Muses of Cartography: Charting Odysseus from Homer to Joyce

Introduction

Poetry has executed a “spatial turn” from the very beginning. Unlike the regionally bound Iliad, the Odyssey turned toward open space, the sea, and its successive discovery. And both of Homer’s epics, traditionally conceived as the “origin” of the Western poetic tradition, are “topographic,” insofar as numerous poetic topoi, which had until then only been memorized and transmitted orally, first found their place in writing here. According to a contemporary scholar’s thesis, the “Ur-text” of Odysseus’s adventures at sea was first put to paper or papyrus around 800 BC. It thereby established and propagated the medium of Hellenic poetry and the Greek vocalized alphabet on both the poetic and actual seaways, by means of the landlocked reader and the increasingly literate sailor.¹ In the Odyssey, writing and seafaring come into contact in order to poetically “suture” the surface of writing and the surface of the sea. Against this background, in modernity—especially in the founding period of the history of cartography around 1900—Homer’s maritime epic became the basis of the literary-historical question: What is the relationship between map and text? What is a cartographic text?

This chapter draws on the observation that the Odyssey’s plot and its respective “topography” is deterritorialized in a peculiar way. If, in antiquity, sailing manuals had to reckon with the nautical and existential disorientation experienced on the high seas, then it is highly probable that Homer fell back on them. In his maritime epic, technical instruction and poetic imagination, topos and tropes, actually seem to join together. One may therefore assume that the Odyssey is based on sailing manuals. But it is certainly more than their mere versification. It discloses the manual’s poetic character by telling (on the plot level of Odysseus’s travels) and by showing (on the level of its own toponymic creativity), how places within the placeless sea are generated, determined, and described at all. The Odyssey has recourse to sailing manuals, but only in order to carry on their “protocartographic” operations.

This principle of “recursion”—harking back to a putative origin in order to redetermine and not only to repeat it—also characterizes post-Homeric literary adaptations of the Odyssey: Roman epics, medieval romances, and modern novels all create “their” allegedly original Odyssey from which they emanate themselves. In other words, in the wake of the “polytropos” Odysseus, literature becomes self-referential, since it always has to grapple with placeless spaces, with their description and visualization. Particularly in modern approximations of the Odyssey that increasingly reference their own protocartographic makeup, this poetic generation and location is pushed to its limits: the charts are overstretched, the tools become dysfunctional, and explorations go methodically astray. The more complex the description of the modern world becomes, the more fatal its shortcomings. It is as if Odysseus, at the edge of modern cartography, has returned to the state of deterritorialization that spurred his departure to begin with.

Homer’s Epic Topography

In its comprehensiveness, Homer’s Odyssey remains authoritative among all preclassical sources on Western seafaring. Numerous nautical practices from shipbuilding to astronomical navigation are first documented or conceptually grasped in the text.² For the description of the seaman’s experiences such as the wild sea and storms and for their allegorical or metaphorical interpretations, the Odyssey remained such an indispensable catalog of topoi into late antiquity that first rhapsodes, especially the Homeridae, then epic poets, lyric poets, and tragedians created veritable glossaries of its terms. These commonplaces were eventually taken up by the rhetors as the basis for exercises, before Alexandrian librarians compiled them as a poetic inheritance for posterity.

Compared to the Iliad and its pictoriality, what stands out in the Odyssey is its overlay of “real” places and poetic locations. For instance, the notorious Cape Maleas, whose promontory marked the outermost boundary of geographic describability, denotes here the node between the routes of Menelaus and Odysseus.³ It became proverbial in Greek that whoever wanted to navigate this dangerous cape must forget about his home.⁴ In the storms and currents of Cape Maleas, one was not just far from the Greek mainland but driven straight into the high seas, into the realm of no places. Already in Homer, “to lose one’s way” means going astray from one’s existence; thus the cape is not merely a place of delocalization but of a loss of self. Odysseus is “characterless” yet determined to survive, and it is only because forsakenness has become a “way of life” for him that the Odyssey can describe the “path of … flight” of its hero with exactly the semantic ambivalence that Adorno and Horkheimer formulated as “being cast up and being cunning.”⁵

Homer’s topoi are not derived from any neutral, underlying “topography.” On the contrary, they make the description of elementary facts themselves into a poetic problem. In describing storms, for example, an existing topos is not simply applied to a geographic location. Rather, it is from a contingent event that a topical determinant is generated in the first place. As early as the turn of the twentieth century, Victor Bérard, a French Greek scholar, diplomat, and senator in the Département Jura, called attention to a sort of elementary realism in the Odyssey: “What we have here is not the storm of writers, rather a storm of seafarers, a storm in the Mediterranean.”⁶ This kind of topography is built on the inspiration of the muses, as well as on “prose fragments,”⁷ which came to the poet by way of Phoenician sailors. The roots of the Odyssey, as purely philological findings also show,⁸ are not to be found on dry land. Its locations and concepts of space are dynamized, its objects and actors are in motion. It is told from the sea with an eye on the coastline. In Bérard’s words: “The interior of the mainland appears only indistinctly, is seen only from a great distance.”⁹

With the ancient Hellenes in mind, Hegel speaks of a historical “state of turbulence, insecurity,” of a positionally unmoored existence: “The physique of their country led them to this amphibious existence, and allowed them to skim freely over the waves.”¹⁰ In this abandonment of the terrane nomos with its ethical and political as well as topological and ontological liabilities; in the orientation toward a “becoming” that is “forgetful-of-being”; and in its turn to an amphibious existence that comes to fruition in the ventures of pirates, the sea trade, or the “thalassocracies,” Plato had already seen the danger of a momentous uprooting and an unpredictable “being cast up” of his own polis.¹¹ But even in Homer’s time before the classical epoch, a mentality of foreignness or even hostility toward the sea had manifested itself, in light of which the deterritorialized structure of the Odyssey seems all the more remarkable.¹² In the escape route of its polytropos—its hero “of many turns,” or “of many twists”—who is at once widely traveled and cunning, trope and topos begin to overlap, to send him adrift and initiate his wanderings. This comes to pass on undescribed and even indescribable terrain: the sea of the unknown west, or simply the open sea far from any visible landmark. If one wants to understand it as a “topographic” text, the Odyssey seems to present a paradox: the endeavor of tracing and describing the places of a nonplace.

