewicz, by repeatedly referring to the image of a circle, making it a central point that organizes space and giving it the Eucharistic resonance, and also by presenting other images related to seven sacraments, indicates that, in fact, the world in all three stories retains its sacramental character, and includes elements that reveal a profound presence of God. Peterkiewicz conveys his vision of the world, visible in both the structure and the subject matter of his novel, in the thought that Eve finally leaves for her children and their generations to come (to which, as the novel suggests, the characters of two other stories belong): ‘We are being made all the time in the image of what we were and of what we are going to be’ (Peterkiewicz 1968: 190). This statement gives meaning to various correspondences between different parts of the novel, and indicates that Peterkiewicz’s story, although it focuses on particular characters in concrete physical (or, one may say, even geographical) circumstances, is essentially universal. The circularity of human experience and 8 The novel indicates the characters’ unique features: a telescopic neck of Leeds, long and unusually flexible limbs of Dover’s companions, or strange colour of Patrick’s hair. All these deformations are even more visible in edition of the novel illustrated by F. N. Souza, whose sketches help to convey the strangeness of the world depicted by Peterkiewicz and indicate correspondences between particular stories (for instance, faces of members of the circle resemble faces of priests who instruct Patrick before his baptism).

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constant awareness of the existence of the divine (although it may not be fully realized) in every human being, however disturbed or deformed it is, seems to be at the center of Peterkiewicz’s novel, and to the author it constitutes the most basic, yet prevalent, truth about the world. Inner Circle in a unique and imaginative way depicts the history of God’s relationship with human beings, and indicates that however disrupted and chaotic the world may seem, it still holds the potential to reveal the inherent presence of the divine. The need of God in people’s lives, even when they are not aware of it, or even reject it, is aptly described in another novel by Peterkiewicz, Isolation, where one of the characters states: ‘Why am I so obsessed by the desire to live in isolation, yet, when isolated, why do I experience this unspecified feeling of absence, as if someone else was about to enter?’ (Peterkiewicz 1959: 232). It is this ‘unspecified feeling of absence’ that often drives the characters of Inner Circle to search for new ways of life, to change their location and follow various elements that mark their landscapes, to constantly form new circles and sometimes break them, to search for their own identity and place in the world.

Works Cited

Bergonzi, Bernard. ‘The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Novel.’ In The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Brown, A.J. ‘A Polish exile’s achievement.’ Yorkshire Observer 7.07.1953; ae umk archives. Cieplińska, Katarzyna. ‘The Knotted Cord: Jerzego Peterkiewicza na tle brytyjskiej powieści katolickiej.’ Zeszyty Naukowe kul 56 (2013), 4 (224); 65–​81. Jones, M. ‘Here is a splendid book.’ The Tribune 24.07.1953. ae umk archives, 1953. Liber xxiv philosophorum, ii 2, accessed July 30, 2021. https://​www.thema​thes​ontr​ ust.org/​pap​ers/​meta​phys​ics/​XXIV-​A4.pdf. Merivale, Patricia. ‘Jerzy Peterkiewicz.’ In Contemporary Novelists. Ed. D. L. Kirkpatrick, London: St. James Press, 1976. 1078–​80. Moskalowa, Alicja. ‘Jerzy Pietrkiewicz (Peterkiewicz) i jego wkład w literaturę angielską.’ Archiwum Emigracji [online]. 31 grudzień 2020, s. 65-​70 [accessed 10.08.2022]. New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, accessed July 30, 2021. http://​www.newadv​ent .org/​cat​hen/​074​89d.htm. Peterkiewicz, Jerzy. Inner Circle. London: Panther, 1968. Peterkiewicz, Jerzy. Isolation. A Novel in Five Acts. London: Heinemann, 1959. Peterkiewicz, Jerzy. ‘Nie walka o treść ale o znaczenie. Z zagadnień literatury współczesnej.’ In Dla pokrzepienia mózgów: szkice literackie z lat 1940–​1948. Ed. Barbara Czarnecka. Toruń: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2002.

236 Słyszewska Peterkiewicz, Jerzy. “Prawo do życia czy prawo do upadku. O Spenglerze i egzystencjalizmie” in: Dla pokrzepienia mózgów: szkice literackie z lat 1940–​1948. Ed. Barbara Czarnecka. Toruń: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2002. Peterkiewicz, Jerzy. ‘Trust the trees.’ Times Literary Supplement 3622, 1971. Taylor-​ Terlecka, Nina. ‘Jerzy Peterkiewicz: Polish Poet Turned English Novelist.’ Independent 26.01.2008. Twardowski, Jan. “Preface”. J. Pietrkiewicz, Wiersze dobrzyńskie. Ed. J. Marlewska. Warszawa, 1994. Williams, Rowan. “Sacraments of the New Society”. In Christ: The Sacramental Word. Incarnation, Sacrament and Poetry. spck, 1996.

chapter 12

Camino (Hyper)Real

California’s Cartographic Imaginations Grzegorz Welizarowicz In the essay, I tackle the legacy of California’s El Camino Real trail, which since the early twentieth century has been the dominant cartographic and, as I aim to prove, ideological paradigm of the state. In the preliminary section I engage the theory of visuality and cognitivity by Bruno Latour and then the theory of critical cartography by J.B. Harley. These and other scholars highlight the complexity of cartographic interpretations and lend me vocabulary and critical apparatus with which I proceed to discuss the genealogy and effects of El Camino. I draw on California vieja historian, Phoebe Kropp and, weary of contingency but identifying a pattern in California’s own colonial era’s heroization, I hypothesize about the trail’s antecedent literary example. I argue that Helen Hunt Jackson’s images/​ideas from Ramona: A Story (1884) found their way onto maps (subsequently turned into facts on the ground) in the era of ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm 2008) and what Erika Doss (2010) calls ‘statue mania’ (27). I offer examples of such maps and interpret their ‘ideological’ (Eagleton 1991) work. I then propose that the originary fallacies of the trail which, as they encouraged affective attachments and belied sociopolitical frictions in the state and the nation, only multiplied over time. El Camino Real is a complex locus of real and ‘imaginary landscapes’ (Appadurai 1996, 31) and the perfect American simulacrum. Thus, adapting Jean Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreality’ (2001, 166), I propose to call the trail, not only figuratively, El Camino (Hyper)Real. The field location of this essay is within the interdisciplinary American studies and postcolonial studies. Agreeing with Clifford Geertz’s conception of culture as semiotics which discloses meaning in the process of interdisciplinary, comparative analysis and interpretation I am interested in the interface between the visual, the historical/​cultural, and the literary and the power relationships involved.1 In my essay, I am also following Homi Bhabha’s 1 Clifford Geertz writes in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973): ‘The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004520288_014

238 Welizarowicz admonition to postcolonial critics: to bear ‘witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority in the modern world order’ and to ‘intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities [and] peoples’ (Bhabha 1992, 437). Postcolonial scholar Graham Huggan (2008) advocates ‘interdisciplinary measures’ and ‘comparatism’ (1) and speaks of postcolonial criticism as an ‘attempt to conceptualize beyond the idea of the nation and the corresponding ideology of the nation-​state’ (3). These perspectives explain my endeavor to probe the space in-​between different media of representation, and different epistemic and cultural horizons, that is at the level of, after Huggan, the ‘interdiscursive’ (5). If the mapping performed by the apparatus of El Camino represents, as the critique drawn from Latour and Harley will help us see and its contextual origins at the formation of the colonial state will make clear, a squarely Western discursive tradition the latter part of the essay points to a different model –​ I pit California’s ‘desert of the real’ against California Native worldview. More specifically, after briefly discussing the effects of the Spanish colonial mission era on Native populations –​a contextual procedure necessary to outline the blank spots in the myth/​Map of El Camino –​I interpret three recent texts by California Indigenous authors (a drama, story, travel-​log) in terms of alternative regional cartography. 1

On Immutable Mobiles and Maps as ‘Knowledge as Power’

Drawing on William McNeill’s (1982) seminal reformulation of the history of power through ‘mobilization’ and asserting, after William M. Ivins (1973), that Modernity’s fundamental impulse towards rationalization ‘is not of the mind, of the eye, of philosophy, but of the sight [emphasis in the original]’ (Latour 1986, 7) Bruno Latour, in his essay ‘Visualization and Cognition,’ focuses on what he terms ‘inscriptions’ (1986, 4). Latour explains inscriptions as graphic devices such as maps, diagrams, charts, projections, etc. which capture and simplify the ‘confusing’ three-​dimensional material reality by turning it into ‘two-​dimensional images which have been made less confusing’ (1986, 15). Deriving their power from perspective and other advances in graphism modern

he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning’ (5).

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inscriptions have offered a homogenous, congruent system which makes it possible to ‘mobilize space and time differently’ (1986, 11) and on an entirely different scale than it had been before. These devices were instrumental in making the empirical ‘out there’ transcribable and translatable. It was purported that they did so without corruption. One, like the French Captain Jean François de Galaup, Comte de la Pérouse whose map of the Sakhalin island Latour cites as an example, was now able to put a whole territory on a flat surface and take it with him/​her back in order to convince others (King Louis xvi in La Pérouse’s case) and, in Latour’s words, ‘to take up a statement, to pass it along, to make it more of a fact’ (1986, 5); that is, inscriptions began to serve an essential role in the processes of mobilization. An inscription as a device of visual rationalization should thus be understood as an instrument of power. First, because it establishes a two-​way or reciprocal relationship with the material object (a territory, a guinea pig). Originating from it an inscription acquires an independent, more-​important-​ than-​the-​object-​itself status2 while simultaneously allowing a return to the object –​if at a distance and ‘in the absence of eyewitness evidence’ (Cosgrove 2008, 167) –​in order to subject it to our agency, combine it with other objects, change its scale, etc. in short, to dominate it. Second, inscriptions are devices of accelerated argumentation and play a key role in what Latour calls the ‘agonistic encounter’ (1986, 5). If successful mobilization is key to resolving conflicts –​not only in war or politics as McNeill argues but also, as Latour affirms, in ‘science and technology’ –​then those ‘able to muster on the spot the largest number of well aligned and faithful allies [emphasis in the original]’ (Latour 1986, 5) will emerge the victors. The writing and imaging of Modernity, Latour tells us, have played that crucial function of persuasion, that is of mobilization of allies and in this way of making the ‘agonistic situation more favorable’ (1986, 5). Thus, Latour continues, we should ask precisely about those aspects of writing and visualization which ‘help in the mustering, the presentation, the increase, the effective alignment or ensuring the fidelity of new allies’ (1986, 5) and in bringing dissenters to our side.

2 Bruno Latour says that the phenomenal ‘out there’ no longer matters; we ‘stop looking at nature and look exclusively and obsessively at prints and flat inscriptions’ (1986, 15) presentable synoptically to the eye: ‘The “objects” are discarded … Bleeding and screaming rats are quickly dispatched. What is extracted from them is a tiny set of figures [be it a lab chart or a territorial map]. This extraction, like the few longitudes and latitudes … is all that counts [emphasis in the original]’ (1986, 16).

