Mapping literature is fashionable. It offers opportunities for extensive cooperation between the field of literary studies and national or regional tourist agencies. The production of atlases or cellphone apps supporting walks through the Swiss or Slovenian “literary landscape” is likely to receive funding from the government. Certainly, the maps produced in Stanford and Zürich—to name only the most prominent examples of this popular trend—also serve other aims. One type of such maps focuses on the production, distribution, and reception of literature. These maps therefore situate authors, publishing houses, or other literary institutions. It is an enterprise that does not make any claims with regard to the setting of the literary texts themselves.1 This chapter is concerned exclusively with another type of literary map: maps that claim to cartographically represent the setting of fictional narratives. For a more careful critique of the procedures involved in these mapping enterprises, it is necessary to make explicit some of their implicit assumptions.
First and foremost, these endeavors assume that literature is, in principle, mappable. Yet, Franco Moretti, for one, does not supply a definition of a map. All the graphic representations he produces do indeed correspond to the intuitive notions of maps most people share. These intuitive notions, however, would not be taken for granted by geographers. Ironically, it is precisely at the moment when mapmakers have developed important critical insights into their own practices that literary cartography is relying on an uncritical version of these practices.2 It might therefore be instructive to begin with a working definition of a map, even if I will eventually challenge this definition in the third section of the chapter. In 1995, the International Cartographic Association defined a map as follows: “A map is a symbolised image of geographical reality, representing selected features or characteristics, resulting from the creative effort of its author’s execution of choices, and is designed for use when spatial relationships are of primary relevance.”3 The definition of a map as a “symbolised image” has the advantage of being broad enough to cover outputs of all kinds of (digital or nondigital) geographic information systems. At the present time, when “the fabulous possibilities of a digital, interactive, animated cartography with database support have been discovered,”4 it seems important to remind ourselves that maps have always been an output of geographic information systems: data first had to be collected in databases and then processed using specific techniques.5 For example, it is possible to reconstruct Ptolemy’s maps with a great degree of precision even though none of them have survived, because his Geography contains his database (the list of places and their coordinates in books II–V) as well as the processing methods (his projections, in the cartographic sense of methods for transforming a curbed surface into a plane, in book I).
The word reality in the ICA definition, however, causes several notorious problems. Even many geographers not dealing with fictional texts would refrain from using “geographic reality” as the simple subject matter of “symbolic images” and instead would emphasize the degree to which something called reality is itself produced by these very symbolic images.6 Paradoxically, literary scholars—a group of people otherwise (in)famous for challenging notions of reality—have fewer reservations about it as soon as they produce a genre of “symbolic images” that they have learned to trust in their everyday experience. It may be hard to say whether we are in a real world when walking down 42nd Street, but it seems to go without saying that the toponym “42nd street” in a piece of fiction refers to the real 42nd Street.
Evidently, not all fictional texts are equally mappable. As a first step it seems convenient to distinguish between two different kinds of literary landscapes, some of which claim explicit relations to places out there (places to be reached by moving a human body, usually superimposed on some transportation vehicle), whereas others do not. Even this distinction is problematic, since it does not account for historical variations: changes in geographic reality itself or its generally accepted conception. Maps attached to the first edition of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, for example, depict, among other things, the peninsula of Brobdingnag, the islands of Balnibarbi, California, Laputa, and Luggnagg, and a country named Companys Land (somewhere near the Pacific Coast of Russia) (figures 3.1 and 3.2). On these maps, however, only Brobdingnag and some of the islands are augmentations of the base map Swift used for them: Herman Moll’s New & Correct Map of the Whole World (1719) (figures 3.3 and 3.4). California-as-an-island and the existence of Companys Land were part of contemporary “reality” as depicted on Moll’s widely accepted map itself. One might be tempted to distinguish between fiction and error—a distinction, however, that takes it for granted that California is not an island.
Figure 3.1. Map of Brobdingnag Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Christopher Fox (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 90
Figure 3.2. Map of Laputa etc. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Christopher Fox (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 148, according to Frederick Bracher, “The Maps in Gulliver's Travels,” in Huntington Library Quarterly 8 (1944–1945): 59–74, here 60. These maps were included earlier in Lemuel Gulliver, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (London: Benjamin Motte, 1726).
