Three Worlds for a Sandwich (was The Wind)

[John Bailey]

While I'm not completely sold on the three worlds thing, Terrance, there are 
a lot of images in M&D that work with that. Sandwiches for one thing are 
something I think are used very interestingly, and the way that a lot of 
triads are given sandwich metaphors, eg. M&D and the good Rev, not to 
mention all the electricity which comes up (energy between two poles etc), 
well, there might be lots more to think about.

I was reading some stuff about William Blake last night, the poet, not the 
Dead Man, and I hadn't read much of him before but the description of him I 
was looking at suggested a Vision remarkably similar to that which seems to 
be espoused in M&D. Lots of mention made to the condemnation of lines 
between eg. Heaven and Hell, the Body and the Mind, Man and Nature, yada 
yada, and when the Energy stuff came in, well I thought Bingo, this is good 
stuff. And roughly contemporary to M&D's setting, give or take a decade, and 
coming out of London, and sometimes concerning America, and containing a 
very very intruiging condemnation of deism, of the scientific age, of 
politics and industrialism, all very nice. Not saying there's a direct 
relation, just good music to have in the background whilst you're reading, 
so to speak.


>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>To: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: The wind
>Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 08:24:58 -0400
>
>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
>
>				--


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