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Theorizing maps with literature
Progress in Human Geography
2014, Vol. 38(4) 513–530
ª The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0309132513510587
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Tania Rossetto
Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy
Abstract
The long superficial engagement of literary scholars with the cartographic lexicon (under the label of literary
‘spatial turn’) has led to a need for a ‘recartographization’ of the field. This tendency, however, still remains
primarily embedded within analytical (‘cartography of literature’) or critical (‘critical literary cartography’)
approaches, and fails to engage the recent development of post-representational rethinking of maps. Literary
criticism, with its creative use of mapping words, and, above all, literary texts, with their involvement of practising maps, should be reconsidered as relevant sources for cartographic theorization and mapping research.
Keywords
cognitive mapping, literary cartography, literary geography, map theory, post-representational cartography
I Introduction
After a long period of laconic existence during
which the humanistic geographers’ peculiar
interest in literary texts has been partly reoriented in the light of a cultural turn (Brosseau,
2009) and partly overcome by cultural geographers’ interest in other texts (Saunders, 2010),
the literary geographic tradition is now reemerging, solicited by the growing ‘spatialization’ of literary studies. The recent resurgence
of the debate on the exchange between literary
criticism and geographical literary studies
(Crang, 2009; Hones, 2008; Kneale, 2009) is
symptomatic of a more general resurgence of
interplay between geography and the humanities in both the academic and public realms
(Daniels et al., 2011; Dear et al., 2011). The
emergent arena of geohumanities is strongly
connected with the extraordinary growth of new
geographical technologies. This is most evident
in the field of cartography, which is experiencing a ‘humanistic turn’ (Monmonier, 2007)
in connection with a widespread interest in (and
direct employment of) cartography within
several fields, such as design, communication,
literature and art (Cartwright et al., 2009). As
for the literary field, indeed, within the wider
well-known ‘spatial turn’, an exciting ‘cartographic turn’ now seems to be flourishing.
Yet, in the same way that the interest in spatiality has been viewed not only as a new
‘idiom’ for literary studies (Tally, 2013) but
also as a ‘spatial vogue’ (Jarvis, 2005: 1), the
interchange between literature and cartography
has been accused of being too superficial. The
main target of this critique is the metaphorical
(vague, ambiguous and vacuous) use of the term
‘mapping’ and, more generally, the abuse of the
cartographic lexicon by literary critics (Cooper,
2012; Cuddy-Keane, 2002; Maleval et al., 2012;
Ogbon, 2005/2006; Thacker, 2005/2006). It has
been noted that, against the popularity of ‘the
‘‘m’’ word’ among critical social theorists
Corresponding author:
Università degli Studi di Padova, DiSSGeA-Sezione di
Geografia, via del Santo 26, 35123, Padova, Italy.
Email: [email protected]
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(including literary critics), this fascination has
been followed by ‘little appreciation of how
maps work as tools’ (Perkins, 2003: 341).
The field of ‘literary cartography’, indeed,
has recently been revealed not only as a terrain
for cooperative understanding between geo/cartographers and literary scholars, but also as a
contested interdisciplinary arena. Recent articles (by both cartographic and literary scholars)
appearing in geo/cartographical journals, in particular, are showing a tendency towards a
‘recartographization’ of the field of literary cartography. As I will show in the review in section
II, these interventions provide different paths
toward a reinforcement of the role of cartography’s specific competencies, both in technical
and conceptual terms, within the interdisciplinary field of literary cartography. However, this
recartographization seems to remain embedded
within the analytical/technical (‘cartography
of literature’) or the critical (‘critical literary
cartography’) approaches, failing to engage
the ‘post-representational’ perspective which
recently arose within cartographic theory.
Map studies, in fact, have been recently vivified by new theoretical approaches that undoubtedly foster a new attitude towards cartography
after a long dominance of academic ‘mapphobia’
(Wheeler, 1998) within geographical studies
themselves. These last perspectives, which are
at the core of the present article, have been
defined as ‘post-representational cartography’
(Kitchin, 2010). According to the ‘representational’ approach, maps have been studied and
deconstructed as powerful representations with
a highly ideological content hidden behind the
appearance of self-evidence. This attitude is at
the root of the so-called ‘critical cartography’,
mainly inspired by Brian Harley’s work. Today’s
critical cartography has been relocated from different internal and external points of view.
Crampton and Krygier (2006) historicize and
revitalize it in the light of the new geospatial
technologies; Hanna and Del Casino (2003)
highlight the limitations of the deconstructive
reading of tourism cartography; Perkins (2003)
manifests the frustration deriving from a
binary opposition of technical and ideological
approaches to mapping; Kitchin and Dodge
(2007: 332) address counter-mapping (or the
use of maps as counterpower means) as a strategy that fails to challenge the ‘ontological status’ of the map.
The recent conceptual epistemological shift
proposed by Kitchin et al. (2009) instead
explores the ‘ontogenetic’ nature of cartography, moving from a representational to a processual understanding of mapping. From a
post-representational perspective, maps are
viewed and researched as contingent, relational,
embodied, fluid entities that are performed and
manipulated by users in their meanings, as well
as in their concrete material consistency. Maps
are practices, they proceed from action, rather
than being grounded in power. It can also be
noted that the term ‘post’ as preferred to ‘non’representational seems to corroborate most
recent attempts to go ‘beyond the binaries’ (Del
Casino and Hanna, 2006) of representation/practice, researching the tensions existing between
representational and non-representational readings of maps. Non-representational, actionoriented perspectives, in fact, ‘do not deny the
importance of representations’; instead, they try
‘to situate them in the flow of a broader process
of knowledging including crucial pragmatic
dimensions’ (Söderström, 2005: 14).