Mapping Odysseus’s Routes

Evidently, this has been no great hindrance. Ever since antiquity many have attempted to reconstruct the journey of Odysseus in accordance with their own geographic knowledge and genealogical claims. Already Hesiod, and after him Thucydides and Plato, placed his route between western Italy, North Africa, and the mouth of the Atlantic. Roman founding myths reclaimed the sirens’ homeland as the coast of Campania. Sometimes the journey of Odysseus is also transposed to the Black Sea or into the Atlantic.¹³ The Alexandrian geographer Eratosthenes mockingly quipped that one would only be able to describe the original locations of the Odyssey after finding the cobbler who had stitched up Aeolus’s sack of winds. The “true” route of “the cunning one” remained the subject of much speculation through the Middle Ages.¹⁴

Abraham Ortelius’s Vlyssis Errores (1597) marks the beginning of the numerous attempts at cartographic representation that continue to the present—attempts whose proponents hoped to substantiate with all manner of cultural and linguistic theories. It was Johann Heinrich Voß, with his “Homeric world-plate” (a supplement to his translation of the Odyssey), who first went beyond projecting the poetic topoi onto a contemporary map. Instead, he interpreted them in the configuration that he himself saw laid out within the framework of the epic verse. (See figure 6.1.) Since then a tradition of an “imaginary” cartography has emerged in opposition to the proponents of the “realistic” one. As the future English prime minister William E. Gladstone claimed in 1858, Homeric cartographies should produce a “fictitious drawing” of Homer’s “pictures of the imagination.”¹⁵ One could adduce good reasons for this, for in Homer’s time no one had nautical charts. Sea travel was still undertaken without elaborate navigational instruments and mostly on the basis of experience and habit.

Figure 6.1. Johann Heinrich Voß’s Plate of the Homeric World (1793) (Johann Heinrich Voß, *Homers Werke*, vol. 3 (Altona, 1793))

Victor Bérard, however, in pointing to ancient sailing handbooks, the so-called periploi, countered with a double argument, at once historical and aesthetic: “In my view, the Odyssey emerged as a Phoenician periplus (from Sidon, Carthage, or elsewhere) which was carried over into Greek verse and poetic myths,” he wrote in 1902. “The anthropomorphic visualization of things, the humanization of the forces of nature, the Hellenization of the subject matter”¹⁶ were to Bérard certain proof that Homer already fulfilled the basic requirement of all cartography: a kind of bird’s-eye view shaping the perception of land formations, which, as the geographer Strabo also later claimed, imprints views of nature with a geometric pattern (such as the triangle of Sicily) or an organic form (such as the maple leaf of the Peloponnese).¹⁷ At the same time Bérard disputes that the poet of the Odyssey had to fall back on mere imagination at sea due to a dearth of cartographic resources: “The amount of fantasy and imagination is limited here. The essential contribution of the poet consists in the organization and logic of the events”—for the epic had as its basis actual Phoenician periploi.¹⁸

Such handbooks are organized according to the principle of the list. They are one-dimensional maps, so to speak, and Bérard’s handbook theory is substantiated up to the present by classical philological analyses. In accordance with the so-called Zielinski’s law, narrative threads in Homer always unwind separately and are never interwoven with one another. Unlike the Argonautika of Apollonius of Rhodes (c. 250 BC), which appears to have been influenced by the first cartographic endeavors in the sixth century BC, the Odyssey eschews simultaneity and interconnectedness of narrative events entirely. Instead, as long as the setting and the action do not shift completely, it traces their course by constantly following successive points of orientation.¹⁹ For Bérard it is simply beside the point whether Homer named real or fictitious locations. Instead, from a “scientific-poetological,” an epistemological, and an aesthetic perspective, he follows the orientation process on the way to the map.

To place the Odyssey within a “realistic” topography, or to illustrate its “imaginary” map, is equally otiose. But it is crucial to consider to what degree Homer localizes Odysseus and topographizes his course. At the beginning of a chain of developments that stretches from floating toponyms in undescribed maritime space to a cartographic visualization of the world (if not yet of the sea itself), “two cultures” collide: in ethnic terms, the Greeks (in the character of Homer, according to Bérard) and the Phoenicians (in the character of Odysseus); and in terms of the order of things, the poetic places of the epic meet the nautical designations of the periplus. Periploi are, from their name, sailing handbooks meant to assist a “round trip” in the dangerous zone of the open sea. To this end, they referred—from the perspective of the sea—to clearing marks, specific maritime and meteorological phenomena, and eventually, to navigable coasts and anchor points.

Handbooks like these had found their way into Greek literature by the time the geographer Pseudo-Scylax composed one (itself titled Periplus) in the middle of the fourth century BC. But their first appearance in the Greek language, or more accurately, in Greek writing, are the sailing instructions given by Circe that make the adventurous nostos of Odysseus’s epic possible in the first place. Handbooks of this kind had likely long since circulated among Egyptians and Phoenicians before the Greeks began their own tradition with the introduction of their vocalized alphabet. By the fourth century BC, the majority of seafarers were sufficiently literate to use written sailing instructions on their own. Along with the nautical markers and distance indications, which were translated into the duration of the journey when not designated by “stages,” periploi also soon recorded descriptions of land and water bases, sacred sites, and defensive positions, and even advice on the morals, political relations, and commercial customs of the seigniories along the route. Thus, they developed into veritable descriptions of the lands themselves.

