AtDTdA: (9) 248 Wednesday's kick-ass question

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Jasper:

>Today's kick-ass essay question:
>This chapter has a lot about mirrors and opposites, "landmarks" and 
>"anti-landmarks", the dualities >of Venice itself, etc. [...] Some 
>instances from this chapter alone: p. 243: Venice "looking like some map of 
>itself"

You ask good questions, Jasper - too good to answer in any precise manner. 
Anyway, I've singled out one of the instances of doubling from your list. 
This phrase: "X looking like/being [something, something] of itself" - is a 
recurring figure throughout the novel. Here's my own little list (which is 
probably far from exhaustive):

p. 243: The Chums see Venice from above, "looking like some map of itself"

p. 451: Merle arrives at Candlebrow: "there it was, laid out neat as could 
be like a map of itself"

p. 574: Dally loathes the tourists in Venice, who are "changing it from a 
real city to a hollow and now and then outright-failed impersonation of 
itself"

p. 581: Dally in Venice (again): "Here in this ancient town progressively 
settling into a mask of itself"

p. 734: Kit looks at Dally's eyes and likens them to: "Photographs of 
themselves"

p. 891: Yashmeen dreams of flying and hovering "at an altitude that made the 
Eurasian continent a map of itself"

p. 1046: Merle sees "tomatoes looking like the four-color illustrations of 
themselves that showed up on lugs down at the market"

Now, the repetition of this phrase must constitute what in GR is called "a 
bit of redundancy so that the message would not be lost" (GR, 322). But what 
exactly is the message? The phrases seem to cluster around certain persons 
(Dally and Merle), certain locations (Venice), and certain perspectives 
(views from above).

Poststructuralists would probably have a field day with this phrase, 
rattling off theories of Baudrillardian simulacra, and they probably 
wouldn't be too far off the mark in this particular instance. Pynchon does 
seem to use this phrase to describe a reality which is once or twice 
removed; a reality which somehow seems fake, like a representation of 
itself. Sometimes this idea is the result of pure altitude (Yashmeen's and 
the Chums' airborne perspective, Merle's perspective from above), and in the 
case of Venice, the idea probably harks back to that old theme of V. about 
tourists who never get beneath the skin of the place (and in catering to 
this shallow simulacrum of proper travelling, Venice has in effect been 
reduced to its own skin).

A similar idea is also expressed in those Finnish postcards described on p. 
84. The postmarks on these Minneskort aren't real postmarks, but pictures of 
postmarks, and the Minneskort itself is "a postcard with a picture of what a 
postcard used to look like before the Russians [...]. A memory of a memory."

And finally (or initially), it is expressed on the very dustjacket of AtD, 
which - like the Minneskort and like Dally's eyes - resembles a photograph 
of itself. A copy of a copy. In AtD Pynchon seems hellbent on elaborating 
this theme of reality once or twice removed - a theme which ties in, of 
course, with the theme of reality vs. fiction that runs throughout the 
novel. There is the world, and then there is AtD which in some sense is 
Pynchon's doubling of the world/his map of the world; and within this 
fictional doubling there are further fictions and doublings. A-and boy, one 
could go on and on here - the lack of immediate response to your 
mirroring/doubling question is probably caused by the fact that there are 
too damn many possible responses....

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