As the title aims to emphasize, this article’s
main goal is to contribute to the current epistemological debate on maps, involving literature
as one of the multiple fields that should be creatively engaged in order further to explore, test
and discuss current hypotheses on the nature
of maps. The intention is not to exploit the literary field to prove a cartographic theoretical
position, but rather to engage with literary criticism and literary texts as sources of unexpected
ideas, destabilizing suggestions, and epiphanies. I argue that a creative or even a misleading
use of the cartographic lexicon by literary
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scholars may, in itself, be a valid source for cartographic epistemology. To illustrate, in section
III, I discuss the concept of ‘cognitive mapping’
as it has been treated by literary scholars, suggesting how this discussion may stimulate some
confrontation (or conciliation) between cognitive and post-representational cartography.
As a matter of fact, my investigation into this
leading concept within the literary spatial
turn revealed a series of unforeseen issues surrounding the tensions between different (cognitive, critical, post-representational) theoretical
approaches to cartography, providing me with
challenging questions to be further scrutinized.
The shift from an ‘essentialist and constructivist cartography’ to an ‘emergent cartography’
(Kitchin and Dodge, 2007: 342) also has important methodological outcomes (Kitchin et al.,
2013). How can we research maps ‘in action’?
According to Perkins and Dodge (2009), the
wide range of possibilities for studying emergent cartographies includes the analysis of narrative accounts of mapping in published letters,
diaries, novels and poems. Thus, another aim of
my article is to suggest that literary texts can
productively be approached as sites of encounter with, as well as sources for, the observation
of emergent cartographies. Section IV is devoted
to maps in literature, and proposes to approach
map practices emerging from literary texts in a
post-representational vein, acknowledging at
the same time the problems deriving from the
inescapable ‘representational’ nature of literary
texts.
Literature is related to cartography in many
different ways. Without attempting to provide
comprehensive coverage of literary studies on
this topic, in section II I contextualize this more
recent revival of interest by means of a rapid
sketch of the wide range of approaches to literary cartography. The review of recent interventions highlights the existing prevalence of
analytical and critical perspectives, showing
how some hints to new approaches in map theory are only starting to appear within this field.
This article is meant to further enrich an
already vast and multifaceted interdisciplinary
field, speaking to geo/cartographers interested
in literature to think about maps, but also to
literary critics interested in using cartographic
theorization to produce literary criticism.
II Literary cartography
1 Maps and literature
What does ‘literary cartography’ mean exactly?
To avoid vagueness and shape the field of literary
cartography, scholars with geographical or literary backgrounds have attempted to draw overviews of the multiple relations between
cartography and literature. In their seminal article
(on which I will focus in the final part of this article), Muehrcke and Muehrcke (1974) offered an
articulated exploration of ‘maps in literature’.
Papotti (2000) researches the ‘liaison dangereuse’ between maps and literature, providing a
framework that includes: methodological issues
(the graphic map located within the text, the verbal description of maps, the verbal description of
space aimed at replacing a concrete map); thematic issues (the evocative functions of maps in
connection with peculiar thematic contexts such
as war or education); ontological issues (the literary treatment of the truthfulness and falseness
of maps); linguistic issues (the creative and metaphoric appropriation of cartographic words).
Ryan (2003a) provides a taxonomy of what she
calls ‘narrative cartography’. Based on the usage
of the word ‘map’ in cognitive science, the taxonomy includes the following categories: maps of
‘real-world’ geographical contexts (spaces of literature production or locations of plots) drawn by
literary scholars; maps of the topographic organization of the (real or fictional) ‘textual world’
designed by authors, commissioned to illustrators, added by editors, spontaneously drawn by
readers or produced by critics; maps of the
(abstract, virtual) ‘textual space’, or database
maps, typically made available to readers of
hypertexts; maps of the ‘spatial form of the text’
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(metaphorical space constituted by the network of
internal correspondences), such as the arrangement of themes or characters’ relations in geometrical diagrams drawn by literary scholars; plotmaps, i.e. graphic representations of narrative
action in the time-space continuum produced by
narratological cartographers; the text itself that
looks like a map (see also Haft, 2000).
A number of works have been devoted to particular aspects of the map-literature relationship, addressing, among other issues: the
traditional genre of (mainly pictorial) literary
maps created for pedagogical and touristic purposes (Bulson, 2007; Hopkins and Buscher,
1999); literary maps produced by critics (Moretti,
1998) or readers (Ryan, 2003b) as tools for spatial
understanding of novels; the use of maps by
writers during the composition of their novels
(Bulson, 2007); the insertion of maps along
with texts, directly realized by authors or not
(Ljungberg, 2003). Other features of mapliterature relationships include: maps as cultural
texts involved with literature in the making of
national or imperial imaginaries (Klein, 2001);
maps and mapping as main themes of a literary
work (Westphal, 2011: 61–63); the ways in which
cartographic genres and conventions inform
spatial description in narrative texts (Sundberg
Wall, 2006); the ways in which cartographic
products and novels work in concert to shape
readers’ perceptions of space (Piper, 2010); the
analogy between the practice of writing and the
practice of mapping (Turchi, 2004); the idea of
the atlas as a novel (Wood, 1987); literary and
rhetorical devices used by actual surveyors and
mappers (Van Noy, 2003); cartographic language
as narrative and the integration of narrative
techniques within map design (Wickens Pearce,
2008).
Against this complex background, within the
recent revival of literary cartographical studies,
and in particular taking into consideration leading
geo/cartographic journals, some prevailing tendencies could be outlined. In the following paragraph, I review a number of recent interventions
showing how they are mostly restricted to technical or critical approaches.
2 Technical/(metaphorical)/critical,
and beyond?