For Bérard, travel and adventure stories, regardless of what sort and era, are essentially poetic recursions of periploi.²⁰ To him they serve as media of narrative and fictionality that make it possible to see “with the eyes of another” in the first place.²¹ As this kind of experience as transit (Er-fahrung) entails both the personal and the spatial, they are furthermore an exemplary medium of discovery. Periploi work their way into the process of generating locations in the first place. They stand at the beginnings of poetry and discovery alike. Without periploi, there would have been no Homer, nor the Greek journey into the blue. And this fact, as Bérard concedes, was already known to the ancients. His work is thus to be understood as recourse to “a sentence or two from Strabo.”²² For he, unlike Eratosthenes, recognized the poetic aspects of geography, and put forth the theory that Homer must have made use of Phoenician periploi.

Odysseus’s Round Trip as Recursion

Against the background of Odyssean traditions, Homer’s recourse to periploi is much more than a simple reference or application. It rather describes the putative origins of poetry, or more precisely, poetry’s “recursive” approach in producing its supposed origins. Already Strabo problematized this approach with regard to the nautical and poetic experience of the Odyssey. One could define recursion as a circular motion that not only facilitates the return to the same, but also makes variation possible through self-referentiality.²³ In more technical terms, recursion means the reapplication of processing instructions to one variable, which is itself already output from these instructions. In the case of Homer, the processing instructions concern the generation and relation of locations, and the variables appear initially as descriptions of place, then as periploi, and finally as poetry. The variable value changes with every journey through this loop, and along with repetition the procedure produces difference. Recursions are processes of discovery, for as a rule, they lead to contingency. Here, especially, the alleged origin is always discovered anew. A clear and, at the same time, allegorical example of this recursive principle can be found in the siren episode. As Odysseus comes closer to the mythical origin of poetry itself, “the bewitching ones” (as seirenes has been translated) promise to strike up nothing other than songs from Homer’s other—allegedly first—heroic epic.²⁴ The Odyssey therefore is a recursion of the Iliad, and the latter epic is said to have arisen from artistic inspiration allegorized here in the form of sirens, their singing, and their promise of supreme knowledge. Odysseus comes to this origin, at which song, poetry, and knowledge intersect, not by accident, but through the execution of the sailing instructions given by Circe.²⁵

From Homer onward various series become recognizable within the history of literature and knowledge alike that not only involve transmission or adaptation, but that follow the principle of recursion. Apollonius of Rhodes’s epic of the Argonauts, for instance, has always been understood as a supplement to the Odyssey. With mirrorlike symmetry it constructs the previously unknown area east of Greece and to this end has recourse to periploi like that of Scylax. Certainly the instructions from Homer’s Circe already presuppose Jason’s adventure, in which the Argo, the “first-ever ship,” set sail with Odysseus’s father Laertes on board.²⁶ The Argonautika becomes a recursion of the Odyssey in that it retroactively reestablishes its origin: the Black Sea instead of the Mediterranean, and Jason instead of Odysseus. Furthermore, the Argonaut material within the Greek tradition appears older than any preserved epic. Because they had no Greek alphabet to rescue them, these corresponding pre-Homeric songs were lost. Nevertheless the Argonautika, as a post-Homeric epic through which pre-Homeric material glimmers, indicates the narrative tradition that may underpin the Odyssey: “helper myths” that herald the rescue of the embattled hero gone astray,²⁷ as well as the ancient Egyptian “Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor” and his meandering journey home, which has been identified as the source of the “Phaeacians.”²⁸

To summarize, we may conclude that the nostos, the heroic journey home, and the narrative of the sea journey point unmistakably to the use of periploi, whose existence in the Middle Kingdom of Egypt (2000–1700 BC) is attested to by numerous bas-relief inscriptions in Egyptian temples. From this perspective it becomes evident that the Phoenicians were already well-versed students of Egyptian seafaring long before the Greeks made Phoenician periploi the starting points for their own poetry.²⁹ According to Bérard, to read the Odyssey correctly, one must not only compare it to materially and thematically similar poetry, but also to the extant nautical writing. As he somewhat provocatively puts it, the Odyssey is ultimately just one piece in a “series of nautical instructions.”³⁰

This has consequences for the “Homeric question” concerning the originality of the Odyssey’s author. With every sentence, if not word, it seems that not only Greek aioidoi (songsters passing down their cantos without any written assistance), but also Phoenician or even Egyptian seafarers find their way into language. “The poet actually invents nothing: he brings to life, arranges, and disposes the material. Every periplus is initially just a wreath of proper names,” writes Bérard. “Each adventure sets itself in motion through the use of toponymy.”³¹ The poet’s imagination is therefore no free-floating faculty. It begins with the places and their naming; it vivifies the names in the form of actors, it arranges corresponding events, and it ultimately casts the whole of the narrative as nostos and “round trip.”³²

Even when toponymy, as Bérard concedes, can be decried as etymological “play,” it still makes it possible to uncover the locations through a sort of lexical and grammatical cartography. And simple wordplay, which, especially in the ancient Greek context, implies hidden truths, indicates cunning linguistic and poetic routes of transmission.³³ Even a metric form like the hexameter could have served the purely mnemotechnical purpose of branding routes into the memory through individual descriptions of place and their succession. But the metric requirements of the Greeks also served to disperse the signifiers of real locations into their poetic counterparts: on purely poetic grounds, Cephalonia, for instance, seems to have been “cut up,” so that another “long island” seems to have emerged from an isle called the “long Same.” And the ethnic description of Homeric heroes goes adrift when the metric order of this or that passage requires it: “The Greeks are called Argeioi, Danaoi, or Achaioi, depending on whether the name appears at the beginning of a line, a medial caesura, or a line’s end.”³⁴ Every Greek in the Odyssey is thus a polytropos. But their topoi are in fact so exact that through Calypso’s sailing instructions ³⁵ and the constellations of Homer’s time that have since been astronomically ascertained, the locations of “merely poetical” islands have been extrapolated.³⁶ In any case, Bérard finds the term “poetic description” insufficient to grasp the extent to which the verse of the Odyssey is entangled with “local details.”³⁷ Therefore, Bérard finally began to look at the stations of the Odyssey themselves as best as his research could localize them. Then, in 1933, he published an Album Odysséen along with numerous photographs. The result corroborated the hypothesis of the “equiprimordiality” of nautical and poetic experience: “All descriptions correspond to perceivable reality, to the scientific and experimental truth.”³⁸

