333-

Geography’s literature
Marc Brosseau
Department of Geography, University of Ottawa, PO Box 450 STN A, Ottawa,
Ontario K1 N 6N5, Canada

Among the great variety of written documents that geographers use or reflect on, literature
has gained considerable attention in the last 20 years. This interest in literature was first
promoted in a bid to open geography to new fields and break up the monopoly of
traditional sources. The rationale for resorting to literature has varied with time and
theoretical frameworks. Geographers have considered the ’documentary’ value of literary
sources, sought to restore geography within the ’humanities’, examined landscape
perception or evaluated the didactic possibilities of literature. Various currents of the
discipline have turned to literature in order to explore its relevance to different points of
view: regionalists in search of more vivid description of place; humanists seeking evocative
transcriptions of spatial experience; radicals concerned with social justice; others trying to
establish parallels between the history of geographical and literary ideas; or more
discursively-oriented researchers addressing the problems of representation. Nevertheless,
the origins of the actual emergence of this field in geography reveals its originality within
the human and social sciences.
Many social and human sciences - certainly in France anyway - started to consider
literature with greater scrutiny around the 1950s and 1960s in the wake of what has been
referred to as the structural revolution. The emergence of structuralism and the parallel
growth of social sciences have contributed to the intensification of the focus on literature.
Putting language at the very core of these sciences - with linguistics as the ’guiding light’ -
structuralism has created an intellectual landscape favouring, as never before, inter-
disciplinary studies. Linguistics, semiotics, but also anthropology (which initiated the
movement), psychoanalysis, philosophy and sociology, and others, followed suit. Within
the emergence of this ’new paradigm’, considerations on discourse, textuality or other
semiotic systems became more frequent, often with a particular focus on literary
productions. It is worth noting that within geography - which was rather slow or even
reluctant to follow in this continental or French intellectual trend up until the mid-1970s
(Johnston, 1983; Dosse, 1991-92) - it is a humanistic Anglo-Saxon geography which has
promoted the use of literary sources. Therefore, the actual ’rise’ of ’literary geography’, as
it is sometimes labelled, did not initially occur within the scope of research on discursive,
semantic or symbolic structures - with the corollary rejection of the subject and/or history
334

-
but within a humanistic project designed to restore ’man’, meaning and values in
geography.

I A new object for geography

The geographer’s interest in literature remained rather marginal until the 1970s when
humanistic geography called for such an orientation. Some have traced the origin of this
interest back to the publication of R. Mill’s guide to geographical books in 1910 (Salter
and Lloyd, 1976; Pocock, 1988). Herbertson and Keating have also shown an early
interest in poetry and travel or fictional literature for the study of place (Herbertson, 1902;
Keating, 1902; see Livingstone, 1992: 282). We could also trace these origins in Vidal de
La Blache’s (1904) short article on the geography of the Odyssey, or even earlier, in
Humboldt’s Cosmos ( 1847), which contains interesting insight on literature and painting.
However, neither Vidal nor Humboldt clearly advocated the use of literary source as a field
of investigation for geography. Wright made a clearer case for the relevance of such sources
in two short articles (1924a; 1924b) and in his ’plea for the history of geography’ (Wright,
1926).
The few articles published before the 1970s were examining the relevance of regional
novels as complements to regional geography (Darby, 1948; Gilbert, 1960). In a sense,
they were working within the scope of historical geography to which they added a literary
point of view. Already in 1948, Darby, conscious of the limitation of any ’attempt to build
up regional pictures from disjointed quotations’, questioned the legitimacy of using literary
sources for serious geographical research, wondering if this was not simply an ’intellectual
exercise’ (Darby, 1948: 430-32). This reluctance might explain, as Salter and Lloyd
(1977) suggest, why so few geographers have focused on literature. Literary sources were
not rejected but simply ignored, as they were considered unfit to serve as solid scientific
data. French geographers of the regional school have been just as ’cautious’ with regards to
literary sources (Chevalier, 1993). The 1960s and the new epistemological vigilance and
thirst for scientificity did not favour this type of orientation because of its presumed
subjectivism.
At the beginning of the 1970s, humanistic geography and radical geography emerged as
critical reactions to the new quantitative orthodoxy (Claval, 1984: Chap. 5; Livingstone,
1992: Chap. 9). Humanistic geographers hoped to bring people and human agency back
to the core of research from which they had been somewhat evicted and replaced by
databanks. Literature would soon be associated with this rehabilitation of subjectivity. It
was seen as a valuable source for examining more subjectively the sense of place and could

provide accounts of personal appreciation and experience of landscape. Radical contribu-

tions would come later, mainly as a critique of humanistic approaches to literature. Since
then, articles, books or collective efforts have been published every year.
In France, the trend has never been as important. Nevertheless, from the 1920s
onwards, there was a ’giographie litteraire’ stricto sensu, which sought to use geography as an
explanatory factor of the content of various literary works (for example, Dupouy, 1923;
1942; for a general overview, see Chevalier, 1993: 7-11). Closer to the current interest in
literature, one could consider Dardel (1952) as one of the first to call clearly upon the
poets and writers to help find a more vivid expression of his notion of géographicité.
However, the book did not receive much attention from French geographers until much
later (Raffestin, 1987; Besse, 1988; 1990). Juillard (1969) also provided a reading of
 335

France’s regional spatial organization according to Stendhal. The works of Fr6mont

(1976) associated literature to the study of espace vécu from the outset. Maintaining, as did
others before and after him, that regional geography is also an art (for example, Wright,
1924a; 1947; Meining, 1983; Lewis, 1985), Fr6mont encouraged geographers to meditate
on literature in order to open up the geographical knowledge of space and place to new
insights. This research would find, in literature, ways to counter the ’monotonous and
tedious’ aspects of school geography. Frémont later provided a more specific analysis of
the espace vicu of Flaubert’s characters (Fr6mont, 1981). Similarly, scholars like Rimbert
(1973) use literary sources (poems and novels alike) to grasp the change in attitudes
towards the city, as does Bailly (1977) to understand the perception of the urban
environment in the nineteenth century. Although it has not received the same attention as
it has in anglophone geography, research on literature has gained importance in franco-
phone geography.
The main objective of this article is not simply to provide an updated ’literature and
geography’ review to be added to the already long list of similar undertakings (for example,
Salter and Lloyd, 1977; Silk, 1984; Pocock, 1988; Lafaille, 1989; Noble and Dhussa,
1990) nor to legitimize such an effort by also taking into account the works of French-
speaking geographers. My aim is to propose a critical and comprehensive assessment of
how literature was integrated into the broader intellectual agenda of geographers. It seems
important, at this stage, to examine what conceptions of literature motivated geography’s
use of such sources. Therefore I will organize this discussion according to the type of

relationship that was developed between geography and literature. This critical review
does not seek to confine the different contributions into fixed categories - many of them
overlap - but to shed some light on how the relationship between the two was
conceptualized, if indeed it was. Let it also be clear, from the outset, that I will concentrate
my discussion on geographical research on fiction and more precisely on the novel, as most
geographers have focused on this type of literature.

