Emmanuelle Peraldo - Literature and Geography - The Writing of Space Throughout History-Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2016)

Literature and
Geography
Literature and
Geography:
The Writing of Space

throughout History
Edited by
Emmanuelle Peraldo
Literature and Geography:
The Writing of Space throughout History
Edited by Emmanuelle Peraldo
This book first published 2016
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2016 by Emmanuelle Peraldo and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-8548-7

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8548-5
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... x
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
The Meeting of Two Practices of Space: Literature and Geography.
Emmanuelle Peraldo
PART 1: LITERARY CARTOGRAPHY, LITERARY GEOGRAPHY

AND GEOCRITICISM
Chapter One: Literary Cartography
1 ................................................................................................................. 20
Adventures in Literary Cartography: Explorations, Representations,
Projections
Robert T. Tally Jr
2 ................................................................................................................. 37
Cartography and the Contemporary American Novel.
Nic Pizzolatto: An Example of Geocritical Analysis
Fabrizio Di Pasquale
Chapter Two: Geographical Imaginations: Time, Space

and Imagination
3 ................................................................................................................. 52
Murder on the Orient Express: A Literary and Train Journey
from Istanbul to Europe
Anna Madoeuf
4 ................................................................................................................. 64
The Place of the Enigma: Time and Space in ArMen (1967)
by Jean-Pierre Abraham
Isabelle Lefort and Thierry Coanus
vi Table of Contents
5 ................................................................................................................. 81
“Non-places” and u-topos in The Cosmonaut’s Last Message
to The Woman he Once loved in the Former Soviet Union
and Europe by David Greig
Jeanne Schaaf
Chapter Three: From Geographical Metaphors to a Geography

of Literature
6 ............................................................................................................... 100
From Literary Myth to Literary Tourism: Cashing in on Expatriates’
Metaphorical Paris
Amy Wells
7 ............................................................................................................... 126
When Space Renews the Literary Workshop: The Oulipo Movement’s
Spatial Literary Practices
Geraldine Molina
PART TWO: GEOGRAPHY AND THE MAPPING OF LITERARY GENRES
Chapter Four: Chorographies and Travel Narratives
8 ............................................................................................................... 150
Geography through Texts: Evidential Strategies in the Travel Accounts
of Navigationi et Viaggi (Venice 1550-1559)
Fiona Lejosne
9 ............................................................................................................... 168
The Perception of the Spaces in the Mediterranean Chorographic
Literature of the Seventeenth Century
Valeria Manfrè
10 ............................................................................................................. 189
Writing Space through the Work of the French Botanist Tournefort,
Relation d’un voyage du Levant
Isabelle Trivisani-Moreau
Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space throughout History vii
Chapter Five: Geographical Novels
11 ............................................................................................................. 206
Walter Scott and the Geographical Novel
Céline Sabiron
12 ............................................................................................................. 222
Walking and Writing: Paul Auster’s Map of the Tower of Babel
Caroline Rabourdin
13 ............................................................................................................. 234
Amitav Ghosh’s Historical and Transcultural Geographies
in Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke
Catherine Delmas
14 ............................................................................................................. 248
Rudyard Kipling’s Writing of the Indian Space: The Shifting Lines
of Fiction and Reality, Adventure Narrative and Journalism
Élodie Raimbault
Chapter Six: Geographical Poetry
15 ............................................................................................................. 264
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Transtextual Map to Venice
Fabien Desset
16 ............................................................................................................. 287
W.H. Auden and the Mezzogiorno
Aurélien Saby
17 ............................................................................................................. 305
Mapping out the North in Simon Armitage’s Poetry and Prose
Claire Hélie
viii Table of Contents
PART THREE: LANDSCAPES, URBANSCAPES AND (GEO)POLITICS

IN LITERATURE
Chapter Seven: Writing the City
18 ............................................................................................................. 322
French Psychogeography Today? The Case of Thomas Clerc’s
Paris, musée du XXIe siècle, le dixième arrondissement
Joshua Armstrong
19 ............................................................................................................. 340
London in The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: From a “Monstrous Town”
to “A City of Marvels and Mud”
Nathalie Martinière
20 ............................................................................................................. 354
The City and its Double: Brasília Narrated by João Almino or the Myth
of Urban Modernity through the Prism of Everyday Life
Paskine Sagnes and Laurent Viala
21 ............................................................................................................. 371
Myth and Reality, Peking in René Leys of Victor Segalen
Xiaomin Giafferri
Chapter Eight: Poetic and Geopolitical Stakes
22 ............................................................................................................. 390
A Geographer Disappears: Politics and Fiction in Purgatorio
by Tomás Eloy Martínez
Matei Chihaia
23 ............................................................................................................. 407
Describing Space in the “Land of the Imaginary Line”: How the Novelist
Javier Vásconez Depicts Ecuador in his Novels
Anne-Claudine Morel
24 ............................................................................................................. 423
The “Frontier Lands” of the South-Western Alps: Analysis of Local
Territorial Processes through the Literary Constructions of Francesco
Biamonti and Jean Giono
Marina Marengo
Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space throughout History ix
25 ............................................................................................................. 438
Chicago: Literary Geography Approaches to an Egyptian Emigration
Novel
Delphine Pagès-El Karoui
26 ............................................................................................................. 457
A Geocritical Approach to Literary Representations of Pakistani Spaces
Juliane Rouassi
Contributors ............................................................................................. 472
Index ........................................................................................................ 478

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many debts I have accumulated over

the two years it has taken me to organize the international conference on
“Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space throughout History”
(Lyon, March 2015) and to complete this volume which contains a
selection of articles adapted from the papers given at the conference.
My home institution, The Université Jean Moulin, Lyon 3, has substantially

assisted me in several ways, and so has the laboratory in which I am a
permanent member, the IETT (Institut d’études transtextuelles et
transculturelles, EA4186), whose director in 2014, Claire Dodane supported
the project from the first time I mentioned it and whose secretary, Delphine
De Veyrac, was incredibly devoted and helpful. I am also grateful to the
LIRE (UMR CNRS 5611 “Littérature, idéologies, représentations, XVIIIe-
XIXe siècles”, ENS Lyon), the laboratory in which I am an associated
member, for their support and financial participation to this event. My
gratitude goes also to the City of Lyon for a subvention to support the
project.
The quality of the conference, and as a consequence of the book that came
out of it, has been guaranteed by the expertise and availability of the
scientific committee composed of Isabelle Lefort (Université Lyon 2),
Jean Viviès (Aix Marseille Université), Yann Calbérac (Université de
Reims), Catherine Delesalle (Université Lyon 3), Bertrand Westphal
(Université de Limoges), Marc Brosseau (University of Ottawa), Jess
Edwards (Manchester Metropolitan University), Gerd Bayer (Erlangen
University, Germany) and Benjamin Pauley (Eastern Connecticut State
University). Their work is gratefully acknowledged.
I also wish to thank all the speakers of the conference and more
particularly the contributors of this book for their good work and will to
provide the best essays they could. Last but by no means least, I offer
heartfelt thanks to the following friends and colleagues for their advice,
encouragement and general support: Stéphanie Gourdon, Alexandre
Palhière, Florent Villard, Lawrence Gasquet, Florence Labaune-Demeule,
Philippe Pelletier, Denis Jamet, Whitney Bevill and David Beyris.
INTRODUCTION
THE MEETING OF TWO PRACTICES OF SPACE:

LITERATURE AND GEOGRAPHY
EMMANUELLE PERALDO
1. Space gradually occupying all space…

Time and space have always been intrinsically linked to fictional texts:
they help define what is called “the setting” of a story. “When and where
does it take place?” is one of the first questions the reader asks oneself
when he starts reading a text. Mikhaïl Bakhtin called that “time-space”
combination the chronotope (a combination of chronos and topos) in The
Dialogic Imagination. (1981) In a period marked by the Spatial Turn, time
is not the main category of analysis any longer. Space is. It is now
considered as a central metaphor and topos in literature, and literary
criticism has seized space as a new tool and stake. Similarly, literature
turns out to be an ideal field for geography, as Muriel Rosemberg suggests
when she says that “literature is the artistic form of an experimental
geography”1. The Spatial Turn as a transdisciplinary phenomenon in the
humanities was coined for the first time in 1989 by Edward Soja in
Postmodern Geographies to explain the increasing concern of academics
in social sciences for space in the 1960s and 70s, especially with the
contribution of Henri Lefebvre (1974), Deleuze and Guattari (1980) and
Michel Foucault (1984). Geography seems to have suddenly invaded
philosophical language, among other spheres. Gaston Bachelard talked
about “topophilia” (1957), a term that is also used by Yi-Fu Tuan (Tuan,
1990) while Robert T. Tally Jr. talks about its opposite, “topophobia”.
In the past two decades, several theses connecting literature and
geography have been defended, like Marc Brosseau’s on what he calls the
“romans-géographes” (geographical novels) in 1992 or Lionel Dupuy’s on
Jules Verne in 2009; many books whose titles or subtitles contained the
terms “geography and literature” have been published2; and several
methods of analysis focusing on the relationship and interconnectedness
2 Introduction
between literature and geography have flourished. Literary cartography,

literary geography and geocriticism (Westphal 2007 and Tally 2011) have
their specificities but they all agree upon the omnipresence of space, place
and mapping at the core of the analysis. Incidentally, these three methods
are the titles of the three chapters in Robert Tally’s book on Spatiality.
(2013) Other approaches like ecocriticism (Buell 2001 and Garrard 2004),
geopoetics (White 1994), geography of literature (Moretti 2000), studies
of the inserted map (Ljunberg 2012, Pristnall and Cooper 2011) or
narrative cartography (which consists in writing a text as one would draw
a map or in mapping narratives, as is done in A Literary Atlas of Europe
by Barbara Piatti or on the Mappingwriting website by Robert Clark) have
likewise drawn attention to space.
Geocriticism was theorized by Bertrand Westphal in an innovative
work published in 2007 entitled Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces.
Geocriticism is a new means for reading and literary criticism, a new
interdisciplinary method of analysis that prioritizes space, places and
geographical practices in literary criticism. Textual and real spaces are at
the core of the analysis and of the “spatial narratives.” (De Certeau)
Ecocriticism is a method of analysis which is part of the
environmentalist movement which started in the 1960s. As in geocriticism,
great attention is dedicated to sense of place. In the introduction to The
Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty describes space as a new critical
category: “in addition to race, class and gender, should place become a
new critical category?” She answers that: “as a critical stance, ecocriticism
has one foot in literature and the other on land.” (Glotfelty 1996, xix) Two
other major theorists of ecocriticism are Lawrence Buell and Greg
Garrard. Geocriticism and ecocriticism are methods of literary analysis
whose object is space3.
Psychogeography, which is an artistic movement derived from
“Situationism” and which claims it belongs to science to some extent, is
defined by Guy Debord (1931-1994) as “the study of the specific effects
of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the
emotions and behaviour of the individual.” (Debord in Coverley, 2006, 10)
This movement can be used to analyze the relationship between
individuals and the space in which they evolve. The predominant
characteristics of psychogeography are “urban wandering, the imaginative
reworking of the city, the otherworldly sense of spirit of place, the
unexpected insights and juxtapositions created by aimless drifting, the new
ways of experiencing familiar surroundings.” (Coverley, 31)
The common point among all these approaches is the cross-fertilization
of categories as different as geography, ecology, psychology, history and
The Meeting of Two Practices of Space: Literature and Geography 3
literature, their interactions, and the way they work on the referential level
(mimesis) and on the creative level (poesis).
2. When several disciplines and approaches meet…

It is from that multiplicity of approaches to the object that geography
and literature share, i. e. space, that the idea for the international
conference that I organized in Lyon in March 2015 on “Literature and
Geography: the Writing of Space throughout History” came to me. Being
a literature specialist, reflecting on geography, on the writing of the earth
(geo-graphia/graphein4) was a way of confronting literary writing with
reference and representation. In the context of literary productions, the
writing of the world may include the referential discourse, but also the
discourse of fiction, and that intertwining of fiction, non-fiction and
(spatial) reference appeared to me as a fruitful and promising research
field. Prior to this interest in space, my research had heretofore been
focused on the writing of History, i. e. time, so I might be a good example
of the impact of the Spatial Turn on academics in the humanities.
This conference aimed at showing that literature and geography were
two practices of space, and that literature, along with geography, was
perfectly valid to account for space. It was meant to be multi-disciplinary,
to provide plural and multifocal approaches that sometimes required us to
leave the realm of literature to make a detour into geography or
cartography in order to get a better understanding of literary processes and
practices, in the way astronomers leave the Earth to see it better. (Aït-
Touati 2011) This determination to gather multifarious contributions had
been dictated by geocritical theory, since Bertrand Westphal defines
geocriticism as plural and multifocal. The questions that drove me were: Is
it legitimate to say that a literary text enables us to work on the object
“space”, which does not belong to geography only? What does it bring to
literary criticism to use geographical tools like cartography or geocritical
concepts? Can literary texts be sources for the geographer?
The response to the call for papers for this conference alone far
exceeded my expectations, as I received close to a hundred proposals –
which in itself is a compelling validation for making literature and
geography meet. The scientific committee that I had constituted for this
conference, composed of geographers and literary academics from
different countries (Isabelle Lefort, Jean Viviès, Yann Calbérac, Catherine
Delesalle, Bertrand Westphal, Marc Brosseau, Jess Edwards, Gerd Bayer,
Benjamin Pauley, Emmanuelle Peraldo), evaluated the proposals with
great care and precision.
4 Introduction
The conference gathered about sixty researchers from all around the
world (Canada, the US, Australia, Germany, Spain, Italy, Great-Britain,
Switzerland, France) and from several disciplines: some were literary
academics working on geographical objects, as a consequence of the
Spatial Turn; and some were geographers interested in literary texts, as a
consequence of the Cultural Turn that occurred in the 1980s and which
questioned the positivist approach by focusing on culture, that is to say,
circumstances which constitute the specificity of human beings. There
were also architects, artists and cartographers. Suggestions have come
from all disciplines on how to take into account representations and
discourses: texts, including literary ones, have become more and more
present in the analysis of geographers. The speakers focused on the cross-
fertilization of geography and literature as disciplines, languages and
methodologies.
This volume’s title also contains the terms “Literature and Geography”
(as in the many previous studies listed by Juliane Rouassi) precisely to
participate in this trans-disciplinary global debate and to propose a
“survey” (an “état des lieux”, to borrow the title of Lévy and Westphal’s
Reader on Geocriticism, 2014) of current research in that field. The
volume presented here contains some of the proceedings of the conference
that have been adapted and gathered in three parts entitled “Literary
Cartography, Literary Geography and Geocriticism”, “Geography and the
Mapping of Literary Genres” and “Landscapes, Urbanscapes and
(Geo)politics in Literature”. These three parts contain 8 chapters, which
themselves contain 26 essays.
3. Literary cartography, literary geography and

geocriticism
Building upon the massive work on literary geography, a number of
scholars in the social sciences have adopted mapping as a conceptual
framework and an alternative in order to interpret narratives and
understand how they work. Literary cartography is sometimes contested as
a method of analysis, but it can be fruitful to better understand literary
texts. Moreover, mapping literary texts offers pedagogical possibilities5, as
is underlined in this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education:
The use of models and other abstract forms in literary study has recently
seen a revival in a digital age that puts data and sophisticated data
management systems in the hands of the literary scholar, teacher, and
student. Pedagogical applications of these abstract models are rich with
possibility for the literary classroom, and offer exciting opportunities for
engaging non-English majors and non-traditional learners in the advanced

study of literature, as well as challenging students to verbally articulate
visual and spatial knowledge. (Prof Hacker, “Mapping Novels with Google
Earth”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 6, 2011)
Confronted with the incapacity of the sequential text to account for space,
which has no beginning, no ending and no chapters, two processes usually
come to mind. The first one consists in describing space through words,
while the second one amounts to recounting space thanks to narration. An
alternative solution is proposed to compensate for the shortcomings of the
text by completing it with the specific language which has been developed
to tell space: cartography. A map is indeed “a representation founded on a
language whose characteristic is to build the analogical image of a place.”
(Lévy 2003, 128) But to exhaust a place, isn’t it necessary to combine both
languages, i.e. text and map? Many writers (Melville, Stevenson, Dickens,
Swift, Carroll to quote a few) insert maps – real or imaginary – for
realistic purposes but they are sometimes truly part of the narrative.
Robert Tally, in the keynote speech entitled “Adventures in Literary
Cartography” that he gave at the conference by video-conferencing from
Texas and that is reproduced in Chapter 1, Part 1, deals with inserted maps
but also with other forms of narrative maps. He uses the figure of the
“adventure” / “venture toward” as a way of looking at both his own
interest in the subject and the ways the field has developed. In his essay,
Tally ponders the distinction between the itinerary and the map, between
the narrative and the descriptive, between text and image, between the
verbal and the iconic to show, with Spinoza, that they are “not opposed but
different”. Fabrizio Di Pasquale then analyzes the symbolic and aesthetic
functions of places in Nic Pizzolatto’s novel Galveston and he traces on a
map the locations and the routes of the characters. He shows that the map
can be considered as a pattern of representation of reality, able “to stage”
or to provide imaginary solutions. Both Tally and Di Pasquale adopt a
geocritical perspective in their articles.
Chapter 2 (“Geographical Imaginations”) contains three case-studies.
Anna Madoeuf deals with the mythical Orient-Express train, that “non-
place” (Augé 1995) between Europe and a hazy Orient, in which time and
space never stop. Thierry Coanus and Isabelle Lefort also tackle the space
and time dichotomy in their essay on Armen by Jean-Pierre Abraham in
which, “[t]he lighthouse, a quasi geodetic point without surface or
thickness, has proved to be a place – a singular place, by definition, since
it exists only through the reflection of a third presence, that of the writer
who inhabits it temporarily”. After the discussion of these two novels,
Jeanne Schaaf brings in theatre in her essay on two plays by David Greig,
6 Introduction
The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the

Former Soviet Union (1999) and Europe. (1994) Not only does the
diversity of fictional places conjured up on stage become a challenge for
the director and his management of real space in the theatre, but it also
questions the way identity is built in interaction with space: a new
geography of identity is drawn thanks to “non-places” such as train
stations, airports, or hotel rooms which proliferate in the plays and
destabilize the characters’ identities.
Chapter 3 is composed of two very different essays but which both
offer a meta-reading of sorts to conclude the first part of this volume. The
first is written by a literary researcher, Amy D. Wells, who examines the
ensemble of inviting geographic codes present in a selection of expatriate
writings and sees how the meta-critique of tourists’ expectations and
disillusions of Paris engenders a conception of this space as a topos of
self-referential space. The second essay is written by a geographer,
Géraldine Molina, who proposes a “geography of literature” in her article
on OuLiPo. L’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo), created in the
sixties, brings together writers who use language in a recreational and
experimental way by inventing constraints to generate new literary
dynamics. Geraldine Molina’s article intends to explore how the
Oulipians’ literary activities instigate a renewed relationship with space,
time and society. The work of the Oulipian Jacques Jouet, particularly
representative of the trend, is at the heart of this analysis. Indeed, this
author’s space-time-society triptych outlines a set of constraints which
generate new literary dynamics.
4. Geography and the mapping of literary genres

The aim of the conference being plurality and multifocal perspectives,
we wanted to deal with different kinds of spaces but also with different
categories of literary productions, i. e. different genres. The essays
included in Part 2 demonstrate the diversity of literary genres that deal
with space and show how each and every generic category deals with
space and places. Appropriately situated at the crossroads of literature and
geography is the travel narrative (which focuses on the connection
between the traveler and traveled spaces) studied in chapter 4 – a chapter
that gives substance to the reflection on the link between space and
literature by bringing a diachronic and cross-border dimension. Indeed,
Fiona Lejosne’s essay deals with 16th-century Italian travel accounts,
while Valeria Manfrè deals with the Mediterranean chorographic literature
of the 17th century, and Isabelle Trivisani-Moreau addresses the work of
Tournefort, Relation d'un voyage du Levant (1717), representing the 18th

century. The connection between traveling and narrative may be an
interesting and fruitful point to study when one tackles the link between
space and literature. While some produced narratives in the confined space
of their study (cosmographers), others explored the world (periegesis) in
the early modern and modern periods, i. e. the period of long discovery
travels, both by land and sea. These travels manifested a desire to map the
world – a will that is itself highly modern. When one wants to analyze the
contribution of the narrative or fictive discourses to geographical
knowledge, two types of narratives have to be distinguished: on the one
hand, the narratives of traveling writers (who are field-explorers as well as
models for geographers), and on the other hand, “closet geographers”,
whose activity is more commonly known as “armchair traveling”. There
were different types of journeys in Britain in the 18th century: travels of
explorers like James Cook, of reformers like Arthur Young, or of women
such as Wollstonecraft, but also enquiries (Defoe’s Tour), imaginary
voyages (Jonathan Swift) etc. The common point of these different types
of travels is the will of their authors to show their itineraries, to map the
world, to classify the places they visited within the accounts they wrote.
An interesting aspect of the travel narrative is the articulation between
the referential and the fictional that it brings up, the proximity between
truth and lies, as the title of Percy G. Adams’s book suggests, Travelers
and Travel Liars, 1660-1800. This point is particularly well examined by
Fiona Lejosne whose essay questions how geography was constituted as a
discipline during the 16th century through the use of travel narratives as
accurate sources, and it identifies the place attributed to personal
experience in the constitution of geographical knowledge. On the whole, it
questions the idea of modern geography as the empirical science par
excellence. Valeria Manfrè particularly focuses on chorographic literature
that was formed in the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, and more
particularly on the textual representations of the Kingdom of Sicily during
the Hapsburg domination. The texts were then often accompanied by a
large number of maps, sometimes even by sketches carried out on site,
manuscript drawings or watercolor perspectives from the coast. The
representations of space supported by a literary instrument and
iconographic sources are in close relation with chorographic literature.
This makes us ponder the visual dimension of geography and more
particularly literary geography, as well as the link between different types
of images and the writing of space.
Finally, Isabelle Trivisani-Moreau takes us to the French 18th century,
when, between 1700 and 1702, Tournefort, a botanist, was sent to the
8 Introduction
Levant on a royal mission to conduct research in various fields such as

botany, antiques, geography, as well as the peoples’ customs, their
religion, history, resources, and economic or political systems. He wrote a
book during this journey: Relation d'un voyage du Levant published in
1717. It was not a mere scientific report, as there were so many goals to
his mission. The use of the epistolary genre, which is not unusual for
travel narratives, helped to increase the literary dimension of the volume.
Chapter 5 shifts the focus to 19th-century British novels, and more
particularly to Waverley by Walter Scott, which is labelled by Céline
Sabiron as a “geographical novel”. This might be seen as a provocative
statement, as Scott has long been said to be the father of the historical
novel, mainly because his work hinges around the Jacobite Rebellions of
1715 and 1745. But Sabiron persuasively argues that Scott’s novels are
mostly geographical since they are anchored in a very spatial Scotland
(The Highlands), inspired by the writer’s travels, but also by sketches from
his friend and amateur painter James Skene, and include maps of the
region. They can aesthetically be compared to William Roy’s 1747 Great
Map, designed to compensate for the blank space on the Scottish map:
“[o]ur geographers seem to be almost as much at a loss in the description
of this north part of Scotland, as the Romans were to conquer it; they are
obliged to fill it up with hills and mountains, as they do the inner parts of
Africa, with lions and elephants, for want of knowing what else to place
there6”, ironically noticed Daniel Defoe in 1727.
The four contributions contained in Chapter 5 want to examine
whether novels are “des récits d’espace” (space narratives or narratives on
space), to quote the title of a chapter from L’Invention du quotidien by
Michel de Certeau; can we define the novel as a “roman-géographe”
(Brosseau 1996)? Caroline Rabourdin shows in her essay on Paul Auster
that writing is walking in the streets of New York, and that the foot, a unit
of empirical but also embodied measurement, is also a literary measure.
Both the activity of mapping on the ground and its result expressed on
paper are acts of language in City of Glass. (1985)
The last two articles of Chapter 5 explore the broad implication of
questions of geography and spatiality in the production of colonial and
postcolonial knowledge, identities and relations of power. In her essay on
Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke (2011),
Catherine Delmas shows how Ghosh revisits geography, which cannot be
dissociated from the historical context, and rewrites (from the etymology
geo-graphein) the impact of free trade on a global scale. Many of the
postcolonial topoi are analysed in that essay (displacement, migrations,
power relations, trade, Empire etc.) Elodie Raimbault’s article on Kipling
focuses on how the issue of referentiality influences the shifting

relationship between journalistic writing and fiction. The lasting influence
of Kipling’s spatial imagination on later representations of various
colonial territories (e.g. South Africa), regardless of their truthfulness, is a
proof of his ability to create a distinct and viable literary space in his
novels.
The dramatic genre has already been represented in the first chapter of
this volume, with Jeanne Schaaf’s article; so the last chapter of the second
part intends to draw attention to the poetic genre. The three contributions
that constitute Chapter 6 interrogate the imbrication between the writing of
space and the space occupied by writing. Poetry also often implies
traveling in space, in time and in imagination or texts: indeed, the poet
finds inspiration in new landscapes, like Ischia in the Gulf of Naples
where W.H. Auden spent his summers in the aftermath of WWII (in
Aurélien Saby’s essay) or Venice, which the romantic poet Percy Bysshe
Shelley visited, as part of his travels on the Continent which introduced
him to picturesque and sublime scenery that influenced his poetry, as is
shown in Fabien Desset’s article. Shelley also traveled through means of a
rich intertext that enabled the poet to go back in time to ancient Greece
and Rome deploying references to Pliny the Younger or Pausanias. These
different travels situate the Italian city between a fantasized and an
experienced Venice. Similarly, even if Ischia looked like a paradise to
Auden, Saby shows that his geo-poetic approach to the Bay of Naples is
fraught with tensions threatening the balance and harmony of the poems at
each line. As a foreigner having found refuge under the sun, Auden was
nonetheless aware of the crisis wreaking havoc in Southern Italy in the
1950s. Italy, which was a traditional country to visit on a Grand Tour, is
indeed massively represented in poetry, but it is not the object of Simon
Armitage’s poetical production, which celebrates the North of England
(with an abundance of Northern place-names, descriptions of local areas
and local people, dialecticisms, etc), as Claire Hélie shows in the third
contribution to this chapter. For Armitage, writing in and on his native
Northern England entails a questioning of the North as a place with a
specific identity to which a whole community can relate.
This second part establishes differences but also confluences in the
way the geographic inscription leaves its mark on the page in a travel
narrative, a novel or a poem. After mapping out these literary genres in
their relation to the writing of space, Part 3 will zoom in on particular
landscapes and places.
10 Introduction
5. Landscapes, urbanscapes and (geo)politics in Literature

The first chapter of the final section, Chapter 7, analyses the complex
and polymorphic representation of the urban space, through the
representation of four cities, namely Paris, London, Brasília and imperial
Beijing.
The spatial practice of psychogeography – individual explorations of
(urban) space that reveal the reciprocal relationship of spatial surroundings
and inner psyche – has recently become quite en vogue. English male
authors such as Will Self or Iain Sinclair especially attend to exploring the
visible and invisible urban spaces of London, which they manifest in
psychogeographical writings. Through a close reading of Thomas Clerc’s
highly psychogeographic Paris, musée du XXIe siècle: le Xe
arrondissement, Joshua Armstrong provides an in-depth glimpse into one
modern-day psychogeographic journey in the French capital, comparing it
to precursors and contemporaries all the way. London is tackled by
Nathalie Martinière in her contribution on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret
Agent. In this novel, she shows, Conrad writes about a real and familiar
place, London, and not an imaginary city, and he constantly oscillates
between “explicit references to the extra-diegetic reality of London and
attempts to give it meaning within the story through symbolization,
geometric reorganization or metaphors”. These processes transform the
referential urban space into something else, something created by the
novelist’s imagination and figurative language. Readers then travel to
South America with the essay written by Paskine Sagnes and Laurent
Viala on Brasília narrated by João Almino. “‘Brasília is a story to be told’”
(Almino 2012, 13): the story of the construction of the city but also and
above all, the stories of all those living on the margins. Small narratives
(Lyotard 1979) take the upper hand by providing a contradiction that
“invite[s] us to consider the possibilities of a postmodern completion of
the Brazilian nation”. Finally, this urban exploration takes us to Imperial
China with Xiaomin Giafferri’s article on René Leys (1922) by Victor
Segalen. The image of imperial Beijing (or “Peking”) is based on a type of
geographical survey gathered by the author during his travels, yet the text
is nonetheless infused with imagination: “The real and the imaginary are
two antithetic and inseparable faces of the same verbal reality, in
symbiosis with Chinese philosophy, in which the ideal is dualism or
perfect balance”, Giafferri says. All four essays are “real-and-imagined”
(Soja 1996) pictures of cities which metatextually debate the dialectics of
perception and representation, of spatial realities and individual
constructions of self.
Even if many essays have already underlined this fact, the second
chapter of Part 3, which is also the last chapter of the volume, shows that
the writing of space is never purely aesthetic, but always ideological or
political. The geopolitical endeavour, as Yves Lacoste – the founder of the
review Hérodote – defined it, consists in the study of power differentials
on territories, taking into account the contradictory representations that are
made of them and that fuel debates among citizens. Matei Chihaia’s essay
is on Tomás Eloy Martínez’s novel Purgatorio (2008), which evokes the
trauma of the “disappearance” of victims of the dictatorship in Argentina,
in this case that of a young member of a topographic expedition. Politics
and fiction are thus strategically intertwined in this novel which shows
“the effort to map the real as well as of the struggle to map the imaginary”.
Next, Anne-Claudine Morel analyses the dialectics between invisibility
and visibility in the writing of space in Ecuador in the 21st century – the
invisibility of the imaginary line of the Equator which crosses the country
and the desired visibility (in writing, in space and communication) of
Javier Vásconez (1946), the writer she analyses. Morel focuses on
Vasconez’s depiction of the unnamed yet easily identifiable Ecuador. The
concepts of lines, frontiers, limits and boundaries, which are highly
geographical, are also extremely (geo)political as they conjure up a
consciousness of space. Marina Marengo dwells on “frontier lands” in her
essay, more particularly, in the Italian-French south western Alps,
employing Raffestin’s definition of “frontier lands”, which are inherently
areas of transit, not only of things, people and ideas, but also between
different “worlds”. The borders, which cut across frontier lands, not only
fail to truly separate, but are an “exchange of promises.” These hybrid
areas are excellent examples of espaces troués. (Deleuze and Guattari
1980) This article enables us to reflect on the processes of production of
territory, marked by numerous borderlines, which bear testimony to the
various manifestations of power over the centuries. Juliane Rouassi’s main
interest in her article is the representation of Pakistan in the novels of
Nadeem Aslam and Fatima Bhutto. They both depict peaceful places and
spaces but they also show how conflicts and bomb attacks brutally change
urban and natural landscapes. Can one really escape violence in what
seems to be a hostile place? Last, but not least, Delphine Pagès-El Karoui
proposes an essay on Chicago, an Egyptian emigration novel by Alaa Al-
Aswany. The topic of migrants is timely, and it connects geographies with
geopolitical situations and individualities being displaced. “Migration
appears in Chicago to be a resource and an attribute of power”, says
Delphine Pagès-El Karoui. Each character illustrates a particular type of
migrant, who emerges, at the end of the narrative, having been
12 Introduction
transformed by the experience of migration. Chicago, like a number of

Egyptian emigration novels, demonstrates the force of attachment to the
native country, and in that sense continues to remain strongly influenced
by “methodological nationalism”, seeming to deny the possibility of an
identity of both “here” and “there”.
The diversity of the essays included in this volume reflects the sharp
interest in spatial problematics in very diverse works from varied
disciplines. As I come to the end of this introduction, I hope that the reader
can perceive the fascinating complexity of the relations between literature
and geography that is going to be explored by the rich and stimulating
contributions that constitute this volume.
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16 Introduction
Notes
1
“La littérature est la forme artistique d’une géographie expérimentale.”
(Rosemberg 2007, 261)
2
Juliane Rouassi established a non-exhaustive list of these publications including
the terms “littérature et géographie” or “literature and geography” in her article
“Géocritique, carte et géographie littéraire” (in Clément Lévy and Bertrand
Westphal (eds). 2014. Géocritique : État des lieux / Geocriticism: A Survey.e-
book, fr-eng. Limoges: PULIM, coll. Espaces humains, 222). It includes: Paul
Claval, 1987, “Géographie et littérature. Le thème régional dans la littérature
française”; Jean-Louis Tissier, 1995, “Géographie et littérature”; Marc Brosseau et
Micheline Cambron, 2003, “Entre géographie et littérature : frontières et
perspectives dialogiques”, 2003; Mario Bédard et Christiane Lahaie, 2008,
“Géographie et littérature : entre le topos et la chôra”; Christine Baron, “Littérature
et géographie: lieux, espaces, paysages et écritures”, 2011; Douglas C. D. Pocock,
1977, “Geography and literature”; Yi-Fu Tuan, 1978, “Literature and geography:
implications for geographical research”; John Douglas Porteous, 1985, “Literature
and Humanistic geography; William E. Mallory and Paul Simpson-Housley, 1987,
Geography and Literature: A Meeting of the Disciplines.
3
For more on ecocriticism, see Peraldo 2015.
4
“Geos-graphia: it is the earth, it is writing: the earth related through a world of
scriptural signs.” (Vincent Broqua, in Alamichel and Brossard, 2010, 120, my
translation)
5
A book entitled Teaching Space, Place and Literature is currently being edited
by Robert T. Tally Jr. and it will appear in the Modern Language Association’s
“Options for Teaching” series.
6
Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Exeter: Webb
and Bower, [1727] 1989, 235.
PART 1:
LITERARY CARTOGRAPHY,
LITERARY GEOGRAPHY
AND GEOCRITICISM
CHAPTER ONE:
LITERARY CARTOGRAPHY
1
ADVENTURES IN LITERARY CARTOGRAPHY:

EXPLORATIONS, REPRESENTATIONS,
PROJECTIONS
ROBERT T. TALLY JR.
Adventure offers a particularly tantalizing theme for a discussion of

literary cartography, particularly inasmuch as adventures are by their
nature exploratory, representational, and projective, three attributes that
are also characteristic of the narrative and mapmaking enterprises. Any
discussion of the adventures in literary cartography would undoubtedly
include some consideration of the work undertaken by various writers in
order to map the real and imagined – plus what Edward W. Soja has called
the real-and-imagined – spaces of the world depicted in, and to a certain
extent created and shaped, by the text. The literary cartographer is, in a
sense, already an adventurer, setting forth to explore territories mapped in
the narrative, connecting disparate elements or event in the effort to
fabricate a larger ensemble or totality. The adventure tale, as a genre or
narrative mode, frequently involves a wayfaring hero, who explores
strange places and undergoes novel experiences, only to return, either to
tell the tale or to be the exemplary figure in some other writer’s story. In
their charting of exotic lands, peoples, and phenomena, adventures seem
especially well suited to the project of literary cartography, although one
could certainly argue that all narratives partake of the cartographic
imperative.
In this essay, I approach the adventures in literary cartography by
examining the ways that adventure stories illustrate and enact the project
of narrative mapping by foregrounding in their own aesthetic projects the
exploratory, representational, and projective or speculative modes of
cartographic theory and practice. I am speaking quite generally, of course,
but my sense is that the adventure – my primary example here comes from
J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1937 fantasy adventure, The Hobbit, but the argument
applies to other works in the genre – affords a privileged vantage from
Adventures in Literary Cartography 21
which to view these characteristic elements. Moreover, the broader project

of literary cartography reveals itself to be a sort of adventure, insofar as its
activity requires the meticulous coordination of different registers, from
the individual subject’s subjective experience of spaces and places to the
vaster, abstract or even scientific apprehension of a spatial and historical
constellation of forces (see Westphal 2013). Hence, in their dynamic
spatiotemporality, the adventurer and the literary cartographer find that
their vocations intertwine, and that the resulting narratives and maps offer
rich resources for further adventures in literary cartography.
1. The Return of the Adventurer

What is an adventure? The term adventure is common enough, but
there is an oddly contranymic quality to the word as it is commonly used.
For the word “adventure” denotes, simply enough, an arrival, an “advent,”
or a “coming to” a place or event. The etymology, from the French and
Latin, is quite clear on this matter. However, in common parlance, the
word adventure has long carried the sense of a “setting forth,” a departure,
or a venturing outwards. To go adventuring is to leave one’s home. True,
any “setting forth” from one place also leads to an “arrival” somewhere,
whether at another place entirely or a return to the original point of
departure, but in common parlance, an adventure is not generally
associated with the arrival at that destination. The word adventure is
freighted with other meanings as well, including the sense of the
extraordinary, of risk and reward, and of matters of chance (here, the term
adventitious shows its family resemblance). But the sense of motion, of
movement in space, and of explorations of other places seems to me to lie
at the core of the word’s significance, particularly as it is used in literature.
When someone is said to be going on an adventure, it is normally
understood that he or she is not arriving, but rather departing,
notwithstanding the etymology. A paradox, perhaps.
Let us consider a very popular and famous adventure story, J. R. R.
Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The novel begins with the wandering wizard
Gandalf the Grey “looking for someone to share in an adventure I am
arranging,” as he tells Bilbo Baggins, who responds that hobbits “have no
use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late
for dinner!” (Tolkien 1982, 4) Naturally, the humorous scene is merely a
prelude to a charming adventure in which the bourgeois Bilbo leaves the
comforts of home, travels over hill and under hill, across rivers, valleys,
forests, mountains, and lakes, all while accompanying dwarves and
encountering trolls, elves, goblins, wolves, eagles, a sort of were-bear,
22 1
lake-men, and, of course, a dragon. But, after all of these adventures, the
final scene of novel portrays Bilbo sitting with Gandalf in his cozy little
home at Bag End in Hobbiton, sharing the tobacco-jar with the wizard,
who tells him that, notwithstanding the role he has played in the great
world-historical events of the Third Age of Middle-earth, “You are a very
fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only
quite a little fellow in the wide world after all,” to which Bilbo assents,
“Thank goodness!” (305)
Is it any surprise that, when he writes up the narrative of this
adventure, Bilbo Baggins chooses to name it “There and Back Again”? If
we were to characterize the adventure story as a distinctive literary genre,
we might conclude that the adventure is only accomplished at this point,
with the return (or advent) of the wandering hero. That is, the narrative
becomes an adventure only when this ultimate arrival, often a
homecoming, takes place. Indeed, it cannot be entirely accidental that
Tolkien’s much grander adventure story, The Lord of the Rings – with its
much larger geopolitical and historical range of reference, its
exponentially greater number of characters, toponyms, and plots –
nevertheless ends in the humble homecoming of an adventuring hero. The
sequel to The Hobbit, which had concluded with an altogether homey or
domestic scene, also ends with a hobbit (Sam) returning to the comforts of
hearth and home, ending with these words: “Well, I’m back.” (Tolkien
1986, 340)
Structurally, then, the adventurer sets forth, but only to come home
again, and this homecoming lends color to all that had come before. As in
the greatest adventure of the classical antiquity, the Homeric narrative of
Odysseus’s postwar travels – now unavoidably mediated by Horkheimer
and Adorno’s astonishing reconsideration of it in the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, – the most memorable scenes contain bizarre, exotic, or
otherworldly phenomena and locales, but the bourgeois gentleman’s
arrival and reclamation of his domicile establishes the ultimate stability, or
we might even say, in a Foucauldian key, the “epistemic regularity,” of the
world depicted in the adventure. At this point, perhaps, one is capable of
envisioning a map of the world, charting one’s knowledge of the places
visited and peoples encountered, projecting an overarching diagram of use
for further reflection and exploration. The narrative of adventure thus
becomes a map, a literary cartography of its own world system.
In fact, the adventure does have an epistemic or scientific quality as
well: the protagonist, who is also an observer, sets forth into exotic or
unknown lands, and his or her account brings such places into the register
of geographical and historical knowledge, which can then be brought to
bear on further study, exploration, and potentially colonization or

domination of disparate territories of the periphery by the forces at the
metropolitan center or core, to invoke Immanuel Wallerstein’s famous
formulation in The Modern World System volumes. We see this quite
clearly in many nineteenth-century adventures, some of which are also
nonfiction personal narratives or travelogues, where the narrator departs
for whatever reason from the world of mainstream or familiar experience,
enters – or, rather, as it would commonly be viewed by contemporary
readership, descends – into some unfamiliar, exotic, or primitive cultural
space, only to return and deliver the goods about these experiences for a
reading public based back in the central and likely privileged zone of
civilization. As Jonathan Arac has put it, looking specifically at personal
narratives written in the United States in the 1840s, “personal narratives
characteristically have the circular shape of descent and return – a
touching of ground, even a humiliation before the return to the elevation of
ordinary, civilized life.” (Arac 2005, 77)
This structure makes possible a related spatiotemporal engagement of
the reader with the details of the narrative. In Arac’s view,
A generic appeal of personal narratives in their time and since is their

registration of what seems a more archaic way of life, a virtual past
achieved by travel in space rather than in time, but from the perspective of
a narrator who is, like the readership, part of the modern world, making
contact with that “other” world and transforming it while integrating it.
Personal narratives may act thereby to colonize places and kinds of
experience, which are then appropriated into national narrative. (77)
Hence, regardless of the author’s intent, adventure stories have frequently

participated, wittingly or otherwise, in a sort of imperialist project, as they
serve to explore, identify, and incorporate foreign spaces and experiences,
ineluctably forcing them into the general reservoir of knowledge and
power in the metropolitan center. In the case of late-nineteenth-century
writers like Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, and other well-known
authors of adventure stories in that epoch, the complicity with or even
celebration of the British colonial project and its “civilizing mission” is
written on the surface of the tales; others, such as Joseph Conrad, may be
more ambivalent about the politics, even if the narrative form and cultural
effects are similar, as Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism so
effectively demonstrated. The geocritical analysis of such tales discloses
their connection to a network of power-knowledge relations that, in its
micropolitical functions or effects, gives form to the modern world system
in its emergence (see, e.g., Tally 2015).
24 1
As we know, such narratives also took part in the burgeoning science

of modern geography, as the stories of individual travelers helped to fill in
the vast white spaces still on the map. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
Marlow speaks of his boyhood love of map-gazing, a love that was
animated primarily by the “big, white spaces” of mystery and promise.
(10) As Marlow explains,
I had a passion for maps. […] 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.” (10–11)
Elsewhere, Conrad praises modern scientific cartography for its “honest”

maps and their blank spaces, in contrast with the “fabulous geography” of
old, which populated the unknown regions with sea monsters and the like
(see Conrad 1926). For Conrad, the “blankness,” rather than the dragon,
was the call to adventure, which must now in part be understood as the
scientific quest to fill in spaces that were hitherto blank. As Marlow points
out, much of the map of Africa “had ceased to be a blank space of
delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It
had become a place of darkness.” (11) Or, rather, as he puts it later, the
map had been filled with many colors, each indicating the sort of activity
to be found there:
all the colours of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red – good to see
at any time, because one knows that some real work is being done in there,
a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East
Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink
the jolly lager-beer. (14–15)
The irony of the “pioneers of progress” reference is acute, but underlying

this observation is the tacit, or perhaps even unconscious, critique of the
mapmaking enterprise in which the geographical and political pioneers are
also engaged. Just as some persons on the ground may imbibe lager-beer,
bringing the comforts of home to their outposts of progress (see Conrad
2012), the cartographer organizes the elements and colors of the map to
make things intelligible, familiar, and generally known to the viewer, here
Marlowe.
In Conrad’s novel, as in Tolkien’s, the itinerary of the protagonist – or,
I suppose I should say, the narrative of that protagonist’s itinerary – gives
form to the overall geography, filling in “spaces that before were blank,”
creating or adding significance to places previously marked, and helping
to render comprehensible the entire imaginary space of the work. The

result is a more-or-less fully formed cartography of the world depicted in
the adventure story. The exotic zones depicted in the narrative are
incorporated into an overall system of geographic, historical, cultural, and
other knowledges, for which the map itself is an entirely apt figure. The
remarkable itinerary helps to trace the contours of the narrative map of that
world, and the homecoming, perhaps, offers the frame-like closure of a
projected artistic space. The adventure, in this way, fashions a certain kind
of literary cartography, which is formed through the combination of the
itinerary-like tracing of lines by the adventuring protagonist or narrator
and the map-like overview afforded by the completed adventure.
2. The Contours of the Map

By this term literary cartography, I merely want to indicate the
practice by which writers figuratively represent, or attempt to represent,
the social space of the narrative or text, as well as the relationship of the
individual or collective subject to a larger spatial, social, and cultural
ensemble (see, e.g., Piatti 2008). It is a form of mapping, but one that
certainly goes beyond the attempt to faithfully reproduce in diagrammatic
fashion the places of the putatively “real-world” geospace. (But, then,
neither is literal mapping.) Literary cartography, in my view, is thus part
of any narrative project, and not a technical term for a certain type of
interdisciplinary practice limited to the combining methods used in
literature and geography, although there are clearly useful ways in which
such overlapping artistic and scientific programs would come to address
matters relevant to any discussion of literary cartography (see Tally 2013).
The figure of the “map” here is metaphorical, but only just so, since I
also believe that a sort of cartographic anxiety animates the desire for
narrative itself, which is necessarily a socially and spatially symbolic
activity by which the subjective and objective modes are bound in
inextricable, yet productive and tense relations (see, e.g., Jameson 1981;
Gregory 1994). As a practical matter, this anxiety reflects not only one’s
sense of being lost, unable to locate oneself in space existentially, but also
the quasi-scientific angst of feeling unable to map one’s place and one’s
surroundings in a meaningful way: a crisis of representation. These two
aspects of the cartographic anxiety align roughly with what might be
considered the two phases, subjective and objective, of the narrative
mapping project. The adventure of literary cartography will likewise
involve the personal, experiential knowledge of given places and spaces,
26 1
as well as the more abstract or philosophical projection of a map-like

totality.
In many ways, telling a story is like drawing a map, and vice-versa.
The adventure story, which traces the trajectory of the individual hero or a
group of characters across the time and space of their adventures, is also a
map of the world depicted in the narrative. Ultimately, the narrative as a
whole not only represents the places depicted in it, but also shapes them,
giving form to imaginary world in the text while also projecting a “world”
that can be apprehended all at once. The adventure story, more often than
not, operates like a world map.
Returning to The Hobbit, for a moment, we see that that the starting-
point for this particular adventure story is an actual map, which Tolkien
supplies in his own hand, and which has a crucial diegetic function as a
motive force for the adventure itself: Thrain’s Map, the artifact that leads
Thorin and Company on their quest. The map not only lays out the
geography of the Lonely Mountain its surroundings, but also reveals a
secret doorway into the mountain, a sine qua non of the Quest for Erebor.
Of course, stepping outside of the narrative, the map is also helpful to the
reader, who is able to orient himself or herself within the fantasy world
Tolkien is creating. (Indeed, the now-dominant marketing genre of fantasy
practically requires maps, it seems; in any case, many fantasy novels
include maps, which – and I hope this is clear – are not the same as, or
even necessarily correlative with, the literary cartography produced in
their narratives.) The map in The Hobbit is thus simultaneously an element
of the plot and a tool for making sense of that plot. Moreover, the map
itself tells a story, while also projecting a spatial diagram; and, similarly,
the narrative of Bilbo’s adventures figures forth a geography, imbuing the
places depicted in it with meaning. Thus, the discovery of Thrain’s Map
makes possible the adventure in which the literary cartography of Middle-
earth is rendered visible, but that hand-drawn map is itself an element of
the strictly literary mapping undertaken by The Hobbit.
This is the nature of literary cartography, which is always
characterized by a productive tension between two related, but sometimes
antagonistic, registers: the narrative trajectory and the descriptive
geography. For example, in his lovely book, Maps of the Imagination: The
Writer as Cartographer (2004), Peter Turchi identifies two distinct, but
overlapping activities that together make possible an effective “map” for
the reader. These are exploration, understood as “some combination of
premeditated searching and undisciplined, perhaps only partly conscious
rambling,” and presentation, the deliberate creation of “a document meant
to communicate with, and have an effect on, others.” Turchi, a creative
writing professor, is thinking specifically about the writer’s approach to a

given work, but the tensions between exploration and presentation can be
seen as typical of any number of literary productions.
Drawing from the history of mapmaking, as well as from Fredric
Jameson, Michel de Certeau, and others, I have suggested that the
distinction between the itinerary and the map offers a useful way of
dramatizing this tension, but we could easily imagine a roster of parallel
binaries, whose elaboration and deconstruction could be productive of
some engaging spatial criticism and theory. Such a list might include
Georg Lukács’s famous distinction between narrative and description in
his powerful essay on European realism and naturalism, “Narrate or
Describe.” Or, perhaps, we might consider the illuminating if not always
stable distinction made by the Russian formalists between fabula and
sjuzhet, except that the discursive form of the latter can be conceived as a
plot in the spatial sense, of surveying a field or plotting a course, for
example. Erich Auerbach’s elegant reading of the remarkable differences
in narrative representation between the Homeric epic and the Book of
Genesis in the opening chapter of Mimesis (1953) hints at this narrative
tension as well. Furthermore, we might look to Bakhtin’s distinction
between the epic and novelistic modes as further evidence of a complex
spatiotemporal antagonism in the text, which is only partially resolved by
reference to a literary chronotope.
Behind these various distinctions, we might discern the old rivalry
between text and image, between the verbal and the iconic, and between
storytelling and painting, for instance. (Here I am purposefully omitting
any discussion of music, the third-wheel of Roland Barthes’s Image-
Music-Text, which seems to lie outside of this particular argument but
which could offer another way of addressing these spatiotemporal
phenomena, particularly since the literary cartography inevitable involves
an aspect of polysensoriality.) The verbal narration and the visual diagram,
while thoroughly compatible, do seem to stand as rival representational
forms, each taunting the other over the ultimate futility of their respective
quests.
The possible antagonism between media is worth considering,
although I remain focused here on how these different modes or registers
of experience, knowledge, and imagination play out in the literary text.
Some people have noticed that I never include any maps, diagrams, or
images of any kind in my own writings. This is not because I believe that
such imagery is not useful, and I am a great admirer of many scholars who
do employ actual maps and other figures in their work. But, I do think that
literary cartography, as I imagine it, has to be able to be practiced without
28 1
recourse to nonliterary means. In other words, the mapping project

implicit in many if not all narratives is not reliant on the use of actual
maps. Indeed, arguably, maps could interfere with or confound such a
project.
However, the rivalry between these two registers in the end is not a
winner-take-all affair, since neither can definitively conquer the other and
nor would either wish to do so, so we ought best view them, à la Spinoza,
as non opposita, sed diversa (not opposed, but different). In any event,
literary cartography is a form that necessarily combines, often in
unforeseen or unexpected ways, both narrative and the description. The
interplay between the two animates and give shape to the figurative map
produced thereby. Any literary cartography must navigate between the
need to advance the elements of a plot or story – thus acceding to a
relentlessly temporal register – and the equally pressing imperative to
pause, to explain matters, to “paint a picture” or describe a scene, or, if I
can draw upon the cinematic idiom for a minute, to pull back and offer
“long” shots, figuring forth some imagined sense of overview.
This process not only allows the literary cartographer to represent, if
only provisionally, the spaces and places under consideration, but also, in
the view of geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, actually calls into existence the
“place” itself, making it subject to apprehension, interpretation, and
exploration. That is, a place does not become a “place” at all until it has
distinguished itself from the undifferentiated and abstract space of which it
is a part. Furthermore, in fact, places are invested with significance only
by being recognized as places “in the first place,” which necessarily leads
back into a narrative framework.
Tuan expresses a phenomenological notion of “place” as a “resting of
the eyes,” a pause that gives meaning, which he elaborates in both
Topophilia and Space and Place. Tuan’s conception reminds us that place
and space are not interchangeable, and yet they cannot be so categorically
distinguishable at all times either. In resting one’s eyes on – or, here,
directing the reader’s attention to – a given place, we observe that this
portion of the spatial array in which we are ourselves embedded or
enfolded becomes, if only temporarily and situationally, meaningful. This
places it within the bailiwick of literary criticism, as something to be
interpreted or analyzed. Within the narrative, these pauses offer the reader
a chance to consider or interpret the place in question and the narrative as
a whole.
This topophrenia, as I have called it (see Tally 2014), is essential for
establishing the contours of the map, as well as the affective geography
and history that emerges from the narrative. In the adventure story, one
finds this dramatized in the well-nigh constant back and forth between the
adventurer’s dynamic adventures, explorations of exotic lands and
experiences, and the narrative’s almost static moments of description or
“still life” in which the places are rendered more fully visible. (Goethe
referred to these moments in Homer’s Odyssey as “retarding elements” of
the story.) The Hobbit, in its rather episodic form, appears to combine
these in somewhat dramatic ways, as each “scene” nearly stands on its
own, many taking place during a moment of rest or pause, which is thus a
break from the overall narrative trajectory of “there and back again.” The
isolated adventures – for example, among the Trolls, riddling with
Gollum, fighting Spiders, or escaping from the Wood Elves – take place at
various “stops” along the road. Yet, as in Tuan’s example, these pauses are
crucial not only for the narrative’s more general meaning, but also for
lending significance to these places, which can now appear on the
narrative map. Bilbo Baggins’s individual adventures are therefore only a
small part, albeit an essential part, of Tolkien’s broader literary
cartography. In order for the literary cartography of Middle-earth to
emerge from the story of The Hobbit, the existential or phenomenological
registers must be supplemented with a more abstract, theoretical, or
speculative project. The sense of imaginary overview achieved by the
narrative map helps to reinscribe both the experience of the characters and
the topographical features of the imaginary world into a larger geopolitical
and historical system, a system that in turn makes meaningful those
discrete phenomena encountered along the way.
3. Structural Coordinates
Earlier I mentioned the distinction between the itinerary and the map.
In Jameson, the reference comes from his famous discussion of “cognitive
mapping” in his original, influential 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or, the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” which became the first chapter of his
1991 book of that name. Jameson there argues that the dramatic
permutations of lived space occasioned, if not entirely caused, by the
radical restructuring of the world system in an era of late capitalism had
produced a sort of postmodern hyperspace with which individual subjects
are not physically (and certainly are not politically) equipped to deal. The
result is a novel form of existential alienation and political impasse, an
aporia that now stifles even our capacity for imagining potential
alternatives. Analogizing the spatial bewilderment of an individual subject
attempting to move about in an unmappable postmodern space – famously,
it was the 1982 MLA convention held at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los
30 1
Angeles, which provided the exemplary selva oscura for so many

postmodern Dantes – Jameson argues that a form of cognitive mapping is
a necessary prerequisite for any future political and aesthetic practice in
the era of globalization.
Jameson’s first use of the phrase “cognitive mapping” actually
appeared in a discussion of literary realism in The Political Unconscious
(1981), although the idea had clearly been taking shape over many years.
In the now canonical version, Jameson presents cognitive mapping as a
blend of Kevin Lynch’s urban studies and Louis Althusser’s reconception
of ideology as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship
to his or her Real conditions of existence.” (Jameson 1991, 51) In The
Image of the City, Lynch had argued for a type of cognitive mapping – he
does not use this term – when he refers to a city-space’s inherent
“imageability” in connection with the urban pedestrian’s practice of
“wayfinding.” In an alienated or alienating urban environment, the
individual subject struggles to imagine the social space and to navigate
within it. Hence the need for some sort of cognitive mapping. As Jameson
summarizes it,
Disalienation in the traditional city, then, involves the practical reconquest

of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated
ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual
subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative
trajectories. (51)
In Jameson’s view, this cognitive mapping coincides with Althusser’s

theory of ideology, in which an individual may form a “situational
representation” of the individual subject in relation to “that vaster and
properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s
structures as a whole.” (51)
At this point, Jameson indulges in what he calls a “digression on
cartography,” for he recognizes that Lynch’s model is more like an
itinerary than a map, properly speaking. That is, Lynch’s maps are really
“diagrams organized around the still subject-centered or existential
journey of the traveler, along which various significant key features are
marked.” (52) Jameson compares this to the ancient portolan charts. Later
developments, such as the technologies of the compass and the sextant,
altered the process, such that mapping “comes to require the coordination
of existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived,
abstract conceptions of the geographical totality.” (52) Finally, with the
globe and the Mercator projection, Jameson notes that the properly
representational crisis of modern cartography comes to the forefront, and
“it becomes clear that there can be no true maps,” but “at the same time it
also becomes clear that there can be scientific progress, or better still, a
dialectical advance, in the various historical moments of mapmaking.”
(52) Jameson concludes this digression by returning to the problem of
ideology, noting that “we all necessarily also cognitively map our
individual social relationship to local, national, and international class
realities.” (52) Jameson later conceded that “‘cognitive mapping’ was in
reality nothing but a code word for ‘class consciousness’,” albeit a class
consciousness of a hitherto undreamed of kind, with a consideration of the
“new spatiality implicit in the postmodern.” (418) For Jameson, such a
figurative map – the projection of an imaginary cartography that can
somehow make sense of the social totality – is the necessary if impossible
prerequisite for any meaningfully utopian political or artistic program
today.
My conception of the aesthetic practice of literary cartography draws
upon this vision of cognitive mapping, which, truth be told, is in
Jameson’s own work a kind of supercharged metaphor for something like
narrative itself. The “desire for narrative,” as he once wrote, functions as a
way of mapping our own, existential spatiotemporal finitude onto an
alternative system of space and time, that of the great economic cycles,
natural history, or just History itself (see Jameson 1988, xxviii). The
conflicting, but not ultimately incommensurable, registers of individual
subjective perception and experience, on the one hand, and an abstract,
totalizing or systemic theorizing on the other, are maintained in the literary
cartographic project. The itinerary informs the map, which in turn makes
possible the significance of all those points encountered along the way.
Just because one cannot represent the totality does not mean that one
cannot try; in fact, as Jameson would point out, we do so all the time,
whether we are aware of it or not. And the effort to map the totality is, in
part, what underwrites the more limited sense-making or form-giving
practices of storytelling itself.
Let me return to my poor, unadventurous little hobbit for a minute.
Bilbo Baggins, although loathe to undertake any adventures when we meet
him at the beginning of The Hobbit, was very intrigued by the history and
geography of the wider world; in this, he was apparently unlike most of
his fellow Shire folk, who preferred the comfort of a rather narrow, largely
ignorant Weltanschauung. Like a young Joseph Conrad, Bilbo was partial
to map-gazing, and he delighted in stories of elves, dragons, and other
mythlore. That is, after all, why Gandalf selects him. The wizard knows
that, in this otherwise unassuming person lies a consciousness equipped to
countenance the ineluctable ruses of history, even if he himself does not
32 1
know it yet. The final lines of the book, which I quoted above – “you are
only a very little fellow in a wide world” and “Thank goodness!” – remind
us of the humble origins of Bilbo’s personal adventure, but they also
advert our attention toward the vaster spatiotemporal adventure that
exceeds any individual’s personal experience. (As a side note, the presence
of immortal beings complicates this somewhat, since characters such as
Elrond and Galadriel vividly recall events that took place thousands of
years before, but even among such persons, the overarching geohistory
appears to be beyond anyone’s individual ken.) As we later learn from The
Lord of the Rings and from the immense backstory provided in The
Silmarillion, Tolkien’s little bourgeois burglar participates in what we can
now see is but a brief episode of a much longer epic, extending backward
into prehistory and anticipating further adventures that manifest
themselves only in some dimly descried future. But, then, such is the
nature of all of our adventures.
What emerges from these narratives, even those that follow closely the
itinerary of a wandering protagonist, is a sense of overview, not very
unlike the projection of a map. The bird’s-eye view – or, maybe I should
say, the dragon’s-eye view – makes possible a kind of mapping that can
empower otherwise bewildered or alienated agents to act, if only
tentatively, and based on provisional and transitory information. Amidst
the apparently chaotic and incomprehensible forces and relations affecting
us, the adventurers, on this shifting, unstable terrain, the clarifying
overview of a map-like figure is frequently needed. Like Oedipa Mass in
Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, alone in the planetarium and
utterly bewildered by the circumstances in which she finds herself, we
might well decide to “project a world”; as she concludes, “Anything might
help.” (1966, 82)
The map, as so many politically engaged critics have correctly
observed, is itself a tool that can be wielded by powerful interests against
the powerless, and geography – like other sciences and arts – has
undoubtedly been complicit in various regimes of domination, from
straightforwardly imperialist appropriations of territory to more subtle
redistributions of power and knowledge relations across an array of social
institutions and spaces. For these reasons, some have found the “map”
form to be inherently repressive. Certeau suggests as much in his famous
analysis of “Walking in the City,” where he finds the urban itineraries of
the pedestrians, postmodern variants on Baudelaire’s flâneurs, to be free,
liberatory, or revolutionary activities, resistant to the panoptic, ultimately
static vision of the map, the view from above from some “Solar Eye.” The
view from above, in Certeau’s reckoning, freezes the fluid mobility of the
pedestrians below, forming a static image or map that, operating

somewhat like Foucault’s panoptic disciplinary mechanism, locates and
distributes bodies in space according to an apparently retrogressive regime
of power and knowledge.
But what is missing from this analysis is the degree to which maps,
however bound up in potentially baleful power-knowledge relations,
remain inescapably useful to the persons on the ground. The itinerary of
the flâneur might seem to follow no set path, as she or he creates shortcuts
within officially sanctioned spaces or idly strolls along carefully planned
avenues of commercial activity, but the urban pedestrian or the wandering
adventurer cannot help but project maps, whether we think of them in
terms of Lynch’s imageability and wayfinding or in terms of a more
abstract cartographic projection of an entire world. The maps produced
from the imaginary bird’s-eye view are, like all maps, provisional, and in
their very mutability such schemes or plots necessarily resist complete
capture by a static or stable image. Like Deleuzian nomads, the itinerant
subjects map and remap, transforming spaces even as they occupy or
traverse them. However, I do not mean to suggest that there is anything
inherently revolutionary in the nomadic cartographies, for as Deleuze and
Guattari have cautioned, smooth spaces alone will not save us (see 1987,
500). In this case, the itinerant pedestrians are not so much subverting
some panoptic mapping scheme as they are informing the creation and re-
creation of multiple cartographies.
As Jameson has put it, with respect to cognitive mapping, “my thesis
[…] is not merely that we ought to strive for it, but that we do so all the
time without being aware of the process.” (1992, 2) This thesis has been
restated, in a way, with great timeliness in Alberto Toscano and Jeff
Kinkle’s recent book, Cartographies of the Absolute, who note that “one
of the first products of a genuine striving for orientation is disorientation,
as proximal coordinates come to be troubled by wide, and at times
overwhelming vistas”. (25) Combining these insights, I might say that the
cartographic imperative compels us to try to produce a map even as we
remain experientially limited in our itineraries, but the one of the more
common results of this cognitive mapping is a completely different,
perhaps unforeseen, or previously unimaginable image. It may sound odd
to say it this way, but literary cartography partakes of estrangement.
Arriving back from where we had set forth on an adventure, the world
may well look suddenly strange and new.
34 1
Conclusion: The End of the Adventure

And this is essential to the adventures of literary cartography as well.
The mapping project of narrative frequently discloses the pitfalls or
downright failures associated with it, as the attempt to give form to the
vast, shifting spaces of any world system, and of its untranscendable
horizon of history, inevitably frustrate the earnest literary cartographer.
But then that is part of the adventure, and the mapmaker’s rough drafts
prove to be the foundations upon which subsequent efforts are based.
“True” maps, after all, are impossible, but that merely ensures the
possibility of better maps.
In this, we might say, the work of art maintains its utopian dimension
in the projection of an alternative reality that, like the map itself, both
depicts a discernable space and bodies forth a distorted vision. In telling a
story, one necessarily traces an itinerary and projects a map, and both of
these aspects of storytelling in turn give form to the world as it becomes
narratable or knowable. The rivalry between text and image, narrative and
description, is thus shown to be both false and inevitable, as the literary
cartographers simultaneously create and represent the territories as they
map them.
The adventure of literary cartography conjures up these various aspects
of exploration, representation, and projection. An adventure ineluctably
combines the inner and outward journeys of a subject situated in, moving
through, and conditioned by space and place (see, e.g., Thacker 2003).
These adventures in literary cartography – adventures as literary
cartography – make possible new ways of imagining the world, and also
the text, today. For critics, whose job is to interpret these maps, the
adventure begins anew with each reading, and the maps formed and
reformed over many adventures in literary cartography yield fresh ways of
seeing, not to mention thinking, the world we inhabit.
References
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DELEUZE, Gilles, and Félix GUATTARI. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Brian
Massumi (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Smith (trans.). New York: Pantheon.
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2
CARTOGRAPHY AND THE CONTEMPORARY

AMERICAN NOVEL.
NIC PIZZOLATTO:
AN EXAMPLE OF GEOCRITICAL ANALYSIS
FABRIZIO DI PASQUALE
Reflections on Crime Fiction

In a postmodern context in which the perception of reality appears
weakened, mimesis is now able to introduce a new interpretation of the
world, through the theory of literature, cultural geography, and
cartography. Such an interest for matters related to space appears to be
part of the evolution of the literary genres, as they are characterized by a
growing spatialization of the narrative forms, as well as by the
development of all those artistic practices connected to the creation of
literary maps. The cooperation between cartography and literature
represents one of the most important themes in Geocriticism, being
interdisciplinary and applicable to all fields of research and, in our specific
case, applicable to American crime fiction.
American crime fiction holds a specific relationship with reality,
therefore the beauty of its locations is the actual beauty of reality. In this
type of narrative texts, space emerges as a constantly unstable battlefield,
or as “aporia”, a system of tensions. Such a literary genre is particularly
attractive due to the attention towards space and its relationship with the
aesthetic and ideological codes of representations. The locations and the
characters make possible an analysis of the qualities and hidden meanings,
thus allowing a hermeneutical reading on several levels such as
sociological, anthropological, cultural, and political ones.
In order to understand all these meanings, an analysis of the places
depicted in literary representations is needed, as long as it considers the
38 2
various socio-cultural contexts in which crime fiction evolves, changes,

and establishes itself. In many different ways, American crime fiction
writers are associated with a specific narrative and visual style,
consequently used in cinema. This style utilizes a dark ambience where
the hidden part of the city, the locations at night, such as nightclubs and
cafés in the outskirts, the rainy streets and the dodgy neighborhoods of the
large industrial metropolises are predominant. These novels are mostly
characterized by a constant presence of descriptions of urban and peri-
urban settings. Here, the street violence and the social distress of a period
undermined by the crisis of the territory are highlighted.
While New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans,
Austin, become the ideal habitat to form the collective identity of a new
urban middle-class, at the same time they turn into real asphalt jungles,
hyperactive and violent mazes consisting of different, fragmented, and
somehow incomprehensible spaces1. The city and the territory acquire a
new meaning, showing the gateways and the limits of space through the
crumbling of their own internal structures, however producing new
identities. The introduction of themes like violence and criminality, which
are associated to a geographic study, generates innovation, as well as
fracture, compared to the literary tradition of the past century. Here, the
inventory of the places and the different points of view lead the reader into
reevaluating their descriptions and narrations. As Marc Brosseau points
out, the plot finds its status symbol in the action, as well as in the concept
of space:
The plot of a novel is not a simple “recollection of events” neither a sole

product of the action. Therefore, the double organization of the sense of
space and the tension established between these two aspects allow the
intrigue to find its drive, thus helping novels to earn their symbolic status.
On the one hand, the narrator provides the foremost interpretation of
topology, on the other hand, the characters give space multiple meanings
through their actions and perceptions of places. (Translator’s Note2)
Crime fiction allows its readers, sometimes indirectly and obliquely, to

engage with their deepest social concerns, their most fundamental
anxieties about themselves and their surrounding world.
1. Galveston: A Narrative Map

The readers are becoming more and more sensitive to the “reality effect”
produced by contemporary crime novels. Such an effect is evident in
Galveston, Nic Pizzolatto’s first novel. As the direct heir in the hard-
Cartography and the Contemporary American Novel 39
boiled tradition, Pizzolatto brings the reader to a hostile environment,

namely in the ambience of Louisiana and Texas, immersed in the squalor
of the cities, where anguish and frustration are palpable, where ordinary
people and criminals alike, despite their differences, share the same
language and the same angst.
The description of the locations goes through Roy Cady, the
protagonist’s own vision, perceptions, as well as his point of view. In
addition, in the novel the awareness of the environmental changes of the
territory contributes in highlighting the centrality and functionality of the
geographical space and image in both literature and cartography. The idea
of map as narrative text, along with the renewed appreciation of its
symbolic dimension, represents the starting point of this analysis3.2.
In Pizzolatto’s case, the map is not to be intended as an illustration, or
a mere decorative frame. Instead, it has to be considered as an analytic
tool, which is able to display the deep structure of the novel, the dynamics
of the narrative plot, the relationships among the characters, and the places
in which they function. The author offers the reader a representation of the
geographical spaces, whether they are urban or peri-urban, which is quite
faithful to the real locations. This is why in this case cartography turns into
the act of reconstruction of the outside world, which is fact into fiction.
Therefore, the map becomes an aesthetic object carrying within itself the
veracity of the territory. As Robert Tally Jr. stresses, the map operates by
virtue of a specifically literary nature of a work, thus becoming a form of
spatialization on its own right:
But literary cartography or literary geography, as I understand it, operates

precisely by virtue of the specifically literary nature of the project, and
writing itself is a form of spatialization that depends upon the reader’s
acceptance of numerous conventions. Once actual iconographic diagrams
or maps are presented, they become supplemental and sometimes
competing images to those conjured forth by the narratives themselves.
This is also the case with works of criticism or theory. According to Franco
Moretti, for example, Mikhaïl Bakhtin’s essay on the chronotope is “the
greatest study ever written on space and narrative, and it doesn’t have a
single map.” (Moretti 2005, 35, in Tally 2013, 5)
In other words, the novel establishes a relationship with reality that goes
beyond embellishment and mere imitation, so the map could
metaphorically represent its “frame”, its embodiment. As far as Galveston
is concerned, the description of its geography allows the reader to create
an outline also suitable for the map. This way, we have at our disposal
several options for the exploration and representation of space, due to the
relationship of analogies we wish to establish with the examined novel.
40 2
The analysis of the novel and its tropes offers the opportunity to utilize the
map as a fast and useful reading tool, in which it is possible to highlight,
thanks to the use of graphic symbols, the locations and the itineraries Roy
Cady crosses (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Galveston. Modified from West Central States and States of the Plains,
Southern Division, 1887.
Source: http://www.usgwarchives.net/maps/texas/misc/1887txarea.jpg
The geographical places become a stage, on which we can recognize the

psychological profile of the characters who never act according to a
coherent plan, but they go with the flow in a reality that presents itself as
an accidental one. Indeed, in Galveston the reconstruction of the events is
mostly based on the topic of Ray Cady’s escape from New Orleans and on
the casual encounter with two other characters: Raquel and Tiffany
Arcenaux. The actual escape is described according to a narration, typical
of a hard-boiled scene, defined by shootings, blood, and violence:
The man beside me slapped the side of my head, then he shoved me

forward and I acted like I stumbled, fell to one knee. When he tugged me
to my feet I flicked my wrist and whipped the stiletto into his neck. Blood
geysered hot over my face and mouth. I left the blade in and fell behind
him as the other two raised guns. One shot at me and smacked plaster off a
wall as the other fired at Angelo and the top of his pompadour flew off and
he fell to his knees. They both fired at me. The shots went thwap like
pneumatic bolts and all struck the third man. He spasmed at the bullets, the
blade still in his neck. My gun was right in front of me, stuck in the man’s
waistband. I pulled it out and raised it and fired through the blood fountain
at the closest one. I didn’t have time to actually aim, and I was half-blind
with arterial spray, but I hit him in the throat and he twitched and fired and
dropped backward. I never shot like that in my life. […] The last man
looked at his gun, his foot, and then at me, just as I shot him in the head.
The whole thing took maybe five seconds. Smoke spread over the foyer
like ground fog. The top of Angelo’s face had broken off, his cheeks
slicked with tears and blood. I threw up. The girl in the chair cried louder,
made a moaning sound. (Pizzolatto 2014, 18-19)
The evolution of the characters throughout the story becomes interesting,

if we keep into account that it goes hand in hand with the description of
the locations. In fact, from the beginning of the novel the instability and
insecurity that the places procure generate a progressive sense of fear and
oppression, which will then lead the main characters into illegal business
and, consequently, it will lead them to escape.
2. Geocritical Paths and Postindustrial Landscapes

In Pizzolatto’s fictional universe, everything is as we see it, but at the
same time, nothing is as it seems. The characters are the typical dark
antiheroes, they are deep, “shady”, mysterious, corruptible, and obsessed
by their own past, everyone with their own agenda and their own skeletons
in the closet. They behave and live in the sheer desolation of beehive
peripheries in large cities, such as New Orleans:
I found the address Stan had given me, a sinkhole apartment building next
to a line of warehouses: pale, graffitied brick, high weeds and crabgrass
blending into the vacant lot next door. Clunkers in the parking lot, that air
of oil and hot garbage that circles New Orleans. […] I slipped in and shut
the door. A small place with a couple pieces of furniture and trash
everywhere, newspapers and a ton of old racing forms, fast-food wrappers,
a dial television with a cracked screen. Empty bottles of well-brand vodka
stood along the counter. I always did hate a slob. (Pizzolatto 2014, 10)
Chance and need4 are the elements that determine the connection among
3
the characters, while the city turns into a suffocating place, a sort of “a
sunken anvil that sustained its own atmosphere.” (Pizzolatto 2014, 4) The
42 2
relationship between chance and need represents an interesting aspect of

the narration, because it allows the author to develop the story according
to the two concepts of polytopy, the composition of different spatialities,
and polychrony, the combination of different temporalities:
The code of space-time necessarily forms a unique bloc. But transgression

imposes heterogeneity, along with polychrony (the combination of
different temporalities) and polytopy (the composition of different
spatialities). Polytopy is space understood in its plurality. But the polytopic
view of space reserves for an individual a zone of intimacy, guarded
against external intrusions. This is a secret space, a space of hyperbaton,
one where the individual deploys a supplemental personal truth, protected
from the eyes of the world and from the prescriptions of the code.
(Westphal 2011a, 43-44)
The plurality of inscriptions in space-time and the proliferation of rhythms

that spring from them could form the basis of a geocritical approach. For
example, the novel develops on two separate temporal axes, 1987, which
is the year of the events lived by Roy Cady, and 2008, the year of
hurricane Ike, when Roy Cady recounts the events. Through the twine of
these temporal axes, the novel manages to filter the truth and to penetrate
the city and, at the same time, the territory. Therefore, it offers a dynamic
reading of the dialectical relationship between man and space, in both a
physical and social morphology. Past and present combine in the same
picture made of heterogeneous geographical paths and postindustrial
landscapes.
In this case, the map gives concrete information concerning the
topographical location of the city, while highlighting the characters’
perceptions of the places. The points of most interest, around which the
best part of the narrative plot takes place are New Orleans, as it is the
starting point of the journey taken by the protagonist, Lake Charles,
Sulphur, Austin, Orange, Angleton, and Galveston, as it is the final
destination. The conventional symbols used in this literary map, have the
purpose of making those places and the function such places hold in Nic
Pizzolatto’s narrative process visible, while offering grounds for a simple
analysis of graphic semiology.
The locations described in the novel turn into visible and legible
spaces, thanks to the map. As Peter Turchi suggests in his Maps of the
Imagination. The Writer as Cartographer, the writer takes on the same
role of the cartographer and, at once, confers the double function of
“exploration” and “introduction” to the act of writing:
The earliest maps are thought to have been created to help people find their
way and to reduce their fear of the unknown. […] Now as then, we record
great conflicts and meaningful discoveries. We organize information on
maps in order to see our knowledge in a new way. As a result, maps
suggest explanations; and while explanations reassure us, they also inspire
us to ask more questions, consider other possibilities. To ask for a map is
to say “tell me a story”. Writing is often discussed as two separate acts.
[…]
One is the act of exploration […] and this includes scribbling notes,
considering potential scenes, lines, or images, inventing characters, even
writing drafts. […]
The other act of writing we might call presentation. Applying knowledge,
skill, and talent, we create a document meant to communicate with, and
have an effect on, others. (Turchi 2004, 11-12)
In this logical system, our map defines itself through leitmotivs regarding
the wide-ranging organization of the local geographical complex and its
dynamics. The notions of direction, movement, and more generally all
those dynamic phenomena within the concept of space are explained here
through lines. If we carefully observe the picture, it will be possible to
notice that the combination of lines and dots, if connected the ones with
the others, traces a pattern, it becomes a sort of “texture”, in some ways
very similar to a “carte-réseau” (Network Interface Card). Our literary
map has a place in a system of knowledge, showing a specific image of the
world reflecting the author’s point of view and his perception of reality
and representing the place where reality and imagination meet. In fact,
each map is able to reconcile “historical diachrony” and “spatial
synchrony”, thus preserving its function as a “stratigraphic space.”
(Westphal 2011b, 66-67)
Within this graphic system, the road appears to be an essential element,
in that it shows the characters’ journeys and traces the distances within
space itself. In addition, it marks the beginning and the end of a
geographical and yet existential trip. The chronotope of the street, as it is
connected to temporal and spatial relationships, then acquires a physical
and symbolical value.
The author describes streets such as Highway 90 and Pontchartrain
Expressway in a very detailed manner every time he talks about them.
They become the emblematic space in which Roy Cady moves and in
which his escape is fulfilled. However, the streets are mostly a meeting
point among the several urban spaces and the surrounding territories. In
fact, these allow the relocation from the city to the countryside or to the
coast, towards a wild and abandoned nature, characterized by stretches of
cotton fields:
44 2
I drove across the Pontchartrain Expressway and left the radio off and my
thoughts hummed like a bee’s wings. Gretna. On Franklin street I
wondered when the last time I did things would be. Every beat of sunlight
that struck the windshield as the trees passed kind of demanded that I
appreciate it, I can’t say that I did. I tried to conceive of not existing, but I
didn’t have the imagination for it. I felt that same choking and hopeless
sense as when I was twelve, thirteen, staring down the long fields of
cotton. (Pizzolatto 2014, 9)
The streets accompany the protagonist’s thoughts and, sometimes, are seen
as true monsters that spoil the landscape. I-10, for example, is described in
the novel as a prehistorical snake hanging onto waters:
Her body washed up on Rabbit Island, this empty patch of forest in the
middle of Prien Lake where the I-10 cantilevered over the waters. […] Old
hopes bayed like ghost dogs inside me, just the old frustrations, old
resentments and I was pissed to find them at my heels this morning,
tracking me across the years. I got up to have a smoke and left Rocky
curled on the bed. A snapped pine craned over the parking lot and marked
the beginning of a weedy field that fell down into a shallow ravine full of
broken bottles and burst garbage bags. (Pizzolatto 2014, 46)
The roads that Roy Cady travels are the interpretation of the events that
unfold around him and in the meantime express that relationship existing
between the space and the time of the narration. For instance, a cyclical
and slow motion of time is associated with the countryside, while a
dynamic and fast paced motion of time is associated with big cities,
whereas suspended time characterizes internal settings.
If on the one hand the street dictates the temporal rhythm, on the other
hand it allows most of all to highlight the different feeling involving the
characters, seen as a sort of psychological and sensorial path. This way,
the concepts of “internal journey” and “external journey” are established
in a direct and suggestive and, at times, symbolic relation with some
geographical areas, such as in our case Louisiana and Southern Texas.
These two areas actually represent the sensorial spaces of the novel, those
through which the protagonist’s perceptions, as well as all the negative
and positive impressions are clearly manifested. The reader’s perception of
space is particularly negative. Sure enough, as we can infer by looking at
the map, Pizzolatto’s world is mainly dystopian.
3. The Dystopian View of Space

The several dystopian forms of space determine, on a symbolic level, a
breaking point where there used to be continuity, a negative feed-back
where there used to be a positive one, and a conflict where there used to be
complementarity. The dystopian view of space has to do with all sorts of
landscapes, east or west, the gulf coast or the internal countryside.
Louisiana in particular appears as a fragile and hostile ecosystem, made of
muddy swamps, oil plants, forests and vines:
Depending on the places we passed, the night around us shaded from ink
black to red and purple to a washed-out yellow that hung like gauze in
front of the dark, like you could see the dark sitting under the light, and
then it would be back to ink black, and the air would change smells from
sea salt to pine pulp to ammonia and burning oil. Trees and marshland
crowded us and we passed over the Atchafalaya Basin, a long bridge
suspended over a liquid murk, and I thought about the dense congestion of
vines and forest when I was a kid, how the green and leafy things had
seemed so full of shadows, and how it had felt like half the world was
hidden in those shadows. Refinery towers burned in the night and their trail
of bright gray smoke made me picture Loraine sitting on that beach in
Galveston, with her head cradled on my chest, telling her about the cotton
fields. (Pizzolatto 2014, 28-29)
Within this sequence, Pizzolatto uses chromatic variations to describe the

landscape and, at the same time, confers olfactory features to the space,
thus turning it into a true “smellscape”. Such features also pertain to the
descriptions of the gulf coast:
The land we passed split like a shattered clay tablet into grassy islands and
all the dark, muddy water spread down to the Gulf in the southern distance.
The sunlight glazed ripples and mud shallows with white fire. We crossed
Sulphur and the petroleum refineries, a kingdom of piping and concrete,
noxious odors. She stopped singing and turned off the radio. […] She
narrowed her eyes at the windshield and then turned to look at the broken
cypress trees that passed like brown bones reaching out the mud.
(Pizzolatto 2014, 51-52)
The exposure of the environmental neglect, for example, hides a much

deeper matter than the so-called “crisis of the territory”. In this
perspective, dystopia acquires a dual symbolic value because, if it defines
an objective condition of the space negatively, it is also true that it reveals
what Lawrence Buell calls “the environmental unconscious” of the author
(Buell 2003, 22). The novel encompasses muddy and swampy landscapes
46 2
in Louisiana, huge and polluted prairies in Texas, where fast food chains,
gas stations, refineries, leafy contours of oak and willow trees, and rusty
trailers dominate the landscape:
A green sign said Orange was eight miles away. […] She folded her
fingers on her purse and sighed. All this rolling world of kudzu and bony
trees and black water seemed to mean something to her, the way it meant
things to me, and she watched out the window with a surrendering gaze.
For both of us the landscape had a gravity that tugged us backward in time,
possessed us with people we used to be. We passed a small main street of
shabby food joints, a gas station, credit union. High, wild grasses. […] The
flat prairie stabbed outward to the sky, crowded at the fringes with bushy
trees, whiffs of ammonia and wet wood. The very air in these parts is so
bright, it actually collects light, and you have to squint even when looking
at the ground. […] In this climate all things seek shade, and so a basic
quality of the Deep South is that everything here is partially hidden.
(Pizzolatto 2014, 53)
In this dystopian universe the only exception seems to be represented by

Galveston island. Within certain limits Galveston filters and conveys all of
Roy Cady’s memories and sensations. This place has an emotional,
somewhat “exotic”, historical, social and touristic function:
The stories have become the place. I read a writer who said that stories
save us, but of course that’s bullshit. They don’t. […] Farther out, the gray
cypress of the pier has rotted and the boards are broken and collapse into
the brassy fog. A few gulls perch on the posts near the end of the thing,
their chests out like tiny presidents. Fiddler crabs scuttle away from my
feet. The calm, rhythmic slap of the tide. You can see the winds building
farther out in the Gulf – the sky beginning to stir in a very slow, sweeping,
churn. […] Bramble and thistle crust the dunes, and a barge crawls out the
fog toward the shipping canals, slides across my good eye. (Pizzolatto
2014, 68-69)
As with all the remaining locations described in the novel, Galveston is

affected by the changes triggered by industrialization. In 2008, Roy Cady
catches a glimpse of a different scenery, where rigs and tankers materialize
in the middle of the ocean as if they were yet another plan in the existence
bursting into the environment:
In 2008. I’m walking my dog on the beach. Trying to. I can’t walk fast or
well. […] Right here and to the south the bronze fog in the morning
appears endless, and the dusky color of it makes me think of sandstorms
blowing in from far out in the Gulf waters, as if a desert sat beyond the
horizon, and to watch the shrimp boats and jack-ups and supertankers
materialize from it, you think you must be seeing another plane of
existence breaking through to this one, and all of it freighted with history.
(Pizzolatto 2014, 65)
The author also focuses on climatic phenomena. For instance, the

reference to hurricane Ike gives the novel a real historical connotation, but
also its conclusion. At the end of the novel, the domination of nature
versus humankind takes place in a horrible and brutal way, reminding us
that the world we live in is mainly dystopian, in a way, farther and farther
from a real imagery. The presence of the hurricane brings a sense of
danger, indicates deep internal changes, it represents the protagonist’s
death and an opening towards something new:
The gale whips the rain into stinging darts, and the clouds turn the
afternoon dark as a widow’s dress. The heavy air teems with ozone and
seawater. It snaps and crackles into the distance, and flares pop over the
ocean as if the sky had swallowed dynamite. At its heaving rim I can
almost make out another darkness, a form of denser black slouching up
from the horizon in a shape I can’t imagine. Branches scraping the boarded
windows sound like something trying to claw its way inside, and the wind
howls like the voice of that animal, a low, wounded moan. It’s been twenty
years. I was worried I’d live forever. (Pizzolatto 2014, 257-258)
Pizzolatto shapes his perception of space through the apocalyptic imagery

of the hurricane and exploring various themes of Ecocriticism. Therefore,
our literary map can also be considered as a focal point of the
interpretation of this natural disaster, providing a renewal of the analysis
of representation on a higher and much more complex level. Furthermore,
the map bridges the gap between humankind and nature for a better
understanding of the geographical changes of places. As a result, the map
provides the reader an insight of the events occurring in the novel.
Conclusion
This analysis demonstrates how every novel is a map, every map tells a
story, and every story is connected to a territory. The criteria that were
used in our map comply with the intent to create a graphic model, which is
as concise and as faithful to the themes described in Pizzolatto’s novel.
Cartography, or mapping, aims to reproduce an image as a form of a
reading experience and explore the full potential of the map seen as a
perceptive organ of reality capable of reflecting the mental attitudes of a
society, its cultural horizons, and its interpretation of the world. Overall,
48 2
even if the cartographic production is not reality, this can lead to the truth
and to the image transmitted by the literary text. Literary maps present a
subjective and selective interpretation of reality and can be designed to
advance a viewpoint or agenda.
The comprehension of a literary map is a creative process allowing the
readers to identify the codes of intrasignification and extrasignification of
the narration. Therefore, regarding contemporary American crime fiction,
the places shown on the map act as semiotic indicators. In other words,
they pose as lived spaces and they are produced through senses, capable to
translate a particular socio-geographical condition. Writers incorporate
maps into their work as illustrations or metaphors, by turns embracing and
troubling the territorial imperatives that maps represent, and writing itself
becomes a form of cartography. This way, the geocritical approach
recognizes narration essentially as a cartographic activity and vice versa.
References
BUELL, Lawrence. 2003. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature,
Culture and Environment in the U. S. and Beyond. Cambridge
Massachusetts, London England: Harvard University Press.
IRWIN, John Thomas. 2006. Unless the Threat of Death is behind them:
Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
PIZZOLATTO, Nic. 2014. Galveston. London: Sphere, Little Brown Book
Group.
TALLY Jr., Robert. 2013. Spatiality. The New Critical Idiom. New York:
Routledge.
TURCHI, Peter. 2004. Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as
Cartographer. San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University Press.
WESTPHAL, Bertrand. 2011a. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces.
Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
—. 2011b. Le Monde plausible. Paris: Les Editions De Minuit.
Further Reading
HARLEY, John Brian. 2001. The New Nature of Maps. Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
HARVEY, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the
Urban Revolution. London: Verso Books.
HILFER, Tony. 1990. The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre. Austin:

University Of Texas Press.
MORETTI, Franco. 2005. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a
Literary Theory. London-New York: Verso Books.
PEPPER, Andrew. 2000. The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race,
Ethnicity, Gender, Class. Chicago: Dearborn Publishers.
PORTEOUS, John Douglas. 1990. Landscapes of the Mind: Worlds of Sense
and the Metaphor. Toronto: University Of Toronto Press.
SELBY, Spencer. 1984. Dark City: the Film Noir. Jefferson: McFarland &
Co.
TELOTTE, Jay P. 1989. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film
Noir. Chicago: University Of Illinois Press.
Notes
1
To better understand this aspect, it is necessary to delve into the representation of
the urban space and verify the influence that this new environment carries out onto
the narrative texts. In fact, by drawing on hard-boiled novels, cinema will be
mostly play, thus making visible, the constant urbanistic, topographic, and social
changes of the megalopolis.
2
In the French edition of the book, the author states: “La trame n’est pas un simple
‘circonstant’, ni le pur produit de l’action. C’est donc sur une double organisation
du sens de l’espace, et la tension qui s’installe en ces deux pôles, que l’intrigue
trouve son moteur et l’œuvre, son statut symbolique: celle du narrateur, d’une part,
qui pose une première interprétation de la topologie, de l’autre, celle(s) des
personnages qui, tant dans leurs actions que leurs perceptions des lieux, informent
cet espace de significations multiples". (Brosseau 1996, 88)
3
The map presents itself as a mark for the literary text, for which its capacity of
reflection and metacommunication is the most important trait. According to this
point of view, the location described establishes an iconic and symbolic relation
with the novel itself.
4
On these two aspects a clarification is necessary. In the examined texts, chance
and necessity are conceived only in a literary sense, as conditioning elements,
whether they might be positive or negative, as the narrative story and the
existential paths of the characters. Here, chance is a game of probability, while
necessity comes out of the “survival instinct”. A constant of Pizzolatto’s novel is
represented by movement: Every character is either stalked or is a stalker, running
away out of necessity and being in danger or safe only out of chance. On a
philosophical, ethical, and mathematical point of view, both concepts take on
different meanings.
CHAPTER TWO:
GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATIONS:
TIME, SPACE AND IMAGINATION
3
MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS:

A LITERARY AND TRAIN JOURNEY
FROM ISTANBUL TO EUROPE
ANNA MADOEUF
“If you want to express

That kind of gloom
You feel alone in a double room […]
Waiting at the Station
For a near relation
Puff, Puff, Puff, Puff
The Istanbul Train….”
—Graham Greene, Orient-Express,
1979, p. 285 (cabaret song).
The title and setting of Murder on the Orient Express, one of Agatha
Christie’s best-known detective novels, published in 1934, are taken from
this emblematic train1. The best-selling novel is both inspired by and part
of the myth, contributing to the fantasy about the king of trains, the train
of kings2. Many international celebrities have traveled on it, including the
Emperor Haile Selassie, Josephine Baker, Leopold II, Mata Hari, Isadora
Duncan, Lawrence of Arabia, Agatha Christie herself, and… James Bond3.
The Orient Express, “the Maltese Falcon of international express trains”4,
is without doubt the train that has been the source of the greatest literary
inspiration, for example in the work of Joseph Kessel, Paul Morand,
Colette, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, John Dos Passos, and Ernest
Hemingway. In fact, the story of the Orient Express began at its
inauguration, with the journalist Edmond About’s account of the epic
initial journey on 4th October 1883, when it steamed out of the Gare de
l’Est (known at the time as the Gare de Strasbourg) in Paris to the sound of
Mozart’s Turkish March, for a journey of approximately 80 hours and
3200 kilometers5. From its creation to the present day, it has been the
setting and source of endless stories, from journalistic accounts to novels,
Murder on the Orient Express 53
from history to fiction, with themes of adventure, luxury, politics, dreams,

exoticism, travel, or nostalgia for times past6.
The saga of the Orient Express, from the end of the 19th century to the
middle of the 20th century, is one of fantastic and epic episodes, of minor
events and moments of history. Passing through a number of unstable
areas and time zones, the line and the train have been affected on many
occasions by geopolitical upheavals7. The emblematic Orient Express,
linking West and East, Europe and its borders, is a line drawn between two
worlds. However, it is generally represented as traveling in a single
direction – towards Constantinople, its outward destination. While the
arrival of the railway undoubtedly changed the shape of the world in
general, the Orient Express also helped shape the way the world is
perceived by the West, pushing back or blurring the borders of Europe and
the exotic East. Of course, “when we take the train, it’s to go from one
town to another” (Pérec 1974, 85), but taking the Orient Express was to go
from a city in Europe to the target city of Stamboul. The Orient Express
formalized the direction from Europe, perceived as the point of departure,
the beginning, the centre of the world, an autonomous universe, to
Stamboul, which was not only the terminus of the train but also the
threshold of another world. The train also changed both the image and the
geography of Stamboul-Constantinople, henceforward a city at the edge of
Europe, the horizon of the Orient, a disembarkation point for travelers who
suddenly arrived in the city in large numbers. For example, Pierre Loti, in
1890, deplored the new influx in Stamboul of European tourists,
“disgorged by the Orient Express”8. Associated with the train, luxurious
hotels were built in the host cities, such as the mythical Pera Palace of
Tepebasi in Constantinople, built in 1892 and inaugurated with great pomp
by a grand ball in 1895. Finally, the very name of the train combines two
apparently incompatible words, given that the Orient seemed to be a
different world, subject to and associated with an idea of a specific time. It
is maybe for this reason that the Orient Express is described as the train
that “makes haste slowly”. Above all, is the Orient Express not a
mystification, a terminological imposture? The train will never keep its
promises, being neither express nor doing more than brush the Orient.
The train journey predicted by Agatha Christie’s novel takes connects
Istanbul to Europe. However, between the city that triggers that fictional in
camera and the place of destination, a blurred somewhere, shrouded in
snow, will appear, in the Far East. The mythical train that moves along
unfolding landscapes and places will suddenly stop. In the confined and
tubular space of the Orient-Express, that sudden stop will expedite the
crime promised in the title.
54 3
The plot of Murder on the Orient Express may be original, but the
singularity of this narrative lies somewhere else, in the mechanisms of the
staging of space, time and the illusion of movement.
My aim is thus to draw a parallel between that geo-literary mechanism
end the creations of the Alexander Calder, carver (1898-1976) that were
instigated and animated by that triptych (space/time/movement). Calder
did indeed create constructions that were said to be mobile for some of
them (as they were suspended in the air), and stabile for others (as if they
were suspended on the ground), or even mobile and stabile at the same
time (hybrid shapes).The stabile can only be imagined as a follow-up of
the mobile, being in a way its antonym. The latter only exists through its
instability, whereas the stabile ossifies in its own object a denial of fixity.
Between the two possible shapes, all the asymmetrical tones of an
unbalanced balance, and vice versa can be observed, from the most
constructed to the most unstructured. These objects, mobile and stabile,
also denote an obsession with time, in the questions it raises, in its
manifestations, expressed in his way by Calder, the artist who “carves
times”, as Jacques Prévert said. (1971, 3) The movement of these
constructions is time, whose energy is created by mobility, whose
evolution is composed of the interaction of stable and mobile things. This
essay will hence make use of the qualities of these artefacts to imagine the
action mechanisms, the places and the landscapes of Murder on the Orient
Express as determining and interpretative configurations of spatial
situations. For that aim, we need to travel back to the beginning of the
1930s, have a seat in that fictional train leaving from Stamboul and going
to the suspense of the criminal plot imagined by Agatha Christie.
1. “Constantinople – Trieste – Calais”

In contrast to the pattern mentioned above, Agatha Christie’s novel9 is
oriented and functions in the reverse direction, towards Europe, in other
words it takes place on the homeward journey as the travelers set off from
Stamboul10. The boarding point is the station of Sirkeci; the coaches are
attached, the characters board, the train and the plot set off in unison. The
construction and the plot are classic, based around a small self-centred and
exclusive world (a group of westerners), confined and transported across a
vast area, the ideal enclosed setting. It comes as no surprise that there are
no Turks in Murder on the Orient Express, just as there are no Egyptians
in Death on the Nile, another enclosed-setting mystery by Agatha Christie
involving an exotic journey, this time involving a river cruise11. Setting the
intrigue in a train does away with the need for natives; the characters can
picture themselves and talk about themselves, highlighted against the

foreign surroundings and amongst people who are different from them and
who become mere shadowy figures. On the other hand, the foreign lands
provide the perfect foil for the western characters and the scenes and
intrigues in which they are involved. In the Orient, even if here it is
subliminal and only hinted at, the imported/transposed characters stand out
sharply, like transfers placed on a pre-drawn background. There are
neither Orientals nor the Orient; both can be dispensed with, because the
Orient Express itself conjures up the myth of the Orient, whose
representation reached its zenith in the 1930s or was at least sufficiently
eloquent to be able to do without its subject matter.
The detective Hercule Poirot boards the Simplon Orient Express bound
for Europe, a 3,000-kilometer journey lasting three days, in a carriage
bearing a plate indicating the destinations “Constantinople – Trieste –
Calais”12. From then on, the plot takes place in a closed setting, and the
train functions as a net ensnaring the characters who are of different
nationalities, social classes, places of residence, ages and fortunes. This
multiplicity of identities is plausible in a train, but in the novel, the
characters were all connected in some way, and, unbeknown to Hercule
Poirot, they already knew each other.
The train envelops the passengers/characters, detaching them from the
outside world, its torments and storms; the train is the only place, an
absolute, a world in itself. At the same time, the train, together with its
coaches, compartments, restaurant, staff (subsidiary characters there to
serve the travelers), way of life, conventions and protocol, all retain strong
references to social class and identity; rather than being held in abeyance,
this aspect is highlighted and rendered almost mechanistic by the confined
space and the inherent cramped conditions and lack of privacy.
2. From station to station; an abstract, fleeting landscape

Like the dividing of the Red Sea as the Hebrews crossed over, the
landscape appears and disappears hypnotically and majestically,
simultaneously emerging and dividing on either side of the train that
confronts, strikes and flees it in a single movement. Here, the unfolding
landscape, composed of two asymmetrical and yet perfectly parallel
horizons, is singularly devoid of depth of political or social meaning. It is
detached, an absolute, simultaneously created and erased by the train along
a given stretch of the track. However, it creates an atmosphere; landscape
and time go by, images and moments linked in a perpetual fleeing
procession. It is the stations that punctuate the stages of the journey, and
56 3
also where the shuffling ballets and codified rituals of boarding and
alighting occur, but they are not treated as features of the modernity of the
time, obligatory thresholds of passage and arrival, but rather as non-places
breaking the journey. Aleppo station, for example, is described as follows:
“Nothing to see, of course. Just a long, poor-lighted platform with loud
furious altercations in Arabic going on somewhere.”13 (9) Belgrade is
dismissed in a similarly terse manner:
The Simplon Orient Express arrived at Belgrade at a quarter to nine that

evening. It was not due to depart again until 9.15, so Poirot descended to
the platform. He did not, however, remain there long. The cold was bitter
and though the platform itself was protected, heavy snow was falling
outside. He returned to his compartment. (27)
The two platforms, symbols of the cities quoted, are uninteresting and
hostile: foreign voices and no lighting on one, cold and snow on the other.
The stations are not used to introduce reminiscences or parallel erudite
comments. They merely serve as props to re-set universal time, incidental,
ill-defined spaces, apparently imperfect, which are neither exotic nor
firmly standardized. The station is “outside and inside” the town (Sansot
1973, 85), but here, is it even part of the country to which it belongs?
Sirkeci station in Istanbul, even though it is where the story starts, is not
even mentioned; it is just the departure point, and the departure itself is
only indicated by the movement of the train along the platform: “There
was a sudden jerk. Both men swung round to the window, looking out at
the long, lighted platform as it slid slowly past them.” (20) A station is just
a station; it can even be reduced to a platform. Ultimately, a country is
concentrated into a city, which in turn becomes a station, summed up in a
platform, which becomes a track. In other words, it is a synthesis of the
entire space, masterfully reduced to a geometric outline. And yet, Agatha
Christie’s story is based on a remarkable journey, starting in Syria on a
Sunday morning and finishing in Croatia (then Yugoslavia) the following
Wednesday. In only four days, they travel a dizzying 2,000 kilometers
(from Aleppo to Vincovci) through stations, towns, plains, mountains,
straits, regions, frontiers, countries and even continents; explicitly a vast
area, but only implicitly hinted at. Murder on the Orient Express has all
the appeal and appearance of a travel novel, but it is far from being such,
or at least, it does not provide any geographical account.
As observed by Guy Laflèche when analysing the novel as material for
a narrative grammar: “The geography is that of crossword puzzles.” (1999,
104) In fact, only nine places are named, but not described: six stations
(Aleppo, Konya, two in Istanbul – one in Asia and one in Europe,
Belgrade and Vincovci), a mountain range (the Taurus), a hotel (the

Tokatlian in Pera), and “somewhere” (between Vincovci and Brod). The
stations are simply mentioned as indications of place and time, setting the
scene and providing a way of checking both the places along the route and
the punctuality and progress of the train. The landscape is clearly there,
but it is incomplete and the description is terse; it has no narrator and is
inaudible and hence invisible. When it is beautiful, which only occurs
once (the Taurus), we only learn about it indirectly, in a roundabout way,
like a reflection in the glasses or eyes of the travelers: “Later they passed
through the magnificent scenery of the Taurus. As they looked down
towards the Cilician Gates, standing in the corridor side by side, a sigh
came suddenly from the girl.” (12) The time frame is equally ill-defined;
while the weather is constantly mentioned, notably the type, variation and
intensity of the cold, there are few chronological pointers. Indeed, no date
(year, month, general external information) is given or hinted at, while
details of the day of the week, the time – down to the minute – constantly
set the pace of the plot; a detailed account given with pointillist precision
against a blurred background.
Summary of the places and times in Murder on the Orient Express
When? No date is given. Probably the beginning of the 1930s.
(Clues: the connection between the Taurus and the Orient Express taken by
Hercule Poirot was created in 1930, and the novel was published in 1934.)
Season: Winter. It was very cold in Aleppo station, it was snowing in Belgrade,
and the train was caught in snow in Croatia, for the first time of the season. With
regard to the number of passengers, it was low season, and according to a director
of the railway company, the train should have been half empty.
Timescale: The story unfolds over 4 days (from the departure at 5 o’clock on
Sunday morning to the final stop, at about 11 o’clock the following Wednesday
night) and approximately 1,900 kilometers from the point of departure, Aleppo in
Syria, to where the train comes to a stop, somewhere between Vincovci and Brod
in Croatia (890 km from Aleppo to Istanbul, 810 km from Istanbul to Belgrade,
150 km from Belgrade to Vincovci, 65 km from Vincovci to Brod).
On board the Taurus (approximately 38 hours and 890 kilometers)
– Aleppo station, departure, Sunday, 5 a.m.
– Taurus Mountains, Sunday, after lunch.