The Tricky Polytropos

Precisely because they reference the real “delocalization” of the “placeless” ocean, the topoi of the Odyssey point as much to a firm origin as to an unstable route of many places and turns. This inevitable “being-off-course” concerns on the one hand the recursive déplacement of tradition and its crafty rescue on the other. Endowed with the gifts of song and supernatural knowledge, the sirens were once something like the daughters of a muse and a river god. But it is said that after their defeat in a contest with the muses themselves, they sank to the level of demonic harbingers of Hades. After that, sirens were regarded as “a kind of evil muse,” as Jane Harrison writes, “rather of the barren sea than of the clear spring water,” and were thought to personify the “perils of seafaring,” or, more ambivalently, the fortuna di mare.³⁹ When they invoke the grammar, diction, and topics of the Iliad within the Odyssey,⁴⁰ the sirens aspire to occupy the place of the muses, previously the source of poetic inspiration as such. At the same time they promise Odysseus immortality by transforming him once more into the hero of the Iliad that he once was. Odysseus voluntarily chooses another way: the journey home, and along with it the peculiar cunning that turns him from a warrior into an adventurer and transmutes demonic songs into poetry.

Leaving the tradition of the old muses behind, the Odyssey opens up the possibility of a new, nonheroic epic: that of crafty survival in the depths of peril and of an adventurous route on a placeless ocean. This is evident in the fact that Odysseus is the first hero to be remembered without a heroic death. He is a hero who becomes immortal by deterritorializing the (traditionally landlocked) lieux de mémoire and by merging them (nautically) into “polytropy.” The exact meaning of polytropos was debated in antiquity for this reason. The term could mean “cunning” and “dexterous” in the sense of spiritual and linguistic versatility, but it could also mean “of many turns” (i.e., “cast up” by fate and left wandering in open space). It has already been established that the Odyssey avoids any attempt at disambiguation. Polytropos appears only in a polyvalent context.⁴¹ In a purely verbal sense, Odysseus is known as the most complex of all the heroes of antiquity precisely because of his boundless “adaptability” and the possibility for endless recursion that comes with it.⁴² But already in antiquity that meant that there is no “true Odysseus” to grab hold of—just as there is no “true route”—beyond his tricks of speech and deceptive maneuvers.

In Latin poetry, however, whose tradition begins with Livius Andronicus’s Homeric adaptation (titled Odusia), the poets fought this “polytropy” and its topographic consequences. In Virgil’s Aeneid, the recursion on the Odyssey is transformed into a pattern of political self-assurance. The escape route of the expelled Trojans outpaces the development of the polytropos by the fact that six “Odyssean” books are followed by six “Iliadic” books that depict a protracted “conquest” in a “justified” war. The epic of the cast-up, who instead of heading home first becomes a refugee and then finally a conquerer and founder, confers the ideology of the principate with the legend of its birth. After all, Virgil set to work after the naval Battle of Actium in 31 BC with the purpose of writing the bloody origins of the Pax Augusta into oblivion.⁴³ That the epic became an instrument of naval supremacy for Virgil demonstrates perfectly how shipwrecks themselves can be transformed into a toponymy of power. Aeneas calls the promontory where his helmsman Palinurus went down “Cape Palinuro” and thereby marks a turning point in the future imperial topography of Rome.⁴⁴ Virgil likewise uses it to glorify the casualties that Octavian’s fleet suffered here, before Rome’s “thalassocracy” was to rasterize the Mediterranean after the rules of land surveying, and proclaim it mare nostrum.

Since the Aeneid connects the “polytropy” of the Odyssey with the empire’s providential telos, Odysseus’s cunning is simply regarded as deceitfulness.⁴⁵ His virtues are vices that go against the virtutes of Roman legal certainty, namely the pietas as intergenerational contract and the fidelitas as sanctity of contract. From the Silver Age to the medieval Latin period, Ulixice therefore idiomatically means “fraudulent.” In the Christian Middle Ages, as late as Dante’s Commedia, a sort of “exit condition” is written into the endless cycle of pagan recursions. In canto XXVI of the Inferno, the circle of the nostos is broken. In a fiery speech Odysseus convinces his crew to sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules instead of continuing their journey home to Ithaca, which would include him in the “economy of salvation.” Henceforth, he is to go down as hopeless and cast up. The trespass represented by Odysseus’s “polytropy” in light of the Christian, namely Augustinian, catalog of sin is on the one hand curiositas, the quest for pure experientia oblivious to self and creation. On the other hand, it is the crafty or even sirenlike seduction of his listeners—the use of incendiary rhetoric to deliberately lead them astray, as described by Dante’s teacher Brunetto Latini in his Retorica.

In the Commedia, Ulisse’s infernal appearance is therefore one of a fork-tongued flame.⁴⁶ He ends up in Malebolge, the circle of Hell reserved for frauds, in the ditch for dishonest advisors. Around 1300, “adventures” that overstepped the bounds of approved itineraria irritated the established Christian order of words and places since they disregarded mortal being-within both verbally and geographically. Ulisses’s violation of nec plus ultra and his alleged search for an earthly paradise in the uninhabited Southern Hemisphere drive him to Mount Purgatory, where he and his ship are thrown into a turbo,⁴⁷ or a cyclone, and devoured by the sea. The wreck comes to pass in this way, “com’altrui piacque,” because the one Christian God wills it, and the pagan epic and its entire fictional cosmos go down along with Odysseus.⁴⁸ Conversely, this shipwreck corresponds to Dante’s ascent. Only because of it can Dante’s work become a “legno che cantando varca” (i.e., a piece of wood, or more accurately, a ship), which rather than going under, drifts upward in song.⁴⁹ From above, in hindsight and with a view of everything earthly, Dante can watch Ulisse’s “mad flight,” his “folle volo” once more.⁵⁰ Run aground in Christian Hell, Dante’s Odysseus becomes an adventurer with no hope of return. But he is also the first Wi(e)dergänger,⁵¹ or revenant, of that unholy discurrere, by which the Occident, since being (dis)oriented by empirical knowledge, will be endlessly haunted.

