University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2009-2010: Penn Humanities Forum Undergraduate Connections Research Fellows 4-2010 Their Eyes Were God's: A Counter-Cartography of "The Known World" Jonathan Howard University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2010 Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Howard, Jonathan, "Their Eyes Were God's: A Counter-Cartography of "The Known World"" (2010). Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2009-2010: Connections. 10. https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2010/10 Suggested Citation: Howard, Jonathan. (2010). "Their Eyes Were God's: A Counter-Cartography of 'The Known World.'" 2009-2010 Penn Humanities Forum on Connections. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2010/10 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Their Eyes Were God's: A Counter-Cartography of "The Known World" Disciplines Arts and Humanities Comments Suggested Citation: Howard, Jonathan. (2010). "Their Eyes Were God's: A Counter-Cartography of 'The Known World.'" 2009-2010 Penn Humanities Forum on Connections. This other is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2010/10 Their Eyes Were God’s: A Counter-Cartography of “The Known World” Jonathan Howard 2009–2010 Penn Humanities Forum Undergraduate Mellon Research Fellowship Their Eyes Were God’s: A Counter-Cartography of “The Known World” What makes a map so useful is its genius of omission. It is reality uncluttered, pared to its essence, stripped of all but the essentials. —Phillip C Muehrcke Cartography has a confession to make. After completing his world atlas in 1594, Cornelis D. Jode decided “Speculum Orbis Terrae” (Mirror of the World) was the title best suited for his cartographic masterpiece. And so this famous cartographer provided the initial strain for what has since become an ever-growing web of longitudinal and latitudinal lies. Naming his map thusly, Jode ironically blasphemes the very Earth of which he and his fellow cartographers are supposed disciples. His insistence upon cartography’s objectivity, that maps, in spite of all they must omit to arrive at their final image, totally, naturally and neutrally reflect the world as a mirror would, is a deception of tragic implications, particularly for the slaves of Manchester County. Perhaps it was with a guilty conscience, then, that cartographers contrived the confession contained in the title of that segment of a map that divulges the meaning of its symbols: the “legend.” Edward P. Jones, however, would have a more explicit confession of cartography’s erring claim to objectivity, even at the threatening point of his meticulous pen. Frustrated with the criminal omissions contained in maps, Jones writes The Known World, a novel of meticulous, if (in the opinion of some) exhausting, narration that strives to tell every story and omit nothing. In order to call attention to cartography’s mounting lies, Jones both literally and literarily arrests cartography’s canonical masterpiece, Hans Waldseemuller’s 1507 world atlas entitled “Universalis Cosmographia” (The Entire Cosmography) and popularly known as the “The Known World.” Hanging “The Known World” upon the wall of the Manchester County jail, Jones interrogates the first ever visual representation of America about its implication in the ideological foundations of American slavery.1 LEGEND There are several maps throughout The Known World, but none more peculiar and unconventional than William Robbins’ home, from which the structure of this paper is derived. Robbins is the most prominent slave owner in Manchester County and his daughter, Patience, executes the novel’s most unusual act of cartography. The downstairs of his mansion his daughter called the South and the upstairs she called the North. “Go to the East, Mama,” Patience, the daughter, would say years later on that day Dora came to the mansion. It was the day Patience thought William Robbins was near death. “Go to the East and I will seek you out there. Please Mama. Please sweetheart…” The two daughters had never seen each other before that day. (119-20) Families live in homes. When Robbins constructs his—a cartographic act in its own right to the extent that it is an organization of space—he makes a vital omission since he must leave in order to visit “a black woman and the two children he had with her.” (20) But Robbins’ omission of the rest of his family is not to be mistaken for their absence. They occupy that section of the house that Patience comes to call the “West.” Years later Patience shows her half-sister, Dora, to the room her omission had already been saving for her, revising her father’s cartography with her own counter-cartography. In the manner of Patience’s counter-cartography, then, this paper divides itself into the four orientations of the compass. Beginning in the East and proceeding clockwise, the East, where Patience sends her mother, will