Novel Mapping

Map from Franco Moretti's Atlas Of the European Novel, showing spatial interactions of the characters in Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

Somewhere on my long lifetime to-do list is the task of verifying a story told by an old painting teacher of mine; Robert Carroll, an American artist who'd relocated to Rome, was invited in as a visiting professor during my final year of study in Cleveland.  Once, in support of his advice to follow through on my intuitions, he recalled having read Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.  This strange and singular book, Poe's only completed novel, takes the form of a diary kept by the stowaway character of the title.  As Carroll read it, he became convinced that its frequent mentions of navigational coordinates, appearing dozens of times throughout, had an added significance beyond realist plausibility, though he couldn't say what that might be.  This nagged at him to a point where he felt he had to investigate; obtaining a large scale map, he plotted each location with a pin; moving through this task, he was stunned to see the outline of a seagull taking shape.  Was this Poe's intent?

It couldn't be accidental, thought Carroll, especially since there appears toward the end of the novel a horrific image of a gull devouring the flesh of a dead man.  Excited by his discovery, he shared it with a couple of English professors, whose reactions were basically, "hmmm, that's curious...", and that was that.  Carroll was discouraged by their apathy, and never pursued it much further.

Maybe Carroll was just unfortunate in his timing; though there's no telling what the literary scholar Franco Moretti--whose maps appear in the Denis Wood chapter we're reading this week--might've made of the image symbolism of this avian contour, he might on some level feel vindicated by learning of Carroll's strange discovery.  Known for his pioneering use of mapping, data visualization, and quantitative analysis in the study of European literature, Moretti has come under fire from more traditional peers who feel his methods (often wildly mischaracterized) treat novels as nothing more than data sets to plug into Excel spreadsheets.  For those who take the trouble to actually read him, one quickly finds that Moretti is extremely skilled in his application of an entire range of traditional literary tools, along with ones derived from mathematics and science.  Here's a link to some thoughtful assessments of his work (there are many others too out there), so you can begin to decide for yourself:

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/franco-morettis-distant-reading-a-symposium/