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Plotted: A Literary Atlas

Page 1

by Andrew DeGraff




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  Art / Popular

  Culture

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  ISBN: 978-1-936976-86-7

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  Design by Adam Grano

  Manufactured in the U.S.A. | DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Plotted

  A Literary Atlas

  By Andrew DeGraff

  For my favorite teacher, my mom.

  —AD

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  Plotted

  A Literary Atlas

  By Andrew DeGraff

  With essays by Daniel Harmon

  9.

  INTRODUCTION

  17.

  “The Voyage of Odysseus”

  From the

  Odyssey

  By Homer

  ca. 800

  bce

  21.

  “Elsinore”

  From

  The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

  By William Shakespeare

  1603

  33.

  “No Man Is an Island”

  From

  Robinson Crusoe

  Daniel Defoe

  1719

  41.

  “The Course of True Love”

  From

  Pride and Prejudice

  By Jane Austen

  1813

  Table of Contents

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  44.

  “Ebenezer Scrooge:

  Time Traveler”

  From

  A Christmas Carol

  By Charles Dickens

  1843

  51.

  “Up from Slavery”

  From

  Narrative of the Life of

  Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

  By Frederick Douglass

  1845

  57.

  “The Pequod

  and Its Quarry”

  From

  Moby Dick; or, The Whale

  By Herman Melville

  1851

  63.

  “Route Zero”

  From “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass”

  By Emily Dickinson

  ca. 1865

  67.

  “Phileas Fogg’s Incredibly

  Credible Circumnavigation”

  From

  Around the World in Eighty Days

  By Jules Verne

  1873

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  71.

  “Huckleberry Finn’s

  Mississippi River Journey”

  From

  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  By Mark Twain

  1884

  79.

  “An Education”

  From “A Report to an Academy”

  By Franz Kafka

  1917

  84.

  “Innite Intelligence”

  From “The Library of Babel”

  By Jorge Luis Borges

  1941

  91.

  “Converging Paths”

  From “The Lottery”

  By Shirley Jackson

  1948

  95.

  “Journey to Nowhere”

  From

  Invisible Man

  By Ralph Ellison

  1952

  101.

  “The Waiting Room”

  From

  Waiting for Godot

  By Samuel Beckett

  1953

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  105.

  “Flannery O’Connor’s

  Family Vacation”

  From “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

  By Flannery O’Connor

  1953

  109.

  “The Wrinkled

  Time Continuum”

  From

  A Wrinkle in Time

  By Madeleine L’Engle

  1962

  113.

  “The Warrens”

  From

  Watership Down

  By Richard Adams

  1972

  121.

  “Those Who Leave

  and Those Who Stay”

  From “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

  By Ursula K. Le Guin

  1973

  124.

  FURTHER READING

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  I

  t’shard to say where

  Plotted

  came from, exactly,but if I had to point to

  a single person, I think I’dhave to go with my mom. She’sa teacher —

  a really good one — and she’salways stressed the importance of context.

  “You need to understand the big picture in order to see what you still have to

  learn...” “You need to know howthings t together before you’llbe able to

  take them apart.” Context, in her view, is essential for understanding complex

  things. And I think I agree with her on that. ese maps vary pretty widely

  when it comes to what they show and howthey show it, but they all resulted

  from my desire to provide a spatial context for some of my favorite literary

  landscapes. I wanted to paint what I imagined (or rather, what great authors

  allowed me to imagine).

  I rst started doing these kinds of maps for movies, not books. I did maps

  for

  Star Wars

  ,

  Indiana Jones

  ,

  e Shining

  , and

  e Lord of the Rings

  . Most of

  the creative work in those cases was focused on providing an integrated experi

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  ence of the given landscape rather than deciding what the Overlook Hotel or

  Mordorlooked like. I wanted to return to those places, not revise them. But a

  somewhat unanticipated benet from those mapmaking exercises is that I was

  forced to expand upon what the movies provided. I needed to plot continu

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  ous journeys for characters who, on lm, only exist
in discrete episodes. e

  dots had to be connected, but before that could be done, the blank spaces had

  to be lled in. And when the maps were completed, I felt like the places had

  become a little bit more real.

  I hadn’tnecessarily planned on mapping books, though. In fact, I was

  thinking about taking a break from maps altogether when Daniel Harmon

  (this book’seditor and essayist) rst approached me about doing something

  mappy and bookish

  .

  As the son of a teacher, I’ve always been a pretty big

  reader, and my soundtrack of choice while painting is usually an audiobook

  rather than an album, so the possibility of tackling classic works that didn’t

  yet have a denitive visual representation was uniquely appealing. And that

  Introduction

  By Andrew DeGraff

  2015

  9.

  ended up being the rst restriction that we settled on: wedidn’twant to do

  books that had already been mapped. (So

  e Hobbit

  was out; as was

  e

  Chronicles of Narnia

  ; as was

  A Song of Ice and Fire

  .) We also wanted to avoid

  creating maps for books that already had a denitive visual representation — a

  movie or TVshow or even a cover that seemed to have settled what the book

  “looked like.” (So no

  Peter Pan

  ; no

  Rebecca

  ;

  no

  HarryPotter

  .) I wanted to start

  from scratch — scratch in this case being the stories themselves — as much

  as I possibly could.

