Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997)
The Los Angeles Times
Ted Mooney
What is history, what is civilization, what are the limits of our
ability to know? It is Thomas Pynchon's great distinction in his four
previous novels and now in the dizzying and encyclopedic "Mason & Dixon"
to have repeatedly brought extra-literary rhetorics to bear on these, the
most pressing questions literature can address. At different times, he
has kidnapped to his cause the languages of tourism and prosthesis ("V.,"
1963); Jacobean drama, philately and thermodynamics ("The Crying of Lot
49," 1966); rocketry, information theory, behavioral psychology,
anthropology and chemical engineering ("Gravity's Rainbow," 1973); 1960s
American counterculture ("Vineland," 1990); and cinema lore,
psychopharmacology and popular song lyrics of all kinds.
This semantic acquisitiveness has not made for smooth development from
book to book. The deliberately digressive sprawl of "V." can, at times,
appear to be called into question by the near-mineral concision of "The
Crying of Lot 49," which immediately followed it. Conversely, "Gravity's
Rainbow" is so grandly architectural in structure that the comparatively
artless "Vineland" almost seems to have been written by a different hand
(as indeed some of Pynchon's more adamant fans insist it was). The
cumulative effect, though, has been nothing if not enlivening. No one
else now writing has done more to refresh the novel's means or, in so
doing, put them to better purpose.
"Mason & Dixon," said to have been more than 20 years in the making,
is a vast, indeed encompassing, meditation on the Enlightenment and its
consequences, with Pynchon this time appropriating the syntax of 18th
century astronomy and geodesy to structure and advance his tale. Like
"Gravity's Rainbow," the book is quietly keyed to the Christian
liturgical calendar, unfolding in a succession of afternoons from Advent
to Epiphany, as the witty and avowedly unreliable Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke
entertains his sister's children with reminiscences of his far-flung
travels. It is through Cherrycoke, then, that we learn the story of
British astronomer Charles Mason and his partner, surveyor Jeremiah
Dixon, from their first meeting in 1761 to Mason's death 25 years later.
Structurally, as one character points out, this chronicle has the
A-B-A form of that 18th century invention, the sandwich: a pair of
astronomical observations with an extended survey expedition in between.
Mason and Dixon meet in 1761 when the Royal Society appoints them to
observe the much-anticipated Transit of Venus, a rare alignment of the
Earth, sun and Venus that will for the first time make it possible to
calculate the solar parallax and so, in turn, the exact distance from
Earth to sun.
Although meant to make their "Obs" from Bencoolen, on the western
coast of Sumatra, the pair have a run-in with a French frigate and are
forced instead to settle for the Dutch colony at Cape Town. From there,
Mason and Dixon make their way first to St. Helena, where Mason works
with British astronomer Nevil Maskelyne collecting tidal data, then on to
Philadelphia, Mount Vernon and, finally, the virgin forests of the
Allegheny Mountains. There, they undertake the work for which they are
now best known: laying out the Mason-Dixon Line that would separate
Maryland and the rest of the slave-holding states from Pennsylvania and
the abolitionist North. It is a complex project, made all the more
difficult by the harshness of the American wilderness, and the two men
spend four years in its service. Finally, they return to Britain, where
the Second Transit to Venus (transits come in pairs) brings the cycle of
their labors to a close in 1769.
Thus the rationalist bones of the tale, with Mason and Dixon
methodically working to subdue nature in a grid of orthogonals and finely
reckoned figures, the very picture of Enlightenment Europe's faith in
reason, natural law and the moral perfectibility of man. As they
triangulate their way across the heavens and Earth, however, reason
quickly proves to be the least of it. Bursting from the interstices of
the expedition's "official" account are alternative histories,
parageographies, marginal sciences, cryptic systems and arcana so profuse
that any talk of "the rule of right reason" soon seems hubris, pure and
simple.
Mesmerism, animism, feng shui, Hollow-Earth anthropologies,
Freemasonry, astral projection, Gaia worship, reflexology, diabolism,
curative electricity, astrology, geomancy, alien visitation--such
quasi-mystical beliefs exfoliate from the novel's every corner with an
abundance that mimics the American wilderness itself. What's more,
neither Mason nor Dixon seems at all inclined to dismiss these
nonrational bodies of knowledge, at least not without due consideration.