Cartography as an analytical tool for mapping
real/fictional literary settings is today animating
an expanding field of studies. The ‘geography/
cartography of literature’ introduced by Moretti
in his seminal book Atlas of the European Novel
1800–1900 (1998) still remains a major reference point. Moretti (2005: 3), in fact, explicitly
uses maps ‘not as metaphors’ but ‘as analytical
tools’. Current analytical interventions, however, refer to this field as ‘nascent’, since
they aim to develop present literary cartography
by reassessing old-fashioned, handmade literary
cartography at the level of current digital cartographic techniques. On this basis, Piatti and
Hurni (2011) clearly claim that cartographers
now hold a ‘dominant position’ over literary
critics. Within this technical context, indeed,
cartographic and literary competences are often
seen as competing. Significantly, contributing
to a recent French collection on cartographie
litte´raire, Wells (2012: 170, emphasis added)
sees in the development of GIS and other
visual-spatial techniques applied to literary
analyses a means ‘to transform a battlefield into
a cooperative interdisciplinary laboratory’.
New mapping technologies have been
embraced in order to overcome the limits of traditional literary cartography as well as to overcome the dominance of the quantitative
approach in the spatial analysis of literary texts.
The aim is to map out qualitative data related
to authors’ spatial experiences, thus allowing a
critical interpretation of the author-space relationship rather than a mere spatial projection of
texts. This is the case of the ‘mood-map’
arranged by Cooper and Gregory (2010) within
their ‘Mapping the Lakes’ project. Cooper and
Gregory stress that Moretti’s reductive and rigid
patterns, once divorced from the primary literary
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sources, preclude any phenomenological appreciation of the fluid, embodied and experiential
engagement of both authors and readers with the
spatiality of literature. At the same time, however, in the development of new mapping and
geovisualizing techniques they see promising
paths toward a qualitative spatial appreciation
of texts.
Alongside this technical line of research, a
line explicitly focused on ‘critical literary cartography’ is now growing. This production draws
on the Harleian deconstructive approach, aiming to ‘define a literary cartography emerging
from critical cartography’ (Bushell, 2012:
150). The ways in which critical cartographers
problematize maps as cultural texts stimulates
the opening of new perspectives in the interpretation of literary fictional maps, such as those
integrated within literary works.
The claim for a more articulated ‘critical literary cartography’ is at the centre of a recent
intervention by Cooper (2012). The author follows Cuddy-Keane (2002) and Thacker (2005/
2006) in critiquing the process of proliferating
the metaphorization occurring with the term
‘mapping’ in literary criticism. The metaphorical drift fails to transform cartographic terms
into effective hermeneutic instruments, producing a ‘decartographization’ of the field. To
enhance the impact of cartography on criticism
(‘recartographization’), Cooper (2012) proposes developing reader-generated mapping,
i.e. (digital) ‘critical maps’ made by literary
critics upon analyses of texts (p. 31), on the one
hand, and a focus on authorial actual maps
included in literary texts, which are to be accurately emplaced by geocritics within their historical, material, social and cultural context
following the ‘work of J.B. Harley, Denis Wood
and other key critical cartographers’ (pp. 30–31),
on the other. The ‘critical’ within the study of the
authorial maps is substantial in the application of
a critical Harleian reading of those cartographic
artifacts (‘critical cartography’ in its proper
sense), while the ‘critical’ within the digitalized
reader-generated cartography seems to consist
of the replacement of a purely metaphorical use
of cartographic concepts with a more effective
map-making (the use of cartographic tools to produce ‘literary criticism’).
However, since Cooper agrees that Moretti’s
approach is based on that positivistic approach
to maps from which Harley moves away, it is
not clear in his statement that Harley’s theoretical deconstruction of cartography ‘might inform
both the analysis of authorial maps and the production of reader-generated mappings’ (Cooper,
2012: 49). This argument should be confronted
with the literature that applies Harley’s criticism
to GIScience or with the field of ‘critical GIS’
(see Crampton, 2001; Crampton and Krygier,
2006: 16; Kitchin and Dodge, 2007: 332), while
the combination of technical and critical
approaches should take into account what
Kitchin and Dodge (2007: 337) have proposed,
arguing that the ‘technical’ and the ‘ideological’
can meet if both are thought of as concerning
practice. Cooper, then, touches upon the debate
over post-representational cartography and the
new attention paid to the processual nature of
maps and mapping, but does not go further in this
direction.
The analytical and the critical are then explicitly combined when an interrogation of the
‘political’ nature of representing narrative locations in map form is posed. For instance, while
working on interactive online literary mapping,
Mitchell and Stadler (2011: 57–58) acknowledge that these atlases have the power to intervene in the perceptual, ideological, political
and practical orientation of audiences.
Some other recent interventions have hinted at
the new post-representational approach in map
theory. In his recent progress report on ‘narrative
cartography’, Caquard (2013: 140) suggests how
the narratives embedded in maps may alternatively be authoritative and compelling (being
consequently the target of critical cartographers’
deconstruction) or creative and open. To support
this last perspective, he passingly addresses the
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‘manifesto for map studies’ launched by Dodge
et al. (2009), who claim, as we have seen above,
a post-representational approach to mapping
practices and cartographic artifacts. Finally,
introducing an unstable opposition between
maps as ‘storytelling limiter’ and maps as ‘storytelling stimulator’, Caquard seems to situate himself between (or beyond) the ‘binaries’ (Del
Casino and Hanna, 2006) of representational/
non-representational thought.
To conclude this review, I find symptomatic
the fact that in the compilation of their Reader
in map studies, Dodge et al. (2011) include
the only piece devoted to literary cartography
in the ‘Power and Politics of Mapping’ section.
The author of the extract, who was sensitive
very early to Harley’s thought (Huggan, 1989),
is known for his interest in maps as a topos of
postcolonial literary texts. Postcolonial literary
studies, indeed, are particularly concerned with
cartographic debates (Howard, 2010). However,
it is worth noting that, while showing how postcolonial writings came to mobilize and creatively
revise the colonial map, Huggan (1989: 124)
refers to the Deleuzo-Guattarian definition of
map as ‘a rhizomatic (‘open’) rather than as a falsely homogeneous (‘closed’) construct’.
