Like the cartographer, the storyteller creates a representation of the world presented in the work, but this representation cannot be a simple reflection of the “real” world in a more figurative form. Spatial representations in literature inevitably place us into a kind of mise-en-abyme, where the contours of the map melt into the distinctive features of the landscape, which in turn shape our own perceptions and narratives, and so on. I will examine the concomitant activities of exploration and presentation in three exemplary scenes from world literature (Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Commedia, and Melville’s Moby-Dick). In my estimation, these scenes are somehow representative of three distinctive aspects of the literary cartographic project: namely, the world-making effects of a narrator’s presentation, as the itinerary of the individual explorer becomes a map of the world; the abstract or architectonic system that undergirds such a created world, as the geography is shown to conform to a logic in order to demonstrate its “truth”; and, finally the intensely reflexive character of the project, as the mapmaker cannot help but be marked by the cartographic endeavor. Along with Odysseus, Dante, and Ahab, we find ourselves on the brink of a great abyss, whose recursively reflecting reflections generate new visions, projecting potentially alternative arrangements, by simultaneously mapping the territory and territorializing the maps.