Yeah, but what's it really about? That description makes it sound like fun and all. But it doesn't really tell us much about where the Pynchonian fascination with Mason and Dixon comes from. Which sets up, as far as I'm concerned, the greatest literary guessing game going: Why Mason? Why Dixon? What is Mr. Pynchon really up to? Frankly, I'm not prepared to wait till April for the answer: And so I propose to do something here that some will consider arrogant and risky: I propose to predict, to dream up, to dream upon the the thematic heart of Pynchon's new novel without having read it. The literary journalist equivalent of Babe Ruth pointing to the stands and predicting exactly where his next swing will deposit a home run ball. I may strike out, but I don't care. I'm not content to spend the next five months from now to April just sitting around waiting. Furthermore, I propose to do this without inside information about the manuscript, going only by the title, by approximately a half-hour spent with the Encyclopedia Britannica and, more importantly, by a lifetime's devotion to Mr. Pynchon's work.

First of all, why Mason and Dixon? There's an obvious answer--anyway, one that should be obvious to anyone with the slightest pretensions to Pynchon literacy: Mason and Dixon are--metaphorically--a two-headed version of Maxwell's Demon. You know Maxwell's Demon, right? He (it) is the elusive hypothetical figure from pre-quantum Thermodynamic Theory who inhabits the heart of both The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow. Without getting into the endless scholarly debate about Mr. Pynchon's imaginative fusion of entropy and information theories, the physics of disorder and the paranoid imagination of order, let's restrict our discussion here to what the Demon--initially imagined by James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist--actually does. As a character in The Crying of Lot 49 (who dreams the perpetual doomed American crank-visionary dream of creating a perpetual motion machine) explains it, Maxwell's Demon is an imaginary "tiny intelligence," a figure of pure perception who performs a sorting and dividing function: "the Demon could sit in a box among air molecules . . . and sort out the fast molecules from the slow ones. Fast molecules have more energy. ... Concentrate enough of them and you have a region of high temperature. You can then use the difference in temperature between this hot region and any cooler region to drive a heat engine."

What Maxwell's Demon does then is divide molecules into two states, a hot region and a colder region. And what did the surveyors Mason and Dixon do with their line? They, too, divided disputed territory into two states. Originally just between Maryland and Pennsylvania, but, of course, the Mason-Dixon line has become a metaphor for the division between North and South ("a hot region and a cooler region"), between free and slave, the divide within the American soul.

Maxwell's Demon and Mason and Dixon's line are both resonant embodiments of Mr. Pynchon's abiding preoccupation with the power and limits of (binary) Division itself as a way of knowing, of constructing, of creating the world. He's fascinated by the division between states, the division between nothing and the most infinitesimal delta T of physics: between zero and one in the digital universe; between signal and noise, language and silence. And, even more urgently, by the kind of information that can be found within--the kind that slips through the cracks of--these divides. The Zones beyond and between binary states.

"We live lives that are wave forms ... now positive, now negative," a key Pynchonian visionary character called Mondaugen (who appears in both V. and Gravity's Rainbow) says at one point in the latter novel. "Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero."

The line that Mason and Dixon drew, the line between two states, could be seen as just such a "signal zero" zone: The line is neither state, neither Maryland nor Pennsylvania, it's itself informationless, yet it's the genesis of Information. But as I said, this should all be obvious. Yes, it may be about ripped bodices and caffeinated conspiracies, but at the heart of Mason & Dixon, I predict, will be a meditation on--a Maxwell's Demonization of--the Lineness of the Line Between States. How Something is created from informationless Nothing, the ultimate metaphysical question. So we'll have that. And I'm hoping that William Penn's religiosity will bring upon a return of Mr. Pynchon's fictive Slothropite Heresy, the one that worships Judas as well as Jesus (the line between Pennsylvania and Maryland is also a line between two religious states, two radically different visions of the Incarnation). I also anticipate considerable theodolite theology.

But in my brief excursion into the Britannica to find out a little more about Mason and Dixon, I made a startling discovery about the two surveyors that I feel must have caught Mr. Pynchon's eye and may represent an even more fertile Pynchonian resonance in the novel: the failed 1761 expedition to Sumatra to chart the transit of Venus. The Britannica tells us that in 1760, Mason and Dixon were selected by the Royal Astronomical Society to travel to Sumatra in order to observe the transit of Venus under optimal circumstances, "but that they got no further than the Cape of Good Hope." You've heard of the transit of Venus: It's a phenomenon whose ripe metaphorical resonance (yes, I know about the Shirley Hazzard novel) almost devours its astrophysical reality. The Britannica informs us that the transit of Venus is an eclipselike phenomenon that occurs "when Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun. At such time, Venus appears as a small dark circular disc projected on the brilliant disc of the Sun."

