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most literal manifestation of such an impulse and its most infinitely
varying expression . The map can be found, metaphorically, in every
area of American life , from nonfictional documents to the grids and
parameters of contemporary art. It exemplifies that union of art and
science , fantasy and fact , which characterizes the ontological con–
tours of American life; it is both image and process, a means of
structuring, moving through, and thus mastering time and space .
The map promises that sheer possession of information which is seen
as, and sometimes is, constitutive of power and mastery itself. (It is
important , of course, not to confuse possession of information with
possession of truth, nor is the efficacy of the one dependent upon the
other. Early maps of the Americas were notoriously inaccurate, but
the urge to label and thus to shrink blank areas served to stave off the
anxiety of disorientation. This is, perhaps, the kind of comfort once
afforded by the medieval appellation "There Be Monsters" that
covered large areas of those strangely assertive early European
maps .) The map represents the epitome of the empirical mind at
work, fashioning a world made to its own measure . It is fitting that
this American icon should so conspicuously lack the charged aura of
the images enumerated earlier; for the matter-of-factness of the map
mirrors precisely that dispassionate state of mind which invariably
accompanies the acquisition and exercise of immense power.
My
imagination, it would seem, has its own geography.
-Mark
Tobey
In 1780 Thomas Jefferson, then governor of Virginia, received
a request from abroad for a detailed sketch of his native state. In the
resulting manuscript,
Notes on the State of Virginia,
Jefferson set out to
provide a comprehensive overview of the state's topography, mineral
wealth, laws , customs, and "infinitude of plants and flowers ." What
he actually depicts , however, is an emerging sense of estrangement,
of remoteness from the Old World, of experience in the New World
which is ultimately
incommunicable.
Cataloguing the state's botanical
forms, for example , necessitates "adding the Linnaean to the popu–
lar names, as the latter might not convey precise information to a
foreigner" ; further on, he finds it impossible to reconcile "our own
knowledge, derived from daily sight" with "European appellations
and descriptions" that have no meaning in the New World . Finally,
Jefferson furnishes what might be termed a paradigm of such dis-
