A couple weeks ago Jeff Martin posted on Google Lat Long about a new Penguin Publishing website called wetellstories.co.uk that fuses fiction and maps in a series of newly published short stories, where the text of a story unfolds interactively on a map.

Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods comes to mind about now. This is a little book of essays in which the novelist muses on the nature of narrative and location.

In one essay Eco tells of getting mail from a reader of his ponderous novel Foucault’s Pendulum. The correspondent, who had obviously been doing research in back editions of Le Monde, complained that if the hero of the book had really traveled that particular route through Paris on that particular night, as Eco described in street-by-street detail, he would have encountered a huge fire that blazed in the city that night and that took hours to extinguish, yet the narrative makes no mention of the fire even as the character walks within yards of the spot.

Eco used this anecdote to discuss the blurring of the line between reality and fiction where familiar location is involved for the reader. We might also observe that 1) people who write letters to novelists correcting historical facts in fictional stories are crazy, but 2) if Eco had subjected his manuscript to testing on a website like Penguin’s, the whole “why didn’t the hero notice the conflagration” question could have been avoided.

Another thought I had about this is, what a boon this would be to Bloomsday enthusiasts, a throng of dedicated James Joyce fans who have demonstrated the allure of linking “story” with “real-world place” by setting a day aside (June 16 – “Bloomsday”) to trace the path of Joyce’s hero Leopold Bloom through the streets of contemporary Dublin, pausing where the fictional Bloom downed fictional pints at actual pubs. It was Joyce’s stated goal that if Dublin disappeared it should be able to be reconstructed from his book, so I wonder what he would have thought of merging maps and narrative.

Of course, Ulysses is not a short story (alas, not even a short novel), which I’m guessing would make it difficult to read on a map. And then there’s the troubling (dare I say unmappable?) matter of Molly Bloom’s 45-page punctuation-free soliloquy. I can just see the Penguin people considering publishing Ulysses as a cartographic novel: “…and maybe we said maybe we will maybe.”

I’m lucky I got my degree in English while geography and mapping science courses were still elective.