Transits--which, we learn, are helpful in "finding the parallax" and from it the exact distance of the Earth to the Sun--are relatively rare phenomena. They come in pairs with more than a century separating them; the last two were in 1874 and 1882; the next two will be in 2004 and 2012. But apparently the one that Mason and Dixon set off for Sumatra to observe in 1761 turned out to be an absolute stunner that revealed two "remarkable phenomena"--one of radiant light, the other of mystical darkness.

First, "when Venus was partially overlapping the disc of the Sun, the part of the limb [apparent edge] of the planet that extended beyond the Sun was seen to be surrounded with a radiant aureole". But before you get carried away with the cosmic eroticism of the limb touching Venus' "radiant aureole," check out the second of the "remarkable phenomena" which has the Britannica indulging in what sounds like almost deliberate planetary porn: "When Venus just touched the Sun's limb on the inside," there developed "a little black connection, the so-called black drop between Venus and the limb."

Tell me Thomas Pynchon is not going to fall in love with the mysteriously engendered "black drop" leaping to link Venus to the limb of the Sun. The Black Drop as a cosmological illusion of a dark connection; the Black Drop as a fictive dark zone, a black hole within a divide; the Black Drop as the link between Venus and the Sun--the link between Eros and Illumination we've all been looking for.

And so I'll go out on a limb (a different kind of limb) here and say that Mason and Dixon's failed expedition to Sumatra--the one that saw them have to settle for a partial, occluded glimpse of "the radiant aureole" and the "black drop" on the hopelessly metaphorical Cape of Good Hope--will figure powerfully in the new Pynchon novel. If not directly in the plot, I see the Black Drop as the thematic backdrop. I can see Mr. Pynchon returning to something like the brilliant historical pastiche style of V. (the Mondaugen sections of which are set in Southwest Africa and involved astrophysical research) to take us on Mason and Dixon's first quest for the transit of Venus (the transit of V.-ness?).

And now I'll go further out on a limb to predict how the book will end. I see it having something to do with the actual historical disappearance of Jeremiah Dixon. Or, as the Britannica puts it, after the surveyors finished drawing their famous Line, "Nothing more is known of the life of Dixon other than the year and place of his death."

I feel Mr. Pynchon, with his love of the Preterite, the quixotic, passed over visionary loser, will be attracted to the mystery of the Lost Final Years of Jeremiah Dixon. I feel he will have come to imagine Dixon as someone for whom the Line (which was completed in 1767) comes to mean nothing compared to that awestruck visionary moment in 1761 when he caught a partial glimpse of the transit of Venus, the radiant aureole and the Black Drop.

The way I see it, ever since that vision, Dixon has been obsessed, haunted by the glimpse of Venusian visionary glory he's gotten. Tormented by a sense of incompletion until 1769, when the second transit of the pair takes place. This time he'll let nothing stop him from gazing directly into the radiant aureole; let nothing prevent him from dissolving himself in the Black Drop. He'll set out for the end of the earth seeking this transformative vision of the transit of Venus, or V-ness. We may never learn from Mr. Pynchon just what that experience is like, just as- maddeningly--we never get to know exactly what dark legacy is being auctioned off at the close of The Crying of Lot 49.

But no matter, we know in essence what it is: the missing term, the invisible lost chord of coherence that will make sense, however sinister, of the Rosetta stone of the visible world, decrypt the hidden code of history.

Jeremiah Dixon will find V-ness--a vision of ultimate convergence. A vision of V-ness that is present not only in V. but in Gravity's Rainbow (which is about the dark side of V-ness embodied in the Nazi V-weapons, whose flight path is gravity's rainbow). That's present as well in The Crying of Lot 49 (the "muted post horn" is a V-shape, V is where the parallax lines of all paranoid plots and plottings comes to a point) and, of course, in V-ineland.

I see Mr. Pynchon's V-ness as a vast, pervasive, Lucretian integrative force of promised coherence, a coherence that is as much erotic as metaphysical (Lucretius personified it in the goddess Venus herself). An Eros that promises to engender meaning out of nothingness, but may betray (or defer) that promise--or give us a coherence that's terrifyingly sinister. A coherence that expresses itself as the madness of love or paranoia, and sometimes both. I can't wait for April to come.

© Copyright 1996 The New York Observer