A dominant metaphor in Thomas Pynchon's novel V. is that of the closed system and how the second law of thermodynamics acts upon it. Seeing the West as a closed system, Pynchon dramatizes it as becoming increasingly disordered and inanimate; and as Mondaugen's cosmic whistles show, when Weissman tries to decode them and comes up with Wittgenstein's phrase “The world is all that is the case” (Pynchon, 278), the only meaning inside this entropy is human-made. So underlying all the individual theories of Truth—the most relevant here are Stencil's theory of V.'s conspiracy and the myth of the Grand Tour—lies, in Godolphin's words, “Nothing” (204). What I am arguing, from a (post-)Marxist perspective, is how the West's deployment of tourism is critiqued in V., for while tourists are literally sightseers in search of experience, they are also, in the context of the West's entropy, what modern humans have become in general. 1

It is necessary to provide a general historical context of the development of tourism before focusing on tourism in V. Tourism is, firstly, travel for its own sake, not for movement. Travellers prior to the Industrial Revolution had a direct involvement with the land they were travelling through, but during the eighteenth century travel began to evolve into the compulsive, unnecessary and uninvolved movement of tourism and the institutionalized Grand Tour of Europe. After World War Two, there was enormous investment in railroads, automobiles and airplanes, so that no part of the globe was inaccessible to tourist operations like Cook's Travels. As Plater notes: “the earth had become one continuous tourist attraction and travel a form of mass transit . . . In 1955 (the year Benny Profane meets Brenda Wigglesworth on Malta ) approximately one million Americans were abroad—most of them in Europe . Tourism had become a multibillion dollar international business with whole economies depending on the influx of tourist dollars” (Plater, 104). No longer was each country, each state, a Natural, autonomous entity in which capitalist production was contained; though they still had power over its citizens, “the complexity of global order meant that such control was less important to the economic organization of the state than developments in the global system” (Stratton, 11). The peripheral countries—the “tourists sites” of Alexandria , Africa and even Malta in V.—lost power to those in the core. Of course, as we have seen in the last few decades, the periphery-core model is problematic, because more dynamic modes of production have seen the periphery as sites of production and few in the West have any real power over the global economy. Power is largely diffused through middle-class consumption, and since the system requires and maximizes differences to maintain this consumption, the consolidation and expansion of modernity's industrial base ironically homogenized a fragmented, superficial, unstable infrastructure on a global scale in both the core and the periphery.

As a consequence of the industrialization which globalization consolidates, people are increasingly alienated from their work, and try to find meaning in leisure. But the more leisure we want, the harder we must work to earn it. And the more we work, the further we want our leisure to take us from work, with the Truth we wish to find in leisure displaced further away, always somewhere else. In other words, to gain a sense of wholeness in the face of alienation and fragmentation, Western subjects can attempt to buy every object and position of subjectivity the system provides—which they can never achieve, constantly proving their lack and augmenting their desire—or they can buy a package-tour. MacCannel argues how tourism draws the tourist into a relationship with the modern social totality by incorporating all the differences of that totality into the tour. But while it here has roots in modernity, it also has roots in the medieval Christian pilgrimage, motivated by “a collective quest for an overarching . . . system, a higher moral authority in a godless universe, which makes of the entire world a single solidary unity” (16). Tourism is a collective striving for transcendence of the social totality; the tourist tries to come into contact with some common unconscious, to organize, systematize and assimilate the world. In doing so he/she invokes the bourgeois ideology which the industries deploying the tour depend on, and subordinates other ideologies beneath it.

