Irreducible Complexity: The Ironies of Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
Open Reif Larsen's 2009 novel The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet to any page and you will be struck by the differences this book exhibits from most contemporary fiction. On the level of story, to be sure, Larson's novel consists of a not too unusual coming-of-age narrative, with its journey of plot and character-changing experiences in adversity, away from home and hearth and family. We follow the voyage of twelve-year-old Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet as he travels from his Montana ranch home to Washington, D.C., where the Smithsonian Institution wants to give him a prize for the scientific illustrations he has drawn for them, under the implicit pretense of being not a prepubescent boy, but a grown man. But if the plot of Larsen's novel is basic, its formal execution is surprising. The margins, comprising a full third of every page, are devoted to an assemblage of miscellany, from parenthetical musings by the narrator in prose through all kinds of maps, diagrams, drawings, and other visualizations, sometimes expanding and clarifying the main text, sometimes offering interjected arguments and philosophical musings. These illustrations are the work of the precocious protagonist of the novel, T.S. Spivet himself. T.S. is an inveterate practitioner of what he calls "mapping," a broader concept than the presentation of mere geographic information: it is the graphic representation of everything from everyday actions (such as the way his sister shucks corn) to facial expressions, historical and genealogical timelines, blueprints, and actual thematic and topographical maps.
Formally and narratively, Spivet speaks to two major contemporary trends in literary fiction: the incorporation of graphic elements as major parts of the narrative (as in Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves or Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), and the question of whether the hallmark of so-called 'post-postmodern' fiction is its lack of irony, its "new sincerity" (cf. Kelly 2010). At the heart of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet lies a meditation on the nature and possibilities of fiction—a meditation which the novel somewhat counterintuitively manifests in a narrative that seems to be chiefly about T.S. Spivet's "maps." The first step in the reading I offer here is to argue that there is a master trope that connects much of the narrative and formal elements at work in Larsen's novel: irony. In what follows, I want to suggest the importance of two interwoven strands of this general ironic stance: the importance of the act of mapping, including the ironic reversal of the valences of mapping and (fiction) writing as processes of reflecting on the world; and the conflation of this epistemological concern with the coming of age narrative, whose own ironic reversal lies at the heart of the novel's plot, with T.S. starting out nearly adult and becoming more of a child at the end. As I will show, it makes good sense to read these two issues in connection: throughout, the novel intertwines T.S.'s commentary on the epistemological status of the map, of fiction writing, and of the nature of adulthood, parsing one onto the other in constant reference. Spivet may be read as a book about post-postmodern narrative form itself, ironically approached in a novel that seems to foreground the possibilities of graphic illustration. It enacts its specific reading of the possibilities of fiction by indexing them to the question of what it means to be adult, but ultimately speaks more broadly to critical concerns about the possible futures of the contemporary novel.
The Ironies of Mapping a Novel
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet repeatedly dramatizes the contrast between mapping as a visual, diagrammatic and networked form of representation and the novel as a form designed to be read linearly and insisting (by and large) on coherence rather than fragmentation. It contrasts the difference between graphic illustration as "[c]omplexity reduced!" (18, original emphasis), as the Smithsonian's curator has it when he praises T.S.'s illustrations, and the novel as an art form committed to high epistemological complexity. If, as T.S. notes, "drafting maps erased many of the unwarranted beliefs of a child" (32), this conflicts with the observation that he fails to appreciate the novel form because he "was never able to successfully manage this simultaneous suspension of the real and the fictive" which the novel requires. "Maybe you just needed to be an adult in order to perform this high-wire act of believing and not believing at the same time" (35-6). The two observations are clearly contradictory: if mapping—graphic representation—is a way of perceiving the real, the adult world, as T.S. seems to note, then why does he, the inveterate mapper, still not appreciate the adult world of the novel? As the narrative progresses, it seeks to negotiate a position that can resolve this paradox; its failure to do so becomes an ironic affirmation of the potential of literary fiction.
