The very first textual encounter we have with Dracula in the book happens in his castle-home in Transylvania, where he is working out the details of a real-estate deal with Jonathan Harker. When he finally reveals himself, Dracula is not only coded as old, traditional, and foreign (he is described using racial markers like “aquiline nose” and speaks throughout the text in dialect), but is also symbolically represented by the Transylvanian castle in which he is introduced. In this opening, the castle actually takes on a more prominently threatening position as Harker is cautioned from entering certain rooms in the castle and eventually realizes his entrapment:

But I am not in heart to describe beauty, for when I had seen the view I explored further; doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked and bolted. In no place save from the windows in the castle walls is there an available exit.

The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner! (28)[3]

Harker, though threatened both by Dracula and the three other vampires in the castle, senses his danger and paralysis by attention to the castle and its architecture itself. Harker’s repetition of “doors” conjures a threatening labyrinth which both seals Harker within its confines and suggests potential danger awaiting him beyond.

Though this castle figures importantly in both the beginning and end of the book, Dracula’s activity in London further associates him with architecture and groundedness. Following some arcane vampire rule, Dracula has to spend each day sleeping in some amount of dirt gathered from his homeland in Transylvania. To make his trip to London possible then, Dracula prepares 50 boxes filled with soil to be shipped and then divided amongst a number of real estate properties throughout London. Having multiple properties grants Dracula multiple safe houses for the storage of his boxes and provides him easier access to different locations. In order to ultimately defeat Dracula, then, the vampire-hunters of the novel have to seek out his different properties to both sanctify his boxes (in order to prevent him from using them) and destroy his property title deeds. This part of the book sees the fight against Dracula move principally towards a contestation over architectural space, or perhaps more correctly, the control over land.

As seen through his ability to purchase and use strategically-placed properties, Dracula is both an adept user of real estate and, I’ll suggest, of architecture itself. Not only do the vampire-hunters have to prevent Dracula from buying properties all over London, but they also have to combat his control over particular architectural spaces. The book stages this conflict with attention to the windows of buildings. Because of another arcane vampire rule, Dracula cannot enter new buildings without first being invited inside. When he targets his first victim, Lucy Westenra, he uses her bedroom window as a direct point of contact. The window in Dracula is the thinnest boundary between inside and outside and, therefore, between Lucy and Dracula.

This interaction is repeated later in the book between Dracula and Mina Harker as she resides in Dr. John Seward’s asylum. Again, there is a seeming protection from the building’s walls and the penetration of those walls through the improper use of window-as-entrance. The window is Dracula’s point of penetration into his victim’s residences which, in a story about vampires, appears to draw a strong analogy to his victims’ necks. The window and the neck both serve as fragile boundaries between an interior — the contents of the house for the window, and blood for the neck — and an exterior — Dracula himself. It is Dracula’s ability to exercise mastery over these fragile boundaries and force an improper entry which provides him power over both his victims and, in the first part of the novel, the vampire-hunters as well.

It is the assortment of both explicit and inexplicit examples described here which functionally tie Dracula to the ground. As he is a master of groundedness, the vampire-hunters ultimately have to make use of groundless technologies to defeat him. This is perhaps best exemplified through the vampire-hunter squad’s use of the telegraph to determine Dracula’s whereabouts in the last section of the novel. The telegraph here provides a more amorphous sense of the environment which works beyond the confines of Dracula’s grounded relationship to the world.

It would seem fruitful to explore this reading of Dracula in regard to both gender and sexuality and British Empire and xenophobia, but I’ll end here by suggesting Bram Stoker’s novel as a critique of the confinedness of the landed aristocracy. Possession and mastery of architecture and real estate ultimately cannot compete with the wide-reaching abilities of modern information technologies.

[1] Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media.” ELH, vol. 59, no. 2, 1992, pp. 467–493., doi:10.2307/2873351.

[2] Fleissner, Jennifer L. “Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer’s Stake in Dracula.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 22, no. 3, 2000, pp. 417–455., doi:10.1080/08905490008583519.

[3] Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Edited by Roger Luckhurst, Oxford University Press, 2011.

Dylan Caskie is a first-year PhD student in the Syracuse University Department of English, and broadly studies interactive media and visual culture with an increasing emphasis on film and digital media.

The post Grounded and Ungrounded: Technology of Space in Dracula appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Written in 1516, More’s Utopia is a text which provides the first major instance of the word “utopia” as we know it today. Derived from a Greek pun which alternately means “no-place” and “good-place,” Utopia concerns the travels of one Raphael Hythloday to a hidden island nation known as Utopia and the report of his findings back at court in England. Book II of Utopia features long descriptions of the island-nation’s geography. More writes:

The island of Utopia containeth in breadth in the middle part of it (for there it is broadest) 200 miles. Which breadth continueth through the most part of the land. Saving that by little and little it cometh in and waxeth narrower towards both the ends. Which fetching about a circuit or compass of 500 miles, do fashion the whole island like to the new moon. (49).

