Distribution of different racial groups across Yoknapatawpha over time – what is immediately noticeable is that characters of different racial backgrounds are placed in separate areas

This is embarrassing. I have spent a significant part of my life mapping a place that does not exist. For nearly a decade, I have been working on the Digital Yoknapatawpha (DY) project. This project is an international collaboration between more than two dozen scholars and technologists. We are attempting to re-create a digital version of all of the characters, locations, and events based in William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner spent most of his writing career, from 1929 to 1962, building the town of Jefferson and the surrounding Yoknapatawpha County in his fiction. Largely inspired by his hometown of Oxford in Lafayette County, Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha is the setting for 54 short stories and 14 novels. The DY features interactive deep maps, advanced data visualisations, documentary and aural archival materials, sophisticated relational searches, and a robust scholarly commentary. The site is one of the most comprehensive single-author resources available on the web. It is also absolutely free, for anybody to access.

Unremarkably, maps of imaginary places have limited immediate use value, but they can tell you a surprising amount about how people create the world around them. Places are deeply embedded in narrative. True, we can use all sorts of reference systems – an address, GPS coordinates – to indicate where a location is. But it is not until we attach a name, an environment, and people to those locations that they become legible and meaningful. Your house address is a location, your home is a place. Fiction is similar. An author reserves a name – Atlantis, El Dorado, Orbis Tertius – and tells stories that make those lands a place, even if they have never existed.

Mapping fiction teaches us that while the world appears to us as a coherent whole, it is, in fact, a far more fragmented and contradictory place. Locations in Faulkner are not stable. The rivers hop around on the map, houses shift from story to story. Distances between places are sometimes only a walk, and at other times a day’s mule ride. Faulkner, I should note,

received a Nobel Prize for literature and not cartography. Remarkably, even the most assiduous readers are not too bothered by this.

We can gloss over inconsistencies in fictional worlds precisely because we can navigate spatial ambiguity in the actual world. Depending on who asks, Ashoka is in Delhi or Sonipat. One might know their favourite restaurant because it is near their favourite bookshop, or something might be close or far depending on the day, the traffic, the weather, or even the person you are meant to meet. Our language is littered with innumerable uncertainties about what is where and how to get there. Yet, we get around. We arrange the network of locations that constitute our spatial experience into a coherent whole.

An example – in regular times, I ask my class their weekend plans. Inevitably, they want to go to Delhi. When asked what Delhi means, the response is predictable: Majnu Ka Tila, Chandni Chowk, Connaught Place, Khan Market, or maybe as far as Saket. There are significant demographic and commercial differences between these spaces. Yet they are all part of one unified version of Delhi: places on the Delhi metro’s yellow line, located within an hour from the campus shuttle stop at Jahangirpuri! My students’ conception of the city then is, actually, a very narrow strip of places determined by commuting times. Their experience of Delhi, however, is no less complete, and feels coherent precisely because space is being unified to their relative position.

As much as narratives of places help us organise them, Faulkner also reminds us to be critical of these stories. The story that the American South told itself after the Civil War justified a racial apartheid regime. The stories the North tells about the South mask the silences around race in its own past. Faulkner asks us to question – why certain neighbourhoods come to be classified as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or why people in certain states are ‘those types’ of voters. Entire nations might become a friend or foe based on the stories we gather from maps, news, TV, and the internet. Whether it is in Yoknapatawpha or along the Yamuna, knowing a place, then, is really just a story you tell yourself.

Johannes Burgers is Professor of English. He also serves as associate director of the Digital Yoknapatawpha project.