Mason & Dixon
By Thomas Pynchon
Henry Holt, 773 pages, $27.50
Nearly 25 years ago, “A screaming comes across the sky,” the first sentence of that strange, magisterial opus “Gravity’s Rainbow,” gave the English language a new word, “Pynchonian.” Since then, author Thomas Pynchon’s vision of ciphers and conspiracies and the alternately vicious and lunatic mania beneath the surface of contemporary life has blossomed beyond his pages along with the sense that the world is spiraling ever further away from comprehensibility. Like Franz Kafka, whose name, appended with an “esque,” entered a previous generation’s vocabulary to betoken an intuition of totalitarianism, Pynchon may be the most emblematic literary figure of our era and the only one deserving his own private adjective.
Pynchon, also famous for refusing to participate in his renown, published “Vineland” in 1990, but otherwise remained silent while rumors of another tome-in-progress circulated since the late ’70s. Now “Mason & Dixon” has arrived with a nearly-800-page wallop. This novel–whose two main characters are the Colonial surveyors who charted the 233-mile straight line between Pennsylvania and Maryland that bears their names–could not be more different from, and yet more akin to, the author’s quarter-century-old masterwork.
In fact, “Mason & Dixon” can be read as a belated precursor of the earlier volume. Pynchon has traveled back from “Gravity’s Rainbow’s” apotheosis of recent atrocity during World War II to a moment that he considers the boundary in time limning the divide between the modern world and its antecedents. Soon to come are the American and Industrial Revolutions, but meanwhile an agrarian society–ready to collapse under the collateral onslaughts of technology and commerce–awaits the two rather minor men who set off to define space in the New World.
These men are diametrical opposites. Charles Mason is a phlegmatic, Anglican astronomer, while Jeremiah Dixon is an optimistic, Quaker surveyor. The former, perennially in mourning for his dead wife, “open(s) himself to the seductions of Melancholy” while the latter free-wheelingly enjoys the “Vapor of debauchery.” Mason drinks wine; Dixon prefers whiskey. And yet they work well together, first on a journey to the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, and thence to 1760s America.
Here, amid much measurement lore and vernacular, (bobs, plumbs, Vistos and Obs) the two heroes are “snake-bit, trapp’d in sucking Mud, lost in Fog, frozen to the Marrow, harass’d by farmers, and visited by Sheriffs.” They converse at great length in a succession of ale and coffee houses, and encounter a series of historical figures, among them Benjamin Franklin and a hemp-smoking George Washington. More frequently as the volume’s thick spine cracks, the episodes involve patently wacky Pynchonian conceits. The expedition’s cook is haunted by a mechanical duck, which has attained consciousness and vindictiveness along with lust. A giant runaway cheese avalanching down a hill nearly crushes Mason. In addition to these exaggerations, the narrative is salted through with trademark Pynchonian songs, such as “I saw your Mother, and I Quiz you not,–Drinking penny-Gin from a Chamber-Pot,” as well as jokes, puns and references from Shakespeare to “Star Trek.” Oh, and the whole melange is written in an 18th Century style, from spelling to syntax to typography, capital Letters and All.
Yet despite the booze, the wenches and the haute literary gamesmanship, “Mason & Dixon” is by no means all giddy high times. As the surveyors’ earthly work proceeds, they cannot help but witness the darkness at the heart of the Enlightenment, a fatal flaw that will come to dominate the world and ultimately produce the stunningly despicable rainbow, the colors of which are slavery, misery and genocide.
Pynchon’s writing is always an idiosyncratic cross between the screwy and the lyrical, though his new novel is neither so screwy nor so lyrical as his previous books, and there are slack stretches in his yarn. “Mason & Dixon” is a panoramically epic, hysterically self-indulgent performance, probably unpublishable under any other author’s name, surely inconceivable from any other writer. The book’s combination of wild tangents and sheer density is often frustrating, and yet–and here lies its mystical genius–upon turning the final page, a wash of comprehension comes over the reader, a sense of the interconnectedness of Everything.
Perhaps the key to understanding this flood of intuition lies in the book’s operative metaphor. If “Gravity’s Rainbow’s” rainbow (or the missile trajectory it refers to) rises, arcs and descends like the novel itself, the line of “Mason & Dixon” must never deviate from straightness, which un-Pynchonianly constrains and even normalizes the book. But what else is this line, other than the thread upon which plot is hung? Is it a grand social and scientific advance, or, “A tree-slaughtering Animal, with no purpose but to continue creating forever a perfect Corridor over the Land. . . . (K)illing ev’rything due west of it”? Or is it a “(Channel) mark’d for the transport of some unseen Influence”?
Besides a tale of men and their crazed adventures, “Mason & Dixon” is a meditation on the way modernity is but “mortal . . . Savagery” haunted by the “Collective Ghost(s)” of the dusky people it has brutalized, and the ominous instinct that suggests that some force (Jesuits? the East India Company? aliens?) is really manipulating life on Earth for its own devious ends.
Of course, Mason and Dixon themselves do not ultimately learn who manipulated them, or indeed if they were tools in the palm of some superlative power. Nevertheless, these ancillary participants in history ponder their fate amid the high jinks. Years ago, Pynchon was castigated by John Gardner as the avatar of “winking, mugging despair.” The critic was right that there’s winking and mugging aplenty throughout Pynchon’s work, sometimes adolescent, sometimes nihilistic, but what Gardner missed is that the despair feels earned, because there’s abundant historical and cosmic motivation.
Also, as a cipher implies a solution, the flip side of despair is hope. “Mason & Dixon” reveals a quasi-religious faith, not in any particular deity, but rather in the notion of redemption attainable via rigorous inquiry and willful immersion in “a state of holy Insanity.” Describing God at the Beginning, separating the portions of the firmament, a peripheral character tells us: “thus the first Boundary Line. All else after that, in all History, is but Sub-Division.” Thomas Pynchon, whoever and wherever he is, thereafter engages in his own sub-division in an all-out attempt to save the world through equal measures of hyperbole, hilarity, moral seriousness and rage. It’s an astonishing ambition, perhaps unfulfillable.