II Literature: a complement to regional geography

Human and social scientists have consulted literary sources for information on various
places and periods of the past. Travel literature has provided valuable first-hand accounts
of foreign and often remote regions of the world. This type of investigation was sometimes
done using more fictional literature when first-hand accounts were not available. The
’pioneer’ work of Darby (1948) and Gilbert (1960), for instance, would fall into that
category when they seek to establish the documentary value of the English regional novel
within a regional geography. In this respect, the question was to evaluate the author’s
capacity to reproduce objectively (or depict) places, regions, landscapes and human-
nature relationships. These novels mostly help geographers to grasp the personality of a
region by providing ‘... a synthesis, a &dquo;living picture of the unity of people and place&dquo;
which often eludes geographical writing’ (Gilbert, 1960: 168; see also 1972). Watson’s
effort to grasp ’Canadian regionalism in life and letters’ shares a similar concern (Watson,
1965; see also Gibson, 1984). Although these studies first dealt with rural landscapes
(physical, social and sometimes economic dimensions), this tradition is being continued
through the analysis of the personality of cities (Jay, 1974; McCleery and McCleery,
1981). In France, this type of research has recently received much attention from
Chevalier (1993). The author reviews a considerable number of French novels (more than
 336

250 authors) according to different general categories - rural, urban and ’labour’ novels,
’
and travel literature - in order to appreciate their documentary value. He strongly favours
realist nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century works, in his effort to identify
’reliable’ sources of information.
Salter and Uoyd (1977) have referred to this type of research as the analysis of the
’literal meaning of landscape’. Although they recognize that there cannot be a strict
correspondence between the written and the actual landscape, they generally agree that the
description of the different genres de vie (human-nature relationship, regional economy,
etc.) is reliable and therefore worth quoting. To ascertain this one needs to verify if the
author has really lived in the location - or, as Geertz (1988) would put it, if the author has
’been there’. The precision of the description and the rootedness that stems from it will
depend on the author’s actual knowledge. At a very basic critical level, it is intriguing to
notice that while we may doubt the referential accuracy of the various literary places or
landscapes (where, as it may seem, the author’s right to be subjective or inaccurate is
recognized), one takes his or her vision of the various genres de vie or construction of the
personality of place for granted. It seems as though the extension of fiction is limited to the
visual aspects of the referred reality (physical elements, topography, place names, etc.)
whereas the interpretation of the relationship between these elements is considered to be
reliable.
There is another type of this so-called ’literal reading’, which does not necessarily seek to
establish the accuracy of the description but rather considers the novel as an account of
’real’ people who are being portrayed in a fictional manner. In this case, the geographer
must verify if the author has really been part of the social milieu that is being portrayed in
order to assess the representativeness of the work (for example, Whittington, 1974). In this
sense novelists are seen as some kind of spokesperson. They immerse us in the various

attitudes, values and conflicts shared by the people of a particular region in relation to their
environment. In this case, the presumed realism becomes a collective subjective realism
that the novel is able to grasp and describe adequately. This raises not only the problem of
verisimilitude but also that of the representativeness which any fictional work may attain or
claim to attain. In order to overcome this problem of control, in terms of accuracy,
reliability or representativeness, there are those who engaged in a comparative analysis of
the works of many authors depicting the same place at a particular time (for example,
Lloyd, 1981). It is believed that such a comparison enables one to ensure the truthfulness
of these collective images: ’the more, the truer’. Truth becomes objective inasmuch as it is
the product of an intersubjective consensus.
The realism problem - and that of its control - is not exactly the same whether the
novel’s setting is contemporary or remote in time and, in this case, the novel may be the
only available source. The idea of ’control’ may be viewed from two angles. On the one
hand, it is a matter of assessing the documentary qualities of the novel, to compare the
’content’ of the description with its referent in the ’outside’ world. This has been referred
to as ’facts in fiction’ (Aitken, 1977, for example). It is precisely in this sense that Darby
(1948) argues that Thomas Hardy manipulates some topographical details for the benefit
of his storyline, that he replaces the place-names of actual localities under fictional names
but that he remains accurate when it comes to the description of the human and natural
landscapes in their general structure. On the other hand, control may be achieved, not by
comparing the text and its presumed referent, but by comparing different texts. In the first
case it seems quite clear that one already knows what to look for, because one has a

preconceived idea of what should be found in the novel and, hence, that it is possible to
 337

confront the description with the ’real’ facts. We are then asking the novel to ’stick to facts’
regardless of the other aspects of its content. We are denying the potential interest of
fiction or of the fictitious treatment of geographical realities within an exercise that deals
with fiction. We are using another source in search of ’new’ insight but, in the end, we are
asking it to provide us with traditional types of information. It is legitimate to wonder why
one would resort to novels when more ’reliable’ sources are available, or when geographers
can do their own fieldwork. The interest of such an exercise lies within the scope of literary

history: what were the degrees of realism and to what extent were novelists accurate with
regards to description of geographical realities?
In the second type of control we are looking for information that is no longer available
because of the outcome of history and, in this case, comparison is legitimate and necessary.
The geographer then becomes an historian in an attempt to reconstitute the image of a city
or a region through the critical comparative analysis of all available literary sources.
However, it is not very common for this type of historical geography to draw on novels.
The main concern is often limited to determining whether or not novelists were good
geographers, in other words, whether or not they ’stick’ to the kind of facts one expects to
find in a geography textbook. Thus it appears that there is a will to transform fictional
literature into a reservoir of positive geographical data.
In fact, the real appreciation of literature lies in a slightly more restrictive field related to
the qualities of writing, the power of literary language to evoke landscape, people and
places, qualities that geography can gain from once the work has been ’purged’ of
parasitical elements: ’Literature evidence is clearly relevant to geography, but it should be
handled with care. The idiosyncrasies of novelists and the nature, quality and reliability of
their fact, fiction, and symbol need to be considered’ (Sandberg and Marsh, 1988:
266-67). It follows from this, almost naturally, that most geographical research on
literature deals with examples taken from the nineteenth-century realist novel tradition.
This clear preference is justified, on the one hand, by the presumed or self-proclaimed
referential finality of these novels and, on the other hand, by the ’easier’ control of the
aspects considered too subjective or fictitious. In the end, the real value of literary sources
for this type of analysis lies in the irreplaceable supplément d’âme that literature is believed
to offer (Chevalier, 1993: 64). It is precisely in this perspective that most humanistic work
has evolved.
’

III Literature: a transcription of the experience of place ,;.