58 3
– Konya station, Sunday, about 11.30 p.m.
– Haydarpasa terminal, arrival in Istanbul (Asian shore), Monday, 7 p.m.
In Istanbul (approx. 2 hours)
On reaching Istanbul, Hercule Poirot crosses the Bosphorus by boat from Asia to
Europe; on arrival at the Galata Bridge, he was driven to the Tokatlian Hotel in
Pera (where Agatha Christie stayed, and which was destroyed in the 1950s).
– Tokatlian Hotel, Pera, Monday, between approx. 7.30 and 8.30 p.m.
– Sirkeci station, Istanbul (European shore), Monday, 9 p.m.
On board the Orient Express (about 50 hours and 1,000 kilometers)
– Sirkeci station, Istanbul, departure, Monday, 2 a.m.
– Belgrade station (where the coach from Athens was attached), arrival Tuesday
8.45 p.m., departure 9.15 p.m.
– Vincovci station (where the coach from Bucarest was attached), Wednesday,
about 10 minutes after midnight.
– Between Vincovci and Brod, Wednesday from 12.30 a.m. until the dénouement,
the evening of the same day (the end of the book). The train is snowbound. Had it
not been delayed, it should have arrived in Brod at 12.58 a.m.
– Lunch, Wednesday midday.
– Dinner, Wednesday evening.
– After dinner, the travelers assemble in the restaurant car where Hercule Poirot
draws his conclusions and where the novel ends.
3. Somewhere that is nowhere

This was not Agatha Christie’s first railway crime novel, nor the last,
but it is the only one in which the train is the actual murder setting. The
drama occurs fairly early on, somewhere and/or sometime after Belgrade,
in a nebulous area on the way to Europe. The train stops, trapped in the
snow; and then the action unfolds. We know that time never stops; but we
are less familiar with the fact that neither does space. However, the
stopping of the Orient Express – sudden, unexpected and at night – makes
it possible to simulate these joint impossibilities. First, the train stops at
some ill-defined place in Croatia – “somewhere between Vincovci and

Brod” – at a vague geographical point about 200 km west of Belgrade14.
Standing irresolutely between two places that serve only as landmarks, the
train is temporarily in what is clearly an incongruous no-man’s-land, in a
landscape that is also a negation, that no longer exists because it is nothing
but a shapeless mass of snow, white on white, matter on matter. The space,
previously drawn in, stretched out and narrowed by the track, is now
resorbed, reduced to a shapeless and monochrome mass. Is not white the
absence of colour, and cold a suspension of climate and the neutralization
of the outside world? The combined effect is to dilute space and absorb
time; all that is left is an over-abundance of snow. The snowdrifts are thus
both an abstraction and a totality: the absence and neutralization of time
and space. Ultimately, the snow becomes time and landscape. It folds
itself around the train, like a wrap. The combination of this effect and the
unforeseen events makes the Orient Express a complete socio-spatial-
temporal object. The train stops suddenly, an event over which the
protagonists have no control, but the action carries on and culminates in
the murder act, which is a continuation of the movement and thus
resembles “a suspension”, to use dance terminology. (Roux 2007, 42) An
unlikely plot, it is true, but above all, the actions and setting are in phase
with the train, which is in a state of equilibrium and disequilibrium
between two suspended worlds and two poles, one the impulse driving it
from Istanbul station, and the other inexorably pulling it towards its final
destination, even if the force of attraction is temporarily hampered by the
proliferation of snowflakes.
It should be remembered that this murder is unusual in two ways: it is
collective, each of the twelve assailants stabbing the victim, who turns out
to have been a murderer himself, and the murder will remain unpunished
because Hercule Poirot will not reveal the culprits. The Orient Express is
also a determining factor of the unusual clemency and directions of the
detective/upholder-of-the-law, breaking with his usual pursuit of reason,
he too perhaps under the spell of the train. Can a deed carried out in a no-
man’s-land located in an area under oriental influence really be subject to
a criminal court? In this case, can the law of retaliation, first mentioned in
an engraving on the Hammurabi stele in Babylon, not prevail as the norm,
and vendetta not be justified as a form of just vengeance?
4. Conclusion: There (easy) and back (difficult)

A straightforward outward journey, a complicated return; it is perhaps
the train that invented, or at least formalized, a binary rhythm of travel,
60 3
breaking it down into two separate journeys, with different directions and
periods of time. Two starting points, polar opposites in a scalar sequence
of events; two sequences materialized by the elastic movement and
direction of the rebound: there and back. The return journey is essential,
and any delays or disruptions are feared and dramatized. With great
subtlety, Agatha Christie set her story explicitly in the context of the return
journey. This defused and forestalled any excitement associated with
traveling, preventing it from disturbing or interfering with her railway
plot. The return is not a journey of discovery, and thus the meaning of the
journey loses its interest and becomes dull, blunting the vividness of the
landscape. Taking a journey means going somewhere, but what about
coming back? The return is the finalisation of the journey.
“Snow?”
“But yes, Monsieur. Monsieur has not noticed? The train has stopped.
We have run into a snowdrift. Heaven knows how long we shall be here. I
remember once being snowed up for seven days.”
“Where are we?”
“Between Vincovci and Brod.”
“Là là”, said Poirot vexedly. (31)
The murder – the ultimate crime, an expression of total social

dysfunction, a symbol of cessation, of the end – is committed in the train,
an object-movement whose purpose is to move ceaselessly, at a constant
speed, following a predetermined route along an indelible and unalterable
track. The train in question is the supreme Orient Express, an additional
vector of disorder, bearing the enchantment and the curse of the
mysterious and threatening world conjured up by its name. Agatha
Christie thus made the Orient Express a literary friction motor, as well as a
composite object, a “mobile-stabile” like the works of Alexander Calder,
both supported in space and suspended from another of its possible
dimensions.
In a somewhere that looks like nowhere, in the Far East, at the limits of
Europe, in a blurred zone, in the confinement of the train, the crime took
place. This thriller promised an event (the murder) and a setting (The
Orient Express), and the relation between the two. And the promise is
kept: Murder on the Orient Express is indeed a geographical narrative and
the literary illustration of particular situations of spatiality generated by
the train, a mechanism that links fixity and movement.
References
ABOUT, Edmond. 2007. L’Orient-Express. Paris: Magellan et Cie, coll.
Heureux qui comme.
CALDER, Alexander and Jacques PREVERT. 1971. Fêtes. Paris: éd. Maeght.
CHRISTIE, Agatha. 1968. Le Crime de l’Orient-Express. Paris: Librairie
des Champs-Elysées, Livre de Poche.
—. 1975. Mort sur le Nil. Paris: Librairie des Champs-Elysées, Livre de
Poche.
GREENE, Graham. 1979. Orient-Express. Paris: Robert Laffont, coll. 10-
18, domaine étranger.
LAFLECHE, Guy. 1999. Matériaux pour une grammaire narrative. Laval:
Les Cahiers universitaires du Singulier n°1.
LOTI, Pierre. 2010. Fantôme d’Orient. Paris: éd. Phebus, coll. Libretto.
PÉREC, Georges. 1974, Espèces d’espaces. Paris: Galilée, coll. l’espace
critique.
ROUX, Céline. 2007. Danse(s) performative(s). Paris: L’harmattan, coll.
Le corps en question.
SANSOT, Pierre. 1973. Poétique de la ville. Paris: éd. Klincksieck.
Further Reading
Il était une fois l’Orient Express. Catalogue de l’exposition tenue à
l’Institut du Monde arabe à Paris. 2014. Paris: SNCF, IMA, Snoeck.
MADOEUF, Anna, and Raffaele Cattedra (eds). 2012. Lire les villes.
Panoramas du monde urbain contemporain. Tours: Presses
Universitaires François-Rabelais, coll. Perspectives Villes et Territoires.
PAMUK, Orhan. 2007. Istanbul: Souvenirs d’une ville. Paris: Gallimard.
LASSAVE, Pierre. 2002. Sciences sociales et littérature. Concurrence,
complémentarité, interférence. Paris: PUF, coll. Sociologie
d’aujourd’hui.
LONDRES, Albert. 1985. Si je t’oublie Constantinople. Paris: Union
générale d’éd., 10-18, série Grands reporters.
ROSEMBERG Muriel. 2012. Le Géographique et le littéraire. Contribution
de la littérature aux savoirs sur la géographie: Habilitation à diriger
des recherches. Paris: Université de Paris 1.
SAÏD, Edward W. 1980. L’Orientalisme: L’Orient créé par l’Occident.
Paris: Seuil.
SERVANTIE, Alain. 2003. Le Voyage à Istanbul : Byzance, Constantinople,
Istanbul du Moyen Âge au XXe siècle. Paris: éd. complexe.
62 3
ZWEIG, Stefan. 1996. Pays, villes, paysages: Écrits de voyage. Paris:

Belfond, Le livre de poche.
Notes
1
Quotations from the book are taken from the edition published by Fontana 1959
(16th impression, 1976).
2
A film of the novel was made by Sidney Lumet in 1974, with an all-star cast.
More recently, a number of Agatha Christie’s novels have been produced as
comic-strip books, including Le Crime de l’Orient-Express, by François Rivière
and Solidor, published by Emmanuel Proust in 2003. There is also a video game
named after the train and which uses its décor as a setting.
3
In the film From Russia with Love (1963), based on the novel by Ian Fleming
(1957).
4
As described by Douglas Kennedy, 1988, Beyond the Pyramids.
5
The Orient Express was the brainchild of a Belgian businessman, Georges
Nagelmackers, who founded the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits et des
Grands Express Européens in 1884. The train was then called the Express d’Orient
and was renamed the Orient Express in 1891.
6
As still shown today by the success of the exhibition “Il était une fois l’Orient-
Express” at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (April – August 2014).
7
It was in one of the train’s carriages that both the armistice of 11th November
1918 and the capitulation of France on 22nd June 1940 were signed. The route has
varied considerably, from the initial route through Strasbourg, Munich, Vienna,
Budapest, Bucarest and Varna (crossing the Black Sea), to the most southerly route
(following the opening of the Simplon tunnel) taken by the train on which Hercule
Poirot travelled (Belgrade, Trieste, Venice, Milan, Lausanne, Paris Gare de Lyon).
8
Pierre Loti, Fantôme d’Orient, 57.
9
Agatha Christie (1890-1976) travelled to Baghdad in 1928; returning from
Nineveh in 1931, she took the Simplon Orient Express in the other direction and
was delayed by problems caused by bad weather. She used this experience and an
episode in January 1929 when the train was snowed up in eastern Thrace for four
days. The plot was based on elements of the sensational Lindbergh affair (the
kidnapping and murder of the son of the famous American aviator in 1932), as the
victim of the Murder on the Orient Express, Samuel Edward Ratchett alias
Cassetti, had murdered a child.
10
In the novel, the city is called either Stamboul (name of the old town of the
historic peninsula) or Constantinople, a name that was no longer used after 1926,
when the name Istanbul was imposed by the Turkish authorities but never in fact
adopted by Agatha Christie.
11
Agatha Christie married the archeaologist Max Mallowan in 1930, and
subsequently, several of her most famous novels were set in the East, where she
spent long periods. After Murder on the Orient Express, Hercule Poirot figured in
other oriental mysteries: Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) set in Tell Yarimjah
(Iraq), Death on the Nile (1937) in Upper Egypt, and Appointment with Death
(1938) between Jerusalem and Petra. They came to Baghdad (1952), published
after the war, whose heroine is a young woman from London, is a spy story set in
Baghdad.
12
The Simplon tunnel in Switzerland was built in 1906. After the First World War,
the train was called the Simplon-Orient-Express, and its new route was London -
Calais (or Boulogne) - Paris - Vallorbe - Lausanne - Simplon - Milan - Venice -
Trieste – Zagreb. At Vinkovci, there were two alternative routes: Bucarest-
Constanza-Odessa and Belgrade-Constantinople-Athens.
13
A comment made at the very beginning of the novel (8), when Hercule Poirot
boards the Taurus Express in Aleppo bound for Constantinople (which makes up
the first part of the novel). The Taurus Express, inaugurated in 1930, crossed
Anatolia and linked Constantinople to Aleppo, where it branched into two, one line
going to Damascus, the other to Baghdad.
14
Vinkovci and Brod are towns in Croatia, 63 km apart, located respectively in the
county of Vukovar-Srijem and in Slavonia. In relation to the route of the train,
Vinkovci is 150 km from Belgrade going towards Zagreb.
4
THE PLACE OF THE ENIGMA:

SPACE AND TIME IN ARMEN (1967)
BY JEAN-PIERRE ABRAHAM
T.COANUS, I. LEFORT
Armen, a text by Jean-Pierre Abraham (1936-2003) published in 1967, is

today the object of a singular (re)cognition. Indeed, its reputation and
quasi status as a cult-book in the small world of maritime culture1 is at
odds with its more secret audience among the broader public. Yet if, a
contrario, Armen2 cannot be shelved among the many literary works on
lighthouses,3 it is because the text not only renders what happens in a
Finisterian semaphore, but also says, fundamentally, something else. It
recounts through an I/narrator in close proximity with the author – himself
a lighthouse keeper from 1959 to 1963 – an inquiry of the self whose
horizon and trials essentially exceed those of lighthouse keeping.4 There is
enigma, and hence mystery, because once the reader has closed the book,
he can decide neither on the object of the narrative, nor on the narrative
tension (what is the I/narrator seeking?). For all that, Armen does not
constitute a novel, inasmuch as the biographical experience is central to it.
Neither is it an autofiction, nor a (travel) diary. To be sure, the text
(almost) linearly narrates the works and days of a lighthouse keeper; but it
is organized into chapters and has no starting date, as if the opening pages
flowed into a text that was already there – an unfolding text – and were
inserted on the first day in a temporality whose origin the reader will not
know.
The hypothesis defended here is that Armen constitutes an especially
effective operative text. It is an experimental work that serves, on the one
hand, to account for the place and status of space in the making of literary
texts, and, on the other, to approach what the relation to place (practically
circumscribed here to a geodesic point) constructs in the construction of
the self.
The Place of the Enigma: Time and Space in ArMen (1967) 65
A geocritical approach5 (Westphal 2007) will shed light on the literary

stakes and modalities involved in doing with space: “doing” in action, but
also “doing” in the writing of action and of the self. These two dimensions
of writing are inseparable in Armen, for the text is essentially organized
around the double capture of “the real” of experience and pursuit, so as to
simultaneously recount, in literary form, duration as well as temporal
outbursts. The tension between doing and saying is palpable – explicit or
implicit – in the folds of a text that revisits, in a spiral movement, the
difficulties of the quest. Underlying such tension is the pain produced by
the frustration of words continuously approached yet never quite right, that
is to say, never adequate to the immediacy of the idea or of the thing itself.
This pursuit, which is at the foundation of literary creation and creativity,
is enacted in the engendering of a self whose place, Armen, serves a
specular maieutic – objectivized and reflective – akin to glass lenses that
project beams of light into the distance. Hence a narrative around three
terms – place, text and I – wherein the reader is left to wonder which of
these shapes the others, and vice versa.
Our analysis is twofold. First, we propose a geographical approach to
the exteriority/interiority of place, mobilising the tools of geocriticism and,
in particular, the notion of chronotope6 (Bakhtin 1978) – a research device
that helps to capture the textual and sensory elaboration of space-time.
Second, we seek to apprehend subjectivity and the narration thereof in its
relation to space and in the values it embodies, so as to grasp what is being
written, in and through the writing of what takes place, in the double quest
of writing place and self.
1. The Enclosure and the Horizon

The place of Armen is known/unknown. The reader familiar with
things of the Ocean will view the reference as a daymark. But the reader
ignorant of maps will have to wait for a while: He will need to suspend the
curiosity about beginnings in order to orient and situate himself in
geographical space as well as in the text. A geographer would say “locate
himself,” because while this ultimate outcrop at the end of the Chaussée
de Sein is initially presented in all its liminal singularity, in its primary
identity as an enclosed space, closed and foreclosed from the land, little
more is said about it at the outset. It is the text itself that gradually unveils,
as would the ebb and flow or the intermittent flashes of a semaphore, clues
to its location at the tip of Finisterre – where, as Vidal de la Blache (1903,
333) once wrote, Brittany expires.7 The description is conducted from
within, through the fine and repeated exploration of the lighthouse’s
66 4
entrails, the scouring of every corner and grain of the materials that
compose it. Alive but able to breathe only in acquaintance with human
labour, this machinery watches over the sea like an immobilized boat in
charge of the maintenance of maritime order and the safeguard of men.
The human suffuses the lighthouse’s windows and stones.
This point – this place vis clearly situated, and its eminence over the
Ocean affords it an overlooking position: Such is its very function. Yet
while this landscape, rare though often researched by geographers,8 could
have given rise to spectacular panoramic views in an essentially
descriptive vein, it is not what is being exploited and worked on here. No,
the 360° panoptic viewpoint rarely intervenes in the text. It does so for the
first time only midway through, after the test of bad weather (the test of
place) has made it possible to face not the storm outside, but the intimate
one (the test of self) within an I that is beginning to find its place:
I am going to watch the other lights from the gallery. This landscape of
mine bears specific names. It is made of different lights that lie in the night
in their proper place. To the north, the beacons of Ouessant: the white
flashes of La Jument and Créac'h, the red ones of Le Stiff and Kéréon. In
the channel of Fromveur: Pierres Noires and Le Four. Sometimes, over
there in the English Channel: the light beam of Ile Vierge. On the coast:
Saint-Matthieu, Minou, Portzic, and further down the cursed lighthouse of
Tévennec—the wonderful white house, alone and abandoned on that rock,
where I once lived an entire day—but also La Plate and La Vieille in the
strait of Raz de Sein, the green Cornoc-an-ar-Braden at the entrance of
Port de Sein, Audierne, Penmarc'h. And to the West, the white glow—six
seconds, three seconds—of the Bouée Occidentale. All the landmarks of
my night, boat lights running to each other: In these words, I breathe
freely9 (87-8810).
In the absence of an overlooking position, of large oceanic or terrestrial

perspectives, the sights described are always fragmented and fractured.
They are in close proximity with daily experiences and activities enclosed
within the walls of the lighthouse whose small openings decompose the
probable panorama into myriad pieces: views captured on the fly, caught
in a reflection, stolen from a window.
These viewpoints, captured in literary form through the prism of light
and luminosity, gradually recompose, by means of isolated localizations,
the geographic configuration of Armen. Space – and here geographic space
– is made in fine though linking the outcrops and lighthouses scattered
along the coast. The point, the line and the surface – the three units of
Euclidean space as deployed by geographers – function in the text like a
network of semaphores whose geographical signification arises when the
light comes, and then vanishes when it goes. Thus, it is time, in its
duration (day/night succession) and in its “quality” and texture
(visibility/opacity), which constitutes space and the architect. “Time
surfaces” (Virilio 1984, 15) in that it produces in Armen a specific
chronotope, always moving and always shifting, like the surface of water
that never looks the same. Between this point and the surrounding
maritime expanse are immaterial lines – those of the sheltering sunlight
that wraps itself with or emerges from the clouds, the white glow that
flashes three times every twenty seconds, but also the beams and streaks
that show the way and bring forth the place in its location. The place,
Armen, is born of light.11
2. Skies, Clouds and Duration

In Armen, le temps12 is at once the weather and the time that passes.
The first imposes the variability of the sky and meteorological hardships.
Storms are spectacular, violent, hostile, even devastating for the lighthouse
building over which keepers watch with great care and passion. Storms are
such that, in the typology of lighthouses, Armen is classified among the
“hellish” ones. Yet stillness is terrifying too, for it speaks of the wait. “But
true fear appears when the sea is too calm, as if we were drifting” (18), as
if the only certainty – the place – could equally sail off into the ocean.
In its temporal dimension, le temps is also that of day/night alternation.
It is largely the time of loneliness during the watch, but also that of the
tension inherent to writing and literary restitution. Whatever the moment,
the I/narrator is very close to sensory experience. His five senses are called
upon: sight, of course, which tracks the smallest cracks of light projected
on the walls of the staircase, the bedroom or the watch chamber13; hearing,
under assault from the fog horn and the shattering swell; but also touch, in
the roughness or smoothness of materials; smell; and taste:
To save some eggs, we have started eating dried fish. I opened the large
crate this evening and desalinated a nice piece of conger. The lighthouse is
filled with its strong smell. (46)
Martin managed to make an omelette, fries, a bland rice cake, and since
there was some rum left, we tried to make island-style prune tea at the end.
It had a taste of sulphur. (58)
This time of experience is in perpetual tension between different

moments. Of these Jean-Pierre Abraham reveals only intervals (those of a
diary) or parentheses, tempuscules14 of what is felt and perceived, and
68 4
duration, punctuated by the rites and rhythms of watches and tasks. The
double tension between place/space, on the one hand, and instant/duration,
on the other, constructs a sort of homothety between the two variables of
the chronotope. But for Armen/Armen, the temporal category is
unquestionably a factor of the variability and constitution of space, as well
as of action. Time subsumes place and gestures. Repetitive yet random,
uninterrupted yet discretized (working time, resting time), it inscribes one
of the questions at the heart of Armen’s literary tension in the duration of
continued human experience: How to render and capture the fragment of
place in the fragment of time. Yet if one considers that the restitution of
activity can overcome the plurality of tasks by producing a functional unit,
then there is, in this text, unity of place, time and action – the triple unity
of classical dramaturgy. A drama, and hence an action, is indeed unfolding
in Armen. This action is a movement whose gestures – and writing is one
such gesture – make sense in both their fleeting urgency and their
repetition. There is no longer a vectorization in space, but an equally
discontinuous and fragmented vectorization of the I/narrator, or, more
precisely, of a narrator in search of an I. This is because the text
solves/tends to solve the fracture of the “in-between”: between the
emotionality of the moment and the patience of duration, between place
and horizon, between the salience of highpoints and sacrifice in work.
There is passion in endurance.
3. Nested Chronotopes
The space-time of Armen (and Armen) is a mise en abyme, for the
present carries within itself the past of other places and other experiences.
It could not be otherwise. Armen/Armen contains nested space-times
whose memory is charged, and whose resurgence, voluntary or not,
permeates one’s presence to the place. Thus, in the second part of the text,
the second stay ashore is inscribed, unlike the first, in the form of
fragmented memories. The immediate places of the lighthouse are also
filled with – and enfold – mediated places from a more or less distant
elsewhere: Ile de Sein during a shift change, but also doubly mediated
places. These are from three carefully chosen books: one on a Cistercian
monastery whose name we will not know, a collection of poems by Pierre
Reverdy (Main-d’œuvre, 1949), and a volume devoted to the paintings of
Vermeer.
The link between the lighthouse and the cloister is clear enough: A
space of enclosure as well as light, of crowded solitude, meditation and
work, hardship and forbearance – an elevated place for the tending of
souls. Reverdy’s collection is called upon more elliptically,15 yet his is a

poetry marked with the seal of religiosity and pictorial rhetorical figures –
metaphors and oxymora – whose creativity Jean-Pierre Abraham
abundantly deploys. In the end, Reverdy chose to retire to a Benedictine
abbey (Cistercian) after having contributed, in the interwar period, to the
elaboration of surrealism, in particular by publishing the works of his
friends and poets. Here the “I” of Armen appears in counterpoint – as the
narrator is struggling to write about the paintings of a friend who stayed on
Ile de Sein. Thus, strong relations can be found that express fine and subtle
nestings between the place/test of Armen and other space-times of human
creation and spirituality. At times, it is even impossible to tell which
space-time contains the others. These references weave a textual web of
artistic chronotopes, clues that serve to unravel the threads of a secret: this
presence to Armen, why and what for?
Nevertheless, it is mainly the references to the paintings of Vermeer
that produce multiple nested space-times. The narrator scrutinizes them at
night, in the den of his room, under the flickering light of the storm
lantern. Thus he seeks to capture the spirit and manners of painting, for
instance, in the tiny cracks discernable in the reproduction. These
paintings by the Master of Delft are essentially those that speak, around
female figures, of pensive interiority, at times of the suspension of
movement, in a pictorial space whose arrangements – open/closed – reflect
those of Armen itself. The Vermeerian treatment of chiaroscuro, namely
the web of reflections between glass, porcelain and copper, echo the
endless plays of light tracked by Jean-Pierre Abraham. Maps – which
speak of maritime culture, the familiarity of the high seas, and the
inscription of the distant in the intimacy of the home – are present too. The
Vermeerian reference introduces other places into those of the lighthouse,
reverberating them in a magnified mise en abyme. Thus, like fragments of
sight and visibility, such textual intercalation constructs a dis-located self,
and stresses the metaphorical co-construction of place and I: “I was
dressed with the lighthouse.” (23) This dislocation is also what stitches
together the distortion between the narrowness and confining enclosure of
the lighthouse and space-times indefinitely conveyed by the fragments of
horizon.
The bewilderment of Reverdy’s poems. Walls, more walls. You want to go

see the other side. You want to stay here even more. Friends leave, take a
wife, settle down, live their lives. You stay here in front of your wall, your
lantern, a painted face. Always this impression to be hearing new sounds.
Someone approaches, never ceases to approach. An entire life can be
arranged around this imaginary sound. Withdrawing further. Remaining
70 4
silent. Every day of one’s life, doing the same thing, at the same time.
Friars. Counting on rituals, on the cold, on hunger, on violent desires to
reduce the gap. What gap? (57)
But how to talk about Vermeer? When faced with what I love, I am
overpowered by an anguish that prohibits all haughty comment. At best I
can go from image to image, return, prowl, watch those faces without
being seen. It is then that the worst in me is activated. (…) Museum Guard.
Prison guard. Guard of a disused monastery. (65)
4. Writing With Shadows16 What Must Remain Hidden

Armen is not any simple text: It is not a novel, a diary, a philosophical
essay, or a poetic work – though perhaps it is all of these at once. It is a
singular text produced by an uncompromising subjectivity. For as soon as
the book is closed, the reader feels vaguely intoxicated with a perfume of
enigma.
On the surface, the narrator primarily evokes the lighthouse, the highly
monotonous daily activities that unfold within it, the watches, the work of
lighting the lantern, the maintenance, the ritual exchanges with the other
keeper, what he sees all around – meteorological and marine phenomena,
passing vessels for the most part:
Even the rain is traveling. Nothing will stop here. We possess nothing. We
watch, observing passages, tracking the traces of an incomprehensible
carousel. We see the wind turn and the ebb tide lose its strength, find its
balance, then flow again. Everything starts anew. (…) The time for lighting
has come. In a thousand years from now, the dashboard will be the same.
(102)
Yet early on in the book, clues reveal that the presence of the narrator is in
no way fortuitous:
The weather was the same when I first saw Armen. The sea was grey, as it
always is when sailing on a warship. I thought I recognized the place. I
wanted to live in this lighthouse. This was the best way for me to no longer
see it. When I set foot the first time on the toy dock, I felt at home. But I
remember little of this whole period. (17)
In a television documentary of late 1962, Abraham already described the

encounter with the lighthouse, with that lighthouse: “And then all of a
sudden, I decided to go there. I had truly found my place.17” As some sort
of fate, the lighthouse imposes itself – a fact that, by definition, cannot be
otherwise commented or explained. Beyond the doubts and difficulties

that are to follow, the need for a place of experience is reaffirmed:
But in the worst moments, I know that nothing in the world could force me
to leave. One thing is undeniable: the impression that I am in my proper
place. For the rest, the uncertainty that now so rightly guides me is not
weighed down with unnecessary words; it does not let itself be seduced. I
constantly feel its needle prick. Surely, it is all much simpler than I think. I
have to sleep. I must blow out the lantern. (41)
It is indeed at the convergence between a point/moment and a subject –

which together make place – that the proper tone of writing is pursued.
Being “in one’s place” entails an uncompromising quest, of which the
lighthouse is in some ways the means, or better yet, the tool. One must
strip down – that is, seek simplicity, discard the superfluous, reduce not to
the minimum, but to the bare essential:
Lighting takes place a little earlier each night. The long nights are coming.
There is no need to worry about anything now. The depression forecast in
the south, which is coming straight towards us, most likely marks the
beginning of a long series. We must close everything, put bars on the door
and wait. Somebody in me must not come out of here alive. (19)
Cistercian architecture, Reverdy’s poetry and Vermeerian light are

different models destined to open the way, in an asceticism to which the
lighthouse prominently participates:
I walked for a long time on the gallery, watching the horizon. I did not feel
comfortable in the watch chamber. My lantern bothered me, I think. Even
now that my shift has ended, the flame remains still on the old desk:
Nothing is more distant, more foreign. How to approach it? How
transparent must one be? Is the desert not enough? A total desert, my
lantern, its circle and its high walls. Winter is just beginning. One will need
even longer nights, endless rains; one must learn how to go and return, like
the current and the wind. (25)
Will I be able to sleep before midnight? The wind presses against the
window. The lantern is distant again. To approach it, one must push
through the drought. Retaining in oneself only the severe trembling.
Obviously this country is not for thieves. (41)
Killing in oneself the part that is futile, complacent, by settling in the

desert so as “to push through the drought”: But what sort of writing is
this? The narrator, whose labour is mostly nocturnal, sometimes works on
72 4
texts meant to accompany the paintings of a friend and painter established

on the Ile de Sein, ten kilometers from Armen. But he also works on
something else, of which nothing really transpires, except at times the
infinite difficulty of engendering words:
I will do nothing more tonight. Things are not going very well. This is
what I meant to say. (9)
Will I continue to write like this without knowing why? For three nights, I
seem to have been keeping vigil over a deceased with my lantern. I make
knots in my hair until, exasperated, I cut them off. I will look at myself in
the mirror. (13)
I hardly feel more confident tonight. I am not sure that I can continue. And
yet, I have found in myself for this battle of words a zone of intense
activity—an essential zone, surely. If this were not the case, I would not be
so beaten. (…) And I hate the sentences—weak, drawn out—that I have
been writing today; I would like them to burn, instantly, to become black
and twisted, like a lit blade of grass, the running red point; I would like
them dead. (…) All this brief past, all these winter months, are akin to a
scorched heath. Further, much further behind, a landscape still stirs; some
days search for their high noon in the future. Might the exact use of words,
which I have just discovered, offer it to them? (95-96)
Savage words. I do not know how to surprise them. I can only be attentive,
ensure their passage. I think I am wasting time; something else pushes me.
When words finally emerge, I lag far behind. (134)
The text therefore adopts, surreptitiously, a Russian doll structure: It is not

the product of this work of writing – which remains, in a way, on the
surface of things – but that of its shadow, or even, as is called in
embroidery, its shadow work. Just as the narrator walks in the lantern
room to the rhythm of fire, and is thus fully invisible from the outside, the
book moves around a centre that will remain hidden, masked by a
stubborn modesty. Work – its difficulties and even its torments – is
disclosed, but its result almost never is. And yet, Armen is clearly a book:
It is a writing on writing.18 All in all, this text is far removed from the
literature on lighthouses.
5. Now an Ally, Now an Enemy: The Lighthouse

Thus the author has not come to the lighthouse for an easier life, or
even for a simple retreat, but to refuse himself any form of escape, if only
because of the confined space. While Armen is open to the outside, and
hence traversed by light, it is also terribly closed – a technical necessity

(which in a way guarantees survival) induced by the narrow foundation of
the building, namely a thin rocky outcrop. But this is not the essential
point. The lesser importance accorded to sounds and noises, which are in
these places especially daunting, may certainly come as a surprise. What
of the whistling wind, the creaks in the structure, the muffled blows of the
swell on the base of the lighthouse, the direct shocks of a wave stronger
than the others, such that it breaks the protective glass of the lantern room
more than thirty meters above? Not to mention the gruelling foghorn that
is to be activated when necessary, and that deafens the occupants to the
point where rest becomes impossible? Familiar with the marine
environment, the author accords all this relative, and merely informative,
importance—except when the door of the lighthouse, though strong and
padlocked, is broken through one stormy night by a wave that, coming up
the stairs, floods the kitchen on the second floor. It is then that fear, well
known in the profession,19 arises:
10 pm. Clet is afraid. He talks far too much. I cannot answer him and I see
he is getting increasingly frantic. He no longer shaves. His hair is too long.
He fears he will not be able to ignite the foghorn’s engines. He is afraid of
blackouts. He fears a radio blackout. He speaks every night to his wife,
repeating always the same thing (...). We no longer see the island.
Apparently, two boats have been lost already. (…) The sea is bombarding
us. The same sounds as last winter, exactly: the same cries below,
incomprehensible squeals. Behind the opaque panel of the kitchen, long
shadows pass. Clet is always jumpy. I cannot reassure him. (19)
What if the sea were strongest after a hundred years? It is attacking with
unprecedented violence. What if, in a final leap, it swept away the
lighthouse, us and our pots, at long last? I do not mind; I will have
accomplished nothing. You have to be an idiot not to experience fear. The
day that I will be truly afraid, will I be saved? (57)
But this is not merely a concrete, materially organized space. The

lighthouse is the place of the ordeal wherefrom salvation might come. As
such, it is neither an ally nor an enemy – unless it is now one, now the
other. The lighthouse, for that matter, often extends through the entire
marine environment (the wind, the swell, the cold, the fog, the night, etc.)
whose indifferent power welcomes the battle with words:
Now I remember that moment when I was very calm, motionless in the
dark, hands on my knees. I had no urge to light my lantern. I was dressed
with the lighthouse. Everything seemed friendly. (23)
74 4
I return to the staircase, a habitable place in the thick of escape and rupture.
Something is stirring here. My lantern awakens the stones. It stares at them
in silence. One by one, it offers them a reassuring shade. The outdoors
press against the high walls. The sweat of dawn. I listen. The space grows
hollow as I go down. It grows lighter, becomes too large a vestment for
me. (28)
Dawn approaches. The fog has not thickened. It is cold. The memory of all
the gales of the past months comes back muted. They have opened nothing.
My body is aching. Who will question me, besiege me so that at last only
the proper words will drip? (66)
I met up with this wind last night. It passed in front of the open door, so
compact, so rapid that, in the doorway, it could not be felt at all. A wall,
into which I entered my hand. The true wall of the lighthouse, the true wall
of my home. (...) I was a prisoner at the top of the tower. Why do I always
feel less dizzy when I am perched? I live in a tree. All the sea is its foliage.
(107-8)
Is it the landscape before one’s eyes that determines the passage of

anger, courage, boredom within oneself? Those eclipses? (112)
It is possible to see in Armen a hollow place which functions as the

missing third, a symbolic instance that allows for triangulation, and hence
avoids the hazardous face-to-face between a writer and his words. The
contemporary writer Pierre Michon said on a radio broadcast in 2002:
(Literature) lacks triangulation. Literature is, increasingly, made up of our

lives, our desires, our... Without an instance that might decide whether it is
proper or not. (...) We need a witness to literature, an important witness.
(...) It is this great absence that causes us to be present. If you are present
only to yourself and to others, then you are absent: You are in the realm of
contingency. If someone looks at you from afar, or if you think this is the
case, if you make this postulate, things feels better, you breathe better. (...)
We cannot get by without a third instance. For me, it is clearly literature
that plays this role.20
Sought yet so rare, harmony and balance always emerge unexpectedly, at

the exact intersection between a light, a tension, and a particular moment.
“When my light is clear, I am a little clearer” (29), writes the narrator,
stressing the importance of resonances that occur (or not) in everyday
gestures. Conversely, an out-of-tune movement, a blunder, too mechanical
a gesture in which one is not invested, become literally off subject. Then
comes a dissonance that one cannot discard, for the lighthouse is a

demanding place that does not forgive:
I broke the atmosphere, yesterday at noon, by entering the lighthouse

carelessly, mechanically. On the first steps of the stairs, I felt slightly
dizzy. The attention and patience I had accumulated in this place, without
fully realizing it, were waiting for me. But I was sad. Everything was
instantly frozen. The soft sound of my shoes on the steps was distressing.
(35)
Upstairs, shortly before midnight, I decided to try out the large emergency
lamp. A copper lamp with an asbestos gas mantle, as powerful as real fire.
I put it on the floor between the three pillars. It heated slowly. I raised the
wick and the mantle became invisible. A white, raw light invaded the
room, upsetting everything, crushing the usual shadows. It was awful. I
must not talk about it. I wanted to escape, go out on the gallery, but the
wind was too strong for me to open the door. I remember this as a bad
action. (40)
What is key here is less the hostility of the lighthouse or the natural
elements than the author’s temporary inability to harmonize himself—as
would a tuning fork – with the multiple fragments that compose his
perception. A strange moment arises in springtime when, after having
repainted the interior of the dome summit, the two keepers suddenly
decide to embark on a complete overhaul of the lighthouse. Once the metal
panel that protects the kitchen has been removed, “A cold light invaded
the room at once, denouncing with cruel precision the wearing down of
things, the slow ravages of winter.” (113) It is, in fact, “the dismal state of
the lighthouse” (114) that is being revealed. An enthusiastic stripping
frenzy then follows, which occupies a singular place in the last and third
part of the text. Maintenance, to which taking initiative is key, consists in
engaging in work that is simply human, but also in joyful teamwork: “This
restoration now delights us. From morning to night we make plans. We
talk a lot.”21 (115) To claim this humanity is to dress with an apparently
useless or gratuitous project a building that, from the point of view of the
administration, represents strictly functional equipment. In some ways, the
men are there merely to fulfil this function, as if they were themselves
extensions of the machine – the light, its optics, and the mechanics that
ensure its operation.
76 4
Conclusion
Since 1990, Armen has been nothing but an automated beacon, empty
of its occupants, whose general condition is deteriorating22 – as if human
action, of which it is now deprived, had proved after the fact vital to its
survival. A place without men, now reduced to its dry and hence
perishable function, proves unworthy of the fight against the double
assault from le temps – understood all at once as duration and clouds.
Armen the lighthouse may be the place of the enigma, but Armen
constitutes its shadow. The latter is a singular place/text, highly localized
yet not without reference to the universal, concerning which the
Portuguese author Miguel Torga (1907-1995) once wrote “O universal é o
local sem muros” (Torga 1990): The universal is the local without walls.
At the dawn of his adult life, a university degree in hand, a young man
asks: Who am I? What to do with my life? Can I become a writer? An
imperious need for meaning gave birth to this unlikely text, Armen,
halfway between zero and infinity.
Jean-Pierre Abraham’s Armen has imposed itself at the crossroads
between literature and geography. The lighthouse, a quasi geodetic point
without surface or thickness, has proved to be a place – a singular place,
by definition, since it exists only through the reflection of a third presence,
that of the writer who inhabits it temporarily. Though rich with natural
elements (the wind, the sky, the ocean, and their intertwined plays) and
anecdotes (life “on board” is nothing but simple), the text is by no means
saturated by them. Besides, were it a mere description, even a brilliant
one, banality would have caught up with it.
Nevertheless, like an ivy wrapped around a radical unspoken, Armen is
the ultimate product of an incandescent quest whose beacon is at once the
operating tool and the symbolic place. From the confrontation between a
geographic point and an acute consciousness a genuine literary fragment
has emerged, akin to a pebble deposited on the beach by the tide.
Translated by Arianne Dorval
References
ABRAHAM, Jean-Pierre. 1988 (1967). Armen. Paris: Le Tout sur le tout.
—. 2004. Au plus près. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
BAKHTIN, Mikhaïl. 1978, Esthétique et théorie du roman. Paris:
Gallimard.
DELEUZE, Gilles and Félix Guattari. (1980). 1987. A Thousand Plateaus:

Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Brian Massumi (trans.). Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
HARTOG, François. 2013. La Chambre de veille: entretiens avec Felipe
Brandi et Thomas Hirsch. Paris: Flammarion.
LE CUNFF, Louis. (1954). 1992. Feux de mer. Saint-Malo: Éditions
L’Ancre de marine.
MICHON, Pierre. (1984). 2008. Small Lives. Elizabeth Deshays and Jody
Gladding (trans.). Brooklyn: Archipelago Books.
REVERDY, Pierre. (1949). 1981. Main d’œuvre 1913-1949. Paris:
Gallimard.
TORGA, Miguel. 1990. Diário XV. Coimbra: Gráfica de Coimbra
VIDAL DE LA BLACHE, Paul. 1903. Tableau de la géographie de la France.
Paris: Hachette.
VIRILIO, Paul. 1984. L’Espace critique. Paris: Christian Bourgois.
WESTPHAL, Bertrand. (2007). 2011. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional
Spaces. Robert T. Tally Jr. (trans.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Notes
1
Several blogs praise the book, while extensive quotations taken from it circulate
on the internet.
2
See for instance Le Cunff (1992 [1954]).
3
By convention, the book by Jean-Pierre Abraham will be referred to here as
Armen (in italics), while the lighthouse will be designated as Armen (without
italics).
4
The lighthouse of Armen was designed in the early 1860s and mainly built from
1867 to 1881 – the year of its inauguration. The presence of the Chaussée de Sein,
whose reputation as a ship cemetery was well established, made this ambitious
project necessary. Extensive studies were required beforehand and construction of
the lighthouse is still remembered today as epic (the first year, only eight hours
were actually worked due to excessive swell). The building was considered safe
only in 1897, when the base of the lighthouse was fully protected with a masonry
envelope. Shift changes could not take place in bad weather, and were often made
via a cable along which men, equipment and provisions would slide, these being
rarely transhipped dry as docking was almost always impossible. Armen was
electrified only in 1988, and fully automated in 1990 – the year that the last shift
change took place (on April 10th). For more information, see for instance Le Cunff
(1992 [1954], 79-113), and more recently http://www.dirm.nord-atlantique-
manche-ouest.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/phare-d-armen-a76.html.
5
Geocriticism is a theoretical approach developed by Bertrand Westphal (2011
[2007]) that contributes to the study of spatial dimensions in literary works.
78 4
Mobilizing the analytical tools of literary criticism, philosophy and the spatial turn,
geocriticism enables the joint reworking of spatial and temporal approaches.
6
The notion of chronotope, first put forward by Mikhaïl Bakhtin, refers to the
intrinsic solidarity of space-time in a narrative, whether fictional or not. The
chronotope can correspond to the space-time of an entire text (here Armen is a
chronotope), but also to that of its parts (the night or the watch each constitute a
specific chronotope).
7
Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918) was a French geographer, founder of the
French school of geography.
8
Ever since geographers began doing fieldwork (following A. von Humboldt),
they have historically and intellectually privileged the vision from above, which
allows them to look at a view in its (almost) entirety. This overlooking position has
fuelled the methodological prevalence of maps in geographical research.
9
TN: All citations were translated into English by Arianne Dorval, except those
extracted from works already published in English.
10
The pages in square brackets refer to the 1988 edition. The initial 1967 edition
was published by Éditions du Seuil.
11
Here a Deleuzian reading would oppose striated space – the organized space of
the safeguard apparatus, of which the lighthouse is part – and smooth space – the
space of the maritime surface, always moving, without ties or direction, the space
of freedom in movement. The latter is no doubt that of the author/narrator, who has
come here to watch others so as to find himself (Deleuze and Guattari 1987
[1980]).
12
TN: The French word temps has two meanings: time but also weather.
13
The historian François Hartog uses this expression as a title for a book of
interviews. The preface makes explicit reference to Armen by Jean-Pierre
Abraham. The work of the historian can be compared to that of the lighthouse
keeper: “There too, within the space of the office, exchanges occur between what
is seen and not seen. There is what you try to see, what you think you see, what
you hope to make seen. And too often, there is that which, for whatever reason,
escapes you.” (Hartog 2013, 11)
14
The reference to tempuscules is primarily linked to the work of formal logicians,
and in particular, logicians of time. “While the moment is a homogeneous and
indivisible point, the tempuscule is understood as an interval of time (a given 't),
‘brief enough’ in relation to a theoretical context for reference.” (...). I believe we
can venture further in this direction and consider that these temporal ensembles
also disrupt the hierarchy, which is determined by a higher authority (i.e., by one
who draws the biographical line). The idea of the tempuscule reveals that the
classic relationship between the moment and duration in time, between the point
and the line, may be superseded beneficially, to interconnect infinitely variable sets
of tiny series or intervals endowed with a modicum of meaning” (Westphal 2011
[2007], 16-17).
15
Jean-Pierre Abraham even indicates the quoted page, which corresponds to the
poem “Tourbillons de la mémoire.” (467)
16
In embroidery, shadow work is preferably done on a light, transparent fabric that
reveals the colour of the threads on the other side.
17
Les coulisses de l’exploit, a television report by Jean Pradinas, commented by
Louis Roland Neil, and broadcast on December 19th, 1962 (11’55”). It can be
watched on the website of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (www.ina.fr).
18
Here we can refer to contemporary writer Pierre Michon, born in 1945, whose
project – a vast saga depicting characters with “small lives” (Michon 1984) – has
no other purpose than to put the narrator to a similar test. To pay a dignified tribute
to the dead, to measure up to them, the latter has no choice but to be a writer. But
is he really? This potentially destructive question is asked in the first line of the
book: “Let us explore a genesis for my pretensions” (Michon, 2008 [1984], 11). A
similar quest, if not for places, at least for ordeals, dots the second half of the text.
Thus, upon returning to his home village: “My journey in the tram was terrifying; I
was going to have to write, and I could not do it; I was backing myself up to the
wall, and I was not a mason.” (Ibid. 142)
19
In general, the marine environment imposes (should impose) great rigour on the
men who frequent it, for an accident almost always results from a series of
oversights. This is also true for the lighthouse—this motionless vessel whose
occupants are sometimes left to their own, like sailors in the storm, especially in
bad weather. An example of this is given by Jean-Pierre Abraham himself in a text
published posthumously, “Velléda mon amour” (Abraham 2004, 17-22). Here he
recounts his experiences by narrating a hasty departure from the lighthouse, as a
potential appendicitis lay in wait. His companion took the threat seriously and
immediately called the emergency shuttle, Velleda, which transhipped him in
extremis. Indeed, the gale foretold would have left the lighthouse isolated for long
hours. It should be noted in passing that this episode does not appear in Armen –
modesty, as always.
20
Pierre Michon continues: “But what is literature? It is God, clearly, since it is
human language at its point of incandescence. It is the same thing. What is God but
the tables...? It is human language at the point where it strikes down the stone. (...)
All good literature is a prayer, that is, a dialogue with the missing third. With the
missing third, yet conveyed through a common word. We can pray together: We
can write and publish books.” In the same interview, shortly before this
development, Pierre Michon says: “But this takes us much too far, because I do not
even know what I am talking about! I know what I am talking about, but I do not
know how to talk about it” (À voix nue, France Culture, third show, November 27th,
2002). The proximity with Jean-Pierre Abraham’s shadow work technique is
obvious.
21
Note here the discreet importance of friendly complicity in a cramped and
enclosed place where two men must coexist for days.
22
On November 29th, 2012, the first president of the Court of Auditors sent to the
Minister of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy and to the Minister
Delegate in charge of the budget a letter outlining serious concerns about the
general state of lighthouses in France, while also pointing out the absence of
80 4
effective action—though measures had been planned at the July 2009 “Grenelle of
the Sea” (engagement n° 103).
5
“NON-PLACES” AND U-TOPOS

IN THE COSMONAUT’S LAST MESSAGE
TO THE WOMAN HE ONCE LOVED
IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION AND EUROPE
BY DAVID GREIG
JEANNE SCHAAF
David Greig is a prolific Scottish writer who has published an important

number of theatre plays since the 1990s. An overview of his work shows
that he fosters a literary landscape in which he investigates the contours of
Scottish identity and history – themes which pervade such plays as
Victoria (2000) or Dunsinane (2010). However, in other plays such as
Europe (1994) or The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman he Once
Loved in the Former Soviet Union (1999), he veers from such themes
towards the staging of a more global world as is suggested by both titles
which refer to real geographical and political spaces – Europe and the
former Soviet Union. This shift in perspective is ultimately yet another
way of questioning concepts of identity, belonging and nationhood. David
Greig’s theater stages a “geography of identity” that transcends the frame
and borders of Scottish theater. Through this approach, Greig’s theatre
finds an echo in Frederic Jameson’s definition of political art – an art
inscribed in both postmodernity and globalization:
(...) the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the
truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object – the world
space of multinational capital – at the same time at which it achieves a
breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this
last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual
and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at
present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The
political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its
82 5
vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a

social as well as a spatial scale.1
The concept of “global cognitive mapping” evoked by Jameson is what we

could refer to as a “geography of identity” in Greig’s theater. The author
explores the significance of space – both theatrical and real – and he
adopts a perspective that challenges notions of national, regional, or local
frontiers as well as the material boundaries of the theatrical space, namely
the stage. In doing so, he stages fragile identities, for indeed, globalization
has a large scale impact on the redefinition of identity, of space and their
correlation; according to Graves and Rechniewski:
In the course of the twentieth century the centrifugal forces of

decolonization and globalization eroded frontiers and seemed to threaten
the dissolution of national and cultural identity in supranational spaces of
uncertain form (European enlargement), while the centrifugal forces of
resurgent regionalism raised fears of the break-up of the sovereign body of
the nation. (1)
These profound modifications of contemporary landscape are at the core

of the two plays under study – Europe (E), and The Cosmonaut’s (C) – in
which the ambivalence of the process of globalization is revealed on stage
through the peculiar use of theatrical space where spectators are
confronted with dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, connection and
isolation, mobility and immobility. The audience discovers worlds in
which opposite notions such as familiar and strange, personal and
universal, intimate and political all coexist, offering a multifaceted map of
contemporary identities. “Non-places” in particular, as defined by Marc
Augé in his book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity, are represented on stage as privileged spaces to stage the
crisis, quest and conquest of identity. Greig’s characters inhabit a
globalized world of “non-places” (hotels, train stations, airports), which
are marked by their relative absence of peculiar history, territory or
identity. Therefore, I wish to confront the concept of non-places (as
emblematic spaces of globalization) to the notion of utopia. I will
endeavor to show that these two concepts – instead of being opposite, as
sociologist Marc Augé argues when he states that “the non-place is the
opposite of utopia: it exists and it does not contain any organic society”.
(Augé 111) – are in fact reconciled on Greig’s stage. The very
fictionalization of “non-places” on the theatre stage allows them to enter
the realm of the utopian. First, I will underline the ways in which non-
places are privileged locations for identity crises in the plays. Then I will
“Non-places” and u-topos 83
focus on Greig’s use of non-places as “in between”, transitory places

where identities are not exclusively in crisis but also in movement, in
redefinition. Finally, I will analyze the extent to which Greig’s theatre
turns space – both real and imaginary – into a place encompassing endless
possibilities, a real u-topos: the imaginary and ideal place.
1. “Non-places”: dislocation and crisis

In Europe and The Cosmonaut, spatial disarticulation is a key for the
representation of a globalized world marked by deconstruction and
fragmentation – as well as simultaneity and porosity. Scenic space
explodes and bursts into a multitude of different scenes, each with its own
location, thus challenging both the stage director’s use of scenic space and
the audience’s reception. Europe is indeed divided into 2 acts and 45
scenes; similarly The Cosmonaut is structured around 2 acts and 42
scenes. The multiplication these short vignettes implies the simultaneity
and overlapping of spatial and temporal spheres. Therefore, as several
scenes often share the stage, the spatio-temporal frontiers of the
representation are marked by their porosity, materializing at once the
fragmentation and the fluidity that characterizes the globalized world. The
interweaving of spaces and scales is typical of Greig’s works and from the
very opening of the play the spectators are destabilized in their perception
of the immediate environment as they are plunged within an unfamiliar
space. The territory is visually unidentifiable at first and it leaves the
audience puzzled, only plunged within a soundscape. In Europe, darkness
and a passing train open the play:
Darkness... An international express train passes the station. The train

makes an incredible noise, building steadily as it approaches. Speed, metal
and light dominate the theatre drowning everything for a moment in the
train’s elemental force. Slowly as the sound dies, the lights come up. (E, 7)
Likewise, as the stage directions show in The Cosmonaut, the incipit rests
on darkness and sound: “Darkness. Stars appear. One star is moving,
describing an arc across the night sky. A sad song from a Soviet choir.”
(209) This breaking away from more conventional modes of
representation enables the staging of dislocation (literally dislocare to
move from a former position), a phenomenon that the peculiar settings of
the play and the proliferation of “non-places” also encapsulate. If we
consider the general settings of both plays, they feature problematic
landscapes. At the beginning of the play Europe, the characterization of
the town where the play is set is ambivalent: it is simultaneously “on the
84 5
border” and “On the plains at the heart of Europe.” (5) Paradoxically
located both in the center (heart) and on the margin (border), this
conflicting city impairs the stability of identities. In her article Anja
Müller comments:
(The) play starts from a paradox (sic) spatial situation uniting centrality
and liminality. (...) Whereas centrality suggests fixity and stable identities
(...) the border situation renders the town a potential site for inter-cultural
contact and ensuing processes of hybridization, transcending national
boundaries and their corresponding identities. (Müller 156)
Beyond the mere geographical location of the action, this tension is further
emphasized by the fact that several scenes take place in the local train
station; a particular topos since it is usually positively connoted with ideas
of globalization, travel, and technology. It represents a contact zone where
a city meets the rest of the world and vice versa. However, in the play
Europe, due to the political re-mapping of Europe post-1989, the trains
only pass and never stop, depriving the station from its very identity as a
station. Fret, the stationmaster states “Trains, I mean. None. They’re all
cancelled (...) None stopping.” (E, 8); a paradoxical situation that turns the
ghostly station into a place in which “the predominant mood is of a
forgotten place.” (E, 7) The town is no longer connected; it is off the grid
as Fret foresees when he talks about his town:
They won’t be able to find it. They’ll just see a blur from the train. Express
trains going so fast they can’t even make out the station name as they pass.
That’s all that’ll be left of us. The home you thought you had, the place
you thought you came from, the person you thought you were … whoosh!
Whoosh! Gone pass. Dust on the breeze. By the time they think to turn up
it’s already be gone. (E, 77)
Not only does the train station lose its identity and become a “blur from
the train”, but it also renders the whole town isolated and obsolete,
depriving the community from their sense of place in the world.
In The Cosmonaut two comrades have literally been forgotten in space
on board the module Harmony 114 after the dissolution of the Soviet
Union and they float in space, unable to reconnect with the earth. Between
the Earth and the moon, the module was initially devised as a mean to
apprehend the world more globally, to survey and to connect – but it also
becomes a confining and isolating place, disconnected from any outer
reality. These settings exemplify how Greig constructs a peculiar
cartography that epitomizes the ambivalence of the processes of
globalization. These spaces are indeed present in absence, since they are
deprived of their initial essence or function. Emphasizing the lack of

anchorage, on a smaller scale, the main environments in which the characters
evolve are “non-places” defined in opposition to anthropological places – by
Marc Augé (Augé 77): “If a place can be defined as relational, historical
and concerned with identity, then a space, which cannot be defined as
relational, or historical, or concerned with identity, will be a non-place.”
The “non-places” – motorways, airports, train stations, restaurant
chains, and hotel rooms – are not anchored within a specific territory:
interchangeable, they participate in the process of fluidity and
homogeneity of contemporary space. In an interview, David Greig refers
to this type of place as “neutral spaces” in which the characters have to
“bring with them their pasts and their cultures and countries” (Greig and
Fisher, 14): a place where characters have to negotiate their identity with
themselves as well as with others.
Thus, through the use of non-places Greig maps out a dramatic
landscape in which dislocation prevails. In his anthropological analysis of
“non–places”, Augé suggests that “the space of non-places creates neither
singular identity nor relations; only solitude and similitude.” (Augé 103)
He concludes his essay on the prospect that “an ethnology of solitude” will
result from such a transformation of contemporary landscape. Solitude,
isolation, exclusion, dislocation are indeed key notions to his theory of
“non-places” and in the plays, identity dislocation pre-determines several
characters.
A feeling of “dislocation” pervades the plays – dislocation in the sense
of disrupting the unity, and dislocation in the sense of being misplaced,
not in the right place, perpetually a stranger to others, or to oneself. The
unstable or un-circumscribed identities are exemplified through various
types of characters in the plays: tourists, migrants, exiles, vagrants – as
many figures of the stranger territorially displaced; but also through
characters that are “borderline”: isolated or exiled in a perception of the
world that jeopardizes their very place in it. In the play Europe, Katia and
her father Sava are exiles; moreover Katia is also “dislocated” by the fact
that she was raped – the resulting trauma prevents her from feeling at
peace anywhere. Linking the traumatic past to a feeling of being out of
place, or misplaced, Anja Müller comments: “Her strategy, by which she
is trying to protect herself and her father, is a deliberate refusal of identity,
not getting attached to a place, not materializing in the eyes of
other.” (Müller 163) She no longer has a place of her own, not even in her
former hometown since she no longer finds its materialization on the maps
as its name has changed and:
86 5
Katia The place I came from isn’t there any more. It disappeared.
Adele A place can’t just disappear.
Katia Its name was taken off the maps and signposts. I couldn’t find it
anywhere. (E, 41)
For Katia, “maps and signposts” are the only material signs of the
existence of a place, which is otherwise wiped off reality. Her local friend
Adele also feels uprooted: she considers herself an exile in her own
hometown.
Adele I was born here by mistake. I didn’t choose it. It happened to

me.Like a car accident.You think you know me but you don’t. You don’t
know the first thing about me. (...) You’ve lost your home and I’ve never
had one. So we’re both exiles. (E, 66-67)
Other characters are destabilized by the economic changes and the

redefinition of frontiers; Berlin loses his job “I can’t do anything else.
Working in a furnace is my job. It’s all I know. There’s nothing else. (...)”
(E, 11) For such characters as Berlin and his friend Horse, migrants
represent a threat to their own place and job:
Horse I’d get rid of the blacks.

Berlin Which ones ?
Horse All of them...boat peoples.
Billy Boat People ?
Horse Steal our jobs. (E, 24)
A position that leads to a hardening of exclusionary attitudes, or a

communal closure and is brought to its paroxysm when they blast the train
station – where Katia and Sava dwell – at the end of the play. Their feeling
of belonging becomes a feeling of appropriation, as they feel dispossessed
of their town:
4 what’s happened to this place ?

5 I don’t recognize it any more.
6 Maybe we lost it in a game of cards
7 Maybe it disappeared into the forest.
8 Maybe it was stolen while our backs were turned
All Only it isn’t our place any more.
1 Our place was taken in the night.
8 Our place slipped away while we were asleep. (E, 48)
Through words like “lost” “stolen” “our” or “taken” the chorus’s

intervention highlights the fact that, collectively, some of the characters
apprehend space as something that could be owned. David Pattie claims

that “Cosmonaut extends and develops the argument over language and
identity posed in Europe: as in the previous play, there is a struggle
between forces that seek to fix meaning and identity, and those who try to
communicate across boundaries.” (Pattie 2008, 152) In fact, in The
Cosmonaut, the character also appear dislocated in various ways, and the
dramatic tension locates itself in the successful or unsuccessful attempts to
communicate, and more generally, to create a link: Oleg and Casimir are
in orbit around the Earth; Natasja is fragile because she has lost her father
Casimir when a little girl, and she is also uprooted since she left Russia
and works in a pub in London. Eric is a Norwegian businessman whose
work “(...) takes (him) to most of the major cities in the world” (C, 266)
where he tries to settle conflicts between opposed factions. Keith “lives an
internal exile from his wife and neighbors: as they are in the habit of
spending their evenings watching television with their shutters down (...).”
(Zenziger, 275). The majority of the characters is thus marked by a fragile
situation – be it spatial, relational or personal; Greig himself states: “I fear
that all my work concerns lostness in some way or another; homelessness;
identity; not quite knowing who one is.” (Greig and Svich, 52). The noun
“lostness” denotes a state or condition which expresses the quality of
being lost – whether spatially or ontologically. The rare appearance of the
word (even in dictionaries) shows how central the notion is in Greig’s
work. Expanding the frontiers of language the noun – as opposed to the
adjective – conveys the abstraction of the notion. However, this overall
sense of dislocation and fragmentation is counterbalanced by the fact that
“non-places” are also presented in the plays as transit-places in which the
characters foster a sense of possibility.
2. “In between places”: a theatre of identities

in movement.
Interestingly, Scottish theatre in general, and more specifically Greig’s
theatre is a theatre in transition, marked by quick evolution and perpetual
redefinition since it shapes and represents emerging identities. While, at
first, the topography of Greig’s plays seems pessimistic, it is in fact on the
very stage of “non-places” that identities evolve in a constant
(re)definition, through deterritorialisation or through the encounter with
the other. In this regard, Tim Cresswell’s concept of “mobility” challenges
our relation to space. In his book On the Move: Mobility in the western
world, Tim Cresswell states that mobility is an ill-defined concept but that
it can become an alternative to place: “And yet mobility itself, and what it
88 5
means, remains unspecified. It is a kind of blank space that stands as an

alternative to place, boundedness, foundations, and stability.” (Cresswell,
2) In the plays, the space of mobility is staged through the representation
of “in-between” or transitory places (which are yet again airports, stations,
roads, planes: non places). Therefore, discourses of sedentariness echo
discourses of mobility, and each character gives space different values.
In Europe, for Adele, open borders are only an imaginary line to be
crossed for Adele “Hardly visible. Like a thought. (...) It’s as if the border
is hardly there, as if you could imagine it away (...) just cross the line.”(E,
11). Clearly on the side of mobility, she conjures up vivid and physical
images to evoke the town as either a prison or a graveyard: “I live in a
graveyard (...) It’s me...being here. I feel like I’m being buried. (...) I need
to get some air, have to dig myself out.” (E, 49) Likewise, Morrocco states
“I don’t live here, it’s a weight, a stone in the stomach, it’s not a place to
live it’s a place to die.” (E, 26) Both characters link their place to images
of decay and death, physically altering their persons. Residence and
settlement in the town is as violent as the deadlock of entombment.
However, in bringing together notions of roots and of routes in his preface,
James Clifford argues that, if mobility “becomes a kind of norm, dwelling
demands explanation. Why, with what degrees of freedom do people stay
home? ” (Clifford 5)
Indeed, the idea of dwelling finds its echo in the discourse of other
characters in Europe, like Fret and Sava, from the older generation, who
develop a discourse of permanence that show their sense of belonging and
longing for stability in a world of changes: “I like stations. They make me
feel at home.” (E, 29) Berlin evokes roots: “I’m staying here. Staying put.
(...) It’s home isn’t it? Roots.” This attachment to the locality as a home is
something that his friend Morocco dismisses when he argues that: “we’re
at home only when we’re away from home. (...) [N]othing’s more of a
prison than a home.” (E, 71) With respect to the idea of “degrees of
freedom” developed by Clifford, the play offers a counterpart to the image
of place as prison. Freedom is thus defined in ambivalent terms. While for
Adele, freedom is nothing but mobility, Katia invites her to “stay at home.
You’re lucky you’ve got one.” (E, 53) For her, as a refugee, “to be free
means not to have to wander around” borrowing from Zygmunt Bauman’s
analysis of mobility. (Bauman, 92) In his book Postmodernity and its
discontents which establishes a new hierarchy of mobility, he analyses its
mechanisms and underlines the fact that tourists and vagrants do not enjoy
the same freedom. Hence, “mobility as progress, as freedom, as
opportunity, and as modernity, sit side by side with mobility as
shiftlessness, as deviance, and as resistance.” (Cresswell, 12) This
ambivalence is strikingly rendered through a scene between Morocco and

Katia:
Morocco (...) To Freedom ! (...)

Katia Don’t mistake me, Morocco. I’m not a trader or a traveller by
nature. I’m a coward. The way you see my eyes glance is me checking the
exits. I’m not a free spirit. (E, 72)
The variety of discourses on freedom and confinement opens up a new

space for interpretation, avoids any didactic representation and requires us
to consider coexisting versions of mobility and immobility. Moreover, on
stage, mobility does not only exist through the character’s discourses, it is
also materialized by a representation of movement, paradoxically
inscribed within the stability and finitude of the stage. Visual signs and
specific soundscapes evoking movement and means of transportation
invade the scenic space, as illustrated in stage directions: “The sound of a
bus pulling away” (E, 63); “Express train passing” (E, 50); “The sound of
a jet aircraft taking off and landing”(C, 220). Fiona Wilkie remarks that
the success of such experience depends “on the success of theatrical
techniques in any one production, on the coming together of soundscape,
lighting design and live performers to create a paradoxical effect of
movement within the stillness.” (Wilkie, 151) Spectators thus find
themselves literally transported by the representation. This landscape of
transitory spaces becomes a metaphor for identity – oscillating between
fixity and fluidity – and represents the feeling of up-rootedness and
dislocation.
Mobility, which pervades the play, is also linked to encounters,
interactions and confrontations with the Other. The geographical mapping
out of a specific territory leads to a human geography. As David Pattie
notes in reference to Greig’s work: “we move from the idea of a
geography that can be contained in a guidebook to a geography that is
mapped out by the experience of the individual interacting with other
individuals.” (2008, 150) Indeed, through mobility there is a subsequent
engagement with the notion of interculturality: “Interculturality (...)
implies movement and can be approached as a manifestation of mobility
that impacts on relations and experiences of Self and Other in a specific
context.” (Zaroulia, 265) Consequently, Augé’s initial thesis about non-
places can be qualified in the context of Greig’s dramatic landscape.
Indeed, if for Augé the world of non-places is a world of solitude, Greig
turns it into a world of encounters and confrontations.
In both plays, the variety of the characters’ names maps out an
indefinite global space marked by multi-culturality if we pay attention to
90 5
the echoes of the onomastics. The names conjure up places in western

Europe, eastern Europe, Maghreb, or Russia as we encounter Berlin,
Natasja, Adele, Bernard, Keith, Katia, Billy, Moroco, Oleg, Sava, Claire,
Sheena who all share the same stage. Identity does not present itself as
essence but as an evolving process, shaped by history, language, and
territory but also by interaction. In this respect, David Pattie establishes a
direct link between Greig’s work and Scottish identity:
The same debates that create Scottishness as a present absence – a culture

whose essence is never fixed, but always exists in relation to other
narratives, other places, and other cultures – is for Greig the process that
defines nationality, identity and culture, not only in Scotland, but
anywhere. (Pattie 2011, 65)
Belonging somewhere is declined into an alternative: belonging with

someone. Feelings of belonging and of destination (or destiny) are no
longer exclusively associated with space but also with interrelation with
the other. In The Cosmonaut, Nastasja tries, in vain, to gain a “sense of
home” from her relation with Keith, but when she asks him whether he
wants children with her, his answer translates his attachment elsewhere “I
have to go home”(C, 228). Later, with Eric, she will successfully bind a
relationship whose solidity is expressed through spatial metaphors:
Natasja (...) I want children. Very much. A little baby boy.

Eric Then you can have one.
Natasja If I left now, would you follow me ?
Eric Yes.
Natasja How far ?
Eric As far as necessary...(...) (C, 273)
However, these bonds between characters can also prove more fragile, or
even more conflictual – as is the case between Katia and Adele – when
freedom is not the same:
Katia Things happen between people. Things happen and then they stop.
Like a summer cold. Trains pass. You can’t just attach yourself to someone
and leave. You can’t do it. Your place is here, Adele. Believe me. I know.
Adele I’ll follow you anyway (E, 67).
In this respect, the movement towards the other is central and finds its
materialization through the medium of language, communication and
images. In the Cosmonaut, Vivienne is a speech therapist and Eric’s work
consists of enabling communication between conflicting parties. While
movement can be experienced through physical place, towards an

elsewhere or towards the other, it can also be experienced across inner
mindscapes.
Indeed, mobility is not per se a physical displacement; the mental or
inner landscape of the characters also works as a mean to explore mobility,
to escape from imprisoning situations. Both memory and imagination are
unifying and creative “inner spaces” in the plays. In Europe Morocco
underlines how permanent and precious memory is:
When you’re a business traveller like me, Horse, you carry your memories
everywhere with you like precious stones and every night, in hotels, on
trains, in ditches, you take them out and count them, you examine every
facet, you count and recount for comfort’s sake till you fall asleep. Believe
me your memories are more valuable than money, never mind the
currency. (E, 33)
While Morocco described the place where he lives as “a stone in the

stomach”, memories are also referred to as “stones” – but precious ones,
with a value of their own: comfort.
Between past and present, memory allows fragmented or disconnected
characters to re-member – come closer to unity as they re-assemble, re-
collect the dismembered or dislocated parts of their experience and
identity. Likewise, imagination shows the human capacity to consider and
embrace a wider world of possibilities. Many characters are indeed
obsessed with imagination – and as such they seem to work as echoes of
the author himself. In Europe, Adele can imagine the world as whole, and
it empowers her and makes her different from Berlin whose lack of
imagination limits the world:
Berlin I can help.

Adele You can’t
Berlin Why not?
Adele Because you’ve got no imagination. I live in a world, Berlin. A
world with millions of things in. But not you. You’re here. If you can’t see
it, it doesn’t exist. If it’s over the horizon no one lives there. (E, 49-50)
In this sense, Greig’s characters create maps to read the world, and as
Peter Zenziger notes, “Jameson’s aesthetic of cognitive mapping offers an
apt description of Greig’s practice.” (Zenziger, 265) Indeed, Jameson
defines cognitive mapping as follows:
Imaginary relationship to (...) real conditions of existence. (...) Surely this

is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower
92 5
framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational

representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and
properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s
structures as a whole. (Jameson, sections I and IV)
The “vaster and unrepresentable totality” and “structures as whole”

evoked by Jameson are materialized on stage through a recurrent feature
which is that of “top views”, between earth and sky, inside and outside, or
local and global. This motif becomes a metaphor for the character’s
aspiration to apprehend the world in a vaster, more encompassing totality.
In Europe, Adele spends her time on top of the roof of the train station so
as to see the trains, coming: “(...) ever since I was small I’ve stood up here
to watch... a train full of everything. Every kind of thing from
everywhere’s inside it. Everything from everywhere is on that train and
it’s coming through here (...)”. (E, 46) In The Cosmonaut, Nastasja has a
similar discourse when she goes onto the roof of her apartment in Oslo to
see her father among the stars: “I can see the whole fucking shitty world
(...) Sylvia you can see all this....Beautiful stuff. All this fucking beautiful
stuff.” (C, 294)
These characters become links between the macrocosmic and the
microcosmic, the universal and the individual, and they allow perceived
space to be constantly put into perspective with a more universal space.
Such back and forth movement, or zooming effect, is also emphasized by
alternating scenes in which character either look up to the sky – Bernard,
the French UFO researcher observes the satellite in space (C, 248), Natasja
shouts at a passing plane from her balcony in London (C, 243) – or down
below – Oleg and Casimir describe their view of the earth as they float
somewhere above. (C, 242) In his analysis, Dan Rebellato suggests that,
through these images, Greig materializes a contemporary dilemma on
stage: “how can we maintain a grand vision of society when such large-
scale thinking has been socially rejected, and where the collapse of such
thinking has prompted such a fragmentation of the very notion of society
in the first place?” (Rebellato, 12)
Thus, through the use of “non-places” on the stage, David Greig
relocates identity crises within the theatrical space and offers imaginative
utopian resolutions that transcend ideas of identity or boundary in favor of
the notion of community.
3. U-topos: a theatre of endless possibilities

Theatre as such is a real anthropological place of collective gathering,
where people share the experience of being offered an imaginative
representation of the world. Through the refusal of dialectical and

circumscribed representations of identity and space, Greig chooses to
stage an encompassing rather than limiting scenario – on every scale. He
claims that truly political theatre stages a world, in which change is
possible
I proposed the idea that truly political theatre was theatre of any type that
created a world in which change was possible. I wanted to get away from
theatre that proposed dialectical solutions (...) and offer a theatre that tore
at the fabric of reality and opened up the multiple possibilities of the
imagination. (Greig 2008, 212)
This is particularly true for Europe in which the plot necessarily conjures
up real political situations and discourses. However The Cosmonaut
displays other attributes through which the possibility of change can be
apprehended. One peculiarity of the play resides in the fact that it is
written in order to be performed with certain actors playing several parts.
Theatre as such plays with the contrast between imagined space and real
space. It is precisely in this interval, in between those two spaces, that the
possibility of utopia, locates itself. In the theatre, it is common to see one
actor embody several different characters; however, Greig’s use of
doublings is peculiar in the sense that he creates a web of echoes between
the doubles by making obvious connections. The use of doublings of
actors on stage creates a sense of unity, a collective body, a shared
ontological essence. One same actor plays 3 different bar tenders in The
Cosmonaut. As the owner of the French bar he predicts: “One day, I tell
you this, there will come a time when all the stories humanity has ever told
will have been made into films set in American high schools.”(C, 42)
Later in the play, in a scene staged in the Highlands, the bar-owner reads
from the newspaper: “there’s a film I want to see. One Crazy
Motherfucker it’s called (…) It’s set in an American high school. (C, 97)
Language seems to be fluid and to “travel” from one character to
another as a shared material – similarly Keith (in Edinburgh) and Oleg (in
space) have never met, and yet they use similar words to describe different
women: “Oleg : the smells of her body. The tastes of her body. The tiniest
blemish on the skin of her tigh. The scar on her forehead (...).” (C, 224)
This speech is almost literally the same when pronounced by Keith, as if
language could migrate from one character to another: “Keith : (...) I can
taste every inch of her body, you know. I can smell every inch of her
body. The tiny blemish on her thigh. The scar on her forehead.”(C, 236)
Simultaneously these two women (Vanessa for Oleg and Nastasja for
94 5
Keith) lose their own individuality as they are shaped by similar discourse.
Each character no longer is the location of its own identity or language.
Through a web of poetic images, connections and echoes, notions of
frontiers, territory and identity are transcended. A new unity emerges from
the initial fragmentation of the plays, since corporeal frontiers are
transcended to perform communication differently. All characters seem
irrevocably linked through this porous topography in which fluidity allows
images to circulate. The colour blue expresses strong emotions (stroke and
orgasm) for both Eric and Bernard (who have never met in the narrative
structure of the play):
Eric my legs went numb and it felt...blue I can remember that feeling
exactly (C, 285)
Bernard My legs went numb (...) I can still remember the feeling
absolutely precisely. Blue. The color blue. (C, 292)
The recurring image of the brand Pepsi obviously evokes the

omnipresence of mass consumption and the homogenization of culture, as
it is described as a rival of the moon – center of imagination and creation:
Bernard (...) The Americans want to write the word ‘Pepsi’ in space. A
giant advertisement.To say ‘Pepsi’.Every night it will compete with the
moon.
Proprietor The moon has nothing to sell. (C, 243)
However, it is also the very Pepsi that allows interaction and

communication between Sylvia and Natasja, (“have a Pepsi”, C, 250) or
Oleg and Casimir (“I love America, I want to drink Pepsi Cola”, C, 252).
Dan Rebellato suggests that:
These ghostly doublings, these corporeal puns, emphasize, beyond the

power of the narrative, the non-identity of things with themselves. Dozens
of such congruences create connections across the expanse of these play
and others, giving the separate stories a “ghostly collectivity. (138)2
These “utopian gestures” (Rebellato) or transcendental images, defying

notions of identity, territory or even language somehow materialize one of
Augé’s wishes; the representation of a world that no longer appears as a
multiplication of “non-places” but rather one single shared place: “One
day perhaps, there will be a sign of intelligent life on another planet. Then,
through an effect of solidarity (…) the whole terrestrial space will become
a single place. Being from earth will signify something.” (Augé 120)
Conclusion
In David Greig’s work, the presence of identifiable or national territories
is elliptic, avoiding an essentialist vision; instead the notion of identity –
Scottish identity – appears behind the images of the nature of a changing
geography. Therefore the Scottish stage can be conceived as engaged with
the negotiation of transnational aesthetics originating in its openness with
regards to concepts of geographical origin. Far from being defined by
“provincial” features and circumscribed to a local audience, Greig’s
dramaturgy reduces the presence of the “national” to create a more
inclusive and “utopian” theater, which becomes distinctive of a Scottish
voice. The setting and constellation of figures suggest a transnational
condition, constantly challenged by spatial and temporal conflicts, which
the characters have to embrace through mobility, whether physically or
metaphorically. David Greig thus abandons too narrow and confining
notions of identity – individual, national or artistic – and displays a
“geography of identity” anchored in a wider and more global perspective.
In this sense he also asserts the ability of “marginal” voices to become
universal, as Scottish theatre is not associated with the Scottish territory
only, but opens up to the spaces of globalization, encompassing their
ambivalence. Moreover, this truly international aspect of Greig’s theatre is
confirmed by the fact that his plays cross several frontiers since they are
translated and staged worldwide. The use of “non-places” favors a
representation of a universal, cosmopolitan, transnational and transitory
condition: a utopian community, whose contours are perceived – both on
stage and in the audience – during the theatrical representation.
References
AUGÉ, Marc. 1995. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropologie of
Supermodernity. John Howe (trans.). London: Verso.
BAUMAN, Zygmunt. 1997. Postmodernity and its Discontent. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
CLIFFORD, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late
Twentieth Century. London: Harvard University Press.
CRESSWELL, Tim. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western
World. New York: Taylor and Francis Group.
FISHER, Mark and David GREIG. 2011. “Interview: Mark Fisher and David
Greig Suspect Culture and Home Truth”, Cosmotopia: Transnational
Identities in David Greig’s Theatre. Müller and Wallace (eds). 14-32.
Prague. Literraria Pragensia
96 5
GRAVES, Matthew and Elizabeth RECHNIEWSKI. 2015. “Imagining

Geographies, Mapping Identities”, Journal of Multidisciplinary
International Studies, [S.l.], Vol. 12, Nb 1, 2015. Available at
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/4380
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i1.4380.
GREIG, David. 2002. Plays 1. London: Methuen Drama.
—. 2007 “Physical Poetry: David Greig in conversation with Caridad
Svich”. Performing Arts Journal. Vol 29. Nb 2. 51
—. 2008. “Rough Theatre”. Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in
the 1990’s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
MÜLLER, Anja. 2005. “We are also Europe: Staging Displacement in
David Greig’s Plays”. In Staging Displacement Exile and Diaspora.
Contemporary Drama in English CDE. Vol 12. Edited by
Houswitschka and Müller, 151-169. Augsburg. Trier WVT.
PATTIE, David. 2008 “Mapping the Territory: Modern Scottish Drama”,
Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990’s. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 143-157.
—. “Scotland and Anywhere: The Theatre of David Greig”, Cosmotopia :
Transnational Identities in David Greig’s Theatre. 50-64. Prague:
Literraria Pragensia.
REBELLATO, Dan. 2002. “Gestes d’utopie : le théâtre de David Greig”,
Ecritures Contemporaines 5 : Dramaturgies britanniques (1980-2000).
Jean Marc Lantéri (ed.), 125-14. Paris: Minard.
WILKIE, Fiona. 2011. “ ‘What's there to be scared of in a train?’: Transport
and Travel in Greig's Europe”, Cosmotopia: Transnational Identities
in David Greig’s Theatre, 151-165. Prague: Literraria Pragensia.
ZAROULIA, Marilena. 2010. “Travelers in Globalisation: From Near to
Elsewhere and back again”, Staging Interculturality. Contemporary
Drama in English CDE. Vol 17. Edited by Werner Huber, Margaret
Rubik and Julia Novak. Augsburg: Trier WVT, 263-278.
ZENZIGER, Peter. 2005. “David Greig’s Scottish View on the ‘New’
Europe: A Study of Three Plays”, Literary Views on Post-Wall Europe.
Edited by Christoph Houswitschka, Ines Detmers, Anna-Christina
Giovanopoulos, Edith Hallberg and Annette Pankratz. Augsburg: Trier
WVT, 261-282.
Further Reading
BACHELARD, Gaston. 1957. La Poétique des espaces. Paris: PUF.
BROOK, Peter. 1996. The Empty Space. New York: Touchstone.
BROWN, Ian (ed). 2011. The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Drama.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
BROWN, Ian and Alan RIACH (eds). 2009. The Edinburgh Companion to
Twentieth Century Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
CRAWFORD, Robert. 2000. Devolving English Literature, Second Edition.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
HOLDSWORTH, Nadine. 2010. Theatre and Nation. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
HOWE KRITZER, Amelia. 2008. Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain:
New Writing 1995-2005. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
LYOTARD, Jean-François. 1979. La Condition postmoderne. Paris: Minuit.
STEVENSON, Randall and Gavin WALLACE (eds). 1996. Scottish Theatre
Since the Seventies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Notes
1
Jameson, Frederic, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham, N.C : Duke UP, 1991, Chapitre 1. Sections I et VI.
www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm
2
Rebellato, Dan, « Gestes d’utopie : le théâtre de David Greig », Ecritures
Contemporaines 5 : Dramaturgies britanniques (1980-2000), éd. J.-M. Lantéri,
Revue des lettres modernes, Paris, Minard, 2002, p. 138. Unpublished english
version of the paper to be found on Dan Rebellatto’s website, p.23,
http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/utopian-gestures/
CHAPTER THREE:
FROM GEOGRAPHICAL METAPHORS

TO A GEOGRAPHY OF LITERATURE
6
FROM LITERARY MYTH

TO LITERARY TOURISM:
CASHING IN ON EXPATRIATES’
METAPHORICAL PARIS
AMY D. WELLS
The city of Paris functions as setting, plot, and even character for many of
the writers who were part of the expatriate movement present in Paris
between the two world wars. Writers such as Ernest Hemingway (The Sun
Also Rises), Gertrude Stein (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas), Henry
Mencken (Europe After 8:15), and Djuna Barnes (Vagaries Malicieux),
write specifically about Parisian geography to the point that their
narratives are mappable to some extent. Plotting out scenes of action onto
Parisian streets helps the reader to imagine, from his or her armchair,
where these stories take place, and on some occasions, the geography, due
to its coded nature, brings additional meanings to the text. At the same
time, these writers are also basing their narratives on the reputation of
Paris—a set of clichés that are developed through writers’ and characters’
own experiences of “space”, turning those locations into “place” (Yi Fu
Tuan 1977, 6; Lutwack 1984, 12). This geographic encoding is examined
through a geocritical lens when we consider Bertrand Westphal’s space—
literature—space cycle1 (Westphal 2001, 21): readers and writers learn
about Paris from books, then they visit Paris, and rewrite their Parisian
experiences into literature, attributing meanings to specific spaces and
even specific addresses. It is in this way that expatriate modernist writers
aspire to experience an authentic, Bohemian ‘Paname’ written of in
numerous texts, endowing the city with its mythic aura. However, this
reality of the city is always deferred as these writers-travelers invariably
transform Parisian space into a touristic trope that further feeds into the
tourism-based ethos of modernism (Kaplan 1996, 27; Méral 1983, 183-
85). This expectation/disillusionment paradigm is heavily critiqued by
From Literary Myth to Literary Tourism 101
cultural commentators and writers, who themselves deconstruct the mythic

realities of Paris. Despite eventual disappointments, expatriate writers and
their Parisian addresses continue to be popular tourist locations, as
indicated by various plaques attached to walls and guidebooks such as
Walks in Gertrude Stein’s Paris (Haight 1988). As we follow literary
pilgrimages throughout Paris, though, not all aspects of the celebrated
expatriate literature have made it onto tourists’ maps: despite the surge in
interest in Left Bank women’s writing spurred on in the 1980s by Shari
Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank (1986), literary locations linked to
women such as Djuna Barnes (rue St. Romain; Mairie du VIe) and Natalie
Barney (rue Jacob) do not enjoy the same popularity as that of sites
associated with their male expatriate counterparts. Here, we will examine
how the meta-critique of tourists’ expectations and disillusions of Paris
engenders a conception of this space as a topos of self-referential space.
Firstly, the analysis will demonstrate the establishment of the literary myth
of Paris, including the “American” spaces of Paris derived at through a
GIS-inspired cartography. Next, theories of literary tourism will be
considered to understand how place becomes a sellable product. Finally,
we will conclude on the current exploitation of literary tourism in Paris,
submitting our examples to a type of Left-Bank litmus test.
1. Literary Myth Making

Literary myth making is a process that evolves over time. Paris is, in
and of itself, a palimpsest for French literature, as different literary
movements and the writers’ characters adopt neighborhoods and
arrondissements. Nevertheless, American literature has also invaded Paris,
or rather, Paris has infiltrated American literature, as investigated in detail
by Jean Méral in Paris dans la littérature américaine (1983) and Shari
Benstock in Women of the Left Bank (1986). These and other critics
conclude that Paris is as an important topos in American literature. It is
through the repetitive evocation, description, and reporting of Paris that a
set of expectations about what Paris should look, smell, feel, sound and
taste like is established. Furthermore, the narrative strategies of expatriate
writers produce a set corpus of Parisian locations to the point that an
“Americanized” Paris can be mapped out. Together with the literary myth
making process, these Americanized spaces will create the Paris tourism
market targeted at Americans.
Returning to the pull of Paris for American expatriates, while there are
many reasons Paris was so attractive to them, one aspect that was highly
influential was the cycle of learning about a place from books, visiting that
102 6
place, and rewriting that place into new books: this process is an example
of the space – literature – space cycle we encounter in theories of
geocriticism, as previously mentioned. Most expatriate writers first
learned about Paris from either books or newspapers. In The Sun Also
Rises (1926), Hemingway offers an example of this “reading about a
place,” which represents a negative view of Paris. While narrating his
personal interaction with the city, Jake Barnes talks about how he likes to
walk down the Boulevard Raspail, but how he hates to ride down it:
I suppose it is some association of ideas that makes those dead places in a

journey. There are other streets in Paris as ugly as the Boulevard Raspail. It
is a street I do not mind walking down at all. But I cannot stand to ride
along it. Perhaps I had read something about it once. That was the way
Robert Cohn was about all of Paris. I wondered where Cohn got that
incapacity to enjoy Paris. Possibly from Mencken. Mencken hates Paris, I
believe. So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken.
(49, emphasis added)
Jake’s comment is rich in many ways: he points out that people associate
ideas with places and he acknowledges the potential influence of outside
sources on a person (or character’s) interpretation of a place. His reaction
is two-fold and represents the persuasion of both an associative emotional
geography and that of a literary geography. Regarding himself, he does not
like riding down the Boulevard Raspail (emotional geography), maybe
because of something he read about it (literary geography). As for the
other character Cohn, Barnes comments that Robert cannot enjoy Paris,
indicating that a “normal” person does enjoy Paris, and then he comes
back to the idea that it could be the influence of a written source that keeps
Cohn from enjoying Paris (in this case, something written by Mencken).
This fictional example relates expatriates were instructed through literature
on how they should feel about Paris. Over time, literary and journalistic
reports created for Americans a set image of what Paris was like. More
than just stereotypes, these notions of Paris evolved to an iconographic
status, creating a fixed set of anticipated experiences.
As I have argued elsewhere (Wells 2005), there are several geographic
coding systems functioning simultaneously through the corpus of
expatriate literature, such as a geo-parler femme2 or the importance of an
artist having two homes3. These codes are based on the expectations of
what a place will be like or what will take place there. For example, and
quite very simply, from Henry Miller’s perspective in Tropic of Cancer
(1934), France is equated with having a good time: “When he said France
it meant wine, women, money in the pocket, easy come, easy go. It meant
being a bad boy, being on a holiday.” (Miller 1934, 277) Miller likens
France to gastronomical and sexual pleasures and a sense of ease. Yet his
description is dead-on: pleasures of food, sex, and “holiday” are the often-
repeated images associated with the myth of expatriate life in Paris.
Turning next to Djuna Barnes, we get another view of the iconographical
status of Paris as a place that authenticates life experience. Vagaries
Malicieux (1922) is an early Barnes pieces about her trip abroad in which
she brings together her pre-conceived notions of Paris and her real-life
experience in arriving at the coveted destination:
For years one has dreamed of Paris, just why, no man can tell, saving that
no pear from an orchard stolen has been atoned for without the mental
calculation: “A Frenchman would have understood; in Paris all would be
so simple, so charming!”
No man dares have a fixed opinion on life, love or literature until he has
been to Paris, for there is always someone at his elbow to hiss: “Have you
visited the Louvre? Have you reacted to Giotto? Have you run your hand
over the furniture of the fifteenth century? Seen the spot where Marie
Antoinette became most haughty? No? Well then, my dear friend, keep in
your place.”
Every day of one’s life one has heard such things as: “When your dear
father was drinking a whiskey and soda one night on the Avenue de
l’Opéra, he was accosted by two women, one with a rose in her teeth, and
one without” or “Well, of course, I know that all philosophies contradict
themselves in the end, so I have made it a point never to do anything about
it, until I have visited Paris, then I knew that I just had to express myself!”
(Barnes 1922, 5)
This extract reveals several levels of the Paris reputation. The first line
brings forward two ideas: the first part of the sentence reconfirms the
iconographic status of Paris as “one has dreamed of Paris” without being
able to explain why. The second part of the first sentence, in a humorous
and awkward way, addresses the part of the Paris myth which holds that
everything is better, easier, freer, and more charming in Paris. Whereas we
may have expected a sexual or gastronomic example (as above) to
demonstrate the French charm, Barnes has chosen a pear-theft anecdote
that evades clichéd stereotypes on which to transfer a perceived French
tolerance. The next two paragraphs communicate the idea that only a trip
abroad to Paris can bring validity and thus authenticate ideas on love, life,
and philosophy. The second paragraph reinforces the idea of an
experiential geography, consisting of seeing certain artworks and city
104 6
locations and touching physical elements that represent history, imparting

an authoritative knowledge that is unavailable elsewhere. The last
paragraph comments more on the mythology produced through Paris
hearsay.
It is just this access to Paris via literary myths that gives those outside
of its geographical boundaries the chance to experience it. Mencken
understands this point, but like Barnes, he mocks certain structures within
the literary geography that contributes to the myth making of Paris:
It is night in Paris! It is night in the Paris of a thousand memories. And the

Place de la Concorde lies silver blue under springtime skies. And up the
Champs Elysées the elfin lamps shimmer in the moist leaves like a million
topaz tears. And the boulevards are a-thrill with the melody of living. Are
you, now far away and deep in the American winter, with me once again in
memory over the seas in this warm and wonderful and fugitive world? And
do you hear with me again the twang of guitars come out the hedges of the
Avenue Marigny? And do you smell with me the rare perfume of the wet
asphalt and feel with me the wanderlust in the spirit soul of the Seine?
Through the frost on the windows can you look out across the world and
see with me once again the trysting tables in the Boulevard Raspail, a-
whisper with soft and wondrous monosyllables, and can you hear little
Ninon laughing and Fleurette sighing, and little Hélène (just passed
nineteen) weeping because life is so short and death so long? Are you
young again and do memories sing in your brain? And does the snow melt
from the landscape of your life and in its place bloom again the wild
poppies of the Saint Cloud roadways, telegraphing their drowsy, content
through the evening air to Paris? (Mencken 1914, 202-3)
This contrast of winter and spring, which is not meteorologically possible,

is humorous, because while Paris is “warm, wonderful,” and a “fugitive
world,” the reader is stuck in the “American winter.” Mencken plays with
a group of clichéd elements by writing romanticized descriptions like
“elfin” lamps and “topaz tears” and citing women’s names like “Ninon,
Fleurette, and Hélène.” Together, these images titillate the imagination,
enticing the reader to believe he or she will find these same people and
setting in Paris. The description begins to associate certain experiences
with certain places, indicating a system of geographic vocabulary: music is
linked with Avenue Marigny and trysts with the Boulevard Raspail. In a
parodical fashion, the passage appeals to the sense of sight, smell, sound,
taste, and touch. Mencken’s mockery of Paris literature (to which he
himself contributed) aims to educate the reader about how to digest the
information.
Extracts such as these reveal an intertextuality of place within the

American expatriate corpus. To arrive at this data, I completed a GIS
database with over 2,000 entries. Based on a corpus of 26 novels, from
French and American male and female writers, each time a character went
somewhere in the text, physically or mentally, I entered it in the database
which is composed of four linked tables (Wells 2012). The first questions I
have addressed are those of nationality and gender. The geographic
narrative strategies revealed through cartography show that the literary
geography of Paris is adapted and adopted by American writers and that
therefore an “Americanized” Paris exists. There are two main poles of
activity: the Latin Quarter and Montmartre. Those addresses representing
the Americanized literary salons, such as 27 boulevard de Fleurus, 7/12
rue de l’Odéon, and 20 rue Jacob, are the most frequently cited sites by
women writers. On the other hand, the sites of consumption along the
Boulevard du Montparnasse, such as bars, restaurants, and cafés, represent
the most frequently cited locations by male writers and the second most
cited locations by female writers. The male writers are relying on locations
such as the Jardin de Luxembourg, the Bois de Boulogne, the Champs
Elysées, and the Boulevard de Saint-Michel. (Wells 2014) Even in the
twenty-first century, after much critical acclaim, readers tend to recognize
the latter set of locations rather than the first, according to the popularity
of the male expatriate writers over that of the Left Bank women writers.
Ultimately, the corpus of expatriate literature has created a reduced surface
area of Paris, and it is this Americanized geography that continues today to
inspire, or moreover, drive, American literary tourism in France.
2. Theories of Literary Tourism

The concept of literary tourism does pre-date the entre-deux expatriate
movement. In a 1905 book review of The Thackeray Country by Lewis
Melville and The Dickens Country by F.G. Kitton, Virginia Woolf evokes
both affective and critical motivations for making the types of literary
pilgrimages proposed by the books. Woolf states:
We are either pilgrims from sentiment, who find something stimulating to

the imagination in the fact that Thackeray rang this very door bell or that
Dickens shaved behind that identical window, or we are scientific in our
pilgrimage and visit the country where a great novelist lived in order to see
to what extent he was influenced by his surroundings. (Woolf 1986, 32)
As demonstrated by her review, the pilgrims either want to pay homage to

places where authors wrote or visit for themselves the “country” and
106 6
“surroundings” which may have been influential in the fictional works. In

a similar fashion, a definition for tourism theory based on the importance
of the “landscape” (like Woolf’s “country” and “surroundings”) is presented
in the collective work, Landscape, Tourism, and Meaning. Editors
Knudsen, Metro-Roland, Soper, and Greer put forward the following
definition:
The starting point for a theory of tourism is the notion of seeing or reading
the landscape and interpreting its meanings. Tourism should generally be
understood as a discourse among three sets of actors: 1) tourists; 2) locals;
and 3) intermediaries, including government ministries, travel agents, and
tourism promotion boards. (Knudsen, Metro-Roland, Soper, and Greer
2008, 4).
From this perspective, the theorization of tourism is a shared activity—not

just an interaction between tourists and locals, and readers or writers, but
also implicating the role of intermediaries, which implies a conscientious
management of the “real” literary spaces.
When critically approaching the use of literary myths to create literary
tourism, there are several aspects that come to the forefront, which we will
rapidly point out here: from a theoretical perspective, geocriticism pairs
well with literary tourism theories because of the particular attention it
pays to the role of spaces in literature. Furthermore, through the process of
literary tourism, places become products. Finally, there is even sometimes
a demand within the realm of literary tourism to offer tourists the
opportunity to visit fictitious places, thus necessitating the creation or mise
en scène of imaginary spaces to respond to the demand for a real
experience.
Given their common interests, geocriticism and tourism studies are
closely linked, and for Nathalie Roelens, geocriticism may be one of the
best approaches to take when executing analysis of literary tourism:
If tourism nourishes itself on textual supports—guides, web sites, etc.—the

journey itself proves inseparable from the story it kindles from this
somewhat hybrid genre (between document and fiction, that requires more
than a literary approach, such as geocriticism (this discipline that has
generated the renewed interest in sites) because it mobilizes
anthropological, historical, and philosophical considerations. (Roelens
2015, 9)
In addition to relying on anthropological, historical and philosophical

considerations, within the scientific study of literary spaces, geocritics
identify literary spaces across a comparative corpus. One geocritical task
is to determine the common and uncommon places evoked in the texts,

which can also lead to the questioning of the “real” vs. “imaginary” nature
of the locations. As the example of expatriate American Parisian locations
demonstrates, patterns can be established amongst authors who employ
real and even specific addresses that are mappable, and those who employ
coded locations or completely fictitious ones. When adopting a geocritical
approach, critics pay special attention to how space is transformed into
place, and we have already evoked Tuan and Westphal’s approach to this
development. The editors of Landscape, Tourism, and Meaning also speak
to the multiplicity of meanings that can be attributed to a place, resulting
in numerous interpretations:
Indeed, it is the case that a single landscape cannot be the same for any two
individuals because each has had a different interaction with the landscape,
thus their knowledge of the landscape differs. However, while the
subjectivity of reading is complete, meaning does not fracture totally. To
those commonly socialized by family, culture, and history, there are certain
similarities in readings—there are congruencies and concordances. These
unspoken institutionalized understandings, when entered into discourse,
are then shaped, refined, and distilled by the inevitable power relations that
are party to all human interaction. (Knudsen, Metro-Roland, Soper, and
Greer 2008, 4)
While the possibilities of interpretation are multiple, “congruencies” and

“concordances” emerge, particularly within the dominant discourse of
“unspoken institutionalized understandings”. This phenomenon of
determining a set of interpretations is what takes place when the Parisian
literary tourist offers focus on the set of sites established mainly by the
male writers. Nevertheless, geocriticism contributes to the demand for
literary tourism, in part by identifying the codes that are established by
literary places. Furthermore, geocriticism’s intervention creates a rare
opportunity for Humanities research to become financially profitable and
exploitable. From the conception of literary itineraries and the creation and
diffusion of corresponding maps, to providing specific tourism-related
services (shuttles, accommodations, and guided tours), the literary tourism
sector is both a longstanding tradition and yet an emerging profitable
market, especially through the availability and accessibility of internet
offers that we will analyze below.
As readers become literary travelers, they also participate in the
encoding cycle, and they expect to see at the place what they have read in
the book. Bertrand Westphal speaks to the transformation of literary space
and tourism discourse into a “product”:
108 6
Tourist discourse emphasizes the functionality and integration ability of a

space perceived as a “product” and arranged in a serial logic. In literature,
the writer-traveler-reporter is clearly distinguishable from the reader,
whom he is instructing, enthralling, or distracting through words that he
himself masters and claims. In the tourist brochure, the reader is a potential
traveler who must own the speech provided to him. The author tends to
disappear and authorial function slips imperceptibly towards the reader,
whose job it becomes to “create” the world based on the parameters that
the brochures have provided. Tourist discourse is conventional, in that it
reveals the contract that must be established with the reader—a contract in
the legal sense of the term, just as a contract whose terms are contained in
a slogan [...] The stay and the stereotype must be reconciled. The
variability of the discourse is related to a calculated modulation based on
an aesthetics of reception. This aesthetic is itself oriented along marketing
principles. Again, tourism discourse is a performative speech, a speech
whose scope is measured against its communicational effectiveness and its
immediacy. (Westphal 2009, 24)
Westphal evokes both a reader of travel literature and a potential consumer

who reads a tourist brochure. Both must create an image of the place that
corresponds to its representation. Tourism discourse creates a contract
between the reader-traveler and the intermediary managing the tourism
offer. The stay itself must reconcile with the perceived stereotypes. It is
through this process that literary places become products on offer. It is not
just the space itself, but also the experience, with all that is encompasses,
that becomes a product. When speaking about American tourists to
France, Maxine Feifer explains that the traveler is a “customer”:
Sailing home on the Aquitania a few weeks later, the tourist had a golden
tan, a slight tarnish of sophistication that was very becoming, and a lot
more clothes, though it was hoped that he, and especially she, would
refrain from showing them off at dinner. He was a satisfied customer.
Modern American technology had combined with European “gracious
living” to give him the best of both worlds, in a perfect bubble which
admitted no disagreeable realities. Though the ensemble was touristic, all
the elements were authentic, from the Gainsboroughs on the Aquitania to
the Mediterranean bouillabaisse. All you needed to have these good things
was to know how to make money. (Feifer 1985, 217)
Satisfaction and authenticity are put forward as the keys to a successful

trip. At the same time, the consumer-oriented attitude is also present, as in
order to have “these good things,” you need to make money.
We have mainly referred to Parisian examples, but there are a few
others that demonstrate this product-ification of place. Marie-Gabrielle
Maistre pinpoints the influence Rousseau has had on Charmettes. Her text,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la Savoie, describes how Rousseau’s literature
has transformed the place:
Those passionate enough to undertake a pilgrimage to Charmettes are often

literati. They sometimes even come with Rousseau’s book in hand. Thus
Lamartine and Julie, in 1816, have simultaneously experienced the charm
of the landscape and reading: “We stopped from time to time and we sat on
the moat around noon to read a page or two of Confessions and identify
with the site.” The pilgrim delights in Jean- Jacques’s descriptions and he
only has to look up for the reality of the place to amaze him. Literature and
Nature merge, and as Stendhal said, after his visit to Charmettes in 1837:
“It is impossible to see this place as it really is, the sensation caused by
Jean- Jacques’s narrative intervenes at every moment between reality and
ourselves.” (Maistre 2012, 119)
Some key elements here are that readers go to the place they have read
about so they can “identify with the site.” They are truly “pilgrims”, and in
their experience, literature and nature melt together. A writer himself,
Stendhal explains that Rousseau and his work are always interposing
themselves between the reality and the reader. Charmettes is no longer the
geographic space of Charmettes, it is Charmettes as described by
Rousseau and imagined by his readers. Ian Brown (2012) best summarizes
the situation when he states, “[l]iterary tourism reshapes its sites” (2).
Sometimes, literary tourism not only reshapes sites but calls for their
creation. Like the many examples offered from the literary passages cited,
readers want to visit the locations they have read about themselves to get a
feel for the space. Occasionally, the literary place cannot be visited
because it does not really exist. Many Harry Potter fans dream of visiting
Dobby’s Shell Cottage, which, since its construction (mainly for filming
purposes) in 2009 in Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, is now
actually possible (Daily Mail, 2011). Another example would be that of
George Sand’s mare au diable: there was not a specific mare to visit, so to
complete the George Sand circuit, a location has been identified as being
“based on” one of George Sand’s most famous novels.4 Ian Brown (2012)
views this “creation” or “attribution” of place as having also taken place in
the Trossachs. He explains:
What is remarkable about the ways in which The Lady of the Lake brought
tourists to the Trossachs is that they came to visit a fictional site. Or rather
they came in increasing numbers to visit a pre-existing, but limited, tourist
destination whose significance was much enhanced and overlaid by his
creative output. Something similar could be seen in Verona where
110 6
Shakespeare’s fictional lovers were assigned actual locations, as in time

was Scott’s own Faire Maid in her spurious ‘House’ in Perth. (I)
Returning to the first cited definition of tourism theories, these examples

of constructing places to respond to readers’ expectations correspond not
only to the involvement of the intermediaries as the third group of actors
involved in producing tourism, but to the creation of a “product”.
3. From Literary Myth to Literary Tourism Attraction:

A Panorama of Parisian Offers
Given the continuous literary myth-making cycle of Paris and the
process of rendering place into a tourism attraction, various actors
(publishers, tour operators, holiday rental owners) are able to “cash in” on
Paris literary myths. The products they offer can be divided into three
different types of sub-genres: they are “armchair” tourism, presented
through the popularity of Parisian anthologies, walking tour guidebooks
and cards, and Internet offers.
There is a difference between reading a bestseller set in Paris (like
portions of The Da Vinci Code) and reading a collection of extracts or
essays specifically dedicated to Paris. In the latter, an editor has made a
selection of extracts or an author has combined bibliographic work to pair
historical information with images and literary extracts. There are
numerous examples of these anthologies, both in English and in French. A
Literary Paris: Hemingway, Colette, Sedaris, and Others in the
Uncommon Lure of the City of Light (Robertson 2010) presents extracts
from well-known writers, without any specific chronological or
geographical organization. Paris vu par les écrivains (Arranger, 2003) is
structured by arrondissement, literally functioning as a literary geography
of place. While the work does not include a bibliography for readers to
refer to when further investigating citations or information, Hôtels
littéraires: Voyage autour de la terre (Nathalie H. de Saint Phalle 2004)
retraces the paths of authors as they spent time in hotels, creating an
alphabetical list of hotels of literary interest by country. She describes the
hotel as a “Pandora’s Box,” asking “What has not one done in a hotel?
Which writer has not written in a hotel or chosen a hotel as the setting for
scenes of a book?”As she theorizes the importance of hotels for literary
production, Saint Phalle also posits that visiting these hotels can bring
something more to the readers’ experience (5). Ultimately, even without
visiting the hotels, Saint Phalle’s work takes its readers on a trip through
time and space. Nearly fifty pages of the work are dedicated to literary
hotels in Paris, and Saint Phalle mentioned some of the Left Bank women
writers, including Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, Anaïs Nin, and Gertrude
Stein. There are several characteristics shared by these anthologies: the
organization can be thematic or geographic, but there are no maps in these
particular examples. Also, these three collections are all published (or re-
edited) after 2000, which indicates that despite the availability of online
resources and democratized European vacations, printed armchair
traveling anthologies set in and about Paris still have a market of readers.
Another product that is similar in some ways to the anthologies, due to
their shared book format, is the various “Walks” or “Walking” tours. For
those interested in literary cartography, this subgenre offers the greatest
contributions, as in the majority of the examples cited here, maps
accompany the texts, indicating the specific locations to visit. The maps
are hand-drawn or computer generated, varying from artistic creation to
GIS precision-based production. Walks in Gertrude Stein’s Paris dates
from 1988 (Haight). This book presents five different thematic walks: the
Literary Quarter, the Aristocratic Quarter, the Spirit of Odéonia, the
Artisans and Foundries, and the Heart of Bohemia. These walks focus
mainly on residences, studios, editor’s offices, and schools that have a
connection to Gertrude Stein or her circle. This guide is rare in that it
actually mentions Djuna Barnes. Just three years later, Permanent
Parisians: An Illustrated Biographical Guide to the Cemeteries of Paris
by Culbertson and Randall came out. (1991) While “Walking” does not
appear in the title, the book does offer maps of itineraries for visitors to
walk while discovering the different tombs of celebrities, such as writers,
artists, and musicians, giving biographical explanations. The chapter on
Père Lachaise, Tour 4, includes a detailed passage on Gertrude Stein,
citing titles by both Stein and Alice B. Toklas. In this way, the memorial
of the women’s final resting place is used as a memorial to their literary
production. The walking guide trend continues as, seven years later,
Picasso’s Paris: Walking Tours of the Artist’s Life in the City appeared.
(Williams 1999) While focusing predominantly on Picasso’s geography,
divided into four walks (Montmartre, Montparnasse, Étoile Quarter, and
Saint-Germain), many writers are featured, including Gertrude Stein. At
stop 10, 27, rue de Fleurus, walkers can pause in front of chez Stein and
read the story of the Picasso-Stein relationship during the settings for the
1905-06 portrait. (Williams 1999, 95)
This type of literary walking tour guidebook has remained popular
through the turn of the twenty-first century. In her volume entitled In Paris
with Jane Austen: Three Literary Walks, (2005) Vera Quin offers Parisian
tourist walks to Jane Austen enthusiasts, with maps by Veronique Yapp.
112 6
Quin explains her approach to the walks which run about 5 miles as
“tracking Jane Austen’s publishers and printers around the streets and
monuments, mostly on the Left Bank (Faubourg St Germain).” (88)
Adopting a somewhat quirky approach, like the other walking tour guides,
the visits include visiting places of literary production, with the first three
chapters dedicated to the genesis of Austen works and their translations, in
addition to the economic factors pushing the author to write. Referencing
Austin, Quin emphasizes: “The proposed itineraries are ‘so convenient for
even solitary female walkers’” and suggests that there is a distinction to be
made between the regular tourist and the literary one: “These streets hold
no menace, only the irritation of too many tourists, while you and I are
literary travelers.” (88) For Francophone readers, another 2005 guide was
established by the Terre d’écrivains group, which is dedicated to
promoting literature and writing, shedding more light on writers and
authors, on their works and on their life and the places that had an impact
on their presence or imagination5. Balades littéraires dans Paris (1900-
1945) (Sarro 2005) focuses on those literary locations considered to be
part of the expatriates’ golden age: references to Djuna Barnes, Natalie
Barney, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Miller, Anaïs Nin,
Pound, and Stein are included in this guide. In his introduction, Sarot
recommends that readers “let themselves be guided,” assuring readers that
“[o]ver the course of these walks a city is gradually drawn—a city that is
ignored by guidebooks, which invites you to relearn Paris and to build
your own Paris.” (Sarro 2005, 9) Like the propagation of the literary myths
mentioned above, the idea that each person has his or her own Paris
continues through the process of making literary Paris into a consumable
product.
Another French text is noteworthy as an example of the walking tour
guides, because of its date: Le Paris des écrivains (Jean Le Nouvel 2012)
proposes 5 different geographically oriented walks, including a map that
divides Paris into the zones corresponding to the walks. Each chapter
gives literary details associated with the place – what authors wrote about
each location along with historical and architectural information. In the
section “Références des ouvrages cités ou consultés,” the list moves from
from Balzac to Barrès, with no mention of Djuna Barnes or Natalie
Barney; the list also passes from Albert Simonin to Stendhal – but there is
no mention of Stein. However, other American writers are included such
as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kerouac, Miller, and even women writers Nin
and Wharton. In the index of names and places, there is unsurprisingly, no
mention of the rue Jacob, rue de Fleurus, or rue St. Romain.
In addition to these walking tours in guidebook form, walking tours

have also been proposed in card-deck format. While the source presented
here, City Walks Paris: 50 Adventures on Foot (de Tessan 2004), does not
claim a literary angle in its title, it does play upon the pre-established
Parisian tourist codes, including the desire to not just visit the cliché
tourist areas. For two of the walks, cards 35 and 45, the tourist is assured
that his or her experience will be “authentic”: “Not especially frequented
by tourists, since there are no great monuments here, this quiet,
unpretentious neighborhood will give you a glimpse into the Paris of
Parisians” (card 35, emphasis added) and “This is a diverse working-class
neighborhood. You’ll find few tourists here, except at Père Lachaise,
where young male visitors flock to pay homage at Jim Morrison’s grave.”
(card 45, emphasis added) De Tessan ignores that Stein’s and Toklas’
tomb is just up and around the corner from Morrison’s. Finally, the deck
also goes against the traditional “Paris is sexy” motive by warning tourists
to avoid the Bois de Boulogne in the evening, rather than encouraging
them to go and watch: “Note: The park is not a recommended destination
in the evening, when it is a popular area for prostitution.” (card 49)
As demonstrated by the examples discussed here, which span four
decades, two languages, a variety of cartography styles, and even print
formats, the walking tour sub-genre is vast and varied. These walking
tours and their corresponding media have given way to some impressive
internet offers, the third type of literary tourism proposition to be included
in this discussion of “cashing in” on literary myths. As a first example, we
may turn to the numerous results linked to Woody Allen’s Midnight in
Paris. (2011) As demonstrated in Figure 1, the film has sparked a string of
Parisian guided tours that range from procuring a list of the filming
locations, a map of the filming locations, a walking tour, and visiting the
filming locations in a classic car (2 CV). The Paris Perfect Paris
Apartment Rentals website includes a tour rubric to gain potential
customers’ attention. This website specifically takes advantage of the
demand to see these filming locations to get renters, as evidenced by the
prevalent place the movie image takes on their website, in Figure 2.
Furthermore, the corresponding text makes the link between seeing where
the scenes were filmed and renting one of their properties:
Guests at our Paris Perfect apartment rentals have asked where some of the
gorgeous scenes were filmed, and we reveal all here. Come along with us
and fall in love with the magic of Paris by visiting some of our favorite
locations where Woody Allen filmed Midnight in Paris!6
114 6
Figure 1: Gooogle Search Ressults for “Midnight in Paris Toour”

From Literary
L Myth to
o Literary Tourrism 115
Figure 2: “Thhe Magic of Parris-Woody Alleen’s Midnight in Paris” Tour Offer

O from
the Paris Perffect Paris Aparttment Rentals Website,
W Paris Innsider Tab
116 6
The advertising discourse continues to play into the clichés of the Parisian
myth-making with “fall in love with the magic of Paris.” In this way, as
Paris Perfect promises to “reveal all here,” they sell a combined package –
both the accommodation and the tour together. A competing website, Paris
Underbelly Discovery Tours offers both a day and an evening Midnight in
Paris tour, at 2012 prices of 75€ and 80€ respectively. Figure 3 shows that
the tour promises to “take you to sites featured in the 2011 Woody Allen
film “Midnight in Paris,” and to places that capture the lively and
quintessential spirit of Paris from the past”7. Again, authenticity and
nostalgia are used as selling points for this tour. While both tours include a
cocktail stop, the day version takes tourists to the “upscale right bank
hotel” featured in the film, and the evening version takes tourists to a
“Hemingway Haunt” for drinks. As previously mentioned, visiting filming
locations is part of literary tourism, and in the case of Woody Allen’s
Midnight in Paris, authenticity and the quest to taste the Paris of
expatriates’ past fill the coffers of numerous tourist outfits.
There are, however, other examples of Internet literary tourism offers
based on the expatriate authors themselves. It is important to note that
these deals range greatly in accompaniment and price. If you are a tourist
who “knows how to make money” to purchase yourself some authenticity
while traveling, the website Travels with Teri, “Journeys for the Curious
Traveler,” offers a complete hand-held tour of Gertrude Stein’s France,
including car service to and from the airport. Figure 4 reveals that this tour
takes you on “a literary romp through Paris before exploring Bilignin and
its surrounding area near the Swiss border. Gertrude Stein’s France
introduces you to one of the most charismatic people of our times”8. Four
of the seven days of the tour are dedicated to visiting some hard-to-reach
places that were crucial to Stein’s life in France, including the house in
Bilignin, which is a private residence with limited access. This made-to-
measure tour is probably the best deal for a Stein fan dedicated to seeing
the important locations of the author’s life without renting a car and doing
all the leg work on their own. In juxtaposition to this all-inclusive
package, some Internet literary tourism offers are of the DIY nature,
relying on blogs and Google maps. Bohemian students who wish to follow
Henry Miller’s “good life” may choose a free map, like the one in Figure
5. The map itself only shows dots on a grid with a corresponding legend.
However, it may be read in parallel with a 2004 blog article, “Henry
Miller: Born to be Wild,” on the “Bonjour Paris: The Insider’s Guide” web
site. Giving outsiders the insider’s scoop on the specific locations that
were important to Miller’s life in Paris, this blog entry provides, for free,
the missing stories from the Google map. The fact that offers exist at both
From Literary
L Myth to
ends of the financial speectrum, for Midnight

M in Paaris and for in
ndividual
authors suchh as Gertrude Stein and Heenry Miller, inndicates that there is a
tour out therre that correspponds to a range of budgetts. These locaations are
on sale for teemporary apppropriation.
Figure 3: “Miidnight in Pariss” Tour Offer frrom Paris Under

erbelly Discoverry Tours
118 6
Figure 4: “Geertrude Stein’s France” Tour Offer from Travvels with Teri, “Journeys
for the Curiouus Traveler”
From Literary
L Myth to
Figure 5: “Henry Miller Walks – Montparrnasse” Googlee Map from millerwalks.

com
120 6
Lesbians in thhe Left Bank”” and “The L

Figure 6: “L Ladies of the Sixteenth
Arrondissemeent” Example Tour
T Offers, 201
18 Paris Gay G
Games, Guided Visits
V Tab
Shoppingg around for Parisian web--based literaryy tourism offeers leaves

some visitoors and poteential clients out, howeveer: the locations and
itineraries oof characters from Left Baank writing aare still not to
op tourist
destinations, with the excception of Gerrtrude Stein’s France. Desppite a few
mentions off Djuna Barnes, the myth making of w works like Miidnight in
Paris still gglosses over the
t contributions of femalee writers. Baarnes fans
have been fflocking to St. Sulpice lon ng before Thee Da Vinci CodeC was
published, but they also stroll the rue St. Romain, and perhaps enter the
“Russian Church,” St. Julien le Pauvre, and maybe even the Picpus
cemetery, if they can find it. With a new project, though, literary tourism
offers may pass the Left Bank test as these locations and itineraries from
this literary corpus are getting put on the map through the efforts of the
2018 Paris Gay Games. Barnes’s works, along with those of other Left
Bank writers such as Natalie Barney and Radclyffe Hall, are particularly
appreciated by the LGBT community. This organization announced their
plans to valorize the community with visits and literary tours to
accompany the athletic events. Figure 6 displays how the literary cultural
heritage of the Left Bank will be exploited to a fuller potential and made
accessible: the “Lesbians in the Left Bank” and “The Ladies of the
Sixteenth Arrondissement” tours will include the literary locations of
Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas,
Djuna Barnes and Janet Flanner, Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks,
putting forward the elements of “empowerment of women and lesbian
identity”9. Finally, the Parisian literary tourism offers will include access
to packaged services enabling those who wish to do so to visit the
historical literary Left Bank.
Conclusion
To conclude, this analysis has identified the process of how literary
myths are transformed into marketable literary tourism offers. The making
of literary myths occurs through the space—literature—space cycle
identified in geocriticism, and a taxonomy of American spaces within
Paris has been established. The dialogic relationship existing between the
primary literary sources on one hand, and the guidebooks and websites on
the other hand, plays upon a set corpus of clichéd accepted images and
expectations of Parisian expatriate life. Taking visitors to see literary
locations is a way to make and remake traditional Parisian tourist offers,
with the elements of authenticity and nostalgia at the forefront of cashing
in on the deal. Readers have always had the opportunity to travel through
the literature itself or handcrafted armchair traveling anthologies. The
other trends in tourism presented here, such as the printed literary walking
tour guidebooks and Internet offers, indicate that, in addition to being
regular “tourists,” these readers may, as “literary travelers,” consume their
own version of Paris. Through these schemes, they may each seek out that
which he or she “expects” to find, temporarily owning the space…in
exchange for a price.
122 6
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Books Set in Top Travel Destinations. London: New Holland.
QUIN,Vera. 2005. In Paris with Jane Austen: Three Literary Walks.
Cappella Archive: Foley Terrace.
RILEY FITCH, Noel. 1992. Walks in Hemingway's Paris: A Guide To Paris

For The Literary Traveler. Saint Martin’s Press, New York.
ROBERTSON, Jamie Cox. 2010. A Literary Paris: Hemingway, Colette,
Sedaris, and Others in the Uncommon Lure of the City of Light. Avon:
Adams Media.
ROELENS, Nathalie. 2015. Eloge du dépaysement: Du voyage au tourisme.
Paris : Editions KIME.
SAINT PHALLE, Nathalie H. de. 2004. (1991]). Hôtels littéraires: Voyage
autour de la terre. Paris: Denoël.
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Minuit.
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Tourismes, Esthétiques. Limoges: PULIM.
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124 6
Websites
Bonjour Paris: The Insider’s Guide. 2004. “Henry Miller: Born to Be
Wild. ”Accessed March 2, 2015.
http://www.bonjourparis.com/story/henry-miller-born-to-be-wild/
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CuE8sQ&msa=0
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patrimoine-naturel?ID=PCUCEN0360070035
Notes
1
“Geocriticism proposes the study of not only a unilateral relationship (space-
literature), but also a true dialectic relationship (space-literature-space), implying
that space transforms itself in function of the text that has previously assimilated it.
The relationships between literature and human spaces are therefore not fixed, but
perfectly dynamic. ” (21) This translation and those that follow are my own.
2
I have previously defined this concept as the use of geography by women writers
as a secret or coded language, communicating emotional or symbolic meanings
that can be understood only by readers who share their context. (Wells, 2005)
3
“After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside
themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to
have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live
really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but
it is really there.” (Stein, 1940, 2)
4
“Dans le bois de Chanteloube, se cache discrète et mystérieuse «la Mare au
diable» faisant référence à l’un des romans les plus célèbres de George Sand.”
(http://www.pays-george-sand.fr/fr/pages/patrimoine-
naturel?ID=PCUCEN0360070035)
5
terredesecrivains.com.
6
http://www.parisperfect.com/blog/2011/10/midnight-in-paris/
7
http://parisunderbelly.com/tours/midnight-in-paris-tour/
8
http://www.travelswithteri.com/itinerary/gertrudes-france
9
https://www.paris2018.com/fr/infos/visites-guid%C3%A9es
7
WHEN SPACE RENEWS

THE LITERARY WORKSHOP:
THE OULIPO MOVEMENT’S SPATIAL
LITERARY PRACTICES
GÉRALDINE MOLINA1
For quite a long time, the field of geography has focused on spaces
depicted in literature. More recently, it has begun to expose the
relationships that literary works nurture with the settings that serve for
their production and acceptance. The groundwork was primarily laid by a
number of seminal works announcing a “geography of literature”
(Brosseau and Cambron 2003, Molina 2010). This approach has taken on
greater legitimacy in light of the tendency of contemporary literary
practices, like that introduced by the Oulipo movement, to engage in a
special relationship with a given place (Schilling 2003, 2006, 2011).
Initiated at the beginning of the 1960’s, the OuLiPo movement (l’Ouvroir
de Littérature Potentielle: French acronym for a workshop of potential
literature) assembles writers, mathematicians and musicians collaborating
on the same project: exercising language through entertaining and
experimental means, inventing constraints in order to forge new literary
dynamics. Among the devotees of Oulipo, or Oulipians, space becomes
occupied not merely as a literary topic, but moreover as a field of
experimentation for new ways to create literature.
By highlighting the emblematic case of the Oulipian Jacques Jouet2,
this article proposes an exploration of how contemporary literary practices
yield a renewed relationship with space that contrasts with the traditional
process for producing literature. As of the 1990’s, Jouet embarked on
literary experiences with a distinct spatial component. An analysis of his
work, as proposed in this article, will seek to assess how occupying a
space within a given time frame, in association with emerging social
When Space Renews the Literary Workshop 127
relations, actually catalyzes new literary dynamics. This reliance on

geographic settings in literary production lies squarely within a more
general trend influencing contemporary artistic practices. Since the 1960’s,
contemporary plastic arts have tended to be more heavily aligned with a
“contextual art” form through a creation process both within and with the
environment. (Ardenne 2002) The analytical model and concepts proposed
by the geographer-turned-artist Anne Volvey to study this movement,
which favors adding a spatial component to contemporary artistic activity
(2008, 2010), will be visited herein to shed light on the production
dynamic behind such Oulipian literature. However, the works of Jacques
Jouet proceed by forming an immediate bond with a place, where the
writer stakes out a position and interacts with his audience and residents.
This body of work entails not just “spatial building blocks” (Volvey
2008), but a temporal and social construct as well (Bourriaud 1998).
Probing the areas of art sociology and literary critique will also provide a
valuable backup to better comprehend the three-pronged approach (spatial,
temporal and social) used by Jouet to produce his works.
An initial analytical time allocation will be devoted to tracing the
evolution in literature production conditions. The term “literary workshop”
will be used to designate the entire set of activities, actors, spaces and
temporal frames that mesh to build a literary work. The traditional
literature production process involves a succession of actors and activities
that play out chronologically within different spaces. The relationship
between an author and his readers thus appears to be remote in both space
and time, with this separation being bridged by a series of actors, activities
and objects that participate in composing the literary work. The first part
of this article will demonstrate how, with these Oulipian writers, literature
has taken a “spatial turn” (Volvey 2010, 7) by thoroughly altering these
production steps. The second part will detail how Jacques Jouet deftly
experiments this new approach to creating a literature assembled for the
here and now.
1. When literary production adds a spatial component

The research stemming from literary theories (Jauss 1978, Eco 1965,
Genette 1991, 1994), much like that inspired by the sociology of art
(Escarpit and Bouazis 1970, Becker 2010, Dirkx 2000, Heinich 2011), has
led to consider literature no longer through the lens of a purely textualist
approach, but rather within a more dialogical perspective (along the lines
of a social construct), as the outcome of a process that mobilizes a
plurality of actors and activities. Could literature be qualified simply from
128 7
the standpoint of the author’s design, or would it need to be received as

such by society, through various social groups participating in its actual
production and symbolizing the work itself. What are the sequence of
activities, the actor input in staging the various spaces and the traditional
literary evolution processes underlying the given qualification? How have
Oulipians occupied space since the 1960s like a laboratory and thereby
renew these modes of literary proliferation?
a) Traditional means of creating literature

A literary work is not merely the end product of the author’s labor. It
mobilizes a “cooperative chain” (Becker 2010, 49), a “division of labor”
(ibid. 32) among the various actors. Their associated activities take part in
in spaces and at distinct moments which constitute the individual steps in
building a literary work.
The output of this chain starts to take shape well in advance of the
actual writing. As exposed in literary genetics targeting the nascence of
written works, spaces inhabited by the writer are influential, to the same
extent as the imaginary and fictitious spaces encountered in his/her
reading. Literary work is also shaped in an intertextual manner and
moreover lies within a network of ramifications connecting it to other
works (Kristeva 1969). To achieve its production, the author takes a
position within a “space of the possible” (Bourdieu 1998, 390), in
acknowledging the output of his/her predecessors.
Formalization through the act of writing becomes a key to the
challenge of producing a manuscript. As the central literary activity,
writing within the collective imagination winds up being shrouded in a
certain mystique and prestige. Writing is often associated with private
spaces, notably that of the writer’s bedroom or office. Flaubert exemplifies
this now legendary figure of the reclusive, solitary writer toiling out of the
world’s view, enclosed in the silence of his/her office, vigorously writing
and rewriting text before depositing the draft in the “mouth of the dragon”.
While literary production is often assimilated with and simplified to this
solitary writing activity, in reality it comes on the heels of many other
steps essential to the nascence of the work. (Becker 2010; Escarpit and
Bouazis 1970)
The ultimate publication presumes the existence of collaboration
between the writer and his/her publisher, in implying a whole series of
activities: external proofreading, potential rewriting sessions, a hard copy
printout. This metamorphosis of the manuscript into a text takes place in
different successive venues: the publisher’s, the printer’s, etc. Several
actors then get involved in the book’s marketing, distribution,

dissemination and promotion, at which point not only is the publisher
quite naturally active, but also the author takes part in auxiliary activities
(public readings, interviews, etc.). A host of other players in the book
production chain then enters the fray as well, including bookstores,
librarians, teachers, the media and literary event organizers. Their
activities are conducted in venues traditionally dedicated to the
dissemination and promotion of literature, while able to offer the same
treatment for the arts: libraries, bookstores, book fairs, museums.
Institutions like schools also tend to play a role in the establishment of
literary culture and the dissemination of literary works.
Moreover, literature implies a dialectic interplay between the text,
which offers a number of possible interpretations, and its readers (Eco
1965, 1992). The existence of a literary work is contingent upon being
refreshed and updated by the act of reading, which occurs in several social
contexts and rallies both lay and professional actors (e.g. publishers,
critics). In reviewing the contributions from over 40 years of research in
the field of pragmatism and sociology of art, Jean-Pierre Esquenazi
summarized by noting that more than a simple "object", artwork appears
as a “working process.” (2007, 194)
The practices involved in appropriating literature cannot be reduced to
the act of reading alone. Literary works can indeed be adapted (e.g.
cinematographically or theatrically), used and even manipulated by a
variety of actors within an array of social spaces (Molina 2010). This
renewal process playing out across myriad social spaces is what serves to
chart the “social destiny” (Moulin 2007, 22) and ensure the “survival”
(Escarpit 1970a, 129) of a piece of work once its production apparatus has
been dismantled.
The traditional mode of literature production typically revolves around
a series of activities and social protagonists, whose interplay is staged in a
multiple number of spaces. In the end, the literary work appears to be
“crafted by society, shaped by a progression of historical situations, laced
with collective connotations.” (Escarpit 1970b, 17) According to this
production mode, the relationship between author and reader is offset
within the temporal domain, as mediated by the book but also by an entire
series of actors. As of the 1960’s, writers began to question this linearity
and the underlying sequencing of the literature production process, while
focusing on renewed modes of literary creation.
130 7
b) The “spatial orientation” of literature

The Workshop of Potential Literature (under the banner “Oulipo”) was
founded at the beginning of the 1960’s, at a time characterized by greater
fluidity in the literary scene and a decompartmentalization of scientific
fields and the artistic realm. Georges Perec, for example, befriended
architects and attended their schools. In seeking to distance themselves
from the technician’s and scientist’s approach espoused by predecessors of
the modern movement, the young generation of architects emerging during
this period drew inspiration from literature and semiotics in rethinking and
reformulating architecture. (Molina 2010) Such attraction by actors from
the fields of architecture and urban planning to Oulipian literature can be
explained by the depth and uniqueness of the relationships these writers
nurtured with space.
The Oulipians in essence attempted to restore literary practices by
reexamining the relationship between space, time, writing and society.
Given the intensity of burgeoning social exchanges, as well as their steady
pace and the diversity of the spaces included, the city was experiencing an
Oulipian occupation as a favored theater of observation. In providing
multiple possibilities to impose constraints and encourage invention, the
city offered a perfect backdrop to experiment with new ways of practicing
literature. Raymond Queneau initiated a mental writing experiment around
a “walking poem” that gave rise to “Courir les rues” (“Hitting the
Streets”) in 1967. By also making use of the city as “a poetic laboratory or
test bench” (Schilling 2011, 57), Jacques Roubaud attempted to “once
again hit the streets” that had been visited 30 years prior by his Oulipian
predecessor (ibid. 58). With “The Invisible Cities”, published in Italian in
1972, Italo Calvino also tried his hand at a kaleidoscopic poetic portrait of
an array of cities. Apparently, the Oulipians had established a special pact
with the city. It was perhaps Georges Perec however who was most
responsible for spatial experiences stimulating the level of literary activity.
While the city had been a preferred subject for poets and novelists, the
setting of Baudelaire’s and Rimbaud’s outings, “detours” by the surrealists
(Stierle 2002), with Georges Perec it had become the laboratory of a new
experiment, namely that of in situ contextual writing, whose substance
was derived from a relationship of geographic immediacy. From the end
of the 1960’s, Perec began taking on “projects completed ‘in the field’”, as
described by Derek Schilling. (2003, 144) This “spatial orientation” was
set into motion with the project entitled “Lieux”. The writer sought to
occupy twelve Paris sites intimately associated with their history.
Temporal constraints would interfere: for twelve years running, he
produced two texts a month at these places by utilizing two distinct
132 7
writing methods. The first was in situ, whereby the writer present inside
the space attempts to relate his perceptions with objectivity and neutrality.
This technique resembles that of the social sciences researcher employing
an “ethnographic” type method. (Schilling 2003, 145) The act of literary
creation is thus bound to a given space and time that the writer fills. The
second mode adopted during this project was less direct: in absentia, the
writer seeks to physically access the site through the power of his writing
and the exercise of his mind in recalling memories. By superimposing
stringent spatial and temporal constraints and necessitating an endurance
exceeding twelve years, this project begun in 1969 was ultimately
abandoned in 1975. Perec would continue the experiment at other Paris
venues. For example, from October 18th to 20th 1974, he took a seat at the
Café de la Mairie, on Paris’ Saint-Sulpice square. In his Attempt at
exhausting a place in Paris (1974), his project consisted of accurately
transcribing his perception of the space, exhaustively describing the life of
this public sphere. These projects reveal the ambition of making a literary
theme out of day-to-day existence, this “background noise”, the
commonplace as exposed in all its banal immediacy, which a few years
later would constitute the main topic of L’Infra-ordinaire. (1989)
Perec’s projects are to be placed in an era characterized by an
extraordinary intellectual climate. Intellectuals and artists were both keen
on “hitting the streets” (Buren 2005) and gaining greater proximity to
society by demonstrating their interest for the mundane. Two-way
exchanges and shared influences characterized the relationships built
between Georges Perec’s output and the works of contemporary artists,
like Christian Boltanski. (Joly 2010) As of the 1960s, contemporary art
had adopted a “spatial orientation” by exiting the museums and dedicated
institutions to occupy the public space and reestablish proximity with its
public. (Bourriaud 1998, Ardenne 2002, Ruby 2001) These modern artistic
practices suggested the pursuit of “outdoor” spatial strategies, in contrast
with the traditional art world. They developed within a relationship-driven
attitude with respect to their public and their context. (Volvey 2008) Like
artists, writers were intent on establishing direct ties with their times, their
city and their fellow inhabitants who sustain and energize the city. Their
goal was to reside in the world and “work” with the world in refining their
craft.
As of the 1990’s, in drawing inspiration from these literary and artistic
experiences as well as from contemporary artists (like Sophie Calle),
Jacques Jouet would pursue this experience by placing literature and
poetry in a spatial context using even more extreme techniques.
2. Space or the new spawning ground of literary

production
Georges Perec’s legacy can be measured more precisely by the
influence of his work on contemporary writers. François Bon, Patrick
Modiano, Jean and Olivier Rolin, and Annie Ernaux, to name a few, all
recognize their debt of gratitude and their “affiliation” with the Perec
movement. (Heck 2011) Among these followers, Jacques Jouet held a
unique role. With this author, the space-time-society triad was paid special
emphasis and gave rise to a set of constraints spurring a literary dynamic
that renewed both the author’s and reader’s experiences with great fervor.
As the Oulipian he was, Jouet dabbled in an array of genres: poetry,
novels, short stories, theater, essays (that he would resurrect by working
from spatial, temporal and social constraints). These experiments ushered
in the invention of new literary forms: the “metro poem”, the “landscape
poem”, the “portrait poem” of individuals or social groups, an author’s
attempt at exhaustion, or a project intended to coordinate literary devices.
What were the specific socio-spatiotemporal systems that these literary
forms embraced? Outside of any distinct features, what were the new
underlying literary production principles?
a) The spatiotemporal dynamics of writing

One of the initial ramifications of Jouet’s writings consisted of
grasping the immediate experience the author had infused into the place of
story narration. The spatial practice had thus generated a unique literary
dynamic, a set of constraints and resources that the Oulipian drew upon to
write. Perhaps the "metro poem" serves to best symbolize this new mode
of literary production from the standpoint of the temporal and spatial
relationships being forged.
What exactly is a metro poem?

