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T**M
Really? Where?
It's not exaggerating to say that this is one of the strangest books I have ever read, and I have read a whole lot of books, many of them pretty strange. (Consider, maybe as a benchmark, E.A. Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, or Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark or Anna Kavan's Ice.) Atlas has won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award as the best 2013 work in long form (i.e., novel, or maybe novella), and that is a fact that might well lead a number of readers into an unexpected and disorienting reading experience. Of course, that is what many of the best works of science fiction aspire to do, but this one works differently.Most science fiction is grounded in one or more familiar sciences--physics, biology, chemistry, anthropology, even economics or political science when we explore dystopias. In the case of Atlas, we have a novel that emerges from (and explores, analyzes, defines and re-defines) cartography--the art of mapmaking. Fifty-one chapters, mostly no more than 3 pages long, some only 2--divided into four sections: Theory, The City, Streets, Signs--the novel seems to be narrated by a single voice, though at some points there are suggestions of new voices entering. From the beginning, the narrative is about the island city of Hong Kong. The narrative is not chronological nor sequential--rather, each chapter has reference to a number of maps produced over many centuries by people of different nationalities and races, different perspectives (both visual and political), different motives or agendas, and so on. If a reader has believed that there is something solid and dependable about the information gained from looking at a map, that belief will be thoroughly and inexorably demolished by reading this work.What is the relation between a map and the territory it purports to represent? How large does a map have to be, with what degree of conformity to the size of the territory before it is trustworthy or sufficiently informative? What is the relationship, cognitively, between the signs on the map and the reality of the places it ---- identifies? names? acknowledges or establishes as "real"? What if the same place (or group of places, as in an archipelago near a mainland) presented on different maps, drawn by different cartographers from different backgrounds and different periods of time, seems to be shaped differently, named differently, juxtaposed with its neighbors at different angles or with different topographical relationships? What if the map represents the topography of an earlier period, whereas the topography has changed radically in the historical period since the map was made? Consider Canal Road East and Canal Road West on Hong Kong Island: It was the fate of Canal Road East and Canal Road West (as with so many other places in Victoria) for a separation between sign and reference to take place in the course of successive stages of time and space. A more thorough deconstruction would be to take the argumenent one step further, that is, when the signifier for the sign "canal" no longer had a natural connection with its signified, then only the phonetic form remained in "canal," acting as a plac-name, while the content of "canal" was abandoned. The underground waterway no longer existed in reality, no matter whether on a map or in people's comprehension. The street name not only made it impossible for anyone to trace its source, it actually tells us how the city deconstructs itself in its unceasing growth. (p. 98)Notice the reference to "Victoria"--that is the name of the city founded by British colonialists on Hong Kong Island, a city that can be located on a map of Hong Kong, but which serves as a reminder of the unstable and complex "identities" of the place represented: British architecture, British customs, British allegiances, British military and commercial interests, superimposed on native Chinese language, Chinese people (coolies, servants, tailors, rickshaw men, etc.) along with place names that may have several different meanings, even exist in different languages, so conveying different information about the character of the places, and so on. You will notice also in that passage the vocabulary of Saussurean structuralism juxtaposed with Derridean postmodern theory, both at the service of an analysis of the fleeting quality of cultural and social meaning in a colonized world. These are themes that float and transform and occasionally illuminate the chapters, which also draw on Foucauldian archaeology (as the book's title suggests), constantly reminding us of the relationships of power (not always obviously consistent with the surface appearances) and even the tectonic shifts and volcanic eruptions that may affect the lives and security of the inhabitants.As the chapters accumulate in the reader's mind, the suspicion that there is an agenda along with all these mindbending (and sometimes very frustratingly opaque) analyses of very old maps (16th century, 18th century, 20th century and more) of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Macao, and the New Territories. Indeed, it appears from comments (on the dust jacket, for example) that these chapters are a compilation of interpretations and analyses by cartographers far in the future, attempting to reconstruct the cities of Victoria/Hong Kong and surroundings, following a catastrophic decline of the whole area, the nature of which is never explained.In other words, the whole book is an examination of what we can know, if anything, about a place by examining a map of it. Is the map in any sense at all comparable to the territory--or is it merely a mental construct, an idealized or degraded "picture," corrupted away from "reality" by the intrusion of human intentions, human myths, human fairy tales, human human interest stories? Many of the streets and locations have such stories attached to them, perhaps signalled by texts or even "legends" attached to the maps. So also the whole island and the complex culture of it. As we learn at the beginning of Chapter 16: The legendary city of Victoria was, like Venus, born from the waves of the sea. It is not known how it disappeared in the end. The legend thus brings us face-to-face with an archaeological question: by what means can we verify a city's existence?The book is about all that. It must be said that the opening chapters, especially, require patience and persistence of the reader. The numerous names flood the brain, the shifting theoretical and philosophical perspectives purposely disorient and confuse. And there is very nearly no payoff for all the effort it takes--while there are anecdotes along the way, there is no plot line, no set of knowable characters. The experience is of a massive mind game and provides all the pleasures for the brain of working out whatever can be known from thinking about dozens of maps one has not even seen, but only known through verbal descriptions that are themselves full of uncertainty. For the right reader, it is a heady pleasure, but it certainly feels at the end as though one has finally found that boojum, and one is nowhere as a result. And happy to be so.
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