RETHINKING THE POWER OF

MAPS: SOME REFLECTIONS ON

PAPER LANDSCAPES

‘Paper landscapes: maps, texts, and the construction of space, 1500–1700’,

Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 18–19 July 1997

Roger Starling

U ntil recently, the study of maps was the almost exclusive preserve of geog-
raphers, cartographic historians and amateur collectors: a small, special-
ized field that attracted little, if any, attention from scholars in other disiplines.
Yet as a consequence of the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social
sciences, as well as the increased prominence of cultural and postcolonial stud-
ies, maps have assumed an unprecendented status as one of the most fashion-
able objects of advanced critical scrutiny. Any doubts as to whether maps
themselves are deserving of such treatment were recently put to rest at ‘Paper
landscapes: maps, texts, and the construction of space, 1500–1700’, a conference
which brought together scholars and critics from at least three continents –
mostly, although not exclusively, from the humanities – to investigate the his-
torical significance of mapping in the early modern world. (One thought
inspired by the conference is that it is only as a result of cartography that we
can speak of an ‘early modern world’ in the first place.) Expertly and imagina-
tively organized by Andrew Gordon of Queen Mary and Westfield College,
University of London, and Bernhard Klein of the University of Frankfurt, the
conference reflected not only the high quality and critical sophistication of con-
temporary interdisciplinary research but also a continuing interest in the power
of maps themselves: the unique, almost uncanny fascination that the carto-
graphic image – in some ways comparable to the impact of photography – has
inspired both in the past and present.
What, we may ask, is the reason for this mysterious fascination? Whence, in
other words, does the power of maps derive? Judging from most papers at the

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106 Roger Starling
conference, the answer lies unquestionably in the uses to which maps have his-
torically been put, and in the investments – cultural, material, ideological –
which are inscribed, with an almost disarming legibility, onto the very surface
of maps. In this reading – as will no doubt be familiar to readers of the late
J. B. Harley – the maps themselves are thus inextricably associated with such
developments as nationalism, colonialism and the fashioning of imperial sub-
jectivity.
While such assumptions can be seen most obviously in the titles of individual
contributions (in which the current lexicon of literary/cultural discourse fig-
ured prominently), they are also evident in the format of the conference, which
functioned as a kind of map or overview of contemporary critical interests.
Divided into four sections entitled ‘Maps and bodies,’ ‘Literary landscapes,’
‘Mental maps and social spaces’ and ‘The politics of mapping’, the papers were
then further divided (like an anatomy or grid pattern) into eight parallel ses-
sions – some of which featured their own separate subheadings – for a total of
39 separate presentations. Finally, the entire conference was framed by no fewer
than three keynote addresses: by Valeria Traub, whose previous work has con-
cerned gender and sexuality in Shakespeare; by John Gillies, the author of
Shakespeare and the geography of difference 2; and finally by Richard Helgerson, whose
article ‘The land speaks: cartography, chorography, and subversion in
Renaissance England’3 has, in the humanities at least, an almost paradigmatic
status for contemporary cartographic research. Indeed, of all these papers,
Helgerson’s was undoubtedly the most eclectic: embracing not only the satiric
‘fool’s cap’ maps of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries but also still
life or vanitas paintings (including Holbein’s The ambassadors), seventeenth-cen-
tury Dutch interiors and Vermeer’s The art of painting.
Other papers, if less wide-ranging in their subject-matter, were undoubtedly
more critically and theoretically focused. Drawing widely on a number of
current critical models – the most pervasive influences being new historicism,
cultural materialism and postcolonial studies – it was the intention of most
papers to illustrate how both maps and their users (and indeed spatial practices
more generally) function both ideologically and materially in the production of
early modern culture and subjectivity. Particularly outstanding, at least to me,
was a paper by Julian Yates entitled ‘The geometry of forgetting: maps, map-
ping, and the culture of print in early modern England’, which was notable not
simply for employing such models but for reminding us of the unstable play of
representation through which we map our positions in the world (the latter of
course mediated, if not constructed, by cartography). Mapping, as John Gillies’
contribution also made clear, is inherently bound up in the production of what
he calls ‘notional space’.
Two points deserve comment here. First, while almost all of the papers demon-
strated a high degree of critical sophistication – some of them, including Philip
Schwyzer’s modestly titled ‘A map of Greater Cambria’, especially so – one curi-
ous fact seemed to pass almost entirely without mention. Could it be, after all,
that maps lend themselves almost too easily to our current methods and
approaches? In other words, are they so obviously implicated in relations of