The Compasso of Navigation

Dante’s Ulisse goes definitively adrift just when seafarers attempt to describe the Mediterranean in a new way: with ships equipped with new kinds of riggings and stern rudders, as well as sea charts and compasses. It is this multimedial navigation that first makes hydrography possible: in other words, the modern project of “writing the sea.” And it is also this that is capable of producing the unity of order and place that those ashore had called nomos since antiquity. The compass is indispensable to this process as a means of orientation linked as much with navigation, astronomy, and cosmology, as with new literary techniques. The compass indicates the particular way it makes use of the earth’s magnetic field. Historically, it was the first measuring device to visualize elemental forces through a pointer as well as their long-distance effects.

Since there was no proper concept of magnetism before the nineteenth century, this phenomenon prompted all sorts of different cosmological pictures: Pliny the Elder mentions the shepherd Magnes, who was said to have experienced a mysterious force pulling at his hobnailed shoes on Mt. Ida on the island of Crete. Ptolemy tells of ships getting stuck on magnetic islands in the Indian Ocean—probably a fabulous reversal of the account that local ship construction in those days made use of wooden nails.⁵² After Ptolemy was translated into Arabic in the ninth century, magnetic mountains began to appear in regional myths such as “The Voyages of Sinbad,” or in medieval verse novels such as Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, before establishing themselves as poetic and geographic myths. The Gudrunlied, for example, places the mountains in the northern waters, and they appear in Guido Guinizelli as relays between the North Star and the compass needle. The dangerous magnetic declinations, which seafarers of the Middle Ages were already fighting and that were imagined as magnetic mountains, stood for an aberration from the true faith. In this way the correct directions of the compass were inversely given a theological association with the right way to God: the needle as a sympathetic sensorium for the otherworldly force that appears in the heavens as the North Star and in the Aristotelian textbooks as the Prime Mover.

The oldest technical attestation of the compass needle, its magnetization and its practical use, comes from Alexander Neckham. In 1187, he mentions a needle in a bowl of water—in other words, a liquid compass. As unimportant as the differences between the magnetic, the geographic, and the celestial poles were to this system, the reassessment of the concept of “orientation” proved vital. While at sea, one no longer looked in the direction of the Orient or Jerusalem, as in overland travel or in the itineraria, but rather toward the polestar. Thus, “to lose one’s bearings” came to be called desnortear in Portuguese, or in French, perdre le nord. Already by 1269, Petrus Peregrinus had described a dry compass with a compass rose, circular graduation, and sights. Only a precision suspension, the connection of needle and rose, and a closed case were needed to have the compass, the bussola in its classic form, ready at hand. (See figure 6.2.) The term bussola first appears in 1380 in Francesco da Buti’s commentary on Dante as a corrupt variant of the Latin buxida (wooden box).⁵³ Compasso, on the other hand, is derived from the Latin cum passare (“to accompany”) or compassare (“to gauge, measure”). It seems probable that from the meaning “circle,” or “ornament in the shape of a circle,” the nautical designation for the parhelic circle also came to be compasso.

Figure 6.2. Portuguese bearing compass (1780) (Wolfgang Köberer, ed., *Das rechte Fundament der Seefahrt: Deutsche Beiträge zur Geschichte der Navigation* (Berlin, 1982), 316)

The portolans, the medieval descriptions of harbors that have come about with the use of the compass, read like prosaically compiled, purely utilitarian sailing handbooks, when compared with the antique periploi. However, they contained a decisive new element: course instructions. Portolans give contextual information for the directions provided by the compass. Together with the bussola, they made possible the graphic system that first visualized the sea itself as seen on the portolan charts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These charts are the very first marine maps. They carry the lists of the handbooks over into the second dimension. Developed from the requirements of nautical praxis, applied as a means of information for dynamic, variable, or merely possible situations, and thus the visual counterpart of a discurso as “getting-there-narrative,”⁵⁴ the portolan charts have no basis in mathematics. They are neither projections nor do they have map grids. Unlike later sea charts, they are not organized from a transcendent perspective. Instead, they correspond to an empirical navigation, moving from point to point. But it is they, and not the portolan books, “that bring the relative locations of each place directly into view for others and designate them exactly.”⁵⁵(See figure 6.3.)

Figure 6.3. Pisan chart (1290) (John Blake, *Die Vermessung der Meere: Historische Seekarten* (Stuttgart, 2007), 11)

Although they only revealed the “unmarked space” of the sea in small “steps” or “measures,” the portolan charts were the first to give a comprehensive view of what would later be called “Europe,” whose continual expansion came from this self-reflection. Together with the portolan data, scales, and numerous compass rose coordinates, the charts made it possible to determine the correct rhumb lines on the surface of the map, and then, with the help of the compass, to choose the right course across the surface of the sea. This simultaneously symbolic, graphic, and operative system circumscribes the ambiguity of the term compasso as it was used around 1300. It describes a handbook and a chart, a pointer, and a pair of compasses, employed to delimit distances. Even if your own place was uncertain, once you were locked into the correct course, you had a few days to find a coastline, at which point the last leg of the trip was manageable. In the confined space of the Mediterranean Sea this is a fairly easy task. The Mediterranean is thus a compasso that secures the empirical and vectorial navigation that promises a successful round trip and that guarantees it a specific “being-within.”

Dante’s Poetic Navigatio Vitae

It is against this hydrographic backdrop that the navigational compass found its way into poetry. In 1258, in an account of his stay in England, Brunetto Latini reported the discovery of the compass by the seafarers there—a discovery both wondrous and dangerous, possibly a tool of the devil. That the magnet could help reveal the secrets of creation without serving the devil’s interests was shown by Latini’s student, Dante Alighieri, by means of poetry. The locus classicus for the first poetic use of the compass is found in the Commedia, in canto XII of the Paradiso, in three lines that allude to the chants of the Franciscan Bonaventura, the pious author of Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (“Itinerary of the Mind to God”):

Del cor dell’una delle luci nove

si mosse voce, che l’ago alla stella

parer mi fece in volgermi al suo dove.

