Scavoir la carte: Allegorical maps and the cartographics of culture in seventeenth-century France.

Abstract

This study examines the proliferation of allegorical maps in seventeenth-century France following the publication of Madeleine de Scudery's Carte de Tendre in her enormously popular novel, Clelie (1654-60). These maps were produced in response to, or in imitation of, Scudery by authors like Francois d'Aubignac, Antoine Furetiere and Francois de Callieres. In a period in which the emergent discipline of geography served the monarchy's nationalist and colonialist policies, the allegorical maps of these authors dramatize the construction and negotiation of cultural boundaries. Through analyses of seventeenth-century atlases and treatises on geography, I show how the map's putative authority as a document of truth derives, like power itself, from the erasure of its conditions of production: in the seventeenth century, cartographers eliminated the mimetic symbols characteristic of landscape painting which registered visually the heterogeneous itineraries of travelers and facilitated the map's totalizing--and impossible--view from above. Through close readings of the allegorical maps, and the novels and stories in which they appear, I argue that these authors appropriate the language of cartography metaphorically in order to delineate textual spaces of debate in which to challenge or defend the representational strategies used by the crown to chart the symbolic and geographic boundaries of its authority. Scudery's Carte de Tendre, for instance, problematizes cartography's rationalist epistemology and associates it with the production of oppressive social narratives; by charting the digressive structure of her novel in the form of a map, Scudery challenges the rules of n arrative linearity, which underlie both cultural and literary standards. In his Carte du Royaume de Coquetterie, by contrast, Francois d'Aubignac attacks Scudery's intentionally polysemous cartographic allegory and rescripts it as an apparently monovocal invitation to sexual license. In each of the maps discussed here, the ideological deployment of topo-graphic/topo-logic spaces of interiority is related to issues of semiotic control in the context of allegory's potentially boundless production of meaning.