Humanistic geography once defined its main scope in terms of ’sense of place’. Seeking to
counterbalance the spatial analysis of quantitative geography, humanistic geographers
have promoted research on what makes the originality of place, on the strong subjective
meanings that experience gives to place. This change of scope was captured synthetically
by the movement from space to place (Tuan, 1974; Buttimer and Seamon, 1980). Values,
representations, intentions, subjectivity, identity, rootedness, experience, perception, all
these themes were brought forth to make the human perspective the centre of attention
(Ley and Samuels, 1978). In France it was mainly with regard to the notion of espace vécu
that these concerns were first addressed (Fr6mont, 1976; Berdoulay, 1989; Bailly and
Scariati, 1990). In this promotion of a ’subject-centred’ geography seeking to break up the
monopoly of a conception of the human agent limited to instrumental rationality, many
have turned to literature. It would be impossible and somewhat redundant to provide a
338

complete review of the great variety of contributions, since it has already been done
(Pocock, 1988; Noble and Dhussa, 1990). I will insist on what I believe are the central
questions and the main theoretical underpinnings of these studies.
Many scholars, who seek evocative accounts of the subjective experience of place, are
preoccupied with the cultural or moral values attached to them and are searching for the
various types of spatial representation. In the novel they find numerous examples to
illustrate their position on the importance of the more intangible aspects of the experience
of place:
La littirature et les arts sont 6galement tres utiles au giographe humaniste comme sources d’informations et pour
mieux saisir le diveloppement ou ]’apparition de notre sensibilite a 1’6gard du milieu; en outre, ils nous aident à
poser ou a confirmer nos hypotheses de recherche (Pocock, 1984: 140).

At a basic level, the legitimacy of such a relationship to literature is based on a conception

of literature as the transcription of a concrete experience: ‘The purpose of literature is to
present concrete experience (including the kind we have everyday) and in so doing, gives
us an experience of the concrete’ (Tuan, 1978: 195). Often, this concrete experience is
considered to be based mainly on perception: ‘... the main information that most of the
works provide is perceptual’ (Simpson-Housley and Paul, 1984: 64). ‘Literature repre-
sents a source of geographical data and perceptions’ (Noble and Dhussa, 1990: 49). Thus
we can better understand why nineteenth-century realist literature is, once again, the main

body of work. Moreover, this perceptual activity is also often limited to vision:
The benefit firom the examples we have been moving through is utterly simple: It is the benefit of seeing. Our
concern is with sight. In fact, the whole process of education is fundamentally one of sight - sight leading, it is hoped
to insight. [...] Literature is an absorbing instrument for developing a critical sense of seeing (Salter and Lloyd,
1977: 28).

Seeking to understand how the experience of place is internalized, humanistic geographers

turn to the novel inasmuch as it seems to constitute the ideal opportunity for a perfect
meeting of the outside world and human subjectivity.
Although the novel’s subjective dimension may be positively looked upon because it
allows one to reach the deep value attached to the environment, most of these studies share
a realist preconception that is often overshadowed. Claiming not to be looking for positive
information of any particular place (not making a naive ’literal reading’), those who
assimilate literature as the transcription of perception only shift the realist preconception
to another ground. Although we admit that it may be difficult, or naive, to look for positive
and reliable information in literature, we agree to assert that the novel - because it evokes
the internalized experience of place so eloquently - enables us to develop or confirm theses
on spatial identity, rootedness or sense of place (for example, Murton, 1983). Thus
realism simply shifts from the representation of the outside world, as was the case in ’literal
reading’, to the interpretation of its subjective evaluation. Nevertheless, we remain within a
generally unexamined mimetic conception of literature: we go from viewing literature as
the reflection of reality to considering it as the reflection of the soul contemplating or
experiencing this same reality. This is somewhat compatible with some versions of the
humanistic agenda that do not so much seek to analyse the characteristics of place as to
understand the experience of place: ’These two approaches are complementary, and not
mutually exclusive, because they deal with the objective and subjective perception of the
same reality, as it is’ (Olwig, 1981: 48).
This realism may be based on an ’obsolete romanticism’ (Lafaille, 1989). This rather
confused relation to literature may be attributed to the near total absence of theoretical or
 339

aesthetical considerations on the literary text, how it functions, and produces or subverts
meaning. For many humanistic geographers, literature represents this mystical or even
magical realm where the most concrete aspects of the outside world and the human
imagination and subjectivity are blended in perfect harmony. As Lafaille (1989: 119-20)
points out:
Paradoxalement done, la litt6rature serait a la fois un outil pour une meilleure saisie de la realite objective et un
moyen efficace pour comprendre les tr6fonds de l’ime. [...] la littirature contribue, d’une part, a r6g6n6rer notre
connaissance des qualit6s objectives des paysages et, d’autre part, a aniner notre compr6hension des experiences
subjectives li6es a ces memes paysages. Somme toute, la force de la litt6rature serait de r6unir 1’objectivite et la
subjectivite deux versants qui se compl~tent alors plus qu’ils ne s’affrontent.
From this limited viewpoint, one should try to locate and isolate the particularly evocative
excerpts, glue them back together and then interpret their deep meanings. This has led to
what Gregory (1981) has correctly identified as a ’casual ransacking’ or, in the words of
Thrift (1978), ’stamp collecting’. Consequently, almost all work on the text as such is left
out, as if considered the exclusive concern of literary critics or theorists. In a sense,
geographers seek, in the novel, what they could find elsewhere and clearly refuse to reflect
on the text as such. In the end, geographers read the apparent content of any particular
work guided by a number of themes to test geographical theses.
It is ironic that such a relationship to literature, which seeks to criticize the orthodoxies
of ’normal’ science - and to expose its deficiencies - is built on relative absence of
reflection on the differences between science and literature, of aesthetical considerations -
even general - on what makes literature a forum where established or rational discourse
can be contested. It is a lot simpler to mystify literature through ’obsolete romanticism’