Figure 3.3. Herman Moll, New & Correct Map of the Whole World, 1719
Figure 3.4. Herman Moll, New & Correct Map of the Whole World, 1719
Taking these problems into account (and therefore avoiding the term reality), we may distinguish between two layers of mappability in literature:
Internal mappability applies to cases in which all of the descriptions of geographic features rendered by a fictional text are consistent with each other and with the rules of Euclidean geometry, such that the world created by this text can be unequivocally depicted on a map.
Referential mappability applies to cases in which geographic features in a given fictional text correspond to features included on maps that are, at a given time, accepted as being useful for purposes other than mapping literature (e.g., world or cadastral maps).
In this distinction, internal mappability seems to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for referential mappability. A relatively unequivocal example of solely internal mappability is the map of Utopia produced by the renowned cartographer Abraham Ortelius in 1595. But obviously, the distinction between the two kinds of mappability is not clearcut. The map contained in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (figure 3.5)—the germ of the novel itself according to its author—plays with the difference between the claims of internal and referential mappability. Its legend, “latitude and longitude struck out by J. Hawkins,” suggests that the island could indeed be located within a system of global coordinates if only the protagonist had not veiled its location. In a different variation, the early maps in Gulliver’s Travels, which follow and elaborate several indications contained in the text itself, mix the claims of internal and referential mappability at least insofar as they make statements about the position of the fictional countries, with Brobdingnag, for example, as a peninsula attached to today’s Oregon. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, which have both been mapped by their authors in peritexts for early editions of their novels, are striking examples of “fictionals worlds, where the real and the imaginary coexist in varying, often elusive proportions.”7 Or, if one still prefers to avoid the word real: these novels are particularly complex mixtures of idiosyncratic and generally acknowledged topological features. Ulysses might count as an extreme value of referential mappability, if one were to put faith in James Joyce’s famous dictum that he wanted “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”8
By and large, all recent endeavors to map literature claim referential mappability to a very high degree. This claim underlies the methods of data collection and data processing silently used by Franco Moretti and partly revealed by Barbara Piatti, methods that can be described as a particular variety of thematic mapping. But even though it is broadly accepted, the distinction between a thematic map and a general reference map can be contested, since any map relies on “selected features or characteristics,” to quote the ICA definition again, and any selection is guided by the theme or purpose of the given map. Why, for example, should political borders count as necessary features of “general reference maps” but not the location of drugstores?9 Literary maps, however, clearly have such a particular theme that it seems safe to classify them as thematic maps.
Data acquisition, processing, and output in thematic mapping are usually characterized by their supplementary relation to other maps. They rely on an augmentation of already existing arrays of data by one or more dimensions. A helpful example for understanding these procedures is the table provided in Berghaus’s Physikalischer Atlas, which presents the database used for the production of climate maps in the same atlas (figure 3.6).
Figure 3.6. Climate Table. Die Hauptmomente der Temperatur auf dem ganzen Erdboden gegründet auf die Beobachtungen an 307 Orten. Thermometer—Centigrade. In Heinrich von Berghaus, Physikalischer Atlas: Eine, unter der fördernden Anregung Alexander’s von Humboldt verfasste, Sammlung von 93 Karten, auf denen die hauptsächlichen Erscheinungen der anorganischen und organischen Natur nach ihrer geographischen Verbreitung und Vertheilung bildlich dargestellt sind (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1845–1848, 2nd ed. (1852), pt. 1, Meteorologie, no. 4).
The first four columns of this table contain latitudes, longitudes, altitudes, and names of locations where weather stations have been installed. All of this information had been collected beforehand. It is not the theme of the climate maps, but their basis which is taken for granted. Mean values for temperatures at the respective weather stations (for the year, for the four seasons, and for the coldest and warmest month) are only given in columns 5–11—while column 12 serves as a sort of metaepistemological control indicating the number of observations recorded and evaluated at the respective weather stations.
