MAPS AND MODERNITY

Towards the end of Sebald's third major prose text, The Rings of Saturn, the narrator arrives at the abandoned Cold War weapons research facility at Orfordness. He includes a map of the area that is produced by the Ordnance Survey, the official mapping agency of Great Britain (RS 232/277). The narrator's interest in the map primarily concerns the fact that it bears absolutely no traces of the military installation, which was, as Sebald's narrative states, shrouded in official secrecy, giving rise to all sorts of conspiracy theories which the opening of the relevant archives failed to lay to rest (RS 231–3/276). Indeed, the very logic of conspiracy theories means that the opening of the files led merely to further conspiracy theories about the suppression or removal of archival material before access was granted, and the fact that the Orfordness base is still absent from OS maps gives little cause to abandon such conjecture.

This absence immediately alerts us to the overt connection between archives and state power that we have seen elsewhere in this study. But beyond this, it also alerts us to the political aspects of cartographic rhetoric. As J. B. Harley has argued, maps are intentional structures that embody social values and power relationships, even though Western cartography seeks to disguise this by conceiving of itself as a scientific exercise involving the development and application of technical procedures in the service of a positivist epistemology (1992).