Notwithstanding this prevailing emphasis on
a (technical and critical) ‘recartographization’
of the field, there are voices which tend to legitimize productive spaces of ambiguity in the use
of cartographic tools and concepts within the literary field. Caquard (2011) finds that literary
cartography is now characterized by the expansion of GIS and cartographic techniques more
generally, on the one hand, and the interest in
maps as revelatory of power structures, on the
other. Yet, highlighting the ‘torments’ (and the
frustrations) of literary cartographers, he finally
embraces a ‘mapping perspective instead of a
purely cartographic one’: the mapping metaphor, as it is used within the arts and humanities,
he suggests, ‘may allow for escaping the torments and anxieties inherent to cartography,
and supporting the emergence of more
exploratory and hybridized practices and concepts’ (Caquard, 2011: 224).
Going further in this direction, Roberts
(2012: 12) has recently stated that ‘there is
so much more to say about mapping than is
often said in cartographic circles’. This statement is clearly in opposition to the idea that
cartographers have to re-appropriate the field of
literary cartography. Roberts notes that although
the use of the cartographic lexicon (by non-geo/
cartographers)
has its problems and frustrations . . . at the same
time the semantic ambiguity that has arguably
dogged theoretical discourses in recent years presents us with challenges that can enliven and
enrich, rather than inhibit, critical understandings
of cultures of mapping. (Roberts, 2012: 11)
Many literary scholars, indeed, use cartographic
terminology in an evocative or metaphorical
manner, thus forging original critical concepts.
To take only some recent examples, we might
think of Brabon’s (2006) ‘gothic cartography’,
Flatley’s (2008) ‘affective mapping’, Ramos’s
(2011) ‘global positioning metaphor’, or Naramore Maher’s (2011) ‘environmental deep-map
writing’. This creative use of the cartographic
lexicon, I believe, provides not only misleading
paths, but also paths to fascinating and stimulating openings for specialized map theorists. In
the following section, I address the concept of
cognitive mapping as a major example of productive, even if sometimes aporetic, confrontation between literary criticism and cartographic
theory. I also suggest how this discussion may stimulate some conciliation between cognitive and
post-representational cartography.
III Thinking maps with literature
1 Literary perspectives on ‘cognitive
mapping’
Notwithstanding the current move toward a
‘recartographization’ of literary cartography,
we might consider that literary criticism offered
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and is still offering an number of stimuli to the
problematization of maps and mappings. A
clear example is the extension of the concept
of ‘cognitive mapping’ to literary studies.
Thirty years ago, Bjornson (1981) introduced
an analogy between the mental activity involved
in both the generation and the comprehension of
literary works and the making of map-like representations by which individuals structure and
store their spatial knowledge in the brain. As
Ryan (2003b) notes, cognitive mapping, however, became an influential concept among literary scholars only when it was introduced by
the literary theorist Fredric Jameson in a 1984
article in New Left Review. Developed in a subsequent intervention on Marxism (Jameson,
1988), the concept of cognitive mapping was
finally adopted in Jameson’s famous book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (1991). According to Thacker
(2005/2006: 57) in his genealogy of ‘geographic
[literary] criticism’, Jameson’s use of cognitive
mapping, together with the circulation of geographical works on postmodernism such as those
of Harvey and Soja, signalled the emergence
of the question of spatiality in many fields of
the humanities. Jameson, in particular, claimed
a new ‘aesthetic of global cognitive mapping’,
extrapolating Kevin Lynch’s research on city
mental maps to the realm of global social structures. Thought of as an integral part of a ‘socialist
political project’ (Jameson, 1991: 416), Jameson’s cognitive mapping aimed to provide the
individual subject with ‘some new heightened
sense of its place in the global system’ (p. 54),
thus preventing the alienating and crippling ‘incapacity to map’ both space and social organization
within which the postmodern subject is situated.
Central to Jameson’s (explicitly ambiguous) theorization, however, is the statement that cognitive
mapping holds an ‘oxymoronic value’ (p. 416),
since it is somehow suspended between the
genuine subject-centred phenomenological
experience (a ‘situational representation’) and
the transcending ‘abstract conceptions of the
geographic totality’ (pp. 51–52) (or supraindividual totality of class-structures), thus
participating in the ‘enormously complex representational dialectic’ of the postmodern realm.
By means of a brief digression on the history
of cartography, Jameson associated ‘cognitive
mapping’ with both the pre-cartographic naive
practices of mapping such as itineraries and the
representational codes of modern mapmaking.
First of all, it is worth noting that Jameson’s
debatable transposition of the concept of cognitive mapping has met with consideration by
geographers themselves. Jameson’s 1984 article
is considered by geographers as a milestone
(Dear and Flusty, 2002: 7). Dear (2000: 47–
69) recognizes the theoretical potential of Jameson’s version of cognitive mapping in facing the
challenges of a postmodern hyperspatiality, and
Harvey (2001) recalls the Lynch-Jameson connection in his analysis of Balzac’s History of the
Thirteen. Kitchin and Kneale (2001: 22), in their
turn, rely on Jameson’s statements that the literary genre of postmodern science fiction provides ‘a cognitive space through which we can
understand the postmodern condition’.
Due in part to its own ambiguity, Jameson’s
terminology has frequently been used by literary
scholars and cultural theorists to address quite
different concerns. Significantly, while critiquing the superficial appropriation of spatial/
cartographical vocabulary by literary scholars,
Thacker (2005/2006: 61) suggests that metaphorical mapping was perhaps generated by Jameson’s use of cognitive mapping. Jameson’s
elusive treatment of the idea of cognitive mapping, indeed, has not led to the suggestion of a
clearly defined method of literary analysis (as,
for instance, in the case of The Political Unconscious). While discussing cognitive mapping, he
did not directly make reference to a reading
method, nor did he cite postmodern literary texts.
