Using the peripatetic appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904, James Joyce, in Ulysses, maps the real landscape of the city onto Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, and, by the stint of his prose transposes past and present, epic and pedantic for eternity.
The Virginia Woolf Society, in the UK, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarly reconstructed the paths of the London amblers in Mrs. Dalloway using Google maps to trace their fictional sojourns onto the city’s modern landscape.
In the process they have created a metalayer that not only links the past and present, the fictional and the real but also highlights how these two novels link the landscape with the mind to acquire meaning. Mrs. Dalloway doesn’t just perceive the city around her as she walks. She also dips in and out of her past, creating a highly textured mental landscape where time and space intertwine, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.”
It is true we live in a world where we occupy physical shape. This presses down upon the Earth. We experience the inexorable pull of the planet’s gravity well and the vagaries of its weather. We are subject to the aural presence of both nature and civilization and we experience the scenes we see not only with our…