From the core of one of these new lights,

as the north star makes a compass needle veer,

rose a voice that made me turn to where it came from.⁵⁶

The Commedia lays out a poetic topography that could be described as a scholastic-theological variant of Aristotelian cosmology and its concentric spheres. (See figure 6.4.) Hell, in which no star shines, in which no heavenly pull can be felt, and where everything is fixed in place, stretches all the way to the center of the earth—the furthest place from God. Mount Purgatory rises from the sea-covered, and thus deserted, Southern Hemisphere. From here the ascent into the earthly paradise may begin before the entry into the spheres of planets and stars, after which the crystalline sphere and Empyrean Heaven finally dissolve space, time, and all efforts into light and bliss. There is nothing in the crystalline sphere that is not raised up in its “being-within” and enclosed by the Primum Mobile—the highest unity in the world, which adjoins the one and highest being of the Empyrean. This does not affect the earthly sphere in the sense of a cause or according to the laws of nature, but rather immediately, in the manner of light or magnetism. And the border between this outermost sphere and the Prime Mover is not spatial but an ontological border between the limited world and the limitless God.

Figure 6.4. Dante’s cosmography (Bruno Binggeli, *Primum mobile: Dantes Jenseitsreise und die moderne Kosmologie* (Zurich, 2006), 92

Within this cosmographic setting, Dante introduces the compass on different levels. In the opening events of the Commedia, in which technical, theological, and philosophical knowledge translate into one another, it appears in persona: the cum passare, the escort to the highest destination, first takes the form of Virgil, then Beatrice, and finally Bernard of Clairvaux. On this side of the Commedia’s topography, the earthly region is located. It is spherically organized and already aligned “north-up” to the polestar, which of course may only be located in a clear sky. On the gran mar dell’essere, on the “grand sea of being,” the normal occurrences of earthly obfuscation necessitate directions. For although everything and everyone are allocated their particular place, their propria essentie operatio (particular activity of an entity) remains decidedly in a sort of theological harbor finding. Just as the needle miraculously points to the polestar after having been coated with lodestone, the Prime Mover imbued torpid hearts with faith, hope, and love, and thus with an aspiration upward. Here on earth, we all find ourselves on a navigatio vitae. Hydrography therefore precedes the divine abrogation of all topography, and how we are guided here on earth determines our place in the hereafter—stuck forever in the place of suffering or on a vector of endless and blissful ascent.

Under these conditions, the journey described by Dante’s Ulisse in canto XXVI of the Inferno must come to an infernal end, for Ulisse does not know the enigma of true belief. Without a compass, he sets sail for the Atlantic, breaks open the circuit of the old periploi, and goes beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which for Dante still marked the boundary of Christian “being-within.” He follows the sun, heads first to the west, then turns to the south. In place of the polestar, a constellation of four stars appears. Instead of the hoped-for earthly paradise, Ulisse spots the highest of all mountains, and goes down in an abysmal undertow. What Dante already knows to be Mount Purgatory, Ulisse still believes to be a magnetic mountain. Certain of his fate in the approach of his own “lodestar” and helically ascending toward “the One,” Dante himself transcends all that is merely conventional and symbolic.

Ulisse too traverses a winding path, but it remains bound by the terrestrial, and thus describes not ascent, but rather a sort of determined aberration from mortality. The failure of spatial sublation corresponds to a breakdown on the level of the sign. Because Ulisse relies not on the directions to the One, but on the “polytropy” of conventional signs—on mendacious words and deceitful rhetoric—he lacks the ontological magnetism that holds order together. Therefore he finally ends up in the pull of the turbo, in a vortex of signs, which, in an act of God, devours both Ulisse and his ship in the sea of garbled being and meaning. Ulisse exceeds the sublunar ordo, but he does not transcend it. Still, such transcendence is the only end of all existence and of all writing, as long as it deals with paradise and thus with our trasumanar, our “moving beyond mere humanity.” To come closer to this “placeless” paradise and to provide it with poetic topoi, Dante relies on the media of hydrography.⁵⁷ He calls his work a legno, a wooden ship, which outstrips the segno, the definite sign. Thus, even against a theological backdrop, Dante’s epic outlines a kind of hydrographic poetics—a mode of writing in response to the challenges of navigation and nautical cartography.

The Commedia is not only a topically organized allegory, but a dynamic frame of reference that begins in an uncertain place (such as the dark forest of the first canto), and navigates, from point to point, per luogo etterno, “through an eternal realm.”⁵⁸ The narrated way becomes here the way of the narration; the cumpassare is at once metaphor and medium of transcendere; and art is no longer merely a handicraft, but something guided by genius or ingenio. It no longer merely follows a predetermined path. Instead, it continuously develops its own coordinates oriented toward a higher order. Yet this ingenio may merely be self-absorption and therefore pretension and hubris. Dante’s fictive words, his “parole fittizie”⁵⁹ and their fiction of not being fiction, but theological discourse, may themselves be seen as sharing an affinity with Ulisse’s deceitful speech. Thereby the signs of being may be read not as signs of the Creator, but as signs for their own sake and for the sake of their mortal author. In the end, Dante may well be the Ulisse of poetry, and poetry and seafaring just two aspects of one and the same transgression.

