Francesca romana dell'aglio

Maps as reading form

Francesca Romana Dell’Aglio

“Literary works often rely on the evocative description of the protagonists’ environment; the house, the street or the city appearing as a precisely constructed décor against which the narrative can unfold. Reminiscences of buildings, their corridors and attics, salons and secret rooms, or of urban scenes nestling in the mind of the narrator, acts as mirrors of the inner self, or as catalysts in the development of the narrative. At times, the description of the architectural entourage introduces a sense of the fact of social arrangements on the narrative; Thomas Mann’s description of the Buddenbrooks’ family house makes the reader acutely aware of the fragile firmness of the bourgeois tradition from which the novel’s main character operate; in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo, the description of the protagonist’s palace is a powerful shorthand introduction to the disintegration of the feudal order and the demise of an old world that is to develop in the novel. Observation like those found in Zola’s analytical perambulations in the nineteenth-century Paris, Döblin’s dark wanderings in Berlin, or Pessoa avoiding and locating himself in the street of Lisbon –the list of literary evocations of ‘real’ and recognisable places is extensive – have had a formidable influence on our view of cities and buildings as mental and physical constructions, and have found access into writing on sociology and historiography, informing, in turn, thinking and writing on architecture.”

Christoph Grafe, Klaske Havik, Madeleine Maaskant, Architecture & Literary. Reflection / Imaginations, OASE 70, 2006

Terry Gillam, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, 1988

I would like to start this digression with conceiving architecture as not just a mere construction, a building or a realised object in general, but rather as a space. Let’s consider the ancient Greek word for that, khôros, the space ‘in which a thing is’, a word that also reminds to the space of a room, a space thus with its own borders, where people move and where themselves contribute to its description.

With those words in mind, let’s try now to go through the reading of the book written

by Franco Moretti in 1997, The Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900. This scholarly but elaborated work presents a methodological effort, which aims to use literature as a critical weapon: the result, quoting the author’s words, is “half methodological manifesto, half pragmatic example; interesting, hopefully; and a real pleasure to write” (Moretti 1998).

Novels considered in their fulfilled form are here compared one to another, and all together contribute to trace a critical study in the field of narration. Franco Moretti writes a cartographic narrative, which examines the history of the nineteenth-century novel –from the Spanish Picaresque to the historical genre, from the romance to the crime one– and lets us experience the France of Balzac and Flaubert, the London of Dickens, Austen and Conan Doyle, and comprehend the causes and consequences of both the Latin American magic novel and the Russian novel of ideas.

“In this book, clearly enough, the method is all. But for precisely this reason, it has to be tested in earnest: across the research as a whole: in its capacity (or not) to change the articulation of the literary field, and in the nature of interpretative problems. And the judge, as always, is the reader” (Moretti 1998) A new instrument, besides the written word, is here used: maps. Those graphics draw a parallel narration, which dismantles each plot and helps to read it in an unconventional way.

Have we ever dwelt on the exact place where a couple of lovers consumes their passion, or where a murder has been committed or the park or street which is described from a character’s window? All this circumstances tend to be a simple scenography, which is taken for granted; they could have been easily dreamed, imagined or accurately described, but nevertheless the reader’s attention is always focused on the chain of events. Maps can thus change the way we read novels.

Various attempts were put in writing before this specific one, since the 1910 A Literary and Historical Atlas of Europe until The Atlas of Literature published in 1996; in all of those publications maps played a marginal role, a “decorative” one. Moretti, instead, places each literary phenomenon in its specific space and he maps it, and those spatial translations ought to be considered as the beginning of this new way of reading novels, not just as a graphic sign which goes along them.

“After which begins in fact the most challenging part of the whole enterprise: one looks at the map, and thinks. You look at a specific configuration – those roads that run towards Toledo and Sevilla: those mountains, such long way from London; those men and women that live on opposite banks of the Seine –you look at these patterns, and try to understand how it is that all this gives rise to a story, a plot. How is it, I mean, that geography shapes the narrative structure of the European novel.” (Moretti 1998) Text and map work together but they can be read independently: each genre comes from a specific geographical space: historical novels are often located within the natural borders, the

ones, perhaps, we never considered and that are potentially more dramatic, where adventure, danger and surprise happens and lead to the appearance of the enemy. The romantic ones, are instead mainly circumscribed in the urban areas, where the main characters live, as a demonstration of the central nationalism, whereas villains are always located abroad.

Tracing one character’s trip helps to describe an entire country; the Bildungroman helps us to understand the difference between English or French novel, where the capital city is the centre of the main characters’s action, and Italian or German texts, where clearly the protagonist wanders around, since there is no evident capital city. The parallel of the graphic translation of those movements helps us to realise features which has always seemed hidden in the narration: how a character like Sherlock Holmes gives shape to a country.

This text is also a sociological study, beyond its historical and geographical intentions, which circumscribes the story in the space that inevitably determines it, since each space gives birth to a different narration, a different genre: “space is not the ‘outside’ of narrative, then, but an internal force, that shapes it from within” (Moretti 1998).

History can be read through the geographic explanation of a novel. The Russian novel of ideas that rose up between 1860 an 1890, or the Latin American magic realism movement, which instead conquers the market scene almost a century later, are both the explanation of the Literary Geography which Moretti starts here to take as an object of study: each new model is the product of a new space.

Although maps are nor precisely or originally drawn –and this is maybe not the main intent of the book– their role is vital for understanding the whole work. Literature is here an unpredictable weapon of understanding how the space is experienced, since it transparently reveals the complex texture of a city. Literature is the outcome of a personal experience, the one of the writer, which sometimes is written in third person. Writers are capable of reading the real space since it its the space they move in too (Havik 2006). And this translation of a space is most of the time a fiction, it is the result of memories of its users, each one reveals a new way of experience, new alternatives open up on different perspectives, which enriches the activity of reading places, an activity that is here brilliantly transcribed in eloquent reading maps.

Bibliography Moretti [1997] 1998 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900, New York - London 1998 Havik 2006 Klaske Havik, Lived Experience, Places Read: Toward an Urban Literacy, OASE 70, Rotterdam 2006