Chapter 5: Paranoia

[Paul Nightingale]

Ch5 as a whole functions as a coda to the sea-battle. It pauses the action
after two chapters in which the Mason/Dixon relationship has been explored
in detail. Ch4 quotes Dr Johnson: being at sea is being in jail. The meaning
is pretty obvious, if sardonic. The people with whom one shares the voyage,
their conversation, might be a little trying. Think Sartre: hell is other
people. Being at sea is imprisonment because there is no escape. There is,
perhaps, a further meaning. Cherrycoke is showing off his knowledge as a
learned man (quoting a literary author). And this in a chapter that
introduces a sea-captain who wishes to monopolise the company of learned
guests. I have already noted that Cherrycoke's appearance as a character in
the story he relates is as one who, empowered, is able to explain/interpret
for the benefit of the ignorant Mason and Dixon. Perhaps we might start to
think of Cherrycoke as the ampersand who holds Mason and Dixon together: he
quite literally constructs their relationship. Henceforth they are to be a
trio.

What, then, of Ch5? It begins by emphasising the narrator's authority to
speak with the aid of hindsight (and this in a novel that prioritises the
present tense). "If ever they were to break up the Partnership, this
would've been the time." This opening also positions the reader, who knows
full well that no such course of action was followed. So another
partnership, that of reader with narrator, is made possible here.

Does Mason's opening comment mean that "the ordinary" requires no author? He
then suggests that authorship must be intentional. The rest of the chapter
offers little in the way of forward momentum (by way of comparison with
those preceding). Mason and Dixon drink and we hear of Dixon's dissenting
background, even within the Quaker community; the earlier reference to
"Coal-Mining" invokes the nascent working-class described in The Making Of
The English Working Class, where Thompson notes the conservatism (born of
prosperity) of the Quakers. Another text-within-the-text is introduced: the
"Letter of Reproach and Threat" that takes us, instantly, from (the
possibility of) working-class resistance in the regions to ruling-class
shenanigans. This is the role that paranoia plays in this chapter: as in GR
and CoL49, it is Pynchon's reworking of the C18th picaresque, a narrative
attempt to construct social change in a post-feudalist England.