Nevertheless, cognitive mapping has been associated with both the practice of literary writing
(as in Arnold, 2006; Tally, 1996) and the practice
of literary reading (as in Vanacker, 2007/2008).
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In his seminal Geocritics, Westphal (2011) refers
to Jameson’s 1984 article and, by evoking
Lynch, calls for a ‘narratological’ reading of real
urban space using books as maps. One of the latest comments on Jameson’s cognitive mapping
(Tally, 2013: 48) is based on the idea that ‘a sort
of cognitive mapping undergirds the project of
literary representation itself’: by means of cognitive mapping, the writer maps the world.
2 From literary criticism to map theory
Interestingly, by discussing Jameson’s cognitive mapping, literary critics pose questions that
are crucial within the cartographic debate. Tally
(1996: 400), for instance, claims that with cognitive mapping there emerges an interrogation
about how cartographic practices are inherently
liberatory or repressive. Jameson’s project was
indeed conceived as a tool for subjects to regain
the ‘capacity to act and struggle’ (Jameson,
1991: 54) within the disorienting postmodern
hyperspace, and Tally confronts this position
with the well-established polemic consideration
of mapping as dominating among literary scholars. By demonstrating how Deleuze’s Foucaultian analysis, in particular, refers to spatial
practices (and mapping) as strategies of reversible, non-linear power, Tally finally proposes
going beyond the binaries of power/resistance.
In particular, he contests the association of Foucault with exclusive anti-mapping positions, an
argument that is very close to those that emerged
within cartographic thinking, namely the limited
Harleian application of Foucault to cartography
(Crampton, 2001).
Other authors highlight how in Jameson’s
formulation mapping is suspended between
polarities, such as closeness/openness, totality/
partiality and fixity/mobility. According to
Mirrlees (2005), the ‘totalizing’ attitude that the
postmodern subject needs to regain is not comparable to the practice of employing a privileged bird’s-eye view, since, for Jameson, to
‘totalize’ is to relate and connect; to situate and
interpret each object, phenomenon or event in
relation to the wider relations and forces, structures and determinations that limit and enable
subjects’ sensual and concrete historical existences. While comparing Jameson’s cognitive
mapping with a Euclidean, ‘panoptical impulse’
that dominates literary criticism and embracing
a different model of textual comprehension
based on mobile and corporeal proprioceptive
orientation, Ciccoricco (2004) recognizes that
Jameson actually envisioned his cognitive mapping not only as a form of viewing-from-above,
but also as a ‘topological figure’. For Hardt and
Weeks (2000), Jameson’s use of the metaphor
of mapping is somewhat misleading, since it
involves a kind of representation – the map –
that is (or is supposed to be) mimetic, stable and
definitive, while Jameson’s cognitive mapping,
instead, refers to the everyday production of
‘practical knowledges’ that are partial, mobile
and open.
These discussions, I believe, disclose various
tensions existing within Jameson’s theory as well
as within mapping theory: between cultural constraints and subject’s agency, social construction
and individual practice, detached visuality and
embodied knowledge, social spaces and material
spaces, cognitive explanations and representational interpretations, technical approaches and
critical positions. Perhaps, though, Jameson’s
ability to move the concepts between different
levels (spatial, political, cognitive, social, subjective) should be inspiring for the current tendency
to find new ways of thinking about maps beyond
the binaries of representation/practice, production/consumption, authoring/reading, sociality/corporeality and power/resistance, as Del
Casino and Hanna (2006) have suggested.
Some analyses by literary scholars address key
questions of this debate. Hegglund (2003: 188–
189), for instance, situates Joyce’s reworking of
the form of the map beyond the critical binary
opposition between an imperial complicity and
a revolutionary postcolonial mapping of resistance, stating that since ‘[map] power can be
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circulated and rerouted in unpredictable ways . . .
maps are perhaps more fluent than many critics
have allowed’. Against what he called an impasse
within cultural studies, that is the ambivalent
approach to maps as dominant or resistant, Alexander (2007) describes Belfast-based author
Ciaran Carson’s writings about the city (where,
nonetheless, maps recur in terms of totalizing
impositions) as a form of ‘rhizomatic narrative’
based on the model of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic, open map.
Returning to Jameson’s use of cognitive
mapping, it is worth noting that it is not the only
way in which literature relates to spatial cognition. The relationship between cognitive maps
and textuality has been more recently analysed
within the field of ‘cognitive narratology’ (see
Ryan, 2010). Ryan (2003b: 215) asked a group
of readers to draw the topographical layout (a
mental model of space) of the literary setting
of a literary work. Even if the approach remains
confined to a ‘topography of the novel’ (Ryan,
2003b: 218) and literature is reductively considered as a text to be cognitively processed (as in
Ferguson and Hegarty, 1994), Ryan’s account
of the cartographic efforts of readers turns out
to be very interesting with regard to the practice
of maps and mapping. Ryan, in fact, states that
the multiple, idiosyncratic and creative textual
topographies of common readers do not merely
represent the storyworld, ‘they also tell their
own story – the story of the reader’s reading’
(Ryan, 2003b: 228).
More recently, Hones has provided an exploration of the ‘potential collaboration and frustration in the cross-disciplinary overlap’ between
the independent field of narrative theory, characterized by cognitive approaches, and literary
geography (Hones, 2011a: 686). Moreover, by
stating that a novel is not ‘a representation of
geographies’ but ‘a geographical event’, Hones
(2011b) calls for a mobilization of literary
(mappable) settings: each time a novel ‘happens’,
its spatial settings are resituated and contingently
practised in a complex web of spatial-temporal
interactions between authors, readers, objects and
places.
