The introduction to this book begins with a pair of quotations on maps from two writers with a profound interest in space. Robert Louis Stevenson found it hard to believe that there are people who do not care for maps; Herman Melville spoke of “true places” that transcend the parameters of maps.1 As a frame for Literature and Cartography, the two statements establish the tension that runs through the individual chapters. Stevenson’s fascination with maps expresses the desire with which numerous authors have engaged cartography productively down through the centuries. But Melville’s pronouncement on the limits of maps—limits that he suggests literary texts may surpass—indicates how the disjunctions between texts and maps are equally important in the history and theory of literature and cartography. Given the scope of the volume, which examines the theoretical, historical, and generic character of these interactions between literature and cartography, it is appropriate to end with a brief summary of the book’s three parts. The conclusion also offers some suggestions for the directions future studies might take.
Part I, on theory and methodology, has highlighted the fundamental role of fiction in both literature and cartography. Though we like to distinguish fiction from reality, the operations of literature and cartography reveal that this simple opposition is inadequate. The curious miniatures such as the Swissminiatur at Melide near Lugano, Italia in miniatura in Rimini, Russie miniature in Saint Petersburg, Miniatürk near Istanbul, and the Beijing World Park have captured the imagination of children and adults across the globe with their merger of representations and territories. Taking his starting point in such blends of the fictional and the real with which we have represented the world to ourselves as a world in itself, Jean-Marc Besse (chapter 1) rethinks the epistemology and ontology of literature and cartography. As he makes clear, maps operate a series of transitions and oscillations that merge the fictional and the real into “half-places” equally partaking of the world of the imagination and the world of things. On the basis of these theoretical statements, Besse offers an overview of cartographic effects in literary works—the ways maps set fiction in motion (Robert Louis Stevenson is a prime example), how they construct a frame around the plot (as in Émile Zola), how they can serve as a principle for the ordering of the narrative sequence (never more evident than in James Joyce), and how they at times clash with the literary text and call linearity into question (as evidenced by John Dos Passos or Alfred Döblin). The basic parameters of the various interactions of literature and cartography are thereby staked out.
One of the most dramatic changes in the study of both literature and cartography is the emergence in recent years of digital mapping. Big data and GIS have opened an array of new possibilities for scholars in the humanities. For one, literary scholars today are not just studying maps, they have also appropriated the cartographers’ newfangled digital instruments and begun making maps. Under the banner of literary geography, Franco Moretti, Barbara Piatti, and many others have begun exploring everything that mapping has to offer as a methodology. In this approach, maps serve a number of functions. They illustrate a narrative, they provide the source of inspiration for new ideas, and they function as “analytic tools” that allow us to notice novel features of individual texts, of genres, or of whole corpora of texts that can only be read at a distance.2 Picking up where Moretti left off, Barbara Piatti (chapter 2) guides us through the development of a detailed geographic information system (GIS) for literature and sketches out some of the ways literature can be mapped in interactive, digital atlases.
The quantification and visualization of unique literary works challenge basic theoretical and methodological assumptions in literary studies. The status of the individual work and the traditional temporal conception of literary history give way to data patterns and the geographic layering of texts, characters, and spatial figures from distant historical periods. With surveys of literary spatiality we might see the development of a new genre as an alternative to conventional literary history. But what happens to the space of fiction once it is superimposed on actual geographic locations? How does this blended object compare to “purely” fictional spaces? Is something essential lost or transformed in the transition from literary texts to literary maps? Robert Stockhammer (chapter 3) examines the unmappability of literature. Reminding us that both literature and cartography are media with distinct and highly complex constitutive elements, he cautions against using the conventions of the realist novel as a model for the signifying processes of literature on the one hand, and the Ptolemaic model of the map with its grid and coordinates as the model for cartography on the other. Not only do many modernist and so-called realist novels contain moments of unmappability that defy Euclidean conceptions of space and resist a straightforward correspondence with geographic space, but can even the strong referentiality effects produced by, for example, a toponym like Paris always be trusted? Does literature not in its most basic forms include “referential aberrations,” as Paul de Man suggested, that challenge a straightforward, mimetic correspondence theory of literary space?3 Such aberrations can take many shapes, ranging from a single point in the text as when Captain Ahab finally locates Moby-Dick in an uncertain space where mappability fails, to the mutual incompatibility of georeferences in one and the same fictional work as in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, to the twisted, Möbius-like spatiality of Kafka’s texts. Even if it is the attempts to conceive of literary space in cartographic terms that make such features of fictional texts clearly visible, these blank spots, charted only by the language of literature, mark one of the things that get lost on the digital maps currently at our disposal.