From time to time, I’ll write poems while riding the metro. This poem is
one such effort. […]
A metro poem is actually composed in the train during the time of a transit
trip.
A metro poem contains as many verses as your trip covers stations less
one.
The first verse is written in your head between the first two stations of your
ride (including the departure station).
It is transcribed onto paper when the train stops at the second station.
134 7
The second verse is composed in your head between stations two and three
of your itinerary.
It is transcribed onto paper once the train stops at the third station. And so
forth and so on.
No transcription is to take place while the train is in motion.
And verse composition must not occur while the train is stopped.
The final verse of the poem is transcribed on the platform of your last
station.
Should your itinerary require one or more line changes, the poem will
contain two or potentially more strophes.
(Jouet 2000, 7)
The writing dynamic relies on the trip-making sequences of the author-

metro user. Individual mobility is utilized as a constraint of spatial as well
as temporal resources. Jacques Jouet’s approach was inspired from that
adopted by the Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (Les autonautes de la
cosmoroute ou Un voyage intemporel Paris-Marseille (1983), undertaken
at the beginning of the 1980’s by the couple of writers Julio Cortázar and
Carol Dunlop, as their mobile writing adventure played out during a trip
along the Paris-Marseille motorway. In this instance, the writing practice
was predetermined by a constrained travel itinerary, with the writers
forcing themselves to stop at every other rest area to spend a night. For
Jouet, like for these South American writers, travels through space and
time energize the writing process. In aiding the Oulipian poet to traverse
space, the metro had become the setting of new poetic creation.
In opting to write “live”, to appropriate immediacy as an advent of new
literary production, Jouet distanced himself from a certain model of
writing:
It’s also a working idea. Flaubert’s model is not mine. […] I prefer to work
in the domain of enjoyment, that’s for sure. Beyond that, it all has to do
with energy, I mean it doesn’t have to be the accumulation of hard labor
that’s required… naturally it still might be! But offering a one-size-fits-all
model, that’s not for me. No way. In the metro poem however, it’s all
about compression. The physical realm, energy, it all gets compressed. The
purpose is stated: "I’m working very intensively for a very short time."3
136 7
Jouet’s poetry is thus rooted in and spawned from a story, that of a

place experienced at a given moment in time. The touching experience of
the place becomes the driver of instantaneous writing. As a counterpoint to
the “metro poem”, the “landscape poem” is also written “live”, in fact
horizontally onto a single verse (known as a couplet) and “within the
landscape.” A panoramic sweep is thus used for the poem writing mode.
Mr. Jouet is emboldened by his perception of venues. He starts out in the
static position of his body’s stance in space and proceeds like a
photographer in seeking to immortalize a panorama by means of a
succession of horizontal images. This poetic layout does not merely imply
a renewed writing mode, but also reconfigures another fundamental piece
of the literary production process in complementing reading by a
relationship held with the reader.
b) Space: A setting of joint literary production

In the traditional production process, the reader is actually first and
foremost a recipient whose primary activity, namely reading, occupies a
place downstream of this process. By “hitting the street” and constructing
poetry from and in a here and now, Jacques Jouet embarks on an entirely
different relationship with the reader. The spaces being occupied become
the stage of a meeting between poet and resident or user of the space.
With this “landscape poem”, writing and reading both share a space
and are driven by a panoramic sweep dynamic. Reading is thus no longer
simply the reader engaging in textual interpretation; it leaves the confines
of the book and evolves through the speaking voice of the poet and the
audience’s rapt attention. The act of reading is projected orally and
accompanied by staging the poet’s gestures in space, in visually scanning
the public from left to right. This scene is an immediate offering to the
recipient, who has been transformed from reader into listener, spectator
and partner of an experience influenced by landscape. Production therefore
takes place in the collusion between writer and reader in a designated
venue. In this manner, writing and reading meld within and via space.
“An author’s attempt at exhaustion” constitutes another radical form of
experience in the author-reader relationship, with the following
constraints: penning a novel by taking up permanent residence in a public
space or a space hosting the public (Paris June 2009 and Beirut June
2010), in the view of passersby and fans especially on hand for the event.
The writing is projected onto a giant screen in real time as it is being
produced by the author to ensure instantaneous reading. Sequenced in
138 7
traditional literature production processes, writing and reading tend to be

synchronized within the same space-time domain.
In considering that “poetry spans all topics”4, Jouet occupied spaces of
day-to-day life in order to produce another poetic experience, namely that
of “portrait poems.” Acting like a geographer or ethnologist, he undertook
the task of observing space and its uses in order to draw portraits. He
targeted an individual or social group: customers in a pastry shop, a
hairdresser’s salon, a class of middle school students, factory workers in
the Nord-Pas de Calais Region, or patients committed to a psychiatric
hospital in Cotonou. All were in the process of living a unique poetic
experience: freely stating their relationships with the setting, showing the
poet their lifestyle and uses of space. This initial step of interacting with
an ordinary place provides the basis for writing the “portrait poem”, under
the scrutiny of the future reader who then becomes both the subject matter
of the work and its co-producer. Once the writing is complete, the author
submits his text to the reader (by either distributing a copy to read or
reading to him out loud) and observes his/her reaction.
Jouet’s set-up therefore fundamentally modified the relationship to
literature and both the writer’s and reader’s experiences. With the "portrait
poem", the author-book-reader linearity has been broken. The spatial
construct of literature strengthens its collaborative dynamic. Works stem
from an encounter within a given space and time between writer and user;
they lie within a "relational" framework comparable to that of the
contemporary artistic movement observed by Nicolas Bourriaud. (1998)
The reader’s status changes significantly, becoming multifaceted. For
one thing, the reader is no longer simply involved downstream of poetic
production through the dual effort of interpretation and appropriation
through reading. Instead, he is now integrated upstream in the text
production process itself. As subject of the work and a character in this
“portrait poem”, the reader also partners to produce the work. The
relationship between the author and his reader no longer appears as
spatially and temporally remote thanks to mediation by a series of actors,
activities and objects. This author-reader cohabitation leads to a change in
the type of interactions held between these two actors and, more broadly,
in the literary “worlds”. (Becker 2010)
140 7
Reading also assumes a new status, becoming an exhibition and

rendering by the author of the outcome of collective efforts accomplished
with his partner/subject: “Reading must take place audibly. I’m a stickler
for that. A face-to-face response is required”, explains Jouet during an
interview. These poetic participation devices therefore rely on an
interactive relationship between author and subject, which on occasion
yields unexpected extensions. Along these lines, Jouet notes that some
“subjects” of “portrait poems” have taken the participatory experience
much further, of their own volition. After discussions with the poet during
his “live” sessions writing their portrait, the subjects themselves tried to
write a “portrait poem” of Jouet, to generate a certain reciprocity between
the two. Their roles overlapped with no more room for distinction, each of
them sharing time as subject, author and partner to an extreme poetic
experience made possible through communing in a given place and time.
c) Literature adds a spatial dimension:

Theatrical productions, demystification
and acknowledgment of the literary experience
Within the realm of “portrait poems” and the “An author’s attempt at
exhaustion”, Jouet’s approach resembles an effort to expose the author’s
persona, now that he is no longer distant and inaccessible. The author must
come forth from behind the book, where the traditional literature
production process parks him; instead, he is exposing himself to the
reader-spectator and offering insight into how literature is manufactured.
Jouet’s poetry is thus built from a relationship of proximity. Literary
production undergoes a major alteration, since the relationship with the
reader is no longer being mediated by the book. The setting becomes the
writer’s stage at work and the scene of his writing process. While
modernity had proclaimed the death of the author, i.e. his relocation
behind the book (Barthes 1984, Foucault 1994), Jouet’s efforts cry out for
his resurrection and exposure to the literature development process. Not
only has the author stopped communicating in absentia, but now he’s
drawing attention to himself. Writing is displayed as it is being produced,
choreographed by a staging process (e.g. installation of the writer in a
transparent tent and projection of his/her work on a giant screen as part of
the initiative “An author’s attempt at exhaustion”). It takes place in full
view of readers. A public space corresponds to the exhibition venue of the
writer at work, in the theater of radical experience for both author and
user, as a synchronization between the acts of writing and reading. The
book is discarded as a transactional object tying author to reader, since the
writing process itself is now performing mediation. While this occupation

of space provides a theatrical stage for the writing and the author’s
persona, it also removes any inherent mystique. Exposing the techniques
used to produce written text looks very much like an unveiling to help
dismantle a myth, and a big one at that, namely the “mysteries of
creation”. (Bourdieu 1998) On display in a public space immersed in the
“creation” process, the writer’s persona is rendered mortal, demystified.
The staging of literary production therefore ultimately places the author’s
identity at risk.
The change in production venue also serves as a fundamental evolution
in the eyes of readers it attracts as well as in author-reader relational
interactions. For starters, the author receives the reader’s direct reaction
and accepts the reader’s verdict without any of the typical intermediaries
(bookstores, critics, librarians, etc.). Moreover, by getting set up in a
public space, literature inserts itself and imposes itself in the lives of users
and residents alike, in upsetting their daily routines. It must also face a
radical distinction whenever an actor does not correspond to a typical
reader (who chooses to take part in the work by owning a book), but
instead to a user or resident discovering literature by chance according to
his/her spatial practices, a so-called “unintended spectator”, a “spectator
almost despite himself”. (Ruby 2001, 18)
During an interview, M. Jouet also explained that his work responded
to a social and activist ambition: publicizing literature through sharing its
production process and enhancing its accessibility to all. This push for
democratization is embodied in a more general movement that tends to
characterize contemporary art. (Bourriaud 1998, Ardenne 2002) Literature
is extracted from its usual spaces (book, bookstore, library, etc.), to be
built via an “outdoor”dynamic by hosting discussions in the public sphere.
Through occupying spaces like a factory or psychiatric hospital (“portrait
poems”), literature seeks to encompass the neglected, the subjugated,
making them not only “readers” but full-fledged actors to the literary
production process, in short partners.
Conclusion
Those few pages have helped me explain how the “geography of
literature” could clarify the evolution of the literature production modes
and the fusional relation that contemporary literary practices have with
space. Fed by the sociology of literature and literary criticism, geography
builds its legitimacy as a social science and makes a specific contribution
by exploring the coproduction logics between space, literature and society.
142 7
An analysis of the production of Oulipian works has led to observe

how this contemporary literature is being “crafted” by space to the same
extent as contemporary art. (Volvey 2008) The addition of this spatial
dimension has reshuffled the typical relationship held with literature.
Space has become the scope of a total literary experience, a place of
inspiration as well as a site of joint literature construction, where the
writing is anchored and then received by residents and space users. While
this Oulipian literature is being created across a multiplicity of social
interactions all made possible by space, it also helps modify not only the
experience of the particular site, notably in the public sphere, but also
residents’ and users’ practices and representations.
Moreover, it would be fruitful to extend this perspective by analyzing
how literature “shapes” space. Research has already explored this line of
investigation in recognizing that literature is asked to contribute to city
building projects. Architects, for example, have collaborated with writers
to refurbish public spaces (Molina 2010), and the Oulipians seem to be the
most commonly cited contemporary literary references by city fathers
during their public speeches. (Molina 2012) The use of literature to build
and run a city thus constitutes a current trend. An accurate determination is
still required in an upcoming paper on Oulipian works in order to assess
their contribution to contemporary urban development with greater
precision. Staged and ascribed a spatial dimension, how has this literature
rendered space more poetic? In what way does it help modify social
representations and, in some cases, even materiality?
This article is a synthesized version in English of another one that was published in
a French review in 2014 (MOLINA, Géraldine. 2014. « La fabrique spatiale de la
littérature oulipienne : quand l’espace renouvelle les pratiques littéraires »,
available at Espacestemps.net, http://www.espaces temps.net/articles/la-fabrique-
spatiale-de-la-litterature-oulipienne/)
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Roland. Le Bruissement de la langue. Paris: Seuil, 61-67.
BECKER, Howard S. 2010. Les Mondes de l’art. Paris: Flammarion.
BOURDIEU, Pierre. 1998. Les Règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du
champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil.
BOURRIAUD, Nicolas. 1998. Esthétique relationnelle. Dijon: Les Presses
du réel.
BROSSEAU, Marc et Micheline CAMBRON. 2003. « Entre géographie et

littéraire : frontières et perspectives dialogiques ». Recherches
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y monter ? Paris: Sens et Tonka.
DIRKX, Paul. 2000. Sociologie de la littérature. Paris: Armand Colin.
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—. 1992. Les Limites de l’interprétation. Paris: Grasset.
ESCARPIT, Robert. 1970a. « Succès et survie littéraire », Robert ESCARPIT
and Charles BOUAZIS. Le Littéraire et le social. Éléments pour une
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—. 1970b. « Le littéraire et le social » in ESCARPIT, Robert. Le Littéraire
et le social. Éléments pour une sociologie de la littérature. Paris:
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Éléments pour une sociologie de la littérature. Paris : Flammarion.
ESQUENAZI, Jean-Pierre. 2007. « La Notion d’œuvre », LE QUEAU, Pierre
(ed). 20 ans de sociologie de l’art. Tome 1, 185-196. Paris:
L’Harmattan.
FOUCAULT, Michel. 1994. « Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ? (1969) », DEFERT,
Daniel and François EWALD (eds). Dits et écrits. Tome I. Paris:
Gallimard.
GENETTE, Gérard. 1991. Fiction et diction. Paris: Seuil.
—. 1994. L’Œuvre de l’art. Immanence et transcendance. Poétique. Paris:
Seuil.
HECK, Maryline (ed). 2011. « Filiations perecquiennes ». Cahiers Georges
Perec, nb 11. Paris: Le Castor Astral.
HEINICH, Nathalie. 2001. La Sociologie de l’art. Paris: La Découverte.
JAUSS, Hans-Robert. 1978. Pour une Esthétique de la réception. Paris:
Gallimard.
JOLY, Jean-Luc (ed) 2010. « Perec et l’art contemporain ». Cahiers
Georges Perec, nb 10. Paris: Le Castor Astral.
JOUET, Jacques. 2005. Cantates de proximité. Scènes et portraits de
groupe, Paris: P.O.L.
—. 2011. Agatha de Mek-Ouyes. 2011. Paris: P.O.L.
JOUET, Jacques and Zeina ABIRACHED. 2011. Agatha de Beyrouth, Paris:
Cambourakis.
KRISTEVA, Julia. 1969. Sèmiôtikè. Recherches sur une sémanalyse. Paris:
Seuil.
MOLINA, Géraldine. 2010. « Les Faiseurs de la ville et la littérature :
lumières sur un star-system contemporain et ses discours publics. Des
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usages de la littérature au service de l’action des grands architectes-

urbanistes. » Thèse de doctorat, Université de Toulouse II – Le Mirail.
MOULIN, Raymonde. 2007. « Réflexions sur vingt années de sociologie de
l’art », LE QUEAU, Pierre (ed). 20 ans de sociologie de l’art. Paris:
L’Harmattan, 15-24
PEREC, Georges. 1989. L’Infra-ordinaire. Paris : Seuil.
RUBY, Christian. 2001. L’Art public : un art de vivre la ville. Bruxelles:
La lettre volée.
SCHILLING, Derek. 2003. « Tentative de description : villes perecquiennes »,
FREEMAN, Henry G. (ed). Geo/graphies. Mapping the Imagination in
French and Francophone Literature and Film. Amsterdam, New York:
Rodopi, 137-150
—. 2006. Mémoires du quotidien : les lieux de Perec. Villeneuve d’Ascq:
Presses universitaires du Septentrion.
—. 2011. « Le Quotidien et la rue, ou comment la nouvelle poésie a battu
le pavé parisien (Réda vs. Roubaud) ». Contemporary French
Civilization, vol. 2, nb 35, 47-63.
STIERLE, Karlheinz. 2002. La Capitale des signes : Paris et son discours.
Marianne Rocher-Jacquin (trans.). Paris: Maison des Sciences et de
l’Homme.
VIOLEAU, Jean-Louis. 2005. Les Architectes et Mai 68. Paris: Recherches.
VOLVEY, Anne. 2008. « Land arts. Les fabriques spatiales de l’art
contemporain ». TIGR (Travaux de l’Institut de Géographie de Reims),
nb 129-130, 3-25.
—. 2010. « Spatialité d’une land activité : le Land Art à travers l’œuvre de
Christo et Jeanne-Claude ». Activité artistique et spatialité. Paris:
L’Harmattan. 91-134.
Notes
1
In alphabetical order, a big round of thanks for their proofing and valuable input
goes out to: Pauline Guinard, Magali Hardouin, Kelly Harrison, Thierry Paquot
and Anne Volvey, as well as to Jacques Jouet for verifying the details regarding his
approach.
2
Born in 1947, Jacques Jouet became acquainted with Oulipians Georges Perec
and Jacques Roubaud towards the end of the 1970's (he joined OuLiPo in 1983).
He conducted polymorph literary and artistic activities through a practice of the
poetic genre, novels, short stories, theater, essays and collage. His body of work is
drawing increased attention in the field of literary studies, to such an extent that an
international symposium has recently been dedicated to him in Poitiers (“Jacques
Jouet: An Oulipian disciple”, held June 27th through 29th 2013), organized by Marc
Lapprand (UVIC, Canada) and Dominique Moncond'huy (Poitiers) within the
scope of the ANR Agency's DifdePo project and with the support of FORELL
(MSHS, Poitiers).
3
Interview conducted on 15th October 2012.
4
Interview conducted with Jacques Jouet on 15th October 2012.
PART TWO:
GEOGRAPHY AND THE MAPPING

OF LITERARY GENRES
CHAPTER FOUR:
CHOROGRAPHIES AND TRAVEL

NARRATIVES
8
GEOGRAPHY THROUGH TEXTS:

EVIDENTIAL STRATEGIES IN THE TRAVEL
ACCOUNTS OF NAVIGATIONI
ET VIAGGI (VENICE 1550-1559)
FIONA LEJOSNE
The Venetian geographer Giovanni Battista Ramusio published between

1550 and 1559 a collection of travel accounts in three volumes entitled
Navigationi et viaggi. The aim of his work was to open up a wealth of
information on the regions and territories that had been newly discovered
or rediscovered, with the latent ambition of ensuring the greatest possible
dissemination of such information. As a consequence, the reliability of
information was a central concern for Ramusio: he constantly claims the
necessity of ensuring that the collected travel accounts are accurate. He
explains his method in particular in the dedication to Girolamo Fracastoro
(a Veronese humanist and doctor to whom all three volumes are
dedicated): scientists should not merely copy or report what others have
said and written but should use a critical approach to select and sort out
their sources.
Such a critical approach is then often detailed in the introductions – or
discorsi – he wrote for each of the texts collected in his volumes. In these
discorsi, Ramusio justifies his choice of texts and expounds on the way he
verified for himself the accuracy of each text, mainly by using the
humanist philological method. But his introductory statements also contain
explanations on why he chose each individual author. Those texts show
Ramusio's concern for the reliability of the authors in connection with
their background and condition: the ideal figure being the one of an author
who was himself well-traveled but who also had significant scholarly
knowledge. My focus will be on the content of the compiled accounts of
the Navigationi et viaggi rather more than the introductions written by
Ramusio himself. Indeed, I would like to take Ramusio at his word and
Geography through Texts 151
question the reliability of the testimonies he selected. In order to do so, I

will analyze how the reliability of their accounts is asserted by the
witnesses themselves. My purpose is to investigate whether Ramusio's
concern about the validity of sources is equally a concern for the authors
themselves.
In order to analyze how the authors of travel accounts assess the truth
of their narratives, two main textual elements should be considered. First
of all, the topic is often directly addressed by the authors in the
preliminary or conclusive statements: when they are in the initial position,
they provide a “declaration of intention” establishing a “pacte référentiel”,
a referential pact. (Lejeune 1975) They can also be situated at the end of
their account, and then offer a guarantee of good faith similar to oaths
found in testimonies or legal statements such as in Leo Africanus's or
Ambrogio Contarini's accounts1. The second relevant textual element is
the contents of the travel account itself. In this case, I will refer to the
category of “evidential strategies” in order to highlight the way authors
express the source of reported information and their degree of commitment
to its veracity. Both elements will be taken into consideration in this essay,
partly by comparing the claims of the authors with the actual content of
their texts. Travel accounts being referential texts, the question of sources
combines with the question of testimony. In fact, the traveler's own
experience appears to be simultaneously the main source as well as the
basis for the reliability of his account.
The underlying questions to this study are the following: how can
personal experience become the ground for geographical knowledge? How
is experience presented as authority in travel writings? In particular, a
focus on autoptic2 testimony raises epistemological questions that are
often considered as being specific to the Early Modern Age. Indeed,
experience, experiment, experimental proof, and autopsy are regarded as
typical elements of the pre-scientific approaches of the sixteenth century.
As a consequence, the Navigationi et viaggi appears as an appropriate
sample to analyze the relevance of such categories. In fact, Ramusio
himself assigns a scientific purpose to his work. In addition, this collection
offers a representative corpus of travel writings since it consists of accounts
written at various periods of time and under diverse circumstances3.
After exposing my method and the corpus I selected, I will analyze the
use of senses as evidential strategies in travel writing, then I will tackle the
issue of autoptic narratives and their limits, and finally I will give an
overview of the challenges encountered by travel writing authors in
combining various information sources.
152 8
1. “Evidential strategies” and travel narratives

I analyzed the texts by using a category derived from linguistics:
“evidential strategies,” namely those strategies that are defined as
linguistic elements “marking one's information source [by] indicat[ing]
how one learnt something.” (Aikhenvald 2004, 1) Strictly speaking,
“evidentiality” understood as a linguistics term is part of a language
system, but this is not the case in European languages, in which no
grammatical codes such as verb tenses give by themselves the possibility
to express the origin of a given piece of information. As a consequence, I
will use the category, but define it in the broader sense that is already
suggested by Aikhenvald's claim that “all evidentiality does is supply the
information source.” (Aikhenvald 2004, 4) In fact, she indicates that
evidentiality is expressed by most European languages through lexical –
and not grammatical – elements such as adverbial expressions,
introductory clauses, particles or modal verbs. Furthermore, whatever their
form of expression, the categories of sources that can be referred to by
evidential strategies are universal. They can be visual, sensory but non-
visual, by inference, by assumption, by hearsay, and quotative.
(Aikhenvald 2004, chap.2 “Evidentials worldwide”)
In the case of travel narratives, evidentiality will help us analyze the
referential aspect which is inherent to our texts. We will try to give an
answer to the following queries: how is evidence expressed and at which
frequency? Do travel narratives authors systematically assert the validity
of reported information by expressing its source? This approach will
enable us to consider if and how a link can be established between the
status of a witness, the expression of an author's sources, and the assertion
of veracity. To chart evidential strategies, the lexical elements I have
selected allow us to investigate the following categories which seem the
most relevant ones to deal with the topic of travel narratives as
testimonies: visual, non-visual sensory, by hearsay, and quotative4.
For the analysis of visual evidential strategies, I have counted the
occurrences of the verb “to see”, “vedere”, under all its forms and tenses
when it is used in the sense of “to notice through the eye”. In this case the
approach is mainly quantitative: the occurrences are classified according
to the grammatical subject of the verb5 and allow us to compare the uses of
this verb with the authors' statements regarding the status of the main
character of their account. For the other three categories, because a
quantitative approach could be biased by the difficulty of defining the
terms to use as research entries, my inventory is mainly based on extensive
reading of the texts and identification of key words or expressions. In the
Italian language the verb “sentire” is used to express two senses: hearing
and touching. As a consequence, it is one of the main entries I used in my
inventory of non-visual evidential strategies. Another entry word for non-
visual indications is the verb “udire”, to hear.
“Hearsay” evidential strategies and “quotative” evidential strategies
are both categories referring to information that has not been acquired
directly by the traveler, but that has been obtained through others: they
offer the possibility to include reported information into the narrative by
underlining the fact that it is such. The distinction between hearsay
evidential strategies and quotative ones is clarified by Aikhenvald as
follows: in the first case, the reported information bears “no reference to
those it was reported by” whereas, in the second case, a “quotative”
expression is the expression containing “an overt reference to the quoted
source” (Aikhenvald 2004, 64). I have analyzed the last two categories of
reported information through the following expressions: “dice che/dicono
che” (he says that, they say that), “avere aviso di”, “avere notizia di” (to
be informed that), “riferire/referire” (to report that), and the two verbs
meaning “to hear”: “udire” and “sentire”.
2. The corpus
The main criterion for the selection of the corpus is its representativeness
within the whole collection of Navigationi et viaggi. First of all, this
representativeness is quantitative: the three volumes of the Navigationi et
viaggi, in the version edited by Ramusio and published between 1550 and
1559, contain a total of 53 texts. In order to chart evidential strategies I
have analyzed 14 of them, which represents nearly 50% of the total length
of the collection in the 1550s editions. The texts selected here contain
some of the most important ones collected by Ramusio, in terms of length
but also when considering the historical interest of the travels and
expeditions they report.
The second criterion is qualitative: in order to have a representative
sample, my selection is also based on the variable characteristics that
distinguish one text from the other: the status of the narrator (traveler or
non-traveler); the time period in which the text was written: from the
Antiquity (Hippocrates of Kos), to the Middle Ages (Marco Polo, Niccolò
de' Conti,) to the Early Modern Age (Ambrogio Contarini, Ludovico di
Varthema, Peter Martyr, Leo Africanus, Antonio Pigafetta, Paolo Giovio,
Oviedo, Cortés, an anonymous Portuguese on the voyage towards India,
Letters from Jesuits on Japan) and the aim of the text and its form, which
often converge (an official report, a letter, a transcribed oral testimony, an
154 8
account of one's own experience, an account of the experience of others, a

scientific treatise based on travelers' testimonies)6.
3. Senses in travel writing

a) Non-visual evidential strategies
Traveling is a physical experience of the world. Through this study I
investigate not only how this physical experience is transposed into
written words, but also how the narrators explicitly highlight the
physicality of the traveler's experience. Generally, eyesight and hearing
are considered as two antagonistic sources of information to which
varying degrees of credit have been attributed throughout the centuries.
For example, Hartog (1980) asserts that in Ancient Greece hearing was
preferred to sight since at the time it was the main way to convey
knowledge. Barthes (1971) and Zumthor (1994) both claim that hearing
was also favored to sight during the Middle Ages since it was considered
as the only path by which God's words could reach men. As Jourde and
Gally (1999) demonstrate, the question can never be fully resolved since
within the same time period, texts establishing theories on the hierarchy of
senses as sources of knowledge often show divergent opinions. For
instance, if we take a look at the period at stake here – the first half of the
sixteenth century – Erasmus Adages' and Charles de Bovelles (Liber de
sensibus, 1509) offer two opposite points of view on the matter. (Jourde
and Gally 1999, 17)
My ambition is not to suggest a way to choose between one or the
other: studying the use of evidential strategies in travel narratives simply
gives us the opportunity to tackle the issue by using the most reliable
source possible, namely the texts themselves. It seems, however, that at
this point a distinction should be established between hearing as a primary
source and hearing as a secondary source. In fact, the ear can be
considered as an organ that allows the traveler to gain direct knowledge of
the world. Yet, at the same time, it can also be the organ that records the
testimony of other witnesses. These two levels can be clearly
distinguished. Although both apply to my study, I will, at this juncture,
only investigate hearing, understood as a primary source of knowledge.
This will allow us to tackle the question of the five senses, and how,
through them, we relate to the environment. We will return to hearing as a
secondary source when addressing the question of reported information.
My inventory clearly shows that non-visual experience is less often
used as a link to the environment than visual experience. Very few travel
narratives refer to senses other than eyesight as sources of knowledge.

However, a clear tendency emerges in the use of non-visual sensory
indications: they appear mainly in texts referring to the New World. In
fact, the main travel narratives containing information gained through
hearing, touch, taste and smell are Oviedo, Peter Martyr, and Hernán
Cortés. Other travel narratives make use of senses other than eyesight, but
with far fewer occurrences: Leo Africanus, Ludovico di Varthema, Marco
Polo and Ambrogio Contarini. In the case of the narratives on the New
World, I postulate that the massive use of non-visual sensory indications is
due less to the fact that the experience of the travelers is radically new,
than to the specificity of their traveling conditions. In fact, for all the travel
accounts regarding the American continent that I have taken into
consideration, the length of the traveler's stay in the foreign land is fairly
long. Peter Martyr is an exception in the sense that he himself didn't travel,
but his text is based on many accounts of travelers who had themselves a
thorough experience of the New World.
It seems however difficult to identify a systematic link between the
length of the journey and the use of non-visual indications in the account.
We can refer here to the case of Antonio Pigafetta, who took part in the
Magellan expedition and wrote an account of its circumnavigation of the
world. In his case, although many of the territories and people he
encountered were completely unknown to his fellow Europeans, he does
not make use of non-visual sensory indications such as smell or taste
(other than through hearsay). Since his trip consisted mostly of a voyage
from one land or island to another and in brief stops, we could speculate
that he had very few occasions for multi-sensory experiences. On the other
hand, Pigafetta is one of the few travelers that transcribed words from the
indigenous languages he encountered (see his glossaries of “Bressil”, “San
Giuliano”, and Tidore island languages at the end of his account). His
interest in native languages demonstrates that his grasp of exotic reality is
not obtained only through his eyes – even if visual evidential strategies are
the ones most frequently used in his narrative.
Whereas we cannot draw a taxonomy of the narratives on the basis of
this study of non-visual evidential strategies, a certain regularity can
nonetheless be identified. Firstly, in the frequency of occurrences of each
sense: it is consistent and goes from touch (hardly ever used, and then only
when a general physical state is mentioned, such as the sense of hot and
cold, and the symptoms of a disease), to smell, taste, and finally hearing,
the most frequently encountered sense (except from sight of course).
Secondly, the perceived objects are themselves recurrent with respect to
each of the senses. Taste is used to comment on the flavor of unknown
156 8
food (mainly meat, plants, and oysters) as well as on plants often

considered to be poisonous. Hearing as a direct source of experience is
used when qualifying natural sound sources (mainly birdsongs), or native
behavior such as singing and the noises and shouting produced before
battles. Varthema is among the very few who refer to the sense of smell in
his narrative, to qualify for instance the sweet odors of a mosque in
Mecca, or the smell of aloe and “belzuí” wood in Sumatra.
The paragons of travel accounts containing multi-sensory indications
are Oviedo's Summario and Historia. For example when giving details on
the pineapple in the Historia, he affirms that four of the fives senses are
stimulated by this piece of fruit: “out of the five senses, this fruit more
than any other involves three of them, and even the fourth, which is touch;
because the fifth, hearing, fruits cannot involve it”7.
b) Visual evidential strategies

I have mainly engaged in a quantitative analysis when dealing with
visual evidential strategies. After completing the inventory, I compared the
number of occurrences in each account with the total length of the
account, in order to have equivalent data. The first striking element to
underline is that, despite the variety of texts analyzed, one general rule can
be enunciated: there is no travel account that does not make use of visual
evidential strategies. In fact, this category is frequently used in travel
accounts, both in first person and third person narratives, no matter when
the text was written. For example, the use of visual evidential strategies in
the account is proportionally equivalent in Marco Polo's narrative (end of
the thirteenth century), Niccolò de' Conti (beginning of the fifteenth
century) and Leo Africanus (beginning of the sixteenth century).
However, there are four authors that stand out by their frequent use of
visual evidential strategies: Peter Martyr, Oviedo, Cortés, and Ludovico di
Varthema. After these four authors, two texts written for a superior
authority – political in the case of Ambrogio Contarini, a Venetian
ambassador, and religious in the case of the Jesuit Letters on Japan – focus
much less on visual evidential strategy. The two treaties of Paolo Giovio
and Hippocrates (written of course in completely different periods) show a
very low use of visual evidential strategies – moreover, in both cases the
few formulations used are impersonal ones, such as the Italian phrase “si +
third person”.
Another overall observation is that the use of visual evidential
strategies is always superior to the one of non-visual ones, and indications
referring to information gained through eyesight are generally numerous in
texts in which the other senses are also mobilized in descriptions. As a

consequence, it appears that even when referring the travel experience as a
multi-sensory one, travelers largely prefer the visual channel to the other
ones.
c) Visual and non-visual indications as proof display

The function of reliability given to visual indications by the authors is
evidenced in the expressions that are used. In fact, many visual indications
tend to give emphasis to the person who is the subject of the sentence: not
only do they use the expression “with my eyes” but also “with my own
eyes”8. They can also be redundant in referring to the eyes as the channel
through which travelers perceive the world: the verb “vedere”, to see, is
frequently completed by the phrase “con gli occhi” (with the eyes, with
my eyes). Even if the general tendency of the authors of travel accounts is
to use visual indications, a contrast appears between the various persons
that are used as grammatical subjects of such indications. In a first person
narrative, the main grammatical subject of visual evidential strategies is
not necessarily the first person. This is the case of Oviedo for instance.
Even if he constantly reminds his reader of the fundamental importance of
his eyewitness status, what comes out of my inventory is the fact that the
majority of the sentences he uses to formulate visual indications are
impersonal. There is also a distinction that can be made between his
Sommario and his Historia9. In the Sommario, a brief text – as indicated
by the title, “summary” – written in 1526 during a short stay in Spain,
Oviedo's use of the first person is more frequent than his use of impersonal
formulas; in the Historia, the expanded version of the latter, published in
1534 for the first nineteen books, the balance between first person and
third person is largely in favor of the third person (both singular and
plural). Paradoxically, in his text which has higher intents of scientificity,
he makes a lower use of eyewitness indications, a criterion which he
himself presents as the grounds for reliability.
After an analysis mainly based on quantitative data, it seems necessary
to comment on the context in which visual strategies appear within the
texts. As a general rule, sensory evidential strategies are used in the
descriptive parts of the texts. The few exceptions can be understood by
taking into account the purpose of the narrative. For example, in Cortés's
letters, evidential strategies appear in the descriptions as well as in the
narrative parts, when the action of the conquest is reported. In fact, as
previously mentioned, his account partly aims at a political and juridical
recognition of his rights over New Spain: it seems necessary for him to
158 8
appear not only as an eyewitness of the new territories but also as the main
player in their conquest, and moreover as someone who hears and knows
everything that is happening there.
Another relevant phenomenon regarding the use of visual evidential
strategies can be observed in Odoric of Pordenone's travel narrative, a text
that I have not included in the inventory corpus as it was added to the
Navigationi only in the 1574 edition of the second volume, that is to say
after Ramusio's death. It is worth mentioning since it is representative of
how evidential strategies are used as displays of proof. In fact, there is a
concentration of such indications in the parts that could be regarded as less
credible or potentially the result of his imagination. For instance, when
reporting that he has seen many dead bodies in the Panj river – commonly
considered to be a river which comes directly from Eden – his whole
description is punctuated with visual evidential strategies: in a single
paragraph Odoric of Pordenone makes use five times of the verb “vedere”,
to see, and twice of “udire”, to hear, at the first person10.
In her introduction to the study of evidential strategies, Aikhenvald
states the following distinction: she argues that “evidence” in linguistics
should be distinguished from “evidence” understood as a legal category.
(Aikhenvald 2004, 4-5) In the case of travel narratives, it appears, on the
contrary, that the border between the two categories is rather a thin line
often crossed. The travel narratives at stake here are referential texts: they
are grounded on the fact that someone has actually traveled. As a
consequence, the challenge for their author is to bridge the gap between
the actual experience and its textual report. The evidential strategies
expressing autoptic experience carry out this function and, as such, they
also take part in giving credit to the content of the narrative: the expression
of one's own experience acts as proof of the veracity of one's statements.
In other words, in the case of travel writing, the mere mention of the
information source plays a role in the expression of the reliability of the
author and consequently of the narrative. Moreover, presenting one's
experience as such takes part in the authentication of the entire narrative. It
thus becomes a testimony which can indeed be understood in the judiciary
sense of “evidentiality”11.
4. Travel writing as autoptic narratives

a) Hierarchy of senses: the preference for visual sources
The inventory of sensory evidential strategies gives us the possibility
to question the hierarchy of the senses when considering the question of
personal experience as a basis for knowledge. First of all, it seems

necessary to stress the fact that many of the texts analyzed here not only
offer a good sample of how eyesight and hearing were presented as proofs
of given information, but that they also explicitly evoke a theoretical
perspective in order to resolve the antagonism between eyes and ears as
sources of knowledge.
For instance, Oviedo's assessment of the superiority of eyewitnesses is
recurrent. This quote from the Second book of the Historia general y
natural de las Indias exemplifies his conviction: “one who talks about
things one has heard has less authority when reporting them than one who
has seen them”12. Ludovico di Varthema is even more radical in
expressing his preference for sight. At the beginning of his account, he
pledges that he has written only what he has seen “especially when
remembering that one eyewitness should be held in higher esteem than ten
earwitnesses”13. In some cases, the link between veracity and eyewitness is
explicitly established, as in Leo Africanus when he deals with the various
hypotheses trying to determine the location of the Nile sources and
affirms: “both opinions are mistaken, since the place where it starts has
never been seen”14.
b) The limits of autoptic narratives

My purpose here is not to deal directly with the matter of utterance in
travel narratives, as many studies have already tackled the subject – for
instance Hartog on Herodotus (1980), and Guérin dalle Mese on a corpus
of travel narratives from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (1989).
Formisano's paper “La scrittura di viaggio come “genere” letterario”
(1996) is probably the most accomplished study on the matter, since he
succeeds in defining the various types of travel narratives according to
their situation of utterance. Instead, I would like to illustrate the possible
contradictions of first person travel narratives, in particular through the
example of Oviedo's Historia. In the frame of my inventory, I have taken
into account the use of the term “testimonio” (“witness”) in the various
texts under study. Oviedo's claim of an absolute supremacy of the
eyewitness (namely himself) does not fully match this inventory. In fact,
amongst the thirty-two occurrences of the term “testimonio”, only half of
them are completed by “di vista” (“testimonio di vista”, eyewitness), and
only one third actually refers to the author himself.
Oviedo's claim is also an explicit criticism of Peter Martyr for not
having been an eyewitness to what he reports. Particularly vivid is the
image of the writer who keeps “his feet dry”, that is to say who has not
160 8
traveled by sea, in the proemio to the Historia. This criticism, however, is

not completely accurate. In fact, it seems most likely that Peter Martyr was
also convinced of the necessity of building his historical writings on
eyewitness accounts: not only does he refer to firsthand testimonies,
underlining the fact that they are authentically so, but, also, in the only
case in which he himself can act as eyewitness, he does not hesitate to
explicitly do so. In fact, he claims to be an eyewitness when he describes
the shape of sweet potatoes, which he saw at the Spanish court since they
were the only vegetables that could be easily brought back to Europe:
“they have some roots called batatas, that they eat; when I saw them, I
considered they were big turnips”15.
From these two examples, it appears that the claim of supreme
authority of individual autoptic experience is never entirely fulfilled in
travel narratives. In fact, none of the accounts under study only makes use
of first person evidential strategies. However, on the whole, travel
narratives clearly tend towards a reinforcement of the centrality of the
autoptic experience. Throughout time, we can observe a graduation that,
schematically, goes from Marco Polo to Oviedo. In the introduction to
Marco Polo's account, the narrator commits to establishing systematically
a distinction between the sources of information, through the following
initial statement: “the things that he has seen, he puts them as seen, and the
things heard as heard”16. The sources of secondhand information are
announced to be “persone degne di fede”, “trustworthy persons”, but, as a
matter of fact, my inventory shows that out of around thirty pieces of
reported information in the whole account, only one third is quotative (the
rest comes from hearsay), and, amongst the quotative ones, only half of
them come from sources explicitly designated as trustworthy ones. In
Oviedo, the initial claim is more demanding, but also more respected. Not
only does he announce that he will draw a line between eyewitnesses and
secondhand testimonies, but he also affirms that in each category he will
establish further distinctions. As already seen, when referring to his own
experience, between visual evidence and hearing evidence, he always
demonstrates a preference for the first type. And when dealing with
reported speech, he explicitly favors information coming from
eyewitnesses.
Of course, a travel experience is never enough in itself to gain
knowledge of other realities. As a consequence, the challenge for travelers
in their written account is to complete their own experience by the one of
others. How can secondhand information cohabit with claims to report
autoptic experiences?
5. Reported information: other witnesses in travel

narratives
In fact, together with the individual experience of the traveler as main
character of the narrative, all travel accounts also contain indications given
by other travelers. There are two types of evidential strategies that allow
the narrator to point out the fact that the information is reported: by
hearsay and quotative. Even if both categories provide information on the
source, they don't necessarily imply “the degree of speaker's commitment
to the veracity of the statement.” (Aikhenvald 2004, 10) The following
paradox is common in travel writing: in the case of secondhand
information, the more often the information source is mentioned as such,
the less reliable it seems. In fact, underlining the idea that the information
has been gained through hearing is often a way for the narrator to
disengage from taking responsibility for such information. However, if we
consider the wide range of reported information within the evidential
strategies inventoried, it clearly appears that this paradox cannot be
considered as a general rule.
a) Hearsay or quotative evidential strategies

We could start with the hypothesis that the two categories – by hearsay
and quotative – differ in their capacity to assert the commitment of the
narrator. Reported information obtained by hearsay could in fact be
considered less reliable than information for which we have “an overt
reference to the quoted source.” (Aikhenvald 2004, 64) But this distinction
is not fully confirmed by the use of evidential strategies in our texts. In
fact, in some cases, information gained by hearsay is presented as to have
the same authority as information gained by personal experience. Of
course, disengaging one's responsibility does not necessarily imply
denying the content of the reported information. For instance, Leo
Africanus seems to simply suspend his judgment when reporting the
presence of bats in the Atlas Mountains: “I myself didn't see them, but it
was reported to me by an infinite number of persons”17. Furthermore, there
are many examples of information that is reported with express mention of
the person from whom it was obtained, but with the clear intent of denying
the information at stake. This denial is often explicit, as we already saw
with the example of criticism of Peter Martyr by Oviedo.
On the other hand, information reported by hearsay is also often
presented as accurate for the precise reason that it is largely conveyed.
Even in demanding authors such as Oviedo we find the idea that, when a
162 8
piece of information is already well-known, there is no necessity to find

complementary sources of evidence to endorse it: “and because this case is
well-known and public, […] I will not take care of reporting the words of
other witnesses”18. These examples show that hearsay isn't necessarily
used to express falsity, and quotative information veracity, in travel
narratives.
b) Trustworthy sources
In my inventory, within the category of quotative evidential strategies,
I have systematically tried to distinguish between the “plain” indications
and the ones that present an explicit mention of the reliability of the
quoted person. This distinction has given me the possibility to tackle the
question of the testimonial claims: in the case of narrators strongly in
favor of autoptic experience, do they have the same demands towards their
witnesses? I will briefly expose here two cases.
As previously referred, Ludovico di Varthema is a fervent advocate of
autoptic experience, considered as “ten times” more reliable than reported
information. However, Valentina Martino's assertion that Ludovico di
Varthema is constant in distinguishing between secondhand information
for which there is no guarantee and the one that has been verified (Martino
2011, 68) does not completely pass the test of evidential strategies. My
inventory shows that only half of the quotative reported information in
Varthema's account comes from persons presented as trustworthy, and the
other half from plain sources. Moreover, information obtained by hearsay
is twice as numerous as all the quotative considered together.
Nevertheless, when referring secondhand information, Varthema seems to
give the advantage to the category of quotative in terms of reliability. In
fact, many of the indications reported by hearsay in Varthema's account
are completed with the mention that he himself has not been able to verify
the information.
On the contrary, and consistently with his claims, when Oviedo makes
use of secondhand sources in a huge majority of cases he explicitly asserts
their reliability, both in the Sommario and in the Historia. However, the
grounds on which the reliability of the witnesses is asserted by Oviedo are
variable and would deserve further investigation. If their credibility is
systematically affirmed by referring to their autoptic experience, other
parameters are also taken into account. In fact, when quoting secondhand
information, Oviedo is aware of the fact that his initial “referential pact”
with the reader includes that he takes responsibility for what the witnesses
affirm. As a consequence, next to the autoptic status of the travelers he has
to give evidence that they themselves can be trusted. Often, such guarantee
is offered by references to elements that are external to the evidential
strategies under study here such as their social position or the credit that
they are given from the king, for example regarding the testimony of
Pietro Margarito:
but more that anyone else that I cited, the commander sir Pietro Margarito,
first man of the royal house and held in high esteem by the Catholic king,
is the one who informed me.19
In a vertiginous mise en abyme of the issue at stake in this paper, the

inventory of indications on source reliability brings us back to the question
of the grounds on which witnesses are chosen – an issue that I
unfortunately cannot fully tackle within this presentation since it would
imply taking into consideration other criteria than the ones strictly related
to evidential strategies. In fact, a complete study should be conducted –
both on the choice of witnesses within the narratives, and on the
justifications given for such choices and the scale of values that they refer
to.
Conclusions
The epistemological issue at stake here is the nature and extent of the
authority given to individual experience in the development of science and
knowledge. I think that my inventory and analysis contribute to proving
that on this matter there is no radical shift in travel narratives between the
Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. Nonetheless, some general
tendencies can be identified and they would deserve further investigation:
an expanding credit conferred to first person – and more precisely to
autoptic experience as the prerequisite to travel accounts used as sources
of knowledge20; major demands in terms of reliability of the sources, both
emanating from the authors of travel narratives and from the compilers; an
increase in the use of visual evidential strategies, in comparison to other
testimonial claims.
The inventory of evidential strategies actually brings up more
questions than answers. The study of evidential strategies echoes many of
the issues faced when studying travel narratives, this very particular field
of study where literature encounters geography. Evidential strategies offer
a fruitful entry point to travel narratives, but I think additional data on the
topic could lead to a new comprehensive approach. Generalizing this study
would imply expanding the corpus of texts while applying a more precise
and systematic analytical framework.
164 8
When geographical and literary studies work closely together, it

benefits the analysis of travel accounts. The main specificity of the travel
account as a literary genre lies in its referentiality. This characteristic
justifies its use by a discipline such as geography which, in the sixteenth
century, was continuously claiming its reliability. However, as shown in
this essay, the analysis of travel writing as raw material for geographers
cannot exclude the fact that it is primarily a written text.
My analysis proves that reliability is, in an obvious manner, a concern
in Early Modern Age travel writings. At the same time, it also shows that
travel accounts authors wander away rather frequently from their purpose,
thus edging closer to fictional texts. In fact, categories such as science for
geography and literature for travel writing cannot remain isolated and
rigid: the risk would be to apprehend in an erroneous manner both the
richness of the texts at stakes, and the emergence of geography as an
independent discipline in Early Modern Age21.
References
BURGIO, Eugenio, and Mario EUSEBI. 2011. Giovanni Battista Ramusio
“editor” del Milione. Trattamento del testo e manipolazione dei
modelli: atti del Seminario di ricerca, Venezia, 9-10 settembre 2010.
Rome-Padua: Editrice Antenore.
AIKHENVALD, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford, New York:
Oxford University Press.
BARTHES, Roland. 1971. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Paris: Seuil.
BETHENCOURT, Francisco. 2007. “The political correspondence of
Albuquerque and Cortés”, Cultural Exchange in Early Modern
Europe. Vol.III Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe,
1400-1700, edited by F. Bethencourt and F. Egmond, 219-273. New
York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
BOULOUX, Nathalie. 2002. Culture et savoirs géographiques en Italie au
XIVe siècle. Turnhout: Brepols.
FORMISANO, Luciano. 1996. “La scrittura di viaggio come “genere”
letterario”, Antonio Pigafetta e la letteratura di viaggio nel
Cinquecento. A. Chemello (ed.), 25-45. Verona: Cierre Edizioni.
GALLY, Michèle and Michel JOURDE. 1999. Par la Vue et par l'ouïe :
littérature du Moyen âge à la Renaissance. Fontenay-aux-Roses: ENS.
GUERIN DALLE MESE, Jeannine. 1989. “Io e lui (il problema del narratore
in alcune relazioni di viaggio del Trecento-Quattrocento”, La
letteratura di viaggio dal Medioevo al Rinascimento. Generi e
problemi, edited by M. Pozzi, 7-17. Alessandria: Ed. Dell'Orso.
HARTOG, François. 1980. Le Miroir d'Hérodote. Essai sur la

représentation de l'autre. Paris: Gallimard.
LEJEUNE, Philippe. 1975. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil.
LE HUENEN, Roland. 1990. “Qu'est-ce qu'un récit de voyage?” Littérales,
7: 11-27.
ROMANINI, Fabio. 2007. Se fussero più ordinate, e meglio scritte...
Giovanni Battista Ramusio correttore ed editore delle Navigationi et
viaggi. Rome: Viella.
RUBIÉS, Joan-Paul. 2000. “Travel Writing as a Genre: Facts, Fictions and
the Invention of a Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe”, The
International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, 1: 5-35.
VARTEMA, Ludovico da. 2011. Itinerario. V. Martino (ed.). Alessandria:
Ed. Dell'Orso.
ZUMTHOR, Paul. 1994. “The Medieval Travel Narrative”, New Literary
History, vol. 25, Nb 4, Part 2: 809-824.
Further reading
CERRETI, Claudio. 1997. “Breve ragionamento intorno ai sette paradossi
principali del viaggio”, Geotema, III, 8: 52-59.
DESCENDRE, Romain. 2014. “'E certo che più vale la pratica che la teorica'.
Premières remarques sur l'expérience comme enjeu de savoir au dbéut
du XVIe siècle (Léonard, Vespucci, Machiavel)”, Catégories et mots
de la politique à la Renaissance italienne, J.-L. Fournel, H. Miesse, P.
Moreno and J.-C. Zancarini (eds). Brussels: P. Lang, 179-198.
ROUMIER, Julia. 2009. “L'affirmation de l'authenticité du témoignage dans
les récits de voyages médiévaux castillans, fictifs ou réels (XIV-XVe
siècles)”, Revue des Langues néo-latines, 350: 143-160.
RUBIÉS, Joan-Pau. 2007. Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the
History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology. Aldershot-Burlington:
Ashgate.
SERRES, Michel. 1985. Les Cinq sens. Paris: B. Grasset.
Notes
1
In some cases, it is more than a similarity: many of the accounts of the third
volume of the Navigationi, for example, are official accounts delivered in front of
a clerk by a Spanish subject and addressed to the emperor, such as fray Marcos de
Niza's.
2
Autopsy – namely the act of seeing with one’s own eyes – is a noticeable
characteristic of Early Modern Age travel literature but, as Hartog demonstrated,
166 8
was also an element taken into account in the conception of testimonies in Ancient
Greece (see Hartog 1980).
3Of course, travel writings as sources of knowledge is neither new nor specific to
Early modern age geographers (see Bouloux 2002 for medieval Italian travel
writings).
4The other two categories, by inference and by assumption, are also used by travel
writing authors; however, they are less relevant to our topic since they appeal to
arguments based on rationality, and not on experience nor authority like the ones at
stake here.
5The first, second and third person of the singular and plural, as well as the
impersonal phrases “si” + active verb, or the relative clauses introduced by the
pronoun “chi” are all present in all the texts studied but at highly variable rates of
occurrence.
6
Many texts collected by Ramusio are translations, mainly produced by himself.
As a consequence, the versions of the texts under study here are not systematically
the most authentic ones – even if recent philological studies have shown that
Ramusio usually applied a relatively reliable editing method to the texts (Romanini
2007). Analyzing the texts in the version edited in the Navigationi et viaggi seems
however relevant for three main reasons: first of all, since this is, of course, how
they were intended to be read by Ramusio's contemporaries. Secondly, because
such versions enjoyed great success and were very widely read and reprinted. And,
finally, for a very long time the texts edited in the Navigationi et viaggi were
considered as the definitive version of those narrations, since they were viewed as
the most reliable ones, and thus they were often transmitted in the Ramusio form,
like Marco Polo's account. (Burgio and Eusebi 2011)
7 “Di cinque sentimenti, questo frutto sopra tutti gli altri del mondo ne participa di
tre, & ancor del quarto, che è il tatto: perche del quinto, che è l'udito, non possono
i frutti parteciparne.”, Navigationi et viaggi, 1556, 135v.; 1985, 596. I quote
Navigationi et viaggi from the original editions (first volume edition of 1554,
second volume of 1559, and third volume of 1556) as well as from the modern
Einaudi edition in six volumes established by Marica Milanesi.
8 As in Leo Africanus: “vidi con gli occhi propi”, ibid., 1554, 44r.; 1978, 198. The
same in Oviedo: “according to what I learned and came to know through my own
eyes and through experience”, “io, secondo che dagli occhi miei istessi & dalla
esperienzia lo ho appreso & saputo”, ibid., 1556, 201v.; 1985, 870. A similar idea
is expressed by Ludovico di Varthema at the very beginning of his account, when
remembering that he left with the intention of “try[ing] to know through my own
person and with my own eyes”, “con la propria persona e con gli occhi medesimi
cercar di cognoscer”, ibid., 1554, 160v.; 1978, 763.
9 Mainly known with the following titles: La Natural hystoria de las Indias (the
Sommario in Ramusio), and La Historia general de las Indias.
10 Navigationi et viaggi, 1983, 301-302.
11 With an approach based on narratology, Le Huenen (1990) offers an alternative
(yet non exclusive) explanation to the massive insertion of visual evidential
strategies in travel narratives. In fact, he notes that there is a paradox in the genre
of travel narrative since its necessary narrative dimension is contradictory with the
descriptive element of its didactic purpose: the descriptions interrupts the
continuous (and usually chronological) flow of narration. As a consequence, Le
Huenen considers that the position of the narrator (in the cases of first person
narratives) saying “I saw” next to all visual information is to be understood as a
way for the narrator to present himself in the “descriptor role” (“rôle de
descripteur”, 21) and, as such, to integrate fully the description into the narration –
the description being thus an emanation of the main character.
12 “Con meno auttorita insegna chi parla le cose, che ha udite, che colui che dice
quelle, che ha vedute”, Navigationi et viaggi, 1556, 83r.; 1985, 382.
13 “Massime ricordandomi esser piu da stimare un testimonio di vista che dieci
d'udita”, ibid., 1554, 160v.; 1978, 763.
14 “L'una & l'altra oppenione è falsa: percioche non s'è mai veduto, donde egli
habbia nascimento”, ibid., 1554, 98r.; 1978, 438.
15 “Hanno alcune radici dette batatas, le quali mangiano, io come le viddi, iudicai
che fusser navoni grandi”, ibid., 1556, 28r.; 1985, 142.
16 “Le cose per lui vedute, mette come vedute, & le udite, come udite”, ibid., 1559,
1r.; 1980, 75.
17 “Io proprio non gli ho veduti, ma m'è stato referito da infinite persone”, ibid.,
1554, 102r.; 1978, 455.
18 “Et perche questo caso è notissimo & publico, [...] non mi curerò di referire
altri testimonii”, ibid., 1556, 210v.; 1985, 905.
19
“Ma piu che niuno degli altri, che ho detti, m'informò à pieno il Commendator
Messer Pietro Margarito, huomo principale della casa reale, et tenuto in buona
estimatione dal Re Catholico”, ibid., 1556, 92r.; 1985, 418.
20
I agree with Rubiés when he states that such an evolution can be considered as
“the emergence of an individualistic and partly self-conscious type of observer”.
(Rubiés 2000, 21)
21
On the development of geography as an autonomous field of study during the
fifteenth and sixteenth century, see Milanesi 1994.
9
THE PERCEPTION OF THE SPACES

IN THE MEDITERRANEAN CHOROGRAPHIC
LITERATURE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
VALERIA MANFRÈ
1. Space, words and images

Maps of Europe where the Spanish Empire appears as the dominant
Western power, there as in the rest of the world, were produced by various
schools of cartography and dynasties of cartographers, although perhaps
nowhere more so than in the Low Countries. Some of the greatest include
Gerardus Mercator, cosmographer to Emperor Charles V, who entrusted
him the task of creating mathematical and geographical devices, and
Abraham Ortelius, who became the royal cartographer to King Philip II
and whose copious production, principally the Theatrum orbis terrarum
(Antwerp 1570) lasted for most of the sixteenth century (Cosgrove 2003,
130), as well as Willem Blaeu and his son Joan and grandson Joan,
creators of the Atlas Maior published between 1662 and 1673.
Much of the cartography of this period bears a relationship to other
genres such as travel literature. Though travel accounts were the most
popular literary form through which the knowledge of Europe was spread,
geographic descriptions of a more scientific nature and informed by
contemporary humanism were similarly published, and may have
constituted the most accurate means to acquire knowledge of the countries
of Europe and their geography, cities, borders, climate and customs.
Beyond the primarily technical emphasis of studies in the field of urban
planning and design, the study of the literary text provides us with insight
on the collective, subjective and social perception of the city. In turn, the
urban cluster outlined by the ramparts transformed the city into a unitary
object that was a constant feature of cartographic representations. With the
end of the Middle Ages came the realization that space traveled needed to
Perception of the Spaces in the Mediterranean Chorographic Literature 169
be translated into space described through literature (Zumthon 1995, 49),

and consequently medieval pilgrim diaries gave way to travelers’ accounts
where the earlier focus on sacred relics was gradually absorbed into the
new topographic description of the city. By that time, capital cities had
become the centers of political, cultural and economic activity for their
territory. Their literary description and visual representation did not
merely illustrate the form, structure and details of the city, as these texts
were also encoded with the language of power, strength and dominance.
(Donattini 2003, 157-169)
These literary texts were largely the work of historians. Take for
example the case of Habsburg Sicily, where the image of the city, its
monuments and works of art was constructed through a variety of sources
that appeared throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were
often accompanied by a set of maps, plans and city views taken from
urban atlases (Manfrè 2013). This sequence of images was reinterpreted
by the artists who drew the plates and placed the various urban “quarters”,
simplified roads and differentiated the buildings that contained and
symbolized power. As Denis Wood (1992) has argued, within the wide
range of cartographic production, maps should also be understood as text,
and as a collection of abstract symbols designed to represent the world. It
therefore follows that literary accounts bring out the relationships between
the language that recreates the space and the context of the work, and
between narration and cartography.
This relationship between text and image in cartography goes back
centuries. At the court of the Norman king Roger II of Sicily (1095/97?-
1154) the Muslim cartographer and geographer Abu ‫ޏ‬AbdallƗh
Muতammad al-IdrƯsƯ (Maqbul Ahmad 1987) famously made a large silver
celestial sphere which was displayed in the Royal Palace of Palermo
together with his geographical compendium. (Chiarelli 1980) In the
prologue to the KitƗb Nuzhat al-mus֕ h֕ tƗۘ fi ’khtirƗۘ al-ƗfƗۘ – the so-called
Book of Roger – al-IdrƯsƯ explains the origin of this work: “Quindi ci è
parso conveniente di aggiungere ad ogni carta una descrizione delle cose
degne di memoria, conveniente ad un libro [di questa natura].” (Amari and
Schiaparelli 1883, 14) Yet in fact, it was the written text that served as the
basis for the maps, to such an extent that some of the errors detected in the
illustrations were the result of mistaken onomastic interpretations of the
text, which as it turns out, is more reliable than the maps. (Amari and
Sciaparelli 1883, XIII, 114, n.1) Another example of the connection
between cartography and historical, literary and geographical descriptions
is the first map of Sicily without Ptolemaic deformations, by the
cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi, who explicitly states its relationship to the
170 9
Descrittione dell’isola di Sicilia (Venice 1546) by an anonymous author

since identified as the mathematician from Messina, Francesco Maurolico.
(De Stefano 1920, 196-199)
Such descriptions also invite us to consider what was given primary
importance in the representations and narrations, and how the territory and
urban landscape, with its civic and religious monuments, were perceived
and described. Who were the authors, and what was the image of Sicilian
cities – both literal and metaphorical – that they intended to project? What
do maps and early modern chorographic descriptions reveal about the
projected image of cities? And how did the historical vision of the city
change over time?
Lastly, the compendium, as a text composed on the basis of other texts,
makes it possible to highlight the differences and similarities in the various
passages that describe and denote urban space. As we shall see, sometimes
the construction of the image of the city mirrors viceregal action, affirms it
and gives it authority. This article proposes a re-reading of these sources
and questions how the relationships between power, knowledge,
perception of space and chorographic images are articulated.
2. Chorography
Chorographic literature gained popularity in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, with the publication of hundreds of texts on various
cities, towns and populations, mostly written by the leading historians of
the period. These works are vital sources, not only for the information they
contain, but also in terms of their literary value. (Kagan 1995a)
Chorography can be defined as the detailed study of a country, region or
province, and differs from the mere study of antiquities in that it deals
with contemporary events in addition to the remote past. Throughout
Europe, the growth of interest in urban iconography coincided with the
rise of chorography as a literary genre in the early modern period. The
works of the humanist Konrad Celtis in Germany, William Lambarde and
John Speed in England, and Gilles Corrozet’s Fleurs des antiquités de…
Paris of 1532 are just a few examples.
While the genre’s literary form varied widely, as a whole it clearly
cannot be disconnected from the history of cities. A chorographic work
can be understood as a “specific history” of a place or province that differs
from a general history in that it is a hybrid of topographic description and
historical narrative. (Kagan 1995a, 49) It includes a description of the
major examples of public works, and in particular of civic and religious
monuments and military constructions, whether ancient or modern.
By looking at both the literary and visual sources, and the contexts of
their signification and circulation, we can study how the rules of
cartographic practice and of written language inform the way a place is
given visual form imaged. The intersection between space and the
practices of representation of the urban context allows us to analyze how
painters, architects, engineers and cartographers responded to a culture
that privileged urban spatiality and how the architectural forms and
aesthetics of buildings were made tangible in different artistic recreations.
To classify the images, we must refer to the distinction between
geography and chorography made in Book I of the Geography by Ptolemy,
who based a whole theoretical discussion on the difference between the
representation of the world – geography – and the representation of a part of
region of the world that goes into some detail – chorography. (Nuti 1996,
25) This distinction extended to the practice of visual representation, as
the styles, forms and technical resources used to represent the world
differed from those used to draw villages, towns and cities. To represent
the earth, the geographer had to use the quantitative values of positions
and distance and make schematic line-based drawings to represent the
coast while cities were represented as dots. The chorographer had to make
use of a pictorial and qualitative language, observe the details of a place,
and be more imaginative in showing what a place looked like. According
to Antoine du Pinet, author of the Plantz, pourtraitz et descriptions de
plusieurs villes et forteresses, published in Lyon in 1564, chorography was
most suited to the representation of places as they were seen and existed in
the moment, and did not need to concern itself with size, proportions,
longitudes and latitudes or other cosmographic measurements. (Du Pinet
1564, 14)
Ptolemy further established the distinction between geographic and
chorographic maps by introducing the comparison of cartography to
painting, and of the body of the earth to the human body: the geographer
depicts the known world just as the painter depicts a face. And just as the
chorographer represents specific place, so the painter depicts the detail of
an eye. The parallelisms instituted by Ptolemy between geography and
painting, and the activities of the geographer and painter, were current in
Renaissance art.
The astronomer, mathematician, cartographer and printer Petrus Apianus
drew on Ptolemy’s concept of chorography and attempted to clarify its
meaning in his Liber Cosmographicus, published in 1524 and widely
disseminated in later sixteenth-century editions; yet he offered a different
theoretical distinction between geography and chorography, arguing that it
was not only a difference in the size of the territory represented, but also in
172 9
Figure 1: G Geographia annd Chorographia, 1545. Soource: Petrus Apianus,

Cosmographiia Petri Apianni, Vaeneunt Antuerpiae,
A 15545, f. II. Biblioteca
Nacional de E
España, Madridd.
the use of different systems of representation, as mentioned earlier.

Apianus also attempted to define chorography in Ptolemaic terms, and
stated that “the aim of chorography is to depict a particular place, just as
an artist paints an ear, or an eye or other parts of a man’s head.” (Kagan
1995b, 84) Apianus was also the first to translate the Ptolemaic concept
into an image. (Nuti 1993, 7-9) He contended that the orthographic plan
was suited to geography, whereas chorography required the perspectival
plan, and illustrated these relationships in a well-known woodcut in which
the chorographer depicts an ear while the geographer draws the whole face
of a man. (Fig. 1)
Returning now to the chorographic literature on Sicily and the content
of contemporary travel accounts, we find that the authors follow similar
patterns, and mix historical, geographic, ethnographic and artistic
information, among other types. The texts contain many of the
commonplaces of this type of literature and the authors scarcely mention
historiographic sources, in keeping with contemporary historiographic
standards, where plagiary and the concealment of sources were common.
A geographic description normally prefaced the text and helped situate the
reader in the framework of the action, followed by information on the
wealth and fecundity of the island, its fruits, plants, trees, fish and animals.
These works also provide more or less lengthy historical information on
the kingdom and its government and church. Particular importance is
given to the description of the island’s main cities, their characteristics and
notable features, and the customs and traditions of their inhabitants. In
addition, the authors sometimes offer personal observations, other
curiosities and colorful anecdotes (at times implausible or taken from
earlier accounts) that reflect established clichés but keep the descriptions
entertaining, if lacking in documentary value.
What’s more, these sources intentionally mix ancient and modern
times, and legend and reality, and thus provide an infinite possibility of
readings. This type of geo-ethno-historical compendia of the island is
proper to the chorographic genre so in vogue in the early modern period,
and includes the descriptions that will now be discussed.
3. “Reading” the city

Numerous manuscript codices that describe the island of Sicily bear
the title Descrittione, Relatione, Descripción, Cosmografia, and less
frequently Littorale or Plantas. This type of text, and early modern
historiographic writing as a whole, was characterized by a lack of
originality and gross plagiarism of earlier sources, which gave rise to a
174 9
number of commonplaces on the city and its landscape. The large number
of manuscript copies that circulated in Sicily indicates the strong interest
in the study of these descriptions and the need of a social environment to
represent the world. To some extent, these texts evoke the beginnings of
tourism and are like the travel guides that cartographers consulted to make
their maps, just as Mercator used Charles Estienne’s Guide des chemins de
France (1522) to draw his map of France. (Estienne 1936)
In comparison to the scholarly interest in the chorographic literature of
France (Conley 1996) and England (Helgerson 1992), the effects of
chorographic description and the revolution in cartography on Sicilian
literature has achieved scant historical attention (Revelli 1911) and awaits
further study. Only the most important descriptions of Sicily produced
during the early modern period in the circle of the viceregal court or for a
cultivated reader have received notice. Not surprisingly, the route traced in
these descriptions takes us through the major urban transformations
promoted by the viceroys and Senate of Palermo. In addition, though, the
observations of the curious traveler deserve greater attention; like the
travelers on the Grand Tour who greatly influenced the paintings,
drawings, watercolors and engravings of cities and architectures, they
allow us to trace a parallel history of the urban space here considered.
As a genre, the travel account had its own characteristics and
personality, and the assertion of the originality of certain buildings or
urban space, as well as the use of comparison to ancient and contemporary
examples were frequent devices. Brimming with anecdotes and colorful
details, and fresher and more spontaneous than the traditionally formal
historical or descriptive genres, travel accounts achieved great commercial
success. A good example of this type of writing is Le voyageur d’Europe
où sont les voyages de France, d’Italie et de Malthe by the French
cartographer Jouvin de Rochefort, who visited the island in 1672. (Jouvin
1995) It contains many observations on the cities of Sicily that he visited,
motivated by knowledge and curiosity.
The literary itineraries produced during the period of Spanish
viceroyalty seem to have been done at the service of the Crown, and
therefore some of the descriptions take second place to political, social and
economic matters. Yet architecture, painting and literary genre could be
used to demonstrate the greatness of the Spanish monarchy and express
the importance of the deeds of the viceroys. In fact, some of the texts
touting the transformation of the urban landscape to the ruling class of
Sicily were financed as well to be sent to the incoming viceroys, or even to
the court in Madrid. This may have been the case for the Descrittione
della fellicisima città di Palermo, a manuscript written in 1599 by the
courtier Gaspare di Reggio. Its first part describes the urban and defensive
morphology of Palermo, the administrative and political capital of the
island, which reinforces the idea of the “città bella” with its squares,
fountains and noble residences. (Di Reggio 1599, 5r-150v) The text served
to inform the new viceroy, Bernardino de Cárdenas y Portugal, 3rd duke of
Maqueda (ruled 1598-1601) of the state of the city’s defenses and of urban
reorganizations – it went as far as providing the duke with specific
indications on what was needed to complete the works on a new dock.
(González Reyes 2014)
On the other hand, in Jouvin’s text the relationship between power and
architecture, and the different urban scales at which power is materialized
are not to be found. There are no official instructions, and Jouvin never
breaks out of his role as observer or makes any reference to the succession
of viceroys on the island that had promoted the architectural and urban
projects that were themselves instruments of cultural and political
propaganda in the cities described. Jouvin does, however, possess the
ability to make lively descriptions of the existing architecture and a
notable interest in spaces that bore a relationship to other urban realities of
the Iberian Peninsula. Prior to Jouvin, Arab-Islamic travelers had noted a
relationship between Sicily and Al-Andalus. (De Simone 1991, 51-79) The
Valencian traveler Ibn Gubayr, for example, compared the region between
Palermo and Trapani to the countryside of Cordoba; and not unjustly, the
impression of the view of Palermo and its old city or qasr (i.e., Cassaro)
made it comparable to the Omayyad capital of Cordoba, which, as Ibn
Hawqal noted (Mandalà 2012, 47-48), was also due to its large number of
mosques. Now, if similarities between Palermo and Cordoba, and Sicily
and the Iberian Peninsula were perceived by Arab-Islamic travelers, to
Jouvin, who describes the Baroque Sicily that existed prior to the War of
Messina of 1674-78, the aesthetic of the old city of Palermo was to be
found along the Via Toledo, the avenue known formerly as the Cassaro
and re-baptized after the urban modifications that were closely related to
the redesigning of the seafront under the viceroy Marco Antonio Colonna
in 1581, as well as the construction of the Porta Felice. (Fig. 2)
This was followed by the construction of the Via Maqueda (Fanelli
1998, 9-16), a new axis that cut across the Cassaro and divided Palermo
spatially into four parts. (Fig. 3) The authors of chorographic descriptions
of the period certainly recalled the breadth and quality of these urban
transformations, but made allusions to other cities as well. Jouvin, for
example, compared the Via Toledo in Palermo to the Calle Mayor of
Madrid, the city king Philip II chose as the permanent capital of the
powerful Spanish Crown in 1561. (Jouvin 1995, 49-53) Equally interesting
176 9
are Jouvin’ss recollectionss of the prommenade beyondd the Porta Felice that
was built whhen the Cassaaro was extended, and of a tree-lined av venue, not
clearly idenntified, which he comparess to the “Lam meda” of Seviille – the
Alameda de Hércules, a garden
g by the Guadalquivirr river built in
n 1574 by
the count off Barajas to reeclaim this sw
wampy area forr the city, andd adorned
with two coolumns that camec from a Roman tempple to Herculees. (León
Vela 2000) These observvations and the t comparisoons to other European
E
locations theerefore make Jouvin’s desccriptions of Siicilian cities somewhat
s
unique amonng the other teexts studied here.
Figure 2: Puerta Feliz, 16886. Source: Tea atro geograficoo antiguo y mo

oderno del
Reyno de Siccilia, 1686, f. 40 Bibliotecaa Ministerio de Asuntos Exterriores y de
Cooperación, Madrid.
Towardss the second half of the seventeenth century, chorrographic

descriptionss such as the Isola
I di Sicilia
a passeggiata (Biblioteca Comunale
C
di Palermo,, QqD87) byy Francesco Ambrogio
A Maaja (1608-1694) were
adorned withh references to
t a whole rep ng the De
pertory of treaatises, includin
Rebus Siculiis decades duae by Tommaaso Fazello (1 498-1570), co onsidered
to be the ffather of Siciilian history. (Contarino 11995, 493-496) These
treatises weere the produuct of an efffort to studyy and dissem minate the
Percepttion of the Spacces in the Meditterranean Choroographic Literaature 177
connection bbetween the geography

g and
d history of Siccily and the reeality and
space of the island.
Figure 3: Plaano de ziu.d dee Palermo capiital del Reyno dde Sicilia, 1707. Source:
Carta Corogrraphica del Reyyno de Sicilia con los Planos dde sus Principa
ales Plazas
el año 1707, ff. 6. Archivoo General Militaar de Madrid.
Maja’s ddescription must

m have beenn written in 11681-82, baseed on his
references tto the viceroys that had governed Siccily from thee time of
Charles V uup to the yeaar 1682. (Majja 1985, 10) It is in part a learned
reiteration oof ancient annd modern so ources, and trraces a profile of the
island’s com mplex realitiees within an articulated w whole that in
ncludes a
description of its coasts, water treatmeents and mostt important orrographic
features, a solution too the debatees on topogrraphic distan nces and
illustrations of the mostt notable phy ysical phenom mena. Unlikee Jouvin,
whose indeppendent descrription was mostly
m interestted in human activities
and landscappe, Maja madde substantial use of medieeval and conteemporary
historiograpphy and thus associated his h text to thhe works of Leandro
Alberti, Giaan Giacomo Adria, Fazelllo, Mariano Valguarneraa, Filippo
Cluverio annd Agostino Inveges. The result is a more im mpersonal
description, with scant reference
r to the
t most receent urban proj ojects and
constructionns, those insstruments of propaganda used to pro oject the
magnificencce of the citiess of the kingdo
om. Maja usedd his sources carefully,
and generallly glossed thhe information n he extractedd from earlierr writers.
178 9
(Rossi 1873, 64) He nevertheless could not avoid certain commonplaces of

ancient topography, such as Paleopoli. (De Seta and Di Mauro 1981, 1-11)
Although this primitive nucleus of the old city of Palermo had only
occupied the area that was highest in altitude and furthest from the coast,
Maja subscribed to the theory that it had occupied the whole spur up to the
sea line that ended at the location of the Baich tower. (Maja 1985, 250)
The authors of descriptions of the city of Palermo always refer to the
remodeling of the Cassaro (Casamento 2000), which had helped connect
the city’s main points of interest, the port and the area of the royal palace
and cathedral. Its visual axis was from that point on consistently
represented in cartographic images.
An analysis of the image of Palermo that was projected throughout the
sixteenth century requires a closer look at the most important works of
geography of the period, the monumental Civitates orbis terrarum by the
Flemish cartographer and priest Georg Braun and the engraver, editor and
book dealer Franz Hogenberg, first published between 1572 and 1588
(Keuning 1963, 41-44) and reedited until 1618 in six volumes (two sets of
three). Although this work helped established the topographic image of
some Sicilian cities, the iconography of the view of Palermo that appeared
in the first volume of 1572 is unlike the later and enduring visual
stereotypes of the city, in that the engraving gives a panoramic view of
Palermo from the sea, greatly foreshortened in a rather simplified style,
with a long strip of houses and palaces with turrets dominated by the
Royal Palace and the bulk of the cathedral. Although this type of
panorama was used for centuries to represent cities by the sea, it was not
specifically used by later engravers and editors to depict Palermo.
The “first” laudatio cartographica of Palermo to be printed, circulated
and achieve greater success than the view in the Civitates orbis terrarum
was drawn by the presbyter Orazio Maiocco, engraved by Natale
Bonifazio and printed in Rome by Claude Duchet in 1580. It re-envisions
the city at a time when urban initiatives were redesigning the city, with the
broadening of the city ramparts. (Giuffrè 1976, 41) It also projects a
homegrown urban identity and quickly captures the latest modifications of
the city. (La Duca 1975; De Seta and Mauro 1981, 65-66) This view
chooses a different orientation for the city, with north placed to the lower
right of the engraving, thus allowing the long stretch of the Cassaro to
figure as the main axis of the urban layout and the geometrical axis of its
cartographic representation.
Bonifazio’s view was quickly followed – and imitated, albeit with
obvious simplifications – by Matteo Florimi (c. 1580). At about the same
time, a view of Palermo was made by the cartographer and engraver
Viterbo Marrio Cartaro (11581). The maagnificent birdds-eye plan of o the city
that appeareed in the fourtth book of thee Civitates (Fiig. 4) was modelled on
Cartaro’s vieew.
Figure 4: Pallermo, 1590. Soource: Georg Braun,

B Franz Hoogenberg, Civittates orbis
5 Bibliotecaa Museo Naval,, Madrid.
terrarum, Collonia, 1590, f. 56
As we hhave seen, thee texts by thee cartographerrs that accom mpany the
maps can bbe interpreted as literary teexts, while thheir literary prose
p also
contains a ccertain cartogrraphic potentiaal. (Conley 20007, 401) Desscriptions
were normally influencedd by maps and d views of thee city, but thesse images
did not alwaays keep pacee with the lateest urban deveelopments. In n fact, the
urban structture of the cityy with the new
w artery of thhe Via Maqued da begins
to appear wwith the view of o Palermo pu ublished in Naaples sometim me during
the last twennty years of thhe seventeenth
h century, accoording to the design
d by
the architectt Paolo Amatoo and engraveed by Paolo P Petrini. (Militeello 2008,
86-88) The outline of thhe city is defiined by the raamparts, and the most
important buuildings in the city are sho own. Within thhe urban netw work, one
can distinguuish the main piazzas and arteries that w were laid outt with the
creation of tthe spectaculaar Piazza Vigliena, also knoown as I Quatttro Canti
(Di Fede annd Scaduto 20011), at the crossing of thee Cassaro and d the Via
Maqueda. T The view refleects the descrriptions that ccirculated at the time,
namely the description by Maja (1985 5, 256): “La ssituation dellaa pianta è
d’una città ddistesa più chhe altramente in
i un quadro bislungo […]] È divisa
180 9
in quattro parti poco men che uguali da bellissime strade, che tagliandosi a
Traverso formano una perfettissima croce.” In comparison to Jouvin’s
description, however, Maja’s text is written in the dry style of someone
who does not seem to have had any real experience of the place he
describes. In culling from earlier authors, Maja does not provide any
personal insights, express admiration for any of the buildings or faithfully
describe the landscape. It seems as though there is no room in his text for
reminiscence or the kind of picturesque detail that is typical of someone
who has traveled through the area that is described.
By contrast, these particulars do characterise the writing of the abbot
Giovan Battista Pacichelli who visited Sicily in 1684 (Scibilia 2014, 776-
788) and fully explored its cities. Fascinated by the architecture of some of
the more important constructions, Pacichelli made many first-hand
observations on the monuments he saw, and these constitute the essential
elements of his Moderno stato della Sicilia, compreso dalla sua
navigatione e passeggio (Naples 1685). As was customary, Pacichelli
visited the main coastal cities of Sicily, and favored those on the north and
east coast, such as Messina, Palermo, Siracusa and Catania. The common
perception of Palermo’s urban structure, as defined by the crossing of the
Via Toledo and the Via Maqueda, is also reflected in Pacichelli’s text and
requires no further comment. (Pacichelli 1685, 31)
Pacichelli’s description of Messina, on the other hand, delights us with
the idea of a city that had developed a new urban identity with the
transformations that were carried out during the sixteenth century. What
most surprised him was the important restructuring of the harbor basin
(Giuffrè 1997, 193-238), noting in particular the building of the imposing
maritime theater, or Palazzata, since destroyed (Aricò 2010), an example
of a uniform city decoration related to the artistic culture of the new
viceroy Emmanuel Filibert of Savoy, who governed from 1622 to 1624
(Pacichelli 1685, 4). He also mentions the royal palace no longer in
existence (Pacichelli 1685, 6). What is most original about his description
of Messina, however, is the lengths he devotes to its defense system, and
in particular to its pentagonal citadel on the San Raineri peninsula, begun
in the 1680’s and designed by the engineer Carlos de Grunenbergh
(†1696). Pacichelli provides certain technical details, such as the
measurements of the walls supported by five entrenched bastions – a
fortification of such a scale that it entailed the destruction of everything
around it in the Terranova area. (Fig. 5) It is surprising, in fact, that there
is not mention of the fabric of the citadel in other chorographic texts of the
period.
Figure 5: Ciiudadela de Messina,

M 1686. Source: Teatrro geografico antiguo y
moderno del Reyno de Siciilia, 1686, f. 19 Bibliotec a Ministerio de
d Asuntos
Exteriores y dde Cooperaciónn, Madrid.
The Teaatro delle citttà reali di Sicilia

S (Giufffrè 1973, XIII) which
appeared at the end of thhe seventeentth century, is closer in con ntent and
style to Maaja’s text, in its reference to an array of past auth hors, both
ancient andd modern – Diodorus Siculus, S Straabo, Fazello, Arezzo,
Vincenzo M Mirabella, etc. – and in its presentation
p oof Sicily and its natural
and man-maade landscapee, its castles and a fields, andd literal descrription of
local historyy, inhabitantss and other geographical facts. Its an nonymous
author skillffully uses the three valleys of Sicily to sstructure his text
t – the
Val Demonne, the Val di d Noto and the t Val di M Mazara (Fig. 6) – and
describes eeach one of the valleys and its citi ties, deferringg to the
geographicaal divisions of o Sicily that most historiaans since Fazzello had
utilized. Thhe informationn provided by y the author, perhaps a scholar or
bibliophile, allows the text t to be daated betweenn 1670 and 1687. 1 He
specifies thaat he is writinng for a cultiv
vated audiencee, and stresses the role
of the monaarchy and its ability
a to fosteer the growth of urban patrrimony in
the context of the urbann policy of the t Viceroy S Santisteban, whom
w he
praises highhly, and Kingg Charles II as well. As regards Paleermo, the
capital of thhe kingdom, after
a describinng its geograaphy he reporrts on the
182 9
fortresses off the old port (Cala) and theeir towers, annd the construcction of a
new dock. (Cardamone annd Giuffrè 19 997) Of the citty and its squ
uare form,
he mentionss the Cassaroo and its adm mirable palacees and homes, the Via
Maqueda, thhe Piazza Villlena, and prov vides a very ddetailed descrription of
the Fontanaa Pretoria. (Giiuffrè 1973, 112-113) In hiis general app preciation
of Palermo, he expresses a great admiration for its m monuments, sttating that
“Lungo la dismisura olttre che incresscevole riusciirebbe il racccontare a
minuto le nnon poche coose di questaa città, che ppur li meriterrrebbono”
(Giuffrè 19773, 114). Lastlly, he claims that
t it would ttake three yeaars to visit
Palermo andd fully appreciiate all of its palaces
p and chhurches.
Figure 6: Mapp of Sicily, 16777. Source. Gab briele Merelli, DDescrittione del Regno di
dicata all’altezzza serenissima del Signor
Sicilia e dell’’isole ad essa coadiacenti, ded
Don Gio. D’A Austria del teneente di Mastro di campo Ger. le Don Gabriele Merelli,
16 August 16677, f. 24 Bibblioteca Reale, Turin.
T
Among tthe most impoortant defensiv ve structure oof the Val Demmone, the
author makees a referencee to the fortreesses of Messiina and to thee defense
policy of C
Charles V, citting the fortss of Castellacccio, Matagriifone and
Gonzaga (GGiuffrè 1973, 58);
5 yet he on nly briefly reffers to the con
nstruction
of the Messina citadel. In fact, it is only when he mentions the revolt of

Messina of 1674-78 that he devotes a few lines to the actions of the
Viceroy Francisco de Benavides, 9th count of Santisteban, but without
going into any detail. (Giuffrè 1973, 24)
Perhaps more than any of the other texts mentioned so far, the Teatro
plays up the role of the monarchy in enriching the urban patrimony of the
island, through the many efforts of the Viceroy Santisteban, a clearly
important figure, at least in terms of his activities in this regard (Manfrè in
press), who undoubtedly saw the choice of urban model as a means to
display and consolidate power. Given his personality and biography, it is
not surprising to find that a number of descriptions written during his reign
make reference to his projects.
Of course, not all of the cities of the kingdom enjoyed the same
political, economic or cultural weight. Of the cities on the southeast coast
of the island, the author mentions Siracusa, although there is a
conspicuous lack of information on its glorious past and many points of
interest, such as the Greek theater, Roman amphitheater and Aretusa
fountain. He does mention the defensive structures in the area of the
isthmus and at the tip of the Ortygia, begun in the 1670’s by Grunenbergh
under the viceroy Claude de Lamoral, 3rd prince of Ligne (Manfrè 2012),
and continued by Santisteban. In his passage on the town of Augusta, near
Siracusa, he emphasizes the need to restore the Torre Avalos, a tower that
had been built by the viceroy García de Toledo following the Turkish
attack on the port in 1551, and destroyed during the French siege of 1675.
(Giuffrè 1973, 100)
It is surprising that both Maja and the author of the Teatro refrained
from producing an exhaustive image of the modern Palermo that stood as
a testament to a prolific present in the contemporary artistic production
that runs through the most novel buildings of the period: the no longer
extant Teatro della Musica (Li Castri and De Angelis Ricciotti 1997), built
on the promenade in 1681 at the behest of the city Senate and the Viceroy
Santisteban according to a design by the architect Paolo Amato, and the
gallery of portraits of the viceroys in the royal palace of Palermo, also
built in 1681 and commissioned by Viceroy Santisteban. (Manfrè and
Mauro 2011, 122-127).
Conclusion
The literary itineraries discussed here make an important contribution
to the history of the stereotypes of the city and its space; and regardless of
form – literary text versus cartographic representation – the urban
184 9
landscape is not merely a physical record but a cultural and symbolic

interpretation of place. Likewise, the “logic” of exclusion and the absence
of a comprehensive narration of the territory do not necessarily suppress
specific issues related to the geography of the city, issues that reveal the
way the territory, urban space or a specific monument is perceived, or
references to patrons and artists. In fact, the patrons and the authors of the
texts studied here played an important role in the way the urban space was
configured, so that the space serves the ends pursued by the literary text.
The authors of maps, views and chorographic texts had to cope with
the limitations inherent to the flat surface and literary text and were
conditioned by contemporary values and ideas. Consequently, they
selected and prioritized the information they transmitted in visual or
written form in accordance with the function or purpose of their works or
to suit their objectives. This helps explain why some of the most authentic
descriptions from the second half of the seventeenth century are to be
found in the accounts of travelers, who for the most part were impressed
by the splendor of the monuments they encountered as they traveled
through Sicily. The affirmation of the urban space and the perception of it
is the direct result of certain voluntary or involuntary decisions; and so the
patrimony described, itself subject to a hierarchy and thus to the
appearance of one city instead of another, or to the perception of a part of
the architectural patrimony, is not always the same in these sources. (Ricci
1982, 3-33) In cartography, beyond the cliché terms of the Supplementum
chronicarum by Jacopo Foresti or the so-called Chronicle of Nuremberg
by Hartmann Schedel, the hierarchy and iconography of the most
important coastal cities of Sicily began with the Civitates and the choice of
cities made by its authors. The five plates, distributed through all of the
volumes (except for two and three) depicting Palermo, Messina, Trapani
and Catania began circulating in Europe, and this helped affirm and
disseminate their urban identity as strongly related to their actual process
of construction.
Text, and sometimes images, became effective tools to encourage the
reader to make a virtual tour of the space described thanks to its vivid
description. Evoking a poetic simile that had been developed by Italian
poets such as Petrarch and Ariosto. (Cachey 2007, 450) Ortelius compared
the reader to an imaginary traveler who can fly from one place to another
by leafing through the pages of an atlas. (Jacob 2006, 75-76) In turn,
chorographic description unveils an urban identity that complements the
rich graphic imagination evoked through maps, city views, and through
isolario (“Book of Islands), the precursors of the modern atlas. The
relationship between literature and the representation of geography is the
product of the mindset and requisites of the society in which they are
created. The Descrittione delimit a physical space and a human
environment, and show the natural landscape containing the signs of the
passage of mankind. In effect, these works “draw” a geography.
This work was supported by Juan de la Cierva Programme, a postdoctoral

Fellowship by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness in
the framework of the Project I + D Arte y lujo. Valoración y presencia de los
tapices flamencos en España en los siglos XV y XVI y su fortuna
posterior (reference: AR2013-41053-P).
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10
WRITING SPACE THROUGH THE WORK

OF THE FRENCH BOTANIST TOURNEFORT,
RELATION D'UN VOYAGE DU LEVANT
ISABELLE TRIVISANI-MOREAU
To a contemporary eye, the career of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort seems to

be that of a scientist. He became an under-demonstrator at the Royal Plant
Garden in 1683, entered the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1691, and
published Éléments de Botanique (Facts about Botany) in 1694. This book
was important for the field of plant classification. A translation in Latin,
modifications that the author brought after the first publication, and some
re-editions are proof of its recognition (Aubier-Sallenave, 2013). Even
though the Linnaean system took over at the end of the 18th century,
Tournefort’s classification remained a point of reference. In 1696, he was
admitted as a doctor of medicine in Paris. He collected numerous plants
for the Royal Plant Garden in several regions. From the spring of 1700 to
mid-1702, he was sent by the King – and, more precisely, on the
recommendation of Louis Phélypeaux, Count of Pontchartrain, Chancelor
of France – on a long expedition to the Levant, which was supported by
the priest Bignon, director of the Royal Academy of Sciences. It seems
inevitable that such a career and such a mission resulted in a scientific
work : the book written during this trip and published after Tournefort’s
death in 1717, Relation d’un voyage du Levant fait par ordre du Roy
contenant l’Histoire Ancienne & Moderne de plusieurs Isles de l’Archipel,
de Constantinople, des Côtes de la Mer Noire, de l’Armenie, de la
Géorgie, des Frontieres de Perse et de l’Asie Mineure avec Les Plans des
Villes et des Lieux considerables. Le Genie, les Mœurs, le Commerce & la
Religion des differens Peuples qui les habitent ; Et l’Explication des
Medailles et des Monumens Antiques. Enrichie de Description & de
Figures d’un grand nombre de Plantes rares de divers Animaux ; et de
plusieurs Observations touchant l’Histoire Naturelle (Story of a Journey
190 10
to the Levant ordered by the King, including the Ancient and Recent
History of several islands of the archipelago, of Constantinople, of the
Coast of the Black Sea, of Armenia, Georgia, and the borders of Persia
and Asia Minor, with maps of Cities and considerable places. The
knowledge, the customs, the trade and the religion of the different peoples
who live there; and the explanation of the Antique Medals and
Monuments. Enriched with Descriptions and Figures of a great number of
rare plants and various animals; and several Observations on Natural
History). The goals set by the authorities were to fill in knowledge gaps or
to correct some information through direct observation. This research was
not only conducted for the botanic field, but also for geography: the
combination of the two fields of study was necessary to verify what was
already known and to learn more about this world. In theory, fiction and
literature did not belong in this context. It is nevertheless the literary
quality of this book that we will try to study here, going back to the
separation between science and literature in the history of scientific travel
stories (Wolfzettel 1996, Montalbetti 1997) in the 19th century. It is
indisputable that Tournefort’s journey at the beginning of the
Enlightenment period had a scientific purpose. But did the ongoing
separation of the fields of science and literature – encouraged by the
academic phenomenon – mean that Tournefort s work had no literary
dimension? We will start by defining the context of the journey to estimate
the dimension of literature in the project. Two aspects of the epistolary
genre will be studied first, followed by the use of the traveler-scientist and
the effect of the complicity with the readership.
1. A Journey with many purposes

Fr. Wolfzettel’s classification of journeys for the 17th century – the
commercial, the missionary and the scientific journey (Wolfzettel 1996,
121-230) – is a reminder that literature (as we restrictively call it today)
can be far from the initial goal of a journey. But at the turn of the
17th century, the field of the « letters » was not as radically divided, as
confirmed by the Furetière dictionary in 1690. By defining the travel story
as a genre, by trying to find its rules and bring out its codes, some
literature specialists showed that these writings could have a literary
dimension: in order to understand the role of these texts in their time, it is
essential to consider the knowledge that they contain as well as the words
that were used, even though the great variety brought to light by research,
both in content and in shape, makes this exercise difficult. The diversity of
Writing Space through the Work of the French Botanist Tournefort 191
elements within this book compensated the scientific dimension and

makes the reading more pleasant.
Where did Tournefort’s report stand? F. Lestringant underlined the
interest of such a text which, as an Isolario, “began to lose its taxonomic
value and met, at the turn of the Enlightenment, its philosophical
function”. It was thus no longer a mere collection but became a field
study, no longer a “window-island” but a “lab-island” (Lestringant 2002,
345-6). This shift was an important one for science, but F. Lestringant also
mentioned a few elements that were close to the literary genre, and he
advanced theories on the structure of Tournefort’s work: he wrote about an
archipelago-shaped composition, in accordance with a way of describing
the world copied on the “island” model, characteristic of a certain period
of time – the beginning of modernity, when the knowledge of the world
was fragmented. But this archipelago description only seems to apply to
the first half of the book, in which the protagonists go through the Duchy
of Candia, the Cyclades, and the numerous islands of the Aegean Sea. In
the continental part of the journey, the herbarium model is used. Inside the
letters that he wrote, Tournefort placed – and sometimes misplaced –
plants, ordering them in a way which resembles that of a herbarium.
Vegetation is given the leading role. This book acts as an intermediary in
the history of science. It seems to get away – even though partially – from
a strictly scientific data recording in order to find better ways to pass on
the knowledge.
We can identify this intermediary status in the diversity of the conjoint
fields mentioned in the introductory texts of the book, like in Fontenelle’s
eulogy for Tournefort :
Aussi nous comptons que ce fut un bonheur pour les Sciences que l’ordre
que M. de Tournefort reçût du Roi en 1700. d’aller en Grece, en Asie & en
Afrique, non seulement pour y reconnoitre les Plantes des Anciens, & peut-
être aussi celles qui leur auront échappé, mais encore pour y faire des
Observations sur toute l’Histoire Naturelle, sur la Geographie ancienne &
moderne, & même sur les Mœurs, la Religion & le Commerce des Peuples.
(Relation…, t. I, Eloge de M. de Tournefort par M. de Fontenelle)
(Thus we think that it was lucky for Science that Mr de Tournefort was sent
by the King in 1700 to Greece, Asia and Africa, not only to acknowledge
the Plants of the Ancients, and maybe also those that they missed, and
again to make Observations about all Natural History, ancient and modern
Geography, and even on the customs, religion and trade of the local
Peoples.)
192 10
This status is also present at the beginning of the story, entitled “Dessein
de ce voyage ” (Purpose of the journey):
Monseigneur le Comte de Pontchratrain Secretaire d’Etat, chargé du soin

des Académies, & toûjours attentif à ce qui peut perfectionner les Sciences,
proposa à Sa Majesté sur la fin de l’année 1699. d’envoyer dans les pays
étrangers des personnes capables d’y faire des observations non seulement
sur l’Histoire naturelle, & sur la Geographie ancienne & moderne ; mais
encore sur ce qui regarde le commerce, la religion & les mœurs des
differens peuples qui les habitent (Relation…, t. I, 1) :
(Monseigneur the Count of Pontchartrain, Secretary of State, in charge of
the Academies and always looking for ways to improve science, suggested
His Majesty at the end of the year 1699 to send to foreign countries people
capable of making observations, not only on Natural History and on
ancient and modern geography, but also on the trade, the religion and the
customs of the different peoples that live there.)
The fields of study mentioned here foreshadow the documentary

dimension of the book. The abundance of information that it provided
seemed to answer these demands: the indications given about each place
were not limited to the field of botany. They could also be topographical,
or about the men and the women, their history, their civil and religious
customs, their resources, their economy, their culture, or their
monuments... Such a plurality said a lot about the purpose of the journey:
the expedition was in the hands of a learned botanist, but the stakes were
political. The importance of the mission appears in the incipit of the
thirteenth letter that Tournefort wrote as an introduction to the second
volume:
Monseigneur,
Si vous n’aviez pas destiné mes Relations à paroître au jour, je me
garderais bien de vous entretenir d’une infinité de choses que vous sçavez
beaucoup mieux que moi ; mais comme vous m’avez ordonné de faire part
au public de ce qui se passe dans le Levant, je crois que vous ne trouverez
pas mauvais que j’insère dans les lettres que j’ai l’honneur de vous
adresser, plusieurs choses que tout le monde ne sçait pas, ou qui ont reçû
divers changemens depuis qu’on les a publiés : je tâcherai même de faire
sentir les veritables causes de ces changemens. (Relation…, t. II, 1-2)
(Monseigneur,
If you had not planned to publish my Stories, there are a lot of things
that I would not tell you about, because you know more about them than I
do. But since you asked me to render public what happens in the Levant, I
think you will not object that I add inside the letters that I am honored to
send you several things which are not generally known, or which have
been changed since their first publication ; I will also try to explain the
real reasons for these changes.)
Louis 14th’s interest in the Levant, and in the several fields for which the
travelers were asked to work, was linked to the grandeur of France and to
the economical and intellectual interest that it could find in opening up to
these regions. This expansion indicates that the book written by Tournefort
after this trip was not a mere scientific report.
2. The matter of leisure in the project

It is thus important to take into account the materiality of the book.
F. Lestringant also underlined what made it different from a herbarium,
and so did Tournefort in his first letter:
La recherche des plantes étant une de nos principales occupations, il

semble qu’il seroit à propos de donner ici le dénombrement de celles que
nous observâmes autour de la Canée. Néanmoins comme ces matiéres ne
sont pas du goust de tout le monde ; que non seulement elles grossiroient
cette relation ; mais qu’elles en interromproient tout à fait la suite, je crois
qu’il est plus à propos de reserver ce grand détail de plantes, pour un
ouvrage particulier, & de ne donner dans celui-ci que la description & la
figure de quelques plantes singuliéres & non connuës. A la vérité la
diversité des matiéres plaît dans les relations ; mais il faut se tenir dans
certaines bornes, & l’on n’en est pas le maître quand on entreprend de
donner le catalogue des plantes, qui naissent dans un pays… (Relation…,
t. I, Lettre I, 28-9)
(Since collecting plants was one of our main activities, it would seem
appropriate here to give count of the ones we saw around the Chania. But
not everyone is interested in plants, and not only would a herbarium make
the volume bigger, it would also interrupt the story ; I think it would be
better to save the details for a more specific book, and to leave in this one
only the description and the figure of a few singular and little known
plants. It is true that diversity ads to the quality of a story, but it needs to
be restricted, and it cannot be controlled while trying to catalog every
plant that grows in a certain country.)
The products from this trip were thus of different natures: a herbarium
meant for scientific use, and also a tale with a whole other purpose. The
intermediality of this book is obvious in the way the herbarium was
“contaminated”. Over fifty plates were inserted in the book since the very
first four-volume quarto edition of 1717. Tournefort had been
accompanied by Andreas von Gundelsheimer, a German doctor, and by
Claude Aubriet, a famous drawer who had drawn the plates for Éléments
194 10
de Botanique. But the plates in Relation d’un voyage du Levant did not
represent only vegetation : they also showed several cities or sites, a few
characters – for the eccentricity of their clothing – and also objects specific
to local needs ; the readers could be drawn into the story through the
pictures (Apostolou 2009). The drawings still appeared in the smaller
(octavo) edition from Lyon, published ten years later in three volumes,
proof that the book had an ornamental dimension. There are two
explanations for the importance of these illustrations: for the plants plates,
the reason is science – many botanist writers think that the description of a
plant should be completed with a figure. For example, Pierre-Joseph
Garidel, a French botanist from Aix-en-Provence, mentioned that same
idea around the same time (Garidel 1714). This iconography, so important
for botany, was then followed by plates depicting journeys in general.
We can try to reconstitute the evolution of the project of this story.
According to Fontenelle’s eulogy, the letters had been written during the
expedition:
Il eut ordre d’écrire le plus souvent qu’il pourroit à M. le Comte de

Pontchartrain, qui luy procuroit tous les agrémens possibles dans son
Voyage, & de l’informer en détail de ses découvertes & de ses avantures.
(Relation…, t. I, Eloge de M. de Tournefort par M. de Fontenelle)
(He was told to write as often as he could to Monsieur le Comte de
Pontchartrain – who provided everything that such a journey required –
and to keep him informed of every detail of his discoveries and of his
adventures.)
Several manuscripts from that Levant expedition are now kept in the
National Natural History Museum, such as MS 1184 which includes
Tournefort’s letters to Pontchartrain and some others, for example letters
from the French ambassador in Constantinople ; ms. 995 which contains
Memoirs along with a catalog and descriptions that Tournefort sent during
his trip ; mss. 996-7, a journal that was mostly written by doctor
Gundelsheimer and was actually the result of a collaboration (one of the
Jussieus who owned this manuscript noted: “Beaucoup de pages sont de la
main de Tournefort, ainsi que les titres. La moitié supérieure de la
première page est de Tournefort, la moitié inférieure de Gundelsheimer ”,
Tournefort wrote most of these pages, and also the titles. The top half of
the first page is Tournefort’s, the bottom half is Gundelsheimer’s). There
are also manuscripts written by Claude Aubriet (mss. 78, 79, 185, and
252). When Tournefort died in 1708, six years after he got back to France,
the book, which was mostly his work, was unfinished. It was finally
completed in 1717, after an intervention from the priest Bignon. From
1702 to 1708 Tournefort took the time to go back over his letters, which
were a good start; but he probably also thought about the general
presentation of his work, so that the book would be accessible to many
despite its scientific dimension.
We can wonder which strategies – and which literary strategies in
particular – were used to seduce that audience, and how elaborate the
presentation of the non-scientific part of the report was. How is that
literature, in the sense we give it today? Because of his concern for science
and of his simple style, Tournefort had to leave out relevant episodes
much more often than other writers. He barely mentioned the working
conditions, said nothing about his relation with his companions, and did
not seem to bond with the natives. Furthermore, one of the motifs of this
genre is missing (Requemora-Groos 2012, 46-76): there is no feeling of
regret in the departure scenes. Even though they did make contacts –
mostly through botany, medicine, or local authorities that foreigners
cannot avoid –, the travelers seemed to keep their distance. Anecdotes are
often used in travel stories to make them more interesting to the readers,
but Tournefort did not use that many of them. A few of them were
chronologically linked to the travelers’ itinerary: they arrived somewhere
and learned that something had just happened. This event was not directly
related to them, but it occasionally added a journalistic dimension to the
tale, and showed both the scientific and the entertaining interest of these
little known places. However, there are very few anecdotes compared to
the quantity of knowledge conveyed through this book.
3. The epistolary genre as a means of involvement

Travel story tellers can use different narrative devices, depending on
whether they choose to tell their story all at once or to segment it. The first
method – used by other travelers such as Henry de Beauvau in his Relation
journalière du voyage du Levant (1608. The day-to-day tale of the trip to
the Levant) or by the Chevalier de Chardin in his Journal de voyage
(1686. Travel journal) about Persia and the East Indies – follows the
chronological structure of the journey. Just like in a diary, all the dates are
written, although they may be lost among all the information about the
places that the travelers go through. The itinerary obviously follows that
timeline, but it is secondary. A segmented structure is probably better for
the reader, for it allows him to take breaks, and because it makes textual
units easier to perceive. This is what Thévenot did by dividing his Relation
d'un voyage fait au Levant (1664. Story of a journey to the Levant) into
chapters, and also what Jacob Spon and Georges Wheler did by splitting
196 10
their Voyage d’Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grèce et du Levant (1678. Trip to

Italy, Dalmatia, Greece, and the Levant) into several books. This kind of
structure highlights the places that are promoted in the titles given to those
textual units, chapters, or books. Travel stories can also be divided into
letters, like in Les Voyages du sieur Du Loir en Turquie contenus en
plusieurs lettres écrites du Levant (1654. The Journey of sir Du Loir in
Turkey, in several letters from the Levant) or in François Bernier's writings
about his trip to the Mughal Empire, published in 1770-1. In both of these
books, the emphasis was put on history and politics. Tournefort’s choice to
mix letters with a scientific report was quite unique: the scientific
dimension, impersonal in theory, blended in with the interpersonal
exchange of letters.
In one of the introductory texts of the volumes, which is a letter to
Monsieur Bregon about Tournefort’s life, Honoré Maria Lauthier
mentioned the relation of the public to the book:
Si c’étoit ici une piéce de Poësie, je dirois que chaque Lettre est comme
émaillée par l’agréable varieté des sujets. (Relation…, t. I, Lettre à
Monsieur Begon)
(If this were Poetry, I would say that each Letter is almost adorned by this
pleasant variety of subjects.)
He also predicted that the book would be applauded:
Ils ne peuvent certainement lui manquer ; puisqu’au jugement des

Personnes de bon goût, à qui M. de Tournefort en avoit lû plusieurs
morceaux, c’est une Encyclopedie qui plaît en instruisant. (Relation…, t. I,
Lettre à Monsieur Begon)
(Things cannot go any other way: to tasteful People, to whom Tournefort
read several passages, it is an Encyclopedia that is both pleasant and
instructive.)
The traditional method associated with 17th century classics and the
reference to taste are competed later on by a praise of Tournefort’s
conversation:
Les choses qu’il disoit, grandes par elles-mêmes, belles de leur propre
fond, n’avoient pas besoin de parure étrangere. Sa conversation avoit de
ces charmes naturels, qui plaisent avant qu’on y puisse prendre garde ; on
ne s’appercevoit de leur effet, que par réflexion, & après coup, &
l’agrément qu’on avoit à l’entendre, se trouvoit justifié par l’avantage
qu’on en retiroit.
Comme il avoit cultivé son excellent naturel par une étude prodigieuse,
il y avoit en lui un agréable mélange de nature & d’art, que l’on ne pouvoit
distinguer, mais qui plaisoit infailliblement.