3 Across cognitive/post-representational
cartographies
The kind of speculations mentioned above,
I argue, should be further explored in order
to open alternative directions for thinking
maps across different cartographic theoretical
‘domains’. The mentioned discussions coming
from literary criticism, for instance, move from
a ‘cognitive’ framework, proceed with a problematic confrontation with the critical approach,
and seem to embrace a more open consideration
of maps and mapping as experienced, contingent
and fluid. In particular, it seems to me that they
interrogate us about the challenging relationship
between cognitive and post-representational cartographic theories.
Cognitive mapping research, which ‘seeks to
comprehend how we come to understand spatial
relations gained through both primary experience and secondary media (e.g. maps)’ (Kitchin
and Freundschuh, 2000: 1) is practised above all
by psychologists, behavioural geographers and
computer and information scientists. Initiated
in 1960 by Lynch, in the late 1970s, cognitive
mapping research has been criticized by humanistic, cultural and radical geographers for
being mechanistic, reductionistic and uncritical.
From their perspective, research on spatial cognition fails to acknowledge structures of political and economic power as well as social and
cultural contexts within which individuals operate. However, the vital field of contemporary
cognitive geographical research now recognizes
that ‘mind is embodied and situated’, and that it
‘emerges and functions within a social and cultural context’ (Montello, 2009: 161, 162; see
also Hommel and Klippel, 2007). Nowadays,
for cognitive geographers, the term ‘cognitive
map’ indicates a metaphorical (!) expression
rather than a mere equation between spatial
knowledge and cartographic maps (i.e. as if
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map-like representations were stored in minds).
In the late 1990s, together with Blades and Golledge, Kitchin noted that behavioural geography
was moving out of the constrictions of cognition
to become reactive to the wider social, cultural
and economic context in which behaviour
occurs (Kitchin et al., 1997: 564). A recent
intervention in the Journal of Environmental
Psychology (Heft, 2013) aims to extend analysis
of the cognitive map beyond environmental
cognition research by evaluating the place of
culture in environmental psychology.
To what extent, however, is cognitive geographical research, moving from its initial proposition of an ‘alternative to the ‘peopleless’
geographies of spatial science and the excesses
of the quantitative revolution’ (Kitchin et al.,
1997: 563), now involved, or not involved,
within post-representational map thinking? The
two fields undoubtedly share the same interest
in the subjective experience of maps. As Kitchin
and Dodge (2007: 339) put it, ‘each person
engaging with a spatial representation beckons
a different map into being’.
Yet the notion of cognitive map and the cognitive approach to map use has been criticized
as detached from actual instances of spatial
actions and map use, and consequently it is challenged by an ethnomethodological approach
aimed at researching how maps are socially,
locally and contingently practised (Laurier and
Brown, 2008). The idea that maps come to life
when they are practised in particular settings and
situations is crucial for a post-representational
approach to cartography. Following Perkins
(2009), the recent shift from representation to
action opens new theorizations of mapping as
‘performative, emergent, narrated, and affectual’
(p. 127), along with a growing need for empirical
investigations of everyday mapping practices.
Perkins states that ‘ethnomethodological observation reveals much more at stake than individual cognitive map reading’ (p. 128), even if
elsewhere he clarifies that a contextual approach
is not better per se than a cognitive approach to
map use, but rather that such an approach allows
scholars to answer ‘different questions about mapping’ (Perkins, 2008: 150).
I suggest that a deeper exploration of the
interconnections between cognitive and postrepresentational cartography, on the one hand,
and literary criticism incorporating cognitive/
spatial perspectives, on the other, should open
new insights into the understanding of both
maps and texts. The appropriation of the ‘m’
word by literary scholars is not only a slippery
practice, it can provide map theorists with fresh
or disrupting perspectives, cues, anticipations
and above all questions.
4 ‘Emergent cartographies’ in literary texts
a Maps in literature. If literary critics may have a
voice in the cartographic debate, literary texts
might be, in their turn, precious sources for map
theorists. As Muehrcke and Muehrcke (1974:
317) note in a seminal article, ‘Maps in literature’, ‘writers, as a special group of map users
with an imaginative and philosophical perspective on the subject of maps, have much to say to
the cartographer’. This essay is a milestone of a
specific approach to literary cartography that
researches reflections, descriptions and narrations concerning maps as objects and practices
within literary texts.
First of all, the authors take into consideration
the theoretical-critical insights that writers can
provide through the disclosure of the processes
by which maps artificially construct reality. As
the authors show, providing several examples,
literary texts reflect (and play) on: the peculiar
visual language of maps; maps as scaled-down,
simplified, generalized, abstracted, selected, synchronized versions of reality; the symbolic and
metaphorical content of maps; the limits and the
intentions of cartographic communication; the
multiple functions, contexts and reading practices for which a map is produced; the sense of
truth coming from maps; the authority and the
power of cartographic representations; the role
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of maps in anticipating and conditioning place
knowledge. Yet, Muehrcke and Muehrcke’s article is not limited to these ontological aspects of:
maps. Along with the consideration of cartographic production and products, they explore
the mapping practices with which writers, characters or readers are variously involved. From
this point of view, the article provides an amount
of hints, drawing from literature examples of:
maps as ‘generative’ and imaginative entities;
the subjective rewriting of cartographic representations; the interiorization and personalization of
maps; the projection of sensations and affects on
cartographic objects; maps as private universes,
storage for memories, fetishes; the animation,
dynamization and dramatization of maps; the use
of the map as a relational tool, an emotional
medium, a link between persons; writing as a
way to ‘dwell’ in the cartographic space through
the narration of the map. Other aspects emerging
from literary treatment of map use in Muehrcke
and Muehrcke’s article are: the interaction
between the virtual and the material always experienced by map users, how maps replace a corporeal experience of space, and in what ways
maps become manipulated, embodied, multisensual objects.
