“Regardless of the late hour and the setting sun, we will have an hour’s rest up by the little cabin; for in front of us, a green, but not all too steep slope of vertiginous depth extends itself between the dark woods, lonely at the top and below covered with hundreds of little houses, and at the very bottom—a tip of Lake Lucerne, embedded in a veritable maze of defiant alpine mountains thrust into each other in a chaotic jumble. This is not a ‘view,’ it is more than that: it is a landscape, in fact a landscape that only the imagination of a Leonardo da Vinci could dream of.”1 This passage was penned by Carl Spitteler, the almost forgotten Swiss Nobel laureate in literature (1919). His novella “Xaver Z’Gilgen” is a telling example of a continuously growing anthology of literary accounts across several centuries, which is still a work in progress and mostly involves a specific area, the region of Lake Lucerne / Gotthard in the heart of Switzerland. It would be no exaggeration to say that the Lake Lucerne and Gotthard region deserves the designation of a gravitational center or crossroads on the European map of literature.2
From the very first legends and chronicles of the early modern era to contemporary novels, hundreds of fictional texts have featured the rocky and at the same time very charming landscape between Lucerne in the north and the Gotthard Heights in the south as their setting. What makes this collection of texts particularly striking is the mixture of authors that are regionally “embedded” (e.g., Heinrich Federer, Josef Maria Camenzind) or accomplished Swiss ones (Gotthelf, Keller, Inglin, Spitteler, Walser, Frisch, among others) as well as foreign writers of international standing (Goethe, Schiller, Hesse, Strindberg, Scott, Twain, Cooper, D. H. Lawrence, Tolstoy, Dumas (the elder), and Flaubert, just to name a few). They all describe the Lake Lucerne and Gotthard region in distinct literary genres, and some make it the backdrop of their work.
From the perspective of literary analysis, how do you approach such a “literary landscape”? Interest in this phenomenon is not new, as an almost unmanageable number of studies, anthologies, collections of essays, and even travel guides for such hauts-lieux of literature attests. In more recent times, however, a series of productive scholarly approaches have been devised or refined. These approaches seem highly promising and at the same time they exhibit a number of similarities. Geocriticism, geopoetics, literary geography—each of them deals, under a different label, with literary texts that refer to an existing landscape, region, or city.3
To this end, I have developed my own research under the already existing banner of literary geography, a field that, as I will show, has a long tradition and in some (but not all) instances entertains close relations with literary cartography. Put simply, a clear line between both expressions can be drawn by differentiating between object and method: what is of interest is the geography of literature, which in turn implies the use of cartographic instruments.
The majority of literary-cartographic approaches have as a common denominator their concern with the interactions between fictional spaces and real spaces, sometimes also called geospace or first space, the latter according to the terminology of Edward Soja. This has already been the object of extensive thinking in (human) geography, literary theory, and philosophy. After all, we are talking about an issue of ontological dimensions: Is it even admissible to assume that there are (spatial) references between fictional worlds and our real world(s)? A significant number of publications have dealt with exactly that question and hence with a major controversial point of literary cartography.4 Within the limited space of this chapter, however, I will just note that it is quite inspiring and thought-provoking to deal with possible interactions and overlays of fictional and real worlds instead of completely denying such interfaces. Literary cartography aims at making these spaces visible in their fascinating intermediate status between reality and fiction.
The sublime landscape of Lake Lucerne and Gotthard mentioned above forms the focal point of a first illustrative study: it is about gauging opportunities to explore a section of first space in its entire literary richness. Figure 2.1 shows a selection of 150 fictional texts written between 1477 and 2005 with their settings drawn onto a topographic map of the region. Where the setting is rather clearly locatable, one can find a point symbol on the map. For settings with a vague reference toward geospace the ellipsoid symbol has been chosen to mark a “zonal location.” Looking at the map one can quickly get an overview—about gravitational centers (Lucerne, Schwyz, Lake Uri, Gotthard) and unwritten areas. In other words, the literary layer of that region, previously invisible, suddenly becomes visible. Furthermore, the map deals with degrees of reference. How meticulously does a fictional text refer to the given section in real space—mimetically or rather in a defamiliarizing way, superimposing and thereby redefining and shifting fictive and existing elements? In this context, I have compiled one of the results under the designation “strong landscape.” The bulk of these texts refer topographically and toponymically in a precise manner to Lake Lucerne and Gotthard (orange points and ellipses). Only a few exceptions, marked in violet, invent settings or transform parts of the landscape. A revealing example is Walter Scott’s novel Anne of Geierstein, or The Maiden of the Mist (1829), which makes use of the area around Lake Lucerne in a fairly accurate way. But at one point a fictitious gothic castle is inserted in the landscape. This is a classic literary-geographic move: adding a nonexistent element to an existing territory to create a suitable setting for a fictional scene.