Etoit-il question de discourir des Plantes ; quelque séche que parût
cette matiere, il lui prêtoit mille ornemens, dont on ne la croyoit pas
susceptible ; il possedoit en quelque sorte l’art de la metamorphoser. Et
c’est en parlant de lui, qu’après notre Horace moderne, on peut dire
véritablement, tant au style propre qu’au figuré, que des ronces & des
chardons, il tiroit des œillets & des roses.
Mais quelque sujet qu’il traitât, il sembloit que la Nature lui avoit
donné un Titre particulier, pour faire bien recevoir tout ce qu’il disoit. Elle
y répandoit un certain agrément, qu’elle seule peut donner, & qu’elle
n’accorde qu’à ses favoris. (Relation…, t. I, Lettre à Monsieur Begon)
(The things he said were great and inherently beautiful. There was no need
for embellishment. His conversation was charming and delightful in such a
natural way that you did not notice it right away ; its effects could only be
perceived after thinking, later, and the pleasure you felt while listening to
him was then justified, because you benefited from it at last.
Since he had improved his already excellent nature through
tremendous studying, he had in him a pleasant combination of nature and
art, that you could not distinguish, but that was infallibly appealing.
When he was talking about Plants, as dull as this subject might be, he
managed to make it unexpectedly beautiful, he had the power to transform
it. About him, like our modern Horace wrote, we can truly say, both
literally and figuratively, that from brambles and thistles he could grow
carnations and roses.
It seemed that Nature had given a special Title to everything he talked
about, so that what he said would be appreciated. She added an enjoyment
to his words that only she is capable of giving, and that only her favorites
receive.)
Such an analysis of an author’s talent for conversation in an introductory

piece seems to imply that his writing was just as good: his style was
indeed very simple and clear, which was consistent with his noble,
comfortable and educated background. Tournefort was praised for his
simplicity as well as for his words.
The choice of the epistolary genre matches this simplicity. The
flexibility of conversation can be found in the discontinuity between the
letters, as well as in the travel stories, which are characterized by
accidents, unexpected events, digressions and bifurcations. What brings
letters and travel stories together is that letters, by definition, travel.
(Dufief, 2007) Travel letters are thus an extremely open genre whitch was
used more recently – for example by La Fontaine in Relation du voyage en
Limousin (1663-4. A trip to the Limousin), or, later on, by Madame Du
Noyer in Lettres historiques et galantes (Historic and gallant letters), that
she published in Holland from 1707 to 1717. The gallant dimension of
198 10
these letters increased their literary quality, and it could also be found in
miscellaneous additions such as verse or connections made between reality
and fiction. (Viala 2008, 49-51) Tournefort did not use both verse and
prose, but his descriptions can still be defined as literary. His tale may not
have been as flowery as some others that undoubtedly belong to literature,
but it was certainly not as dry as his herbaria.
The writer-narrator and the audience-reader are both busy enough for
the text to be pleasant. The writer-narrator is not a mere witness of what
happens before his eyes. Those letters were not only about drawing figures
of people and landscapes, nor about drawing a map: their purpose was also
to show the difficulties of the journey and how different it was from the
life back in France. The travelers had to face the cold, the heat, the storms
and the rain; they had to cross seas and climb mountains, to experience
these new countries with their bodies. The mistakes of European
cartographers exasperated Tournefort who knew now what he was talking
about when he said that there was nothing like traveling to be able to draw
accurate maps.
He lived classic travel stories – both the robinsonade that he liked to
depict and less glorious adventures. As foreigners, they depended on other
people, and sometimes they were deceived – for instance when they were
falsely accused of being spies. They faced other dangers, such as
drowning, or horse-riding on the edge of a chasm so deep that they could
not keep their eyes open. The scientists seemed to be poor adventurers:
there was nothing heroic about them, and they were fearful. They became
the victims of their own curiosity when they had to wait, terrified, for the
end of negotiations that they could not understand between ambiguous
mediators when they met some Kurds in the mountains.
But sometimes their fear was not justified. They were once kept awake
by weird noises – that were actually made by common seals – and another
time by crane flies which bit them and made their faces swell. A lot of
these pitiful nights are described in the eighth letter. They were less about
promoting adventure than to mention the pranks put on by mischievous
natives who offered them to stay “in a lazaretto with some slaves eaten up
by vermin.” (Relation... ; t. I, Lettre VIII, 355-6)
Foreigners usually draw attention to themselves, but Tournefort also
mentioned people laughing at them. Even in their own field of study,
women made fun of them and actually showed them how to use some
kinds of plants. And people mocked them too when they were practicing
their favorite activity:
Mais comment herboriser au clair de la lune ! Nous ne laissâmes pas

pourtant de remplir nos sacs ; nos marchands ne cessaient de rire en nous
voyant tous trois marcher à quatre pattes et fourrager… (Relation…, t. II,

Lettre XVIII, 253)
(But how could we collect plants in the moonlight? We still managed to fill
our bags; our merchants could not stop laughing, watching the three of us
rummaging on all fours…).
Tournefort voluntarily exaggerated his clumsiness to break the stereotype

of the serious scientist. Even the episode of the climb of Mount Ararat –
which could almost have been epic – was not far from burlesque. The
scientists’ thirst for knowledge was misplaced there. They wanted to reach
the top to be able to find a plant, so tiny that it minimized the importance
of the ascent itself. The scientists found themselves physically unable to
climb all the way up, especially as the shepherds who were guiding them
started mocking their unrealistic aspirations. When Tournefort described
the group in the mountain, he ironically called them the “Martyrs of
Botany.” (Relation..., t. II, Lettre XIX, 368)
Tournefort tried to ridicule the scientists to make them more human,
but he also tried to convey a feeling of complicity with the recipient, the
Count of Pontchartrain (as is reminded at the beginning of each one of the
twenty-two letters). Tournefort often asked him in the letters to solve some
organization problems due to the overflow of information that disturbed
the linearity of the travel story. The Count is often mentioned to justify
digressions:
Pour moi je me flatte, Msgr, que vous me continüerez l’honneur de vôtre

protection, & que vous voudrez bien faire graver tant de belles Plantes que
j’ay observées dans mes voyages.
Voilà une de ces sortes de digressions qu’il n’est permis de faire que
dans des lettres ; le genre epistolaire souffre tout & il convient parfaitement
aux voyageurs qui ne sauroient s’empescher de s’égarer quelquefois dans
une longue route. Me voici de retour à la Caravane. (Relation…, t. II,
Lettre XVIII, 298)
(I flatter myself, Monseigneur, that you still honor me with your protection,
and that you will have all the beautiful plants that I observed carved.
This is the kind of digression that can only be found in letters ; the
epistolary genre tolerates everything and it is perfect for travelers who
cannot help but lose their way sometimes. I am back to the Caravan.)
Mille pardons, Msgr, de cette digression ; nous sommes si accoûtumez

à nous écarter en herborisant, qu’il n’est pas surprenant que je m’égare
quelquefois dans le lettres que vous m’avez permis de vous écrire.
(Relation…, t. II, Lettre XVIII, 284-5)
(I apologize, Monseigneur, for this digression. We are used to wander
about while we collect plants, so it is not surprising that I should lose track
200 10
of what I am saying in the letters that you allowed me to send you.)
Tournefort used several methods to underline the digressions in this kind

of extracts. He gave two reasons for them: the nature of the book (its shape
and genre), and its movable contents (the travel story and the herbarium).
He used the recipient of the letters as an excuse. He also addressed the
Count in transitions between miscellaneous passages:
Nous voici pourtant, sans y penser, en pays d’érudition. Qui le croiroit,

Msgr, parmi des Proserpines & des Curdes ! (Relation, t. II, Lettre XVIII,
274)
(There we are, however, in an erudite country. Who would have thought we
would find such a country here, Monseigneur, amongst Proserpinas and
Kurds?)
Although he was a part of the narrative system, the Count of Pontchartrain

was not the only reason why Tournefort wanted people other than
scientists to read his book. The purpose of this enterprise can be felt in the
background:
J’apprehende, Msgr, que le détail de nôtre marche par journées ne soit

languissant ; mais il ne sera pas inutile pour la Geographie & pour la
connoissance du pays. Je suis persuadé même que ce grand détail vous
ennuyera moins que les autres, vous qui sçavez faire un si bon usage des
moindres circonstances dont on a l’honneur de vous rendre compte. De
plus habiles gens que moi profiteront peut-être aussi de ce Journal ; une
montagne, une grande plaine, des gorges, une riviere, servent souvent à
déterminer des endroits où se sont passées de grandes actions. (Relation…,
t. II, Lettre XVIII, 244)
(I am afraid, Monseigneur, that the daily tale of our journey might be
languishing; but it will be useful for the geography and the knowledge of
the country. I am even sure that those details will not bore you as much as
others, since you are able to enjoy any circumstance that we are honored to
report to you. Other people, more clever than I am, might also enjoy this
Journal; mountains, plains, gorges and rivers can often help to determine
where great things happened.)
Tournefort tried to pick subjects that he thought would be interesting to

the public – women, for example. French readers, and especially women,
were curious about these foreign girls, whose descriptions were not really
flattering: some were “conceited”, others “quite appealing” but they still
suffered the comparison with French women, and did not uphold their
reputation. The presentations of their clothing were often satirical. For
example, the costumes of the ladies of Mycone were described piece by

piece by Tournefort, who gave each element a letter from A to H.
Religion was described as an exotic object and a supersition born from
the Papas’ lack of knowledge: their practices sanctified the superiority of
the Roman Church over the declining Greek Church. The Romans were
also superior in other domains, such as sailing and architecture. Even the
Serail and its mysterious aura seemed worthless to Tournefort, who was
rarely enthusiastic about things other than plants. Among the adjectives
used in the descriptions, only a few – such as “beau” (nice) or “agréable”
(enjoyable) – are positive. The numerous slighting adjectives such as
“mauvais” (bad), “affreux” (horrendous), “horrible” (horrible), “triste”
(sad), “désagréable” (nasty), or “effroyable” (dreadful) express this
constant reluctance.
Conclusion
The Story of a Journey to the Levant written by Tournefort and
published by the priest Bignon was more than a scientific report: it was a
vulgarization that a large audience, used to other kinds of readings, could
understand. The epistolary genre (which Thévenot, Spon ou Chardin had
not used) was part of that project. The knowledge could be shared despite
the simple style. Sometimes the letters became reports in which both the
writer-traveler and the reader-recipient had a bigger role.
Tournefort was careful to reach the high expectations of the Count, but
he also chose to double the reports that he had first sent with the ulterior
publication of an illustrated book. The embellishment strategy that he used
then to conquer an audience larger than that of the scientists and the
politicians of his time included the quest for a literary genre that was
intermediary in many ways: the epistolary genre allows to give more heart
to a subject that could have been dull by incorporating the writer and the
readers, but it is also based on a simple style which forms a compromise
between the geographical and the literary discourse
Translated by Fanny Morel
References
Relation d’un voyage du Levant fait par ordre du Roy contenant l’Histoire
Ancienne & Moderne de plusieurs Isles de l’Archipel, de
Constantinople, des Côtes de la Mer Noire, de l’Armenie, de la
Géorgie, des Frontieres de Perse et de l’Asie Mineure avec Les Plans
202 10
des Villes et des Lieux considerables. Le Genie, les Mœurs, le

Commerce & la Religion des differens Peuples qui les habitent ; Et
l’Explication des Medailles et des Monumens Antiques. Enrichie de
Description & de Figures d’un grand nombre de Plantes rares de
divers Animaux ; et de plusieurs Observations touchant l’Histoire
Naturelle. Par M. Pitton de Tournefort, Conseiller du Roy,
Academicien Pensionnaire de l’Academie Royale des Sciences,
Docteur en Medecine de la Faculté de Paris, Professeur en Botanique
au Jardin du Roy, Lecteur et Professeur en Medecine au College
Royal, Paris, Imprimerie Royale, 1717. Reprinted in Lyon, Frères
Bruyset, 1727.
Further reading
ANTOINE, Philippe. 2001. « Préface », Roman et récit de voyage, Marie-
Christine Gomez-Géraud et Philippe Antoine (eds). Paris: Presses de
l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 5-8.
APOSTOLOU, Irini. 2009. L’Orientalisme des voyageurs français au XVIIIe
siècle. Une iconographie de l’Orient méditerranéen. Paris: Presses de
l’Université Paris-Sorbonne.
AUBAILLE-SALLENAVE, Françoise. 2013. « Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
(1656-1708). Un botaniste collectionneur éclairé au XVIIe siècle », Le
Goût de l’Orient. Collections et collectionneurs de Provence,
catalogue de l’exposition « Le Goût de l’Orient » Cité du livre –
Bibliothèque Méjanes, 22 juin – 15 septembre 2013 en coproduction
avec Marseille-Provence 2013. Aurélie Bosc and Mireille Jacotin (ed).
Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 76-84.
DUFIEF, Pierre-Jean. 2007. « Préface », La Lettre de voyage. Pierre-Jean
Dufief (ed). Rennes: PUR, 5-10.
GARIDEL, Pierre-Joseph. 1714. « Explication des Noms des Auteurs
Botanistes avec quelques remarques historiques sur leurs ouvrages »,
Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs d’Aix et dans plusieurs
autres endroits de la Provence. Aix: David, I-XLVII.
LESTRINGANT, Frank. 2002. Le Livre des îles. Atlas et récits insulaires de
la Genèse à Jules Verne. Genève: Droz.
MONTALBETTI, Christine. 1997. Le Voyage, le monde et la bibliothèque.
Paris: PUF.
REQUEMORA-GROS, Sylvie. 2012. Voguer vers la modernité. Le voyage à
travers les genres au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-
Sorbonne.
VIALA, Alain. 2008. La France galante. Paris: PUF.
WEBER, Anne-Gaëlle. 2004. A beau mentir qui vient de loin. Savants,

voyageurs et romanciers au XIXe siècle. Paris: Champion.
WOLFZETTEL, Friedrich. 1996. Le Discours du voyageur. Paris: PUF.
Notes
1
MS here and in the following paragraph stands for Manuscript.
CHAPTER FIVE:
GEOGRAPHICAL NOVELS
11
WALTER SCOTT AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL

NOVEL
CÉLINE SABIRON
In his 1994 essay entitled “History and Geography” published in The

Mirror of Ideas, French writer Michel Tournier unequivocally associates
Walter Scott with the genre of the historical novel:
The historical novel, represented by Walter Scott [...], is a major literary

genre. But one of the merits of these great examples is to point us to their
opposites – works in which landscapes are more important than events. It
is thus instructive to oppose [...] [Walter Scott's] 'historical novel' to the
'geographical novel' of Jules Verne [...]. Should we go further and dare to
say that 'geographical' inspiration is fundamentally optimistic, made of
love of the native land in its sedentary version and of the ardor of
exploration in its nomadic version? Whereas the historical novel borrows
its somber colors from the evil and ferocity of men of power? (Tournier
1994, 53-4)
Scott has been unanimously considered as the father of the historical

novel, and Georg Lukács was the first one to present him as the originator
and chief innovator in this new genre in his influential 1956 Historical
Novel. Since then many critics, and more recently Avrom Fleishman,
David Brown, Ina Ferris, Ian Duncan, Harold Orel, Elliot Shaw, and
James Kerr, have focused on the articulation between history and fiction in
their critical studies of Scott’s works. Indeed, the stories of the Waverley
series – named after 1814 Waverley – hinge around the 1707 Union
between England and Scotland or the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and
1745, and involve historical characters, like Bonnie Prince Charlie in
Redgauntlet (1824), or the Duke of Argyle in The Heart of Mid-Lothian
(1818). History is usually viewed as the structural backbone of Scott’s
texts because the latter have often been read through the prism of
Bakhtin's concept of the literary chronotope, so that space becomes time.
Walter Scott and the Geographical Novel 207
The border is a crucial topographical limit in his work. The diegeses

meaningfully take place on the national border between England and
Scotland, in the liminal border region called the Borders, or on the internal
border marked by the geological Highland Boundary Fault that crosses
Scotland diagonally and separates the Lowlands from the Highlands. The
border is mostly interpreted in a symbolic manner: it is seen as a trigger
which starts the time machine and conveys the readers into another era; it
is the “on and off switch of the historical novel” (Moretti 1999, 38) to take
up Franco Moretti's metaphor from his Atlas of the European Novel. The
geographical borders are thus traditionally viewed as time markers,
distinguishing one epoch from another, and therefore differentiating levels
of civilisation. They are used to separate the outdated Highlands and their
medieval-like rituals from the more commercial and intellectual Lowlands,
the seat of learned universities. This “vertical layering” (Oliver 2007, 42)
based on geographical borders can be applied to the domestic space –
according to the theory of stadial social development designed by
Enlightenment thinkers such as Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, or Adam
Smith –, or within the Empire as demonstrated by Saree Makdisi's colonial
reading of space, which analyses the status of Scotland as an internal
colony of Great Britain.
And yet, is space condemned to be translated into time, to be used as a
metaphor for history in the Waverley novels? Even if space is shifting and
mutable, does it irretrievably have to be appropriated, colonised by its
invasive, dominant twin notion? Can't critics be accused of taking up and
adapting a rhetorical discourse once used in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries by French revolutionaries – in particular Danton, one of the
leading figures of the Revolution –, and relayed by Emperor Napoleon
Bonaparte, before flourishing much later in the field of academic
geography advocated by German geographers and geostrategists Carl
Ritter and Friedrich Ratzel? Do historical and geographical novels have to
be opposed as Michel Tournier proposed in his short critical essay? Are
they mutually exclusive fictional genres?
This article aims to challenge the overall tendency among critics to
subordinate topography to history and point at the potential weakness of
such an argumentation which partakes a little too much of the eighteenth-
century wish to rationalise space through the concept of “natural borders”.
With the development of absolutist States and cartography, there is a
predominance of the imperialist discourse that Nature has designed these
“natural boundaries” so they can serve as political borders and now as
timelines dividing nations. Through the implacable tyranny of time over
space, prominent landscape features seem to be pressed into the roles of
208 11
organic time boundaries, for order and control purposes, as well as for
critical benefits. This work seeks to question the label of historical novelist
which has been permanently put on Scott since the mid-twentieth century
by reassessing the author’s position within the Enlightenment movement,
which was "a moment, and a movement in space as well as time" (1), as
Charles Withers very aptly indicates in his 2007 book entitled Placing the
Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (1). He
then adds:
[t]he Enlightenment itself was geographical. Ideas of rationality and

freedom did not float free from the ground. The Enlightenment took place
in and over space. It had a geography and even geographies. It was also
about space, about the earth and its geographical variety, and how that
variety, in plants and people, cultures and climates, could be put to order.
(Withers 2007, 6)
My contention is that Scott's novels are as geographical as they are

historical, and even more perhaps. In order to prove this point, I will seek
to highlight the importance of space and the mapping of space in the Scott
novels before stressing the author's adherence and resistance to
Enlightenment thinking through his ironic rendering of "the Great Map of
Mankind" and the different stages of human development. I will
eventually conclude by wondering whether the Waverley novels can be
generically labeled as geographical, following Lionel Dupuy's conceptual
keys for understanding Jules Verne's Extraordinary Voyages.
1. An Enlightenment Obsession with Geography

a) Mapping Localities and Portraying the Picture-sque
“Writing has nothing to do with signifying, but with surveying,

mapping” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 11), Deleuze says as he compares
the act of writing with the art of drawing maps. Walter Scott fully
embraces this idea which already characterises the spirit of the
Enlightenment when he pays particular attention to geographical details in
order to convey “precisely delineated localities.” (Reed 1980, 5) His
poetry and Waverley novels are indeed rooted into the Scottish landscape
as demonstrated by waves of sightseers flocking into Scotland, and in
particular the Trossachs, looking for Loch Katrine which serves as a
backdrop for the 1810 story of “The Lady of the Lake”, or Perth where
1828 The Fair Maid of Perth takes place. If Scott is now believed to be
responsible for the development of modern tourism, putting Scotland on
the map for literary tourists from the beginning of the nineteenth century,
it is because he adopted an ekphrastic approach. The latter was inspired by
art and based on very visual vivid descriptions, through his taste for travel
literature, with characters who journey from England to Scotland and vice
versa. It is also due to his interest in the picturesque (from “picture”), as
Scott was very much influenced by the theorists William Gilpin
(Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, 1786), Richard
Payne Knight and above all Uvedale Price (Essay on the Picturesque,
1794) who tend to fix nature, including irregular, anti-classical sights seen
during their exploration of rural Britain, into a pictorial composition.
Likewise, Scott’s landscape is often composed, arranged like a picture:
The appearance of the piquetted horses, feeding in this little vale, the forms
of the soldiers, as they sate, stood, or walked, in various groups, the
vicinity of the beautiful little river, and of the bare and romantic rocks
which hedge in the landscape on either side, formed a noble foreground,
while far to the eastward the eye caught a glance of the lake of Menteith,
and Stirling Castle, dimly seen along with the blue and distant line of the
Ochill Mountains, closed the scene. (RR III.6, 271)
In this extract from Rob Roy, the first-person narrator Frank Osbaldistone
sketches a verbal painting of the Highland landscape surrounded by a
stone edge (“the bare and romantic rocks which hedge in the landscape on
either side”) that is “closed”, thus forming like a frame around the picture.
He stages the gaze of the onlooker, through a reference to “the eye”, who
looks at the painting. The latter is composed of a “foreground” made of
very defined outlines (“the appearance”; “the forms”; “in various groups”)
and a background, the limits of which are very blurred (“dimly seen”),
with a blue hue looming in the horizon (“the blue and distant line”), in
accordance with the convention of landscape painting, as developed by
Hélène Bonafous-Murat in her thesis “De L’Idéal à l’organique” (1996,
274).
In Scott's texts, geography is thus composed like a painting or like a
map. In an article published in Études Anglaises in 2010, I have already
argued that describing Edinburgh in Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian
equates to marking it out with a nexus of vertical and horizontal lines.
Indeed, the Scottish capital, surrounded by the Flodden Wall and opened
by four symmetrical gates (I.6, 49), is delineated in the fashion of a mock
Roman city with a street plan in the form of a grid. Laid out in a strict
crisscross pattern, the two main east-west-oriented roads, or “decumanus”,
join in a “large open street, or rather oblong square” (I.2, 21), a sort of
Roman “Forum” called the Grassmarket, a centre of political or social
210 11
activity and “an esplanade for the scene of public executions.” (I.2, 21)
The text registers both its specific location at the bottom of “the steep and
crooked street called the Bow […] descend[ing] from the High-Street”
(I.4, 32), and its relative position by the Edinburgh Castle. Distances are
also indicated so that a scale drawing of places is produced: Reuben
Butler’s “place of residence” at Libberton is located “in a small village,
about two miles and a half to the southward of Edinburgh.” (I.6, 49) Not
only does the writer present two-dimensional, geometrically accurate
images, but he also drafts three-dimensional topographic maps in which
height is taken into account. For example the narrator specifies that Mrs
Saddletree’s “shop-door opened at no great distance from that of the jail,
though on the opposite or south side of the street, and a little higher up.”
(I.6, 48) Geography is thus set on a pedestal in Scott’s texts, whether the
latter describes the Lowlands or the Highlands. As James Reed puts it in
his study of the author, “[w]hatever fictional gloss may be applied, when
he is writing of Scotland, and especially of his own Border region, Scott is
recording, not inventing; his vision grows out of an objective world, a
place of time and the senses.” (Reed 1980, 4) This objective world was
drawn from the Scotland which he was familiar with, and which he
canvassed throughout his life.
b) Scott the Geographer

Scott’s first-hand knowledge of the Scottish landscape is indubitable,
and the geography of the Waverley novels is partly based on Scott's own
travels. During his 1814 six-week expedition to the Shetlands, he kept a
notebook, known as the Northern Lights, which stands as the first discursive
and didactic cartography of northern Scotland. This raw material was then
reshaped and used in novels like The Pirate which is set in the Orkney and
Shetland islands. Scott’s understanding of geography is also supported by
his minute study of cartography. He used Dutch geographer Willem
Blaeu's first map of Scotland (“[s]o says the geographer Blaeu”, P II.7,
180), especially for the wild, mountainous northern archipelagos, and
Czech engraver Wenceslaus Hollar's “Quartermaster's map”, which is
more anglo-centered and serves to document the space between northern
England and southern Scotland. The drawing of the Great North Road
followed by Frank Osbaldistone to cross the Anglo-Scottish border in Rob
Roy is based on John Ogilby's road map (Britannia, 1675) which is mostly
focused on England and Wales. For an atlas of Scottish roads, Scott
analysed the 1776 map drawn by topographers Taylor and Skinner. In The
Fair Maid of Perth, he regrets that the road which crosses the Perth district
from north to south should be used instead of the old more picturesque
path through the Ochil Hills: “[t]he alteration of the road, greatly, it must
be owned, to the improvement of general intercourse, avoids this
magnificent point of view, and the landscape is introduced more gradually
and partially to the eye, though the approach must be still considered as
extremely beautiful.” (FMP I.1, 12)
Topography is often used to symbolise a narrative turning point in
Scott's novels, as noted by Tom Bragg who talks about the “mimetic
relationships between space and narrative.” (Bragg 2010, 208) Both
Waverley and The Heart of Mid-Lothian, which are built like a diptych,
focus on characters who are measured and tested by their encounters with
the novels’ uncertain, unknown spaces, such as Edward Waverley’s being
challenged by his reading of the Highland landscape – seen as both wild
and romantic (W I.22, 110-17) –, and Captain Thornton’s disastrous
misreading of the landscape in Rob Roy that leads to his party’s ambush by
a horde of highlanders guided by Helen MacGregor. (RR III.4, 252-6) The
Antiquary, which deals with the question of interpretation thanks to the
running metaphor of sight and vision, opens on a misreading of the
landscape. The novel's titular antiquary, Jonathan Oldbuck, proudly
displays his estate to the romantic hero, Lovel, and their tour concludes
with a climb to a dearly-bought hillside which Lovel gamely admits
“commands a fine view” (I.4, 27), but which, for Oldbuck, possesses far
more significant layers of meaning:
‘do you see nothing else remarkable? – nothing on the surface of the
ground ?’
‘Why, yes; I do see something like a ditch indistinctly marked.’
‘Indistinctly! – pardon me, sir, but the indistinctness must be in your
powers of vision – nothing can be more plainly traced – […] Indistinctly ?
Why, heaven help you, the lassie, my niece, as light-headed a goose as
womankind affords, saw the trace of the ditch at once. Indistinct ? […]
Indistinct ? […]’
Lovel endeavoured to apologize, and to explain away his ill-timed phrase,
and pleaded his inexperience.
‘My dear sir,’ continued the senior, ‘your eyes are not inexperienced; you
know a ditch from level ground, I presume, when you see them? Indistinct?
Why, the very common people, the very least boy that can herd a cow,
calls it the Kaim of Kinprunes, and if that does not imply an ancient camp,
I am ignorant what does’ (A I.4, 27-8)
The adjective “indistinct” comes back like a leitmotiv, with the old
antiquary fancying himself as a teacher of “space reading”. For him, the
traces are remains of an ancient camp, a Roman fort, and they testify that
212 11
this place was the site of the “final conflict between Agricola and the
Caledonians.” (I.4, 28) In fact, he has located this site by his reading of
history, instead of space, before confirming it visually: the land
correspond[s] with all the marks of that celebrated place of action. It was
near to the Grampian mountains – lo! yonder they are, mixing and
contending with the sky on the skirts of the horizon! It was in conspectu
classis – in sight of the Roman fleet; and would any admiral, Roman or
British, wish a fairer bay to ride in than that on your right hand? It is
astonishing how blind we professed antiquaries sometimes are; Sir Robert
Sibbald, Saunders Gordon, General Roy, Dr. Stokely, – why, it escaped all
of them. (RR I.4, 28)
The land is a pretext for him to project his historical reading of space, as
further demonstrated by his deciphering of the letters A. D. L. L. carved
on an ancient stone and which he takes to mean “Agricola Dicavit Libens
Lubens”, i.e. “Agricola willingly and happily dedicated [this].” (29) Not
only does he refer to Scottish but also, by extension, classical history when
he mentions the plains of Marathon, which is where the first Persian
invasion of Greece took place in the fifth century before Christ: “it was a
national concern; […] Whose patriotism would not grow warmer, as old
Johnson says, on the plains of Marathon?” (29) The scene is interrupted by
the sudden and unexpected apparition of a mendicant and embodiment of
the prophet in the novel, Edie Ochiltree, who explodes Oldbuck’s erudite
lecture by asserting that what he fancies a Roman ruin is nothing more
than the remnants of a fairly recent wedding barbecue. Through this
character, Scott warns the reader against a historical reading of space,
inviting him to look at the landscape and read it without any prejudice or
bias. In addition to being a repository of folk wisdom and local history,
Ochiltree is the character who has an outstanding ability to navigate the
novel's spaces, to read into the palimpsest of space. He is the most
conversant with the landscape, as suggested by his surname which means
"old tree": unremittingly rooted into the ground, he is able to blend into
space. Through his ironic remark, he depicts the failure of typical
knowledge-gathering methods to read the space-history palimpsest.
2. A Departure from Enlightenment Thinking

a) Condemning the Concept of “Natural Boundaries”
and Debunking the Stadial Theory of Social Development
The space-history palimpsest is all the more mocked since Scott
debunks two eighteenth-century discourses in his Scottish novels. That's
where he departs from Enlightenment thinking, promoting both the
concept of natural boundary and the theory of stadial social development
as shall be seen in this paragraph.
His short novel The Black Dwarf (1816) starts with this following
description of the setting: “[i]n one of the most remote districts of the
south of Scotland, […] an ideal line, drawn along the tops of lofty and
bleak mountains, separates that land from her sister kingdom.” (BD I.2,
14) Scott pretends to adhere to the idea that the most perfect political
border is the one that follows the mountain tops and conforms with natural
features. Indeed, “ideal” can mean “perfect”, “archetypal”, but it can also
mean “ideological”. The novelist only takes up this popular discourse to
condemn it as a mental illusion, an ideological construction inherited from
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “[i]n truth, nature, as if she had
designed this tract of country to be the barrier between two hostile nations,
has stamped upon it a character of wildness and desolation.” (GM II.2,
124) The alleged indelible mark of the border is presented as unreal (“as
if”) to denounce its questionable character.
Similarly, Scott purports to be complying with the Enlightenment's
stadial theory of social development in his novels, like in his description of
Rob Roy, as shown by critic Mark Weinstein:
[Rob Roy] owed his fame in a great measure to his residing on the very
verge of the Highlands, and playing such pranks in the beginning of the
18th century as are usually ascribed to Robin Hood in the middle ages, and
that within forty miles of Glasgow, a great commercial city, the seat of a
learned university. Thus a character like his, blending the wild virtues, the
subtle policy, and unrestrained license of an American Indian, was
flourishing in Scotland during the Augustan age of Queen Anne and
George I.[...]. It is this strong contrast betwixt the civilised and cultivated
mode of life on the one side of the Highland line, and the wild and lawless
adventures which were habitually undertaken and achieved by one who
dwelt on the opposite side of that ideal boundary, which creates the interest
attached to his name. (Weinstein 1978, 115-6)
The “strong contrast” between civilization (“civilised and cultivated mode

of life”) and savagery (“wild and lawless adventures”), highlighted by the
214 11
Highland line which serves as a dividing line, seems to stem from the
anachronistic co-existence of two temporalities, between the erudition of
the Enlightenment era (“the beginning of the eighteenth century”; “the
Augustan age of Queen Anne and George I”) and the obscurantism of the
Middle-Ages (“in the middle ages”). In Scott's novels, the characters’
northward travels seemingly take them backward in time. They go from
buzzing commercial England to the static Lowlands, depicted like a still
life with the Baron of Bradwardine’s house resembling Sleeping Beauty’s
castle in which time, symbolized by a sun-dial (“a sun-dial of large
circumference, inscribed with more diagrams than Edward’s mathematics
enabled him to decipher”, W I.9, 39) displayed at the entrance gate,
appears to have stopped. Further north they get to the Highlands still
dominated by a feudal political system composed of a chief and his
liegemen. These three temporalities stereotypically correspond to three
different levels of economic and social development. The movement in
space is also a movement in time according to the critics who endow Scott
with a chronotopic imagination, like David Lipscomb in his Geographies
of Progress quoted in Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel:
[i]n the Waverley novels […] there is a three-estate time-line,

running from a civilized estate […] up to the king’s highway to a
semi-civilized estate (or the ‘Lowland estate’) at the base of a
‘formidable topographical barrier’, and finally over the barrier to a
fully-feudal estate (or the ‘Highland estate’, the realm of Fergus
[…]). (Moretti 1999, 41)
This “vertical layering” (Oliver 2007, 42) is based on the theory of the
four stages advocated by the Scottish philosophers of the Enlightenment,
such as Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson or even Adam Smith. In his 1762
and 1763 lectures at the University of Glasgow, Smith mentions: “[t]here
are four distinct states which mankind pass thro: – 1st, the Age of Hunters;
2dly, the Age of Shepherds; 3dly, the Age of Agriculture; and 4thly, the Age
of Commerce.” (14) Through this reference, Scott’s novels question the
central notion of Progress, considered in the eighteenth century as a linear
historical process through which humanity goes from primitivism to
civilisation. And yet, far from following this “natural” progression
advocated by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, Waverley and Henry
Bertram travel backward through the various stages of social development,
thus defying the law of nature, and thereby the Enlightenment theories:
backward, or against the current. Flora Mac-Ivor symbolically leads
Waverley “up the stream” to the mysterious source of the raging Scottish
torrent: “[i]t was up the course of this last stream that Waverley, like a
knight of romance, was conducted by the fair Highland damsel, his silent
guide.” (W I. 22, 112) The inversion of the natural course of things is
unnatural and monstrous, and therefore not only regressive, but also
transgressive for the border traveler who meets a temporal, but also a
political, economic and social Other during his initiatory geographical
journey. Through this distortion, Scott disconnects the two notions of time
and space in order to show that they work independently. Space is
meaningful by itself, so much so that Scott wishes to reach a universal
geography, with Scotland featuring as the ultimate model in his novels.
b) Blending Spaces to Reach a Universal Geography:

Scotland as the Ultimate Geographical Model
In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, there is an interpenetration of space, so
that there is no north and south, civilisation and wilderness, here and
abroad. England blends with Scotland through, for example, the character
of Jeanie Deans who only registers the Scottishness of the English
landscape. In London, the Scottish protagonist stays with her own
countrymen and -women as if she had not left her fatherland. She also
describes the English countryside with extended comparisons which bring
about the blending of the two pictures: the North Sea (“the sea coming
in”), which the heroine can admire from the mountain next to her home
near Arthur's Seat, seems to have invaded the English countryside
characterized by its “huge sea of verdure” and flowing water rippled by
“hundreds [of] barks and skiffs, whose white sails and gaily fluttering
pennons gave life to the whole.” (III.37, 329) Jeanie plays with an
interactive map in which the cardboard scenery can be moved and re-
assembled at will. The Tower of London overlooking the Thames is
compared to “the castell of Edinburgh, if it were taen and set down in the
midst of the Nor’-Loch.” (IV.2, 351) Places are thus displaced like
counters on a board.
If England and Scotland overlap, so do Scotland and India as Scott
wishes to show how “the domestic expands into the imperial; the imperial
folds back into the domestic.” (Trumpener 1997, 188) The writer plays on
the eighteenth-century image of Scotland as an internal colony within
Great Britain. This is most obvious in Guy Mannering (1815) in which
“Colonel Mannering from the East Indies” (GM I.11, 66), also nicknamed
the "Indian Nabob" (GM I.14, 81) after he spent some time in India to
pacify the country, buys the Ellangowan property and builds a new site
“with a few bags of Sicca rupees.” (GM II.19, 354)
216 11
The relationship between England and Scotland is replayed in the

nordic archipelago between the Orkney islands and the Shetlands. The
English borders fuse with those of the Orkney islands, while the Scottish
borders mix with those of the Shetlands. On the main Orkney island, a
circle of stones called “the Standing Stones of Stennis” (P III.12, 369) is
the exact replica of Stonehenge in Wiltshire: “that remarkable semi-circle
of huge upright stones [...] has no rival in Britain, excepting the inimitable
monument at Stonehenge.” (P III.11, 359) First compared, and therefore
separated since the comparison is a grammatical marker of both similitude
and difference, the two antique monuments end up merging with the
border between the two countries being crossed through language, and the
expression “the Orcadian Stonehenge.” (P III.13, 371)
Scott’s novels show a superimposition and mise en abyme of the
borders which are multiplied like Russian dolls, since the Shetlands (from
Scandinavian Hjatland, meaning “high lands”) share a similar
mountainous topography to northern Scotland, while being endowed with
a character of hospitality and excessive generosity. They are inhabited by a
people with a rebellious and patriotic spirit, who wish to throw off the
Scottish yoke, exactly like the Scots who want to free themselves from the
English. Not only is there a merging of the Lowlands and the Orkney
islands on the one hand, and the Highlands and Shetlands on the other
hand, but also within the Shetlands themselves as they are divided by a
stupendous geographical barrier which looks like the Highland Boundary
Fault, and which splits them into two, with the open and more civilised
region in the south, and the more “bleak and bare country” (P III.6, 132) in
the north. Scotland's geography thus serves as a model that is endlessly
transposed at various scales, at home and abroad.
3. The Genre of the Geographical Novel

Spaces overlap in Walter Scott’s novels, so that here and there, home
and abroad, the domestic and the imperial, the repetitive familiar and the
exotic unknown merge. The chronotopic inversion is one of the five
criteria Lionel Dupuy has singled out as partaking of the definition of the
genre of the geographical novel. Dupuy is a specialist of geography who
has been working on Jules Verne, the best representative of the genre,
since 1998. Geographical novels have developed at the same time as
historical novels which they also succeed, in particular in the second half
of the nineteenth century through Jules Verne and his Extraordinary
Travels, a sequence of fifty four novels published between 1863 and 1905.
Another criterion, according to Dupuy in his 2013 book, is “marvellous
geography”, i.e. the passage from realism to imagination, the latter being
particularly powerful in geographical novels. To give an example of this
shift which highlights Scott’s “geographical imagination” – to adapt David
Brown’s 1979 critical work entitled Walter Scott and the Historical
Imagination – let us look at the depiction of the landscape in Waverley,
just as the eponymous character is about to cross the border into the
Highlands. The outlines of the landscape are hardly drawn when they are
blurred by the foam over the stream (“foaming stream”, W I.16, 81) to
give it an unearthly, ethereal appearance favourable to Scott’s imagination:
“Edward gradually approached the Highlands of Perthshire, which at first
had appeared a blue outline in the horizon, but now swelled into huge
gigantic masses.” (W I.7, 34) Scott immediately deprives the landscape of
any characteristics to aestheticize it, following the principles of Burke’s
theory. It is because of the absence of any well-defined limits that the
image of the border partakes of the sublime. While Waverley is nearing
the outlaw’s den on the Highland Line, he sees a light on the horizon:
“[t]he light, which they now approached more nearly, […] appeared
plainly to be a large fire.” (W I.17, 85) This very literal description, given
in plain style (“plainly”) is yet followed by a more figurative depiction
marked by a very vivid imagination. This “sudden figurative leap”
(Moretti 1999, 44) generated by the impact with the border aims at
blurring the image which had previously been clearly outlined: “but
whether kindled upon an island or the main-land, Edward could not
determine.” (W I.17, 85) The fire suddenly turns into a
red glaring orb […] rest[ing] on the very surface of the lake itself, and
resembled the fiery vehicle in which the Evil Genius of an oriental tale
traverses land and sea. […]. Edward could discover that this large fire,
amply supplied with branches of pine-wood by two figures, who, in the red
reflection of its light, appeared like demons, was kindled in the jaws of a
lofty cavern. (W I.17, 85)
Comparisons (“resembled the fiery vehicle”; “appeared like demons”),

metaphors (“the jaws of a lofty cavern”), and hyperboles (“lofty”; “large”;
“amply”) are thus combined to convey an even more sublime image of
space.
On top of resorting to rhetorical devices to convey an image of
marvellous geography, Scott more specifically uses organicist metaphors,
which are another criterion stressed by Dupuy. Land invasion is often
described as a violation, even a rape, the border – described by imperialists
as a peripheral membrane deforming as the State expands (Guichonnet and
Raffestin 1974, 21) – being associated with the hymen. While the image of
218 11
the land is intermingled with that of the desired female body, it also
merges with that of the mother found in the watery and breast-like hilly
landscape in the Highlands. The journey northward and the crossing of the
Highland Line is all the more monstrous since it is interpreted as a
reversed and incestuous childbirth. It is a “regressus ad uterum” (Eliade
1959, 115) as underlined by the merging of the geological and anatomical
lexical fields in Waverley. There are ambiguous references to the “mouth
of the cave” (W I.18, 89), looking like a vagina dentata (Eliade 1959, 116)
through which the explorers wish to journey: “[the] dusky barrier of
mountains had already excited his wish to penetrate beyond them.” (W
I.16, 78) The mountainous border seems to split into two, thus tightly
encircling the travelers as shown by the binary structures: “a chasm
between two tremendous rocks” (81); “between two mountains, both very
lofty.” (82) Space serves to map out a symbolic initiatory trial through
which the protagonists face their own organic origins.
Lastly, Dupuy mentions the resort to a possibilistic discourse, which
Scott does when he makes use of the Enlightenment’s theory of stadial
evolution, before discarding any determinism. He points at the correlation
between space and social development but refuses any amalgam and
systematic adequation, as we have seen. According to Arthur Getis’s
definition, “possibilism” in cultural geography is the theory that the
environment sets certain constraints or limitations, but culture is otherwise
determined by social conditions. Scott’s heroes travel through spaces
which conjure up possibilistic thinking.
Scott’s novels thus perfectly match the five criteria spelt out by Lionel
Dupuy. While Scott relies on the historical context to place his characters
in the middle of political crises, the latter are rooted to the ground and it is
thanks to their movement through space, rather than time, that plots
unfold. Scott’s geographical thinking thus takes over his historical
imagination.
Conclusion
To conclude, Walter Scott’s scenic descriptions were one of the
earliest-noted and most celebrated features of the Waverley novels. Before
the series fully caught on, reviewers sometimes praised the descriptive
passages and little else, like the unsigned review of Guy Mannering (1815)
which noted the novel's “enchanting descriptions of natural scenery”.
Despite being bewitching and enchanting, space has gone from casting a
spell to being cast away, expelled from any critical reading of his novels.
Disagreement about the value and significance of Scott’s spatial

description should probably not surprise anyone familiar with the
contradictory criticism linked to the author's Scottish novels: “Scott is a
novelist over whom we shall violently divide.” (Forster 1966, 38) The
Waverley novels “lend themselves to univocal readings because their
complexity is unobtrusive.” (Shaw 2004, 159)
Perhaps the most accurate and useful paradigm for Scott’s works is
that space is a palimpsest, with scenes conveying different layers of
significance to the “viewer”. It is an old idea, as Wilt points out: “the most
insisted on trait of [Scott’s] landscapes is that they are all palimpsests, ruin
within ruin, structure upon structure, inscription under inscription.” (Wilt,
1985, 158) So there is no reason why Scott’s novels could not place
history within geography, space upon time, historical chronology under
geographical mapping. Scott’s novels may not be the first historical
novels, but the first geographical novels.
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12
WALKING AND WRITING:

PAUL AUSTER’S MAP
OF THE TOWER OF BABEL
CAROLINE RABOURDIN
The title Walking and Writing inevitably calls for Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and his Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire. In a 2013 interview about the
publication of his autobiographical fragments in Winter Journal, Paul
Auster admits to having read Rousseau at the age of 22, just before
moving to France from his native America. But in the same interview
Auster insists that the autobiographical author who made the deepest
impression on him is in fact Michel de Montaigne, whose Essais he reads
time and time again. The interview I am referring to, led by François
Busnel and published in French in L’Express, is entitled “Tout commence
avec le corps” (“It all starts with the body’). So I will start with the bodily
engagement in writing, the necessary, and even generative engagement of
the body in writing. Writing of course generally involves the hands, either
one holding a pen or two typing on a keyboard, it also involves the brain,
the eyes, but what I am referring to here is an involvement of the overall
body, a mobilisation of the entire body towards the act of writing.
To the first question of the interview “how do you write?” Auster
answers that each project’s incubation and inception is unique and then
talks about the music of writing in the following words:
Writing is, for me, inextricably linked to music. And to walking. Thus to
the rhythm of the body. In fact this is what music is: rhythm of the body. I
find rhythms in the act of walking, which help me compose sentences and
paragraphs. I feel this melody, or cadence, call it what you will, firstly in
the body. It then turns into words as soon as I have a pen in hand. I often
quote this formidable phrase by Ossip Mandelstam: “ I wonder how many
pairs of sandals Dante wore out while writing The Divine Comedy.”
Walking and Writing: Paul Auster’s Map of the Tower of Babel 223
Mandelstam felt the rhythm of the walk in Dante’s writing and poetry. And
indeed, don’t we use the word feet when we talk about verses?1
Firstly about the foot, which is both a part of the body and a measuring
tool, what a great tool! “The lower extremity of the leg below the ankle,
on which a person stands or walks” is the first definition of the word in the
OED. The “unit of linear measure equal to 12 inches (30.48 cm)” only
comes in fourth position, so the foot is first and foremost a part of our
body, one that we use to measure the land, or rather used to use. When we
walk the land, we take measure of it, ultimately we experience its extent,
how much of it we can cover in one minute, one hour, one day, by foot.
We position ourselves and relate ourselves to the land. It was, and still is
in some countries, a measuring unit of phenomenological nature, one that
we can relate to, and that we understand through our very own body.
In 1791, the metre was defined “as being equal to the ten millionth part
of one-quarter of the terrestrial meridian.” In 1875 it was institutionalised
and internationalised through the Bureau International des Poids et
Mesures, still in action today, and the Metre Convention treaty, signed by
17 countries. Although one is inclined to think of this definition of the
metre as purely geometrical, requiring the most precise of astronomical
observations to calculate the circumference of the earth, the metre was not
in fact to be defined solely by looking at the stars. The ten millionth part
of one-quarter of the terrestrial meridian was measured by walking the
Earth. Between 1791 and 1799, two men, Pierre-François Méchain and
Jean-Baptiste Delambre, walked the meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona,
the first traveled from Dunkirk to Rodez in France, whilst the second
traveled the uncharted territories between Rodez and Barcelona. The arc of
9 and a half degrees was measured by triangulation using what is called
the Borda Circle, an instrument pointing at the sky and landmarks on the
territories, including church spires, towers or mounts. The ten millionth of
the quarter of the meridian was then made into a prototype of platinum-
iridium, to be recently replaced by “the distance travelled by light in
vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second”, admittedly a lot more difficult to
remember that the length of my foot. But ultimately, it all started with a
walk from Dunkirk to Barcelona. And with Geometry, which
etymologically comes from the Greek Geometria, combination of geo,
earth, land and metria, measure. So I like to think that the meter was
originally established by walking the land.
Both the meter and the foot are used to qualify, or measure poetry. The
meter, according to the OED, is “the rhythm of a piece of poetry,
determined by the number and length of feet in a line”; it is also
incidentally “the basic rhythmic pattern of beats in a piece of music,”
224 12
where the foot is “a group of syllables constituting a metrical unit. In

English poetry it consists of stressed and unstressed syllables, while in
ancient classical poetry it consists of long and short syllables.” Taking
measure of poetry is the movement which occurs in the reading and
writing of poetry. For Auster, the music of writing is born out of the
experience of movement. In the essay White Spaces, he writes:
I walk within these four walls, and for as long as I am here I can go
anywhere I like. I can go from one end of the room to the other and touch
any of the four walls, or even all the walls, one after the other, exactly as I
like. If the spirit moves me, I can stand in the center of the room. If the
spirit moves me in another direction, I can stand in any one of the four
corners and in this way bring myself into contact with two walls at the
same time. Now and then I let my eyes roam up to the ceiling, and when I
am particularly exhausted by my efforts there is always the floor to
welcome my body. (Auster [1980], 2007, 159)
This extract could serve as the introduction to Auster’s 2007 novel Travels
in the Scriptorium, which is set entirely in the main protagonist’s room.
The space we are invited in in the above-quoted extract is quasi Euclidean
with its four walls, its ceiling and its floor. The perfect cube. Yet it is not
static. First there is the centre within, the “here”, like a dot on the map, but
then comes movement, and with it, its intentionality “I can go anywhere I
like”, seemingly opening up horizons, to be promptly brought back to the
boundaries of the room, its four walls, with, still, this sense of freedom
“exactly as I like” and terminating with an exhausted body lying on the
floor. So the movement, the writing are intentional, they are motivated by
the desire of the writer to explore new spaces and made possible by his
physical or muscular efforts. And Auster adds:
In the beginning, I wanted to speak of arms and legs, of jumping up and

down, of bodies tumbling and spinning, of enormous journeys through
space, of cities, of deserts, of mountain ranges stretching farther than the
eye can see. […] Now emptiness is all that remains: a space, no matter how
small, in which whatever is happening can be allowed to happen.
And no matter how small, each and every possibility remains. Even a
motion reduced to an apparent absence of motion. A motion, for example,
as minimal as breathing itself, the motion the body makes when inhaling
and exhaling air. (Auster [1980], 2007, 160)
So if his first instinct was to start with the body, he decides against it and
focuses on the void instead; a space is thus deployed, where anything can
happen, a stage enabling movement. But then, strangely, the movement,
referred to in the next sentence as an example, is actually the movement of

the body, its breath, the slight motion the body makes when inhaling and
exhaling air. So what he chooses to show in the white space thus created,
returns back to the body. There is no escaping it.
In Travels in the Scriptorium, Auster tells the story of a man, Mr
Blank, who travels within the boundaries of his own, monitored, room.
The book starts with this sentence: “The old man sits on the edge of the
narrow bed, palms spread out on his knees, head down, staring at the
floor.” It speaks of palms, knees and head. Then there is the surveillance
camera, planted in the ceiling above his head, as if to tell us not only that
the old man is being watched, but that he is well and truly confined to the
extent of his room, whilst the room is linked to somewhere else. If Mr
Blank cannot travel outside of his room, another kind of travel takes place,
through his memory and the recollection of situations and people the
reader would have encountered in Auster’s earlier novels. These somehow
surprising and disconcerting allusions in turn ask of the reader to
reconsider his understanding of the novels he has read as the new elements
described by Mr Blank introduce a new angle or shed a new light upon
them.
If at first glance Auster’s map found in The New York Trilogy and
discussed in this essay reminds us of psychogeography or of
Situationnists’ practices, ultimately the author’s intention is literary and
spans not only the streets of New York but an entire literary oeuvre and,
we will see, asks for an active participation of the reader as an early
cartographer.
1. Mapping
Quinn was struck by the way Stillman had skirted around the edge of the
territory, not once venturing into the centre. The diagram looked a little
like a map of some imaginary state in the Midwest. Except for the eleven
blocks up Broadway at the start, and the series of curlicues that represented
Stillman’s meanderings in Riverside Park, the picture also resembled a
rectangle. On the other hand, given the quadrant structure of New York
Streets, it might also have been a zero or the letter “O”. (Auster [1985],
1990, 82)
In this extract from City of Glass, possibly one of the most potent and
memorable passages of the novel, writer turned detective Daniel Quinn
examines the drawing he has made in his red notebook, of his following of
Peter Stillman, a literary scholar recently released from prison. The red
226 12
notebook is where Quinn records all his observations about the ins and
outs of the mysterious character.
Quinn discovers that the movement of Stillman’s body through the
streets of New York formed the letter O, although he could not be sure at
first. We learn later that he would spell THE TOWER OF BABEL over
the course of fifteen days at the rate of one letter a day and are presented
with a series of drawings of the letters O, W and E, showing the trajectory
of Stillman’s body through the streets of New York. Note that Quinn starts
not with the letter T of ‘The’ nor the T of ‘Tower’, having missed the first
four days of meanderings, but with the letter O as the point Zero of
departure of the mapping exercise.
The streets of New York, with their gridded layout lend themselves to
the drawings, as well as to the Cartesian naming system using sequential
numbers for streets and avenues. There even exists a part of Manhattan
called Alphabet City with Avenues A, B, C and D. But here Stillman’s
letters are of a different nature, they are performed to form a series of
words. Through his steps in the streets of New York, they are slowly
taking meaning, step by step, letter by letter, day after day. The meaning is
carefully and painstakingly constructed. Stillman walks and writes the
words which consumed his entire life to the point of insanity: “The Tower
of Babel”. Obsessed with the episode of the bible, Stillman conducted a
monstrous and failed experiment and locked his child away from
civilization. For nine years, from the age of two, the child was kept in a
blackened out room and forbidden to speak the few words that he knew.
Language was beaten out of him in the absurd assumption that he would
eventually communicate using god’s language. Stillman’s child “could not
see or say, could not think or do.” (Auster [1985], 1990, 23) Unable to
move freely and to communicate throughout his formative years, the
young man’s struggle after his rescue is immensely complex. The struggle
is not only linguistic, it is also a physical and motor :
The act of moving from one place to another seemed to require all his
attention, as though not to think of what he was doing would reduce him to
immobility. Quinn had never seen anyone move in such a manner, and he
realized at once that this was the same person he had spoken to on the
phone. The body acted almost exactly as the voice had: machine-like,
fitful, alternating between slow and rapid gestures, rigid and yet
expressive, as if the operation were out of control, not quite corresponding
to the will that lay behind it. (Auster [1985], 1990, 17)
The loss of language is accompanied by a loss of mobility. Speaking

required all his attention and effort. A conversation exhausted him. And in
this passage the same effort is applied to both the act of moving and the
act of speaking.
2. Gesture
Quinn’s thoughts momentarily flew off to the concluding pages of A.
Gordon Pym and to the discovery of the strange hieroglyphs on the inner
wall of the chasm – letters inscribed into the earth itself, as though they
were trying to say something that could no longer be understood. But on
second thought this did not seem apt. For Stillman had not left his message
anywhere. True, he had created the letters by the movement of his steps,
but they had not been written down. It was like drawing a picture in the air
with your finger. The image vanishes as you are making it. There is no
result, no trace to mark what you have done. (Auster [1985], 1990, 85-86)
With the last three sentences Auster seems to dismiss the undertaking of
Stillman as an act without a trace before adding that the letters did in fact
exist, not in the streets where they were drawn, but in the main
protagonist’s notebook, who recorded the meanderings. By so doing,
Auster gives prominence to the written text, the trace on paper, whereas
Stillman’s steps through the streets of New York disappear without a
trace. He compares them to drawing a picture in the air with your finger,
which in turn reminds us of what Merleau-Ponty describes as the geste or
gesture. Merleau-Ponty (1945) makes the distinction between touching, or
holding, and showing with your finger, which is seen as an attempt to
express something. But if he clearly says that showing is not touching, his
endeavour is to show us that the gesture in itself is also the desire to touch
or even hold something. The gesture is intentional; it requires the
mobilisation of the entire body to be accomplished. Someone writing a
word in the air with his hand, just like someone miming an action with
their entire body, is trying to communicate as well as express something
and Merleau-Ponty’s chapter “Le corps comme expression et la parole”
sets out to define the parole (in its broadest sense of spoken and written
word) as a linguistic gesture. He tells us that “[Parole] is a genuine gesture
and, just like all gestures, [Parole] too contains its own sense.” ([1945],
2012, 189)
The parole is an attempt to reach meaning, to make sense of
something, and he adds that the body, through the tone of the voice, a
hesitation etc. contributes to the modulations of meaning. With the
following words, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Auster’s own,
Merleau-Ponty tells us about the immateriality of the thought and the real
sense of parole:
228 12
It is in the same fashion that the spoken word (the one I utter or the one I
hear) is pregnant with a meaning which can be read in the very texture of
the linguistic gesture (to the point that a hesitation, an alteration of the
voice, or the choice of a certain syntax suffices to modify it), and yet is
never contained in that gesture, every expression always appearing to me
as a trace, no idea being given to me except in transparency, and every
attempt to close our hand on the thought which dwells in the spoken word
leaving only a bit of verbal material in our fingers. (Merleau-Ponty [1960],
1964, 89)
The hand draws a map in the air. The hand attempts to grasp meaning, and
fails. Meaning does not appear to be given by words alone. Words are only
instruments of the linguistic gesture through which meaning is made
accessible, but are always part of a wider context and it is for the reader to
make sense of them. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty tells
us that “the sense of gestures is not given but rather grasped, that is to say
seized through an act of the spectator.”2 But the hand of the listener is not
enough to make sense. We cannot grasp, we can only understand. And to
understand, the whole body needs to take part.
In Auster’s novel, both walking and the gesture disappear without a
trace, they appear to have no permanence, no tangible physicality beyond
the actual act. And so I want to ask: do walking and the linguistic gesture
really have no tangible physicality beyond that of the movement? In his
essay White Spaces, Auster invites the reader to consider the verb as
something ephemeral, transient, and further, devoid of meaning:
I ask whoever is listening to this voice to forget the words it is speaking. It

is important that no one listen too carefully. I want these words to vanish,
so to speak, into the silence they came from, and for nothing to remain but
a memory of their presence, a token of the fact that they were once here
and are here no longer and that during their brief life they seemed not so
much to be saying any particular thing as to be the thing that was
happening at the same time a certain body was moving in a certain space,
that they moved along with everything that moved. (Auster [1980], 2007,
155)
An attempt to detach what cannot be detached. What Auster asks of the

reader here is that he does not try and make sense of what he hears.
Hearing a voice, a sound, but ignoring the meaning of the words, for “they
seemed not so much to be saying any particular thing.” (ibid) Most
novelists aspire for the reader to identify with the action in the book, take
part in it through the words, but here we are asked to hear and not listen
carefully, hear the music of words perhaps, but not their meaning. And we
start to understand how difficult it is to ignore the meaning of words, for

as Merleau-Ponty puts it, it is Language’s virtue to “propel us toward the
things it signifies.” ([1969], 1974, 10) If we hear a word we almost
immediately make sense of it by relating it to its most common sense, as
well as to other associations we might have constructed over successive
encounters of the word. So suppressing the meaning of words appears to
be harder than it sounds; it requires a conscious effort from the part of the
reader, not to listen carefully, not to make sense. Auster asks us to suspend
this propensity, which is almost instinctive, immediate, to understand the
action and the words by relating them to our own experience. He asks for a
distance to be set between the reader and the book, between the listener
and the spoken words as well as the action that is described. Trying to pull
apart what makes a whole. But we make sense of the linguistic gesture
through our very own body and the linguistic gesture is first and foremost
a bodily gesture.
Speaking and listening, action and perception, are quite distinct operations
for me only when I reflect upon them. Then I analyse the spoken words
into “motor impulses” or “articulated elements”, understanding them as
auditory “sensations” and perceptions”. When I am actually speaking I do
not first figure the movements involved. My whole bodily system
concentrates on finding and saying the word, in the same way that my hand
moves toward what is offered to me. (Merleau-Ponty [1969], 1974, 18-19)
Merleau Ponty’s original version reads: “tout mon appareil corporel se

rassemble pour rejoindre et dire le mot comme ma main se mobilise d'elle-
même pour prendre ce qu'on me tend.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1969, 28)
Rejoindre is not so much finding as reaching, arriving at and moving into.
The entire body comes together in an effort to reach meaning and make
sense. The voice is speaking and the body is moving, not merely its finger
but, possibly in a non-descript way, the entire body. In the act of mapping
as described in Auster’s novel, the entire body is involved in the making
of sense. For sedimentation to happen it is not enough for the hand to
grasp a meaning, the entire body needs to reach the meaning, to make
sense and ‘incorporate’ the meaning.
3. Sedimentation and Trajecture

He asked himself why he had taken Auster’s word for it that Stillman was
dead. He tried to think about eggs and wrote out such phrases as “good
egg,” “egg on his face,” “to lay an egg,” “to be as like as two eggs.” He
wondered what would have happened if he had followed the second
230 12
Stillman instead of the first. He asked himself why Christopher, the patron
saint of travel, had been decanonized by the Pope in 1969, just at the time
of the trip to the moon. He thought through the question of why Don
Quixote had not simply wanted to write books like the ones he loved –
instead of living out their adventures. He wondered why he had the same
initials as Don Quixote. […] He wondered what the map would look like
of all the steps he had taken in his life and what word it would spell.
(Auster [1985], 1990, 154-155)
Here both the activity of mapping on the ground and the result of it on
paper are acts of language and contribute to what Merleau-Ponty calls the
“sedimentation of language.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1960, 88) Like Quinn in
Auster’s novel, we will consider our walking – the act of mapping or
surveying in Deleuze’s terms (1980, 11) – diachronically, and ask “what
the map would look like of all the steps he had taken in his life and what
word it would spell.” (ibid) If at the beginning we give a word its most
“common” meaning, the way it is then used will progressively alter this
meaning to the point that we constitute a sense for this word which is
unique, rich with successive layers of associations and interpretations.
That sense, the sense that we make of a word through our own senses, is
constantly evolving, adjusted, expanded. This is what Merleau-Ponty calls
the “sedimentation of language” ([1960], 1964, 91) and it is also this
process which gives a text its texture.
I understand or think I understand the words and forms of French; I have a

certain experience of the literary and philosophical modes of expression
offered to me by the given culture. I express when, utilizing all these
already speaking instruments, I make them say something they have never
said. We begin reading a philosopher by giving the words he makes use of
their “common” meaning; and little by little, through what is at first an
imperceptible reversal, his speech comes to dominate his language, and it
is his use of words which ends up assigning them a new and characteristic
signification. (ibid.)
We construct meaning by the incremental experience we have of words,

we understand; and then these meanings are made available at once in all
their depth and complexity, with all their associations and feelings. Thus
each new usage of a word, or group of words as it the case here with the
Tower of Babel (already loaded with so many meanings and associated to
so many discussions) contributes to the ever-making of our linguistic
world. In my version of the New York Trilogy published by Faber & Faber,
I was surprised to see that when I scanned the diagram of the third letter E
drawn in Quinn’s notebook, the diagrams of the letters O and W appeared
in transparency as under-layers, the drawings being laid out on successive

pages so as to superimpose almost perfectly. Meanings are subjective;
words are subjective as they become a layering of meanings acquired over
time.
And the sense of the speech is nothing other than the manner in which it
handles this linguistic world, or in which it modulates upon this keyboard
of acquired significations. I grasp it in an undivided act that is as brief as a
cry. (Merleau-Ponty [1945], 2012, 192)
Every further encounter with the word modulates ever more the linguistic
world. Page after page, novel after novel. But as Merleau Ponty points out,
this sense we constitute is then immediately available to us at any given
time, without having to decompose, or enumerate its various associations
and references: once a word is inhabited, once we make sense of it, it is
incorporated (acquis) and leaves a trace in the body itself, it becomes part
of the linguistic world of the reader.
And so the trace is not to be found in the verse, the furrow, but in the
reader’s linguistic world, in the sense that is slowly constituted through the
reader, by the reader, the hearer. In each novel, the reader reaches to the
meaning that the writer is trying to convey. Each reading of a word
reinforces or alters, to various degrees, its signification to the reader. The
word is enriched with a new meaning, it is presented in a new context to
which it remains associated and the reader has a feel for it, a certain sense
of the word. This ever-changing linguistic world is an equilibrium in
movement. If the trace left by the linguistic gesture, by Auster’s words or
by Stillman’s map, is to be found in the reader/writer themselves and their
respective linguistic worlds, then, in virtue of Merleau-Ponty’s sedimentation
of language, the trace is a dynamic trace. The trace is a trajecture, the
result of a diachronic trajectory of the reader, and is unique to each
individual.
Conclusion
Auster’s musing on such phrases as “good egg,” “egg on his face,” “to
lay an egg,” “to be as like two eggs” invites the reader to think about the
instersubjective constituted meaning of the said phrases, but it is also
clearly a reference to the earlier mention of Humpty Dumpty in the book
and its philosophy of language. It is a renvoi, a return to, a cross-reference
which takes us across the text. A rejoinder in the text. Auster invites us to
move across the text and in the same paragraph also writes about
Christopher, patron saint of travel, and the first trip to the moon so as to
232 12
reinforce the idea of travel. Auster juxtaposes the movement of the reader
across the text to the longest and most ambitious trip man has ever taken,
so that the literary travel is effectively compared to a journey most of us
can only imagine. He then brings our attention to Don Quixote, another
character, in another book, by yet another author. We travel not across the
same book, but start and constitute a sense which is intersubjective and
travels further to another author. He remarks that Don Quixote, who bears
the same initials as the main protagonist, chose to live the adventures of
the books he liked so much, instead of simply reading or writing about
them, though of course we know that what he lives out is actually the life
depicted in the books and we remember the passage where Don Quixote’s
maids and servants, worried by the effect the books had on their master,
decided to block him access to the library. All to no avail, since Don
Quixote had already incorporated all his books, to the point that he
believed them to be his life. By using this reference in his book Auster not
only calls on the reader’s knowledge, but also alters it by placing it in a
new context. Daniel Quinn is Don Quixote.
If the sense is constituted by sedimentation, by the successive
encounters of the words throughout various writings, the process is truly
spatial, we follow a certain trajectory not only across a single novel or
piece of text, but across our entire library, and by that I mean across all our
encounters with language, the spoken as well as the written word. The
sense has a unique dynamic trajecture.
And so the linguistic map of all the steps we have taken in our life is a
dynamic one, one where motion is felt, one which contains a trajectory
which knows no boundaries and also contains its future travels.
References
AUSTER, Paul. (1980). 2007. White Spaces. In Collected Poems. London:
Faber & Faber
—. (1985). 1990. City of Glass. In The New York Trilogy. London:
Penguin Books
—. 2007. Travels in the Scriptorium. London: Faber & Faber
—. 2011. Winter Journal. New York : Henry Holt and Co.
BUSNEL, François. 2013. “Tout commence avec le corps “in L’Express,
March 2013
CARROLL, Lewis. (1871). 2010. Through the Looking Glass. London:
Bloomsbury Publishing.
CERVANTES, Miguel de. (1605-1615). 2010. Don Quixote. Tom Lathrop
(trans.). Oneworld Classics Ltd.
DELEUZE, Gilles and Félix GUATTARI. 1980. Mille plateaux. Paris: Les
Editions de Minuit.
MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice. 1945. Phénoménologie de la perception.
Paris: Gallimard
—. Maurice. (1945). 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Donald A.
Landes trans. London: Routledge
—. 1960. « Sur la Phénoménologie du langage », Signes. Paris: Gallimard.
—. (1960). 1964. Signs. Richard C. McCleary (trans.). Northwestern
University Press
—. 1969. « La Science et l’expression du monde », La Prose du monde.
Paris: Gallimard.
—. (1969). 1974. The Prose of the World. John O’Neill (trans.). London:
Heinemann.
MONTAIGNE, Michel de. (1580-1582) 2007. Les Essais. Paris: Gallimard.
POE, Edgar Allan. (1838). 1999. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of
Nantucket. London: Penguin.
ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques. (1782). 1972. Les Rêveries du promeneur
solitaire. Paris: Gallimard.
Notes
1
Original quotation reads: “L'écriture est pour moi très liée à la musique. Et à la
marche. Au rythme du corps, donc. D'ailleurs, c'est ça, la musique : le rythme du
corps. Je trouve dans l'acte de marcher des rythmes qui m'aident à faire des phrases
et des paragraphes. Je ressens d'abord cette mélodie, ou cette cadence, appelez cela
comme vous voudrez, dans le corps. Puis ça se transforme en mots dès que j'ai un
stylo à la main. Je cite souvent cette phrase formidable d'Ossip Mandelstam : ‘Je
me demande combien de paires de sandales Dante a usées lorsqu'il a écrit La
Divine Comédie.’ Mandelstam a ressenti ce rythme de la marche dans l'écriture et
la poésie de Dante. D'ailleurs, lorsque l'on parle de versification, on parle de pieds,
n'est-ce pas?” (Auster, in Busnel’s interview, 2013, my translation)
2
I have used my own translation here instead of Donald A. Landes’s translation
where the idea of grasp had disappeared. Merleau-Ponty’s text reads “Le sens des
gestes n’est pas donné mais compris, c’est à dire ressaisi par un acte du
spectateur.” (1945, 225) and Donald A. Landes translates: “The sense of the
gestures is not given but rather understood, which is to say taken up by an act of
the spectator.” (2012, 190)
13
AMITAV GHOSH’S HISTORICAL

AND TRANSCULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES
IN SEA OF POPPIES AND RIVER OF SMOKE
CATHERINE DELMAS
Many of the book reviews published when Amitav Ghosh’s first two parts
of The Ibis Trilogy were launched1 (Sea of Poppies, 2008, and River of
Smoke, 2011) insist on the historical dimension of his epic saga, in the
vein of The Glass Palace (2000), and his desire to fill in the blanks of
history by focusing on subalterns forgotten by grand narratives. In the first
volume he portrays coolies or girmitiyas ņ i.e. indentured labourers who
had signed a girmit (SP 75) ņ, transported from India to Mauritius in order
to work on the sugarcane plantations after the abolition of slavery (1834).
Among them are Deeti, and Kalua, her lover who rescued her from sati,
but also convicts (an indebted rajah wrongly accused of forgery and
spoliated by the British, and an opium addict, Ah Fatt, the son of a Parsi
merchant, Bahram Modi, whose failure to sell his cargo of opium in
Canton leads him to bankruptcy and addiction in the second volume),
Paulette, the daughter of a French botanist, and Jodu, the son of her wet-
nurse, i.e. people from various origins, castes, religions, displaced from
their own land and transported on board a former slave ship, the Ibis, en
route for Mauritius.
The ship is a kind of Noah’s ark transporting people, some of them
couples, with different languages, cultures, customs, food, clothes, to a
new land, and a whole gamut of personal predicaments that are the result
of the imperial situation and British economic interests in the Indian
Ocean, thriving on the cultivation of opium in India and exports to China.
The Ibis, in Sea of Poppies is a floating jail, a former blackbirder, which
sets in parallel the condition of coolies in the Indian Ocean, and that of
slaves in America, or Mauritius before 1834. The ship is manoeuvred by
Zacharie, the second mate, the mulatto son of an American female Black
Amitav Ghosh’s Historical and Transcultural Geographies 235
slave set free by her master. However it is also a promise of liberation, in a

distant future, as Deeti’s vision of a ship and a shrine suggests from the
very first pages. Her prophecy is fulfilled after the sea storm that
concludes the first volume, and when the second volume opens with the
description of Deeti’s shrine in Mauritius.
As Gaiutra Bahadur’s review of Sea of Poppies shows, Amitav Ghosh
“attempts to fill in the blanks left by the archives” as his novel follows the
tracks left by his subaltern characters, and he conducts the same kind of
enquiry as Sir George Grierson’s, sent in 1883 by the British government
“to look into alleged abuses in the recruitment of indentured servants from
India […] Ghosh obviously wants to make the novel a literary excavation,
digging up the stories of people lost to history.” (Bahadur, 2008) As a
result, the narrative is a polyphonic conglomerate of stories, each character
being introduced and delineated by his or her past history, and the
circumstances of their being on board the Ibis. The characters are like
poppy seeds, all separate but assembled in a common pod, eventually
gathering on board and merging in a narrative and diegetic melting pot.
Each story is the object of encyclopedic research, as Ghosh’s long list of
acknowledgements shows, and an opportunity to excavate past events or
facts (the factory of Ghazipur, the cultivation of opium, the transportation
of coolies, life in Canton, etc...) and languages:
Ghosh creates an encyclopedia of early 19th-century Indian food, servants,

furniture, religious worship, nautical commands, male and female costume
and underlinen, trades, marriage and funeral rites, botany and horticulture,
opium cultivation, alcoholic drinks, grades of clerk and non-commissioned
military officers, criminal justice, sexual practices, traditional medicines
and sails and rigging. (Buchan, 2008)
If according to Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1999, 75), the ALTER function he

has devised sets up a pragmatic relation of interpellation between author
(A) and reader (R), thanks to language (L) and encyclopedia (E), the
relation in Ghosh’s two novels is rather one of defamiliarisation as Creole
combines with Bhojpuri, Pidgin and Hinglish, Hobson-Jobson, and
Lascari: “[Zacharie] discovered now that they came from places that were
far apart, and had nothing in common, except the Indian Ocean; among
them were Chinese and east Africans, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and
Goans, Tamils and Arakanese.” (SP 14) The description of the Lascari
crew sets the tone of the novel and history takes on a global dimension,
radiating from the imperial center, London, and its economic core, the
Stock Exchange. The period is limited to 1838-1839 before the outbreak
of the first opium war, due to the Chinese emperor’s decision to prohibit
236 13
opium and the subsequent fall in prices, but the fictional space of the two
novels sets in parallel British interests and triangular commerce with
Africa and America before the abolition of slavery, and with India and
China, i.e. the Atlantic and the Indian ocean. If history is examined from a
kaleidoscopic perspective, as polyphony and dialogism intermingle the
points of view of British, American and Indian merchants, coolies,
convicts, the victims of opium and the Chinese authorities, Ghosh also
revisits geography, which cannot be dissociated from the historical
context, and rewrites (from the etymology geo-graphein) the impact of
free trade on a global scale2.
To that purpose, he opposes his characters’ roots, which they have left
and lost in the process of displacement, and economic and financial routes
along which they are tossed, to borrow James Clifford’s metaphor in his
seminal work. (1997, 1)3 The tossing of people is both literal when some
coolies jump ship before the Ibis leaves the Delta and crosses the Kala
Pani or Black Water, recalling the dead slaves thrown overboard into the
Atlantic, and figurative when echoed by the ebb and flow which
characterizes the narrative, jumping from one set of characters to the next,
until they gather on board in Sea of Poppies, and scatter again in River of
Smoke. The displacement, gathering and scattering of characters in the two
novels are set in parallel with the commerce of opium, grown in northern
Bihar, transformed in Ghazipur, sent to Canton and sold illegally to the
Chinese. Both “thugs and drugs – or opium and coolies as some would
have it” (SP 79) are mere commodities for Burnham, the British merchant,
and the plot of Sea of Poppies clearly exposes and denounces this analogy.
Globalization in Ghosh’s work means “an imperial spatiality consisting
of networks” and “specific juxtapositions or constellations of multiple
trajectories. These trajectories may be those of people, objects, texts and
ideas.” (D. Lambert and A. Lester 2006, 13-14, quoted by Butlin 2009,
38). In Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke they involve the exchange of
commodities, the smuggling of opium and the transportation of coolies.
The trading route is highlighted by the geographical markers which
punctuate the linear journey of the characters (place names like Ghazipur,
Chhapra, Calcutta, the Sundarbans, or distances, which build up the
cartography of the area) and the narrative structure of Sea of Poppies
(“Land”, “River”, “Sea”), and River of Smoke (“Islands”, “Canton”).
Ghosh’s vision of geography is maritime and fluvial as in The Hungry
Tides. (2004) The characters’ stories take place along the Ganges (Deeti
and Kalua’s escape, Paulette and the Burnham’s place of residence) or on
the water: Jodu’s fellow villagers “earn their living by wandering on the
water, working as boatmen, ferry-wallahs and fishermen.” (SP 63) Deeti’s
and Kalua’s journey down the Ganga on board the pulwar taking them to
Calcutta is an opportunity for the narrator to describe the landscape,
through the point of view of frightened subalterns. The geography and the
topography of the area take on a fantastic and mythic dimension when
they reach the Delta, and a subversive one when they hear of “villages put
to flames by the white man’s troops” (SP 258) or are shown Alipore jail in
Calcutta. Both internal focalization and tropes in Sea of Poppies (Deeti’s
hut compared to a “tiny raft, floating upon a river of poppies”, SP 30) and
Robin’s embedded letters in River of Smoke convey Ghosh’s ethic and
postcolonial standpoint, which denounces colonial power and violence,
and the effect on the local people and their environment.
Ships also have a narrative and structural function: a boat often is the
rhizomatic link which enables the shift from one set of characters and one
story to another, like plateaus which connect in a heterogeneous manner to
refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (2004). The Ibis is a
recurrent connector, through Deeti’s vision; a comparison with Raja Neel
Rattan Halder’s palatial budgerow in Raskahli (SP 41) also introduces his
father’s association with Burnham, or Jodu’s aspirations to become a
Lascar; a boy’s dinghy enables the narrator to introduce Paulette‘s story
(SP 67). The loops of the text carry the reader along like the meanders of
the river, the Delta and the Sundarbans, and as with Laurence Sterne in
Tristram Shandy, digression is progression. However, as the pace of the
narrative quickens, the connectors vanish; the various plots are merely
juxtaposed, separated by asterisks, like dots on a map, and the
fragmentation constructs a mental cartography of the characters’ origins
and displacement, roots and routes, encompassing the Indian Ocean, from
Calcutta to Mauritius, Nicobar, Singapore, Burma, Malacca, the Sultanate
of Aceh and China. The various geographical markers, which juxtapose
people, stories, origins, and languages, and the final textual assemblage of
fragments in the two novels help delineate a postcolonial cartography of
dis-location, gathering and reconstruction. The metaphor of the poppy
seeds gathered in a pod, then scattered throughout the Indian Ocean,
obviously illustrates the theme of the diaspora, a term which comes from
the Greek speirein, the sowing of seeds. (Israel 2000, 1) But the metaphor
also is metafictional as it combines the different diegetic, poetic,
cartographic and political plateaus of the text. By focusing on places of
production, exchange, commerce or smuggling, Ghosh’s map unveils
structures of power, and division and administration of territories.
Geography and cartography are epistemological and discursive practices,
supported by institutions which are productive of knowledge and power as
Edward Said explained in his seminal work, Orientalism. (1979) Ghosh,
238 13
on the contrary, revisits geography and mapping in order to expose

underlying structures of power in the context of 19th century imperialism,
and to deconstruct hierarchies through fragmentation and polyphony.
His approach is definitely that of historical geography, which,
according to Robin A. Butlin
incorporates reconstruction of changes in geographical spaces and places

in the past. […] [It] incorporates a wide range of the perspectives and
analytical tools of geography in identifying and understanding aspects of
past life and environment. These include the character and construction of
places, spaces and landscapes, the dynamic of human and environmental
change, the appropriation and management of resources, geopolitical issues
and conflicts including the determination of boundaries, the dissemination
of cultural and belief systems, the varied role of maps and mapping (as
records, and tools of power), the nature of human settlements, gender and
postcolonial perspectives, economic and trading links, modernity, cultures
of exploration and ‘discovery’, the creation and development of
geographical knowledge, and the roles of institutions and individuals in
shaping the experiences of particular peoples and places. (Butlin 2009, 3)
Ghosh tackles most of the issues mentioned by Butlin, in his two novels,
first in North India, then in China, through various narrative and thematic
means: the narrator’s description of places and spaces, internal
focalization, embedded narratives and letters, power relations between
subalterns and Westerners (plant owners, sea captains, merchants…), the
effects of the cultivation of opium on farming and the farmers’ lives and
environment, trading links… Ghosh denounces the hypocrisy of the
Western presence in the East: Burnham justifies slavery, then the
employment of coolies, for their own benefit, in the name of the ‘civilizing
mission’4, as he justifies the traffic of opium in the name of free trade,
progress (SP 121) and by divine intervention, or religious beliefs; as a
result the opium factory in Ghazipur which is “among the most precious
jewels in Queen Victoria’s crown” also is “steeped in Anglican piety” (SP
95). But Ghosh’s approach is also human, often close to social
anthropology5 when he examines the plight and destiny of his characters,
all victims of free trade, or when he describes a place through social
activities (commerce on the river) or events such as Diwali (SP 354), or
the effects of the climate on the coolies in the depot, customs, beliefs,
myths, and eventually life in Fanqui town.
Ghosh’s sea chart of the Indian Ocean draws trade routes, based on the
exchange of goods and the circulation of cash-flow. In River of Smoke,
three ships converge to Canton: The Ibis, the Anahita and the Redruth. All
of them transport seeds, but of a different kind: opium exported to China,
plants brought back to Europe and on a metaphorical level, coolies. They

articulate three different plots and sets of characters, and three commercial
networks. In Canton, the foreigners live in a separate enclave, Fanqui
Town, in “a tangle of swamps, sands, creeks, marshes and inlets” (SP
392), at the edge of the floating city, and opium is introduced into the
mainland illegally, out of “necessity” to restore the balance of cash-flow as
it enables the British to buy silk and tea, and to maintain their position in
India. Fanqui town, “like a ship at sea, with hundreds – no, thousands – of
men living crammed together in a little sliver of space” (RS 197), is an
enclave of thirteen Hongs or factories at the edge of the city of Canton and
it concentrates both foreign powers and subalterns from all over the Indian
Ocean, who live together along hierarchical division of class and labour.
Ghosh’s cartography of the Indian Ocean opposes two perspectives:
one which is economic, pragmatic, and financial, based on triangular
commerce between London, India and China, on an analogy with the
former triangle with Africa and America which the presence of the Ibis, a
former blackbirder, of Zacharie, and the demands of planters in Mauritius
allow. The cartography of the Ocean weaves webs of commercial
activities, with leading trading houses radiating all over the Indian Ocean
and for Burnham, “agents and dufters in such cities as Bombay,
Singapore, Aden, Canton, Macao, London and Boston.” (SP 80) Those
commercial webs converge in Fanqui town, the foreign enclave in Canton.
The other perspective is mythical, based on the characters’ beliefs, and
Hindu mythology: Deeti is afraid of crossing the Ocean, thought to be
Kala Pani or the Netherworld, and of “Ravana and his demon legions”
associated with Lanka; Deeti’s visions, or supernatural or religious beliefs,
combine with numerous prophecies : Neel’s reversal of fortune is
announced by red winds or “suqlat” (SP 42) which disturb the peace of the
favorable blue wind, of which he bears the name, and which is Krishna’s
skin colour.
Ghosh invents new chronotopes6 such as the ship and the island, and
they have this dual function depending from which perspective you
consider them: ships on the Ganges belong to rival commercial companies
(the Burnhams or Jardine and Matheson, SP 43), and on the Hooghly in
Calcutta, Jodu can “count the flags of a dozen kingdoms and countries:
Genoa, the Two Sicilies, France, Prussia, Holland, America, Venice.” (SP
108) The landscape on the riverbank has been turned into a fanciful motley
of European or oriental gardens, emblematic of the wealth and power of
nations, but the value of the mansions comes from their commanding view
of “the comings and goings on the river” (SP 108), free trade implying
spying on one’s competitors‘ activities. But the Hooghly is also a place of
240 13
gathering of various boats and ships, both an opportunity for Ghosh to

instruct the reader on nautical lexicon, and to create a transcultural context
oblivious of power relations, in which sound, language and the binary
rhythm of the parallelisms act as social levellers, and make the unfamiliar
strangely familiar to the reader:
Emerging into the busy waterway of the Hooghly, [Jodu] found himself
suddenly in the midst of a great multitude of vessels – crowded sampans
and agile almadias, towering brigantines and tiny baulias, swift carracks
and wobbly woolocks: Adeni buggalows with rakish lateen sails and
Andhra bulkats with many-tiered decks. (SP 65)
Ghosh revisits the meaning generally associated with the tropes of ship
and river, i.e. displacement, migration and diaspora, and he turns them into
places of gathering, a third space, a place of
gathering of exiles and émigrés and refugees, gathering on the edge of

‘foreign’ cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gathering in the ghettos or
cafés of city centres; gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign
tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language; gathering the
signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses, disciplines;
gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other worlds lived
retroactively; gathering the past in ritual of revival; gathering the present.
(Bhabha 1990, 291)
The island of Mauritius is a place of import and export, sugar cane

plantations associated with slavery, to be replaced by contract labour; but
it turns into a place of gathering of migrants, languages, cultures.
Prolepses echoing Deeti’s prophecies announce the gathering of a variety
of characters on board the Ibis in Sea of Poppies and in Deeti’s shrine,
located in a cave in Morne Brabant, a refuge for escaped slaves before
1834, in River of Smoke. The members of La Fami Colver (a “clan” or
“phalanxes”, RS 4) come from the different parts of Mauritius and meet
there for Puja. It is a place of memory, Deeti’s “Memory Temple” in
which her shipmates are represented: Jodu, Neel, Baboo Nob Kissim,
Kalua, Paulette, Ah Fatt… The transmission of memory is made possible
by tradition, repetition though food and rituals of gathering, and iconicity
which fixes the past on a surface: the images painted by Deeti on the wall
of the shrine and the photographs from the period examined by the
narrator. Photography, in the process of “re/membering”7 the past (both
memory and reconstruction) and supplementing narratives, is a trope used
by Ghosh in The Glass Palace, and Ondaatje in his work of fiction (In the
Skin of a Lion, for instance) and poetry.
The Ship and the island are places of transformation. The Ibis changes
names, transforms people’s clothes and activities : Zacharie, a black man
passing for white, a former carpenter, becomes novice sailor then second-
in-command (SP 15), then a “Free Mariner” or “malum” thanks to a
change of clothes or voice (SP 52); Baboo Nob Kissim’s social rise is
echoed by linguistic transformation, from “carcoon”, “cranny”, “munshi”,
“mootsuddy” and “gomusta” (SP 171); Paulette boards the Ibis disguised
in a sari, and the Redruth disguised as a boy. Ghosh deconstructs the myth
of fixed identity and origin, and replaces it with hybridity, crosspollination
as names, identities and languages are enriched by contact with others.8
The exodus abolishes differences and erases castes: “when you [Neel] step
on that ship, to go across the Black Water, you and your fellow
transportees will become a brotherhood of your own: you will be your
own village, your own family, you own caste” (SP 328); “we will all be
ship-siblings – jaházbhais and jaházbahens.” (SP 372) The Ibis is a place
of gestation and a promise of rebirth: “this vessel was the Mother-Father
of her new family a great wooden mái-báp, an adoptive ancestor and
parent of dynasties yet to come.” (SP 373) The Ibis, “a vehicle of
transformation” (SP 440) makes Baboo Nob Kissim‘s spiritual
transformation possible as he is gradually inhabited by the presence of his
mentor, Ma Taramony. Deeti gets pregnant and becomes a matchmaker.
Deeti’s painted images in the shrine act as a founding myth for the Fami
Colver: that of the Founding Father, and the “Parting”, the “critical
juncture” (RS 14) between the past and a new beginning.
The transformation of people is accompanied by that of language:
Zacharie (and the reader) must become familiar with “a new shipboard
vocabulary, which sounded a bit like English and yet not.” (SP 16) Words
are distorted and transformed, become hybrid and fluid. In Mauritius, the
language of Deeti’s family combines Creole and Bhojpuri. But Ghosh also
transforms the act of reading, and urges the reader, like Zacharie who tries
to navigate with a watch and sextant, to use Serang Ali’s “method of
navigation that combined dead reckoning […] with frequent readings of
the stars.” (SP 18) The reader is urged to be carried away by the flow of
numerous foreign words and no matter if he does not understand all of
them, contrary to the characters: Paulette was brought up in a “confusion
of tongues.” (SP69) For Jodu the port’s traffic and its “anarchic medley of
Portuguese calaluzes and Kerala pattimars, Arab booms and Bengal
paunchways, Malay proas and Tamil catamarans, Hindustani pulwars and
English snows” are inkeeping with the variety and the fluidity of the
Lascari’s “motley tongue.” (SP 108) Ghosh’s characters are go-betweens:
Zacharie, Paulette, Deetie, Baboo Nob Kissim, themselves in-between
242 13
characters, connect the other characters together, and make transculturation

possible. Instead of a loss of identity due to displacement, the journey
entails the characters’ transformation, owing to their encounter with other
cultures, religions and languages, and it becomes a gain.
The parallel between the Black Atlantic and the Indian Ocean,
illustrated by Zacharie’s journey, on board the Ibis, from Baltimore to
Calcutta, via Mauritius, evokes the Ocean as a place of transculturation,
the concept developed by Gilroy, defined as “the rhizomorphic, fractal
structure of the transcultural, international formation I call the Black
Atlantic.” (1993, 4) This process entails exchange, transformation and
renewal:
The fractal patterns of cultural and political exchange and transformation

that we try and specify through manifestly inadequate terms like
creolisation and syncretism indicate how both ethnicities and political
cultures have been made anew in ways that are significant not simply for
the peoples of the Carribean but for Europe, for Africa, especially Liberia
and Sierra Leone, and of course, for Black America. (Gilroy 1993, 15)
This fractal pattern is best illustrated by the “n°1 Fungtai Hong of Achhas”
(or subalterns) in Fanqui town; it is a hybrid, transcultural place, “with its
own foods and words, rituals and routines” gathering people from different
origins and from all over the Indian Ocean: “they were a motley gathering
of men from distant parts of the Indian subcontinent and they spoke
between them more than a dozen languages.” (RS 204) The “lumping
together” or syncretism is the result of migrations and subservience, and
the commerce of opium, and yet it erases origins, castes and religions, and
creates new bonds and a new hybrid nation, “a yet unmade Achhasthan”
(RS 204), along the thirteen factories representing Western economic
power. The ship for Gilroy is also a “means to conduct political dissent”
(17) as the mutiny on board the Ibis shows. “Ships also refer us to the
middle passage, to the half-remembered micro-politics of the slave trade,
and its relationship to both industrialization and modernisation.” (Gilroy
1993, 17)
In spite of the overwhelming effect of polyphony and transculturation
created by the text, and symbolically condensed in Deeti’s Creole, food
and shrine, language remains associated with the characters’ origins:
Deeti’s songs, in Bhojpuri, remind Neel of his infancy, and his nostalgia is
shared by all the coolies on board, “the most stubbornly rooted in the silt
of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop
of story and song?” (SP 416) Ghosh takes up the botanical metaphor when
the plants seen by Paulette on the banks of the Ganga, named by her
father, and her father’s acquaintances remind her of her own “childhood
roots.” (SP 397)
Thus, in Ghosh’s two novels, transculturation also involves a process
of transplantation, and botany is obviously a trope used by the author to
illustrate up-rootedness. Like the plants transported to England, the
migrants must adapt to a new soil. Botany is not an innocent activity in the
diegesis, in spite of what Mr Lambert believes, raising Paulette in “the
innocent tranquility of [Calcutta’s] Botanical Gardens and the French
revolutionary ideal of “Love, Equality and Freedom” taught by Nature.
(SP 143) The botanist collects, labels and classifies plants, naming them in
Bengali and Sanskrit, “as well as to the system recently invented by
Linnaeus” (SP 137), and he is the direct inheritor of the Enlightenment.
Even if a family story is attached to each plant that the Lamberts or
Paulette‘s great aunt have named, in spite of the emotional and personal
dimension of Paulette’s upbringing and passion, naming and classification
are discursive and epistemological practices which are forms of power.
Paulette, too, is eager to “inscribe her name in the annals of botanical
exploration.” (RS 110) Ghosh exposes the traffic of which botany is the
object, by setting in parallel all forms of seeds, opium and decorative
poppies, and the commercial use that is made of foreign species. Like the
coolies, there are collected, renamed, transplanted, sent to Kew Gardens,
sold and exchanged.
Botany in River of Smoke is a lucrative activity, and Penrose is first
seen as a plant hunter, whose purpose is to make money and develop his
company. His ship, the Redruth, symbolically follows the same course as
that of the Ibis and the Anahita, and is involved in the commercial
networks which criss-cross the Indian Ocean. According to Johnson:
Overseas empires provided a vehicle and sites for the development of

networks of plant exchange, and the gardens themselves acted as spaces for
the reciprocal representation and circulation of knowledge between empire
and home. Between 1837 and 1901 there were at least 378 botanical
gardens across the globe. Britain had the largest network, peaking at well
over a hundred overseas gardens and twenty-one at home in Britain and
Ireland. (Johnson 2006, quoted by Butlin 2009, 45)
Kew Gardens, like Calcutta’s Royal Gardens or Pamplemousses in

Mauritius, were “institutional agencies”. The curator of Kew was Joseph
Banks, the botanist who accompanied Cook in his travels and also was the
president of the Royal Society, and whom Penrose meets in the diegesis of
River of Smoke. His French counterparts were Bougainville and
Commerson, whose wife also is a character in Sea of Poppies (she is
244 13
Paulette’s great aunt, disguised as a boy, who accompanies the expedition

to Polynesia and the bougainvillea is named as a gift to her). Ghosh’s
reference to botany thus creates another network, and far from being a
subplot, it superimposes, in a fractal manner, the collusion of interests
between commercial power and knowledge, and a literary map onto the
referential map: “Botanical gardens are part of a broader context of
historical concerns about human effects on the environment, means for
improvement, and, in the imperial context, means for the discovery,
evaluation, propagation and commercial production of plants.” (Johnson
2006, 444-445, quoted by Butlin 45) They had medicinal functions (like
opium or laudanum, whose effects were notorious in the 19th century) and
ornamented English gardens. They also contributed to the “propagation
and promotion of sugar cane, coffee, tea, rubber and forest trees,”
(McCracken 2007, 135, in Butlin, 45), and of course, by creating demand
for certain products, they had an “immense commercial value.” (RS 107)
Tea for instance is a type of camellia, Camellia sinensis, introduced into
Sri Lanka and mentioned in River of Smoke (107); and the tea plantations
find their commercial counterpart in the sugarcane plantations of
Mauritius mentioned by Ghosh; they required the same indentured coolies.
However, when a garden, like Pamplemousses in Mauritius, is no longer
tended, it returns to a wild primitive state and becomes a place of
gathering, a “botanical Babel” (RS 39), a hybrid place in keeping with
“the confusion of tongues” in which Paulette was brought up or which is
to be found on board the Ibis.
Through his network of trading routes, Ghosh recreates the context of
19th century imperialism, in which religion, science and art dovetailed to
support the ethos of progress, commerce and profit. Botany relied on plant
hunting and the collection and representation of new species when they
could not be transported; and if plants are exported on the Redruth, the
ship “was also carrying a ‘painted garden’ – a collection of botanical
paintings and illustrations.” (RS 129) Among these is a picture of a
legendary “golden camellia”, whose power is supposedly to bring eternal
life (Penrose calls it “the plant’s hunter’s Grail”) and which was allegedly
found in James Cunningham’s collection in the 18th century, then was in
Joseph Banks’ hands. The treasure hunt which follows on the diegetic
level involves Paulette and her friend Robin Chinnery the painter; the
exchange of letters between the two is an opportunity for Ghosh to expose
the mercantile value of art and the treasure quest at the core of the imperial
venture. But he also implies that money is a chimera and that the whole
imperial venture of enrichment and eternal youth is a Faustian dream and a
pact with the devil.
In his two novels Ghosh sets in parallel the networks of commerce,

knowledge and art, and he superimposes three webs or charts of the Indian
Ocean in a fractal manner, as Gilroy also said (1993, 15), each system
echoing the whole, cartography echoing historical geopolitics. As a result,
the novel is a treasure hunt for the reader who must navigate in the
profusion of historical figures, botanists and painters, who roamed the
Indian Ocean in the 18th and 19th centuries and create in the novel the
epistemological network which dovetails knowledge and power, and
illustrates what Saïd (1983) called cultural affiliation. But the novel is also
an entertaining web of stories which represent on a micro-structural level
the commercial networks which criss-cross the Indian Ocean and converge
in Canton, and which are echoed by the metafictional mise en abyme of
Robin’s epic tableau and “gallery of pictures”: “there are so many people
here who simply cannot be left out.” (RS 228) Globalisation is not only
the topic of historical geography or geopolitics at work in Amitav Ghosh’s
two novels; it is also the issue at stake in this epic saga, geo-graphein
being thus taken literally, writing the world.
References
BAHADUR, Gaiutra. 2008. “Sunday Book review.” The New York Times
November 28. In Amitav Ghosh. 2011. “Sea of Poppies.”
http://www.amitavghosh.com. Accessed February 2015.
BUCHAN, James. 2008. “Lascars, sepoys and nautch girls”, The Guardian,
7 June. In Amitav Ghosh. 2011. “Sea of Poppies.”
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/07/fiction7.
Accessed February 2015.
BUTLIN, Robin. 2009. Geographies of Empire, European Empires and
Colonies, c.1880-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CLIFFORD, James. 1997. Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late
Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
DELEUZE, Gilles and Félix GUATTARI. (1980). 2004. A Thousand
Plateaus. Brian Massumi (trans.). London: Continuum.
DELMAS, Catherine and André DODEMAN. Re/membering Place. Bern:
Peter Lang, 2013.
GHOSH, Amitav. (2008). 2009. Sea of Poppies. London: John Murray.
(Abr. SP)
—. (2011). 2012. River of Smoke. London: John Murray. (Abr. RS)
—. (2000). 2001. The Glass Palace. London: Harper Collins Publishers.
—. (2004). 2005. The Hungry Tides. London: Harper Collins Publishers.
GILROY, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP.
246 13
HARLEY, J.B. 1992. “Deconstructing the Map”, in Trevor Barnes et James

S. Duncan (eds). Writing Worlds. Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the
Representation of Landscape. London: Routledge.
ISRAEL, Nico. 2000. Outlandish. Writing between Exile and Diaspora.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
JOHNSON, Nuala C. “Cultivating Science and Planting Beauty: The Spaces
of Display in Cambridge’s Botanical Gardens”, Interdisciplinary
Science Reviews, 2006, 31, 1, 42-57, in BUTLIN, Robin. 2009.
Geographies of Empire, European Empires and Colonies, c.1880-
1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
LAMBERT David and Alan LESTER (eds). 2006. Colonial Lives across the
British Empire. Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, quoted by Butlin, Robin (ed).
2009. Geographies of Empire, European Empires and Colonies,
c.1880-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
LECERCLE, Jean-Jacques. 1999. Interpretation as Pragmatics. London:
Macmillan.
MCCRACKEN, Donald P. (1997). 2007. Gardens of Empire: Botanical
Institutions of the Victorian British Empire. Leicester University Press,
p 137, in Butlin, Robin (ed). 2009. Geographies of Empire, European
Empires and Colonies, c.1880-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
RUSHDIE, Salman. (1981-1991). 1992. Imaginary Homelands. Essays and
Criticism. London: Granta.
SAÏD, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
—. 1983. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
UP.
Notes
1
To be found on line on Amitav Ghosh‘s personal website: Amitav Ghosh. 2011.
“Books”. Accessed February 2015. http://www.amitavghosh.com/index.html. For
example, Shirley Chew, “Strangers under sail,” The Independent, Friday, 16 May
2008; or James Buchan, “Lascars, sepoys and nautch girls,” The Guardian, 7 June
2008.
2
Although Burnham, the British merchant in the two novels, is a staunch supporter
of free trade, it was actually implemented later, in 1846 with the repeal of the Corn
laws in Great Britain, explains historian Robin Butlin, in Geographies of Empire,
European Empires and Colonies, c.1880-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), p.20. Opium being illegally smuggled into China, the term “free
trade” takes on an ironic dimension in Amitav Ghosh’s novels.
3
Clifford shows that “global history proceed[s] from the fraught legacies of
exploration, colonization, capitalist expansion, immigration, labour mobility and
tourism.” Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century
(Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 1997) p.1.
4
It must be noted, however, that the ‘civilising mission’ was conducted in order to
abolish slavery, for example Livingstone in Africa.
5
Amitav Ghosh has a PhD in social anthropology (Oxford, 1981); he began his
career as a social anthropologist and his field work in Lataifa, a small village in
Egypt, is the topic of his first work, In an Antique Land (1986), a hybrid mix
between fiction, travel writing and autobiography, which contains the seeds of his
subsequent novels (travel, migration and trading routes, history revisited by
subalterns).
6
Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic (Harvard University Press, 1993) proposes new
chronotopes, such as the ship, “a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in
motion” which “focus[es] attention on the middle passage”, p. 4.
7
“Re/membering” as a dual process of recollection and reconstruction among the
diaspora is the issue of the book edited by Catherine Delmas and André
Dodeman. Re/membering Place (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013).
8
The term applies to botany and refers to the transfer of pollen from one flower to
another from another species. As a metaphor, used by Salman Rushdie in
Imaginary Homelands, Essays and Criticism. 1984, it applies to literary and
linguistic cross fertilization.
14
RUDYARD KIPLING’S WRITING

OF THE INDIAN SPACE:
THE SHIFTING LINES OF FICTION
AND REALITY, ADVENTURE NARRATIVE
AND JOURNALISM
ÉLODIE RAIMBAULT
In his 1914 speech in front of the Royal Geographical Society, Kipling

pointed out the strong relationship existing between mental space and
physical geography, between the psychological and the geographical. For
him, mental representations are first and most easily explained in
geographical and even geometric terms, each traveler having his own set
of “pressure-lines,” (Kipling 1914, 366) as he calls these visualizations.
Among these visual representations, the most strikingly kiplingian are the
trajectories of diverse modes of transport. Kipling contrasts the experience
of land and sea travels with the new experience of air travel, especially in
terms of point of view when discovering new territories: “The time is near
when men will receive their normal impressions of a new country
suddenly and in plan, not slowly and in perspective.” (Kipling 1914, 365)
He presents geographic knowledge as both universal and highly personal:
I do say that as soon as men begin to talk about anything that really
matters, some one has to go and get the atlas. And when that has been
mislaid or hidden, it is interesting to see how far the company can carry on,
scribbling and sketching in the fork-and-tablecloth school, without it. One
discovers then, that most men keep a rough map in their heads of those
parts of the world they habitually patrol, and a more accurate – often a
boringly precise one – of the particular corner they have last come out of.
(Kipling 1914, 368)
Rudyard Kipling’s Writing of the Indian Space 249
Cartographic vantage points and representations are objectifying processes, as

Bourdieu explained in The Logic of Practice, they are means of
constructing the objects as objects of knowledge, here the Indian space,
especially in the colonial context. Many of Kipling’s characters are
soldiers, engineers or land surveyors: they share a topographical and
structural approach in their vision of the world and of the territories they
patrol. The imperial ambition of such representations of space is
comparable to that of the map-maker who is instrumental in transforming
an unknown space into a territory which can be taken, controlled,
exploited and developed.
As a journalist, Kipling traveled through Northern India, in particular
in Rajasthan, Simla and Calcutta. His travel narratives were published in
the press, and later collected in Letters of Marque1. In these journalistic
writings, referentiality was obviously a requirement. But more
surprisingly, even when Kipling did not use his actual experience, for
instance in the Jungle Books which are located in the district of Seeonee
which he had never visited, some readers were convinced that the places
depicted could be placed on the real map of India. Some claimed to have
visited the Council Rock and other fabled locations of the Jungle Books
stories and poems. The referentiality of the Plain Tales from the Hills,
located in Simla and full of characters inspired from real members of the
Anglo-Indian community, is different from that of the Jungle Books; this
paper aims at identifying these different modes of connection between the
fictional spaces and the geographical reality of India.
The complexity of Kipling’s geographical drive appears critically in
his Indian fiction because of the diversity of genres he practiced, because
of his intimate knowledge of certain parts of the territory, and because
some of these stories were written after he had left India for good. To use
Bertrand Westphal’s terms, homotopic and heterotopic spaces found in
Kipling’s works, including in his main novel Kim, are often treated
similarly. This appears to be paradoxical since homotopic spaces
reproduce known territories realistically, using the same names for
instance, whereas heterotopic spaces are imaginary. The generic nature of
Kipling’s texts can be deceiving: travel narratives, which we would expect
to be purely homotopic, often include heterotopic spaces and many
fantastic short stories use the codes of homotopic representation. The
limits between journalism and imagination are porous, and the spatial
focus is presented under different lights. Indeed, it seems that the
geographic intent of his writing hinges on the use of three different kinds
of points of view – that of the outsider attracted to touristic and exotic
landscapes, that of the cartographically-minded adventurer and that of the
250 14
practical boy whose experience of the Indian space is intrinsically intimate

and ordinary.
1. Verisimilitude as the fiction of homotopic space

As a young journalist in Northern India, Kipling wrote both
journalistic reports and literary prose and poetry for the Civil and Military
Gazette in Lahore and, later, for the Pioneer in Allahabad. Similar places
are described in the accurate reporting mode and in the fictional mode. It is
generally considered that his journalistic experience furnished Kipling
with material for his fiction, but more importantly, the homotopic
constraint of serious journalistic writing can be seen as the basis for the
verisimilitude of most of Kipling’s Indian stories.
In the 1890s, Kipling was simultaneously praised and blamed by critics
for the journalistic quality of his style, seen either as efficiently accurate
and concise or as crudely attentive to realistic, common details2. Indeed,
his description of Calcutta in “The City of Dreadful Night” famously
features a detailed account of the different smells one should be prepared
to endure when visiting the city.
It is certainly not an Indian smell. It resembles the essence of corruption

that has rotted for the second time—the clammy odour of blue slime. And
there is no escape from it. It blows across the maidan; it comes in gusts
into the corridors of the Great Eastern Hotel; what they are pleased to call
the “Palaces of Chowringhi” carry it; it swirls round the Bengal Club; it
pours out of by-streets with sickening intensity, and the breeze of the
morning is laden with it. It is first found, in spite of the fume of the
engines, in Howrah Station. It seems to be worst in the little lanes at the
back of Lal Bazar where the drinking-shops are, but it is nearly as bad
opposite Government House and in the Public Offices. The thing is
intermittent. (Kipling 1888, 187-8)
The humorous chronicle of the trajectory of the smell enables the narrator
to list the landmarks of central Calcutta for the reader, amusingly giving
exact toponyms and locations as if writing a satirical guidebook. The trope
used in the passage gives the description a mythic dimension through the
hyperbolic characterization of the smell. The smell reaches the status of an
almost supernatural force, with its ubiquitous presence and its notorious
character as “the clammy odour of blue slime”, a legendary designation
complete with its definite article. In “The City of Dreadful Night”,
Kipling’s actual visit of Calcutta gives the description its referential
quality but the introduction of literary tropes make the generic
identification of the text more complex. Conversely, this journalistic,

straightforward referentiality is taken as a model in most of his Indian
short fiction, when texts give precise distances and describe journeys
minutely. A realistic sense of place is thus created in his fiction, should the
texts be based on the real experience of the author or on an imaginary
space which seems homotopic. This sense of reality is derived from the
knowledgeable tone of the narrator and the referential use of toponyms,
thus creating a fictional homotopic space.
The spatiality found in journalistic travel narratives is often used also
in adventure tales so as to create a sense of reality. In the short story “The
Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes”, Kipling appeals to the readers’ spatial
imagination when Jukes delineates a very structured narrative space for his
tale of horror:
Imagine then, as I have said before, a horseshoe-shaped crater of sand with

steeply-graded sand walls about thirty-five feet high. (The slope, I fancy,
must have been about 65°.) This crater enclosed a level piece of ground
about fifty yards long by thirty at its broadest part, with a rude well in the
centre. Round the bottom of the crater, about three feet from the level of
the ground proper, ran a series of eighty-three semicircular, ovoid, square,
and multilateral holes, all about three feet at the mouth. (Kipling 1885, 17)
The visual vividness of the passage and its cartographic precision makes
the fictional space of the crater believable and the first-person narrative
enhances this impression of accuracy and simple referentiality. Here,
Kipling’s fiction and his journalistic output both create literary spaces
which are apparently homotopic, on different scales. This is all the more
striking as the tale is presented as authentic by the narrator, although it
tells a nightmarish story akin to those of the Victorian colonial gothic,
complete with entrapment devices and mummified corpses. The main
protagonist, feverish and overworked, also is the narrator’s only source,
which would not be sufficiently certified for a journalistic account. The
tale seems a little tall, but the character’s status and temperament as a civil
engineer are presented by the narrator as ample evidence of his
trustworthiness: “with a head for plans and distances and things of that
kind and he certainly would not take the trouble to invent imaginary
traps.” (Kipling 1885, 15) Not an engineer himself, the narrator may be
hinting metanarratively at his own propensity to invent imaginary traps,
but at the level of the main narrative, the fiction of authenticity is
maintained.
However, accuracy of description is not Kipling’s only spatial mode of
writing; he also draws analogies between Indian places and territories and
252 14
other parts of the world. These analogies blur the lines of referentiality and
create layers of literary maps which are highly charged ideologically.
2. Ideological analogies and superimposed literary maps

On a large scale, the geographical representation of colonial cities such
as Calcutta or Hong Kong in Kipling’s travel narratives is ideologically
interesting insofar as it uses London as both the standard and the absolute
of urban space. The example of Calcutta is striking in this other
descriptive passage from “The City of Dreadful Night”:
The litany is an expressive one and exactly describes the first emotions of a
wandering savage adrift in Calcutta. The eye has lost its sense of
proportion, the focus has contracted through overmuch residence in up-
country stations – twenty minutes’ canter from hospital to parade-ground,
you know – and the mind has shrunk with the eye. Both say together, as
they take in the sweep of shipping above and below the Hugli Bridge:
“Why, this is London! This is the docks. This is Imperial. This is worth
coming across India to see!” (Kipling 1888, 186)
The “wandering savage” whose point of view is given here is an Anglo-

Indian unused to large urban spaces; his way of expressing his admiration
for the size and grandeur of the city of Calcutta is to compare it to London,
the metropolitan centre of the imperial political, technological and
commercial power. In particular, the bridge and the docks are mentioned
as feats of imperial urban planning and engineering, but also as places
common to both cities, creating similar urban centres focused on trade and
transport. The superimposition of the map of London on that of Calcutta
anglicizes the Indian space, disregarding the specificities of each city so as
to construct the splendour of Calcutta through its analogy with London.
Similarly, in From Sea to Sea, Hong Kong is seen as a third instance of
that particular place, the urban imperial hub, with explicit references to
both Calcutta and London, although London remains the ideal standard,
not Calcutta:
All Hong-Kong is built on the sea face; the rest is fog. One muddy road
runs for ever in front of a line of houses which are partly Chowringhee and
partly Rotherhithe. […] When I went into the streets of Hong-Kong I
stepped into thick slushy London mud of the kind that strikes chilly
through the boot, and the rattle of innumerable wheels was as the rattle of
hansoms. A soaking rain fell, and all the sahibs hailed ‘rickshaws,—they
call them ‘ricks here,—and the wind was chillier than the rain. It was the
first touch of honest weather since Calcutta. No wonder with such a
climate that Hong-Kong was ten times livelier than Singapur, that there
were signs of building everywhere, and gas-jets in all the houses, that
colonnades and domes were scattered broadcast, and the Englishmen
walked as Englishmen should—hurriedly and looking forward. (Kipling
1889, II, 249-51)
The reference to Calcutta is made through the comparison with