Pynchon uses Baedeker in V. as a metaphor for the ways in which ideology—or knowledge in general—(re-)constructs our experience of place. For the Baedeker “stands as a symbol of man's knowledge of the world, a world known only by its representation. Baedeker selects the details of place for emphasis, creates a hierarchy of asterisks, and ignores most of what passes as reality for those who host the world's tourists” (Plater, 66). Baedeker tells us what to see, ensuring that the actual land is less important to the tourist than the landscapes seen in it. Pynchon makes this point most obviously in the third chapter, which is narrated by various “natives” (a term of course nonexistent before the West came): P. Aieul, “cafe waiter and amateur libertine” (Pynchon, 63); Yasef the factotum; Maxwell Rowley-Bugge, a “peregrine” who preys on tourists (69); Waldetar the conductor; Gabrail, a coach driver; Girgis the Mountebank; and Hanne the barmaid. These natives observe tourists interacting with Baedeker's landscapes, not with Egypt itself. Gabrail's family, for example, lives “all together in a room no bigger than your W.C., out in Arabian Cairo where you never go because it's too dirty and not ‘curious.' Where the street is so narrow hardly a man's shadow can pass; a street like many not on any guidebook's map” (83). This land is excised from the tourist's landscape; Baedeker insulates the tourist from any information that would contradict the Baedeker reality. The implication is, as the above narrators make obvious through their thoughts as they work, that the natives are trapped by the tourist trade, and not only physically. When they are visible, they are forced to act in accordance with Baedeker's description of them. They are forced to deny the duality of their own and the Baedeker's reality. “In Baedeker land one doesn't often come across impostors. Duplicity is against the law” (74). This is most obvious with Max:

How he had come to Alexandria , where he would go on leaving, little of that could matter to any tourist. He was that sort of vagrant who exists, though unwillingly, entirely within the Baedeker world—as much a feature of the topography as the other automata: waiters, porters, cabmen, clerks. Taken for granted. Whenever he was about his business—cadging meals, drinks, or lodging—a temporary covenant would come into effect between Max and his “touch”; by which Max was defined as a well-off fellow tourist temporarily embarrassed by a malfunction in Cook's machinery . . . [It was a] common game among tourists. They knew what he was; and those who participated in the game did so for the same reason they haggled at shops or gave baksheesh to beggars: it was in the unwritten laws of Baedeker land. Max was one of the minor inconveniences to an almost perfectly arranged tourist-state. The inconvenience was more than made up for in “color.” (70-1).

Here the natives' presence, not the tourists', is seen as the inconvenience. But the “color” of the performance sublimates this, for the performance denies the natives to articulate the “real” inconvenience. The natives' many voices, their pre- and post-colonial experiences, remain exotic spectacles, never serious realities. So the differences which are marvelled at are not those of the culture as a totality; a few differences are selected and placed in the tourist's view.

The voyeurism of tourism is thus a colonialist activity. It is the imposition of a Western Baedeker reality onto an already existing reality, the natives'. The West here doesn't destroy all non-modern alternatives, it objectifies and reproduces them as its irrevocable past, as pre-modern, and the tour unites them as one Other. The tourist, travelling geographically, seems to move backwards through time and space along the linear path of Progress plotted by the West. The tour here abstracts cultural symbols and monuments out of their context—such as the Pyramids and the Campanile—and glorifies them as part of its own heritage. The middle-class tourists can thus enter their desired transcendental realm as if omniscient, with Otherness staged nostalgically around them. But the tourists' transcendence and the natives' immanence is only an illusion produced by their respective economic mobility and immobility, with both unified in a West/Other binary as the Truth. So, be tourists “American, German, Italian, whatever, the Tour Eiffel, Pyramids and Campanile all evoke identical responses from them; their bible is clearly written and does not admit of private interpretation” (409). The religious implication is important, for the past is an automatic art object, with Truth and Goodness coexistent in it. The tour is aestheticized as picturesque, as the eye wanders the sheer diversity of scenes; as beautiful, when the past is held up as a harmonic object with the present; and as sublime, when the Truth of the Grand Tour understood to be the Goodness of the modern nation-state. The Tour here represents a rediscovery of a morality in the “purity” of the “primitive” when morality seems lost in a “civilized” system in which power is so alienated that causes and effects seem to have disappeared—part of some conspiracy, like V., no one understands.