Further visualized aspects on other maps in that study include settings connected to famous plots or even myths. Some of these plots might be so dominant that they literally “block” other storylines or motifs. In other words, contemporary or later writers avoid those spots, already marked. The Wilhelm Tell material, the Swiss liberation saga, stands out as such an exclusive topography. It is an interesting fact that certain Tell settings around the lake and in the mountains only lend themselves to this particular literary plot and apart from that are not used (or cannot be used) for any other storyline. The Rütli, a meadow surrounded by trees, is a scene that is monosemanticized to the extent that it seems exclusively reserved for the theme of the Tell legend and the liberation saga, something that also applies to the Hohle Gasse (the narrow pass close to Mount Rigi, where, according to the legend, Wilhelm Tell killed his enemy Gessler with a single arrow). An “overwriting” of the Tell topography with a love story or thriller generally seems avoided at all costs. To sum up, literary landscapes, the way they should be understood here, are actual existing places and regions that have become objects of (narrative) literature: as a setting, a backdrop, sometimes carrying a story, in some cases limited to a specific historical moment, in other cases used diachronically throughout a succession of decades and centuries up to the present.
Needless to say, literary landscapes and urban topographies that are exceedingly rich in detail can never achieve bibliographical completeness. Hence the visualization will always remain partial. Accordingly, we must acknowledge an undeniable feature of literary cartography: a different choice of texts and/or different parameters of analysis would have yielded different maps. One of the major challenges for literary cartography is indeed to cope in a productive way with numerous uncertainties. These range from the unavoidable incompleteness of the primary sources (with respect to a certain landscape or region) to the individual reading of the text that clearly differs from expert to expert, to name just two seemingly problematic aspects. Against this background, literary cartography and its output, the maps, should not be expected to deliver precise, reproducible results. Moreover, while literary cartography joins forces with the technical science of cartography, it is common knowledge that maps can no longer be regarded as reliable, unambiguous, and true depictions of facts. Under the rubric of “critical cartography,” scholars such as J. B. Harley, Denis Cosgrove, Denis Wood, and Jeremy Crampton have from various angles shown that maps by no means simply reproduce “reality,” but that their representational strategies are pervaded by at times overt, at times hidden political agendas and ideologies.
In other words, literary maps, as presented here, do visualize spatial aspects of fiction, but they themselves contain fictional elements. They are the product of selections, omissions, and interpretations, but as an analytic method literary cartography can nevertheless reveal unknown aspects of texts or unexpected patterns of a literary landscape. But maps that enable such discoveries should rather be seen as sources of inspiration, as a starting point for further research, not as its endpoint.
A Literary Atlas of Europe: Development of a Prototype (2006–2014)
Literary geography and cartography are anything but new inventions. In fact, they can look back on a hundred-year history. But systematic attempts to chronicle this field have just begun to get underway.5 The visualizations generated in literary cartography range from handcrafted collages with artistic pretensions to high-tech data models. In recent years the situation has changed fundamentally. Although there have been database-supported literary research projects employing digital maps since the 1990s (most of these projects have not been developed any further),6 it is digital and animated cartography, the alliance of the humanities and data technology, that have opened endless possibilities, especially after Web 2.0. To name a few, “Mapping the Lakes,”7 “Mapping St. Petersburg: Experiments in Literary Cartography,”8 “The Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922–1949,”9 “Mapping Emotions in Victorian London,”10 as well as “A Cultural Atlas of Australia: Mediated Spaces in Theatre, Film, and Literature”11 all demonstrate that the interest in mapping fiction is vivid and widespread. Last but not least, tools such as Google Lit Trips12 and participatory Internet services such as “Pinbooks.de,” (Dein Buch zur Stadt/Your Book to the City), which allow readers to locate books and their settings geographically, serve the wider popularization of the concept.13 Another joint project is “A Literary Map of Manhattan,” on which readers of the New York Times have entered their favorite books.14 One thing is clear: literary cartography has become a truly interdisciplinary challenge. Real progress can only be made if cartography and IT experts are included in these endeavors. That was precisely the case with “A Literary Atlas of Europe.”
