Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel

2. Islands and Maps: A Very Short History

29 Spaces are constantly in the process of production. They are thus characterized by change, substitution, and replacement. However, as Lefebvre reminds us, spaces never disappear: they leave traces behind. A space like the forest is crisscrossed by traces, from the paths that are trod upon in order to traverse it, whether trails through pastures, footpaths, or merchant routes, which link up glades, springs, and inns; islands are loaded with mythology, colonization practices, marked as safe ports, or stepping stones in a commercial route. All of these spaces are imprinted with values of safety, riches, danger, and adventure, added on to the series of cultural build-up that they support. Space is dialectical. It is result and cause, product and producer, but, most importantly, it is a stake: “the locus of projects and actions deployed as part of specific strategies, and hence also the object of wagers on the future—wagers which are articulated, if never completed.”1 In the movement from continental space to the sea, the experience of the space of the Mediterranean must be thought of as the object of such speculation. Before being traversed by sails and routes, the Mediterranean was for the longest time an obstacle. Navigation worthy of the name, writes Fernand Braudel, only occurred before the second half of the third millennium b.c. with Egyptian travels to Byblos or, more accurately, with the rising popularity of sailboats in the Cyclades in the second millennium, boats that, 2 QW Islands and maps A Very Short History So Geographers, in Afric-maps, With Savage-pictures filled their gaps; And o’er unhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns. —j. swift, On Poetry 30 Islands and Maps provided with a keel, were able to find a way to root themselves in the waters.2 Fear of the sea was not only a reminder to use common sense, but a serious philosophical question.3 One can even hypothesize that sea travel was possible among these islands because, at all times, at least one of them was in sight. In this sense, the sailor was never really engulfed, empelagado, or engolfé, as Spanish and French put it. In fact, throughout the sixteenthcentury , ocean travel was still a feat, one that was only attempted when a profitable result was sure to come of it. Even though the compass was available from the twelfth century on, it was not generally used in the Mediterranean , where travel generally consisted of small mercantile trips, buying here, selling there.4 What the sailor could not afford to lose sight of was the shoreline, the limit of what constituted the access to stability, to safety, to the reliability of land. For it is the sea that sets limits to the land; or, as Strabo put it, it is the sea that “shapes and defines the land,” emphasizing the inscriptionary gesture in the Greek word geographei.5 This limit line, the reality of which anyone can witness in the trace of sea foam left on the beach by an ebbing wave, becomes in the process of being imagined or abstracted the primary cartographic gesture. I suggested in the first chapter a series of relationships between spaces of the material world and spaces of fiction, their interaction and mutual influence . Any reflection on space, however, would not be complete without the perspective granted by cartography, which I have only gestured at until now. Cartography is relevant here not only in relation to discourses on or about space. It has a direct relationship with the development of the romance. In the pages that follow, I consider some lines in the development of cartography especially from the twelfth century on, in order to arrive at a particular cartographic genre that disembarks, as does the book of chivalry in Spain, on an island. As another manner of interpreting the imaginary, maps focus on insular geographies as the fifteenth century draws closer. Marvelous, palimpsestic, insular cartographies will allow for a theory of islands in which both cartography and narration serve as mirrors of the world. The limit traced by the map was in ancient thought bound together in one single notion, that of peirar, which designated simultaneously the boundary of limit, the distant, and the shoreline or coast surrounding an Islands and Maps 31 island, especially in the context of the image of the island-earth surrounded by the Ocean.6 A line drawn on the...