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A New Paradigm of Home-Mapping for Literary Cartography

2022; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/style.56.1-2.0093

2374-6629

Wen Yongchao,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

Home has been traditionally idealized as a stable, safe, and static haven imbued with positive emotions, and conceptual homelessness and rootlessness have even been romanticized. Against this background, Aleksandra Bida’s work, Mapping Home in Contemporary Narratives, puts forward a timely critique to such understanding, drawing readers’ attention to the paradoxical nature of home, which is tranquil and precarious, certain and uncertain, and attached and detached. In this book, she provides a full framework of home through time-spanning and place-spanning literary narratives (including filmic narratives) and sheds new light on how homemaking contributes to a coherent place identity and a stronger sense of belonging in the twentieth and twenty-first century.Bida’s monograph consists of an introduction (Chapter 1), four parts (Chapters 2–13, three chapters for each part), and a conclusion Chapter 14). In the opening chapter, Bida introduces the essential weightiness of the idea of home and then, quoting J. Brian Harley, calls for “an epistemological shift” toward the mapping of home, infusing affective or emotional elements into this process and thus moving it “beyond the unquestionably scientific or objective form of knowledge creation” (9).Part One deals with home on the individual scale in light of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of learning to dwell (Chapter 2). Heidegger articulates that dwelling is the defining feature of human existence and that home is one of the identity markers for human being. Importantly, this theory privileges meditative thinking, which is “qualitative and self-reflective,” over calculative thinking, which is “quantitative and seemingly objective” (17). Heidegger maintains that despite its quotidian nature, calculative thinking, or technological thinking, is a hindrance to the process of learning to dwell, for on the surface, technology erases the distance between each other, but in essence it “imposes new distances in relation to one’s immediate experiences of self and surroundings”(23). The two novels in this part, House of Leaves (Chapter 3) and Neverwhere (Chapter 4), explore the personal construction of home amid technological flux.House of Leaves, a debut novel by Mark Z. Danielewski, depicts a fantastic “inner” house on Ash Tree Lane in Virginia, “a space that is impossibly large, windowless, dark, shifting, and at times seemingly doorless” (29). This defamiliarized, gothic structure is a mysterious labyrinth which changes and moves at will, and defies any technological charting or mapping. In this chapter, Bida dismisses the traditional conception of home as rigid and fixed, and highlights the peacemaking process of the dwellers. Besides, she emphasizes that the notion of home continues to function as a crucial personal anchor of identity despite “the postmodern push towards multiplicity, detachment and leaving” (47). Chapter 4 is an illustration of a chimerical space in Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, who creates two diametrically different Londons: London Above and London Below. Through accurate descriptions of these two spaces, Bida redefines home as a locale that motivates homemakers to ponder on their “self-concept” and “belonging” on the one hand and reiterates that homecoming should be understood as “a deeply personal, lifelong process” on the other (52). Essentially, this process is the projection of human emotions upon a certain space and the transformation of place alienation into place attachment, as evidenced by the protagonist’s changed feelings to the London Below.In Part Two (Chapters 5–7), Bida adopts the concept of liquid modernity of Zygmunt Bauman, expanding the scope of home beyond the individual level to the communal and interpersonal level. Bida (Chapter 5) discovers that Bauman draws a distinction between solid liquidity and fluid liquidity: the former is characterized by “stability, production, and tangible goods” (67) with a special emphasis on root or rooting, whereas the latter by “the flows of changing routes and the uncertainty of where these might lead” (71). In Bida’s mind, this distinction is very significant, in that the liquid and solid metaphors constitute a dialectic, problemizing the previous distinction of modernity and postmodernity and highlighting the interpenetrative rather than the conflicting relationship between the two. She advocates an eclectic view of home, featuring “roots and stability along with an added emphasis on routes and mobility” (71). By means of Bauman’s concept, Bida showcases the various impediments toward homemaking and identity-building in the precarious age of liquid modernity and criticizes the phenomenon of commodifying home.The Village (Chapter 6) portrays an enclosed community: Covington Woods, a vivid illustration