Bongo's Aesthetics

[Paul Nightingale]

The train journey transforms the narrative from one that is predominantly
realist (based on Porpentine's introspective musings, the action and
characterisations are quite plausible within the bounds of comic writing) to
one that is anything but.

HBS exposes himself, physically to Mildred, temperamentally to Porpentine,
as a character to the reader. Pynchon, in the Introduction, mocks his own
use of Baedeker as a source. However, in the text (115) the (first)
reference to Baedeker is more than just an in-joke at the author's own
expense. Porpentine here responds to HBS' "single-minded concern with
matters archeaological"; hence, the text undermines the presentation of HBS
as an authoritative speaker. It holds up realistically because we are given
Porpentine's plausible response to HBS' obsession, and also (continuing on
116) his suspicion of HBS as a likely spy. That it also alludes to the
author's writing of character (HBS writing his own cover story, or Pynchon's
own writing of the story as a whole) signals HBS' function in this area.

As does Porpentine, HBS looks two ways at once. The modernist text taught
the reader to distrust the Word. If the text alludes to the real world, it
does so to ask if writing can accurately and unproblematically represent the
world. In this sense modernism is suicidal. Having asked the question, we
are already on the road to a postmodernism that the world is represented in
and by the text, is unknowable otherwise. The ending of the story highlights
theatre and artifice: the stage performance of Manon is integrated in the
narrative (132-3). Porpentine's stage death is witnessed at a distance (137)
before the "blonde barmaid with a mustache" recalls Victoria (130) andthe
second Baedeker reference.