Washington Post
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lucifer at dhp.com
Sun Apr 27 12:51:28 CDT 1997
Since this is already freely available on the Web, the Information
Liberation Front, People's Republic of Berkeley, Amerika, is pleased
to forward it to you. (Scandinavians gotta love it, and it may be the
best review yet.)
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Measure For Measure
By Michael Dirda
Sunday, April 27 1997; Page X01
The Washington Post
MASON & DIXON
By Thomas Pynchon
Henry Holt. 773 pp. $27.50
SHORTLY after Gravity's Rainbow appeared in 1973, Thomas
Pynchon reportedly signed a contract for two future books.
One was tentatively titled "The Japanese Insurance
Adjuster"; Pynchon scholars such as Edward Mendelson have
speculated that parts of this book may have been
cannibalized for Vineland (1990). When that serio-goofy
California novel appeared, many readers felt more or less
disappointed: For all its merits, Vineland just couldn't be
the awesome masterwork that Pynchon fans were patiently
awaiting. Obviously, it was a breather, the analogue to the
novella-length Crying of Lot 49 (1967), which the reclusive
author brought out between his ambitious first book, V.
(1963), and his youthful summa of modern history and
culture, Gravity's Rainbow.
The other novel, envisioned nearly a quarter of a century
ago, was at that time called "The Mason-Dixon Line." Did
Pynchon, who will be 60 on May 8, then know how many years
he would devote to this project? Did he, as rumor has it,
actually walk the entire line, the boundary between
Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania established in the
1760s by astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah
Dixon? He certainly must have spent considerable time in
libraries, mastering the arcana of surveying and early
modern science, picking up the contemporary lingo of
sailors, fops, Quakers, Dutch businessmen, preachers,
Indians, slaves, colonial farmers, whores and Philadelphia
lawyers, gathering folktales and historical anecdotes,
above all, sucking in the flavor of 18th-century speech,
acquiring a bone-deep feel for its sentences.
The long-anticipated result, Mason & Dixon, proves a
dazzling work of imaginative re-creation, a marvel-filled
historical novel, set largely in colonial America, but with
extended side trips to England, South Africa and the island
of St. Helena. In its pages Pynchon sets the reader down in
a bustling world where bewigged men of science believe in
ghosts and magic, where geometry may butt up against
ancient myth, where dogs talk and Golems stride through the
wilderness and Jesuit agents are masters of guile and
disguise. There are thrilling escapes, melodramatic
revelations, glimpses of the great (Ben Franklin, Samuel
Johnson), much reflection on death, dozens of songs (a
favorite Pynchon device), and the steady growl of colonial
complaint against King George and his rule. Not least,
though, Mason & Dixon is a paean to friendship, a buddy
book about an English Don Quixote and a Scots Sancho Panza
at large in the New World, a 1760s On the Road.
Though daunting in appearance -- the text is stippled with
capitalized nouns and strange words -- the novel is in fact
fairly accessible and exceptionally funny, ever the saving
grace of big demanding novels. Pynchon's humor takes many
forms: puns, anachronisms, mimicry, in-house jokes,
pastiche. Two ships, for instance, are named the HMS
Inconvenience and HMS Unreflective. "You know of the Ecole
de Piraterie at Toulon? Famous," says one character, adding
that the notorious St. Foux "has lately been appointed to
the Kiddean Chair." Elsewhere Pynchon mentions a seaman
named O'Brian, Pat being the best storyteller in the navy,
with an unrivalled knowledge of complicated rigging.
Deftly mixing past and present, Pynchon frequently takes
familiar proverbs and gives them a periphrastic,
neo-classical spin: "this island . . . not ev'ryone's
Brochette of Curried Albacore, is it?"; "Inexpensive
Salvo"; even the Laurel and Hardyesque "Another bonny
gahn-on tha've got us into . . ." There are the usual funny
names -- the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, the Redzinger family --
and an aunt who tells her nieces and nephews tall tales
about her wild youth: " 'Twas given me by the Sultan. Dear
Mustapha, `Stuffy,' we called him in the Harem chambers,
amongst ourselves . . ." At one point a spooky clockwork
duck hopes to attend a performance of the opera "Margherita
e Don Aldo" (recall that a Margherita is a daisy, then
think Disney). At a hanging young aristos critique the
condemned man's clothes: " `Hideous suit,' remarks one of
the Fops, ` -- what's that shade, some kind of Fawn?
altogether too light for the occasion." Pynchon also
periodically drops in a bad pun: " `Sari,' corrects Mason.