Chowringhee, a road running along Calcutta’s central open space of the
maidan, a desirable neighbourhood. On the contrary, Rotherhithe is a
dockland area on the south bank of the river Thames in Southwark, with
low-quality housing. Hong Kong becomes here a combination of the
affluent residential area of Calcutta and the more popular port area of
London, in a typical kiplingian reversal of values between what is
generally considered the dominant metropolitan centre and the second-rate
colonial periphery. Kipling’s superimposition of maps is not only
informed by his centripetal imperialist ideology, but also by his sense of
belonging to the Anglo-Indian community and, as such, to the colonial
periphery.
The end of the passage moves away from cartographic representations
of urban space and focuses on the climate, the modes of living and human
geography. The similarity of weather between Hong Kong and London,
with rain and a chilly wind, enables the exiled Englishmen to remain
properly English even in their way of walking. Here, the danger of “going
native” seems to be more readily avoided than in Calcutta, since the
climate encourages a pace which is “[hurried] and going forward” rather
than slow and idly meandering, the latter being stereotypically associated
to the cliché of Eastern indolence. The city is inhabited by the Englishmen
exactly as they would inhabit London and the social geography of urban
space is ideologically marked through the negative comparison with
Calcutta. The geographical specificities of Hong Kong are erased and
replaced by a list of London’s common urban attributes, among which
modern gas burners representing technological and social progress in the
city and the colonnades and domes. Interestingly, these architectural forms
are seen as distinctly European in this list whereas they really are
universal; the viewpoint is remarkably Europeo-centric.
Kipling also sustains cartographic analogies at a global level by
drawing a comparison between two border territories. The North-West
Border area in India and the Frontier in the United States of America are
brought together on the imaginary map of the journalist when he visits
California in 1889. In letter XXX, the journalist meets a well-seasoned
Captain of the US Cavalry who has been fighting Native Americans for
much of his career. During their conversation, the journalist and the
254 14
Captain compare their knowledge of the Indian wars and the military
campaigns on the border between India and Afghanistan: the Captain
launches the analogy with an anecdote about “a trooper there who had
been in India [and] told me that Arizona was like Afghanistan. There’s
nothing under Heaven there except horned toads and rattlesnakes – and
Indians.” (Kipling 1889, 82) The comparison may well be spurious in fact,
as is suggested by the sentence “we sat up till two in the morning
swapping the lies of East and West.” (Kipling 1889, 87) However, it still
creates a community of experience and a superimposition of the two
spaces. In both the Captain’s and the journalist’s points of view these
border spaces are simultaneously places of confrontation and places of
ethnological study, where the “Indians”, be they Native Americans or
from the sub-continent, are constructed as other and “objectivised”. The
comparison is upheld by the fact that both men draw their ethnological
knowledge from their personal, long-term experience of the territories at
stake, which makes such knowledge inaccessible or even irrelevant to the
metropolitan centre, that is to say on the East coast or in London. Here
again, Kipling’s characters are caught between an imperialist, centripetal
drive and a pragmatic sense of belonging to the liminal spaces of the
Border or the Frontier:
"Nobody knows and nobody cares. What does it matter to the Down-Easter
who Wrap-up-his-Tail was?"
"And what does the fat Briton know or care about Boh Hla-Oo?" said I.
Then both together: "Depend upon it, my dear Sir, the army in both Anglo-
Saxon countries is a mischievously underestimated institution, and it's a
pleasure to meet a man who," etc., etc. (Ibid.)
Their abridged conversation does not give any proof of their knowledge of
either of these native leaders against whom the British or US armies
fought, apart for their names, and they merely stand for almost
interchangeable representatives of the enemy in the colonial context.
Compared to the supposed absolute ignorance of the metropolitans, their
familiarity with native names seems authentic, but the superimposition of
two territories in a generic mapping of frontier warfare spaces nevertheless
reveals the true objectified nature of their knowledge. A decade later,
Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) took up this
comparison between US imperialism and the British Empire in a more
explicit manner, yet the geographical displacement of imperial issues from
the territory of India to that of the USA in the texts just quoted is to be
read as part of Kipling’s theorization of the power shift between the two
imperial centres.
3. Alternatives to the cartographic point of view

The superimposition of the Indian territory onto the US territory in
Kipling’s travel letters is echoed in the Americanization of the Indian
space in the Jungle Books which were written in Vermont in 1894 and
1895, after Kipling had left India for ever. Andrew Hagiioannu argues that
the spaces described in the Jungle Books (the Indian jungle, the Arctic
Circle, the deep ocean) are neither referential nor mythic but imaginary
spaces where American spatial dynamics of the time could be staged:
In writing the Jungle Books, Kipling thought not just about the East and its
fables, but also of the modern civilisation denounced by his American
friend, Brooks Adams; the civilisation of the ‘timid social stratum’, which
had lost touch with its ancient myths and forms, and had in turn lost its
appetite for heroism, romance – and empire. In the age of unrelenting
urbanisation, declining rural community, mass immigration, and all the
concomitant social conflicts of an expanding, multi-ethnic population, he
sought to recover the roots of American culture in the raw values and
aspirations of the frontier. The Jungle Stories recovered that common
imperial spirit, building bridges to an imaginary scene of shared suffering,
striving, and belonging. (Hagiioannu, 98)
The Americanization of India is also partially visible in Kim because its

conception was founded on Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn,
although as Harold Bloom points out, “the mixing of Tom and Huck in
Kim’s nature brings about a softening of the focus that malforms the
novel” (Bloom 25): the Huck part of Kim freely experiences an open
territory in a way which undermines the pure referentiality of Kim’s India.
The meaning of Kipling’s cartographic representation of the Indian space
is directly linked to his ideological standpoint, with the jungle representing
another Frontier and Kim’s wanderings along the Grand Trunk Road
recalling Huck’s travels down the river, but the spatial imagination at
work in his texts is also rendered more complex by a fluctuating point of
view, especially in the deceptively simple “boy’s books”. So as to study
the impact of shifting points of view, I will build on Andrew Hagiioannu’s
study and on the typology defined by Michel Korinman and Maurice
Ronai who inventoried the different types of connection one has with a
specific space. Although their 1980 study focuses on the desert, it applies
also to other heterotopic spaces such as the Indian territory, the jungle or
the ocean.
The four types of connection to the desert defined by Korinman and
Ronai are touristic, heuristic, encratic and endotic. In the touristic mode,
256 14
the beholder contemplates the exotic territory like a passing spectacle of

images, landscapes and faces. During his early years as a journalist in
Northern India, Kipling strived to be identified as an Anglo-Indian writer
and he stressed his intimate knowledge of the places he depicted, mocking
the inexperience and ignorance of metropolitan tourists who saw India as
exotic. In Letters of Marque, this sort of character is referred to mockingly
as “winter Birds of passage”, “the insolent Globe-Trotter” or again “the
Young Man from Manchester”, as opposed to the narrator who sees
himself as part of a community, “we in India”, meaning those who do not
go sightseeing but administrate:
A full account of the insolent Globe-trotter must be reserved. He is worthy

of a book. Given absolute freedom for a month, the mind, as I have said,
fails to take in the situation and, after much debate, contents itself with
following in old and well-beaten ways – paths that we in India have no
time to tread, but must leave to the country cousin who wears his pagri
tail-fashion down his back, and says “cabman” to the driver of the ticca-
ghari. (Kipling 1887, 4)
Despite this self-definition as an insider, the exoticism of India is the

leading principle of landscape description in some of Kipling’s texts.
These passages highlight the pleasure felt by a character discovering the
Indian landscape, in an idealised orientalist perception of the territory
which is elsewhere derided as a tourist’s inaccurate perception of
something Indian as generically “very Eastern.” (Kipling 1887, 7) The
implied separation between the beholder and the spectacle in front of him
partakes in what Homi K. Bhabha identifies as the ideological construction
of otherness inherent to colonial discourse. (Bhabha, 94)
In Kim, the young protagonist’s journey through India first takes a
touristic turn because he discovers new sights and is not yet an active
character in the plot: “This broad, smiling river of life, he considered, was
a vast improvement on the cramped and crowded Lahore streets. There
were new people and new sights at every stride – castes he knew and
castes that were altogether out of his experience.” (Kipling 1901, 109) In
addition to his passive recording of the sights, the character is given a
superior point of view because he walks along a road situated on an
embankment. The touristic connection between Kim and the landscape
remains the main mode of description and reminds the reader of a
picturesque orientalist painting foregrounding the exoticism of the scene:
It was beautiful to behold the many-yoked grain and cotton wagons

crawling over the country roads: one could hear their axles, complaining a
mile away, coming nearer, till with shouts and yells and bad words they
climbed up the steep incline and plunged on to the hard main road, carter
reviling carter. It was equally beautiful to watch the people, little clumps of
red and blue and pink and white and saffron, turning aside to go to their
own villages, dispersing and growing small by twos and threes across the
level plain. (Kipling 1901, 111)
The character revels in the diversity of colours and sounds and in his
ability to tower above the scene and distinguish several planes in the
distance. Jean-Marc Moura argues that the peculiarity of Kim’s exotic
view of India lies in the combination of its extreme realism and its childish
representation of the land as an immense playground for the boy
protagonist – the childish reverie softening the imperialist exoticism.3
Although the workers are toiling and complaining, Kim remains aloof and
keeps an aesthetic distance to the scene.
In spite of this softening, the indisputable commanding view and
imperialist visualization of the land makes the text veer towards other
types of connection to an objectivized India, seen by the characters in an
encratic and heuristic manner. The encratic mode as defined by Korinman
and Ronai is typically enacted by the administrator of a territory by
organising it and dividing it into separate administrative entities. The
heuristic mode relies on knowledge, acquired through a scientific study of
the land. The superiority of the point of view reveals the commanding
position of the character. Kim may have been raised as a native boy but he
is of Irish descent and he eventually works for the British intelligence
service. Mowgli may have been raised by wolves, but he really is a man
able to master fire. India and the jungle are not only objects of curiosity
and pleasurable sights, they also are objects of knowledge objectivized in
an imperial intention. Here, the exotic point of view of the tourist turns
into the point of view of the adventurer and the colonial administrator,
who use cartographic representations and commanding views of the
territory they intend to master.
In the story “Tiger-Tiger!” Mowgli is living in a village among
humans, herding cattle like other children. His unique position, sitting on
the back of the great herd bull, is commanding, like the one Kim assumes
in the opening chapter of the novel, astride the gun in Lahore. Mowgli
uses his position to understand the lay of the land and prepare the attack
against his mortal enemy Shere Khan, the tiger. He discusses his plan in
topographic terms with one of the wolves:
The big ravine of the Waingunga [River]. That opens out on the plain not
half a mile from here. I can take the herd round through the jungle to the
258 14
head of the ravine and then sweep down – but he would slink out at the
foot. We must block that end. (Kipling 1895, 88)
His ultimate purpose in defeating the tiger is to be able to return as the

master of the Jungle, not to prevail in the human village. Geographical and
topographic knowledge enables him to take power, the point of view is
again that of an outsider who intends to master the territory through his
mental mapping of the jungle.
Kim and Mowgli are two figures of adventurers but their colonial aims
are mitigated because Kipling’s characters change points of view, thus
showing the limits of imperial mapping in the Jungle Books and Kim.
Cartographic frameworks may still be present but the imperial value is
played down when the point of view becomes practical, when the
characters’ perception of Indian space becomes phenomenological. Here,
the connection to the land becomes endotic, that is to say practical issues
are given precedence over ideological interpretations. As opposed to the
encratic and touristic modes which are ideologically marked, the endotic
apprehension of space is a simple compliance to suitable local practices
and behaviours, for instance taking up a nomadic way of life in the desert.
The passages where the Indian territory is seen in an imperial way are
crucial to the plots, but neither book is a plain colonial adventure tale. The
imperial plot in Kim is downplayed by the other story line, that of the
lama’s spiritual quest, as well as by the general picaresque structure of the
novel. The Jungle Books are two collections of short stories where the
Mowgli stories are full of ellipses and thematic counterpoints. For
instance, the story “The Spring Running” is mostly devoid of colonial
ideology and focuses on Mowgli’s passage into adulthood and on his
awareness of his physical presence in the Jungle.
Both Kim’s and Mowgli’s experiences of their environments are
eventually presented as very practical, sensitive and commonplace: the
attention paid to trivial details such as their way of walking, of running, of
inhabiting spaces depicts them as insiders, not conquerors. In Bourdieu’s
terms, they “[apprehend] the world as self-evident, ‘taken for granted’”,
they have a “practical experience of the familiar universe.” (Bourdieu, 25)
When Kim walks along the Grand Trunk Road, once the exotic delight of
discovery passes, he becomes one traveler among the crowd and dives into
the flow; he walks in “the indescribable gait of the long-distance tramp all
the world over” (Kipling, 1901, 109), he joins the groups of travelers in
their experience of the road. As for Mowgli, he leaves the village at the
end of ‘Tiger-Tiger!’, “trotting across at the steady wolf’s trot that eats up
the long miles like fire” (Kipling, 1895, 94) proving by his way of running
that he can be one of the pack, despite his human body. Their experiences
of the Indian space are not exotic anymore, but on the contrary, endotic,
familiar and internal.
Conclusion
Doubly bound by his imperialist ideology and his practical experience
of the peripheries of the empire, Kipling superimposes on his
representation of India many types of space. It appears that the generic
difference between journalistic travel narrative and fictive stories of
adventure does not create two distinct representations of space: on the
contrary Kipling uses the homotopic quality of his experience as a
journalist to create realistic fictive spaces and places. The most realistic
texts on Anglo-India are not his journalistic letters of travel which give
precedence to ideological analogies between various territories over
simple geographical and social facts, but his short stories, even if they
verge on the gothic. The ideological orientation of Kipling’s spatiality
appears even in his less referential books, his Jungle fables. The
relationship between literature and geography goes beyond the question of
achieving referentiality in a text: it raises the question of how to interpret
the intent of verisimilitude in fiction. Although geographic reality is a
necessary realistic backdrop, the text becomes ideologically charged,
especially in the colonial context when even a fable is a displaced
commentary on contemporary issues.
Kipling’s writing uses geographic methods in the poetic creation of a
fictional space, mapping, naming and delineating territories in a textual
way without including an actual map into his works, but this topographic
text is infused with a very sensitive and personal approach of space thanks
to Kipling’s use of varied points of view.
The use of a shifting point of view in his fiction produces different
approaches to the Indian territory and different experiences of geography
in multifocal texts. The combination of these approaches in the same texts
or in collections of stories gives Kipling’s prose its ambiguous and
contrapunctual character, in a fluctuating relationship to the territory.
Kipling’s texts manage to create a literary space which is not simply
referential yet remains highly realistic. Together with the formal play on
networks and multiple entries, this relationship to the territory creates a
specifically Anglo-Indian literary geography.
260 14
References
BHABHA, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London, New York:
Routledge.
BLOOM, Harold. 2005. “Introduction”, Edwardian and Georgian Fiction.
New York: Chelsea House, 1-40.
BOURDIEU, Pierre. 1980. Le Sens Pratique. Paris: Editions de Minuit,
1980. English translation by Richard Nice: The Logic of Practice.
Cambridge: Polity, 1990.
HAGIIOANNU, Andrew. 2003. The Man Who Would Be Kipling: The
Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
KIPLING, Rudyard. (1885). 2011.“The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes.”
The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories. Janet Montefiore
(ed). London: Penguin, 15-32.
—. (1887). 1913. Letters of Marque. In From Sea to Sea and Other
Sketches: Letters of Travel, Volume I. New York: Doubleday and
Page, 3-189.
—. (1888). 1913. “The City of Dreadful Night.” In From Sea to Sea and
Other Sketches: Letters of Travel, Volume II. New York: Doubleday
and Page, 185-248.
—. (1889). 1913. From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches: Letters of Travel.
2 Volumes. New York: Doubleday and Page. Last accessed April 2nd,
2015: https://archive.org/stream/cu31924029874637
—. (1895). 2000. The Jungle Books. Daniel Karlin (ed). London: Penguin.
—. (1901). 2000. Kim. Edward W. Said (ed). London: Penguin.
—. 1914. “On Aspects of Travel.” The Geographical Journal, 43-4 (April
1914), 365-375.
KORINMAN, Michel and Maurice RONAI. 1980. “Le désert – mode
d’emploi. Aide-mémoire pour une épistémologie de l’aride.” In
Traverses 19: “Le Désert” (June 1980), 80-91.
LANG, Andrew. (1889). 1971. “Mr Kipling’s Stories.” In Rudyard Kipling:
the Critical Heritage edited by Roger Lancelyn Green. London; New
York: Routledge, 44-46.
MOURA, Jean-Marc. 1998. La Littérature des lointains: Histoire de
l’exotisme européen au XXe siècle. Paris: Honoré Champion.
WESTPHAL, Bertrand. 2007. La Géocritique: Réel, Fiction, Espace. Paris:
Editions de Minuit.
WILDE, Oscar. (1890). 1963. “The Critic as Artist”. In The Works of Oscar
Wilde. John Gilbert (ed). London: Spring Books, 857-898.
Notes
1
From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel is a two-volume collection published in 1889,
gathering travel narratives previously published in newspapers. The first volume
contains Letters of Marque (first published 1887), which narrate Kipling’s travels
through India, and the 24 first letters of From Sea to Sea devoted to his trip in Asia
(from Calcutta to Japan) and his arrival in the U.S.A. (San Francisco). The second
volume contains letters 25 to 37 of From Sea to Sea (from California to Chicago)
and three separate pieces, “The City of Dreadful Night”, “Among the Railway
Folk” and “The Giridih Coal-Fields”. This global tour led Kipling to England and
marked the end of his Indian years.
2
Andrew Lang supported Kipling very early, in particular for the novelty and the
informative quality of his short stories for the metropolitan audience: “it may
safely be said that Plain Tales from the Hills will teach more of India, of our task
there, of the various peoples whom we try to rule, than many Blue Books. Here is
an unbroken field of actual romance, here are incidents as strange as befall in any
city of dream, any Kôr or Zu-Vendis, and the incidents are true” (Lang 48). Oscar
Wilde famously wrote of Kipling’s “odd journalistic realism” in his dramatized
essay “The True Function and Value of Criticism”: “As one turns over the pages of
his Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree
reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle
one’s eyes. The jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with
their surroundings. The mere lack of style in the storyteller gives an odd
journalistic realism to what he tells us. […] He is our first authority on the second-
rate, he has seen marvellous things through keyholes, and his backgrounds are real
works of art.” (Wilde 895)
3
“Elle est un monde puéril, et avant tout au sens où elle est vue par les yeux d’un
enfant lancé sur ses routes. Cet espace indien est fragmenté. Conformément à la
vocation de l’exotisme impérial, il apparaît sous l’aspect de facettes changeantes,
étranges, parfois brillantes, n’ayant d’autre cohérence qu’une tradition séculaire et
pesante, faite de superstitions diverses. Il s’agit d’un monde réduit à sa dimension
spectaculaire, organisé selon le principe ludique du dépaysement. […] Toutefois,
cette Inde aux personnages ignorants et aux paysages étranges n’est pas un simple
sous-continent du pittoresque et de l’arriération historique. Kim correspond à une
euphémisation de l’exotisme impérial, car la terre indienne est celle du retour à
l’enfance.” (Moura 320-3)
CHAPTER SIX:
GEOGRAPHICAL POETRY
15
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY’S TRANSTEXTUAL

MAP TO VENICE
FABIEN DESSET
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) had already traveled to Scotland,

Ireland, Wales, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland when
he embarked on his third journey to the Continent and discovered Italy,
where he settled in various places. His travels on the Continent introduced
him to picturesque and sublime scenery that changed him and his poetry,
so that his motives for going once again to Switzerland and for the first
time to Italy could no longer be limited to the need to flee political,
religious or social oppression or even to find a more congenial climate for
his delicate health; Shelley wished to discover new places and cultures,
and more particularly to have a glimpse of the ancient Greeks in the
deserted lanes of Pompeii and Paestum.
To accompany and guide him, he ordered books that helped him to
travel back in time to ancient Greece and Rome, like Pliny the Younger’s
Letters (end of the Ist century A.D.), Pausanias’s Description of Greece
(IInd century) or J.J. Winckelmann’s Histoire de l’art (1764, in a 1801-
1803 French translation). Shelley also read travel guides or “tours.” As
Benjamin Colbert shows in Shelley’s Eye (2005), Shelley’s tourism was
indeed both literary and intertextual, since the poet not only sought the
sites celebrated in ancient and modern literature, but also drew on
contemporary guides like John Chetwode Eustace’s Classical Tour
through Italy, first published in 1813, to develop an aesthetic discourse on
places, just as Winckelmann helped him develop a discourse on ancient
art. To use Gérard Genette’s terminology in Palimpsestes (1982),
Shelley’s experience of geography did not only rely on an intertext of
literary influences but also led to a hypertext of literary creations, like A
History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817), an edition of their letters and journals
written during their first journeys to the Continent, plus the poem “Mont
Blanc”.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Transtextual Map to Venice 265
Among the places influenced by, and transmuted into, literature is

Venice. This paper will therefore analyse the transtextuality behind
Shelley’s description of the Italian city, as well as the evolution of the
motifs, borrowed or more or less original, signalling it in his poetry.
1. Shelley's fantasized Venice: Exoticism and Gothic

characterization
Shelley had actually chosen Venice as early as 1810 as one of the
locations for his Gothic novella, Zastrozzi. Retrospectively, this shows
how mythical the city was to the poet when he first laid eyes on it eight
years later. It is probably in Gothic literature that the young Shelley found
some of the Venetian motifs he uses, as Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian
(1797) may show as far as mountains are concerned. There is no room
here, however, to study the intertextuality of Zastrozzi, but it is necessary
to identify those motifs, so as not to attribute them to the reading of
Eustace, whose Classical Tour had not been published yet.
Following the description of the Venetian moors, hills, waterfalls and
forest, the characters enter Venice at the end of chapter twelve:
Meanwhile they had arrived at the Brenta. The Brenta’s stream glided
silently beneath the midnight breeze towards the Adriatic.
Towering poplars, which loftily raised their spiral forms on its bank, cast a
gloomier shade upon the placid wave.
Matilda and Verezzi entered a gondola, and the grey tints of approaching
morn had streaked the eastern ether before they entered the Grand Canal at
Venice; and passing the Rialto, proceeded onwards to a small, though not
inelegant mansion, in the eastern suburbs. (2002, 92)
In the following chapter, Matilda and Verezzi then attend the festival at St
Mark’s Place:
The evening was serene. Fleecy clouds floated on the horizon – the moon’s
full orb, in cloudless majesty, hung high in the air, and was reflected in
silver brilliancy by every wave of the Adriatic as, gently agitated by the
evening breeze, they dashed against innumerable gondolas which crowded
the Laguna. […]
Every eye which gazed on the fairy scene beamed with pleasure;
unrepressed gaiety filled every heart but Julia’s, as, with a vacant stare,
unmoved by feelings of pleasure, unagitated by the gaiety which filled
every other soul, she contemplated the varied scene. A magnificent
gondola carried the Marchesa di Strobazzo; and the innumerable flambeaus
which blazed around her rivalled the meridian sun. […]
266 15
The spacious canal was crowded with gondolas; merriment and splendour
reigned around; enchanting harmony stole over the scene; but, listless to
the music, heeding not the splendour, Matilda sat lost in a maze of thought.
[…]
Meanwhile, the hour was late, the moon had gained the zenith, and poured
her beams vertically on the unruffled Adriatic when the gondola stopped
before Matilda’s mansion. (92-95)
The function of Venice and St Mark’s Piazza is above all dramatic:

typically, the serenity, beauty and “gaiety” of Venice contrast with the
inner torments that cut off the focal characters from their environment.
The outsider, especially Matilda who is a criminal, is trapped in her inner
geography, which is described as a “maze” (Julia is for her part “immersed
in thought”). The metaphor is actually metonymic, since it actually reflects
the “labyrinth of walls” and canals, as Shelley described them eight years
later in “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills.” Like the Poet in
“Alastor,” she can only empathise with the creations of her own soul, a
Romantic theme, the Wordsworthian fear of not being able to sympathise
with external nature, which is also human in Shelley’s poetry.
Venice is typically Gothic here: on the one hand, it makes the diegesis
exotic, especially through the motif of the gondola, so that the reader
might be transported to a mysterious and unknown land; this exoticism
insisting on “pleasure” and “merriment” recalls the stereotyped Orient of
Gothic literature. Venice is also described as a “fairy scene,” all the more
so since Shelley had never been there. On the other hand, the “gloomy”
atmosphere, with its moon shining “vertically” and whose “orb” is
reflected by the “beaming” “eye[s]” of the Venetians, is dark enough to
contextualise and even influence Matilda’s decision to murder Julia.
Venice’s function is therefore more dramatic than aesthetic, in spite of the
“postcard” impression of its description in chapter XIII.
This first representation of the city displays formal as well as thematic
motifs that Shelley will use again in his future ekphrases and which
cannot, therefore, be attributed to Eustace or canto four of Byron’s Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818). To start with place names, “the Adriatic” is
mentioned a couple of times and described as “unruffled;” the “Laguna”
has an Italian ending (contrary to the English “Lagoon” and French
“Lagune,” see below), but “the Grand Canal”, “the Rialto” and “the
Brenta” are three names which Shelley will never use again.
Again, the romantic and exotic associations of those names as well as
the need for realistic details account for their presence, but the Canal,
bridge and river are barely described. Shelley does not even mention the
Lido, while it will play a prominent part in his later poems once he has
read Eustace and been to the city.
Curiously, however, “they entered the Grand Canal at Venice; and
passing the Rialto” announces Eustace who, “entering the city, rowed up
the grand canal, and passed under the Rialto” (see below), so that the
authors seem to follow the same transtextual map. Besides the verb
“enter” and “pass,” Eustace uses the past participle of “the unruffled
Adriatic.” In the 1818 edition of A Classical Tour, the change of “rowed
up the grand canal, and passed under the Rialto” into “passed under the
Rialto, and rowed up the grand canal,” only possibly justified by the
preposition “up” meaning the terminus, might even betray a wish to
conceal some (Gothic?) borrowing or plagiarism. However, whereas
Eustace describes a glowing sunset, Shelley prefers the “grey dawn,” then
night, highlighting the moon, and despite Julie’s “blazing” “meridian
sun”- like gondola (in Matilda’s eyes), “silver” overwhelms gold. Shelley
will also again use the verb “glide” for Venetian gondolas, but here he
actually describes the Brenta, although it might be a metonymy. Finally,
the motif of the mirror in his and Eustace’s later descriptions is already
there, although the poet does not use the verb “pave” yet – what Gérard
Genette (1982, 85-86) would call a “Shelleyism”, a stylistic trait or habit
(“tics stylistiques itératifs”): “was reflected in silver brilliancy by every
wave of the Adriatic.” The reflection on each wavelet that breaks the
moonlight, and the greyness of dawn, then the silver light of the moon, the
blazing fire of the “flambeaus” and the darkness of the night also contrast
with the homogenous Laguna, Adriatic and gold of later tableaux.
Shelley will no longer use the poplars to describe the Venetian country
but Tuscany in “The Boat on the Serchio”. (1821, l. 53-54) Another
contrast is the “innumerable gondolas which crowded the Laguna” in
chapter XIII, whereas in his 1818 letters and poems, the poet insists on the
absence of sound and people (“silence,” “you hear nothing,” “isles
depopulate,” “desert streets,” see below), even though silence at the end of
chapter XII is echoed by the mute, musing characters of chapter XIII. As
in the 1818 letters, “the gondolier’s voice […] was the first interruption of
the silence,” but the narrator means the silence that cuts off the three
characters and especially Verezzi from the “music,” “harmony” and
“merriment” of the scene. The change of viewpoint accounts for this
difference: apart from “Ode to Naples” (1820), in which the streets of
Venice are “desert,” it is more particularly the surrounding islands that are
“depopulate[d]” in Shelley’s later poems, where the predominant
viewpoint is outside the city, not inside as in Zastrozzi. Whereas Matilda,
Verezzi and Julia are among the crowd – yet without really belonging to it
268 15
–, the 1818 poet shuns it. This impacts greatly on the representation of the
city.
For instance, the gondolas are more picturesque than the “coffins” of
Shelley’s 1818 letters, even though the blazing “flambeaus” of Julia’s
evoke Hell to Matilda, or a funeral bark, all the more so since it carries her
future victim: “A magnificent gondola carried the Marchesa di Strobazzo;
and the innumerable flambeaus which blazed around her rivalled the
meridian sun.” Still, the narrator prefers to compare it to a “meridian sun,”
which, besides, is apt to exasperate Matilda: “The dark fire which flashed
from her eye more than told the feelings of her soul as she fixed it on her
rival.” The gondola is therefore ambivalent, like the fate of Julia, who may
at that point live or die. The gondola also anticipates on the “frail bark” of
“Alastor” (1815) through the motif of speed: “the gondola rapidly passed
onwards but, immersed in thought, Matilda and Verezzi heeded not its
rapidity.” The “Alastor” Poet does not drown but eventually dies, so
although the gondolas are more picturesque here, due to the motifs of the
“flambeaus” and of the festival, they are already related to death, which
partly accounts for the simile of the 1818 letters.
Other motifs are absent here, like the personification of the city,
although the serene night air is turned into a zephyr (“Exquisite harmony,
borne on the pinions of the tranquil air, floated in varying murmurs”); the
description of Venice as an archipelago, since the narrator only evokes
“eastern suburbs,” which Shelley will never mention again; and especially
the many edifices. In Zastrozzi, Shelley does mention “the clock at St
Mark’s” that slowly “toll[ed] the revolving hours” and Matilda’s mansion,
but that is about it and, due to the different viewpoint, he rather focuses on
the interior, like the ubiquitous sofa whose main function is for the
characters to throw themselves onto it out of Gothic or sentimental
despair. Similarly, it is the interior of the prison of the Inquisition, “the
Consiglio dei Dieci” which is described in chapter XIV:
One of them bore a lamp whose rays, darting in uncertain columns,

showed, by strong contrasts of light and shade, the extreme massiveness of
the passages.
The Gothic frieze above was worked with art, and the corbels, in various
and grotesque forms, jutted from the tops of clustered pilasters. (2002, 104-
105)
Like the 1818 gondolas, the madhouse of “Julian and Maddalo” might
have found a prototype here, all the more so since it has a belfry tower
with a bell like the clock of St Mark’s “toll[ing] / In strong and black
relief” (lines 105-106) and since the narrator insists on darkness (“gloomy
prisons,” “a lamp”) to suggest an edifice not unlike the “windowless,

deformed, and dreary pile” (l. 101) of the later poem. Shelley, however,
seems to draw inspiration from the cathedrals he saw in England or read
about in Gothic novels. He already uses the chiaroscuro that features so
prominently in his ekphrases of Italian paintings (“strong contrasts of light
and shade”) and the architectural terms “corbels,” which he will never use
again, “columns”, unless he means the candlelight, “pilasters,” which it is
not certain that he distinguishes from columns, and the classic “frieze.”
What matters here is the gloomy “Gothic” motif.
Shelley’s first version of Venice is thus a fantasy, since he had never
actually seen it, modelled on descriptions and stock-motifs he had
probably read about and places he himself had seen. It has a more dramatic
than aesthetic function, conveying exoticism, a gloomy atmosphere and
above all helping characterise the three participants by highlighting their
psychological states. Yet the fictional ekphrasis shows elements that he
will use again to describe a city he has eventually lived in, and even
prototypes of some of the most important motifs of his later descriptions.
2. Shelley's experienced Venice: Aesthetics and Symbolism

Since Eustace describes Venice in the beginning of his book and since
Shelley visited and described the view of the city just after reading A
Classical Tour in August 1818 (M Shelley 1947, 103), a transtextual or
comparative study is tempting:
About five o’clock we arrived at Fusina, on the shore of the Lagune [the
shallows that border the whole coast, and extend round Venice (n.)],
opposite Venice. This city instantly fixed all our attention. It was [then]
faintly illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, and rising from the waters
with its numberless domes and towers, attended, if I may be allowed the
expression, by several lesser islands, each crowned with [its] spires and
pinnacles, [it] presented the appearance of a vast city, seated [floating] on
the [very] bosom of the ocean. We embarked, and gliding over the Lagune,
whose surface unruffled by the slightest breeze, was as smooth as the most
polished glass, [we] touched at the island of St. Georgio [Giorgio,] half
way, that is two miles from the main land on one side, and from Venice on
the other, and then entering the city, rowed up the grand canal, [ļ] and
passed under the Rialto; admiring as we advanced, the various architecture
and vast edifices that line its sides.1
Some of the motifs I have italicised found their way into Shelley’s letters
and poems. The poet first describes Venice in a letter to Mary Shelley
270 15
written on August 23rd, 1818, and then in another to Thomas Love

Peacock dated October 8th:
So he [Byron] took me in his gondola […] across the laguna to a long

sandy island [Lido] which defends Venise [sic] from the Adriatic. When
we disembarked, we found his horses waiting for us, & we rode along the
sands of the sea talking.
Venice is a wonderfully fine city. The approach to it over the laguna with
its domes & turrets glittering in a long line over the blue waves is one of
the finest architectural delusions in the world. It seems to have – and
literally it has – its foundations in the sea. The silent streets are paved with
water, & you hear nothing but the dashing of the oars & the occasional
curses of the gondoliers. […] The gondolas themselves are things of a most
romantic and picturesque appearance; I can only compare them to moths of
which a coffin might have been the chrysalis. (1964 II, p. 36, 42-43, italics
mine)
The August letter to Mary is worth quoting, as it shows the inspiration for
the gondola sailing across the Laguna after the ride on the “sandy island”
in “Julian and Maddalo,” but there is not enough description for any
echoes of Eustace, except for the Lido that “protects the city […] against
[…] the Adriatic.” (Eustace 1813, 74) Byron and Shelley indeed leave
Venice and head eastwards, contrary to Eustace. There are more echoes,
some admittedly inevitable, in the October letter to Peacock, first the
entrance into the city over the Laguna (“over the Lagune… entering the
city” / “approach of it over the laguna”), although the spelling is different
– it will be again in the poem –, then the cityscape (“domes and towers” /
“domes & turrets”) and the line of edifices along the canal (“that line its
sides” / “in a long line”), two of them absent in Zastrozzi and all now in
Eustace’s style. The “foundations in the sea” and the verb “paved with
water,” however, do not really echo the verbs “rising” and “seated on” in
A Classical Tour, especially if Shelley had read the 1818 edition, in which
“seated” is replaced by the less static “floating.” “domes & turrets” and the
replacement of the preposition “across” of the first letter by “over [the
Laguna]” in the second yet suggest that the poet could be remembering the
book two months after reading it, but he here completes the visual and
tactile description with sounds, while omitting the effect of sunset.
“Julian and Maddalo” was begun in late August, but most of it was
apparently written in December, while the epigraph, preface and Maniac’s
soliloquy were composed in the first half of 1819 (Shelley 1989-2011, II,
655):
I rode one evening with Count Maddalo

Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: – a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds
Is this: – an uninhabitable sea-side,
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons, and no other object breaks
The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes
Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes
A narrow space of level sand thereon,
Where ’twas our wont to ride while day went down. […]
– Meanwhile the sun paused ere it should alight,
Over the horizon of the mountains; – Oh
How beautiful is sunset, when the glow
Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee,
Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!
Thy mountains, seas and vineyards and the towers
Of cities they encircle! […]
Looking upon the evening and the flood
Which lay between the city and the shore
Paved with the image of the sky… the hoar
And aery Alps towards the North appeared
Through mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark reared
Between the East and West; and half the sky
Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry
Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew
Down the steep West into a wondrous hue
Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent
Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent
Among the many-folded hills: – they were
Those famous Euganean hills, which bear
As seen from Lido through the harbour piles
The likeness of a clump of peakèd isles –
And then – as if the Earth and Sea had been
Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen
Those mountains towering as from waves of flames
Around the vaporous sun, from which there came
The inmost purple spirit of light, and made
Their very peaks transparent. “Ere it fade,”
Said my companion, “I will show you soon
A better station”– so, o’er the lagoon
We glided, and from that funereal bark
I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark
How from their many isles in evening’s gleam
272 15
Its temples and its palaces did seem

Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven. […]
I looked, and saw between us and the Sun
A building on an island; such a one
As age to age might add, for uses vile;
A windowless, deformed and dreary pile
And on the top an open tower, where hung
A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung,
We could just hear its coarse and iron tongue:
The broad sun sank behind it, and it tolled
In strong and black relief […]. The broad star
Of day meanwhile had sunk behind the hill;
And the black bell became invisible;
And the red tower looked grey; and all between,
The churches, ships, and palaces, were seen
Huddled in gloom; into the purple sea
The orange hues of heaven sunk silently. (1-138, ibid., 663-670, italics
mine)
In the poem, Shelley restores the westward view of A Classical Tour,

since both the island of San Giorgio, from which Eustace sets sail, and the
Lido, from which Julian and Maddalo approach Venice, are east of the
mouth of the Grand Canal.
The first echo is the first person autodiegetic narrator (“we” / “I,”
“our”), which likens the poem to a travel narrative. The diegesis is thus
rooted in reality, all the more so since it is partly autobiographical (“[…]
we rode along the sands of the sea talking”). Several of Eustace’s motifs
also find their way into the poem, the smooth surface of the Laguna over
which the gondola glides, the city resting on or rising from the “ocean,”
the numberless buildings turned into islands by the liquid streets and, as
Ralph Pite already noted in “Shelley in Italy” (2004), the gleam of the
setting sun, while its omission and the “blue waves” in Shelley’s October
letter suggested daytime. Pite argues that this verse rewriting of Eustace is
dramatic and helps characterise the more naïve Julian:
Julian’s first celebration of Venice is notably cliché. […] Maddalo

responds to this familiar, touristic enthusiasm by dryly promising “a better
station” which will reveal the tower of the Venetian madhouse silhouetted
against the setting sun. […] The poem’s language works against Julian,
making him sound as enthused as Eustace, as eager to disguise the
precarious or disgusting foundations of enchantment. (2004, 53)
Maddalo’s more obscure site indeed mirrors his darker, more cynical,
more experienced character: “I […] / Argued against despondency, but
pride / Made my companion take the darker side” (46-49), Julian says.
However, the opening of “Julian and Maddalo” is less a parody of Eustace
or tourists, than a celebration of Shelley’s experience (“It was delight to
ride by the lone sea” again, l. 550), otherwise, the poet would not have
used this sunset “cliché” again in “Lines Written among the Euganean
Hills” (1818). Indeed, Julian’s idealism and love of beauty, even if it
comes from A Classical Tour, are not derided by Shelley, but tested out
against Maddalo’s pessimism, one of the recurrent themes in the poet’s
work and life2. Shelley even seems to sigh out of relief when he describes
a more silent Venice than in Zastrozzi.
Ralph Pite’s interpretation is obviously influenced by the simile “Like
fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven,” whose source, he notes,3
is Shakespeare’s Tempest (IV, i, 151-152):
And like the baseless fabric of this vision

The cloud-capp’d Towers, the gorgeous Palaces,
The solemn Temples, the great Globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve […]. (Shakespeare 1994, 80)
The word “fabric,” which Shelley seldom uses for buildings, is not,
therefore, a “Eustacism” here. The poet also substitutes the word
“enchantment” – inspired by Byron’s “I saw from out the wave her
structure rise / As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand” in Childe
Harold (IV, 3-4, 1933, 28) – for “vision,” so that Venice also looks like a
fairy city. For Pite, this “self-rebuke” is a criticism of the fantasy visions
of tourists, including Shelley’s, encouraged by such authors as Eustace or
such painters as Richard Wilson. Indeed, Shelley speaks of “the finest
architectural delusion of the world” in his October letter, “The approach to
it over the Laguna with its domes & turrets glittering in a long line over
the blue waves.” The city, in the same letter, really seems to be built on
the sea, without any foundations that is, and in “Julian and Maddalo” the
Euganean Hills become “transparent.” Yet, Shelley was also really fond of
optical effects and the fine line dividing the tangible world of matter from
the intangible world of ideas. His castle in the sky is thus more a
hyperbole than a self-rebuke, and this fairy city is far cry from the cliché
“fairy scene” of Zastrozzi.
His description of the Laguna as “the flood / Which lay between the
city and the shore / Paved with the image of the sky” is reminiscent of the
moon which, in Zastrozzi, “was reflected in silver brilliancy by every
wave of the Adriatic”, but it is here superseded by “the Lagune whose
surface unruffled by the slightest breeze, was as smooth as the most
polished glass” in A Classical Tour, as Ralph Pite also notes. (Shelley
274 15
1989-2011, II, 667, n.) The verb “pave,” which Shelley had already used
in Laon and Cythna (1817: “From the swift lights which might that
fountain pave,” 3007 [IV, xx, 7], 1989-2011, II, 187), suggests yet another
source. It is also used in the October letter (“paved with water”), although
not for the Laguna but, as in the “unruffled Adriatic” of Zastrozzi, for the
sea. The smooth surface of the water makes it possible for the gondola to
“glide:” “so, o’er the lagoon / We glided” also recasts Eustace’s “gliding
over the [equally “unruffled”] Lagune,” with an anglicised “lagoon” this
time and a poetic inversion. The verb “glide,” which the poet only used to
describe the Brenta in his Gothic novella, may still evoke ghosts or a
fateful encounter, as suggested by the metaphor of “funeral bark.” In the
draft, the gondola is indeed described as “the most ghastly bark” (1989-
2011, II, 668, n.), while in the October letter it is compared to a coffin or
more precisely a moth: “I can only compare them to moths of which a
coffin might have been the chrysalis” (quoted by Pite). This announces the
Maniac’s mental, then physical death, as well as Julian’s mental
metamorphosis or at least enlightenment, like Aeneas and Dante crossing
the Acheron. It also reflects the mood of the poet at the time, as his
daughter Clara died in late September. The one year old child had been
carried in various gondolas and, like the moth, was indeed short-lived. She
was buried on the Lido, and the precedent of Zastrozzi completes the
picture.
So, Eustace’s account of a November evening, when it is already
getting dark at five, probably better fits the gloomy mood of “Julian and
Maddalo” than Shelley’s daytime account in August: “faintly illuminated
by the rays of the setting sun” thus becomes “The sun was sinking” (35),
“The broad sun sunk”, “The orange hues of heaven sunk silently”, “How
beautiful is sunset, when the glow / Of Heaven descends upon a land like
thee” or “in evening’s gleam / Its temples and its palaces,” with the noun
“evening” repeated three times and the participle “sunk” also three times
in Maddalo’s “better station.” Then, Shelley contrasts Eustace’s evening
“gleam” (“gleam,” “ere it fades”) with the dazzling sunlight behind the
Euganean Hills (“Brighter than burning gold”), before “gloom” settles. He
adds colour (“purple,” “gold,” “orange”), which evokes Milton’s Hell
lines 81-82 (“lake of fire,” “waves of flame”) and 41, where Julian
compares his conversation with Maddalo to the discourse “The devils held
within the dales of Hell,” since they talk about “God, freewill and
destiny.” (42) The warm light also cheers Julian up, like the conversation,
which is “forlorn / Yet pleasing.” The picture in Eustace and the opening
lines of the poem are not devoid of beauty, and Shelley expands on the so-
called “cliché” to unfold his ambivalent vision (like the gondola in
Zastrozzi), which becomes symbolic of the “Satanic school” and adds

what concreteness (Webb 1976, 103-104) is necessary for a realistic
setting.
Shelley also recalls Queen Mab (1813), which, according to Kelvin
Everest and G.M. Matthews (Shelley 1989-2011, I, 279-280), rewrites the
sea-shore scene in Robert Southey’s Madoc (1805):
‘When evening came, toward the echoing shore

I and Cadwallon walk’d together forth:
Bright with dilated glory shone the west;
But brighter lay the ocean-flood below,
The burnish’d silver sea, that heaved and flash’d
Its restless rays, intolerably bright.’ (Southey 1805, I, iii, 276-281, italics
mine)
If solitude hath ever led thy steps

To the wild ocean’s echoing shore,
And thou hast lingered there,
Until the sun’s broad orb
Seemed resting on the burnished wave,
Thou must have marked the lines
Of purple gold, that motionless
Hung o’er the sinking sphere:
Thou must have marked the billowy clouds
Edged with intolerable radiancy
Towering like rocks of jet
Crowned with a diamond wreath.
And yet there is a moment,
When the sun’s highest point
Peeps like a star o’er ocean’s western edge,
When those far clouds of feathery gold,
Shaded with deepest purple, gleam
Like islands on a dark blue sea; […]
Yet not the golden islands

Gleaming in yon flood of light,
Nor the feathery curtains
Stretching o’er the sun’s bright couch,
Nor the burnished ocean waves
Paving that gorgeous dome, […]
As Heaven, low resting on the wave, it spread
Its floors of flashing light,
Its vast and azure dome,
Its fertile golden islands
Floating on a silver sea (Queen Mab, II, 1-35, italics mine)
276 15
The “echoing shore” which Shelley borrows in Queen Mab from Southey
only survives in the silence disturbed by the gondoliers’ curses in the
October letter and the waves from which “sound like delight broke forth /
Harmonizing with solitude” (25-26) in “Julian and Maddalo.” The
“burnished [ocean] wave[s]” is also faintly echoed by the overall golden
hue of the later poem (“burning gold”). On the contrary, the “flashing”
light of the reflecting “flood” in Madoc (“brighter lay the ocean-flood,”
“flash’d / Its restless rays, intolerably bright”) and Queen Mab (“flood of
light,” “floors of flashing light”) as well as the “intolerable radiancy” of its
clouds are still very obvious in 1818: “the flood / Which lay between the
city and the shore / Paved with the image of the sky”, “Brighter than
burning gold.” Madoc can even be considered as a competing source for
“Julian and Maddalo,” as the two characters, including the narrator Julian,
evoke “I and Cadwallon,” and the evening, Southey’s. As the bright
clouds and paving water show, Queen Mab also crystallises certain motifs,
like the “purple gold” light of evening, which accounts for the addition of
“deepest purple” in “Julian and Maddalo,” the solidification of the ocean
through the words “pave” and “floors,” and the resting sun (“Meanwhile
the sun paused ere it should alight,” “Where the swift sun yet paused in his
descent / Over the horizon of the mountains”). The experience of Venice
and the reading of A Classical Tour thus concretise Shelley’s earlier castle
in the sky, Zastrozzi’s “fairy scene” and Mab’s “Fairy Hall,” which may
account for Julian’s – and the poet’s – wonder.
Eustace’s influence may also be seen in the description of Venice as an
archipelago of “temples and palaces”: there are “numberless domes and
towers” and it is “attended […] by several lesser islands, each crowned
with its spires and pinnacles.” In “Julian and Maddalo,” the quantifier of
“their many isles” echoes that of “several islands” but also the adjective of
“its numberless domes and towers,” with the possessive determiners
reverting the relation isles-buildings. Eustace’s “domes and towers” and
“spires and pinnacles” are condensed into Shelley’s “temples and palaces,”
which conflates the buildings on the islands with the buildings in Venice.
Despite that condensation of the setting, the motif of the islands
proliferates in the scenery of “Julian and Maddalo,” from the “heaped”
“hillocks” of “sand” that make up the Lido and recall the August letter (“a
long sandy island”), through the island on which the madhouse rises, to
the “peakèd isles” of the mountains, which could be described as islands
“crowned with spires and pinnacles,” to use Eustace’s phrase. The “domes
and towers” of Eustace and the October letter are not altogether absent
either, as Maddalo points to the “belfry tower” and “red tower” (106) of
the madhouse and as Julian later mentions “churches, ships, an palaces.”
Indeed, the word “pile,” which Shelley seldom uses as a noun, may have
been borrowed from Eustace, all the more so since the latter uses it to
describe the Lido. Julian’s view is characterised by a harmonious unity,
like the Turneresque passage from “dark purple” to “gold,” which Pliny
the Elder might call harmogen, or like the verb “harmonized” actually
used line 26 to refer to the harmony between sounds and silence. This
harmonious unity conveys the serenity of the place, which will then
contrast with the fragmented mind and soliloquy of the Maniac. If this
helps characterise the participants or, as in a symphony, creates themes,
movements and counterpoints, I insist that this has nothing to do with a
parody of Eustace or of Shelley’s early fantasy in Zastrozzi and Queen
Mab.
Indeed, Shelley reproduces that view inspired by Eustace in “Lines
Written among the Euganean Hills,” which was composed in October, the
same month as Shelley’s second letter on Venice:
Beneath is spread like a green sea

The waveless plain of Lombardy,
Bounded by the vaporous air,
Islanded by cities fair;
Underneath day’s azure eyes
Ocean’s nursling, Venice lies,
A peopled labyrinth of walls,
Amphitrite’s destined halls,
Which her hoary sire now paves
With his blue and beaming waves.
Lo! the sun upsprings behind,
Broad, red, radiant, half reclined
On the level quivering line
Of the waters crystalline;
And before that chasm of light,
As within a furnace bright,
Column, tower, and dome, and spire,
Shine like obelisks of fire,
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies;
As the flames of sacrifice
From the marble shrines did rise,
As to pierce the dome of gold
Where Apollo spoke of old.
Sun-girt City, thou hast been
Ocean’s child, and then his queen; […]
From thy throne, among the waves […]
278 15
O’er thine isles depopulate,

And all is in its ancient state,
Save where many a palace gate
With green sea-flowers overgrown
Like a rock of ocean’s own,
Topples o’er the abandoned sea
As the tides change sullenly.
The fisher on his watery way,
Wandering at the close of day,
Will spread his sail and seize his oar
Till he pass the gloomy shore,
Lest thy dead should, from their sleep
Bursting o’er the starlight deep,
Lead a rapid masque of death
O’er the waters of his path.
Those who alone thy towers behold
Quivering through aërial gold, [...] (90-143, 1989-2011, II, 433-435, italics
mine)
The gloomy atmosphere of “Julian and Maddalo” reappears at the end of

this extract, which also describes a sunset (“close of day”), but although
the “dead” leaping before the lone “fisher” from the shore of what was the
Lido in the other poem may include little Clara, buried barely a week
before composition, the view here is more political or “historiographical”
(Colbert 2005, 142); now that it is under the dominion of the Austrians,
Venice has lost its former grandeur.
The rest of the extract, though, describes sunrise, and the poet now
looks east towards the city and the Adriatic Sea. Still, the evening gleam
and dazzling western sunset of “Julian and Maddalo” are again found in
“Lo! the sun upsprings behind, / Broad, red, radiant, […]” and “And
before that chasm of light, / As within a furnace bright, / Column, tower,
and dome, and spire,” where “radiant” recalls “intolerable radiancy” in
Queen Mab, and the more Coleridgian “chasm of light,” “flood of light.”
The “furnace bright” also evokes the “lake of fire” and “burning gold” in
“Julian and Maddalo.” Because of the new eastward view, the reflecting
Laguna before the city now extends to the “chasm of light” of the
reflecting sea or ocean beyond it. Consequently, the backlighting of the
Euganean Hills and of the madhouse is transferred to the towers of Venice.
That Shelley transfers the sunset to the east in order to describe the sunrise
can also be seen in the transformation of “peaks… transparent” into
“obelisks of fire / Pointing with inconstant motion” and “towers /
Quivering through aerial gold,” in which the adjective “inconstant”
(recalling the “uncertain columns” of candlelight in Zastrozzi) and
participle “quivering” at once refer to the towers reflected in the slightly

ruffled water and to the forms vanishing in the light behind them. As to the
substitution of towers for peaks, they often refer to the same paradigm in
Shelley’s poetry: in this very poem, there is “a palace gate… / Like a
rock.” The colours “red” and “golden” also echo the “purple” and “gold”
of Queen Mab and “Julian and Maddalo,” whereas the colour “rose” has
more often been used since Homer to describe dawn. In Queen Mab, for
instance, Shelley describes Sleep as “[…] rosy as the morn / When throned
on ocean’s wave / It blushes o’er the world.” (I, 5-7, 1988-2011, I, 270-
271) In Zastrozzi, he had used yet another colour, “the grey tints of
approaching morn.” In “Lines…,” “sapphire-tinted” is also substituted for
“dark purple” and, like “azure,” might also refer to an evening or night
sky, as is often the case in his poetry, so that the sunrise is again
ambiguous. The meaning of the panorama, sunrise, thus changes, but the
poetic form, sunset, remains – or vice-versa if Shelley composed “Julian
and Maddalo” after “Lines…” This form has now become one of the main
emblems of Venice, hence its presence in both poems. The adjective “Sun-
girt” may not, therefore, be an error of transcription for “sea-girt,” as
surmised by the editors. They note that “sea-girt” is used by Milton and
Byron (Shelley 1989-2011, II, p. 434, n.), but Shelley might only have
used the idea of a compound adjective and offered his own version.
That the sunrise looks like a sunset is not only ambivalent from a
formal point of view: on the one hand, Venice looks as if it could never
rise again; on the other hand, the sunset poetic form constitutes a
transcendent picture that suggests that Venice’s glory has not totally
faded.4
As to the motifs inherited from Queen Mab and thus Madoc, the fact
that Shelley remembers poems written five years before – which is not that
long after all – shows how resilient his poetic forms can be. As in Queen
Mab and the October letter, Shelley again uses the verb “pave,” which
solidifies water, like Eustace’s polished mirror. Indeed, Shelley’s sea,
which ultimately replaces the Laguna, is like a mirror, since the “blue and
beaming” waves of ocean reflect the “azure eyes” of the sky: “Which her
hoary sire now paves / With his blue and beaming waves.” As often in his
poetry, it is the transparency (“crystalline”) of the unruffled water which
makes it possible to reflect the light from the sky.
Despite its towers vanishing in sunlight, Venice is solidified by that
verb, as well as by Eustace’s “domes and towers” and “spires and
pinnacles,” which are this time found in a similar list, “tower, and dome,
and spire,” to which Shelley adds “column[s],” “palace gate[s]” and even a
“marble shrine,” in a simile that likens Venice to Apollo’s temple at
280 15
Delphi. The symbolism is obvious: Venice, at least free Venice, is an heir

to the democratic Greek cities. Apollo, of course, is the sun – and poetry.
The next motif borrowed from A Classical Tour in this poem is the
building of the city on the sea, although a visitor will inevitably have this
impression, since it actually is. Still, Eustace also resorts more or less
deliberately to anthropomorphism: “a vast city, seated [floating] on the
[very] bosom of the ocean.” While in “Julian and Maddalo” the poet only
uses the verbs “pave” and “piled” (“Like fabrics of enchantment piled to
heaven”), and in the October letter he only insists on the concreteness of
the foundations (“It seems to have – and literally it has – its foundations in
the sea”), he also personifies Venice in “Lines…,” where “Underneath
day’s azure eyes / Ocean’s nursling, Venice lies,” “Amphitrite’s destined
halls.”
It is in fact the juxtaposition of the static sitting motif (“seated” in
Eustace, “lies” and “throne” in Shelley, but see Byron below) and the
description of the sea as a parent that suggests Eustace, since Shelley
already used the static verb “resting” to describe Mab’s “faery hall” (and
“throned” for the rising sun). If there is nothing original in the
mythological personification of a city or in the dead metaphor “Ocean’s
bosom,” Shelley seems to transfer this anthropomorphism to the sky or
“day,” using the opposite preposition “Underneath” and substituting
“eyes” for the “bosom:” “Underneath day’s azure eyes.” Like Mab’s hall,
Venice is also a city in the sky. The idea of a nourishing bosom, though, is
still obvious in “Ocean’s nursling” and “Ocean’s child,” which both echo
the genitive of “Ocean’s bosom.” Perhaps the addition of Amphitrite in
Shelley’s poem aims at restoring Ocean’s gender (“thy sire”), which is
equivocal in Eustace’s dead metaphor. From Eustace, therefore, Shelley
might have taken the hint to make an Oceanid of Venice, similarly to Asia,
Ione and Panthea, who, like the city “rising from the waters,” also rise
from the sea in “Prometheus Unbound” in the same manner as Venus
Anadyomene. Indeed, like Venice, their names refer to place names, even
Panthea, who, in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1596), is a fairy city.5
Although the Eustacism “crowned with [its spires and pinnacles],”
which, like the metaphor “attended by,” contributes to the personification
of Venice in Eustace’s account, is not used in the poem either, Venice is
described by Shelley as Ocean’s “queen.” As Kelvin Everest and G.M.
Matthews note (1989-2011, II, 434), Venice used to be called the “Queen
of the Adriatic” (“regina del Adriatico”) or of Italy (“Italum regina”). In
the fourth canto to Childe Harold, Byron, who also rewrites Eustace (see
the “correction” of the gondoliers no longer singing Tasso, lines 19-20),
translates this into “A ruler of the waters and their powers” and actually
appears a more direct source for Shelley when the lord describes Venice as
an Anadyomene “sea-Cybele, fresh from ocean, / Rising with her tiara of
proud towers” who “sate in state, throned on her hundred isles.” (1833, 28,
l. 9-13) Shelley thus develops Eustace’s personification thanks to Byron,
while resorting to a traditional representation which Ralph Pite might have
called a “cliché.” Mythological personification is more relevant in this
poem than in “Julian and Maddalo,” as “Lines…” is more politically
symbolical, like the other odes to Naples and Liberty.
Venice is again described as an archipelago, but this time, Shelley is
closer to Eustace when he explicitly means the isles “attending” the Queen
of the Adriatic, “thine isles depopulate.” Benjamin Colbert also notes this
borrowing and especially the motif of solitude:
Even Shelley’s image of “thine isles depopulate” (l. 127) with its ruined
“palace gate” (l. 129) and its superstitious “fisher” (l. 134) glosses
Eustace’s conclusion: “the population of Venice … will diminish, till …
this city shall become a superb solitude, whose lonely grandeur will remind
the traveller, that Venice was once great, and independent” (CT, 1:182-3).
(2005, 151)
As in “Julian and Maddalo,” the islands proliferate, since they can be

found in all Lombardy, which is at once compared to the sea or the
unruffled Laguna, “like a green sea / The waveless plain of Lombardy,”
“islanded by cities fair.” The past participle must be understood as “filled
with islands” rather than “transformed into an island,” which would not
make any sense. The harmonious unity in “Julian and Maddalo” is thus
again expressed through that continuity between the plain and the sea.
This actually stems from Shelley’s own description in the October letter,
as K. Everest and G.M. Matthews note: “We see before [us] the wide flat
plains of Lombardy, in which we see the sun & moon rise and set, & the
evening star, & all the golden magnificence of autumnal cloud.” (1964, II,
43) The adjective “waveless” in the poem transforms the “wide flat plains”
of the letter into a sea.
Shelley’s Venetian letters and poems are the traces of an epiphany,
through which the poet at once realises that some of the features of the city
he had imagined or borrowed were true to life, and that reality transcends
imagination. His map to Venice yet remains transtextual, as he is clearly
influenced by other texts, which he transforms to recreate motifs or
symbols. Some of them even develop beyond his two Venetian poems.
282 15
3. Towards Independent Venetian Motifs:

Propedeutic Geography
For instance, the verb “pave” evokes Venice even before the poet
mentions it in “Ode to Naples” (1820): “[…] the Sea / Which paves the
desert streets of Venice […].” (106-107, 1989-2011, III, 641) As in
“Lines…,” though, the Laguna has been replaced by the broader “Sea,”
which is more hyperbolic or sublime. The “desert streets” are also
reminiscent of the “uninhabitable sea-side” of “Julian and Maddalo” and
of “thine isles depopulate” of “Lines…,” but in “Ode to Naples” Shelley
actually transfers the solitude of the shores to the city. Although in
“Lines…,” Venice was described as a “peopled labyrinth,” it was the
“dead” (138) and “mouldering” “human forms” (149, 146) that actually
peopled the labyrinth. “Ode to Naples” in fact rewrites the October letter,
in which “[…] the silent streets are paved with water, & you hear nothing
but the dashing of the oars & the occasional curses of gondoliers.” In the
two poems, the deserted city symbolises its loss of grandeur.
It is thus possible to recognise Venice even when it is not named, as in
“Ode to Liberty” (1820), 61-70:
Athens arose: a city such as vision

Builds from the purple crags and silver towers
Of battlemented cloud, as in derision
Of kingliest masonry: the ocean-floors
Pave it; the evening sky pavilions it; […]
A divine work! Athens diviner yet
Gleamed with its crest of columns […] (1989-2011, III, p. 393-394, italics
mine)6
Venice enables Shelley to concretise and solidify his city “of battlemented
cloud,” which is not only compared to, but is his vision of Athens, since he
had never visited it. The “castle in the sky,” therefore, but also the verb
“pave,” used once again for watery streets, the “ocean-floors” recalling
Southey’s “ocean-flood” and Mab’s halls, the “purple” clouds belonging
to the same paradigm as towers (“battlemented”), like the Alps sustaining
the sky in “Julian and Maddalo,” obviously suggest the poet’s Venice. The
motifs inherited from Eustace and Byron can even be found here, like the
“evening” sky, although it was already present in Madoc and Queen Mab,
the “gleam,” the “towers” and Cybele’s “crest of columns”. The verb
“arose” echoes the verb “rise” in A Classical Tour, Childe Harold and
“Lines…” so that Athens, like Venice, is described as yet another Oceanid
Cybele or Venus Anadyomene. If there is “self-rebuke” in Shelley’s
description of Venice, it is more appropriate in this poem, where the poet

shows the limits of his fantasy of an ideal city made up of concrete
elements that do not belong to it: Athens is “diviner yet.” Although the
diegesis is Italianized by those Venetian motifs, the poet finds another
opportunity to recollect their beauty in tranquillity.
Shelley uses the verb pave in “Prometheus Unbound,” also begun in
late August 1818, but without referring to a city: “His footsteps paved the
world with light” (I, 767); “Sister of her whose footsteps pave the world /
With loveliness.” (II, i, 68-69, 1989-2011, II, 522, 530) This is worth
quoting, though, as it sheds light on the motif: like Eustace’s “polished
glass,” water expanses such as the Venetian Laguna or the bay of Baia
reflect Love’s or Asia’s light and thus make the Earth as beautiful as the
Ideal, now that Prometheus has rejected hatred. What is at stake, therefore,
is the anchoring of the Ideal to the earth. Thus, when in Act IV Earth’s
light is communicated to, and regenerates, the Moon (“The love which
paves thy path along the skies,” 522, 645), it is the whole planet which is
paved with Love’s mirrored light. The symbolic motif reappears in “A
Vision of the Sea” (1819), “The Cloud” and “The Witch of Atlas” (1820)
with more explicit references to lakes and seas, but as in “Prometheus
Unbound”, the influence of Eustace and William Collins is left behind,
even forgotten, and the motif has gained its independence.
Similarly, the only other mention of the Laguna, in “Peter Bell the Third”
(1820), no longer displays the reflection motif, so that new symbolism
“regenerates” the form:
So thought Boccaccio, whose sweet words might cure a

Male prude like you from what you now endure, a
Low-tide in soul, like a stagnant laguna. (IV, 330-332)
The swamp-like low-tide, although its “stagna[tion]” is reminiscent of the

“unruffled” Adriatic, has nothing to do with the Venetian reflection of the
Ideal. Besides, Boccaccio is Florentine and, despite the Italian ending, “a
laguna” has also become a common noun that does not necessarily refer to
Venice. Still, if the poet has the city in mind, he then implicitly opposes
the poet Peter/Wordsworth at his lowest – as suggested by the stammering
repetition of the feminine rhyme “a” – to the better one at the other end of
the “moral” range, the Venetian Byron.
Some of the Venetian motifs thus survive the description of the city to
assume a life of their own.
284 15
Conclusion
The evolution of the representation of Venice in Shelley’s poetry is of
course first and foremost due to the poet’s visit of the city in 1818; what
was mainly fantasy geography eventually turned into realistic, even
autobiographical geography. Yet, the evolution is not that clear-cut. The
names used in Zastrozzi, like the Rialto, or the reference to the clock of St
Mark’s already had a realistic function, while the “fairy” city is still
present in the Venetian poems: Venice is still a Panthea, because reality
matches or transcends fiction. Some of the early Venetian motifs thus
survived the discovery of the city, firmly rooted in Shelley’s repeated
poetical practice, each poem developing the motifs or elaborating new
ones, as Queen Mab did, until some of those poetic forms became
independent, like poetic atoms constituting new meaning. As from
nothing, nothing comes, Shelley did not so much invent them as recreate
them, so that his map to Venice is also transtextual, from the Gothic
(fictional) accounts of the city to the “tours” in prose or verse he read
before or while in Italy.
References
BYRON, George Gordon. 1833. The Works of George Gordon Byron: In
Verse and Prose, Including his Letters and Journals, etc. with a Sketch
of his life. Halleck Fitz-Greene (ed). New York: George Dearborn.
COLBERT, Benjamin. 2005. Shelley’s Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic
Vision. Farnham, Burlington [VT]: Ashgate.
EUSTACE, John Chetwode. 1813. A Tour Through Italy, Exhibiting a View
of its Scenery, its Antiquities, and its Monuments, Particularly as they
Are Objects of Classical Interest and Elucidation: With an Account of
the Present State of its Cities and Towns; and Occasional
Observations on the Recent Spoliations of the French. 2 Vols. London:
John Mawman.
—. 1818. A Tour Through Italy. 4th Edition. 4 Vols. Leghorn: Glaucus
Masi.
GENETTE, Gérard. 1982. Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré.
Paris: Le Seuil.
HUNGERFORD, Edward B. 1941. Shores of Darkness. New York:
Columbia University Press.
PAUSANIAS. 1784. The Description of Greece. 3 Vols. Thomas Taylor
(trans.). London: Richard Faulder.
PITE, Ralph. 2004. “Shelley in Italy”, Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing.

The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 34. David Seed (ed). Leeds:
Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association,
46-60.
—. 2013. “Shelley and Italy”, The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe
Shelley. Michael O’Neill, Anthony Howe and Madeleine Callaghan
(eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 31-47.
PLINY THE ELDER (Caius Plinius Secundus). 1968. Natural History in Ten
Volumes. Harris Rackham (trans.). London: William Heinemann;
Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press.
RADCLIFFE, Anne. (1797). 2008. The Italian or the Confessional of the
Black Penitents: A Romance. Frederick Garber (ed). Introduction and
notes by E.J. Clery. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
SHAKESPEARE, William. (1610-11). 1994. The Tempest. London: Penguin
Books.
SHELLEY, Mary Wollstonecraft. (1814-22). 1947. Mary Shelley’s Journal.
Frederick Lafayette Jones (ed). Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press.
SHELLEY, Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Bysshe. 1817. A History of a Six
Weeks’ Tour through Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and
Holland: with Letters Descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva,
and of the Glaciers of Chamouni. London: T. Hookham, Jun., and C.
and J. Ollier.
SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe. (1840). 1964. The Letters of Percy Bysshe
Shelley. Frederick Lafayette Jones (ed). 2 Vols. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
—. 2000-2011. The Poems of Shelley. 3 Vols. Kelvin Everest et al (eds).
Harlow: Pearson Education.
—. (1810). 2002. Zastrozzi: A Romance. Foreword by Germaine Greer.
London: Hesperus Press.
SPENSER, Edmund. 1999. The Faerie Queene. Ware: Wordsworth
Classics.
WEBB, Timothy. 1976. The Violet and the Crucible: Shelley and
Translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
WINCKELMANN, Johann Joachim. 1801-1803. Œuvres complètes. 3 Vols.
Michael Huber (trans.). Henrick Jansen (ed). Paris: Chez Etienne Gide.
286 15
Notes
1
Eustace 1813, I, 66 and n., italics mine. There are a few additions (“it,” “we”),
suppressions (“then,” “its,” “very”) and changes (“floating,” “Giorgio,” the
inversion of “rowed up the grand canal, and passed under the Rialto”) in the 1818
edition (I, 182-184 and n.), as well as an extra note about the “Canal grande”
which the “Rialto crosses,” “one of its most conspicuous ornaments.”
2
In “Shelley and Italy” (2013), which studies the representations of Venice and
Padua in “Lines...” from a more political point of view, Pite seems less critical of
the opening ekphrasis, limiting the cliché to phrases like “sweet Venice” and
“bright Venice” (583), in “contrast with the detailed descriptions of the opening,”
and concludes: “Yet the logic of disillusionment is not followed through in this
poem and, in the remainder of Shelley’s output, he does not renounce or abandon
idealism […]” (2013, 43, 41, n. 25).
3
Ralph Pite (Shelley 1989-2011, II, 663-669) mentions other interesting sources
like Byron’s “Ode to Venice” (8-12) and Marino Faliero (II, ii, 111-113) for the
weeds of the Lido, and Samuel Rogers (Italy, “Venice,” 3-4) for those of the
palace gates.
4
Like Ralph Pite, Colbert’s earlier study of “Lines…” (2005, 142-158) is more
political: “Shelley’s poetical analysis of the Classical Tour engages seriously with
Eustace’s historiographical musings, often sympathetically, and weighs them
against Byron’s personalised account of Italy’s past and present. […], synthesising
through a Byron-Eustace dialectic his own cross-cultural understanding of the
relation between the modern British sightseer and sights seen, the alienated subject
and the outward signs of social, political, and intellectual mutability” (142). In that
perspective, “Light is a crucial motif. The poem begins at sunrise, culminates with
the dioramic effects of sunlight on the Venetian towers, and subsides as ‘noon
descends’ (l. 320). […] Light represents equilibrium between the subject and
object world that repudiates both Byronic solipsism and the empirical travel
writer’s quest for accuracy or objectivity” (146-147).
5
Spenser 1999, II, x, 73, p. 248. See E.B. Hungerford (1941, 182) who interprets
Asia, Ione and Panthea as the classical Ionian sea, the Black sea or Euxine and the
Caspian sea, at the foot of Caucasus, represented by Prometheus. The name of Asia
is even more obvious.
6
K. Everest quotes William Collins, Ode to Liberty (1747), 103-106: “Beyond yon
braided clouds that lie / Paving the light-embroidered sky, / Amidst the bright
pavilioned plains, / The beauteous model still remains,” which draws on Psalms
xviii, 11: “his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the
skies.” Collins may be the source for Shelley’s use of the verb “pave,” since the
verb is again found accompanied with the noun “pavilions” in “Prometheus
Unbound,” II, ii, 72-74: “Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave / The
oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools, / Are the pavilions where such dwell and
float” (Shelley 1989-2011, II, 546).
16
W.H. AUDEN AND THE MEZZOGIORNO
AURÉLIEN SABY
“Every good poem is very nearly a Utopia. Again, an

analogy, not an imitation; the harmony is possible
and verbal only.”
W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (71)
From 1948 to 1957, W.H. Auden (1907-1973) spent his summers on the
island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples, which, in the aftermath of the
Second World War, seemed like paradise. There, in the village of Forio, he
hosted other prominent artists – including Allen Ginsberg or Hans Werner
Henze –, far away from New York where he had settled in 1939. In her
personal memoir of that period, Thekla Clark1 notes that to the poet “Forio
qualified as a moderate Eden” (18), while James Merrill portrays Auden as
an eccentric character already subject to gossip on the island:
So we did our time on Ischia. In those years, W.H. Auden was that
island’s Prospero – invisible to us, though a compatriot of Rolf’s,
joining us for dinner on the terrace of the pensione, repeated this
season’s gossip about the increasingly eccentric genius.2 Many bottles
of wine had glazed over the miseries of the day. “But I mean!” I cried,
adopting Robert’s huffiest voice under the tipsy impression that any note
of solidarity would please him. “Auden goes too far. In New York he
wears his carpet slippers to the opera, with a dinner jacket. Being a great
poet doesn’t excuse that sort of affectation. Of course I’ve barely met him,
so it’s not for me to say…” (Merrill, 226)
Not only did Ischia inspire unprecedented verse spawning a new Anglo-
American literary geography of the Mezzogiorno, but it also allowed
Auden to meditate further on the close relationship between the concept of
utopia and artistic creation. My contention here is that the poems
dedicated to Southern Italy can easily be regarded as “very nearly utopian”
indeed. For one thing, they seem to offer an ideal world inspired from
288 16
Thomas More’s archetype as well as all literary utopias associated to

plenitude in idleness. For another, they also point to the tensions of the
context in which they were composed and to the dark side of History that
the poet refuses to overlook – hence reaching only “very near” perfection.
While endeavoring to redefine a landscape reminiscent of a dream home
where both the poet and his readers might fulfill and regenerate
themselves, they may approach the truth of a harmonious place only by
forcefully resisting the powers of evil and chaos through a personal “geo-
poieisis”.
1. A geo-poetic approach to Ischia

a) The Bay of Naples in the 1950s
With “Ischia” (1948, CP, 543-545), Auden’s approach to the island
differs from previous poems like “On this Island” (1935, CP, 130) or
“Pleasure Island” (1948, CP, 343) which did not refer explicitly to a
precise location. Here, the choice of a toponym as the title of the poem
testifies to a desire to find inspiration in a real place; and in that respect,
the poet somehow starts putting himself in a geographer’s shoes,
concerned about contextualizing the subject matter of his study. Before
focusing on the island of Ischia itself, it is important to note that Auden
wrote his poem in the aftermath of the Second World War. Naples had
been devastated by the Allied forces and was having trouble recovering
from its ruins and from the plague that had ravaged the city during its
liberation. This is illustrated by the following extracts from The Skin
composed in the late 1940s on Capri where Curzio Malaparte had his own
summer house, just a few miles away from Ischia across the water:
And yet everything that these magnificent soldiers touched was at once
corrupted. No sooner did the luckless inhabitants of the liberated
countries grasp the hands of their liberators than they began to fester
and to stink. It was enough that an Allied soldier should lean out of his
jeep to smile at a woman, to give her face a fleeting caress, and the same
woman, who until that woman had preserved her dignity and purity, would
change into a prostitute. It was enough that a child should put into its
mouth a candy offered to it by an American soldier, and its innocent soul
would be corrupted.
The liberators themselves were terrified and deeply affected by this
dire scourge. “It is human to feel compassion for the afflicted,” writes
Boccaccio in his introduction to the Decameron, with reference to the
terrible plague which swept Florence in 1348. But the Allied soldiers,
especially the Americans, faced with the pitiable spectacle of the
W.H. Auden and the Mezzogiorno 289
plague of Naples, did not feel compassion for the unhappy people of
that city: they felt compassion for themselves as well. […] The source of
the plague was in their compassion, in their very desire to help these
unfortunate people, to alleviate their miseries, to succor them in the
tremendous disaster that had overtaken them. The source of the disease
was in the very hand which they stretched out in brotherhood to this
conquered people. […]
Ragged boys, seated on the stone parapet which rose sheer from the
sea, sang with their eyes turned to the sky, their heads tilted slightly on
to their shoulders. Their faces were pale and thin, their eyes blinded
by hunger. They sang as the blind sing, their faces uplifted, their eyes
fixed upon the heavens. Human hunger has a wonderfully sweet, pure
voice. There is nothing human about the voice of hunger. (Malaparte, 34-
36)
Neither in “Ischia” nor in “Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno” (1958, CP,

642-645) does Auden deny those bleak living conditions in a horrifying
cityscape, and he is well aware of the crisis that had hit Southern Italy
during and after the war: “Not that you lie about pain or pretend that a
time / of darkness and outcry will not come back”. (“Ischia”, II, 53-54) He
had probably read Malaparte’s The Skin, and, as he wrote in The Dyer’s
Hand, when faced with hopeless confusion, “everybody wishes that this
world were not like that, that he could live in a world where desires would
conflict neither with each other nor with duties nor with the laws of nature,
and a great number of us enjoy imagining what such a world would be
like.” (409) Therefore, his poetry about the Mezzogiorno is first and
foremost aimed at redressing the imbalance of the world that surrounded
him, in which survival had barely become possible; hence his choice of an
island allowing him to keep chaos and evil at bay, at least temporarily.
b) “very nearly a Utopia”

For Auden, “every good poem is very nearly a Utopia”, and, of course,
“Ischia” is no exception to the rule. More’s Utopia indeed is not easily
accessible and remains cut off from the rest of the continent:
But the entry into the bay, occasioned by rocks on the one hand and
shallows on the other, is very dangerous. In the middle of it there is one
single rock which appears above water, and may, therefore, easily be
avoided; and on the top of it there is a tower, in which a garrison is kept;
the other rocks lie under water, and are very dangerous. The channel
is known only to the natives; so that if any stranger should enter into
the bay without one of their pilots he would run great danger of
shipwreck. (More, 32)
290 16
As for Ischia, it stands out as a kind of immune outpost, as Thekla Clark

humorously points out, warning us against crossing the bay when the sea
is rough:
Crossing even this small expanse of water was considerably less

pleasant in bad weather. Custom decreed that once seated the passengers
left their seats only to disembark. When necessary they turned their heads
aside and threw up on the floor, noisily and cheerfully. Among the regular
passengers there was almost a competition: ‘Aai, was I sick today!’
inferred superiority over the less sensitive. Rivers of pasta asciutta flowed.
The crew members would get busy with buckets of sand and extraordinary
goodwill. The passengers not actively sick sucked on enormous lemons
and groaned. How the Italians ever had a navy… (Clark, 6)
Truman Capote further depicts Ischia as a place entirely distinct from the
rest of the Mezzogiorno and mainly peopled by locals, unlike Capri which
is “the tourist catch-all”:
Consequently, we watched the chalky façade of Naples fade with

mixed anticipation. It was a classic day, a little cold for southern Italy in
March, but crisp and lofty as a kite, and the Princepessa spanked across
the bay like a sassy dolphin. It is a small civilized boat with a tiny bar and
a somewhat outré clientele: convicts on their way to the prison island of
Procida or, at the opposite extreme, young men about to enter the monastery
on Ischia. Of course, there are less dramatic passengers: islanders who have
been shopping in Naples; here and there a foreigner – extraordinarily
few, however: Capri is the tourist catch-all. (Capote, 45)
Auden’s verse only relates Ischia to the bay of Naples by alluding to it as a

distant threat (“Vesuvius, / looming across the bright bland bay”, “Ischia”,
II, 39-40), associating evil to the “soiled productive cities” (I, 21) of the
continent, notably Naples that was worthy of Sodom and Gomorrah at that
time. As in More’s archetype, the poet’s goal is to contemplate a
“Secondary World”3 – a microcosm reserved to a happy few –, intended to
counterbalance the disorder of history, whose destructive menace
nonetheless haunts each and every line, just as looming Vesuvius haunts
the Mezzogiorno.
c) An “Eutopia”
This “Secondary World” may easily be regarded as what Michael
Edwards calls an “Eutopia” – i.e. a “Good Place”, so often glimpsed in
Auden’s work4:
Here always is, for our own good, a partly human work of fiction. Here
does not aim at becoming a utopia (corresponding to nothing but the dream
of an ideal place whose non-existence is pointed out by the very shape of
the word – ou-topos – meaning “a place that does not exist”), but an
eutopia, i.e. a good place. […] I for one think that we all have caught a
glimpse at an eutopia, at a certain time of our lives when either a
human being or a landscape, a street, an object or some light suddenly
seems strange. And I strongly believe that art is meant to sound
eutopias and to make us aware of them. (Edwards 2011, 36-37, my
translation)
“Ischia” delineates a scenery where life seems good, easy and sweet. Yet,
for this purpose, Auden adopts what Bertrand Westphal calls “a geo-
critical approach” (see Collot, 88-92), which is quite unusual in his work;
and his description of Ischia corroborates Jean-Pierre Richard’s definition
of the poetic landscape:
According to Jean-Pierre Richard, the word landscape does obviously not

refer to the place or places where writers lived or traveled and that
they may have described in their works, but to a certain vision of the
world, closely related to their style or sensitivity. A landscape does not
call such or such referent to mind; instead, it means a group of signifieds
and a literary construction. (Collot, 100, my translation)
Both Westphal and Richard focus on the intimate relationships between

the world and literary creation, paying great attention to the natural
elements of the landscapes that inspire the poet’s imagination. With
“Ischia” and “Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno”, one might argue that
Auden’s “geography is first and foremost a physical one, a writing of the
land, both concrete and imaginary.” (Collot, 100-101) Or, to put it in
Michel Chaillou’s words, “all daydreams bring a land” (Chaillou, 26), and
vice versa, “all lands stir the imagination.” (Collot, 101) For example,
when summering in Southern Italy, Auden starts celebrating a “re-created”
utopian motherland enjoying an ideal climate (“sun-drenched
Parthenopea”, “Ischia” I, 18; “your uniform light”, I, 24; “Always with
some cool space or shaded surface”, I, 45), in a beautiful setting that might
have been inspired from an artistic postcard (“What design could have
washed / with such delicate yellows / and pinks and greens your fishing
ports / that lean against ample Epomeo”, II, 26-29), with outstanding
views delighting the travelers’ eyes (“we / learn to simply wander about /
by twisting paths which at any moment reveal / some vista as an absolute
goal”, II, 35-38).
292 16
What is more, the rich soil provides one with earthly delights turning
Ischia into a Horn of Plenty on a par with Plato’s Atlantis:
tasting what bees

from the blossoming chestnut
or short but shapely dark-haired men
from the aragonian grape distil, your amber wine,

your coffee-colored honey, we believe that our
lives are […] welcome to us (“Ischia”, II, 46-51)
In these lines, the sense of profusion is highlighted by the numerous

plurals coupled with alliterations (notably in bilabial, guttural and plosive
consonants) conveying the liveliness of a Bacchanalia. Ischia is actually
nothing but the new version of a “Pleasure Island” with, among other
natural wonders, rejuvenating hot springs changing it into a temple of
sensual pleasures:
The boiling springs

which betray her secret fever,
make limber the gout-stiffened joint
and improve the venereal act; (II, 30-33)
On this island, life is a permanent state of holiday or otium, where one is

liberated from worries and thinking – a place where one may be as
carefree as in childhood or in Eden:
your ambient peace

in any case is a cure […], ceasing to think
of a way to get on, we
learn to simply wander about (II, 33-36)
The present tense emphasizes the sense of suspension in an “eutopian”

world projected out of time through the harmony of the verse, with regular
iambic units (“your ambient peace”) set off at the end of lines inviting the
reader to take a break, so as to just enjoy a moment of poetic grace –
“ceasing to think / of a way to get on”.
Moreover, by delaying the introduction of the name of the island
(mentioned only on line 19), the poet elevates it to an object of desire
enhanced by a very astute enjambment: “my thanks are for you, / Ischia”.
Once reached, the island thus imposes itself as a sacred place of bliss and
merry-making where time seems to have stopped, as Truman Capote had

noticed in 1949:
Islands are like ships at permanent anchor. To set foot on one is like
starting up a gangplank: one is seized by the same feeling of charmed
suspension – it seems nothing unkind or vulgar can happen to you; and
as the Princepessa eased into the covelike harbor of Porto d’Ischia it
seemed, seeing the pale, peeling ice-cream colors of the waterfront, as
intimate and satisfying as one’s own heartbeat. In the wrangle of
disembarking, I dropped and broke my watch – an outrageous bit of
symbolism, too pointed: at a glance it was plain that Ischia was no place
for the rush of hours, islands never are. (Capote, 45)
Nevertheless, in Auden’s poems the suspended moments of happiness are

always surrounded by destructive forces threatening the harmony of the
text at each line.
2. The disenchanted island

a) “All is never well” (“Ischia”, I, 56)
One might blame Auden for offering a pale version of Arcadia, where
the characters are overacting in their roles of modern foreign shepherds,
playing the part of idle visitors awkwardly trying to experience the “Italian
way of life”. Yet, even if tourists are capable of averting their eyes from
the daily concerns of a foreign place, and take upon themselves the passer-
by’s immunity from feeling any obligation to love their temporary
neighbor, Auden refuses to take this stance, acknowledging that even in
this earthly paradise where he enjoys the privileged life of an outsider, “all
is never well”. Mention is made to Santa Restituta, the island’s patron
saint, about whom a local superstition persists, according to which there is
one unnatural death on the island every year – a forfeit demanded by the
saint as a blood sacrifice: “Restituta’s all-too-watchful eye, / whose annual
patronage, they say, is bought with blood.” (II, 61-62) The poem actually
ends with a propitiatory gesture declaring to the saint that “since / nothing
is free, whatever you charge shall be paid” (II, 64-65), reminding both the
speaker and the readers of their debt to “these days of exotic splendor” (I,
66) on Ischia.
Moreover, beyond the stereotypes opposing Northern and Southern
cultures which the poet conjures up before deriding them, his lines also
point to the endless search for a more authentic self:
294 16
Out of a gothic North, the pallid children

Of a potato, beer-or-whisky
Guilt culture, we behave like our fathers and come
Southward into a sunburnt otherwhere
[…]
Nevertheless – some believing amore
Is better down South and much cheaper
(Which is doubtful), some persuaded exposure
To strong sunlight is lethal to germs
(Which is patently false) and others, like me,

In middle-age hoping to twig from
What we are not what we might be next, […].
(“Good Bye to The Mezzogiorno”, II, 1-4 and 13-19)
In order to comment on these lines, and on the way they oppose two
groups (the visitors from “a gothic North” and the locals “down south”),
while underlining the artificiality of the Anglo-Saxons’ adaptation to
southern customs with received ideas in mind (“some believing amore / Is
better down South and much cheaper”), one could quote these remarks by
Thekla Clark:
We played the parts assigned to us, our unpronounceable names

changed by the Forians into indicators like lo scrittore, the writer; lo
studioso, the scholar; I was la biondona, the big blonde. The important
thing was to play the parts well. It was as though we lived in the third
person; we were what we appeared to be to others. Wystan studied it, I
reveled in it and Chester accepted it unquestioningly. […] [Yet] Wystan
was disappointed that, in spite of hints suggesting his availability, he had
never been asked to march in local religious processions. There was a part
of him that longed for a conventional life. It was what made him pay bills
upon receipt, answer letters by return and pretend that the house was in
order. He wasn’t concerned with appearances, it was ‘mother’ that he
answered to, ‘mother’ being that well-ordered family life that he
remembered and used as a standard. (Clark, 19-22)
No matter how much he may play with clichés, Auden is also capable of
putting them at a distance (literally in parenthesis in the stanzas quoted
above). In his poems, the parodies of travel literature or tourist guides
always end up indirectly pointing to a more authentic voice still looking
for itself… “hoping to twig from / What we are not what we might be
next.”
b) “noise / As a counter-magic”
Auden never yields to the easy temptation of shallow Arcadian poetry
for too long. If some of the lines of “Ischia” and “Good-Bye to the
Mezzogiorno” might seduce naive tourists by pandering to their
expectations, the “eutopian” spell always remains transient, the island
portrayed being only “very nearly” utopian indeed. His poetry is all the
more forceful as it often gathers both a dream world – sometimes
deliberately verging on mawkishness – and its downside, throwing light on
all its flaws immediately after the phase of enchantment. He repeatedly
insisted that poetry was not magic and that “in so far as poetry, or any
other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the
truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate” (The Dyer’s Hand, 27); and the
verse in “Ischia” and “Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno” does so by offering
a highly critical socio-poetic view of Southern Italy in the 1950s:
To “go southern”, we spoil in no time, we grow

Flabby, dingily lecherous, and
Forget to pay bills: that no one heard of them
Taking the Pledge or turning to Yoga
Is a comforting thought – in that case, for all

The spiritual loot we tuck away,
We do them no harm – and entitles us, I think
To one little scream at A piacere,
Not two.
(“Good Bye to the Mezzogiorno”, II, 77-85)
John Fuller argues that in “Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno”, Auden marked

the end of a phase in his poetic career, and took the opportunity in leaving
the land of the siesta of once more examining the difference between
North and South that for him validated his own unwavering
“Northernness”:
In the poem Auden brings to his contrast between the ‘gothic North’
and the ‘sunburnt otherwhere’ just that contrast which readers have
felt between the New York and the Mediterranean poetry, between
‘those who mean by life a / Bildungsroman and those to whom living /
Means to-be-visible-now’, between (predominantly) anxiety and
happiness. We Northerners are eager to learn, but we have nothing to
teach in our encounter with the South (like Goethe in his fifth Roman
Elegy taking time out of an erotic encounter to compose
hexameters). (Fuller, 479)
296 16
Besides, Auden also refers to the sun as an all too dreadful force of
destruction making Italians age rapidly, with no hope of change or
improvement:
Yet (if I
Read their faces rightly after ten years)
They are without hope. The Greeks used to call the Sun
He-who-smites-from-afar, and from here, where
Shadows are dagger-edged, the daily ocean blue,

I can see what they meant: his unwinking
Outrageous eye laughs to scorn any notion
Of change or escape.
“Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno” even goes as far as cynically alluding to

noise as the only way to make up for unemployment, idleness,
hopelessness and despair – “noise / As a counter-magic” –, as if the
islanders were stuck in dead-end streets:
This could be a reason

Why they take the silencers off their Vespas,
Turn their radios up to full volume,
And a minim saint can expect rockets – noise

As a counter-magic, […]
c) American Dream
Ironically enough, in “Ischia”, utopia, for local youngsters, is an
American city where they could escape misery, find a job and live their
American Dream, away from a country where they hardly manage to
survive:
upon
your quays, reminding the happy
stranger that all is never well,
sometimes a donkey breaks out into a choking wail

of utter protest at what is the case or his
master sighs for a Brooklyn
where shirts are silk and pants are new. (“Ischia”, II, 54-60)
The harmony of Auden’s poems is thus based on a precarious balance

between the eulogy of a beautiful, benevolent and generous second
motherland “Of vineyards, baroque, la bella figura” (“Good Bye…”, II, 4-
5), and a dystopian Southern Italy – inevitably bringing Malaparte’s work
to mind – that the poet will not overlook; such tensions making his
celebration of the land that welcomed him after the war all the deeper and
all the more authentic.
3. Thanksgiving for an adoptive home

a) De Amicitia
As a counterpoise to the social and political strains underlying his
poems, Auden puts forward his wish to remember happy moments in
Southern Italy, as is clearly expressed in the conclusive words of “Good-
Bye to the Mezzogiorno”:
though one cannot always
Remember exactly why one has been happy,
There is no forgetting that one was. (“Good Bye…”, II, 90-92)
Such moments are remembered in the present tense, whose first value is
that of a narrative present, acting as a lure to make both poet and reader
believe that each time they read the text they are introduced in medias res
into the poet’s intimacy:
my thanks are for you,

Ischia, to whom a fair wind has
brought me rejoicing with dear friends (“Ischia”, II, 18-20)
These harmonious lines celebrate friendship and the importance of human

bonds in a world that had just been shaken by mere barbarity. They allow
the poet to thank a new adoptive home gathering loved ones from all over
the world, the center of which was “The Caffè” on the square of Forio:
Evening life in Forio was centred on The Caffè, where the Table was
reserved for Wystan, Chester and their friends. The owner of The Caffè
was the famous Maria, who rated a column in the national newspapers
when she died many years later. Its official name was Caffè Internazionale,
but I never heard it called anything but ‘Maria’s’. (Clark, 8)
Collecting the mail is a self-appointed chore. It is the first time during

the day that I see the other Americans living here: there are four at the
moment and we meet at Maria’s café in the piazza (from the journal:
298 16
“We all know that Maria waters her drinks. But does she water them
with water? God, I feel awful!”). With the sun warming you, and Maria’s
bamboo curtains tinkling in the breeze, there is no nicer place to wait for
the postman. Maria is a sawed-off woman with a gypsy face and a
shrugging, cynical nature; if there is anything you want around here, from
a house to a package of American cigarettes, she can arrange it. (Capote,
47-48)
Furthermore, the narrative present in “Ischia” awakes our imagination,

inviting us to relive the summer evenings spent in Forio when
conversations between Wystan Auden and, among others, Chester
Kallman, Truman Capote, Allan Ginsberg, Anthony Hecht5, Brian
Howard6, Thekla Clark, or even locals like Nino D’Ambra7, must have
been by turns highly animated, highbrow, funny, and extremely warm – as
in any happy community bound together in brotherhood against the
outside threat of evil:
What did last was the friendship with Wystan and Chester. It was to
grow and grow, based mostly on shared laughter but also on the ease
we found in each other’s company. It certainly wasn’t ever – with either
of them – a relationship (horrid word) in which one went for ages without
talking. None of those deep understanding silences so prominent in
descriptions of friendship. Not at all, it was talk, talk, talk day and
night. Any subject, nothing was too much or too little. […] Although it
didn’t meet all his requirements, Wystan agreed that Forio qualified
as a moderate Eden. Eden was temporary and ours was no exception.
[…] During the fifties life on Ischia was, for me, indeed blessed; free
from anxiety and full of outward joy. […] When I think of it I think of
Wystan striding along with that dreadful dog of his, swinging a soiled
string bag crammed with books and the day’s shopping. When I asked him
years later if he really had been the person he appeared to be – that
enchanted foreigner trying to belong – he said, ‘Yes, and that is why I had
to leave.’ (Clark, 10-19)
Such a deep sense of reunion still lingers well after the poet’s death, as
Joseph Brodsky (430) underlines in a poem entitled “Ischia in October”
(1993):
Once a volcano here belched with zest.

Later, a pelican plucked its breast.
Virgil dwelt not too far away,
and Wystan Auden held drinks at bay.
[…] in this limestone

place we are not alone.
So much so that Auden’s “Ischia” eventually celebrates much more than a

private Eden: beyond personal friendships, it may be read as an ode to
love, and a reminder of the importance of loving one’s neighbor, which
the poet emphasized throughout his work and life:
In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things in life are earning
one’s living so as not to be a parasite, and loving one’s neighbour… 8
O every day in sleep and labour

Our life and death are with our neighbour,
And love illuminates again
The city and the lion’s den,
The world’s great rage, the travel of young men.
New Year Letter (1940), ll, 1703-1706 (CP, 243)
The present tense in “my thanks are for you, / Ischia” therefore also has a
universal value: it is the present of a thanksgiving for a land offered by
God where the poet – who had regained his faith in 1939 – can regenerate
himself through forgiveness and prayer, while ever-renewing his artistic
genius:
I go grateful (even
To a certain Monte9) and invoking
My sacred meridian names, Vico, Verga,
Pirandello, Bernini, Bellini,
To bless this region, its vendages, and those

Who call it home; (“Good Bye…”, II, 85-90)
b) Towards a “geo-poieisis”
The “fair wind” that brings the poet to Ischia is also unmistakably
rekindling the flame of creation, and igniting what one might name a “geo-
poieisis”. In the poem, this wind is much more than an element of the
backdrop or a mere prop; it becomes an actor through which the landscape
may easily turn into a mindscape or inscape renewing itself at each
reading. Such a metaphor eases the departure from a specific location
towards a place where borders between different identities, cultures and
countries are blurred, thereby testifying to the opening power of poetry to
what Jean-Louis Tissier calls the “land of truth”:
300 16
There are between the imaginary and the real, between representations and
experiences, lingering tensions expressed by writing. […] Poetry does not
aim at teaching any lesson or spreading knowledge; it opens up horizons
and throws a different light on the world. […] In a world where there
aren’t that many secrets left for us to discover, poetry is not some other
data bank; it is a source of intimacy bringing us back home. […] Poetry
is the land of truth where our conscience can freely face the world.
(Tissier, 123-138, my translation)
The poetic text does not content itself with describing the world: it re-
describes it to allow the poet and his readers to inhabit it poetically.
For instance, the wind in “Ischia” calls many intertextual references to
mind, opening up endless horizons within the verse. First, by quoting
Melville, Auden instills in us the impression that the island is a homeland
finally rediscovered after years spent fighting the storms of life and
history:
‘Here !’ cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his
hand towards the weather bow, ‘markest thou not that the gale comes from
the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? … The gale
that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair wind that
will drive us towards home.’ (Ch. 119)10
Moreover, the “fair wind” blowing on Ischia might also remind the reader
of the “gentle wind” that brought Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner back home
after showing repentance, thus symbolizing divine grace, as Auden
remarked in The Enchafèd Flood (70-71):
The wind is always a force which the conscious will cannot cause or
control. In the works we are considering which were written before the
advent of the steamship, it is also the source, good or bad, of all the
movements of life.
In The Ancient Mariner there are four winds described.
[…]
4. Finally, when [the Mariner’s] repentance is complete, so that he can
even look away from the dead men (the proof of his sin), then comes the
gentle wind which fans his cheek and leads the ship back home, i.e.,
the powers of grace and blessing.
Auden’s verse also echoes Wordsworth’s Prelude :
Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze,

A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.

Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.
What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale
Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream
Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?
The earth is all before me. With a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way.
Just like Wordsworth’s speaker, Auden’s discovers a “Good Place”

unfolding before his eyes. Both move happily on (“the joy it brings”,
“With a heart joyous” in Wordsworth’s lines ; “my gladness”, l, 17, “me
rejoicing”, l, 20, in “Ischia”), guided by a “fair wind” blowing on the new
world of the poem, and offering a new relationship to the world, while
“sounding” what Michael Edwards names “The Happiness of Being
Here”:
How well you correct
our injured eyes, how gently you train us to see
things and men in perspective
underneath your uniform light. (“Ischia”, II, 21-24)
The “fair wind” stirs the creation of a poem giving birth to a new literary
island. Each reading of these lines is an invitation to re-discover the world
in a different way – “to see / things and men in perspective” –, suggesting
that Beauty and Goodness (“underneath your uniform light”) remain
accessible if one agrees to follow the path of art and poieisis (“you train
us”), in spite of injuries caused by time and life (“our injured eyes”).
Last but not least, “Ischia” alludes to the following sonnet by Keats
(42):
To one who has been long in city pent,
‘Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open space of heaven, - to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
Who is more happy, when, with heart’s content,
Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair
Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair
And gentle tale of love and languishment?
302 16
The journey to the island is an act of purification, transferring us from a

post-Edenic “soiled” and enclosed (“pent”) urban space to a utopia
comparable to the large biblical plains flooded with a divine light (“sun-
drenched”; “the fair / And open space of heaven”, “blue firmament”). In
both texts, not only is the wind a metaphor for a prayer voiced with human
breath and intended to thank God for the blessing of the sacred island, but
it also represents God’s breath itself, bringing happiness to each character,
and to humanity at large: “me rejoicing with dear friends” ; “more
happy” , “with heart’s content”. The wind is phonetically intensified by
the numerous fricative and sibilant consonants (“I am presently moved /
By sun-drenched Parthenopeia, my thanks are for you, / Ischia, to whom a
fair wind has / brought me rejoicing with dear friends / from soiled
productive cities”), taking the speaker almost musically away from the
degraded fallen city. In “Ischia”, the displacement is purely vocal though,
triggered off by the sibilant [f] operating a phonological transfer from an
underworld (“from soiled”) towards a redemption (“fair wind”) through
self-giving and praying (“for you”).
Conclusion
All in all, with poems like “Ischia” and “Good-Bye to the
Mezzogiorno”, Auden presents us with a new literary geography in verse
that may be compared to a verbal melting pot where physical elements
from the natural landscape – as well as local customs and habits – serve as
a breeding ground for inspiration, before merging into what Pierre Bayard
calls an “atopic place”: “An “atopism” is an element of the literary space
condensing several places as well as several temporalities while drawing
its strength from this very concentration, hence allowing readers from
various countries and times to believe that they find themselves at home
through the meanderings of thinking.” (Bayard, 137, my translation)
While renewing “The Genius of English Poetry”11, the lines provide both
the poet and his readers with a new home. As Michel Collot claims, “if the
image of the world offered by a writer is not in accordance with the data
associated to an objective topography, this is because it corresponds to a
subjective vision abiding by the rules of the topography of the
Unconscious” (96) – or, to put it in Roland Barthes’s words: “More than
its subject, the place of a work of fiction may be its truth, as it is at the
level of the place […] that the signifier can more easily be expressed;
therefore, this place may well be the representation of desire without
which there cannot be any text.” (Barthes, 158, my translation) With
“Ischia” and “Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno”, the poet takes us to a place
approaching the truth of the ideal home where beauty is equated with love.
The harmony of the verse bears witness to such an “Eutopia” while
keeping it at bay through language that inevitably cuts the reader off from
that truth. It is therefore up to each of us to picture our own dream
Mediterranean island in our mind’s eye and remember it as an inscape
with “some vista as an absolute goal.” (“Ischia”, I, 38)
References
AUDEN, W. H. Collected Poems (CP). (1976). 1994. London: Faber.
—. 1988. The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Plays, 1928-1938.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
—. (1951). 1985. The Enchafèd Flood London: Faber.
—. (1962).1989. The Dyer’s Hand. New York: Vintage Books.
—. 1968. Secondary Worlds. New York: Random House.
—. 2010. Prose Volume IV 1956-1962. Edward Mendelson (ed).
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
BARTHES, Roland. 1972. Le Degré zéro de l’écriture suivi de Nouveaux
Essais critiques. Paris: Seuil.
BAYARD, Pierre. 2012. Comment parler des lieux où l’on n’a pas été ?
Paris: Minuit.
BRODSKY, Joseph. 2000. Collected Poems in English. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
CAPOTE, Truman. (1949). 2008. “Ischia”, Portraits and Observations.
New York: Random House.
CARPENTER, Humphrey. 1981. W.H. Auden: A Biography. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company.
CHAILLOU, Michel. 1976. Le Sentiment géographique. Paris : Gallimard.
CLARK, Thekla. 1995. Wystan and Chester : A personal memoir of W.H.
Auden and Chester Kallman. London: Faber.
COLLOT, Michel. 2014. Pour une géographie littéraire. Paris: Corti.
EDWARDS, Michael. 2006. Le Génie de la poésie anglaise. Paris: Librairie
Générale française.
—. 2011. Le Bonheur d’être ici. Paris: Fayard.
FULLER, John. 1988. W.H. Auden: A Commentary. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
HECHT, Anthony. 1993. The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden.
Harvard: Harvard University Press.
KEATS, John. (1817). 2009. “Sonnet 10”, The Complete Poems and
Selected Letters of John Keats. London: Vintage.
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MALAPARTE, Curzio. (1949). 2013. The Skin. David Moore (trans.). New
York: NYRB.
MERRILL, James. 1993. A Different Person: A Memoir. New York:
HarperCollins Publishers.
MORE, Thomas. (1516). 2010. Utopia. Simon & Brown.
TISSIER, Jean-Louis. 1993. “Victor Segalen et la Terre Jaune. Une
géopoétique du loess”, in Michel Chevalier (ed). La Littérature dans
tous ses espaces. Paris: CNRS.
Notes
1
Thekla Clark was one of Auden’s closest friends in the 1950s.
2
In all quotes, the bold emphasis is mine.
3
« Secondary Worlds » is the title of a series of essays by Auden.
4
Inspired from the title of a short story by Henry James (“The Great Good Place”,
1900), Auden’s work often mentions an ideal place named “the Good Place”,
notably in On the Frontier (The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Plays, 1928-
1938, 388), in “A Voyage” (CP, 174), or in “The Prophets”. (CP, 255)
5
The American poet Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) met Auden in Forio at the same
time as Thekla Clark, and later wrote an essay on Auden’s poetry. (The Hidden
Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden).
6
“Ischia” is dedicated to Brian Howard (1905-1958) who was an English poet who
was famous for being an entertainer and for being ostentatiously homosexual (and
ridiculed by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited under a fictive name). Auden
especially prized the gift in others of being amusing (a faculty in which Chester
Kallman excelled).
7
Nino D’Ambra is an Ischian poet and lawyer. In 1957, Auden wrote the preface
to his collection Nulla Vogliamo dal Sogno. (see W.H. Auden. Prose Volume IV
1956-1962, 99-100)
8
Auden quoted by Humphrey Carpenter. (425)
9
« A certain Monte » refers to signor Monte, one of Auden’s landlords who was
quite mean to him and would not sell him his Ischian house (see Fuller, 479). By
quoting Monte in his thanks to the Mezzogiorno, Auden obviously shows his
proneness to forgiveness.
10
This extract from Moby Dick is quoted by Auden in The Enchafèd Flood (72).
11
This phrase is borrowed from the title of Michael Edwards’ essay Le Génie de la
poésie anglaise.
17
MAPPING OUT THE NORTH

