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Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives

Indiana University Press

NARRATING SPACE AND PLACE

DAVID J. BODENHAMER

Over the past two decades, the humanities and social sciences especially have advanced a more complex and nuanced understanding of space. For nongeographers, this intellectual movement, often labeled the "spatial turn," has been largely defined by a greater awareness of place, manifested in specific sites where human action occurs. Subject matter once organized largely by periods of time, with names such as the Great Depression or the Age of Discovery, now embraces themes of region, diaspora, contact zones, and borders or boundaries. Interest in the material and cultural markers of space and place has reinforced this shift. As a result, our sense of space and place has become more complex and problematic, but in the process it has assumed a more interesting and active role in how we understand history and culture.

It is not the first time that attention to space and time has reshaped the way we approach social and cultural questions. A similar turn occurred from 1880 to 1920 when distance-collapsing innovations—the telephone, wireless telegraph, radio, cinema, automobiles, and airplanes, among others—challenged traditional understandings of how time and space intersected with the social world. It suddenly was possible to know events as they happened, and this experience of simultaneity refashioned people's sense of distance and direction. It also meant that individuals were no longer cut off from the flow of time; widely available film and photographic images made the past as accessible as the present, while new developments in science and the World Fairs that showcased them made the future seem more definite and real. New scientific theories, business practices, and cultural forms reinforced the shift: Einstein's theory of relativity and Freud's conception of psychoanalysis shaped consciousness directly; time-management studies, known as Taylorism, dominated manufacturing; and James Joyce and Marcel Proust explored how to link time and space in novels, while the Cubists challenged notions of spatial perspective and form that had long dominated art.

A continuous thread links the first spatial turn with the one we have experienced more recently, but it is likely that this second turn will have a more profound influence on the theory and practice of the humanities, in large measure because of the digital revolution that has accompanied and facilitated it. The early twentieth-century reworking of space and time had less effect on the study of heritage and culture than it did on the study of art and literature. The frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner and the emphasis on the American western history it spawned were exceptions, as was the decades-long work of the Annales school of historiography; both reflected an intentional focus on spatial questions. But the cataclysms of the mid-twentieth century, from world wars and revolutions to mass movements for equality, spurred historians to search for the roots of momentous events in ideas and politics and technological or social change, causes for which spatial markers were less pronounced. The consideration of space did not disappear, but it became marked by particularity, an emphasis on place, as scholars began to discern how the story of change differed from one location to another. This focus on the local reflected and reinforced a postmodernist unease with the grand narrative, which created a literature that increasingly became fragmented, with analyses existing at different geographical and temporal scales and few efforts made to link them. For many humanists, space itself became less geographical, as scholars found richer meaning in conceptual space—for instance, gendered space, racialized space, or the body as space—than in categories related to the physical environment, the traditional frame of definition for spatial terms.

Today, historians and other humanists are acutely aware of the social and political construction of space and its unique expression as place. Space is not simply the setting for historical action but is a significant product and determinant of change. It is not a passive setting but the medium for the development of culture: "space is not an empty dimension along which social groupings become structured," sociologist Anthony Giddens notes, "but has to be considered in terms of its involvement in the constitution of systems of interaction." All spaces contain embedded stories based on what has happened there. These stories are both individual and collective, and each of them link geography (space) and history (time). More important, they all reflect the values and cultural codes present in the various political and social arrangements that provide structure to society. In this sense, then, the meaning of space, especially as place or landscape, is always being constructed through the various contests that occur over power. There is nothing new in this development—the earliest maps reveal the power arrangements of past societies—but humanities scholarship increasingly reflects what may in fact be the greatest legacy of postmodernism, the acknowledgment that our understanding of the world itself is socially constructed.

