On and Off the Map: Literary Narrative as Critique of Cartographic Reason

Abstract

The cartographic élan on display in the new literary geography responds to the twofold wish to formulate “objective,” verifiable knowledge by anchoring the coordinates of fiction to the geohistorical world of reference, variously known as the “zero-world,” “geospace,” or “actuality,” and to acknowledge the formative capacity of literary representations to augment, correct, or supplant that world. Mapmaking in a literary-critical context¹ capitalizes on a readerly impulse that in most interpretive encounters with the fictional text remains latent, failing to resolve into a graphic representation of any sort. Readers use discursive cues routinely to ascertain the shape, scale, and axiological status of the story world, and, aided as they are by extended passages of description and what Umberto Eco calls a readerly “encyclopedia,” may generate more or less precise mental images of place.² A world begins to coalesce alongside and around the characters that populate it. Yet at this stage in the literary encounter, the experience remains immersive and projective, pre-schematic at all events.