More’s book is best remembered for its discussion of social practices in Utopia, but these geographic details have inspired several attempts to visualize the island which I’ll explore here.

First, let me introduce the map included in the original 1516 edition of Utopia:

The 1516 map makes use of several representational shortcuts. It suggests the 54 cities of Utopia with the presence of only about 10 manmade structures on the island. The size of these representational structures in relation to the 500-mile long perimeter island also points to discrepancies between image and text.

The 1595 edition of Utopia sees a dramatically more attentive cartography:

In addition to representing all 54 of the cities described in the text, this map emphasizes the details of the landscape with depictions of hills, forests, and rivers throughout the island. Furthermore, the cities of the island are represented significantly more proportionally to the remainder of the landscape. Overall, the 1595 map represents a markedly higher attention to detail which, as a whole, conveys a sense of verisimilitude. Mapping the island to such a high level of detail suggests a more stable conception of the Utopia within the text.

As we skip to the contemporary moment, we can see an interesting clash across a technological divide on how to make a map of Utopia. Brian Goodey, in his 1970 essay “Mapping ‘Utopia’: A Comment on the Geography of Sir Thomas More,” undertakes the project of rendering a map of Utopia which is thoroughly founded on what he describes as the “statistical and topographical description of Utopia provided by More in the early sections of Book Two” (15). He makes step-by-step analyses of components of the mapping process before ultimately concluding that “The answer is unfortunately all too simple. More presents us with a Utopia, a ‘Nowhere,’ that cannot be mapped.” (8) Not only does Goodey find it impossible to piece together the details of the text into a coherent map, but he suggests that this is indicative of a larger project by More — an impossible utopic society on an impossible-to-map island.

Andrew Simoson’s 2016 article “The Size and Shape of Utopia” offers a starkly contrasting position to Goodey.[i] In this article, Simoson works through the text of Utopia to find what he considers the five most important cartographic details given in the text. Describing them as “clues,” he lists them as:

Clue 1: Utopia is shaped as a crescent, the horns of which bound a large harbor on its eastern end.

Clue 2: If we loosely define the midline of the island as the perpendicular bisector of the crescent’s two tips, then Utopia’s cross-sections parallel to the midline are all about 200 miles, except near the extremes where it collapses to 0.

Clue 3: This harbor is circular with a mouth of 11 miles so as to make a perimeter of about 500 miles.

Clue 4: Utopia consists of 54 city-states, each separated from the nearest neighbor by 24 miles. Each city-state is square-like with side lengths of at least 20 miles.

Clue 5: The capital city, located in the center of the island, lies about 60 miles from the harbor and 140 miles from the opposite coast. (65-66)

After Simoson works through the way previous maps have failed to accurately render Utopia following these five clues, he proposes five mathematic formulations to more precisely determine the map’s parameters. For Clue 1, he provides “Feature 1: The outer coast of Utopia will be an ellipse parameterized by O = (a cos t, b sint)” (68). Where Goodey relied on analog mathematical devices to attempt a map of Utopia, Simoson inputs his five mathematical features into a computer.

In other words, the mysterious hidden island of Utopia created in the year 1516 could only finally be mapped correctly in the year 2016 with the aid of computers. Those leery of some techno-positivistic moral lesson in this narrative should note that Simoson’s final map actually looks very different from that which was yielded by computer.

Ultimately, the closeness of the computer’s map to the text falls somewhat short and we are left instead with a map that appears in kind very similar to both the 1516 and 1595 maps. However this 500-year long mapping struggle seems to imply a kind of increasingly rational mode of ordering the world, this ultimate recourse seems to suggest an intertwined narrative about the role of maps and their relationship both to imaginary worlds and, perhaps, our own. Maps provide an inlet for us to orient ourselves to text not only in a rationalistic kind of space-ordering, but, as these examples suggest, some kind of imagistic and artistic way as well.

[i] Simoson’s article was the culmination of a project undertaken for the 500-year anniversary of Utopia.

References

• Goodey, Brian R. “Mapping ‘Utopia’: A Comment on the Geography of Sir Thomas More.” Geographical Review, vol. 60, no. 1, 1970, pp. 15-30.
• More, Thomas. Utopia. In Three Early Modern Utopias edited by Susan Bruce, Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Simoson, Andrew. “The Size and Shape of Utopia.” Bridges Finland. August 2016, Jyväskylä, Finland.

Dylan Caskie is a first-year PhD student in the Syracuse University Department of English, and broadly studies interactive media and visual culture with an increasing emphasis on film and digital media.

