REVIEW: Mason & Dixon (Thomas Pynchon)
In Alan Jacobs’ introduction to the works of Thomas Pynchon, he describes Mason & Dixon as Pynchon’s ‘most profound’ work:
Mason & Dixon (1997): The only Pynchon novel set wholly before the twentieth century tells, in remarkably though not uniformly faithful eighteenth-century prose, the story of the mapping of a great Line that changed the course of history — in very large ways — and also describes the complicated friendship of the men who mapped it. In my judgment, for what that’s worth, this is the most profound of Pynchon’s works.
Source: Pynchon: An Introduction by Alan Jacobs
After finding a narration by Steven Crossley in Audible’s Plus catalogue and a read-along on the Mapping the Zone podcast, I decided to dive into the wilderness.
Similar to Gravity’s RainbowI entered Mason & Dixon with little appreciation about what lay ahead of me, other than a fictional account of the collaboration between Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in the mapping of the Mason Dixon Line. I wonder if this was actually a benefit?
The story is split into three parts. In the first – Latitudes and Departures – we are introduced to the Mason and Dixon, the world that they lived in and their work for the Royal Society in capturing of the transit of Venus in 1761. The middle part – America – takes us to the new world and the surveying of the land. The last part – Last Transit – circles back around to the transit of Venus in 1769 and their legacy after their work on the Mason-Dixon Line. However, this is a story that goes beyond a mere narrative.
I remember reading in Now You See It Cathy Davidson recounting the awareness test from Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris.(1) I was reminded of this with Pynchon’s treatment of history. There are so many elements in Mason & Dixon that are both rooted in real history and pushed into a realm of pure Pynchonian absurdity. Maybe it is a line in a diary or some piece of history that sits in the margin, which is then taken to its extreme. A prime example of this is the ‘mechanickal Duck’ that follows the Mason and Dixon. As Brett Biebel highlights, this is based on a historical invention:
Jacques de Vaucanson French inventor who made some of the first robots, including (in 1739) a realistic mechanical duck that could eat food and then excrete it. Though the eaten food was stored in one compartment and the excrement pellets in another, the robot gave the impression that the duck was “digesting” its food.
Source: A Mason & Dixon Companion by Brett Biebel
This is where Pynchon’s treatment of history feels different to something like Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang in that Pynchon really doubles-down on the ambiguity, placing it front and centre. The book is filled with digressions, rumors, and apocryphal tales that disrupt, interrupt and reinterpret the official history of Mason and Dixon. Perspectives of Native Americans, enslaved people, and other marginal groups, highlight the power dynamics inherent in historical storytelling.
In addition to history, Mason & Dixon explores the concept of space, moving from a physical frontier to a metaphorical, psychological and invisible boundary.
There is a Post-Script in Emerson’s self-school’d hand, exclamatory, ending upon a long Quill-crunching Stop. “Time is the Space that may not be seen.—”
Source: Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
To borrow from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the Mason-Dixon Line is a paradoxical attempt to create a tracing that functions as an reterritorializing map. However, Pynchon’s narrative constantly undermines this, showing how the “map” of the Line fails to contain the lived reality of the space. The wilderness, the native peoples, and the very characters themselves serve to deterritorialize attempts for order.
Mason & Dixon persistently exposes, satirises, and destabilises binaries—science/occult, astrology/astronomy, empire/colony, map/territory, reason/madness, freedom/slavery, North/South. The Line itself produces ‘Bad History’ that divides peoples and drives conflict.
“To rule forever,” continues the Chinaman, later, “it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call . . . 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.”
Source: Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
Aspects like the Wedge’s ambiguous space, Indigenous paths, feng shui, Jesuit geometries, and rhizomatic social scenes all work to undercut either/or logics. Instead, the novel enacts a practice of creating new realities and new knowledges in their turn.
As readers, we mirror Mason and Dixon by tracing our own lines through the text, constantly attempting to make sense of it. Trying to make sense of the text. However, every time I re-trawl back through my notes – quotes, thoughts and ideas – I am left either contemplating something new or recalling something previously forgotten. This experience confirms the text’s multiplicity.
It is interesting is to consider Mason & Dixon today, long after the surveyors lived and the book was published in 1997. Devin Thomas O’Shea suggests that Pynchon’s exploration of Ronald Reagan’s slashing of the federal government in Vineland provides lessons for today as political figures cut back on spending. However, in A Mason & Dixon CompanionBrett Biebel suggests that in a polarised world, Mason & Dixon offers the complexity and nuance that we need more than ever.
We are routinely forced onto a zero or a one, a “liberal” or a “conservative” spectrum, and the great virtue of Pynchon, the great virtue of Mason & Dixon, is that they both resist automatic categorization. Call the novel difficult if you wish. Obscure. Dense. Too demanding or time consuming. But what it really is is layered (and keenly aware of the knife’s edge separating delusional conspiracy from scientific “Enlightenment”). It promotes complexity and nuance and the weighing of difficult moral and emotional trade-offs, and in today’s America, we need that more than ever.
Source: A Mason & Dixon Companion by Brett Biebel
Given this contrast, I wonder if Pynchon as a whole is as important today as ever – a writer who, instead of providing a “degraded attempt” at making sense of the world, helps call out its multiplicity. Alan Jacobs further supports this by noting Pynchon’s concern with the ‘insoluble obscurities’:
Pynchon is a riddling writer, but he is also concerned with those insoluble obscurities that cannot be fought but must simply be waited out.
Source: Pynchon: An Introduction by Alan Jacobs
This analysis is perhaps best concluded by Pynchon’s own reflections on being a Luddite and what that might mean for our times.
If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come – you heard it here first – when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. O boy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long.
Source: Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite? by Thomas Pynchon
- A philosopher who conducts research over in the medical school was talking about attention blindness, the basic feature of the human brain that, when we concentrate intensely on one task, causes us to miss just about everything else. Because we can’t see what we can’t see, our lecturer was determined to catch us in the act. He had us watch a video of six people tossing basketballs back and forth, three in white shirts and three in black, and our task was to keep track only of the tosses between the people in white. I hadn’t seen the video back then, although it’s now a classic, featured on punked-style TV shows or YouTube versions enacted at frat houses under less than lucid conditions. The tape rolled, and everyone began counting.
Everyone except me. I’m dyslexic, and the moment I saw that grainy tape with the confusing basketball tossers, I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep track of their movements, so I let my mind wander. My curiosity was piqued, though, when about thirty seconds into the tape, a gorilla sauntered in among the players. She (we later learned a female student was in the gorilla suit) stared at the camera, thumped her chest, and then strode away while they continued passing the balls.
When the tape stopped, the philosopher asked how many people had counted at least a dozen basketball tosses. Hands went up all over. He then asked who had counted thirteen, fourteen even, and congratulated those who’d scored the perfect fifteen. Then he asked, “And who saw the gorilla?”
I raised my hand and was surprised to discover I was the only person at my table and one of only three or four others in the large room to do so. Around me, others were asking, “Gorilla? What gorilla?” Some people were getting annoyed. Several muttered that they’d been “tricked.” Instead of answering them, the philosopher rewound the tape and had us watch again. This time everyone saw the gorilla.
Source: Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn by Cathy Davidson ↩
REVIEW: Mason & Dixon (Thomas Pynchon) by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
