Jerry Brotton's book delves into the history, significance of the compass

By Ian Volner 

FOUR POINTS OF THE COMPASS: The Unexpected History of Direction

Author: Jerry Brotton

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

Pages: 209

Price: $27

 

In times like these, it can be hard to know which way is up. But it’s always been a subject of debate: For the 16th-century cartographer Juan de la Cosa, the top of the map was west, in the direction of his first voyage with Christopher Columbus. Nearly 500 years later, Stuart McArthur of Melbourne, Australia, produced a map with a southward orientation; when his teacher reprimanded him, he held his ground, finally publishing his upside-down map in 1979. “East is East, and West is West,” as Kipling had it — but where does the one start and the other end?

 

 

It’s a topsy-turvy world. We’re just rotating on it.

 

This at any rate is the conclusion of Four Points of the Compass, a cultural history from the author and University of London academic Jerry Brotton that explores the whats and whys of those little arrows that guide our feet and, occasionally, our fate.

 

The book is not for those with severe inner ear imbalances: Chapter by chapter, Brotton hopscotches from east to south to north to west, systematically destabilising our inherited conventions of spatial organisation along the way.

 

“There is no reason why north should necessarily sit at the top of modern world maps,” he writes, then proceeds to enlist a rather dizzying array of sources — not just Kipling and McArthur and de la Cosa, but Henry David Thoreau, José Martí, the Manus islanders of Papua New Guinea, NASA and Frodo Baggins — to show us how we got here, and where we might

be headed.

 

“The configuration and language of the four directions is common to many — though not all — cultures,” Brotton observes. From the Chinese (whose ideographs for south and north suggest bodies facing towards or away from the sun), to the ancient Egyptians (who reckoned from the south, the origins of the Nile), to the Aztecs (rare adherents of a five-point system, with a spare axis running clear through the earth), human societies have adopted a remarkable array of positional schemata, the only common thread being their adoption.

 

Hard-wired into the collective consciousness by way of myth, faith and historical experience, these semi-arbitrary coordinates became the determinative framework through which entire civilizations viewed themselves and others: A “conflation of direction with identity,” writes Brotton, “that still persists today.”

 

With so much ground to cover, and with a device as mutable and evidently subjective as the compass to lead him, the author has set himself no easy task. His work, and ours, is made easier by the chronological structure of the discrete sections, and to some degree of the book as a whole. Thus, in the introduction, we learn that the third-millennium B C Mesopotamians were the first to deploy the familiar tetrad; in “East,” we witness the evolution of China in the global imagination, from the Orientalist idyll of the Victorians to the economic dynamo of the contemporary Middle Kingdom. In “West,” we go all the way from Plato’s Atlantis to the decline of Spengler’s “Abendlandes,” with a quick nod to Tolkien’s plucky band as they schlep toward Sauron and the sunset.

 

Segueing to his future-facing epilogue, Brotton presages the imminent collapse of the received Eurocentric worldview — or at least that’s what it sounds like he’s seeing. “Just as in the language of international development the East has been assimilated into the ‘Global South,’” he says, “so too the American West is now turning not just to the North, but also to the East.” Anyone lost?

 

The succession of incident, anecdote and interpretation that makes the book so remarkably informative can also make for a bit of a bumpy ride, factoid after factoid jumping before the reader’s mental windscreen like so many startled narrative deer.

 

In this aspect, it has the bad luck to tread on terrain partly covered by Peter Davidson’s superlative The Idea of North (which Brotton cites extensively in the relevant chapter), a more focused effort brought off with considerable stylistic elan.

 

But if some passages in Four Points can feel disorienting, that would appear to be the objective — and it’s one that gets its creator to places prior practitioners never did.

 

In Brotton’s view, the cardinal directions not only contain the confusions and contradictions inherent to any such artificial social construct: They are in fact getting more contradictory and more confused all the time, thanks largely to 21st-century technology and its ongoing substitution of the virtual for the real.

 

The author hits a surprisingly elegiac note as he considers our current fallen state, the magnet and the stars now supplanted by the address field of a smartphone app. “Eyes glued to that jerky little blue ball,” Brotton writes, “we spend less and less travel time observing the physical terrain through which we move, bumping into others as we go.”

 

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The reviewer writes about architecture,  design and urbanism. © 2024 The New York Times News Service