weird morning in america | page 2
But more paranoia later. The crossroads where serious literature and conspiracy theory meet is not that busy. Potential readers -- most of them, anyway -- will reach "Mason & Dixon" along the High Culture thoroughfare. All the standard Pynchonian elements are in place -- most conspicuously, of course, the erudition, which is casual yet abundant. "The Crying of Lot 49" incorporated thermodynamics, Jacobean revenge plays and the evolution of the postal system. "Gravity's Rainbow" drew from behaviorism, rocket science and German history. With "Mason & Dixon," a nodding acquaintance with British and American history of the period is taken for granted; and it does not hurt to have a look at Dava Sobel's recent bestseller, "Longitude," unless you have acquired some knowledge of 18th century astronomical and navigational problems through alternate means. Other familiar qualities carry over from Pynchon's earlier work. There are references (direct and indirect) to his past novels -- and, as always, funny character names. The narrator, for instance, is the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke. Pynchon once dreamed of writing musicals, and his characters sometimes burst into poetry and song -- all of it deliberately awful, usually to humorous effect. Sometimes, though, it merits only a groan. And then there is the prose. For nearly 800 pages, Pynchon mimics the rhythms, punctuation and spelling of the 18th century -- with those irregular, tho' colorful, Bursts of Capitalization and Italics, govern'd by one knows not what internal logic, save it be that of the Author's peculiar Humor. Every review of the novel in the continental United States, Hawaii and Guam will compare it to John Barth's "The Sot-Weed Factor," and some resemblance is certainly there. But in "Mason & Dixon," the pastiche is livelier and shows a better ear. In the life and opinions of the Reverend Cherrycoke, Pynchon has created a narrative voice that shifts between various styles of prose (novelistic, philosophical, psychotic) -- and unites the comic and the pathetic. Pynchon somehow borrows from Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" without sounding anything like it. That is more difficult than it might sound. From his earliest work, Pynchon has focused on that state of heightened and modified attention called paranoia. And I do mean earliest. In a piece of fiction from his high school newspaper, he has a character mentioning "a fascinating experiment in psychology entailing the instilling of paranoid hallucinations into the logical mind by psychoanalytic deletion of the superego." And so today -- with the benefit of keen hindsight -- it seems inevitable that he would set a novel in colonial America during the 1760s. After all, the years leading up to the Declaration of Independence were a period of intense conspiracy theorizing. Countless pamphlets and sermons denounced the nefarious intentions of both the king and the pope, and their various minions. George Washington himself believed in a "regular, systematic plan" by which the British intended to reduce the colonists to slaves "as tame and abject ... as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway." Anxiety has deep roots in our history; it finds plenty to nourish it there. So the mid-18th century colonies offer Pynchon a perfect stage for cabals to skulk upon. "Mason & Dixon" arrives with the requisite number of grand, sinister plots. There are schemes involving -- among others -- the Freemasons, Sweden, France, the Dutch East India Company, calendar reform and a very long-term Jesuit maneuver to take over China. (Diagraming how the conspiracies all link up is a task best left to Lyndon LaRouche's staff.) Cherrycoke's impressions of the New World Order have their echoes in the land today, but the familiar paradoxes of paranoia are not so overtly the focus of Pynchon's own interest, now, it seems to me. He gives Cherrycoke other things to think about. What has taken its place, then? Mysticism, for one thing. And melancholia as well. In Pynchon's hands, the surveying expedition becomes the model of a rational, scientifically-minded Enlightenment trying to re-create the world in its image. Mason and Dixon use precise instruments and calculations to determine where a perfectly straight line should be. Yet their progress -- moving east to west, slowly, for several years -- cuts through scenes of Old World occultism (golems!) and New World religious enthusiasm. Backwoods surrealism is not the only dominant note, though. Extermination of the Indians is off to a gradual but promising start. And the line divides (or, conversely, joins) a slave state and a free state. The coffeehouse libertarians do not trouble themselves too much about such things.
As Mason and Dixon finish their work, they realize that the line itself is evil. "To mark a right Line upon the Earth," explains their companion, Captain Zhang, master of feng shui, "is to inflict upon the Dragon's very Flesh, a sword-slash, a long, perfect scar, impossible for any who live here the year 'round to see as other than hateful Assault. How can it pass unanswer'd?" Or perhaps the line's effects simply confirm "the melancholy suggestion, that the 'new' Continent Europeans found, had been long attended, from its own ancient Days, by murder, slavery, and the poor fragments of a Magic irreparably broken." All of which must sound unbearably gloomy. Not at all. "Mason & Dixon" is, by turns, demanding, silly and profound. And, at times, just plain weird. (There is, for example, an involved subplot involving an amorous mechanical duck that undoubtedly owes something to the "unchecked consumption of ... modern substances.") Pynchon's reputation as a fearsomely abstruse and difficult writer is secure, as long as the larger reading public never finds out how funny and moving he can be. After finishing "Mason & Dixon," I am ready to turn back to page 1, to read anew Pynchon's map of "this Country cryptick and perilous."
Scott McLemee writes for the Nation and Lingua Franca. He is also a regular contributor to Salon. |
