Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 3

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Literary Cartography in an Age of Interconnectedness (reviewing Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality [Routledge, 2013]) / Matt Hudson

<1> Prior to the twentieth century, literary and cultural critics had been fascinated with the trajectory of time - of the remembrance of things past as situated inside of a historical canon. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, however, a change began to take place. Scholars and critics began to take a closer look at "space." Specifically, how an author constructed a place within literature, and how in turn, a reader reconstructed a place through his or her reading. This change has been termed the "spatial turn" in literary and cultural studies, and this turn is the context for Robert T. Tally Jr.'s Spatiality, published as part of Routledge's New Critical Idiom series. An ambitious and engaging introduction to how space is viewed in literature, Spatiality offers a timely discussion of spatially oriented criticism in literary theory. Tally conducts a well-rounded discussion, incorporating a dazzling range of key literary and cultural scholars and topics intrinsic to spatiality. The result is an enlightening exploration of recent criticism and theory focused on the element of "space" in our current epoch of interconnectedness.

<2> Tally divides his study into four main chapters, featuring an introduction which briefly lays out the importance of the topic and a conclusion that discusses directions for further inquiry, especially focusing on the otherworldly spaces of science fiction, utopia, and fantasy. The first chapter, entitled "The Spatial Turn," provides a historical survey for the broad-based context of spatiality. Beginning before the Renaissance and following through to postmodernism, Tally provides a number of historical perspectives and critical insights that call for the study of "space" in literary and critical studies.

<3> The second chapter, "Literary Cartography," I found to be most emblematic of the theory of spatiality presented in the book as a whole. There Tally explores the most productive ways in which an advanced English major or graduate student of literature might apply the criticism of space to pieces of literature. Tally draws on the work of several modern theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, and Georg Lukács in order to develop his argument that the author functions as a kind of metaphorical mapmaker, projecting onto the "often chaotic world" a form of literary cartography through the act of storytelling (8). Going further, Tally includes Fredric Jameson's influential notion of cognitive mapping, extending the metaphor for the author as a mapmaker; this, in turn, introduces the larger contexts of postmodernism and postcolonialism. As a graduate student of literature myself, I found the chapter to be the most illuminating out of the four. It surveys a number of applicable concepts and methods for the prospective scholar of "space" to use in one's own work. Tally proves to be an illuminating guide, incorporating a number of important spatiality oriented scholars and theories.

<4> In chapter three, "Literary Geography," Tally moves the spotlight away from the author, and shifts the perspective onto the reader. More specifically, the chapter investigates the "hybrid-space" that exists between an author's construction of a locale - or an actual "geospace" - in a work of literature, and the reader's own reconstruction. Tally looks at a number of concepts, including D. H. Lawrence's idea of "the spirit of place" in Studies in Classic American Literature and Raymond Williams's analysis of the "country" and the "city" in predominantly British literature. Tally expands his argument into such broader dimensions of imperialism and geography by analyzing Edward Said's work on culture and imperialism. The chapter also discusses the "phenomena of metropolitan space and mobility" (9) in the theory of the flâneur as introduced by the French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, which enables Tally to examine such critics as Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau in order to illustrate the curiously modern experience of a spectator walking amidst a crowd of people. Tally also discusses Franco Moretti's bold call for a reinvention of the way literary scholars conceive world literature, in the form of a method of distant reading, which would allow one to more broadly assess the enormous corpus of literature. With his interest in literary geography and new modes of literary historical analysis, Moretti provide another perspective on the ways a reader or a critic might "map" a literary text.

<5> After examining the multiple spatial perspectives of the author and the reader, in chapter four Tally moves his focus to "Geocriticism." In a sense, geocriticism can be imagined as the broader category from which spatiality functions. The most theoretical chapter out of the four, Tally suggests a more scientific approach to the mapping of spaces within literature. By including an impressive number of literary critics as analyzed under the spatial lens, Tally makes the case for a more liberating conception of spatiality. Tally's exploration of spatial theory ranges from Gaston Bachelard's poetics of space and Henri Lefebvre's spatial dialectic and the production of space to a section on the "Engendering of Spaces," which looks at feminist approaches. Tally also provides an overview of Michel Foucault's lengthy discussion of how spatialization and social organization may function on a philosophical level. After a discussion of Gilles Deleuze's concept of smooth versus striated space, as well as his theory of nomad thought, one gets the impression that the theoretical aspects of geocriticism and spatiality are really Tally's forte. Tally acts as a clear and informative guide to what can be read as the most philosophical and theoretical of the four chapters. However, because I personally found Chapter Two, on literary cartography, to be the most resourceful for prospective graduate students of literary and cultural studies of "space," I would like to devote more discussion of the critical theorists and concepts in which Tally employs in that chapter.