The reflections presented here have grown out of several years’ work on the research project “A Literary Atlas of Europe,” which was anchored at the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation at the ETH Zürich between 2006 and 2014 (with research partners at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen and the Charles University in Prague). “A Literary Atlas of Europe” was launched and designed by the author of this chapter.15 The collaboration included experts in literary studies, cartography, graphic design, and IT solutions. We developed a prototype of an interactive database-supported literary atlas that incorporated the autonomy of literary space in an appropriate manner and that produced numerous visualizations.16
Three literarily imbued model regions of a highly divergent character formed the starting point of the “Literary Atlas of Europe”: Prague as an urban space, North Friesland as a coastal and border region, and the region of Lake Lucerne / Gotthard, introduced above, as a mountainous landscape. In a first step, we collected fictions (using “fiction” in a narrow sense of the word, hence novels, short novels, short stories, legends, etc.) and referenced them bibliographically. The corpus consisted of narrative texts set in the named regions from around 1750 to the immediate present. To study the three model regions accurately, to portray them cartographically, and subsequently to compare them using literary-geography parameters, we developed a database that specifically targeted these objectives. At the same time, we developed an extensive online-input form that allows for intuitive data entry by literary scholars. The locations of the action are sketched onto the map and described thematically along with annotations of various attributes.
Obviously this presupposes an a priori close reading by the literary scholar applying every trick of the trade. Concerning the parameters like localization, for example, one might reasonably ask: Are the settings localizable, are they just zonally localizable, or is their position entirely indeterminable? Or about function: Does the setting fulfill only the background function or does it interfere with the story? Does it usurp the protagonist function, so to speak, as may occur with avalanches, landslides, earthquakes, floods? Is a direct reference to the geospace noticeable, or does the author employ the technique of “indirect referencing”? The latter signifies that an existing place in the text is not explicitly named but is made identifiable through description and surroundings. Once the spatial units and the corresponding attributes have been saved, the system can handle (almost random) inquiries. Out of this extracted data a geographic information system (GIS) for literature is created, which enables a thematically and spatially diverse analysis of data. Fig. 2.2 presents the—filtered—aspects of a coastal landscape in the model region Northern Frisia, which in various fictional accounts turns into a kind of agent itself, when floods and storms, sliding landmasses and other natural hazards turn into opponents of the characters.
The results of these inquiries are issued as prototype maps or GIS visualizations based on a newly developed set of symbols. Space created in fiction is always incomplete; it has only vague boundaries and often is not precisely localizable. Moreover, a number of literary techniques can emphasize the reference to a real and existent geographic space as well as being able to cloud it. This implies that these different levels of transformation have to be taken into consideration during the mapping process.17 Blurry boundaries, for example, are symbolized as fuzzy shapes and a vague localization with newly developed symbols along with a color gradation (the richer the color, the closer the fictional stage comes to the real-world setting; the paler the color, the more the one is dissociated from the other). The system thereby enables the generation of both statistical queries and maps of individual texts from the same set of data.
Test Cases: What Can Be Seen in Literary-Cartographic Visualizations?
In the words of Franco Moretti, the founding father of a new literary geography, the following question should be asked when developing a map: “What exactly do they do? What do they do that cannot be done with words, that is; because, if it can be done with words, then maps are superfluous.”18 Or in the words of Jörg Döring, who puts it to the test with “Berlin literature”: “What do you see differently, what do you see more clearly, or what do you only see when the places in the storyline of ‘Berlin literature’ are mapped out?”19 What can actually be discovered on literary maps?
