Anderson: Towards an Assemblage Approach
Literary Geographies I(2) 2015 120-137
120
Towards an Assemblage Approach
to Literary Geography
Jon Anderson
Cardiff University
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Abstract:
Over recent years literary geography has adopted a relational approach to its subject matter.
This article continues this move, suggesting that assemblage theory can help develop the
sub-discipline in two interrelated ways. Firstly, at a project level, assemblage theory enables
literary geographers to identify all components that have agency and influence on fiction
(including authors, translators, publishers, readers, places, etc.). As part of this first
argument, the article develops Hones’ concept of reading fiction as a ‘spatial event’ (Hones
2008, 2014). This article interacts with Hones’ textual ‘happening’ to emphasise the valency
of fiction on ‘extra-textual’ geographies. It offers a short case study from the work of
novelist Tessa Hadley to illustrate this valency. Secondly, at the sub-disciplinary level, the
article argues that assemblage theory may offer a common ground which allows scholars
from both literary and geographical positions to locate their writings in the broader set of
approaches that define literary geographies.
Keywords: spatial event; assemblage; novel; Tessa Hadley; The London Train; Cardiff
Author contact:
andersonj@cardiff.ac.uk
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Introduction
To both literature and geography, place matters. Following the humanist and cultural turn in
the 1970s and 80s (Cosgrove and Duncan 1993; Cosgrove and Jackson 1987; Tuan 1974,
1976), many geographers now insist that humans are spatial beings; who we are, what we do,
and how we conceive of ourselves is influenced to a large extent by where we are (Casey
2000, 2001; Preston 2003). To geographers, place is vital to human identity, as Soja confirms:
As intrinsically spatial beings [...] we are at all times engaged and enmeshed in shaping
our socialised spatialities and, simultaneously, being shaped by them. (Soja 2010: 18)
As a consequence of these relations, literature has witnessed a growth in interest from
human geographers (Brosseau 1994; Cameron 2012; Cooper and Gregory 2011; Johnson
2004; Lahaie 2008; Pocock 1981; Sharp 2000; Yap 2011). Akin to their ‘real world’
counterparts, fictional narratives and characters are recognised as similarly tied to spatial
settings and geographical contexts; as Piatti et. al. observe, it is ‘impossible to even think of
literature without any spatial context’ (2008: 4). Geographers therefore have looked to
literature as one site through which the extraordinary relations between people and place
(following Madanipour, Holloway, and Hubbard 2001) can be investigated. Fiction is
considered to be a form of cartography that can help us understand the nature of homo
geographicus (Sack 1997), it is a route map to help engage with the ways humans locate
themselves and relate to the world.
However, due to the variety of approaches that distinguish human geography, allied to
the many lines of inquiry apparent in literary studies, the field of literary geographies is often
defined by ‘gaps and disconnections’ between works (Hones 2014: 164). Some human
geographers may be interested in plotting locational reference points on maps; others may
look to compare fictional cities with real geographies. Some literary scholars may focus their
attention on the role that place plays in structuring a narrative, whilst others may explore
how geographical fictions are interpreted and experienced by their readers. This myriad of
approaches may all ‘talk the language’ of literary geography, but also may talk past and
beyond one another due to their differing interests and conflicting epistemologies. Thus as
Hones states,
In the current moment, as I write, studies in literature and geography as a whole are
neither generating nor (as a result) collaborating in a coherently common academic
space; this makes it very difficult to understand the relative positions of thematically
adjacent but relationally distant work, because the production of multiple disconnected
spaces means that it is not easy to gain a coherent overview. (Hones 2014: 166)
The pages of this journal are one space through which a common ground for the sub-
discipline can be created and debated, and this article is a contribution to this end. The article
suggests that the relational turn within the social sciences in general can offer literary
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geographies an opportunity to fashion a common space through reconsidering the nature of
associations within this complexity. This relational turn provides the impetus to rethink the
fixed and singular chunks of all (sub-) disciplines and refashion them in new, more useful
ways. To paraphrase Latour, it offers the opportunity to ‘redefine the notion of [literary
geographies… and] trace [its] connections again’. (Latour 2005: 1). The article suggests that
the concept of assemblage can help us in this process. At a project level, assemblage theory
enables literary geographers to identify all components that have agency and influence in
fiction (including authors, translators, publishers, readers, places etc.). From this basis, this
article interacts with Hones’ concept of reading fiction as a ‘spatial event’ (Hones 2008,
2014) in order to emphasise the valency of this happening on ‘extra-textual’ (or ‘real world’)
geographies. This valency will be illustrated through a short case study of the assemblages
created by this reader’s engagement with the novel The London Train by Tessa Hadley (2012).
