Revisioning Maps without Images

After spending about an hour trolling the internet for images of the Thai maps described in Benedict Anderson’s essay entitled “Essay, Map, Museum,” I found few examples of either Thai Military maps or the Buddhist Cosmographies. These two book covers (http://www.riverbooksbk.com/images/product/34.jpg, http://www.riverbooksbk.com/images/product/33.jpg) of Siamese (Thai) military/trade maps were the best that I could come up with through Google searches. Clearly, images of these artifacts are not easy to locate, which invited the question, why weren’t images of these items provided with this article? In an essay that leans so heavily on visual artifacts and sites for its argument, is it fair to ask the reader to trust to the description of the writer without the visual experience of the artifacts themselves? The lack of these important landmarks to support and direct this argument is especially glaring in an article that focuses on mapping and labeling as a strategy of empire. Surely, there is a place for reorganization when the necessity of visual support is so apparent.

            Lady Audley’s Secret’s publication history suggests the revisioning that may and should happen when the need for supporting imagery in a text is detected. This novel was serialized in 12 monthly installments in Sixpenny Magazine from January to December of 1862.  At the end of that year the serialized parts were combined into a novel and redivided into 32 chapters in three volumes. In March of 1863, the novel was republished serially in 22 weekly parts in London Journal. The reason for the republication of this already widely-read narrative was the addition of 22 woodcut illustrations. The impulse to milk whatever remaining income could be squeezed from this cash-cow may have been a motivating force in the additional release of the novel. However, there is also an implication that illustrations were somehow necessary for properly understanding the message of the narrative.

            The structure of the weekly installments re-mapped the suspenseful impact of the narrative drastically, so that they would coincide with the moments that the illustrator chose to depict. Like European revisioning of Thai maps, the contours of the novel were redrawn to reflect the agenda of these illustrations. This agenda is clearly patriarchal mapping of Lady Audley’s deterioration: at first she is a glamorous and upright young woman subject to the admiring male gaze, but gradually she becomes shrewish and severe, raging and pleading as she is denounced by male characters, and drooping when she is confronted by her doctors. The illustrated figures both literally and figuratively point to the way the narrative should be read.

            By ommiting pictures in his article, Anderson does not account for the very differences in seeing that Lady Audley’s publishers took into account and that differentiates the Eastern and Western map-making that he draws attention to. European maps rely on “the plane relationship” between “indifferently profane and sacred dots” and the “bird’s eye view” of space “situated in a larger, stable geographic context” to produce “an infinitely reproducible” “logo-map” (171-2, 5). In contrast, the Siamese “cosmograph” and diagrammatic military and shipping guides, rely either on symbolic arrangements of “supraterrestrial heavens and subterrestrial hells” along a “single vertical axis” or “a queer oblique perspective or mixture of perspectives, as if the drawer’s eyes, accustomed from daily life to see the landscape horizontally, at eye level” is attempting to render it vertically (171). These two sets of disparate maps were created looking at and attempting to represent the same visual space. Keeping this in mind, it is unreasonable to assume that any two readers of the description of visual imagery would envision the same representation without actually seeing what is represented. Thus, by omitting examples of the artifacts that are the basis of his argument, Anderson disallows the reader the ability to properly map his assertions—he cannot see what Anderson sees because he literally does not show it to him. Anderson’s topic intrinsically insists that the borders of his article must be redrawn, as was Lady Audley’s Secret, so that the imagery beneath both the Siamese “written-in notes” and the Colonial “grid” of longitudinal and latitudinal marks can guide the reader to his conclusion.