(Lafaille, 1989) and then legitimize the fact that we may resort to it. But if this conception
of literature is in fact romantic, it only retains some aspects thereof: its overestimation of
the author’s genius and the idea of fusing contradictions (synthetism) especially. However,
it fails to recognize the other fundamental dimensions of the romantic aesthetic theory,
such as the radical criticism of art as imitation, the intransitivity and autonomous nature of
any work of art, that very clearly opposes any kind of instrumental recuperation (Todorov,
1977; Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1978; Schaeffer, 1992). There seems to be a great
reluctance to reflect on the discursive dimension of literature, or on the text for that
matter. This reluctance leads to a ’transparent’ conception of language that prevents one
from grasping what is either evocative, creative or destabilizing in the novel. In the final
analysis, creativity is only based on the writer’s greater imagination and sensitivity and not
on their different relationship to language and its polymorphic resources. Some have
referred to this as the author’s myth: ’Our standard approach has been: the author is
knowledgeable, the author is skilled, the author is talented, and, therefore, the literary
creation is reliable evidence’ (Osborne, 1988: 267).
Yet this sensitivity and this experience are not readily available in their pure immediacy
in the novel. Is there not a difference between words and things, between our perceptions
and what we can say or write about them? It is precisely the potential mediation of
language and its resistance that are overshadowed. Referring to Merleau-Ponty’s phenom-
enology, for example, where the body l ’corps proprej - the primary medium of concrete
experience - works as a ’prereflective conscience’ that science is unable to grasp, Seamon
(1981) believes accounts of such an experience can be found in literature. But the
assumption that the experience of place can be both directly and transparently recon-
stituted by the novel is somewhat problematic. Body and language are indeed ’co-
fondateurs de l’expérience’ for Merleau-Ponty: the experience of a phenomenon is not
340

fundamentally different from what one can say about it (Merleau-Ponty, 1945). In this
respect, the scope of phenomenology lies in the attempt to describe the experience of a
phenomenon before it is reorganized through rational discourse. Nevertheless, one may
wonder if experience is still accounted for in its full immediacy once language has
intervened (Descombes, 1979). What seems to be postulated here is that, since the novel
does not use the categories, concepts and logic of scientific discourse, it gives landscape’s
spectacle - and the impressions of the soul before it - in their pure presence. Again, even if
we were to agree that the body (the combination of sensations) and language (speech) both
come into play equally in experience, it is difficult to assume that we can find this
experience in its raw state in literature. Literature is not this experience, it is at best, a
discourse on this experience (which is therefore secondary) and which is also mediated by
writing and literary conventions. The language through which people represent their own
experience while they are living it through their body and language is quite different from
the language any novel uses even when it seeks to relate such an experience. Moreover,
upon studying Merleau-Ponty’s subsequent research on literature, one will see that he is
very sensitive to the indirect nature of the representation of experience. One will find the
same resolute conviction that ‘... the work of art teaches us to see and ultimately gives us

something to think about as no analytical work can; because when we analyze an object, we
find only what we have put into it’. Literature is a ’... conquering language which
introduces us to unfamiliar perspectives instead of confirming us in our own’. However,
for Merleau-Ponty, it is a ’... slippery hold on experience that literature gives us’
(Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 77-78; see also Charron, 1972).
This general understanding of poetic language can be traced back to the ’origins’ of
humanism in modern geography that some have identified in Dardel’s book L’homme et la
terre (1952). This idea of immediate presence and transparent language is very clear in his
writings on Vidal de La Blache:
Presence, presence insistante, presque obs6dante, sous le jeu altemé du sombre et du clair, le langage du g6ographe
sans effort devient celui du po~te. Langage direct, transparent qui ’parle’ sans peine a l’imagination, bien mieux sans
doute que le discours ’objectif du savant, parce qu’il transcrit fid6lement I&dquo;6criture’ trac6e sur le sol (Dardel, 1952:
3).
This is why Dardel sought to draw from different languages and discursive practices, while
clearly preferring the evocative powers of ’natural’ or ’noncodified’ language. This raises
the very touchy philosophical question: ’Is there a method (which one?) that enables one to
represent, through discourse, what comes before any discourse?’ (Besse, 1988: 44, my
translation). This is the problem that Merleau-Ponty was addressing and that philosophy
and semiology radically criticized after the 1960s. However, one must acknowledge that
Dardel was searching for the language that would account for this primary experience and
thought he had found some manifestations of it in poetry or in the best of Vidal de la
Blache’s work. Thus Dardel recognized the problematic nature of this venture, unlike
many contemporary humanistic geographers, who have taken the ’transparency’ of poetic
or natural language for granted.
The works of Porteous, recently assembled in a book (Porteous, 1990), offer a
perspective that may be more compatible with the humanistic project and what it looks for
in literature. Reading the imaginary landscape in the novels of Malcolm Lowry - hence
breaking the rule of interpreting harmonious human-nature relationships of nineteenth-
century literature - Porteous draws our attention to the symbolic mode through which a
particular relationship to place is being expressed (see also Costantino, 1990). Guided by
humanistic notions of sense of place borrowed from Relph or Tuan, Porteous uses the
 341

’symbol’ as a way to decipher positive or negative values attached to various places, thus
avoiding some of the most obvious traps of an unexamined realist reading (may it be
objective or subjective). In a way, symbols become mediators through which the human
relation to place, or subject-object interface, can be interpreted (see also Lutwack, 1984).
Similarly, Levy (1989) uses the Jungian archetype to interpret the deep symbolism of
Herman Hesse’s literary landscapes.
The writings of Levy (1989) constitute a clear exception in the humanistic geography
dealing with literature. His work provides argued reflections on the limits of scientific
discursivity for the establishment of an ontologically grounded humanistic geography.
Levy is sensitive to the tension between geography and literature, between the language of
science and that of poetry. Experience - and particularly ’limit experiences’ - that are
indirectly communicated in the language of one cannot be translated in the language of the
other. His scope is resolutely existential and biographical. He seeks to explain the content
of the works in relation to the life of their author while trying to avoid narrow-minded,
psychogeographical determinism. Although I do not subscribe to Levy’s approach or
convictions, I believe his position is very coherent and developed with nuance. In order to
be consistent with such a resolutely humanistic and existential perspective, he could not
separate Hesse’s works from his life. In a way, it is just as much Hesse’s existential space as
the space in his works that Levy tries to analyse and read in a parallel manner. His
relationship to Hesse’s works, which is more dialogic than analytical, makes it possible for
him to be sensitive to its aesthetical dimensions and thus avoid the realist readings which
most have favoured up to now - and which he has quite appropriately criticized. However,
I cannot help but question his claim to establish a dialogue with the author’s consciousness
(who is considered as nothing short of a ’genius’) and the consciousness of his interpreter
who must, quite silently, consider himself a ’genius’ too in order to make sense of the
dialogue. It is precisely this type of 61itism that some have criticized in many humanistic
interpretations of literature. Also, Levy’s dismissal of any type of reference to semiotics or
narratology, fearing theoretical contagion, is too hasty, and leads him, as a last resort, to
celebrate the author’s genius in order to legitimize geography’s use of literature (see also
Prioul, 1986). Yet Ricoeur (1985), for example, has demonstrated the relevance of
narratology and, even, of structural analysis, for the hermeneutical understanding of the
configuration of time in the narrative. This type of ’rapprochement’ is also advocated in
geography by De Pater (1984).
This argument does not intend to dismiss any attempt to reflect on the complex
relationship among author, world and text. For example, Steiner (1988; 1989) addresses
the delicate problem of the ’broken contract’ between the word and the world, and the
related dethronement of the author as the guarantor of this union. This situation - the
Afterword as he calls it - may seem to constitute the basis for rejecting any effort to draw
parallels between author and world through the word for being naive and obsolete.
However, elaborate mediations notwithstanding, there is still room for fertile reflections in
this direction. In his efforts to re-examine the humanistic search for meanings, Steiner
highlights the importance of the challenge and the acuteness of the problem. It is this
particular sense of the problem that was often overshadowed by many humanistic
geographers’ assumption that these relations were stable, transparent or unmediated.
Daniels and Rycroft have certainly made a significant contribution in their way of
addressing this problem. They show how greater attention to the complex interplay of
different genres and texts, and the author’s particular relationships with maps, are
342

