literary maps

ain't it purty? The webpage where I found it sez:

The Voyage of the Pequod is one of a series of twelve literary maps based on British and American literary classics produced by the Harris-Seybold Company of Cleveland between 1953 and 1964. The map was part of a calendar printed to advertise the capabilities of the company's lithographic printing equipment. Illustrator Everett Henry was a well-known New York commercial artist also noted for his mural paintings. The Library has more than 225 literary maps that record the location of places associated with authors and their literary works or serve as a guide to their imaginative worlds.

I love how the needs of advertising "the capabilities of the company's lithographic printing equipment" spurred the illustrator to such rainbow effects. On the one hand, couldn't they just have printed out a few simple figures? On the other, why doesn't anyone take the opportunities offered by advertising to create such silly/beautiful things anymore? I mean, 40 years isn't that long ago.

The "library" referred to as possessing more than 225 literary maps is, of course, The Library of Congress, more specifically the geography and map division (about which I'll have much more to say later), which possesses quite a collection of cultural and literary artifacts, not a few of them "literary maps" of various types.

The John Steinbeck Map of America features popular images from Steinbeck's novels such as Tortilla Flat (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and The Pearl (1947). The outline of the map shows the route of Travels with Charley (1962), and the central portion consists of detailed street maps of the California towns of Salinas and Monterey, where Steinbeck lived and set some of his works. Numbers on the maps are keyed to lists of events in Steinbeck's novels. A portrait of the author appears in the upper right corner. Research and design of the map were done by Molly Maguire, who produced a series of literary maps in the 1980s.

There are, of course, millions of ways to do this kind of thing. I think it's fun to compare the map of a novel (an encyclopedic novel, but a single novel nonetheless) to a map of the entire imaginary world of an author, over the course of several books. The Moby Dick map maps not just a journey over space, but also over time, with its representations of key scenes from the book as they happened along the ship's route. The portraits of the characters above and below are not necessarily fixed in time and space, but rather present the abstractions of the characters as archetypes. The impact of the book, the integrity of its singular, fictional world, is what is important here. The map is not metafictional, but rather a companion volume to the book, maintaining its illusion, smitten by and infused with its fancifulness.

The Steinbeck map, on the other hand, is coming from such a meta position that it can't give in to fictional integrity even to the extent of following a fictional journey. The journey here is from Travels With Charley, Steinbeck's memoir of a journey with his poodle. The journey is represented as a route, a static road, not a journey through time, from event to event. You can start anywhere, and choose to go nowhere if you'd like. Along the road are points of interest from different novels. The concern here is clearly to flatten the differing worlds of Steinbeck's differing novels into one integral world that encompasses all the dramatic moments. There's an anxiety that the various worlds Steinbeck created don't match up. Cathy Ames, for example, doesn't belong on the same map with Tom Joad, so they become symbolic sprouts of a (once) extant tree.

And if you look at the map of the landscape covered by America's "first western" genre novel, The Virginian below, about which book I know nothing, no route is followed at all. All of the sites on the map are presented as store fronts, facing outward, almost terraced. What does it mean?

The point is: there's more than one way to skin a map.

Therefore, I declare the next few days/week/s to be literary map week/s. There will be more comin'!

Comments

[virginia]

Wonderful website! I'm passionate for cartography and I'm reading now Moby Dick, so this article is more than fantastic. I'll keep an eye on the website everyday! :) THANKS!

[claire]

thanks for dropping by, virginia!

[Scott]

Great post. I'm reading Moby Dick and illustrating it for a project as part of my degree in London. V useful. Thanks.

[raven]

hey whats the meaning of literary map..?