Mapping Home in Contemporary Narratives

Aleksandra Bida

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319979663
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319979670
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

By offering an analysis of the idea of home across the individual, interpersonal, social, and global scales, Mapping Home aims to show the extent to which self-concept is deeply tied to constructions of home in a globally mobile age. The epistemological link between dwelling as "knowing oneself" and the experience of welcome as key to being able to map "one's place(s) in the world" are examined through Martin Heidegger's concept of dwelling, Zygmunt Bauman's notion of liquid modernity, Jacques Derrida's exploration of hostile hospitality, and Kwame Anthony Appiah's sense of cosmopolitanism as border-crossing conversation. To further explore these ideas, the book draws on multimodal literature and films that span genres, including gothic horror, fantasy and science fiction, thoughtful comedies, and politically nuanced tragedies. The quality that deeply links the texts is their ability to illuminate the stabilities and mobilities through which home not only mediates but also integrates an individual's diverse experiences of belonging in different locations as well as on different geocultural scales—from the intimate "household" to the more abstract "hometown" or "homeland" and beyond.

 

© The Author(s) 2018

Aleksandra BidaMapping Home in Contemporary NarrativesGeocriticism and Spatial Literary Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97967-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Aleksandra Bida¹

(1)

Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada

Aleksandra Bida

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In her novel Kartography, Kamila Shamsies writes, “Who among us has never been moved to tears, or to tears’ invisible counterparts, by mention of the word ‘home’? Is there any other word that can feel so heavy as you hold it in your mouth?” (63). This “heaviness” or importance of the idea of home stems from its links to the construction of identity and notions of belonging. Geographer Anne Buttimer similarly remarks in “Home, Reach, and the Sense of Place” that “like breathing in and out, most life forms need a home and a horizon of reach outward from that home” (170, original emphasis). She goes on to elaborate: “Personal identity and health require an ongoing process of centering—a reciprocity between dwelling and reaching—which can find its external symbolic expression in the sense of place or regional identity” (186). My aim in Mapping Home is to consider the essential weightiness of the idea of home in order to unpack the potential in using the metaphor of mapping the spaces and experiences of “home” as a process of “home-making.” Rather than demand specific claims such as time spent in or owning a space, this process is one in which “home-makers” (a gender-neutral term) “make” themselves at home.

A core premises of this book is that home—as an idea, an ideal, and a lived reality—requires an interdisciplinary approach, and so I draw on geography, psychology, anthropology, architecture, communications studies, and cultural studies while my primary focus is on the ideas of authors and filmmakers as well as philosophers and sociologists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.¹ Geocriticism remains key to my use of imagined home spaces as a means to think through and gain insight into the current as well as potential future modes of home-making. Bertrand Westphal explains that it can “work to map possible worlds, to create plural and paradoxical maps, because it embraces space in its mobile heterogeneity” (73). According to Eric Prieto , Westphal’s approach shows how “fiction (and other hypothetical modes of thinking), by creating alternative realities that overlap in various ways with the world as we know it, has a powerful referential function, getting us to think about the real world in ways that would have been impossible without this hypothetical distantiation from the world in which we live” (23). Furthermore, the performative function of fictional places can also alter our lived sense of place.

I study a corpus of psychologically and sociologically complex, formally innovative, and epistemologically diverse works that span genres as well as geographical borders, specifically the US, Quebecois Canada, Mexico, England, Germany, and Denmark. These works span genres, including gothic horror (a haunted house in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and a haunted subculture in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village), fantasy and science fiction (a world of two Londons in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere in novel, BBC series, and adapted graphic novel form as well as a time-spanning saga in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas along with its film adaptation by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis), thoughtful comedies (Nicolas Dickner’s Nikolski and Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin!), and politically nuanced tragedies (Lars von Trier’s Dogville and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel).

I use these fictional texts to highlight the diversity of experiences of home and what it means, examining the imagery and emotional connotations of home in these genre-crossing works that present commonplace as well as uniquely customized approaches to making oneself at home. In so doing, I am seeking to provide a paradigm for thinking of home as a dynamic, multi-scalar construct that is not only amenable to modern mobility and connectivity but, in many ways, the nexus of mediating these cornerstones of globalization. What interests me in these texts is the ways in which they show that when contemporary authors and filmmakers undertake the project of rethinking home—where it begins, where it ends, what it feels like, what it does and does not do, what it can and cannot do—they interrogate naturalized modes of understanding our “corner” of the world and to what extent an individual can construct a sense of home physically and conceptually or must concede that work to outside forces.