The procedures of “data acquisition” in the process of constructing a “Literary Atlas of Europe” are by no means identical, but they are comparable. Piatti underlines the novels she reads with a set of markers in many different colors. She elaborates a number of fine distinctions with regard to degrees of referentiality.10 And she is remarkably honest in admitting the hermeneutic element in this transformation of texts into data.11 Whereas the acquisition of weather data, or even the mere counting of letters or words, may to a large extent be automated, any evaluation of words that includes their semantic features still requires a human agent. Somebody must, for example, recognize that the word Hamburger in a novel does not necessarily refer to an inhabitant of Hamburg. Its classification as a geographic datum is debatable, and somebody has to resolve this debate, most often by an interpretation of the word’s cotext.
With regard to the data output, the supplementary character of thematic maps is evident from the fact that most of them use base maps that had already been produced for other aims than mapping literature. The “features or characteristics” relating to literary texts are then simply augmented from those that already exist on the base maps.12 Moretti’s and Piatti’s base maps differ strikingly with regard to the amount of detail they depict. But even Moretti’s paper maps, which are relatively poor in detail, depict a large range of features obviously not derived from the literary texts themselves. Most gothic novels, for example, abound in Italian or German toponyms, but contain few individualizing descriptions of respective settings. Moretti’s map of these novels, however, not only represents many towns and castles in “spatial relationships” that Ann Radcliffe or Charles Robert Maturin would probably not have been able to locate with such precision, but also elaborate coastlines of European countries. Even these maps display a much more worldlike coherence than one would get from reading these novels.
Neither Moretti nor Piatti discusses the geographic data themselves because they take them for granted in their thematic mapping: “The coordinates are directly constructed through the geocoding tool.”13 Supplementary data are not expected to influence the primary ones; a change in the average temperatures of Paris cannot relocate the whole city—neither can a fictional description of Paris perform this feat. All this seems obvious. But is it true?
Innumerable Types of Unmappability
I admit that using the toponym Paris in a fictional narrative is highly likely to evoke various ideas about a city that a human being can reach by way of a plane, car, train, or bicycle. The assumption that any use of language, even in fictional texts, produces effects of referentiality, seems to me undeniable. In methodological side remarks, however, adherents of literary mapping often assume a somewhat crude oscillation between referentiality and nonreferentiality that has allegedly been developed in literary theory. In this narrative, so-called poststructuralist theories are said to have denied referentiality tout court in order to indulge in the endless self-referentiality of signs. They therefore feel it is time to turn the wheel again.14 The strategy behind this line of argumentation repeats a situation after 1968 when close readings in the New Criticism tradition were attacked by more sociologically and historically interested scholars, a situation already ironized by Paul de Man: “Like the grandmother in Proust’s novel ceaselessly driving the young Marcel out into the garden, away from the unhealthy inwardness of his closeted reading, critics cry out for the fresh air of referential meaning.”15
De Man, however, did not deny the referential effects of language. Quite the contrary, he stressed the “irresistible motion that forces any text beyond its limits and projects it towards an exterior referent.” He just doubted that referential effects simply bring in fresh air and therefore preferred the metaphor of “vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration.”16 Close reading does not negate referentiality. Rather, it demonstrates that it is much more complicated than it appears in the dim light of distant reading.
J. Hillis Miller’s Topographies, a book sometimes mentioned but seldom really discussed in studies of literary cartography, closely investigates cases of referential aberration precisely with regard to literary topography. The book even includes a reading of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and the map attached to its first edition, thereby discussing a typical example of the very tradition usually taken as a model for unproblematic mappability: the nineteenth-century realist novel. Miller, however, emphasizes: “Sooner or later, in a different way in each case, the effort of mapping is interrupted by an encounter with the unmappable.”17 It is important to stress that the distinction between the mappable and unmappable is not meant as a handy tool for classifying two different groups of entire texts.18 It is rather a relation of conflicts, of interruptions, not easily classified. Hence Miller’s insistence on the singularity of “each case.”
The interruption of mappability may take the form of the peculiar spatiality of Kafka’s The Castle. The setting of the novel does not seem to follow a Euclidean concept of space, at least not with regard to the location of the castle itself: a street that seemingly leads to the castle remains in constant distance from it.19 This type of unmappability, by the way, transgresses the distinction of internal and referential mappability, as it is independent of the (im)possibility of identifying any model for the castle. The description would be unmappable even if the village and castle in the text shared a toponym with a village and castle in some Bohemia or Moravia once visited by Franz Kafka, the actual human being.