On the Edge of Modern Cartography

Like the instructions of the bussola- and portolan-guided navigation, the signs of Dante’s autopoietic course are neither merely natural nor completely artificial, neither primal nor purely deduced. They unleash the virtus fictiva (the fictive force and force of fiction) that the Commedia seeks to legitimize, in order to simultaneously presuppose it. Dante’s poetical compasso opens up or even builds a new world. And within a century of the Commedia, this nautical “construction” of a new world had moved into the realm of concentrated and institutionalized knowledge production. Unlike the Genoese brothers Guido and Ugolino Vivaldi, who disappeared on Africa’s west coast in 1291 and served as models for Dante’s Ulisse, the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator organized a systematic circumnavigation of Africa based on his legendary sailing academy in Sagres. In the steady feedback loop between continuously updated sea charts and the latest information from sea expeditions, he wanted to realize his geopolitical vision of regular oceanic sea trade and the conversion of pagans and Arabs, but further, the world was from then on to be developed “empirically.” And indeed, by the time of Bartolomeu Dias’s doubling of the southern cape in 1488, the old Ptolemaic “worldview,” according to which Africa could not be circumnavigated due to its connection to an unknown southern continent, had been overtaken. (See figure 6.5.) The future linkage of seafaring and sea trade based on the steady refinement of a general chart and general catalog can be described as the prototype of institutionalized occidental empirical knowledge.⁶⁰ It was already practiced in 1503 in the Portuguese Casa da Índia, followed by the Spanish Casa de Contratatión, and eventually, based on the Iberian models, by the English Royal Society. That the fabrication of this global topography did not occur seamlessly, however—that this new “worldview” contained a number of blind spots—is evidenced by numerous cartographic complications, fabulous historical accounts, and the modern poetics of the cast-up.

Figure 6.5. World map according to Ptolemy from Donnus Nicolaus Germanus, *Cosmographia* (1482) (http://cartanciennes.free.fr//maps/monde_ptolemee.jpg)

Gaspar Correa’s Lenda da India from the 1550s, for instance, adopts the style of imperial chronicles of seafaring and tells of Vasco da Gama’s definitive opening of the seaway that made stable trade possible with the East Indies, and thereby of Portugal’s rise as a maritime world power. Here the immense and decade-long endeavor to circumnavigate Africa’s southern cape is compressed into a dramatic storm at sea, in which da Gama’s convoy revolts and the failure of the whole venture looms. But the commander reacts promptly: he puts the mutineers in chains, gathers all the navigational instruments and charts, throws them overboard, and proclaims, “I do not require master nor pilot …, because God alone is the master and pilot.”⁶¹ As later comparisons with documents from da Gama’s voyages show, Correa indulges in a fabulous historical narrative. In reality, there was neither a great storm nor a dramatic mutiny. In Correa’s account, however, the historical figure of da Gama runs together with that of Bartolomeu Dias. Moreover, as the maritime sovereign by God’s grace who can count on God’s gubernatio even without charts or navigational instruments, da Gama appears as a pious and successful antitype to Dante’s Ulisse. He acts as a prototype of the “captain,” who would become indispensable to the command of the sea by Iberian, English, and Dutch naval powers. Nevertheless, Correa’s foundation myth was soon perverted by the seaman’s yarn spun all over the world: da Gama here seems to be the model of the accursed “Flying Dutchman,” who, like a Widergänger of Ulisse, is damned to a “transcendental homelessness,” an endless and directionless odyssey along the “Cape of Good Hope.”

This yarn emerged at the very moment that the end of all real aberrances was promised by the scientification of seafaring, as it has been undertaken since the seventeenth century particularly in England. Francis Bacon conceived his Great Instauration in direct opposition to Dante’s Ulisse. To him, the journey past the Pillars of Hercules was a duty rather than hubris. For in order to acquire “empirical knowledge,” one must push beyond the “round trips” in the well-known mare nostrum. While it may lead into the unknown and the darkness, such a “great journey” is guided by method and science, and can thus reckon with the perpetual discovery of New Worlds. Certi viæ nostræ sumus, certi sedis nostræ non sumus—“We are certain of our road, but not of our position”—thus read Bacon’s guiding maxim, which turned the direction of the compass, proven nautically and interpreted theologically by Dante, into the fundamental principle of “experimental science.”⁶² In this way, the compass came to serve as an emblem of the modern acquisition of power.

The more certain modernity became of its way, however, the more precarious its globalized system of orientation proved to be. From the outset, the great journeys confounded the old compasso. The portolan charts failed on longer ocean journeys because the rhumb lines could no longer be precisely located due to the curvature of the earth, so the distances led ships astray. The new “world picture” overwhelmed the old means of representation. The gridded world maps, made since the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia, could not simply fall back on older imaging processes. Especially the gridlike positioning based on longitude and latitude conformed to an entirely different set of principles than the old vectorial localization. Despite Pedro Nunes’s introduction of loxodromes and Gerhard Mercator’s development of the conformal cylinder projection, usable nautical representation was limited to small sections of the world and faltered the closer one came to the upper latitudes where the scale became increasingly distorted. Furthermore, it had been known since Columbus’s time that variation, the misleading angle between local magnetic and true geographic north, was stronger in some places and reversed in others. And the consequent revisions of geomagnetic hypotheses—from the assumption of a static axial or tilted dipole to that of a rotating or unconnected dipole ⁶³—could not thwart the further destabilization of the compasso. Alongside its declination, the compass needle’s “inclination,” its mutable tendency to point toward the center of the earth, and its temporal variability were discovered.⁶⁴ Around 1800, “deviation,” the fact that the compass needle was thrown off by the ship’s iron, was finally observed. To make matters worse, it was determined that the iron parts had a specific “magnetic signature” that could change anew with every route, according to its angle relative to the lines of force of the earth’s magnetic field.