Literary Homecomings and Haunted Extremes

Elisabeth Bronfen points out that “traces of dislocation inextricably inhabit any configuration of home” (24), and this is evident in literature and film through the extremes of themes of homecoming (whether seeking out a place to finally call home or working to return to a previous home) and haunted homes (from uncanny rooms to houses or towns). The tales of homecoming seek to overcome this dislocation, while stories of haunting draw on fears that such dislocation will, sometimes violently, usurp the very possibility of home. One of the most internationally recognizable and classic tales of homecoming, which has also been adapted for stage and screen with some regularity, is Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery .² The novel centers on an orphan girl who confesses to the man she hopes has adopted her, “You see, I’ve never had a real home since I can remember. It gives me that pleasant ache again just to think of coming to a really truly home” (20–21). The charmingly childish construct of “a really truly home” might suggest stability, safety, a modicum of affection, and a sense of belonging, and Anne does, in fact, find these qualities at Green Gables over the course of the book, both through the picturesque house and also in the town of Avonlea.

Anne’s decision to give up a university scholarship and return from college so that the house will not be sold is highlighted by her insistence that returning to work as a local teacher in lieu of fulfilling her academic ambitions “is no sacrifice” because “[n]othing could be worse than giving up Green Gables—nothing could hurt me more” (324). Her claim on the house is quite radical for the time, in that she is no biological (male) heir, and yet her return is “right” because of what I would call her agency as a home-maker and reinforced sense of belonging. The final line of the novel has Anne quoting Robert Browning that “all’s right with the world” (329), suggesting that Green Gables is where Anne should naturally be—just like the sunrise and morning dew that Browning’s verse in “Pippa Passes” conjures.

This is not to say that there is not a long counter-tradition of texts that challenge this overly optimistic model of a happy return and, in doing so, also draw out its complexities. The gothic home, for example, is the unheimlich or uncanny and unwelcoming home.³ Gothic narratives frequently expose the underside of an archaic notion of home which is allotted by birthplace, familial or ethnic legacy, and other uncontrollable circumstances. Count Dracula, in Bram Stoker’s novel, lives in “a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky” (16). The Count is looking to leave this home to buy property in England and quite cordially invites Jonathan Harker, the solicitor working as his estate agent: “Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring!” (19). However, the young man encounters duplicitous hospitality and finds this ruined home in a foreign land to be treacherous. The castle is his prison, while England itself is at jeopardy while the Count tries to settle there.

Twenty-first-century literature can draw on the rich traditions of these competing themes but must also contend with mobility in more complex ways. For instance, Shamsie’s novel, Kartography, includes a hand-drawn map (112) along with a partial street map (134) of the city but also illuminates new issues of our virtual engagement with home when characters, who are privileged enough to study and work around the world, seek to make a virtual and interactive map of the city of Karachi; a map that can be navigated with zooming features as well as links to stories, images of objects and seasonal change, and sound clips in different dialects (337–38). The hypermobility of the contemporary world has also created very different sets of experiences for which the notion of home as a single location with static roots cannot account. Larger “territories” have been made accessible, connected through communication technologies and the global media as well as cultural products invited inside home spaces or their extensions through the conduit of mobile technologies. We see shifts in the territories of home, notions of belonging, the distribution of privacy, the evolution of comfort as well as domesticity, and homelessness in a materially “home-centred culture” (Morely 26) in which full citizenship implies property ownership or owning literal “roots.” Elizabeth B. Silva explores some of the less obvious ways in which technology transforms familial as well as local relations through new linkages and suggests that “the home is seen as being constructed out of movement, communication and social relations or, more generally, it is made out of practices that always stretch beyond the boundaries of the home as location” (32).