But unmappability may also take the form of a few but constitutive “points.” That is the case with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a novel that in other respects seems so easily mappable that several of its editions include charts depicting “the cruise of the Pequod.” Most parts of the Pequod’s route from Nantucket on the East Coast of the United States to the Pacific Ocean can indeed be traced by using geographic information gleaned from the text. At the climax of the novel, however, when the ship eventually meets the whale, the novel’s eponymous hero, somewhere, but only somewhere close to Japan, mappability fails. This climax corroborates the enigmatic claim from a much earlier passage in the novel that Kokovoko, the birthplace of the harpooner Queequeg, “is not down in any map. True places never are.”20
Other types of unmappability result from the incompatibility of various georeferential data given within one and the same text. For certain vague reasons, Marcel Proust’s Combray, to quote a familiar example, seems identifiable with Illiers, a small town near Chartres. Once this identification was approved by the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray, the district council renamed the town by hyphenating “reality” and “fiction”: today, the town’s official name is Illiers-Combray, and the visitor is invited to retrace Marcel’s famous walks du côté de chez Swann (or Méséglise) and du côté des Guermantes. This visitor, however, will fail to understand the topography of the landscape within the Recherche, because the literary landscape consists of two spatial organizations that are entirely incompatible. Readers of the first volume have to choose between two alternative walks, since it is impossible to proceed from one side (côté) to the other. The literary geography of the first volume is organized in “two ‘ways’ ... so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door, according to the way we had chosen: ... And so to ‘take the Guermantes way’ in order to get to Méséglise, or vice versa, would have seemed to me as nonsensical a proceeding as to turn to the east in order to reach the west.”21 And it is only at the beginning of Le temps retrouvé that Gilberte, a Swann by birth and a de Guermantes by marriage, proposes to the first-person narrator that they take a walk that combines and reconciles the opposing sides (les “côtés ... si opposés”)—a proposal that overturns the entire spatial conception of the narrator: “‘If you like, we might go out one afternoon, and then we can go to Guermantes, taking the road by Méséglise, it is the nicest walk,’ a sentence which upset all my childish ideas by informing me that the two ‘ways’ were not as irreconcilable as I had supposed [emphasis added].”22 In other words, the hyphen between Combray and Illiers does not so much connect a fictional toponym with a real one, as it marks the difference between, on the one hand, a readable geography that contains two incompatible spatial conceptualizations within one and the same novel, and, on the other hand, a walkable geography supposed to be identical with itself. Even though the two opposing sides are eventually reconciled within the novel, its twofold conception of space cannot be reconciled with the self-identical conception of space somewhere near Chartres.
Alternative Mappings of Literature? Some Preliminary Reflections
Some of the literary features that are unmappable with regard to the ICA-map may nevertheless be mappable with regard to other kinds of maps.23 On the one hand, I have my reservations about the widespread use of mapping as a metaphor for the most heterogeneous kinds of symbolic images, since this metaphor often merely insinuates the values of scientific exactness and a graphical as well as graphic appearance. In these cases, the metaphor veils the specific procedures and media used in such representations as well as their important epistemological differences from cartography in a narrower sense. On the other hand, I admit that there is no clear-cut distinction between creative work on concepts (not only with concepts) and metaphorical operations, concepts being neither more nor less than well-motivated metaphors.24 In a similar vein, even the History of Cartography, an enterprise certainly not interested in blurring notions of mapping, starts out from a surprisingly broad definition: “Maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, processes, or events in the human world.”25 In contrast to the ICA definition, this definition carefully avoids any reference to “geographic reality,” and even the adjective spatial has been moved from relationships (meaning something out there) to understanding (meaning something within the graphic representation itself, or within the brain of its beholder or reader).
Moreover, as the object of understanding according to this definition is “things, processes, or events,” the definition is more suitable for including the mapping of such a thing, process, or event as a literary text itself, instead of simply its alleged setting, as is the aim of most conventional literary maps. A conventional map of the voyages of the protagonist of a novel, for example, would not be distinct from a conventional map of the voyages of a reader of this novel who traced the voyage of its protagonist. Alternative forms of mapping literature, however, can be expected not only to account for unmappable moments, but also to display specific features of literary texts as literary texts26 (i.e., their literariness: the ways they differ from other texts or nontextual things, processes, or events).
