Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997)
Born Under A Bad Sign
David Cohea
Makers of maps of old when the world was still new would point to unexplored,
dark margins and warn: "There beyond lie dragons." For Thomas Pynchon, those
regions--beyond the known, the thinkable, and, for some, the readable--also promise
freedom. In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon's sprawling, dense, wickedly funny new novel,
he tries to show how America lost--or sold--that freedom. More fundamentally,
Pynchon peers into our odd American soul, divided between wandering heart and
shackled mind.
At turns high-minded, wildly comic, bittersweetly lyric and bewilderingly obtuse,
Mason & Dixon is the book that Pynchon lovers have been waiting for since
Gravity's Rainbow was published in 1973 (Vineland, Pynchon's 1990 novel, seemed
too superficial to warrant the long delay). This is a huge and difficult book. Few
writers have the gall to ask so much of their readers and offer so few clear
answers. But therein lies its greatness.
Pynchon travels 200 years into our past to examine the darker wellsprings of the
American soul, settling in the pause between Enlightenment and Revolution. The
story is narrated (in the literary style of the day) by a Reverend Cherrycoke at
Christmastide 1786 to a parlor of relatives in post-Revolution Philadelphia. He
recalls the travels of George Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, astronomers who recorded
the Transits of Venus for the Royal Society in 1761 and 1769, and between those
dates surveyed a boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland-the famous Mason
and Dixon Line.
Expect no traditional tale: The narrative sprints everywhere with leaps around
Mason and Dixon's travels, asides from Cherrycoke, myriad digressions into
memory and dream, alternate tales, unanswered questions, grand ruminations and
missed messages. This is history postmodern style, "a great disorderly Tangle of
Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with
only their Destination in common."
Accordingly, we should not expect coherence, nor much desire it, for those who
profit from such order aren't interested in the truth. "Who claims Truth, Truth
abandons," Cherrycoke meditates. "History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests
that must ever prove base." Only "fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and
Cranks of ev'ry Radius," are trustworthy enough to spin this tale.
As science and mathematics come to the fore of the Age of Reason, Pynchon
develops his theme using many concepts from those disciplines. Astronomy in
particular is applied to a broad range of speculations. (So much star jargon is
off-handedly bantered that it's a good idea to have a dictionary at hand.) Isaac
Newton's "as above, so below" cast reality as rational symmetry; earth is thus
mapped through precise observation of the heavens.
Yet the rational universe wars with the natural lay of the land, and Pynchon is rich
with irony. The line which Mason and Dixon survey in America (used to settle a
boundary dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland) also scars a divide between
people. "Nothing will produce Bad History more directly, more brutally, than
drawing a Line, particularly a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the
midst of a People,--to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,--'tis the first
stroke.--All else will follow as if predestin'd, unto War and Devastation."
Just when things get too weighty, Pynchon flips into near-anarchic silliness. The
Age of Reason is anything but. Consider: A 512-sided Gloucester cheese nearly
flattens Mason as it rolls merrily across England; a hulking miner named Lud
Oafery turns, werewolf-style, into a fop when the moon waxes; a mechanical duck
is so lifelike (it even has a digestive track) that it falls in love with a French chef
whose specialty is duck. (Every age is full of romantic saps.)
Sight gags are stuck in everywhere, like the sampler hanging in frontier cabin
which reads "EXPECT INDIANS". Loonies are everywhere, too, including the paranoid
leader of the Royal Society who believes that a gang of pygmies are secretly
hoarding 11 days cut from the English calendar in 1752. Further antics are
supplied by a bounty of lowlifes who booze and dope and rip bodices at the end of
each day's surveying work. George Washington's slave is a genteel, standup
comedian who peels off Master/Slave and King George jokes. And you never know
when Pynchons brings everything to a halt for an exquisite a song and dance
number.
Between the speculation and buffoonery, Pynchon shows us how America lost it's
struggle for freedom. As usual, money is a culprit. Kings and entrepreneurs are out
to make a killing in the land- and ship-grabbing, slave and colony markets.
Everybody's struggling for a piece of the pie; there are manifold conspiracies and
betrayals, Jesuit intrigues, secret corporate plots, Royal Society machinations.
Mason and Dixon are never quite sure who's pulling their strings, nor exactly what
their efforts benefit.
What's being victimized is a disappearing order Pynchon only hints at. Something
is vanquished with each new astronomical calculation or survey of virgin forest.
Mason and Dixon run across old "telluric" powers, ancient ruins in the forest
resonant with magnetic energy, and hear of a race of beings who live under the
earth. In all that is a "Secret ... denied to all who came to America, for Wealth, for
refuge, for Adventure ... a secret Body of Knowledge ... meant to be studied..."
Beyond whatever natural wisdom is being lost, wounds inflicted by humans upon
each other scar the psychic landscape. We encounter darker, ghostlier orders,
nooks haunted by massacre and anguish. Pynchon hears a wailing in the land, the
result of violence by European white against African or Native American, and vice
versa, as well as betrayals from within. Gearing up to fight the British tyranny,
America blindly instituted its own.
What is the true agent of this tyranny? A tragic, historic forgetfulness. The
wounds of one generation--revolution, slavery, poverty, civil war-slip down some
moral oubliette in the brain, dooming the next generation to re-inflict the whole
mess. "In Time, these People are able to forget ev'rything," observes Mason. "In
America...Time is the true River that runs 'round Hell."
And what happened to the urge for freedom? Do we forget that too, lulled by our
securities? Pynchon suggests that human sin may be less an indulgence of desire
than the failure to live them fully. Pynchon laments our enslavement to systems of
control-boundaries, laws, dogma-which enable everyday life but severely limit
freedom. He also faults the superego inside our heads which calibrates conscience
to the moral compass of society. And even more fundamentally, our ancient fear of
death has locked created so many doors in the psyche that we are virtually blind to
whole orders of experience.
Pynchon still finds freedom, although the moments and locations are scant,
scattered, fragmented, and temporary. The Chinese notion of Feng Shui allows
water to freely flow along the natural course of the land; a mind so attuned taps
into "the dragon ... within." Mason's dead wife Rebekah tries to contact Mason
"along surfaces not so much 'random' as outlaw-uncontroll'd by any apparent End or
Purpose." And just the east of the starting point of Mason and Dixon's Line, there's
a small wedge of land not any map, "not so much claim'd by any one Province, as
priz'd for its Ambiguity--occupied by all whose Wish, hardly uncommon in this Era
of fluid Identity, not to reside anywhere..." (Here we can respect Pynchon's
notorious, career anonymity--he hasn't been photographed since the 1950's-for it
has allowed him an identity wholly within his art.)
At the end of Cherrycoke's tale, Mason and Dixon return to England, their boundary
line complete, both ambiguous about the nobility of their ends. They separate
professionally yet remain friends, settling into a comfortable enough dotage. When
they occasionally get together, they fish and comment on the odd circularity of
their fortunes: "To leave home, to dare the global waters strange and deep, consort
with the highest Men of Science, and at the end return to exactly the same place,
us'd,--broken..." The other replies, "No-body's dream of a Life, for Fair."
It is a quiet coda for so resonant a tale of America's troubled birth, leaving us to
fish for a meaning that ever remains dark and free in our own haunted, wandering
hearts.
David Cohea is a writer who lives in Mt. Dora, MN
