Geographies of the Imagination

You can invent a street in Manhattan.

I think you mean can’t — at least south of 96th street.

also, isn’t there a whole subgenre of nineteenth century European opera, of which “Lucia di Lammermoor” is the tip of the iceberg, which is based on a Romantic view of Scottish clan life which is rather more colourful than the reality?

For “conceptually pastic as Africa ” read “conceptually plastic as Africa”

Consistent with the thesis, it’s possible to invent towns or villages in Ireland, courtest of the prefix Bally- (i.e., the Irish _Baile_, town, related to “Bailey” I think). Then again, didn’t David Lodge repurpose Birmingham as “Rummidge” and invent the State of Euphoria in between Northern and Southern California?

Western Europe: Nina Bawden does it in Rebel on the Rock (the sequel to Carrie’s War); Antonia Fraser in one of her mysteries (I forget which one, they all kind of meld together) Reginald Hill does it in a couple of his books under the name Patrick Ruell, and I’m pretty certain Peter Dickinson does it in The Seventh Raven. Not uncommon at all in the seventies and eighties, really.

Daniel has already introduced Donizetti to the discussion. Tip of the iceberg is right. Emilia di Liverpool is set in the mountains of Liverpool!

Cool. Interesting point, I hadn’t really thought of this particular issue.

Like some other commenters, I can think of exceptions. In the height of the Cold War, lots of popular entertainments would offer generic fictional Eastern European countries to substitute for real ones, for example. Herge actually reversed the pattern you note: the real Belgian Congo, a fake Europe.

I think closer to the mark is to say that places which typicall are the subject of anthropological inquiry can just be made up; places which are the subject of sociological inquiry are subject to demands for versilimitude in popular entertainments. This makes Africa particularly prone to geographic fabulism, but not uniquely so.

Or you could just study this in terms of comic books. Gotham City and Wakanda are both geographical fictions. Gotham sort of invokes New York, even down to its name; but so does Metropolis. (Though try watching the more recent WB Batman cartoons: Gotham City has desert mesas and jungle islands apparently within five minutes of its outer suburbs, popular adventure being what it is in terms of the genre requirements for settings). But Wakanda’s fiction is a major order removed from the referentiality of Gotham’s. Wakanda resembles no African place, just an Africa of the imagination, though more recent Black Panther stories essentially interpenetrate Merrie Olde Africa with Africa Land of Dictators.

Much of this comes down to what audiences already know, and what they’re prepared to be persuaded they might come to know instead. So many readers can make the move easily from generic imagined Africas that come straight out of Tarzan to the fairly specific and “realistic” Africa of Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency and probably recognize that the latter feels “right” in some respect. But offer to an American audience a fiction of place that’s about somewhere they know or think they know that simply feels flatly wrong–a New England fishing town full of flashy Hollywood types, Southern crackers and hardworking Mexican farm laborers and they’ll probably just curl their noses unless that “offness” is a deliberate conceit of the fiction in question for some plausible reason.

Superhero comics do it pretty well. Whole invented nations (Wakanda’s been mentioned, but there’s also Dr. Doom’s Eastern European monarchy of Latveria and the mutant-dominated island state of Genosha, while DC has the unstable Middle Eastern nation of Qurac and the Latin American drug hub of Santa Prisca) and imaginary cities (Metropolis and Gotham City are the most famous – light and dark versions of New York City – but there’s also Coast City, Keystone City, Opal City, etc.).

The Simpsons’ home town of Springfield deserves a mention, if only for making its everywhere-yet-nowhere status part of a running joke in the show itself (the state’s capital is called “Capital City”, the state’s motto is “Not Just Another State”, and so on.)

you can’t just invent some fictional new state in the Midwest

No, you have to do it in the West instead. And Michener actually makes it work pretty well.

Regarding The Mouse That Roared, was it OK before they turned the book into a movie, or did Peter Sellers jsutify it retroactively?

Relaxing the other evening after dinner, I heard the end of Family Feud coming on. You know, the part with the rapid fire questions. The contestant was asked for a country where spanish is spoken. He replied Europe. His family thought this would be a great answer. Geography is an alien science in America.

This blog is surely too confusing for me and the rest of our populace.

Eugene, Oregon? Isn’t that down the road from Marathon, Cascadia?