240 Welizarowicz Third, the rise of inscriptions imposed a regime of a discursive standard to which now all parties had to conform. To resort to non-​inscriptive means would immediately signify illegitimacy and irrationality; that is, to legitimately oppose an argument a dissenter would have to produce her own inscriptions appealing to the same set of (visually rational) norms left unquestioned. Inscriptions thus set interpretative frames for discourse and play a key role in mobilization of both resources and allies, that is, in swinging and sustaining the balance of power. If the new inscriptions’ key purpose is that of economization and acceleration of the mobilization processes their effectiveness depends on certain properties. Among them, for Latour, is that ‘of being mobile’ –​one gathers ‘things’ into portable ­figures –​and of being ‘immutable, presentable, readable and combinable with one another’ (1986, 7) –​a ‘thing’ does not wither away but is conveyable and compatible across distances of space and time. Hence Latour’s term ‘immutable mobiles’ (1986, 7). But mobility and immutability (or incorruptibility) are not the only properties of the things on paper. Consider also that they are ‘flat’ presenting the image synoptically to the observer;3 their scale is modifiable ‘without any change in their internal proportions;’ they are easily and cheaply reproducible ‘so that all the instants of time and all the places in space can be gathered in another time and place;’ their fundamental organizing qualities of ‘optical consistency’ (Latour 1986, 19) and ‘semiotic homogeneity’ allow their (re)combinability, superimposability (images of different realms easily fused together), integrability as ‘part of a written text’ and ‘geometry [emphasis in the original]’ (Latour 1986, 20). Latour considers the latter property as the greatest advantage of the immutable mobiles for it allows the ‘space on paper [to] be made continuous with three-​dimensional space’ (1986, 20). When inscriptions can be used to effectively manipulate the things ‘out there,’ not only those under direct scrutiny but also other families of objects, thanks to adjustments in scales and other calculations, they are revealed to possess what Latour calls ‘the second-​degree advantage’ or ‘the surplus-​value’ (1986, 20) which links them to strategies of capitalization. All these properties work in conjunction with one another. Although Latour references cartography extensively his argument pertains to all types of graphic devices. J.B. Harley’s work on the other hand is more directly concerned with the discourse of maps as ‘preeminently a language of power’ (1988, 301). In ‘Maps, Power, Knowledge’ (1988), he calls maps

3 Latour: ‘when someone is said to “master” a question or to “dominate” a subject, you should normally look for the flat surface that enables mastery’ (1986, 19).

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‘value-​laden,’ ‘rhetorical images’ (278) which teleologically construct the social world. Harley also thinks of maps in terms of mobilization: their content, their use of specific semiotic or stylistic conventions, as well as their legitimacy derived from particular ‘codes and modes of social production’ reveal them as ‘a way of conceiving, articulating, and structuring the human world which is biased towards, promoted by, and exerts influence upon particular sets of social relations’ (1988, 278). In other words, Harley thinks of maps as devices of persuasion ‘appropriate … to manipulation by the powerful in society’ (1988, 278). Harley discusses maps adopting three perspectives which highlight the socio-​political implications of cartography. First, he postulates to consider them as a ‘kind of language’ (1988, 278) and ‘part of a wider political sign-​ system’ (1988, 300) bound by historical circumstances (political, religious, social), as well as, by internal rules of discourse. In other words, maps, like Latour’s mobiles, set their own normative interpretive frames, and operate within and in conjunction with a larger network of referents. Second, drawing on Erwin Panofsky’s theory of iconology, he argues that in maps one can ‘identify not only a ‘surface’ … but also a ‘deeper’ level’ (1988, 279) in the realm of the symbolic. Connected with this is the third aspect: maps as instruments of power for it is on the level of the symbolic that political power is reproduced and communicated (1988, 279). After Michel Foucault’s critique of ‘will to power,’ Harley argues that, the maps reflect, either openly or in nuanced ways, the goals of their makers.4 Similarly, drawing on Anthony Giddens’ critique of the ‘authoritative resources’ as a means of state ‘retention and control of information and knowledge’ (Giddens 1981, 94) Harley links cartography with methods of state surveillance (1988, 280). Harley explores three areas of maps as ‘knowledge as power’: cartography’s political origins, the ways in which maps are structured by power, and third, how power and its exercise are reinforced by maps’ symbolic dimensions. Mapmaking has historically been implicated in the exercise of power, practiced by specialized elites within political contexts for specific purposes.5 After Benedict Anderson’s analysis of ‘imagined communities’ we can add

4 Harley: ‘whether consciously or otherwise, [the map] replicates … the territorial imperatives of a particular political system’ (279). 5 This has been especially the case in the modern era when maps, alongside the Bible and the gun, became, first, weapons of imperialism legitimizing ‘the reality of conquest,’ creating and abetting myths which would assist violence and aggressive rhetoric of the empire (Harley 1988, 282) and, later on, arose as invaluable instruments of the nation state and its culture of militarism (Harley 1988, 284).

242 Welizarowicz that the map was one of the three crucial institutions of power of the colonial state –​the other two being the census and the museum –​which with the rise of mechanical reproduction helped concretize the ‘“nation-​building’ policies of the new states’ (Anderson 1991, 163). Anderson lists important consequences of the rise of maps in the context of the nation-​state: the change in the imagined dominion from sacred spaces to a ‘“country” … of bounded territorial space’ (this, ultimately, being an ontological break); subjection to a ‘totalizing classification’ by bureaucrats (1991, 173); the production of ‘“historical maps,’ designed to demonstrate … the antiquity of specific, tightly bounded territorial units’ (1991, 174–​175); and the rise of the ‘map-​as-​logo’ which presented a territory as ‘a detachable piece of jigsaw puzzle’ (1991, 175) and converted it into an emblem, a ‘[p]‌ure sign, no longer compass to the world,’ now ‘infinitely reproducible … available for transfer’ (Anderson 1991, 175), that is, immutably mobile. It was especially, what Anderson calls ‘logoization’ (1991, 176) by way of a map, that facilitated mobilization of popular imagination around nationalist sentiments. Anderson’s study supports Harley’s argument that maps are ‘the currency of political “bargains”’ which ‘once made permanent in the image … acquired the force of law in the landscape’ (1988, 283). The implications of this have not only been geopolitical but psychological as well. As ‘the silent lines of the paper landscape foster the notion of socially empty space,’ the territory is not only, as I already suggested, remade ontologically but also de-​socialized. In the context of the agonistic encounter understood as competition over the same resources (i.e.: settler colonial land disputes) this will not only, as Harley alerts us, ‘palliate the sense of guilt’ (1988, 284) produced by the exercise of violence against human and non-​human actors in the landscape but, to extend this logically, will also afford moral justification for the perpetrators. In the context of the daily life of people in the modern state maps’ fundamental effect is creating a spatial discipline, which like the clock, demands compliance to the centralized authority (Harley 1988, 285). In summary, Harley, like Latour and Anderson sees maps in the context of political mobilization of resources and allies. Because it is its content that builds the transactional value of the map, that is, mobilization hinges on what and how the map shows/​speaks, power structures cartography in ways that lend themselves to falsification and/​or distortion. Thus, Harley says that even ‘[a]‌pparently objective maps are characterised by persistent manipulation of content’ (Harley 1988, 287). But the bias in cartography works also on the level of the unconscious. This is primarily so because maps, without proclaiming it explicitly, reflect ‘the values of the map-​producing society’ (1988, 289), are founded on the culture’s assumptions

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which remain undeclared and hence invisible. In a Latour-​like argument Harely talks of maps’ ‘hidden structures’ related to the silences and hierarchies they establish, and to their geometric character. Maps appeal for example to what Harley calls ‘subliminal geometry’ which even if unintended ‘determines their transformational relationship to the earth’ (1988, 289) and to entities inhabiting it. Many maps use what after E. H. Gombrich (1979) Harley terms a ‘“positional enhancing’ geometry’ which focuses the observer on the center and reduces the symbolic and/​or social significance of the outlaying territories. In this way, after Samuel Y. Edgerton (1987), ‘the development of ‘exclusive, inward-​directed worldviews, each with its separate cult centre safely buffered with territories populated only by true believers’’ (Harley 1988, 290) is promoted. The implications are obvious: on the subliminal level maps construct the world by exclusion and implicit hierarchization, divide the social sphere into us and them, promote a tacit sense of superiority for the mapmaker’s culture, act ‘as a geopolitical prophecy’ (Harley 1988, 290). Note that maps’ ‘silences’ can work as self-​fulfilling prophecies anticipating spatial reality. If the maps’ authority sustains and is sustained by the sanctity of the law, science, dominant culture and its cognitive attachments the omissions they perform carry as much concrete weight as the elements emphasized on it (Harley 1988, 290). What is removed from the map acquires the status of fact (Harley 1988, 292).6 Finally, maps not only by way of simple signs on their surfaces can make summary statements about social hierarchies (Harley 1988, 292–​294) but they can become symbols themselves embedded in other discursive forms. Conversely, purely artistic expressions may be embedded in the works of cartographers. Harley points to two examples: paintings which make use of cartographic elements and the tradition of decorative emblems featured on maps since the Renaissance (Harley 1988, 296–​299).7 Such techniques mix the

6 Anderson’s study of how the ‘Dutch colonial logo-​maps’ showed ‘West New Guinea with nothing to the East’ and in doing so, ‘unconsciously reinforced the … imagined ties’ (1991, 176) Indonesian nationalists used to legitimize their claims of ‘Indonesia Free, from Sabang [in Sumatra]… to … Marauke [West New Guinea]’ (Anderson 1991, 176) illustrates how maps’ silences and pronouncements can direct human action, promote false memory or public amnesia. Not only in the history of the Southeast Asia was the map, as Thongchai puts it, ‘a model for, rather than a model of, what it purported to represent’ (in Anderson 1991, 173). 7 Consider, for example, the globe or the orb to signify sovereignty and/​or ‘political control … indicating the world-​wide scale of which it could be exercised and for which it was desired’ (Harley 1988, 295).

244 Welizarowicz scientific, the aesthetic, and the political, often making them indistinguishable and in doing so reinforce maps’ role as devices of mobilization for ideologic-​ political purposes (Harley 1988, 297). This indistinguishability brings us to maps’ ambiguity, their tendency to blur the line between ‘what appears at first sight to be cartographic “fact”’ and what is simultaneously ‘a cartographic symbol’ (Harley 1988, 299). Harley argues that the maps’ effectiveness as ‘political act[s]‌or statement[s]’ (1988, 299) derives principally from this ubiquitous equivocality of their language. Scientific measurement, often regarded as giving cartography a more accurate framework, only increased the discipline’s symbolic power; precision emerged as a new fetish of authority; advanced techniques of mapping in the digital era have intensified the monopoly of power. Harley thus concludes that the division into ‘decorative’ and ‘scientific’ phases in studies of cartography should be set aside (Harley 1988, 300). While historical circumstances shift and result in changes in the content of maps the more elusive, unspoken rules and assumptions perpetuating the cognitive assumptions and promoted values persist. It is these hidden and entrenched rules (optical consistency, subliminal geometries, hierarchization, slippage, etc.) that sustain cartography as a symbolic discourse mobilizing for power. Harley is pessimistic about maps’ subversive potential: ‘unlike … literature, art, or music … [maps appear] to have few genuinely popular, alternative … modes of expression’ (1988, 301; my emphasis). Despite this assertion I believe such alternatives are possible. When cartography is integrated with other media and/​or confronted with a different set of historico-​epistemic-​ ­ontological coordinates or ‘“other” geographies’ (Piatti et al. 2009, 177) the possibility of destabilizing the maps’ grip emerges. 2

El Camino (Hyper)Real

Before I present examples to support this thesis let me introduce a map which has over the past century become the dominant cartographic, ethical and political paradigm of California. The map in question is that of El Camino Real or the old Spanish royal highway, a route which connects a chain of twenty-​one picturesque missions from San Diego on the border with Mexico to Sonoma in the northern part of the state. In California’s public imagination the route and its nomination are synonymous with the founding myth of the state. In short, the myth holds that California’s beginnings were glorious, that the province was founded by pious and kind Franciscan friars who under the mandate of the Spanish king planted the Western Christian civilization there.