More recently, Sills, a literary scholar specializing in the history of cartography, has claimed
that the study of cartography in literature (the
references made to maps and mapping within
narrative itself), has much to offer to historical
cartographic studies. Revisiting the ‘democratization’ of cartography in 18th-century Britain,
he highlights how this field has recently moved
away from the Foucaultian-Harleian approach
(a ‘New Carto-Historicism’) towards more pluralistic understandings of maps as ‘multivalent
texts’ (‘post-Harley cartographic histories’)
(Sills, 2007).
Significantly, Brown and Laurier (2005)
open an influential article on ethnomethodological investigation of map use with a poem
by Miroslav Holub titled ‘Brief Thoughts on
Maps’, which appeared in the Times Literary
Supplement in 1977. As the title suggests, the
poem itself is a reflection on the nature and the
use of maps.
The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian
detachment in the Alps sent a reconnaissance unit
out onto the icy wasteland. It began to snow
immediately, snowed for two days and the unit
did not return . . .
But the third day the unit came back. Where had
they been? How had they made their way? Yes,
they said, we considered ourselves lost and waited
for the end. And then one of us found a map in his
pocket. That calmed us down. We pitched camp,
lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map
we discovered our bearings. And here we are.
The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map and
had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps
but a map of the Pyrenees. (quoted in Brown and
Laurier, 2005: 18)
Expressions such as ‘Holub’s poem reminds us
that maps are used for much more than merely
reading and navigating’ (Brown and Laurier,
2005: 18), ‘explanations grounded in cognition
. . . miss the questions raised by Holub’s poem’
(p. 18) or ‘a final point we might take from the
poem’ (p. 19), all show how the poem functions
as a sort of counterpoint to Brown and Laurier’s
argumentation. Literary texts, in fact, may contribute directly or indirectly to the epistemological debate on maps. This particular case reveals
that literature is used to support a strong claim
for field research on how actual map readers
go about reading a map in a concrete setting.
Widening the range of possible applications
of a geocritical approach in literary studies,
Prieto (2011) points out that a new frontier might
be the study of spatial practices rather than of
places in literature. He explicitly refers to the
field of behavioural geography and suggests
focusing the analysis of literary texts, for
instance, on the theme of orientation. The literary
treatment of orientation, Prieto argues, ‘could
contribute to the studies of cognitive scientists,
architects, and urban planners’ (p. 24). Literary
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texts, therefore, are for Prieto important sources
for the understanding of spatial practices and
techniques of orientation (like maps).
Introducing a recent Italian collection of
essays on maps and literature, Guglielmi and
Iacoli (2012) recognize the return of reliance
on ‘cartography of literature’, on the one hand,
and the persistent need for critically acknowledging the power (or counter-power) embedded in
maps, on the other. However, they finally suggest, in a more open perspective, how the subjective nature of maps’ literary treatment
makes unpredictable the ways in which maps
burst into the literary imagination.
Moving from these suggestions, I argue that
the analysis of maps in literature should be confronted with the current theoretical debate and
empirical research on post-representational cartographies. This does not mean considering
literature instrumentally, namely as a ‘raw
material to prove or illustrate various theoretical
positions held by the geographer’, an attitude
that Sharp (2000: 329) contests to critical geographers’ readings of literary texts; rather, it
means to consider, with Brosseau (1995), ‘the
novel as a geographer’. Literary texts are here
conceived as sites for ‘alternative geographic
epistemologies’, and sources with which map
thinkers should engage for epistemological
insight; from literature, interrogations about
geography’s epistemological assumptions can
arise, thus producing an impact on geographical
knowledge (Brosseau, 2009: 214, 216).
b Encountering maps along McCarthy’s The Road.
In light of recent post-representational perspectives on maps, I argue that it is in the literary
treatment of everyday banal mapping practices
that we find a valid companion to such an
approach. In literature we find maps and mapreaders in actions. Literary repertoires are an
immense archive of living maps and emergent
mapping practices and should be considered as
sources, alongside other cartographic narratives
coming from ethnographic fieldwork. Of
course, in literary texts we encounter literary
representations of maps and map use. As critics,
geographers or common readers, we read them in
different ways. I do not want to suggest the mere
use of fiction as evidence of real-world practices.
On the contrary, texts should be researched for
their added value: texts provide elicitation of
practices that are often mute, put emphasis on
neglected aspects of cartographic artifacts and
acts, give shape to cartographic emotions in their
multiple nuances, and make us feel the processuality of mapping practices. Analogous to the
geo-centred approach of the French ‘geocriticism’ (see Prieto, 2011: 21), I am adopting a sort
of ‘cartocriticism’, i.e. a carto-centred mode of
analysis within which the traditional tools of literary criticism have a role since they help to
reveal the complex relations between the mode
of representation and the object of representation, but the ultimate objective is cartography.
Literary texts can transform into interesting fictional environments where theoretical reflections
on maps can flourish.
To conclude, I will briefly present a case study
of the analysis to which a subsequent article will
be devoted. In Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed
novel The Road (2006), a father and his son are
projected against a post-apocalyptic wasteland
as a surviving relational unity. With and between
them along the road, among the few things that
they are allowed to hold, there is a map. ‘Long
days. Open country with the ash blowing over the
road . . . They ate more sparingly. They’d almost
nothing left. The boy stood in the road holding the
map’ (pp. 214–215). It is one of those road maps
that, since the late-1920s, oil companies freely
distributed for promotional purposes. This particular kind of map is especially exposed to the
‘representational’ study of maps. The oil company road map, in fact, is an icon of American car
culture (Akerman, 2002), a typical cartographic
representation imbued with cultural meanings.