IN SIMON ARMITAGE’S POETRY AND PROSE
CLAIRE HÉLIE
The terms of William George Hoskins’s famous proposal, “Poets make the
best topographers” (Hoskins 1970, 17), can easily be switched around to
assess poet Simon Armitage’s work – topographers make the best poets.
Born in Marsden, West Yorkshire, in 1963, Armitage earned a BA in
Geography from Portsmouth Polytechnic. He then became a probation
officer in Oldham, a job for which he had to walk the poorest areas of
Greater Manchester, but which he quit to embrace a career as a full-time
poet in 1993. Since then, he has walked the Pennine Way and the south-
west coast path; he has been on a trip along the Amazon River and on a
trail in Iceland; he has sailed from Troy in Turkey to the Greek island of
Ithaca, not mentioning the many readings he has given in England, in the
United States, and in Europe. Therefore, a concern for location, for place,
for geography is at the heart of his poetry and prose. His first pamphlet,
published in 1986, was entitled Human Geography, and indeed his work
focuses on how human beings and their environment interact, how we
inhabit the earth and how the land moulds us into the kind of person we
are. One of his latest poems, published in the 2012 volume of Granta
dedicated to Britain, bears the same title as Hoskins’s seminal book, The
Making of the English Landscape (1955): not only does it suggest the
same historical approach to the geography of England, but it also rejects
the exoticism of faraway countries in favour of “matters closer to home”,
taking a “satellite image” (Armitage Spring 2012, 22) of the land that
makes its past and future clearly visible to all.
For even though Armitage has stridden across the world, he has always
gone back to his native Marsden, located on the border between Yorkshire
and Lancashire near Huddersfield. The North is his compass, both in the
moral sense that W.H. Auden gave it in his essay “I Like it Cold” (1947)
and in the affectionate sense that John Donne gave it in his poem “A
306 17
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” (1611?) It should come as no surprise

then that the title of Armitage’s first memoir reads All Points North
(1998). And indeed, Northern place-names, descriptions of local areas and
local people, dialecticisms even, place him in the chorographic tradition.
He is not strictly speaking a regional poet, nor is he a Northern poet (or
not only at least). First, because that would make him a spokesperson for
the North, a role which he adamantly refuses to endorse – even though he
is not against indulging in London-bashing once in a while, or at least
playing the Great Divide card, as in “The Practical Way to Heaven”
(Armitage 2010, 42-44) which comically opposes a bunch of toffee-nosed
London critics and a group of pie-craving Northern farmers. But also
because the North is an ever-shifting place for him: he likes changing
scales and angles while surveying it; imagined and imaginary references
proliferate in his work; and he often dwells on means of transportation.
Therefore his Northern England is characterized by what Marc Augé has
termed “the three figures of excess [that] characterize the situation of
supermodernity – overabundance of events, spatial overabundance, the
individualization of references.” (Augé 1995, 40) Paradoxically, the North
is home to quite a few “non-places” to take up one of Augé’s key
concepts, spaces that are not significant enough for the humans who walk
through them to be called places. The question Armitage relentlessly tries
to answer is: how to turn these Northern non-places into spaces open for
poetry? How to write poetically his patch of the world? How to navigate
between poetic creation and geographical representation?
The aim of this essay is to map out the North in Simon Armitage’s
work, using Michel Collot’s “literary geography” (Collot 2011), that is to
say a method to study the spatial elements not only in literature but also of
literature. That will lead me to four directions: first, I would like to give a
short overview of the spatial context of the publication of his collections;
then I will focus on his construction of the North as a place with a specific
geography that can easily be recognized; this will lead me to analyse how
he questions that very construction since the North is regularly
experienced as a non-place; finally, through a presentation of recent poetic
experiments with the land, I will tackle the question of a possible
ecopoetic inscription, of literally writing back, not in the sense that
Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffins gave it in The Empire Writes Back (1989),
but in the sense of actually writing back in, on and all over the North.
Mapping out the North in Simon Armitage’s Poetry and Prose 307
1. The geography of Armitage’s work: the spatial context

in which Armitage’s work is produced and published
One branch of literary geography examines the geography of
production of a work of art; in our case, it concerns the spatial context in
which Armitage’s work is produced and published. One way of reading
Armitage’s career is the traditional success story with its linear trajectory
from northern poetry workshops and small magazines to major publishing
houses and poetry readings all over the world. Indeed, in the 1980s, at
Huddersfield Polytechnic, he joined the creative writing workshops run by
Peter Sansom who co-founded, with Ann Fischer, The Poetry Business, a
writer development agency, which was instrumental in helping Armitage
gain public recognition. The Poetry Business was funded by the Regional
Arts Association which deemed the promotion of art was a way of fighting
against the rise of unemployment in the aftermath of the 1984-1985
Miners’ Strike and the wave of deindustrialization that submerged the
North. Hence the name, which is clearly a mockery of Thatcherite Britain.
The agency has two main modes of publication: the magazine The North,
in the first number of which Armitage published his very first poems, and
a small press, Smith/Doorstop, whose first published pamphlet was shared
by Armitage and Clare Chapman. That was 1986 and Armitage was being
recognized as a budding poet with strong local roots.
1989 marked a first move away from Huddersfield since he had his
first collection, Zoom!, and, two years later, the accompanying
audiocassette, published by Bloodaxe, a publishing house based in
Newcastle, which was first created to publicize Basil Bunting’s Northern
long poem, Briggflatts, in 1965. The Bloodaxe catalogue has widely
expanded since then but publishing quality local poets is still part of the
policy. These choices have deeply influenced both the marketing and the
reception of Armitage’s works. For instance, on the back-cover of Zoom!,
Peter Sansom praises “his language and rhythms [that are] drawn from the
Pennine village where he lives: robust, no-nonsense and (above all)
honest.” (Armitage 1989) Therefore, from the onset, he has been branded
as a “Northern poet”, a label he has never felt comfortable with. For
instance, there have been attempts at seeing him as the figurehead of a
never-existing “Northern School” (Robinson 2003), not so much in the
postcolonial / imperialistic model of centre versus periphery that a poet
like Tony Harrison seems to embody, but more in the sense of
rediscovering regions as creative hubs. Incidentally, the Huddersfield
Creative Town Initiative turned the city into some kind of model town for
308 17
creative economy, something Armitage describes with a tongue-in-his-

cheek in the poem “Lest We Forget”:
Ramsden, Horsfall, Radcliffe, Kaye,

Laycock, Dyson, Broadbent, Haigh,
on behalf of the town for a life of years
at David Brown Tractors and David Brown Gears. (Armitage 1997, 17)
In this poem, through a process of repetitions and accumulation, local

cultural icons become brand names and the North a commodity.
Yet, Zoom! received such critical and public acclaim that Armitage felt
the need to move on to Faber for his next collection, Kid (1992), and, apart
from one book of selected poems, The Shout, published by Harcourt in the
USA in 2005, he has published all his poetic works with Faber ever since.
In 1994, he was then heralded as one of the “New Generation Poets”, a
loose term used to promote the works of twenty young poets, who were
collected and who read together and claimed that poetry was the new
rock’n’roll, an assertion that still needs to be proved. Even if this move to
the London crowd has propelled him as a major poet of his generation, it
can also be interpreted as a way for the Southern publishing houses to
claim the vital forces of the North for themselves, to redefine themselves
as being democratic, open to diversity and not elitist.
On the upside, this national recognition has also given him the
financial means to explore the planet and write verse based on first-hand
experience of other countries. In other words, he is no armchair traveler
but a poet well versed in the art of traveling. Today, Armitage seems to be
branded as the flower of national poetry. In 1999, he was appointed Poet
of the Millennium and his name was mentioned when Andrew Motion’s
Laureateship came to an end. A few years ago, his work was put on the
syllabus for the GCSE (along with current Poet Laureate Carol Ann
Duffy). In September 2014, he released Paper Aeroplanes, his second
selection of poems with Faber. More recently, in June 2015, he succeeded
Geoffrey Hill as Oxford Professor of Poetry after a fierce competition
including such major poets as Wole Soyinka. It can therefore easily be
argued that he has become an integral part of the canon of British poetry.
Yet, the trajectory is not linear but circular. For instance, he still
publishes his pamphlets, limited editions and experimental works in small
publishing houses, mostly in the North. Also, he was a Professor of
Creative Writing at the Manchester Metropolitan University and at Leeds
University, and he is now a Professor of Poetry at Sheffield University.
His archive is kept in the Library of Leeds University, which also has a
huge archive of poets connected with Leeds, entitled Leeds Poetry 1950-
1980 and which includes material on and by the likes of Tony Harrison,
Geoffrey Hill and Peter Redgrove. The archive is attached to the Leeds
Poetry Centre which aims at supporting new poetry and exploring poetry
of the past. Because even though Armitage is not sure about being a
Northern poet, he has always claimed strong affiliation with some
Yorkshire artists: Tony Harrison, Barbara Hepworth, W.H. Auden, Alan
Bennett, Alan Ayckbourn (who is actually a Londoner but who is strongly
associated with Scarborough) are repeatedly mentioned on his it-list. And
he has done a lot to promote local poets, be they minor poets like Samuel
Laycock, or major ones, like Ted Hughes.
So when Armitage says “My work is positional, and it comes from
geography” (MacDonald 2014), we can be sure it is slightly slanted
towards the North. Now, using Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between
“le calque” and “la carte”, between “tracing”, a reproduction of a self-
enclosed world, and “a map”, an open form of experimentation with the
real (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 12), I would like to show that under the
disguise of tracing the North, Armitage actually maps it, which means that
he rejects the mimetic illusion in favour of multiple interactions.
2. Mapping out the North: Geography as chorography

in Armitage’s work
Indeed, Armitage’s first poems can be read as postmodern
chorographies. Chorography, from the Greek chôré, region or geographical
space, and graphein, to write, is a term which seems to have been
abandoned today, at least to discuss contemporary works, but which refers
to the act of describing a specific region and finding the features that make
it totally different from any other region. A map and a poem have two
obvious common ways of delimiting a region, which is by naming the
places. In the first three poems of Zoom!, the collection that has
established Armitage’s reputation as a Northern poet, there are fifteen
toponyms, all situated in the same area and all easily located on a map.
The fourth poem opens up to other spaces and wider conceptions of the
North since it mentions Wales and the East coast with the Humber Bridge.
His complete map of the North includes the whole of the Pennine, the
Lake District, the Peak District, and former major industrial cities. Yet,
nowhere are place names as obtrusive as in the first poems of Zoom!, even
if the area is still mentioned (Huddersfield, Marsden and the M62 in
particular). In his later collections, the titles give some place names, but
the sheer number is counterbalanced by place names outside the North.
Anyway, these are clear landmarks that serve a referential purpose.
310 17
Another way to trace the region on the poetic page is to mention its
flora and fauna, its climate as well as its monuments (be they historical or
cultural). For instance, West Yorkshire is a particularly rainy region of
England. Its climate is described as “a mild humid temperate climate with
warm summers and no dry seasons”1 and the poems tend to reflect that
meteorological fact, as in “Gone” where he writes:
I suppose the rain, damping, or the specks

of rain on the face of my watch
will be everlasting. (Armitage 1989, 36)
Even when he describes the weather in other places, like Yosemite Park,
he uses very specific words for the rain, just like the Inuits will have many
words for what we call “snow”.
Consequently, the North is a language, an accent, marked by both
scientific words and dialecticisms. Phonologists and linguists, like Katie
Wales who is a specialist in Northern English, use maps so as to locate
specific features; consequently the use of dialect words, structures and
phonemes can be traced on a map or trace a map of their own, not a visual
one but an aural one, one that can be heard through the reader’s inner ear.
Whereas the use of dialecticisms was rather subtle in Armitage’s first
collection, he has extensively experimented with the form in later poems,
for instance in the very self-conscious dialect poems “The Phoenix”
(Armitage 1997) and “On an Owd Piktcha.” (Armitage 2006) Compare for
instance the first lines of “Ten pence story”:
I was loose change for a Leeds pimp,

burning a hole in his skin-tight pocket
till he tipped a busker by the precinct. (Armitage 1989, 64)
and the first lines of “The Phoenix”:
Tvillage cuckoo wer caught one spring

to trap tgood weather, an kept in a tower baht roof. (Armitage 1997, 62)
These northern maps become all the more aurally alive when the poet
gives public readings of his works – the accent is clearly heard2.
Recognizing the signs (place-names, referents, dialecticisms) as being
Northern and not merely English, requires a competent reader, one whose
personal library and sense of place are good enough to locate the North.
Yet Armitage does not consider the reader as a holder of meaning but as a
producer of meanings, which implies that the reader is not a passive
receiver of a tracing but engages in creating the map; in other words, the
reader performs the map. Hence the fact that the reception of Armitage’s
poems are doomed to change. For instance, while tracing a North that can
easily be pinned down on a map, Armitage defamiliarises the very image
he is creating. One case in point is that he constantly pits one place against
another through typical rhetorical devices like metaphors and
comparisons, or on the contrary oxymora. This twinning of spaces create
subterranean connections between places, as in “The Practical Way to
Heaven” in which a Northern Sculpture farm visited by “London people”
becomes the locus of Bacchanalia celebrating the god pie, that Northernest
dish of all, which frightens the Southern sponsors away. More
interestingly, Armitage uses what could be thought of as cinematic
methods like editing, panning, zooming in and out to show a map in
motion. For instance, in the poem “Zoom!” what “begins as a house” in
Marsden ends as a “ringed planet.” (Armitage 1989, 80) Yet, I would
suggest that in this day and age, we have grown so accustomed to new
technologies, for instance Google maps that allow us to situate our house
on a world map in just one click, that the feeling of disorientation is
getting lost on us, or at least has changed what could be read as an attempt
at weighing the homely against the uncanny, into an attempt at seeing
what seems extraneous in the local, therefore embracing heterogeneity.
One may wonder therefore what the function of mapping and naming
is. Place names, scientific words, icons seem to say “this is my region” in
four different ways depending on which word is emphasized. “THIS is my
region” enhances the deictic function of these words used as effets de réel
or “reality effect” (Barthes 1982, 11) that trace the North and bear no
symbolical significance. “This IS my region” claims that the North is
there, that what is pointed at is not a place constructed in the media but the
essence of the real. For instance, in Walking Home, the poet refers to “the
notoriously changing Pennine weather.” (Armitage 2012, 13) “Pennine” is
somehow redundant because the geographical context is extremely clear.
Yet it is a non-literary annotation that makes the reader feel the presence
of the North. “This is MY region” both claims the area for oneself and
states that one is a spud of the region. It calls to a sense of community, it is
popular and demotic. “This is my REGION” turns the area into a
battleground of regional sub-divisions against the national whole, a way of
celebrating the legendary spirit of independence of Yorkshire.
A good example of these four ways to understand what place names
and dialecticisms seem to say is the poem “True North” (Armitage 1993,
3-4), in which the poet, freshly returned from a year at Portsmouth
Polytechnic uses the Portuguese word “Malvinas” instead of the British
312 17
name “Falklands” and is punched in the face by locals, both as a sign of

rejection from the Northern community and as a way to hammer some
sense of community back into him. The poet is of the north, just as the
men in the pub are. Therefore “True North”, a place with invariants, just
like Ultima Thulé, is also a myth, a figment of the imagination. If at the
beginning of the poem Armitage traces an image of the North: “the village
looked stopped: a clutch of houses / in a toy snow-storm”, frozen in time,
he shows there are subterranean intersections, found in the language to
speak of geography, history and politics. This introduces movement,
allows the poet to “make the crossing”. Indeed, geography does not only
encompass physical features but also economic, human, cultural, social
dimensions. It is a “lived space” or “third space” to use Soja’s term,
meaning that it is both “real and imagined” (Soja 1993, 3), a place that can
be mapped and seen, a place with coordinates and geographical features
that can be checked out, as well as a place that is perceived and argued
over. Armitage’s poetry participates in constructing the North by
relentlessly questioning Yorkshire as a region a whole community can
relate too.
3. Out of the Northern map: Non-places as renewed

spaces for poetry
While in the 1980s the postmodern spatial turn had shown scholars
moving away from time and history to social relations and society, Marc
Augé introduced the idea of supermodernity as the disappearance of place
and of stable communities, both to be considered as things of the past: “If
a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity,
then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or
concerned with identity will be a non-place.” (Augé 1995, 77-78) In other
words, non-places are transitional, a-historical, a-symbolical. In poetic
terms, they seem to be anti-Wordsworthian, in the sense that
Wordsworth’s revisiting poems read like emanations of a particular place
imbued with personal and collective memories and stories that can still be
shared in the lives of people and readers through imagination. Yet,
Armitage adheres to his native place, which seems to be a corollary of his
spirit. Does that make him a neo-Romantic or an anti-modernist? Indeed,
he does express nostalgia for a place that is changing as in the poem “A
Vision” which begins with “The future was a beautiful place, once”
(Armitage 2006, 12), but has this place ever existed outside our
imagination?
Even though the North seems to be mappable because it has

landmarks, it still escapes definition, for instance through plays on
onomastics. In his first two poems published in Zoom! Armitage refers to
“Hyde” (Armitage 1989, 9-10), a real place and a place-name that is just
too easy to interpret on a symbolic level. This raises the question of the
legibility of the map. In the first poem, the road the protagonist takes is
covered with snow, the signs become unreadable and the protagonist ends
up trapped in a landscape he cannot find his way through; in the third, the
poet is driving his car and admits “misreading the tangents of the
pavements.” (Armitage 1989, 11) A slightly later poem, from his
collection Book of Matches, entitled “Map Reference” (Armitage 1993),
strives hard to undermine the existence of a mountain as a point of
reference on his map, first through a series of negations (“Not that it was
the first peak in the range”), then by suggesting that the map was not made
by experts (“In fact, if those in the know / ever had their say about sea-
level or cross-sections […] / it might have been more of a hill than a
mountain”), and finally by asserting its features are so picturesque they are
clichés (“Incidentally, pine trees / pitched about its south and west
approaches”). The whole point of the poem is to blur the mountain as a
map reference so as to turn it into a love token: “it stood where it stood, so
absolutely, for you.” He thus questions both his own ability as a
cartographer, a map-reader and a map-maker, and the sheer mappability of
the North, in order to call attention to his own experience in the space thus
created.
Therefore, against essential conceptions of space, he promotes an
experiential approach, which means that place is not only a construct but a
construct in progress, in other words, it is constantly evolving. Hence the
importance of means of transportation, that are everywhere to be found. In
that sense his poetry is not so much loco-descriptive as it is filled with
loco-motive descriptions. All the more so as his native village is “on the
border” (Armitage 1999, 1) between Yorkshire and Lancashire, as he
repeatedly states at the beginning of All Points North. It is a transitional
space. Besides, Marsden’s totem animal is the cuckoo and the poet has
devoted a whole collection to that figure of the interloper,
Cloudcuckooland, which is used as a nickname for the village and a way
to denounce it as a collective fantasy location. All these are characteristics
of supermodernity, and constitutive of what Marc Augé calls “non places”.
That is why the poet and the people described in the poems are
marginalized and always on the move. They cannot be fixed, categorized,
they do not belong. The poetic map they evolve in is not self-enclosed: it
has many ways in and many ways out. The map is a fragment that points
314 17
to a somewhere else, or to put it in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms a rhizome

that generates many lines of flight, and most notably to the earth itself
when it is treated as paper for writing, for tracing letters.
4. Inscribing poetry in the North:

a geopoetical approach to the work
Now I would like to delineate a quick overview of the relationship
between creation and space in Armitage’s poetry, this time giving another
meaning to the word geography, no longer understood as writing the earth
or about the earth, but writing on the earth, and in the poet’s case,
inscribing poetry in the North is as literal an activity as can be, an activity
that can be deemed reminiscent of Kenneth White’s geopoetics, not in the
sense of the poet being a shaman for his community as in Ted Hughes’s
work but in the sense of questioning, not to say breaking, the frontier
between art and land.
I will only say one word about his TV poetic documentaries, a genre
initiated by W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten in 1936 with Night Mail.
Poetic documentaries, in that sense, are not documentaries that use the
poetic mode (as opposed to expository, observational, participatory,
performative or reflexive modes), but documentaries in which the narrator
recites poems that do not get in the way of realism and social purposes.
There again, Armitage’s first works were based on local issues. For
instance Xanadu (1992) describes a derelict estate housing project while
Drinking for England (1998) has Northerners speak about their addiction
to alcohol in rhymed verse. More recently he has turned to environmental
concern, like in Climate of Change, a Tribeca film released in 2010, which
gives a hearing to the people all over the world who strive, at their own
level, to reduce their carbon footprint. Armitage usually works with Brian
Hill and the way they work is that the poet will be sent interviews of the
people and rushes and will either write poetic commentaries or give the
interviewees poignant poetic speeches. The accents, the rhythms, the
voices of interviewees and of the narrator all share a role in embodying the
issues at stake and in making them linger in our ears – they turn us into
actors of the solution that need be found.
What I would like to dwell on though is Armitage’s work on site-
specific interventions. The Guggenheim describes site-specific art as “an
artist’s intervention in a specific locale, creating a work that is integrated
with its surroundings and that explores its relationship to the topography
of its locale, whether indoors or out, urban, desert, marine, or otherwise”3.
I will mention three such interventions.
In 2008, Armitage participated in a project at the Yorkshire Sculpture

Park entitled “The Twilight Readings” – he gave six readings in different
areas of the Park and read what could be called “récits poétiques” (Tadié
1989) of his own, as well as translations from The Mystery Plays. Most of
the poems he had selected focused on death, which was in keeping with
the place and time of year and which, in his introduction, he cannot help
relate to his fellow countryman Ted Hughes’s interest in “death-in-life”
(Armitage 2008). The book comes with photos and a CD of the reading, so
that you can almost live the experience vicariously from the dry space of
your home (the photos prove that Yorkshire is rainy indeed).
In 2012, two years after walking the Pennine Way, Armitage published
a travelogue that ends on a promise: to give back to the land what it had
offered him during his trek. And that is exactly what he did in 2013 with
the Stanza Stone Project that consisted in carving six poems on huge
rocks, some of them imported from different parts of the area, along the
way. The poetic guide to the trail can be downloaded from the Internet for
free. The poems deal with natural elements and are supposed to be so
arresting that the walkers will actually stop on their way to read them. The
project has raised a controversy though, because experienced walkers saw
this reconfiguration as a disfiguration of the path, which is a recurring
polemic when it comes to site-specific art.
Finally, I would like to mention the poem “In Praise of Air”, described
as “the world’s first catalytic poem developed in collaboration with
Professor Tony Ryan at the University of Sheffield”4. It is a poem by
Armitage that uses nano-technology that eats pollution and cleans the air
around it. The scientific process is explained on the website that was put
up to advertise the experiment. Of course, one can argue, like fellow poet
Peter Riley, that absorbing the exhalations of 20 cars a day is not much
compared to the thousands of cars that pass by everyday (Riley 2015), but
still, thanks to Simon Armitage’s relentless poetic approach to geography
and to the North, the day when writing a poem is just as life-saving as
planting a tree is nearing.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we may wonder what this overview of Armitage’s
poetry on and in Northern England brings to the debate on the interaction
of the fields of geography and literature. This paper has researched the
interaction in four ways, claiming first that mapping a specific literary
production is a relevant approach to a poet’s work in so far as the atlas
thus produced tells a story that sheds light on the writing by revealing the
316 17
position from which it was written; second, that analysing the way the
reference to a specific region is created within the works is tantamount to
questioning the validity of the geographer’s tools (place-names,
coordinates, classifications…) since the questions of the scriptural and the
fictional can be raised in both literature and geography; third, that writing
about place is not the same as fixing place or assigning a one-and-only
meaning to place, but on the contrary opening it to many different readings
by following the lines that connect it to other spaces; finally, that literally
writing on or over or into places can actually change the face of the earth
and of literature, re-enchanting the world we live in and encouraging us to
join forces by making the song of the earth clearly heard and shared by all.
In other words, if the tools and methods of literary geography are many
and constantly sharpened by new researchers, the universal and ecological
purpose of this interdisciplinary field is to remain a focus point.
References
ARMITAGE, Simon. 1989. Zoom! Bloodaxe: Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
—. 1993. Kid. London: Faber.
—. 1997. CloudCuckooLand. London: Faber.
—. 1999. All Points North. London: Faber.
—. 2006. Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid. London: Faber.
—. 2008. The Twilight Readings. Barnsley: The Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
—. 2010. Seeing Stars. London: Faber.
—. 2012. “The Making of the English Landscape”, Granta, 119, p.22.
—. 2012. Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way.
London: Faber.
AUGÉ, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity. John Howe (trans). London: Verso.
BARTHES, Roland. 1982. “The Reality Effect”. R. Cartes (trans.). In
French Literary Theory Today, Tzvetan Todorov (ed). New York:
Cambridge UP, 11-17.
COLLOT, Michel. 2011. “Pour une géographie littéraire”. Fabula-LhT,
Nb8, “Le partage des disciplines”, URL :
http://www.fabula.org/lht/8/collot.html. Accessed on 17 April 2015.
DELEUZE, Gilles and Felix GUATTARI. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Brian Massumi (trans.). Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
HOSKINS, W.G. 1970. The Making of the English Landscape. Penguin:
Harmondsworth.
MACDONALD, Alex. 12 October 2014. “Jaundiced Reality: Simon

Armitage Interviewed”, The Quietus.
http://thequietus.com/articles/16464-simon-armitage-paper-aeroplanes-
interview-next-generation-poetry
ROBINSON, Mark. 2003. “True North: The Reinvention of ‘The Provinces’
in the Poems of Simon Armitage and the Northern School”. A World of
Local Voices: Poetry in English Today, Klaus Martens, Paul MORRIS,
Arlette Warken (eds). Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 103-114.
Riley, Peter. 11 January 2015. “Northern Poetry: From on High and From
the Tall Grass”. The Fortnightly Review.
http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2015/01/northern-poets/. Accessed 17
March 2015.
SOJA, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other
Real-and-Imagined Places. Malden: Blackwell.
TADIE, Jean-Yves. 1978. Le Récit poétique. Paris: PUF.
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-
online/movements/195235?page=2.
http://catalyticpoetry.org. Accessed on 17 March 2015.
Further reading
SMITH, Stan. 1996. “The Things that words give a name to: The ‘New
Generation’ poets and the politics of the hyperreal”. Critical Survey
8:3, 306-322.
WALES. Katie. 2006. Northern English: A Social and Cultural History.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
All websites accessed on 17 March 2015.
http://library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections-leeds-poetry
https://weatherspark.com/averages/28736/West-Yorkshire-England-
United-Kingdom.
http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/listeningbooth/poets/armitage.cfm
http://www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2012/05/Stanza-Stones-Trail-Guide.pdf.
http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2015/01/northern-poets/.
Notes
1
https://weatherspark.com/averages/28736/West-Yorkshire-England-United-
Kingdom, accessed on 17 March 2015.
2
Besides Armitage’s many CDs, the voice of the poet can be heard on the internet.
For instance at
318 17
http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/listeningbooth/poets/armitage.cfm, accessed on
17 March 2015.
3
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-
online/movements/195235?page=2. Accessed on 17 March 2015.
4
http://catlyticpoetry.org. Accessed 17 March 2015.
PART THREE:
LANDSCAPES, URBANSCAPES
AND (GEO)POLITICS IN LITERATURE
CHAPTER SEVEN:
WRITING THE CITY

18
FRENCH PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY TODAY?

THE CASE OF THOMAS CLERC’S
PARIS, MUSÉE DU XXIE SIÈCLE,
LE DIXIÈME ARRONDISSEMENT
JOSHUA ARMSTRONG
Do you have what it takes to be a psychogeographer?1

—Questionnaire, Internationale Situationniste 2
Seeing must not separate me.

—Thomas Clerc, Paris, musée du XXIe siècle, le dixième
arrondissement
More than half a century has passed since Guy Debord and his Lettrist and
Situationist colleagues began talking about psychogeography and dérive in
the 1950s. The radical, revolutionary spirit of 1968 – which the
Situationist International (SI) would help fuel – seems but a dim memory
in contemporary French culture. Today, Debord’s graffitied slogan, “Ne
travaillez jamais” (“Never work”), sounds hopelessly romantic in a France
of chronic unemployment, where today’s young and jobless become
vulnerable to very different radicalisms. And yet, if the times have
changed, the SI’s critical assessment of the city – “the crisis in urbanism is
worsening” (Constant 2006, 71)2 – is perhaps more true than ever, as the
ever-growing footprint of urban planning leaves no stone unturned, no
space un-purposed. The “dismal and sterile ambiance” (71) produced by
this crisis is even reinforced today by the proliferation of planned and
preconfigured zones, chain stores and hotels, shopping centers, and other
such environments described by ethnographer Marc Augé as non-places.
Moreover, that other enemy of the SI, spectacle, increasingly infiltrates
everyday life via the newfound digital-age ubiquity of the screen. Guy
Debord and the SI sought out the authentic “psychogeographical contours”
French Psychogeography Today? 323
of their cities, but in the digital age that more “passional” urban stratum
(Debord 2006, “Theory”, 62) is increasingly difficult to find, quantified
and reified as it is into information by “a global communication system
that has become quasi-instantaneous” (Virilio 2000, 8-9). In many ways,
then, the dilemmas the SI highlighted persist and are even exacerbated in
today’s world.
Perhaps this is why psychogeography has been resurrected in recent
decades—albeit in an altered form. Psychogeography, with all its avant-
garde trappings, has become a “buzz word” (O’Rourke 2013, 204) in the
contemporary art world, where installations and performances have taken
particular interest in the question of everyday spaces and rhythms in the
city.3 In literature, the term was repopularized in the 1990s in the UK,
thanks to the works of authors like Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, and Will
Self. In 2007, Bloomsbury published Will Self and Ralph Steadman’s
Psychogeography, a sexy, expensive volume with luxurious color plates.
Psychogeography is a testament not only that dérive (drift) has become
one of the UK’s most “popular objects of selective desire” (Smith, 104),
but also that “psychogeography” can be a lucrative commodity in its own
right.
However, if psychogeography is regaining popularity, it is not being
resurrected without significant modifications to its form and function. For
Guy Debord, psychogeography was meant to be – on the one hand – a
practice, a discipline (like geography). Namely: “the study of the precise
laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether
consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of
individuals” (2006, “Introduction”, 8). Walking through 1960s Paris, the
psychogeographer would seek such “effects”, mentally mapping “unities
of ambiance” (zones where one particular mood or feel seemed to
consistently predominate4), and identifying the location of plaques
tournantes that connected such unities. In their literal sense, plaques
tournantes are railroad pivotal points: pivoting platforms upon which a
stationary locomotive can be reoriented. Psychogeography sought
metaphorical plaques tournantes in the city – locations where the walker
would feel compelled to suddenly change direction, suddenly passing from
one unity of ambiance into another.
And yet, if psychogeography was to be a practice – an admittedly
vague one5 – it was also deeply theoretical. Psychogeography performed
the work of the SI’s radical program of “unitary urbanism.” Unitary
urbanism wished to liberate city-dwellers from the forms of alienation
imposed by urban planning and spectacle. It was overtly utopian in scope:
“Unitary urbanism acknowledges no boundaries; it aims to form an
324 18
integrated human milieu in which separations such as work/leisure or

public/private will finally be dissolved.” (“Theses,” 69) It wished to
restore authenticity to urban life by providing agency, play, and a sense of
adventure that would everywhere accompany life. Via radical play, both in
building and using urban spaces: “the autonomy of place can be
rediscovered…thus bringing back the reality of the voyage and of life
understood as a voyage which contains its entire meaning within itself”
(Debord 1983, 178). Psychogeography, then, unlike liberal arts disciplines
such as geography, was to be a utopian praxis in and of itself. It is –
perhaps not surprisingly, in today’s world – this emphasis on cultural
revolution that has been largely absent in its resurrection in recent,
postmodern decades. Psychogeography today is a “walking corpse”: the
practice continues in a “plundering of situationist tactics,” but in an altered
state that has shaken itself “free from theory.” (Smith, 104) In other words,
it is not so much Debord’s social vision that inspires today’s authors and
artists, but rather the call for radical play in one’s physical relationship
with the city. Given the aforementioned exacerbating of the conditions of
alienation already mentioned, this is perhaps no surprise. As the SI put it,
“the lynchpin of spectacle is the planning of happiness” (Vaneigem 1997,
231), and it is arguably more difficult than ever to break from the role of
passive, contented consumer. Good luck, in today’s world, allowing
psychogeographical plaques tournantes to guide you through Paris. They
will have to compete with your Google map – that virtual plaque
tournante ever at your disposal, rendering dérive impossible by preventing
you from getting lost. In a world of increasingly complex urban planning
and spectacle, in which we spend more time navigating screens than
walking streets, authors and artists increasingly seek new forms of agency
and long for a more authentic contact with place – something
psychogeography, if simply by virtue of its name, seems to promise. The
SI presented us with enticing descriptions of an abstract practice, but
perhaps left to future generations the question of how best to put it into
practice. With the popularity of such urban experimentation on the rise in
literary publishing, the dearth of actual documented dérive left to us by the
SI6 is being offset by an ever-widening and varied corpus of radical re-
mappings of contemporary urban spaces.
In contemporary France, however – and surprisingly, perhaps – the
resurrection of “psychogeography” has, in fact, not taken place. Apart
from college art history courses, the term has nearly faded out of
existence. This disappearance is perhaps inevitable as part of moving on
from a historical period marked by wars of decolonization, progressive
abandoning of hopes for a socialist utopia in the wake of May 1968, and
an awakening to post-Trente Glorieuses economic realities. And yet, the

problem of the urban has, in equal part, been at the center of much French
literary output in recent decades. That is, even if no one is calling it
“psychogeography” – as they do in the art world and in the UK –
something we might call the unfinished business of psychogeography is
indeed being carried out in 21st-century Paris, where, in the sphere of
contemporary French letters, site-specific urban experimentation and
exploration have been on the rise, especially in post-1980 French
literature.7 This trend is exemplified by an experimental text that will be
the subject of this chapter: Thomas Clerc’s Paris, musée du XXIe siècle, le
dixième arrondissement (Paris, Museum of the 21st Century, the Tenth
Arrondissement), published by L’Arbalète Gallimard in 2007. Although
Clerc does not call himself a psychogeographer, his text, I will argue, is as
psychogeographical a literary project as one will find in the literary avant-
garde of the 21st century8. Or, to put it another way, it mobilizes the legacy
of psychogeography to the extent that any contemporary literary text can,9
while also usefully adapting it so as to respond to the much-changed face
of the urban in the 21st century.
Thomas Clerc, of the generation who “felt annoyed not by ’68 but by
the ’68ers” (74),10 does not envision a more authentic city that is to be
unearthed under urbanism’s aberrations. The space Clerc chooses to walk
and write will be an already-crowded city-space, a local milieu that bears
an increasingly deterritorialized and global footprint. It is not a buried
utopia, but, rather something like a heterotopia, with its heterogeneous and
at times confusing amalgamation of cultures and practices. The question,
in this kind of space, is not what to build or construct – something that
preoccupied the SI11 – but rather “what type of storage, circulation,
marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted.”
(Foucault and Miskowiec 1986, 23) Information – and city as information
– must be taken into account. Clerc’s text takes up this challenge, thus
responding to a form of alienation unbeknownst to Debord and largely
ignored by neo-psychogeographers – specifically, the millenial malaise of
information overload. In today’s world, one of constantly streaming
information, locative technologies like Google maps play an ever-
increasing role in how we perceive and navigate urban geographies. Clerc
employs a radical system of constraints that parodies this informational
paradigm and allows him to create a quasi-geographical database that
operates the détournement of data – one whose information is inextricably
tied to a bodily performance, and meaningless without it. In so doing,
Clerc may not construct any utopias, but he produces a nuanced psycho-
topographical study of the geographical and affective contours of the
326 18
Tenth Arrondissement – one that, in true situationist tradition, refuses to

accept the official mode d’emploi of its chosen urban environment.
1. “Seeing must not separate me”

For Paris, Musée du XXIe siècle, le dixième arrondissement, Thomas
Clerc decided to walk – in alphabetical order – every street, boulevard,
square, and other public space, of the Tenth Arrondissement of Paris
(where he lives), documenting everything he saw along the way. He
carried out this fieldwork from 2004 to 2007, and then set it to the page in
a stream of consciousness narrative voice that makes the reader feel she is
experiencing the streets of the Tenth in real time. The result is a chaotic
and nearly overwhelming avalanche of information. However, Clerc
provides us with some landmarks to help us navigate his Tenth: “I plotted
some markers to help the reader enter the outside.” (2007, back cover)
This word play – typically one enters the inside, not the outside – firmly
anchors this stream of consciousness as an outwardly-oriented one: a
stream of consciousness as much spatial as it is subjective. As for the
“markers” Clerc mentions placing within the text, we can divide these into
two categories. First, locative geographical markers are ubiquitous: the
names of the 142 streets, boulevards, squares, and other public spaces he
walks and the building numbers as he passes them are diligently and
prominently provided, so that the reader always knows exactly where she
is in the Tenth. Second – and more idiosyncratically – Clerc applies to
each geographically marked space a much more subjective (or
psychogeographical) marker. He classifies everything he observes into 62
categories of experience, which include markers such as Ambiance,
Antiville, Configuration, Contact, Danger, and To Be Destroyed (to name
a few). In the stream of consciousness narration these markers occur
spontaneously in italics, often in mid-sentence. Finally, an index at the
back of the book lists all the occurrences of each subjective marker.
The prominence of the subjective marker Ambiance – along with
Clerc’s intermingling of the subjective and the spatial via radical walking
– makes of Le dixième arrondissement an inheritor of the situationist
tradition. Clerc plots Ambiance as a marker 14 times. It occurs, for
example, in his description of Rue La Fayette. This description begins:
La RUE LA FAYETTE (2 830 x 20m), springs from its source at the

Galeries of the same name, plunges into the Tenth precisely at number 94.
Ascending radial whose end we cannot see, as though it flowed off into the
sea, a horizon effect constitutes it. (146)
Clerc’s description scrupulously documents topographical information:

Clerc will provide not only specific address locations along his walk, but
even (as we see here) the dimensions of each street. However, it is the
subjective experience of that geography – its psychogeography – that is
ultimately favored. Cartographically, Rue La Fayette may be a line, a
simple “radial” on the map, but Clerc’s description likens it to a more
embodied geographical feature: a river. Moreover, he describes it with an
on-the-ground perspective, with its “horizon effect.”
Moving on, he documents feeling suddenly overwhelmed by the
particular ambiance of the street: “Ambiance: this street lances, cuts,
penetrates”. As though moved by an invisible plaque tournante, he feels
compelled to escape into another ambiance, that of a cathedral: “I seek an
alternative to its ingratitude – god. Intrusion: I enter the parish of Jaques
artisan.” (149) This passage is representative of Le dixième
arrondissement in that we discover in quick succession a series of
subjective markers. Here the markers happen to be Ambiance and
Intrusion, both of which call to mind dérive and its “rapid passage through
varied ambiances.” (Debord, “Theory,” 62) It calls to mind that particular
Parisian “passage” Debord indicated on the Naked City12 map where one is
able to escape the relatively claustrophobic ambiance of Rue de Seine
through a gateway in the wall of the Institut de France and suddenly enter
into the spacious Place de l’Institut. The entrance to the Église Jacques-
Artisan proves to be just such a gateway from one ambient world to
another, and some kind of intuition – one we could describe as
psychogeographic – compels Clerc to enter this gateway. The protocol of
his project is strict enough to bring him into prolonged contact with the
particular “unity of ambiance” of Rue La Fayette, and yet flexible enough
to allow him this sudden intrusion into another.13
Speaking of the Institut de France, it was of course upon one of its
walls that, in 1953, Guy Debord graffitied his slogan “Ne travaillez
jamais.” But it is precisely le travail – the work factor – that distinguishes
a modern-day psychogeographer like Clerc from his situationist
predecessors. Clerc’s work – rigorous enough to take three years to
complete – is to thoroughly, if ludically, classify (according to his system
of markers) the contents of all the public space of the Tenth
Arrondissement. Clerc does not have time to graffiti revolutionary slogans,
but he dutifully records those he finds within his ongoing documenting
process. He finds two there in Jacques-Artisan: “Looking for God? –There
is a path, says the light green flyer pinned to the wall. A less approachable
graffiti completes the thought: Priests are a bunch of queers.” (150)
328 18
Clerc’s dérive is highly methodical. Method serves, incidentally, as one

of Clerc’s subjective markers. He plots it 30 times, such as here, in its final
occurrence, on the closing page: “Method: walking, I grasp the world in
the instant it appears, with my body and my eyes; seeing must not separate
me.” (238) Not only must Clerc produce a thoroughgoing inventory of the
contents of the Tenth Arrondissement, he ambitiously attempts to do so in
such a way that seeing does not separate him from that outside into which
he wishes to enter with his reader. Subjectivity cannot be detached from –
but rather must be unified with, must be of a medium with – its urban
environment. Clerc must find the prose form that will obliterate not only
Cartesian dualism, but also the alienating effects of urban planning and
spectacle. For Guy Debord and the SI, “separation” – of the city dweller
from his or her authentic existence – was precisely the unwanted effect of
these nuisances. It was precisely this separation and alienation of city
dwellers that was to be remedied by “unitary” (un-separated) urbanism –
the very work of psychogeography14. Clerc would also cut through these
strata of separation, exacerbated, as they have been, in the time elapsed
since the days of the SI. However, Clerc’s motives have less to do with a
long-term revolutionary seeking of authentic life than with a short-term –
but total – immersion into the plenitude of the everyday. Clerc hopes to
capture that most elusive of things: the qualitative, infra-ordinary
experience of everyday spaces15. He is eager: “I’m passionate about the
infra-meager” (107),16 but his quarry is elusive: “Making my way back
down it, I see how the street evolves more rapidly than my text, which is
already out of date.” (52)
Clerc will not be “separated” from the plenitude of the everyday. Of
course, earlier practitioners of French urban poetics also wished to tap into
plenitudes: the plenitude of universal beauty within the modern and
ephemeral for Baudelaire, liberated desire for the Surrealists, social utopia
via a unitary urbanism for the SI. However, Clerc departs radically from
the in-turn liberated, epiphanic, and utopian subjectivity of his forerunners
in that, like a disciplined geographer, he constrains and confines himself to
his rigid protocol. He pushes system and constraint—his global
positioning system—to unseen extremes in an all-out Perecquian tentative
d’épuisement17 of his chosen urban territory. As a result, Le dixième
arrondissement cannot read like a manifesto, cannot culminate in
epiphany, cannot voice a coherent aesthetics or politics: it lets the city do
the talking and simply tries to keep up via its spatial stream of
consciousness.
2. Reconfigured and Reappropriated

The alphabetic global positioning system (GPS),18 the systematic
listing of the street names (and dimensions) and building numbers, and
finally the presence of a marker entitled Cartography all point to a clear
cartographic impulse driving Le dixième arrondissement. And yet, as we
have seen, Clerc has hit on a kind of cartography that permits mobility and
mutation. His will, moreover, be a distorted, psychogeographical map
upon which the alphabetical ordering of streets, coupled with the
continuous stream of text, produces impossible contiguities. Where, for
example, it becomes possible to juxtapose spatially the Quick restaurant
located at the end of Faubourg du Temple and the McDonald’s at the
beginning of Rue Faubourg Poissonnière. In reality, more than two
kilometers separate these two locations. However, according to the
alphabetical ordering of his excursion, Clerc must leave off at the former
and begin again at the latter. Accordingly, Clerc’s stream of consciousness
prose style then absorbs those couple of invisible kilometers: “End of the
street: Quick. Beginning: McDo.” (112)
Such a surreal cartography, while certainly not in conformance with
the geographical layout of actual spaces, proves altogether fitting in a
heterotopic urban environment in which topology is often a more useful
guide than topography. It was certainly a coincidence that Clerc’s
alphabetical perambulation led him to leave off at the Quick and pick up
again at the McDonalds, but this hasard objectif of late capitalism is in
fact not surreal or coincidental at all. Clerc’s geographical elision
illustrates how these kinds of non-places, chain restaurants, are to be found
in the prime real estate spaces of the Tenth: precisely those at large
intersections and squares where streets (and Clerc’s excursions) end and
begin. And yet, the unflinching movement of Clerc’s spatial stream – as it
quickly passes these by – underscores that even these seemingly
implacable commercial implantations will not be exempt to the historical
“tracking shot” (9)19 by which the ever-changing networks of power,
value, and signification continue to (re)configure the city.
In fact, configurations – and especially changes to existing configurations
(reconfigurations) – are of great interest to Clerc. Occurring 22 times
throughout Le dixième arrondissement, Configuration is one of his most
frequently plotted markers. By tracking and comparing its occurrences, we
can glimpse something of the psychogeographic “configuration” of the
Tenth. We find an instance in Square Alban-Satragne: “Configuration: the
area surrounding the square, transformed by the Green Party into an
amusement park,” which Clerc humorously decries as a “crime of spatial
330 18
cute-ifying.” (40) Further on, near 8 Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle:

“Configuration: the widening of the sidewalk, whose traces are faintly
visible in the concrete, creates a scarred ground,” which causes him to
muse: “It’s esthetic to slightly modify space.” (58) Near 2 Rue Gustave-
Goublier: “Configuration: exported into working class neighborhoods, the
ornamental phenomenon of the archway backfires, a constant atmosphere
of conspiracy, urine, and refuse reduce it to no more than a passage.”
(128) In another occurrence there is question of the “restoration of
Magenta” and remarks about the relative wisdom of allowing car ports to
“break” the “symmetries of the façades.” (204) In Boulevard de la Villette,
he notes how the street is being altered to make parking space for
automobiles: “Configuration: they have deformatted the boulevard into a
parking lot.” (233) Guy Debord saw streets modified to accommodate cars
not as deformatted, but as degenerate. Clerc’s deformatted, on the other
hand, signals a downgrade in ambiance, but one that is less attached to
absolute value and that implies a temporary change – one that needn’t be
judged so much as absorbed into the ongoing stream of consciousness.
Clerc’s text thus proves to be in tune with the always already reformatted
nature of a city-space in flux like the Tenth. Ultimately, when we examine
the contents that have been filed under the subjective marker of
Configuration, we discover a clearly established lexical field that
highlights change and transformation: spaces are respectively transformed,
cute-ified, exported, restored, broken, and deformatted.
Clerc, who admits, “if I stigmatize the bobos, it is because I am one
myself” (52), seems truly in his element in the Tenth, which is after all a
particularly hybrid and recently-gentrified zone of fluctuation, passage,
and change in twenty-first-century Paris. In a true – if unspoken –
testament to the psychogeographical influence of the city upon its
inhabitants (and vice versa), the behavior of Clerc’s fellow passersby
proves equally open to reconfiguration. Clerc effortlessly and matter-of-
factly homes in on re-christianings (Rebaptism), conversions (Reconversion),
and reappropriations (Reappropriations), as these are operated in real time
by his fellow denizens of the Tenth:
Reappropriation: a wholesaler legitimizes the brand Rakaï,20 a word that

has taken on an new aura, according to the known process by which those
whom it was aimed at claim it as their own: Impressionists, Decadents,
Formalists, or rap Bitches turn the insult back on the insulters. (75)
Clerc’s mapping of the Tenth arrondissement demonstrates to what extent

such transformations are no longer exceptional but the norm. When, for
example, he comes across “The ‘sweet little restaurant’ Aunt Alice” which
is “always hiring,” he remarks ironically: “To the familial ambiance of

businesses responds the commercial ambiance of families.” (76) In the
Impasse Bonne-Nouvelle, he does not seem surprised that “the anti-
Semitic comedian Dieudonné shares the showcase with Jewish shows.”
(61) At Place de la République: “always crowded, and at all hours, the
enormous McDonalds on the corner incorporates the decorative elements
of the café it replaced, notably the moldings.” (108) In Rue Beaurepaire,
Clerc stops to marvel at “the nonchalant counterfeit” that is being sold all
around him, counterfeits and copies “protected by what the law calls ‘the
free circulation of ideas’.” (50) The reappropriation and selling of ideas –
their translation into new networks of signification – is signaled in a
different context as he then crosses “a group of idle pizza deliverymen
awaiting orders on their mopeds.” As he notes: “the trick is to give the
worker the pleasurable effect that makes him forget the rest: ‘It’s cool, you
get to be like a gangster’.” (50)
Via Clerc’s spatial streaming of the Tenth arrondissement, we obtain a
sense of a highly semiotically-charged, culturally and commercially
globalized, and often paradoxical space: “I like my Tenth, global because
it is local, local because it is global.” (132) Forget any stable sense of local
identity: in the cultural and physical space of the Tenth, everything is
passing itself off as something else and nobody seems to have any qualms
about it. The McDonald’s restaurant appropriates the incongruously ornate
moldings of the café space it has usurped, the delivery men are
reformatted into gangsters, and they are happy to play this game. In an
echo of situationist demystifications, Clerc’s documentation deftly
portrays how capitalism and spectacle have blurred the line between
genuine and fake, object and commodity. However, Clerc’s is a space
where such a blurring has become status quo. His is “an ensemble
perceived as territory open to deterritorialization, to escapism.” (Westphal
2011, 51) Just as capitalism subsumes revolt and revolution into its own
modus operandi as a commodity, today’s space-time actually incorporates
and therefore normalizes transgression as one of its inherent codes:
“transgression is difficult to imagine in an order in which the way out of
the code is always an option.” (51) Accordingly, this heterotopic space is
to be apprehended not occasionally but constantly in its temporal and
spatial recombinatory potential. Clerc’s Le dixième arrondissement – with
its insistence not only on the mutability of the spatial, but also of the
constant reappropriations being negotiated by the people and things
circulating in those spaces – offers a portrait of this kind of transgressivity:
of a space-time where transgression and détournement are simply
absorbed into the fabric of the everyday: both in its physical and
332 18
architectural forms as well as in its human uses. Indeed, the “walking

corpse” metaphor Smith proposed for contemporary psychogeography
must be understood in light of this changed face of the city. As Smith puts
it: “disruption and détournement have a rather different impact in
spectacular spaces that are, by definition, in constant disruption and
détournement.” (114)
In Le dixième arrondissement, that impact is not so much to disrupt but
to reveal, infiltrate, and reappropriate, the deterritorialization paradigm of
the territory at hand. Whereas Debord and the SI countered top-down
urban technocracy and spectacle with play, proclaiming that “play…must
invade the whole of life” (Debord, “Contribution,” 10), Clerc confronts an
urban environment in which play has already accomplished this invasion –
enlisted, now, precisely by urban planning and spectacle. Clerc’s clever
response is to counter this by excessively regulating his own activity – to
the extent that he rediscovers play in constraint. In so doing, Clerc seems
to intuit what fellow French author and urban explorer Philippe Vasset
articulates, namely that “simple curious and opinionated wandering (the
famous dérive of the situationists) no longer suffices”. “The only
alternative,” states Vasset, “is to follow arbitrary itineraries that distort the
preconfigured points of view.” (2007, 78)21 Clerc’s systematic play allows
him to do just this. This systematic approach to play is Clerc’s sesame to
the deeper city: with it, he discovers what Westphal calls “the sidestep” by
which “one discovers the incalculable variations of space-time.” (43) Such
variations or nuances are, in fact, rendered explicit by Clerc’s labeling
system, plotting a kind of psychogeographical strata upon place. This is
most striking when he assigns a large number of subjective markers within
a single location. Listed in the vicinity of 34 Impasse Bonne-Nouvelle are,
for example, instances of Branding, Votive Gesture, Trap, Configuration,
Subtitle, and Method. That particular physical location and its contents are,
in this way, recast and realigned before the reader’s very eyes. In this way,
Le dixième arrondissement plots overlapping and variously intersecting
geographies of human signification. “Psychogeographies,” in short, as the
ephemeral networks Clerc produces with his markers are necessarily the
product of a moment’s idea: “Branding: I propose a reform of Banque
Populaire’s logo: -X” (60); impression: “Configuration: on the Grand
Boulevards, frank vulgarity renders one reactive (not reactionary)” (61);
feeling: “Trap: my local temple, the Cinémathèque, is closing, alas,
relocating to Bercy” (61); or any other subjective response to the social
and spatial environment at hand.
3. Détournement of Data
To conclude, Clerc’s Le dixième arrondissement does inherit from a
situationist tradition and even shares certain of the SI’s objectives. It
captures with great nuance the ambiances and configurations of its chosen
territory, and it highlights the primacy of radical movement and counters
and demystifies spectacle. It is situational, in that it introduces “certain
artificially constructed elements” into the “flow” of everyday life,
perturbing it “quantitatively, and, especially, qualitatively.” (Debord 1997,
“Moments,” 119) Moreover, what can be called unities of ambiance are
mapped across the urban grid – if in an altogether original way. However,
having been influenced probably less by Guy Debord than by Georges
Perec, Clerc favors practice over theory. He jettisons theoretical or
ideological structure and instead focuses on structuring practice. Like the
SI, his walking and writing are provoked by rapid changes to his familiar
urban milieu. However, in the 21st century, these changes are as much
linked to globalization and information technology as to the more local
urban development of Paris. Clerc’s performance is not exactly dérive, but
it is a radical movement through the urban landscape, and it produces
tangible results. Namely, it reveals the infra-ordinary spatio-temporal
complexity of the Tenth, as this can be experienced in the simple act of
walking. It restores a sense of play and adventure to the experience of
place. Paradoxically, perhaps – and in rather un-situationist fashion – this
ultimately liberating gesture is the result of a complex system of imposed
constraints governing both walking and writing.
In the actual process of walking and documenting the streets, one likes
to think Clerc hit on a practice that prevented “seeing” from “separating,”
but as the real Tenth becomes Le Dixième, as place becomes book with its
contents fixed and catalogued for us to peruse, Clerc carves the Tenth off
the official grid and – in a decidedly un-situationist move – makes of it
something like an object to be perused. True to its title, then, Paris, musée
du XXIe siècle, le dixième arrondissement is, in the end, a kind of museum.
For Foucault, the museum is one of the concrete forms of the heterotopia:
a site “in which all other real sites that can be found within the
culture…are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” (24)
Clerc in fact draws the connection between his literary musée and
Foucault’s heterotopia, when he “subtitles” 23 Rue d’Hauteville precisely
with the term Heterotopia. (133) Moreover, for Clerc, the fundamentally
fluid spatial aspects of the Tenth are heterotopic in that they are
microcosmic of France at large: “Cartography: the Tenth hexagon is a
minifrance.” (160) In fact, because Clerc consistently highlights how
334 18
cultural and physical elements from around the globe intermingle and are
“simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” in the Tenth, one
could argue that the subtitle Heterotopia stands for Clerc’s book at large.
Clerc’s text demonstrates to what extent the Tenth – like a museum well-
curated – is always renegotiating its floor plan and displaying itself in new
ways. Like the visitor to the museum, the reader – liberated by the lack of
fictional plot and facilitated by the index of subjective markers at the end
of the book – is free to choose her path. In one room she finds the Tenth
rearranged according to Danger, in another she peruses it according to
Past City. She gets lost, finds a new way, leaps from one boulevard to
another with the turn of a page: the recombinatory possibilities are
virtually endless, and the finite geographical space of the Tenth becomes
something like an infinitely varied territory, a labyrinth inside of which,
having entered, we lose the kind of topographical bearings that equip us to
envision the spatial as something we might master. In the museum devoted
to such geographies, the visitor is invited to construct her own itineraries:
a kind of agency is restored, but there is no real beginning or ending to the
tour (or to the book).
By becoming an instrument for absorbing the locative and
psychogeographical information of the Tenth, Clerc, as narrator-curator,
becomes dislocated: he is nomadic, homeless in the very arrondissement
he calls home. One wonders how he survives without sleep and food.
Clerc possesses only a fragmentary voice and presence, consumed and
eclipsed, as he is, by the great wealth of information he produces. And yet,
Clerc is not so much buried under an avalanche of information – as we
often feel ourselves to be in today’s world – as he is self-effaced in the
production of information. And it is precisely via the densely
informational character of the text that Le dixième arrondissement pushes
back against 21st-century forms of alienation tied to information overload.
In today’s world of constantly streaming information, “our personal
perception is being ratcheted up to move at mechanistic rates.” (Dixon
2013, 161) One feels this, reading Clerc’s text. In everyday life, our
mobile devices facilitate – and oblige – this ratcheting up of subjectivity,
but at the risk of further distancing us from a meaningful relationship with
place itself. Clerc responds to this by employing a radical system of
constraints that – as we have seen – parodies the informational paradigm
and allows him to create a database that operates the détournement of data.
Accordingly, Clerc has the guile, the ruse, to operate his own reformatting
of the Tenth according to his invented parameters – via his system of
subjective markers. This move allows Clerc to remain true to – and bring
to the surface – the Tenth’s highly fabricated and coded nature. At the
same time, it affords Clerc (and his readers) a newfound agency in taking
control of the code. If structure and information are to excessively
intervene in everyday life, penetrating and fragmenting our relationship
with place, it will at least be Clerc who ludically builds these structures
and produces this information. In today’s world, where data is everywhere
at our virtual disposal, we would be wise to extrapolate from Clerc’s text a
more nuanced understanding of our relationship to information, so as to
ensure we are not allowing its reifications to separate us from a more
qualitative and meaningful – and perhaps psychogeographical –
relationship with the geographies we inhabit.
Afterthought: Mapping Le dixième arrondissement

The intense geographical orientation of Clerc’s text, along with its
wealth of locative data, lends it to a cartographic reading. Such was, at
least, the consensus between myself and colleagues in the Department of
Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was almost as
though simply reading the text proved insufficient. We wanted to see what
kind of mad map we could make using Clerc’s deviant data. To this end,
we created a database tagging every subjective marker to the physical
address Clerc associates with it: 749 tags in total. Then, cartographer Dean
Olsen mapped this database onto the geographical space of the Tenth
Arrondissement. Olsen implemented interactive features that allow the
user to visualize Clerc’s movement across the geographical space of the
Tenth: “playing” Clerc’s walk as a series of points on the map. The map’s
user can also select any combination of subjective markers to see how
their occurrences plot as color-coded points on the map22.
The map palpably demonstrates the rigor of Clerc’s undertaking, and
allows the user to navigate those plaques tournantes that Clerc’s text
reveals within the Tenth. Moreover, it is freely accessible and can be used
as a research tool – one that bridges the disciplines of literature and
geography. The humanistic geographer, for example, or even the urban
planner, could use the map to detect patterns of subjective response to
particular urban configurations, as these occur in Clerc’s text. The literary
critic or historian, on the other hand, could use the map to locate the places
of greatest psychogeographical interest: such as where Clerc felt
compelled to plot Ambiance, or Intrusion. Of course, the subjective
markers are Clerc’s own. No one else will experience the same
Synesthesia or the same feeling of Danger in the same location as Clerc
did. Hopefully, in its mapped form, Le dixième arrondissement suggests
itself not as any kind of conclusive knowledge but rather as a model to
336 18
appropriate for the aspirring modern-d day psychogeeographer. Fo or just as

reading the text does not seem to be enough when iit comes to Lee dixième
arrondissemment, neither – it turns ou ut – does m mapping it. Ultimately,
Clerc’s perfformance insppires us to enteer the outsidee by reminding us that,
even in a world full of boooks and map ps, and inform
mation and speectacle of
all kinds, pllace is still ouut there waitin
ng to be purpoosefully, radiccally, and
meaningfullly inhabited.
“Ambiance annd Intrusion”. The T map can bee accessed at:

wisc.edu/files/jarmstrong/Digiital_Clerc/map1
http://frit.wiscc.edu/sites/frit.w 1.html]
Refereences
ARMSTRONG G, Joshua. 2015. “Empiritexxts: Mapping A Attention and Invention
in Post-11980 French Literature.”
L Freench Forum 400 (1): 3-108.
CLERC, Thhomas. 2007.. Paris, mussée du XXIe Ie siècle, le dixième
arrondisssement. Paris: L’arbalète Gallimard.
G
CONSTANT. 2006. “Annother City for Anotheer Life”, Situationist
Internatiional Anthologgy, Ken Knab bb (ed. and traans.). Berkeley
y: Bureau
of Publicc Secrets, 71-773.
DEBORD, Guuy. 1997. “Coontribution à uneu définitionn situationnistee du jeu.”
Internatiionale situatiionniste, Patriick Mosconi (ed). Paris: Librairie
Arthèmee Fayard, 9-100.
—. (1981). 2006. “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” In

Situationist International Anthology; Revised and expanded edition,
Ken Knabb (ed and trans.). Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 8-12.
—. 1983. Society of Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red.
—. 2006. “Theory of the Dérive.” Situationist International Anthology,
Ken Knabb (ed and trans.). Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 62-66.
—. 1997. “Théorie des moments et construction des situations.”
Internationale situationniste, Patrick Mosconi (ed). Paris: Librairie
Arthème Fayard, 118-119.
DIXON, Wheeler Winston. 2013. Streaming: Movies, Media, and Instant
Access. Lexington: U P of Kentucky.
FOUCAULT, Michel and Jay MISKOWIEC. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.”
Diacritics 16 (1): 22-27.
KHATIB, Abdelhafid. 1997. “Essai de description psychogéographique des
Halles.” Internationale situationniste, Patrick Mosconi ‘ed). Paris:
Librairie Arthème Fayard, 45-49.
O’ROURKE, Karen. 2013. Walking and Mapping. Cambridge: MIT.
PEREC, Georges. 1975. Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien. Paris: C.
Bourgois.
SELF, Will and Ralph STEADMAN. 2007. Psychogeography. New York:
Bloomsbury.
SHERINGHAM, Michael. 2006. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from
Surrealism to the Present. New York: Oxford.
SMITH, Phil. 2010. “The contemporary dérive: a partial review of issues
concerning the contemporary practice of psychogeography.” Cultural
Geographies: 17 (1): 103-122.
VANEIGEM, Raoul. 1997. “Commentaire contre l’urbanisme.”
Internationale situationniste, Patrick Mosconi (ed). Paris: Librairie
Arthème Fayard, 231-235.
VASSET, Philippe. 2007. Un livre blanc. Paris: Fayard.
VIART, Dominique. and Bruno VERCIER. 2008. La Littérature française au
présent. Paris: Bordas.
VIRILIO, Paul. 2000. The Information Bomb, Chris Turner (trans.).
London: Verso.
WESTPHAL, Bertrand. 2011. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces,
Robert T. Tally Jr (trans.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
338 18
Notes
1
English translations of Situationist Interantional texts will be provided, when
available, from the Situationist International Anthology (see references). Those not
included in that anthology – such as this one – have been translated by the author
from the original French as published in Internationale situationniste (references).
2
Full quote: “The crisis in urbanism is worsening. They layout of neighborhoods,
old and new, conflicts with established patterns of behavior and even more with
the new ways of life that we are seeking. The result is a dismal and sterile
ambiance in our surroundings.”
3
O’Rourke provides a large corpus of psychogeographically-inclined artists,
including the likes of British filmmaker Patrick Keiller, Dutch blogger and postal
worker Wilfried Hou Je Bek, and the Italian urban exploration group Stalker.
4
For a methodical description of unities of ambiance, see Abdelhafid Khatib’s
“Les Halles” (references).
5
The precise purview and methodology of psychogeography remained purposely
vague: “The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographical can be applied to the
findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human
feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the
same spirit of discovery. (2006, “Introduction,” 8)
6
The “situation” the SI sought was to be an “artistic production” that “breaks
radically with concrete works. It is inseparable from its immediate consumption, a
use value that knows no conservation as merchandise.” (Debord “Construction,”
118)
7
For a methodical description of such literary projects, see Armstrong’s
“Empiritexts: Mapping Attention and Invention in Post-1980 French Literature”.
8
In their 2008 état des lieux of contemporary French literature, La littérature
française au présent, Dominique Viart and Bruno Vercier note the postmodern and
contemporary absence of a literary avant-garde: “contemporary literature proceeds
rather by a critical reading of the world surrounding it and a no less critical re-
reading of the discourses that convey the past. It does not echo preconceived
ideologies, but speaks from that defection of grand narratives that Jean-François
Lyotard described.” (253, author’s translation)
9
Even a self-professed psychogeographer like Will Self admits what he is doing is
not exactly psychogeography as the SI intended: “Although we psychogeographers
are all disciples of Guy Debord and those rollicking Situationists who tottered,
soused, across the stage set of 1960s Paris, thereby hoping to tear down the scenery
of the Society of the Spectacle with their devilish dérive, there are still profound
differences between us.” (11) Most of the “psychogeographic fraternity,” Smith
jokes, “are really only local historians with an attitude problem. (12)
10
All English translations of Le dixième arrondissement are the author’s.
11
The SI proposed fantastical urban planning projects (cf. Constant “Another City”
in references).
12
The Naked City map is one of the few works of art produced by Debord. Labeled
as a “Psychogeographical Guide of Paris,” it shows Paris distinctly divided into
unities of ambiance, and uses arrows to indicate how plaques tournantes suggest
movement across the distinct unities during dérive.
13
In this way, like SI psychogeographer Abdelhafid Khatib, he is able to explore
the “possibilities of contact” to be found between one unity of ambiance and
another. (“Les Halles” 47)
14
Misguided urban planning separates city dwellers from their authentic existence,
because it “conflicts with established patterns of behavior and even more with the
new ways of life that we are seeking.” (“Another City,” 71) Moreover, Part I of
Debord’s Society of Spectacle is entitled “Separation Perfected.”
15
Clerc inherits from a particularly rich French tradition of theorizing and
artistically representing the quotidien. See Sheringham’s Everyday Life.
16
“l’infa-mince me passionne.” Here we find a reference to Georges Perec’s
neologism l’infra-ordinaire (cf. Perec’s L’infra-ordinaire).
17
“Attempt to exhaust.” In Georges Perec’s Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu
parisien. Perec spent three days in Paris’s Place Saint-Sulpice, attempting to
exhaust in writing everything he observed in the square.
18
Clerc adds that this alphabetical GPS “leads and misleads.” (38)
19
“Travelling.” Clerc privileges the metaphor of the cinematic tracking shot
throughout Le dixième arrondissement.
20
Alternative spelling of racaille: translating as “scum” or “riff-raff,” it is a
pejorative term used to describe delinquent youth, especially of immigrant origin,
in France. The mention of racaille is implicitly political, as, in 2005, then Interior
Minister Nicolas Sarkozy controversially applied the term to describe the youth
perpetrating riots in and around Paris.
21
Author’s translation.
22
Special thanks to Professor Robert Roth (UW-Madison, Geography) who made
this interdisciplinary collaboration possible, as well as to French and geography
student Sasha Barkhaus, who created the database, and to geography students
Adam Gile and Scarlett Zhang, who assisted in creating the map. Most especially,
however, the author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the effort, technical
expertise, and creative talents of cartographer Dean Olsen (UW-Madison), lead
designer and builder of the map.
19
LONDON IN THE SECRET AGENT

BY JOSEPH CONRAD:
FROM A “MONSTROUS TOWN”
TO “A CITY OF MARVELS AND MUD”
NATHALIE MARTINIÈRE
The importance of geography and places in Joseph Conrad’s fiction is

well-known. Critics tend however to concentrate on the exotic dimension
of far-away countries or on the sea. In The Secret Agent, it is London, the
metropolis, that takes pride of place, and many places and neighbourhoods
could easily be identified by the English readers of 1907. But London can
also be read as a fantasy, a place worked upon by the novelist,
transformed, dismembered and re-membered to suit his own purposes – so
much so that in the end it becomes almost “exotic” in comparison with the
city Conrad’s contemporaries knew. The Secret Agent offers its readers a
picture of London which conveys the sense of a loss of reliable, stable
landmarks, a loss that should inevitably be associated with modernity. Yet,
it is not immaterial that Conrad chose London as a backdrop and a frame
for his story1 – not an imaginary place; the real city cannot be left aside
and forgotten and what he has to say cannot be dissociated from London at
the beginning of the 20th century, the centre of the civilized world and the
epitome of democracy and modernity: London proved a perfect choice for
a novelist who wanted to tackle the threat of meaninglessness,
fragmentation, disorder and chaos with which the western world was
confronted2.
In her preface to L’Invention du paysage, Anne Cauquelin, a specialist
of aesthetics, underlines the artificial character of landscapes in painting,
insisting on their cultural dimension. Her remarks also apply to literary
cityscapes:
London in The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad 341
[…] what we see, the painted landscape, is the materialization of the link
between the different elements and values of one particular culture: it
provides a sequencing, a design, a form of “order” to our perception of the
world.
[…] The landscape […] in a way depends on the forms of culture.
(Cauquelin 2002, 6-7, translation mine)
This is why London in The Secret Agent is only partially connected to the
real city: it exists as a major signifier within the narration besides using the
real city as its model. Significantly, what indicates to us that the place is
London is the fact that the name appears from the very start (§2). If, as
Henry James puts it in the preface to Roderick Hudson, “[t]o name a place
in fiction is to pretend in some degree to represent it,” (James 2011, 8) the
repeated mention of a few well-known places like the Greenwich
Observatory, Belgravia or Soho offers the readers landmarks. And the
choice of London is important since the novel makes it clear that London
stands for democracy and the questions and difficulties raised by
democracy: what happens in London (the threat represented by the attempt
to bomb the Greenwich Observatory) is only the mirror image of what
happens to the society that epitomizes modernity and democracy –
England – and to its citizens.
What is particularly interesting for that matter is the way Conrad
reshapes London for his own narrative purposes: while meaninglessness
and the loss of landmarks for the characters are systematically conveyed in
the way places are represented, Conrad’s narration also relies on a number
of strategies that give space a prominent role (abundance of spatial
symbolism, role of geometry, space metaphors) and enable him to convey
a sense of chaos associated with his vision of modernity. For that matter
not only is London a place of defamiliarisation and alienation but – more
interestingly – places are systematically metaphorised in spatial terms, as
if a place could be metaphorised only in terms of another place: space is
where the metaphors that give the novel its structure are articulated.
Relying on the tension between “here” and “there”, the city and the sea,
the systematic choice of spatial metaphors may be read as an attempt to
acknowledge and resist the incoherence of the world simultaneously. It is
above all a way of thinking the stakes of modernity in space, and with
space (and spatial imagery) as a privileged tool.
1. “[…] a monstrous town”

The city is a favourite theme in modernist literature and art as
modernist writers/artists tended to see cities as mirrors of modernity
342 19
sharply contrasting with the more “organic” type of life associated with
rural settings. Christopher Butler points out that in most 19th century
novels, the city is a kind of larger village which serves as a backdrop for
the characters’ adventures and social relationships. (Butler 1994, 134) It is
highly codified and works as a mirror of society’s organisation. At the
beginning of the 20th century however, the city had become largely
anonymous, threatening and disorientating, subjecting the individual to
what Georg Simmel in his famous article “Metropolis and the Mental
Life”, published in 1903, four years before The Secret Agent, defines as
“the rapid telescoping of changing images, […] the unexpectedness of
violent stimuli.” (Simmel 2002, 11) Butler points out that:
[i]n the early Modern period, [a number of artists] rejected an imagery

which assimilated the city to the natural object. [... There were attacks on]
Monet and Pissarro as ‘two lyricists who belonged out in the country with
trees and bushes. [...] The Modernists thus tended to resist those metaphors
and symbols which had metamorphosed the city into the more ‘acceptable’
aesthetic realm of the natural object. [… The city] is the site of a new kind
of sensibility, which can only express itself through disjunction and
juxtaposition. (Butler 1994, 136-137)
This choice of disjunction and juxtaposition is a characteristic of The

Secret Agent and mirrors the crisis in representation. It means that the
readers’ expectations of realism are frustrated: naturalism and mimesis are
rejected and replaced by symbolic and metaphorical networks. Conrad’s
vision of the city shows a somewhat ironic interest in what the city
represents in terms of modernity: a new god-like figure threatened by
disintegration. Interested in defining new modes of representation, Conrad
relied on a subjective approach, thus creating a sort of “kaleidoscopic”3
image of “reality”. The logical result is that, though The Secret Agent
originates in a true story and topical preoccupations (science, progress,
democracy, the individual as individual and as part of a collective
movement of which he has no control), it is absolutely not naturalistic,
particularly in its description of London; on the contrary, it questions the
traditional representation of space and time and challenges the reader’s
familiarity with the city. As Daniel Schwartz puts it,
[…] images are not really comparisons of the world within the novel to an
extrinsic one with which narrator and reader are familiar, but rather they
are part of the process of subverting the reader’s ‘familiarity’ with the
London being described. (Schwartz 1980, 162)
a) A polarised city
From the start, what is represented of London in The Secret Agent is
polarised around two distinct areas: the shop in Brett Street on the one
hand and the embassy in Belgravia on the other: both appear from the very
beginning of the novel and stand for larger groups. Associated with Brett
Street are the anarchists’ rooms (the Professor’s; Ossipon’s)4, Winnie’s
mother’s “charity-cottage” or the rooms she lets out (even though they are
in Belgravia); a major characteristic of London in the novel is its gloomy
atmosphere, poverty and grime, even though the fashionable districts
around the Embassy, the Home Office and the drawing-room of the “great
lady” where Mr Vladimir and the Assistant Commissioner meet are a very
privileged environment of high windows, tall mirrors, precious woods and
gleaming chandeliers. Light in The Secret Agent, or rather the absence of
light, is a powerful agent of stylisation of places that contributes to
conveying an impression of secrecy and squalor that dominates the
representation of London but also to suggesting that there is no moral
order left: “the light of […] tall windows” in the “great drawing-room”
(92) contrasts heavily for instance with Brett Street, “a sordid street
seldom touched by the sun.” (40) Communication between the two worlds
remains rare and characters that go from one to the other can do it only in
secret: Verloc has to hide his connections with the embassy, the assistant
commissioner does not feel in his place anywhere and Michaelis is no
longer taken seriously by his friends because he is protected by “the great
lady.” When these juxtaposed, fragmented worlds come into contact, a
catastrophe takes place: Verloc’s visit to the embassy is responsible for
Stevie’s death, Heat’s visit to the shop in Brett Street leads to Verloc’s
murder by Winnie.
Similarly, if plots are schemed indoors (in Verloc’s shop or parlour, or
in the embassy), they are carried out outdoors, and London streets are also
organised according to a pattern of oppositions, creating almost two
parallel networks; “wide thoroughfares” (21, first occurrence of the term)
correspond to the well-lit drawing-rooms, but it is through “narrow lanes”
that the characters move around: Verloc goes to the embassy by “[a]
narrow street along a yellow wall” (21), the Professor meets Heat in a
“narrow and dusky alley” (74) and the Assistant Commissioner walks
from the Home Office to his own office “along a narrow street.” (127) If
the presence of the anarchists in these “narrow lanes” may seem a serious
threat for the people in the “wide thoroughfares”, anarchists feel even
more threatened by “populous streets” – reversing the readers’
expectations:
344 19
[The professor] was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of

an immense multitude; but all around him, on and on, even to the limits of
the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of
mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous like locusts,
industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and
orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror too,
perhaps. (74)
After she has killed Verloc, Winnie also dreads walking into the street:
“The street, silent and deserted from end to end, repelled her by taking
sides with that man who was so certain of his impunity.” (206)
b) “London’s topographical mysteries” (21)

The novel mixes the mention of existing places and neighbourhoods
like the Greenwich Observatory, Soho or Chesham Square in Belgravia –
well-known for its embassies, among which the Russian embassy – and
invented streets or places like Brett Street5. However, if geographical and
physical markers contribute to an “effet de réel”, the narrator also insists
on the absolutely unreliable aspect of the city’s topography:
With a turn to the left Mr Verloc pursued his way along a narrow street by
the side of a yellow wall which, for some inscrutable reason, had No. 1
Chesham Square written on it in black letters. Chesham Square was at
least sixty yards away, and Mr Verloc, cosmopolitan enough not to be
deceived by London's topographical mysteries, held on steadily, without
a sign of surprise or indignation. At last, with business-like persistency, he
reached the Square, and made diagonally for the number 10. This belonged
to an imposing carriage gate in a high, clean wall between two houses, of
which one rationally enough bore the number 9 and the other was
numbered 37; but the fact that this last belonged to Porthill Street, a street
well known in the neighbourhood, was proclaimed by an inscription placed
above the ground-floor windows by whatever highly efficient authority is
charged with the duty of keeping track of London's strayed houses. (21-22,
emphasis is mine)
As Arnold E. Davidson underlines, the narrator’s insisting on the

numbering of houses in Chesham Square is a sign of the irrationality that
reigns supreme in the city. (Davidson 1984, 69) Places refuse to comply
with human logic and one needs, like Verloc, to be initiated to these
mysteries to find one’s way there, which is perfectly in keeping with the
character’s occupations as a triple agent and dealer in shady goods. What
is suggested is the presence of two (or more) parallel worlds in the city,
accommodating groups who remain largely unconscious of the others’

existence – except maybe when a bombing occurs.
It is also interesting to note that Conrad’s descriptions of London are
highly reminiscent of Dickens as he repeatedly resorts to anthropomorphism
and the grotesque for instance and constantly blurs the line between
inanimate and animated objects and suggests that “civilisation [is]
returning to jungle and wilderness” (Schwartz 1980, 164):
Facing the only gas-lamp yawned the cavern of a second-hand furniture

dealer, where, deep in the gloom of a sort of narrow avenue winding
through a bizarre forest of wardrobes, with an undergrowth tangle of table
legs, a tall pier-glass glimmered like a pool of water in a wood. (74)
As we are going to see, the problematic relation nature/culture is never far

when the city is mentioned in The Secret Agent and contributes to the
suggestion of a dehumanized city.
c) The city as a zoo

The novel opens with Verloc’s walk from his shop in Soho to
Belgravia where he has an appointment in an embassy for which he plays
double agent. This walk from East to West is the occasion for
considerations on the organisation of society on Verloc’s part, a society
whose divisions are supposedly mirrored in the urban organisation: “He
surveyed through the park railings the evidences of the town’s opulence
and luxury with an approving eye. All these people had to be protected.
Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.” (20) However, a
number of images due to the narrator and of which Verloc is “not in the
least conscious” (19-20) undermine this clear-cut differentiation of places
in a highly ironic manner: first, this “opulent” and superficially elegant
world looks very much like a zoo and the people in it are like animals:
“here and there a victoria with the skin of some wild beast inside and a
woman’s face and hat emerg[ed] above the folded hood.” (19) Verloc’s
idealised vision of the upper classes is, because of a piece of clothing
whose presence is underlined by the narrator, ridiculed at the very moment
when it is mentioned. The well-to-do people parading in the park are but
tamed animals offered to the contemplation of passers-by. The image also
suggests residual savagery in a group supposedly with the highest degree
of refinement and, to a Conrad reader, is reminiscent of Marlow’s famous
parallelism between the Europeans and the Africans, England and the
Congo, in Heart of Darkness (“[…] what thrilled you was just the thought
of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with
346 19
this wild and passionate uproar.” (Conrad 2006, 36) Though far less
obvious than in the novella, the similarities between the two continents
(and between their inhabitants) are reinforced by the fact that in both texts,
London is characterised as “a monstrous town”:
Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town

more populous than some continents and in its man-made might as if
indifferent to heaven’s frowns and smiles; a cruel devourer of the world’s
light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough for
any passion, variety enough for any setting, darkness enough to bury five
millions of lives. (Italics mine, The Secret Agent, Author’s Note, Conrad
1994, 10)
“And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town
was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a
lurid glare under the stars.
"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of
the earth."” (Italics mine, Conrad 2006, 5)
Then, the fact that the upper classes are offered to the lower classes’
admiration in what looks very much like a zoo reinforces the idea of a
tamed, weakened kind of civilization, a sham Eden, protected from
confrontation with reality by the railings only.
Similarly ambiguous and ironic is the distinction between culture and
nature. Mr Vladimir, Verloc’s contact at the embassy, asks him to blow up
the Greenwich Observatory because it stands for what he calls the new
“fetish” (21) of the British (and more generally European) middle classes
– science. In the end, it is Stevie, the half-wit, who is blown up in the
Greenwich Park. The fact that the bomb explodes in the park and not in
the observatory underlines the limits of their symbolic value: for if the
observatory is the symbol of modernity, the park’s value is much more
ambiguous. Limited by its railings, containing only domesticated plants,
the park is a degraded image of the Garden of Eden, which rejects man
through the association of the Professor’s bomb (an image of modernity
run mad) and a tree stump (a sign of nature’s degraded state in an urban
environment).
As a result, two usually conflicting myths collapse together: on the one
hand, scientific progress that produces both observatories for the
measurement of time but also lethal and uncontrollable bombs; and on the
other hand the myth of nature as an image of salvation since, in this urban
environment, it is soiled by contact with the city as much as by the bomb
itself. Stevie’s death is a sign of the epistemological break at work at the
beginning of the 20th century: neither nature nor culture can be seen as a
refuge; both are threatening for modern man. Osiris/Stevie is not resuscitated
by Isis/Heat and his exploded body does not fertilise the park but
desecrates it. An image of nature imprisoned in the heart of the city, the
park is the place where, symbolically, a degraded form of nature and
culture-run-mad collide and destroy each other.
As mentioned in the Author’s Note, London in The Secret Agent is also
a cannibal city, “devouring” not only the “world’s light” (10) but
individuals like Stevie; and at the end of the story, Winnie kills her
husband with the kitchen knife he had used to carve a joint of meat, a
situation that emphasizes the association of London (or Londoners) with
the repeated transgression of taboos. Again, the image of cannibalism
confirms the parallelism between London and the “heart of darkness”
whose presence cannot be limited to Africa – or to Heart of Darkness. As
Daniel Schwartz has shown, numerous myths superimpose in the London
of The Secret Agent, but they are always corrupted, turned into parodies,
keeping only their more grotesque features: “[… in The Secret Agent,
myths] serve to emphasise how far Western man has strayed both from his
biblical heritage and his epic tradition.” (Schwartz 1980, 171) The
collapse of values being general and the traditional naturalistic rendition of
reality no longer adequate, Conrad’s narrator resorts to other strategies in
order to fight the growing impression of chaos and make the urban
environment legible.
2. “[…] a rendering of cosmic chaos […]”

or “[…] a city of marvels and mud […]”?
Traditional landmarks being no longer reliable, an alternative to the
collapse of signification has to be found: geometry and metaphors
therefore become the new organising principles in The Secret Agent and in
its urban environment. While man’s confidence in his environment leads
to a naturalistic mode of representation of the world, anguish and doubts
are often responsible for the choice of simple, sometimes simplified,
geometric shapes6. The whole process can be read as an image of the crisis
in representation at the beginning of the 20th century: meaning has
collapsed and is recreated along new lines. Once more, London’s diversity
is replaced by a codified, stylised representation based on a system of
oppositions illustrating the antagonistic forces at work in the novel. As we
will see, the picture thus created is very dark.
348 19
a) Organising the city along geometric lines

The novel is characterized by the opposition of two geometrical
figures, the circle and the triangle, which leave their mark on the city: the
circle is the image of chaos and (spatial and mental) disorder, while the
triangle stands for geometrical rationalization, which proves vain. Both are
associated with groups of characters and with places.
The triangle is Verloc’s geometrical shape (he is the “famous agent ǻ”,
31) and also the shape of the place where he lives, as if his main
characteristic had been transferred onto the place (or is it the other way
around?), leaving only “[…] the darkness and solitude of Brett Place in
which all sounds of life seemed lost as if in a triangular well of asphalt and
bricks, of blind houses and unfeeling stones”(223): in Brett Place7,
humanity has been wiped out by the power of geometry and what it stands
for. Order and symmetry are naively expressed in Verloc’s code name and
stand for his faith in science considered as a supreme value.
On the other hand, the circle is associated with characters like Stevie,
Michaelis or Winnie, and Stevie’s circles are signs of his incapacity to
cope with reality and of his autistic personality:
[...] the innocent Stevie, seated very good and quiet at a deal table, drawing
circles, circles, circles; innumerable circles, concentric, eccentric; a
coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of repeated
curves, uniformity of form, and confusion of intersecting lines suggested a
rendering of cosmic chaos, the symbolism of a mad art attempting the
inconceivable. (Italics mine, 45-46)
Interestingly, the circle, a traditional image of order and perfection is here

interpreted by Verloc as a sign of mental chaos. And when Winnie stabs
her husband, circles invade the otherwise well-regulated space of Brett
Street, confronting her to the “undulatory and swinging movements of the
parlour.” (213) The graphic aspect of what she sees is transferred onto
space as psychic alterations associated to what she has done influence her
perception of the place. The opposition between circle and triangle is
systematized throughout the novel and gives Conrad (or his narrator) the
opportunity to caricature social groups or ideologies which the characters
would like to be able to believe in. Unfortunately, they no longer offer
stable landmarks, as is made clear when Verloc, who believes his role is to
protect established order, organises the bombing in Greenwich Park: it
results in chaos, not only in the park but also in his personal life.
Ironically, the only fragment that can be identified after the explosion is
“the triangular piece of broadcloth” lovingly sewn on Stevie’s coat by his
sister and it leads to Verloc’s identification and his death. Geometry

therefore may also lead to chaos: a unifying principle throughout the
novel, it works as an image of what the universe of The Secret Agent is
refused, its failure reflects the growing impossibility for the moderns (and
among them the modernist novelist) to give a stable meaning to reality.
With the main characters’ deaths, Verloc’s attempt to preserve “order”,
which is predicated on his belief in science and geometry, proves a failure
and the novel ends on the idea of impending chaos, with the professor
walking the streets of London, his hand on the detonator that could blow
up a large part of the city.
b) Metaphors as landmarks
The process of metaphorisation of London in spatial terms is not
specific to The Secret Agent, but in this novel it is systematized, as if a
place could be defined only in terms of another: London is repeatedly
associated through metaphors with water and the sea, creating a tension
between here and there, a well-known, supposedly firm environment and
the constantly changing sea. In The Secret Agent, the basic unit in London
is the street; and it is the street that is primarily described in terms of the
sea. What prompts the metaphorical process is the watery element in
London – not the Thames but the rain. When the Assistant Commissioner
looks from his window into the street,
[...] the short street he looked down into lay wet and empty, as if swept
clear suddenly by a great flood. It was a very trying day, choked in raw fog
to begin with, and now drowned in cold rain. (88)
As a consequence, the precise lines defining the city’s shapes (the

horizontal and vertical lines of buildings, streets or pavement) are blurred
and turned into indistinct masses. Clearly delineated reassuring forms are
wiped out – all the more so since darkness also contributes to turning the
city into a marine immensity whose unexpectedly exotic aspect
mesmerizes the characters: “And still, the Assistant Commissioner did not
turn away from the darkness outside, as vast as a sea.” (90) In the whole
city, buildings and houses have also been transformed and have become
“[...] empty shells awaiting demolition” (74) while for the Assistant
Commissioner “[…] descent into the street was like the descent into a
slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off.” (124, italics
mine) In moments of particular tension, rooms and houses even seem to be
carried away, as when Winnie stabs her husband: “The room behaved as if
it was at sea in a tempest.” (213)
350 19
As a matter of fact, it is always in moments of extreme dramatic

tension that spatial metaphors abound. It seems that overwhelming events
cannot be contained into one place only and therefore overflow diegetic
space. Verloc’s murder by his wife Winnie in their kitchen in Brett Street,
Soho, cannot be described objectively; metaphors therefore allow for the
manifestation of an “elsewhere” which is necessarily more expressive and
more dangerous since it is alien, as if things could be expressed only by
transfer to another sort of place. It endows London with some sort of fairy
atmosphere superimposed onto the city’s depressing grime: “The whole
town of marvels and mud, with its maze of streets and its mass of lights
was sunk in a hopeless night, rested at the bottom of a black abyss.” (218)
The association of the two antithetic terms, “marvels and mud”,
epitomizes the way the whole metaphorical process works. Even a place as
sordid as Brett Street may create an impression of the “marvelous”;
analogies underline London’s degradation but also its poetic qualities, its
imaginary potential. The sea metaphors also contaminate the characters:
Londoners move by “streams of people” (59), life is like “drowning” (45),
Mrs Neale, the Verlocs’ cleaning lady is “[…] a sort of amphibious and
domestic animal” (152) and the Assistant Commissioner is “[…] one more
of the queer foreign fish that can be seen of an evening about there.” (124)
The characters’ movements also become liquid, especially Winnie’s after
her husband’s murder: “She sank against [Ossipon’s] breast.” (227), “Her
throat […] convulsed in waves […]” (216) The character’s breathing
obeys the laws of the oneiric space rather than those of the place she
inhabits. And then, life as a whole is concerned: the phrase “stream of life”
is repeated a number of times. And the liquid element has taken over all
internal sensations: “[…] blood trickl[ed] as a destroying flood” (214),
Winnie underwent “a wave of faintness.” (218)
The whole process results in turning London into an undefined space,
neither totally city nor completely sea, as Winnie experiences when she
leaves the shop after Verloc’s death: “This entrance into the open air had a
foretaste of drowning [...] she floundered over the doorstep, head forward,
arms thrown out, like a person falling over the parapet of a bridge.” (217)
The air has become liquid and therefore deadly and getting out of the shop
is like falling into the river. Of course, the whole passage can be read as an
announcement of Winnie’s suicide in the Channel’s waters: there is no
way out, neither in reality nor in fantasy. In the end, this attempt at giving
the city a new shape through sea metaphors can also be read as a
(somewhat paradoxical) way of fighting the incoherence of the modern
world, of endowing it with a form of renewed coherence. Yet it underlines
the fact that for man, “elsewhere” is not a refuge but only the reflection of
here.
Conclusion
Conrad’s London mirrors the loss of reliable landmarks and explores
the possibility of new modes of representation. Metaphors offer an
alternative that signals the fact that “reality” boils down to words – an
observation which led Conrad to what Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan defines as
a “metaphysics of absence” (Erdinast-Vulcan 1991, 144), the world being
only “[…] a void covered by a thin network of interpretations.” As a
result, the description of the city veils and unveils the ontological
emptiness at the same time, oscillating between explicit references to the
extra-diegetic reality of London and attempts to give it meaning within the
story, through symbolization, geometric reorganization or metaphors.
Places therefore are endowed with more meaning or transformed into
something different (the sea) in an attempt at coherence, and a fantastic
space is superimposed onto the city. Sea metaphors give the city a new
dimension and underline its mythical potential: as London is turned into a
city swallowed up by the sea, the Verlocs’ story takes on the shades of
tragedy. It would be impossible in the sordid shop of a secret agent but the
situation is different “at the bottom of a black abyss”. (217) Space
metaphors therefore contribute to the (relative) preservation of meaning,
with all locations converging towards a similar symbolical value. In the
end, places become opaque as they all correspond to a similar, very dark
vision of the world, which is an image of meaninglessness and chaos and a
reflection of Conrad’s position on modernity. The Secret Agent is not only
a good instance of the “geographical bias” in Conrad’s fiction, it also
shows how writers reshape spatial “data” for their own purposes, thus
reflecting a period’s way of “thinking space” and influencing the readers’
perception of “real” places.
References
BUTLER, Christopher. 1994. Early Modernism. Literature, Music and
Painting in Europe 1900-1916, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
CAUQUELIN, Anne. (1989). 2002. L’Invention du paysage. Quadrige/PUF.
CONRAD, Joseph. (1899). 2006. Heart of Darkness, Paul B. Armstrong
(ed). New York, London: Norton Critical Edition, 4th ed.
—. (1901). 1996. Lord Jim. Thomas Moser (ed). New York, London:
Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed.
352 19
—. (1907). 1994. The Secret Agent. Harmondsworth: Penguin Popular

Classics.
DAVIDSON, Arnold E. 1984. Conrad’s Endings: A Study of the Five Major
Novels, UMI Research Press.
ERDINAST-VULCAN, Daphna. 1991. Joseph Conrad and the Modern
Temper, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
JAMES, Henry. (1875). 2011. “Preface to Roderick Hudson”, The Art of
the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press.
SCHWARTZ, Daniel R. 1980. Conrad, Almayer’s Folly to Under Western
Eyes, Basingstoke, London: Macmillan.
SIMMEL, Georg. (1903). 2002. “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, Gary
Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds). The Blackwell City Reader. Oxford
and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Also available on
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_st
ore/Sample_chapter/0631225137/Bridge.pdf.
Consulted on 02/01/2015.
Notes
1
In his Author’s Note, Conrad writes that The Secret Agent is the “story of Winnie
Verloc.” (10) Winnie’s husband, Adolf, is a triple agent, the member of a group of
anarchists, a third-rate agent provocateur for an Eastern (probably Russian?)
embassy as well as a spy for the London police. At the beginning of the novel, the
Embassy orders him to organise a bomb attack in order to force the English
government to take energetic measures against the anarchists (at the beginning of
the 20th century, London was a hub for such movements): his target is the
Greenwich observatory, the emblem of the general taste for science, the “fetish” of
modernity. Verloc has the bomb carried by Stevie, his half-wit brother-in-law. The
bombing is a failure but Stevie is killed in the process. Mad with grief when she
hears what happened to her brother, Winnie stabs her husband with a carving
knife, tries to flee to France and finally drowns herself in the Channel. Verloc’s
group of anarchists, the Embassy people and two policemen, Inspector Heat and
the Assistant Commissioner, also take part in the story, all of them wandering
through the city.
2
After all, it is not immaterial that London is precisely mentioned when Brussels
in Heart of Darkness is not and remains only a “whited sepulchre.”
3
I have borrowed the word from Marlow who sees things as through a “damaged
kaleidoscope” in Lord Jim. (Conrad 1996, 96)
4
All page references to Conrad, 1994.
5
There is no Brett Street in London but Brett Road exists. It is not located in Soho
though, but in Hackney. What matters is the fact that the name is evocative of
London and therefore verisimilar.
6
Cf. W. Worringer, “Abstraction and Empathy: a Contribution to the Psychology
of Style”, New York: International University Press, 1953, 48.
7
Interestingly, though there is no Brett Place in London, Chesham Place has a
triangular shape, a fact which reinforces the connection between the embassy and
Verloc’s place, the fashionable districts and the world of the anarchists. Reality
and symbolic elements superimpose.
20
THE CITY AND ITS DOUBLE:

BRASÍLIA NARRATED BY JOÃO ALMINO
OR THE MYTH OF URBAN MODERNITY
THROUGH THE PRISM OF EVERYDAY LIFE
PASKINE SAGNES AND LAURENT VIALA
At the turn of the 1950s, Brazil underwent a major change with the
edification of its new capital, Brasília. The developers of this new city
aimed not only to create a highly symbolic urban form and affirm a
modern style of architecture, but also to forge a national destiny through
both of these channels. The weight of its colonial heritage had never really
allowed it to do so before. The return to the heartlands of legendary Brazil
(Aubertin, Vidal 1997, 39), and the symbol of the cross, masterfully
orchestrated (the Pilot Plan) by the architect Lucio Costa, in an ironic
gesture reminiscent of that of the colonists taking possession of the
territory, made this undertaking possible: Brazil’s destiny would now
unfold on this land thus marked.
With his latest novel, Free City (2012), the Brazilian author João
Almino returned to the city just as construction sites were cropping up
everywhere. The author was obviously not aiming to retell the official
story, but rather to relate “a saga of men and machines creating a new
city.” (Almino 2012, 15) The narrator leads the reader around the Cidade
Livre (the novel’s original title), a temporary city built near the future
capital to welcome a population of labourers who had come in large
numbers from the Nordeste, one of Brazil’s five statistical regions. The
story is set in the four years preceding the inauguration of Brasília in April
1960. As well as the construction workers, this temporary city was home
to immigrants, traders and even mystics who saw in it the possible advent
of a new humanity. The story is based on several figures belonging to the
same family circle, including the narrator and his father, Moacyr Ribeiro,
The City and its Double 355
as well as Valdivino, a construction worker figure. For the narrator this is

a way of bringing into the present the dialogue he had with his father
during the seven nights preceding his death, which occurred six months
before the narrative.
As the narrator reminds us at the start of his story, quoting his father:
“‘Brasília is a story to be told’.” (Almino 2012, 13) Almino makes Brasília
the very subject of his book and, through the medium of fiction, shows the
tribulations of the human heart in the face of dreams and myths, which
many see as harking back to a national destiny made official at last (Vidal
2002); or so they believe at least.
This text is an invitation to decipher an exceptional world halfway
between the extraordinary, ambitious project for the city and society, at the
centre, and the ordinariness of daily life on the margins. The aim is indeed
to show the motivations of a novel that manages to give an account of a
socio-spatial reality with great historical content reflecting an ideological
stance and embodying an unusual political orientation, in order to deliver
an augmented version of it that mobilises the resource of memory and the
register of the emotions.
Geography of an ordered, centrally positioned ideological

object
Brasília is a controlled, regulated, central urban reality that is staged
with great skill. In Free City, the author tackles the reality of the facts
attached to this perfect form, set in stone forever, meant to embody the
future of Brazil. These facts, based on an event, are of sufficient
significance to ensure that Almino has no difficulty in making them play a
full part in his intrigue. The politician, the architect, the town planner and
the prestigious visitors are here to remind us of the power of this central
urban object. The narrator’s father also works towards this, since his main
activity is following the guests and recording in his notebooks their
feelings of admiration and the words of praise they speak. “One day these
collected statements will be in a museum,” (Almino 2012, 153) he proudly
declares. The Pilot Plan, a magnificent and wonderful spatial incarnation
of the capital, occupies a central position, but this centre, like all centres,
only makes sense when related to the outskirts, which the novel describes
to us in detail. The author clearly invites the reader to consider the very
morphology of Brasília. The form given by Lucio Costa to the beating
heart of the new capital is indeed the point of reference here. All energy
and all attention converge on this intriguing, expansive new urban form, a
sign of a bright future under the auspices of architectural modernity. The
356 20
literary invention reminds us of the peripheral (dis)order. The novel points

to the area that appears less central than the Pilot Plan, which happens to
be organised on the outskirts and very early on houses most of the Brasília
conurbation’s population in poorly managed and therefore politically
undesirable urban and architectural forms. The work of fiction precisely
emphasises that territory, the Cidade Livre, the marginal city of chaos,
disorder, transience and poverty, the exact opposite of the message
conveyed at the centre which this world revolves around. The hopes raised
by the creation of the new capital would give many people the idea of a
better life that Brasília was never able to satisfy, simply because that was
not its purpose.
The hidden face of Brasília’s history

This dual object embodies an important issue. The fundamentally
Brazilian way of being and living together, which the centre was meant to
exemplify, competes with the peripheral social and societal organisation,
at the risk of compromising the essential purpose of establishing a
renewed social project. Almino and his narrator harness the criss-crossing
experiences of the characters and manage to create a dialogue between the
centre and the outskirts. This dialogue will lead them to piece together the
memory of a daily life under construction, which takes its primary form in
these outskirts and displays a boundless intensity in contrast to the ethereal
urbanity of the Pilot Plan.
In Brasília, a story initiated by the new President Juscelino Kubitschek
(1956-1961) unfolds. The new capital must embody and support a Brazil
that is definitively rooted in its land. There is a political will to definitively
overcome the traces of the colonial legacy that persist despite the official
separation having taken place over a century ago already (1822). Once
erected, the new capital does not fail to brilliantly display this ambition,
but just as the modern Brazil is emerging, the scenario that it had hoped to
escape seems to be repeating itself. The social project, celebrated by a
strong architectural and urban vision, aimed to create a more egalitarian
society, avoiding the social tensions long observed in the coastal cities. A
nation freed from the yoke of colonisation does not necessarily move
forward as one. This is our understanding of Brazilian society, which has
not been able to adequately break away from its colonial legacy. Almino
precisely entrusts the narrator with the task of questioning this national
destiny in a mysterious form of complicity, no doubt an expression of his
hesitancy in choosing the genre in which to tell this story. Neither a
historical account, nor a memoir/documentary, nor even a work of pure
fiction, would have been able to perform this complex task. The national
destiny, which the country’s politicians and intellectuals dreamed of as
they moved into the inland region, seems to ultimately lose itself in the
Cidade Livre, a prefiguration of the urban and social forms which would
quickly overwhelm the Pilot Plan. Without detracting from the intrinsically
remarkable and exceptional character of Costa and Niemeyer’s architectural
and urban work, the project to forge a national destiny and invent the
Brazilian identity consequently seems more hesitant.
The birth of a double: the invention of a teeming daily life

Do the small histories refute the big history? Brasília supposedly writes
the big history, the one we remember. The Cidade Livre, its double, is
made up solely of the small histories, those of everyday life.
To give the story some life, all I had to do was transport myself back to a
day from my childhood, imagine myself in the middle of an avenue in the
Free City, and then I could see my aunts sporting fine figures and scowls,
Valdivino seated at a table transcribing letters, Dad talking with someone
in the doorway of a bar, a little girl with braids and dark eyes riding a
bicycle […] and I could see the colors of the shops, the wooden buildings,
bulky black cars parked on the side of the street, their white-wall tires
exposed, and then the smell of gasoline would emerge, the smell of oil, the
smell of trash heaps and horse manure, and the stories of crimes, sins,
despair, and grandiose futures would appear on an enormous, colorful
screen. (Almino 2012, 18-19)
It is precisely in this everyday life that the essence of the story happens.
This essence simultaneously reflects the expression of an intense life, of a
determination to experience the diversity of our origins, of a hope for a
better life. Yet on closer inspection, did the city (the Cidade Livre) before
the city (Brasília) not contain within it the reasons for the ultimate failure
of the project for a renewed society? At the end of the day, was the
temporary nature of this city not a harbinger of this story’s unhappy
ending? This double is in fact an opposite. The city which was meant to
stand forever, Brasília, is therefore opposed by the ephemeral, the
impermanent. An ephemeral city which is also built as a contradiction.
The dusty, disjointed atmosphere of the Cidade Livre stands against the
immaculate, regulated appearance of Brasília. The singularity of the
temporary city is a retort to the proclaimed universality of the new capital.
The immensity of the space developed in the middle of nowhere contrasts
with the overcrowding of the village. Because it will resist its planned
358 20
disappearance and therefore achieve a kind of durability, the flipside of

Brasília will signify a double loss: on the one hand, a national destiny in
decline, and on the other, the disappointed aspirations of a diverse army of
construction workers, traders, prostitutes, mystics and the curious, drawn
from all over by the mirage promise of a better life and a new humanity.
The tutelary figures of a modern saga versus

its anonymous craftspeople
The face-off between, on the one hand, the historical figures mentioned
throughout the story – from Kubitschek through Bernardo Sayão, Director
of Novacap (the new capital’s development company), to the illustrious
visitors, intellectuals who came to inspect the work under way, such as
Malraux, Dos Passos or Huxley – and on the other, the anonymous
workers, embodied by the central figure of Valdivino, once more conveys
the duality revealed by the story, a duality also manifested by this constant
oscillation between a desire to give an account, to write “the ‘Golden
Book’ of Brasília” (Almino 2012, 31-33) and what might be termed the
novelistic temptation, although the narrator prohibits himself from writing
a novel in the first few pages. In his introduction, the narrator, who
presents himself as a journalist, proclaims his ambition to paint a picture
of an era with the help of readers of his blog, created for the occasion, with
the intention of adding to or complementing the sometimes uncertain
memories of a childhood spent in the Cidade Livre between 1956 and
1960, as well as his father’s account, which he records in prison a few
months before his death. However, very early on, the intrusion of the
author himself, whom the narrator says he has appointed to proofread his
book, and his comments dotted throughout the book, cast suspicion over
the purely historical dimension of the story. The narrator himself enjoys
causing confusion since, like the author, his first name is João, and he
writes the initials “JA” in the margin in the introduction, declaring:
You all just have to know what my name is, or at least whether or not I'm
Joao Almino […] but never mind all that, I'm maintaining my anonymity
for the simple reason that it gives me more freedom, most importantly the
freedom to be honest. (Almino 2012, 11)
As the story goes along, the chronicle of Brasília gives way to the
novelistic intrigue playing out between the characters, who are: “Lucrécia,
Valdivino, Aunt Matilde and Aunt Francisca, the principal characters
without whom the story would not be able to move forward” (Almino
2012, 137), as the narrator himself admits. The bloggers’ comments

gradually merge with the narrative framework, or are removed from the
story: “I have kept my text as it is, which is happening more and more”
(Almino 2012, 113). At the same time, Almino constantly encourages the
narrator to “add stories from Valdivino” (Almino 2012, 98) or “is
indignant about his absence.” (Almino 2012, 183) Would the story of
these anonymous figures, on the margins of history as it is being made, be
a better record? Valdivino, a native of the Nordeste, is a simple, pious man
encountered during one of the narrator’s expeditions with his father in the
Cerrado (Brazilian savannah) while he is helping to found a holy city.
Upon his return to Brasília, he will constantly cross paths with the narrator
until his final departure for the Garden of Salvation with the prophetess
Iris. In contrast to the official figures, extras in the story who serve to
revive the spirit of Brasília’s foundation, Valdivino represents a primitive
hero through whom the epic dimension of the novel is expressed. Through
him, the narrator introduces the image of these anonymous craftsmen,
pioneers of the modern urban adventure. Through this saga, Valdivino
appears as a figure symbolising these “candangos […] who arrived
without their wives, hoping to land a job with a construction firm.”
(Almino 2012, 15) Moreover, Valdivino “is not just any old construction
worker” (Almino 2012, 95), he is an idealist who feels that he has a
mission, “to build only churches” (Almino 2012, 97), because according to
him, the construction of a city starts with a church. Driven by a powerful
and deep religious sentiment that is not confined to just one religion, and a
tormented passion for the prophetess Iris, his profoundly novelistic
personality is shrouded in mystery, which endlessly fascinates the reader
and the narrator. Yet Valdivino is also an epic hero figure because through
his destiny, he tells Brazil’s primordial story, the one that blends myths
and beliefs.
The capital, between exotic temptation

and urban pathology
The emergence of Brasília as the new capital is not a departure from
the evolution of the forms and objects of Brazilian literature, which are
themselves connected to this story. Almino resorts to two recurring themes
(nature and the social question) which become reference points for his
narrative.
Brazil’s diverse geography offers an exuberant natural environment, a
source of inspiration in many ways. In Free City, the narrator confuses the
reader when, through his elaborate descriptions (Almino 2012, 81-88), the
360 20
natural treasures of the Brazilian Highlands monopolise the story. What is

he essentially trying to do? To glorify nature, to remind us of its riches in
contrast to the mineral structure? The author questions the alteration of
this natural order. The construction of the Pilot Plan, and above all the
urbanisation brought about by the growth of the Brasília conurbation, as
well as the subsequent development of extensive farming, will gradually
come to threaten this territory’s biodiversity.
One day all of this will be gone, it will be covered with houses and people,
the river will be full of garbage, and there won’t be so many animals […].
(Almino 2012, 88)
The narrator and his father go on a few expeditions there and are amazed
to find such diverse fauna and flora. This is the first reference point.
A second one examines the relationship of literature to these typically
Brazilian situations of high urban density paired with segregation. While
Brasília does not have a high level of concentration, it has had to deal with
a dual form of ghettoisation. It is true that it takes a very different form
from that seen in Rio or São Paulo for example. Here, the city of the rich
and the well-off middle classes, at the centre, ignores the poorest families
who have chosen to live on the outskirts. The atmospheres and scenes
described by the narrator when writing about the Cidade Livre show us the
life associated with these peripheral realities, which in a short period of
time will proliferate around Brasília. The toughness of the characters and
the difficulties they face cannot make us forget the everyday life that is
revealed, as well as forms of urbanity that in absolute terms have nothing
to envy to the life which the Pilot Plan will offer. The way Almino writes
about Brasília and therefore the Cidade Livre, an archetype of the
peripheral town, echoes the search for a new social and societal model that
will never be achieved. This novel’s motivation is therefore typical of the
Brazilian novel from the very end of the 20th century, that is, the “realistic
representation” (Olivieri-Godet 2005, 15) of the social and urban
phenomena that can be observed in large Brazilian cities. Free City could
have provided a counter-example to this trend if it were not telling us that
the project for the new capital has not kept its promises.
Brasília therefore at first appears as a sort of societal mystery, a total

incongruity, an unidentified urban object, one might say: a city against
nature (social) where everything apparently conspires to avoid creating a
society; a city organised not as a place for meetings, communication and
varied encounters, but on the contrary to create as much distance as
possible between the various social classes. (Couret 2006, 31)
The author’s reflections on this peripheral reality benefit from an effective

fictional device.
Narrative strategies and rehabilitation of an unsung

collective memory
The relationship to memory fulfils two aspirations: to record the big
history, and “compose a history of the Cidade Livre.” (Almino 2012, 15)
The aim is twofold: to remind us of the collective enthusiasm for this ideal
of grandeur that the future Brasília embodied at the time, but also to “paint
the picture of an era”, to capture the daily reality of the inhabitants of the
Cidade Livre. It is interesting to examine this dual purpose and observe
what the retrospective story of everyday life reveals about the story being
written. The division of the story into seven nights, corresponding to the
conversations with the father shortly before his death, give it a primary
function as a record: documenting the father’s memories, to which the
narrator adds his own childhood memories, making the story a kind of
palimpsest:
he told me that writing was also a type of construction, that one went along
laying brick upon brick, and with that lesson in hand I have spent many
years carrying this journalistic torch forward, and it is because of this same
lesson that I am now arranging the bricks of this story into their present
shape. (Almino 2012, 11)
In notebooks preserved like precious stones (Almino 2012, 37) in a box,

Moacyr Ribeiro collects statements by foreign visitors in the city under
construction. In his role as a recorder, the father is constantly giving an
account of these beginnings. (Almino 2012, 138) The commemorative
memory summoned up here records for posterity an event considered to be
of major importance in the history of the Brazilian nation. This
relationship with memory is consistent with an apologetic discourse on the
work to come: “[…] something grandiose is being created here” (Almino
2012, 36), says the father, in the words of Kubitschek: “I foresee the new
dawn with an unbreakable faith and absolute confidence in its grandiose
destiny” (Almino 2012, 31). However, the father’s naïve enthusiasm, like
his many failed attempts to enter Kubitschek’s entourage (Almino 2012,
31; 147; 165) seem to be a source of derision. The father himself would
recognise that his success as a chronicler of visits was minimal and
temporary. (Almino 2012, 65) Do we not see here a sense of irony
looming over the official discourse to which the father has in vain
attempted to make a contribution? The collection of visitor statements
362 20
recorded by the father in these same notebooks could contain a critique

from the opposite side, with the grandiloquent tone often used, as well as
the systematic use of a hyperbolic vocabulary to describe the advent of the
future city, calling into question the utopian vision commonly accepted at
the time.
While the narrator admits that he resembles his father in his desire to
record what was happening (Almino 2012, 195), he considers the father’s
account as a starting point:
All I had to do to start constructing the story was fill in the dry sentences
he told me with sunshine, dust, tears, and fear, as well as everything else
the story of the Free City should be made of. (Almino 2012, 15)
The narrator’s main aim is to tell the story of his childhood spent in the
satellite town with his father, his two aunts Francisca and Matilde, as well
as Valdivino, with the chronicle of everyday life taking over from, even
supplanting, the account of big History, no doubt to better reveal and even
question it. The period described is the time of the narrator’s childhood,
who is six at the time. Four years during which he made a number of
initiatory discoveries that projected him beyond the world of childhood:
experience of sexual desire upon seeing the generous curves of Aunt
Matilde, or discovering his vocation as a journalist. However, everyday
life in the disposable city is much more than just a simple backdrop to this
story of initiation. Several times, the narrator expresses the wish to paint
the picture of an era, the prism of subjectivity being only an artifice to
achieve this goal, attain the sincerity that is deemed essential and which he
describes at the end of his introduction when addressing the removal of
doubt over his real identity, and his possible connection with the author
himself. (Almino 2012, 11) Fiction would be a better way to bear witness
than a historical account. However, the question of memory appears in a
problematic light this time. Indeed, from the beginning of the account, the
narrator stresses its flawed and subjective nature:
I do not presume to know everything that took place in those times. I may
have erred, written too much or too little, memories and research being
flawed and incomplete, as you all know […]. (Almino 2012, 9)
The last pages of the novel refer back to this opening passage, like an
amplified echo:
I didn’t want to say anything, for memory itself has nothing that it wants to
say, it merely speaks amidst oblivion and that which it seeks to hide, and
for that reason there is nothing to interpret – words, like memories, are
what they are, and nothing more. Looking into the mirror of the past,
where at times I don’t even recognize myself, I am inventing nothing,
merely writing an account of what I had lived, which stands as a witness,
among the many that might be in existence, to compose a portrait of an era.
(Almino 2012, 222)
The fragile attempt to “unearth some flashes of life from my

forgetfulness” (Almino 2012, 15), which has no purpose other than that
and nonetheless achieves something essential, succeeds more than any
history book in recreating the spirit of an age. The composite aspect of
Almino’s text can ultimately be seen as a response to the flawed nature of
memory, with writing presented as a collective construction: “a mixture of
my memories, those of my father, my research, and Aunt Francisca’s
observations.” (Almino 2012, 9) The son’s memories respond to those of
the father, the bloggers’ comments respond to the account published in his
blog, in a polyphony that blends the present and the past to ward off
forgetfulness and give an even greater illusion of taking part in a living
picture:
For this reason this is a text to be modified by its readers, as if I’d created a
Wikipedia for this story, with the only rule being that I’m the only one who
is allowed to meddle with my memories and those of dad and Aunt
Francisca. As for the rest – the description of events that gives us the
impression of belonging to the spirit of the times – you readers of this blog
can revise as you will, and if you have any incident to relate or
commentary to make, don’t be shy […]. (Almino 2012, 10)
A story constructed as a mystery – the unexplained disappearance of

Valdivino – fragmented, uncertain but open and abundant, re-establishing
an unsung collective memory.
Archaism vs modernism: the fruitless effort of a child

wanting to become an adult
Brazil’s cities, society and literature seem to be driven by the same
sentiment: the wish to break away from what has been, to access a form of
modernity, display it and turn one’s back on the archaisms inherent in
Brazil’s history, embrace diversity and mixing, follow a considered plan,
open up to the world and assert an identity with passion. This sentiment
comes up against a form of opposition that cannot be explained by reason
alone. The realm of beliefs therefore comes to the rescue. This is exactly
364 20
what is happening with Free City. Almino mobilises fiction, combines it

with historical reality, makes it into a critical weapon, and pits it against
the big narratives and their rhetoric, which made Brasília even before the
first stone was laid.
The novelist tells a story. Fiction and historical reality mix in an
interplay of reciprocal interrogation. Incidentally, when it comes to
Brasília, is there room for a novel? Almino warns us from the outset:
Brasília is already a novel because of the ideological and social thickness
of the new capital. Is it not simply possible to acknowledge this and
therefore resort to a genre which, depending on the intentions behind it,
will be more journalistic, more scientific, more historical or documentary?
Writing a novel requires one to fully enter the realm of fiction. But is it
reasonable to attempt to mobilise the imaginary and give it Brasília as a
socio-spatial setting, an object of fiction embodied in the real? Is it
possible, quite simply? Is the author not attempting an improbable feat,
given the fictional power already vested in the real? Because achieving
fictional distance is difficult, in a way, Almino chooses to explore the
theme of the search for identity. The latter oscillates between two
extremes: on the one hand, the archaism of society’s structures, which is
inherited from the long colonial history and will survive the country’s
independence, and on the other hand, a new modernity entirely made of
modernism.
With regard to Brasília, the archaic frame of reference harks back to
Brazil’s first state of being, its childhood in a way. The country was
locked in this state of childhood. The fact of having been colonised seems
to be the main reason for this state of general paralysis. This is not too
strong an analogy to explain the phenomenon that the author explores
without necessarily setting it out explicitly. The intrigue imagined in Free
City is constantly playing on this. This phenomenon affects the very
structures of a society which has not really had the ability or knowledge to
construct itself in the absence of a controlled historical trajectory. The
stages by which this initial state of being would normally gradually form
are missing. The child has not been able to reach adolescence and has not
had the leisure of attaining adulthood under acceptable conditions.
Extending the analogy, it is not absurd to think that, with the passing of
time, the desire to reach a form of maturity, marking adulthood, has found
a resolution in a radical attitude — displaying a modern identity — which
does not achieve its aims and loses itself in the image of an overplayed
modernism. Writing about space through history, between geographical
consciousness and literary creation, makes perfect sense here. Although
they do not concern literature, the works of Marcio de Oliveira on the
myth of the nation (2014) and the Brazilian imaginary provide many
insights that can help us understand why the territory of Brasília has been
chosen as a suitable subject for a novelistic work. The deciphering of the
discourses of the main political players over time gives access to a
“mythical narrative”, “a mythical story deeply rooted in the Brazilian
imaginary” (De Oliveira 2014, 13) that reminds us constantly that Brazil is
not a nation and that there is no such thing as the Brazilian people. And
Brasília, appearing as the end point of such a path, paradoxically becomes
an archaic object as soon as it is conceived, meaning that it is already out-
of-date at the moment of its inauguration. Its architectural and urban
modernism makes no difference. For while it believes it is achieving
modernity (the character of modern things) by fulfilling the national
destiny it desired so much, Brazil is actually merely creating a work of
modernism (the taste for modern things).
The virtues of disorder versus the perversity of order.

