Chapter Seven - The Book-as-World-as-Book: Analog Novels and Geographical Information Systems

Summary

We want to be chained in history, but we also want to be unlinked via an escape character (in programming: a backslash, quote sign, comment tag, and so on) that allows us the freedom to be a link unto ourselves or to whom and what we choose.

—Alan Liu, Local Transcendence (2008, 328)

In relation to Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, I commented on the book's capacity as container technology and a space of containment where exteriority and interiority, and surface and depth, bleed into each other. I stated that Lila's and Lenu's voices were given material form between the covers of a book, which is as a container of their joint world of storytelling, while also being contained by it. The present chapter builds upon these insights, and applies them to the relation between the monumental and the global. The central paradox that informs this topic concerns the “representability” of the globe: under the influence of conjoined processes of digitalization and globalization, our world seems to be at once smaller and larger than ever. The world exceeds every possible representation in its vastness, the ultimate instance of Kant's mathematical sublime: “[t]hat … which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses” (2008 §25, 34). Trying to comprehend or imagine its size intuitively, we can only become aware of an idea of its totality, which we demand of ourselves but which we can never resolve without resorting to reason. “It is … as if the imagination included a sound barrier,” Fredric Jameson writes in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, “undetectable save in those moments in which the representational task or program suddenly collapses” (1992, 4). In these moments of collapse, we find that the world is un-representable as a totality: we can only list its parts in a seemingly infinite, yet always incomplete enumeration. There is no outside position from which we can form a satisfactory total representation of the world, because we take part in it; we are worldly, of this world, even when we observe it from space.

The same world, however, seems to have condensed. Until recently, the idea of traversing its surface implied entering uncharted territory. Now, travel takes place in a world that is comprehensively known and mapped. To the expanding middle classes of the Global North, globalization and mobility have gone hand in hand.