Abstract
The adventures of Don Quijote take place in La Mancha and create a map of this region in the pages of its text. However, this geographical map is incomplete. It references particular locations while leaving others—those unrelated to Quijote’s adventures—blank.1 The recorded locations become signposts of the various adventures to which they are intimately tied. This is a fictional and partial mapping of a real geographical area. While the novel itself engages in an act of mapping, so does the character of Quijote. The books of chivalry affect how Quijote views not only the geography of his adventures, but also his relationship to every aspect of external reality. In other words, Quijote tries to make everything and everyone that he encounters fit into what is, for him, the coherent and totalizing system of the chivalric romance. Quijote’s deployment of chivalric romances to map external reality emphasizes the role of literature in the process that Fredric Jameson terms “cognitive mapping” and makes clear the negative impact that a desire for an unchanging and totalizing cognitive map might have on one’s ability to successfully navigate the world.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Karl-Ludwig Selig’s “Don Quixote and the Exploration of (Literary) Geography” looks at a number of the geographical sites in the novel. Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 6.3 (Primavera 1982): 341–357.
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960), 118. Edward W. Soja offers a historical account of the concept of space in critical social theory. He also highlights Jameson’s debt to the work of Lefebvre, Berger, and Foucault.
See Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989), 63.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Cory A. Reed examines Don Quijote’s relationship to the external world by using chaos theory and comes to a similar conclusion: “how we perceive reality […] is a function not only of our external sense […] but also of our internal sense of imagination and how we process the information our senses receive” (742). See
Reed, “Chaotic Quijote: Complexity, Nonlinearity, and Perspectivism,” Hispania 77.4 (December, 1994): 738–749.
Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 353.
Jameson, Postmodernism, 44. Robert T. Tally Jr. also notes the connection between “the spatial turn” and the postmodern; see Tally, Spatiality (New York: Routledge, 2013), 37–42.
Robert T. Tally Jr., “On Literary Cartography: Narrative as a Spatially Symbolic Act,” New American Notes Online 1.1 (2012); accessed August 21, 2012 [available at http://www.nanocrit.com/essay-two-issue-1–1/]. Regarding the distinction between cartography and cognitive mapping, the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan distinguishes these terms when he notes the rats that have a cognitive or “mental” map, which “does not have to form a total picture as a draftsman or cartographer does” (207). This suggests that cognitive mapping is not yet cartography, but rather a necessary step in a cartographic project. See Tuan, “Images and Mental Maps,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 65.2 (June, 1975), 205–213.
Foucault also points to the cartographic elements of Don Quijote, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 47.
Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge Press, 1990), 165.
Qtd. in Jameson, “Authentic Ressentiment: The ‘Experimental’ Novels of Gissing,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 31.2 (September, 1976), 130. Jameson takes this definition of ideology from
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 162.
All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid: Biblioteca EDAF, 2003), 24, 25.
James Casey, Early Modern Spain: A Social History (New York: Routledge, 1999), 172.
At the time of Don Quijote, “Spain” did not exist. Rather the Habsburg monarchy ruled the (temporarily) politically unified kingdoms south of the Pyrenees on the Iberian Peninsula. While historically anachronistic, “Spain” is useful in discussing the broad societal changes that were relatively generalizable across the kingdoms, though as Carla Rahn Phillips notes there was some variation by kingdom. See Phillips, “Time and Duration: A Model for the Economy of Early Modern Spain,” The American Historical Review 92.3 (June, 1987), 531–562.
J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716, 2nd edition. (Penguin Books: London, 2002), 285.
“Constancy” is Edith Grossman’s excellent translation. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003), 845.
Anthony J. Cascardi, Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 188.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2014 Robert T. Tally Jr.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Goddard, J.E. (2014). Plotting One’s Position in Don Quijote: Literature and the Process of Cognitive Mapping. In: Tally, R.T. (eds) Literary Cartographies. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137449375_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137449375_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-68752-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-44937-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)