Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon' revisited

Having recently heard Mason & Dixon proclaimed Thomas Pynchon's finest novel "“ and having been humbled less recently by my bailing on Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow "“ I decided to give it a go. As soon as I finished, I wanted to (a) immediately re-read it; (b) enroll in a one-semester course devoted to nothing but its study; or (c) stick it on the shelf and have nothing to do with it again. Mason & Dixon is a great novel; and I say this without having understood any more than, oh, 10 percent of it.

To write it, Pynchon had to familiarize himself with the lives of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, about whom most of us know nothing probably beyond a North-South demarcation bearing their name. Having ingested their entanglements with parents and children, their professional highs and lows, their griefs and joys, and having elected to tell this story as if written by their contemporary, Pynchon had to construct an authentic-seeming, if often off-putting, set of 18th-Century spellings, grammar, punctuation and, most annoying, rules of capitalization.

Next he had to imagine this fictitious writer's knowledge of and views about history, theology, politics, science, economics, the physical universe, the nature of man, space and time, and the philosophical implications thereof.

Finally, Pynchon enriched this brew with his own generously applied fantasies, preoccupations and surrealistic seasonings.

What's Jenkins Ear?

Then, to intensify his novel's challenge, Pynchon adapted the conceit that his readers would be as familiar with his narrator's command of 18th-Century arcana as he was. So Mason & Dixon doesn't explain, for instance, who or what were (a) the Paxton Boys; (b) Nevil Maskelyn; or (c) Jenkins Ear. Since the book already runs close to 800 pages, this may have been a blessing, but it does leave those disinclined to run off to Google every page or two rather in the dark.

(Googlers would find the answers to be (a) perpetrators of a massacre of two dozen peaceful Indians, near Millersville, Pa., in 1763; (b) the fifth Astronomer Royal; and (c) an organ, severed from the head of a merchant ship captain, that gave its name to a nine-year war between England and Spain.)

My customary reading style wouldn't work with Mason & Dixon. I couldn't rely on my eyes skimming across lines and down pages to afford my brain what it needed to follow plot, imagine surroundings, understand characters, comprehend ideas.

I tried limiting myself to ten pages a day. Soon I decided to attempt three.

But that would have meant devoting nine months to my reading, undoubtedly forgetting by its climax much of what I had ingested during the previous three seasons. So I trekked on.

Talking dog

And much of value penetrated the fog. Mason & Dixon is alternately comic, horrific, loony, profound; and when Pynchon's two principals— one in thrall to memories of his deceased wife, the other gripped by more Bacchanalian spirits— meet their fated ends, it's surprisingly but deeply touching.

Mason & Dixon's narrative bubbles with songs and puns, and its dialogue crackles like the best burlesque. (If one narrative won't satisfy you, it offers digressions into ancient China, the late Crusades and a nunnery ripe for soft-core porn.) It's enlivened with ale quaffing, hemp smoking and bodice ripping. It generates suspense from rumored conspiracies involving the Illuminati, Freemasons, Kabbalists, a Sino-Jesuit alliance, and the East India Company.

It head-spinningly mixes the Stamp Act with a talking dog, a four-ton cheese ("The Octuple Gloucester"), the Transit of Venus, lethal labor disputes, the Hellfire Club and a passel of ghosts, giants and golems, all topped by a sprinkling of pizza, Popeye and the origins of rock 'n' roll. It contains mind-twisting considerations not only of the cosmos but also of a wilderness, nearly as vast and nearly as dark, with nearly as many spirits potentially lurking within.

Freedom to exterminate

Upon this wilderness Pynchon brings the implications of imposing the "Line" dividing Maryland from Pennsylvania: "This great invisible Thing that comes crawling straight on... devouring all in its path... a tree-slaughtering Animal... Its teeth of Steel "“ its Jaws, Axmen "“ its Life's Blood, Disbursement," with its probable outcome the "killing (of) ev'rything due west of it."

That is the underlying canvas upon which these colorful spoofs and profundities are applied. Everywhere Mason and Dixon journey— from England to the Cape of Good Hope, from St. Helena to colonial America— slavery de jure or de facto is rampant. Everywhere, genocide is barely suppressed, with those toting the biggest guns believing in a "Liberty... to injure whomever we might wish"“ into extermination, were it possible."

One meets in Pynchon's telling those with whom one is familiar, though tweaked in ways to make you grin. Ben Franklin alternates pairs of orchid, aquamarine and nocturnal blue spectacles. George Washington is attended by a Jewish black slave, who prepares kasha vernishkies with hog jowls.

"'Sodom on the Schuylkill'

They share the stage with clearly fictitious folk, like Zepho Beck (who turns into a beaver under a full moon), Professor Voam (who travels with Felipe, his electric eel), and Stig, an axe-wielding agent for Swedish Jacobites planning to reclaim Philadelphia. (Philadelphia, incidentally, is cast as both "second only to London as the greatest of English-speaking cities" and "Sodom-on-the-Schuylkill.")

One also meets the likely unreal, such as Jacques de Vaucanson, inventor of a mechanical duck that can "eat" and "defecate," who turns out to have existed"“ though Vaucanson's duck, unlike Pynchon's, probably couldn't talk, lust and fly so fast as to become invisible. The effect of such rug-tuggings is to leave one unsure where to step, with questions raised and confidences shaken.

Such liberties lead Pynchon to warn readers of "the danger of... irresponsible narratives that will not distinguish between fact and fiction," leaving the "frail"-minded at risk. But this warning is presumably tongue-in-cheek; Pynchon seems more likely to side with his later-voiced belief that traditional history has been twisted into service of the mighty, and that history really needs "to be treated lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, to provide her the Costume, Toillette, and Bearing and Speech nimble enough to keep beyond... the Curiosity of Government."

Alienating critics

I came away from Mason & Dixon feeling that I too had explored a vast, unmapped expanse. Mystery lurked in every page's corner. Adventure awaited each leaf's turn.

The book, like the wild, stirred the awe in which all grand creations are held. Its seriousness of purpose could cause knees to bend and artistic integrity heads to bow.

Pynchon appears to have approached this work by asking himself, "Where haven't I gone before? Hell, where has no one gone?"

Such authorial boundary pushing is heroic. The writer risks inflaming critics with his perceived hubris. He risks antagonizing readers who have clustered by the hearth in more settled zones.

But Pynchon refused to write down to appease his audience. He complimented it by expecting it to rise to his level.

Simplicity and clarity, I presume, would bore him, chaining his free-swinging limbs, draping a sedating cloth over his imagination. Compromise would be equivalent to surrender.

The result is a novel that crackles within me long after its cover has been shut.