The post Utopia and Mapping the Imaginary appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Manson’s book was originally advertised as a kind of puzzle “contest” in which the first reader to find their way from room 1 to room 45 and back again in 16 steps (or less, if possible) would win $10,000 dollars. The puzzle was solved in 1987, but the book remains an interesting early entry into what fan-site Into the Abyss calls the “Immersive Puzzle” genre. Here I’ll be thinking a little more about how MAZE works as an immersive puzzle, but more specifically how it does that by existing as a book.

Each of the 45 rooms in MAZE consists of two pages across a single fold. On the right-hand page appears an illustration of the room replete with clues, as well as doorways to other rooms in the book. On the left-hand page appears text in which “The Guide” and your fellow travellers discuss their encounter in the room.

As Manson suggests in the “Directions” page at the beginning of the book:

There are any number of clues in the drawings and in the story to help you choose the right door in each room. Clues in a series of rooms may relate to each one another, and may indicate a path. Other clues may refer to a specific door in a single room.

Anything in this book might be a clue.

Not all clues are necessarily trustworthy.

This multiplicity of clues becomes quickly clear upon encounter with Room 1. It’s difficult to determine whether the numbers, the lighting, the symbols, or the words in the first room are meant to clue us in on which door to take. There’s no way to really know if the choices you make in MAZE are the correct ones. The only way to be sure of your path is to attend to both the pictures and the stories and cross-check the clues given. The correct door should be motioned towards through more than one set of clues.

Though you have to use them together to succeed, the texts and pictures of MAZE maintain a strange relationship throughout the book. We never see any of the characters who speak in the stories in the images themselves. We hear them talk amongst each other and purportedly share the same spaces as they do, but we are never able to visually engage with the characters of the text. Because the images never contain any referents (such as the characters) that would guide the image-text relationship temporally, this relationship is left ambiguous.

Since the text is given on the left-hand page of each fold, we are prompted to encounter it first; that’s how English-language readers expect to read a book. We read the story and then look at the picture of the room with the story in mind; but, as we have no temporal markers in the image which correlate to the text, we don’t know whether the picture exists before the contents of the story or after it.

This ambiguity poses a problem for the interpretation of certain rooms in the maze. In Room 26, for example, the story reads: “They objected to my tone, but it distracted them from the real clues … I quickly picked up the bell, ringing it loudly” — “they” being the maze-goers, and “I” being the actively misleading Guide. The savvy reader will pick up on the language of “tone” as hinting towards the significance of the bell. The bell in the picture points towards Room 30, but since we don’t know whether the story or picture takes place first, we don’t know whether this is the “real clue” the Guide picks up the bell in order to interrupt — or whether this bell positioning is a trap set by the Guide after they put the bell back down.

This temporal ambiguity is multiplied by what Into the Abyss calls the “Loop Rooms.” When I first encountered MAZE, I felt very skeptical at the warning on the back cover of the book that “one wrong turn and you may never escape” could ever possibly apply to a book. After all, I have the entire contents of the maze within my physical possession and there’s no real penalty to flipping through rooms at random. Unlike other interactive content (like a puzzle video game), it seemed that I didn’t actually have to solve the puzzles of the book to reach the end — so how could I actually get lost in the book? Manson’s “Loop Rooms” proved me wrong. Of the 45 rooms in the book, 19 are effectively set apart from the rest of the rooms, and, once you enter them, there’s no way to get outside of the 19 rooms. This means that, while you feel like you are making progress, you repeatedly encounter the same rooms, and thus the same stories and pictures, over and over again, until you acknowledgement some kind of vague defeat.

The looping in the pictures forms an interesting labyrinthine architecture. Sometimes you go up ladders to get to rooms and later down slides, in ways that appear coherent spatially but are not coherent in actuality. Meanwhile, the text forms an interesting kind of narrative hodgepodge as each story connects to the next via ellipses that both begin and end each story (except for the Prologue and Room 24). Upon first reading, the characterization of the Guide seems to build over time as you progress narratively through the labyrinth. But, once you enter the “Loop Rooms,” you are forced to encounter the same segments of narrative over and over again. Since MAZE is a book, neither the text nor the images ever change and this sameness is immediately coherent to the reader. MAZE rigidly denies the flippant reader access to the Path to Room 45, forcing a closer reading of its contents and an active deliberation of both text and image.

It is this reconsideration of text and image within the book format which I’ve continually pointed to in MAZE. Though the immersive puzzle book genre never really took off, MAZE’s ambiguous text-image relationship and active refusal of disengaged readership positions MAZE as both an important predecessor to immersive puzzle video games like Myst (1993) and The Witness (2016), and as something fundamentally different. MAZE takes advantage of a certain degree of medium specificity to position the book and its reader in a hermeneutic battle which, if not “The World’s Most Challenging Puzzle” is at least “The World’s Most Challenging Puzzle Book.”

Dylan Caskie is a first-year PhD student in the Syracuse University Department of English, and broadly studies interactive media and visual culture with an increasing emphasis on film and digital media.

The post MAZE: Playing Between Image and Text appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.