Eric Bulson, Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000. Eric Bulson. New York and London: Routledge, 2007. Pp. xii+176.

Abstract

Bulson traces this argument through three historical “moments” in fiction, each roughly corresponding to realism, modernism, and postmodernism. In classical realism, the disorientation effect is one that is highlighted less by reading the novels themselves and more by the act of “tracking” a novel's geography; moving back and forth from Bleak House (1852–53) to the Dickens Atlas (1923), to cite one of Bulson's examples. Such cartographic tracings involve a trade-off: what the map gives in a spatial overview, it cannot provide in the ground-level thick description of the November fog, muddy streets, and imaginary dinosaurs lurching up Holborn Hill. Modernist fiction, posits Bulson, begins to encode a disorienting effect within the experience of reading, largely by incorporating an excess of cartographic precision. The inclusion of hundreds of toponyms in Ulysses, for example, works less to orient the reader in a plausible similitude of 1904 Dublin and more to draw attention to the colonial and nationalist implications of naming places. Bulson's signal example from post–World War II fiction, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), likewise relied upon maps and guidebooks in its composition, but Pynchon encodes a self-conscious skepticism about the “reality” of such documents, instead forcing his reader to acknowledge that precise cartographies are inextricably tied to more complicated and ambivalent histories; location in space happens at the expense of dislocation in time. To Bulson's credit, his argument does not begin from a realist-modernist-postmodernist schema and then try to account for stylistic differences characteristic of each of these modes. Rather, he works out how writers engaged with topographical detail in different cultural- historical periods, which leads to a fresh argument about realism, I would suggest. As writers of fiction from Cervantes to the present situate their imagined worlds within the coordinates of actually existing topographies, the “reality effect” of topographical signifiers can operate in multiple—though, to Bulson, always disorienting—ways. The difference is not one between a normative realism and the stylistic experimentation of modernism and postmodernism; it is rather between different modes of negotiating the fixed specificity of place with the ceaseless flow of narrative. While any incorporation of topographical detail is influenced by the cultural, political, and historical context of an author, this need not be melted down into an overarching and reductive period classification.