The Great Divide

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

jp4321 at idt.net writes:
> The equator crossing scene, and its discussion by the extended LeSparks, is
> a seemingly minor sequence in the book, but I think it is important. I
> think it is a comment on the racial, and probably unconscious, "crossing
> over" from the time which preceded all ritualized behavior. Can't we come
> up with a ritual to celebrate that passage... a ritual for the birth of
> rituals?

I can't remember who suggested that the Equator was a `natural'
dividing line whereas the other latitudes were not so, but Jody shows
here quite how unnatural the ensuing division is. When humanity
eventually looked up at the sun and later the moon, planets and the
stars, and not before, suddenly there was a chance to orient
oneself. Looking up and choosing to use the heavens as a reference
frame was a choice which had to be made and which took many years to
develop. The Sun and the other heavenly bodies had to be invested with
power by prehistoric astrologers. Natural geography is actually as
unnatural, as much to do with adopting a perspective, as natural law.

It is true that the earth's own axis of spin and this axis' near
alignment with the axis of its rotation around the sun do indeed
demarcate the poles, an equator and the two tropics. Actually, the
earth's spin also implies every line of latitude in the continuum from
from 90.0S degrees to 90.0N degrees, or make that 100.0S radians etc
or pi/2 S radians etc. the numerical labelling of each line being
incidental according to the adopted angular scale. But note that there
is a definite sense of up and down in the way we conventionally
orientate ourselves (and our maps) wrt these poles which only serves
to underline global cultural divisions. For us northeners the crossing
of the equator also represents a transition from top to bottom, from
high to low and from civilization to wilderness, into that there heart
of darkness.

And there is a similar example of this spatio-cultural distribution in
the East/West division which placed Europeans, and Brits in
particular, in the centre (i.e. the zero in Greenwich - reinterpret
that `beyond the zero' as you will, you will Oscar) and made the now
decadent East the cradle of civilization and the West a wilderness to
be conquered. Not surprising that the direction of cultural flow is
also the direction of the sun's transit across the heavens but it
didn't have to be.

This is what the Gwenhidwy passage in Gravity's Rainbow is hinting at
and is why I linked it to the cosmological metaphor taken from Rev^d
Wicks' Spiritual Day Book (and there's a definite irony in that
`spiritual day', one day encompassing all 360 degrees of our cultural
diaspora). The east-west gradient straddling that zero line in London
reflects a deep-seated habit of cultural division and human
divisiveness as does e.g. the north south gradient which separates
Dixon from Mason, the gradients which separate Pennsylvania from
Virginia or both of these from the land west of Susquehanna. All these
gradients reveal much about our sense of self.

Pynchon himself equates these north south and east west axes when he
compares the viciousness of the South Africans to their slaves with
slaughter of the native Americans in Lancaster County. After citing
the various excuses claimed by the Dutch, Dixon, in one of the most
moving passages in the whole novel, asks what excuse the Americans
had. No surprise that the Lancaster assassins bear rifles with the
same inverted star motif as the Dutch in South Africa. Nor, indeed,
when Pynchon later baldly states that the purpose of carving all those
grid lines on the land was so that it could then be divided up,
possessed and fought over. However natural the original demarcations
might appear to be once you look up at the stars the orientation we
have chosen to impose on these `natural' coordinate systems says more
about humanity (rather, inhumanity) than it says about the physical
world.

That Mason & Dixon manage to resolve the oppositions manifest as much
in their distinct geographical origins as in their respective
characters seems to me to be the fundamental theme of M&D. They not
only grow to like each other but actually come to depend on each
other. Apply their resolution of difference to the divisions implied
in the cosmological model and you can universalize the message to a
global cultural critique, a moral and spiritual lesson for us all.


Andrew Dinn
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We drank the blood of our enemies.
The blood of our friends, we cherished.