Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains by Susan Naramore Maher (review)

In a famous line from his study of Melville, Call Me Ishmael, Charles Olson wrote: “I take space to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom Cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.” It is a powerful statement, even if Olson may have confused the “Folsom site” and Sandia Cave, each in New Mexico, as the original font of prehistoric America. However, this attentiveness to spatiality has always seemed grander in the West, with its Big Sky and its wide open spaces. Such a region might well be labeled “Deep Map Country.”

In Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains, Susan Naramore Maher analyzes the “deep map,” a distinctive narrative form or even a new genre that seems particularly well suited to this region of North America. Maher examines several works of recent or contemporary nonfiction focused on the social and natural environment of the Plains, dubbing them forms of “deep mapping.” The depth to which she refers has to do with the dense historical, geographical, and narrative layers that make up these works, along with the fundamentally polyvocal or heteroglossic nature of their projects. Maher is careful to differentiate this genre from personal, regional, or nature writing. Thus,

what distinguishes the deep map form from other place- based essays is its insistence on capturing a plethora of interconnected stories from a particular location, a distinctive place, and framing the landscape within this indeterminate complexity. Deep maps present many kinds of tales in an effort to capture the quintessence of place, but the place itself remains elusive and incompletely limned.

(10–11)

With allusions to Bakhtinian and Deleuzian thought, Maher meticulously elaborates the multiformal, rhizomatic aspects of a genre that challenges “mythic renderings of place” and destabilizes “established or dominant viewpoints” (23).

Maher explores the range and possibility of this deep map genre by looking at examples from Wallace Stegner, William Least Heat-Moon, Don Gayton, Wes Jackson, Loren Eiseley, John McPhee, Julene Bair, and Sharon Butala, among others. The diversity of perspectives— “journalists, scientists, ranchers, and poets . . . united through their topophilia” (172)— is impressive, and these chapters elicit subtle themes of history, biology and the natural sciences, spatiotemporality, family, personal attachments to place, and affective geography more generally. In reading these texts while also laying out the constitutive characteristics of the deep map genre, Maher discloses the formal innovations of this type of literary cartography and suggests the ways in which such deep mapping may help transform what we mean by “knowing” a place. That is, such narratives distance themselves from the implicitly colonial project of earlier types of travelogue, naturalism, or ethnography by embracing a complex, sensuous, and “spiritual” geography (186). Maher’s study is a significant contribution to narrative theory and criticism, as well as to literary geography, but Deep Map Country ought to be especially valuable to anyone interested in the contemporary West, its history, and its future.