Is there a plot keyword for “jumps out of airplane without parachute, hoping to catch one on the way down”? I could make do with “skydiving”, but….

Eco traced a scene from _The Three Musketeers_ (in an essay in _Six Walks in the Fictional Woods_, I believe) in which D’Artagnan leaves his house, wrapped in revery over the lovely Bonacieux. After wandering the streets, he arrives in front of Athos’ house just in time to see Bonacieux enter. Looking up the street names on period maps, Eco finds that D’Artagnan’s walk takes him in a full circle, and that Athos’ house is in exactly the same place as D’Artagnan’s (albeit the street names are different)!

The essay itself focuses on demands for verisimilitude Eco received from his readers, for instance letters exclaiming that the evnts of _Foucault’s Pendulum_ couldn’t have happened the way they were described because, for example, it was snowing (in the real world) on a day the novel describes as “sunny”. (It’s been years since I read the essay, so I’m reconstructing the *type* of complaint, not an exact example.) The question of how fiction intersects with the non-fictional world is an intriguing one — as Eco points out, authors are constrained in some ways (e.g. a cart moving up a hill has to be pulled by a horse) but not in others (e.g. a street with two names may well be two different streets in Dumas’ universe). Where that line is drawn may well be different for each reader, and may well be shaped by power relations in the society at large.

The Simpsons’ home state actually has the abbreviation “NT”, as seen on some mail in the show. Reportedly the producers say this stands for “North Tacoma”.

The Funny Farm comic strip has one (villianous, anthropomorphic computer) character take over the country of Denmark, expelling its inhabitants, and rename it to “Siliconopolis”. Why the author chose Denmark when Belgium is the obviously correct choice escapes me.

Thomas Pynchon invented two whole California counties in “Vineland”, including one (Trasero county) somehow wedged betweeen Orange and San Diego counties, and it works quite well.

“The general rule is: there is some threshold of presumptive clear and distinct awareness of the actual facts, and you stay below the radar of that line.”

I don’t think so, actually. I don’t think this is a question of reader response. I think this is entirely a function of the author’s comfort. Take Trollope as an example. To the extent that his novels take place in London, he’s totally faithful to the actual geography of London, without saying so. He doesn’t use street names. But it’s perfectly possible to work out exactly where incidents take place. A few years back we went on a Trollope Walk led by a member of the Trollope Society from Marylebone through into Mayfair and the enthusiast pointed out where (by deduction) scenes from the novels must have taken place. Barchester and Barsetshire, by contrast, are completely imaginary. Barchester is not a renamed Salisbury, though Hiram’s Hospital is modelled on an almshouse near Salisbury. Barsetshire is sufficiently consistent that people can draw maps of it but it doesn’t mirror any existing county.

It must, I think, be assumed that the streets of London were ever present to Trollope’s imagination, available as he needed geography (Mr. Bonteen’s murderer can cut through by this alleyway, for example), while no part of rural England was (at least in the detail he needed), so he needed to invent his own.

In Fountains of Paradise Arthur C Clarke doesn’t invant a country, but he moves Sri Lanka down to the equator because he wanted to write about Sri Lanka and the space elevator in the book had to be built at the equator. Unlike many authors he is quite open about what he did in the preface too. (Otherwise he probably could have gotten away with it without too many readers noticing)

on the Africa list, you can’t do without the Eton-educated tribal chief’s son, calling people “old bean”, cricket bat and monocle optional.

Mission Impossible had a field day with East Europe and South America. Veyska, U.C.R., Santa Costa and …

Fredonia is a town in upstate New York, which I’ve always suspected was a stop on the vaudeville circuit when the Marx Brothers were on the road.

Florin and Guilder, from The Princess Bride, presumably in western Europe.

And maybe you can’t invent a street in Manhattan, but only the dead know Brooklyn.

In Islandia, Austin Tappan Wright invented a whole bloody continent.

1. Not only did Vladimir Nabokov invent the country of Zembla, but I believe the narrator of Pale Fire immigrated from Zembla to the US state of Utana. I believe Humbert Humbert also ended up in a motel in Cedarn, Utana.

