REEL POLITIK

Contrary Commentary

by James Reel

The Armchair Cartographer: Maps As Fiction

"NOW WHEN I WAS A LITTLE CHAP I had a passion for maps," says Marlow in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. "I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, 'When I grow up I will go there.'"

Every unread novel is a space inviting exploration; "When I have time I will look into that book." And there's no more intriguing way to enter a novel's realm than through a fictitious map.

Peter Whitfield touches on maps' storytelling power in his lavishly illustrated, carefully pondered, but poorly proofread The Image of the World: 20 Centuries of World Maps: "The act of representing reality in maps may not be too different from the act of representing it in art or literature: the impulse to crystallize, comprehend, and therefore control aspects of reality."

The Soviets, remember, tried to control reality by issuing false maps. Complicit cartographers either displaced or passed over certain small towns where the government cached military installations, dissidents, or critical mines or factories.

Lying with maps must have been a fine challenge. But organizing and defining the world beyond the cartographer's true knowledge has been even more daunting yet alluring. John Noble Wilford, in The Mapmakers, writes, "Once, the map makers' range was quite limited. The only maps that could be trusted were confined to immediate surroundings. Those that essayed to describe distant lands and seas were, until the modern era, exercises in conjecture based on inadequate surveying, wishful thinking, theological dogma, or sheer imagination."

Conjecture, wishing, imagination, even a bit of dogma: these are the very elements of fiction. So it makes perfect sense to accompany a novel with a map. Devising a tale and drafting a map of unfamiliar lands are, really, twin endeavors.

"(Maps') origin is instinctive, in that they are products of both the intellect and the imagination confronting problems in reality," writes Whitfield, who could be describing the genesis of any novel.

The parallel may not be so clear if you consider only today's drab, factual road charts. Think instead about Roman and Medieval world maps, in which, according to Whitfield, "the natural and miraculous wonders of the world are of far greater interest than objective geographical description." Or look at the seventeenth century's ornate world maps, decorated with mythological figures, scenes from antiquity, and portraits of contemporary monarchs. What unites these disparate figures, explains Whitfield, "is the intention of the map maker to display not merely the world but the forces which shape and control the world." Such an intention, of course, lies behind any novel, too .

So how logical, and wonderful, it is to open a novel and find a map as an extension of the story. Especially if the map is designed with the demeanor and bias of the prose just ahead.

The map may offer a bitter foretaste of the story to come. On the endpapers of Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead lies a map centered on the Arizona-Mexico border. This is how the map labels Tucson: "Home to an assortment of speculators, confidence men, embezzlers, lawyers, judges, police and other criminals, as well as addicts and pushers, since the 1880s and Apache Wars."

Another of the map's text boxes, labeled "The Indian Connection," states: "Sixty million Native Americans died between 1500 and 1600. The defiance and resistance to things European continue unabated. The Indian Wars have never ended in the Americas. Native Americans acknowledge no borders; they seek nothing less than the return of all tribal lands."

Presumptuous (Silko claims to speak for all Native Americans), antagonistic, cynical, yet not entirely devoid of humor -- these are the qualities we expect from Almanac of the Dead just from opening the cover and looking at the map. And we aren't being misled.

A map may be even more seductively exotic than the text it previews. Consider the cartography in The Lord of the Rings and related books by J.R.R. Tolkien. Run your finger across the page, over the herringbone mountains, the strange quasi-Middle English place names, and the hand-scratched details of woods and streams and Orc-haunted hills. Then try to resist entering Tolkien's fantasy world.

A map shouldn't be valued merely as a guide to the story's locale. Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World includes a map of the End of the World, the dream place that has some inscrutable bearing on the main character's real life. The End of the World is an enclosed, rather Kafkaesque settlement that may represent a psychological predicament, or a metaphysical puzzle, or hell.