Pynchon dramatizes, through V.'s conspiracy, the continuity between the tourist and the spy. While the tourist and the native must perform the Baedeker scene for each other, the spy is allowed to break the rules, as shown when Max meets Victoria Wren, Mildred Wren, Goodfellow and Porpentine. “On the face of it, all normal . . . But beneath?/He came to the awareness reluctantly (that) they were only posing as tourists. Playing a game different from Max's; and it frightened him” (74). This “posing” ceases when Victoria Wren tells Porpentine: “Do finish with your cripple. Give him his shilling and come. It's late” (76). Later, Victoria Wren's “intuition” tells her that “Goodfellow was a spy not a casual tourist; more, had revealed to her all at once a latent talent of her own for espionage” (198). She decides to help him for reasons of “virtu”—a tenant of Machiavellian, of fascist politics—not for moral reasons. While tourism has a moral pretense, the spy is merely pragmatic. The function of the spy is, like the tourists, to keep an eye on the colonized people and make sure they stay the way the colonizers expect, but while the tourist's colonization is one of coercion, the spy's colonization re-enacts the colonial act as one of war. When the spy supplants the tourist, the indirect colonial violence of tourism is shown to be continuous with the direct colonial violence surrounding the Gaucho's anarchist dream, the Bondel uprising, the anonymous soldier's personal colonization of Africa and Schoenmaker's colonization of Esther in New York ; and all these colonizations are predicated, on one level, on “winning” economic power 2 .

But Pynchon's narrative shows native's seeing through and resisting the West's turbulent landscape. Aieul bitterly says: “Let them be deceived into thinking the city something more than what their Baedekers said it was: a Pharos long gone to earthquake and the sea; picturesque but faceless Arabs; monuments, tombs, modern hotels. A false an bastard city; inert—for “them”—as Aieul himself” (64). And later: “All Aieul could distinguish were names. Victoria Wren. Sir Alastair Wren . . . A Bongo-Shaftsbury. What ridiculous names that country produced” (64). This ironic inversion, with the Other finding the colonizer's names exotic, subverts the colonial impulse because the reader no doubt agrees the names are ridiculous. More bitter still, Waldetar says: “There's no organized effort about it but there remains a grand joke on all visitors to Baedeker world: the permanent residents are actually humans in disguise” (78). The sewer rats of Fairing's Parish, which the priest attempted to convert, is a fitting metaphor for this resistance, for it dramatizes the impossibility and absurdity of trying to make the native accept the West's reality. Beyond the work, the acting, the native's realize they are forced into that reality and resent it. However, being caught in the momentum of entropy, their resistance is largely pre-empted; generally, they must resign themselves to the suffering and wait till the West's closed system has exhausted them or itself.

The control the West holds over resistance is obvious because these natives only exist in the text through the mediation of Stencil's dossiers, those “forcible dislocations . . . into a past he didn't remember and had no right to be in” (62). Stencil's search for V. through these dossiers sends up the West's search for an exotic, objectified Other. He is a perpetual tourist, and his father's journal is his Baedeker. Indeed he is, like his name, a map of the landscape. His identity is his search for V., and that search involves the imposition of specific maps over time and space and himself. Yet he has made a point of avoiding Malta , Valletta , where his father died and the mystery of V. may have been born and resolved. Malta is an innocent bystander in a brutal history, and the issue of independence and identity is very much at stake there. Its wasted surface, like Africa 's, implies a moral or spiritual wasteland—but only because the profane West fails to see it as their sacred home. And despite many colonizations some rock-like quality, some land beneath the ravaging landscapes, survives. Indeed it is the sheer multitude of landscapes imposed on Malta that reveals all of them to be mediated, partial experiences of its land. Stencil avoids going there because its reality may question his own; when he runs out of clues and has no where else to go, he knows that for him to recognize V.'s death there, in the form of the Bad Priest, means an end to his search, his identity. Pynchon foreground this through the last words Stencil speaks in the novel: “Is it really his own extermination he is after [by coming to Malta ]?” to which Maijstral replies, gesturing to Valletta , “Ask her . . . Ask the rock” (451). Malta forces Stencil to choose between recognizing his search as a self-imposed fiction, or suspending disbelief and continue searching for V.; since the tour at least affirms life and Truth, he chooses the latter. The West's identity is likewise bound up in the tour. Without its Truth, imperial capitalism loses its ideological justification.