Maps, however, form an integral part of language itself. While cartographic metaphors have exploded in our map-saturated culture and so have deprived maps of some of their explanatory power as critical concepts, they were once used in a conscious attempt to hold metaphorical slippage at bay. The writings of two of the main thinkers of space, Kant and Foucault, abound in cartographic metaphors. Instead of diluting them further, however, Oliver Simons subjects them to a careful analysis (chapter 4) and shows the profound shift they undergo within critical thought. For Kant, the rigor of geometry makes it a model of philosophical writing. Striving for a language of exactitude that could illustrate the concepts of understanding and reason, his critical work is pervaded by cartographic tropes as he painstakingly maps the territory of the mind and draws the borders of knowledge. Kant’s cartographic writing is thus a way of containing the seductive metaphors of pure invention and fantasy—the literary aspect of language—that always threaten philosophical discourse from within. With Foucault, however, the cartographic metaphor changes status. Geometry no longer serves as a bulwark against the dangerous inventions of language. It rather takes the fictions of literature as the model for a novel form of cartographic writing that invents and constructs new spaces of knowledge, as much as it describes and represents the territories of knowledge that already exist. The cases of Kant and Foucault demonstrate just how much the explicit meanings as well as the underlying assumptions of cartographic metaphors vary even among the master thinkers who have shaped the spatial turn over the past fifty years.
It is not only philosophers, however, who have wrestled with cartographic writing. Throughout his works, Jorge Luis Borges uses the language of mapmaking to test the functions and limits of language and representation in general. Considering language as cartography, Borges hovers between a critical and a utopian perspective framed by the scholastic debate between realism and nominalism. Is language, in other words, motivated by the things to which it refers—does it, in Borges’s formulation, constitute “a map of the universe”—or is it merely an arbitrary collection of symbols? Bruno Bosteels (chapter 5) charts the linguistic, epistemological, and ontological consequences of this historical debate with its long philosophical heritage. And going beyond it, he pursues a third conception of language that Borges also connects to cartography, namely the pragmatist view that regards language as producer of new realities that grow the world rather than copy it. Teasing out the major and subtle differences of the language of cartography in both philosophical and literary texts is a productive undertaking that could reveal other divergences and affinities between the principal conceptions of space and language.
Turning from theoretical fundamentals to historical developments and contexts, part II opens with the birth of Western literature out of nautical guidebooks. Burkhardt Wolf (chapter 6) traces the links between literature and navigation from Homer to Joyce, as he plots Odysseus’s course through literary history and the history of nautical instruments. Poetry and the tools of seafaring were closely intertwined from the beginning. In the reconstruction of Odysseus’s actual travels, Phoenician periploi or sailing manuals came to be regarded as the basis of Homer’s epic. As Odysseus travels into the Christian era in Dante’s Commedia, however, the periploi give way to actual sea charts whose graticules mark an ordered space in which the cunning Odysseus no longer has a proper place. When modernity expanded the circumference of its known world, the instruments of navigation could not keep up. Compass deviations and map distortions undercut the explorations of the mind. Accordingly, when Odysseus travels through modern literature, he gets increasingly lost, suffering a transcendental homelessness ever more distant from his Homeric home. Charting the steady collapse of nautical and narrative orientation, the chapter shows the intimate correlation between literary orientation and the concrete instruments of navigation that either guide literature or make it suffer a shipwreck.
