Introduction: Mapping Narratives

Abstract

James Joyce once stated that his goal in writing Ulysses was “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth, it could be reconstructed out of my book.”¹ I imagine that readers of Ulysses, even those with a strong background in geography or urban planning, would find it difficult to discern the blueprint of Dublin in the text of the modernist novel, but the cartographic impulse, broadly conceived, in Joyce’s fiction is certainly apparent. From the meticulous descriptions of recognizable locales to the more implicit, affective geography of the intellectual and emotional content of the narrative, a work like Ulysses provides readers a map of the diverse spaces represented in it. Indeed, although certain narratives may be more ostensibly cartographic than others, all may be said to constitute forms of literary cartography. In works of fiction, in which the imaginative faculty is perhaps most strongly connected to the verbal and descriptive, this mapmaking project becomes central to the aims and the effects of the narrative. In the words of J. Hillis Miller, “A novel is a figurative mapping.”²