Even when the new maps with their grids and projections suggested completeness and precision, expanded to the global scale, the compasso system of location and order ultimately had to surrender. Understanding the dynamic field of reference between a ship and its parts, compass needle and geomagnetism, to say nothing of controlling or balancing it, appeared to be an endless task. Cartographically, for example, the difficulties could be seen in the attempt to depict the polar regions. Since they had hardly been explored, one could only wonder what tidal conditions reigned there and how they might affect the world’s oceans. It was also unclear to what extent the magnetic North Pole coincided with the geographic North Pole, the location of which was in turn dependent on the compass, and, through the projective distortion in the polar regions, caused problems for cartographic representation. Even in 1861, Matthew Fontaine Maury, the father of modern oceanography, called the topo-, carto-, and hydrographically precarious polar region “a circle of mysteries,” to which we are not driven by empty curiosity, but by the desire “to comprehend the economy of our planet.”⁶⁵

The Odyssey in Modern Literature

Against this backdrop, narrative texts in the tradition of the Odyssey—recursions on Homer’s Odysseus, Dante’s Ulisse, or the Flying Dutchman—proliferated in the nineteenth century, all highlighting the collapse of nautical and narrative orientation. In Edgar Allen Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle” from 1833, for example, a cast-up protagonist finds himself once again aboard a Flying Dutchman, whose sea charts are long since out of date, but whose crew are determined to make their way to a polar whirlpool. The text ultimately opens itself to a topology of engulfment, which marks the limit of topographic representability. At long last, the narrative that is supposed to reach the reader as a message in a bottle from the “sirenlike” abyss of world knowledge is annotated by a short endnote: the text, it says, is only comprehensible with the help of Mercator’s enigmatic polar map. For on this map “the Pole itself” is “represented by a black rock, towering to a prodigious height” and, at the same time, by “the bowels of the earth”—as if the indescribable finds its “analogous” depiction in the legendary magnetic mountain and its “negative” depiction in the maw of the earth.⁶⁶ A glance at Mercator’s map makes the aporetic text comprehensible. (See figure 6.6.) Yet the map itself arose to depict the aporias of polar research. The ocean and its fatal pull, the pole and its enigmatic magnetism, and the map and its distorted projection all stand for one another in a kind of endless equation. And so, as though Poe wanted to plug one hole in knowledge with another, map and text stand for one another as well. Although the pole once more takes the form of a compasso on the circular map, it has become an unreachable and fathomless region of the world and of knowledge as such.

Figure 6.6. Detail from Gerhard Mercator’s world map (Gerhard Mercator, *Septentrionalium Terrarum descriptio*, VIII, Arktis, ([1595] 1634), taken from Roger Calcoen, *Le cartographe Gerard Mercator 1512–1594* (Brussels, 1994), 89)

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) represents a far-reaching recursion of Poe’s story, as well as of Dante’s canto XXVI and Homer’s epic. On the one hand, the novel depicts contemporary maritime practices and navigational technology with great precision (as is obvious in Melville’s explicit references to Maury); on the other hand, it pursues that very maelstrom that leads out of the topography and cartography of the modern disclosure of the world. Maury’s sea maps, for which he continually analyzed countless logbooks of whalers around 1850, record global appearances of whales in grids he indexed numerically and topographically. In light of this, Ahab’s “hunting instinct” is statistically underpinned—as the novel itself underscores in an extra footnote.⁶⁷ Yet he is absolutely possessed by The Whale, by an unprecedented example or unexampled precedent (beispielloses Beispiel) that at once incarnates and transcends its species and that therefore transgresses the field of statistical normality and deviation just as much as that of cartographic representation. The nearer the Pequod comes to him, the “less scientifically” it is piloted. Ahab destroys all navigational instruments, shirks the cartographic dispositif, and navigates vectorially—not to find Moby-Dick “down in any map,” but where he has always been, in “limitless, uncharted seas.”⁶⁸ If Moby-Dick exerts some kind of magnetic influence from outside, then, once again, external forces fundamentally transform the old Homeric nostos. But instead of Dante’s highest of mountains, there appears the greatest of all living creatures; that which wills the descent into the whirlpool or turbo is no longer that big Other by the name of God, but a blind will behind a screen of pure, almost polar “Whiteness.” If Ulisse’s end was observed from God’s perspective, then Ishmael now sees Ahab’s disappearance from within an immersive situation; and if Ulisse found his place posthumously in the topography of the Inferno, then Ahab, on his entropic trajectory, vanishes completely.

The shift, which is not just genre-poetological, but also historico-philosophical, from the nostos in the rounded cosmos to the “transcendental homelessness” and eternal wandering that Georg Lukács characterized as the shift from epic to novel, becomes most explicit in the maritime recursions of Homer’s Odyssey and in their dissolution of world pictures backed by cartography. In modern writing, this “chaodyssey,” or “chao-errance,” as Gilles Deleuze said, comes to pass apart from the sea. James Joyce understood Ulysses (1922) as his novelistic recursion of the Odyssey, and it picks up exactly where Odysseus’s “last” journey, as prophesied by Teiresias, falls out of its epic framework, or where Odysseus simply left out one of the many forks in his path: the passage through the Symplegades (which Joyce calls “the Wandering Rocks”), for instance. Ulysses unfolds a space of possibility of different modalities of being, and in so doing it experiments with endless organizational principles—the linguistic and the list, the topographic and the topological—among which cartography is merely one possibility. Joyce recurses here on Bérard’s toponymic work, and on his thesis that the Odyssean poet invents nothing, that everything narrated and all the methods of narration have a local character and are bound to a specific place.⁶⁹ While, for Bérard, the Phoenicians or the Greeks were a “polytropically” mixed race of traders and explorers with impure ethnic and linguistic origins, for Joyce, the same holds true of the places and words, the routes and roots, of the Irish. As Joyce knew from Giambattista Vico’s teachings of historico-cultural ricorso and his early-Enlightenment study of Homer, the question of the “real” Odysseus and the “true” Odyssey is a question of cunning. Once they are taken to sea and thus to their own edges, maps guide the way between the Scylla of sheer realistic perception and the Charybdis of purely imaginary interpretation. But to escape the shipwreck of poetry, the map and the text alike must undergo a continual sea change. When it wants to open itself to that which is beyond representation without going astray, cartographic writing must again take up Odysseus’s strategy of the cast-up and cunning hero. Or, as Ezra Pound tells us, it must assume Homer’s perspective of the “periplum”: “not as land looks on a map / but as sea bord seen by men sailing.”⁷⁰

Translated by E. A. Beeson

6 Muses of Cartography: Charting Odysseus from Homer to Joyce