Not being a cartographer myself, not having experimented with actual alternative forms of mapping literature, I am not able to suggest concrete examples. Instead, I propose three hypotheses as indispensable conditions for the development of alternative mappings. I will proceed ex negativo with an interrogation of a set of assumptions usually taken for granted in the production of literary maps. These hypotheses are therefore formulated as cautions, following the order of work steps in the production of those maps as already sketched in the first section of this chapter.
Caution against Conversion of Words into Data
Among the favorite readings of the young Marcel is a city map of Paris that allows him to locate the residence of his beloved Gilberte. In conversations with his parents he obsessively mentions a certain street simply because Gilberte lives there.27 This habit is one of the numerous things he shares with Gilberte’s father, Swann, who, while still young and desperately in love with Odette, preferred to have lunch at a restaurant named after the famous explorer Jean-François La Pérouse, and always seized the chance to mention him in conversation.28 The reason for his obsession with this proper name, however, has nothing to do with its bearer, but only with Odette’s habitation at Rue de La Pérouse. Swann uses the proper name as a signifier evoking his beloved in a doubly metonymical chain of association.
Toponyms, Proust teaches us, are signifiers whose georeferential function constitutes only one dimension of their potential for signification, a dimension that does not prevent its use as a signifier for various desires. The spatial relation between the restaurant Lapérouse, the Rue de La Pérouse, and the salons where Swann forces his interlocutors to talk about La Pérouse, follows quite another logic than the spatial relation between, say, the places La Pérouse had visited during his extensive journeys. Swann’s use of the word in its double character as a proper name and a toponym is a striking example of the performative dimension of each speech act, of the importance of the very act of enunciating a word. This performative dimension tends to get lost during the process of data acquisition in literary cartography precisely because toponyms appear as words that are to be easily converted into data as mere constatives.29
I’m not suggesting that Swann’s aberrant use of the toponym poses an insurmountable problem to conventional literary cartography. The difficulty is just that, from this point of view, it appears as a problem: “There [in written interpretations of literary texts], ambiguity of a reading is a sign of quality; here, in developing a system of signs and symbols for literary cartography, it becomes a problem.”30 In this case the ambiguity or the multifunctionality of the proper name / toponym (Rue de) La Pérouse is a quality not only for the readers of the Recherche, but even for the eponymous hero of its first volume Du côté de chez Swann. A map of the novel that “solved the problem” of the toponym would also rob Swann of his favorite way of enunciating his desire.
On the one hand, it does not seem altogether impossible to map a performative as maps are known to rely on performative acts. On the other hand, cartography is a medium particularly seductive in veiling its own performativity, more seductive than, for example, texts written in languages whose arbitrariness is much more noticeable. The more familiar maps appear, the more they hide their own performativity. Most likely, a map that would be able to translate (not just represent) literary performativity would have to be a map that defamiliarizes the reader’s expectations of maps.
Caution against Using Traditional Projections
“In a novel it would have a good effect to present the concepts of its hero, for example of the earth, on a small map. The world would be represented as round, in the middle lies the village where he lives, represented as very large with all the mills etc., and then the other towns around it, Paris and London very small, in general everything becomes much smaller the further away it is located.”31 As proposed by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the map of the concept of the earth according to a novel’s hero is reminiscent of Saul Steinberg’s famous depiction of the New Yorker’s worldview: centered on the home of the hero, its close neighborhood depicted in abundant detail, with everything else diminishing in proportion to its distance from the center, and Paris and London appearing miniscule (figure 3.7).
This “map” would probably not even be accepted as a map by an organization like the ICA. Since it is dependent on a particular point of view, it is rather a graphical hybrid, something like an extended version of a town view in cavalier perspective. As a mere “mental map” of a protagonist, it may seem of limited interest for literary cartography. But if the novel in question is told by a narrator with internal focalization, the hero’s point of view is scarcely distinctive from that of the narrator. In such a case, and not an uncommon one according to narratologists, a Steinbergian graphical hybrid that evokes only some features of maps might be a more adequate representation of the spatial understanding supplied by the novel itself.
