Defoe and the London Wall: Mapped Perspectives

Defoe and the London Wall: Mapped Perspectives Edward Copeland He read now like a man walking along a street might count the cracks in the pavement to the last and final page, the last and final word.1 William Faulkner, Light in August Space in Defoe's London is admittedly hard to describe. "What does he actually show us?" Samuel Monk asks, and answers his own question: "Nothing."2 Max Byrd agrees. ForByrd, Defoe's London remains "abstract civic space," "somehow two-dimensional, an abstract environment, so to speak, without colors or smells or windows and doors."3 If we grant Monk and Byrd their frustration in describing the quality of space in Defoe's works, the question still has to be asked—what precisely does "abstract civic space" look like? How do we experience space in a Defoe novel when the cues we expect to find, those of Hogarth and Dickens, are not given us? Or perhaps a question that is more to the point, what are the cues that are given us in place of the ones we expect? 1 William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 112. 2 Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life ofthe Truly Honourable Col Jacque, commonly Call'd Col. Jack, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. xix. 3 Max Byrd, London Transformed: Images ofthe City in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 13. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 4, July 1998 408 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Critics who find that Defoe has no "eye" generally cite a particular kind of passage to demonstrate it, the lists of street names that he uses to describe the escape routes of criminal protagonists such as Moll Flanders or Colonel Jack. I would like to turn the tables and suggest that these lists of street names hold the key to a rival tradition for visualizing urban life, one that fits Defoe's culture and generation, and one that may well be unfamiliar to us, since it belongs to late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century practices of northern European map reading and map production.4 Maps in any era occupy a privileged position determined by their selfpromoting claims to offer information in a straightforward and unproblematic manner.5 In fact, of course, maps never come to their viewers as pure and transparent bearers of information at all, but they bring, unannounced, three highly problematic complications. First, maps are phenomenological artefacts—that is, they are themselves visual images that cause readers to believe they are having other visual images, like those stripmaps that prime us, with their little forest icons, picnic tables, and filling-station pumps, for the dubious joys of the family car trip.6 Second, they are fictions, but fictions produced from a particular union of visual images and written text. Third, they are rhetorical texts—that is, they have a point to make. A comparison of "street" passages in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939)7 and Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722)8 reveals differences in the cognitive operations expected from early eighteenth-century map readers and map readers in our own era. In the familiar passage in which Moll 4 I am indebted to Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1983), for her discussion of the relation ofDutch mapmaking to the representation of urban space in Dutch art. References are to this edition. Maximillian E. Novak, in a recent essay, "Picturing the Thing Itself, or Not: Defoe, Painting, Prose Fiction, and the Arts of Describing," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9:1 (1996), cites Alpers, as well, for suggesting connections that link Dutch art to Defoe's "sense of scene, his sense of the visual" (pp. 2, 5). 5 John Pickles, "Texts, Hermeneutics and Propaganda Maps," Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of the Landscape, ed. Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 194. 6 Daniel Dennett, "Two Approaches to Mental Images," Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Montgomery, Vt.: Bradford Books, 1978), cited by Ellen J. Esrock, The Reader...