2. The small fictional European country of
Ruritania, from the once famous book and movie Prisoner of Zenda, was once so famous that it was used as a placeholder reference to the entire class of small fictional European countries. Note that this class was once so prominant in the American imagination as to require a placeholder reference. Of course, Ruritania was also used as a reference for not-specifically-known real European countries as well, implying a mysterious-Africa phenomenon as in the original post.

But you can’t invent even a neighborhood of LA or New York (or London?) that doesn’t really exist.

Evidently you can in London…

not to mention Walford: http://www.bbc.co.uk/eastenders/

Sue Grafton has done roughly the opposite with her <some letter> Is For <some word starting with some letter> books. They are set in Santa Teresa, California. Santa Teresa is, as far as I can tell, exactly Santa Barbara with new street names (eg, Anacapa becomes Anaconda, Carillo becomes Capillo, etc).

IIRC, there’s a footnote in Les Misérables, where Javert is chasing Jean Valjean through the streets of Paris, in which Hugo actually says that the part before they cross the Seine is an accurate description of pre-Haussman Paris, and after they cross the river, they’re in a totally fictional neighbourhood.

As Mitchner’s books show, if you can sell the appropriate level of suspension of disbelief, you can even invent a fictional midwestern state and an Apollo 18. As for the fictional images of Africa, well, there’s a fair amount of fiction about remote Pacific Islands too. I can recall a few fictional Latin American countries. Gulliver’s Travel’s relied on the lack of clear knowledge of the Pacific Northwest to advance its plot. There’s a fair amount of 19th century literature fictionalising – totally inaccurately – China and Japan. But then, who could possibly believe in a country where people eat raw fish? Or use sticks to eat rice? Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes projects his criticisms of France onto a fictional Persia; Swift’s Modest Proposal cites “reliable sources in the Americas” about the taste of roast babies; heck, the whole Princess Caraboo schtick smacks of the same capacity. I can probably think of a few others if I try. I’m not sure Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is really any different, with its fictional Mars and Martians, from Lettres Persanes in terms of projecting the author’s criticisms of his own society onto aliens.

I think the right track is to think that the capacity to support fictional geography and sociology has less to do with Africa than a need for authors and readers to have an empty spot in their mental maps onto which they can project whatever they like with a minimum of interference from reality. If Africa became rich, powerful and well-known, they’d just find somewhere else.

“Of course, in fiction there is always allowance, in any locale, for some invention – a sliding scale of geographic plasticity. You can invent a small English town, or a small American city. But you can’t invent even a neighborhood of LA or New York (or London?) that doesn’t really exist.”

And thus all of science fiction and fantasy is invalidated. Not the real stuff. Doesn’t follow the rules.

Perhaps you should have specified “realistic fiction,” or some other modifier?

“The Middle-East?”

Might look up “George Alec Effinger.”

“What about The Mouse that Roared? I suppose as long as the country is small enough, and you have Peter Sellers in your movie, you can even muck with western Europe.”

Us fans of Leonard Wibberley are also now moping.

But the entire principle that “you can’t invent even a neighborhood of LA or New York (or London?) that doesn’t really exist” in fiction is apparently beamed in from an entirely different universe than mine. We have whole fields of literature that do this as a matter of course and commonplace. Unless they’re defined as, somehow, not counting. (Which saying you were only discussing realistic fiction would do nicely.)

Gorilla City, home of the society of super-intelligent, peace-loving race of gorillas that also spawned the evil Gorilla Grodd, one of the Flash’s deadliest enemies. Reliable accounts locate it in “the Congo basin.”

I’m pretty sure chateaubriand wrote about the “deserts” of louisiana, not florida. which would make more sense, as louisiana was still a posession of france.

“the Eton-educated tribal chief’s son, calling people “old bean”, cricket bat and monocle optional”

33 and 46 are on to something, John:
see: Buffy Toto, tribal chieftain and old friend of Bertie Wooster,
as well as Prince Bumpo, Oxon-educated friend of Dr. Dolittle.

My god- Metropolis clearly has nothing to do w/ New york City. It’s the DC universe version of Chicago, as everyone knows. And Keystone city is Philadelphia, obviously enough.

Marvel, at one time, had a map of New York city that had Peter Parker’s apartment, Empire State University, Aunt May’s house (in Queens) Avenger’s Mansion, etc. It was pretty cool. If I recall correctly the Avergener lived in the Met.

