FRONTIER - Maphead - page 150

Chapter 11
FRONTIER
n. : a line of division between two countries
Our age today is doing things of which antiquity did not dream . . .
a new globe has been given to us by the navigators of our time.
—JEAN FERNEL, 1530
I n Lewis Carroll's final novel, Sylvie and Bruno, a mysterious traveler called “ Mein
Herr ” tells the two titular children that his faraway world has advanced the science of map-
making well beyond our puny limits. He scoffs at the idea that the most detailed map avail-
ableshouldbesixinchestothemile.Onhisworld,heboasts,“Weverysoongottosix yards
to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of
all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile !” But, he has
to admit, this ultimate map has never even been spread out, because the farmers protested
that it would block their crops' sunlight due to its amazing size.
Carroll's notion of a map exactly the size of its territory, in perfect one-to-one detail, in-
spired Jorge Luis Borges's short story “On Exactitude in Science” and was further explored
by Umberto Eco in a remarkably thorough 1982 essay . Eco straight-facedly enumerated the
logistical problems that such a map would entail: the armies of men required to fold it, for
example. He ponders making it transparent, to address the objections of Carroll's farmers,
but realizes that any markings on the map would have to be opaque, thereby blocking some
local sunlight, which could affect the ecology of the territory beneath. And if it did, the map
would then become incorrect!
Obviously, Carroll, Borges, and Eco weren't proposing such a map as a serious carto-
graphic innovation. * Their giant maps are whimsical thought experiments on the tricky rela-
tionships between maps and the territories they describe, and affectionate send-ups of map
buffs and their love of endless detail. Consider how little the maps these men knew had
changed over the centuries: a map in 1870 or 1970 looked more or less like a map in 1570.
It was a piece of paper with dark lines standing for coastlines, pastel borders for political
divisions, and labeled dots for cities. North was probably up; a grid of thin lines probably
represented latitude and longitude. Except for the sad dearth of mermaids or cannibals en-
graved in the corners, little had changed in five hundred years.
But we live in a strange, shifting time for maps. The sudden onslaught of digital carto-
graphy and location-based technologies has changed, for the first time in centuries, our fun-
damental idea of what a map looks like. Twentieth-century map buffs absorbed in an atlas