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“My feelings have been oriented by the compass as far back as I can remember,” wrote poet WH Auden in 1947. “To this day Crewe railway junction marks the wildly exciting frontier where the alien south ends and the north, my world, begins.” For a man born in Yorkshire but raised in the Midlands, the cardinal directions could provoke mystery or familiarity depending which way he looked.
As long as north, south, east and west have existed, they have not just directed the world but defined it. In Four Points of the Compass, historian Jerry Brotton goes in search of their origins to find out what they can tell us about the Earth and its inhabitants. We take the directions for granted, as though they have always been there and represent something objective. Yet they are of course human constructs, wholly relative and different astronomically, cartographically and magnetically.
“These four apparently simple and universally accepted terms are far more subjective and specific to time, place, language and culture than we might realise,” is how Brotton opens his intriguing account. The earliest record we have of a four-point system is a tablet map dating from the Akkadian dynasty, c2350 BC, but it was Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne who in the ninth century standardised the etymology we have today: Nord, Est, Sund and Oëst. In a similarly signposted structure, Brotton proceeds to approach the points of the compass one by one, diligently charting their geographical, historical and cultural connotations.
After all, they are more than simply directions on a map — they represent hard-fought opinions and prejudices. Uruguayan-Spanish artist Joaquín Torres-García’s 1943 drawing “América Invertida”, for example, upended the Eurocentric projection of South America, putting south at the top of his drawing of the continent to challenge what he regarded as a colonial inheritance. “There should be no north for us, except in opposition to our south,” he wrote. “We know what our true position is, and it is not the way the rest of the world would like to have it.”
Nor is it simply a question of a north-south divide: by the 19th century, west had become not only a direction but a pseudo-ideology, one that reached its epitome in the grasping westward expansion of US settlers. Writer Henry David Thoreau summed up the perceived difference in priorities between America and Europe as “Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente frux” — “from the east light; from the west fruit”. Today, whether you regard the west as the defender of liberal democracy or a domineering and complacent hegemony, it is a term that prompts preconceptions despite lacking any consistent geographical definition.
On these broad-brush subjects, Brotton is measured and precise. He does not attempt to craft a narrative where there is none: “This book does not reveal any hidden truth or enduring geographical reality to north, south, east and west, because such truth does not exist,” he writes.
Yet the fact that the four points of the compass are artificial creations means that a book of the same name must follow suit: there is no single, inevitable story to tell here, no one thread to pull on. And that makes Brotton’s well-written account more of a miscellany than a history at times. He touches on the colonial legacy of the west, changing attitudes towards orientalism, the ascendancy of the global south, and our environmental legacy on the Arctic north.
Four Points of the Compass is a unique and observant history — one that never lingers or overshares, and one that shines in its ability to subvert our preconceptions. What it lacks is a more sustained examination of how new technologies have changed our relationship with the compass points. Brotton is judicious in his evidence of how they came to be defined, but only briefly touches on what that means for us now.
Does it make a difference, for example, that we now all have compasses on our phones? That the immediacy of the internet complicates traditional ideas of distance? That the compass points come with as much political baggage as they do geographical insight? Four Points of the Compass points lucidly at where we have come from. But as to where we are headed a next, we may still be in need of some direction.
Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction by Jerry Brotton Allen Lane £20, 208 pages
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Publish date : 2024-09-26 17:00:00
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