M&D & something

[Swing Hammerswing]

So pleased to read McHale's essay on M&D ("Mason & Dixon in the Zone" 
**Pynchon and Mason & Dixon** Edited by Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin), 
Chaucer by god, yes, How about Swift and Dante? (too brief, my only 
complaint, oh, and after he says,

see M&D 218-20 440, 602-3, 739

Here, too, the seeming verticals of MASON & DIXO N turn out to be 
horizontals.
This general reorientation from the vertical to the horizontal axis has 
thematic, ideological and ultimately metaphysical consequences. The 
opposition "horizontally vs. vertically" serves, here and elsewhere, as a 
kind of special code for encoding ideological positions and metaphysical 
commitments.

and a bit more, all so beautiful and brilliant, he stops).

He mentions the Iroquois. During the MDMD, did anyone suggest a text on 
Iroquois "theology" (I'm borrowing McHale's term here)? BTW, the study of 
the Iroquois has been part of NY State curriculum for
decades.

McHale says,

For it is never clear whether these fragmentary other worlds, glimpsed 
sporadically throughout, form a single integrated Other World (as the 
apparently do in Gravity's Rainbow) or multitude worlds of potentially 
different kinds. (His Note; Compare also the parellel worlds of The Crying 
of Lot 49, where Americans behave "as if they were in exile from somewhere 
else invisable yet congruent with the cheered land [they] lived in" 
(CL49.135, 72,76).

As I've mentioned, too many times I'm sure, the world of GR is divided in 
three (maybe P got this from reading those comic book versions of **The 
Divine Comedy**, a more likely source, the old Western Cannon, see also, 
"Three Cosmic Levels" **The Sacred and the Profane** Mircea Eliade). McHale 
mentions Mikhail Bakhtin

McHale's note:

Mikhail Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," The 
Diologic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl 
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas, 1981, See also, 
Gabriel Zoran, "Toward a Theory of Space Narrative," Poetics Today 5, 1984)

and as mentioned here too many times, I'm sure,  Bakhtin's  **Dostoevsky's 
Poetics** is also useful ("Earth" and "Olympus" and "Nether-world") or in 
GR, the "physical,"  "spiritual" or "other side" and the "realm of the 
Angel."  It is, as McHale suggests, the Earth, and not the East as opposed 
to the West where some dialectic privileging of Eastern "Consciousness" is 
Elected or provides the (re) solution.

McHale says,

If a yearning for transcendence lingers in Gravity's Rainbow, it has been 
replaced in Mason & Dixon by a different metaphysics entirely: something

(see Thomas Moore's **The Style of Connectedness** page 221, where he tries 
to name this "something" (Sklar, noted previously and Alfred Kazin, Bright 
Book of Life: Novelists and Storytellers from Hemmingway to Mailer, 1971, 
Moore's chapter, I complained, is  a total mess, but it's actually very, 
very good on this, again, too brief and as he admits, vague, though I don't 
think P's "something" is entirely at  fault)


like a resolutely earthbound this-worldliness. Here the Other World lies, if 
anywhere, not above or below this one, but along side or ahead of it, 
"across the wind," somewhere out there in subjunctive America."

Mchale, again his essay is too brief, is very good on the subjunctive 
"space" and the wind.

This something is (I think, and it's  important to remember that P was 
apparently working on M&D for a long time, perhaps, he started it when he 
was writing V.)  beyond the pale of enlightened or  "German" (to use a GR 
example) consciousness or at least,  consciousness as distinct from the soul 
and thus the earth.
The body, the mind, the earth form a Unity ( to borrow Henry Adams' term 
again) in subjunctive space/time. So to answer. in part, Otto's post-P 
treating science as "myth", the religious quest, be it, Calvinistic, or 
Buddhist, when it suppresses or in the Platonic (or neo-Platonic, using this 
term broadly, it includes Jewish Mysticism-Scholem--, Gnosticism-Jonas, 
Christianity, Freemasonry, not simply because these are employed by their 
adepts and "congregations" in the "present dispensation" to maintain 
dualisms and binaries, i.e.,  elect/preterite, but because of the disdain 
for the material world, the earth, and the attempt to set it apart, with the 
use of  language, texts, names, the Word, Logos as Logocentrism….) sense, 
seeks to transcend the world of fallen matter (the broken vessels, Sparks, 
shards of light, etc.) AND the scientists (and P makes the scientists the 
Profane counterparts (both having doppelgängers on the Otherside, the 
trinity forming a parodic and profane "unity") seek to transcend the world 
of "fallen" spirits.
So P treats science as myth in that science is a profane and rationalized 
version of religion, thus Poitsman is Knight-Pavlovian while Slothrop is 
King George after the fact.
In suppressing or seeking to transcend  matter (religious quests) or spirit 
(scientific quests)  the characters cast-off, or toss over the side, 
everything of value, including the Earth itself, the something, a "unity" or 
a "mindbody" in GR's terms, (590, 354, 362, 612).

TBC....


_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com