The metaphor of “focalizing,”32 widely used by Gérard Genette, relies on the vehicle of optical instruments. This metaphor is somewhat plausible for a type of narration with a cavalier perspective like the one in Lichtenberg’s proposal, but it is entirely incompatible with its own vehicle in the case of another of the most common types of focalizing: the focalisation zéro that usually characterizes the omniscient narrator. Neither a camera nor a telescope can be adjusted to this type of narration.
Since Genette explicitly admits that a narrator of a text does not, after all, possess a camera, a focalisation zéro might have more affinity for mapmaking. In this case, the metaphor of perspective could be replaced by the metaphor of narrative projection in the technical sense of cartographic procedures. The advantage of this metaphor consists in describing points of “view” that are not views at all: maps constructed in accordance with almost all conventional projections donot depict territories from a bird’s-eye view or an astronaut’s view, as is usually assumed in everyday parlance. The astronaut’s view of the earth would produce a distortion of its margins so extreme that it would not be acceptable to any cartographer. Rather, map projections mathematically eliminate any individual point of view. They are, of course, not “objective” in the sense of an undistorted representation—the curved surface of the earth will never be presented without distortions on a plane sheet of paper or a plane screen—but they are, after all, “objective” in the sense that these distortions depend on many factors, just not on the position of a viewer.
The shift from perspective to projection is enacted in a passage written by Adalbert Stifter, who was very familiar with surveying and cartography practices, as demonstrated in several of his fictional narratives. The protagonists of both “Kalkstein” (“Limestone”) and Nachsommer (Indian Summer) work as surveyors, and a version of “Der beschriebene Tännling” (“The Inscribed Fir Tree”) begins with the description of a map. In a passage from his story “Granite,” which presents a topographic initiation of a boy by his grandfather, Stifter carefully transforms idiosyncratic points of view into a cartographic nonview:
[Grandfather]
“That is the life of the forests. But now let us look at what is outside them. Can you tell me what those white buildings are that we can see through the double pine?”
[Boy]
“Yes Grandfather, those are the Prang farms.”
“And farther left from the Prang farms?”
“Those are the buildings of the Front and Rear Seminary.”
“And still farther left?”
“That is Glöckelberg.”
“And farther toward us on the water?”
“That is the Hammer Mill and Farmer David.”
“And the many buildings quite close to us, among which the church rises, and behind which there is a mountain on which there is another little church?”
“But Grandfather, that’s our market town Oberplan, and the chapel on the mountain is the Chapel of the Good Water.”
“And if the mountains weren’t there and the heights that surround us, you would see many more buildings and villages: the Karl farms, Stuben, Schwarzbach, Langenbruk, Melm, Honnetschlag, and on the opposite side Pichlern, Pernek, Salnau, and several others.”33
The narrative point of view of the protagonists relativizes itself in order to be transformed in two steps into a mere enumeration of places from a non–point of view. Beyond the visible places (from the Prang farms to Oberplan), the grandfather insists there are places not visible from the point of view of the protagonists. And among these places, one group (from the Karl farms to Honnetschlag) is still, ex negativo, related to the beholders—they could be seen if mountains would not block “our” view—whereas the second group of places (from Pichlern to “several others”) is no longer related to any beholder, but only to other places “on the opposite side” of the first group of places. In its abstraction from any concrete point of view, the passage is simulating a cartographic projection.34 The increasing affinity of this passage for a map, its “cartographicity,” is even visible on the level of the signifiers, since the percentage of toponyms in the total amount of words increases drastically during the passage.35
Most likely, this narrative projection is the exception rather than the rule within fictional narrative prose, and perhaps even within the nineteenth-century tradition of literary realism. Paradoxically, a conventional map of places in Stifter’s version of the Böhmerwald would precisely fail to demonstrate that Stifter’s texts themselves have a much greater affinity for these conventional cartographic techniques than other texts that take place in the same area. Its cartographicity could only be mapped in contrast to other mapping procedures, especially other projections.