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 Rethinking the power of maps 107
power, their social and cultural inscriptions too easy to read, to provide anything
more than a performative confirmation of our critical paradigms and resources?
Does the mapping of cartography do anything more than reveal our current
social inscriptions as clearly as it does those of our precursors? That is to say –
and this is the second point – in attributing the power of maps to the uses and
intentions that are ascribed to them, do we run the risk of simply repeating, at
the level of analysis, the uncanny power of maps?
To address such issues, let us recall first of all that mapping as a mode of rep-
resentation has an intimate relationship with what we habitually regard as the
real. Yet we must also remember that, qua representation, maps have an onto-
logical status poised somewhere between fact and fiction, illusion and reality
(assuming for the moment that the distinction is a valid one).4 Indeed, while
their most commonly accepted purpose is to (re)present what is at least notion-
ally beyond or other than themselves, they do so by employing the resources
and procedures of fiction (in this case the production of images). In the case
of early modern maps, this reliance on what we would otherwise consider to be
proper to the realm of fiction is made explicit not only by the maps themselves
but also by the prefaces, frontispieces and other parergonal matter by which
they are almost invariably framed. Thus in his preface to the Theatrum Orbis
Terrarum, for example, Ortelius provides a lengthy discussion of the theatrical
(that is, visual) power of the cartographic image, while the maps presuppose an
audience or viewer before whom the image is presented. In this context, pres-
ence implies absence: there is no ‘original’ to be copied, nothing, in fact, cor-
responding – in a relationship of homoiosis or adequatio – to the image thus
presented, outside the performance itself. In this respect, as indeed in others,
maps exert a figural or mythic force which both breaks with and exceeds their
immediate social context: maps, in other words, inaugurate meaning while
appearing simply to reflect it.5
Much of this, of course, is reinforced by the (predominantly) visual nature of
the cartographic image; while working to make some things appear present,
maps also, like all images, entail a certain blindness. Indeed, as Lacan remarks,
‘In this matter of the visible, everything is a trap’.6 What Lacan means by this
can be briefly explained by addressing what is meant by the Mythic, which, to
put it briefly, is an imbrication of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. As the art
critic Rosalind Krauss observes with respect to the modernist grid, myths deal
with paradox and contradiction (in this case in the relationship between pres-
ence and absence) ‘not by dissolving the paradox or resolving the contradic-
tion, but by covering them over so that they seem (but only seem) to go away.
The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with
materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides
us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction)’.7 As should be obvious, no
simple untangling is possible here.
What then, does this entail for the study of cartography? First, it compels us
to recognize that maps themselves embody an intentional structure (or will-to-
figure, if you like) which is by no means reducible to the intentions of those
who use or produce them. If anything, we are fashioned or manipulated by

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108 Roger Starling
maps, by the fantasies that the making of them generates, as much as we manip-
ulate them in an endless and, at times, lethal game of mastery and subjection.
(The question of who, or rather what, is the ‘master’ here becomes an inter-
esting subject for discussion.) Second, it invites us to consider more closely the
often uncanny parallels between the emergence of early modern cartography
and our current spatial preoccupations, including the almost ubiquitous use of
spatial and cartrographic metaphors in the humanities and social sciences. Such
an inquiry would no doubt tend to confirm – if any confirmation is needed –
that the dream of presence, of a past or even future presence, is the oldest and
most powerful dream of all.

Department of English
University of Toronto

Notes
1 I should emphasize that my own paper is by no means excluded from the strictures
which follow.
2 J. Gillies, Shakespeare and the geography of difference (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1994).
3 R. Helgerson, ‘The land speaks: cartography, chorography and subversion in
Renaissance England’, Representations 16 (1986), pp. 51–85.
4 I am by no means suggesting that maps, least of all early modern ones, operate in
terms of a single representational mode. Indeed, different modes are frequently and
often fancifully combined in the same cartographic space. Here, however, a connec-
tion with early modern art forms such as painting or theatre, which often combine a
number of different techniques or acting styles, is almost inescapable. One of the few
papers to deal with issues of representation at the conference was Catherine Delano
Smith’s ‘Representation or depiction? shaping maps for the reformation’.
5 The allusion is to the Derridean problematic of writing, spelt out in Of grammatology
and elsewhere: J. Derrida, Of grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976).
6 J. Lacan, The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis, trans. A. Sheridan (London,
Penguin, 1979), p. 93.
7 R. Krauss, ‘Grids’, in The originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths
(Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1986), p. 12. What Krauss is referring to here is the struc-
tural use of grid patterns by such artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman and Piet
Mondrian. Her comments, however, are equally applicable to the early modern or
perspective grid.

Ecumene 1998 5 (1)

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