Topography and mappability in Virgil's underworld narrative.

The paper offers a narratological analysis of spatiality in the Aeneid, Book 6. It begins with a comparison of Virgil's spatial representations, which follow the usual classic strategy of describing a route, i.e., the hodological space, with the Late Antique method of describing bigger areas in one view, as practiced by Claudius Claudianus. The analysis of Underworld space in Book 6 of the Aeneid focuses on three crucial problems. First, the essentially poetic discourse of the epic text challenges the mappability of Virgil's Underworld because it is impossible to tell literal usage of spatial terms from metaphors. Second, the allegoric interpretations of Aeneas's journey (exemplified by the highly elaborated theory of Károly Kerényi) make the text mappable in a very abstract way, but also obliterate most of the text's spatial references as insignificant poetic embellishments. Third, the gates of the dream, through one of which Aeneas quickly returns from the Underworld, are interpreted as a spatial anomaly that overtly contradicts normal physical experience, namely that the way from B to A is much shorter than it was from A to B. The term anatopy is coined as a suggestion to denominate the narrative's spatial distortion, which might function as a tool to solve problems similar to the ones discussed in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]