Emissaries of order and "mathesis" they may be, but the duo are also
sensitive to the vast potential for destruction that accompanies any
claim to "objective" truth. The Enlightenment that produced Diderot and
the Encyclopedists will soon enough produce the Terror.
This, of course, is quintessential Pynchon. All his published work
reflects a passion for knowledge systems that have been marginalized,
concealed or discredited by the presiding official discourse. In the
characters of Mason and Dixon, moreover--men sworn to the spirit of
rational inquiry--Pynchon has found the perfect means for approaching
these alternative modes of thought. No sooner has Rev. Cherrycoke
described Mason and Dixon's first meeting (the rather more worldly Mason
takes Dixon to a hanging) than they encounter the Learned English Dog
(a.k.a. Fang), a "disheveled English Terrier, with a raffish Gleam in its
eye." True to his billing, the dog has an admirable education and, what's
more, an elocutionary manner to match. Mason, who throughout the book
mourns his wife Rebekah's untimely death, is instantly intrigued:
" 'Dixon. Why mayn't there be Oracles, for us, in our time? Gate-ways
to Futurity? That can't all have died with the ancient Peoples. Isn't it
worth looking ridiculous, at least to investigate this English Dog, for
its obvious bearing upon Metempsychosis if nought else. . . .' "
Dixon agrees and, when they are alone with the dog, Mason pops the
question:
" 'There is something I must know,' Mason hoarsely whispers, in the
tone of a lover tormented by Doubts, 'Have you a soul--that is, are you a
human Spirit, reincarnate as a Dog?'
"The L.E.D. blinks, shivers, nods in a resign'd way. 'You are hardly
the first to ask. . . . But please do not come to the Learned English Dog
if it's religious Comfort you're after. I may be praeternatural, but I am
not supernatural. 'Tis the Age of Reason, rrrf? There is ever an
explanation at hand, and no such thing as a Talking Dog--Talking Dogs
belong with Dragons and Unicorns. What there are, however, are Provisions
for Survival in a World less fantastick.'
'Viz.--Once, the only reason Men kept Dogs was for food. Noting that
among Men no crime was quite so abhor'd as eating the flesh of another
human, Dog quickly learn'd to act as human as possible--and to pass this
Ability on from Parents to Pups. So we know how to evoke from you, Man,
one day at a time, at least enough Mercy for one day more of Life. . . .
I am but an extreme expression of this Process.' "
It is a sobering rebuke, at once bitter and resigned, and for Mason
especially the L.E.D. has here set the terms for all that is to follow.
The story unfolds in picaresque fashion, taking its momentum mostly
from Mason and Dixon's progress through the stations of their journey.
Episodes involving historical figures--George and Martha Washington, Ben
Franklin, James Boswell and Doctor Samuel Johnson, royal astronomers
James Bradley and Nevil Maskelyne--are freely muted with others that
introduce characters more fully fanciful: feng shui crusader Captain
Zhang; Jesuit commando Father Zarpazo (a.k.a. the Lord of the Zero);
werebeaver Zepho Beck; a land-locked electric eel named Felipe; a true
conqueror Worm; and, memorably, Jacques de Vaucanson's celebrated
clockwork duck, here given an erotic upgrade and a shot at immortality.
More often than not, these episodes are self-contained, heaving into
view like passages of landscape that reveal themselves once and are left
behind, replaced by other vistas that in turn also pass from sight.