One important category in our analysis are the so-called projected spaces. According to our definition, projected spaces are not “accessed” by actual characters, but rather inserted into the literary space by means of memories, dreams, and reveries. In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, set in the province of Normandy, the title hero dreams of Paris. Max Frisch’s Montauk is another good example. While the melancholic main plot takes place in New York City and Long Island, over long stretches the narration consists of the first-person narrator’s flashbacks and memory fragments that bring us through Swiss regions and places such as the Ticino and Zurich, locations that are quasi–“brought into” the main plot.20
Literature is full of projected places. Arguably they constitute one of the most important spatial categories because they are specific to literature. With the exception of film, no other art form has such a wide range of possibilities for creating projected spaces or for transitioning from scenes to projected spaces or vice versa. Even when it comes to individual texts, retrieving the “geography of projected places” can be highly illuminating. Bruce Chatwin’s novel Utz (1988), about the eponymous quirky porcelain collector who is visited by an American expert (this is still during the Cold War), uses Prague almost exclusively as a backdrop. Yet, when the numerous projected places are added, a completely different picture emerges (figure 2.3). Although the main action does take place in Prague, Utz’s stories and the story of the first-person narrator fabricate a dense network of places all over Europe and even globally, which within the framework of the fiction is only accessible via the imagination. One of the elaborately projected places is the French health resort Vichy. At first, Utz imagines the place and connects all sorts of mental pictures to it: Utz had “an idea, derived from Russian novels or his parents’ love affair at Marienbad, that a spa-town was a place where the unexpected invariably happened.”21 Then he actually travels to Vichy for a stay at the health spa, which thereby changes its status and becomes a setting.
What does this mean? Especially with regard to projected spaces it is more than obvious that a literary landscape can never be viewed in isolation. The integration into a global network is sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker. The example of North Friesland is telling in the sense that the work of what appears to be an extremely locally anchored author such as Theodor Storm actually contains a wide variety of projected places (figure 2.4).
A world map of Storm’s work features exotic places such as East Africa, India, Hong Kong, and Oregon—in Storm’s novella “Bötjer Basch” (1886) the main character is back in Northern Frisia, but recounts his adventures during the gold rush in Oregon. The inclusion of such faraway destinations does not necessarily correspond to the tightly defined geographic horizon with which one would generally associate this poet and that is presented in the framed map extract, “Detailkarte: Nordfriesland, Norddeutschland.” Storm and the tiny North Frisian fishing village Husum determine themselves mutually.
Figure 2.5 reveals the hidden spatial dynamic in Friedrich Schiller’s famous play Wilhelm Tell (1804), set in the pre-alpine and alpine scenery around Lake Lucerne. The play is packed with descriptions of journeys made by the characters, be it journeys in the past (purple) or planned journeys (green) or real-time journeys witnessed by others (yellow). Looking at this map, it immediately becomes visible how crucial the flow of ideas, thoughts, and information is, as well as the transport of weapons and goods between the scattered settings, for the play is all about a fight for freedom and a conspiracy between oppressed tribes. Some of the heroes such as Wilhelm Tell and young Melchthal turn out to be veritable long-distance runners traversing the valleys, moving along the shores of the lakes and over passes and peaks. Only a map can reveal these undercurrents of movements, which are only very indirectly indicated in the original text, but that add greatly to the suspense of the play. Once you have seen the map, you will probably read the play in a different way. Indeed, the map may be considered from the point of view of Wolfgang Iser’s literary theory. For Iser, a literary work consists of both written and unwritten portions of the text. According to his reader-response theory, a literary text is “full of unexpected twists and turns, and frustrations of expectations. ... Thus whenever the flow is interrupted and we are led off in unexpected directions, the opportunity is given to us to bring into play our own faculty for establishing connections—for filling in the gaps left by the text itself.”22 In the present case, that is quite literally what the map provides. It visualizes the distances the characters travel, although the act of traveling itself is rarely described in a comprehensive way. Already in the very first scene, when “Baumgarten of Alzellen” arrives at the shores of Lake Uri, out of breath, hunted by the soldiers of Landvogt Wolfenschiessen, the entire dramatic downhill flight has been omitted in the description. The flight is marked on the map as are many other movements that appear only as “gaps” (in Iser’s sense) in the play. Of course, the map does not allow a movielike complete immersion in the setting. But the shaded topographic background relief at least reveals that moving through that region must be connected with a great deal of physical strain. In other words, what is hardly obvious when reading the text—the long distances, the sheer number of journeys, the physical stress—becomes clear when viewing the text on the map.23
Figure 2.6 presents a map of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night (1934). Individual text maps hold a whole string of legible information: the geographic radius of a text (does it take place entirely in the model region or is there another setting on the European or world map?), the reference level of settings and projected spaces, the function of the space (setting, projected space, marker, path), the labeling (are toponyms taken from the geo space or does it result in newly invented names?). Again, we find the settings (in orange) and projected places (in violet). But this time the map also reveals the so-called weight of the settings—some are more important than others, as indicated by the bigger circles. In other words, the map allows us to capture the spatial extension and structure along with the network of settings of the novel at a glance, including information about the main elements of the story and the projected dimensions.
