Plan
Haut de pageOronce Fine double cordiform map of the world (1531), representing the Terra Australis myth and featuring Northern America and Asia linked together

Public domain
“Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it’s essential”, explains Mark Monmonier in the opening sentence of his canonical work, How to lie with maps, 1996. On this point, the media seems to agree. One need only take note of the following headlines “La cartographie, entre science, art et manipulation” (= Cartography, between science, art and manipulation), “La carte thématique, objet scientifique source de manipulations” (= Thematic maps, scientific object cause of manipulation) and “De ‘fausses’ cartes pour dire le ‘vrai’” (= False maps to tell the truth) in Le Monde Diplomatique, Cause commune and Libération respectively. And, if Cornell University Library’s collection of “persuasive maps” is anything to go by - over 800 propaganda maps classified by theme and period - the corpus of corrupted maps is inexhaustible. These geographers and cartographers, journalists and archivists, by warning us against the inaccurate science of cartography, which we have been taking at its word since elementary school, are sounding the alarm, inviting us to step outside of the map and rethink our relationship to, and conception of, space. At the crossroads of text and image, fiction and reality, but also cultures and languages, deceptive cartography is a subject particularly well-suited to Interfaces and its interdisciplinary vocation.
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The map’s illegibility
If all maps are fiction, then what happens when this distrust of cartography, finds its way into the work of fiction itself? What can we say, for example, of the cartographic short-circuit that Flaubert’s protagonist Félicité undergoes in “Un coeur simple”, when confronted with the “network of colored lines” that is M. Bourais’s atlas:
“She bent over the map; this network of colored lines tired her eyes, without teaching her anything; and when Bourais invited her to say what was bothering her, she asked him to show her the house where Victor lived. Bourais raised his arms, sneezed and laughed; such candor excited him; and Félicité couldn’t understand the reason for it, - she who had perhaps expected to see even the portrait of her nephew, so limited was her intelligence!”
« Elle se pencha sur la carte ; ce réseau de lignes coloriées fatiguait sa vue, sans lui rien apprendre ; et Bourais l’invitant à dire ce qui l’embarrassait elle le pria de lui montrer la maison où demeurait Victor. Bourais leva les bras, il éternua, rit énormément ; une candeur pareille excitait sa joie ; et Félicité n’en comprenait pas le motif, — elle qui s’attendait peut-être à voir jusqu’au portrait de son neveu, tant son intelligence était bornée ! »
If the geographical map were a faithful image of the real world (an idea played on by Borges in De la Rigueur de la Science (1946), assuming a 1: 1 scale map), Félicité should be able to see her nephew’s house, but of course this is not the case. From our point of view, 150 years after the publication of Three Tales, Félicité’s candor reveals a certain vigilance of a map reader, or even a Google Street View user, alert to the risks of misleading cartography. Félicité’s account of the map’s illegibility could therefore be a good starting point for thinking about other moments of disjunction between cartography and real, tangible space, whether in print or on screen.
Thinking about illegibility also leads us to consider the genre of children’s literature - and to think, for example, of child-characters who cannot yet decipher maps, or of maps with riddles (such as the one that launches the characters on an adventure in Bilbo the Hobbit), as well as stories in which the map is only available to the hero (think of the Marauder’s map).
Cartographic illusion
In addition to the issue of illegibility, there is of course the question of cartographic illusion (the map acts as a dream-machine, launching the adventurous, and often disappointed, character to another world. Once there, they must come to terms with the gap between reality and its representation, but also that of the deceptive map within the story itself, when characters deliberately draw false or trick maps to deceive others (as seen, for example, in Pierre Mac Orlan’s Le Chant de l’Équipage): the cartographic lie then becomes a diegetic driving force.