At its core, the current spatial turn rejects the universal truths, grand narratives, and structural explanations that dominated the social sciences and the humanities during much of last century. Above all, it is about the particular and the local, without any supposition that one form of culture is better than another. Its claim is straightforward: to understand human society and culture we must understand how it developed in certain circumstances and in certain times and at certain places. From this knowledge, we can appreciate that the world is not flat but incredibly complicated and diverse. This view no longer seems new because humanists have embraced it eagerly; now, we all recognize the particularity of space, the importance of place. But for all the uses we make of this insight—and for all its explanatory power—the concepts of space and place employed by humanists frequently are metaphorical and not geographical. Far less often have we grappled with how the physical world has shaped us or how in turn we have shaped perceptions of our material environment.

New spatial technologies, especially geographic information systems (GIS), are aiding this rediscovery of physical space in the humanities. Within a GIS, users can discern relationships that make a complex world more immediately understandable by visually detecting spatial patterns that remain hidden in texts and tables. Maps have served this function for a long time, but GIS brings impressive computing power to this task. Its core strength is an ability to integrate, analyze, and make visual a vast array of data from different formats, all by virtue of their shared geography. This capability has attracted considerable interest from historians, archaeologists, linguists, students of material culture, and others who are interested in place, the dense coil of memory, artifact, and experience that exists in a particular space, as well as in the coincidence and movements of people, goods, and ideas that have occurred across time in spaces large and small. Recent years have witnessed a wide-ranging, if still limited, application of GIS to historical and cultural questions: Did the Dust Bowl of the 1920s and 1930s result from overfarming the land or was it primarily the consequence of larger-term environmental changes? What influence did the rapidly changing cityscape of London have on literature in Elizabethan England? What is the relationship between rulers and territory in the checkered political landscape of state formation in nineteenth-century Germany? How did spatial networks influence the administrative geography of medieval China? What spatial influences shaped the development of the transcontinental railroad network in the United States? Increasingly, scholars have turned to GIS to provide new perspective on these and other topics that previously have been studied outside of an explicitly spatial framework.

Despite this flurry of interest and activity, the humanities pose epistemological and ontological issues that challenge the technology in a number of ways, from the imprecision and uncertainty of humanities data to humanists' reliance on time (and time linked to space) as an organizing principle. Essentially, GIS and its related technologies currently allow users to determine a geometry of space; fuzzy data, conceptual space, and relative time pose often-insurmountable problems for these tools. In the context of the humanities, it will be necessary to replace this more limited quantitative representation of space with a view that emphasizes the intangible and socially constructed world and not simply the world that can be measured. It also will be essential to match technologies with the traditions of argument and narrative employed by humanists.

The goal of humanities scholarship is not to model or replicate the past but rather to pursue the fullest possible understanding of heritage and culture. Questions drive historical scholarship, not hypotheses, and the questions that matter most address causation: why matters more than whom, what, or when, even though these latter questions are neither trivial nor easy to answer. The research goal is not to eliminate explanations or to disprove the hypothesis but to open the inquiry through whatever means are available and by whatever evidence may be found. This sense of eclectic borrowing has long informed humanities scholarship and even finds strong advocates among some of the most well-known theorists in the humanities, hence the advice offered by Paul de Man to develop "a new kind of skill ... the capacity to use and feel at home in a whole series of different critical and theoretical codes and systems, as one would use a particular foreign language, without remaining rigidly locked into any one of them, but rather developing the capacity to translate those findings into different codes, systems, critical positions, as the case may require."

Humanists develop knowledge through the process of argument, but a well-presented argument often does not settle a question; it may complicate it or open new questions that previously were unimagined. Similarly, humanists are hard-pressed to identify a preferred method because each avenue of investigation yields different evidence and thus different insights. Their approach is recursive, not linear: the goal is not so much to eliminate answers as to admit new perspectives. These methods doubtless appear quixotic to nonhumanists because they do not lead to finality. But for humanists, the goal is not proof but meaning. The goal of scholarship is less to produce an authoritative or ultimate answer than to prompt new questions, develop new perspectives, and advance new arguments or interpretations.

