My C-Map organizes the main actors and processes in my thesis work on earthquake literature. My question “how and why does Japanese and Pacific Northwest literature render earthquakes and earthquake cultures?” is a piece of a larger guiding questions pondering the power of literature to act upon cultures unsettled by risk of disaster and crisis. These questions interrogate the concept of “earthquake culture” through the artifacts of fictional works produced by authors. To this end, my project is situated in two ways. The first is geographically, reflected by the Japan vs. Pacific Northwest binary. These geographic loci are centered around both seismic events and places where authors reside. Japan and the Pacific Northwest are linked by the seismic hazards to which each place must adapt and the Pacific Ocean that spreads between them. Their connection also has importance to the presence and absence of a historical memory of disaster. The second method of situating is around each specific literary work, which contains its own fictional geography and time period. It should be noted that each text could yield its own actor-network in regards to their fictional actors and processes. The network largely falls under the perspective of someone in the Pacific Northwest looking to Japan to shed light on the ways that earthquake culture is created.
The actors represented here generally fall under four categories: author, literary work, seismic event, and place. The authors and writers are human actors, each engaged with the creation, translation, or adaptation of a literary work. The circumstances of their life, including the places and cultures in which they are entrenched, have importance for their creative work. The creative works themselves, through produced and received by humans, are non-human actors that are containers for alternate, fictional worlds. The seismic events are concrete moments in both place and time that are folded into discourse and disaster culture.The borders of these actors reflect their permeability; while the events are concrete in time and space the creative works are more fluid depending the design of the writer and the moment of reception. The places are not just physical locations but indicate a geographically-influenced culture as well. The Pacific Ocean doesn’t exactly fall under any of these categories since there is no so-called Pacific Ocean culture. Instead it acts as an in-between space, a conduit, a shared border, and a communicative space that relays information between the places on either side. While each text is a locus for important connections between events, authors, and places, the Pacific Ocean holds both a physical and imaginative significance within these relationships.
Many of the processes describe actors doing work: authors writing, tsunamis causing damage or providing information, the sale of a book raising funds to disaster relief. Another category of process represented here has an emotional element: authors concerned and saddened, creative works grieving. A third category would be simply descriptive: where things and people are located, movements of water. I suppose a major difference between these three types of processes is the agency expressed. Whereas the work category gives the writers and creative works agency in response, the power in the descriptive category is in the non-human earth systems at play. Importantly, there are several overlaps where the processes of work and emotion are one and the same. This network has four sub-networks, each of which connects a creative work and an event through work and emotion. In three of the sub-networks, a specific author is implicated within these emotional and working processes. Perhaps another sub-network can be seen near the top of the chart, centering on the Orphan Tsunami of 1700. These actors and relationship helps to set up the situated context of the question, and as a result they are more descriptive and lack a fictional world as a counterpart.
This network emphasizes the importance of emotional response in creative work. It also describes how specific creative works and their creators can act upon a culture that they are linked to geographically. It demonstrates how human actors can assert creative agency over physical systems that pose a threat. This operates in both a reflective and prospective way. The reflective mode centers on grief whereas the prospective mode centers on anticipated grief, and therefore anxiety. As a result, the reflective works generate worlds that are in the past whereas the prospective work (Rothstein’s After the Big One) generates a future world. This network also emphasizes the Pacific Ocean as an important bridge between places, between events, and between creative works and events. Thus, this network speaks to the ‘how’ of the focus question: emotionally and connected to place. The ‘why’ has to do with agency, grief in regards to Japan, and fear in regards to the Pacific Northwest. This agency component has implications for the guiding question regarding power, indicating that at least in the minds of the authors, the production of creative works is a useful cultural contribution to places grieving and anticipating disaster.
The process of making this actor-network was one of simplification. As mentioned above, each sub-network focused around a fictional work could yield a map describing the specific relationships between the fictional world and the ‘real’ world. This is an important piece of my extended literary analysis. This generalized map has inspired me to expand these sub-networks. In describing and summarizing my map, I was able to gain more organization and specificity. In particular, my organization of the processes as work, emotion, and description led to realization about power and agency that is very much related to my guiding question. There are certainly structural mistakes within the network that did not allow for certain important connections between actors in Japan and the Pacific Northwest. Likewise, there were only two general places represented, simplifying the differing earthquake cultures between regions of the Pacific Northwest and Japan. This also leaves out the Chicago origins of the after the quake stage adaptation. Overall, the exercise yielded some every important realizations surrounding the power dynamics in the processes and served as an effective organization tool.