Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997)
The News and Observer - Raleigh, NC
May 4, 1997
Bernard Duyfhuizen
When Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V., was published in 1963, the
25-year-old wunderkind was hailed as a major new writer. Three years
later he solidified that position with a hallucinatory decoction of
Tupperware, America and the postal system, The Crying of Lot 49.
Then, in 1973, he dropped the big one, Gravity's Rainbow, a 760-page
tour de force that linked the extinction of the dodo bird, V2 rockets,
Nazi cartels, Mickey Rooney and a lonely immortal lightbulb into a
postmodern revision of the last year of World War II. How would he top
that? Rumors started burbling that the reclusive genius was walking
the Mason-Dixon Line. But for 17 years no novel appeared. Then came
the relatively disappointing Vineland in 1990. Finding no signs of
the Mason-Dixon, devotees relegated the rumor to the literary scrap
heap.
But here it is, Mason & Dixon, a rollicking, ambitious,
dense and difficult novel that in its scope and brilliant reimagining
of 18th-century literary style is a worthy successor to Gravity's
Rainbow. As in his earlier works, Pynchon combines wicked puns, bawdy
songs, encyclopedic knowledge and a gifted eye for finding the
profound in the absurd, to track down, but never quite bag, the
malevolent forces controlling everyday existence. In Mason & Dixon
he explores the underside of the American colonial enterprise, and
European imperialism in general, to unravel the historical roots of
the racial and social dislocations that haunt his other works and
contemporary America.
The novel focuses on Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon -- an
oddly matched pair of British scientists who joined their lots at
Capetown, South Africa in 1761 to measure the transit of Venus across
the sun. We then follow the astronomer (Mason) and the surveyor
(Dixon) to the New World where they establish the boundary line that
bears their names.
Concentrating on actual historical figures somewhat constrains
Pynchon's plot-making, but Mason & Dixon is dependent on neither
plot nor character in the conventional senses of those terms. Nor are
the characters typically Pynchonesque. While earlier protagonists like
Oedipa Maas and Tyrone Slothrop engaged in quests after truth, Mason
and Dixon serve as foils to the forces who commission their work for
ends neither can fully recognize. For Pynchon's real concern is the
"world-making" activity represented by the Line. Establishing the Line
presents a metaphoric locus for exploring the colonial enterprise as
it refashions the new Eden of America into legal and land development
parcels, imposing the worst forces of the past on virgin land that had
seemed to promise a fresh start.
As they trek through the American wilderness -- encountering
caffine abuse, an exiled French chef and revolutionary cells of
anti-taxation Americans -- the pair gradually realize the
ramifications of their Line separating North from South, although they
can only imagine what it will mean in terms of slavery, how it will
belie the rhetoric of "equality" upon which the nation would be
founded. Dixon wonders: "No matter where in it [the world] we go,
shall we find all the World Tyrants and Slaves? America was the one
place we should not have found them."
But they do, and in a small personal effort at emancipation,
Dixon chooses to intervene and stop a slave dealer from abusing his
"property." Of course the effort is isolated, minimal and futile in
the long run. But in the ethics of Pynchon's fiction it is the small
act of kindness that reveals the true human spirit. History for
Pynchon is always a site for fictional invention that looks behind
accepted appearances. It is a vehicle for debunking, rather than
propagating myths.
In many ways Mason and Dixon are compelling for the same
reasons as Maas and Slothrop. Their ordinariness, their perspectives
as outside witnesses, they serve as a moral compass. And yet, like
their literary predecessors, their humanity is not quite enough to the
overwhelming force of the system. Late in the book, Capt. Zhang, a
Chinese member of the survey company, observes, "To rule forever it is
necessary only to create, among the people one would rule . . .Bad
History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally,
than drawing a Line, in particular 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."
As Mason and Dixon reach its terminus at the "Great Warrior
Path," a native American "line" whose spiritual force they choose not
to violate by crossing, they come to realize their Line's potential as
a "conduit for Evil." Mason or Dixon asks Capt. Zhang, "Right Lines,
by minimizing Distance, are highly valu'd by some.-- Commanding
Officers, Merchants, Express-Riders?" Zhang replies, "Without
Question. Officers kill men in large numbers. Merchants concentrate
wealth by beggaring uncounted others. Express-riders distort and
injure the very stuff of Time."
Ultimately it will be how their Line is abused that will
define Mason and Dixon, making their innocent attempt to complete
their contract one more fall from Grace in the Eden of the New World.
And yet, in the best Pynchonesque spirit, while Mason, Dixon and the
readers are are given clues that strange and powerful forces are at
work, we never quite figure out who is behind them.
But the book's deeply serious, almost melancholy tone is
leavened with Pynchon's Beat-infused wit. There is an improbable cast
of characters with impossible names including Fenders Bodine, an
ancestor of Pynchon mainstay Pig Bodine, Professor Voam and his
electric eel, and the Ghastly Fop. There's also the Learned English
Dog, a mechanical duck and talking clocks. Cameo appearances by some
American Founding Fathers -- Mason and Dixon smoke hemp with George
Washington and a young Thomas Jefferson cadges the line "the Pursuit
of Happiness" from a Dixon barroom toast -- display Pynchon's
demythologizing irreverence.
Nevertheless, the satire in Mason & Dixon is more studied
and the jokes more mature. The narrative language is often some of his
finest, with passages that will make readers both laugh and weep. With
Mason & Dixon Pynchon charts the historical ground of American
reality while displaying the height of his powers, reasserting his
place as one of the preeminent post-war American novelists.
Bernard Duyfhuizen, chair of the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, is an editor of the scholarly journal Pynchon Notes.