combined in the representation of the modem city in the Nottingham novels of Sillitoe
(Daniels and Rycroft, 1993).
I believe that a sociological perspective can help us understand the humanistic
geographers’ reluctance to position geography’s relationship to literature at the language,
discourse or writing level. This general absence of reflection might very well not be a
reluctance at all but the expression of another type of polemical attitude. In a bid to
recentre geography’s focus on the human perspective, humanistic geographers had to
contend with two schools of thought: on the one hand a quantitative geography whereby
individuals were reduced to quantifiable characteristics and, on the other, a more radical
geography where the individuals were often considered as the product of a petit-bourgeoise
ideological illusion. The situation is obviously not as simple as this rather simplistic
disciplinary ’triangle’ seems to imply. At any rate, the general response to this tension
might have been an ’excessive celebration of man’ (Ley, 1981: 252):
in general it seems as if the literature is sometimes guilty of overstatement. In retrieving man from virtual oblivion in
positivist science, humanists have tended to celebrate the restoration perhaps too much. As a result values,
meanings, consciousness, creativity, and reflections may well have been overstated, while context, constraint, and
social stratification have been underdeveloped.

It isprecisely the weight of the social context on literature that more radical works have
sought to examine, and that more humanistically inclined geographers have tackled in
various fields of social research throughout the 1980s (Ley, 1989). However, I would like
to emphasize not so much the underdevelopment of the sociopolitical context but, rather,
the absence of aesthetical, formal or linguistic considerations. It is true that literary
criticism and linguistics, which could have been most insightful in reflecting on these
questions, were in full structuralist turmoil in the 1960s and 1970s - and we know how
much they promoted the idea of the ’death of man’. Literally ’comered’, humanists have
been ’forced’ to overestimate the author’s great talent and sensitivity in transmitting his or
her immediate spatial experience, and thus to overlook the characteristics of the material
they were considering which would have exposed them to the very pitfalls they were trying
to avoid or sometimes contradict. This particular type of disciplinary or ideological tension
is by no means exclusive to geography and must not be viewed as a quick disqualification:
Boas and Mead, for example, were ’forced’, in order to counter the biological determinism
(and fascism) of the ’eugenics’ movement, to radicalize their support for cultural
determinism (Freeman, 1983). In this particular case, if I consider the absence of
reflection to be a form of reluctance, it is because humanistic accounts of literature, with
very few exceptions, have not given any voice to the relevant theoretical discussions of the
last 20 years. The critique of phenomenology, in philosophy as elsewhere, and the
numerous semiotic theories have addressed similar questions at length. To assert such a

conception of literature, without critical debate, in an intellectual context where literature

was the object of so many discussions is, to say the least, problematic.

IV Literature: a critique of reality and hegemonic ideology

In the charge against quantitative geography, a radical or critical current arose to denounce
the unexamined support for a conservative status quo that statistical analysis was thought
to be producing (see Peet, 1977; Johnston, 1983; De Koninck, 1984; Gregory, 1986).
Geography, it was suggested, must not limit its activity to the description and explanation
of society in space but must also produce a theoretical critique of today’s conjuncture. It
 343

must not be used to plan tomorrow’s society by simply forecasting according to yesterday’s
and today’s general trends, but to orient and steer its evolution towards a greater social
justice. Although less abundant, radical geographical research has also seen in literature a
means of showing what reality could or should be or, more appropriately, of offering a
critical interpretation thereof. From this standpoint, Olwig (1981: 47) tries to understand
’Not so much with the individual’s apprehension of geographic reality as it actually is, but
with literature’s social function in envisioning reality as it is not but ought to be, and with its
potential, thereby, for stimulating change.’ Olwig claims to be using Marcuse’s aesthetic
theory, but nowhere in his book does Marcuse assert that literature shows reality as it
ought to be. On the contrary, Marcuse insists that literature criticizes established reality by
describing it as it really is by using an aesthetic form that gives it its subversive power and
thus functions as a liberation force (Marcuse, 1977). At any rate, Olwig seeks to account
for the ’fictitious’ dimension of literary reality and for the liberating function of the ecart
between this reality and the one that is widely recognized. Therefore, literature can be seen
as contradicting the monopoly of ’established reality’. Olwig draws parallels between the
transformations of the Jutland Heath and the literary depictions that preceded or
accompanied those changes, thus examining literature’s function in this social-spatial
process. His research does not actually take part in a radical project but rather in a study of
literature’s sociocultural functions, as Newby and Butler attempted with regards to
literature’s role in the promotion of ’scenic tourism’ (Newby, 1981; Butler, 1986).
Although he does not show how a particular use of language and form actually contributed
to the changes that occurred, he nevertheless draws our attention to the complex interplay
between literary conventions (a certain pastoral romanticism) and its echoes in the
historical process. Thus, along with Cook ( 1981 ) and Thrift ( 1983), he provides one of the
first actual critiques of humanistic works on literature.
Confronting both humanistic and radical perspectives, with their clashing notions of
’conscience’, Cook (1981: 66-67) adequately seizes the distance between these two
conceptions of literature:
Both approaches are of course concerned with the interaction between the individual and society, but humanist
geographers consider conscience to be the result of the individual’s interpretation of the world, flowing outward to
society, while radical geographers consider it to be the result of the individual’s position in society, flowing inward to
the individual. The humanist focuses upon the individual’s experience of life, his or her values, attitudes and beliefs,
the meaning attached to phenomena, and other ’subjective’ factors, and studies consciousness via this route. In
contrast, the radical begins by analysing the person’s class position, the relationship between this class and the ruling
class in society, and the susceptibility which this class exhibits to the absorption of the ideology disseminated by the
ruling class.
Cook chooses a critical perspective by putting the novel and its author in their original
’situation’ - ’the psychological and social influences upon them’ (Cook, 1981: 69) - which
should help one to understand how it ’distorts’ social and geographical reality. Thus the
novel’s distortions, compared to a hypothetical ’authentic realism’, are interpreted as the
expression of ideological false consciousness that resulted from the deforming filter of the
author’s class identity. Cook falls straight into the class determinism of orthodox Marxist
aesthetics that Marcuse so rightly criticized, and whose limits and pitfalls were clearly
shown by Walter Benjamin in his work on Baudelaire (Marcuse, 1977; Benjamin, 1982).
Many have expressed strong reservations concerning humanistic use of literature
(Thrift, 1978; Gregory, 1981; Silk, 1984; Jackson, 1989). However, apart from some rare
instances, like those mentioned above, there have been very few radical interpretations of
literary works in geography. In fact, radical critiques have mainly identified the theoretical
flaws of humanistic accounts or simply suggested new research directions. One of the most
344

severe critiques probably comes from Silk (1984).

