Mason & Dixon

The most recent (1997) novel written by Thomas Pynchon. In it, the Rev'd Wicks Cherrycoke tells the story of the famous astronomer and surveyor to his family, during the Christmas of 1786. Cherrycoke is a liar, so we don't know how much of his story is invented to entertain his nieces and nephews.

The book is written in the voice of an 18th century storyteller, and although its outline is historically true, the real action is in the bizarre episodes that occur throughout the novel. Pynchon's genius lies in his ability to craft passages of incredible beauty and strength, right alongside the slapstick comedy and disjointedness of the main plot.

A recurring theme in the novel is the conflict between the scientific, materialistic view of the universe, being advanced by Mason and Dixon, and the older world of the spirit that this outlook was replacing. This is an old theme, and its hard to think of much new that can be said about it. In roughly the same historical time as the novel's setting, the poet William Blake was writing of the insignificance of Newton's physics next to the world of the mystic:

The atoms of Democritus
And Newton's particles of light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel's tents do shine bright.

Pynchon takes up on this theme, and gives it new relevance, in this passage from chapter 34, thought by the melancholy Mason as he camps on the edge of the Western frontier at Lancaster, Pennsylvania:

Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream? - in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the Majority of Mankind, seen, - serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true, - Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments, - winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.

These fine asides, pretty much able to stand on their own as tiny essays, make this novel a worthwhile read.

I had a copy of "Mason & Dixon", by Thomas Pynchon, for over 10 years. I got it for free or very cheap from a library surplus sale, and I carried the hardback book around with me, from place to place, for years. I had it in a box of "must reads" in storage. And after a decade, I finally decided to dive in. The only other book by Pynchon I had read, 20 years previously, was "The Crying of Lot 49". Well, the only book I read successfully, I had tried Gravity's Rainbow but never finished it.

The first and most obvious thing about this book is that the orthography and punctuation are all done with 18th century conventions. Or perhaps faux 18th century conventions, but in any case, apostrophes are used in "ed" endings, nouns are capitalized, "topic" is spelled "topick", and "Rev'd" has the d in superscript, among many other changes from our normal, modern conventions. It took me a while to adjust to this. Perhaps this says something about me, but rather than getting into the book's substance, I spent a lot of time adjusting to the style. Eventually, I did so, and once I got in the right mood, the chapters went relatively quickly, and I got the general point of the book---the episodic journeys of the titular characters, Mason & Dixon, across the world during the end of the Age of Exploration. I can even recall a few of these episodes. More or less. Many of which are mentioned in the book jacket, and in online summaries. There is a talking dog. And George Washington.

To be honest, though, my question when reading this book, and after finishing it, wasn't about the who or what or where of the plot---those were all pretty confusing, but I bet I could eventually suss that stuff out. My real question was about the "Why?". Apparently, this book took some time to write. It is almost 800 pages long in hardback. Pynchon is considered one of the most important novelists of the second half of the 20th century. While I am not looking for a doctrinaire or easy message, not looking for something that could be summed up on middle school reading lists a la To Kill a Mockingbird or The Catcher in the Rye, I did expect some type of central theme to arise. There are sections of the book that talk about slavery and colonialism, but they seem to move on quite as quickly to another shaggy dog story (sometimes literally) as any other episode in the book. Maybe I wasn't trying hard enough, but I couldn't manage to fish out a central theme from the thick morass of the book's convoluted style and shifting, episodic structure.

This book was published in 1997, in the middle of the 1990s, we were at the end of history, it is said, and all the big debates were over and all that there was left to do was to laugh at the remainder of history, and perhaps to see if any light could shine through. But we were also hoping for a book that could break us out of that tedium, and were even earnestly making lists of works that would shatter our complacency. I don't know if that was Pynchon's mindstate, of course, but it was the zeitgeist. And while reading this, I wondered, if for all of Pynchon's skill and inventiveness, anyone would say "Mason & Dixon was the book that changed my life". And I can't imagine this book ever being the single book that woke someone up to the possibilities of life and literature.