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If you draw a map of where Jane Austen's heroines grew up, and compare it with where they traveled in order to encounter a husband, fascinating new discoveries about literature and history are uncovered. Franco Moretti does just this in his Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900.
Placing a literary phenomenon in its specific space - mapping it - is not the conclusion of geographical work; it's the beginning. 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 a 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 is it that out of them arises a story, a plot. How is it, I mean, that geography managed to give rise to the modern European novel.
Think of the maps in this Atlas as points of departure, then: for my reflections, as well as yours (a good map should allow far more than one line of thought); and also for the (many) captions which sketch a further array of interpretive paths: towards a text, a critical idea, a historical thesis. Coordinating these intersecting, verbal-visual discourses has not always been easy; the rhythm may be rough, uneven. But I like to think that even so (and even, alas, with all the mistakes that are certainly present) this book may turn out to be useful: an adjective that I had never dreamt of applying to myself -- and of which I have now grown extremely proud.
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Let me begin with a map of very well known novels: figure 1, which shows the places where Jane Austen's plots (or more exactly: their central thread, the heroine's story) begin and end. Northanger Abby, for instance, begins at Fullerton and ends at Woodston; Sense and Sensibility, at Norland Park and at Delaford; and so on for the others (except Persuasion, whose endpoint is left rather vague). Please take a few moments to look at this figure, because in the end this is what literary geography is all about: you select a textual feature (here, beginnings and endings), find the data, put them on paper - and then you look at the map. In the hope that the visual construct will be more than the sum of its parts: that it will show a shape, a pattern that may add something to the information that went into making it.
And a pattern does indeed emerge here: of exclusion, first of all. No Ireland; no Scotland; no Wales; no Cornwall. No "Celtic fringe", as Michael Hechter has called it; only England: a much smaller space than the United Kingdom as a whole. And not even all of England: Lancashire, the North, the industrial revolution -- all missing. Instead, the much older England celebrated by the "estate poems" of topographical poetry: hills, parks, country houses. It's a first instance of what literary geography may tell us: two things at once: what could be in a novel - and what actually is there. On the one hand, the industrializing "Great" Britain of Austen's years; on the other, the small, homogeneous England of Austen's novels.
A small England, I have said. Smaller than the United Kingdom, to be sure; and small for us, now. Less so, however, at the turn of the eighteenth century, when the places on the map were separated by a day, or more, of very uncomfortable travel. And since these places coincide with the residences of the heroine (the beginning), and that of her husband-to-be (the ending), the distance between them means that Austen's plots join together -- "marry" - people who belong to different counties. Which is new, and significant: it means that these novels try to represent what social historians refer to as the "National Marriage Market": a mechanism that crystallized in the course of the 18th century, which demands of human beings (and especially of women) a new mobility: physical, and even more so spiritual mobility. Because it is clear that a large marriage market can only work if women feel "at home" - in figure 1, many of the names indicate homes -- not only in the small enclave of their birth, but in a much wider territory.
Marriage market, then. Like every other market, this also must take place somewhere, and figure 4 shows where: London, Bath, the seaside. Here people meet to complete their transactions, and here is also where all the trouble of Austen's universe occurs: infatuations, scandals, slanders, seductions, elopements - disgrace. And all of this happens because the marriage market (like every other market) has produced its own brand of swindlers: shady relatives, social climbers, speculators, seducers, déclassé aristocrats
It makes sense, then, that this figure should be the inverse of figure 1. Look at them: the former is an introverted, rural England: an island within an island. The latter opens up to the sea, the great mix of Bath, the busiest city in the world. In one, a scattered distribution of independent estates: in the other, an ellipse with one focus in London, and the other in Bath. There, homes; here, cities that are all real, whereas those homes were all fictional: an asymmetry of the real and the imaginary -- of geography, and literature -- that will recur throughout the present research.
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"The victory of the mule, in the sixteenth century, is undeniable", writes Braudel in the Mediterranean; true, and with this modest and stubborn animal -- which is also, remember, Sancho Panza's best friend -- European narrative changes forever. Mules against ships, one could say (and against aristocratic steeds): the wonder of the open sea, with its extraordinary adventures, is replaced by a slow and regular progress; daily, tiresome, often banal. But such is precisely the secret of the modern novel (of "realism", if you wish): modest episodes, with a limited narrative value -- and yet, never without some kind of value. At the beginning of Guzman de Alfarache, in the first fifteen miles, we read of three inns, two encounters along the road (a mule driver, two priests), a case of mistaken identity, two interventions by the guards, and three swindles. In fifteen miles. |