At the heart of the paradox facing T.S. and the reader is T.S.'s own take on what it means to "map" something. A process far beyond mere cartography, mapping for T.S. ultimately involves something like grasping the essence of the real. Even on the first page of the novel, this problematic relationship between objects and their representation becomes evident: watching his sister Gracie shuck corn, T.S. is not merely recording the event, but is "drawing a diagrammatic map [...] of precisely how she was shucking" it (3, original emphasis). The "map" as T.S. is envisioning it is not reality, to be sure—"representation was not the real thing, but in a way this dissonance was what made it so good: the distance between the map and the territory allowed us breathing room to figure out where we stood." It is, nonetheless, true to the spirit of the thing called reality: "mapping was not an act of forgery but of translation and transcendence" (56-7). Mapping, in this account, provides access to the underlying truth about the everyday, indeed to the ultimate reality of the world, by showing "precisely how" things are. It translates what is individual into what is general, reducing the complexity of the individual act, the individual insect, the individual area, or the individual problem into a general and transcendent truth. It is, in this reading, completely un-ironic, thus perhaps even 'sincere.' It is this notion of the sincerity of the visual that the novel comes to break in due course.
Yet mapping is also, although T.S. does not initially realize it, a burden. T.S. perceives it as his "lifelong task" to be "mapping the real world in its entirety" (338). It is precisely this burden that T.S. comes to resist, a resistance grounded in fiction's creation of a 'real' world incapable of sustaining the kind of transcendental mapping that he initially desires to do. The major realization that T.S. has in the course of his metafictional and metacartographical musings is that mapping's reduction of complexity produces something that is in itself fictional, something very like a novel; and that conversely, there exist no transcendent truths. It is no coincidence that Spivet's major point of confluence between fiction and mapping is that perennial candidate for the great American novel, Moby-Dick. Having received an invitation from the Smithsonian Institution to receive a prize and speak at a formal event, T.S. finds himself vaguely upset. His solution is to return to the soothing act of mapping, but his object of choice is revealing: "The next day, in an effort to distract myself, I tried to start my map of Moby-Dick" (36). What the "map" of Moby-Dick might entail is at first unclear. Does it mean plotting the geographic progress of Ishmael up the coast and on the ocean? Or a genuinely transcendent rendering of the novel as such, distilling "precisely how" it works? Spivet doesn't say, and indeed, T.S. immediately segues into pointing out the impossibility of the project:
A novel is a tricky thing to map. At times the invented landscape provided me shelter from the burdens of having to chart the real world in its entirety. But this escapism was always tempered by a certain emptiness: I knew I was deceiving myself through a work of fiction. Perhaps balancing the joys of escapism with the awareness of deception was the whole point of why we read novels [...]. (36-7)
The real world's oppressive demand on T.S. is the charge of mapping it "in its entirety," producing a simile of the world on paper, a burden that is clearly premised on the belief that such a thing is possible in the first place. Mapping fiction is by the same logic impossible, however, because there is no reality to be transferred, no ultimate truth to map. Fiction, in T.S.'s parsing, makes complicated epistemological demands upon the reader, while the map does not: it merely must be accepted as a representation of reality, a transcendent reality perhaps, but a reality nonetheless. This is certainly a first important recognition on T.S.'s part, but it is, for now, empty. It leads him only to abandon fiction as an object of mapping, not to abandon mapping as a concept.
The contrast between fiction writing and mapping that the novel both formally and thematically pursues thus begins, like the coming-of-age narrative, in inverted fashion. T.S., the precocious child, prefers the map over prose, the diagram over the story. Here, at the beginning of the story, is the most extreme pronouncement of the power of mapping: it may chart the world entire, while fiction is deception. T.S. considers himself an "empiricist" (123); he believes in "tempering the impulse to invent rather than represent" (33). T.S.'s father cautions against this stance early on:
You could draw a picture showin' me how to git water from Three Forks clear across the mountains and you could make it look real purty, but that's piss in a tin can, far as I can see. This kinda thing's just fancy-pants numbers and bullshit. Open your eyes a little bit and you'd see that. (56)
While T.S. holds that that a cartographer has to avoid "wandering beyond the known boundaries of [his] data set" (32-3)—that, in other words, empirical reality must determine his mapping—his father clearly sees reality as a more complicated, more complex place than any of T.S.'s maps can possibly comprehend. This becomes, increasingly, T.S.'s own position, as he softens his stance during the course of the novel.
T.S.'s journey, his inverted coming-of-age, forces him to re-evaluate his own firm commitment to mapping as a way of perceiving the world, and to complicate the simple parsing of fiction as (denigrated) fantasy and mapping as (valorized) representation. The problem with fiction, T.S. suggests, may merely be that it leaves too much to the imagination:
I had read E.L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler in one day beneath the cottonwood tree. As I flipped the last page and was met with only the stiffened cardboard and cloth of the back cover (it was a library book from the Butte Public Library), I was stung with the realization that this was a work of fiction, that no such events had ever taken place as described in between the bounds of that cloth.