of “the utilitarian nature of liquid modern social relations” (87). In response to the mobile dangers of this age, the elders in this community attempt to block the information flow through fabricated myths, thereby isolating themselves and the younger generation from the outside town and attaining their goal of creating meaningful places. But what they build meticulously turns out to be empty spaces laden with greed, enmity, and detached emotions. Unlike the escapism through isolation and exclusion in The Village, Nicholas Dickner’s debut novel Nikolski (Chapter 7) focuses on three protagonists’ active engagement with the environment. Bida aptly showcases the difference between “buying” and “building”: “buying” signifies the commodification of home and the distribution of land resources, whereas “building” emphasizes the homemaking process. More importantly, “building” is mapping, which “incorporates other people, places, and social forces into the already labyrinthine idea of home” (100). Bida also points out that the three protagonists are actually cartographers who learn to dwell and “construct a more meaningful identity anchor” through “mapping multiple ‘corners’ on different scales” (101). This statement accurately describes “the powers of integration” of physical structures and the multiple meanings of home spaces in a fast-moving, technologically mediated age.In Part III (Chapters 8–10), Bida turns her attention to the home on the social scale. The guiding theory in this part is Derrida’s “hostipitality” (Chapter 8), a blended concept of hostility and hospitality, which emphasizes the inextricability and the tension between the two concepts. Bida explicates that “hostipitality” reflects the ethical dimensions of hospitality, and explains the relationship between home and agency, power and social justice. The advantages of this theory are twofold: on the one hand, it enriches Heidegger’s “poetic dwelling” through adding “the need to learn to navigate the realities of hostility as well as welcome”(121); on the other hand, it improves Bauman’s binary of “the welcome tourist” and “the unwelcome vagabond” by introducing a middle space, where the prerogatives of the tourist are restricted and the agency of the vagabond is enhanced. Through deconstructing home and hospitality, Bida argues, “hostipitality” creates dynamics in which the two identities of host and guest are mutually constitutive of each other.Two film narratives showcase the operations of “hostipitality” through prison-like home space. Depicting an isolated yet more open town called Dogville in Dogville (Chapter 9), Lars von Trier, the director, aims to reveal the politics of home, namely, the power relations between strangers and guests, hosts and parasites implicated in homemaking on the social scale. In Bida’s eyes, these power relations can negate homemaker’s agency, thereby destroying the possibility of dwelling. She argues that this film is “an allegory exposition of welcome,” which attests to “the pretense of hospitality” and “the subtle and even violent violations of home” (134). The economic “contracts” binding the town people together predetermine Grace’s subordination and dehumanization and make her final brutal retaliation to these town people an inevitable outcome. Under such unbalanced economic and social system, Grace’s individual construction of home can never be realized. In Good Bye, Lenin (Chapter 10), the director Wolfang Becker explores Derrida’s idea of “giving place,” that is, the protagonist Alex creates a home space in which his mother is left in the dark about the gravity of her illness and about the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in so doing he tries to prevent her mother’s health from deteriorating. Although Alex’s homemaking means well, in Bida’s view, this practice should be frowned upon in that he deprives his mother of the agency to actively learns to dwell after a political upheaval. Besides, Bida maintains that in this film, Becker “critiques the hostilities of life in socialism as well as capitalism in order to more broadly deconstruct the relationship between home and hospitality across interpersonal, communal, and national scales” (158).In Part IV (Chapters 11–13), Bida probes into the home concept on the global scale by virtue of philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s theory of cosmopolitanism. Contamination is part of cosmopolitanism for Appiah (Chapter 11), and he creatively uses it in a positive way, demonstrating that contamination is an impetus for conversation across boundaries. Bida emphasizes that Appiah’s dual metaphor of contamination and conversation are closely related to the analysis of home, for it “reinforces the notion that home-makers do not need to cling to a singular conception of national ethnic, religious, or another brand of ‘roots’” and it can encourage fruitful engagement “with multiple roots in a multi-local or multi-lingual and multi-scalar context” (174). More importantly, Bida reminds readers that Appiah does not efface the negative connotation of