Indeed, one begins to suspect after a while that it is the American earth
itself--unsullied, savagely fertile--that is generating this
superabundance of stories and interim protagonists. Pynchon (or his
mouthpiece, Cherrycoke) repeatedly hints at such a possibility, though he
is always careful to avoid the definitive utterance, the confining fact,
the objective truth. No door is allowed to shut without two more being
thrown open. And in the end, the only certainty to be found in Mason and
Dixon's America--at least the only one accorded the status of objective
truth--is the line itself, a thing of reason rather than of nature,
violently inscribed upon the body of the Earth. It is folly, it is
fracture, and from it stems all the ills of our own American century,
ripened now to rot. About this Pynchon is unambiguous. Here, to cite but
one example among dozens, is the feng shui expert Captain Zhang on the
subject:
" '[The Line] acts as a Conduit for what we call Sha, or, as they say
in Spanish California, Bad Energy. Imagine a Wind, a truly ill wind,
bringing failure, poverty, disgrace, betrayal--every kind of bad luck
there is--all blowing through, night and day, with many times the force
of the worst storm you were ever in. . . .
" 'Ev'rywhere else on earth, Boundaries follow Nature--coast-lines,
ridge-tops, river-banks--so honoring the Dragon or Sha within, from which
Land-Scape ever takes its form.' "
Implicit in this assessment is an indictment of private property,
arguably man's most pernicious invention; after all, it was to settle a
property dispute that the Mason-Dixon Line was commissioned in the first
place. But the real offense of the line, like the offense of reason
itself, is that it recognizes no authority beyond its own deductive
principles, clinical and self-perpetuating. Whatever splendors bequeathed
us by the Enlightenment, Pynchon leaves us to conclude, must be weighed
against the moral and spiritual absence at its core. And that, he would
surely add, is no contest at all.
In many ways, "Mason & Dixon" exhibits a restraint that we've not seen
from Pynchon previously. Most notably absent are the set pieces of
specialty sex--coprophilia, necrophilia and the like--that reached a
crescendo in "Gravity's Rainbow" (and, it is said, so inflamed the
sensibilities of the 1974 Pulitzer committee that it could not bring
itself to give anyone the fiction prize that year). But it's not just the
sex that has been toned down--violence, paranoia and plain old
caca-mindedness also play a much-diminished role in "Mason & Dixon." This
moderating trend seems quite in keeping with the new book's mise en scene
and subject matter, but it also has the unlooked-for effect of allowing
Pynchon to strike a variety of emotional registers that might otherwise
have been lost in the fireworks.
Most obviously benefiting from the author's new interest in emotional
shading are his title characters. Mason and Dixon evidence a
psychological complexity and depth lacking in Pynchon's earlier
protagonists. From the outset, the two are temperamentally at odds, but
the years bring them plausibly closer and when, with most of their
adventures behind them, Dixon tells Mason that they "must count on
becoming old Geezers together," the moment is genuinely affecting. By the
same token, several key scenes--especially those dealing with slavery,
for which Pynchon reserves his most withering scorn--achieve a moral and
dramatic intensity that might well have been unavailable in the
super-heated idiom of "Gravity's Rainbow" or "V."
Most great talents tend toward classicism as they mature, and
classicism's hallmarks and overall naturalness of form, easily
discernible governing principles and absence of unbalancing tensions are
everywhere evident in "Mason & Dixon." Even the 18th century English, in
which it is written, conforms serenely to Pynchon's purpose. Not only is
it historically accurate (as a cursory look at Mason and Dixon's
surviving letters confirms) but, through its convention of capitalizing
dominant nouns, it also creates an undercurrent of quotidian idealism
that keeps the book's main theme constantly before us. A line is not
necessarily a Line, any more than a zone (in "Gravity's Rainbow") is a
Zone, but here the upper case arises naturally, without calling attention
to the authorial intelligence.
Finally, though, it is the vision itself that one takes away from this
remarkable book: a wilderness America, peopled as much by European hopes
and longings as by the interlocking kingdoms of the indigenous; a virgin,
undivided land. Until, one morning, two ordinary men appear, charged with
cutting a perfectly straight line, eight yards wide, westward into its
heart. . . .
It is a moment of surpassing beauty and sadness, a glimpse of
something whose sense we can never take for granted or be lastingly done
with--even when, as here, it has occasioned a masterpiece.
Ted Mooney Is the Author of "Easy Travel to Other Planets," "Traffic and Laughter" and the Forthcoming "Singing Into the Piano," Which Will Be Published Next Year
Copyright Los Angeles Times