Traditionally, humanities scholars have used narrative to construct the portrait that furthers this objective. Narrative encourages the interweaving of evidentiary threads and permits the scholar to qualify, highlight, or subdue any thread or set of them—to use emphasis, nuance, and other literary devices to achieve the complex construction of past or present worlds. An ancient device common to most cultures, narrative allows us to make sense of complexity, to find structure and meaning in the otherwise chaotic rush of events that occur in all times and places. Historical narratives, the foremost form among humanities disciplines, share much in common with fictional narratives, except for their claim to objectivity and their reference to evidence or works beyond the narrative itself. In each narrative form, historical or fictional, the story is told, not lived, with textual unity imposed by the storyteller, not by history or culture itself. And like their fictional counterparts, they require a sympathetic imagination that allows us "to see small and think big," as literary critic Adam Gopnik terms it, as well as to disassemble the big nouns into the small acts that make them up.

But what is a narrative? It is not merely a sequence of events arranged chronologically. A list of this sort is a chronicle, which we recognize easily but have difficulty comprehending. Our nature requires that we seek meaning in events; we search for connections among events that will lead to something we can use to solve a problem, to understand an enigma, or simply to frame what we know. The story, a plot, serves as this framing device; it allows us to evaluate the relative significance of events and to relate them to whatever concerns us. It is the plot that marks the shift from chronicle to narrative: its classical form, as Aristotle noted, "has beginning, middle, and end"—and the "end is everywhere the chief thing" because it provides unity and meaning, thereby allowing us to judge an action by its results.

The Western style of narrative emerged over five thousand years ago from an oral tradition and maintained many of its characteristics for centuries. Its classic expression was the epic, a category that contains a number of forms—sacred myths, legends, and folktales, among them—but its central purpose was to recreate the traditional story. The narrator's obligation was not to fact or entertainment, but to the mythos itself (mythos is the ancient Greek word for the story or plot). "Knowing, and thus being able to tell," film theorist Edward Branigan reminds us, "is a fundamental property of narration." Over time, this narrative form evolved in two antithetical directions—the empirical and the fictional, the first marked by an emphasis on accurate measurement in time and space and on causality and the second by its allegiance to an ideal, truth, or beauty, instead of fact. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a new synthesis had emerged in the novel, which sought to reconcile these two threads. Since then, the novel has become the dominant form of literature and has had a powerful influence on the way humanists use narrative to conceptualize a story, illustrate reality, provide perspective, and develop meaning. It also has shaped the way we represent space.

From the time of Kant, Western society has regarded time and space as the two fundamental categories that structure human experience. Narrative theory privileges the former by emphasizing the sequence of events—"Narrative gives us what may be called the shape of time"—and all narratives imply a world of spatial extension. Some theorists, however, recognize an explicit linkage of time and space, such as is reflected in Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope (time space) as the "intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships," with time supplying the fourth dimension of space. In this view, narrative is the "representation of movement within the coordinates of space and time," with events marked by the intersection of horizontal and vertical axes in a dynamic interplay between surface and depth.

Narrative space, however, is not a simple construct, a mere representation of the world (fictional or real) that acts as a container for events; instead, it encompasses several types of spaces, all of which have implications for spatial narratives. It is the setting or the physically existing environment in which actions occur and through which people move, but even this concept involves more than we might assume intuitively. This spatial setting, or spatial world, of the narrative unfolds temporally as readers progress through the text: it includes a spatial frame, the shifting scene of the action; the story space, the composite of all the spatial frames and other locations mentioned in the text; the story world, the story space as constructed the reader's knowledge of and experience with the real world; and the narrative universe, the world presented as actual by the text plus all of the counterfactual worlds encompassed in the characters beliefs, ideas, fears, or speculations. This spatial world, the scene of the story, is fundamental to what happens in it, as the story's actions are always consistent with its setting.

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Excerpted from Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives by David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, Trevor M. Harris. Copyright © 2015 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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