So I drew a series of maps documenting Claudia and Jamie's travels. At first I was filled with that empty feeling that often accompanies the invented landscape (the same feeling I experienced when I tried to map Moby-Dick), but then it slowly dawned on me that Ms. Konigsburg's novel was actually completely free from the burdens of the mappable world. I could draw this made-up map in a thousand different ways and never be wrong. Unfortunately, this freedom of choice paralyzed me after a while, and I eventually returned to my lifelong task of mapping the real world in its entirety. (338)
At this point, however, T.S.'s realization that mapping need not be merely the simplification of the outside world, but can be a creative, indeed a liberating process, is still tempered by his fear of performing this frightening (because potentially limitless) process of mapping a fictional text.
The novel, unsurprisingly, locates the final step of T.S.'s progress away from an empiricist belief in the necessary connection between the map and territory in another act of fiction making. Trying to adapt to the adult society in which he now, in Washington, finds himself, T.S. invents the death of his parents in a car crash. He finds, to his shock, that he is even capable of inventing a map of their death, which produces a revelatory sidebar:When you drew a map of something, this something then became true, at least in the world of the map. But wasn't the world of the map never the same as the world of the world? So no map-truths were ever truth-truths. I was in a dead-end profession. I think I knew I was in a dead-end profession, and the dead-endedness was what made it so attractive. In my heart of hearts, there was a certain comfort in knowing that I was doomed to failure. (351)
With a nod to Jorge Louis Borges's "On Exactitude in Science," the realization that any representation, no matter its status as more or less scientific, is merely another representation, subject to all of representation's limits, comprises a significant moment for T.S. It is not just the mapping of fiction that permits thousands upon thousands of possible ways of rendering the world. Rather, this limitless possibility is a constitutive part of all mapping—there is, finally, no transcendent truth to be discovered anywhere. T.S.'s essentialist belief in mapping as a way of reducing complexity without losing content—indeed, as a device for coming to fully grasp content in the first place—crumbles under this realization. But now he can accept the benefits of this realization: mapping is a dead-end profession, insofar as it will not allow him to speak the truth about the world; but it is a dead-end to which he can resign himself cheerfully, realizing that the oppressive burden "of having to chart the real world in its entirety" has been lifted from his shoulders. This is because the entirety of the world—as in Heidegger's example of the hammer—is never fully accessible to anyone.
Curiously, the process by which T.S. discovers the potential of fiction writing, and the shared status of fiction and maps as at best modestly representative expressions of an irreducibly complex outer world, is the process, as well, by which he discovers his own childhood. The process by which T.S. Spivet 'grows down' into his own age is mirrored by his evolving loss of faith in the merit of mapping as a praxis signifying adulthood. If he sets out claiming, "drafting maps erased many of the unwarranted beliefs of a child," his discoveries about the nature of mapping lead him to a remarkable reversal. In the safety of his father's presence at the end of the novel, T.S. feels he is "off the map" (374), finally relieved of the burdens of adulthood manifested in the impossible epistemological demands of his idea of mapping—and also, perhaps, 'in the novel.'
T.S. is relieved, too, of the belief that there is something constitutively different between the fictionality of the map and the fictionality of the novel. Larsen's book strikingly illustrates this proposition. For all T.S.'s "empty feeling that often accompanies the invented landscape (the same feeling I experienced when I tried to map Moby-Dick)," the novel ends on precisely such a map of Moby-Dick: a collage of drawings shot through with the same dotted lines of logical connections that tie the marginal notations of Larsen's narrative to the narrative proper. What makes mapping Moby-Dick possible is Spivet's recognition of the shared status of all representation. Small type in the map of Moby-Dick affirms that "everything is fiction." Beyond this, the map of Moby-Dick tapers out; there is nothing more to be said. Tellingly, this map of Moby-Dick echoes the map of Spivet that served as the frontispiece of the novel.