feature a close reading of Hans Waldseemuller’s “The Known World.” The atlas will be established as a site of the omission and distortion of black humanity, and its over-looked role in the formation of 1 “The Known World” was the first map to feature the word “America.” American slavery will also be explored. The South, that geographic address slavery, will detail precisely how the visual dehumanization of Africans contained in Waldseemuller’s atlas creates a world of slavery. For this purpose, it will consider the execution of democracy in the antebellum period as an extradiegetic parallel to Manchester County once it is transferred to the judicial supervision of the democratically inclined sheriff John Skiffington. The West, the site of Patience’s counter cartography, will perform a close reading of the map that concludes the novel as well as divulge the counter- cartographic method of its author, a fugitive slave named Alice Night. Finally, the essay will conclude in the North, the geographic address of liberty, where the end of slavery’s jurisdiction signals possibility for the recuperation of freedom. EAST There, on the wall of the Manchester County Jail, hangs history’s first cartographic illustration of America. Han Waldseemuller’s canonical masterpiece was printed in St. Die, France in 1507 on twelve individual sheets of woodblock that could be assembled into a wall map.2 Jones is precise in his rendering of the map in everything but the year he chooses to uncover it. After its printing in 1507, Waldseemuller’s revolutionary view of the world fell into obscurity. For more than 300 years, the only remaining copy lay dormant on the shelves of a German library until its re-discovery in 1901. Thus, the “The Known World” was ironically unknown in the antebellum age in which Jones chooses to resuscitate it. In this way, Jones manipulates history’s distribution of existence to render an actual historical map a piece of fiction, no more real in its time 2 Hessler, John W. The Naming of America: Martin Waldseemuller’s 1507 World map and the Cosmographiae Introductio. Library of Congress, 2008. than the fictional county over which it presides. A fictional truth claim, then, the map is ripe for the employment of postmodern deconstructionist methodologies.3 This conceptual leap—that a map can and should be interpreted as a piece of fiction—is easy to make when, as is the case with Waldseemuller’s map, we find literal text embedded in the map itself. (Image 1) Furthermore, a literary close reading of this map, in particular, is encouraged since its primary influences, by Waldseemuller’s own articulation, are literary: Few will deny that it is also profitable to learn from books the location of lands…Therefore to the best of my ability I have studied with the help of others the books of Ptolemy from a Greek manuscript and, having added the information from the four voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, I have drawn a map of the whole world…4 Here we learn that Waldseemuller’s map is complete with its own bibliography, one populated with unquestionably subjective sources that disavow his claim to the production of “true and precise geographic knowledge.”5 And as we begin to analyze the fictional elements of Waldseemuller’s atlas, we may situate his map within the literary traditions represented by the literatures mentioned above: Greek mythology and the travel narrative. Deconstruction encourages the postmodern reader to read in the margins of the text. Fittingly then, we begin our textual reading of “The Known World” from its margins. There, immediately evidencing the influences of Greek mythology, we see the Four Winds—Boreas, Eurus, Notus, and Zephyrus—teeming about the Olympian Clouds 3 Cartographer J.B. Harley should be credited with introducing the map as an object needing the attention of deconstruction. In “Deconstructing the Map,” he writes, “Deconstruction urges us to read between the lines of the map—‘in the margins of the text’—and through its tropes to discover the silences and contradictions that challenge the apparent honesty of the image. We begin to learn that cartographic facts are only facts within a specific cultural perspective. We start to understand how maps, like art, far from being ‘a transparent opening to the world,’ are but ‘a particular human way…of looking at the world.’ 4 Hessler, John W. (72) 5 Hessler, John W. (35) that constitute the map’s periphery. (Image 2) Centrally located and visually deified in the Olympian clouds, we also find the portraits of Amerigo Vespucci and Claudius Ptolemy, each depicted beside a sub-map of the New and Old World respectively. (Images 3-4) Thus, Waldseemuller credits Vespucci and Ptolemy with the discovery of the parts of the world that he so famously synthesizes in “The Known World.” Deified in this manner, Vespucci and Ptolemy occupy a seat of power otherwise reserved for Zeus in the context of Greek mythology.