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

[John BAILEY]

Cf. Michel de Certeau's chapter "Walking in the City" in The Practice of Everyday Life, where he argues that those bird's eye view medieval maps suggest a desire for ocular mastery over the city - itself impossible, really, since you have to remove yourself from the city in order to "master" it that way. The all-seeing eye is a powerful fiction. Obviously pertinent to the Chums.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Michael J. Hußmann
Sent: Thursday, 17 May 2007 11:51 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: AtDTdA: (9) 248 Wednesday's kick-ass question

Tore Rye Andersen (torerye at hotmail.com) wrote:

> 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).

There may be a reason why views from above should evoke the image of a map. Bird's-eye-views for maps had been popular for centuries at least.
For example, there is a map of Cologne drawn by Arnold Mercator in 1571, showing the whole of the city in 3D, each building rendered in painstaking detail, from a virtual vantage point about 150 meters above the surface. I believe bird's-eye-views of cities even date back to Roman times. Now drawing a bird's-eye-view of a city requires imagination and the mastery of perspective, but only after the invention of manned balloon-flight could one actually see a city in just the way its maps had been drawn for centuries.

- Michael


Michael J. Hußmann

E-mail: michael at michael-hussmann.de
WWW (personal): http://michael-hussmann.de WWW (professional): http://digicam-experts.de





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