As Plater argues, Pynchon uses quantum physics' observation that micro-particles are simultaneously particles and waves as a metaphor of Stencil's, and tourist's in general, double vision in regards to land and its representation as landscape. Though micro-particles exist, the more we know of their position, the less we know of their momentum; the knowledge of the particle is always partial (101). Likewise, the distinction between land and landscape is a duality; the more landscapes we view, the less we can the land. Sidney Stencil, like his son, realizes this when he talks of the Situation,

which refused to make sense no matter who looked at it, or from what angle . . . He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it existed only in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moments. The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three” (Pynchon, 189)

This relates to what Van Wijk tells Mondaugen: “The European civil servant normally sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history. He doesn't fight it, he tries to coexist with it” (233). The official History, or Situation, is abstractly imposed by the West; but different landscapes can be seen by different people in the same territory, so the same content—the continuous material processes of the land itself—can take on different forms. This reveals the official History or Situation to be a relative, self-serving truth. But so is all History, all Situations. No one views the land more accurately, their views are always relative to their relationships with it. Any critique of the Western landscapes imposed on the natives' landscapes rests not on their validity, but upon the fact that they do not have any “rightful” relationship with the land there: as Pynchon's metaphor of entropy makes clear, the West objectifies and abuses, or destroys, the land and landscapes beyond its “rightful” territorial control. It is a genocidal, suicidal system, taking without asking and never giving back, with an addicted to the consumption of energy which the world cannot support indefinitely.

As Stencil dramatizes, the only quest in this entropic system consists of group flights, chartered buses and supermarket runs, with guides, maps, schedules and a sense that endless others have gone before: the stages of the perilous journey have been economized into a single, routine sight-seeing act, and the enemy searched for remains impersonal and diffuse, secret force, a corporation conglomerate that is never found (Plater, 71). There is no climactic battle, only another tour. V. is, in this sense, the personification of the West's closed system, and Stencil illustrates, by searching for her, that since the enemy cannot be identified, the tour is an endless search for information about it. Of course information, or knowledge—like ideology—is abstract, can be imagined or real, and can redefined according to new information; while it is the West's most important commodity, it has no value except for those who seek or provide it (72). Stencil's details about a woman he calls V. deny the encompassing detail that V. is merely a fetishized representation of the West. His avoidance of V. on Malta, and his consequent denial of her death there, is equivalent to the Grand Tour's avoidance, by focusing on the Baedeker's details of the tourist sites, of the industry the colonial impulse, which deploys it. Stencil suggests that touring tries, by seeing everything but its own processes, to deny how bad things are, and thus forces us to continually defer exercising responsibility over the violence of the system we are agents of. 3

Of course the tour is more than just an attempt to find meaning in the system and an avoidance of the system, it is an alleviation of the boredom the system produces, and this boredom lies in the sensation of being lost in a world of objects. All the other eccentric characters in the novel fill the void of Stencil's, the West's, existence, by trying to make the world more exciting or entertaining, and, consequently, less alien. But in doing so they only prove how alien an experience it is to be an animate human subject in a world of inanimate commodified objects. Benny Profane is the common tourist. His whole life lies within the Street: “this was all there was to dream; all there every was” (40); but “it had taught him nothing” (37), and the comical calamities and traumas it forces him into (his constant collisions with objects, which justify his title of schlemiel) are what passes for entertainment in the modern world. At the end of the novel he meets meets:

one Brenda Wigglesworth, an American WASP who attended Beaver College and owned, she said, 72 pairs of Bermuda shorts, half of which she had brought over to Europe around June at the beginning of a Grand Tour which had then held high promise. (452)

This foregrounds the tour as merely another objectified commodity reciprocally promoting consumerism, with the Street part of not only the Tour, but life beyond the Tour; life is, for Benny, one big Tour. The Street represents the global imposition of the West's 2-dimensional Baedeker of abstract differentiation, and Benny represents our experience of it. Like him, we “entertain” ourselves with objects, be they Bermuda shorts, a tour, or the lives and deaths of people. For natives, women, Jews and finally all humans, are reduced to objects by the force of the West's abstraction, as intimated by Benny's conversations with SHROUD (286, 295). The West tries to manipulate people as commodities to its economic advantage. And since commodities, are merely abstract objects, there is no human, moral guidance in the way those in power, those who are still animate human subjects, treat them. We are, then, our own slaves, and “entertain” ourselves at our own expense. Like Benny, we are tourists, controlled by unseen powers; and we, like the people of the “host” countries, are the objects, the commodities produced by our tours. We are the land beneath the Baedeker landscape and the omniscient, ubiquitous gaze that produces it.