Sea charts are not the only maps that have served as narrative devices. In the Middle Ages, maps were part of a larger diagrammatic culture of thought that brought the operations of cartography and literature together. The famous mappaemundi of Beatus manuscripts, for example, trigger narratives of biblical stories or invite apocalyptic commentaries. As Simone Pinet has shown (chapter 7), the pervasive diagrammatic imagination in the Middle Ages made porous not just the divisions between the visual and the verbal, the cartographic and the literary, but also those between the geographic, the historical, and the spiritual. Indicating or generating texts in processes of accretion, as on the elaborate Ebstorf and Hereford maps, or through minimal symbolism as on T/O maps where the T denotes the Crucifixion, diagrammatic thought forged tight links between the cosmological and the human. In such figurae of medieval culture, between the two extremes of the diagrammatic and the encyclopedic, maps present a treasure trove of materials for narrative development, pedagogical instruction, mnemonic retrieval, silent meditation, or other functions, layering and merging theological, political, scientific, and personal meanings within clerical discourses. Inflected by recent theorizing, the diagram thereby opens up whole new perspectives on the richness of medieval visual culture, whose fluid exchanges are only beginning to be understood.
The Renaissance inaugurates the fetishization of the Ptolemaic model of the map—the planar coordinate grid of locatable positions. But as is often the case in the history of maps, cartographic dreams outstrip their realization. The maps produced in the early modern period suffered a number of limitations that cannot simply be attributed to the bias inherent in all maps. Turning solid theoretical foundations into practice was fraught with difficulties. Without any reliable means of measuring longitude, or compensating for magnetic declination when reading the compass, maps were often inaccurate, based on errors or estimates. When mapmakers prepared their maps they had to resort to a vast and heterogeneous archive of topographic texts and sketches of various types. In the Spanish imperial expansion in the sixteenth century, texts served as sources for making maps, but they also formed a mode of cartography in its own right. As Ricardo Padrón explains (chapter 8), the dominant cartographic mode in the spatial imagination of the time was still the linear geometry of the “itinerary” rather than the planar geometry of the gridded map. But often these modes of mapping imperial conquest coexisted side by side, forming hybrid spatialities that competed against one another. The fictional texts of the time not only embody such tensions in the transition from the European Middle Ages to the early modern period, they also reflect on the very nature and limitations of mapping and the consequences of its role in fulfilling imperial ambitions.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries new technologies of woodcut and copperplate illustration give rise to an unprecedented production and dissemination of cartography. Circulating throughout society, maps frequently make their way into the writings of poets. In the period between 1550 and 1660 the aesthetic sensibility of the Baroque is particularly evident in the serpentine, meandering, ever-mobile forms of French literary hydrography. From Oronce Fine to Madeleine de Scudéry, Tom Conley (chapter 9) traces the interactions between fluvial literature and cartography and shows how rivers become the site of shifting functions and meanings, ranging from the elements of war and destruction, to the celebration of wealth and beauty and the development of a fluvial style of writing, to the representation of feminine virtue and the force of generation in Scudéry’s famous Carte de tendre.
The exuberant Baroque sensibility reflected in these writings not only reveals the wide array of themes expressed by literary hydrography, it also raises the question of limit: What is suppressed or curtailed by cartographic representation? The frequent association of maps with science, control, and objectivity, particularly in the eighteenth century, should not make us forget the objects that seem to exceed or evade cartographic organization, or the will and the impulses behind them. Beneath the grid lurk exuberant natural phenomena and obscure desires often at odds with the product of mapping. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Goethe brilliantly reveals this internal contradiction of cartography in his novel Elective Affinities. As John K. Noyes makes clear (chapter 10), maps may simultaneously contain two opposing rationalities—an instrumental one of economic value, and an aesthetic one of pleasure and desire. Uniting such conflicting rationalities on the same flat surface, Goethe not only develops his novel from the friction of their incompatibility, he also shows how the apparent objectivity of cartography is an outgrowth of a hidden economy of desire that far surpasses the amorous entanglements of the novel. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, questions of the taxonomy and cartography of various phenomena such as botany, zoology, ethnography, and language were debated by the leading scientists of the time. But when historical developments and natural processes are frozen in a table or on a map, what happens to the genealogies that explain them, what disappears in the a priori generalizations of the mapmakers’ choice of forms, and which will to truth drives the mapping? As Goethe’s novel and his reflections on contemporary science show, maps are steeped in desires and reveal more than they prefer to put on display.
