Locked Rooms: Map-ability and Cramped Spaced in Contemporary Fiction and Culture

Abstract

Maps have taken center stage in key twenty-first century fictions. When literary works engage with this new approach to mapping, the result is what I refer to as “map-able” text. “Map-ability” refers to the way authors deliberately integrate cartographic practices into their narratives to reveal previously invisible geographies of power. Map-able texts “proposition” certain futures or aspirational models of belonging, invite readers to map their worlds differently, and intervene in the prefigurative politics in the present. In this paper, I discuss two contemporary novels that demonstrate map-ability’s scope for articulating alternative social spaces and new political identities. Kevin Brooks’s controversial Young Adult novel, The Bunker Diary (2014), chronicles the life of a teenage boy, Linus, held captive in a bunker by an anonymous man. Soon after Linus arrives, several other kidnap victims of different ages and races are mysteriously brought to the bunker. With escape impossible, it becomes unclear why Linus feels compelled to map a finite, cramped space. Another captive narrative is Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010), loosely based on the 2008 Fritzl kidnapping case in Austria. In Room, young Jack and his Ma inhabit a world shrunk down the size of a room; only by repeated drilling and memorialization of spatial relationships and mental mapping of a world he has never experienced allows Jack to carry out Ma’s escape plan. Both the bunker and the room are not on any map and exist outside of geopolitical boundaries. Both spaces embody what William Walters and Barbara Luthi, taking their cue from Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of minor politics, call “cramped space” which “registers degrees of deprivation, constriction, and obstruction” (361) that force us to radically rethink the linearity and access to mobility. If cramped space offers an “obstructed agency” (365) enabled by the intensification of social relations and mediating entities (those that can mediate reversals, change or even release), then mapping the cramped space of the bunker or the room suggests that map-ability can be a way to make sense of a carceral geography that has seeped into everyday space. This paper ends by situating map-ability and cramped spaces within a discussion of affordable housing and the trend of nano or micro apartments in urban centers across Asia.