Abstract
Any discussion of the map and the territory, at least insofar as it touches on literary or cultural studies, will frequently turn to the evocative little story by Jorge Luis Borges, tantalizing titled “On Exactitude in Science.” It is certainly one of the most recognizable, even most canonical, texts in spatiality studies, broadly conceived, and it always helps to set a properly philosophical tone when thinking about the problem of representation.
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Notes
- 1.
Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 325. Borges cites a fictional source: Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658.
- 2.
Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (London: Macmillan, 1893), 169.
- 3.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1–2, italics in original. In The Matrix (1999), directed by the Wachowskis, a character introduces another to the fact that what is taken for human reality and lived experience is in fact only a great computer simulation, punctuating this surprising news with the line, “Welcome to the desert of the real.” This phrase was used as the title of 2002 book by Slavoj Žižek, in which the author employed a Lacanian and Marxist analysis of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the media responses to them. See Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 (London: Verso, 2002).
- 4.
See, e.g., J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
- 5.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 52.
- 6.
Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 161–162.
- 7.
See Marc Augé, Non-Place: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995).
- 8.
Siobhan Carroll, “Atopia/ Non-Place,” in The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, ed. Robert T. Tally Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017), 159, 164–165.
- 9.
See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 233.
- 10.
Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 217–219.
- 11.
Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 88.
- 12.
See my “Lukács’s Literary Cartography: Spatiality, Cognitive Mapping, and The Theory of the Novel.” Mediations 29.2 (Spring 2016): 113–124.
- 13.
Jameson, Postmodernism, 51.
- 14.
See Miroslav Holub, “Brief Thoughts on Maps,” trans. Jarmila and Ian Milner, Times Literary Supplement (February 4, 1977): 118. This poem relates the story, itself a retelling of a tale formerly told by the Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent-Györgi, of a Hungarian reconnaissance unit, hopelessly lost in a snowstorm in the Alps during World War I. At the brink of despair and resigning themselves to death, they find a map that one soldier had kept in his pocket. Using it to locate their bearings, the soldiers manage to make it back safely to camp. There the commanding officer, who had been wracked with anguish and guilt over the loss of his troops, asked to see this miraculous map that had saved their lives. A soldier handed it over, and it was revealed to be a map, not of the Alps, but of the Pyrenees. The moral of the story appears to differ among its tellers. Szent-Györgi’s point in originally recounting the anecdote was to show that, in science, even errors or false starts can lead to success. Holub’s broader intention in retelling the tale, however, may have been to show how, in the words of his poem, “life is on its way somewhere or another,” regardless of one’s sense of orientation.
- 15.
See, e.g., Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 54–57.
- 16.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 12.
- 17.
Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 168–169.
- 18.
Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), xix–xx.
- 19.
See my forthcoming Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).
- 20.
Northrop Frye, “Maps and Territories,” The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991, eds. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 439.
- 21.
Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Heidegger, Basic Writings, 172.
- 22.
Jameson, Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality (London: Verso, 2016), 77.
- 23.
See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, translated by Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), xviii: “If it—learning to live—remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone. What happens between the two, and between all the “two’s” one likes, such as life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost. So it would be necessary to learn spirits […] to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better.”
- 24.
Jameson, Raymond Chandler, 78.
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Tally Jr., R.T. (2018). In the Deserts of Cartography: Building, Dwelling, Mapping. In: Wuppuluri, S., Doria, F. (eds) The Map and the Territory. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72478-2_32
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