Silk, too, seeks to immerse the novel in the sociohistorical context of its production and
thus clearly positions himself in the Marxist tradition by combining his critique of
literature with action:
The goal of any research based on such a materialist analysis should, I believe, not only go beyond a celebration of
the experiential to the level of explanation and understanding, but to provide a basis for intervention in the process
of ’mental appropriation of the world’ which combats bourgeois ideology, the latter consisting of themes, ideas,
sentiments, values, and the like which bolsters the position of the ruling class (bourgeoisie) in capitalist societies
(Silk, 1984: 151).
Thus literature must take part in a revolutionary process and contribute to the uprising of
social movements that are hostile to the ruling class’s ideology. Consequently, relevant
research directions should look towards feminist issues, separatism, nationalism and,
finally, landscape and environment appreciation. Here, the risk is great of ’recruiting’
literature, of asking it to be militant and consequently rejecting any politically non-
committed literature into the great sphere of ideological discourse to be denounced and
dismantled. Not only would there be a ’bad’ use of literature but also ’bad’ literature per se.
This is quite clear in Cook’s disqualification of Lawrence’s works (Cook, 1981).
Although Silk is efficient in identifying the flaws and contradictions in the various other
approaches of literature, he does not proceed to self-critique. One needs to acknowledge
that his aesthetical positions on the role of literature - whose relationship to reality is
mediated by a certain number of institutionalized ideological and rhetorical conventions -
are clearly exposed, something that is not very frequent in most geographical works on
literature. However, Silk is a rather quick to disqualify Marcuse as his conception of
literature would be too ’idealistic’ because of its ’independence from the material
conditions of its production’, or Benjamin because his would be too aesthetically inclined
in its strong emphasis on literary techniques with regards to their political progressiveness.
In the end, it seems that the sociopolitical context surrounding the literary production is
more relevant to Silk than is the text itself. The ’power of writing’, to use Bourdieu’s

terminology, the many ways in which ‘... writing abolishes determinations, constraints
and limits that are constitutive of social existence’ is not considered in Silk’s sociological
approach. Although Bourdieu recognizes that ‘... it is difficult to elude the question of
social determinants within the ambition to withdraw oneself from all determinations and
to fly over, in thought ( &dquo;survoler en pensee’~, the social world and its conflicts’, he is
sensitive to the active works of writing (through form and style) in his sociological reading
and analysis of the ’literary field’ (Bourdieu, 1992; 53-54, my translation).
Silk and Silk (1985) later provide an analysis of the function of the literary production in
the aftermath of the American civil war. They examine how a group of publishers and
distributors - ‘... who were looking for nostalgic portraits of the &dquo;Old South&dquo; combined
with a wholehearted acceptance of the reconciliation of the North and South’ -
contributed, through magazine and popular literature, to the moulding of a national
ideology and to the creation of a mythical representation of the ’south’, with its class, racial
and gender dimensions that never really corresponded to reality: ‘... these novels built up
a powerful image of the South as a region in which plantation life, Southern belles and
docile black servants were an integral part’ (Silk and Silk, 1985: 179-80). Jeans, who is
also interested in literature as a particular practice to be studied in relation to the
conditions of its production, analyses the evolution of attitudes towards small towns in the
American novel in the context of the country’s fast urbanization process:
The rediscovery of the virtues of the small town in the novel indicates the souring of the dream which once inspired
 345

the spatial process of urbanization, and this can be expected to shape the pattern of future population growth. These
novels in many cases represent the author’s own experiences, rather than a direct polling of the masses, but their
significance as social indicators is increased by their acceptance within the publishing industry (Jeans, 1984: 271).
This case analysis shows how the novel is part of a wider system of cultural signification
that contributed in the modifying, re-enforcing, motivating or steering of the mobility of
the American people. Here the sociological perspective does not operate within the scope
of a radical critique of hegemonic ideology but, rather, it seeks to demonstrate the social
relevance of literature inasmuch as it takes part in the general transformation of society’s
geographical organization. But here again, the text offers no resistance. It is seen as a clear
reflection of ideas or ideologies that were involved in its production and disseminated by its
distribution.
Recently, some geographers have focused on gender-related issues when questioning
’mainstream’ cultural representations in literature. For example, Avery examines the
prevailing cultural images in the interpretation of Canadian prairie literature. She argues
that it has been dominated by a masculine vision of human-nature relationships and that,
therefore, the prairie is interpreted either as a threatening landscape or as a territory to be
’conquered’. She then draws our attention to a ’feminine voice’ that suggests a less
conflictual or antagonistic view of these same relationships. This feminine point of view,
although culturally marginalized, shows that ’... the antagonism caused by the feeling of
human separation from nature, thought to be invoked by the prairie landscape, is not
universal’ (Avery, 1988: 272). In the Australian context, Monk and Norwood (1990)
explore how gender, life-stages and class are combined to shape different images and
experiences of place (see also Teather, 1991). Writings of women authors may thus
provide ’alternative’ visions that question widely accepted ideas but whose impact is still
somewhat limited because of relative cultural marginalization. However, the feminist
critique has not yet produced many case studies of fictional literature within geography’s
disciplinary boundaries. (On women’s travel literature and imperialism, see Blunt, 1992).

