The Perils of Literality

On reading a deeply flawed essay, I am stunned that it could ever have passed peer review. (How stunned am I? I now have the mental capacity of a concussed bee.)

update 8 January 23: I’ve made a few small corrections, I also need to note the existence of another article in an earlier issue of Cartographica by the same author (Simon 2017). This earlier essay is not as flawed as the article discussed in this post, but it is certainly a paper that lacks an argument and intellectual significance.

Prompted by a recent email notifying me that the more recent issues of Cartographica are available online, I went online to look at some essays. In the process I encountered an essay in the Spring 2022 issue that I hope is a really clever and sustained April Fool’s Day joke. Somebody really committed! Alas, I don’t think it is, and I am utterly gobsmacked that this deeply flawed essay ever passed peer review.

The Essay

The essay in question is Zoltan A. Simon, “Robinson Crusoe’s Travels on Maps from Costa Rica to Russia,” Cartographica 57, no. 1 (2022): 80–108. I have been interested in the maps included in Daniel Defoe’s three Crusoe books (1719–20) ever since the late J. H. Andrews (2001, 7) used Crusoe in a thought experiment that exemplified the individualistic preconception of the ideal of cartography, and I accordingly took exception to Andrews’ ideas (Edney 2005, 8–12; Edney 2019, 65). I was therefore immediately intrigued by what this essay was about.

The author is a literalist. That is, texts are read only for their surficial meaning and the context for interpreting those texts relates only to their overt content. This is an attitude surprisingly common among map scholars, for whom a map is a map is a map; things like politics and culture are simply irrelevant to the question of how best to show the earth’s surface.

Why do I characterize the author this way? Because, contrary to every commentator since the early eighteenth century (Adams 1962, 1983), the author reads Defoe’s conceit literally. For this author, Robinson Crusoe was not a fictional device but a completely real person, who sailed the oceans in around 1700, who made the maps that were included in the books, and whose memoirs were only edited by Defoe for publication. The author also identifies the exact island where Crusoe was marooned. Such a remarkable argument requires powerful proof; unfortunately, what the author provides is a maze of self-reinforcing circular logic and unsupported presuppositions.

Consider the opening paragraph:

The first edition of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner...Written by Himself and edited by Daniel Defoe was entered in the Stationers’ Register in London as of 23 April 1719 and published on 25 April. The author’s handwritten manuscript for Robinson Crusoe is lost, unlike Defoe’s many other manuscripts. The real author probably requested him to return it after the editing or printing. The sequel, entitled The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, appeared on 20 August. Defoe would have been unable to write two books within a few months’ time. Defoe implies that the book was really written by a man named Robinson Crusoe, and that he was only the editor of the manuscript (Trumbull 1965, xxx). Defoe repeatedly denied the authorship of the book. He was likely pressed to make that statement, since Crusoe was still alive in 1719, as he admitted. Besides, no author would deny that he had written a bestseller. (Simon 2022, 80–81)

This statement reveals a profound lack of understanding not only of the nature of writing but also of publishing and of the ownership of published works in early modern Britain. And, there are NO citations to any works that support the statements: where, for example, are all the manuscripts that survive from Defoe (the literary scholars who debate the attribution of works to Defoe would love to know!) and how does one know that Defoe could not write quickly? Ultimately, the author mistakes the literary voice as a literal voice.

The author goes through an opportunistic array of maps to identify the actual island where Crusoe was first shipwrecked, and then traces Crusoe’s arduous circumnavigation (in the second volume) on a number of other maps that the author happens to know. There is no systematic evaluation of the relevant cartographic record. The key analytical method is simply visual comparison: if it looks like, it must be like, a principle that has long been disputed (Skelton 1965). The author concludes with the matter of treasure maps (never a real thing) and concludes by arguing that Robert Louis Stevenson did not imagine “Treasure Island” and create a map of a fictional place as a diversion—“but no child could have drawn that map,” he claimed with absolutely no evidence—but inherited it from Crusoe’s own depictions of his own island.

The Peer Review Process

I am aghast that this essay passed successfully through the peer review process. It is full of problems, each and every one of which should have precluded publication:

• it rests on repeated assertions that are unsupported by actual evidence, other than presuppositions based on whatever the author wants to believe.

