Reading as Mapping: Max Yeh's The Beginning of the East

Despite all the critical and media attention generated by most novels which grappled with the issues swirling around the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyages, Max Yeh's 1992 novel The Beginning of the East somehow slipped by relatively unnoticed. Yet Yeh's novel presents a critical, quirky reading of Columbus's logs by tracing a fascinating imaginative voyage, one filtered through the consciousness of a cartographer who struggles to understand the historical causes of imperialism and their continuing reverberations in the present. Columbus might have been "sure that this was China, the beginning of the east" (Yeh 72), but Yeh's novel shows the folly, and impossibility, of such surety. This does not mean, of course, that one should ever stop asking questions; in fact, it is in the questions that the narrator--and Yeh--ask that this novel annexes concerns and issues shared by contemporary ethnography. For example, James Clifford points out how the publication in 1967 of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski's diaries, a disturbingly subjective account of Malinowski's field work, forever upset the "apple cart" of anthropology: "Henceforth an implicit mark of interrogation was placed beside any overly confident and consistent ethnographic voice. What desires and confusions was it smoothing over? How was its `objectivity' textually constructed?" (14). Yeh's novel places such marks of interrogation beside all of the interwoven texts it maps, from press accounts of the international oil market to Columbus's logs. Here I explore intersections between Yeh's novel and theories of cartography, postcoloniality and postmodernism, making manifest connections already latent in Yeh's complex palimpsest of narratives. In this way we see not only the rich density of Yeh's work, but also important concerns shared by these seemingly disparate theoretical approaches. For example, in its emphasis on mapping, and because the cartographer interrogates maps alongside other embedded texts, Yeh's novel shares with other fictional and theoretical investigations of the post-colonial response a fascination with the possibility or necessity of remapping terrain once violently appropriated by an other. This fascination with the figure of the map is due in part to the fact that "as much as guns and warships, maps have been the weapons of imperialism" (Harley "Maps, Power and Knowledge" 282). Historically, maps, at least in a European context, looked forward to and projected empire; for example, maps were important components of imperial proclamations, serving as figurative claims to lands not yet literally occupied. In turn, maps of new lands far across the then-known world were used to authorize the new holdings, to prove the extent and power of the empire.(1) Contemporary theorists of cartography, notably the late J. Brian Harley, have emphasized the role of maps as instruments of empire by maintaining that maps are socially constructed images, "manipulated forms of knowledge," which have in fact helped to shape or construct the very geographical features which they claim to represent (277). This knowledge is of course linked to power, for both the content (what is mapped) and the representational style used in the mapping procedures are specific to "a way of conceiving, articulating, and structuring the human world which is biased toward, promoted by, and exerts influence upon particular sets of social relations" (Harley 278).(2) As Harley suggests, viewing maps as constructed and manipulated images allows us to ask new questions about maps: to explore how maps are products of specific circumstances of authorship and audience (made for whom by whom for what purpose), and to investigate how maps intersect with political agendas. By asking such questions, we can see that maps not only serve as an emblem for the administration of colonial power (both, after all, attempt to order and control geographic space), but also open up the possibility of exposing the extreme effort needed to order this space, and the ultimate failure of doing so definitively. …