The road map’s ideological discourse can easily
be deconstructed without taking notice of its concrete usage on the ground. In the context of
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McCarthy’s dystopian future America, however,
this iconic map has lost advertising content,
rhetorical strategies and cultural impact to such
an extent that its cultural codes are no longer
meaningful.
Can I see it on the map?
Yes. Let me get it.
The tattered oilcompany roadmap had once been
taped together but now it was just sorted into
leaves and numbered with crayon in the corners
for their assembly. He sorted through the limp
pages and spread out those that answered to their
location . . .
These are our roads, the black lines on the map.
The state roads.
Why are they the state roads?
Because they used to belong to the states. What
used to be called the states.
(McCarthy, 2006: 42)
The end of the world entails the end of the map.
The map is naked, deprived of its commercial and
political values; it is a ‘dead cultural artefact’
(Weiss, 2010: 73). Its sense now rests only in its
residual practicability. The map reverts from
being a cultural icon to an essential device with
regard to spatial knowledge. On the map, the
father and son simply try to determine their position. The harsh post-apocalyptic environment
makes any attempt to read this map as an ideological device aimed at inculcating a consumer
culture in map-practitioners seem groundless
or even frivolous. It has been noted, in fact, that
McCarthy’s novels offer a critique of the map
as a source of information and as an authoritarian account of western progress, development
and historical ‘containment’, but also that each
of these novels use maps to ‘transcend’ this containment (Weiss, 2010: 73–74).
The cultural meaning of the map, thus, tends
to be replaced by its pragmatic dimension:
the map is reworked, privately re-inscribed
(Akerman, 2000) and manipulated in its
immaterial as well as material consistency by
the father and son.
He found a telephone directory in a filling station and he wrote the name of the town on
their map with a pencil. They sat on the curb
in front of the building and ate crackers and
looked for the town but they couldn’t find it.
He sorted through the sections and looked
again. Finally he showed the boy. They were
some fifty miles west of where he’d thought.
He drew stick figures on the map. This is us,
he said. The boy traced the route to the sea
with his finger. (McCarthy, 2006: 181–182)
McCarthy’s map scenes tend to present individual, dialogic interactions between maps and
their practitioners, as well as the transiency of
map artifacts: ‘instead of static, written guide,
the map becomes a kinetically changing document’ (Weiss, 2010: 70). Maps, in sum, are narrated not as fixed cultural representations but as
objects bodily and emotionally performed and
as relational practices caught in their spatial and
temporal contingency.
You always think we’ve gone further than we have.
He moved his finger. Here then.
More.
Here.
Okay.
He folded up the limp and rotting pages. Okay, he
said.
They sat looking out through the trees at the road.
(McCarthy, 2006: 195–196)
In The Road, the map, which is periodically
examined, appears in the hands of the father and
son during moments of rest, as an intimate
medium. Instrumental and cognitive dimensions
are overlapped with the affective one. The map
becomes one of the many material vehicles for the
emotional exchange between the father and son.
The boy nodded. He sat looking at the maps. The
man watched him. He thought he knew what that
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was about. He’d pored over maps as a child, keeping one finger on the town where he lived.
(McCarthy, 2006: 182)
Once it loses its normative, assertive and totalizing character, the map seems to gain a new lease
of life as an emotional, relational, lived entity.
The overwhelming moments in which the map
seems to embrace the father and son together
do not speak of an ideological, constraining tool,
but rather of a vital practice, an innocent need.
In The Road a living cartographic practice can
be observed. Its lived dimension is emphasized
by the particular fictional context in which it has
been imagined by the author and is felt by the
reader (especially if he or she is a map scholar). The
literary displacement of the road map, from its
proper cultural context to a dystopian wasteland,
proves to be effective in displacing a firm representational reading of the oil company road map. Thus,
I believe that an important task for cartographers
collaborating with literary critics should be to
explore the ways in which literary texts both encapsulate emergent cartographies and work as sources
for the epistemological interrogation of maps.
IV Conclusion
This article has aimed to address the field of literary cartography from the point of view of a
geographer interested in map theory and literary
geography. The recent call for a ‘recartographization’ of the field of literary cartography, which
implies the need for a more effective influence of
mapping research on literary criticism, has been
here partly embraced and partly criticized.
I have suggested that literary cartography
remains primarily embedded within analytical
(‘cartography of literature’) or critical (‘critical
literary cartography’) approaches, and fails
to engage the recent development of postrepresentational approach within cartographic
theorization. With this suggestion, I do not want
to call for a recartographization informed by a
post-representational thinking of maps – e.g.,
again, map experts to teach something to
literary experts. In my view, a crucial strategy
to enrich this field of research is to maintain a
breathable space of confrontation between map
scholars and literary scholars, in which more
expert as well as creative, destabilizing or even
aporetic ways of thinking about maps are welcome. The analysis of literary debatable use of
cognitive mapping has tried to suggest that literary criticism can sometimes provide disrupting perspectives, cues, anticipations and
questions to cartographic researchers.
This article, moreover, has aimed to suggest
how post-representational perspectives within
map studies should be enriched by an investigation of literary texts as fields where living cartographies can be encountered, observed and
studied. The fact that the interesting case of
McCarthy’s The Road was suggested to me by
a literary student interested in spatial concerns
is symptomatic, and demonstrates how map
researchers should profitably collaborate with
literary scholars in order to explore literary
repertoires as sites of ‘emergent cartographies’.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Rob Kitchin and my second editor at
Progress in Human Geography, and especially to the
three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable,
thoughtful comments. I would also like to thank Veronica della Dora for her effective advice and support.
Finally, I am in debt to Giada Peterle, who authored a
Masters thesis titled Attraverso la catastrofe: mappe
letterarie della metropoli postmoderna (2012) at the
Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies of the
University of Padua (Italy), for pointing out the
potentiality of McCarthy’s case study.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any
funding agency in the public, commercial, or notfor-profit sectors.
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