“The map is not the landscape”: Canadian and other landscapes in Jane Urquhart’s novel A Map of Glass (2005)

Abstract

The title of Jane Urquhart’s novel of 2005, A Map of Glass, is borrowed in an acknowledged gesture to the landscape artist Robert Smithson, in particular his installation A Map of Broken Glass. The novel is also broken up and structured as a series of narratives set in different times and spaces but all evoking multiple landscapes of loss: loss of civilizations, loss of generations of settlers, loss of memory, loss of love, loss of trees and natural resources, loss of language, loss of the integrity of the body, loss of place. At the same time that the remnants of loss are mapped out, however, new landscapes emerge and are des-covered in the telling and reading of narrative itself which thus presents itself as the privileged landscape of memory that guarantees the maintenance of inner space, the space of the imagination.