But where were they going without ever knowing the way?
Right up until the emergence of the moving picture medium in its most flamboyant forms, the stories we read or listened to or told ourselves occupied pinched and somewhat claustrophobic domains. They took place not only in, at best, two dimensions, but in a fog or some sort of fuzzy amniotic soup.
Yes, of course, they were psychologically liberating and emotionally fulfilling but they did not really inhabit what we’ll laughingly call the real world.
Indeed, they might strike out often from their home parlours in the direction of a London or a Bath or a wherever; but these were locations in name only, mere semi-abstract nouns. Or, as in Cheapside taverns, archetypally vague in their apparent specificity. True, we must acknowledge occasional outings to recognisable landmark settings: a cobb at Lyme here, a Stonehenge there. But still…
Your adventure novelists, your Fenimore Coopers and your Walter Scotts, aspired to tempt you away from the fireside too, but mainly toward other categories of near-abstraction: stagey impressionistic backdrops of forests and moors and engorged river valleys and clifftops resplendent with ecclesiastical moonlit ruins.
This is why (to cut a long story short (there’s a thesis or two here, perhaps even a modest academic career) so few storytellers ever really seized on maps as a potential adjunct to their storytelling.
Robert Louis Stevenson obviously numbers among the few. Who doesn’t love his Treasure Island map?
But surely it’s rather telling that this happy few, this small band of literary mapmakers, is dominated by authors who wrote primarily with children in mind? And that their maps are, pretty much without exception, renderings of fantasy domains?
All of which brings me at last to the curious case of the map of Killin in Alfred Hitchcock’s take on The 39 Steps. And the questions it raises.
I suppose to me these questions boil down this: is this an instance of Hitchcock treating his audience like children?
But then what are we to make of the fact that this isn’t, as in the Stevenson tradition, a map of a fantasy domain? Or rather it is and it isn’t. It’s a map of Killin, yes. But adulterated.
Again I’m sure there are all sorts of aesthetic theory threads just waiting to be pulled at here.
But for now, all I’ll say is, I like this map.
I like it a lot.