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In California Vieja (2006) Phoebe S. Kropp locates the genesis of the Camino Real within the context of the debates about the state’s identity that came to the fore in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The question of California’s Spanish heritage and what to do about it was urgent then to many members of the Anglo-​Saxon Protestant elites who had come to dominate the state since the Mexican American War. Some argued that the missions were ‘outside the nation’s normal bounds’ (Kropp 2006, 50), foreign or, as Charles Franklin Carter argued, ‘oriental in character’ (Franklin in Kropp 2006, 50) and stood in the way of implanting an ‘East Coast-​style civilization’ (Kropp 2006, 52). Others, like Charles Dudley Warner, dreamt of ‘Our Italy’ (Warner in Kropp 2006, 51). This vision of the new Rome on the Pacific correlated with aspirations of a growing movement of mission preservationists represented by, for example, Charles Fletcher Lummis or Harrie Forbes who saw in the crumbling adobe ruins a potential for romanticizing the Spanish past and making it into ‘a particularly appropriate regional emblem’ (Kropp 2006, 55). Kropp reminds Forbes’ statement expressed to Los Angeles Times in 1904 –​‘We do not need to go back in California to Colonial teas. Let us have our Spanish afternoon, our Indian dances’ (Forbes in Kropp 2006, 55) –​which reflected a growing sentiment that only by emphasizing their local distinctiveness grounded in the fanciful, non-​Anglo folklore tropes, could Southern California’s Anglo-​Americans assert their identity in the nation ‘not as anomalous but as analogous to a more familiar national past’ (Kropp 2006, 55; my emphasis). If French Creoles of New Orleans could be incorporated into the nation why not the fandango dancing señoritas and dons? Forbes, Lummis and others had solid grounds for their conviction: the success of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona: A Story and the cultural transformations it had helped accelerate. Jackson’s novel was inspired, in Matthew F. Bokovoy’s words, by the ‘“romance” of the California Missions, which had made an aesthetic impact upon her imagination’ when she visited the state during her research for A Century of Dishonor (1881). Consciously emulating Uncle Tom’s Cabin8 the novel was intended to advance the cause of California Mission Indians. But it was not the maltreatment of Indians but lavish 8 Jackson decided to follow Harriet Beecher Stowe’s lead in order to stir the conscience of the audience and generate sympathy for the California Mission Indians’ cause: ‘If I can do one hundredth part for the Indians that Mrs. Stowe did for the Negro, I will be thankful’ (in DeLyser 891). In May of 1883 she wrote: ‘If I could write a story that would do for the Indian a thousandth part what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the Negro, I would be thankful the rest of my life’ (in Bokovoy).

246 Welizarowicz pastoral scenes ‘of verdure and bloom, sunshine and tranquility’ (DeLyser 2003, 893) and a sentimental story of a beautiful mestiza brought up in an aristocratic rancho family that captivated audiences. The novel’s immense popularity (15.000 copies sold in the first ten months) coincided with the arrival of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad to Southern California (San Diego in 1885, Los Angeles in 1887) and brought, to cite Dydia DeLyser’s analysis of Ramona’s impact on the region, a ‘colossal wave of incoming tourists and home-​seekers’ (2003, 888) boosting ‘tourism and real-​estate speculation on a massive scale’ (2003, 893). Needless to say, as ‘Ramona-​related tourist attractions’ (DeLyser 2003, 886) saturated the landscape the Indian cause was quickly forgotten.9 In Jackson’s novel, set at the time of Anglo invasion, the world of the Spanish beginnings in California is made into an idealized legend. At the center of this idealization is the Catholic faith, its chapels, bells, saints’ statues and, most importantly, Junípero Serra, the founder of the mission system who arrived in Alta California in 1769. The eponymous heroine and others refer to him as the ‘holy Father Junípero’ (Jackson 1885, 332) or ‘our beloved master in this land’ (Jackson 1885, 53). It must be noted however that this rhetoric did not so much express Serra’s actual complex legacy (which I address later) as voiced the sentiments of Jackson’s contemporaries. Bear in mind that, it was a ceremonial opening of Serra’s tomb at Mission Carmel in 1882 which first drew attention of ‘the citizens of California to the cause of mission preservation’ (Kimbro, Costello, with Ball 2009, 52). It was in the wake of this highly publicized event that multiple associations and organizations emerged to advocate for missions’ rebuilding. Appearing two years later Ramona was well-​timed and fell on an already fertile soil, its success poignantly demonstrating to the yet-​unconvinced not only the spiritual or cultural but economic potential of the right validation of the state’s Spanish past. The legend of Serra’s sanctity, missions’ ruins, ‘ancient’ (by a mere century) temporal remove afforded mission enthusiasts and boosters a sense of high moral certainty not unlike that of the missionaries. And so, California began to preach its mission past. In 1893 the Mission Revival became the state’s official architectural style when a white stucco pavilion was presented at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Iconic images of former Spanish life –​including the most famous of all, the figure of a pious monk in a cowl –​lent themselves to theatricalization. Starting in 1894, 9 For more on the growth of the Ramona-​related tourist industry see Dydia DeLyser’s article ‘Fiction, Tourist Practices, and Placing the Past in Southern California’ or S. Kropp’s ‘Los Dias Pasados: Tales from Nieneteenth-​Century California’ in her California Vieja, 19–​46.

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perhaps heeding Forbes’ call, Lummis organized Spanish-​and mission-​themed fiestas in Los Angeles (Davis 1992, 26). Mission themes were picked up by dramatists (i.e.: Chester Gore Miller’s Father Junipero Serra: New and Original Historical Drama in Four Acts (1894)) and early Hollywood film (i.e.: D.W. Griffith’s Ramona (1910), In Old California (1910)). The Mission Play by Steven McGroarty was an immensely popular pageant first staged in 1912 at mission San Gabriel near Los Angeles. It would attract millions before folding in 1929. Early in the century, Lummis proclaimed that, ‘The missions are, next to our climate and its consequences, the best capital Southern California has’ (in Davis 1992, 24). By 1910 John S. Mitchell, president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce was already unequivocal: ‘We realize today that the Old Missions are worth more than money, are a greater asset to southern California than our oil, our oranges, even our climate!’ (in Kropp 2006, 71). ‘Everything from furniture suites and candied fruit to commercial and residential architecture stressed the mission motif,’ assessed Joseph O’Flaherty (in Davis 1992, 27). The growth of the missions as the state’s icons was paralleled by the promotion of Serra to a mythical status. A popular campaign for his sainthood was first launched by Lummis in 1909 (Weber 1988 101). Although sainthood itself would not be granted until 2015 already in 1931 the priest was officially named California’s Founding Father when his bronze statue was placed in the Statuary Hall on the U.S. Capitol. Around the same time a New York advertising convention assessed that, ‘the mission aura of ‘history and romance’ was … more important attraction in selling Southern California than weather or movie-​industry glamor’ (Davis 1992, 27). The emergence of this broad consensus around what Mike Pedelty calls, ‘the ‘new mission system’’ signaled that the debates over California’s identity had been positively resolved. It was however, as Pedelty rightly observes, ‘a physical and conceptual system whose creation has been patterned more by the needs and desires of ethnic, religious, class, and state interests, than it has been constructed through careful analysis of the historical evidence of the mission period’ (1992, 80). That is, it gave California what Carey McWilliams has famously called ‘the fantasy heritage’ (1968, 35) or ‘the synthetic past’ (1994, 21) –​a fabricated identity based on bowdlerized history which omitted references to the friars’ use of coercive violence and Indian enslavement, as well as the missions’ devastating effects on the Indian populations they were supposed to serve. As Kropp notes, the ‘representation of the past [was split] along racial lines,’ and ‘dominion of one over the other’ was admired (2006, 84). If the celebration of the Spanish past relied on suppression of the Other or on what McWilliams calls keeping ‘The Indian in the Closet’ (1994, 21), then this anamnestic split was mirrored in the social arena of the day: ‘as the Indians were

248 Welizarowicz eliminated … the distinction, always shadowy, between Indian and Mexican was forgotten’ (McWilliams 1994, 47) and translated into a conscious ‘repudiat[ion of] the Mexican-​Indian’ (McWilliams 1968, 47) which precipitated, we can add after DeLyser, ‘the final Anglo conquest of the Hispanic Californio culture’ (2003, 893) and land.10 Eric Hobsbawm’s work on invented traditions helps us see the developments in California in a larger turn-​of-​the-​century context. ‘Traditions are invented,’ says Hobsbawm, ‘[and] it can easily be discovered that one period which saw them spring up with particular assiduity was in the thirty or forty years before the first world war’ (2008, 263). It was then, when rapid transformations worldwide ‘called for new devices to ensure or express social cohesion and identity and to structure social relations’ (Hobsbawm 2008, 263). As traditional legitimacies for power became increasingly obsolete ‘new methods of ruling or establishing bonds of loyalty’ were sought (Hobsbawm 2008, 263). Thus ‘the creation of traditions was enthusiastically practised in numerous countries,’ adds Hobsbawm, and both official entities like ‘states or organized social and political movements,’ and unofficial ‘social groups not formally organized … clubs and fraternities’ (Hobsbawm 2008, 263) took part in the process. Erika Doss speaks of the same era as the ‘memorial mania … [or] the ‘statue mania’ that gripped nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century Americans and Europeans alike’ (2010, 20). In the United States, she says, the era lasted ‘from the 1870s to the 1920s’ (2010, 20). It was then that a ‘reimagin[ing of] what Benedict Anderson terms the ‘affective bonds of nationalism’ was encouraged by a frenzy of memorials, statues, and likenesses of ‘great men’ (Doss 2010, 20). Doss adds that the era was ‘symptomatic of turn-​of-​the-​century anxieties about national unity’ (2010, 27). Hobsbawm’s and Doss’ arguments let us see the rise of the new mission system as part of these larger processes of mobilization. If California was not unique in this way the fact that it was a settler society built not only on Spanish domination but full-​scale Anglo-​perpetrated genocide of native peoples (Madley 2016) and exclusion based on race (McWilliams 1968, 45–​68) may have made its hunger for palliative measures and anxiety over social cohesion and collective memory the more urgent. The new mission system as an all-​encompassing (historical, religious, epistemic, ethical, geographic, affective, anamnestic etc.) physical and conceptual paradigm –​a paradigm which was supposed to explain and absolve at once, 10

If up to that point Californios had been able to maintain a measure of independence, now with the influx of tourists and real-​estate speculators and ‘under new population, political, and promotional pressures, ranchos became subdivisions’ (DeLyser 2003, 893).

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at-​a-​glance the complex socio-​historical relations in the region –​can be seen as one iteration of what Hobsbawm describes as the modern nation state’s reliance on ‘both formal and informal, official and unofficial, political and social inventions of traditions’ in order to build and maintain ‘the largest stage on which the crucial activities determining human lives as subjects and citizens [would be] played out,’ and upon which the citizens’ ‘civil existence (état civil)’ would not only be defined but registered (2008, 264). Hobsbawm presciently cautions that, ‘conscious invention succeeded mainly in proportion to its success in broadcasting on a wavelength to which the public was ready to tune in’ (2008, 263; my emphasis). This insight draws attention not to the content of the invented traditions but to the mode of their transmission. Consider then, that in the context of the new mission system it was not only the mass-​reproduced (logoized) mission and mission-​related imagery but also the new technical invention, the car, that played a key role in its promotion. Like real sites which were advertised as actual sets from Ramona, missions were turned into destinations reached by engaging in a new type of activity: tourism and driving as leisure. It was the car (together with the road and the road map), the epitome of progress and of a new, mobile, independent subjectivity, that afforded one particular ‘wavelength’ on which these tourists-​ turned-​pilgrims were being ‘tuned in’ to the regional (invented) tradition and, simultaneously, to the new type of citizenry which Thorsten Veblen spoke of in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen says that, ‘conspicuous leisure has the greatest vogue as a mark of reputability’ (2005, 23). Missions as leisurely destinations transmitted on the same conspicuous consumption wavelength. It is in these contexts that we should consider the birth of the idea of a ‘single road linking the twenty-​one missions, where travelers might undertake a complete mission tour’ (Kropp 2006, 55). Kropp: ‘Promoters decided to call the road El Camino Real, a name whose historical origin was ambiguous but that held some local currency and a good amount of flair’ (2006, 55). Like in Hobsbawm’s model the project combined diverse interests: ‘public and private … converged in local promotion. The association with El Camino Real offered a new outlet for this private/​public partnership’ (Kropp 2006, 70). Various reasons, the key being romanticized past and its marketability, brought support from historical preservation societies and women’s organizations, automobile clubs and the good-​roads’ advocates (Kropp 2006, 56), as well as ‘coastal cities and towns’ (Kropp 2006, 70) and, ultimately, the state and Congress. The early leader of the movement was Mrs. Forbes who, in 1903, published a popular guidebook California Missions and Landmarks and How to Get There. Before the road was planned however a debate ensued as to what the project should emphasize: modernity or nostalgia? Formed in 1906 under Forbes’

