The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature by Cóilín Parsons

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature by Cóilín Parsons Kiron Ward (bio) THE ORDNANCE SURVEY AND MODERN IRISH LITERATURE, by Cóilín Parsons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xiv + 247 pp. $90.00. In popular British usage, the term "ordnance" bears little of the resonance of its full meaning. Offer the word to anyone who has been through primary-school geography lessons, and the response will be "survey?" The words collocate in a memory of poorly photocopied maps layered densely with once-memorized symbols, connoting none of the deadly heft of the phrases like "ordnance and artillery," "unexploded ordnance," or "Massive Ordnance Air Blast." One of the many things that Cóilín Parsons's compelling monograph on the relationship between the British "Ordnance Survey" and Irish literature does is to reassert that meaning—to make visible the implied violence of the "Ordnance Survey," the British Army's Board of Ordnance's project for mapping British territories, which began in the late eighteenth century and was brought to Ireland in 1824, in the shadow of the 1800 Act of Union. As Parsons clarifies, this is not to say that the Ordnance Survey of Ireland was "at bottom a military exercise," but to affirm that "it was also, indisputably, an exercise in colonial management—an effort to gather information to allow the effective [End Page 207] control and administration of the colony" (12). The Ordnance Survey, for Parsons, is a technology that at once rationalizes the local while abstracting it into the national—and by understanding this "defining point in the cultural history of Ireland" as a "signal modern project," he is able to outline a story about the emergence of Irish modernity that sees the continuity between its different "expressive dimensions," to borrow Susan Stanford Friedman's phrase (2).1 In this, Parsons's narrative of "the emergence of modernist form" in Ireland casts the Ordnance Survey as nothing less than an "originary point" for the period's literary modernism, and the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Revivals that appeared were its supposed antitheses (2, 34); indeed, Parsons's study offers a richly sourced elaboration of Terence Brown's contention that the Revivals were "contiguous with modernism rather than merely concurrent."2 Parsons's argument appears in three sections. First, "Archives" pairs studies of two nineteenth-century writers whose work was shaped by the Survey: John O'Donovan, a little-examined but prolific writer of letters while employed by the Survey, and James Clarence Mangan, whose poetry he reads as coexisting dialectically with the Survey's archive. Parsons finds in O'Donovan's letters a narration of the Survey's attempts "to recover and preserve the meanings embedded in the landscape, to turn memory into history, and to allow for the rationalization of the national space," thus creating an archive that "oscillates between a Foucaultian absolutism and a Derridean ambivalence," which Mangan goes on to respond to in his poetry by producing an anti-archival and anarchic "anarchive" (38). These studies frame the following section, "Scales," in which Parsons pairs chapters on the arch-Revivalist John Millington Synge's The Aran Islands and Joyce's Ulysses.3 Both Synge and Joyce, he contends, are in dialogue with the Survey's attempts "to account for local scale in an increasingly non-localized world" (39), and while, for the former, the effort is reparative, for the latter, it is part of an ironic encyclopedism. In the study's final section, Parsons turns to Samuel Beckett's abstract landscapes in his pre- and post-war fiction, which he posits as "the logical conclusion of a story about the Survey's efforts to represent a rapidly changing landscape of modernity, recovering meaning even as it is being destroyed" (39). There is a lot throughout Parsons's study that will be of interest to Joyceans working to reframe or reappraise the historical and literary contexts of his work. That said, his chapter on scale in Ulysses is of particular note. Parsons argues that Ulysses's "experimentation with scale is its most direct engagement with the concerns of the Ordnance Survey," focusing specifically on "Wandering Rocks" and "Ithaca" (157). Through deft...