Through this process the article presents the assemblage approach to answer calls to not
only ‘better understand the impact of stories on the production of places’, but also, ‘grasp
the nature of the different aspects of this interaction and how to conceptualise it’ (Caquard
and Fiest 2014: 18). The article thus presents the case that assemblage theory can help re-
define the sub-discipline as a literary geography of associations.
Rethinking relations
A relational approach to understanding the world has grown in popularity in recent years
(see Doel 1999; Latour 1999; Murdoch 2006). According to Jones (2009: 487), a relational
approach challenges scholars by insisting that the world is constituted as ‘an open-ended,
mobile, networked, and actor-centred geographic becoming’. Relational thinking therefore
marks a shift away from independent conceptual categories of the modern constitution
(Latour 1993), and towards considering units as part of actor-centred networks. As Barnes
notes, relational thinking attends
to the networks of relations that crosscut, interleave and fold across [fossilised
categories of the modern], and form hybrid collectives. [...] It is by undertaking this
[approach] that we enter the ‘middle kingdom’, and see the world before it is torn in
two.... (Barnes 2005: 72)
Relational thinking does not consider ‘concepts’, ‘things’, or ‘networks’ as ‘a priori’ in the
world, but rather considers them to be continually ephemeral, (re)composing, and emergent
(see also Whatmore 1999: 31-2). As Latour puts it in relation to the modern category of the
‘social’: the social ‘does not designate a thing among other things, like a black sheep among
other white sheep, but a type of connection between things that are not themselves social’ (2005:
5, emphasis in original). From this perspective, as Haraway tells us, the connection (or
relation) is the smallest and perhaps the most appropriate ‘unit of analysis’ (2003: 20). No
longer do the fixed independent chunks of the modern constitution hold sway (after Laurier
and Philo 1999), but these now give way to an inter dependent epistemology where things are
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always acting and being acted upon by everything else. From this perspective each
component (or thing) is not discrete and singular, but its nature and meaning changes due to
its position in a relation. This is a challenging and radical approach to take. As Latour admits,
At first, this [approach] seems absurd since it risks diluting [categories and, in this case,
sub-disciplines] [...] But this is precisely the point[.] [T]his alternative branch of social
theory wishes to [show how] all those heterogeneous elements might be assembled
anew in some given state of affairs. (Latour 2005: 5)
As a result, the relational approach acknowledges that ‘ambiguity, uncertainty and instability
[will] always [...] haunt efforts to generate the certain and the definitive’ (Smith 2001: 131); it
is a paradigmatic shift that ensures that taken for granted entities, ‘are never stabilised,
normalised, sedimented or structured’ (after Rose 2002: 385). In sum, the relational turn
‘rearticulat[es] the way we see, understand and thus live the world’ (Dewsbury 2011: 148).