250 Welizarowicz leadership, El Camino Real Association (cra) represented the position of the ‘sentimentalists’ (Kropp 2006, 61) who advocated for the road to be constructed exactly as it had been in the colonial times. Convinced that, ‘any deviation from the true trail of the padres would be sacrilege’ (Kropp 2006, 62) the sentimentalists, initiated research to ensure the route’s authenticity. On the other hand, the powerful Automobile Club of Southern California (acsc), whom The Los Angeles Times nicknamed ‘automobile scorchers’ believed that attention to historical veracity should not outweigh the road’s practical or commercial potentials (Kropp 2006, 61). When it became clear that no single old route could be found –​popular booster and mission enthusiast George Wharton James tried to find a single road on horseback but concluded that it never existed (Kropp 2006, 62); local historian James Miller Guinn said that there were ‘fifty or one hundred old caminos reales that anciently existed in California’ and asked sarcastically: ‘Which one of these shall [they] designate as the real [emphasis in the original] one?’ (in Kropp 2006, 63) –​a compromise rhetorical formulation was proposed. If there was no genuinely historical highway –​as Nathan Masters (2013) succinctly explains, the original Spanish ‘road’s exact route was not fixed; the actual path changed over time as weather, mode of travel, and even the tides dictated. Furthermore, while the road provided local transportation links … the primitive highway was eclipsed in importance by a coastal water route’–​then, it was now reasoned, one had to settle on the next best thing. Wharton James called it an ‘Approximation, near enough for all sentimental and practical purposes’ (in Kropp 2006, 63). Although the route would omit several important missions (San Fernando, Carmel, la Purisima, Santa Cruz) it would serve a practical purpose of bringing Californians to their past. Thus, the Camino Real first conceived as historical/​preservationist was accommodated to fit the interests of the automobile and the good-​roads lobby. Forbes embraced this turn (Kropp 2006, 70). Calling for the ‘betterment of our roads when by so doing we reap the benefit and sustain the supremacy of progress’ (in Kropp 2006, 66) she supported the program of state highways construction hoping to push ‘state engineers toward the [already-​mapped] association’s preferred route’ (Kropp 2006, 66). But Forbes did not stop at advocacy. To ‘keep the Camino Real at the top of the state road’s agenda,’ as well as to ‘generate publicity [and] attract donations’ (Kropp 2006, 67) the cra initiated, in one significant iteration of the statue mania, a campaign to mark the envisioned road with special artifacts: roadside markers made of tall metal rods in the shape of a pastoral staff (or crozier) with a hook on top from which a cast metal bell was hung. At mid-​ level plates with the name of the trail, ‘El Camino Real,’ and with distances

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to the nearest missions north and south were placed. And so, before the state legislature allocated funds for surveys of actual roads, the Mission Bell Marker (mbm) project was born. The marker itself married various functions. It would not only serve as a guidepost but, crucially, it offered an epistemic and historical enunciation. I hypothesize here that Jackson’s Ramona may have been an inspiration for this symbolic intervention into the landscape. Consider that, in the novel, set during the transitional period between Mexican and American eras the heroine Ramona adores an old bronze bell which as she believes Serra once used. She dreams of living in a house from which she would be able to see it ‘all the time’: ‘It will be like a saint’s statue in the house’ she says (Jackson 1885, 332). Her foster mother, the Spanish-​born matriarch Señora Gonzaga-​Moreno, on the other hand marks the hills of her fictional rancho not unlike Forbes’ team would in the real life. Agonized by the sight of Protestant Anglo settlers passing by her house she ‘caused to be set up, upon every one of the soft rounded hills … a large wooden cross; not a hill in sight of her house left without the sacred emblem of her faith’ (Jackson 1885, 19). We may never know if consciously or inadvertently but Forbes’ project of the roadside markers combined these two literary visions into a single artifact. Instead of Señora Moreno’s ubiquitous crosses –​bearing in mind the overwhelming Protestant character of Southern California and particularly of the Camino Real patrons such a direct reference to Catholicism could be risky11 –​ now staffs with Ramona’s beloved bell would be conspicuous in the landscape all the time. Forbes designed the bells herself (she made first papier-​mâché models as early as the 1880s) and had them cast at her husband’s foundry in Los Angeles (Kropp 2006, 69). The staffs were made at the Forbes’ factory.12 The statues/​ signposts evoked obvious evangelical and civilizational connotations (highly resonant in the era of Social Gospel and Progressivism). The crozier, according to Herbert Norris (2017), is ‘the symbol of office, authority, correction and 11 12

For more on the dilemmas Protestants faced in relation to the California missions and El Camino Real see Kropp 2006, 85–​89. By 1914 Forbes and her husband had opened the only bell foundry west of the Mississippi, the California Bell and Novelty Company specializing in the manufacture of replica bells in all sizes. Another profitable enterprise of the Forbes’ was the largest gypsum mine in California which provided the key ingredient in the production of cement, an indispensable material for the construction of state highways and the Owens River Aqueduct. Kropp concludes: ‘The Forbses’ interest in the romantic El Camino Real could not be divorced from their stake in the commercial one’ (2006, 70).

252 Welizarowicz dignity,’ its hook ‘denoting pastoral ministration’ (2017, 116). The bell is the symbol of ‘sacred power to dispel evil’ (Handy 2013, 110), and, as David Hendy (2013) argues, the enforcer of the ‘state of anxiety’ over the battle between good and evil (113). For Ramona it signified Serra’s presence. Thus, her dream of her saint’s preeminence would be extended interminably to the whole territory. Not exactly the saint’s statue but close enough to combine consumption with, to adopt Doss, ‘affective allegiance to the nation that would be as strong and as sacred as that to family, region, religion, and/​or ethnic and racial group’ (26–​27; my emphasis). If the hypothesis of the markers’ genealogy –​from literature to landscape –​ may be unprovable it seems logical. First, because if El Camino Real was meant to be an ‘approximation,’ that is, a modelling of complex and multidirectional history according to the desires of the present, that is, an invention then literary fiction may have been a radically authentic source in this context. Second, because it would be yet another, albeit by proxy, Ramona-​related tourist attraction extended from Southern California onto the whole state. No wonder then that Los Angeles leaders called the markers ‘“emblematic and appropriate’’ (in Kropp 2006, 67) and inaugurated the mbm on the city’s Old Town plaza in August 1906. By 1909 the markers mania had reached San Francisco. By 1915, 459 markers had been installed at the density of a mile apart between San Diego and Ventura (Kropp 2006, 69). Jackson writes of Señora Moreno’s crosses: ‘There they stood, summer and winter, rain and shine, the silent, solemn … and became landmarks to many a guideless traveler … in the lonely places, standing out in sudden relief against the blue sky; and if he said a swift short prayer at the sight, was he not so much the better?’ (Jackson 1885, 19). The mbm directly transferred this passage onto the material world. The anticipated effect of the mbm campaign was successful –​the state surveyors recommended a route similar to that of the cra buying into, what one engineer’s report described as, the ‘[r]‌omance … built into the roads … laid out by the padres’ (in Kropp 2006, 66). These recommendations however may have been inevitable for the growing numbers of automobilists, inspired by the publicity of the Camino and, more generally, by the new mission industry, had ‘clamored to drive’ (Kropp 2006, 67) the trail long before the first state-​highway bond was passed (in 1910; additional funding allocated in 1916 and 1919) not to mention the actual roads paved, bridges built or passes cut. To summarize, within the industry of the new mission system the Camino Real trail and its markers occupy a unique place. The project first began as a map informed more by their makers’ sentiments, interests and their negotiations than the actual knowledge or concern with history. Jackson’s text stands here as this map’s predecessor both in terms of its sentimentality and

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in its actual vision of imprinting beliefs on the landscape with evangelical guideposts. In this way, the novel is an antecedent (if literary) inscription to the project of El Camino. This confirms Latour’s theory that inscriptions are combinable. Further, the marker can be thought of as a unique immutable mobile and part of the chain of the Camino’s inscriptions –​its dense spacing making the mission bells immutable, ever present or at least ever anticipated, round the next curve. Although three-​dimensional, its effectiveness would have been the same if it was a flat cardboard cut-​out because it is its silhouette, its contours, it as a logo or an emblem of the Camino –​as opposed to, for example, its bell’s sound (no clappers installed) –​that communicates its message. As a flat sign it is easily combinable, integrable and superimposable with visual and literary inscriptions. Adapting Jean Baudrillard’s famous formulation we could say that the map of the trail and its marker preceded and engendered the territory –​the actual paved road and its consequences (Baudrillard 2001, 166).13 We could also add that the marker as the map’s and its literary (imaginary) model’s grand extension may be thought of as a realization of that utopian impulse Jorge Louis Borges made the subject of his story ‘On Rigor in Science’ (1969) –​to create, in Russell West-​Pavlov’s summary, ‘a map which is perfectly identical with the landscape it represents’ (2010, 2). Borges considers such a project impossible, doomed, hubristic, ‘[u]‌seless and not without Impiety’ (Borges 1969, 90). Forbes, the cra, and the whole new mission system’s apparatus however managed to turn this into reality. Also, in accord with Latour’s theory, the route, combined with the technological invention of the automobile, became more important than the landscape and the actual missions it served to promote. As Kropp’s examples illustrate (2006, 73–​80) the fantasy, romance, exoticism, or an aura of antiquity the trail conjured and writers and promoters of the new mission system eagerly promised was almost all that the visitors, ‘overwhelmingly white and … from middle to upper classes’ (Kropp 2006, 73), cared for. Once the route was 13

Baudrillard writes: ‘Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory –​precession of simulacra –​it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself’ (2001, 166).

254 Welizarowicz charted and marked it attracted investors –​‘real-​estate developers, architects, restauranteurs, hoteliers’ (Kropp, 2006, 71), publishers, post-​card and map designers, etc. –​which confirms the Camino Real’s enormous surplus-​value. Guidebook and travel writers provided enthusiastic and free advertisements for the growth of the tourist, motor, and infrastructural industries –​the designation of ‘El Camino Real’ being enough justification to fabricate stories of weary padres traveling the same dusty trail or drinking from the same freshwater springs the tourists on ‘A Gasoline Pilgrimage in the Footsteps of the Padres’ (Kropp 2006, 85) encountered. A 1915 acsc brochure announced that, ‘El Camino Real was siezed on as a great State Highway … with the promise of paved boulevards to come. These monuments in concrete to the achievements of California’s first civil engineers [the padres] are no less real gifts to the world than were the missions themselves’ (in Kropp 2006, 72–​73). This succinctly illustrates the two legs upon which the project stood. One was nostalgia, the other was progress and economic development. Their combination had everything to do with what Latour calls mobilization, in this case, the consolidation of public consensus around a set of cultural tropes. As Kropp persuasively argues, one group of tropes organized the past: ‘[distancing of] the mission past from modern life by associating it with bygone romance and glorifying the ruins,’ the ‘vanishing race’ nomination imposed on the California Indians, the lionization of Franciscan missionaries as the region’s pioneers (2006, 74). California’s history, hitherto disjunctive and multilateral, was rearticulated as a linear narrative in both, civilizational –​‘from primitive, to colonial, to modern eras’ (Kropp 2006, 74) –​and racial terms –​ from dark Indians, via brown Catholic Californios, to white Protestant Yankees. Another set of tropes pertained to the present: Progressivism, Social Gospel, American empire, industry, capitalism, weekend leisure. Although driving to the missions many automobilists were enthused to imagine themselves, to cite Thomas Murphy, ‘like many a pious pilgrim of old’ (in Kropp 2006, 85), they were always squarely here and now, modern self-​determined subjects immersing themselves only temporarily in the quaint and picturesque past, transported into the bygone era but never trapped by it, saviors or rediscoverers of the national past as a way of reasserting their allegiance to progress. This unique fetish of combined nostalgic fantasy and progress or modernity was accommodated and transmitted, as mentioned before, by rhetorical devices, visual representations, technical innovations. Maps were central to this. Even before state highways were approved the early close partnership between the cra and acsc resulted in the publication of the first series of maps of the Camino. Consider two maps (Figure 12.1; Figure 12.2) published

