Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997)
America's Own Line: Surveying "Mason & Dixon"
David Kipen
Thomas Pynchon can't even write a linear novel about the Mason-Dixon
Line. His first novel, "V." (1963), was shaped like the 22nd letter of the
modern English alphabet, with two parallel narratives half a century
apart converging, Euclid be damned, in a waterspout off Malta in 1919.
"The Crying of Lot 49" (1966) suggested more of an asterisk, a short, six
chaptered starburst of invention that mocked the footnotes with which
academia was already beginning to festoon Pynchon's fiction. "Gravity's
Rainbow" (1973), routinely called the best American novel of everything
from the decade (per the stingy) to the century, left its key by the door,
disclosing its structure right in the title. It's a rainbow, a parabola, the
same one traveled by the V-2 rocket launched in its first chapter, and by
the doomsday missile about to strike Los Angeles in its last. "Vineland"
(1990) assumed just about the oldest shape in fiction: a love triangle, in
this case hanging off a chuckwagon at breakfast and beaten loudly, so as
to rouse America--Pynchon's perennial subject, more explicitly with each
succeeding book--from its nodding, post-1960s doze. A "V," an asterisk, a
parabola, a triangle--not a straight line in the bunch. Punchlines, not
straight ones, have always been Pynchon's stock in trade. His newest
book, "Mason & Dixon" (a masterpiece, by the way) is desperately serious,
yet even the very best comic novels are as dirges next to it.
"Mason & Dixon" reconstructs the story of the two Englishmen--the
former a melancholy professional astronomer lost in the stars, his partner
an earthbound surveyor--contracted to run a boundary westward between
the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland in the 1760s. This was harder
than it sounds, as the monarchy had generously granted some of the same
land to both the Calverts of Maryland and Pennsylvania's Penns. Mason and
Dixon succeeded where several others had failed, but their success
became America's tragedy, prefiguring the divisiveness of a civil war
that Appomattox only interrupted.
The novel falls into three sections. The first, "Latitudes and Departures,"
tells of Mason and Dixon's first meeting and slow friendship on a royal
expedition to the southern hemisphere in 1761. There they observe and
record the "transit of Venus," a kind of eclipse in which that planet
passes in front of the sun. When compared with other such observations
taken around the world, their calculations help to measure the earth's
distance from the sun, demystifying the heavens and ushering in the Age
of Reason.
The third section, "Last Transit," chronicles their final
wanderings, separately and together, as they confront not just a second
transit of Venus in 1769, but their own transits from this life into the
doubtful next.
In between stands the middle passage, by far the longest and called, with
linear directness, "America." In other words, "Mason & Dixon" resembles
less a straight line than a luncheon snack, as a minor character divines
immediately: "When (Mason and Dixon) come to explain about the two
Transits of Venus, and the American Work filling the Years between, 'By
heavens, a "Sandwich,"' cries Mr. Edgewise." The Earl himself doesn't
appear in this sandwich-shaped novel, but just about all his 18th-century
contemporaries in the not-just-English-speaking world do, including
then-Colonel George Washington; a sinister, Promethean Ben Franklin; and
"a tall red-headed youth" never directly identified as Thomas Jefferson.
Dr. Samuel Johnson and his youthful ward James Boswell put in an
appearance late in the proceedings as well, and even a squinty mariner
with a weakness for spinach rates a cameo.
The list, like the novel, does go on. Limitations of space, memory and
erudition all forbid an exhaustive catalog of the book's contents. More than
any line or sandwich, "Mason & Dixon" resembles the wondrous carriage by
which our heroes travel in one episode: "Our Coach is a late invention of
the Jesuits, being, to speak bluntly, a Conveyance, wherein the inside is
quite noticeably larger than the outside, though the fact cannot be
appreciated until one is inside."
This proto-holodeck is a favorite image with Pynchon, who returns to it
not 50 pages later to describe a remote cabin where they "find more room
inside than could possibly be contained in the sorrowing ruin they believ'd
they were entering." Unlike the coach and the cabin, the 773-page "Mason
& Dixon" looks plenty big even on the outside. But to house the bottomless
wealth of ideas hatching inside, an entire library would appear
impossibly small. One of Pynchon's best ideas may have been his first one.
"Mason & Dixon's" achievement begins with Pynchon's discovery of an
historical subject commensurate not only with his twin obsessions --
America and science -- but with his anger at the mess that greed has
made of them both.
