Toporefs - Metanarrative and Anti-Idyll

The complete map of War of the Worlds, as with many of the longer texts in the Chronotopic Cartographies corpus, is so detailed as to be difficult to parse. However, filtering the graph, as in these two visualisations, reveals the ways in which Wells uses topographic references. In the visualisation on the left, the graph has been filtered to show only the ‘metanarrative’ topoi and their associated topographic references. These passages are either fragments purportedly from newspaper reports or other textual sources from the world of the novel, or moments where the narration steps back from events the Narrator or his brother have experienced directly to describe events occurring elsewhere. In these, topographic references tend to be to either named places—‘Nice’, ‘Kingston’, ‘Richmond’, ‘Paris’, ‘the Channel’—or to abstractions—‘the universe’, ‘through all the deep of space’, ‘the silent streets’.

Conversely, when the graph is filtered to show only ‘anti-idyll’ spaces (right), which tend to coincide with descriptions of events the Narrator or his brother have ‘actually’ experienced, topographic reference is much more concrete. In addition to named spaces, we see features such as ‘the roadway’, ‘the pinewoods’, ‘a walled garden’ or ‘the centre of the pit’, indicating the ways in which the text uses topographic reference to build a coherent sense of place.