Brasília: ideal mathematics?
In the epigraph to his novel, Almino quotes Paulo Leminski (1944-
1989), a Brazilian poet and writer: “Yes, Brasília. I marvelled at time
Which is already covering with years Your flawless mathematics. ” The
confrontation between archaism and modernism is doubled by another
opposition involving order and disorder. An order, supposedly the
expression of modernity, to which disorder, apparently viscerally Brazilian
(a dated reference to hostile nature and the savage), could not conform.
The “flawless mathematics” of the new capital speak of this will to restore
order to a world that never could or would take a rigorous, reasoned,
acceptable form, and to accompany its inhabitants, guide them, give them
reference points and establish a common destiny. In other words, the
sought-after order could only come from the perfect form acting as a
model. Finding the right formula, an irrefutable one with the force of a law
or theory, the geometric figure, this abstract being, whose mathematics
questions its properties. These “flawless mathematics” invite us to
rediscover a rather archaic reflex which consequently does not necessarily
lead to a form of ideality. Can we therefore imagine disorder as a
potentially structuring force for civilisation? Order, for its part, does not
always bring happiness. The rigorous and rigid layout of the Pilot Plan
contrasts with the less well-formed urbanisation of the outskirts; however,
this discrepancy, extending into the appraisal of sociabilities and ways of
life, is appraised by interpreting it in the opposite way (Ferreira Nunes
2005, 93), revealing the element of perversity in order: the Pilot Plan is
366 20
thought to encourage the distancing of the populations. The quote by

Paulo Leminski moreover stresses the persistence of Brasília despite the
passing of time. In his novel, Almino indirectly questions this relationship
with time. The narrator’s return to the capital under construction is in
effect mediated (his memories, his father’s notebooks, the capturing of the
memory of daily life, the description of the dialogue with his father) and
takes place at a distance, seen from the present time. The ternary
dimension of time is somewhat muddled.
The observation of Brazilian reality can lead simultaneously to two

experiences of time that appear to be antagonistic and incompatible: on the
one hand, the feeling of persistence of a past that refuses to disappear, in
order to return, immovable, and invade the present in the form of archaic
social relations, an obvious mark of colonisation; on the other hand, the
impression of dizzying change — a subversive element — that dissolves
traditional social ties and pulverises quite solid institutions (family, state,
religion, customs, etc.) to the point of transforming the physical
surroundings and the natural environment in an astounding way. (Penjon,
Pasta 2004, 7)
Regarding Brazil, here we have a resounding analysis of the truth of

Brasília’s situation, in which the novelist enjoys leading the reader astray.
This temporal disconnect is one of the aspects that animates the myth of
the nation inhabiting the capital, resulting in the “tearing of the social
fabric, the pulverisation of traditional references […] and the abandonment
of the popular masses.” (Penjon, Pasta 2004, 9) The spectacle of such an
ultimately tragic destiny cannot encourage any form of identity catharsis,
for the first people to be affected are the lead actors in this drama. What
ultimately prevails is situated in a spatio-temporal impermanence that
promotes recourse to beliefs in particular.
Recourse to beliefs as a release from ideological disarray

A destiny resists against the will of a people. Reason and passion alike
do not seem disposed to allow a country, a nation, a people to exist. The
reality of Brasília only seems to hold firm and find coherence with
reference to the realm of beliefs. The novel gives many examples of this.
Yet beyond this register, the mystical order takes hold of the new capital.
The mobilisation of the legendary, mystical, millenarist and eschatological
frames of reference provides a framework for a world which ultimately
gives the slightly disoriented reader a satisfactory set of keys for
understanding. The impression of incompleteness dominates, as if the
historical narrative could never be enough to recount or contain Brasília,

as if fiction served to reveal the mystery that constitutes this city. Almino
does not hesitate to mobilise this register and draw on the reality of the
moment. Since the legend that actually circulated in Brazil in the late
1950s, which claimed that Kubitschek was the reincarnation of the builder
pharaoh Akhenaton, through the omnipresent reference to the mystical
communities that admittedly did converge in very large numbers in
Brasília, thinking that the place had all the physical qualities needed to
survive the end of the world, to Saint John Bosco’s premonitory dream of
Brasília at the end of the 19th century.
Researchers generally see the idea of divine inspiration having influenced

the political choice of this region for the edification of the country’s capital
(a “chosen” geographical area, making it a sacred land predestined to
survive the apocalyptic cataclysm often forecast by the local prophets) as
one of the common founding myths of this multiform religious creation.
By making the Brasília region a predestined place, a chosen land from the
outset, do the religious doctrines not bestow a foundation myth on this city
without a past, a history of origins, to which each person can refer in re-
writing their own history? (Muel-Dreyfus, Martins-Rodrigues 1986, 120)
Today, Brasília and its region are home to hundreds of communities, sects
and orders with a focus on faith in esoteric knowledge, not equal to a
scientific approach or a religion, but freely paving the way for a
comforting outcome for humanity. The idea of the myth of the nation, of
the search for a common destiny, seems to have had its day and is sound
asleep in the museums dedicated to the new city and its developers.
Today, the passionate devotion that can be observed in Brasília lives on in
the new age ideology and the feeling among its followers that they will
find the conditions for bringing about a universal future state for humanity
in this city, which has thus become mythical. The narrator remembers the
words of a journalist and explains:
“Brasília is beyond anything you could imagine, something that would

have frightened Jules Verne himself, had someone told him about this
city”. The reason for this stupefaction was not Oscar Niemeyer’s
architecture, nor the plan of the city designed by Lucio Costa; it was the
beliefs and sects that already proliferated in the area and the fact that
Lucrécia, a prostitute, could be transformed into a prophetess. (Almino
2012, 208)
Subsequently, both the fictional exercise and the reality attached to this
world found in this Brazilian mystique a balance between the subjection of
368 20
the majority to the great discourses and emancipation from the nation’s
burden.
The art of storytelling: power and counter-power

of fiction
That which relates to the new narrative order described by Christian
Salmon (2007) stands in contrast to literature, the novel, a counter-
narrative that liberates by outlining a possible experience beyond the
blueprints imposed by historic facts.
From the great myths of the past to the modern novel, the function of
stories has always been to explore the conditions of a possible experience
– the new relationships to the body, time and space – in the words of
Deleuze, to invent a “missing people”. (Salmon 2007, 199)
Brasília is a crushing machine. The power of the official discourse almost

lies less in the mobilisation of extraordinary resources capable of bringing
forth a capital city in record time than in the capacity of the political
authority and the ideological apparatus to tell a story and ensure that each
person works to make it come true, supports it and lives it in the instant as
if it were already there. Almino seems to pit literary fiction against this
pioneering storytelling exercise and takes a highly critical look back at
Brazil’s fundamentally inegalitarian society. The project entrusted to
Brasília takes the perversion of the system to its climax by leading a whole
population on an adventure that on paper seems exceptional, but which in
reality – whether or not it worked – was only the expression of a
determinism from another time, giving the impression that social harmony
would prevail through the urban and architectural forms. The origins of
Brasília’s utopian dimension lie in this wish.
The socio-spatial determinism that presides over the edification of the
new capital brings answers to those who asked for nothing (civil servants),
while those who raised the question of their future prospects, the most
underprivileged, understand very quickly that they will not be stakeholders
in this regeneration. The Cidade Livre, whose author speaks to us, the
characters, their histories, the double of Brasília in fact, bear witness to a
new resistance. The latter opposes the big discourses, purveyors of a
reserved form of ideality, with the story of a daily life organised on the
margins, while aiming to make the most of what will end up happening
when the populations amassed here and there near the Pilot Plan are
excluded from it. We must certainly bear in mind that in these early 1960s,
as the end of the great narratives of modernity was looming (Lyotard
1979), Brasília was a response at odds which what the world was
becoming. The supposed self-fulfilling prophecy becomes self-destroying
(Merton 1965). Bringing forth a Brazilian nation and people on the one
hand, and a new society freed from its recurring ills on the other, by
constructing a new capital - was this not a project with a purely
performative utterance (Austin 1970) nurtured by an excess of naivety?
Inaugurated upon the country’s achievement of independence (1822),
the construction of the Brazilian nation is an undertaking that is still
relevant today. What appears to be the latest stage of this complex process
provides Almino’s novel with a realistic setting. His novel is also part of a
history. Apart from the history of Brazilian literature in search of an
identity, there is that of the relationship between the intellectual world and
the task of creating a national community that displays itself by mobilising
historical frames of reference, all too often buried deeply but adapted to
suit the tastes of an agonising modernity. The positioning of this novel at
the intersection of this dual history enables its author to deploy a work of
fiction that questions this process’s modalities of concretisation. Through
Brasília’s double, the Cidade Livre, which is indeed real and associated
with the story imagined by Almino, with a certain realism, the reader
accesses a critique of the political and ideological strategy that takes
concrete form in Brasília. Literary fiction revives a memory that reminds
us of the majority’s enthusiasm for what was at the time only a project,
despite the firm commitment of the construction site and the solemn
inauguration. The activation of this memory testifies to the misleading
power of a modernity that is consecrated, formally embodied, universally
accepted, that dominates nature and is ordered to make society. The great
narrative of modernity, that of a people’s emancipation, was finally lost in
the storytelling of a singular destiny that did not win public support. The
small histories of the Cidade Livre provide a contradiction and, set against
a metafictional backdrop, invite us to consider the possibilities of a
postmodern completion of the Brazilian nation.
References
ALMINO, João (ed). 2012. Hôtel Brasília. Paris: Métailié.
AUSTIN, John Langshaw. 1970. Quand dire, c'est faire. Paris: Seuil.
COURET, Dominique. 2006. “Brasília : une ville contre-nature (sociale) ?”
in Brasília, ville fermée, environnement ouvert, Marcia Regina DE
ANDRADE MATHIEU, Ignez COSTA BARBOSA FERREIRA, Dominique
COURET (eds). Paris: IRD, 17-36.
http://books.openedition.org/irdeditions/342
370 20
DE OLIVEIRA, Marcio. 2014. Brasília : entre le mythe et la nation. Paris:

l'Harmattan.
FERREIRA NUNES, Brasilmar, and Lourdes BANDEIRA. 2005. “Brasília :
l'urbanité dans une ville nouvelle.” Espaces et sociétés, 119: 93-11
DOI: 10.3917/esp.119.0093
LYOTARD, Jean-François.1979. La Condition postmoderne : rapport sur le
savoir. Paris: Éd. de Minuit
MERTON, Robert King. 1965. Éléments de théorie et de méthode
sociologique, Henri Mendras (trans.). Paris: Plon.
MUEL-DREYFUS, Francine, and Arakcy MARTINS RODRIGUES. 1986.
“Réincarnations [Note de recherche sur une secte spirite de Brasília].”
Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 62-63: 118-134
OLIVIERI-GODET, Rita, and Ribeiro UBALDO (eds). 2005. Littérature
brésilienne et constructions identitaires. Rennes: Presses
Universitaires de Rennes.
PENJON, Jacqueline, and José Antonio PASTA (eds). 2004. Littérature et
modernisation au Brésil, Paris: Presses Sorbonne nouvelle.
SALMON, Christian. 2007. Storytelling : la machine à fabriquer des
histoires et à formater les esprits. Paris: la Découverte.
VIDAL, Laurent. 2002. De Nova Lisboa à Brasília : L'invention d'une
capitale (XIXe-XXe siècles). Paris: Éditions de l’IHEAL.
http://books.openedition.org/iheal/1463.
21
MYTH AND REALITY, PEKING

IN RENÉ LEYS OF VICTOR SEGALEN
XIAOMIN GIAFFERRI
René Leys1 was written by Victor Segalen, a travel writer and adventurer
in the Far East, between two trips to China. The book explores otherness
through a geographical experience. The historical background is the 1911
Revolution that brought the two-thousand-year-old Chinese empire to an
end, but the novel is pervaded by a keen sense of place, which is
materialized in the imperial capital, Peking. Major historical events merely
anchor the story in time and provide a pretext for probing the foreign city.
The description of Peking gives the city a strong physical and spiritual
presence, revealing Segalen's singular approach to geography and fiction
and the various aspects of language employed in the novel to establish a
relationship between them. Although the geographical account, like all
travelogues, is a precious source of information about a distant country
and culture, the “geographicity” or “picturesque geography” developed by
Segalen sheds light on particular ways of turning places into an
incarnation of the confrontation between the real and the imaginary, which
is central to the aesthetics of Segalen’s exoticism.
When Segalen started to write René Leys, China was still a mysterious
world unfamiliar to European readers, although exotic novels had become
popular during the Belle Époque. The first famous traveler to describe
Peking, and the Forbidden City in particular, was, of course, Marco Polo.
His Book of the Marvels of the World brims with details of the city. In
Segalen’s time, the main reference in French was Péking, histoire et
description by Mgr Favier2, who was the bishop of Peking for many years.
Many travelers’ accounts of Peking were published at the turn of the
century and their impressions of the citys splendour were often associated
with an image of decadence at the end of the Empire. Pierre Loti’s Les
derniers jours de Pékin (The Last Days of Peking), evoking the troubles in
China at the time when French troops were sent to help put down the
372 21
Boxer Rebellion, is often compared with René Leys. Both books are set in
Peking and the city overshadows the plot; both explore the role of
foreignness and the myth of the Forbidden City. And yet, Segalen despised
the chinoiseries or shoddy Far Eastern junk that epitomised colonial
exoticism. He also criticised Paul Claudel, whom he had met in Peking,
for his poor command of the language after thirteen years in the
diplomatic service in China. Segalen’s more intimate description of the
place is closer to Péking, by the Comte de Beauvoir3, because of its poetic
tone, and lingering nostalgia for a grandiose past.
Segalen discovered Peking on his first trip to China, from June 1909 to
July 1913. His plan to travel extensively in China dated back to 1908,
when he started learning Chinese at the School of Oriental Languages in
Paris. The following year he passed the Navy’s examination to become a
“cadet interpreter” and set off for China, where he explored landscapes,
archaeological sites and Chinese arts in many different regions. He
embarked on several literary projects during this journey, including Le Fils
du Ciel, his first novel on a Chinese subject, Stèles, scholarly poems first
published in China and Lettres de Chine, his correspondence with his wife
Yvonne, who had stayed behind in France. His letters are full of emotion
and the shock of contact with foreign places.
When Segalen arrived in Peking, he was not at his first brush with
exoticism, but the capital of the North was his chosen city; he called it
“my town” and “the home of my dreams”4. He returned to Peking between
his great treks through the North China Plain, the “Land of Yellow Earth”,
visiting Sichuan, the Yangtze River, and Changde. In 1910 he explored the
treasures of Peking, plunging spiritually into the Chinese symbolism of its
great sites, especially the Forbidden City, which incarnated what he called
the myth. He was in Peking during the 1911 Revolution and, as a doctor,
took care of the son of Yuan Shikai, then president of the Republic. It was
also in Peking that he met the “model” for his René Leys character, and
started his Annales secrètes d’après MR. MR stood for Maurice Roy, a
young Belgian who had been living in Peking for several years. He was a
great connoisseur of Chinese manners and spoke and wrote Mandarin
fluently. Listening to Roy’s strange tales about the Imperial Palace,
Segalen began to work on the plot of René Leys. After a brief stay in
France from July to October 2013 to prepare an archaeological mission,
Segalen returned to China. He wrote the first draft of his manuscript on the
voyage to Tianjin, drawing on the revelations he had noted in his secret
journal. In this sense, René Leys is a true “travel novel”.
Myth and Reality, Peking in René Leys of Victor Segalen 373
1. Describing a Place: from the Real to the Imaginary

The narrative framework of René Leys draws on the chronology of the
Chinese revolution and Segalen's experience of China, but the framework
is deliberately that of fiction, as Segalen saw it: an invention based on
logical, coherent and plausible plot. The novel starts by stating the place
and date: “Pei-king, 28 February 1911” (Segalen, 1922, 3)5, but the
importance of the date as the eve of the Revolution is soon swamped by
the overwhelming presence of the place. Space in René Leys is firstly
geographical. The representation of Peking closely resembles the real city,
primarily to make it credible for the reader. The topographic description
makes use of authentic maps and place names. The writing relies on views
and photographs bringing out lines, dimensions, shapes and
measurements: “The capital of the greatest empire under the sun was
conceived for its own sake, laid out like a chessboard in the far north of
the Yellow Plain, girt with geometrical walls, ruled with alleys running at
right angles, and raised in one monumental sweep.” (Segalen, 3-4) The
features of the city built by the Yongle Emperor are stressed from the
outset and often repeated throughout the novel.
The triple town of Peking, or “Pei-king” as Segalen more accurately
transcribed it, composed of the Imperial city, the Tatar (or Manchu) city
and the Chinese city unfolds visually as the narrator paces through the
streets (see Figure 1). He calculates, measures and notes landmarks on
maps and plans; we discover the main features of the capital as he pieces it
together: its central axis running from north to south, with the Drum
Tower and the Bell Tower; Legation Street leading to the foreign
embassies, the “eccentric” Observatory, so-called because it is located
outside the foreign quarter, a string of lakes and the island with the stupa
commemorating the Dalai Lama's visit, Coal Hill, at the foot of which the
last Ming emperor hung himself and the Chien-men-wai district, with its
shops, brothels and mosque… The position of the various places and the
distance between them are often indicated with scientific precision and the
use of authentic place names increases the impression of veracity. Street
names and districts are mentioned, along with houses lived in by famous
travelers or Jesuit scholars, like Ricci6, Schall von Bell7 and Verbiest8 in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The allusion to historical figures
introduces spatial truth as well as a mythical element.
374 21
Figure 1: The triple town of Peking, according to a Map of Peking, 1900
Cartography, an integral part of both the text and the paratext9,

functions on several levels. The map is often mentioned as an important
object: as the narrator strolls through the city, he checks and comments on
the data provided by specialists:
Oh, how I wish I could recognize the way we went! I have a large-scale
(1:100) plan of the Forbidden City complete and exact, in color, and
bristling with transcribed names, but in fact a hasty and somewhat childish
piece of work drawn up by the Allied troops during their occupation of the
palace in ‘nineteen hundred’… (Segalen, 87)
The map in question, a simplified illustration of which is reproduced in the

appendix of the book, was drawn up by the Prussian Expeditionary Corps
sent to Peking with the allied forces in 1900 to quell the Boxer
Rebellion10. It was already much better than the sketchy earlier maps but
the author dismissed it as “a hasty and somewhat childish piece of work”,
having just “paper precision” to which a Chinese mandarin hardly gave
“even a scornful glance.” (Segalen, 89) The narrator attempts to make a
detailed survey and, as he paces it out, realises that the Imperial City is not
regular: “Towards the west it is slightly disconcerting. Having to follow
the line of the lakes, it lacks the four-square solidity of the eastern side. Its
recesses betray the outline of the gardens it protects.” (Segalen, 16)
Segalen is quick to criticise it. Talking about the mound topped with five
kiosks, he makes his character say: “It is absurd – all the Europeans call it
‘Coal Hill’; (…) It's ridiculous. The proper name is ‘The Hill of
Contemplation’.” (Segalen, 20) The emphasis on maps in the novel is a
reminder of Segalen’s ideas on cartographic information. As a sailor and
archaeologist, he was well aware of the operative and utilitarian value of
maps and in the course of his travels he attempted to bring out their poetic
value. Other writings of this period, such as Les Immémoriaux or Equipée,
simultaneously unfold a geographical and interior or spiritual itinerary.
Unlike many travel narratives, those of Marco Polo, for example,
where the “sense of place” is concretized in the social-economic aspects,
Segalen’s exoticism does not emphasize the sensitive components of the
place. Instead of an urban “habitat” brought to life through picturesque
observations – atmosphere, local colour, customs or other folkloric
elements –, René Leys puts the emphasis on geometry. The description
continually refers to mapping, showing not so much an inhabited city as a
“topographical” configuration. The triple city of Peking is “a Square set on
top of a Rectangle” (Segalen, 87), with its “geometrical walls” (Segalen
3), “cross-ruled avenues” (Segalen, 4) and “rectangular, symmetrical
internal courtyards.” (Segalen, 85) The “gigantic chessboard” (Segalen,
19) standing on a quadrilateral is no doubt one of the most insistent images
in the representation of place in René Leys. In his first draft, Segalen had
compared Peking with the Chinese game of chess: “This Town to be built
there: draw it as you arrange symbolic moving pieces on a chessboard (…)
What a fine symbol of the Empire!”11 This passage was eliminated from
the final text but the chessboard metaphor stayed.
Instead of developing the usual themes of travel literature, Segalen's
Peking is a pure frame, almost uninhabited, an exclusively monumental,
fleshless structure. The lie of the land, the architectural plan, and the
perception of contours, lines and curves all give rise to spiritual meanings.
376 21
His Peking house, “my palace”, as Segalen refers to it, vibrates with the
ontological and cosmological spirit of the Chinese tradition.
I meditated that, lying there with my head in this direction and my feet in
that, so close to the Southeastern corner of the Tatar City, I was lying
exactly along a line from north to south. Like all the houses, palaces and
huts of Pei-king, my house, hut or palace is very astronomically oriented
(and occidented) with all its principal buildings facing south. (Segalen, 34)
I gazed out over my roofs with their elegantly curved corners and saw how
summer was deepening the blue rectangle of Pei-king sky (…) I tried to
gauge the hour at a given moment from the course of my obliquely slanting
shadow as it approached the axis of my principal buildings. And when the
shadow cast by my body fell exactly along that axis I felt in my bones that
this the true noon at the meridian on which I live, on which I was situated
at that moment as I sat on these paving stones, then saturated with light, in
the quadrangular vat of this courtyard which is my Palace! (Segalen, 50)
Material place is perceived through an abstract process and geography

becomes an instrument of the imagination. Instead of enhancing the effect
of reality, it intensifies an allusive approach. The authentic phonetic
transcription of the Chinese place names has a distancing effect: Tung
Hwa Men, “Gate of the Flowered East”, Ta Tsing Men, “Gate of Supreme
Purity”, Cheng Yang Men, “Gate that faces due South”, K’iao leu,
“Corner Pavilion”… The landmarks, although real enough, seem elusive
behind the shapes, lines and names. There are no geographical entities but
merely geographical notions. The surrounding countryside has few
geometrical shapes to offer and is scarcely sketched in. It is summed up in
a few words, highlighting above all the “immense quadrilateral” of a
sorghum field bordering the canals, which can be viewed from the
ramparts.
The imaginary reaches its apex with the invention of an “underground
city”. When out riding, the narrator comes across a part of the road that
sounds hollow. René Leys lets him into the secret of a subterranean city
reached through the aqueduct bringing water to the capital.
Pei-king is not, as one might think, a chessboard whose game, fair or foul,
is played on the surface. No -- there is an Underground City complete with
its redans, its corner forts, its highways and byways, its approaches, its
threats, its “horizontal wells” even more formidable than the wells of
drinking and other water that yawn up at the open sky (…) It’s – and I
can’t get away from it; I keep coming back to it in spite of my self – it’s as
mysterious as the Forbidden City itself! All the unknown, thrice immured
behind twenty-foot-high walls, has taken on ten times the mystery in being
furnished with this vertical abyss at their base – the Profound City with all
its subterranean cavitations! (Segalen, 158-159)
The existence of an “inner city”, not marked on any map but solidly
constructed, according to René Leys; who confirms the two ideograms
“Pei-King” inscribed in a place under the road they often rode along,
opens up a new horizon in the narrator’s quest. Unable to pierce the centre
of the city on the surface, the search turns downwards. The underground
city is a dream place, as labyrinthine as the city on the surface. The flat
expanse of Peking acquires disturbing imaginary depth. This fictitious
invention is surrounded by a host of topographical details that make it
plausible, but sow the seeds of confusion and hallucination. The text
becomes dreamlike, confusing appearance and depth. The representation
of Peking based on geographical experience reconciles the paradox of
truth and fantasy.
2. Space and Narration

The myth of Peking rooted in its geographical representation unfolds
through a narrative constructed on the dynamism of the place. The place is
part of the plot, not only as the setting for the action, but also as an active
entity in the story and its telling. It plays the role of an actor and even of a
character. On the narrative level, the place is both a source and an object
of desire. It begs to be looked at and interpreted. As the narrator rides
about the city, he not only wilfully imposes his route on the space, but
consents to the desire the space arouses in him. The characters' actions are
governed by their search for a place. Every move on the chessboard of
Peking creates an event; every transformation of the way of the city is
perceived establishes a new order in the characters’ world.
The obsession is focused on the “Within”, the Imperial Palace in the
heart of Peking, a closed, hermetic middle. All attempts to reach it, on foot
or on horseback, prove vain and the narrator is kept on the outskirts. One
ride, which is described in detail, is a good example (See figure 2). Trying
to verify the exact contours of the Forbidden City, the narrator starts from
his house located at the south-east corner of the Tatar City and goes along
the south wall. He passes Chien Men and Ta Tsing Men, dynastic gates of
the Imperial City, gazing intently about him, letting his horse follow the
line of the moat. He rides northward, skirting the lake, seeing on his right
the mosque overlooking the wall, until the Hsi Hwa Gate where he turns
east, and then north again alongside the wall. Above the crest of that wall,
the “White Tower” thrusts out its alien paunch. It is at the northwest
378 21
corner, at a point diagonally opposite the Observatory, that he meets René

Leys. Continuing his tour behind his tutor, Segalen discovers a route much
closer to the centre than he has ever attempted on his own. Nevertheless,
the great forbidden wall is always on his right. The words “disconcerting”,
and “its recesses betray the outline of the gardens it protects” aptly
describe his view “over the wall” of a place which, although near at hand,
remains inaccessible.
Figure 2: The itinerary of a ride described in René Leys

Only once does he manage to reach the centre. But the longed-for
incursion into the “Within” proves to be a disappointment. Invited to join
the French delegation when the French Minister presents his letters of
credence to the Regent, the narrator goes through the gates of the
Emperor's palace for the first time. Far from being filled with delight, he is
tormented by doubts and worries. The foreign labyrinth makes him
anxious, bewildered and exasperated:
Inside, I tried to log my progress exactly. It was hard to unravel that

confusing network of gateways and rectangular, symmetrical internal
courtyards. I knew that running from south to north was the axis and raison
d’être of this reticulated Palace – the straight way, the median way… I
determined to try and note the exact moment at which I crossed it… From
time to time, pale-faced valets in blue robes appeared, stood still, and
followed our progress with their eyes… They all belonged to one or
another enclosure of those identical, vermilion walls, lived beneath roofs of
the same yellow curvature… How, I wondered, should I ever find my
bearings again? Must I, in this place where Diplomacy had brought me, ask
my way? How should I ever retrace my route on a map - how, above all,
identify this place we were now entering…? (Segalen, 84-85)
The great discovery of the much longed-for place is reduced to a few

maps, shapes and colours, a feeling of ambiguity and disorientation. The
mystery remains. The “Within” seems “absent”, “a great emptiness”.
(Segalen, 35)
Penetration is impossible and the narrator’s quest, and his narration,
stalls. The storytelling process splits in two: henceforth “Within” will be
seen and recounted only through René Leys. The Belgian grocer’s son is
no stranger to Peking, his facility in Chinese and ability to enter the Palace
give him the power of speech. He is the figure who can slip into the
forbidden space, break in where others cannot go. From then on, he will
lead the action and spin a fabulous yarn. René Leys’s narration dynamizes
the absent place; it becomes an essential factor in the plot and an
accomplice in the crime. The initial narrator, Segalen, doubles up to
become his character's narratee, because René Leys “can ride about as he
pleases in the (geometrically) ‘other’ place”. (Segalen, 183) Every day at
dawn, René Leys goes to the Great Council or the head office of the Secret
Police and the eunuchs bow before him. He is the chief of a secret
organisation, a friend of the Regent and even the Dowager’s lover. Out of
friendship, he makes it his duty to protect the Regent: he foils an attack on
him by keeping on the lookout all night, cutting the wires of a detonator
and saving his life. The epic actions he takes part in correspond to the
380 21
events on the eve of the 1911 Revolution, but the historical chronology is
diluted in this enigmatic place.
René Leys is a mirror reflecting the narrator’s secret wishes and living
out his dream: “I have truly, for the space of a moment, lived the most
intimate life of the Palace.” (Segalen, 104) The story his character tells
seems to be a last-ditch effort to reach the hidden essence of the closed
space. But Segalen grants it less and less credit as the fabulation is
gradually revealed. At first he believed his tale because it gave him a
glimpse inside the palace. “All his confidences really did inhabit an
essential Palace built upon the most magnificent foundations… And the
sets he conjured up… and that teeming ceremonial and secret Pekingese
life that no truth as officially known will ever begin to suspect…”
(Segalen, 206) But Segalen ends up suspecting that René Leys’s fabulous,
contradictory story might be just the reflection of his own suggestions:
“He abode by his word and it may be by my suggestions…” (Segalen,
206) The word of René Leys, like the ground in Peking, “sounded
hollow!” (Segalen, 159) The narrator no longer knows what is true and
what is false. Suddenly called upon to answer his own doubt, he ends the
novel with the burning question: “yes or no?” (Segalen, 207)
The vacuum of the centre metaphorically echoes the failure of the
narration: an empty space and an elusive story. The realization of the
absence of reality annihilates the novel. The end of the story reminds us of
Segalen’s notorious reservations about the novel as a genre, which he
often denigrated as outdated, bastardized and paradoxical. He was
reluctant to turn his secret notes into a novel. The last pages of his first
draft show that he was struggling to write it. In the finished text, he
confides, in an aside: “After that I recall… (I am slipping despite myself
into the style that would be in order should ever come to write this book…
this book that will never be, for is it not better to live it? Problem).”
(Segalen, 112) Behind the narrator's criticism we can hear the author
heaping sarcasm and mockery on his own head. The narration is designed
to inspire both confidence and suspicion, using a narrative process related
to the thriller and language full of innuendo and allusions, to confront
reality and fiction.
2. Ideo-graphic Space
The geographical space of René Leys takes shape in writing that plays
with the compartmenting of the concrete and the abstract. The spatial
dimension of the material and technical landmarks takes on a metaphorical
value: space is not simple matter but a support for perspective and
symbolic inscription.
When Segalen was planning his book, he thought of titling it
Mysterious Garden, or The Mystery of the Purple Room. Both contain an
indication of place. “Mysterious Garden” is also Maurice Roy’s Chinese
name (Mi Yuan). His fascination for strange places prompted Segalen to
consider putting a map of Peking on the cover. On one page of the
manuscript, he wrote in the margin: “If I had to make a book of this, what
more beautiful seal? What more beautiful ‘stamp’ than a map of
Peking12?” Also he wrote at the foot of the page: “Put it like a crescam on
the cover”13.
In the text, the relation between the character and his surroundings is
rendered by a metaphorical discourse linking topographical notions and
synaesthetic phenomena. The vocabulary used to describe geographical
things refers to psychic and psychological sensations, as in “I enjoyed the
feeling of security that the geometrical quietude of my house provides.”
(Segalen, 33) Such descriptions bring to mind Segalen’s earlier medical
research, especially when he evokes “visions” his character has when he is
out riding in Peking: “he is suddenly overwhelmed by the certainty that he
can actually see before him, but in a reversed mirror image, the
corresponding point of the city lying diagonally opposite.” (Segalen, 183)
or “in these strange, private moment he lives in a space turned upside-
down, full of agonizing experiences of penetrating solid matter or of
having the law of gravity reversed…” (Segalen, 184).
The leitmotiv of circumscription gives rise to several recurrent themes,
the first one being the “wall”. Full of resonance and stressed by other
words like “confined”, “enclosure”, “to be walled up” and “immured”, the
“wall” combines with the idea of “no entry” as can be seen in the
following quotations: “I decided I would go out and, for the umpteenth
time, trace and as it were renew contact with that square of walls to which
I shall one day, one way or another, be granted admittance…” (Segalen,
15) or “It is perhaps the twentieth time I have set out thus to lay siege to
the place, encompass it, verify its exact contours, circle like the sun about
the foot of eastern, southern, and western walls, and try if possible to
complete the circle and come back by way of the north”. (Segalen, 16) The
Forbidden City is “all the unknown, trice immured behind twenty-foot-
high walls.” (Segalen, 159) Expressions like “passions immured”
(Segalen, 21) give an intimate impression of the place. The obsession with
walls in René Leys brings to mind a similar obsession in Le Fils du Ciel, a
chronicle of the last years of Guangxu, the Chinese emperor from 1875 to
1908. The moving story of the sovereign shut away after the failure of the
382 21
“Hundred Days’ Reform” hinges on the theme of closing: once he has run
away from the capital, he feels he has escaped from a closed space: “The
walls have fallen, the way is clear.”14 The wall symbolises physical
separation but also an obstacle to communication. It is the language barrier
that led the narrator to René Leys’s tutoring. “He learns a language,
known to be a difficult one. He finds his way into the Palace, known to be
hermetically sealed.” (Segalen, 186) “His prodigious talent for
assimilation… his linguistic gifts—speaking English, Pekingese,
Shanghaian, Cantonese, and Pidgin quite at will.” (Segalen, 203) His
admirable gift for languages gives René Leys access to the closed space
and puts him at the heart of the story. Human adventures parallel linguistic
adventures.
The “well” is another recurrent motif. René Leys’s obsessive fear of
wells appears to be a symbolic phobia, the token of the empty centre and
dead water. The well is a bottomless mirror, a death threat and a
vertiginous drop. “If you don’t see me again, look for me… down some
well” (Segalen, 151), René Leys says on the eve of a police operation he
boasts of leading in the seedy district of Chien Men Wai. While making
fun of René Leys’s anxiety, the narrator does not take any risks and picks
the quietest horse for his ride: “One can never be too sure of one’s wells
and one’s escape routes.” (Segalen, 153) “Beneath the broad, flat expanse
of the capital anything that even nibbles at the dimension of depth is
unexpected, disturbing…” (Segalen, 159) The obsession with wells that
torments René Leys is also found in Le Fils du Ciel, where the great void
is represented by “the depths of the within” symbolising the Imperial
Palace. René Leys also dwells on this image making the “well” a symbol
of Heaven.
And when you look up, your eye pierces the roof of the kiosk, too, through
a hole of the same diameter as the thumb ring, and you expect to see, by a
process of inverse reflection, the well shaft thrusting up-ward to where the
water’s surface is mirrored in the sky…” (Segalen, 71)
The danger of the well not only lurks in the depths, but also lies in wait at
the surface, because there are “horizontal wells”, even more formidable
than the “wells of drinking and other water”. A reader familiar with
Chinese will immediately think of a “pitfall”, which in Chinese is
transcribed in two syllables, xian jing, meaning respectively “trap” and
“well”. The “entrapping well” is no doubt the idea that Segalen wants to
convey. He is receptive to the particularities of the Chinese language,
fascinated by its structure which associates semantics, phonetics and
graphics. The “Notes et Plans” associated with his manuscript confirm

this:
At the very moment of my expectation, around the stage of the well and
the trap in the house by Chien-men, I received or I intercepted from one of
his so-called friends a Chinese note: the words dancing their figures; the
horses galloping with their four little points. There were some sabres, some
hooked spears. A man under a lid: a tomb, a well, etc… I established a
translation, or rather a suggestion or hallucination.15
Segalen who had already explored the pictorial and architectural nature
of signs in his collection of poems, Stèles, renewed the experience in René
Leys. Instead of the conventional translation, place names are transferred
directly from Chinese and expressions are modelled on the Chinese
wording, for more original colour. Some are already familiar to Western
readers, such as Pei-king (Northern Capital) hyphenated to emphasise the
two graphic symbols, or the Emperor called “Son of Heaven”, others are
found only in René Leys. Thus, the Chinese sovereign is called “Master of
Ten Thousands Ages”, the “Forbidden City” becomes the “Purple and
Forbidden City”, the Imperial Palace is Danei or Ta-neï (Great Within),
and he plays with the double meaning of a dead-end street, the peculiarly
Pekingese alley called hutung or si hutung (dead alley): “…some of which
go through and others of which are dead end. Dead! But of course I
realized – they must all end in wells!” (Segalen, 154)
His bilingualism is even more ostentatious when he inserts Chinese
ideograms in his text. Segalen had a passion for Chinese writing, the
figurative power of which highlights innuendo and spatial references.
Thus, in the French text of René Leys, we can see several Chinese signs,
written in Segalen’s hand, such as the epigraph Tianzi, which literally
means “Son of Heaven”. But, more often, the signs are used alongside
place names: Peking, Tianjin (a northern city near Peking), Chien Men
Wai. As for “Within”, not only must its name be pronounced Tanei, in the
Chinese manner, but this phonetic reading is several times accompanied
by the corresponding character:
The first version became the book's epigraph. The second, given in the
appendix, is a whimsical invention by Segalen composed from disparate
elements borrowed from Chinese ideograms: the top sign is a combination
384 21
of “great” ⮶ and “man”ⅉ, the lower part repeats the element man, inside
some bars, and the whole character is surrounded by a rectangle frame,
symbol of the walls. Segalen adds a note: “Possible translation: ‘to be put
greatly within’.”16 This sign brings to mind another Chinese character ⥩,
which means “prisoner”. To understand Segalen’s passion for signs, it
may be interesting to look at the pictogram for a “well”:
The character symbolizes the well, in its vertical and horizontal forms, but
also the “chessboard” or “criss-crossed” city that Segalen constantly refers
to. Here the writing becomes literally “geo-graphical”.
The metaphorical space developed in its pictorial, graphical and
cosmological truth reflects a Chinese Taoist vision. When the narrator
comes up against a hermetic and hermeneutic space, he begins to doubt
René Leys’s story, just as he doubts his own critical faculties: “I simply
must try and distinguish the true from the false… the possible from the
probable… the credible from the disconcerting.” (Segalen, 186) “It is a
deep, deep sleep I am waking from. For the first time the day is not what I
expected. Pei-king is no longer the haunt of my dreams. My bad mood
invading and besieging the very Palace itself, I even begin to doubt that I
ever wanted to set foot inside it!” (Segalen, 197) These words echo what
Segalen wrote to his wife after reading the Annales secrètes d’après MR to
his friends, before he turned his notes into a novel: “… and it finished, in
the same ambivalence: what is true / what is false?”17 This question seems
to echo the paradox of truth developed by Laozi, the founder of Chinese
Taoism, but also the famous parable “The Dream of a Butterfly” involving
Zhuangzi, another Taoist philosopher. One day, Zhuangzi dreamed that he
was a butterfly, flitting happily about; in turn, the butterfly dreamed that
he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly, he woke up but longer knew whether he was
Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming he was
Zhuangzi.
Conclusion
Whether it is a dream of a place or a dreamed-of place, Peking in René
Leys, constructed on the basis of a geographical survey, is shot through
with imagination. Charged with symbols and metaphors, it is a portrait of
the Other by a dreamy traveler, an esoteric poet of faraway worlds. Going
beyond the purely documentary, Segalen’s narrative bores deep into the
system of meanings and correspondences woven by Chinese culture,

ultimately revealing less about the city than about the image and spirit of
Peking. The geometrical and magical image, which overshadows the
human side of society, attempts to reach the city's nerve centre and the
empire of signs, while maintaining the mystery by shuttling back and forth
between the real and the imaginary. The real and the imaginary are two
antithetic and inseparable faces of the same verbal reality, in symbiosis
with Chinese philosophy, in which the ideal is dualism or perfect balance.
The relationship between the two establishes the space of this novel. The
writing of Peking in René Leys is a formidable tool for Segalen’s
exoticism, drawing on an aesthetic and cosmological dimension of
geography. As a process of the individualization of the writer’s travel
experience, it has succeeded in making the textual space the matrix of
literary space, which incarnates myth and reality.
References
CORDONNIER, Noël. 1996. Victor Segalen: L’expérience de l’œuvre. Paris:
Honoré Champion.
DENG, Wei. “Xiangxiang zhong de zhenshi yu zhenshi zhong de
xiangxiang”, Wenxue jiaoyu, 2008, accessed March 11, 2014,
http://mall.cnki.net/onlineview/MagaView.aspx?fn=WXYS200802*1*
FAVRE, Yves-Alain et al. 1985. Victor Segalen, colloque international,
Tome 1, Cahier de l’Université, nb 11, Université de Pau.
FORMENTELLI, Eliane et al. 1979. Regards, espaces, signes: Victor
Segalen. Paris: l’Asiathèque.
GONTARD, Marc. 1990. Victor Segalen: Une Esthétique de la Différence.
Paris: L’Harmattan.
SALABERT, Juliette. 2014. “Faux et usage de faux. Sur le bilinguisme
chinois de René Leys", Trans 5 Est/Ouest, 2008. accessed March 12,
http://trans.revues.org/221.
SEGALEN, Victor. (1922). 2000. René Leys. Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio
classique.
—. René Leys. (1974). 2003. J. A. Underwood (trans.). New York: New
York Review Books,
SONG, Weijie. 2014. “Jiyuan qiejin de muguang: Lin Yutang,
Delinggongzhu he Xiegelan de Beijing xushi”, Suzhou daxue Haiwai
yanjiu zhongxin, accessed March 10, 2014,
http://www.zwwhgx.com/content.asp?id=2698
WESTPHAL, Bertrand. 2007. La Géocritique. Réel, fiction, espace. Paris,
Les Editions de Minuit.
386 21
WEI, Keling. 2007. “René Leys: espace scriptural, espace herméneutique”,

in Victor Segalen et Claude Ollier, Récits de l’étranger (78-91). Paris:
L’Harmattan.
Further Reading
CHEVALIER, Michel. 1992. La littérature dans tous ses espaces. Paris:
CNRS Editions.
GARNIER, Xavier and Pierre ZOBERMAN. 2006. Qu’est-ce qu’un espace
littéraire? Coll. L’Imaginaire du texte. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
Vincenne.
SEGALEN, Victor. (1929). 1983. Equipée. Paris: Gallimard.
—. (1975). 1995. Les Fils du Ciel. Paris: Robert Laffont.
—. (1907). 1966. Les Immémoriaux. Paris: coll. 10/18, Union Générale
d’Editions.
—. (1967). 1993. Lettres de Chine, Paris: coll. 10/18, Union Générale
d’Editions.
Notes
1
The French version serving for reference is René Leys, Paris: Gallimard, “Folio
classique”, 2000. The English text we quote from is René Leys, translated from the
French and with an introduction by J. A. Underwood. New York, New York
Review Books, 2003.
2
Mgr Favier, Péking, histoire et description, Lille: Desclée De Brouwer, 1900.
3
Comte de Beauvoir, Pékin, Yeddo, Sans Francisco, Voyage autour du monde.
Paris: Plon, 1872.
4
Lettres de Chine, 12 June 1909, Paris: 10/18, 1967, 58. Segalen’s letters to his
wife Yvonne.
5
This date is different from that in the French text (20 Mars 1911): the English
version adopted the chronology used by the first publisher of the book, whereas the
French edition we quote from restored the dates used by Segalen in his first
manuscript. “Pei-king” is the old transcription of the French School of the Far-East
to designate the Chinese capital. Segalen sometimes uses Péking, that was a
common way of calling it at that time.
6
Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) was an Italian Jesuit priest and one of the founding
figures of the Jesuit China missions.
7
Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1591-1666) was a German Jesuit and astronomer.
He spent most of his life as a missionary in China.
8
Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688) was a Flemish Jesuit missionary in China. He
corrected the Chinese calendar and was later given the role of Head of the
Mathematical Board and Director of the Observatory.
9
The “paratext” is a word used by Gérard Genette for the parts surrounding and
prolonging the text: title, sub-title, annotation, preface, appendix and illustrations.
See Gérard Genette, Seuils, Paris: Seuil, “Poétique”, 1987.
10
This detailed map, drawn up by the Cartographic Division of the Royal Prussian
Ordnance Society, is based on surveys carried out by the German East-Asian
Expeditionary Corps sent to China in 1900 as part of the eight-nation operation to
suppress the Boxer Rebellion against foreign influence.
11
Segalen, “Notes et Plans”, in René Leys, Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique”,
2000, 341.
12
Segalen, “Notes et Plans”, op. cit., 400.
13
The “crescam” is the emblem that Segalen’s publisher, Georges Crès, printed on
the flyleaf of his books. The Latin motto crescam (I will increase) incorporates the
publisher's name (Crès).
14
“Les murs son tombés, la Route est libre.” Segalen, Le Fils du Ciel, Paris:
Robert Laffont, 1995, 113.
15
16
Segalen, “Notes et Plans”, op. cit., 333. These graphics are printed in the French
edition but not in the English translation.
17
CHAPTER EIGHT:
POETIC AND GEOPOLITICAL STAKES

22
A GEOGRAPHER DISAPPEARS:
POLITICS AND FICTION IN PURGATORIO
BY TOMÁS ELOY MARTÍNEZ
MATEI CHIHAIA
1. Disappearance narrated
The violent disappearance of a geographer is the subject of Tomás Eloy
Martínez’s 2008 novel Purgatorio. Violent disappearance is one of the
strategies of the so-called “dirty war”, which began in the mid-seventies
and lasted up to the end of the military dictatorship in 1983, in the wake of
the Falkland Crisis. During this time, the sudden disappearance of citizens
– unionists and civil opponents to the dictatorship, as well as guerilleros,
socialist politicians and politically committed students – became a very
specific form of state terrorism in Argentina. The fact that disappearances
happened in familiar contexts – that people were arrested at their homes –
disrupted family relations and violated the psychological and cultural
opposition between the private and the public, the family and the
community, and even invaded the division between life and death.
(Robben 2005) The impossibility to contact or even locate the person
during his or her detention, as well as the vanishing of the bodies, was part
of this violent disappearance. An individual trauma for the relatives and
friends who were unable to communicate with the victims or to end their
grief by burial, violent disappearance also posits a problem for the
collective memory, as it replaces any possible “lieu de mémoire” with
blank absence1. There are recent “lieux de mémoire” related to the broader
context of disappearance, such as the Centro cultural de la memoria
Haroldo Conti that reinvested the principal site of imprisonment and
torture, or the Madres de plaza de mayo, whose white scarf became a
symbol of those who stood up for the right to see their abducted children –
or to retrieve their bodies. The terror of disappearance, however, cannot be
commemorated adequately, because it eludes any localization or spatial
A Geographer Disappears: Politics and Fiction in Purgatorio 391
representation. Literature and film have filled this void with an important
number of testimonial, fictional and autofictional works on disappearance
– a phenomenon that has already been duly noticed by criticism (cf. for
example Di Marco 2003 and Aletta 2010).
Martínez emphasized in several interviews that the purpose of his
novel was to show what everyday life felt like during the dictatorship.
(Kristal 2012, 474–475, Rosana 2006, 662) Thus, Purgatorio does not
pretend to give a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of violent
disappearance, which would have to include the epoch of exhumations and
re-burials (as analyzed by Robben 2005). In fact, although it provides a
great deal of historical detail (see Valverde 2014, 96), it goes beyond
speaking about disappearance in a historical perspective. At the heart of
the story is the subjective experience of state terrorism, with the
uncertainty about the lost person’s life or death, which makes closure
impossible. This uncertainty receives a political as well as existential and
poetological interpretation, and the present article will insist on the
intricate relationship between these two layers of meaning and geography,
which constitute the principal context of Purgatorio.
The main character of the novel, Emilia Dupuy, stands at the center of
a complex story. The novel explores her relationship with three men. First,
there is her fiancé Simón, a politically committed geographer, who will be
detained during their honeymoon, never to be found again. Second, her
father Orestes, a journalist who essentially works as a spin-doctor and
ideologist for the military government, and whose grip she barely escapes
through exile. And, third, there is the narrator, a fellow exile in New
Jersey, whom she tries to persuade that Simón has reappeared and who
witnesses her own mysterious disappearance. Although every relationship
will be decisive for one specific stretch of Emilia’s life history, the
presence of the three men exceeds their material presence and hovers in
different ways over her entire existence. Simón reappears as an imaginary
friend; the authority of the father lingers on in media that links her to him,
as well as in the personal trauma she has experienced from domestic
violence; and, finally, the narrator is the one who voices the whole of her
biography.
A narration with countless flashbacks emphasizes the fact that the
timeline is more like the curved space of relativity theory, where the past
and the present can connect through ‘worm-holes’. Given that Emila and
her fiancé both work as cartographers, one of the recurrent allegories of
narrative is that of the map. Thus, the opposition between flat
representation and three-dimensional topography, then between space and
time, predominate in the complicated metaphorical web Martínez spins
392 22
around the subject of geography and disappearance. The relativity of space

and time, and the paradoxes caused by it, are not only referred to the
characters’ imaginations, but also to a social and geographical imaginary
which goes beyond individual delusion.
The novel mainly embraces Emilia’s point of view; in other words the
story focuses a person who is partly a victim, and partly entangled with the
system her family supports. Focalization changes, however, with episodes
told from the point of view of her father, Orestes Dupuy, and, of course,
from that of the homodiegetic narrator. The author shares so many
characteristics with his narrator that he can be considered his “alter ego.”
(Nunes 2013, 67–70) However, Purgatorio avoids the habits of the
testimonial or autofictional narrative, the relation between history and
storytelling, between fictional and factual writing being one of the points
Martínez has explored in his Perón-cycle. (Spiller 1993, 111–137;
Valverde 2014) The novel is highly self-reflexive, with a complex
narrative strategy that verges on “unnatural narration” (Richardson 2006).
Although the narrator appears as a homodiegetic first person, most parts of
the novel are focalized by the female protagonist, and some – such as the
secret meetings with Orson Welles or the generals – by her father. The
logical explanation for the blend with Emilia’s focus would be that she has
told the narrator about her experience, who then tells the story from her
point of view. Nevertheless, there are allusions that suggest that he simply
made her up (Nunes 2013, 34–35), which would also explain the double
internal focalization. Both the narrative metalepsis and the confidential
scenes Orestes Dupuy alone witnessed – and would not have shared with
the narrator – resist a ‘natural’ explanation of the combination of voice and
focus. They fit better with the idea that the author compensates his lack of
experience through the power of imagination; an explanation Martínez
himself encourages in an interview. (Rosana 2006, 662)
The novel’s action sets in with an unlikely meeting, with Emilia
recognizing her fiancé, whom she has tried to find for thirty years, in a
New Jersey diner. Even more puzzling, he does not seem to have aged.
They take up their relationship where it ended, in spite of Emilia’s doubts
about him being a delusion, or an impostor. This situation is reminiscent
of many motifs in world literature. The unexpected reunion with a fiancé
who died near the wedding appears in various versions in German
literature: Hebbel (Unverhofftes Wiedersehen) and Hoffmann (Die
Bergwerke von Falun) have delivered famous versions of the motif.
Uncertainty about a dead character’s return, then, is a typical situation of
fantastic literature; especially in Edgar Allan Poe, for instance in The Fall
of the House of Usher. Among the many intertextual cues of Martínez’s
novel, Poe is mentioned, in the context of an explicit comment on the

fantastic. (Martínez 2009, 157) The return of the dead as seen in horror
movies appears briefly in a proleptic scene with zombie-like figures
approaching a car in the wilderness. The use of the uncanny, the horrific
and the fantastic is no exception in the Argentinian context. (Mandolessi
2014, 157) But there is more, for the uncertainty of the novel’s outset
eventually gives way to a situation inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice
fictions (cf. the extensive reference to Through the Looking-Glass in
Martínez 2009, 283). The narrator – a fictional version of the author
himself – leaves no doubt that the new Simon is not a revenant but some
kind of imaginary friend. And while Emilia is ever more persuaded that
Simón vanished through a cartographical rabbit-hole – that is, into a map –
her own disappearance opens a new form of existential uncertainty and
conjures the poet’s own power to bring back the dead, as in the myth of
Orpheus and Eurydice, or in Dante’s Divina Commedia.
This web of very diverse more or less explicit intertextual references
provides a backdrop for map-making, the main allegory of trauma-related
melancholy (and of literature, of course). The diversity of these references
converges around two centers of interpretation: the real and the imaginary
– or Hebbel versus Carroll. The novel offers two layers of interpretation of
the geographer’s violent disappearance, which both have to do with his
occupation, cartography. One layer accounts for geography’s subversive
potential and the dialectics of symbolic and real power, of place and space;
the other belongs to the imaginary dimension, which becomes evident in
the existential discrepancy between place and time, and in the semiotic
confusion between map and territory. The two sections of my essay will
address each layer separately. This separation also accounts for the novel’s
tendency to alternate between the trauma of violent disappearance and the
experience of exile. Another goal of the essay is to develop the specific
role cartography plays with respect to the realistic as well as to the
imaginative side of fiction.
2. Mapping the real

Why does the geographer have to disappear? In the general thrust of
cultural criticism, the explanation would be straightforward. As Jens
Andermann and Graciela Montaldo have shown, ideology needs the
territory to appear either as an uncharted, natural presence or as a part of
the cultural heritage which the state can exhibit in national institutions
such as museums. (Montaldo 1994, Andermann 2000, 18–21) The
geographer’s work somehow interferes with both claims, as his maps
394 22
unravel the cultural underground of the seemingly natural – and this is

what he has in common with the archeologist –, but he also confronts the
discourse of historical heritage with present-tense facts. (Andermann
2000, 19) With regard to the authoritarian regime and the “National
Reorganization Process” in Argentina, which used disappearance as a
means of state terror, cartography plays a pivotal role.
The figure of the disappeared geographer in Purgatorio underlines a
blind spot of the dictatorial state – the fact that it pretends to install order
and infrastructure against communist chaos and barbarism, while it
actually needs the uncharted desert territory in order to permit the violent
disappearance of its enemies. In the words of one of the most recent
studies dedicated to that subject, this event is probably directly related to
“the question of whether and how urban capitalism makes possible,
fosters, relies on or even requires the existence of specific spaces of
violence, disappearance and exception.” (Colombo and Schindel 2014, 3)
Thus, the case of the disappeared geographer links two aspects that are
normally considered separately (Colombo and Schindel 2014, 4): the
practice of disappearance that leaves space unchanged, and the practice of
intentional changes of topography brought about by authoritarian regimes,
for example through displacement. It seems obvious that the novel
presents cartography as a possible counter-power to the state’s authority –
it does so, however, by insisting on “the impossibility to represent reality”
(translated from De Diego 2003, 266) as much as by criticizing the use of
the civilization myth during the dictatorship.
Before exploring the dialectics of the government’s power directly, the
novel focuses on the reach and limits of the geographers, two factors
which eventually lead to their clash with the state. The reader is presented
with an elementary introduction into cartography and shares what the main
characters learn in class: maps are imperfect copies of reality that turn
volumes into two-dimensional surfaces and moving elements like rivers
into motionless forms. Through the force of imagination maps even create
landscapes out of nothing. The power of cartography is the authorship of
the geographer as world-maker: he can twist, if he likes, the very course of
the world. (Martínez 2009, 19) At first this imaginative dimension has
positive, optimistic connotations. From her early childhood, Emilia has
learned that drawing maps helps deal with reality: maps taught her to
disorient the logic of nature, to create illusions in the exact spots where
reality seemed most invincible. (Martínez 2009, 19) Cartography seems to
be a form of myth-making which, through drawing, helps one cope with
the absolute, suffocating power of the real. However, this optimistic view
of what might be called the poetics of map-making, does not last. It is

annihilated by the events that lead to Simón’s disappearance.
The very power of the geographer – his influence on topography –
turns out to be what puts him in danger by confronting him with the real,
with a reality that is pictured as a force of deliquescence and evaporation.
Here, Martínez draws on some traditional South American (and
specifically Argentinian) discourses about geographical nation-building,
barbarism and the reign of the local caudillos who rule the far-off
provinces, including – in the case of Argentina – the desert and pampa
(Sarmiento’s Facundo). Simón, Emilia’s husband, disappears during their
honeymoon, while they both attempt to draw ten miles of an “invisible
road” (road 67) near Tucumán, in a region where the Montonero guerillas
had at one point ruled, and where the government is about to restore law
and order. (Martínez 2009, 51)
With hindsight, there are some hints that the entire mission belongs to
a scheme made up by Emilia’s father, the chief ideologist of the
government, in order to get rid of an excessively insubordinate son-in-law.
Before they fall prey to the perfect plan and Simón disappears in prison,
the couple experiences the real in the form of a desert without boundaries
– a disorientating anti-place (a space whose meaning is antithetical to that
of regular places, which would provide marks of orientation; cf. Crane and
Fletcher 2014) that paralyzes their attempts at drawing and makes the idea
of “disorientating the logic of nature” look like an all-too naïve confidence
in the power of poetics. Zombie-like vagrants stroll over the land. They do
not belong there and do not ‘inhabit it’. The military have simply picked
them up in Tucumán and driven them into the desert in order to rid the
town of their presence. (Martínez 2009, 56–57) They deposit them in a
deadly wilderness, a space which becomes an instrument of torture (a
practice commented by Mahlke 2014) and abjection, where humans arrive
in dog-trucks and are disposed of like waste. (Viseneber 2014, 239) Before
being arrested, and in Simón’s case disappearing, the geographers witness
disappearance as the strategy of (dis)placing people in an uncharted and
uninhabitable territory.
The politics of map-making relies on its mimetic power, on the
information it gathers from the real. The officers the couple meet on their
way frown on the very attempt at drawing maps as a potentially subversive
action, a kind of espionage. (Martínez 2009, 52) Given that the power of
disappearance depends on the existence of uncharted anti-places,
geographers interfere directly with the government. (Valverde 2014, 197)
This also explains their importance within the politics of memory; the role
of geography in this context goes beyond the case of Martínez’s novel. A
396 22
contemporary play by Juan Mayorga mentions the “cartography of

disappearance” (Mayorga 2010, 387) as a way of commemorating state
terrorism, and of course, as “a form of combat.” (Mayorga 2010, 386)2
This layer of interpretation meets a long-standing discourse on the
clash of science and power, of empirical fieldwork and official ideology
among geographers. In Purgatorio, the two protagonists’ childhood
dreams and academic knowledge about the power of mapping meet an
uncharted reality and the politicians’ desire to maintain it as a void. The
hero is crushed between the real, which resists symbolic interpretation,
and a central power that maintains a hegemony of interpretation and
denies the existence of the real. This discrepancy, and the presence of
wastelands as the nations’ “flip-side”, goes back far beyond the specificity
of Argentinian culture. (Serje 2011) It was, for example, addressed by the
Columbian writer José Rivera as early as 1924 in his novel La vorágine.
Rivera’s narrator expresses direct criticism towards the Columbian state,
which accepts the discrepancy between map and territory, and thus denies
the existence of the landscapes – and by extension – the citizens that he,
the narrator, has experienced. (Mahlendorff 2000, 178–179; Serje 2011,
218) This blind spot belongs not only to the politicians but also to the
geographers appointed by the government, who fail to see these territories
and do not include them in their “expensive, pompous, lying and most
deficient maps” (translated from Rivera 1990, 272). In Alexander von
Humboldt’s tradition, tropical nature is usually considered an
overwhelming power that “makes man and his creations disappear”
(translated from, Humboldt 1991, 35–36, quoted from Mahlendorff 2000,
121). For Rivera, it is not only nature, but also the ignorance of the
cultural elites, that erases entire landscapes: in the battle between the real
and the symbolic, the geographer is caught in a no man’s land between the
two enemies.
In the specifically Argentinian context of Purgatorio, the dialectics of
governmental ideology shows in the contrast between the declarations
made by Emilia’s father and his practice. He is the one who calls for
transparent infrastructure in a now secured area (Martínez 2009, 51), but
the very action of sanitizing this area presupposes the existence of an
opaque desert, which swallows the unwanted and unpresentable. It is the
meeting of Orestes Dupuy with Orson Welles, whom he wants to direct
and speak a propaganda documentary for the ’78 World Cup that leads to
an open explanation of this dialectics: Welles reminds him of the fact that
despite his rationalist rhetoric, the Argentinian government relies heavily
on the irrational. The director offers to consider the disappearance of
persons into nothing as an act of stage magic. However, unlike in stage
illusion and film tricks, the disappeared in this case will not return – which
is why Welles turns down the offer, while at the same time revealing the
Argentinian government’s need for opaque and irrational areas, and giving
Dupuy a lesson in existentialist ontology:
Things exist only when we see them; in fact you might say they are created
by your senses. But what happens when this thing that doesn’t exist looks
up and stares back at you? It ceases to be a something, it reveals its
existence, rebels, is someone with density, with intensity. You cannot
make that someone disappear because you might disappear, too. Human
beings are not illusions, Charlie. They are stories, memories, we are God’s
imaginings just as God is our imagining. Erase a single point on that
infinite line and you erase the whole line and we might all tumble into that
black hole. (Martínez 2009, 210; translation from Martínez 2012, 191–192)
This philosophical interpretation of violent disappearance becomes more

and more important towards the end of the novel. One could argue
whether the implied ontology of these comments refers to Berkeley and
Kant (Valverde 2014, 136-141) or to Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of the
gaze of the other in L’Être et le néant – whatever the case, the ontological
argument and the insistence on the imaginary adds a new layer of meaning
to the geographer’s disappearance.
3. Mapping the imaginary

The geographer’s disappearance receives a second meaning, then,
which goes beyond political criticism of the Argentinian dictatorship:
Emilia progressively embraces the idea that Simón disappeared not into
the uncharted nothingness of the Argentinian provinces, but into a map – a
transgression that is explicitly linked with Lewis Carroll’s Alice fictions.
(Martínez 2009, 283)3And Emilia is ready to follow him, for she vanishes
too, eluding the concern of friends and public authorities. While in the first
part of the novel disappearance is a consequence of politics, and expresses
the clash between the force of symbolism and the overwhelming power of
the real, the second part introduces time and semiotic fallacy as two new
elements which change the face of the map and confront the symbolic with
the imaginary.
With hindsight, Emilia becomes more and more aware of a fourth
dimension constituting something like the inherent blind spot of maps,
which cannot show how things change or how they exist in time (Martínez
2009, 110): although almost infinite, maps do not show everything. It is
for instance the ritual and sacred distinction between the time of work and
398 22
the time of religious celebration, the zone Emilia’s orthodox Jewish

neighborhood calls “eruv” that is absent from the map (cf. also Valverde
2014, 198–199 and 211); only a chronological “layering” – as current
mapping theory would call it (Corner 1999, 235–239) – or narrative fiction
can represent this dimension.
The many quotes from Dante which underpin the relation of the title
with the Divina Commedia point in the same direction and raise the
question of a possible mapping of time, as well as of fiction’s ability to
express the imaginary. (Kristal 2012) The novel Purgatorio is a parody of
Dante’s purgatory in the sense that the narrator takes the role of Virgil but
seems unable to guide Emilia towards the gates of paradise, where she
would meet Simón. The meeting with Simon in a possible world seems
only feasible to Emilia if she keeps drawing; her storytelling is accessory
to that activity, and her interviews with the narrator do not help with her
trauma. In the constant struggle between cartography and narrative fiction,
Martínez explores a cartographic imagination in order to reflect on the
limits of literature, as well as those of mapping.
This existential intuition is why the main character returns to her old
job as a cartographer in order to search for her lover in the infinite
possibilities of maps. (Martínez 2009, 110) Indeed, “in a context of
systematic disappearance, maps will allow people to locate each other”
(translated from Valverde 2014, 196). The labyrinth of time, open to
possible worlds, is a topic from Borges, of course: the “Garden of Forking
Paths” features such a labyrinth in the fourth dimension. (Valverde 2014,
204) Together with the time-dimension of maps, several enclosed episodes
address their semiotic relation to the correlative dimension of territory.
Emilia dreams of entering a map, whether by entering it or descending into
it; the image of the book’s title, “Purgatory”, is present in the hesitation
between these two metaphors of immersion. (Martínez 2009, 110) This
immersion into a map rather than into the desert – which the reader
increasingly presumes to be the reason why Simón has vanished – goes
with the semiotic fallacy of taking the icon for the thing itself: the map for
the territory into which one can disappear. The fallacy belongs to a literary
tradition, as well as to a specific discourse on Argentinian identity.
The confusion between map and territory begins with Sarmientos
Facundo, where the pampa is a profoundly ambiguous space, map and
territory at the same time.
The pampa exhibits its flat and villous forehead, infinite, without known
limit, without remarkable accident: it is an image of the sea on land; of the
land as in a map [la tierra como en el mapa]; earth that still waits for
someone to order it to sprout. (Translated from Sarmiento 1999, 116, cf.

Rodríguez 2002, 1122)
Borges developed this idea in two of his best-known short fictions. “Del
rigor en la ciencia” (1946) quotes some early modern source on an
ambitious project. A society fond of cartography makes a map of an
Empire in always larger scale, ultimately reaching the size of the Empire
itself; once the interest in geography decays, the giant map has to be
discarded. (Borges 1958) The place that can serve as a disposal for the
repressed mirror image of the territory is a desert – a clear reference to, as
well as a reinterpretation of, Sarmiento’s topology. The desert is not only
the point where map and territory become indistinguishable; it is also a
blank, uncharted space that is large enough to harbor the repressed image
of that territory. In “Magias parciales del Quijote” (1949), Borges returns
to his idea of a map that is located in the territory and becomes part of the
land it represents. Then, he concludes, the map would have to contain a
version of itself in scale, and this version would be a map that again would
have to include an image of itself, and so on, in an infinite mise en abyme.
This form of cartography becomes, then, an allegory of literature, and of
the vertiginous effect a fictional mise en abyme can have on the reader.
(Borges 1960) The two stories, which reduce “the cartographic ideal of
mimetic representation to an alternative between tautology and infinity”
(Bosteels 1996, 121), have often been commented on in post-structural
theory (Bosteels 1996, 120–136). Indeed, they raise a problem of
representation that goes beyond the politics of mapping.
Both paradoxes of the map-territory relation, the total identity of map
and territory as well as the infinite autopoiesis of the map that forms part
of a territory, develop the metaphor used by Sarmiento. They have often
been compared to the ideas of the semiotician Alfred Korzybski who
wrote the well-known line “the map is not the territory”, as well as to
similar paradoxes explored by Lewis Carroll, and they figure, together
with those other paradoxes, in recent reflections on cartography. (Bosteels
1996, Palsky 1999, Corner 1999, 221–223) Indeed, paradoxes such as
those described by Borges arise from a total or partial coincidence of map
and territory – that is, from the semiotic fallacy Korzybski tries to avoid.4
Most importantly, though, the paradoxical map-territory relation allows
Borges to reflect on fiction’s ability to chart the imaginary.
The theoretical consequences for fiction of Korzybski’s theorem have
been developed by Wolfgang Iser in The Fictive and the Imaginary. Iser
takes up Gregory Bateson’s analysis of play in order to explain the fact
that fiction does not remove the difference between the signifier and the
signified, but splits the signifier, and thereby pluralizes difference. (Iser
400 22
1993, 247) Bateson rephrases Korzybski’s theorem with respect to three

different states of mind, first dream and daydream, second full
consciousness, third play: “In primary process, map and territory are
equated; in secondary process, they can be discriminated. In play, they are
both equated and discriminated.” (Bateson 1987, 191, quoted in Iser 1993,
248–249) Iser concludes that a similar process allows for the play on
signification in fiction. Fictive texts use both a functional rule-set and
metalinguistic (or metapoetic) information in order to avoid a dream-like
sameness of sign and signifier, and a “canceling of denotation” which sets
free all the free-floating implications the signifier bears within itself. (Iser
1993, 249) In the context of literary anthropology, the map appears not as
an allegory of mimetic effort, or of agency directed towards the real, but
rather of literature’s attempt to cope with the imaginary.
It is not difficult to see how a novel whose main character has an
imaginary friend might reflect on this attempt. Indeed, the narrator, who is
a writer, has many self-reflexive comments; but even more interesting are
those he reports from Emilia, and the competition between maps and
fiction that inevitably arises in this dense mesh of signs: “Maps are poorly
written fiction”, Emilia states at the beginning of the novel. (Martínez
2009, 16) In what sense?
We have seen in the first section of this essay that a large part of the
narrative is concerned with the map’s impact on the real, which explains
its immediate connection and interaction with the territory in which it
plays: “If a map has circumscribed reality, reality is already different.”
(translated from Martínez 2009, 185) The straightforward meaning of this
idea, as explained by the character in the immediate context, is that an
accurate map helps people orientate themselves and prevents them from
getting lost; it simply makes reality a better place. However, in the light of
Borges’ paradoxes and Iser’s anthropology, a different reading is possible:
charting reality is a performance that changes reality; change is brought
about by the process of imagination; therefore charting – very much like
fiction – is not simply a mimetic activity, but involves the force of the
imaginary. The imaginary potential of cartography shows especially in
Emilia’s dialogues with the Simón she has made up. At their heart is the
semiotic operation that consists in taking the symbol for an icon, then the
icon for the real – in another playful reversal of the map-territory theorem
(cf. on the semiotics of cartography Bosteels 1996, 119). Simón, the
imaginary Simón, tells a story about a writer who pretends to have entered
a Japanese map, which turned out to be a door to some kind of parallel
universe. The Japanese letters that figure on this map turn into the image
of a door, then into a door properly speaking, which opens some kid of
wormhole between Japan, Jerusalem and Buenos Aires. Instead of getting

off the train at the right station in Japan, the writer finds himself crossing a
“no man’s land” (Martínez 2009, 188) between the Israeli and Jordan part
of Jerusalem: there, a map drawn on a ruined wall shows Jerusalem as the
center of the world, and the mysterious Japanese letter. Again, a door
opens in the map, and the writer passes through it, only to find himself in
an old people’s home. (Martínez 2009, 188) His further existence will
consist in an effort to reenact the primary state, which made map and
territory coincide, by means of fictional play – more precisely by writing
signs on a small chalkboard.
There is nothing playful, of course, about the presence of the
imaginary friend, nor about the “canceling of denotation” Emilia
experiences through exile. The release of free-floating implication is not
an intentional act, as in fiction, but a consequence of the separation from
the person’s symbolic identity:
By the time you’ve taken two steps, you are nowhere, there are no
columns, there are no trees, there is no sky, the compass that has guided
you has disappeared, your reason for existing has been wiped out, you are
nothing and you have stopped in a place from which no one ever returns.
Exile. (Martínez 2009, 236, translation from Martínez 2011, 217)
The paradox of a landscape without points of reference, which is at the

same time a map and a territory, appears in a key dialogue between Emilia
and the Simón she imagines:
Simón: “I saw you standing in the map. I didn’t know where you were
because the vectors had been erased. It was a desert with no lines.’ And
Emilia: ‘In that case it wasn’t a map.’ Simón: ‘Maybe it wasn’t, but that’s
where you were.’ And Emilia: ‘If it was a map with no landmarks, you
could have left a trail of names, drawn trees for reference, I would have
found you. […]’ (Martínez 2009, 244, translation from Martínez 2012,
224)
Among Emilia’s belongings, the narrator will find a map, which has
become unreadable because of its many stains, tears, saliva, and the name
“Simon” written all over it. The map has become an ontological metaphor
of time, as well as a substitute for the beloved being, whose identity it
harbors not only symbolically (the name), but also physically, corporeally,
through an imaginary body that can only be grasped in its material traces.
The connection between desert and body which pictures the map as a
skin with scars and other traces of life is a topos of avant-garde
performance and land art. Martínez’s title is likely reminiscent not only of
402 22
Dante, but also of the influential collection Purgatorio (1979) of the

Chilean poet Raúl Zurita. (Kristal 2012, 479) A section of Zurita’s book,
“El desierto de Atacama”, insists on the analogy between desert and
illness, physical decay and – ultimately – death. (Cánovas 2010, 232) The
map Emilia leaves behind becomes a space of transgression that absorbs
all the characteristics of Zurita’s desert. The “emptiness” that stands at the
center of discourses of Argentinian identity appears not only as real, but
also as imaginary, as it offers a void which calls for phantasmal
completion. (Spiller 1993, 90–92; Andermann 2000, 36–46) In this sense,
Emilia’s struggle to chart the imaginary, to locate Simón, mirrors the
narrator’s efforts to cope with his own exile and imminent death.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the metapoetic weight of cartography in Purgatorio
does not only rely on its relationship with the real; it is almost as important
to consider the role of the imaginary. There is no doubt that both express a
concern with the specific limits and potential of fiction in the context of
historical memory. (Mozejko 2010, 586–587) In a prologue to another
book, Martínez emphasizes the fact that he sees the imaginary’s uncharted
territory as the main challenge for fictional writing:
Filling a void of reality, […] write what has been omitted, plant the flag of
imagination in the places where history did not dare to go, or recreate
reality, rewrite it, transfiguring it according to one’s desire or […]
pleasure. (Translated from Martínez 2011, 13).
The “or” divides the attempt into two very different projects and causes a
tension that polarizes Martínez’s essay: filling the void of reality is not the
same as being faithful to one’s desire. It is ultimately this tension between
the real and the imaginary that cartography reflects in Purgatorio: the
uncharted desert and the geographer’s disappearance take on a different
meaning depending on the two sides of this story. Purgatorio tells of the
effort to map the real as well as of the struggle to map the imaginary.
While topography serves the narrator as an often explicated allegory of
fiction, this double effort also allows us to read fiction as an allegory of
geography.
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Purgatorio de Tomás Eloy Martínez. Master Thesis. Salamanca:
Instituto de Iberoamérica. Accessed 24.3.2015.
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noamericanos_Nunes_Viel_Ricardo.pdf
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Luis Carlos Herrera (ed). Bogotá: Caja de Crédito Agrario.
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instinto de muerte.” Revista Iberoamericana 201: 1111–1128.
ROSANO, Susana. 2006. “En definitiva, en Argentina todos caemos en el
barroco fúnebre. Reportaje a Tomás Eloy Martínez.” Revista
Iberoamericana, 72 (215): 657–662.
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SERJE DE LA OSSA, Margarita Rosa. 2011. El revés de la nación:
Territorios salvajes, fronteras y tierras de nadie. Bogotá: Universidad
de los Andes, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Departamento de
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Ermittlung der Identität in argentinischen Romanen der Gegenwart.
Frankfurt a.M.: Vervuert.
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406 22
VISENEBER, Karolin. 2014. Poetiken des Verschwindens. Zeitgenössische

argentinische Romane über die Militärdiktatur 1976-1983. Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann.
Notes
1
On the limits of this concept and the difficulty of installing “lieux de mémoire” in
a Latin American context, see Colombo and Schindel 2014, 7.
2
Both quotes are taken from an article on the play. (March and Martínez 2012,
117–118)
3
The reference to Carroll is, by the way, a common topic in Argentinian art and
literature on disappearance. (Feierstein 2013)
4
Borges was an avid reader of Korzybski’s, although he seems to have been more
interested in his theory of time than in his semiotics. (Jenckes 2007, 104–106)
23
DESCRIBING SPACE IN THE “LAND

OF THE IMAGINARY LINE”:
HOW THE NOVELIST JAVIER VÁSCONEZ
DEPICTS ECUADOR IN HIS NOVELS
ANNE-CLAUDINE MOREL
The Ecuadorian writer Javier Vásconez (1946) is currently one of the best
known authors in his country. His depiction of Ecuador is problematic
because the country is never named in his novels and short stories. It is
hinted at through a network of spatial references, place names and
topographic forms, such as volcanoes, quebradas1, the páramo2 or the
cordillera, which refer the reader unmistakably to Ecuador and the Andean
region; evocative metaphors such as “the land of the imaginary line” and
“the country of the invisible line” replace direct designation. Some
Ecuadorian towns are mentioned, but the capital city, for example, is never
named. A discerning reader will recognize the city from street names or
emblematic places and buildings: the Dos Mundos hotel, the racecourse,
the El Ejido or La Alameda parks, the La Floresta district, the El Madrilón
café. The writer’s decision to blur the references to the capital or the
country itself is intriguing. Why does he not name Ecuador, when the
country welcomes the main character in his first novel (Vásconez 1996),
Dr Kronz, a Czech doctor who has chosen to settle Barcelona? And why
does the narrator dilute the spatial referent in an approximation that makes
the country hard to pin down, although it is recognizable to anyone
familiar with the region? I shall show that writing about space in Ecuador
and in the twenty-first century is a matter of tension between a universal
denomination and widespread ignorance of the rest of the world.
Paradoxically, it forces the writer to seek visibility: he strives to reveal
both the nation and its literature, but from an unusual perspective far
removed from the tradition of indigenism or the social realism cultivated
408 23
by contemporary writers. The first part of this paper will deal with the
evocation of this invisibility, which creates a mythical, and therefore
universal territory. The metaphor of the “land of the imaginary line” is
used to reveal an Ecuador whose geography is redefined through literature.
The second part will examine this new geographical configuration as a
host country for illustrious foreigners: Javier Vásconez invites the world's
greatest writers to Ecuador; this approach is another way to connect
Ecuador and its literature to the rest of the world and give them a measure
of visibility.
1. From the Invisible Line of the Equator to a New

Mythical Territory
I studied Vásconez’s novels and short stories, interviews and rare
theoretical writings in search of the reasons for his reluctance to name his
native country. The first clue came from his scathing attack on the
fortuitous, historical link between two disciplines, geography and
geometry:
I ended up thinking that Ecuador is not a country but rather an imaginary

line, whose fateful, abstract name we owe to eighteenth-century Spanish
and French geodesists. Curiously, this contradictory, equivocal feeling that
we Ecuadorians are used to living with, has an enigmatic, luminous side.
How can we write on an imaginary line?3
For Javier Vásconez, the name of the country is both a fatality and
fortuitous. A fatality, because it conflicts with the idea of a border, that
invisible line which delimits the shape of a territory -- a horizontal line
cannot trace the contours of a nation, or else it reduces the country to an
abstraction that its inhabitants have trouble imagining. Fortuitous, because
the name of Ecuador was given by “foreigners,” European colonists,
whose main intent was the economic, and incidentally scientific,
exploitation of the territory. The name therefore refers to a geographical
concept which only partly characterizes the country, but nonetheless
reduces the nation to an invisible line and a simple segment of a perfect
circumference. So it is the notion of instability, inherent in the writer as
well,4 that is displayed in the name of the country, and Javier Vásconez
expresses it through a key question that conditions his entire production:
How can we write on an imaginary line? How can writing be used to give
thickness and depth to this country whose name fatally refers to a
geometrical abstraction?
Describing Space in the “Land of the Imaginary Line” 409
The first solution is to keep explicit references, such as metaphors or

certain place names, and to leave out the real name of the country and its
capital in order to create a sense of mystery and suggest a territory where
anything can happen; writing and various stylistic devices allow this
transformation. It is in his short stories that Vásconez is most successful in
bringing about this change by disrupting Ecuador’s real geography. The
story called “A Stranger in the Port” encapsulates this desire to escape
from a fatal, simplistic national name, but also from a sometimes stifling
natural environment. A brief analysis of the classic opposition between the
ocean and the cordillera updates these writing processes typical of Javier
Vásconez’s style. It also maps out the country’s geographical space as the
characters perceive it.
Some real Ecuadorian towns, such as Manta, Manabí and its beach, or
the seaside town of Salinas, are clearly named. These coastal towns are
opposed to the Andean capital, which is hemmed in by the mountains and
dwarfed by the volcano Pichincha. Several characters in the stories talk
repeatedly of suffocation or asphyxia and the coastal towns are mentioned
in counterpoint to the capital encircled by high peaks. Talking about the
ocean gives the characters endless possibilities for making plans and
dreaming, while the capital city locks up their destiny. So the jockey César
Lagos, in the story entitled “The Jockey and the Sea”,5 talks about a race
on the beach at Salinas; winning it seems at first unlikely, then possible
and finally becomes a reality:
The sea opened up my horizons... That sea was hurling me towards an

abyss, perhaps with nothing in its depths. […] [My horse] was running like
an angel. And I won because I had the sea in front of me, doctor. A sea that
cheered me like the best crowd ever, the wildest and most uproarious
crowd I have ever raced for.6
When they gaze out to sea, the characters are jubilant and exultant, while
they feel sad and stifled in the landlocked city: “They all lived in the
shadow of a rather comfy sadness, ensconced in their humdrum life; they
were waiting for something better, sensing vaguely that life was
elsewhere.”7 So by a process that I shall call “incrustation”, the writer
creates a special, new geography which scorns the laws of science. For in
several stories, an unlikely sea is “incrusted” in the mountains or else an
ocean and a port loom up in the cordillera. These maritime spaces are an
escape from the feeling of suffocation produced by the Andean city.
This is the main theme in “A Stranger in the Port”. From the very first
paragraph the narrator hints at the possibility of a port. The chimera of the
ship mooring in the midst of the Andes is cleverly served by the narrator’s
410 23
alcoholic haze: “After my first whisky for the evening, I let myself be
carried along on the flow of this story which starts with a foghorn
sounding through the misty port, although there has never been a port in
this town.”8 Realizing the impossible, that is, bringing a port into being in
the Andes, is in my view an aesthetic invention, which answers one of the
questions asked in the introduction: How does the writer imagine the
geography of this country and its capital that he never names? This story
brings an astonishing answer: Quito is not the landlocked city it is thought
to be, just as Ecuador is not only the country crossed by an imaginary line.
Fiction allows a broader view, sweeps away prejudices and theoretical
knowledge. “Fiction does not mimic reality, but […] actualizes new
virtualities hitherto unexpressed, which then interact with the real
according to the hypertextual logic of interfaces […]” (Tally 2011, 103) as
Bertrand Westphal has pointed out. I would add another comment by
Westphal, insisting on the “representation of the real” and “an experience
of the real” which appear in works of fiction as new worlds, and as the
creators of new worlds:
The analogy between the world as we experience it and its representation is

less and less meaningful. But in any event, representation reproduces the
real or, better, an experience of the real. For we must not forget that human
space exists only in the modes of this experience, which, now becoming
discursive, is the creator of the (geopoetic) world. Any work, no matter
how far from sensed reality, as paradoxical as it seems, is part of the real –
and, perhaps participates in forming the real. Unreal realism is therefore an
option, only just a bit more disconcerting than other postmodern processes.
(Tally 2011, 85)
In his fiction, the writer can therefore conjure up the sea, or the memory of
the sea, in the heart of the Andes. The paradox is all the easier to envisage
if the name of the city or the country is not given. Geographic reality is
indeed “unreal”, or rather “surreal” in that the narrator adds a geographical
reference, the ocean, to an existing reality. Imagination and the principle
of confusion, aggravated by exhaustion and inebriation which affect the
narrator’s perceptions, work together to reveal a new geographical feature
in the Andean city; Vasconez's use of tenses (the unreality of the present,
the imperfect which freezes the action first stated in the simple past) and
adverbs is also remarkable:
Although the doctor had not brought the letter, I was sure I could hear the
distant booming of a foghorn of a ship that must be berthing in the port, at
this hour of night. The tide was relentlessly pushing the waves, it was no
doubt washing scraps of paper and driftwood to the quayside, because

there where the páramo and the Andean city began, I again heard the
sound of a foghorn9.
The metaphor of the “imaginary line” in this short story rolls three
separate geographical spaces – the ocean, Ecuador and the Andean city –
into one: “The fuzzy lights of the port faded little by little until they
formed an imaginary line in my memory.”10 The city with its characteristic
mountain range and high desert plateaus is no longer assimilated to a
prison or a closed space, since the novelist uses fiction to alter the
environment. The story depicts Quito as a port, facing the sea and freed
from the grip of the Cordillera of the Andes.
There is another example of this process of geographical re-creation. In
“Café Concert” a seascape is incrusted in the city through the imagination
and ingenuity of a photographer, Félix Gutiérrez. A Bolivian cabaret
singer dreamed of being photographed by the sea. The photographer
satisfies her wish by posing her alongside a mediocre painting of a
seascape. In fact, the trick is “suggested” by the narrator-writer, who
works his way into the story as a writer called J. Vásconez, “an impossible
writer” but a real demiurge able to remodel geographic realities and
suggest other spaces. It is while he is reading a few lines of an article
signed by J. Vásconez that the photographer thinks of a way to bring the
Bolivian singer’s impossible dream true. The article enlightens and guides
the character: writing becomes the vector of the imagination which makes
any project possible11. Imagination liberates and transcends geographical
laws and everyday reality:
J. Vásconez, an impossible man who claimed to be the town’s new

chronicler, had written these lines in the morning newspaper: ‘Never will
the sea bathe these high ports doomed to nothingness in this unfathomable
cordillera of the Andes. No, never will we see a ship enter the harbor,
unless we start to dream of it…’ The idea had traveled, by land or by sea,
who cares; in any case it came to Gutiérrez in a flash. That morning he
thought of nothing but the young woman, fixed in a photograph as if he
had already taken it12.
Set free by imagination, the Bolivian singer at last achieves her dream and
leaves the city for other climes. The main character can at last resume his
daily reveries: “As he smoked in his studio, Felix could imagine the cities
where [Gipsy] would stop to sing. Cities that he himself would never go
to.”13
412 23
Ecuador’s geography is thus disrupted and rearranged, and put at the

disposal of an imagination that also enables the writer to dialogue with
literature from other countries and world famous writers. Because if, in
various interviews, Vásconez raises the problem of the relationship
between the “space of writing” and “the space in which writing is done”,14
it is also because he seeks to break with Ecuador’s literary tradition.
2. The Land of the Imaginary Line becomes a Space

Welcoming Universal Literature
Indeed, Vásconez disrupts space for another purpose. By inventing
new spaces and cities, he can break with a stifling national literary
tradition, and, more importantly, engage a dialogue with a universal
literature. His remarks about the genesis of his first novel shed light on his
desire to make this break:
If I look back on the process of writing The Traveler from Prague I have
the impression of having gone through a series of nightmares. That is
probably due to the fact that I was not born in a country with a rich novel-
writing tradition (I am talking about Ecuador), which gave me greater
freedom and guided my work. [...] I wrote The Traveler from Prague
because, among other things, I was convinced – naive as I am! – that
literature was elsewhere. And I suspected that the risk was elsewhere. I
wanted to escape from the sordid “huasipungos” writing of our suffocating
literary tradition, I wanted to explore the horizon and get away from this
incoherent, muddled rambling, steeped in bad conscience, that is called
“indigenism” or “the Andean world” invented by sociologists. […] I was in
search of other shores, other cities and literary affiliations. In short, I
wanted to write a novel which would connect me unashamedly with the
literature of other latitudes and would let me sit at the same table as Kafka,
to smoke the night away with Onetti, to drink whisky with brilliant crime
writers and play spy games with John Le Carré. I wanted to renew myself
by interpreting other people’s texts15.
In a recent article presented as a retrospective analysis of Javier

Vásconez’s work, an Ecuadorian critic, Mercedes Mafla, returns to a belief
which seems to motivate all his literary production. It could even be the
core of an aesthetic choice which is also moral, because writing is not only
“an act of freedom”16, but also a tool for escaping the asphyxia induced by
the country’s characteristic topography and, consequently, a place of
transgression:
The novel [The Traveler from Prague] is the product of profound isolation
and the liberating belief that literature has no temporal and spatial
boundaries. Vásconez is an Ecuadorian who, just like the brilliant, tragic
poet, Alfredo Gangotena, takes inspiration from desolation; and since they
both washed up in the deepest Andes, they decide to play host to their
spiritual mentors. It is that, or death. Vásconez, because he is desperate,
therefore invites Kafka to join him on the imaginary line17.
Ecuador thus welcomes not only Dr Kronz, the Czech doctor who is the
main character in the novel, The Traveler from Prague, but also world-
class writers who have extraordinary adventures on Ecuadorian soil: that is
the theme of a collection of short stories entitled “Guests of Honor”
(Vásconez 2004), whose main characters are Colette, William Faulkner,
Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov and the American film director, David
Butler. A possibility offered by the country’s invisibility, which the writer
exploits to the full. The absence of names for Ecuador and Quito contrasts
strikingly with the explicit naming of certain countries and cities, such as
Spain, Prague, and Barcelona. If we delve deeper into the writer’s ties to
his native city and his country we find a complex idea: he does not name
them, because he feels they lack cultural and literary relief. In his view, for
the South American continent and the rest of the world, they do not exist.
Ecuador’s literature and the country as a whole suffer from the
“invisibility syndrome”. This idea is largely exploited by Javier Vásconez
who insists on the invisibility of the country, in general, and of its cultural
and artistic production, in particular. Of course, this insistence should be
seen as a device to achieve the opposite effect: by drawing attention to
their lack of visibility, he attempts to give them more relief and push them
into the foreground. Vásconez cleverly describes this invisibility by using
Ecuador’s many typical volcanoes as a metaphor. The invisibility he
emphasizes (“In Ecuador, we live in a crater”) allows him to justify his use
of intertextuality, to associate his native land with the homeland of world
famous authors:
In Ecuador, we live in a crater. We are isolated, culturally speaking. That is

why I have taken the liberty of inviting to my table, so to speak, a whole
string of writers whom I admire, in whose footsteps I have followed and
whose works I have read in depth. I am thinking of Nabokov, Conrad,
Faulkner... On a whim, the author has taken the liberty of bringing them
here and giving them a role to play in this city18.
The Ecuadorian writer intends to break with a weighty national literary

tradition, the indigenism of Jorge Icaza, the social realism and the
“terrigenism”19 of authors writing in 1930-1970. He wants to disentangle
414 23
himself from literature obsessed by certain national characteristics: the

country’s ethnic mix, social issues, and regionalism. He does not seek to
destroy the themes and clichés traditionally exploited by the writers before
him; on the contrary, he approaches the country from another angle. The
way foreigners see the country opens up new perspectives, literary as well
as geographical. Ecuador extends its hospitality to stateless people like Dr
Kronz, in The Traveler from Prague, and to famous authors whose renown
revives and nourishes Ecuadorian literature: Kafka, Faulkner, Colette, and
to all the other “guests of honor” that the writer invites to his native land.
This rediscovery of the country through literature enables the writer to
help efface the invisibility from which the nation and its literature suffer.
Its heavy literary tradition and geographical isolation are two of the key
factors in the opacity that he feels is characteristic of Ecuador. Another
comment by Vásconez reveals his strategy based on ambiguity and his
deliberate refusal to name the country and its capital city:
I see Quito in various ways. It is a different city in each book. If you

compare the city in The Traveler from Prague with the one in The
Gambler’s Shadow or in the short story The Secret, you realize that there
are several Quitos. And that is logical: it is a city with several spaces and
several possibilities and it can be seen in several ways. In any case, I did
not want to name it. I preferred to leave it ambiguous, as if seen through a
rainy landscape. I have always had a conflicting relationship with Quito,
but it is my city, I was born there and I love it. […]
- And how do you see Ecuador? In the same way?
- Ecuador is increasingly blurred, in many respects20.
The writer filters his knowledge of Ecuador and Quito through the prism
of “ambiguity”. This avoids having to anchor his stories in a specific
geographical context. On the contrary, it opens up to universality. By
keeping all possibilities open – “it is a city with several spaces and several
possibilities and it can be seen in several ways” – he sets his writing in a
context which exceeds the geographical and temporal boundaries of
Ecuador in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He creates a “literary
geography”, as discussed by Horacio Vázquez-Rial21. He develops an
urban and national space which becomes a paratopic place, a “paradoxical
place, or paratopia, which is not the absence of place, but a complicated
negotiation between place and non-place, a parasitic localization which
lives on the very impossibility of stabilization.” (Maingueneau 2004, 53)
That means that the “narrative arises in a place on the fringe of the
ordinary world” (ibid), in a marginal space in a country and a city that are
geographically isolated by their location, because Quito is in the middle of
the Andes and Ecuador spreads out on either side of an imaginary line.
This space “materializes the constitutive gap between the author and
society.” (Maingueneau, 2004, 184) This gap is also assumed by most of
the characters in Vasconez’s stories, including Dr Kronz in The Traveler
from Prague: they are outsiders, in a perpetual state of emotional and
territorial instability, going from one country to another, one continent to
another, from one part of the city to another. The city and the country
sketched by the writer therefore belong to the world without belonging to
it; they are like an island22, a quintessentially paratopic place, with
indefinable boundaries.
Conclusions
Javier Vásconez often talks about his search for new geographical and
literary horizons which will bring him a few answers to his questions
about Ecuador. He is a writer whose experience as an ordinary citizen,
coupled with that of a hardened, curious traveler, allows him to wonder
about his country in these terms:
I realized that the history of Ecuador and the way it was interpreted was
full of commonplaces, ready-made comments repeated over and over. I
looked for new horizons, new answers to literary problems. It was a trying,
lonely process, because I had to read and interpret the country in a new
way. From a personal point of view, I discovered a secret country and I
decided to poke my nose into that secret. After that experience I wrote The
Distant City, The Traveler from Prague, etc23.
His writing is a way of redrawing the space of the nation, and in our view
this act sits well in a discourse on Ecuadorianness by reconstructing the
national geography. In a sense, Javier Vásconez shakes up the clichés
about his country. He does not redraw the borders of the nation, which
continue to be “landmarks” for the collective imagination and the
Ecuadorian reader, but he blurs the outline of the country by talking about
the famous line of the Equator. Taking the ingenuous, simplistic view that
other nationalities have of Ecuador, he asks questions and awakens
curiosity that the locals sometimes struggle to formulate about their own
country. Here we touch on the question of redefining a national identity
bound up with a cultural identity, formulated in other terms by the
supporters of geocriticism, which Javier Vásconez was one of the first to
practice. Like the writer himself, most of his characters are stateless,
wandering travelers, rootless individuals briefly anchored in a space that
they explore and shape according to their own perception of it. This
analysis therefore serves the definition of Ecuadorianness which emerges
416 23
by default in Javier Vásconez’s work through the reconstruction of a

national geography:
It is exhausting to explain my conception of the country in literary terms,

whenever I talk about my books. […] So I prefer to talk of the only
tradition that I feel comfortable with: language. And certain geographical
areas as well. But to return to the “imaginary line”, to the literally
“invisible” country called Ecuador. […] Let us say that my work is based
on the literary maps of other writers. I have constructed it as a visible
tribute to Kafka, Nabokov, Onetti, Faulkner, Céline and Le Carré, among
others. I have also built a poetics of opacity, based on voluntary incursions,
associations, layers and re-creations, using various literary genres very
freely. I have stubbornly burrowed like a mole into the works of these
writers, hoping that the experience would transform me; this complex and
fascinating process is not without limits or danger, because often I can no
longer say where I am24.
This dialectic between invisibility and visibility involves taking risks,

because it leads to a dangerous loss of references both for the reader and
for the writer himself. It is vertiginous, part of an innovative artistic
process and characteristic of Javier Vásconez’s writing. He calls on the
power of imagination and the freedom conquered by the pen, which offer
an escape from the discomfort of living in a country where literature
struggles to exist. That is the crux of the matter: he does not deny the
reality of his country's geographical existence, far from it, but he
constantly denounces its lack of relief in famous literary works and the
production and circulation of works of fiction. He denounces the
impoverished literary tradition of his native land. However, through the
“absolute power of the imagination” as he calls it here, Javier Vásconez
can escape from a reality in which he cannot find his place either as a
creator or as a publisher:
I do not try to turn my back on a reality; on the contrary, I believe in the

legitimate desire of any writer to invent and dream up lives, like that of this
insolent traveler, Dr Kronz […] And better still: I support the desire to
invent a port in the heart of an Andean city, starting from the vision of a
character holed up in his little studio. I must say that the task has been
fascinating. No doubt because I had to construct a country which was at
once ambiguous and personal, starting from literature, a country where
everything is possible, because the longer I live in Quito, the less this city
fascinates me. […] Whether or not a country called Ecuador exists is of no
importance whatsoever 25.
This painful realization further refines the links between geography and
literature, and deepens the delicate notion of borders and limits: “Where
can I stand on this line which smashes limits and borders, that will now
have to be abolished?26” asks Javier Vásconez further on in the same
article. The answer seems obvious for anyone who knows the man and the
writer: on the fringe of clearly delimited “territories”, those literary
“freeways” marked out by their inscription in the constraints of a
nationality, he claims a writing space without borders, in which his writing
of space and his fiction could be freely expressed. He maps out a sort of
literary no man's land enabling him to hold the reality of his country at
arm's length while drawing closer to universality which, by definition,
brooks no limits: “That is probably why I have had to construct such an
ambiguous and personal country, based on literature, a country where
anything is possible”27.
References
AVEIGA, Maria. 2007. “De viaje con Vásconez”, Francisco Estrella (ed).
“Apuesta: los juegos de Vásconez”. Quito : Taurus Ediciones.
BALMACEDA, Paz. 2010. “La manipulación del tiempo”. Varios, 18
Escritores. La novela latinoamericana contemporánea. Barcelona:
Colectivo FU, Editorial Barataria.
CASTRO RODAS, Juan Pablo. 2012. “El síndrome de los invisibles, Diálogo
abierto con el escritor ecuatoriano Javier Vásconez.” OtroLunes, nb 22,
http://22.otrolunes.com
HERNANDEZ, José. 2012. “Mientras más se nombra una ciudad, o
cualquier lugar, más lejos estamos de él”. OtroLunes, nb 22,
http://22.otrolunes.com
MAFLA, Mercedes. 2013. “En el jardín con Vásconez”, Revista Ómnibus,
nb 43, Quito.
MAINGUENEAU, Dominique. 2004. Le Discours littéraire. Paris : Armand
Colin.
PEÑAFIEL, Cristóbal. 2012. “Javier Vásconez : mi deseo es ser yo mismo”,
Revista Otrolunes, nb 22, http://22.otrolunes.com
SILVA, Erika. 1986, “El terrigenismo : opción y militancia en la cultura
ecuatoriana”, Fernando TINAJERO (ed). Teoría de la cultura nacional.
Quito: Banco Central del Ecuador y Corporación Editora Nacional.
WESTPHAL, Bertrand. 2007. La Géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace. Paris.
Les Éditions de Minuit.
418 23
—. 2000. “Pour une approche géocritique des textes”, La Géocritique:

mode d’emploi. Limoges: Presses Universitaires de Limoges, coll.
Espaces Humains
VASCONEZ, Javier. 1996. El viajero de Praga, Quito: Alfaguara.
—. 2009. “Café Concert”. Estación de lluvia. Madrid : Veintisieteletras.
—. 2009. “Un extraño en el puerto.” Estación de lluvia. Madrid :
Veintisieteletras.
—. 2009. “El jockey y el mar.” Estación de lluvia. Madrid :
Veintisieteletras.
—. 2004. “Invitados de honor”, Revista cultural El Búho, nb 10, Quito.
—. 2002. “Divagaciones acerca de una línea imaginaria”, In Varios, El
exilio interminable, Vásconez ante la crítica. Quito : Paradiso Editores.
—. No date indication, “Interrogatorio”, Revista Común presencia, nb 16,
Bogotá.
http://comunpresenciaensayos.blogspot.fr/2006/12/interrogatorio.html.
VÁSQUEZ-RIAL, Horacio. 2009. “Prólogo”. Estación de lluvia. Madrid:
Veintisieteletras.
Notes
1
Ravine.
2
Barren, cold, high plateau in the Andes.
3
“A veces he llegado a pensar que Ecuador no es un país, sino una línea
imaginaria cuyo nombre fatídico y abstracto se lo debemos a los geodésicos
españoles y franceses del siglo XVIII. Este sentimiento contradictorio y equívoco,
con el que los ecuatorianos nos hemos habituado a vivir, curiosamente posee su
lado enigmático y luminoso. ¿Cómo escribir sobre una línea imaginaria?”
(Vásconez 2002, 195, our translation)
4
“The narrator in a constituent discourse cannot position himself outside or within
society: his writing is necessarily fed by the radically problematic nature of his
own belonging to that society. His utterance is constituted through this very
impossibility of assigning himself a real ‘place’. Paratopia is a paradoxical
locality, which is not the absence of place, but a difficult negotiation between place
and non-place, a parasitic location, which feeds on the impossibility of its own
stability. Without localisation, there is no institution that can legitimise and
manage the production and consumption of literature, but without delocalisation,
there is no real constituance.” (Maingueneau, 2004 , 52-53, in bold in the original
text)
5
Vásconez 1989, 164. All quotations are taken from Vásconez 2009, 77-87.
6
“El mar se me abrió en el horizonte... Era ese mar el que me estaba arrojando
hacia un abismo donde quizá no había nada. […] Corría [mi caballo] como un
ángel. Y yo salí vencedor porque al frente tenía el mar, doctor. Un mar que me
aplaudía como el mejor de los públicos, el más entusiasta y alborotado de los

públicos ante el que yo haya corrido nunca.” (Vásconez 2009, 86-87)
7
“Todos vivían instalados en una cómoda tristeza, amparados en el pasillo de los
días, en espera de algo mejor, y presintiendo que la vida estaba en otra parte.”
(Vásconez, “Café concert”, Estación de lluvia, 175)
8
“Ahora, cuando me he servido el primer whisky de la noche, tras haberme
sometido al flujo de esta historia que comienza con la sirena de un barco sonando
entre la niebla del puerto, aunque en esta ciudad jamás hubo un puerto.”
(Vásconez, “Un extraño en el puerto”, Estación de lluvia, 203)
9
“A pesar de que el doctor no había traído la carta, escuché a lo lejos la sirena
ululante, persuasiva, de un barco que a esa hora estaría atracando en el puerto. La
marea seguía agitándose, incansable, y seguramente arrastraba papeles y astillas
hasta los bordes del muelle, porque allí donde empezaban el páramo y la ciudad
andina yo volvía a escuchar una sirena.” (Vásconez, “Un extraño en el puerto”,
225)
10
“Las luces amortigadas del puerto se fueron desvaneciendo hasta formar una
línea imaginaria en mi recuerdo.” (Ibid, 219)
11
“He soon saw the mistake he had made; he had doubted himself and his ability
to transport himself to the sea through his imagination.” “Y no pasó mucho tiempo
antes de que se diera cuenta del error que había cometido, al haber dudado de sí
mismo, incluso de su capacidad para llevarla con su imaginación junto al mar.”
(Vásconez, “Café Concert”, Estación de lluvia, 182)
12
“J. Vásconez, un hombre imposible y con pretensiones de convertirse en el
nuevo cronista de la villa, había escrito en el diario esa mañana: ‘A esto altos
puertos de la nada, los Andes, a la insondable cordillera jamás llegará el mar. No,
nunca veremos entrar un barco en las dársenas del puerto a menos que empecemos
a soñarlos...’ Es posible que la idea hubiese venido por tierra, pero poco importaba
si vino por mar: porque para Gutiérrez todo ocurrió como un relámpago. Esa
madrugada no pensó en nada, sólo en la mujer, era como una fotografía que ya
hubiera sido tomada.” (Ibid)
13
“Félix podía imaginar, fumando en el estudio, las ciudades donde [Gipsy] se
detendría a cantar. Ciudades a las que él nunca llegaría.” (Ibid, 187)
14
An analysis of what Dominique Maingueneau calls “paratopian places” enables
us to see the conflict between the writer and the place where he produces his texts
as a double tension between reality and fiction and between the universal and the
local: “As we have said, even if the work claims to be universal, its emergence is a
fundamentally local phenomenon, and it is constituted only through the norms and
balance of power in the places in which it emerges. It is in these places that the
relationships between the writer and society, the writer and his work, the work and
society are really forged.” (Maingueneau 2004, 74)
15
“Si examino retrospectivamente el proceso de escritura de El viajero de Praga
me da la impresión de haber pasado por sucesivas pesadillas. Es quizás el hecho de
no haber nacido en una tradición rica en novelas -me refiero a Ecuador-, lo que me
permitió una mayor libertad y modeló el rumbo de mi trabajo. […] Tal vez escribí
El viajero de Praga, entre otras cosas, porque estaba convencido -ingenuo de mí,
420 23
desesperado de mí- de que la literatura estaba en otra parte. Y sospechaba que el

riesgo también estaba en otra parte. Deseaba escaparme de los sórdidos
“huasipungos” literarios de nuestra sofocante república de las letras, quería
explorar el horizonte y apartarme de toda esa palabrería incoherente, confusa,
atestada de mala conciencia denominada indigenismo o mundo andino, esa fantasía
de los sociólogos. […] Buscaba otras estaciones donde apearme, otras ciudades y
filiaciones literarias. En definitiva ambicionaba escribir una novela que me
vinculase sin complejos con la literatura de otras latitudes y me permitiera
sentarme a la misma mesa de Kafka, fumar durante la noche con Onetti, tomar
whisky con algunos escritores de talento incomparable de la novela negra, jugar al
juego de los espías con John Le Carré. Además aspiraba a renovarme interpretando
los textos de otros.” (Castro Rodas 2012, http://22.otrolunes.com)
16
“Writing is much more than storytelling, it is above all an exercise in freedom.”
“ Pero escribir es mucho más que contar bien una historia, es sobre todo un
ejercicio de libertad.” Javier Vásconez, “Interrogatorio”, Revista Común
presencia, n°16, Bogotá, undated.
http://comunpresenciaensayos.blogspot.fr/2006/12/interrogatorio.html.
17
“La novela [El viajero de Praga] es, más bien, el producto de un profundo
aislamiento y de la convicción, siempre liberadora de que la literatura no tiene
fronteras ni temporales ni espaciales. Vásconez es un ecuatoriano que al igual que
el brillante y trágico poeta Alfredo Gangotena parten del desamparo y en vista de
que se han quedado varados en los Andes profundos deciden convertirse ellos
mismos en anfitriones de sus maestros. Es eso o la muerte. Vásconez invita por
desesperación a Kafka a visitar la línea imaginaria.” (Mafla 2013, 3)
18
“En Ecuador vivimos en un cráter. Vivimos aislados culturalmente Por eso me
he tomado la libertad de invitar a mi mesa, por así decirlo, a una serie de escritores
a quienes admiro, a los cuales he seguido sus pasos y los he leído profundamente.
Me refiero a Nabokov, Conrad, Faulkner... Ha sido una libertad y también un
capricho por parte del autor de traerlos hasta aquí y hacer que actúen en esta
ciudad.” José Hernandez, “Mientras más se nombra una ciudad, o cualquier lugar,
más lejos estamos de él”, OtroLunes, op. cit.
19
Erika Silva calls “terrigenism”, thinking which anchors people in their native
land, with their myths, legends and languages. “Terrigenism” is opposed to
intellectual “metropolitanism”. (Silva 1986, 419-493)
20
“- A Quito la veo de distintas formas. En cada uno de mis libros es otra ciudad.
Si se compara la ciudad de Quito de El viajero de Praga, con la de La sombra del
apostador o con la del libro El secreto, nos damos cuenta de que hay muchas
ciudades de Quito. Y es lógico: Quito es una ciudad que posee muchas miradas,
muchos espacios, muchas posibilidades. En varios casos no he querido nombrarla,
y escribir sobre la ciudad desde la ambigüedad, un poco como debajo de la lluvia.
Mi relación con la ciudad de Quito siempre ha sido y será conflictiva, pero es mi
ciudad, en la que nací y a la que amo. Espero seguir escribiendo sobre ella.
- Y en esa misma perspectiva, ¿ como ve al Ecuador?
- Al Ecuador le veo cada vez más desdibujado en muchos aspectos.” (Peñafiel,
http://22.otrolunes.com)
21
“'I like to think that the world I have invented is rather like a cornerstone of the
universe.' This elegant remark by Vásconez refers to the process of writing he uses.
Neither he nor Faulkner started by looking at the map of Yoknapatawpha, or the
map of the Andean city; they were drawn in the process of writing and that is how
literary geographies are written.” “ ‘Me gusta pensar que el mundo que inventé es
una especie de piedra angular en el universo.’ Es una formulación elegante del
proceso del propio Vásconez, que algo tiene que decir cuando la obra ya está allí.
Por supuesto que ni Faulkner ni él empezaron por el plano de Yoknapatawpha, ni
por el de la ciudad andina, sino que éste se fue dibujando solo a través de la
experiencia de la escritura, que es como se dibujan las geografías literarias.”
(Vasquez-Rial, 8-9)
22
This image refers us to a definition of geocriticism given by Bertrand Westphal:
“La géocritique correspondrait bel et bien à une poétique de l'archipel, espace dont
la totalité est constituée par l'articulation raisonnée de tous les îlots - mobiles - qui
le composent. [...] Là où l'espace est archipel, les identités culturelles se
compliquent au point de rester à tout jamais définissables, et donc indéfinies.”
(Westphal 2000, 11)
23
“Una de las cosas de que me di cuenta es que la historia del Ecuador y sus
interpretaciones están plagadas de lugares comunes, de frases hechas: muchas se
repiten. He buscado nuevos horizontes, nuevas respuestas a una serie de
inquietudes que el país me planteaba como, por ejemplo, las literarias. Fue un
proceso arduo y solitario a la vez, pues había que releer e interpretar de nuevo el
país. Desde un punto de vista personal descubrí un país secreto y decidí internarme
en ese secreto. A partir de esa experiencia escribí Ciudad lejana, El viajero de
Praga, etc.” (Aveiga, 118)
24
“Resulta agotador explicar literariamente mi país cada vez que hablo de mis
libros. […] Por eso prefiero hablar de la única tradición en la que me siento
cómodo: la lengua. Y también con ciertas zonas geográficas. Pero regresemos a “la
línea imaginaria”, al país literariamente “invisible” llamado Ecuador. […]
Digamos que mi obra está levantada sobre los mapas literarios de otros escritores.
La he ido construyendo como un homenaje visible a Kafka, Nabokov, Onetti,
Faulkner, Celine y Le Carré, entre otros. Pero también he construido una poética
del ocultamiento a partir de invasiones voluntarias, de asociaciones,
superposiciones y recreaciones, utilizando con plena libertad distintos géneros. Y
he cavado obstinadamente como un topo en los parajes de estos escritores, con la
ilusión de salir transformado en esta aventura. Este proceso tan complejo y
apasionante no deja de tener sus limitaciones, sus peligros, ya que muchas veces
yo mismo no soy capaz de saber dónde estoy ubicado.” (Balmaceda 2010, 135-
136)
25
“No intento volver la espalda a ninguna realidad, al contrario, creo en el afán
legítimo de todo escritor de inventar y soñar vidas como la de ese viajero osado, el
doctor Kronz, [...]. O más aún: mantengo vivo el deseo de inventar un puerto en
una ciudad andina, gracias a la visión de un hombre recluido en el estudio de una
casa. Tengo que decir que mi tarea ha sido fascinante. Quizá por eso he debido
construir un país tan ambiguo y personal a partir de la literatura, un país donde
422 23
cualquier cosa es posible, porque cuanto más tiempo vivo en Quito menos me
cautiva esa ciudad. […] Que haya o no un país llamado Ecuador no tiene ninguna
importancia.” Javier Vásconez, “Divagaciones acerca de una línea imaginaria”,
(Varios, El exilio interminable, Vásconez ante la crítica, 196)
26
“¿Dónde encajo yo en esta línea que rompe los límites y las fronteras que hoy es
tan necesario abolir?” (ibid. 197)
27
“Quizá por eso he debido construir un país tan ambiguo y personal a partir de la
literatura, un país donde cualquier cosa es posible […].” (ibid.)
24
THE “FRONTIER LANDS”

F THE SOUTH-WESTERN ALPS:
ANALYSIS OF LOCAL TERRITORIAL
PROCESSES THROUGH THE LITERARY
CONSTRUCTIONS OF FRANCESCO BIAMONTI
AND JEAN GIONO
MARINA MARENGO
1. Introduction: Mountain, as well as literary,

liminality
According to the definition of Raffestin (1992, 371) “frontier lands” are
inherently areas of transit not only of things, people and ideas, but also
between different “worlds.” (Marengo 1996) The borders cutting across
them, not only fail to truly separate, but are, in effect, “promises of
exchange”. These hybrid areas are excellent examples of “espaces troués”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1980) and over time they have become a powerful
combination of linearity and zonality (Marengo 2012). This characteristic
leads us to reflect on the process of production of territory, marked by
numerous borderlines, which bear testimony to the various manifestations
of power over the centuries. (House 1979, Marengo 1997)
The Alps have been a “land of borders” since the beginning of the
modern era, but they were a “land of frontiers” long before this. Paola
Guglielmotti (2006, 1), when referring to the Middle Ages, stressed how it
was in no way contradictory a
[…] coexistence of linear and zonal borders […] identified by a plethora of

details that declared their function as an element of “transmissive and non-
restrictive” contact rather than of separation, and for this reason they
424 24
appear frayed, complex, fluid intermittent, articulated, grey, permeable,

porous.
These boundaries, so fractal and come to think of it, ultramodern, are now
the “living membrane” allowing the “frontier lands” to breath. According
to Paolo Cuttitta,
[…] the purpose of these liminal areas, these frontiers extending bi-
dimensionally (that is, they extend not only in length, but also in width), is
to prevent conflict without necessarily preventing […] activities of
exchange and commerce. (Cuttitta 2007, 28)
The recent evolution of the European border area following the Schengen
agreement, formally removed the border lines, however, signs of rough
demarcations still remain from the distant or more recent past.
They have always been areas of contact, despite the modern “silent”
lines chosen by those who drew them: the frontier lands are intrinsically
areas of dialogue, sometimes rather heated, but dialogue all the same.
Furthermore, they are areas of social, cultural and economic contact, as
well as intense curiosity and creativity. In this essay, the specific “frontier
land” in the south-western Italian-French Alps will be analysed. The
subject matter for the analysis is based on the literary works of Francesco
Biamonti, with some additional “forays” into Jean Giono1. They describe
an alpine frontier area that extends across the Italian and French Pre-Alps
(the Alpine foothills), and includes the coastal strips of Western Liguria
and Provence. A vast mountainous area starting from the western parts of
Piedmont and Liguria and covering a good part of the region now
officially known as P.A.C.A.(Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur):
From where he stood, more than five hundred leagues spread out from the
Alps to the massifs along the sea. A part from the sharp peaks high in the
sky and the dark cliffs to the south, all the area was still covered by haze
and dank mists. (Giono 2009, 42)
The inhabitants on both sides of the border, in their daily routines as well
as in their imagination, consider the concepts of border and frontier as part
of their everyday life, and not even the most important part:
In the evening, the solemn sunset on the “Bay of Angels” made her dream
again of the no man’s land, where the dead and the living could meet […]
She leaned against a terrace wall. The first star shone in the fiery sky
beyond Cap Ferrat. (Biamonti 1995, 87)
The “Frontier Lands” of the South-Western Alps 425
The writings of Biamonti and Giono have been chosen because their
precise and meaningful descriptions provide many possible interpretations
of the conceptual categories of border and frontier. Their depictions help
us to reconstruct the territorial, socio-economic and cultural processes,
which have contributed to defining a territorial and cultural identity, which
is unique to this cross-border area and irrespective of the exercise of power
that has “marked” these mountains over time2:
Never speak badly of France: this was one of his principles. Entire
generations of Luvaira and Aùrno had sated their hunger, among other
things, in the port of Marseilles. Longshoremen at the docks, loading and
unloading in the mistral wind. (Biamonti 1994, 88-89)
The aim of this study is to establish how the two novelists have
contributed to the understanding of the Italian-French “frontier land”
which, for millennia, has not only been a border region, but also a
distinctive cultural region – the Maritime Alps being a name that has
disappeared from the official subdivisions of the Alps. This contribution
can be added to research by scholars, who have used specific language and
scientific categories to explain what Michel Butor wrote about the
“frontier lands”:
Fortunately, little by little, all territories touch at some extremity or

another: we all become frontier people […] In this way, even the most
impenetrable borders slowly become transparent and these buffer regions,
transit areas, gateways, gaps are transformed into new centres. The
multitudes converge on them and then spread out from them more sensitive
to a new way of listening to things. (Butor 1987, 412)
2. The Frontier Zone: a porte-à-faux with a particular

identity and way of operating
The succession of different powers and rulers for at least a millennium
have made the western Alps a rich laboratory for the study of the ways in
which boundaries and spatial borders are defined, continue to persist, are
transformed or disappear. Over time, these signs of power have left a
memory, not only a historical one, but also tied to everyday life, to
generations of inhabitants of the region who have helped, officially or not,
to shape and change them.
In the harsh and steep lands of the far western part of Liguria, the
modern borderline crosses countless ancient paths, such as the salt routes
or paths of transhumance. The most well-known passes used and
426 24
frequented by smugglers, passeurs and illegal immigrants, used to be

equipped with physical barriers in the past. Biamonti describes a historical
barrier which is particularly tangible, the gate of Passo della Morte (TN:
Death Pass):
–Je ne peux pas oublier, monsieur! Je ne peux pas oublier! –What could
she not forget? –The rocky pass where her husband had died years before,
she said. A pass, close by, barred by a gate, with spikes even on the sides.
A guide had abandoned them on a ledge there one night. You had to hang
on the spikes to get across and her husband had been dragged down by the
weight of his suitcase. –A terribly dishonest guide, madam! He chose the
most difficult pass, the shortest, but the most difficult. It is not for nothing
that it is called Death Pass. I am sorry to have to tell you this. –So the one
who took us there was a murderer. Who put the gate there? Who was it? -It
has been there since the 1930s or maybe even before […] The Savoys […]
it could have been them […] –When did it happen? –Twenty years ago.
We had just got married. We were fleeing from Poland and we had already
illegally crossed three borders. (Biamonti 1995, 34)
The political changes in Europe over the last few decades, aimed at the
free circulation of people and goods, have caused the disappearance or, at
least, the transformation of many frontiers from a physical to a virtual
state. A few years after, Francesco Biamonti described the Death Pass and
the ancient narrow path again, but this time the basic conditions, both
political and material, had changed:
Footsteps can be heard up above. –People going towards Death Pass. - Is it

really so dangerous? –An exaggeration. Once there was a gate that forced
people to lean out across the emptiness, now it has been removed. Further
up you can get across quite easily. (Biamonti 1998, 27)
The frontier area and even the residual border line within it, is an entre-
deux-cultural space where the natives have learned to attribute special
names to places, things and people, leading one to think of endless and
remote exchanges as well as centuries of hard toil. These have resulted in
intense métissages, both legal and illegal, between the two sides of the
Franco-Italian border:
The vineyard is up there, too far away, abandoned. –Where is it? –On the
summit, at the posatoio3. Do you know where I mean? There is a long
ridge, where those who pass can put down their load and rest, catch their
breath. (Biamonti, 72)
The frontier inhabitants have adapted with great flexibility to the changes
and fluctuations of the borders. They have defined strategies for survival,
weighing up and regarding with distrust and cunning (a trait which never
diminishes in the inhabitants of these places: part sailor and part mountain-
dweller) those outsiders appointed to enforce power through the control of
the borders. In this vast spatial interstice, the natives have established rules
for interacting with all outsiders “for the sake of peace”:
Remember the Decalogue of the Maritime Alps: “Do not mess with the
state or the local council. With those who are more than you. With those
who have nothing. With those who are crazy”. I will spare you the other
commandments. (Biamonti 1998, 186)
The fact that a “Decalogue” was and still is necessary for survival, is a
cultural, but also material fact of the contemporary age: “All sorts passed
along those short-cuts, some were half-naked others wore tunics or short
kaftans. A silent desperation spread across those rocks, corroding one’s
heart. They were passages without brutality.” (Biamonti 1998, 172) Even
though the basic conditions have changed over the last few decades; in
other words, the strong and sharp features of the borders have gone, the
passage of people heading towards a safe haven where they can settle, the
same yearning for Eldorado, is still as intense as ever.
3. The Frontier: creator of economic activity and intense

cultural exchanges
Most border regions display specific cultural identities and their
inhabitants are often able to provide a powerful anchor to attributes such
as “ephemeral” and “temporary” linked to borders, which can be more or
less linear, rigid and “insurmountable” or plastic and “permeable”. Jean-
Paul Boyer (1990) and Beatrice Palmero (2007 and 2009) in their research
and analysis of the Western Alps have categorized frontier territoriality
using concepts of zone-tampon and cuneus comune. The categories they
describe are a mixture of people and cultures, nowadays there are Italians
and French, while in the past there were the Savoyards and Genoese, who
bitterly contested and subsequently made pacts to share the coveted
highland pastures, and other agricultural practices linked to these steep
lands – lands that are mainly terraced out of necessity and are wild and
rugged, fascinating and inexorable.
428 24
Francesco Biamonti, looking from the Mediterranean towards the Alps,

in a slightly more poetic version compared to the historian Fernand
Braudel (2008 and 2010), explained in a simple, but clear and effective
way, how the insiders have modelled and tamed these steep and frugal
slopes over the centuries:
His olive tree trunks are so big, they must be very old! […] –When do they
date back to? […] –The youngest ones date back to the sixteen hundreds,
the oldest were planted against all odds by the Benedictine monks in the
thirteen hundreds. (Biamonti 1998, 15)
For centuries, the economy of the frontier land centred on the typical
activities of this mountainous, poor and not very fertile Mediterranean
area. Nevertheless, it guaranteed subsistence income to the inhabitants on
both sides of the Alps and their borders:
In the summer we would scythe the hay on the mountains and collect a few
bunches of lavender. –We set off on our mules with our alembic, we
crossed all the Maritime Alps and at every stop we would distil. One man
came from Grasse to buy our essences. –And in the winter? We made coal
in the years when there were no olives. We cut down the holly oak woods.
(Biamonti 1994, 22)
Often olives are a good harvest, despite them being open to all human
transits. Even these olive trees are frontier trees, clinging to the almost
bare rocks, searching for support on the steep slopes and a little earth to
survive in those harsh places:
–Where are his olive trees? –On the boundary face, above the Comba, rock
olive trees, small olives, full of oil, growing on cavernous rock where the
roots went down deep. The olives yielded more than three kilos of oil for
every four when the olives were pressed. (Biamonti 1995, 66)
The traditional activity which has left its mark on the entire frontier region
is pastoralism. The land is poor allowing only for only a meagre
subsistence agriculture, however, sufficiently steep to define the age-old
paths of transhumance. Evidence of this ancient activity is everywhere in
the region, a few have survived to this day and others have been brought
back into use in the last few decades: “He stopped to look at an empty
sheepfold, the shepherd must have stayed on the hills further inland, given
the mild winter weather, almost like a long Indian summer.” (Biamonti
1995, 34) The surviving pastoral culture has handed down age-old
traditions and customs to this day:
Clouds […] the flock of sheep looked like clouds as he came closer and so
sacred those gestures that the blue-capped shepherd used to restrain his
dog. They both looked at him with curiosity, shepherd and dog. They
stared with sad eyes, the eyes of companions, habitués of the solitary
summits touched by the wind from morning to night. (Biamonti 1995, 52)
Sometimes it is possible to come across archaic languages, such as the

Provencal. Most are long forgotten, but thanks to recent efforts to promote
local heritage some are being rediscovered, although mainly in a
folkloristic way and for tourism and marketing:
That man, quite old and almost sacred, explained how he had walked
through the night to come down, to escape the snow in the air (l’auro de
nèu), the enemy for those having all their possessions in blood, the blood
of God. He spoke in Provencal, a strange sing-song lilt of the Maritime
Alps; high trebles like hiccoughs followed by low, drawn-out sounds […]
The clouds from the high seas (dis auti mar) had not arrived in autumn so
now freezing ice took the place of scorching heat. (Biamonti 1995, 53)
The pastoral routes, for the most part circulatory circuits used with
rhythmical intensity, were also shared, or crossed, by others that used
them for their livelihood and many of them brought precious goods to
areas where they were lacking. The shepherds often encountered these
traveling salesmen, colporteurs, carrying rare goods for those living a
meagre existence: haberdashery, candles, matches as well as other
products that they added to their stock by using their knowledge of the
mountains:
They heard the sound of studded boots crunching the track and then they
saw a man at the crossroads carrying a rather large bag on his back […] he
set down the bag and waived to them again. In the midst of all that hair,
only his smiling eyes could be seen […] –I do not make a fortune, but I
earn a living. […] With the contents of this bag, madam. Plants. I travel far
and wear out my shoes looking for them. They are hard to come by and
you have to have a keen eye. (Giono 2009, 326-327)
The insiders have often transported contraband, now as well as in the past.
A frontier “profession” which has permitted a constant exchange of goods;
not necessarily precious goods, but certainly necessities and rationed items
(for example oil, salt and tobacco). Francesco Biamonti, with a certain
amount of regret for the current evolution of a “profession” that never
suffers a crisis, affectionately describes the smugglers of far western
Liguria:
430 24
–Where do you live? –he asked Mire. –Down here by the sea. But my
home town is Rocchetta Nervina. I sold my goats and olive trees to buy a
restaurant. –Rocchetta, the town of smugglers. They wore white cloaks to
look like monks. (Biamonti 1998, 78)
Another “typical” frontier activity was the one carried out by the passeurs.
While the smugglers dealt in goods (the nature of the goods changing over
the centuries according to the era, the requirements, and the laws imposed
by the ruling power), the passeurs on the other hand, have worked with
people:
We have taken many journeys together […] we have met nomads and
wanders. We were two honest passeurs; he was a professional and I did it
in my spare time. We never left anyone on this side of the border.
(Biamonti 1994, 3-4)
The free movement of people in the European Union has almost wiped out
this profession carried out by the local inhabitants of this particular border
area. This has not been the case for the “long-haul” people-traffickers from
the southern Mediterranean, who continue to accompany those fleeing
endemic wars or recurrent famines to destinations in Central or Northern
Europe. The new migrants now travel without the aid of the local
passeurs, who, nevertheless, being used to the continuous movement of
people across the borders, offer assistance, material or otherwise, to these
people needing a place to rest before resuming their march towards more
welcoming nations. Support and solidarity which are not favourably
regarded by the authorities and sometimes not even by other inhabitants:
“You give them food, don’t you? What are you thinking of? –A little
solidarity, but cautiously. I let live.” (Biamonti 1994, 29) These frontier
crossings are almost always permanent, or at least the protagonists hope
they will be. Very different from the alternating and seasonal migrations
taking place on both sides of the border in the frontier area, in different
eras and for different reasons:
Our old folk used to go to work as longshoremen in the port of Marseilles.