Caution against Using Base Maps
In the last volume of the Recherche, only a few pages after the narrator’s conception of the geography near Combray is “overturned,” something similar happens with the reader’s conception of this area. As a Proustian in Illiers-Combray, he was just enjoying the smell of the famous hawthorn (aubépine) as described in the first volume of the Recherche, a passage quoted in imitated handwriting on an aluminum plate close to a hedge that today forms one of the boundaries of an officially classified “Marcel Proust garden” (the Pré Catalan / Jardin de Marcel Proust / classé par arrété ministériel du 12 déc. 1945). Now, however, a letter written by Gilberte and dating from 1916 informs the Proustien or Proustienne that the large grainfield adjacent to the hawthorn served as a famous battlefield during the “battle of Méséglise,” which lasted for more than eight months and ought to be recorded “in the same way as Austerlitz or Valmy.” The great wheatfield “is the famous slope ‘307,’ the name you have so often seen recorded in the communiqués.”36 For many good reasons, however, the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray, housed more than a hundred kilometers west of Paris, has to this day abstained from digging trenches for literary tourists—an act that would otherwise have made these events as traceable as the smell of the hawthorn.
It would be ridiculous to deny the high degree of referentiality in the passage about the battle of Méséglise by pointing out that such a battle never took place (but only a battle of, let’s say, Verdun), and that no record of a slope 307 is found in official communiqués but only a slope 607. The kind of referentiality claimed in this passage even approaches types of what has recently become popular as “counterfactual narratives.” But the passage does not simply add some individual details, as a typical historical novel is supposed to do. Rather, it challenges History as recorded and sanctioned in official communiqués.
I do not want to suggest that this passage makes the Recherche completely unmappable.37 Even the location of Combray—west or east of Paris?—is less inconsistent than a tourist in Illiers-Combray might assume. During World War I, Proust was already eager to relocate Combray in the first volume. “Chartres,” the name of a town close to Combray in the first edition of 1913, is replaced with “Reims” in the second edition of 1919.38 Thus, Combray seems to be quite consistently located 250 km west of Illiers, whose present name, “Illiers-Combray,” turns out to be nothing more than a fraud designed to mislead literary tourists. Even Cambrai, the seat of Hindenburg’s headquarters in the first years of World War I, located 130 km north of Reims, is not just linguistically but geographically closer to Combray than Illiers.
But how could a map account for the “vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration,” as explored in the Recherche? Should Combray simply be superimposed on a contemporary map of the Île-de-France and its adjacent regions? Should one depict the battle of Méséglise as yet another detailed map of the theater of war like the supplements to the multivolume official record Schlachten des Weltkrieges (Battles of the World War) (figure 3.8 )?
Figure 3.8. Early World War I map of the theater of war. Der deutsche rechte Heeresflügel am 17. und 18. 9. 1914. In Der Weltkrieg 1914–1918. Bearbeitet vom Reichsarchiv. Die militärischen Operationen zu Lande, vol. 5 (Berlin: Mittler & Sohn, 1929), Karte 2.
Instead such a map would have to challenge the reliance on the base maps themselves. The authors of an illuminating article on thematic mapping in the age of digital navigation have distinguished a navigational use of maps from a mimetic one. The navigational use does not rely on any “resemblance between the map and the territory but on the detection of relevant cues allowing her [the navigator’s] team to go through a heterogeneous set of datapoints from one signpost to the next.”39 The use of a base map that has been prepared for allegedly mimetic purposes may even mislead its reader. It suggests the existence of a whole “world” (“with all of its mills etc.”) as a consistent unity of geographic elements. Most literary texts, on the contrary, have more affinity for a navigational than for a mimetic use of maps. They only supply some “relevant cues” in a discontinuous allocation,40 and of very unequal ontological status: Méséglise (which only exists within the Recherche); a hawthorn (an existing species, but not unequivocally locatable as an individual plant); the Western front (which existed as a historical event); Cambrai (which exists on Google Maps); Illiers-Combray (which exists on Google Maps, but was spuriously invented after the Recherche had been published …).
Admittedly, few of these proposals will appear satisfactory to those currently involved in mapping literature. These proposals are derived from close readings of individual texts, so it would be even more difficult to realize these kinds of mappings if the aim is to evaluate whole clusters of texts according to comparable data. But they might support an understanding of the specificity of literary texts, and they might lead to a more reflective usage of maps.
Notes
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