The last example (figure 2.7) comes from a master’s thesis written under my supervision. Andreas Bäumler maps two fictional texts, both set in the rocky landscape of Engadine in the South of Switzerland.24 At first glance, one can see how differently the two authors make use of the given geospace. While Ulrich Becher in Die Murmeljagd (The Woodchuck Hunt, 1969), marked in red, narrates mainly along the roads, railways, and villages, Hans Boesch in Der Kreis (The Circle, 1998), marked in blue, by and large ignores the populated valleys (except for the part between Bever and La Punt) and lets his characters act almost exclusively within the alpine zones in the North and South.
The maps presented here illuminate different literary phenomena. Some deal with a single text, others with a whole group of texts. They visualize various themes and topics such as the paths of characters, the dimension of projected spaces, or the density of a literary landscape with regard to a specific topic. What they all have in common is, first, a (topographic) base map and hence the assumption of the mapmakers that the fictional texts refer to geospace. Second, one immediately notices the shortcoming of including much more on the map than what the text itself offers in terms of geographic and topographic information (you can find motorways, rivers, political borders, and other features on background maps that have nothing to do with the content of the works in question). In other words, the ideal type(s) of background maps for the purposes of literary studies are yet to be developed.
What becomes clear is that the functions of literary maps range from pure illustration (to present something that could also be explained in a text), to inspiration (the process of mapping or in some cases its impossibility may lead to a new train of thought), and finally to instrument (in the best-case scenario something will be visible on the maps that could not be seen without them). In this latter function, maps become hermeneutic tools. The visualization of literary cartography in no way replaces the classical hermeneutic methods. They are rather a sort of intermediate result, and starting from there the literary expert should return to the primary sources (the fictional texts) and continue analyzing them with the proven techniques of literary study: weigh ambiguities, compare, contextualize, enlighten historical references, juxtapose several readings, combine, and include other methods and instruments.
Such an approach is even more necessary since every literary-cartographic study considerably reduces the complexity of a fictional text. For this reason, the maps should be seen as signposts toward further exploration rather than conclusive evidence. In some cases the map, once produced, might even become obsolete, since it was the actual process of mapping and maybe the impossibility of mapping some features of the text that stimulated new thoughts.
Of course, one could think of entirely different, alternative maps of fiction—ones that are more artistically oriented. These might include a kind of fluid, multidimensional map, which changes smoothly between scales and layers; maps that include “foggy zones” where the text opens up blank, unwritten spaces as opposed to richly elaborated settings; maps that play with distortions; or maps that could merge georeferential elements with invented places and spaces. But for the moment, such ideas still belong to the future.
Literary Cartography as a Tool for Conveying Culture
It is hardly surprising that literary geography is appealing to a broader audience. In 2014, the “Literary Maps of Switzerland” project drew quite a bit of media attention in both Germany and Switzerland. I developed this project together with Ann-Kathrin Weber (formerly Reuschel) on behalf of the Swiss Embassy in Berlin and on the occasion of the book fair in Leipzig (http://www.literatur-karten.ch). What is being presented is a comprehensive literary map of Switzerland. Many voices have contributed to this fictive and imaginative Switzerland. Swiss-born authors stand next to foreign ones—poets who temporarily or permanently have been living in Switzerland, some of their own free will, others as refugees from war, poverty, and fear. German literature takes center stage, complemented by treasures of the French, Italian, and Rhaeto-Romanic Swiss literature. Intriguing literary neighborhoods can be discovered on this map. Peter Stamm finds himself in the company of Carl Sternheim and Franz Hodjak in the Lake Constance area; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Stefan Zweig, and Gustav Meyrink meet up with W. G. Sebald at Lake Geneva. Eras, cultures, nations, and destinies mingle on literary-geography maps, linked by only one commonality: the settings and inspirational locations are found in Switzerland. A strikingly large number of various origins and manifold backgrounds converge on this Swiss map: German, Austrian, Swiss, Danish-German, German-French, German-British, Hungarian-Swiss, and others (and there would be many more, if English, American, Italian, French, and other writers were included). The focus is not “national literature,” but the complexity and many voices of a literary space. With all the arbitrariness of choice, these by-no-means-complete literature maps emphasize that between the Jura Heights and Lake Constance—covering centers like Zurich, Bern, Basel, and the lonely Ticino—stretches the territory of the jointly created cultural heritage that now becomes visible in this superimposition.