`Not at all Sir, -- 'Twas I who was sarong.' " Of course,
there are numerous more recondite literary jokes too: "
`Couldn't believe it,' reported the room-steward Mr.
Gonzago, `like watching Hamlet or something, isn't it?' "
(The dumb-show in Shakespeare's play is called "The Murder
of Gonzago.")
In general, Mason & Dixon follows the actual events of its
heroes' professional lives pretty faithfully -- but makes
sure that the duo bump up against a steady parade of
eccentric, Monty Pythonesque characters, most with stories
to tell. The Thermos bottle, pizza, shopping malls, and the
self-winding watch make their American debuts. And
Pynchon's flair for shoptalk proves an especial joy. For
instance, here a colonial huckster starts his pitch:
"Scandinavians! yes, the famous Swedish Loggers, each the
equal of any ten Axmen these Colonies may produce. Finest
double-bit Axes, part of the Package, lifetime Warranty on
the Heads, seventy-two-hour replacement Policy, customiz'd
Handle for each Axman, for `Bjorn may not swing like Stig,
nor Stig like Sven,' as the famous Timothy Tox might say,
-- Swedish Steel here, secret Processes guarded for years,
death to reveal them, take you down a perfect swathe of
Forest, trimm'd and cleared, fast as you're likely to chain
at the distance. -- Parts of a single great machine, --
human muscle and stamina become but adjunct to the deeper
realities of Steel that never needs Sharpening, never rusts
. . ."
As it happens, miles into the wilderness, the survey team
and its axmen encounter a case of -- " `Kastoranthropy,'
Professor Voam shaking his head, `And haven't I seen it do
things to a man. Tragick.' " Seems that people suffering
from this malady turn into giant beavers during the full
moon. Naturally, the wife of the Were-Beaver soon
instigates a contest between her husband and blond Stig to
determine who can fell the most trees during a moonlit
night. Huge bets are placed. Alas, the astronomers fail to
remember the scheduled lunar eclipse, with disastrous
consequences. About this time they also learn that Stig is
not really a Swede but a mysterious Northern being who has
mastered the subtle art of "impersonating a Swede." "Is
ours not the Age of Metamorphosis, with any turn of Fortune
a possibility?"
No Thomas Pynchon novel is authentic without its dollop of
paranoia. Mason and Dixon speculate constantly about
whether they are being manipulated by their superiors in
Britain, or by Providence, or by other, stranger forces.
The Indians speak of ancient Guardians; Dixon finds himself
spirited away for a visit to the gnome-like creatures who
inhabit the Hollow Earth; there are hints of aliens from
outer space and a time when people could fly. At one point
the British East India Company is referred to as the
Company in solemn tones that suggest an 18th-century CIA.
Obviously, the colonists are meeting secretly in taverns,
talking sedition, and there is occasional fear of
Kabbalists, Illuminati and Freemasons. But a greater danger
than any of these lurks behind the world's paper-thin stage
scenery: the Jesuits and -- shades of Lot 49's secret
postal system -- their so-called Telegraph, made up of
giant balloons and beams focused on parabolically perfect
mirrors:
"As expected of a Jesuit invention timing and discipline
are ev'rything. It is rumor'd that the Fathers limit
themselves to giving orders, whilst the actual labor is
entrusted to the Telegraph Squads, elite teams of converted
Chinese, drill'd, through Loyolan methods, to perform with
split-second timing the balloon launchings, to learn the
art of aiming the beam, and, its reflection once acquir'd,
to keep most faithfully fix'd upon it, -- for like the
glance of a Woman at a Ball, it must be held for a certain
time before conveying a Message.' " Adds the magus-like Ben
Franklin, " `If we could but capture one Machine intact, we
might take it apart to see how it works . . . Yet, what
use? They'll only invent another twice as fiendish, -- for
here are conjoin'd the two most powerful sources of
Brain-Power on Earth, the one as closely harness'd to its
Disciplin'd Rage for Jesus, as the other to the Escape into
the Void, which is the very Asian Mystery. Together, they
make up a small Army of Dark Engineers who could run the
World. The Sino-Jesuit conjunction may prove a greater
threat to Christendom than ever the Mongols or the Moors .
. .' "
Division, boundaries, chains, lines -- such visible and
invisible constraints provide the central metaphor of the
novel. The melancholy Mason is obsessed with his dead wife
Rebekah, whose spirit occasionally crosses "that grimly
patrolled Line, the very essence of Division." Slaves, in
South Africa and America, are circumscribed in every aspect
of existence; Dutch girls live constantly reminded "of the
Boundaries there to be o'er stepped." While surveying,
Mason and Dixon divide future states, at one point even run
the line through a farmhouse and separate a man from his
wife. Their unswerving path, we learn, violates the sha or
spirt of the land, may even be "a conduit of Evil." In
their own lives the pair constantly suffer from the
barriers of class and ethnic prejudice, Dixon being from a
Scots coal-mining family, Mason the son of a baker: Both
are denied membership in the Royal Society, and the coveted
post of Astronomer Royal goes to a well-connected cluck.