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in 1915 by acsc under the title of ‘Automobile Tour of the Famous Missions in California on El Camino Real.’ The maps, combinable into a single chart, graphically perform the object of reconciling a detached or objective cartography of the modern, automobile age with a historical summary of the ancient grandeur; in other words, the maps recapitulate the imperatives of the epoch. They not only present the territory with names of cities and towns marked according to their sizes (note the town Ramona top right of the Mission San Diego). They also open a historical vista: pronounced lettering of the missions’ names and the dates of their founding correlate with the font of the ‘Famous Missions.’ Both the dates and the lettering subliminally entice viewers to travel back in time while the logo of the acsc and other elements (longitudinal arrow, topography, convoluted thread of the road) give the maps a stamp of trustworthy authority in the present. In other words, the maps invite to consume history while squarely in the now mobilizing around the dominant version of California identity which celebrates its past in order to feel good today; that is, they perform an anamnestic intervention serving indirectly a palliative function. Note another important aspect: because these are early maps, perhaps still negotiating the scorchers/​sentimentalists’ dilemma, they do not offer a singular route of the Camino. Rather, charted here are multiple trails which lead in various directions, meander in the California topography (mountains, valleys, lakes) and elements of infrastructure (roads, railway). A reduction of this complexity was however inevitable and by the mid-​century was complete as the next example illustrates. This is a map which, as a simple on-​line search informs, has become perhaps the most popular representation of El Camino (Figure 12.3). It is also probably the most frequent image of ‘The King’s Highway’ one finds at mission museums today. Published in the early 1950s by Hubert A. Lowman, long-​time popularizer of the missions and the West, the map was originally published by the California Mission Trail Association (cmta). Against a blue and yellow (golden?) background, representing, respectively, the ocean to the left and the land to the right it offers a synoptic view of the whole territory of Alta California from San Diego to Sonoma. Except for faint gray shapes which stand for mountains of almost equal shapes and sizes the map lacks any topographical or urban features except for the twenty-​one missions, named and with dates of founding. What on the 1915 maps was a complex network of roads has now been reduced to two lines only which may illustrate the changes in the regional imaginary paradigm the Mission Bell Marker had effected over a few decades. One is a thick red line which at first glance seems to indicate the Camino Real trail but upon closer examination –​two

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­f igure 12.1  1915 Automobile Club of Southern California strip map showing the route of El Camino Real from San Diego to Los Angeles. c ourtesy of the automobile club of southern california archives.

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­f igure 12.2  1915 Automobile Club of Southern California strip map showing the route of El Camino Real from San Luis Obispo to San Rafael. c ourtesy of the automobile club of southern california archives.

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­f igure 12.3  ‘Historic El Camino Real. The King’s Highway in California.’ Official California Mission Trails Association card. published by hubert a. lowman. public domain.

small ‘101’ stamps near San Juan Capistrano and Sonoma –​it is revealed to stand for the U.S. Highway 101. To the right of it, a thin black line stands for fragments of the coastal State Route 1. The latter is necessary to connect all the missions into a network of El Camino, but it is the pronounced red of the 101 that surreptitiously invites the viewer to infer that the King’s Highway was a singular road. What is more, the red line is given a clear direction: an arrow on top (in the North near Sonoma) and no beginning (it emerges from the bottom of the map, the South) suggesting that the origin of the Camino is beyond the U.S.-​Mexico border, perhaps in Europe. An inscription on the back of the original image reads: ‘Today U.S. Highway 101 closely follows the route between the Spanish missions blazed long ago by gray-​robed Franciscan friars.’ Read together with the directionality of the red line it summarily narrates the glory of the friars who came from the South and ‘blazed’ the trail to the North. That they were assisted by the military, that they moved up and down the coast, that is, that California’s missionization was never a linear process, that a lot of California was settled by civilian colonists, is all silenced. I found the same map at Mission San Fernando in 2012. Its caption is slightly different –​‘El Camino Real was California’s first highway. It was a dusty trail between the missions. The padres traveled it on foot or horseback’ –​ and perhaps avoids the lionizing language of the former but it still casts the

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Franciscans as the sole, poor and self-​sacrificing (‘dusty,’ ‘foot or horseback’) agents of European civilization. In other words, unlike in the more complex first two maps this one’s content serves not topographic but narrative and ideological goals. These goals are amplified by two other features of Lowman’s map: the title declaring its purpose (to show locations of ‘famous California Missions’) and a drawing or what, after Harley, we can call a complex decorative emblem below it. The emblem consists of two elements which implicitly enact what after Bhabha can be called the ‘colonial mimicry’ (Bhabha in Huggan, 22).14 The first presents a lump, perhaps jovial padre with a cross in hands accompanied to his left and right by two Indigenous men: one tending adobe bricks, the other wielding a harvest of crops. Revealing its narrative purpose, the image recapitulates the argument of the Franciscans’ double task: to instruct their Indians in religion and industry. Its ideological work is built on the indeterminacy or ambivalence between mimesis –​the priest’s instructions make Indians like him –​and mimicry, always already inserting difference between the priest (and the larger dominant colonial or settler discourse and representation) and the Indians, producing them as unlike him and whose arrival at the threshold of the civilized existence is being continually postponed, they are never there. Superimposed upon this image is a red logo of the mission bell marker which thus declares the marker as the metonymy of California’s first cause –​ la primera causa –​of the godly and good missionary narrative as well as, by implication, as the guardian of colonial difference. Consider that the image is produced and massively reproduced by mid-​twentieth century onwards freezing the Indian in another time. It thus not only effectively, to adopt Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz (2014), ‘disappear[s]‌… the prior existence of Indigenous peoples’ (9) in California by, after Jean O’Brien (Ojibwe), ‘firsting’ (2010, 1) Christianity, the padre and the marker but also erases Indians from the present, ‘lasting’ them, ‘denying them a place in modernity’ (O’Brien 2010, 105). The differences between the acsc maps and the one endorsed by the cmta are striking even if we realize that their purposes were quite different (the former addressed to motorists, the other to mission enthusiasts, tourists). If the 1915 maps aspire to retain at least an appearance of cartographic factuality, the latter thrives on that duality or ambiguity between the fact (the 101 and 1 highways) and symbol (red line, arrow, emblems, colors) Harley points to. Lowman’s map has entirely emptied and de-​socialized California’s space silencing all history and fact other than the one glorified in the emblem. The Indians are 14

Huggan: ‘colonial mimicry produces a set of deceptive, even derisive, “resemblances” that implicitly question the homogenizing practices of colonial discourse’ (2008 22).

260 Welizarowicz merely extras to the ecclesiastic’s agency. The central location of the trail and vivid colors suggest positional and visual enhancement at play with possibly all the consequences suggested by Harley, Anderson, Gombrich and Edgerton (cult center, cultural superiority, prophecy, deontological closure, palliative function, etc.). The arrow and implied verticality may be understood to subliminally suggest the idea of linear progress, futural orientation, and that the project of missionization, or evangelization has yet to be completed, that is, that it is morally imperative. In other words, the Camino Real is a map which, to adopt Huggan’s reading of Wilson Harris’ maps, offers a ‘perceptual transformation that allows for the revisioning of … [California’s] cultural history in terms other than those of catastrophe or complex’ (2008, 27). All in all, it can be concluded that both maps to varying degrees offer ideological propositions. It is the maps’ interplay of elements that lends them to reading through Huggan’s description of maps as a manifestation of the ‘desire for control expressed by the power-​group or groups responsible for the articulation of the map’ (2008, 23). For, as Huggan explains, rather than a statement of fact the maps’ composition, their ‘“uniformity” … becomes the subject of a proposition … [which] comes to be identified with the “mimetic fallacy” through which an approximate, subjectively reconstituted and historically contingent model of the “real” world is passed off as an accurate, objectively presented and universally applicable copy’ (2008, 23). I call this fallacy ‘ideological’ after Terry Eagleton (1991), who suggests that what makes ‘claims ideological is their motivation’ rather than their falsity or truthfulness (94). Eagleton explains that the motivation of ideological statements is to ‘encode emotive attitudes relevant to the reproduction of social power’ (1991, 94) and analyzing both types of maps we see that, if the 1915 ones attempted to strike a balance between cartographic detachment (a tangle of roads, topography and infrastructure) and emotional content (lettering) then the effect of Lowman’s map rests almost entirely on such, explicit and implicit, emotive encodement. That this diagnosis is correct is confirmed by the fact that the map is still on display in mission museums, offering visitors a compact lesson in the mission ‘history.’ The mbm’s fate has recently been fluctuating. Early in the century, between 2005 and 2012, thanks to federal and state grants almost 600 new markers were installed on the roads connecting Los Angeles to Sonoma by the California Department of Transportation or Caltrans. Spaced almost exactly as Forbes had hoped for –​each a mile apart –​at sixty miles per hour motorists pass one marker per minute, a veritable mission wall. Simultaneously, El Camino Real trail was dramatically extended by more than fifty percent –​what in Forbes’ times was a modest route of 459 miles now measures 700.

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The Royal Highway also acquired (and then lost) a new cartographic rendition. Although currently discontinued, until 2019 the Caltrans website offered a fully interactive (zoom in and out, pop-​up coordinates) satellite imaging map (gis) of a winding chain of golden bells.15 The experience of engaging, interactive spectatorship from the perspective of the cosmos or le point de vue de Sirius was not unlike gazing from the Earth’s orbit at the Great Wall of China (Figure 12.4). If, as Harley argues, cartography’s symbolic power intensifies with more precise measurements then the authority of the newest technology was put at the service of the state’s privileged version of history and the values the bells and markers propagandize. Despite doubts as to the originary authenticity and recent adjustments of the Camino Real’s route the roadside markers still stand by California roads and carry a confusing inscription: ‘Historic El Camino Real.’ Caltrans once boasted on its website that ‘[t]‌he bells are exact copies of the original 1906 bells; in fact the original bell molds were used to fabricate the bells,’16 a statement which only added to the confusion as to what ‘history’ was being referenced. Does the sign reference the ‘historic’ Spanish route which never was? Or has the original project of Forbes now been reinvented to commemorate what she and others accomplished in the early 1900s? Is the project about the Spanish history of California or is it about what the Booster era made of that history? The prolonged absence of the mbm from the official website of a state agency which a mere decade ago was tasked with its conservation and expansion suggests that now that the last salvo of the fantasy heritage, the canonization of Serra in 2015, has been discharged the moral conundrum the markers enact and the Camino represents may finally have to be addressed.17 Or, perhaps, this lull in the mbm promotion is just a new iteration of what Doss identifies as 15

In my email correspondence with Caltrans website administrator Beth E. Bennet I learned that, ‘Caltrans website had to be rebuilt and was replaced on July 1, 2019 due to a new state law.’ Ms. Bennet assured me that the suspension of the Mission Bell Marker section was temporary and ‘eventually the Mission Bells page will be published again’ (Beth E. Bennet, direct email message to the author, October 07, 2019). As of January 30, 2022, no information about the El Camino Real markers could be found on the Caltrans site. 16 ‘Mission Bell Marker Project,’ Livability, California Department of Transportation, accessed January 22, 2018, http://​www.dot.ca.gov/​des​ign/​lap/​liv​abil​ity/​miss​ion-​bells -​map.html. 17 Other major signals of a changing trend in the historical consciousness of the state have been, for example, the diminutive celebrations of the 250th anniversary of California’s founding in 2019–​2020 the apology issued to California Native peoples by the governor Gavin Newsom in 2019, and the establishment of the Truth and Healing Council by the Executive Order N-​15-​19 (2019).

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­f igure 12.4  The ‘Mission Bell Marker’ interactive map. Discontinued California Department of Transportation (caltrans) Livability website. screenshot by the author, january 22, 2018.