Pynchon's text can of course be seen as a tour in itself and the reader the tourist. However it does not merely reconstruct the traditional tour, nor the traditional colonialist themes of travel fiction in general. Though V. may have all the accumulative detail of a Baedeker, it does not have the same rationalizing, unifying order. Pynchon splices real Baedeker detail with fictional detail: a landscape is created, co-ordinate with the reader's, then subverted, showing how prior knowledge and experience can make the strangest landscape familiar, and the most familiar landscape strange. Readers are forced to reach through their own experiences, to construct meaning out of the estranging detail and make connections with the multiplicity of voices placed before them. Pynchon's is, then, an interactive tour, which does not claim there is a single moral Good Truth in the many, “pure” voices of the colonized people. Rather it claims that the morality we are supposed to find during the tour is not contained in the system which produces it, and that a great deal of terrorism is involved in subordinating and objectifying the multiplicity of voices beneath the agency of that one system. For Pynchon, so long the relative Truth of the Grand Tour still speaks, the system will remain closed and the Dance of Death will continue 4 ; but if travel is reclaimed—an actual (dis-)engagement with not only the land but the alternate landscapes and Truths in the local cultures—an open system may be possible which is not subject to entropy. Chance, accident and fortune will always remain—the land always speaks alongside the landscape—but beyond Baedeker's visually consumed landscapes are possibilities for landscapes without a death-wish.

Notes

1. I use the term “modern” only to remain consistent with MacCannel's text: “post-modern” more accurately describes the cosmology Pynchon represents and the experience of late capitalism in as much as I am theorizing it here.

2. Pynchon does not isolate the West's economy, in a Marxist sense, as the final cause of entropy: his text also codes gender (partly through the violence against his female characters and the personification of V.) and religion (partly through his many religious allusions) as other determinants. Though I am focusing on an economic determinant, the overdetermination of the West's forces needs to be recognized to place the economic determinant in context.

3. Eden here functions allegorically. Adam, by his surrender to a temptation of the flesh in a religion valorizing the non-material, transcendent soul, brought down the wrath of God and so destroyed the Garden; Western man, tempted by the dollar, prostituted the land as a resource, and so destroyed the balance of the “natural” and “cultural” ecosystem(s). Plater says that:

God reminded Adam that he had been made of dust and to dust he world return. Man and the earth were made one. His fate is irrevocably tied to the world . . . Man set forth from the Garden as a perpetual tourist, doomed ever to travel its surface as a stranger with no other home. The only imaginable destination is memory” (Plater, 65).

Here both Adam and the tourist try to hide the truth of the original sin and the broken land which testifies to its loss by their dreams of redemption, of reclaiming a lost but remembered utopian land. Godolphin says: “If Eden was the Creation of God, God only knows what evil created Vheissu . . . [that] gaudy dream. Of what the Antarctic in this world is closest to: a dream of annihilation” (206). Pynchon implies that humans created Vheissu, and Eden, these dreams, surfaces and illusions, to disguise the dust and waste of the ruined Garden. Certainly from a (post-) Marxist perspective, Eden and Vheissu are both ideological constructs; they are landscapes retrospectively constructed as objects of nostalgia which offer a hope of redemption for those trapped in a system which cannot be redeemed except by its change or destruction. Of course tourism, which “looks” for these dreams, makes the land look less and less like the landscapes it abstracts—or dreams—from its ravaged surfaces: Baedeker, by turning Adam's tour into a profitable industry, compounded the original sin.

4 The Dance of Death is an allegorical theme “dating from the 14th Century, in which death converses with a number of persons of all stations of life and eventually leads them all away to the grave in a solemn dance” (Funk and Wagnalls, 345). Pynchon uses it as a metaphor for tourists, Africans, The Whole Sick Crew, and those yo-yoing on the trains in the underground (Pynchon, 201, 264, 296 and 303). The most obvious interpretation is that it signifies how people across the globe are carried along by the West's entropy towards the void of its suicidal death.

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