The records can be found on the overview map and can therefore be filtered according to different criteria. Moreover, special maps for large literary subjects can be retrieved: for love encounters, murders, and deaths; for utopian, dystopian, and counterfactual worlds; for journeys of the mind; as well as—under the title “Place Name Games”—for fictitious and renamed settings (figure 2.8). A feather quill indicates a famous place that has been given a pseudonym (e.g., Otto F. Walter’s “Jammers”—a play on the meaning of the German verb jammern (moaning, lamenting)—disguises the existing provincial town Olten), and a tipped-over inkwell indicates a fictitious setting that can only roughly be localized such as Gottfried Keller’s Seldwyla.
The map “Gedankenreisen” (“Journeys of the Mind”) (figure 2.9) presents the projected spaces introduced above. Symbols that look like shooting stars indicate dreams, memories, and longings, and they visualize such journeys of the mind. In his novel Das Jahr der Liebe (My Year of Love, 1981) Paul Nizon writes that Wohlen Lake, close to Bern, “was my space of memory, desire and longing.” The literary characters are not present in the marked places; they only summon them in the form of dreams, memories, and longings. Peter Bichsel’s sailor sits in a bar in the U.S. state of Kentucky and seems to remember a deepwater port in Bern, the capital of a country that is widely known to be landlocked. … And Nicolas Bouvier experiences déjà-vu at a provincial train station in the extreme north of Japan, which “beams” him thousands of kilometers away to the Vaud train station Allaman. As already mentioned, the map slightly resembles the image of a shooting star: the symbol shows where the thought “lands,” the tail where it was triggered.
Literary cartography is an approach that works on many levels—from theoretically highly demanding research endeavors to more popular, playful products like the “Literary Maps of Switzerland.” One of the major advantages of that field is precisely its appeal to a wide range of audiences (scholars, teachers, students, tourists, interested readers in general and of all ages), as well as the mediation of literary-cartographic content in many formats such as research papers, scholarly books, popular online applications, educational material for schools, tourist guidebooks, and so on. In other words, besides many other things literary cartography can ease the way for reading experiences.
Limitations and Future Tasks
There are numerous possibilities for further studies in literary cartography. For example, it would be possible (and would surely make for a highly interesting map) to visualize the research of Immacolata Amodeo, who in her essay “Verortungen: Literatur und Litteraturwissenschaft” (“Locations: Literature and Literary Studies,” 2010) addresses the fictional geography of writers who have come to Germany as a result of the immigration waves since the 1960s. In smartly chosen categories Amodeo distinguishes between the “mythical elsewhere,” which is usually described as the home left behind, the “intermediate/temporary place” such as train stations, trains, and transit hubs, and the “here-and-now-places of a new home country literature [Heimaten-Literatur]”—Berlin appears in numerous examples.25 But for such complex content, appropriate symbols are yet to be developed.