A driving force, too, in the creation of a posteriori cartographic images, i.e. maps created from fictional narratives, and therefore by definition lies or imaginary projections. These map-objects, rather than discourses of - or about - the map, have various functions:
- to represent invented places, such as the maps of Lilliput attached to editions of Gulliver’s Travels as early as 1727; those accompanying Conan Doyle’s Lost World; or R. L. Stevenson’s representation of Treasure Island, but also the tropism of fantasy literature in particular for geographical representation. The paratext is thus central to the questions raised by the map.
- to represent the journeys of imaginary characters in real places: consider Victor Bérard, for example, who in translating the Odyssey in 1930 sought to draw Ulysses’ route geographically - and then to retrace his steps, per se, aboard a sailing boat, with his map in hand - or the Carte d’une partie du royaume d’Espagne, which includes the regions traversed by Don Quixote, and the sites of his adventures (1780) which, although based in fiction, possesses, as Roger Chartier reminds us, “all the desirable scientific credentials: it was drawn by Tomás López, the king’s geographer and cartographer of kingdoms […], who followed ‘observations made in the field’”. Both the text and the map itself encourage credulity, questioning the boundary between a mystifying map and a map representing a lie, and underlining the importance of the map as a means to suspend disbelief.
Allegorical maps, particularly common in the 17th century (beyond the famous Carte de Tendre based on the fiction of Mme de Scudéry), also raise the question of the forms of cartographic artifice.
Finally, on screen in particular, cartographic representation, a model inspired from the documentary genre, serves to maintain the illusion of movement as well as the realism of fiction. One might think of the opening scene of Casablanca (1945), where a map traces a path from Paris to Casablanca, on which the image refocuses, anchoring the viewer in reality - the story seems truer as a result - and maintaining the fiction of filming in situ. On the other hand, when the map object appears on screen in the hands of a character, it is often diverted from its intended use, or modified by the addition of imaginary details that blur or alter the real referential space.
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Suggested themes to explore
These notes on the subject of cartographic lies in fiction, whatever its form (cinema, radio, novels…), have led us to identify several themes around which contributions may be organized:
- Illusory maps - cartographic illusion
- (Il)legible maps
- Mystifying maps
- Allegorical maps
- Elliptical and truncated maps
- Surrealist maps
- Mapping colonial space
- Cartography and propaganda
Bibliography
Black, Jeremy, Maps and History. Constructing Images of the Past. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997.
Black, Jeremy, Visions of the world - A History of maps, Londres, Octopus publishing Group, 2003
Braco, Diane et Genay, Lucie. Contre-Cartographier le monde, Limoges, Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 2021.
Castro, Teresa. « Le cinéma et la raison cartographique des images », Travaux de l’Institut de Géographie de Reims, vol. 33, no. 129.
Chartier, Roger. Cartes et Fictions (XVIe-XVIIIe Siècle), Collège de France, 2022.
Collot, Michel. Pour une géographie littéraire, Paris, Éditions Corti, coll. « Les essais », 2014.
Garel-Grislin, Julie. « Les coordonnées de la fiction : ce que la carte fait au récit », Revue de la BNF, vol. 59, no. 2, 2019, pp. 22-30
Monmonier, Mark. How to lie with maps, The University of Chicago Press, 1991
Jacob, Christian. L’empire des cartes, Paris, Albin Michel, 1992.
Lefort, Jean, L’Aventure cartographique, Paris, Belin, 2004.
Lumbroso, Olivier. Zola, La Plume et le compas : La construction de l’espace dans Les Rougon-Macquart d’Emile Zola, Honoré Champion, 2004
Milon, Alain. Cartes incertaines : regard critique sur l’espace, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2013.
Séveno, Caroline. « La carte et l’exotisme », Hypothèses, vol. 11, no. 1, 2008, pp. 47-56.
Deadlines
Contribution proposals (title; half-page argument; brief biographical notice) must be sent before March 15, 2024 to eburston@holycross.edu and sophie.f.bros@gmail.com
Full articles written in English or French should not exceed 25,000 signs including spaces and will have to be sent for June 15, 2024.