Throughout these pages traditional distinctions are also
deliberately blurred: between the organic and the
mechanical, the past and the present, the fabulous and the
historical. Moreover, since many of the jokes and allusions
only make sense from a modern perspective -- a kind of
reversed palimpsest -- one must, so to speak, always read
between the lines.
This blurring takes its most dramatic effect two-thirds of
the way through the book. Rev. Cherrycoke has been relating
the adventures of his friends Mason and Dixon as a
Christmas treat, 20 years after the fact. During the
evening two cousins vie for the attention of the beautiful
Tenebrae, who eventually retires to peruse, secretly, an
installment from a gothicky serial called "The Ghastly
Fop." In this sensationalist pulp a young wife is captured
by savages and transported to a Jesuit redoubt in Quebec,
where she is prepared, a la The Story of O, to become a
Widow of Christ, i.e. part of an international network of
pliant, selfless courtesans. When she and a Chinese acolyte
escape from Father Zarbazo, the Wolf of Jesus, the couple
eventually reach the safety of the Mason-Dixon camp.
Smoothly the "fictional" Eliza and Captain Zhang slide
right into Cherrycoke's "factual" narrative. Matters grow
even more complicated when Zhang -- in order to elude his
nemesis -- alters his appearance so that he looks exactly
like Father Zarbazo, a master of disguise. But then,
perhaps, he has been the insidious El Lobo de Jesus all
along?
Along with its japery and playful artifice, Mason & Dixon
conveys a real sense of felt life, of the years slowly
rolling by: The two heroes only gradually recognize their
affection and need for each other, and both ultimately
discover that their fondest dreams will never be fulfilled.
By comparison with Pynchon's trademark flash and narrative
density, this new book seems unusually serene, almost
mellow, avoiding both dramatic tension and serious erotic
content. There are wonderful descriptive passages, however:
At his worktable the aged Dixon "erases his sketching
mistakes with bits of Bread he then keeps in a Pocket, not
wishing to cast them where Birds might eat the Lead and
come to harm." Still, I doubt that Mason & Dixon will
attract the computer freaks, science fiction fans and
Gen-Xers who look upon Gravity's Rainbow as a kind of
modern Scripture (as little read, I suspect, as the ancient
one). In truth, the novel will probably appeal most to the
people who first celebrated Pynchon, the '60s generation
that is now entering its own late middle age.
At its climax, Mason and Dixon glimpse the edge of the Old
America, a world of Indian mounds, magical Warrior Paths,
giant vegetables, Telluric power sources, and invisible
"Protectors." This experience of the "rapture of the west"
never quite leaves them. It is, of course, an old dream:
the prospect of an Edenic garden where the Fall never took
place, the inviting legend of the Big Rock Candy Mountain,
the recurrent sense that once, on these shores, mankind
might have escaped some of the bonds and charters and
boundaries that confined him elsewhere. Mason & Dixon
transports us to the period when that mythic, natural
geography -- the realm of Vineland the Good -- was first
fading away, as surveyors divided the land and astronomers
charted a sky across which there will all too soon come a
certain hideous screaming.
Still, one mustn't end a review of this dark carnival of a
book on a melancholy note. After all, Mason first meets his
beloved Rebekah when he is nearly crushed to death by a
gigantic cheese. When Dixon offers a toast "To the pursuit
of happiness," a young man with red hair wonders if he
would mind "if I use the Phrase sometime?" A politically
incorrect colonist asserts that "Bodices are for ripping,
and there's an end upon it." Even a colonial sampler reads
EXPECT INDIANS. In the strangest of all his jokes, Pynchon
actually turns George Washington's manservant into a
black-Jewish comedian, with a taste for terrible Borscht
Belt shtick. " `You see what I have to put up with,' groans
Col. Washington. `It's makin' me just mee-shugginah.' " In
the pages of Mason & Dixon humor may surprise you anywhere:
When Dixon angrily frees some slaves, he decides to whip,
maybe even kill, their swaggering, foul-mouthed exploiter,
who immediately crumples and pleads, "No! Please! My little
ones! O Tiffany! Jason! . . . Scott!"
You gotta love a book like that. I certainly did.
Michael Dirda is a writer and editor for Book World.
) Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company
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