‘heightened anxieties about who and what should be remembered in America’ (2010, 2) and one of the state’s ‘[c]‌ultural efforts to assuage those anxieties’ (2010, 27)? This confusion prompts me to think of Baudrillard’s concept of simulation which he defines as ‘hyperreal’ or ‘the generation by models of a real without origin or reality’ (2001, 166). As we already saw the original idea for El Camino Real was marked by inauthenticity, even fictionality masked as (invented) tradition. Its maps, markers and the new mission system in whose context they emerged created their own territory, history, affects. Later decades, as Lowman’s map, the Caltrans expansion, and the Überblick digital map suggest only added to this original simulation. California engendered by them may be thus aptly called, after Baudrillard, ‘The desert of the real’ (166).

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El Camino Real visitors sought in the missions ‘an aroma of romance,’ antiquity, some perceived ghosts, others ‘likened them to European cathedrals … England’s abbeys and Romanesque basilicas’ (Kropp 2006, 78, 79) which suggests that what they hungered for was at least a modicum of metaphysics. Read through Baudrillard however we discover that this poetry was prose all along. For, Baudrillard cautions, when reality is simulated, as opposed to coextensively reflected, it is cleansed of metaphysics, serializable, combinable, reproducible: ‘produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models –​and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times.’ Such reality is no longer rational or imaginary; it has become purely ‘operational.’ It has thus turned into one more, if giant, immutable mobile which operates by signs concealing the fact that the real is no longer real; signs which have become ‘the signs of the real’ substituting ‘the real itself’ (Baudrillard 2001, 167). Such signs, like the markers or the maps of the Camino, act as ‘deterrence … set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real,’ or to ‘[save] the reality principle’ (Baudrillard 2001, 168, 172). If I am correct in interpreting the Camino Real as a simulation that is, as ‘Camino (Hyper)Real,’ then we can extend Baudrillard’s argument a little further. He says that ‘Los Angeles is … nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation’ or ‘nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture’ (2001, 172). His chief example to support this thesis is the Disneyland. But Disneyland opened almost fifty years after the first marker on the Camino Real had been installed at the city’s old plaza. I want to suggest then, that the Camino Real stands as phylogenetically anterior to Disney’s project and hence, it is Forbes’ (and Jackson’s, Lummis’ and other boosters,’ preservationists,’ scorchers’) not Disney’s work that should be recognized as the originary California simulacrum which ‘conceal[s]‌that reality no more exists’ (Baudrillard 2001, 172). Perhaps then, it is Jackson, Forbes and others that deserve the title of ‘The Perfect Americans.’18 If the markers are to remain, let me suggest in closing here, perhaps their signs’ alteration –​from ‘Historic Camino Real’ to ‘Historic Camino (Hyper)Real’ –​could be one simple way of returning to reality while acknowledging California’s historic complicity in its erasure. So far, the reader may have had an impression that the prime accusation waged against El Camino Real is that it never followed the original Spanish

18

I adopt this nomination from Phillip Glass’ opera The Perfect American (2013) which focuses on Walt Disney’s later years.

264 Welizarowicz path (if such a patch ever existed), that it was a mere ‘approximation.’ However, I have also hinted that the legend of El Camino hails the Franciscans as the Indians’ saviors and suggested that this interpretation is a fallacy. I need to explain this before the last section. 3

Missions in California –​Reminder

The arrival of the first Spanish colonists under the banner of the ‘Sacred Expedition’ in California in 1769 marked the beginning of the devastation for the Indigenous peoples of the region who had hitherto been isolated from European intrusions. In the distant colony which could not count on regular shipments of foodstuffs from Mexico the missions, operated by Franciscan friars, were assigned the role of the prime food sources. The missionaries’ role was to congregate Indians and, by enticing them and coercing to work in the fields, to assure agricultural production. In other words, scholars argue (Archibald (1978), Sandos (2004), Street (2004), Castillo (2015), and others), Franciscans’ proselytizing efforts were in no small measure motivated by the need for free Indian labor performed by ‘unfree field hands’ (Street 2004, 38), slaves (Archibald, Castillo), or peons (Sandos 2004, 108). Father Junípero Serra, a fifty-​six-​year-​old, experienced missionary was charged with the task of organizing a chain of such frontier outposts. He proceeded with an eschatological fervor grounded in ‘work-​theology’ (Ranft 2009) enforcing compliance by severe physical punishments. Spanish Governor, Felipe de Neve, was so alarmed by his methods that he wrote to the viceroy in Mexico City lamenting that the fate of Indians in Serra’s missions was‘worse than that of slaves’ (Neve in Sandos 2004, 71). Determined to resolve the conflict with the Governor, Serra personally appealed to the viceroy in Mexico City and as early as 1773 was able to reconfirm the priests’ mandate to hold ‘independent and sovereign’ power, ‘without recognizing any other authority than their own religious superiors’ (Neve in Sandos 2004, 71) over the baptized neophytes. Under the model of loco parentis, anomalous and retrograde considering the Bourbon crown’s reforms elsewhere (Weber 2004, 38–​44), members of sovereign Indigenous California nations with specific time-​immemorial territorial claims were turned into wards of the church whom Franciscans were ‘to manage … as a father would manage his family’ (Engelhardt 1908, 117). As ‘children’ of the padres, baptized Indians were removed from the category of the crown’s subjects. Stripped of all civil protections and excised from the polis they were turned into, to use Giorgio Agamben’s category, ‘bare life’

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(1998, 85) or ‘homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’ (1998, 8), that is, doomed to unconditional precariousness.19 Now they could be used as what Richard Steven Street has called the ‘Beasts of the Field’ (2004). When in 1786 la Pérouse anchored in Monterey (a year later he would visit Sakhalin) he was invited to Serra’s headquarters at Mission San Carlos. He reported that the situation of the mission Indians there ‘scarcely differ[ed] from that of the Negro inhabitants of our colonies [St. Domingo]’ (la Pérouse in Sandos 2004, 107). Military commanders were obliged to enforce the royal mandate; they would ‘track down runaways, bring them back, and punish them in public spectacles’ (Street 2004, 73). One Governor, José Joaquin Arrillaga, saw in this missionary-​military system a path to ‘their [Indian] total conquest and reduction’ (in Street 2004, 73) and considering runaways traitors and apostates organized frequent expeditions during which ever new Native tribes were attacked, rounded up, and then marched to missions to replenish the quickly dying neophyte/​farmworking populations. Arrilaga’s tenure represented a nadir in the Spanish California’s Indigenous history, but from the perspective of Franciscan eulogists like Zephiryn Engelhardt, whose publications were contemporaneous with the rise of the new mission system, the same period was the ‘Golden Age’ (1908, 599). The laws secured by Serra in 1773 outlived the Spanish and Mexican eras. In 1850, in Suñol v. Hepburn, the California Supreme Court ruled that Christian Indians ‘should not be given any U.S. constitutional rights’ because their status in Mexico was the same ‘as lunatics, children, women, and other people dependent upon the state’ (Menchaca 2001, 220). As Martha Menchaca (2001) reminds us, this decision opened the door for ‘the War Department to clear hundreds of thousands of acres … for the arrival of Anglo-​American settlers,’ a campaign that ‘resulted in the massive reduction of the Indian population … to 50,000 in 1855’ (223). It also prompted California Governor Peter Burnett to issue a ‘genocidal proclamation’ (Castillo 2015, 204) in 1851. By the close of the nineteenth century ninety-​five percent of the original Indigenous population of California had been wiped out or succumbed to diseases. These results –​ studied most recently by Benjamin Madley in his monumental An American Genocide (2016) –​and their legal foundations disturb the idyllic image of the system Serra created and which the new mission system and its immutable mobiles, have worked to promote and absolve. 19

For a more in-​depth analysis of the situation of the mission Indians through the category of homo sacer see, for example, my article ‘Junípero Serra’s Canonization or Eurocentric Heteronomy’ in Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 53s1 (2018): 267–​294.

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Alternative Native Cartography

In his postcolonial theory of maps Huggan says that, ‘the map’s systematic inscription on a supposedly “uninscribed” earth reveals it … to be a palimpsest covering over alternative spatial configurations which, once brought to light, indicate both the plurality of possible perspectives on, and the inadequacy of any single model of, the world’ (2008, 24). If the map of Camino Real is such a map what alternative spatial configurations does it occlude? How do we see beyond the wall of El Camino and read it as a palimpsest? To answer this, I offer three examples of mappings of California’s territory and history from the Indigenous perspective. I argue that these works embed and reconfigure the cartographic imagination in a textual form and engage either directly or indirectly the hierarchies, silences, and subliminal symbolism the Camino Real and the ‘good missions’ legend have promulgated. I also suggest that these works are motivated by different axiological and epistemic coordinates and make Camino (Hyper)Real real again, that is, they contribute to the well-​being of the region as opposed to perpetuating its mania for ‘the manifestation of social and cultural excess’ (Doss 2010, 28). 5

Vertically Downwards, Gleaning

The first example is drawn from Deborah A. Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013). Miranda is a Native American author and an enrolled member of the Ohlone/​Costanoan-​Esselen Nation of California from the Monterey-​ Salinas area, that is from where Serra made his headquarters in 1770. Miranda’s is a sprawling text encompassing her personal history, the history of her father and grandfather, which she combines with the history of the Native California populations affected by what she calls ‘a great holocaust’ (2013, 76) of colonization. Her goal, as stated in her introduction is to counter the ‘only one story about California Indians’ she has always heard: that of ‘godless, dirty, stupid, primitive, … weak-​willed people’ which, as she indicts, is the underside of ‘the story of the missionization of California’ (2013, xvi). She argues that it is this image of the ugly or ‘bad Indians’ which provides the rationale for ‘the state’s biggest tourist attractions;’ the denigration of the Indian humanity and agency sanitizes the missions’ legacy, their ‘brutal and bloody pasts [drained] for popular consumption’ (Miranda 2013, xvii). Miranda discusses various aspects of the missions: Serra’s legend, Indian labor, violent punishments, bells, adobe bricks and much more. One short scene may serve as an illustration of her value system and spatial orientation

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which, I want to argue, may be understood in terms of alternative Indigenous cartography. In a story ‘Soledad’ Miranda arrives with a group of friends (including the Esselen Tribal Chairwoman Louise J. Miranda Ramirez) at Mission Soledad, a small, partially reconstructed, off-​highway mission south of a town of the same name in the Salinas Valley. The narrator, Miranda herself, gazes onto the neighboring fields where ‘Brown workers from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala [are] picking since dawn.’ She then immediately adds: ‘I wonder if the soil recalls their bruised Indian bodies; I wonder if it ever forgot’ (2013, 149). The image of stooping figures in the field right now (indigenous migrants from Central America) prompts her to recall, in language foregrounding intersubjectivity, another one across time. The recognition of the soil as subject with its own memory allows Miranda to collapse the temporal gap between the ‘bruised’ workers of today and of the ‘beasts of the field’ her ancestors were turned into by the padres. The scene in front conjures a scene from the past establishing a continuum between the ‘now’ and ‘then.’ The witness to this continuum is the ‘soil’ itself subject to the same type of work across generations. It is this ongoing work and the sacrifice it takes which makes the relationship to the land organic and will not let the land forget. Miranda expresses here at least three chief principles of American Indian epistemology. The first is what Native philosopher, Thomas Norton-​Smith (2010), terms ‘the expansive conception of persons’ (11).20 What for a typical Western subject is a mere materiality yielding crops Miranda’s sentences render as an entity of different ontology but sentient and endowed with a mnemonic faculty. Secondly, Miranda captures what Norton-​Smith calls, ‘the semantic potency of performance’ (2010, 11) for it takes the continuous human effort to maintain the connection between entities. Third, Miranda’s grammar, which operates by the slippage of subjectivities and time frames winds like a serpent realizing the principle of ‘circularity as a world ordering principle’ (Norton-​Smith 2010, 14). Miranda’s opening sequence to ‘Soledad’ thus reveals her non-​Western epistemic location which calls for a very different type of cartography.

