Before the Baedeker

[bandwraith at aol.com]

Mappings. Baedeker's of the mind. Both liberating for the imagination- 
eraseable, adustable-  and risky: never quite real enough, always 
leaving something out. It adds up. Worse when the mapping becomes 
talismanic, like religion, and closes out options, blocks alternatives. 
Still, necessary for sanity. Can't have it all. Have to manage the day 
to day.


-----Original Message-----
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thu, Nov 15, 2012 7:09 am
Subject: Before the Baedeker




Under the influence of Pynchon, I always thought that - among the many 
problematic things about modernity that have a German origin - modern 
travel guides, as a medium to prevent experience of the Other rather 
than to enable it, were the invention of Karl Baedeker. Imagine my 
surprise when I learned that this is not the case! In the last 
paragraph of the third chapter in the third part of Hans Christian 
Andersen's novel Only a fiddler (orig. Kun en Spillemand; dt. Nur ein 
Spielmann) from 1837, I yesterday read about Naomi, the female 
counter-protagonist of Christian the fiddler, that she, sitting in the 
carriage on her way to Italy, "has a map of Italy on her lap and 
Mariane [sic] Starke, the well known Italy travel guide, beside her".  
Me I had never heard about Mariana Starke before, and there isn't much 
in the net, so I could imagine that she's largely forgotten. From 
wikipedia I learned that her travel literature got published long 
before Baedeker's, the volume on Italy first in the year 1800 (Letters 
 from Italy, between the years 1792 and 1798 containing a view of the 
Revolutions in that country, 2 vols. London, 1800). The more general 
Travels on the Continent appeared in 1820. It is also noted that Starke 
revolutionized travel literature: "Previously travel guides had 
concentrated on architectural and scenic descriptions of the places to 
be visited by wealthy young men on the Grand Tour. Starke recognised 
that with the enormous growth in the number of Britons travelling 
abroad after 1815 the majority of her readers would now be travelling 
in family groups and often on a budget. She therefore included for the 
first time a wealth of advice on luggage, obtaining passports, the 
precise cost of food and accommodation in each city and even advice on 
the care of invalid family members. She also devised a system of !!! 
exclamation mark ratings, a forerunner of today's 'stars'." This comes 
already pretty close to the world of Baedeker, no?

Andersen's novel is a gem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Starke