Postmodern Cartographies

[Dave Monroe]

Continuing in Brian Jarvis, Postmodern Cartographies:
The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American
Culture (New York: St. Martin's, 1998), Ch. 6, "Notes
from Underground: Thomas Pynchon," pp. 51-79 ...

"... concurrent with all the ultra-contemorary
concerns for I[nformation]T[heory], cybernetics and
all the characteristic Pynchon technologese, there is
an ultra-traditional religious discourse within this
work.  Metasemiotics in Lot 49 is accompanied by a
deep conern for spiritutality.  As Phillipa Berry
suggests in 'Deserts of the Heart', this combination
is not uncommon in contemporary cultural production:
'the trace of the holy survives within postmodernism
in persistent echoes of that cultural legacy to which
it declared itself the muderous heir' (Berry 1990, p.
7)." (p. 62)

Citing ...

Berry, Phillipa.  "Deserts of the Heart."
   Times Higher Education Supplement, 28 Dec. 1990.

But to continue ...

   "Religious discourses have always been one of the
most effective means of ploting the physical universe
and the place of the individual within it.  For the
believer who subscribes to scriptural authority, the
environment and each event that occurs within it can
be fixed in relation to the will of a divinity. 
Puritanism offered one of the most authoritative and
authoritarian forms of spiritual cartography.  Its
mappings encouraged the American faithful, upon
arrival in the New World, to read every landscape
detail as a potential sign of His Will.  Subsequently,
Puritan hermeneutics, founded upon the doctrine of
correspondences, were reinscribe in Emersonian
transcendentalism, with its insistence that physical
facts were symbols of spiritual truths and that each
and all were interconnected through an infinite
ethereal network (the 'Over-Soul').  In part, the
prominence of the need to map and connect in Pynchon's
fictions is a testament to the legacy of Puritan
ideology and American romanticism.  Whilst the Puritan
faithful and the disciple of transcendentalism read
nature as God's Book, the second nature of
postindustrial landscpaes in interpreted by paranoid
plotters, like Oedipa Maas, as texts which promise
revelations concerning secular masters and the path to
new forms of redemption.
   "The term most frequently used to describe the
landscapes of Lot 49 is 'hieroglyphic' and this is
continually linked to a sense of and the need for
'patterns of revelation.'" (pp. 62-3)

And might I add here ...

Irwin, John T.  American Hieroglyphics:
   The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics
   in the American Renaissance.  New Have, CN:
   Yale UP, 1980.

Perniola, Mario.  Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment
   in Society and Art.  New York: Verso, 1995.

Again, Jarvis is writing too early to have taken Mason
& Dixon into account as well, but do see in this
regard ...

Seed, David.  "Mapping the Course of Empire in
   the New World."  Pynchon and Mason & Dixon.
   Ed. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin.  Newark:
   U of Delaware P, 2000.  84-99.

Which I'll no doubt get around to here as well ...


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