contamination (such as the contamination in the colonial context) despite his positive use of this term. For expounding the connectivity between cosmopolitanism and globalized home, Bida chooses two filmic texts, both of which are composed of interlinked stories.The first one is Babel (Chapter 12), a multilocal and multilingual narrative that spans Morocco, the United States, Mexico, and Japan and is told in at least seven languages including sign language. Through this multilayered and polyphonic “international picture” (180), Bida argues that the characters’ fears of contamination, or their “mixophobia” in Bauman’s term, erect geographic, linguistic, cultural, and psychological fences against strangers. Only when homemakers are brought into contact “with new ideas, practices, norms and worldviews” can a healthy sense of home and belonging be acquired amid globalized mobility, thereby resulting in the removal of these fences (193).Chapter 13 is devoted to a parallel analysis of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas and its filmic adaptation by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer. This work is a synthesis of six interlinked narratives and forms a truly cosmopolitan work of art ranging from the early nineteenth century to the postapocalyptic period. Bida argues that different forms of exclusion on the part of different characters, such as enslaving on Autua, exiling on Robert Frobisher, endangering on Luisa Rey, entrapping on Timothy Cavendish, and imprisonment on Sonmi, impair the agency of these homemakers. She calls for the establishment of a “transhistorical and transmigratory community” that brings “the inclusion of others and openness to the world” into full play. (208) She also expounds the connotation of the cloud metaphor of this novel’s title, signifying “the mapping of shifts and flux” and “the movement of objects, practices and ideas” across geographic, social, and cultural scales (211). In the concluding chapter (Chapter 14), Bida points out the direction for future research into the mapping of home, indicating that ecocriticism and gender studies are two particularly promising fields in this regard.Generally speaking, Bida’s work contributes to literary studies in two major aspects. First, it provides a new paradigm of home-mapping for literary cartography. According to Robert T. Tally Jr., “like the mapmaker, the writer must survey territory, determining which features of a given landscape to include, to emphasize, or to diminish” (Tally 45), but Bida focuses on characters’ cartographic activity instead of the writers’, which enriches the methodological system of literary cartography. Bida equals homemakers in story worlds with mapmakers and calls for new forms of mapping “to make sense of spatial or geographical place and cultural identity” (8). To be specific, home in her paradigm is conceived as a dynamic, multiscalar construct, which challenges the lopsided static idea of “home, sweet home” and stresses homemakers’ agency in crossing boundaries at different scales—the individual, interpersonal, social, and global. A striking feature of her new paradigm of home is her interdisciplinary approach for cartographic analyses. She insightfully draws on geography, psychology, anthropology, architecture, cultural studies, and other disciplines, offering more illuminating and convincing explanations to literary phenomena. For instance, when elaborating in Chapter 12 on Susan’s hyperactive monitoring of her and her husband’s dietary intake, Bida borrows the findings of immunology in medical science to prove that Susan’s effort is futile and even pernicious, because “the immune system grows stronger from some contamination rather than constant sterilization” (187).Secondly, by attaching great importance to place studies, Bida’s monograph offers additional lenses to cognitive ecocriticism, an approach dealing with the mind’s relevance to the literary account of the environment initiated by Nancy Easterlin. In Easterlin’s view, place is “a continuous and dynamic redefinition of space” (231), which aligns well with Bida’s conception of home as an adaptive, dynamic construct. The criticism of commodifying homeplace also echoes cognitive ecocriticism in that both Bida and Easterlin emphasize the agency of the physical space. Objectifying or commodifying things (in natural spaces) will induce place alienation (such as Richard Mayhew’s emotion toward London above in Neverwhere) or even destructive consequences to human dwellers (such as Roderick’s psychological breakdown in The Fall of the House of Usher). Borrowing the general theories of place from cognitive ecocriticism and the detailed analyses of specific places from Bida, literary scholars can extend their place studies to other writers in other periods so as to discover new thematic meanings.With its systematic theorizing, balanced structuring, and fine-grained textual analysis, Bida’s Mapping Home in Contemporary Narratives is an ideal guidebook for scholars engaged in the studies of literary cartography and cognitive ecocriticism.