Partial Faiths.....re mapping per recent posts

[Dave Monroe]

On 3/23/08, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From Prof Mcclure below:
>
> . Pynchon is particularly insistent on the necessarily and even redemptively
> unfinished nature of any ontological mapping, the ever-present danger of
> confusing a particular representation of reality for being itself, which
> must always exceed any formulation.
>
> http://english.rutgers.edu/faculty/profiles/mcclure1997.html
> >
> http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v041/41.1mcclure.html

"In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that
the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the
map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those
Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds
struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and
which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations,
who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears
had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some
Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of
Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are
Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all
the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."

https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/0/f2d03252295e0d0585256e120009adab?OpenDocument