Mason & Dixon (1997)

It would take me about three hours to do a decent review of this novel but suffice it to say that it really delves into the actual characters that Mason and Dixon both were, or at least how Thomas Pynchon imagined them to be. Pynchon did an extraordinary amount of research from the foods eaten to the old fashioned words in dialog and even the way words were spelled back then. There's also a sense of the preposterous here between the ghost of Mason's dead wife and a sense of missing 11 calendar days. My favorite parts were the animated duck and dog, gigantic vegetables, werewolves, the discovery of Uranus, the sense of overall adventure, the personification of Melancholy, and the sense of history of these two Brits coming to survey the land of America on the brink of it's fruition when there was a clear struggle between and the European settlers as well as a clear sense of wrongdoing that Mason and Dixon have against slavery...and, of course, animosity was growing between those who had settled in North America and Great Britain. It was a time when lightning storms and eclipses were the most exciting thing to happen and when two land surveyors could, in Pynchon's mind, have the adventure of a lifetime. There's a bizarre supernatural aspect of this in parts but just enough of a sense of actual history to keep it grounded. There's also a great deal of religion here with partial sermons even.

In any case, I'm not sure how much Pynchon embellished on their personalities but I found myself wanting every word to be true and really routing for these two...Also, I admit I liked Mason the best. This is the kind of novel one could cherish many times throughout a lifetime in all it's nonfiction historical elements mixed with the preposterous ones.

Some quotes I liked:

pg. 220 "He (Emerson) has devis'd a sailing Scheme, whereby Winds are imagin'd to be forms of Gravity acting not vertically but laterally, along the Globe's Surface,-a ship to him is the Paradigm of the Universe."

pg. 289 "Melancholicks are flocking to Town like Crows, dark'ning the Sun"

pg. 309 "Soon there's a distinct feeling in the Rooms of Afternoon...the Child trembles at the turn in the Day when the ghosts shift about behind the Doors, and out in the Gust beaten wilderness come the Paxton boys..."

pg. 346 "In America, as I apprehend, Time is the true River that runs 'round Hell."

pg. 361 "What Machine is it, "young Cherrycoke later bade himself goodnight, "that bears us along so relentlessly? We go rattling thro' another Day,-another Year,-as tho' an empty Town without a Name, in the Midnight...we have but Memories of some Pause at the Pleasure-Spas of our younger Day, the Maidens, the Cards, the Claret,-we seek to extend our stay, but now a silent Functionary in dark Livery indicates it is time to re-board the Coach, and resume the Journey. Long before the Destination, moreover, shall this Machine come abruptly to a Stop...gather'd dense with Fear, shall we open the Door to confer with the Driver, to discover that there is no Driver,...no Horses,...only the Machine, fading as we stand, and a Prairie of desperate Immensity..."

pg. 512 "Like a Dream just before the animals wake up..."

pg. 555 "Mason for a while had presum'd it but a matter of confusing dates, which are Names, with Days, which are real Things. Yet for anyone he met born before '52 and alive after it, the missing Eleven Days road again and again in Conversation, sooner or later characteriz'd as "brute Absence," or "a Tear thro' the favric of Life," and the more he wrestl'd with the Question, the more the advantage shifted toward a Belief, as he would tell Dixon one day, "In a slowly rotating Loop, or if you like, Vortex, of eleven days, tangent to the Linear Path of what we imagine as Ordinary Time, but excluded from it, and repeating itself,-without end."

pg. 586 "There is a love of complexity, here in America..."

pg. 603 "Withal, he (Mason) is too open himself to the seductions of Melancholy and its own comfortless phantoms, to call anything even as remotely hopeful as this into question..."

pg. 614 "A Defile of Ghosts growing, with the Years, more desperate and savage, to Settlers and Indians alike. You'd not wish this Line to pass to close to them, I shouldn't think."

pg. 634 "So that's why Swedes chose to sail between the Capes of Delaware,-the thought it was another Fjord! You fellows do like a nice Fjord, it seems. Instead, they found Pennsylvania!"

pg. 637 "But Time, surely, by now, no longer matters to her (the duck)?" Peter now curious,"-no longer passes the same way, I mean."

The Frenchman shrugs. "Yet we few, fortunate Objects of her Visits remain ever tight in Time's Embrace," sighing as if for the Duck alone.

"She, then,...enters and leaves the Stream of Time as she likes?"

pg. 657 "Another Lively Question is, Does it remember the Days, when we were bigger than Beets, yes, by about the same Proportion'd you notice, that Beets are now bigger than us? Now that the Tables are turn'd, do, do they harbor Grudges? Do they have a concept of Revenge, perhaps for insults we never intended?"

pg. 702 "Then why not consider Light itself as equally noxious," inquires Dixon, "for doth it not move ever straight ahead?"

"Ah!" a gleam as likely Madness as Merriment appearing in his Eye..."

pg. 745 "Out there in the Fog brimming and sweeping now over Ridge-tops and into the Glens, somewhere it waits, the world across the next Line, in darkness and isolation, barren, unforgiving, a Nation that within Mason's lifetime has risen to seize the Crown, been harrow'd into submission, then been shipp'd in great Lots to America. "I imagine there's yet a bit of ..resentment about?"