20

The expansive personhood assumes that other than human entities ‘are raised to the ontological and moral status of a person’ (Norton-​Smith 2010, 11) which means that they ‘are in some sense “equal”’ with human beings. This applies to animals, plants, ‘powerful spirit persons embodied as places, physical forces and cardinal directions, ancestors, nonhuman animals and plants –​even the Earth itself’ (Norton-​Smith 2010, 91; 137; my emphasis).

268 Welizarowicz In accord with Norton-​Smith’s theory the method of such a cartography must be based on the fundamental principle of American Indian world-​view which the latter three help to order, that is, ‘relatedness’ or a belief that, ‘everything is related and … all entities and beings are interconnected … and due respect’ (Norton-​Smith 2010, 58). What follows from this is that all actions are morally charged because each action has the power to affect the networks of relations. Hence, mindfulness, or awareness are the first procedural obligations in the American Indian worldview. Consider now the following excerpt from the story: It’s Saturday morning, and we have never walked so mindfully. We find bone fragments on paths, in the parking lot, at the edges of groomed green fields. Here is a finger joint, here a tooth. Here a shattered section of femur, here something unidentifiable except for the lacy pattern that means human being. Our children run to us with handfuls of ancestors … our relatives scattered on the earth … Bits of bone rise up from the dirt, catch in the steel-​belted tire treads of tourists, carry out ancestors out to Highway 101, scatter them to the wind. miranda 2013, 149; my emphasis

Note here that for Miranda these are not merely the ‘bones’ but ‘ancestors’ and ‘relatives’ –​lexical choices which suggest a very different reading of the place: it is not transparent like a map or a Western museum nor is it the site of romance. This is a giant burial ground which, we may note after architectural historians Edna Kimbro, Julia G. Costello and Tevvy Ball (2009), by bulldozing and ‘a heavy-​handed assault on the fragile archaeological remains’ (221) was turned into a quaint tourist site. To phrase this in terms of cartography we could say that Miranda and her company are surveyors equipped with a set of mindful eyes which let them see what most visitors, those automobile scorchers, will certainly miss. The latter will look for confirmations of the grand narrative of El Camino, for the bell, the marker, the last priest’s or Governor Arrillaga’s (interred, as the myth has it, in Franciscan robes) tombstones, the convexities of what is left of the adobe walls, a water fountain, a loquat tree. They will inhale the aura, look at the horizon, ponder museum’s artifacts but they will rarely grasp the site’s metaphysics for this requires not looking ahead but looking downward. In other words, the map of El Camino like the one by Lowman will blind them, transfixing them on the tunnel-​vision of the hyperreal. Only close examination in a downward posture, only gleaning will reveal the mystery Mission Soledad holds. Only such a micro-​mapping, close, anamnestic, cross-​temporal, inter-​subjective will break the Mission myth’s heteronomies.

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This is then a cartography of detail, of micro scale, and of macro awareness. If one was to draw a map based on that experience one would have to zoom in on the dust on the ground, to reduce the optic, to go underground, and account for the wind which raises the prayers to the sky. Such a map is not a flat inscription one carries in her pocket, but a multilayered cross-​section vertical imaginary or conceptual tangle of times and subjectivities continually remade or circularly calling for performance of world-​making obligations. 6

We Are the Land

Miranda’s guide in Soledad, the Esselen chairwoman, Louise J. Miranda Ramirez also contributed to another work. iya: The Esselen Remember (2015), is an unpublished drama by a Salinas-​based Chicano author/​actor/​director Luis ‘xago’ Juarez who, having become interested in the tribal peoples of his home region turned to Ramirez for stories and guidance. The two collaborated on the project: Ramirez provided material; Juarez put it together. The play opens with an Esselen origin myth which apart from telling a creation story of a coyote marrying a woman who turns into a shrimp –​a story suggestive of a union between the land and the sea, two fundamental food sources which had sustained the regional nations for millennia –​it also names the sacred landmarks of the Esselen –​Pico Blanco, the peak of Los Gavilanes (Juarez 2018, 2) and the Salinas River (Juarez 2018, 3). In other words, the myth establishes a cartography of origins located in specific places. It draws a map unlike any other popularly known map of California. This is a map of sacred places of the Esselen which, it can be said following David Carrasco (2007), a scholar of religions, provides them with the ‘ultimate orientation’ (61). In this sense, it disrupts and supersedes the normative social and cartographic imaginary of the state with one based on the claim to the land and mythical anteriority of ‘the brown shy quiet people who are dead’ Robinson Jeffers could only intuit writing ‘Hands’ after his visit to ‘a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara’ (1959, 264). The crisis in the play ensues when a discovery is made at a nearby construction site. The remains of an Esselen child, perhaps as old as 4000 years old (Juarez 2018, 21) are unearthed by a bulldozer. The bones, or ‘iya’ in the Esselen, are, similarly to Miranda’s strategy, subjectified, that is, brought to an ontological status of a person, ‘the ancestor.’ This is not easily understood by the boss of the Golden State Domain development company doing the on-​site works. When Mat, one of the Esselen family members who also works for the company confesses to him: ‘Never thought I’d have to work directly with the

270 Welizarowicz ancestors’ the boss responds, ‘We’re talking about the bones now, right?’ to which Mat replies, ‘Yeah. The ancestors’ (Juarez 2018, 23). Mat then adds, ‘The ancestors are everywhere’ (Juarez 2018, 23; my emphasis). Iapa is the grandmother of the family and, standing perhaps for Ramirez, she has taken upon herself the responsibility of stewardship for this ancestral territory. When she learns of the new discovery she orders: ‘Get all the stuff together. We got some new ancestors to meet’ (Juarez 2018, 31). What follows is a complex tale of family members coming to terms with their responsibility to the land, ancestors, to each other, and to themselves. Norton-​Smith says that in the American Indian world, ‘human beings … become persons by virtue of their relationships with and obligations to other persons’ (2010, 77) and moral agency consisting in sustaining relatedness ‘is at the core of personhood’ (2010, 82). The play enacts the process of coming to terms with these obligations; this is a story of relatedness, of an implaced, genealogically ancient spatial orientation, of belonging to a specific place in America where the land is marked by iya everywhere, where iya is land, and we are iya. In other words, there is no essential difference between us and the land as well as us and those who came before us except that it is upon us, the living humans, that the responsibility of sustaining circularly these relations rests. To draw a map according to the worldview expressed here one would have to chart not only the topography of the terrain with its ultimate landmark orientations but to account for the geological, archeological, and human (living and ancestral) component as well. Once again, such a map would have to be an imaginary locus, a cross-​section vertical, as well as, horizontal and would have to negotiate between multiple ontologies, subjectivities (not only human) and simultaneous temporal frames –​past, present and future –​for each recognition of the past in the present is a gesture toward renewal and well-​being going forward. An approximation of this sort of a map was envisioned by Juarez when he asked artist Eduardo Z. Esparza to design a poster for the show: ‘at the bottom is a (Native American) thanksgiving dinner, in the center is an ancestor (a calaca), above that is a silhouette, impression of padre Serra and colonial Spanish soldiers, Carmel Mission and the Salad Bowl on top with Fremont’s Peak on the left (the Gabilan Mountains) and the Santa Lucia on the right’ (Juarez in Esparza).21

21

To see Esparza’s initial sketches and the final version of the poster visit Esparza’s profile on Bēhance: https://​www.beha​nce.net/​gall​ery/​30687​911/​I YA-​The-​Esse​len-​Remem​ber-​ %28Post​erFl​yer%29-​2015.

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271

In the Footsteps of the Ancestors

The last example is taken not from an artistic text but from a travelog Walk for the Ancestors September-​October 2015. In September 2015 Caroline Ward Holland (Tataviam) and her son Kagen undertook a pilgrimage from Sonoma to San Diego to actively address what they perceived as the wrong of Serra’s canonization. The log is available on their website. Erika Doss argues that ‘anger about the violation of certain precepts … surfaces again and again in contemporary memorial cultures’ (2010, 325). Although anger was a significant element of counter-​canonization protests and a number of Serra’s statues were toppled or vandalized it is not an affect which dominates the pilgrimage journal. Caroline Holland says: ‘We are walking to honor our ancestors, at this time right now, when they’re being so totally disrespected. We don’t want to forget, and we’re not going to forget. Until we make things right’ (Walk for the Ancestors). The purpose was thus relatedness-​ connected and anamnestic. Further, its goals were learning and healing. The journal reveals several alternative mapping strategies. First, the trek or ‘pilgrimage’ (Walk for the Ancestors) spanned 780 miles from Sonoma in the North to San Diego and was, as Rudy Ortega, Jr, chairman of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians observes, a spatial performance which reversed the legacy of the priest: ‘Because Father Serra walked up, north [they are] reversing that walk’ (Walk for the Ancestors). In other words, the Walk for the Ancestors, represented a symbolic turning back of Lowman’s arrow. The pilgrimage can be understood as a symbolic folding back of the Camino Real trail, an undoing of its work as, to use the words of Jim Igo (Kumeyaay), one of many people who met and supported the marchers, ‘our Trail of Tears.’ For if along this route ‘[o]‌ur people had to walk before the crack of the whip’ (Walk for the Ancestors) the Walk for the Ancestors was understood as an expression of Indigenous agency to confront and remake/​ reverse the official Eurocentric spatial script. But the Walk for the Ancestors was more than just a reaction to the symbolic regime of the Camino Real. It was first and foremost an effort to, as Holland states, ‘follow in the footsteps of the ancestors. Wherever their villages were, that’s what they were forced to do: walk to the Missions’ (Walk for the Ancestors). In other words, the trek was retracing the routes of the Native peoples of California to each mission. It was a movement across space in order to empathize across time, to go back to roots and routes. This embodied retracing can be understood as a mapping radically different than the linear stringing up of all 21 missions along the Camino Real trail. By insisting to prioritize the Indigenous perspective, the Walk for the Ancestors

272 Welizarowicz conjures a map of California in which each mission is a separate, active center which, to bring back Miranda, functioned like an insatiable ‘furnace’ demanding ‘a continuing fresh supply’ (2013, 16) of fuel, the Indigenous people. Each mission had its concentric circles of influence pulling that fuel from its surrounding areas. Thus, for example, at Mission Soledad ‘in addition to Esselen and Chalon Ohlone people, Salinan and Yokuts-​speaking people were brought … from the south and east’ (Walk for the Ancestors). What is more, many Native people were exiled to other missions. Today’s California Indians’ hybrid or multiple, intertribal identities (i.e., Miranda’s) are the direct result of this ineluctable mixing of formerly distinct nations, cultures, and languages. Such a highlighting of the missions’ role as producing not one but multiple Indigenous trails of tears reveals the El Camino Real map as a palimpsest hiding within the role of the missions as concentration camps and prisons to which Indians were driven, or forcibly returned. It also reveals El Camino Real –​in its multiple forms of inscription (literature, maps, postcards, roadside markers, fetishized nomination) –​as a cognitive artifact which by organizing our imaginary in a linear chain (leading from Europe to Northern California) with each mission following another in a sequence like beads in a rosary obscures their role as hubs each with its own rhizomatic tangle of trails which pulled and sucked neighboring and more distant peoples. The Hollands’ trek was an attempt to offer not a short-​time angry protest against the canonization’s institutional, symbolic and theological/​ideological power. It was a prolonged embodied effort to break with the map and experience the pre-​map territory, to walk not only for but with ancestors, be them across ontological and temporal divides. It is this goal that is common to all the three mappings discussed here. Even though all of the texts tackle the legacy of El Camino, and representation weighs heavy, these are first creative and active offerings invoking a higher-​ order epistemology or relatedness and promoting ‘lasting’ in a sense of endurance, or what Gerald Vizenor (1994) calls ‘survivance’ in the face of ‘the manners of domination’ (1994, 161). 8

Conclusion

Arjun Appadurai speaks of ‘the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity’ (1996, 3). He says that ‘self-​imagining [is] an everyday social practice’ (1996, 4) and adds that ‘imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape’ (1996, 7). To link this to our context it can be said that the immutable mobile and the map, which had been