Murakami's map is hardly essential for you to get your bearings in the End of the World, but it is important for setting the tone of the chapters that deal with this place. Certain spots on the map are marked "Abandoned Barracks," "Ruins of House," "Power Station," "Wilderness," "Shadow Grounds, " "Watchtower," "Beasts Enclosure." Unless you mistakenly believe you've opened the manual for the computer game "Myst," you can tell immediately that the ensuing novel will concern mystery, loss, and surrender of personal control, all in mysterious surroundings.

Murakami's map may be optional, but occasionally a novel's very structure or pretense demands cartography. Last Letters from Hav by Jan Morris is a novel by a travel writer, presented in the form of a travel memoir. It describes a summer spent in the fictitious international crossroads city of Hav, sort of a Hong Kong on the Crimean, perhaps a Sevastopol with a bad harbor. The novel is partly a satire of travel writing, but partly an elegy for lost pockets of place -- the colorful, singular, complex locales that are now pretty much homogenized into world culture. Hav has been enriched by two millennia of cultural imperialism, but that very imperialism brings it down at the end of the twentieth century.

Morris is both a perceptive sociological observer and a skilled faker. Even though she's created this society, she knows how to make it seem that she's peering into it from the outside. And essential to the conceit of this novel-as-travelogue is the reader's ability to peer at the city from above, by flipping back to the map of Hav's topography, quarters, and monuments.

A novel's map needn't be so detailed, so keyed to the narrative. The endpapers of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain display a Civil War-era map of the novel's setting, the southern Blue Ridge Mountains. This map does not, however, bother to trace the route of Inman, the character who's wandering home from war. It merely presents a context for Inman's travels, showing the web of rivers and bad roads in which he's tangled, and the dreary flatlands rising, eventually, to Inman's beloved hill country.

Frazier's narrative generally evades place names, at least along Inman's path, for this traveler has only a vague notion of where he may be and how he may reach his destination. Frazier's scenic description is always keen, but it's the land that matters, not what people call their settlements and surroundings, how they're labeled on a map.

Naturally, some stories are better off without maps. Heart of Darkness begins without one, and rightly so; although the plot follows Marlow deep into the jungle, the important journeys here are interior and unmappable. For a similar reason, one appreciates the exclusion of maps in Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. These novels concern the souls of adventurers, and geography itself is rather beside the point.

Maps in such books would be all wrong. However imaginative it can be, cartography exists to clarify, to put things in perspective, and thus must be used in fiction with great care. Fictive maps are great as opening teasers, or as supplementary material that enriches the story. So let novel-cartographers draw their inventive maps, but allow intrepid readers to draw their own conclusions.

Reel's Archive

Reel Politik 1: On The Future Of Reading

Reel Politik 2: How Not To Read A Book

Reel Politik 3: Plagiarists Of Experience

Reel Politik 4: Logolingus: A Private Pleasure

Reel Politik 5: A Community of Dreamers

Reel Politik 6: The Sensuous Bibliophile

Reel Politik 7: A Divine Madness

Reel Politik 8: Show Me The Books!

Reel Politik 9: The Argument

Reel Politik 10: Literacy & Community

Reel Politik 11: Real Writers Need Real Editors

Reel Politik 12: How To Read For Yourself

Reel Politik 13: Lies, Damn Lies & The MFA Novel

Reel Politik 14: The Merchant-Ivory Connection (ML 100, Round 1)

Reel Politik 15: Who's Stuffing The Ballot Box? (ML 100, Round 2)

Reel Politik 16: Interactive Fiction: It Still Doesn't Compute

Reel Politik 17: Feel The Burn

Reel Politik 18: Whose Life Is This, Anyway?

Reel Politik 19: Buy My Book. Please!

Reel Politik 20: The Overstuffed Bookstore

Reel Politik 21: Who's Looking At Who, Kid?



James Reel's most recent book, Tucson: A CitySmart Guidebook, is published by John Muir Publications. Reel, a Tucson-based writer and editor, is a contributor to Fanfare and the author of The Timid Soul's Guide to Classical Music.

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