The Doctor snorts. "The word you grope for is Hatred, Sir,-inveterate, inflexible Hatred. The 'Forty-five lives on here, a Ghost from a Gothick Novel, ubiquitous, frightfully shatter'd, exhibition gallons of a certain crimson Fluid..."

pg. 746-747 "This Mountain I'm about to seek must be regular as a Prism, as if purposefully constructed in days of old by forces more powerful than ours...powerful enough to suggest about God (whatever that may be) has not altogether quit our own desperate Day."

pg. 750 "Reflection on any Topick is an unforgivable Lapse, out here at any moment where Death may come whistling in from the Dark.

"Well Hullo, Death, what's that you're whistling?"

"Oo, little Ditters von Dittersdorf, nothing you'd recognize, hasn't happen'd yet, not even sure you'll live till it's perform'd anywhere,-have to check the Folio as to that, get back to you?"


pg. 759 "When the Hook of Night is well set, and when all the Children are at last irretrievably detain'd within their Dreams, slowly into the Room begin to walk the Black servants, the Indian poor, the Irish runaways, the Chinese Sailors, the overflow'd from the mad Hospital, all unchosen Philadelphia, as if something outside, beyond the cold Wind, has driven them to this extreme seeking refuge. They bring their Scars, their Pox-pitted Cheeks, their Burdens and Losses, feverish Eyes, their proud fellowship in a Mobilitiy, that is to be, whose shape none inside this House may know."

pg. 762 "Yet, 'tis possible, after all, down here, to die of Melancholy."




( )

Mason & Dixon is the only Pynchon book I've read twice: once on my own, and once aloud with my Other Reader. It's a downright hilarious tome, and only funnier if you're familiar with the larger Pynchon oeuvre for the coy references that start with the parabolic trajectory in the opening sentence. If the rocket of Gravity's Rainbow is merely a snowball in this novel, that's a wonderful thing. Despite the book's heft, it has a real intimacy, and--in many senses of the word--domestication. The Pynchonian playfulness works itself out on a more human level, and while there are still views of social and cosmic tragedy that strike hard and chill, this weave of historical improbabilities and personal yarns leaves the savvy reader with a flushed and slushy sense of satisfaction.

Pynchon offers Mason and Dixon as a pair of characters that are almost a diagrammatic odd couple: the mournful encompassing astronomer, and the cheerily square land-surveyor. But for all that, they are never mere allegorical poles. Unlike earlier Pynchon protagonists, who seem to dissolve under the force of the author's manifold micro-plots, Mason and Dixon actually become more coherent and characterful from start to finish.

This volume doesn't even pretend to be anything but fiction within fiction, but I give it more points for capturing the likely weirdness of its place(s) and period than any number of naive or revisionist pictures of the nascent United States. And if the worth of history is to give us a sense of the origin of our own perspectives and values, Pynchon seems to have done real historical work here. All of the crazy anachronisms and supernatural oddities just help the reader maintain the sort of healthy and happy skepticism such enterprises should always have at hand.

“Snow-Balls have… their Arcs,” Thomas Pynchon’s fifth novel begins. Trying to calculate the arc of the narrative of Mason & Dixon is as difficult as the calculus involved in calculating the arc of a thrown snowball. It’s a huge book, not just in number of pages, but in ideas, both comic and profound, and in erudition.

The story involves the lives, travels and adventures of two globe-trotting Brits, an astronomer and a surveyor, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, as they travel south to the Cape of Good Hope and then west, into North America. Mason and Dixon survive, of course, into the present as the name of the line that separates North from South (the southern boundary of Pennsylvania). But Pynchon, as ever, is never only writing biography or history; indeed, he writes that “Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base.”

This story is related to an unruly bunch of kids on a series of winter’s nights in 1786 (“the War settl’d and the Nation bickering itself into Fragments”) by one Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke. As long as the Reverend can keep the children entertained and out of the hair of adults, he’s welcome to the room and board of the house.

As such, the story Cherrycoke tells is only marginally about measurement, precision and mapping. As with Gravity’s Rainbow, the density of vocabulary and scientific data, once a reader manages to scale the intimidating walls they present, function as metaphors of human emotion and motivation. To redeploy the words of one young character, this language-rich novel acts as “A Vector of Desire.”

Pynchon, despite his (well-earned) reputation for difficulty and his refusal to help us poor readers out with the occasional interview (indeed, the most recent photograph of him is some 45 years old), is a joker and a prankster. Mason & Dixon is like the carriage in which the eponymous heroes ride in one scene: “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.” The novel looks quite large enough from the outside; inside are universes entire, parallel, tangent and quite divergent.

Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book ( )

Unread

Sincerely blown away by this one-- amazing word play, staggering to conceive of the amount of work that had to've gone into this thing. The best book I've read in a while-- and, to boot, gave me an appreciation of Pynchon that his previous works hadn't. ( )