Pynchon's Baedeker Trick

[Dave Monroe]

>From Eric Bulson, "Pynchon's Baedeker Trick," Novels, Maps, Modernity:
The Spatial Imagination, 1850-2000 (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp.
85-105 ...

Witness Thomas Pynchon's so-called "Baedeker trick" from his first
novel, V (1963)....  Pynchon became increasingly aware that he was
tapping into an expansive cultural and political history of
representation.  He associated spatial abstractions with a logic of'
violence that blotted out "natives" from the landscape in the
nineteenth century and enabled bombing campaigns in the twentieth....
he used maps to produce the space of his novels while simultaneously
critiquing their historical and indeological meaning.... (p. 86)

[...]

   Although Baedeker was a relaible companion early on, Pynchon began
to associate his enterprise more generally with the rise of mass
tourism, cosnumerism, and imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.... (p. 90)

[...]

The geographical references in Pynchon's war-torn historical landcape
play an integral part in a reading experience intended at all points
to distract readers and involve them in a playful exchange where teh
cost of the joke is in human lives. (p. 94)

[...]

But in tracking down such references, it is more often the case that
critics celebrate Pynchon's meticulousness without speculating on why
such precise geographical and historical details matter at all.... (p.
95)

... Pynchon manipulates the perspective on these maps so that readers
can imagine themselves from up above and down below depending on
whether they want to assume the role of victim or perpetrator. (p. 95)

[...]

... he is at work reflecting on the cultural tendency to think about
space as an abstraction ripe for dissection and order.... (p. 87)

[...]

Faced with the choice between metaphor and meaninglessness, Pynchon
chooses the former treating the map as a mirror capable of
establishing a link between spatial representation and the inhuman
distribution of human beings in space.... (p. 98)

[...]

   For Pynchon, the act of imagining oneself hovering above a city or
landscape does not have the liberatory effect that Michel de Certeau
imagined in his theory of a "spatial precatice."  To be up above or
down below signals for his characters an overwhelming sense of
estrangement.... (p. 100)

[...]

   Although Pynchon's characters cannot make sense ... readers, like
Pynchon himself, have historical hindsight to guide them.... (p. 102)

[...]

   By repeatedly drawing the reader's attention to the
conspiracy-laden, map-mediated theories of his characters, Pynchon is
at work challenging preconceived notions of a divide between map
stories and historical events....  The historical events and apaces
... disrupt any neat separation between teh world of teh characters
and that of the reader.  Although often caught unaware, readers are
brough to places where real history and imaginary plots are
simultaneously in progress.  It is their choice to decide if the
"fiction" is better kept that way.

... As readers, we cannot decode Pynchon's maps or experience of the
space of his novels without considering the ethical and poltical turn
of the author himself.  "Cartographic accuracy" can make us feel at
home in the world but only if we refuse to figure out where we are in
history.  That was Pynchon's way of making us remember what all teh
stars down below represent. (p. 105)

http://www.routledge-ny.com/books/Novels-Maps-Modernity-isbn9780415976480

de Certeau, Michel.  The Practice of Everyday Life.
   Trans. Steven F. Rendell.  Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/1794001.html

http://books.google.com/books/ucpress?vid=ISBN9780520236998