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Plotted: A Literary Atlas
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Art / Popular
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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.
“Innite 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
-
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 benet 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 denitive 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 denitive 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,
suce 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
denitive 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 decit 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 oer 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
-
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
-
&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
-
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
-
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