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• 1 2016-02-16T18:46:37-08:00 Guidebook: Google Maps 55 Placemarks from Rendezvous Eighteenth plain 237828 2016-04-22T11:14:20-07:00
  
  
  
  
  Rendezvous Eighteenth has forty-nine placemarks on Google Maps. Most of these placemarks are from locations the protagonist Ricky Jenks traveled to within the four days that the novel is set.  Thirty-one of these locations are in the Eighteenth Arrondissement. Lamar's mapping of Ricky Jenks's movement in the novel makes it appropriate for literary mapping. Unlike my analysis of "Baldwin's Paris," which is framed by and based on the clusters that were made visible through placemarking on Google Earth, in this chapter I am analyzing three major descriptions of neighborhoods depicted in the novel and juxtapose the images from Google Map's Street View with Lamar's descriptions.
  
  I provide an analysis of Google Maps and Rendezvous Eighteenth to enhance my critique of the guide function in the novel. I believe my critique of the novel is enhanced through a juxtaposition since both are re-presenting reality in a fiction, and this will also give further insight of what the guide's gaze in the novel. There are three aspects of Google Maps and Rendezvous Eighteenth that I critique: 1) both are authored works that are subject to distortions, 2) generalize and therefore privilege, 3) and have silences. 
  
  First, I approach my comparison of Google Maps and ​Rendezvous Eighteenth street "scenes" in Montmartre, la Goutte d'Or and Barbes as two fictional texts or representations. Rendezvous Eighteenth is a work of fiction and to a large extent so are maps. Mark Monmonier notes in How to Lie With Maps, "In showing how to lie with maps, I want to make readers aware that maps, like speeches and paintings, are authored collections of information and also are subject to distortions" (2). In addressing cartographers as authors and comparing maps to speeches and paintings, Monmonier makes the strong case that maps are fiction. Along these lines, in ​Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and the Process of Postmodern Cartography, Jason Farman states, By accepting the map as reality, the reviewer enters into partnership with the map's author over the hegemonic assumptions such a visual representation makes. Acceptance of the map without question to the authorial nature of its design shifts ownership of the gaze onto the map user (8). Here, Farman claims that without detachment from the map or critique of the map, the user becomes the co-author of its gaze, which not neutral. Monmonier and Farman affirm maps as authored works that re-present reality or information. In my comparative analysis of Google Maps Street View images and Lamar's depictions in Rendezvous Eighteenth, I am comparing two authored works depicting areas in the Eighteenth arrondissement, highlighting an aspect of their distortions.
  
  Second, I address what the guide and map privileges in Rendezvous Eighteenth and Google Maps, respectively. I emphasize that each gaze has a purpose. Since, as Lamar states, one of his purposes in writing the novel was to expose a Paris his friends don't know, then the question of what the guide privileges in Montmartre, la Goutte d'Or and Barbes is important. Likewise, in terms of maps, Monmonier writes:

  A good map tells a multitude of little white lies; it suppresses truth to help the user see what needs to be seen. Reality is three-dimensional, rich in detail, and far too factual to allow a complete yet uncluttered two-dimensional graphic scale model. Indeed, a man that did not generalize would be useless. But the value of a map depends on how well its generalized geometry and generalized content reflect a chosen aspect of reality (1996:25).   (5) <--Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and the Process of Postmodern Cartography

  Monmonier claims that each map generalizes in order to privilege--"or what needs to be seen" (--). What the map privileges exposes its purpose, and this display is consistent whether the map, such as Google Maps, is in aerial or street view. In my juxtaposition of Rendezvous Eighteenth and Google Maps, I analyze what and how the gazes privileges in the Eighteenth Arrondissement. 
  
  Third, I critique the silences in Rendezvous Eighteenth and Google Map's representation of streets in the Eighteenth Arrondissement. For instance, in privileging the lesser known, Lamar silences some of the obvious portrayals in the Eighteenth, and, as I will show, the third-person narrator places more distance between some perspectives than others. Similarly, Google Maps has many silences in the Eighteenth, particularly in street view. In his discussion of silences in maps from "Mapping and Geovisualization," Martin Dodge states:

  Subaltern interests are often consciously ignored--the concerns of women, children, disabled, non-car drivers, and so on. Many other aspects of reality, including temporal change and much of the social richness of places, which are hard to capture and code with conventional digital maps are consequently 'silenced'. Therefore, the politics within digital maps is important because it effects the larger ontology of geographical knowledge built upon them" (Martin 14).

  Dodge claims that the silences in maps are political choices and are uncoded ontologies. With regards to Google Maps, I will examine the silences that are captured in the changes of street view between May 2008 and June 2015. These silences in street view are inclined to the spatial data in aerial view. In this final comparison of Rendezvous Eighteenth and Google Earth, I illuminate what the gaze of the guide and the street view would does not know or rather not see.
  
  My analysis of Rendezvous Eighteenth and Google Maps provide further insights into the guide's familiar and distinct point of view through critiquing the guide's gaze. As noted previously, the familiar point of view gives the impression that the reader is a participant in the text and portrays the Eighteenth in a way that is aligned with the African-American tradition. The distinct point of view describes a fluid transition from characters to the narrator's point of view and depicts the Eighteenth at the turn-of-the-century. The familiar and distinct alone does not reveal the purpose or critique the point of view. However, the juxtaposition of the novel with Google Maps reveals that like a map the guide's point of view distorts, privileges, and silences in the novel. This enhances how mapping is central to charting what Lamar is achieving with the guide function in the Rendezvous Eighteenth.