<6> The second chapter begins by defining the term literary cartography as it is used to refer to the way an author can project an imaginary map through writing or storytelling. As Tally writes: "The writer must establish the scale and the shape […] the degree to which a given representation of a place refers to any 'real' place in the geographical world" (45). In other words, while Tally recognizes this as a form of cartography, it is also somewhat imaginary and metaphorical. The creative element is apparent in what the author chooses to include or to leave out in imagining a place. As Tally argues, "the writer, not unlike the cartographer, must determine what elements to include in the story or map," and which ones to omit (50). However, as Tally states a few pages later, just as a mapmaker "must determine the function of the map and its intended 'meanings' for a map-reader," a writer is bound to certain constraints such as narrative and genre in the act of storytelling (54). Tally goes into some detail in illustrating a few of the infinite possibilities that might arise in the alignment of an imaginary depiction of a place and an actual "real" locale. "As much as Ulysses might have to offer to the reader who wishes to know Dublin as it actually is," Tally states, "Joyce's novel is hardly a manual or guidebook for city-planners" (53). Of course, an actual locale can never be entirely portrayed in a piece of literature (nor is it realistically feasible) but, as Tally writes, this is "almost certainly a good thing" (53). Drawing upon a scene in Italo Calvino's postmodern novel Invisible Cities, Tally discusses how the narrator "expresses some mild frustration at the overlapping of geography and storytelling, when he struggles to make known a place which cannot simply be described in strictly spatial or geographical terms, since what makes a place noteworthy is often the narratives that give it meaning" (51). Here, the story and the place are inextricably bound together in the metaphorical projection of a place. Though an image of a metaphorical place and an actual locale might overlap, there are several elements in a work of literature that should not be omitted. I am speaking of course of the meat in a story - the narrative and the plot - but also of genre.

<7> In this section of Spatiality, Tally examines the structural and organizational qualities of genre. Just as a map might situate "different bits of data into a meaningful ensemble to be interpreted and understood," Tally argues, "genres can be understood in relation to their organization of space and time" (56). Here, Tally points to Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope as a tool to help make clearer "the sense of relations between historical time and geographical space in literature" (155). The chronotope, though heavy in conceptual framework, can be helpful in analyzing elements such as narrative and genre in a more meticulous fashion. As is common throughout Spatiality, Tally manages to incorporate the ideas of one literary critic with several others, forming an interconnected display of provocative evidence. Bakhtin's chronotope, for example, leads Tally into an engaging exploration of Auerbach and Lukács, existentialism, and an examination of Jameson's concept of cognitive mapping. Tally metaphorically likens the process by which individual subjects and writers "establish a sense of place and purpose in the world, via a project in which [an] individual subject orchestrates the elements or aspects of life in some meaningful way" (65) to the idea of mapmaking itself. The individual, surrounded by endless forces of displacement, works out a kind of map - places he or she has visited, and journeys yet uncharted - in order to make sense of the world. This metaphor for "existential mapmaking" coincides more particularly with Jameson's idea of cognitive mapping. Jameson's multi-tiered concept appears as a "strategy" employed to define and to "place" realist, modernist, and postmodernist, works of literature in a worldly context by accounting for the wider economic and communicative ramifications on the politics of a global society.

<8> As a graduate student of literature who was not very familiar with spatiality to begin with, I personally felt that the critical discussion of literary cartography was open enough to provide other graduate and advanced undergraduate students with an impressive breadth of applicable concepts and theories. The other chapters of Spatiality, while encompassing a wide range of theoretical and philosophical investigations, mainly function to provide readers with a comprehensible introduction to the study of "space" in all of its complexity. While reading Spatiality, one gets the sense that this is a very current discussion in need of more debate. A number of the critics that Tally discusses, such as Jameson, Moretti, and Bertrand Westphal, to name a few, are still actively refining spatial theory and criticism in their current work. In addition, Tally himself weaves together a number of insights from seemingly non-spatial philosophers and literary critics in light of recent work done on the criticism of space. In our current age of interconnectedness and instability, the study of space seems entirely logical and important.

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