–There was a sort of consul in Luvaira: a cobbler (cordonnier). He sorted
everyone out. They used to meet up in his workshop when the Mistral wind
swept the port and the waves splashed over the docks. –They came back
after Easter wearing Morocco leather shoes and making questions with
“n’est-ce pas.” (Biamonti 1994, 22)
There is almost always a migrant figure in the families of the frontier

region, at least on the Italian side. Usually a seasonal migrant, whose
experiences were recounted and passed down by the older family

members4.
4. Inhabitants of the Frontier: stories of people either

deeply rooted or eternally moving
The inhabitants of the cross-border region, often described as rustic,
shy and sometimes aggressive, have always been able to count on
intensive exchanges, easier along coastal routes, more complex proceeding
inward and upward. (Giorcelli Bersani 2000) As Claude Raffestin wrote
(1992, 371), the Western Alps are “[…] frontier lands, but not separated
lands”: this is because they have been shaped by transhumance for
thousands of years “[…] the pace of these alternating (or alternate)
movements have been set by climatic conditions and they give us an
insight into the ecological function of the frontier.” (ibid) This rhythmic,
circular and almost ritual alternation powerfully emphasises the fact that
these lines have a directional and not a separating function. In most cases
they refer to externalities full of promise of exchange and innovation, as a
consequence of “curious” internalities, or in any case, not closed to
interaction and hybridisation.
Furthermore, we can distinguish between the old and new inhabitants.
The former knew how to adapt to the harsh nature of the environment, by
means of temporary migrations or inventing new (legal or illegal)
professions, which have now become part of local traditions. The new
inhabitants can be subdivided into three categories:
(a)- “New arrivals”, sometimes residents, usually foreigners, bringing with
them new but not necessarily “exotic” languages, cultures and customs:
They ended up talking about the new inhabitants in that old town quarter.
They came in waves. First the Dutch, among them an architect who bought
and renovated property. Then English and Danish and a few Germans.
There was also a refugee from Istria. Recently, an Arab couple, who lived
in small lodgings. –It is strange that you are the only French. –there were
others, but they left. You can find places like this in France too. (Biamonti
1998, 11)
(b)- “Temporary inhabitants”, seeking shelter or an alternative life in the

no man’s land of the frontier:
So the rumours going around were true! There were people up on the
higher ground and on the ridges of the border, strange people, cunning as
432 24
foxes; although the area is under surveillance they hid away in those places
where nobody would look for them. (Biamonti 1995, 67)
All in all these “ghost” inhabitants may be a little dissolute, but they are
not particularly dangerous.
However, most residents are doubtful about certain types of movement:

there were strange rumours at Avrigue about that area: on some nights
populated by drug-addicts and thieves and the ravine was used as a hiding
place for stolen goods. (Biamonti 1995, 58)
The reason for this is that some cannot forget certain violent episodes
towards migrants as well as Maritime residents that took place in the past:
There are certain things better not talked about, things that he had found
hard to believe: fleeing Jews, robbed and thrown into the sea by a boatman
in 1938 and 39, shepherds who had their throats slit in their cottages by
transitory people. –It is better not to stay up on the border –he concluded. –
Or maybe the whole world is the same. (Biamonti 1998, 74)
(c)- “Travelers”, migrants, illegal immigrants, fugitives, refugees,

whichever term is more contemporary and political to define people “in
transit”. In this regard, it is important to consider the function of this
specific frontier region as an interstitial space. Although there has always
been a political border, which has certainly affected these transits, it has
never actually stopped them. For the fugitives of the 19th century,
described by Jean Giono it was a welcoming land: namely the Carbonari
or other revolutionaries who “wintered down” in Provence to escape from
the Piedmonts: “So, are you one of those who stoke up conversations and
make a big fuss about hiding yourselves in the forest on the other side of
the Alps?” (Giono 2009, 446) Closer to our time, there were those who
escaped from the “obligations” of the fascist regime: “As he took the
coffee pot off the tripod, Edoardo said something about destiny; then he
added openly that even he had taken refuge in France at the time of the
dictatorship.” (Biamonti 1995, 41) Currently, people who are transiting are
involved in long and dangerous migratory journeys. Sometimes they find
temporary refuge in the abandoned olive groves:
And at night? […] What is it like at night here? –Calm. Even though
occasionally someone mistakes the ridge and looks for the border. We light
small fires to warm ourselves. (Biamonti 1998, 18)
In any case, it is not these new migrants that are dangerous:

Do not be afraid. He recognised the ones fleeing from their homelands,

wandering between Italy and France. And these gloomy fellows and thin-
faced women were neither thieves nor murderers. (Biamonti 1998, 22)
More often than not, they were victims of dishonest passeurs, outlaws,
profiteers taking advantage of their situation or accidents befalling them:
– I forgot to warn the Kurds of the dangers at the border. –The guards? –
Certainly not. There are Arabs that wait for them at the pass. –Where? – At
Cardellino Pass and Death Pass; the police do nothing. Nobody intervenes.
(Biamonti 1998, 23)
Sometimes the locals rediscover gestures of solidarity from their past, a

capacity to welcome, now a little rusty, but still a part of local culture.
5. Frontier Landscapes: Final reflections

on the “mountains of the sea”
The descriptions of the novelists and reflections of the researchers have
made it possible for us to propose an idea of how the frontier landscape of
the south-western Alps can be represented. However, it is necessary to
reflect further on the close relationship between nature and culture, which
is the basis of most contemporary representations of territory and
landscape. On the other hand, we should underline that
[…] every place has an identity derived from a specific link between
phenomena in progress and those already stratified, which make it a
territorial microsystem endowed with a relative autonomy […] and
therefore it is necessary to set up specific processes to plan the
interpretation of endogenous heritage which constitutes the “locality.”
(Carta 2002, 150)
The reason for this being that “[…] the territorial process develops over
time, taking the place of a previous form, another natural state or other
type of territory” (Raffestin 2005, 40), with the help of “[…] creative
imagination, or in other words, the faculty to assemble spatial images
according to principles that do not necessarily reflect reality” (Debarbieux
1992, 894). In addition, “[…] that symbolic imagination, which attributes
a powerful meaning to places” (ibid), and through which
[…] the perceived material world becomes a “raw material”, offered to the
eye, to be processed for the production of images and representations that
can be manifested through different types of language […] The territory,
434 24
before being a landscape to observe, is primarily a material system to be

used, because it has been built as a use-value […] The landscape comes
into being when the eye meets the material territory. (Raffestin 2005, 41-
42)
And so then, towards that sea only imagined by Jean Giono’s small
mountain-dweller, the relationship between nature and culture brings us
back to the barren and sometimes arid landscapes, always worn away by
an eternal verticality:
There are places up here where the bridle paths end. Steep and barren
terraces above the olive trees, walls like gravestones of the past, almost
poised to fall in the breeze. And never ending ridges. (Biamonti 1995, 52)
Terraces patiently built by man on these “[…] high lands with just a
couple of inches of soil, burnt buy the wind and salt.” (Biamonti 1998, 97)
The sea, back to a wild state despite the wounds caused by the invasive
presence of man and his boats, regains strength:
I watched the day as it faded, a return of light. Behind the Esterel a

diaphanous blaze opened a sort of eternal night out of the ashes. “Bright
flares fall from the sky. The night descends”. Suddenly the starry night
seemed distant. They walked on, you could smell mastic and absinthe, and
the sea, which came in gusts and made them forget. (Biamonti 1998, 9)
Thus, the Maritime landscape acquires a peaceful note, despite its

harshness: “The morning had been fair, bright blue, an apotheosis for
November. We saw the Saccarello emerge from behind the hill on a
backdrop of wispy clouds.” (Biamonti 1998, 20)
The cultural landscapes are as unusual as the natural ones. They have
been shaped by an economy of subsistence and the ingenuity of the local
inhabitants, who have learnt how to exploit the local resources in every
way: “Eventually, through the trees, Angelo caught sight of a sheepfold.
The walls were the colour of bread and the roof made of luze, that is, huge
and very heavy flat rocks.” (Giono 2009, 16) The historical and cultural
backgrounds of the two sides of the Alps also account for the differences
between the two, particularly in the character of the people and their
ability to act and react:
These French […] could never stomach Napoleon. But now that he has
gone […] they dream about Austerliz in the woods […] this insurgent is
just waiting for the chance to become king of Naples. This is where the
difference lies between the two sides of the Alps. We have no precedents
and this makes us shy. (Giono 2009, 19-20)
Nevertheless, the cross-border exchanges have contributed to making the

landscape of this region quite unique:
The men of my age remember when the road towards Sainte-Tulle was
lined with a thick row of poplars. It is a tradition from Lombardy. It arrived
as a long procession of poplar trees from the heart of Piedmont. They
climbed the Monginevro, slid through the Alps and reached this place in
their loaded creaking carts, accompanied by curly-haired navvies that
strode along in their Hussar trousers singing songs. (Giono 1972, 3)
Sometimes literary works offer us non-geographical descriptions that are

far more effective than pages of scientific reflections. (Brosseau 2008)
This is the case of the smuggler’s dog, a symbol of this specific frontier
land. It also represents the people who have tamed the land at all costs to
satisfy their needs and in this way they and their animals have become
unique:
Near home, on the path, you feel the dog between your legs […] That dog
belonged to the breed of Maritime sheepdogs, a sort of border guard and a
companion on the path homewards. Grey like a shadow, when it turned
dark, you could hardly see it, but you could hear it breathing How old was
it? It was hard to say. It was gentle, but always seemed to be a little
offended. It could hardly see, or maybe it just pretended to be half-blind.
Up there, at a certain time of day, in between the shadows, it was good to
have a dog with you. (Biamonti 1994, 65)
The description of the Maritime dog is a metaphor for the character of the
south-western Alpine inhabitants and encompasses the ceaseless
movement in this “land of passage” and at the same time, its immobility
imbued with ancient and eternal knowledge. It is a more effective
description than many territorial marketing campaigns and a splendid
visiting card for the whole frontier region.
To conclude this essay, it should be emphasised that the geo-literary
analysis of some of the writings of Francesco Biamonti and Jean Giono
has fully demonstrated how the literary representations of the spatial
dimension allow us to penetrate the local processes in depth. In this
specific case, the representations relating to the frontier have led us to
contexts of everyday reality and repetitiveness over the centuries, which
are difficult to detect directly by using the standard methods of scientific
research.
436 24
References
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—. 1995. L’angelo di Avrigue. Torino: Einaudi.
—. 1998. Le parole la notte. Torino: Einaudi.
BOYER, Jean-Paul.1990. Hommes et communautés du Haut-pays niçois
médiéval : La Vésubie (XIIIe-XVe siècles). Nice: Centre d'Études
Médiévales.
BRAUDEL, Fernand. 2008. “La Terra”. Il Mediterraneo: Lo spazio la storia
gli uomini le tradizioni, Fernand braudel (ed). Milano: Bompiani, 11-
30.
—. 2010. Memorie del Mediterraneo. Milano: Bompiani.
BROSSEAU, Marc. 2008. “L’espace littéraire en l’absence de description:
un défi pour l’interprétation géographique de la littérature”. Cahiers de
géographie du Québec, Volume 52: 419-437.
BUTOR, Michel. 1987. “Meditazione sulla frontiera”. La frontiera da Stato
a Nazione: Il caso del Piemonte, Ossola Carlo, Raffestin Claude, and
Ricciardi Mario (eds). Roma: Bulzoni, 407-413.
CARTA, Maurizio. 2002. L’armatura culturale del territorio: Il patrimonio
culturale come matrice di identità e strumento di sviluppo. Milano:
Franco Angeli.
CUTTITA, Paolo. 2007. Segnali di confine. Milano: Mimesis.
DEBARBIEUX, Bernard. 1992. “Imagination et imaginaire géographiques”,
Encyclopédie de la géographie, Bailly Antoine, Ferras Robert, Pumain
Denise (eds). Paris: Economica, 893-906.
DELEUZE, Gilles, and Félix GUATTARI. 1980. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les
Editions de Minuit.
GIONO, Jean. 1972. “Jean Le Bleu”. Giono J., Oeuvres Romanesques
Complètes, II. Paris, Gallimard- La Pléiade, 3-186.
—. 2009. Le Hussard sur le toit. Paris: Gallimard-Ed. Folio.
GIORCELLI BERSANI, Silvia. 2000. “La montagna violata: il sistema alpino
in età romana come barriera geografica e ideologica”, Bollettino
Storico-bibliografico subalpino, Vol. 98: 425-449.
GUGLIELMOTTI, Paola. 2006. “Introduzione”. Reti Medievali Rivista,
Volume 7: 1-12. Distinguere, separare, condividere: Confini nelle
campagne dell’Italia medievale, Paola Gugliemotti (ed).
http://www.dssg.unifi.it/_RM/rivista/saggi/Confini_Guglielmotti.htm).
HOUSE, John W. 1969. “The Franco-Italian Boundary in the Alpes
Maritimes”. The Structure of Political Geography. Roger E. Kasperon
and Julian V Minghi (eds). Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co, 258-272.
MARENGO, Marina. 1996. “The Maritime Alps: a Transition Area between

the Mediterranean and Alpine Systems”. Sustainable Development of
Mountain Communities. Guglielmo Scaramellini (ed). Milano: Guerini
e Associati, 89-97.
—. 1997. “Les frontières culturelles dans les Alpes Maritimes”. Actes du
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Occidentales. Grenoble: CNRS LAMAESA 5038, 75-78.
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alpi del Tanarello tra XV e XVIII secolo”. Lo spazio politico locale in
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Guglielmotti, Sandro Lombardini and Angelo Torre (eds). Alessandria:
Edizioni dell’Orso, 145-153.
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Notes
1
The novels by Jean Giono that are used for this study are: Le Hussard sur le toit
(Paris, Gallimard-Ed. Folio, 2009) and Jean Le Bleu (Oeuvres Romanesques
Complètes, II, Paris, Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1972, 3-186). Francesco Biamonti’s
novels that are used, are Vento largo (1994), L’angelo di Avrigue (1995), and Le
parole la notte (1998), all published by Einaudi.
2
The whole area described by the two novelists is studied here, and is part of the
Alpine-Mediterranean region of Europe, which covers Piedmont, Liguria and
Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, but also the region of Rhône-Alpes (see the bilingual
site http://medalp.eu/).
3
TN: the resting place.
4
The author comes from this frontier area and can count at least a dozen of her
ancestors, who crossed the Alpine passes to work in the South of France in the last
century. In many cases they were seasonal workers in agriculture. In other cases,
the migrations became permanent and resulted in a veritable “family diaspora”.
25
CHICAGO:
LITERARY GEOGRAPHY APPROACHES
TO AN EGYPTIAN EMIGRATION NOVEL
DELPHINE PAGÈS-EL KAROUI
In Egypt, emigration, which has increased since the 1970s (currently,

between four and eight million Egyptians live abroad), plays an important
role in the national collective imaginary, shaped by a variety of articles,
novels, and films on the subject. Despite the emergence of the emigration
novel as a literary genre, of which Chicago, the second novel of Egypt’s
most-read contemporary novelist, Alaa Al-Aswany, is an excellent
example, no in-depth research has been devoted specifically to this theme.
(Nasir 2006)1
Born in 1957, Al-Aswany is a dentist who continues to practice in
Cairo. He rose to prominence when his first novel, The Yacoubian
Building, published in 2002, became internationally famous after it was
translated into English (2004) and, subsequently, more than twenty other
languages2. Chicago, which was published in 2007 and immediately
translated into English in 2008, recounts the lives of several Egyptians
whose destinies cross paths in and around the medical school of the
University of Chicago. The novel sold very well in Egypt (19 editions), in
the Arab World, and in Europe. The Yacoubian Building and Chicago are
both polyphonic novels that play on a classic literary recipe (“sex and
politics”): the plot cleverly brings together the destinies (particularly
amorous) of picturesque characters, while forcefully denouncing the ills of
contemporary Egyptian society in an unrestrained tone3. In a social realist
lineage, Chicago renders in detail the universe of Egypt’s highly educated
and qualified migrants: the reasons that pushed them to leave, their
integration into American society or withdrawal into their community,
their nostalgia for Egypt, their hypothetical returns…
Chicago: Approaches to an Egyptian Emigration Novel 439
This article proposes a geographic reading of Chicago, following in the

footsteps of a number of authors who work at the border between
geography and literary studies. (Claval 1993, Tissier 2007, Westphal 2005,
Collot 2014) The analysis will focus on migration imaginaries, which in
turn refer to geographic imaginaries, in this case of the United States and
Egypt. In order to explore these, I will make use of the threefold
analytic—territories, temporalities, and identities—proposed by Anne
Barrère and Danilo Martucelli (2005) in their approach to mobility as “an
imaginary that articulates a relationship with time, with space, and with
the search for an existential transformation.”
The article begins by underscoring the correlation between narrative
structure and spatial organization, through the chronotope of post-
September 11 Chicago. It then examines the geographic imaginaries of the
United States and Egypt, in which Al-Aswany struggles to present a
nuanced vision of the American Dream and to emphasize that oppression
exists on both sides. Finally, it shows how each character illustrates a
particular type of migrant, who emerges, at the end of the narrative, having
been transformed by the experience of migration.
1. Analysis of a chronotope: post-september 11 Chicago

Bakhtin defined the concept of chronotope as follows: “We will give
the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic
connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically
expressed in literature.” (Bakhtin 1981, 84) The concept, despite or
because of its plasticity, met with great success both in the literary analysis
practiced by geographers (Claval 1993, Tissier 2007, Dupuy 2013) or
literary critics (Mitterand 1980, Collot 2014) and has been taken up in
other disciplines such as film studies. (Naficy 2001)
a) Place and Time of the Narrative: The Realist Illusion

For Al-Aswany, the spatial frame is foundational since the title
Chicago is the name of the American city where the action takes place.
This is recurrent with the author: his two other novels, The Yacoubian
Building and Automobile Club (2013), are also titled on the basis of
locations where the action takes place. In each case a very circumscribed
location – a building in downtown Cairo, an automobile club in 1940s
Cairo – in order to describe an Egyptian microcosm, with a portrait of the
time-period as backdrop. Although Chicago gives the impression of a shift
440 25
in scale, the events in reality take place almost exclusively on the campus
of the University of Chicago, on the city’s outskirts.
Emphasizing place by causing it to feature in the title is a way of
anchoring the novel in the real, by appealing to the place’s “narrativity”,
defined by Henri Mitterand as the “ensemble of characteristics that make
the inscription of place indispensable to the realist illusion.” (Mitterand
1980, 194) Mitterand continues, saying that “the name of the place
proclaims the authenticity of the adventure through a sort of metonymic
reflection that short-circuits the reader’s suspiciousness: since the place is
real, all that which is contiguous to or associated with it is too” (ibid.). The
anchoring in the real is reinforced by the autobiographical dimension of
the novel, since Al-Aswany himself studied for a Master’s in dental
surgery at the University of Illinois in Chicago in the 1980s.
While the location of the narrative is clearly specified, the diegetic
time remains somewhat unclear (during the 2000s), though not in a
manner that attenuates the realist illusion, since the novel begins with
university induction (the decision to award scholarships, the arrival of the
new students Nagi and Shaymaa, etc.), reinforcing the centrality of the
university in the novel’s architecture. All we know is that the narrative
takes place between two temporal markers: after the 11th of September
2001, which is clearly evoked on several occasions, and before 2007,
when the novel was published. The events of September 11 thus constitute
a founding moment, more of which below.
Like Al-Aswany’s other novels, Chicago’s narrative structure is not
linear. An omniscient narrator blends together the stories of two
generations of Egyptians in the department of histology at the medical
school of the University of Chicago: professors and students rub
shoulders, allowing for an encounter between two different waves of
qualified Egyptian migrants, that of the 1960s and 1970s, who sought to
integrate and became American, and a more recent one of young medical
students whose intention, at least initially, is to remain only temporarily in
the United States, long enough to obtain their diploma. Al-Aswany also
introduces a secondary narrator, Nagi, extracts of whose journal also
appear in the novel.
b) The Foundational Narrative of Chicago

The novel’s first chapter that recounts the legend of Chicago’s
founding, inviting the reader to reflect on the city onomastically: “Many
do not know Chicago is not an English word.” (14) This prologue is the
occasion for recalling that the United States, a country emblematic of
freedom and human rights, was founded on the massacre of its indigenous
population. Al-Aswany hastens to associate this barbarity with
Christianity, in an implicit game of mirrors that inverts the contemporary
image of Islam as intrinsically violent:
Anyone reading American history must pause at this paradox: the white
colonists who killed millions of Indians and stole their land and other
possessions were, at the same time, extremely religious Christians. (1)
He then expands on the city’s prodigious development, located on the

shores of Lake Michigan, which in the 19th century became a major
crossroads between the Great Plains agricultural areas and the industrial
heart of the metropolises of the North-East. This extraordinary expansion
was disrupted by the great fire of 1871, which was followed by a period of
anarchy. But the reconstruction would revive the city’s dynamism and its
prosperity was soon greater than ever – it was baptised “Queen of the
West”, “City of the Century”, and “the city of “I will”” (5) – with its share
of strident inequalities, of millionaires and misery. Al-Aswany also
mentions the massive immigration, notably of Europeans, which fed the
city’s spectacular growth. He evokes the “thousands of non-Chicagoans
poured into the labour market” (4), “the ambition that impels Americans to
converge on it in search of a better future” (5), “the “City of
Neighborhoods,” in reference to seventy-seven neighborhoods throughout
the city where different ethnic groups lived: black, Irish, Italian, German,
etc. At the same time each neighbourhood preserved the culture and
customs of its inhabitants.” (5)
For Al-Aswany, this is less a matter of describing the décor or giving
an inventory of places and landscapes – which in the end interest him
relatively little (see below) – than of giving a moral portrait of the city as
full of resilience and contradictions, contradictions that are also found in
the characters, like Nagi, who comes to study in the United States despite
having violently protested against the country while in Egypt, and who
falls in love with a Jewish girl, Wendy, even though Israel is his great
enemy.
This prologue also has a narrative function, serving to start the action.
Unaware of the history of Chicago and its residents’ fear of fire, Shaymaa,
a young veiled student recently arrived from an Egyptian country town,
sets off a fire alarm and a forceful intervention of the fire department when
in a moment of nostalgia she tries to cook peppers on the open flame of a
propane burner. During the ensuing panic she meets another Egyptian
student, Tariq, with whom a love affair quickly ensues.
442 25
c) The Unity of Place: An Egyptian Microcosm in Chicago

Al-Aswany maintains spatial unity: all of the action takes place in
Chicago, and he does not tackle the crossing of borders or the trip to the
United States. More specifically, most of the action takes place within the
University of Chicago, which functions as a small independent city, with
its own shopping centre and public transport. Numerous scenes take place
in the university residence, in the department of histology, and in the
houses of the houses of professors, which the reader is left to suppose are
on campus. Like in The Yacoubian Building, Al-Aswany chooses to focus
on a microcosm in which a very diverse set of characters live, allowing
him to analyze some of the broad cleavages that cut across contemporary
Egyptian society: men/women, Muslims/Copts, Cairo/countryside,
opponents and supporters of the corrupt regime. Contrary to The
Yacoubian Building, because Al-Aswany focuses his attention on qualified
migrants, social cleavages are not at the heart of Chicago, even if there is a
world of difference between the millionaire surgeon Karam Doss, and
Shaymaa, who in order to save money only calls her family once a week.
The question of political Islam is also less central in this novel than in the
author’s first.
The novel’s characters are largely sedentary, and we rarely see them
leave their homes. Shaymaa confesses to Tariq that she only knows the
University of Chicago buildings, leading him to take her on the metro to
visit the centre of Chicago, where he points out the most famous
monuments, the Marshall Field’s department store, the Sears Tower and
Water Tower. Similarly, when Muhammad Salah picks Nagi up from the
airport and takes him to visit the centre of Chicago, the same set of
monuments is evoked, as well as the large park on the shores of Lake
Chicago, which reminds him of the Corniche in Alexandria. (39)
Relative to such sedentary existences, mobility acquires a special
meaning in the novel. It is perhaps not insignificant that the first
appearance of Ahmad Danana, an odious, corrupt and money-hungry
character, occurs as he emerges from the metro on the way to his
downtown office as president of the Egyptian Student Union in America.
This mediocre medical student, feared by other Egyptian students, is
described as looking “totally out of place”, “in the midst of this purely
American scene.” (44) Al-Aswany emphasizes the clumsy appearance of
this rural figure from the Minufiya Governorate, whose forehead has a
prayer mark (zebiba5) and who is never seen without his prayer beads and
Cleopatra cigarettes. Even the office of the Egyptian Students’ Union has
a typically Egyptian spatiality:
even though the apartment was in Chicago, it had mysteriously acquired an

Egyptian bureaucratic character that reminded one of the Mugamma6
building in Tahrir Square or the old court building in Bab al-Khalq. (46)
The characters who leave their living space often find nothing outside but
desolation. Ra’fat Thabit goes to the poor and seedy neighborhood of
Oakland looking for his daughter on two occasions. On the first, at night,
he is mugged before happening onto his daughter as she takes cocaine, and
on the second, during the day, he does not find her since she has moved.
Each time, the reader gets only a very brief description of the location.
d) Little Interest in Description

Although the “post-September 11 Chicago” chronotope plays a
foundational role in the novel, Al-Aswany paradoxically does not give
special attention to the description of the landscapes, or even the interiors,
where most of the action takes place. The descriptions, where they do
occur, are reduced to the bear minimum, and bear the mark of common
stereotypes associated with them. Thus, Shaymaa is dazzled by Chicago’s
skyline as she leaves the airport:
She saw streets so wide she could not imagine they existed anywhere and
gigantic skyscrapers that spread as far as the eye could see, giving the city
an enchanted mythical look like those in comic books. (9)
Oakland is described in just a few words:
As soon as Ra’fat Thabit drove into Oakland, he was horrified: many of the
redbrick homes were in ruins; backyards were filled with old junk and
garbage; gang slogans were sprayed in black and red on the walls; groups
of young black people were standing on street corners smoking marijuana;
loud music and noise came from some open bars. (162)
The infrequency of spatial descriptions can be accounted for on the basis

of the fact that Al-Aswany’s goal is not to describe the United States so
much as an Egyptian microcosm in the United States. The place serves
only as a backdrop for denouncing the authoritarian and corrupt regime of
Mubarak. Indeed, if we draw up a list of toponyms, they are as much or
more Egyptian as they are American. This US-Egypt bipolarity of spatial
referents can be found in the novel’s geographic imaginaries.
444 25
2. Geographic Imaginaries
This section draws on Bertrand Westphal’s (2005) geocritical approach
to writers’ geographic imaginaries, and in particular their representations
of elsewhere and the foreign, which he calls imagology. Al-Aswany’s
visions of these themes can be situated in a long tradition of Arab writers’
narratives of the West, the topic of Rasheed El-Enany’s Arab
Representations of the Occident: East-West Encounters in the Arabic
Fiction. Inverting Edward Said’s approach, El-Enany analyzes 56 Arab
authors of whom an important number are Egyptian. He distinguishes
several periods: the pre-colonial period, of “enchanted encounters”, to use
the title of a chapter from his book, in which Europe attracts the
admiration of Arab writers and functions as a model following which the
region could emerge from its under-development; the colonial period in
which admiration for the West persists but in which East and West are
enclosed in different essences and in which the moral degradation of an
overly materialist West is contrasted with an increasingly spiritual Arab
world; the post-colonial period itself is divided into two parts, before and
after the 1967 defeat against Israel. The first part of this period is marked
by the enthusiasm of writers who are proud of their countries’ newfound
independence and who tend to emphasize the similarities between the
West and the Arab World, whereas the second period is more
disenchanted, in which the ambient pessimism leads to a glorification of
European otherness and total self-abnegation. While representations of the
West tend to be dominated by Europe, a special chapter is devoted to the
United States. In it, El-Enany demonstrates a progressive shift in the Arab
view. In the first half of the 20th century, the United States appears as a
place where modern Western civilization might express itself in a manner
that is untainted by the evil of colonialism. In the second half of the 20th
century, the United States’ image is tarnished as it becomes progressively
politically and militarily engaged in the region, and unwaveringly supports
Israel. The United States surpass Europe as the new colonial power,
whereas the latter’s image improves. Certain Egyptian authors, like
Sonallah Ibrahim, in Amrikanli, do not hesitate to openly criticize not only
the United States’ foreign policy but also American society. On this point
Al-Aswany’s vision is more nuanced, since his character Nagi finds
Americans very likable even though he finds the policy of the American
government detestable:
I am now in America, which I’ve often attacked, shouted for it to fall […];
America, which is responsible for the poverty and misery of millions of
humans in the world; America, which has supported and armed Israel,
enabling it to kill the Palestinians and steal their land; America, which has
supported all the corrupt, despotic rulers in the Arab world for its own
interests; the evil America I am now seeing from inside. I am gripped by
the […] dilemma […]. A question persists in my mind: those kind
Americans who treat strangers nicely, […] [d]o they realize the horrendous
crimes their governments commit against humanity? (36)
a) Chicago, Metonymy for an Ambivalent America

Al-Aswany attributes the following statement to a (fictional) “famous
sociologist”, Gregory Squires: “It’s not the many contradictions that
Chicago embodies that distinguish it. What makes it a unique city is that it
always takes its contradictions to the utmost.” (162) These contradictions
are the heart of his portrait of America.
The Egyptian novelist’s depiction of the United States in Chicago is as
a country in which freedom of expression clearly reigns supreme, and
Mubarak’s authoritarian and corrupt regime can be openly denounced.
Indeed Nagi Abd al-Samad and Karam Doss manage to organize a major
protest in front of the Egyptian consulate during the President’s visit and
when Egyptian security personnel attempt to end it, the American police
stop them from doing so, insisting that protest is a right in their country.
But at the same time, Al-Aswany also heavily underscores the urban
insecurity, drugs, racism, exclusion of black Americans, and exploitation
of women—especially black ones—as sexual objects in the United States.
September 11 2001 is mentioned on several occasions in the novel as a
key moment at which these contradictions are exacerbated: since the tragic
events, Ra’fat Thabit permits himself to express opinions “against Arabs
and Muslims, using language that most fanatical Americans might be
reluctant to use.” (30) Shaymaa experiences the aggravated Islamophobia
and xenophobia immediately on her arrival to the United States, sensing
the dislike directed at her for being Arab and wearing the veil. September
11 is also associated with an erosion of democracy in the United States:
the American administration empowers its security services to do
whatever they judge necessary. Cooperation between American and
Egyptian security services is reinforced by the events. America sends
suspects to Egypt to be tortured before returning them to the US. In sum,
Al-Aswany endeavours to show that oppression exists both on the side of
dictatorship and the capitalist system that tramples on the weak.
Nevertheless, for a number of characters, American remains superior:
“Here you are in America and not in Tanta. You have to behave in a
civilized manner” (27), Tariq scolds Shaymaa, after the incident with the
firefighters. It is worth noting that Tariq does not say to her “you are not in
446 25
Egypt”, but instead refers to her provinciality, since she is from the Delta.
This formulation clearly implies a double-hierarchy for Tariq: Americans
are more civilized than Egyptians, and people from Cairo moreso than
those from the Delta (see below).
b) Visions of Egypt: Between Nostalgia and Revolt

Evocations of Egypt oscillate between nostalgia, which all of the
characters experience, and, for some of them, revolt against authoritarianism.
“We all feel homesick like you” (57), Tariq confesses to Shaymaa, who
feels very isolated and rejected in the United States and considers
returning to Egypt. He then adds that obtaining her diploma is worth all
the sacrifices, recalling the importance of education in Egyptian society.
This nostalgia, related to exile, ghurba in Arabic, functions as a driver for
the plot, since it is on this basis that Tariq explains his interest in
Shaymaa:
What attracted him to her was something that he felt but couldn’t describe,
something purely Egyptian like ful, taamiya, bisara,7 the ringing laugh,
belly dancing, Sheikh Muhammad Rifaat’s voice in Ramadan, and his
mother’s supplications after dawn prayers. She represented all that he
missed after two years away from home. (60)
All through the novel, nostalgia for Egypt expresses itself less through
attachment to an idyllic landscape than through the celebration of food and
soundscapes. The territory of the Nile is therefore not a foundational
element of this nostalgia. This shared nostalgia creates a link between the
expatriate Egyptians and they express this solidarity by swapping tips.
Thus, Muhammad Salah, who has been living in Chicago for 30 years and
is nicknamed the “mayor” of Egyptians in Chicago, explains to Nagi when
he arrives where to buy typically Egyptian food like ful and taamiya. But
the ties between Egyptians do not amount only to ones of solidarity, and a
strong degree of social control is exercised, even at a distance. For
example Shaymaa, who is still single at age 30, knows that she cannot
afford to be seen too much with Tariq:
I am a girl and my family has strict conventions. Everything we do here in

America will reach people in Egypt, thanks to the offices of good people
who, as you know, are quite numerous. I don’t want to bring shame on my
family. (131)
The surveillance of students is orchestrated by Ahmad Danana, whose

Union of Egyptian students is also responsible for maintaining links with
the home country: he gives them a list of Halal butcher shops in Chicago,
freely distributes Egyptian newspapers, etc. He keeps track of those who
do not attend classes and makes recordings of all meetings. If an absentee
student is caught, he can cause their Egyptian government scholarship to
be withdrawn. This policing function explains the relations he has with
Safwat Shakir, the Egyptian secret services representative in Chicago, who
strikes fear into the hearts of the expatriates and is reputed to excel at the
most inhuman methods of torture. The novel is thus very critical of the
authoritarian regime of Mubarak which, though never directly mentioned,
appears at the end of the novel in a scene involving a Presidential visit to
Chicago. Echoes of a growing revolt in Egypt reach the expatriates in
Chicago. Al-Aswany evokes the growing number of protests and strikes in
the 2000s8 that paved the way for the 2011 Revolution. (Pagès-El Karoui,
Vignal 2011) Nagi, who participated in the protests, recounts the latest
event to Muhammad Salah in a dialogue that in retrospect seems prescient:
(Nagi) The Egyptians have awakened and started demanding their rights.
The corrupt regime is shaking hard and I believe its days are numbered.
(M. Salah) Don’t you think the demonstrations and the strikes will lead the
country to anarchy? (39)
Another theme, which was more central in The Yacoubian Building, is the
re-Islamization of society, under the influence of Saudia Arabia and the
Egyptian migrants returning from the Gulf, about which Zeinab, Muhammad
Salah’s old girlfriend who remained in Egypt, has this to say:
What’s widespread in Egypt right now is not true religiosity but a

collective depression accompanied by religious symptoms. What makes
matters worse is that millions of Egyptians have worked in Saudi Arabia
for years and have come back with Wahhabi ideas. The regime has helped
spread these ideas because they support it. (288)
This passage underscores the social change that migrants may propel in
their society of origin, a common line of argumentation of “secular”
Egyptian intellectuals. Paradoxically, Egyptians reflect much less on the
impact of the return of migrants from the West. Be that as it may, the
majority of characters in Chicago are transformed by their migratory
experience and the question of identities is the third theme that must be
examined, since it is at the heart of the narrative structure.
448 25
3. Emigré figures and the narrative structure

The gallery of characters of characters presented in Al-Aswany’s novel
are mainly Egyptians working at the medical school of the University of
Chicago, along with their American colleagues or spouses. The plot
unfolds around a multitude of stories that bring together characters
belonging to two distinct generations, which each represent a different
figure of the émigré. The first of three principal subplots revolves around
the love story between Tariq and Shaymaa, the young medical students
who will break the Egyptian taboo on sexual relations before marriage.
The second sub-plot involves the protest organized by Nagi Abd al-Samad
and Karam Doss in front of the Egyptian consulate during the visit of the
President, during which hundreds of Egyptians shout slogans against the
regime. They also hope to get Muhammad Salah to read a manifesto
denouncing the authoritarianism of the regime. The third involves the trio
formed by Ahmad Danana, his wife Marwa, who loathes him, and Safwat
Shakir, the head of the Egyptian secret services who covets Marwa. When
the medical school expels Danana for falsifying results, Shakir manages to
convince him that he will help Danana enroll in another university if
Marwa gives herself to him. As in any narrative scheme, the characters
undergo transformations in their initial situation, and their personality or
state is modified in the course of the novel. A synthesis of these subplots
and the changes undergone by the characters can be found in figure 1.
Before studying how the experience of migration transforms their
lives, it is worth returning for a moment to the question of motives for
emigration. On the whole, emigration results from an individual, not a
collective choice, sometimes taken against the wishes of the family.
Shaymaa’s departure, for example, is against the opinion of her mother
who is afraid that she will never find a husband upon her return and that
she will be mistreated in the United States because of her veil. Al-Aswany
is describing a very specific kind of migration, migration for the purposes
of study, which differs from economic migration, in which people go to
live abroad in the hope of finding work or earning more money. Three
characters are Egyptian government doctoral scholarship recipients, and
one, Nagi Abd al-Samad, who is studying for a masters, has a scholarship
from the University of Chicago since his application was passed over by
the Egyptian government due to his involvement in political activities
against the dictatorship. The reason for migrating, in this case, is the
opportunity to obtain a diploma from an American University, which is
much more prestigious than its equivalent from an Egyptian university.
Figure 1: Narrative framework of Chicago

For these young students, migrating to the United States can be
regarded as a strategy, a springboard that will allow them to return to
Egypt having improved their social status, or perhaps to expatriate
themselves to the Gulf, as many Egyptians working in universities do.
This strategy is described by Ra’fat Thabit who speaks of the students
coming there in the hope of getting “a promotion or a lucrative contract in
the Arab Gulf countries.” (16) Only two characters were forced to leave
Egypt, Ra’fat Thabit, who left in the 1960s following the nationalization
of his father’s factory under Nasser, and Karam Doss, an excellent surgeon
who moved to the United States in the 1970s because as a Copt he was not
appointed to the university in Egypt.
a) “The Older Generations: The Impossible Assimilation

The three characters of the old generation, who arrived in the 1960s
and 1970s, have the outward signs of being perfectly integrated: all three
have obtained American citizenship (two married American women), they
have excellent positions at the university or the hospital, their American
450 25
accent is flawless (Muhammad Salah even has a slight accent when he

speaks Arabic). Al-Aswany nevertheless endeavours to show the flaws in
their integration.
Ra’fat Thabit has completely disavowed his Egyptian origins and
fancies himself more American than the Americans themselves: he no
longer speaks Arabic, he thinks in English (which he masters perfectly,
along with the rules of Baseball), and he does not hesitate to make remarks
that are Islamophobic or racist against Arabs. He is married to Michelle, a
nurse. Yet, he has not completely managed to divorce himself from a
masculine Arab mentality, since he cannot accept that his daughter has a
boyfriend, Jeff. Behind the image of the perfect couple that they project,
his marriage is a failure. During a fight with his wife, Ra’fat says:
You’ve never loved me. You regret having married me. You’ve always
believed you deserved a better husband. Every day you make me feel
inferior to you in everything. You’ve done everything to prove to me that I
was just a backward Egyptian whereas you were created from a superior
race. (100)
Ra’fat loses his daughter tragically, following an overdose, after she has
accused him of being responsible for her angst and being imposter:
You’ve made me miserable. […] It’s about time you heard what I think of
you: you’re phony. […] Who are you? Are you Egyptian or American?
You’ve lived all your life wanting to be an American. And you failed.
(296)
If Ra’fat does not entertain for a moment the prospect of returning to

Egypt, what the novel underscores is a kind of suppressed return since
despite all his efforts to Americanize, he never manages to entirely adapt
to American mores, of which the boyfriend symbolizes the radical
difference of values.
With Muhammad Salah it is more a matter of an imagined return. This
likable and charismatic man decides to leave his American wife (after
admitting to his psychologist that he married her to obtain citizenship) and
commits suicide, after failing to muster the courage to read the manifesto
written by Nagi and Karam. His old girlfriend, Zeynab, an activist who
refused to leave Egypt since in her view emigrating was fleeing,
abandoning one’s country, had already associated him with the image of
the traitor long beforehand. We see him slip slowly into depression: he
locks himself in his basement, wears old Egyptian dress, and spends his
time recalling the memories of his youth. The worsening of his

psychological problems leads to his suicide.
Karam Doss’s fate is less tragic: single, a millionaire heart surgeon
with an international reputation, he had offered to come work pro bono for
one month per year in an Egyptian hospital and to create a modern heart
surgery unit in the country. All his propositions were refused because he
was a Copt. Contrary to Ra’fat, he has a deep attachment to Egypt: “For
the last thirty years that I’ve lived in America, I haven’t forgotten Egypt
for a single day;” (157) “Life in America […] is like American fruit: shiny
and appetizing on the outside, but tasteless.” (157) Although his return,
even temporary, was several times refused, Karam ultimately accepts to
operate on, and thus to save the life of, the former dean of the medical
school who refused to nominate him. This final act of pardon strikes a note
of hope in contrast to the tragic fate of the two other characters.
This bleak image of the impossibility of assimilation constitutes one of
the themes of the literature and cinema on Egyptian emigration. (Pagès-El
Karoui 2012, 2013) As though to disavow this very pessimistic view, Al-
Aswany hastens to add that there exists the possibility of being bicultural:
“Many Egyptians have fathered children in America and were able to
maintain a balance between the two cultures.” (55)
b) The New Generations: Temporary Migration

With the new generations, the perspective changes since none of the
young students seems to want to stay permanently in the US. Their
fundamental reference remains Egypt, with which they maintain strong
links, of the kind which are now called, in migration studies, transnational
links.
Ahmad Danana is the least integrated and the most communitarian of
the characters. Backed by the Egyptian regime as president of the Egyptian
Student Union in America, he does not take advantage of his stay for
educational purposes. A mediocre student, his time in America is merely a
means to achieving a prestigious post after his return, as his predecessors
have done. A money-hungry and corrupt man, makes ostentatious shows
of pious behavior but manipulates religion depending on his interests and
is willing to give his wife over to Safwat Shakir in exchange for the
latter’s promise of registering him at another university after he is expelled
from the University of Chicago for academic misconduct. By the end of
the novel he has lost his wife Marwa, who returns to Egypt to ask for a
divorce, but he is largely unaffected, since he immediately sees in it an
opportunity to obtain money from his father-in-law. Above all he has
452 25
managed to shake the president’s hand, which encircles him in a halo of

glory and will undoubtedly serve his ascension of the ladder of power.
For Nagi, migration is also a strategy, but one leading toward much
more noble ends: he hopes to obtain a Master’s degree from Illinois in
order to work for a few years in the Gulf and earn enough money so that
he can devote himself to poetry. His time in America leads him to revise
his positions on his two principal enemies, America and Israel. He falls in
love with Wendy, an American Jew, but their relationship fails because of
Nagi’s prejudices, which lead him to believe that Wendy has betrayed him
by denouncing him to the Egyptian secret services. His end is also tragic,
since he is arrested by the FBI on suspicion of belonging to a terrorist cell,
an accusation fabricated by Shakir in order to punish him for organizing
the demonstration against the Egyptian president.
Shaymaa is a young veiled girl from a conservative milieu who
progressively distances herself from her initial values. At 30, the bright
young woman is still single, and gives in to Tariq’s advances. She thus
breaks the taboo on sexual relations before marriage and when she become
pregnant, she goes alone to have an abortion, since Tariq is not prepared to
marry her. A rare positive note in this generally dark novel, when she
awakes from the operation, Tariq is there, smiling; this is the novel’s
closing image.
c) The Social Topography of Egypt Overturned by Migration

If there is another thing that migration upsets, it is social topography,
as the relationship between Tariq and Shaymaa demonstrates. In Egypt,
social hierarchies are very marked; they are founded, among other things,
on one’s territorial origin, which attests one’s belonging to a certain
milieu. For almost all of the characters, this belonging is disclosed to the
reader: Nagi is from Giza, that is to say the left bank in Cairo, Danana is a
parvenu peasant from a large village in the Delta, in the Minufiya
Governorate, who – a sign of social ascendency – managed to marry the
beautiful Marwa, the daughter of wealthy Cairo trader, himself from a
“popular” neighbourhood.
The territorial cleavage appears very clearly between Tariq and
Shaymaa: Tariq is from Heliopolis, an upscale neighborhood in Cairo, and
is the son of the assistant director of security for Cairo. His family was
obviously of a certain standing since they had domestic workers. For him,
education is a supreme value: he becomes angry with the father of a
potential fiancée who casually over-sells the school in which his daughter
was educated. Even if she too is educated and her father was the director
of the boys’ high school in Tanta, Shaymaa’s social status does not suit
him. According to Tariq, the social gulf comes from the fact that she is
originally from Tanta, one of the principal cities of the Delta, the
agglomeration of which has close to 500,000 inhabitants. But for Tariq,
like the majority of people from Cairo and Alexandria, and in accordance
with a deep-rooted prejudice, the cities of the Delta are nothing but large
villages populated by peasants. (Pagès-El Karoui 2008)
He openly expresses this territorial gulf between them in these terms:
True, she is an instructor at the College of Medicine, but she is still a

peasant. I am the son of General Abd al-Qadir Haseeb, assistant director of
Cairo Security; I grew up in Roxy and went to the Heliopolis Club and
turned down daughters of notables. Do you expect me to end up marrying a
peasant? (128)
Later, he adds that “[m]y dignity is more important than my life.” (129)
The ambivalence of the peasant figure is clear, since she represents at once
the essence of the nation (Baron 2007) – “[e]verything about her was
Egyptian” (60) – and the image of inferior status if one is from Cairo or
Alexandria. This prejudice is not just Tariq’s but also the author’s, since
Al-Aswany described Shaymaa in these terms in an interview he gave at
the time of the book’s publication: “in this novel, I gave a primary role to
a young Egyptian woman, she comes from the countryside, wears the
veil…”9
Conclusion
Migration thus appears in Chicago to be a resource and an attribute of
power. The encounter with other cultures is not marked by radical
otherness and the violence of a clash of civilizations, as it has been
depicted in other novels, like Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb
Salih. Rather, the relations between Egyptians and Americans are more
marked by goodwill and sympathy. The disorientation of a new country
may lead the émigré to question his prejudices (Tariq), to distance herself
from the values of her own society (Shaymaa). Although the novel is
solidly anchored in a critical realism and space plays a critical role in the
narrative structures and as a foundation for the characters’ identities,
paradoxically, the near-absence of descriptions and the small number of
toponyms do not anchor it in excessive realism.
Contrary to other authors who are much more critical of America, Al-
Aswany offers a nuanced portrait of the United States, characterizing it as
a country of individual freedom, while at the same time decrying
454 25
American imperialism, racism toward blacks, and the erosion of liberties

since September 11. We are thus no longer in the presence of the cleavage
that for a long time structured Arabic literature on the West, a vision of a
materialist West and a spiritualist East. (El-Enany 2006) The portrait of
Egypt is darker: torture, violation of the rule of law, discrimination against
Copts, etc.
Emigration and its imaginaries are often associated with cultural
hybridity, notably in the wake of Appadurai’s (1996) work on
ethnoscapes. Territorial rootedness is often associated with fixed
identities. Uprooting does not necessarily produce plural identities that
have been deterritorialized and mixed. Chicago, like a number of Egyptian
emigration novels, demonstrates the force of attachment to the native
country, and in that sense continues to remain strongly influenced by
“methodological nationalism”, seeming to deny the possibility of an
identity of both “here” and “there”. This may be one of the major findings
of this geographic study of an Egyptian novel: the writing of transnational
spaces in Egyptian literature strongly differs from dominant academic
discourses.
References
AL-ASWANY, Alaa. 2007. Chicago. New York: Harper/HarperCollins
Publishers.
APPADURAI, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
BAKHTIN Mikhaïl. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin,
London: University of Texas Press.
BARON, Beth. 2005. Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and
Politics. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California
Press.
BARRÈRE, Anne and Danilo MARTUCCELLI. 2005. “La Modernité et
l’imaginaire de la mobilitéௗ: L’inflexion contemporaine”. Cahiers
internationaux de sociologie 118 (1): 55-79. doi:10.3917/cis.118.0055.
CLAVAL, Paul. 1993. “La Géographie et les chronotopes”. La littérature
dans tous ses espaces, Michel Chevalier (ed). Paris: CNRS ed. 103-
121.
COLLOT, Michel. 2014, Pour une Géographie littéraire, Paris: Corti.
DUPUY, Lionel. 2013. Jules Verne, la géographie et l’imaginaire: aux
sources d’un voyage extraordinaireࣟ: Le Superbe Orénoque (1898).
Aiglepierre: La Clef d’Argent.
EL-ENANY, Rasheed. 2006. Arab Representations of the Occident: East-

West Encounters in Arabic Fiction. London: Routledge.
JACQUEMOND, Richard. 2013. “The Yacoubian Building and its Sisters:
Reflections on Readership and Written Culture in Modern Egypt”.
Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa: A Postcolonial
Outlook, Mounira Soliman and El Hamamsy Walid (eds). New York:
Routledge. 223-236.
MITTERAND, Henri. 1980. Le Discours du roman. Paris: PUF.
NAFICY, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic
Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
PAGÈS-EL KAROUI, Delphine. 2013. “Les mirages de l’émigration au
miroir du cinéma égyptien.” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la
Méditerranée, nb 134 (December): 99–115. doi:10.4000/remmm.8261.
—. 2013. “Les mirages de l’émigration, au miroir du cinéma égyptien”,
REMMM, Cinémas arabes du XXIe siècle. Nouveaux territoires,
nouveaux enjeux, 134: 99-116. URL : http://remmm.revues.org/8261
—. 2012. “Imaginative Migrations: Narratives of Otherness in the
Egyptian Literature and Cinema”. Making a Difference:
Representing/Constructing the Other in Asian/African Media, Cinema
and Languages Proceedings of the Papers, Toru Aoyama (ed). Tokyo:
Office for International Academic Strategy (OFIAS) Tokyo University
of Foreign Studies (TUFS), 1-20.
—. 2008. Villes du delta du Nil: Tantâ, Mahalla, Mansûra, cités de la
densité. Cairo, Paris: Karthala, CEDEJ.
PAGES-EL KAROUI, Delphine and Leila VIGNAL. 2011. “Les racines de la
‘révolution du 25 janvier’ en Égypte : une réflexion géographique”.
EchoGéo, Sur le vif 2011, October. http://echogeo.revues.org/12627.
TISSIER, Jean-Louis. 2007. “Géographie et littérature, présentation”.
Bulletin de l’Association de géographes français, vol. 84, nb 3: 243-
247.
WESTPHAL, Bertrand. 2005. Pour une Approche géocritique des textes.
(Vox Poetica). Accessed July 10 2015.
http://www.vox-poetica.org/sflgc/biblio/gcr.htm
Notes
1
This research is part of a larger project that compares a corpus consisting of a
dozen films and novels on emigration that appeared in the 1990s and 2000s. As a
geographer, I am interested in migratory imaginaries in Egyptian literature and
cinema and their academic analysis. (Pagès-El Karoui 2012, 2013)
2
In March 2009, Al-Aswany announced that more than 300 000 copies had been
sold in France and a million copies had been sold worldwide. (Jacquemond 2013)
456 25
3
This freedom of tone is afforded among other things by his status as an
independent writer. He is one of the rare Egyptian writers who is not paid by the
Egyptian government. (Jacquemond 2002)
4
All page references refer to the Harper Collins edition translated by Farouk Abdel
Wahab.
5
An ostentation sign of religious practice, claimed to be produced by the rubbing
of the forehead against the prayer rug.
6
A large building from the Nasser period that houses a number of government
offices, it is a symbol of the Egyptian bureaucracy.
7
Lentil purée.
8
In 2004, the Kifaya ("Enough”) movement, of which Al-Aswany was a member,
was founded to press for democratic reform.
9
http://www.babelmed.net/component/content/article/240-egypt/2894-chicago-de-
alaa-el-aswani.html
26
A GEOCRITICAL APPROACH TO LITERARY

REPRESENTATIONS OF PAKISTANI SPACES
JULIANE ROUASSI
As a study of representations of spaces and places in literature, literary

geography1 is using concepts that are now common to both disciplines,
literature and geography, such as landscape. The writing about a place is
not only about data and location, but also about creating an image in the
readers’ minds, as a sort of interior landscape. Depicting landscapes can be
a strategy for Pakistani writers to show the beauty of their country
confronted to the ravages of external and internal conflicts. Created by
Great Britain in 1947 in order to give Muslims in India a state of their
own, Pakistan has been living at a historical and geographical crossroads
ever since. Conflicts continue to shape this young country’s face, making
life insecure and places unstable. The complexity of the geopolitical
situation and the unstable context of Pakistan are due to internal conflicts:
Taliban vs locals and external ones: US vs Taliban. Indeed, after
September 11, 2001, Pakistan became a target for the US chasing Al
Qaida chiefs.
National landscape changes almost every day. Literary landscapes
transport readers into places they can perceive with all their senses, seeing
spatial-temporal strata, thinking about other texts depicting the same
landscapes from multiple points of view. This is what the geocritical
approach can do, by studying the “cultural interactions” (Westphal 2007,
17) between real places and their textual, iconic or film representations,
and by using conceptual tools such as polysensoriality, stratigraphies,
intertextuality or multifocalization.
Our main interest here is to analyse how Pakistan is represented in two
novels by Fatima Bhutto and Nadeem Aslam. Fatima Bhutto, the niece of
Benazir Bhutto the ancient Prime Minister of Pakistan who was
assassinated in 2007, recently published The Shadow of the Crescent
Moon. Born in Pakistan but raised in Lebanon by her father until she was
458 26
11, and having studied abroad (in New York and London), Fatima Bhutto
is now 32 and lives in Karachi. She has chosen words and not political
functions in order to show that violence will not bring any good to her
country. Her novel depicts urban and natural landscapes, but not from a
contemplative position, as spaces are often perceived by feminine and
masculine characters who are in movement. The action mainly takes place
in Mir Ali, a little town near North Waziristan, in the Tribal Areas, close
to the Afghan border, a region where forests and mountains that were once
an “enchanted kingdom” (117) are now a “wild” place and have become a
refuge for rebels. Mir Ali lives in the “shadow of the crescent moon” of
Pakistan, as many people want to belong to Afghanistan. As for the urban
landscape, it is composed, among others, of labyrinths of streets,
devastated houses or a hospital deeply transformed by a bomb attack.
As for Nadeem Aslam, he left Pakistan with his family when he was
14. The spaces his characters live in (Heer) or just cross (Peshawar,
Meggido) are insecure in this country where danger and hostility can
spring up anytime, anywhere, be it in natural spaces or constructed ones
like the cemetery or the school. In this sense, Rohan’s garden is a
heterotopia (Foucault 2009b), a place that becomes a refuge from the
dominant space.
Our reflection will examine how one can live in what seems to be a
hostile place like Pakistan? And how can one represent it? Firstly, we will
see how the architecture of urban landscapes is transformed by armed
conflicts. Then, can “natural” landscapes be a refuge when confronted to
the destruction and insecurity of the urban spaces? And finally, how can
writers imagine some “other places” in order to escape violence?
1. Urban landscapes: a diversity of constructed places

Urban places are often perceived as places of action and movement.
These constructed places have different functions in the humans’ lives.
They can serve to educate (schools, Universities), to heal people
(hospitals) or lock them up (prisons); they can respond to spiritual needs
(mosques, churches), or can simply be made to be lived in. Fatima Bhutto
and Nadeem Aslam build these types of spaces in their novels, thus
depicting a diversity of human places and the way of functioning of a
society. Comparing the two novels helps to enrich the readers’ way of
seeing space. And, as a comparative method and literary theory,
geocriticism puts forward the plurality of perceptions of space. Space is
revealed at the crossroads of different views.
Geocritical Approach to Literary Representations of Pakistani Spaces 459
Both writers imagine a place for education, but they treat it differently.
Aslam builds two models of schools: an extremist Islamic one, named
Ardent Spirit (founded by Rohan and his wife, Sofia), and a Christian one,
named Saint Joseph (founded by Father Mede), which becomes a target
for the students of the first school. As for Bhutto, she imagines a
University where a group of teachers plot against military control and
organize attacks.
In The Blind Man’s Garden, a group mainly constituted by the
members of the Ardent Spirit School attack Saint-Joseph School and
demand that the Americans leave Afghanistan and free the prisoners.
Before raiding the school, they prepare the surroundings and sever a grove
composed of rosewoods and cypresses, thus modifying landscape in order
to avoid that “the police and army […] storm the school from that
direction.” (189) Leaning against a rosewood, Father Mede understands
that the trees had been severed and that “someone’s blade […] [had gone]
through them at sternum height.” (218) He is afflicted by the
disappearance of the trees and he expresses his disarray faced to such an
act:
They were just standing in place waiting for the merest touch, the meshed
canopies providing the minimum steadiness until now, and they are
crashing around him, the falling boughs generating a wind. In Joseph
Mede’s Key of the Revelation a historical meaning was given to the various
symbols of Revelation and “winds” had always meant “wars”. Dust fills
his eyes, nothing but the torn leaves and branches around him as he
attempts to gain a place of safety, the dark red flowers of the Madagascar
gulmohar erupting into the air as the green limbs come down and he stands
mercifully unscathed and watches how the place has suddenly filled up
with light, the sky painfully exposed. (218)
The felling of trees announces what will happen within the school a few
days later. The void in the sky reflects Father Mede’s state of mind. He is
the one who feels “painfully exposed” by the disappearance of the beauty
and the enchanting odours of the trees. At seventy-five, he is very
sensitive to nature’s beauty. He is brutally awakened from his sensuous
exploration: just before falling, he had “take[n] in [the] scent” (217) of a
rose called Rosa mundi. It was just before reviving his own childscape
(Porteous, 1990) by sucking a wild jasmine flower. His journey is not only
a physical one but also a temporal one as it transports him back to
childhood:
460 26
childhood is a secret garden wherein our innermost beings are germinated

and nourished. […] For the creative, it seems, the secret garden can be re-
entered at will, and it smells of joy. (Porteous 1990, 173)
The perception of space is not only visual, as all senses contribute to it.
While the visual sense keeps the subject at a distance, smellscape and
tastescape immerge on in the heart of nature. The loss of the trees given by
Sofia and maybe the foreboding of what will happen cause him a deep
pain, as the “eutopic landscape” (Porteous 1990, 88) has just changed into
a “dystopic” one. About two weeks later, thirty terrorists attack the school
and take about seven hundred persons present in the schoolyard as
hostages, bringing them to the assembly hall where seven statues of angels
hang from the ceiling. They install bombs all over the room. Inside the
school there is a confrontation between two types of people: the ones who
work for education and the ones who want to impose their vision of the
world. The first victim of the terrorists is the deputy headmaster that
accuses the ones who call themselves “warriors of Allah” (242) of actually
being “thugs with Korans”. His dead body is dragged on the floor and it
draws a blood line that separates men from women. Space is thus divided
into two parts and the only ones who are free to move are the terrorists.
The attack takes place during several days. To children, impressed by
“[t]he shot [that] leaves an echo under every skin” (242), terrorists form a
“landscape of fear” (Tuan 1979). Starved, thirsty and tired, they finally fall
asleep.
Homesick for lost assurances, the children are falling asleep in clusters, the
limbs going limp. The hands are holding on to fistfuls of each other’s
clothing and the place feels somewhat calmer, almost hushed. (259)
In Bhutto’s The Shadow of the Crescent Moon the history department of

the University of Mir Ali, a town situated near North Waziristan, close to
Afghanistan, became a place of resistance to the acts of the local army.
This time it is not the educational institution that is a target, but an exterior
one, as a group of teachers and students organize an attack in order to kill
the Chief Minister. The university yard is occupied not by terrorists, but
by the army. The trees were not cut down in the yard as in Aslam’s novel;
the perception of the place is modified here by the presence of the dead
body of a student in philosophy, named Azmaray. He was the brother of a
junior professor, Balach, that “had been disappeared by the armed forces”
(63) for having published a pamphlet about “Pakistan’s crimes against its
people”, especially minorities. While participating in a weekly march with
the families of other missing men and by holding a photo of his brother,
Azmaray is noticed by a journalist who publishes an article about this

movement. The student becomes the “face of the disappeared” (66) before
being killed. Bodyscape thus becomes a deathscape2, a landscape that is
not only lifeless but that has been tortured and still bears the traces of what
he endured. Hundreds of men and women had spontaneously gathered on
campus to pray and weep. The army fired and some students fired back,
killing seven soldiers. The university was “set ablaze” and a building was
burned. This episode changed the spatial organization: a truck of soldiers
was set at the gates of the university in order to control access to it. A
second one is set in the yard. Despite this military surveillance, a group of
rebels organize a space of resistance in the tower of the history
department, situated on the third floor. Its members occupy the space in
the classroom after a precise scheme: some smoke at the window, some sit
on the ground, Samarra leans against the desk.
What is interesting in the episode of the reunion is the description of
the faces of the participants. Hayat, Samarra’s boyfriend, is the only one
who has an “honest face” that makes “people believe him; they believe
Hayat’s sincerity before they have any reason to.” (72) He is different
from the others members of the group:
None of the other men in the underground have this particular power. They
look contorted by rage, made ugly by vengeance. Their hearts are too
corroded to present any other face. But not Hayat. He lives in the
camouflage of his belief and carries out his services to his homeland
without question.
He is a true soldier. You never see him coming. (72)
The face too is a landscape. It does not only serve to identify a person, but
can also dissimulate the truth behind a mask of sincerity (Hayat) or can
expose one’s true feelings (the others). It is “both the most intimate and
the most exterior of the subject.” (Courtine and Haroche 1994, 275) The
face is ultimately a landscape the signs of which must be decoded. For
Deleuze and Guattari the head does not belong to body strata anymore, as
it is connected to strata of “significance or of subjectivation.” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1980, 2006, 211) The correlation between face and landscape
could be expressed in the term facescape3. Moreover, the Chinese
ideogram that means “face” is the same as that for landscape plus a hat.
(Perrot 1996)
Students are not the only ones who fight the army. And the university
and the school are not the only “cicatricial”4 or “scar territories.” (Gruia
2014) Bhutto mentions some “ramshackle homes”, “crumbling
neighbourhoods” (98), an “annex […] demolished by the bombing of an
462 26
unmanned plane” (101) and narrates the attack of a hospital by Taliban

and the marks it left. Taliban attacked Hasan Faraz Government Hospital
because it was subsidised by the state and army, and they thought it treated
soldiers. They hit the hospital with RPGs (Rocket Propelled Grenades)
and, when the survivors started to escape the “broken building” (213), a
Taliban activated the explosives hidden in a trunk in front of the hospital.
The whole town of Mir Ali seems to be a “cicatricial” insecure place.
In The Blind Man’s Garden too, one of the characters speaks of Pakistan
as an “unliveable” place. (152) Facing violence and destruction in the
urban places, can one find refuge in “natural” spaces?
2. “Natural” spaces: a refuge from constructed places?

While some characters have to cross a forest in Bhutto’s novel, in
Aslam’s fiction the exploration of landscape takes place on a larger scale
and covers a part of the country. Can the beauty of nature counterbalance
violence and bring some comfort and peace in the souls of people
suffering from conflicts?
In The Shadow of the Crescent Moon the attack of the hospital is
reconstituted by Mina who was, at the time, a Professor of Psychology at
the University of Mir Ali. She and her husband, Sikandar, a doctor at the
Hasan Faraz hospital, lost their six-year-old son in the hospital attack. One
morning Eid Sikandar has to go beyond the forests to help a woman give
birth. Mina, who gave up her job and spends most of her time going to
children’s funerals and reading newspapers as she is trying to understand
all the details of the attack, accompanies him. As they leave Mir Ali, the
landscape changes and the agitation of the city remains behind them and
the view becomes clearer:
The colours have muted since they left the city’s main roads, the crowds
have thinned and it has grown quieter.
There is something beautiful about the day, something Sikandar hadn’t
expected. Something has shifted. The light has lifted through the early
morning December fog.
Sikandar is completely absorbed in the moment, by the sight of the
clearing view and the sound of Mina’s voice. (118)
The couple in the van finally managed to find a space-time of their own,
after a long period of grief endured at their son’s death. They enjoy the
moment and the quiet landscape around, out of the world, as if they had
found their own world. It is a moment of sharing when Sikandar finds
again the woman he fell in love with, a woman who laughs and sings, as
before their son’s death. The hospital van becomes a space of intimacy.
But this moment of peace that was so difficult to find is broken by the
sound of a bullet that hits the van. They have entered a tribal zone that is
inhabited by “militants”, as people call the “refugees of the war of drones
in neighbouring Waziristan towns and villages.” (139) Two armed
Talibans force Sikandar to get out of the van and question their entrance
on their territory. In this quiet zone danger can spring up anywhere.
Human nature is as wild as nature is. Young Talibans, usually uneducated
people, are fighting for what they believe is just: faith. Nature is not a
refuge for everybody. It is for the Talibans, but not for Sikandar, or not for
a long time: he does not completely enjoy landscape. The smell of pines
comes once the window is open, but he cannot enjoy it. The rain
contributes to create a dramatic atmosphere. In this remote zone, the
humans are a threat for one another. The landscape is wild and so are
people living in it. Once an “enchanted kingdom”, the forest and
mountains became hostile places for anyone except for the Talibans. They
are not interested in the emergency of the situation, but they take their
time in questioning Sikandar’s faith: is he a Muslim, is he a Sunni or a
Shia? They are convinced they are entitled by their faith to control the
others. There are two camps, two worlds facing each other, but the forces
are asymmetrical. They cannot really confront one another, as one camp
dominates the other. The only hope resides in Mina who transgresses her
place as a woman by getting out of the van, pushing one of the Talibans,
and starting talking. She calls out to the two men by telling the story of the
hospital attack by Talibans and the terrible loss of her innocent child. The
moment is very intense, as she gets to express all the rage that she had
kept inside her for the last few months. Sikandar and Mina finally leave
the place at full speed, as the Talibans are shooting the van.
In The Blind Man’s Garden, Mikal, an expert in arms, is the one who
travels most and gets to explore landscape in East Pakistan, (Heer) to
South Waziristan (Meggido), and to Peshawar. A month after the
September 11 attacks in New York, he left his town with his adopted
brother, Jeo, a student in a medical school, in order to get to a camp in
Afghanistan and help wounded people. On the road, they are betrayed by
the organization that sends Pakistani in Afghanistan and they are given up
to the Talibans. With the help of the Americans, Afghani people attack the
Taliban fortress and Jeo is killed, but Mikal does not know it. Hurt and
unconscious, he is imprisoned by a warlord who cuts off both of his
“trigger finger[s]”. (87) After a few months he is sent on a false mission
that consists in stealing the Prophet’s cloak from a mosque. At one
464 26
moment, Mikal and the two men accompanying him have to abandon the
car and walk. They come across an apocalyptic landscape:
He is facing a graveyard of planes and helicopters, Russian MiGs and

Hinds, all resting at odd angles with cockpits slung open and the glass
smashed, the tyres ripped and rotted. There are several dozen of them, a
swathe of hulks stretching all the way to another ridge half a mile away.
(132)
Almost frozen by the snow and cold of January, they recover some
strength when Mikal burns the lichen that grew on the metals. They leave
the “necropolis of steel” (134) and continue on their way to the mosque.
As one of the men accompanying Mikal is hurt and his son does not want
to leave him alone in the snow, Mikal is the only one who has the force to
go to the mosque that now lies “in the far distance.” (135) Exhausted,
Mikal thinks he has the time to rest in front of the mosque, but his hair and
chains get locked in the ice. He lies there helplessly, admiring the façade
of the mosque with inscriptions from the Koran and the celestial nocturnal
landscape, thinking about the contribution that Arab scholars brought to
humanity:
He looks at the sky as he sinks into sleep. Arabic is written up there in the
cosmos too, he knows. Of the six thousand stars visible to the naked eye,
210 have Arabic names. Aldebaran, the follower. Algol, the ghoul. Arrakis,
the dancer. Fomaulhaut, the mouth of the fish. Altair, the bird … (135-136)
Finally there was nothing to steal in the mosque; he and some twenty
persons inside were actually sold to the Americans. He is released after a
while but, hearing some gun fires, he believes that his death is near, so he
kills the two Americans that accompanied him back to the mosque. It takes
him eight days to go to Peshawar. Nature provides for him: he eats the
marrow of a jackal, a rabbit, a snake, termites and steals from an orchard
or a planted field and goes nesting in order to survive. He is given shelter
near Meggido by Akbar, a prisoner he had met in the American prison. He
finds some comfort looking at the sky and sleeping outside, covered by the
starry veil of the night. He finally returns to Heer, then he has to go back
to Meggido in order to help Akbar.
Nature is sometimes a space that is destroyed by the humans and it
becomes a desolate landscape. But nature has also a wild face: if it
provides what is necessary to survival, it remains nevertheless difficult to
live in it. However, natural spaces can bring some comfort, especially the
nocturnal sky that has fascinated humanity since ancient times. It is often
the case for Mikal who admires the sky at night, but also for Rohan and
Naheed (Jeo’s wife) who are reminded of Mikal by the stars.
Are there some other spaces where people can find some comfort?
3. Escapes?
In a well-known article named “Des espaces autres” (1994), Michel
Foucault writes about “other spaces” than the public and the private ones
and he calls them heterotopias. For the French philosopher space is
heterogeneous and is defined by human relations. Spaces like cemeteries,
prisons, museums, cinemas are the expression of a sort of utopia. They are
also a “counter-space” where “sites are represented, contested and
inversed.” (Foucault 1994, 755) Also named “counter-spaces” (Foucault
1994, 755), they are a contestation or neutralization of dominant spaces
and can be a refuge from them.
The garden too is “another space”. The Persian garden was a sacred
space that united inside it four parts that represented the parts of the world.
In its centre there was a water jet that was even more sacred, and
vegetation all around. To Foucault (1994, 759) “the garden is a carpet
where the entire world accomplishes its symbolical perfection”. It is also
“a sort of happy and universaling heterotopia”. (759)
For Aslam this place plays an essential part, as the title of his book is
The Blind Man’s Garden. The emphasis on this space can be explained by
the fact that different characters visit it and sometimes find comfort in it.
In this constructed natural place where Rohan and his wife planted flowers
and trees, the old man finds a refuge from the outside world. This space is
explored with all senses: birds sing in trees and a variety of colours and
scents are a delight for the human body: Arabian date palms, climbing
roses, Spanish almond trees, carnations, Egyptian blue lotuses, hibiscus,
Persian lilac trees. The vision and scent of a tree’s flowers in his garden
send Rohan back to the time when his wife, Sofia, was still alive and
planted that tree. Smell is a way of traveling back in time:
Rohan looks out of the window, his glance resting on the tree that was
planted by his wife. It is now twenty years since she died, four days after
she gave birth to Jeo. The scent of the tree’s flowers can stop conversation.
Rohan knows no purer source of melancholy. (6)
When Rohan lost his sense of sight, mutilated by the warlord that kept
Akbar’s son prisoner, smell and touch were everything he had left in order
to explore this peaceful place. But this quiet space is also a place for
recollection: after his son’s death, Rohan expresses the despair of not
466 26
being able to search for him or feel him anywhere. Life takes place
between two obscure spaces: before birth and after death. Once he could
feel his son in his wife’s womb, but once his body disappeared, he
wanders in the garden trapped in his souvenirs and searching for the
meaning of what happened:
Before Jeo was born, he had placed his ear to Sofia’s skin, just above and
to the left of the navel, and listened to the small heartbeat, there in the
darkness before life began. Now the boy is in the other darkness and Rohan
doesn’t know where to find a sign of him, what wall or barrier or skin or
veil to place his ear on. (81)
After Jeo’s sister, Yasmin, was struck by some extremist women from the
Ardent Spirit School who forbid access to women in the graveyards, her
husband Basie also finds comfort in nature, in the promise of a new day,
with its colours, sounds and fragrances:
He goes up to the roof and finds comfort in the brightening sky, receiving
his share of the earth through the five senses, the dawn glow of ochre and
cinnabar, the light calling things into existence, the thin voices of birds. As
the sun rises higher he walks through the garden where a near-thousand
flowers are opening […] (233)
The body is also a kind of “another space”. One cannot escape one’s body.
But one can escape the social space thanks to one’s body. Basie and
Yasmin create another reality far away from the public sphere. The couple
tastes the delights of flesh and their bodies escape time, uniting past and
present, in an impression of immortality:
Basie kisses her mouth when they are alone in the room and astonishingly
she wants more, an intensity in her body as when adolescence’s delight had
first found completion years ago, in both of them, here in these very rooms,
and he walks to the door and bolts it shut and comes to her, shedding his
clothes on the stripes of light blazing on the floor. Mortality? When he is
near her his impermanence has no power over him. (233)
Desire makes one forget the limits of one’s body and opens one to another
space, the other’s. The body too is a heterotopia (Westphal 2007, 113), as
it moves between the social and the intimate space. Intimacy is the
occasion of escaping politics and recovering one’s body. There is always a
part of a territory that escapes power. Intimacy is a private space that one
protects from the exterior. Intimacy is the immensity of two people
discovering each other and sharing their innermost being.
As Simone Weil stated, “love is not consolation, it is light” (quoted by

Aslam 2013, 290). Love makes things appear in new colours and lights
and everything seems more beautiful: “the blossoms [are] beautiful as
Eden.” (286) When they are together, Mikal and Naheed’s bodies are
simple spaces, as they live the moment and “they speak quietly into each
other’s skin.” (288) When he has to leave again, he takes his strength from
Naheed’s voice and breath as he calls her from the bus station. Her chain
is as a talisman and taking it off would mean death to him.
In The shadow of the Crescent Moon, there are some possibilities of
escaping everyday life and creating a space of one’s own. Sikandar’s
brother, Aman Erum, who feels like a prisoner in Mir Ali, enjoys going to
Lake Chitral every summer, since he was about five years old. For five
days he goes fishing with his father and his three friends.
When he was eleven years old, Aman Erum fell in love with Samarra,
who “wore jeans and played cricket and rode horses and shot pellet guns
and did everything and anything she had seen her father do.” (8) She had
also learned how to drive her father’s motorcycle and she “tore through
traffic, turning corners with the slightest swing of her hips.” (9) For five
summers the two young people had been happy to explore the
surroundings together, by day or by night, with a total feeling of freedom.
But Aman Erum had always dreamed of leaving Mir Ali and finding a
place on his own. “He had been dreaming escape plans since taking his
first trip out of Mir Ali” (12) and “[h]e wanted a stamped passport out of
his strangled home.” (19) He would settle down anywhere, near Lake
Chitral or even Australia, Canada or England. It is not the case for
Samarra. She does not want to live in a place where there is no memory of
them:
I don’t want to walk on roads that have no memory of my life. I want you
and me to walk our children to school on streets we know by heart, streets
that have known us since we were children. (41)
Aman Erum manages to leave Mir Ali for Montclair State University in
New Jersey. Without meaning to hurt Samarra, he betrays her as he
informs the Pakistani army that she has a lot of information about rebels
before anyone else. Samarra cannot escape her body, this “merciless
topia.” (Foucault 2009, 9) She is hit by Colonel Tarik who tells her, as she
is lying on the floor: “[d]o you know the force of what you are dealing
with? Do you know how small you are, zama lur [my daughter]
underneath me?” (166) The relation between the male body and the
feminine one is asymmetrical and antithetic: vertical/horizontal,
strength/weakness.
468 26
There is also a suggestion of a rape by Colonel Tarik’s men and this

possession against her will can never be washed away. Recuperating her
body and becoming a subject again is a political act. After this episode, her
role in the rebel organization became more important, and even essential.
Helped by Hayat, Aman Erun’s youngest brother, she organizes attacks
against the official forces of Mir Ali. The tour in the History Department
was Samarra’s and Hayat’s meeting place before she decided to transform
it in a place for the group’s reunions.
Inayat, the father of the three brothers, Aman Erum, Sikandar and
Hayat, never spoke about the future but only about the past and rebellion.
Hayat become aware of his sacrifice when Aman Erum comes back from
the United States “with nothing but a future attached to him.” (219)
Indeed, Hayat never got a chance to think about what he could become.
Hayat cannot escape in love; Samarra has closed her heart after Aman
Erum’s betrayal. “What life?” she asks Hayat when he tells her he could
lose her life in the attack against the Chief Minister.
The couple formed by Mina and Sikandar can hope for a better future
together. After having met the Talibans, they continue on their way quietly
to the house where a baby needs help in order to see the light of the world.
All around “[t]here is the smell of pine, late into the winter. It fills the air,
the mountains, the woods.” (230) Sikandar admires Mina as she
“murmur[s] her secret prayers, incantations to keep her, at varying points,
either brave or calm. She has been both, Sikandar thinks.” (231)
From large spaces to intimate places, there is little refuge for people
from the army’s control (The Shadow of the Crescent Moon) or from that
of the religious extremists (The Blind Man’s Garden). But confronting
power is not impossible; Yasmin does it, and so do Samarra and Mina.
They trespass on the boundaries that separate them from freedom of
speech and action.
Conclusion: geocriticism, a critical reading of (literary)

space
Literature is a way of escaping reality and plunging into a fictional
world. Geography is about referential places. Both literature and
geography are a way of reading and writing of space. At the same time
they invent it, as the perception of space depends on its observer. By
imagining plots that take place in real places, Aslam and Bhutto reveal
possible worlds to the readers. Based on theories of space, (Deleuze, Soja,
Lefebvre), geocriticism helps analyzing these spaces and interactions
between real places and their literary or artistic representations.
Western fiction usually represents Pakistan as a hostile place,

especially cinema. It is the case for Zero Dark Thirty5 (Bigelow, 2012) or
Forces specials6. (Ribojad, 2011) Studying Pakistani fiction is a way of
connecting oneself to the point of view of those who know reality from the
inside. Aslam and Bhutto depict peaceful places and spaces but they also
show how conflicts and bomb attacks brutally change urban and natural
landscapes. Literature ultimately constructs alternative worlds in the face
of dominant geopolitical representations of Pakistan, thus contributing to
open readers’ minds to other(s’) words.
References
ASLAM, Nadeem. 2013. The Blind Man’s Garden. London: Faber and
Faber. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
BHUTTO, Fatima. 2013. The Shadow of the Crescent Moon. London:
Penguin Books.
BROSSEAU, Marc. 2011. “L’espace littéraire entre géographie et
critique.” Après tout, la littérature : Parcours d’espaces
interdisciplinaires, Blanca Navarro Perdiñas and Luc Vigneault (eds).
Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 31-53.
COURTINE, Jean-Jacques and Claudine HAROCHE. 1994. Histoire du
visage. EXPRIMER et taire ses émotions (XVIe-début XIXe siècle). Paris:
Payot & Rivages.
DELEUZE, Gilles and Félix GUATTARI (eds). (1980). 2006. Capitalisme et
schizophrénie 2 : Mille Plateaux, 2nd Edition. Paris: Minuit.
FOUCAULT, Michel. 2009. “Le corps utopique”. Le corps utopique. Suivi
de Les Hétérotopies. Paris: Éditions Lignes, 9-20.
—.1994. “Des espaces autres”. Dits et écrits IV 1980-1988, Paris:
Gallimard, 752-762. First published in Architecture, Mouvement,
Continuité, october 1984, 46-49. It is a shortened version of
Hétérotopies, a Conference held at the Circle of Architectural Studies
14th of March 1967 and finally published in its original version in
2009.
GRUIA, Ioana. 2014. “Territorios cicatriciales en la narrativa de Juan
Marsé : el caso de Rabos de lagartija”. Bulletin hispanique, 116-1, 263-
281.
PERROT, Jean (ed). 1996. Visages et paysages du livre de jeunesse.
Paris/Montréal: l’Harmattan/ Université de Paris-Nord, Centre d'études
littéraires francophones et comparées et l'Institut international Charles
Perrault, coll. “Itinéraires et contacts de culture”.
470 26
PORTEOUS, John Douglas. 1990. Landscapes of the Mind: Worlds of Sense

and Metaphor. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press.
RODAWAY, Paul. 1994. Sensous Geographies. Bodies, Sense and Place.
New York: Routledge.
TUAN, Yi-Fu. 1979. Landscapes of Fear. New York: Pantheon Books.
WESTPHAL, Bertrand. 2007. Géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace. Paris:
Minuit, coll. “Paradoxe”.
Movies
BIGELOW, Kathryn. 2012. Zero Dark Thirty. Universal studios.
RIBOJAD, Stéphane. 2011. Forces spéciales. Easy Company/Studio Canal.
Notes
1
Many critics have written about literary geography, starting with William Sharp,
in 1904 and continuing with Virginia Woolf (1905), André Ferré (1946), Marc
Brosseau (2011), Andreea Răsuceanu (2013), Michel Collot (2014), and others.
The concept seems to be widely accepted by literary and geographical criticism.
Refer to my article “Géocritique, carte et géographie littéraire” (2014), in
Géocritique : état des lieux/Geocriticism : a Survey, edited by Clément Lévy and
Bertrand Westphal, Presses Universitaires de Limoges, coll. “Espaces Humains”,
222-232. Transactions of the 20th Congress the International Comparative Literary
Association (ICLA), Comparative Literature as a Critical Approach, Paris, 18-24
July 2013.
2
My use of the term “deathscape” here is different from that of Malcolm Lowry
who invented it in order to express his pessimistic view of the city. In Dark as the
Grave wherein my Friend is Laid (1968) he writes about the “barren deathscape of
Los Angeles”.
3
In France Sandra L. Beckett writes about “visage-paysage” in “Les visages-
paysages by J M G Le Clezio”, Visages et paysages du livre de jeunesse, Jean
Perrot ed. 1996, 23-37. Refer to my chapter about “visages-paysages” in
Territoires du corps féminin, to be published in 2016, Paris: Orizons, coll.
“Comparaisons”.
4
Ioana Gruia (2014) analyzes the body, the city and history as “scar territories”
(“territorios cicatriciales”). She states that “scar is the visible witness of the wound
and of the presence of a traumatic past.” (265) I prefer the neologism “cicatricial”
to “scar” since the verb “cicatrize” exists.
5
Bigelow’s (2012) movie Zero Dark Thirty is about US army tracking Ben Laden.
It is a propaganda movie that is not interested at all in the point of view of the
locals.
6
Forces spéciales (2011) is about rescuing journalist Elsa Casanova (Diane
Kruger) who is taken hostage in Afghanistan and brought to Pakistan. A
commando frees her and they return to Afghanistan, pursued by the Talibans.
Ribojad’s movie is not so Manichean as Bigelow’s, but it qualifies reality as it

shows a group of Pashto village people giving hospitality to Westerners, thus
exposing themselves to the rage of the Talibans.
CONTRIBUTORS
Robert T. Tally Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Texas State

University. He is the author of six books including Spatiality; Utopia in
the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World System
and Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the
American Baroque. The translator of Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism,
Tally is also the editor of four collections of essays among which
Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and
Cultural Studies; Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and
Narrative; and The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said: Spatiality,
Critical Humanism, and Comparative Literature. A larger editorial
project, The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space is in the works.
In 2014, Tally edited special issues of the journal Reconstruction: Studies
in Contemporary Culture devoted to “Spatial Literary Studies.” In
addition, Tally serves as the general editor of the Palgrave Macmillan
book series Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies.
Fabrizio Di Pasquale is a Joint Ph.D Student in Comparative Literature at

the “G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy) and at the
University of Limoges (France). He is a member of the research group in
Geocriticism EHIC at the University of Limoges. His main research
interest areas are Geocriticism, Literary Cartography, Ecocriticism, Theory
of Literature and Crime fiction. He has published “Dystopie. Patrick
Raynal et Massimo Carlotto. De Nice-est aux territoires du Nord-est”,
Bertrand Westphal and Clément Lévy (éds), Géocritique : état des lieux/
Geocriticism : a survey, Pulim, 2014.
Anna Madoeuf is Professor of Geography at the University François-

Rabelais of Tours. She is a member of EMAM (Équipe Monde Arabe et
Méditerranée), CITERES (Cités Territoires Environnement Sociétés). Her
Key publications include Lire les villes. Panoramas du monde urbain
contemporain (with R. Cattedra), 2012; Les Pèlerinages au Maghreb et au
Moyen-Orient. Espaces publics, espaces du public (with S. Chiffoleau),
2010; Divertissements et loisirs dans les sociétés urbaines à l’époque
moderne et contemporaine (with R. Beck), 2005.
Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space throughout History 473
Thierry Coanus is a researcher at the laboratory RIVES of the École

nationale des travaux publics de l’État (ENTPE), which is part of the UMR
CNRS 5600 “Environnement, Ville, Société”. An engineer by training and a
doctor in urbanism, he has been working since the beginning of the 1990s
on the theme of risks in a social sciences perspective. Isabelle Lefort is
Professor of geography at the University Lyon 2 and member of UMR
CNRS EVS. Her research focuses on the production, circulation and
transmission of geographical knowledge, and more particularly on writing
and geographical literariness. Since 2011, Thierry Coanus and Isabelle
Lefort have been co-hosting he seminars entitled “Crisis” at the UMR EVS.
Jeanne Schaaf is a PhD candidate at the University of Paris Sorbonne.

Her research focuses on the notions of space and place and on
representations of the nation in contemporary Scottish theatre. She has
taught French at St Andrews University and is currently a teaching
assistant in English at Paris Sorbonne where she prepares her thesis under
the supervision of Professor Elisabeth Angel Pérez.
Amy D. Wells is Associate Professor of English in the Applied Foreign

Languages Department at the University of Caen. Recent publications
include the essay collection Traces, empreintes, monuments : quels lieux
pour quelles mémoires? de 1989 à nos jours and her translation of
Bertrand Westphal’s The Plausible World, published by Palgrave. Her
research interests include gender studies, modernism, geocriticism, and
literary tourism.
Géraldine Molina is a post-doctoral researcher at the IRSTV (FR CNRS

2488 – École Centrale de Nantes) and at the CERMA (ENSAN– UMR
CNRS 1563, “Ambiances architecturales et urbaines”). Trained both in
Modern Literature and Geography, she has been exploring the links
between the two through an analysis of the social-spatial dynamics of
production and appropriation of literature. She investigates phenomena
such as spatialized literary practices, writers’ new working methods,
spatial literary practices, literature appropriation. Her articles are available
at: http://geraldinemolina.org/recherche/publications-sous-page/
Fiona Lejosne is doing her PhD under the supervision of Romain

Descendre. Her thesis is an analysis of the sixteenth-century collection of
travel writings, Navigationi et viaggi, a collection published in Venice by
the civil servant Giovanni Battista Ramusio in the years 1550 to 1559. She
studies how a political and a scientific dimension of geographical
474 Contributors
knowledge combine in this collection. Her main fields of interests are: the
history of geographical knowledge, sixteenth-century Italy as a laboratory
of political ideas, and the first representations of Early modern age
discoveries.
Valeria Manfrè is Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the

University of Valladolid, Spain. In 2014 she got her European Doctorate
from the Department of Art History at the Autonomous University of
Madrid. Her research focuses on Renaissance and Baroque art and
architecture with a focus on iconographical analysis of maps and the
artistic interest of historical cartography in the early modern Habsburg
Empire. She is currently working on developing her PhD dissertation into
a manuscript for publication, examining a series of unpublished
manuscripts of Sicilian cities’ atlases.
Isabelle Trivisani-Moreau is Associate Professor in 17th-century French

literature at Angers University, and she is a member of the CERIEC. After
writing a thesis on the fictional representation of nature from 1660 to
1680, she continued her research on 17th century novels. She also kept on
studying the representation of nature and expanded her field to space in
general and to the environment by working with literary groups (such as
“Ecolitt”, a regional program) or cross-disciplinary teams such as the
“Culture du Végétal” pole of the SFR Confluences.
Céline Sabiron is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the Université

de Lorraine in Nancy (France), and Research Fellow at Oxford University
(Wolfson College, UK). She is the author of a doctoral thesis on Walter
Scott, which has been reworked into a monograph entitled Écrire la
frontière: Walter Scott, ou les chemins de l’errance to come out early
2016. She has published a few articles on Scottish authors, and a bilingual
textbook on Evelina aimed at Agrégation candidates. She is now interested
in cross-Channel literary and cultural transactions through the prism of
translation in the Romantic period.
Caroline Rabourdin is an architect, writer and educator. She graduated

from the ENSAIS in Strasbourg, and holds a Master in Architectural
Design from the Bartlett, UCL. She is currently teaching at the AA School
of Architecture and is a PhD candidate at Chelsea College of Arts,
University of the Arts London. Her research is concerned with the
relationship between space and language, where language is considered as
an embodied and spatial practice. The research borrows from art practices
as well as architectural theory, phenomenology, linguistics, and also

scientific disciplines such as geometry and neuroscience.
Catherine Delmas is Professor of English and Commonwealth literature

at Université Grenoble Alpes and the Director of the CEMRA (Research
Unit on Modes of Representation in English Studies). Her fields of interest
focus on orientalist and (anti)imperialist discourse and representation,
modernism and postmodernism. She has published various articles about
Joseph Conrad, T.E. Lawrence, Kipling, E.M.Forster, Lawrence Durrell,
Michael Ondaatje or J.M.Cootzee and a book, entitled Ecritures du désert:
voyageurs et romanciers anglophones XIXe-XXe siècles (2005). She is co-
editor of History/Stories of India with Professor Krishnan, (2009), of
Science and Empire in the Nineteenth Century with Professors Andreolle
and Vandamme (2010), and Re/membering Place with André Dodeman.
(2013)
Élodie Raimbault is Senior Lecturer at Université Grenoble Alpes

(ILCEA4). Her doctoral thesis analyses the motif of the frontier in
Rudyard Kipling’s fiction. Her current research concentrates on popular
literature, detection and adventure in the works of Victorian and
Edwardian authors such as Kipling, Rider Haggard, Conrad, Wells and
Conan Doyle, focusing on the cartographic, political and geopoetic
representations of colonial territories in these authors’ texts, as well as on
their scientific and technological scope.
Fabien Desset is Associate Professor at the University of Limoges. In his

PhD dissertation, he used Gerard Genette’s transtextuality to study the
rewriting of ancient myths in the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley. He is now
working on ekphrasis in Shelley’s poetry and prose, and has published
several articles on Romantic Hellenism, mythopoeism, intertextuality, art
and ekphrasis.
Aurélien Saby earned a PhD in 20th century poetry from Paris-Sorbonne

University (Paris IV) in 2013. His dissertation bore on the city in W.H.
Auden’s work. His research currently focuses on both W.H. Auden and
the “post-Auden generation”, including James Merrill and John Fuller.
476 Contributors
Claire Hélie is Assistant Professor at Lille 3 University where she teaches

English to Arts students. She specializes in contemporary British poetry,
in particular poetry from Northern England, and theatre for young
audiences. She has organised a conference on contemporary Canadian
playwright Evan Placey and published numerous articles on Basil Bunting,
Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage. She is currently
working on a monograph on Simon Armitage.
Joshua Armtrong is Assistant Professor of French at University of

Wisconsin-Madison, where he specializes in experimental, performance-
bound literature, urban poetics, and the everyday, as well as in geocritical
and cartographic theory. He is currently completing a book
entitled Globally Positioned Prose: Planetary Preoccupations, Place, and
Contemporary French Literature.
Nathalie Martinière is Professor at the Department of English, Faculty of

Arts, University of Limoges where she teaches literature. She wrote her
doctoral dissertation on spatial representations in Joseph Conrad’s novels
and works both on Conrad and on postcolonial rewritings of classics. Her
latest book entitled Figures du double: du personnage au texte (2008)
deals with this question. She is the editor of L’Epoque Conradienne.
Paskine Sagnes, Professor of Modern Letters at the Jean Mermoz high

school in Montpellier, and Laurent Viala, town planner, geographer,
Assistant Professor at the National School of Architecture in Montpellier,
try to create a dialogue between literature and geography, around issues
attached to town, to urban planning and architecture, between the real and
the imaginary. Their research has led to several publications.
Xiaomin Giafferri is Senior Lecturer in Chinese at the University of Nice

and member of the LIRCES (Interdisciplinary Laboratory Narratives
Cultures And Society). Her research focuses on narratological analysis,
with a recent focus on literary bilingualism and Chinese French-writing.
Her latest publications include L’Occident dans la nouvelle poésie
contemporaine chinoise (Paris, 2013) and “Le Dit de Tian-yi, un dialogue
de deux mondes” (in Créativité et expressivité du/en français – journées
scientifiques internationalesn 2012).
Matei Chihaia is Professor of Spanish and Hispano-American literature at

Wuppertal University (Germany). His main research topics are cultural
studies and narratology. He is one of the editors of DIEGESIS,
Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research.
Anne-Claudine Morel is Assistant Professor at the University of Nice

and her research is on Ecuador’s cultural institutions and contemporary
literature. She has published several articles on the Casa de la Cultura
Ecuatoriana. For several years she has taken a particular interest in the
work of Javier Vásconez.
Marina Marengo is Associate Professor of Geography at the University

of Siena (Italy). The main fields of her research are migratory phenomena
and interculturality, gender studies, local sustainable development and
literary geography. Her latest book, Geografia e letteratura. Percorsi,
concetti, metodi is to be published in 2016 (Bologna, Patron).
Delphine Pagès-El Karoui is Senior Lecturer in geography at the

INALCO. Although she was originally a specialist of urban questions in
Egypt, in the past few years she has reoriented her research in two
directions: Egyptian migrations and the spatial dimensions of the Arab
revolutions, constantly keeping literature in mind.
Juliane ROUASSI is an associate member of the EHIC research team

(Espaces Humains et Interactions Culturelles- Human Spaces and
Cultural Interactions) at the University of Limoges. Her PhD in
Comparative Literature, entitled Territoires du corps féminin (Territories
of the Feminine Body, 2013) is about to be published at Orizons Editions.
(Paris, 2015) Her research interests are related to gender and
postcolonialism, from an interdisciplinary perspective, as she is interested
in relations between text, image and cinema.
INDEX
Abraham, Jean-Pierre, 5, 64, 67, 69, 333, 334, 335, 336, 339
70, 76, 77, 78, 79, 168 Collot, Michel, 291, 302, 303, 306,
Almino, João, 10, 354, 355, 356, 316, 439, 454, 470
357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, Conrad, Joseph, 10, 23, 24, 31, 35,
363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369 340, 341, 342, 345, 346, 347,
architecture, 71, 131, 174, 175, 180, 348, 351, 352, 413, 420, 475, 476
187, 201, 269, 354, 367, 440, cosmographers, 7
458, 474, 476 Cultural Turn, 4
Armitage, Simon, 9, 305, 306, 307, De Certeau, Michel, 2, 13
308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, Debord, Guy, 2, 13, 322, 323, 324,
314, 315, 316, 317, 476 325, 327, 328, 330, 332, 333,
Auden, W. H., 9, 287, 288, 289, 336, 338, 339
290, 291, 293, 294, 295, 296, Defoe, Daniel, 8, 13, 16
297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, Deleuze and Guattari, 1, 11, 33, 78,
303, 304, 305, 309, 314, 475 208, 237, 309, 314, 423, 461
Augé, Marc, 5, 12, 82, 85, 89, 94, displacement, 8, 91, 236, 237, 240,
95, 306, 312, 313, 316, 322 242, 254, 302, 394
Auster, Paul, 8, 222, 224, 225, 226, ecocriticism, 2, 16
227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233 Eliade, Mircea, 219
Bachelard, Gaston, 1, 12, 96 emigration novel, 11, 438
Bakhtin, Mikhaïl, 1, 12, 27, 34, 39, environmentalist movement, 2
78, 206, 219, 439, 454 expatriate, 6, 100, 101, 102, 105,
Biamonti, Francesco, 423, 424, 425, 107, 116, 121, 446, 449
426, 427, 428, 429, 430, 431, Fielding, Henry, 15
432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437 Foucault, Michel, 1, 13, 33, 35, 140,
Brasília, 10, 354, 355, 356, 357, 143, 325, 333, 337, 458, 465,
358, 359, 360, 361, 364, 365, 467, 469
366, 367, 368, 369, 370 frontier lands, 11, 423, 424, 425,
Brosseau, Marc, 1, 3, 8, 12, 13, 16, 431
38, 48, 49, 126, 143, 386, 435, Garrard, Greg, 2, 13
436, 469, 470 geocriticism, 2, 3, 4, 17, 65, 78,
Buell, Lawrence, 2, 13, 45, 48 102, 106, 107, 121, 415, 421,
Chorography, 170, 309 458, 468, 473
Christie, Agatha, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, geographical novel, 8, 206, 216
60, 61, 62 geopoetics, 2, 314
chronos, 1 geopolitics, 245
chronotope, 1, 12, 27, 39, 43, 65, Ghosh, Amitav, 8, 234, 235, 236,
67, 68, 78, 206, 439, 443 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242,
Clerc, Thomas, 10, 322, 325, 326, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247
327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 332, Giono, Jean, 423, 424, 425, 429,
432, 434, 435, 436, 437 49, 63, 87, 92, 95, 96, 122, 123,
Greig, David, 5, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 215, 219, 220, 232, 233, 235,
87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97 239, 245, 246, 252, 253, 254,
Guichonnet, Paul, 217 260, 284, 285, 303, 306, 308,
Hemingway, Ernest, 52, 100, 102, 311, 316, 337, 340, 341, 342,
110, 112, 116, 122, 123 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 349,
heterotopic, 249, 255, 329, 331, 333 350, 351, 352, 353, 403, 404,
Hewitt, David, 220 454, 455, 458, 469, 470, 474
homotopic, 249, 250, 251, 259 map, 2, 5, 7, 8, 11, 20, 22, 24, 25,
identity, 6, 9, 12, 38, 55, 65, 81, 82, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34,
84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 39, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 82, 91,
95, 121, 141, 178, 180, 184, 241, 112, 113, 116, 121, 169, 174,
242, 312, 331, 357, 362, 363, 198, 209, 210, 215, 218, 224,
364, 366, 369, 398, 399, 401, 225, 228, 230, 231, 232, 237,
402, 415, 425, 433, 454 244, 248, 249, 252, 253, 259,
Imagination, 1, 12, 13, 26, 34, 36, 267, 281, 284, 306, 309, 310,
42, 48, 51, 144, 217, 219, 410, 311, 312, 313, 324, 327, 329,
411, 436, 454 335, 336, 338, 339, 374, 375,
Jouet, Jacques, 6, 126, 127, 132, 377, 379, 381, 387, 391, 393,
133, 134, 137, 138, 140, 141, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400,
143, 144, 145 401, 402, 421
journey, 8, 10, 30, 42, 44, 52, 53, Martínez, Tomas Eloy, 11, 390,
54, 55, 56, 59, 79, 102, 106, 155, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396,
190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 198, 397, 398, 400, 401, 402, 404,
200, 209, 215, 218, 232, 236, 405, 406
242, 256, 264, 302, 372, 459 metaphor, 1, 31, 89, 92, 207, 211,
Kipling, Rudyard, 8, 9, 23, 248, 236, 237, 242, 247, 266, 274,
249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 280, 299, 302, 332, 339, 375,
255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 399, 401, 408, 411, 413, 435
261, 475 migrations, 8, 242, 430, 431, 437,
landscape, 44, 45, 46, 55, 57, 59, 477
60, 66, 72, 74, 81, 82, 85, 89, 91, mimesis, 3, 37, 342
104, 106, 107, 109, 133, 137, modernity, 56
170, 174, 177, 180, 181, 184, non-place, 5, 82, 85, 306, 312, 414,
185, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 418
212, 215, 217, 218, 237, 239, novel, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21, 24,
256, 288, 291, 299, 302, 313, 29, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47,
333, 341, 401, 414, 433, 434, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 62,
435, 446, 457, 458, 459, 460, 63, 64, 70, 137, 183, 206, 211,
461, 462, 463, 464 212, 213, 218, 224, 225, 228,
Literary cartography, 2, 4, 19, 25 229, 230, 231, 232, 235, 245,
literary geography, 2, 4, 7, 17, 39, 249, 255, 257, 258, 341, 342,
102, 104, 105, 110, 259, 287, 343, 344, 345, 347, 348, 349,
302, 306, 307, 316, 414, 457, 352, 354, 355, 358, 359, 360,
470, 477 362, 364, 365, 366, 368, 369,
London, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 35, 48, 371, 372, 373, 375, 380, 384,
480 Index
385, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394, Segalen, Victor, 10, 304, 371, 372,
395, 396, 397, 398, 400, 407, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378,
412, 413, 438, 440, 442, 443, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384,
445, 446, 447, 448, 450, 451, 385, 386, 387
452, 453, 454, 458, 460, 462 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 9, 264, 265,
Oulipo, 126, 131 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 272,
Pakistan, 11, 457, 458, 460, 462, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278,
463, 469, 470 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284,
Peking, 10, 371, 372, 373, 375, 377, 285, 286, 475
379, 380, 381, 383, 384 Situationnism, 2
periegesis, 7 Smith, Adam, 220
Pizzolatto, Nic, 5, 37, 38, 39, 41, Soja, Edward, 1, 10, 15, 20, 35, 312,
42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49 317, 468
poetry, 9, 69, 71, 132, 133, 137, Spatial Turn, 1, 3, 4
138, 140, 208, 223, 240, 250, Tally, Robert T., 1, 2, 5, 15, 16, 20,
264, 265, 266, 279, 280, 284, 23, 25, 28, 35, 36, 39, 48, 77,
289, 295, 299, 300, 304, 305, 337, 410, 472
306, 307, 308, 309, 312, 313, The city of Paris, 100
314, 315, 317, 452, 475, 476 theatre, 5, 81, 82, 83, 87, 92, 93, 95,
politics, 10, 23, 53, 196, 242, 312, 473, 476
317, 319, 328, 395, 397, 399, topophilia, 1
438, 466 topophobia, 1
postcolonial, 8, 237, 238, 307, 476 topos, 1, 6, 12, 16, 81, 83, 84, 92,
Psychogeography, 2, 13, 322, 323, 101, 291, 401
337 tourist, 101, 107, 108, 109, 111,
Ramusio, 150, 151, 153, 158, 164, 113, 116, 120, 121, 256, 257,
165, 166, 473 290, 294
realism, 27, 30, 217, 257, 261, 314, Tournefort, 7, 189, 191, 192, 193,
342, 369, 407, 410, 413, 453 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199,
referentiality, 9, 164, 249, 251, 252, 200, 201, 202
255, 259 transdisciplinary, 1
Richardson, Samuel, 15 trauma, 11, 85, 390, 391, 393, 398
Romans-géographes, 12, 386 traveler, 6, 30, 108, 151, 153, 154,
Scott, Walter, 8, 110, 122, 206, 208, 155, 161, 174, 175, 184, 190,
209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 201, 215, 248, 258, 308, 371,
215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 474 384, 415, 416
Guy Mannering, 213 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 1, 15, 16, 28, 29, 36,
Redgauntlet, 220 100, 107, 123, 460, 470
Rob Roy, 209, 214, 220 Vásconez, Javier, 11, 407, 408, 409,
The Antiquary, 13, 16, 211, 220, 411, 412, 413, 414, 415, 416,
221 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 477
The Black Dwarf, 213 walking, 8, 46, 102, 110, 111, 112,
The Fair Maid of Perth, 220 113, 121, 131, 222, 223, 228,
The Heart of Mid-Lothian, 220 230, 253, 258, 315, 324, 326,
The Pirate, 220 328, 332, 333, 344, 349
Waverley, 214, 215, 221 Watt, Ian, 15
Westphal, Bertrand, 2, 3, 4, 14, 15, 417, 421, 439, 444, 455, 457,
16, 21, 36, 42, 43, 48, 65, 77, 78, 466, 470, 472, 473
100, 107, 108, 123, 249, 260, Wordsworth, 285
291, 331, 332, 337, 385, 410,

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Literature and

The Writing of Space

Edited by Emmanuelle Peraldo

This book first published 2016

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2016 by Emmanuelle Peraldo and contributors

ISBN (10): 1-4438-8548-7

PART 1: LITERARY CARTOGRAPHY, LITERARY GEOGRAPHY

Chapter One: Literary Cartography

Chapter Two: Geographical Imaginations: Time, Space

Chapter Three: From Geographical Metaphors to a Geography

PART TWO: GEOGRAPHY AND THE MAPPING OF LITERARY GENRES

Chapter Four: Chorographies and Travel Narratives

Chapter Five: Geographical Novels

Chapter Six: Geographical Poetry

PART THREE: LANDSCAPES, URBANSCAPES AND (GEO)POLITICS

Chapter Seven: Writing the City

Chapter Eight: Poetic and Geopolitical Stakes

Contributors ............................................................................................. 472

Index ........................................................................................................ 478

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many debts I have accumulated over

My home institution, The Université Jean Moulin, Lyon 3, has substantially

THE MEETING OF TWO PRACTICES OF SPACE:

1. Space gradually occupying all space…

between literature and geography have flourished. Literary cartography,

2. When several disciplines and approaches meet…

3. Literary cartography, literary geography and

engaging non-English majors and non-traditional learners in the advanced

The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the

4. Geography and the mapping of literary genres

Tournefort, Relation d'un voyage du Levant (1717), representing the 18th

Levant on a royal mission to conduct research in various fields such as

focuses on how the issue of referentiality influences the shifting

5. Landscapes, urbanscapes and (geo)politics in Literature

transformed by the experience of migration. Chicago, like a number of

BROSSEAU Marc and Micheline CAMBRON. 2003. “Entre géographie et

GLOTFELTY, Cheryll and Harold FROMM (eds). 1996. The Ecocriticism

SOJA, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of

“Mapping Novels with Google Earth”, The Chronicle of Higher

MappingWriting (The Literary Encyclopedia), www.mappingwriting.com

ADVENTURES IN LITERARY CARTOGRAPHY:

ROBERT T. TALLY JR.

Adventure offers a particularly tantalizing theme for a discussion of

which to view these characteristic elements. Moreover, the broader project

1. The Return of the Adventurer

bear on further study, exploration, and potentially colonization or

A generic appeal of personal narratives in their time and since is their

Hence, regardless of the author’s intent, adventure stories have frequently

As we know, such narratives also took part in the burgeoning science

Elsewhere, Conrad praises modern scientific cartography for its “honest”

The irony of the “pioneers of progress” reference is acute, but underlying

to render comprehensible the entire imaginary space of the work. The

2. The Contours of the Map

as well as the more abstract or philosophical projection of a map-like

writing professor, is thinking specifically about the writer’s approach to a

recourse to nonliterary means. In other words, the mapping project

Angeles, which provided the exemplary selva oscura for so many

Disalienation in the traditional city, then, involves the practical reconquest

In Jameson’s view, this cognitive mapping coincides with Althusser’s

pedestrians below, forming a static image or map that, operating

Conclusion: The End of the Adventure