In addition to the Genovia of the Princess Diaries books, which has an entire origin story, the romance author Jude Deveraux has one book about, and refers to in other books, a country called Lanconia.

Ah yes, Zembla. That distant Northern Land.

Well, if we’re on the subject of superheros and fictional exurbs of LA, I think there ought to be some mention of Sunnydale, California – I always assumed it was meant ot be a stand-in for Irvine – complete with a fictional University of California campus. Southern California, like Africa, is one of those blank spots on the mental maps of people, even those who actually live there. Just as one can invent fictional African tribes to suit one’s purpose, so it seems that one can invent fictional SoCal suburbs where any depravity one seeks to imagine can be normal. Who knows what’s going on in the next town over, or what mysteries are enshrouded by the cul-de-sacs of another postal code?

eton in Africa

The Eton tribes live primarily in the Lekie division of Cameroon’s Centre Province with major settlements at Saa and Obala. They speak the Eton language or dialect, which had 52,000 speakers in 1982.

The story of how that small tribe came to rule so much of Africa, Nepal, Kuwait, Tonga, etc is fascinating, but too long to explain here.

soru

Scott Martens unnecessarily postulated that “one can invent fictional SoCal suburbs where any depravity one seeks to imagine can be normal”, entirely missing the point, probably known to everyone else, that in these climes it’s difficult to imagine – or, for many, to recall – that anything could be consdiered impermissible, forbidden, unconscionable. Dude, such a thought as that would be way too judgmental.

The hero of B. Traven’s _the Ghost Ship_ refers to “Chi(cago), Wisconsin”. Steve Erickson’s _Days Between Stations_ features a hidden street that’s in both LA and SF.

tom t.:
Another (extremely silly) account places Gorilla City in the Antarctic. See Foglio’s Angel and the Ape series.

On an unrelated note, I’d like to point out that “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” definitely has at least one exploding boat in it.

60. The crown prince of Tonga is hardly imaginary

Absolutely, but proof that just because something is a stereotype doesn’t mean it there aren’t real-world examples. Watching him give an interview to a Western journo was almost surreal.

Just remembered the African country part of the plot of a Yes, Prime Minister ep.

Hogan,

I think Neptune, CA pretty much floats between the San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles and Ventura counties of the mind. La Jolla is a good feel, as would be Laguna Beach — but in one ep this season Veronica and Jackie’s friend pop on over to Chatsworth to an outlet mall after school, a 2 1/2 hour drive from San Diego.

Bad Jim: Fair point.

A close contemporary — never say copy — of Ruritania was Graustark; in America, “Ruritanian romances” were also known as “Graustarkian romances”.

There’s a charming bit in one of the Cuckoo books (The First Cuckoo, The Second Cuckoo, the Third Cuckoo, The Last Cuckoo) in which letter-writers debate in the London Times the precise location of Ruritania, given the clues in the manuscript. German-speaking, Catholic, somewhere on the train route from Vienna…

“Of course you all realize it was just a trick on my part, saying ‘of course you CAN’T do x,’….”

It certainly was a head-scratcher to me, coming from John Holbo. I kept going back to check that the post was from you. I was absolutely baffled that you’d make such a completely bizarre assertion.

“I always liked the innocence with which Ron Howard just plucked a bunch of archaic sounding names with some tenous historical basis, like Cimmeria, Kush, Argos, and slapped them all together into an impromptu continent.”

Ah, yes. I loved the episode where Conan met Gomer Pyle, and cut his head off. Also, Cocoon, as directed by Robert E. Howard, where the old people, well, get their heads cut off. Oh, the lamentations of their women!

Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct police procedurals, set in the city of Isola, which is a thinly veiled NYC.

Some people claim that Metropolis is now in the approximate location of Lewes, Delaware (the map apparently has to do with some role-playing game; I don’t think it has a huge amount of textual support).

Metropolis does seem to have started out as a Midwestern city and then gotten increasingly East Coast over time.

Providence has a sky-line? Or had one in the 50’s? No wonder ‘ol supes could leap those in a single bound. I’d thought Keystone city was likely philadelphia or perhaps Pittsburg becuase of the obvious “keystone state” reference, though I guess I could be wrong on that. Among other reasons why Metropolis must be Chicago (there are lots) is that if you’re a farm boy from Indiana (or wherever in the mid-west smallville is) Chicago is the big city you go to to work at the major newspaper.