Pynchon's work, ironically for someone so long misfiled under science-
fiction, has always focused on his excavation of the past. Perhaps the
whole point of writing a historical novel such as "Mason & Dixon" is to
find some overlooked turning point behind us. At the height of the Age of
Reason, which bequeathed us not only a country but the wisdom it took to
ruin it, Pynchon finds the setting of his dreams. The period also affords
him endless opportunities for language play -- not exactly Pynchon's
weak suit to begin with. Ever the ventriloquist, Pynchon throws his voice
a distance of two centuries, and it comes whizzing back like a boomerang
with the strangest English on it you've ever heard. Teenage girls say "I'm,
as, 'maz'd," when of course what they mean is "I'm, like, wow." "Cheap
shot," Mason tries to say when Dixon insults his attire, only it comes out
"Inexpensive salvo." Goofy? You bet. Pynchon's got the stately 18th
century diction down cold, but he splices it together with his own
idiosyncratic style to produce a hybrid that moves at the very speed of
thought.
More effort's been expended over the years in praising Pynchon's prose
than in actually describing it, and that's unfortunate. Most reviews of his
work concentrate on its surrealistic aspects -- the "hallucinatory,
pyrotechnic, phantasmagorical" school of adjective-stuffed, blurb-ready
criticism. Commas are very big with these people. More and more, though,
the defining quality of Pynchon's voice strikes me as, of all things,
understatement. Listen to him early on, detailing the way certain
dockside denizens of Philadelpia "have pass'd the Morning perfecting
before pocket mirrors images of guilelessness." Without ever coming out
and calling them pickpockets -- though the specification of "pocket"
mirrors sneaks in a subliminal hint -- Pynchon almost casually nails the
scene.
Time and again these signature circumlocutions yield long sentences that
fairly beg to be read aloud. But that would spoil the visual pleasure of
seeing all the trappings of a vanished English resurrected, like Mason and
Dixon themselves, from undeserved obscurity: the capitalized Nouns; the
commas, that introduce dependent clauses,-- and the comma-dash combos
that writer Nicholson Baker has styled "commashes." Of course, Pynchon
capitalizes nouns except when he doesn't in "Mason & Dixon," and even
less consistently as he goes along. This may strike some as carelessness,
but there's another way to read it: as an index of how the Age of Reason
was steadily overtaking "an Age of Faith, when Miracles still literally
happen'd." What better way for Pynchon to memorialize the mapmakers'
victory over the Indians' pantheism -- which saw divinity all around them
-- than gradually to decapitalize the world, leaving us all a nation
disconsolately lower- case?
So, is there anything wrong with "Mason & Dixon"? Well, the dust jacket's
a mite annoying. It's two jackets, really: one a very attractice inner
sleeve; the other, one of those clear plastic outer sleeves that make
almost all copies of Donna Tartt's "The Secret History" look, just a few
years after publication, like inadvertently laundered collar stays. Better
to have spent the design money on a nice, useful map of Maryland and
Pennsylvania for the endpapers.
"Mason & Dixon" will be nobody's idea of an easy read, either. "Gravity's
Rainbow" has been called, one hopes wrongly, the least read bestseller of
all time, and it would be an easily avoidable shame if "Mason & Dixon"
suffered the same fate, since a simple trip to the library yields all the
provisions a hardy reader ought to need.
A reading of Dava Sobel's award-winning short nonfiction book
"Longitude" would make a concise introduction to some of the science
"Mason & Dixon" takes for granted. As for Pynchon's gloriously complex
style, the magnificent 1964 short story "The Secret Integration" (found in
his 1984 collection "Slow Learner") has always offered the best bunny
slope on which to find one's footing, before tackling the novelistic alps
that lie beyond. Pack a sturdy dictionary for "Mason & Dixon," too -- the
older the better -- to keep up with the best vocabulary in literature this
side of Pynchon's old Cornell prof, Vladimir Nabokov.
Why go to all this trouble? Why not go pick up some other, easier book,
one you don't need a decoder ring to enjoy? I can only answer firsthand
that Pynchon's is writing worth the work, fiction that can change, even
save, lives. There may always persist a certain signal-to-noise ratio
with regard to the most challenging fiction. There may always be
passages we don't quite get, or think we don't, the first time through. But
my noise may be your signal, and on the next page vice versa, and with
Pynchon even the noise is unmistakable as a snowflake's fingerprint, and
the signal, when it returns, a revelation. Just such a revelation occurs in
"Mason & Dixon" when the duo and their motley camp followers adjourn
for the winter, and Mason heads north to take in a "Broad-Way" show. He
enjoys it well enough, but when a promised but never quite expected
elephant actually materializes before the second-act curtain, "The
audience sit stunn'd in the vacuous Purity of not having been cheated."
"Mason & Dixon" will win Thomas Pynchon more raves and more readers,
and maybe more awards than even he can turn down, and all for "the
vacuous Purity of not having been cheated."
Malibu-based writer David Kipen was senior editor of Buzz magazine at the time of this review, and is now the Senior Book Editor for the San Francisco Chronicle.
