Reconfiguring Bodies, Maps, and Geography in Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest

This article analyzes Catherynne M. Valente’s fantasy novel Palimpsest as a literary example of the rhizomatic mapping conceptualized by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. While fantasy literature has been long criticized for being formulaic and conformist, the quality which extends to and often is reinforced by its use of maps, there have been works that subvert and challenge the hegemonic perceptions of the world. Many of them, including Palimpsest, utilizes the radically imagined fictional world and characters that are prerogative of the genre. Utilizing Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the map and the becoming and Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of body-city, this article examines how Valente uses cartographical and geographical imaginations to envision an alternative relationship between the body and space. It argues that, by subversive reimagining of the map and the landscape, Valente creates an imaginary world where the boundaries between the self and the other and between the body and the environment are blurred and thereby challenges the conventions of the hegemonic geographic imagination as well as those of fantasy literature.