From efforts to map Odysseus’s journey to Borges’s commentary on map-making in On Exactitude in Science (where the only sufficient map is in fact as large as the territory it depicts), fictions and maps have long maintained a complicated, entwined relationship. While the right map can uniquely resonate with a literary text, this resonance exists amid an undeniable tension: a concern that the map might demystify or oversimplify a story, at worst imposing a single, reductive viewpoint on something that should be open and unbounded.
Exploring this tension, while also charting the ways that the relationship between maps and literature has changed through eras and genres, the Huntington’s new exhibit Mapping Fiction brings together literary maps from hundreds of years of literary history. Drawing from the Huntington’s archives of rare literary texts, the exhibition goes back to the early days of modern literature with texts like The Pilgrim’s Progress and Journey to the Center of the Earth (not Jules Verne’s version but rather a 1741 book written by Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg), continuing up to the contemporary era with mappings of Octavia Butler’s life and works and artist David Lilburn’s 2006 mapping of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
