within the perimeters of the map. When Turchi states that, “The first lie of a map—also the first lie of fiction—is that it is the truth” (Turchi 2004, p. 73), he reveals the constructed nature of both.
Both books and maps are constructions which show us a carefully-crafted view of the world. This is not to say they are out to trick us necessarily, but that the magic they perform is to show us something that we would not have been able to see without them. When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island he drew the map of the island first while stuck inside his house on a rainy Scottish day. Before he knew it, he was writing a novel based upon his doodle, but when he sent it off to the publishers the original map was lost. He had to draw another, this time painstakingly recreating it from the novel, a far harder task. He felt that this new map never truly represented Treasure Island as the first one had. The original map had been unique and could never be remade in the same way that the original manuscript of a novel, if lost, would have been impossible to replicate (Turchi 2004, p. 227). Both maps and literature are thus constructed and are unique to their author and to their time of making.
In Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English, Damien Walford Davies suggests that works of literature can in themselves represent an atlas of complex cultural interrelations: “in the Anglophone literature of Wales, maps are a means of signalling and contesting cultural differences and emplacement” (Davies 2012, p. 15). In a bilingual country whose first language was subjugated by English and whose geography is squeezed between England and the Irish Sea, a preoccupation with maps is understandable. Maps, in whatever form—oral, written or drawn—allow us to place ourselves culturally as well as geographically. They allow us to consider where we belong and to whom. Katherine Harmon, who brought together a collection of artist maps and essays in You are here: personal geographies and other maps of the imagination, suggests that “humans have an urge to map—and that this mapping instinct, like our opposable thumbs, is part of what makes us human” (Harmon 2004, p. 10).
Our need to locate ourselves, to map our territory, is far older than the property laws and national boundaries which mark the maps of the modern world. It could even be argued that maps have been, and remain, necessary for survival: “The earliest maps are thought to have been created to help people find their way and to reduce their fear of the unknown. We want to know the location of what we deem life-sustaining (hunting grounds and sources of freshwater, then; now, utility lines and grocery stores) and life-threatening (another people’s lands; the toxic runoff from a landfill)” (Turchi 2004, p. 11).
Maps offer us parameters in which to live in practical terms, as above, but potentially the idea of orientation also includes social or even spiritual connotations. As writer Stephen S. Hall suggests: “Orienting begins with geography, but it reflects the need of the conscious, self-aware organism for a kind of transcendent orientation that asks not just where am I, but where do I fit into this landscape” (Harmon 2004, p. 15). Duncan Campbell, cited by Walford Davies, defines psychogeography as “a species of border-writing, standing uneasily between so many oppositions (mind and world, city and country, myth and history), never resolving in favour of one side or another, and above all, never forgetting” (Davies, p. 23). To say that one belongs here is implicitly saying one does not belong elsewhere.
Maps and the (In)visible
Maps shape our view of the world and mirror our cultures. They can chart us at the centre of the universe or make us disappear. It is this power that can make them dangerous.
Etymologically the map is a conception of the arrangement of something as much as it is a representation of the earth’s surface. The state’s cartographic violence thus helps it define who or what exists and in what order. Maps are thus a means of both physical colonization and conceptual control, involving both a cognitive paradigm as well as a practical means of political administration. (Neoclaus 2003, p. 419)
Mark Neoclaus in Off the Map: On Violence and Cartography discusses the relationship between the map and the state arguing that the widespread use of cartography was concurrent with the birth of the nation state (circa 1600) and that since this point maps have been utilised as a state tool to legitimise and control state territory. Such a political understanding of cartographic practice is at odds with more traditional views. The International Cartographic Association has defined the map as “a symbolized image of geographic reality, representing selected features or characteristics, resulting from the creative efforts of cartographers and designed for use when spatial relationships are of special relevance.” (International Cartographic Society cited in Dorling and Fairbairn 1997, p. 3) Although this definition is broad and allows for the ‘creative’, the map is designated as an object containing ‘geographic reality’ and attributing the ability to create this reality to a specific profession: ‘cartographers’. Further to this, cartography is understood to utilise scientific methods which suggests scientific certainty or at least objectivity on the part of the creator (Godlewska 1999, p. 21). The subjective choices of the cartographer must then come at the point of selecting which ‘features or characteristics’ to represent. It is into this gap between the objective and subjective that Dennis Wood, author of The Power of Maps, steps, suggesting that “... all maps, inevitably, unavoidably, necessarily embody their authors’ prejudices, biases and partialities...” (Wood 1992, p. 24). Taking the map as a text which is contrived, conceived and edited it would necessarily contain the ‘prejudices, biases and partialities’ of the author not only through what is included, but also though what is omitted; an overtly political, and potentially violent, act.
Karen Piper, author of Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race and Identity, suggests that the editing process utilised by cartographers, the decision over what is shown and what is hidden, always has a political agenda:
The history of cartography has […] been a history of coding the enemy, making a “them” and “us” that can be defended with a clear border. It has been, above all, a history of pushing “them” out of territory that is considered ours—denying their existence, deleting their maps, drawing lines in the sand. (Piper 2002, p. x)
Such a schism between the political reality of a country and its representation, has led J. B. Hartley to question the ‘geographic reality’ proposed by the International Cartographic Society: “If a map asserts that the status quo is good, and the status quo is actually evil, then the map is to that extent incorrect...” (Hartley 2002, p. 21). To what extent it is the role of a map to address concepts such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is questionable yet if maps can be conceived as providing us with “reality” (Wood 1992, p. 4), which Wood suggests goes beyond geography alone, then it seems unavoidable that they should contain some form of value judgement. Viewed in this moral context, a map of a country under fascist rule could, as Woods states, be described as ‘incorrect’ as the ‘status quo’ represented is generally considered unacceptable, and in the case of many countries in Europe during the Second World War was fatal for a large proportion of the population. A novel, on the other hand, has the ability to articulate the human experience of living within the geographical space in which the action takes place.
To be ‘Off the map’ according to the Oxford English Dictionary is to be “Out of existence… an insignificant position; of no account; obsolete” (OED cited in Neoclaus 2003, p. 417). This is often the case for spaces inhabited by the marginalised and bordered, the migrant ‘jungles’ in France for example are invisible upon the map of France and thus exit both inside and outside of French territory in the political imagination.
This is perhaps best highlighted by Michael Shapiro, author of The New Violent Cartography, who points to the Pentagon’s new ‘map of danger’:
From the point of view of the US executive branch’s geography of enmity, not being an intimate in the global exchange of resources—for example being an Iran rather than a Saudi Arabia—increases your chances of becoming a ‘rogue state’ or part of the ‘axis of evil’ and