V Literature: counterpoints in the history of geography

Other geographers have concentrated their efforts on analysing the parallels between the
history of geography and that of other intellectual domains, such as literature. This fourth
perspective does not constitute a conception of literature in the same way that the previous
three did. It does not ask literature to participate in a precise geographical agenda, it simply
seeks to establish parallels between the ’evolution’ of both. This type of interest has
received more attention in French-speaking geography. Within the scope of a parallel
history of ideas, Broc identifies the presence or absence of mutual concerns between the
geographer-explorers and the writers of the renaissance. He shows, for instance, that the
different ’national’ literatures have not been equally receptive to the great ’discoveries’ and
that the ’exotism’ that one might expect has characterized the various works in very
different ways (Broc, 1980: Chap. XV). While studying the ’geography of philosophers’ of
the eighteenth century, Broc identifies the emergence of a new ’genre’ - the ’geographical
novel’, which, he argues, lies within the whole movement of travels, explorations and a
certain fascination with geographical relativism (Broc, 1975: 257-71).
Similarly, Claval (1987) follows the evolution of the regional theme in French literature
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He establishes important parallels between the
evolution of the role of the spatial setting in the French novel and the history of geography.
346

For instance, he reconstitutes the sequence which starts out as a relatively unspecified
spatial setting, which only serves as the necessary material basis for action, and gradually
becomes a greater regional diversity that actually plays an important role in the outcome of
the plot. Here, the interplay of a geographical perspective provides a different under-
standing of the history of literature and that of literary conventions. Such reconstitutions
were also briefly outlined by Pocock ( 1981 a) for example. From a different perspective,
Miller provides a combined analysis of American regionalism as a sociocultural phenom-
enon and of the regional novel, and tries to show how they both reinforce one another

(Miller, 1987; see also Rousseau and Laprise, 1982).

Other works have examined this interplay at precise moments in time. For example,
Giblin shows how much the geographical culture of Jules Verne - that came, in part, from
his readings of Elisee Reclus - has played a central role in his works. She further argues that
his novels provide more than a simple ’descriptive catalogue’ of the countries visited by the
characters and that his novel is based on sophisticated geographical knowledge (Giblin,
1978). Tissier draws our attention to the broad geographical culture of the famous French
writer Julien Gracq and to the great ’finesse’ with which this culture has been blended into
his literary achievements (Tissier, 1981a; 1981b; 1982). Gracq’s writing has also been the
object of a ’geopolitical reading’ by Lacoste (1987). Inspired by similar concerns, Hudson
studies Arnold Bennett’s great interest for geography and its various manifestations in his
works (Hudson, 1982), and Baker analyses Defoe’s geographical culture (Baker, 1931).
The search for these parallels has also been conducted in the more general field of
collective representations. In this spirit, Rimbert tries to discern the presence of two
antagonistic attitudes towards the city in novels and poetry. She sifts through French
literature (mainly that of the nineteenth century) in search of conflicting views on the city:
on the one hand, the rejection of the city as a source of corruption, uprootedness; on the

other, the city that is celebrated for the freedom, the variety of acquaintances that it makes
possible (Rimbert, 1973). This has also been addressed in the works of Jeans (1984) on the
small towns or by Bordesa on the interpretation of Canadian cities (Bordesa, 1988).

VI Space, alterity and literature

The great majority of geographical research on literature shows a clear preference for the
nineteenth-century realist tradition. Whether they pursue the regional tradition, adopt
humanistic or radical points of view, or attempt to draw parallels with the history of
geography, most show a strong commitment to realism. One can also find, in this
literature, an art of geographical description that has somewhat been lost since the 1960s.
Indeed, many have argued that geographers must rediscover the literary qualities that
ensured the success of the French regional tradition (Gilbert, 1960; Meining, 1983;
Watson, 1983; Claval, 1984; Lewis, 1985; for a general discussion, see Gilbert, 1988;
Johnston, 1991).
Humanistic geographers believe that the ’rooted’ quality of the realistic literary tradition
offers insightful subjective accounts of the experience of place and landscapes which
immerse the reader in an historical period where the human-nature relationship is
somewhat more harmonious. There is a somewhat nostalgic attitude in this praise of a
deep-rooted and meaning-laden territorial identity in reaction to the increasingly standar-
dized space of the twentieth century: Relph’s ’place versus placelessness’, for example, has
been a frequent reference for many humanistic geographers (Relph, 1976). Works of
 347

radical geographers do not share the same motivations nor do they favour nineteenth-
century literature with the same constancy. However, the tendency to disqualify certain
authors for their lack of ’real’ realism shows just how much traditional Marxist aesthetics,
with its well-known ’attachment’ to realistic literature, is still deeply rooted in geography.
Moreover, although the emphasis on the political context enables one to appreciate
literature’s social relevance as both effect and agent in political struggles, it sometimes has
the effect of drowning the text under an overwhelming reconstruction of the ideological
context, or only permitting it to ’say’ what the ideological critique requires. The underlying
problem, which is particularly acute when dealing with literature, is that of any strong
theoretical (and political) commitment with the corollary risk of ’... first shooting the
holes in the fence and then painting the bull’s eye around them’ (Geertz, 1973: 26; in
geography, see Ley, 1989; Ley and Mills, 1993). However, theory need not always nor
does not necessarily produce such predictable results (Gregory, 1989; 1993). This
particular tension is very much unresolved and remains a source of healthy debate.
Entrikin (1991) has exposed this tension with regards to the concept of place, but it has
hardly been addressed with regards to literature.
Most geographers’ accounts consider poetic language and forms in strictly transitive
terms that rest on an instrumental conception of literature whose relevance, therefore, is to
be found outside itself. It is legitimate to resort to literature in the light of what it can teach
us on the outside world or on our relation to it. This instrumentalism - which is hardly

escapable - obviously has different causes, but its legitimacy is often similar: to serve one’s
own cause. For some, literature is used as a source of primary or secondary information;
for others, to restore the human perspective to the core of geographical investigation; or to
destabilize the political or social status quo in search of an imputedly better world. But in
all cases we know exactly what to look for, and we find it.
If one tries to summarize, in a condensed form, one of the central limitations of
geography’s relationships with literature, one should pinpoint the problem in the question
of the identity of the former and the alterity, difference or specificity of the latter. There is
an inevitable tension for all social or human sciences to engage in a dialogue with an
aesthetic object. This problem raises the question of method and ineluctably leads us to
ethics (the analyst’s attitude towards the text). It seems quite clear from this survey that
geographers have almost always been searching for questions ’already’ answered in
literature and that they knew beforehand what was to be ’found’ therein. The idea whereby
a novel may be used as a source to verify geographical hypothesis clearly reveals the role
and status of literature for many geographers. Whatever our reasons for turning to
literature, we have almost always tried to find a confirmation of our own thesis, bring water
to the mill of traditional geographical knowledge (see Levy, 1989). Here it is the problem
of the literary text, in its density and difference, that is obliterated (Lafaille, 1989).
This conclusion must not prompt a quick and total disqualification of the different
interpretations. It simply emphasizes the fact that, in general, geographers have not been
looking for what might be disruptive, subversive or a source of new questions in the novel
but mostly what can be reassuring, what can approve or provide answers for their quest.
To give the text a better voice is obviously a tremendously tricky task, but it is possible, as
a first step, to spend more time on the text itself - its general structure, composition,
narrative modes, variety of languages, style, etc. - before embarking on any type of
interpretation whatsoever. Thereafter, one can start to approximate how it defines its
reader, how it creates an ’eye’, and how it questions geography’s rational discursivity. If
geographers undertake to entertain a relationship that is more dialogical with a literary
348

