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

[Tore Rye Andersen]

John Bailey (on views from above):

>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.

Yes, but the eyes above are sure to have agents in the city below (or to be 
agents of the Masters in the city below)....

The idea of aerial surveillance, BTW, is also very much present in GR. Cf. 
Tchitcherine's vision of a giant finger in the sky:

"It appears to be a very large white Finger, addressing him. Its Fingernail 
is beautifully manicured: as it rotates for him, it slowly reveals a 
Fingerprint that might well be an aerial view of the City Dactylic, that 
city of the future where every soul is known, and there is noplace to hide." 
(GR, 566)

- and cf. the story of Minne Klaetsch who can't perceive umlauts, and who 
subsequently, upon seeing a hübsch Räuber (cute robber), shouts 
"Hubschrauber" (helicopter). The shout reaches the ears of the engineer 
"Spörri" who promptly gets a vision of a bleak future and its surveillance 
from above:

"can this cry be a prophecy? a warning (the sky full of them, gray police in 
the hatchways with ray-guns cradled like codpieces beneath each whirling 
screw *we see you from above there is nowhere to go it's your last alley, 
your last stormcellar)" (GR, 684)

(and those futuristic ray-guns would actually seem to enable that mastery 
from above which de Certeau spoke of as impossible, wouldn't they?).

BTW, there might be a subtle nod in AtD to that old pun-driven anecdote from 
GR. When the Chums visit the airfield at the World's Fair, among many other 
flying wonders they see some (probably anachronistic) "electrical 
lifting-screws of strange hyperboloidal design for drilling upward through 
the air" (AtD, 27). That Hubschrauber old Minne was yelling of in GR 
literally translates to "Liftscrewer" as Pynchon reminds us on p. 683, and 
the lifting-screws of AtD set up an echo (at least in my mind) to GR's 
lift-screwer.

_________________________________________________________________
Opret en personlig blog og del dine billeder på MSN Spaces:  
http://spaces.msn.com/