  Because each of these maps requires a pretty intense amount of time and

  labor — both for the research and for the actual drafting and painting — we

  had to restrict our nal number of books and stories to the nineteen that

  you see here, which meant a lot of cuts to our initial list of fty works (an

  insane number, in retrospect). Maintaining diversity across genres, centuries,

  and authors was also very important to me, as was including my own personal

  favorites, regardless of their overall appeal. (I’mstill a little devastated that

  Dune

  didn’tmake the nal cut.) But with just nineteen works stretching from

  the ninth century BCE to , there aregoing to be a lot of gaps. Anyway,

  suce it to say that we have plenty of ideas for expansions and sequels.

  So that’sthe rough process by which weselected the books and stories

  that you see represented here. But that still leaves the question of why the

  chosen books were mapped the way they were. And the short answer is that

  I tried to let the books guide the maps. Daniel and I would have long con

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  versations about each map before I began my rst draft, but those conversa

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  tions were usually moreabout literature than they wereabout cartography or

  design. In some cases, as with

  Moby Dick

  and

  Hamlet

  ,

  there was no shortage

  of possible interpretations, and as a result we wanted to nd a way to try out

  something new. (

  Moby Dick

  is also one of the few works for which a fairly

  denitive map already exists — “e Voyage of the Pequod,” by artist Everett

  Henry.) In other cases, as with

  Around the World in Eighty Days

  and

  Watership

  Down

  , we had no grander idea than simply to plot the characters’ journeys

  — and that left simply the question of aesthetics. But for the remainder, the

  central question really was, “What is this book about?” I won’tpretend that

  we’ve answered those questions, but they were central to the design process.

  (ey were also half the fun of doing this book.) Which brings me back to the

  question of context.

  ere’sbeen a huge increase recently in infographic/data visualization

  work for a popular audience. ere have also been a number of great books

  10.

  about intelligent design (not that kind) and the history of maps. (Check out

  the “Further Reading”section at the back of the book for a quick rundown of

  standouts in the latter category.) For the maps in

  Plotted

  , I tried to operate in

  a kind of middle ground between infographic work and cartography.I tend

  to think of both as fairly two-dimensional; and without the added dimen

  -

  sion of depth (to say nothing of time), it’simpossible to provide that sense of

  “diving in.”

  However, before moving on I have to address the things that havebeen left

  out in the construction of these maps. And there was a lot. A two-hour movie

  of a -page novel leaves a lot of the book on the cutting-room oor. A nar

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  rative can ow in and out of multiple perspectives in the course of a novel; it

  can veer from reality to the realm of magic and back again in a paragraph, or

  it can jump a thousand years in a sentence. So, translating the  pages of

  Watership Down

  into six pages of maps is, for lack of a better word, impossible.

  But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.

  Perhaps the best way to explain this decit without excusing it is to say

  that, for each of these literary works, I attempted to map at least one aspect

  of the given book as completely as I could. In

  Watership Down

  , I mapped the

  physical movements of twenty-two rabbits and one black-headed gull. e

  characters’journeys (and their various resting places) became the basis for the

  map. And that makes sense for many of these books. e resulting maps may

  not oer enough information to understand the plot fully, but neither will

  reading a single chapter of

  Moby Dick

  explain the full majesty of that novel.

  But that one chapter does at least tell you something important. It doesn’tsay

  everything, but it certainly says something. Much as the skyline of New York

  creates a rough map of the bedrock that it rests upon, or in the way that a map

  of the London Tube can tell you where the population centers are, these maps

  provide a sense of contour — sometimes literal and sometimes metaphorical

  — for their literary inspirations. ey reveal the focal points of the plot, with

  -

  out delineating every single point contained within in the plot itself.

  at being said, this was always going to be a fairly subjective enterprise.

  My vision of the Pequod will not be everyone’s. But I did try to be as objec

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  tive — and historically accurate — as I could be. is means that Ellison’s

  New York of the s is built out of the city as it existed at that time. e

  Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building had just been completed,

  creating a new, taller midtown district. e bridges along the East River were

  completed in the early s, and many of the buildings downtown are based

  11.

  on real buildings of the time. e Liberty Paints factory,however, is a com

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&nbs
p; plete ction — a Frankenstein construction made up of various factories from

  that time and a few actual paint factories that I was able to nd. ere aren’t

  that many though, and most of the ones that were being photographed in the

  s had been built well prior to the Jazz Age. Wecan infer from the lack of

  photos that a paint factory job was not one that people frequently memorial

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  ized on the mantle above the replace. Wecan also infer that I basically made

  up that particular factory from scratch.

  What surprised me in my subjectively objective work was the amount

  of real locations, ships, buildings, and settings that appeared in these largely

  ctional publications. Jules Verne’stale of circumnavigation is lled with real

  railroads and mostly real ships. And whenever they were real, I did my best

  to nd them. All of the architecture that appears in

  Plotted

  is at best a good a

  pproximation of regional styles from the given time, and at worst a pretty

  good guess at the same. For less reality-based stories like “ose Who Walk

  Away from Omelas” and “Library of Babel”I was left with just the author’s

  words. But that’s not a bad place to be either.

  “e Library of Babel”does deserve some special mention here, as it is a bit

  of an outlier in another sense. Borges’sstory has no real characters (the narra

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  tor is just one librarian among many) and no real journey — and so the map

  lacks the usual character route — but the story does still move. Wego from

  an understanding of the single cell to an understanding of the surrounding

  cells, to a dawning consciousness of the universe that repeats endlessly around

  us. And that “us” reveals howcentral the reader is to the experience of that

  story.Because the reader is, in a way,the main character — which presents a

  unique problem: how to include the reader in the map.But the answer to that

  question is contained above. As a reader of the story and as the mapmaker, I’m

  already contained within the map.Or rather, just outside it. at perspective

 

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