The disjunction within the scientific discourse between cartographic order and the objects on which it is imposed has a counterpart in the reorganization of national space in nineteenth-century France. Following the tumult of the French Revolution and the beginning of heavy industrialization, the diverse, local territories, each with its own culture, were rationalized into the abstract, national unity of the French Republic. Inspired by the detailed Cassini maps of France based on accurate geometric triangulations, the borders of local regions were redrawn and replaced with the political départements. The culture and history were thereby subsumed under an isotropic expanse imbued with a distant, national ideology. This profound change in the perception of space was reflected in the literature of the nineteenth century. As Patrick M. Bray explains (chapter 11), French literature, in particular the novel, devised new ways to represent the lost spaces of the past and to resist the dominant spatial discourse. Reimagining the relationship between the self and lived spaces, novelists such as Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, and Émile Zola sought to create alternative literary maps through the interaction of word and image, textual map and geographic space, striving to harmonize the rootedness of the autochthonous with the possibilities of movement and change opened up by the processes of modernization.
The national conception of space was not only one of rationalization. It was also deeply informed by colonialism. Since the Berlin Congress in 1884–1885 partitioned the African continent and set off the colonial race for Africa, the imbrication of the here and the elsewhere has been a condition of national self-consciousness as well as of lived experience in both Africa and Europe. Which spatial imaginations did this entanglement of the two continents result in? How did migration from formerly colonized territories to European metropolitan centers and new diasporic formations and networks transform the coordinates of the African literary landscape? Charting the history of the colonial and postcolonial spatial imaginary, Dominic Thomas (chapter 12) explores both how an imperial power persuaded its citizens of the legitimacy of the colonial enterprise through propagandistic board games, and the responses of colonial and postcolonial writers, who sought and seek to deconstruct the expansionist myths of the past and to invent relevant and accurate conceptions of belonging in today’s multisited and truly globalized world.
As an ordering principle that cuts across distinct media, genre is a useful way to bring together literary texts and cartographic objects. Part III of the book explores some of the central genres within literature and cartography. As Martin Brückner shows (chapter 13), not all literary cartographies include actual, physical maps. Sometimes the maps precede the narrative, when authors write their works with a map in hand. At other times, certain textual genres allude to or invoke specific types of maps. In American literature, mapping has been a central trope during the past four hundred years in spite of the fact that there is a surprising scarcity of actual maps accompanying the texts. Conveying the changing American experience down through the centuries, literary texts instead use the rhetoric of cartography, referencing maps, measurements, and coordinates to transform geographic descriptions into literary maps. A number of key genres have emerged as a result. From early travel accounts to picaresque narratives, frontier stories, and didactic fiction to the grand-tour account, fantasy novels, and the American road trip, literary texts have displayed a strong affinity for popular map genres such as small-scale overview maps, large-scale promotional maps, river maps, or interstate highway maps. Surveying and correlating these genres, Brückner reveals the fundamental themes of territorial thinking and geographic mobility that lie at the heart of American literature.
But which types of movements in literary texts is it even possible to map? What would a basic typology of mappable movements look like, and might literary texts suggest models of mobility different from the one we usually operate with? Juxtaposing four types of map lines in the geometric construction of the map as they have appeared historically in different narratives, Jörg Dünne (chapter 14) suggests that a dynamization of space takes place around 1800 that allows for a new conception of space, one based fundamentally on movement. Plotting the literary narratives of Jules Verne along the isolines of the map, the traditional opposition between the static map and the mobile narrative gives way to a dynamic model in which the general state of space is one of movement rather than stasis, where agents are primarily a complex of forces and nonhuman actors such as storms and currents, and where literary “events” occur as the interruption of movement rather than their commencement. Inverting basic assumptions about maps and narratives, this highly suggestive alternate model has far-reaching implications for how we might conceive cartographic space and literary events in other contexts.
The dynamic model of space can arise from the particular construction of the narrative line, but other dynamisms emerge from the materiality of the book itself. Paratexts such as maps, book covers, tables of contents, and indexes offer concrete spaces for reflections on form, materiality, and movement. An author who, perhaps more than any other, has experimented with the relations between the center and the margins of the material text and used them to probe and challenge the traditional conception of cartography as a static, atemporal means of representation is João Guimarães Rosa. Throughout his oeuvre, as Clara Rowland shows (chapter 15), the vast geography of his native Brazil is at once constructed and destabilized by paratextual invitations to map the reader’s path in an unlimited and unmappable space, or to reread the chapters in a different sequence. In the dissonance between temporalizing and spatializing gestures, Guimarães Rosa’s material cartography seeks to delineate a literary space that is forever mutable. Such paratextual experiments remind us of the material layer not just of maps, but also of the literary medium. Guimarães Rosa’s work may serve as a model in itself for further explorations of the materiality of paratexts—their inherent spatiality and their influence on narrative space.