In addition to continued experimentation and more case studies, an agenda for future research in the growing field of literary geography and literary cartography should include three major tasks:
1. Developing a joint set of categories and terms
There appears to be an unfortunate pattern within literary-geography and literary-cartography research, namely, that identical phenomena are being studied but with different terms. To give an example, what is called “projected spaces” in “A Literary Atlas of Europe” is called “imaginative-functional toponyms” in the study by Döring.26 In the future it is less the individual maps (individual solutions for singular texts) that will be in demand, but rather systems of literary cartography that can manage large amounts of data and thereby enable the pooling of individual analyses. As Arnim von Ungern-Sternberg points out, “It is important and should be possible to develop cartographic standards that ensure the comparability of such undertakings.”27
The same set of literary and spatial studies and theories is referenced time and again when new projects are developed (Bachelard, Bakhtin, Lotman, Lefebvre, Soja, Moretti, etc.), so there is reason to assume that a convergence of existing glossaries, methods, model studies, and references—in the sense of a literary-cartographic toolbox—would greatly facilitate future work in the field. One could start by studying and comparing the terminology in the works by some of the leading scholars in the field, such as Robert T. Tally Jr., David Cooper, Charles Travis, Michel Collot, and Tania Rossetto, to name just a few.28 Based on those and other sources a quite useful common glossary might be extracted.
2. Mapping imaginary spaces
Since the very beginning of literary geography it has been postulated that imaginary spaces are cartographically difficult if not impossible to represent: “All the different attempts to create maps of literature always fail when literary texts—and this from the very beginning—depict spaces that evade mapping, such as fantastic spaces, fictional places, or utopias governed by spatiotemporal conditions that are neither physically, mathematically, nor geographically verifiable and presentable.”29 To cope with those spatial dimensions, one would need to leave the conventional base maps behind and move toward other modes of visualization—for instance, toward topologically structured images, where actual map scales and correct distances can be disregarded. As suggested above, such an unrestricted, artful way of mapping fiction has been sketched several times, but so far only in words. An early example was given by the Austrian writer and poet Ingeborg Bachmann in 1959–1960 in her “Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen.” There she speaks of an atlas of literature where the settings of fiction from James Joyce’s Dublin to Marcel Proust’s Combray build a new type of network, where the river Neva in Saint Petersburg, as described in Russian novels, is located next to the Seine in Paris, so extensively detailed by the narratives of Balzac, Flaubert, and several other writers; where we find not one Venice, but hundreds (one by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, another by Thomas Mann, and so on); and where finally creations such as Atlantis and Orplid, fictitious countries, are seemlessly incorporated into that large continuous territory of literature.30 In short, there are plenty of concepts around, but as far as I can see, we still lack convincing realizations as actual cartographic visualizations.
3. Combining hermeneutic approaches with methods of distant reading
As far as I can tell, both procedures that are currently used to produce literary maps are limited in their output as well as in their explanatory power: reading and analyzing individually, text by text, and with hermeneutic methods vs. not reading and analyzing enormous corpora with big data/macroanalysis tools.31 If those two procedures could be more closely linked, new possibilities will undoubtedly open up, but for a variety of reasons this is easier said than done.
One of the most impressive and convincing examples of data mining in the humanities is “Mapping the Republic of Letters” at Stanford University. The project documents and animates the network of well-known academics in the eighteenth century: Who sent a letter to whom and when?32 However, when it comes to literary cartography things are obviously somewhat more complicated, a fact that also makes it more contestable. Unlike clear criteria such as consignor and consignee location of letters or for methods of word counting, literary cartography as it is exercised today still relies on an interpreter or a team of interpreters to prepare a literary text for mapping. To return to our examples, the editor decides if a place is a “projected space” or just a simple marker (a brief mention in the text), if a character’s path is carrying the story or not, how vaguely or precisely it can or should be entered, and so on. Although we have made an effort to capture the criteria of interpretation as intersubjectively as possible and to define them as precisely as possible in our own system, it is not unimaginable, but actually highly likely, that different interpreters would interpret one and the same text differently—just as it should be in literary studies.
One possible approach to merging hermeneutics and distant-reading procedures has been tested, again, by the Stanford Literary Lab. “Mapping Emotions in Victorian London” is designed as a crowdsourced research experiment: “The project has invited anonymous participants to annotate whether passages drawn from novels, published mainly in the Victorian era, represented London places in a fearful, happy, or unemotional manner. This data from the crowd allowed us to generate the maps you find here.”33
The “Mapping Emotions in Victorian London” project focuses on text snippets and passages, not entire novels. Needless to say, the crowdsourcing approach is also a multiplication of individual readings. It might very well be that two readers would label the same text extract in different ways. And then we are again at the same point mentioned above: not only a different set of texts, but also different readers will generate different maps.