• there is no overall argument.

• it cites as authoritative works and authors who are irrelevant and by no means authoritative.

• it is overly literal and as such is unable to adduce any relevant contextual material.

• it does not explain why Crusoe was real, contrary to three centuries of recognition that Crusoe was a fictional character.

• there is no engagement with recent literature on Defoe. With the brief exception of a 1989 book on Defoe (cited as 1992) by a scholar whose other work I know and trust, only pre-1930 works are cited and it is unclear that the author appreciates the significance of the works he does cite re Defoe. The evidence of the literary works seems instead to have been cherry picked.

• it rests on an incoherent corpus of maps that supposedly show the information Crusoe collected from his travels, all gathered opportunistically from online sources; there is no systematic analysis of the map evidence.

• the selection of sources, primary and secondary, appear to all be as available online and therefore evidently excludes any other sources and systematic engagement that might, possibly, be relevant and appropriate.

• instead, the essay adduces irrelevant evidence about other voyages, modern maps reconstructing Crusoe’s travels (why not use the map of those travels provided in the second volume of Crusoe’s travels?), and the environment of Crusoe’s island (climate, geology, plant life), all seen through the lens of modern expectations.

• one of the maps that is reproduced—a supposed treasure map of the island, supposedly drawn in 1820—is a) from an unknown source and authority and b) completely illegible even on the uncurated website from which it was taken; there is absolutely no way to say that this map is in any way what it is purported to be.

And my favorite (if that’s the word for permitting such a mind-boggling thing):

• the author cites as a source the original submission of the essay to the journal, described as a “preprint” and posted on academia.edu. I can accept self-citation (heck, I do it all the time), but citing the version of the paper as originally submitted within the paper as published is a betrayal of the entire concept of peer review. The fact that the actual citation refers to the photographs included in the submitted paper of Crusoe’s fortified cave as it still supposedly exists on this one island is beside the point.

What truly horrifies me—what insults and distresses me, viscerally and painfully—is that the editors of Cartographica, and whoever they got to review the essay, think that this article is good history, or even just good. The essay is a travesty of logic, of history, of intellectual practice. I am serious. This is not a good essay, in that it does not meet basic academic standards, and if the editors think that this is good enough to publish, then their opinion of map history is clearly very low, indeed.

I can forgive much, knowing how publication systems work, and how easy it is for systems to fail. I was reminded in a meeting earlier today that one should not ascribe to malice or conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence. I do not think that the appearance of this essay in the pages of Cartographica, a journal with an honorable history of innovative and provocative essays, was an act of malice. Its appearance is, however, an outstanding example of incompetence. I don’t blame the author; he’s clearly telling his truth as he sees it. The issue is that he has not had the training nor, it seems, the access to paywalled academic resources needed to appreciate the inadequacy of a strictly literal reading of the source materials he can access. But everyone within the hallowed halls of academia who were involved in reviewing and approving and editing this essay for publication in a journal that claims academic rigor should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

Adams, Percy G. 1962. Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 1983. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.

Andrews, J. H. 2001. “Introduction: Meaning, Knowledge, and Power in the Map Philosophy of J. B. Harley.” In J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton, 1–32. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Edney, Matthew H. 2005. “The Origins and Development of J. B. Harley’s Cartographic Theories.” Cartographica 40, no. 1–2: Monograph 54.

———. 2019. Cartography: The Ideal and Its History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Novak, Maximillian E. 1996. “The Defoe Canon: Attribution and De-Attribution.” Huntington Library Quarterly 59, no. 1: 83–104.

———. 2001. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Simon, Zoltan A. 2017. “Secrets of South Asia from Fra Mauro (1459) to Later Maps.” Cartographica 52, no. 3: 263–87.

———. 2022. “Robinson Crusoe’s Travels on Maps from Costa Rica to Russia,” Cartographica 57, no. 1: 80–108.

Skelton, R. A. 1965. Looking at an Early Map: The Annual Public Lecture on Books and Bibliography, University of Kansas, October 1962. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.