The final chapter turns both to the past and to the future. It analyzes the three main genres of military mapping that all involve the invention of possible futures. Military maps not only offer a crucial means of orientation, they have become a sine qua non for tactical and strategic planning. As such, they constitute event maps that serve to bring about the future invented on their surface. This function endows them with a peculiar epistemology. Transforming spatial configurations into hypothetical scenarios, the military map is a tool for the management of possible futures. The nature of these futures, however, differs between the three main genres of military maps. From the star charts of astrology to the topographic map to the modern war game, the representation, character, and management of the futures of war undergo profound shifts. The typology of war mapping sketched by Anders Engberg-Pedersen (chapter 16) alerts us to its overlaps with literary history. Equally concerned with the plotting and management of future events, authors from Schiller to Bolaño have variously reflected, challenged, and transformed the assumptions and the epistemology of the military event map. Linking readers and astrologers, writers and commanders, entertainment and death, the interaction of war literature and military cartography has generated important metareflections on the very possibility of representing and managing the futures of war.
Far beyond the map’s function as a tool of orientation in a fictional world, the chapters of this book have revealed just how complex the conjunctions and disjunctions of literature and cartography are. Some basic insights stand out. Thriving on the metaphorical fecundity of maps and mapping, scholars of culture at large have inadvertently weakened the explanatory power of cartographic concepts. To restore the power and usefulness of these terms, the book has underlined the need for greater awareness both of the history of cartography proper and of the history of philosophy and its changing use of spatial concepts. Where Kant could use cartographic metaphors in his quest for a language of exactitude, today these metaphors need to be subjected to scrutiny before they can be deployed as a productive means of thinking—whether as models to understand the poetics of literary texts or as tools in digital mapping projects. Thus the book takes a critical stance toward the cartographic turn, one that encourages greater self-reflection among literary cartographers to ensure the continued value of cartography and of its terminology for the study of literature. On the other hand, historians of cartography would do well to broaden their focus and become more attuned to the larger cultural sphere in which questions of maps and mappings are key. As the preceding chapters have shown, literature in particular emerges as a prism that refracts and reflects on the nature and functioning of cartography, discussing its virtues and vices, its productive possibilities as well as its blind spots. And just as literature and cartography have colluded to produce hybrid forms of representation, they have also appeared as estranged cousins with a keen eye for their incompatibilities and for the shortcomings of the other.
What lies ahead? The chapters just summarized invite further explorations of the theoretical foundations, historical exchanges, and generic links between literature and cartography. For example, much more can be said about the role of maps in the writing process, the spatial organization of poetry, and the mappability of different literary genres. Some contributors have also hinted at larger projects beyond the scope of their individual chapters, namely new ways of writing literary history. Exchanging the traditional linear form for a spatial model, a cartographic literary historiography may involve using maps as a tool, as we have seen. It could also involve the examination of cartography as a topos that cuts across national literatures and allows for new comparative assessments of established literary periods. Further, technological developments in the mapping sciences will surely continue to transform the writing and analysis of literary texts. One innovation that deserves more attention in literary studies is the rise, in the twentieth century, of electronic navigation systems such as GPS. Where the map with its disembodied, distant view traditionally operates within a representational regime governed by questions of mimesis and truth, GPS offers an embedded experience of navigation by coordinates that shifts the focus to utility. Whether the geographic information is correct matters less than getting you to your destination.4 But what are the implications for our understanding of literature, and of the spatial structure of literature in particular? Always placing the user at the center in a space designed for travel, GPS enables a spatial experience with many similarities to that of reading a fictional text. With more than a billion GPS receivers in use across the globe, it is worth examining how the spatial order of this already fairly old technology will inflect the literary organization of space. It might, for example, make us notice alternative literary cartographies whose spatial figuration calls for a rethinking of the object that has for so long served as a foil for the literary production of space—the map. This book has sketched a basic framework for literature and cartography and offered a range of models for how future work in the field may be undertaken, but it has only taken the initial steps toward these larger projects.