Another remarkable project is called “Reframing the Victorians” and is headed by Fred Gibbs and Dan Cohen, who have researched over 1.6 million English book titles between 1789 and 1914 using word-count and word-search programs to find out what really preoccupied the Victorian era. The two researchers “looked at what Victorians thought was sinful, and how those views changed over time.”34 The query led to a result set of nearly a hundred pages of “detailed descriptions of acts and behavior Victorian writers classified as sinful.” In a next step, the researchers took a closer look at the full texts when necessary. “In other words, we can remain close to the primary sources and actively engage them following computational activity.”35 This is exactly the point: the fragile intersection of machine-driven data mining and the subsequent interpretations, based again on an engagement with the primary sources. In the case of the “Reframing the Victorians” project by Gibbs and Cohen, the team came up with some quite surprising observations. Regarding the concept of “sin,” they were able to “trace a shift from biblically freighted terms to more secular language.”36 But they rightly conclude that any “robust digital research methodology must allow the scholar to move easily between distant and close reading, between the bird’s eye view and the ground level of the texts themselves.”37
The most interesting maps in the field of literary cartography are undoubtedly based on the analysis of such large text groups. But you either have to process the texts through a program or algorithm or you have to collaborate with the crowd as described above, since a limited group of researchers is obviously incapable of dealing with thousands of texts. Hence the challenge for literary scholars lies in the informed handling of technical procedures. The autonomy of our own area of expertise has to give way to a certain extent when forging an alliance with cartography and even more so when we work with data technology. But as long as this collaboration is accompanied by critical reflection on its methods and procedures, it is a path into the future.
Once the research community has come up with suggestions or solutions for those three desiderata—(1) a common toolbox and glossary, (2) extended cartographic means for charting invented fictional territories in a scientific way, and (3) a teaming up of macroanalysis and hermeneutic techniques—we might have an actual chance of approaching an ambitious vision of literary geography and cartography, something like a global “literary map.” Such an overarching atlas system should ask (and maybe even answer) questions such as: Where are the areas of concentration in literature found? Are there entire unliterary landscapes? What is the density of fictional storylines in a given space? To what degree can one find international representation, or do native authors occupy it almost exclusively? When does the imaginary space of literature contract and when does it expand? In other words, literary geography and literary cartography could very well open up new horizons toward a spatially organized history of literature that combines big pictures with careful, detailed analyses of individual texts, and even more importantly, that allows us to read and study texts from different eras, areas, and authors side by side, in unprecedented and surprising combinations.
Concluding Remarks
Literary cartography as a method is about productive exchange and mutual complementarity. Jon Hegglund writes about Ulysses: “Cartography promises a surveying view, but this vantage is distant, abstract and ahistorical. Narrative, conversely, can project individual movements through time and space but ultimately must rely on partial views and situated knowledge. Ulysses frequently represents spaces that hover between these two perspectives but ultimately exist only in the negative space between literature and geography, narrative and historical space.”38 And cartographer Sébastien Caquard adds: “Neither cartography nor narrative on their own can capture the essence of place: both are required to get a better sense of it.”39 This insight may very well be extended to studies of literary landscapes and topographies. Together, narrative and visualization can undoubtedly open up new dimensions when a profound understanding of literary regions is sought.
Moreover, growing interest in sectors such as “story maps,” “fictional cartography,” “narrative atlases,” and “geospatial storytelling” is noticeable. The common denominator in all these interests is the desire to understand more clearly how places and spaces function and how they interact with narratives of all types.40 Literary maps, whether they are science- or audience-oriented, increase our access to literary layers of meaning in descriptive ways. Unlike architecture and natural attractions, “localized” literature is not visible, but it always leaves an imprint on the history of a city or landscape. Reflectively inserted literary cartography is an innovative, indeed eye-opening method, adding to existing approaches in the wider field of literature and geography or enhancing those approaches with new impulses and questions.
Despite the long tradition of mapping fiction and despite the numerous efforts made in the last few years, we might only be at the beginning of a literary cartography that meets the high standards of both cartography and literary studies—and one that, last but not least, does justice to the literary texts themselves. While I am a strong believer in the inspirational force provided by literary cartography, the ultimate, adequate maps of great literary works and of famous literary spaces are most likely still maps in our minds.
Notes
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