Relational pages and places
The relational turn can be identified within both literary studies and geography over recent
years. In comparative isolation to one another, both geographical and literary scholars have
recognised the range of relevant actors that can come to influence place and literature, and
thus be the centre of any relational geographic becoming. Conceptualisations of literature
have developed from being understood as an objective rendering of the reality of the world
(approached by the scholar from a detached, positivist epistemology) into being understood
as a situated interpretation of the world created by the author and their characters (see Sharp
2000). Through acknowledging the increasingly positioned geography of authorial intent (be
it an attempt at neutrality or otherwise), scholars have also identified the necessity of
exploring the geography of reception (after Sharp, in Johnson 2004: 92). Following Barthes
(1977), we as readers have come to be positioned not as passive consumers of authorial
purpose, but rather enjoying the agency to produce our own reading of any fiction. Indeed, a
reader’s (re)construction of any text is now seen as a vital component in understanding
fiction, as Cameron states, ‘stories demand interpretation’ from a reader (2012: 574), our
production of meaning becomes ‘the very essence of literature’ (Ljungberg 2003: 174; also
cited in Piatti and Hurni 2009: 340).
Thus over time, literary scholars (and now literary geographers) have come to
challenge the perceived stability and homogeneity of literature and the characters and places
within them. Texts are no longer framed as fixed and singular, but have a variety of
interpretations based on authorial intent and audience (re)interpretation. Fictions are now
framed as ‘phenomenal’ in nature, they encourage the ‘complex production of meaning and
effect [...] from dynamic interaction’ between a reader, their imagination, pre-existing
knowledge, and the work of the author (Drucker 2008, cited in Barnes 2013: 166). This
challenge to the perceived stability and singularity of a fictional text has converged with a
broader move in geography to see cultures, practices and places as forms of text that can be
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read, interpreted, and performed (see Anderson 2010; Duncan 2004; Geertz 1977).
Geographical sites have been reframed as dynamic and plural, rather than fixed and singular
(for a full review see Anderson 2010; Massey 2005). Where once scholars would contend
that it is every geographical site’s, ‘persistent sameness and unity which allows [it] to be
differentiated from others’ (Relph 1976: 45, my emphasis), places are now argued to be
‘always in a process of dynamic unfolding and becoming’ (Rose 2002: 385). As a result of
these complementary shifts in perspective, both fictions and geographies are now
understood as ‘culturally produced [and] differentially enacted through embodied practice’
(Ogborn 2005–2006: 148). In short, both fiction and geographies are considered as actor-
centred ‘ongoing compositions’ (see Anderson 2010).
These shifts towards the relational in literary and geographical studies suggest that
both disciplines are increasingly occupying complementary epistemological ground. One
example of how literary geographies have sought to harness the relational turn is Hones’ re-
articulation of fiction as a ‘spatial event’.
New ground for geography and literature: fiction as a spatial event
According to Sheila Hones, fiction is a spatial event (2008, 2014). In her view, a fictional
work ‘happens’ through the ‘intermingled processes of writing, publishing, and reading’
(2014: 19). Reflecting the relational turn, this framing suggests that fiction is not completed
when it is written, but this apparent end point simply begins a new process of editing,
translating, proofing, typefacing, designing, marketing, positioning in a (virtual or material)
shop, purchasing, reading, and reflection. Hones reminds us of the explicitly spatial and
temporal dimensions of these processes; in Hones’ terms the ‘happening’ of a book is not a
singular and isolated occurrence, but rather a connected process which:
emerges [...] as a geographical event, or a series of connected events, which have been
unfolding (and continue to unfold) in space and time. (Hones 2014: 19)
In one sense, Hones refers here to something geographers would find axiomatic – that
life (and literature) is inherently spatial. But rather than suggesting “simply” that geography is
a crucial part of a fictional plot (in the sense that it locates and defines a storyline) or a
crucial influence on a writer’s practice (in terms of the crucial where of their typing, dictating,
or writing habits), the notion of a book as a spatial event suggests a re-thinking of the
modern category of ‘a book’. It re-articulates the associations that bring a book into being,
and goes on to contribute to its nature and meaning over time. In short, this idea emphasises
the relational nature of fiction, offering a ‘[...] spatial view of the writing–reading nexus as a
contextualized and always emerging geographical event’ (2008: 1301). As Hones describes:
As reader and writer, you and I, we are currently sharing a moment of text-based
spatial interaction, a geographical event. We are engaged across distance, participating
in an improvisation that is bringing together a broad array of people, places, times,