text, they cannot overlook the specificity of its form (broadly defined) and of its singular
use of language in order to be sensitive to the particular way it generates another type of

geography, to the particular way it writes people and place, society and space.
More recently, some geographers, coming from various perspectives, have looked at
twentieth-century literature in order to examine how much it ’expressed’ different ways of
conceiving space and place or to redefine our relationship to the literary text. In this sense,
it is the text in its difference and that of the space it generates that have become the focus.
These rare works illustrate the importance and interest of locating the dialogue on the
terrain of language, discourse and writing. Olsson is probably the first geographer to have
undertaken this delicate task of destabilizing certainty within the human-geography
discourse. Some of his arguments with regards to ambiguity and certainty stemmed from a
reflection on both modem science and literature. He also insists on the impossibility of
translating the ambiguity of the latter into the general tendency towards certainty of the
former (1978; 1981). Although his linguistic experiments were not always well received or
understood (for example, Billinge, 1983), Olsson’s goal was to forge a new language for
the social sciences, a language which would not be allergic to contradictions, tension and
ambiguities (Olsson, 1980; for a general appreciation, see Philo, 1984). Olsson’s reference
to literature was certainly not one to secure and confirm geography’s usual standpoint.
Reflecting on one of the ’founders’ of modem poetry (Rimbaud), Lafaille identifies the
pitfalls of any referential reading in the light of the constant process of ’decentration’ and
dislocation of the sign that is involved in Rimbaud’s poems. Thus he strongly criticizes
geographers’ preconception of language that seems to be exclusively limited to referential
and communicative functions. It is our own relationship to the written text that is thus
questioned. Also, in this particular case, Lafaille is right when he insists on the fact that it is
not a new experience of place or of the city that Rimbaud offers us, but a new way of
reading and writing (Lafaille, 1989).
Robinson has shown that humanistic geography was rather uneasy about the modem
literature of the twentieth century (Robinson, 1987). Also insisting that literature does not
’translate’ a concrete experience directly and that there is not necessarily a unity in space
but rather a spatiotemporal fragmentation, Robinson asserts that the ’modem’ novel
requires other reading practices. ’Thus, one does not expect an art form to confirm or to
provide a therapeutic for a discipline, let alone living. Certainly, twentieth century art is no
longer a comforting ready-made source for the social sciences’ (Robinson, 1987: 192; see
also Gay, 1993). Referring to various modem works - Joyce, Proust, Butor and Robbe-
Grillet (Robinson, 1977) - or, more generally, to twentieth-century tendencies such as
modernism or surrealism (Robinson, 1987) - he steers geography’s relationship with
literature on to less secure grounds by addressing problems related to literary forms
(Robinson, 1988). Bonnett also draws attention to some subversive artistic tendencies and
their transgression of art and everyday space (Bonnett, 1992). Nevertheless, these
contributions were rather general and concerned with twentieth-century tendencies more
than with particular texts. Case studies with a similar focus are few in geography.
From outside geography, Barrell (1982) is looking more closely at the way a text ’works’
in order to appreciate the changing geographies in Hardy’s novels. Sensitive to narrative
modes and their ambiguities, Barrell shows that these geographies cannot be separated
from the subtleties of the form in which they are embedded and through which they are
constructed as modes of cognition. More in line with recent developments in cultural
geography and cultural studies are some analyses of literary texts which address the
complex relationships between the text, the world, the cultural context and, sometimes,
 349

the author. Sharp (1993) examines the intricate and ambivalent national identities that are
being mapped out in Rushdie’s Satanic verses. Cresswell ( 1993) shows how Kerouac uses
jazz as a stylistic metaphor to write (about) mobility as both a way of being and of resisting
American cultural hegemony. Reichler explores how identities are being redefined and
destabilized as the subject crosses foreign frontiers (both in the ’world’ and in the text) in
the writings of Leiris or Segalen (Reichler, 1990). Daniels and Rycroft (1993), as noted
earlier, show how various texts and maps interweave in Sillitoe’s representation of the
modem city. In an effort to understand how novels can generate particular geographies, I
have tried to show how an ’olfactive geography’ is suggested both by an intricate plot and
different narrative strategies in Sfskind’s novel The perfume. The reconstitution of the
protagonist’s fictional olfactive epistemology, which produces a complex ’smellscape’,
draws our attention to the impossibility of operationalizing this type of undertaking within
the realm of academic geography, although it is perfectly writable within the realm of
literature (Brosseau, 1993). In examining the representation of New York’s urban
landscape, with its frenetic and fluid city life, in Manhattan transfer, I have presented the
benefits of focusing more attention on the formal dimensions of the novel. Such a focus
enables one to appreciate how the interpretation of the city is not (only) expressed
transitively but also embedded in the materiality of the text itself (Brosseau,
forthcoming) .
These contributions promote other types of relationship between geography and
literature. Although they may not envision this relationship in the same manner, they do
acknowledge the tension between the two, tension that is made tangible through a greater
examination of the literary text, be it in terms of its ambiguity, density, polysemy,
complexity or self-referentiality, construction, composition, etc. This can lead to a
stronger reflexivity on the ways in which geography’s discourse constructs its objects, and
on the geographer’s usual reading practices. It seems important to consider more closely
how the literary text may constitute a ’geographer’ in its own right as it generates norms,
particular models of readability, that produce a particular type of geography. This is
especially relevant since discourse and textuality are under greater scrutiny in geography as
in most human and social sciences (in geography, for example: Berdoulay, 1988; Bames
and Duncan, 1992; Duncan and Ley, 1993).
This interpretation of geography’s literature sought to draw attention to the partial
silencing of the literary text as a text. In the final analysis, I am not advocating a total
dismissal of all contributions - many interesting themes have been exposed, and many
noteworthy analyses have indeed been suggested. But it seems clear, at the same time, that
a more dialogical relationship with a much greater focus on the text itself would transform
the actual tendency to use literature in a predominantly instrumentalist fashion. After all,
when geographers come into contact with literature, they do more than simply come across
insightful information; meet a great mind who shares subjective accounts on the
experience of space and place; take part in the struggle against ideological hegemony in
relation with a cultural artifact that either promotes or criticizes it. The first ’thing’ they
face is an intricate and complex signifying practice called text, which requires great
scrutiny before they can go on with their usual business.

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Derek Gregory and David Ley of the geography department of the
University of British Columbia, Paul Claval of the geography department of the Universite
350
de Paris Sorbonne, Jacques-Henri Gagnon of the philosophy department of the Universite
de Paris Pantheon-Sorbonne for their insightful comments of an earlier draft of this article,
and my wife, Sarah, for her thorough proofreading. I would also like to thank the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its financial support.
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