The wind

[Terrance]

See McHale's essay on M&D ("Mason & Dixon in the Zone" 
**Pynchon and Mason & Dixon** Edited by Brooke Horvath and Irving
Malin). 



Here, too, the seeming verticals of MASON & DIXON 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.

He mentions the Iroquois. 



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 says, 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)


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.


"I don't do,  and I don't do,  and I don't do for you kids, but I trust
you will do for you and yours."

	--The Old Woman Who Lived in a railroad apartment in the Bronx

				--