Yet where that map depicts Spivet as a linear narrative, in which three clearly distinguishable sections ("The West," "The Crossing," and "The East") are simply plottable chapter by chapter onto a map of the U.S., the map of Moby-Dick makes such easy connections unstable. Arrows on this latter map branch out in two different directions from the first chapter, with the various lines of connection spreading far and wide over the illustration, only finally to end, as if in resignation, on Chapter 10. The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet here seems to ironize not only its pretensions vis-à-vis its literary forebears—comparing its own lack of complexity to the abundant complexity of Melville's novel, which is impossible to map completely—but also the idea of mapping as such as an adequate response to fiction. T.S. had been struck by the way E.L. Konigsburg's novel ended on "only the stiffened cardboard and cloth of the back cover" and realized there that the book was just "a work of fiction," a recognition that points T.S. back inward, towards the enclosed space of the novel. Spivet ends on an open-ended map of Moby-Dick pointing towards the necessary openness of all fiction. The map of Moby-Dick remains incomplete, its intricate structure impossible to manage in graphic representation. If there are a thousand ways of mapping a novel, no individual attempt will be sufficient.
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet thus connects two major strands of ironic reversal. The first is supplied by T.S.'s inverted coming-of-age narrative, in which he finally becomes not an adult but a child. The recognition of his failure to be as grown up as he believes himself to be comes forcefully to T.S.: having made up the death of his parents in an effort to hide the facts of his journey, he finally comes to realize that what he truly wants to do is "go home" (369). When, at that moment, his father arrives, ready to take him, T.S.'s relief is palpable:
He was the most glorious sight I had ever seen, and in that single instant, my conception of my father was forever changed, forever inflected with the expression on his face as he walked into that room [...] the deep, deep love, bound up in my father's face. (370)
Here the novel offers its ironic take on the coming-of-age narrative: T.S. Spivet does come of age, but he comes, so to speak, of his age, he experiences instead of a 'growing up' a 'growing down' into an age-appropriate behavior, with his journey away from his family ultimately leading him back to that family.
This produces the second ironic inversion, in which T.S.'s effort at mapping the real world and his disdain for fiction eventually leads him to value fiction and to realize that for all its apparent direct relation with reality, mapping inhabits no privileged epistemological position. The paradox which engages T.S. early on, his simultaneous belief in the "adultness" of mapping and the necessity of being an adult to fully appreciate a novel, is ultimately resolved by the recognition that mapping's claim to depict a transcendent reality is, in fact, a childish belief. It is at this junction that Spivet combines its concern both for the possibilities of graphic representation in the novel and the opportunities and indeed the difficulties of a "new sincerity." In Spivet's initial parsing, to be graphic is to be true to reality, to be sincere—maps seem to, in David Foster Wallace's words, "endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles" (Wallace 192)—while to be fictive is not. The discovery that maps cannot lay claim to reality ultimately lends a deeply ironic nature to the book itself, whose most recognizable formal feature and claim to innovation is precisely those maps and illustrations whose difference from fiction the narrative is ultimately concerned with undermining. For all Spivet's visuality, then, it ends up reaffirming the value of the traditional novel form. Everything is fiction, and to try to map fiction, to try to empiricize, as it were, the novel, is an exercise in futility.
Spivet formally intervenes in contemporary debates about graphic storytelling and the valence of irony in post-postmodern fiction: in the first by questioning the epistemological potential of graphic representation to be more truthful or sincere than literary fiction, in the second by making this intervention ironically through a highly graphic novel. And indeed Spivet insists on the importance of irony to the very end. T.S. makes his way to Washington with the help of a Pynchonesque secret society, the Megatherium Club. But beneath the final part of the map of Moby-Dick, at the very end of the novel, a line of morse code reads: "The megatherium do not exist RK." It may be the ultimate expression of the constitutive ironies of Larsen's novel that his ultimate disavowal of the reality—the reality in fiction, that is—of his disavowal of the secret society is initialed wrongly, and so itself untrustworthy. This final ploy, if ploy it is and not merely bad morse coding, is symptomatic of the deeply ironic relationship of the novel to itself, and indeed on its implicit insistence that even in an age of new sincerity, irony is alive and well.
Tim Lanzendörfer, assistant professor at Mainz University, Germany, is author of The Professionalization of the American Magazine: Periodicals, Biography, and Nationalism in the Early Republic, and currently editing a volume on the poetics of genre in the contemporary American novel.
Works Cited
Kelly, Adam (2010). "David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction." Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays. Ed. David Hering. Austin: SSMG Press. 131-46.
Larsen, Reif (2009). The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. New York: W.W. Norton.
Wallace, David Foster (1993). "E Pluribus Unam: Television and U.S. Fiction." Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2, 151-195.