“I always liked the innocence with which Ron Howard just plucked a bunch of archaic sounding names with some tenous historical basis, like Cimmeria, Kush, Argos, and slapped them all together into an impromptu continent.”

Kush is also the fictional country in a John Updike novel, The Coup. But it’s actually a fictional African country, so it doesn’t count as a counter-example…

It’s not fair to call Sunnydale a center of depravity, Scott — LA is clearly still that. Sunnydale is just on a Hellmouth. Kinda bypasses depraved.

What’s the Ruritanian-type country in “The Great Race”?

And in one of the Amelia Peabody mysteries (Elizabeth Peters the author) — I think maybe the one with ‘ape’ in the title? The intrepid archaeologists find some relic civilization or other — I want to say pre-Old Kingdom, or maybe remnants of Kush? Just ‘cos John started out talking about Tim’s tropes.

On that topic, how many of Tim’s Africa tropes hold true for South America — especially the Andes and Amazon?

Hm, 100 entries and no one has mentioned Shangri-la, in or near Tibet. Tibet and neighboring areas such as the present Uzbekistan were inaccessible until well into the XIXc.

In Muslim traditions Tibet was a magical fantasy land for centuries as a place where “When a Muslim goes there, he becomes so happy that he never returns”. So was Korea sometimes.

ADM: quite a few of those tropes apply to Central/ South America and/or the Pacific and Papua New Guinea. In fact, a few of them, in my view, originate from there historically. (The chief’s daughter married to the explorer strikes me as a gloss of Western reactions to Polynesian sexuality…) One of the interesting things that I noticed preparing my introductory presentation on the visual trope of the missionary in the cannibal’s cookpot (besides discovering, that there is an entire icky genre of pornography devoted to images of naked women in cookpots) was that more recent popular culture basically takes the substance of the cannibal trope and makes it more contemporaneously acceptable by grafting it onto…headhunters. (The Far Side is really notable for this).

The degree of specific knowledge a popular culture assumes about a particular region of the world varies over time. For instance, there a joke in Portnoy’s Complaint about a U.S. soldier who marries a Japanese woman for the sole purpose of upsetting his mother. It’s primarily one of the Jewish mother jokes on which Roth’s career is based, but there’s a detail that always threw me. The name of the Japanese bride is something like “Ming Ling”. It’s clearly supposed to be a made up nonesense name, but it’s also clearly a nonsense Chinese name. I could never tell whether this was on purpose, to show what an idiot the soldier was, or because a man of Roth’s generation didn’t have enough command of east Asian stereotypes to come up with Japanese gibberish.

Either way, that detail dates the novel. Today you’d have to call her “Akiko” or something, or else the joke would fall flat. Times have changed. For the typical American of a few generations ago, east Asia was just one big Oriental blur. That’s not the case today. Today Americans generally grok that there’s a difference between China and Japan, and of course everybody knows about Vietnam and Korea. The level of cultural literacy has increased via the usual suspects of war, trade, and immigration.

So the phenomenon we’re talking about here is likely not specific to Africa, and is possibly also more sensitive to cultural contact they we realize. As an American, it’s hard for me to get a sense of it: this culture’s idea of Africa is particularly abstract because there hasn’t been as much war, trade and immigration from that part of the world. (Lingering guilt over slavery and its reprucussions muddies the waters even more.) Africa is still one big black blur. I wonder if representations of Africa are more specific in European as opposed to U.S. popular culture because African immigrants are more common there.

There’s always the made-up university of campus fiction (and the closely related invented Oxbridge college, that is, an invented college of a real university). But campus fiction descends into the roman à clef much of the time.

Western Europe isn’t as sacred as one might like, at least in the airport class of novel. Tom Clancy takes enormous liberties with geography in the Rhine valley. The worst was a character getting in trouble driving from Aaschen to Aix-la-Chapelle.

Thinking back into the mists of my childhood… I don’t know how universal this was, but we were assigned to write thick reports about countries in the sixth grade. I received Africa. The continent. I didn’t really possess the social, racial or historical vocabulary to express the utter wrongness of it at the time, but honestly… Bless education in Arizona.

Okay, maybe 12 or 13.

I am shamed yet further.