A Multi-scalar Paradigm for Home

My approach to analyzing the idea of home takes as a starting point Michel de Certeau’s observation that “the text [is] habitable, like a rented apartment” (xxi). In fictional homes, readers are not invited as guests who are then bound by a host’s rules but enter as spectral “renters” who are offered access to a home-maker’s narrative of complex beliefs, circumstances, and histories.⁴ I take the opportunity to “inhabit” texts—which include not only metaphorical apartments but specific rooms, buildings, streets, and their larger regions—in order to uncover some of the intricacies of not just a physical space marked by its economic value and municipal or national affiliation but also a complex network of material realities, sociopolitical forces, interpersonal relations, as well as personal dreams and disenchantments. I adopt another claim from de Certeau by seeking to explore the “subtle art of ‘renters’ who know how to insinuate their countless differences into the dominant text” (xxii). The renter/reader is in a unique position to assess these imagined home spaces and maps against conventions in order to uncover deviations and adapt the idea to new experiences, parameters, and expectations. The approach of de Certeau also resonates with important postmodern sensibilities, such as “de-naturaliz[ing] some of the dominant features of our way of life” which are “made by us, not given to us” (Hutcheon 2). Rather than viewing home as “natural” or unalterable, it is possible to also adapt to the postmodern stance of remaining “certain of its uncertainty” (Butler 2) with “suspicion to[ward] the notion of origins” (Sheehan 20) along with an understanding of endings as “thorny and recalcitrant” (Sheehan 20).

In order to examine the ways that postmodern sensibilities and growing mobility impact aspects of how we think of and experience home, I draw on four of the most significant thinkers to write about home through issues that are central to the idea. I begin with Martin Heidegger’s postwar essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in order to explore the metaphysical idea that he uses to define humans as, first and foremost, dwellers. Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity offers a critical framework of modern sociopolitical and economic systems, and it highlights the continued effects on notions of home of new kinds of uncertainties and risks—not only due to physical attacks and the technologies that Heidegger argues impede our ability to dwell but also blows from the “invisible hand” of global capitalism and its volatile economic flows. Jacques Derrida’s later work on hospitality serves as a way to think about dwelling in a broader context of increased short and long term migration. Lastly, the writing of Kwame Anthony Appiah on cosmopolitanism helps me to reframe the idea of being at home in a global scope. My main objectives are to demonstrate the possibilities of what Heidegger calls “poetic” dwelling (“Poetically Man Dwells” 211) in liquid modern times and examine the significance of imagining home as a means of inclusion and renewal in personal as well as globally situated contexts.

I have organized the book through four specific yet interrelated scales—the individual, interpersonal, social, and global—and in each part, I first introduce the theoretical issue and follow this with critical examinations of texts through the lens of that theory. In each pairing of texts, the first work that I analyze grapples with obsolete and limiting models of home as a space of isolation, while the second work investigates new possibilities of thinking of home as a means of discovery or exploration. Additionally, the homes and home-makers in my primary texts represent a spectrum of different subject positions, from unwilling (Richard Mayhew in Neverwhere) to inadvertent (the protagonists in Nikolski) to overzealous home-makers (Alex in Good Bye, Lenin!). In some cases these home-makers flounder, unable to commit to rethinking home or unwilling to try insinuating their differences into the construction of home, but in other cases they illustrate Heidegger’s notion of “learn[ing] to dwell” (“Building Dwelling Thinking” 159) by seeking to “build” in the sense of both constructing and preserving their own kind of composite home.

I begin my examination of the individual scale of home with Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) because this novel poignantly examines many of the fears and traumas that the idea of a singular and static “home, sweet home” fosters. I pair this multimodal book of contemporary gothic horror with an “urban” fantasy novel, which was originally a BBC mini-series (1996) and was later adapted as a graphic novel (2007), because Gaiman’s Neverwhere mitigates these same fears through an emphasis on individual agency in constructing home and by redefining the boundaries, networks, and nodes that can constitute an individua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Home on an Individual Scale and the Philosophy of Learning to Dwell
• Part II. Home on an Interpersonal Scale and the Economics of Mobility
• Part III. Home on a Social Scale and the Politics of (Hostile) Hospitality
• Part IV. Home on a Global Scale and the Relevance of Cosmopolitanism
• Back Matter