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hitherto the domain of power and the central loci of enunciation, have now been freed of the flat surface, linearity, monologic unidirectionality by the practices of imagination which ‘has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people’ (Appadurai 1996, 5). This egalitarian assertion does not preclude Appadurai from insisting that literature elaborates the ‘social and moral maps’ and the ‘conceptual repertoire of contemporary societies’ (Appadurai in Huggan 2008, 12–​13). Reading closely the excerpts by Native authors I have demonstrated how by using non-​incsriptive, but subjectifying, non-​authorative (‘I wonder if the soil …’) means the texts engender imaginary maps or models of an imagined world or worlds which can be rendered as a horizon of interpenetrating and ever shifting imaginary landscapes and which radically reread, remap, and elide the master scripts (i.e. El Camino) in favor of what José Rabasa calls ‘antecedent spatial [and moral] configurations’ (Rabasa in Huggan 2008, 23). Indigenous mappings turn away from El Camino Real’s mimesis and mimicry by registering active procedural (orientational, embodied) mindfulness of doing, and the use of language as an intersubjective practice. They register, to adapt Huggan, their ‘dissociation from a dominant discursive system’ (Huggan 2008, 23), undermine the Map’s ideology. In other words, they decolonize El Camino: ‘decolonization entails an identification of and perceived dissociation from the empowering strategies of colonial discourse (including, for example, a rejection of its false claim to a “universal” history). The result is a dismantling of the self-​privileging authority of the West’ (Huggan 2008, 25). However, because these cartographies are grounded in a radically different ontology and epistemology (drawn from the principles of relatedness, expansive personhood, semantic potency of performance, circularity), their dispute with the hyperreality is not one of rejection or counter-​identification but of incorporation. The Camino (Hyper)Real also explains who the authors and their communities are or have become (in Tribal Memoir Miranda says that The Mission System and the New Mission System are now part of the Native dna). This non-​essentialist stance establishes a Reality (and Cartography) of the higher order which incorporates the California hyperreal as part of its whole.

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Index of Authors and Works Abbott, Edwin 5 Flatland 5 Agacinski, Sylviane 96 Agamben, Giorgio 264–​265 Agosti, Stefano 147 Akbari, Susan Conklin 37, 46 Idols of the East 37 Anderson, Benedict 241–​242, 248 Appadurai, Arjun 272–​273 Arrilaga, José Joaquin 265 Arsić, Branka 93–​94, 95 Auden, W. H. 68 Augé, Marc 5, 95 In the Metro 95 Barad, Karen 218 Meeting the Universe Halfway 218 Barthes, Roland 6 Bashō, Matsuo 17, 159 Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) 17, 160 Baudrillard, Jean 237, 253, 262–​263 Baumann, Zygmunt 91 Beckett, Samuel 79–​80 Texts for Nothing 79–​80 Benjamin, Walter 173 ‘In the Sun,’ 173–​74 Bennett, Jane 1 Bergson, Henri 2–​3 Bhabha, Homi K. 237–​238, 259 Bitel, Lisa 126 Blake, William 113 Bloomfield, Mandy 163 Bodenheimer, David 156 Boelhower, William 32–​33, 52–​53 Bokovoy, Matthew F. 245 Borges, Jorge Luis 253 ‘On Rigor in Science,’ 253 Breyer, Stephen G. 212 Bushell, Sally 68–​69 Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text 68–​69 Butler, Samuel 5 Erewhon 5 Calvin, John 10–​11, 25, 26 Classen, Albrecht 125–​127

Casey, Edward S. 5 Chaput, Martin 186 Chazallon, Martial 186 Cockburn, Ken 17, 160–​174 passim Conley, Tom 14, 79–​80, 83–​85 An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France 14, 79–​80 Conrad, Joseph 15, 16, 112, 120–​121, 212, 223 Heart of Darkness 15, 16, 112, 120–​121, 212 Cosgrove, Denis 178 Davies, Hilary 15, 99–​115 Imperium 15, 99–​115 Debord, Guy 182, 190 De Certeau, Michel 178 The Practice of Everyday Life 178 Deleuze, Gilles 1, 5, 96, 97, 211 De Man, Paul 4 Derrida, Jacques 168, 171, 172 Deventer, Jacob van 195–​218 Dicker, Joel 12, 13, 68–​77 The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair 12–​13, 68–​77 Donne, John 11, 27, 39–​44, 53–​57, 62 Elegy xix 54 ‘Hymn to God My God in My Sicknesse,’ 55, 56 ‘Love’s Progress,’ 11, 42 ‘The Good Morrow,’ 11, 42 ‘Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,’ 56 Dosse, Erika 248, 271 Eagleton, Terry 260 Edgerton, Samuel Y. 243 Edwards, Leslie 69 Eliot, T. S. 111 The Waste Land 111 Empson, William 170 Erba, Luciano 17–​18, 137–​158 Finlay, Alec 17–​18, 160–​174 Avant-​Garde English Landscaping 169 Còmhlan Bheanntan /​A Company of Mountains 165–​166 A Far-​off Land 172–​173 Gathering 173

278  Finlay, Alec (cont.) I Hear Her Cry: Anagrammatic Poem-​Clues for The Oaks, Wellesley 170 The Road North 17–​18 Some Versions of Landscape: A Survey of Artist Projects in the Landscape (1998–​2006) 168 Three Rivers Crossword 170–​171 Forbes, Harrie 245 Forester, C. S. 106 The African Queen 106 Foscolo, Ugo 13 Foucault 241 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel 100 Garrigan, Sinead 132 Geertz, Clifford 237 Giddens, Anthony 241 Gillies, John 49, 51, 62, 63 Gissing, George 71 New Grub Street 71 Gombrich, E. H. 243 Glosowitz, Monika 120 Graham, Desmond 16, 17, 124–​134 Unmapping Memory: Looking for Hildegard of Bingen 16, 124–​134 Greenblatt, Stephen 51 Greene, Graham 223, 224 Brighton Rock 224 Guattari, Félix 1, 5, 96, 97, 211 Guinnm James Miller 250 Haraway, Donna 202 Hardy, Thomas 2 Harley, John Brian 178, 237, 240–​244, 259, 261–​273 passim Hart, George 163 Hawkins, Stephen 46 Partheneiasacra 46 hbo 5 Heat-​Moon, William Least 167 PrairyErth: (A Deep Map) 167 Heidegger, Martin 173 Hendy, David 252–​273 passim Hobsbawm, Eric 23, 248, 249 Hodby, Alex 161, 168 Holland, Caroline 271 Walk for the Ancestors 271–​272 Hopkins, Lisa 57, 62

Index of Authors and Works Huggan, Gregory 238, 260, 273 Hurni, Lorenz 155 Husserl, Edmund 184 Iveson, Richard 211 Ivins, William M. 238 Jacobus, Mary 2 Jackson, Helen Hunt 23, 237, 245–​273 A Century of Dishonor 245 Ramona: A Story 23, 237, 245–​246, 249, 251–​273 James, George Wharton 250 Jones, David 114 The Anathemata 114 Juvan, Marko 178 Kafka, Franz 155 Amerika 155 Kant, Immanuel 209 Kassabova, Kapka 85 Keats, John 42 Kotva, Simone 165 Krause, Bernie 179 Kripke, Saul 171 Kristeva, Julia  Revolution in Poetic Language 168 Kropp, Phoebe 237, 245, 247, 249, 253–​254 Kubin, Alfred 155 The Other Side 155 Latour, Bruno 237, 238–​241, 253–​254 Lawton, Richard 128 Leeghwater, Jan 203 Haarlemmermeerboeck 203 Lefebvre, Henri 127–​128 Long, Richard 166 Line Made by Walking 167 Lummis, Charles Fletcher 245, 247 Maclean, Sorley 165 An Cuillithionn 165 Madley, Benjamin 265 Malpas, Jeff 7–​9 Marion, Jean-​Luc 10, 26, 35 Marlowe, Christopher 11, 12, 50, 55, 57–​59, 61–​63, 64–​66 Tamburlaine 55, 58–​59, 61–​63, 64, 66 Doctor Faustus 55, 64–​66

279

Index of Authors and Works Martin, George R. R. 5 Game of Thrones 5 Marvell, Andrew 11, 27, 43–​46 ‘On a Drop of Dew,’ 11 Massey, Doreen 118, 119 Masters, Nathan 250 McGroarty, Steven 247 The Mission Play 247 McNeill, William 238, 239 McWilliams, Cary 247–​248 Menchaca, Martha 265 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 2, 3, 161, 162, 165, 166 Mill, John Stuart 171 Miller, J. Hillis 19, 161 Topographies 161 Miranda, Deborah A. 266–​267, 269, 272, 273 Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir 266–​ 267, 273 Mitchell, John S. 247 Moore, Thomas 3, 4 Utopia 4 Morrison, Gavin 171 ‘14 Views of the Isle of Skye’ 171 Murphy, Thomas 254 Nelson, Horatio, Lord 15, 101–​112 passim Nora, Pierre 119 O’Brien, Jean 259 O’Rourke, Karen 177, 178 Walking and Mapping 177 Ortelius, Abraham 49, 58, 61 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum 49, 58, 61 Ortiz, Roxanne Dunbar 259 Oswald, Alice 111 Dart 111 Panofsky, Erwin 241 Pedelty, Mike 247 Peterkiewicz, Jerzy 21–​22, 222–​235 Inner Circle 21–​22, 222–​235 The Quick and the Dead 224 Pearson, Mike 183, 191 Piatti, Barbara 129, 155 Pickles, John 201–​202 Plato 168 Timaeus 168 Pope, Alexander, The Dunciad 103

Rabasa, José 273 Reuschel, Anne-​Kathrin 155 Rohl, Darrell J. 167 Russell, Bertrand 171 Ryan, Marie-​Laure 100 St. Paul 30 Epistle to the Corinthians 30 Salter, Jo 163 Sawday, Jonathan 53, 54, 55, 59 Schafer, Raymond Murray 19, 179, 183 Schalansky, Judith 16–​17, 121–​123, 134 Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will 16, 121–​123 Schulz, Bruno 3 ‘The Street of Crocodiles,’ 3 Schuyler, James 170 ‘October,’ 170 Seaton, Ethel 58 Selkirk, Alexander 38 Serra, Father junipero 237–​238 Shakespeare, William 30, 49, 62 Shanks, Michael 183, 191 Sidney, Philip 10, 12, 28, 50–​51, 57 Apology for Poetry 28, 50 Defence of Poetry 10 Sneddon, Andrew 165 Snow, C. P. 218 Solnit, Rebecca 166, 184 Wanderlust 184 Sowcroft, Philip L. 68 Spenser, Edmund 10, 25–​46 The Faerie Queene 10, 25–​46 Spirn, Anne Whiston 7 Street, Richard Steven 265 Swiatkowska-​Callebat, Kinga 91 Szymborska, Wisława 3, 6, 81–​83 ‘Map,’ 81–​83 Tarbuck, Alice 162, 165 Tilley, Christopher 164, 167 Tokarczuk, Olga 5, 13, 14, 80–​97 Bieguni 5, 80–​97 Flights 5, 13–​14, 80–​97 Tolkien, J. R. R. 3 Trollope, Anthony 5–​14 The Fixed Period 5 Turner, Henry S 14, 79

280  Turner, Henry S (cont.) ‘Literature and Mapping in Early Modern England 1520–​1688’ 14, 79 Veblen, Thorsten 249 The Theory of the Leisure Class 249 Veitch, Scott 2 Vizenor, Gerald 272 Vondel, Joost van den 215–​216 Vranken, Thomas 68 Warminski, Andrzej 88 Watson, Adam 173 The Place Names of Upper Deeside 173 Watson, Chris 163 Waugh, Evelyn 223, 224

Index of Authors and Works Brideshead Revisted 224 West-​Pavlov, Russell 253 Wheeler, Sara 99 Off the Map 99 Williams, Rowan 224 ‘Sacraments of the New Society,’ 224 Williams, Tony 164 Wolf, Burkhardt 117 Wolfreys, Julian 172 Woolf, Virginia 8 Mrs Dalloway 138 ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure,’ 8 Zagajewski, Adam 90