MDMD2: Prolegomena

[Dave Monroe]

>From David Foreman, "Historical Documents Relating to Mason & Dixon," 
Pynchon an Mason & Dixon, ed. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin (Newark: U of 
Delaware P, 2000), pp. 143-66 ...

"There is a game among Thomas Pynchon's readers.  In order to cope with the 
enormous amount of scientific, historical, pop-cultural, and artistic 
references in Pynchon's novels (some of them of dubious accuracy), the 
reader must ask at some point, 'Is this true or is he making this up?'" (p. 
143)

"To compound these difficulties, Pynchon' novels often present imagined 
events and people as if they are true." (p. 143)

One might ask here, what novel doesn't?  But ...

"The most important surviving document relevant to Pynchon' novel is The 
Journal of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon ..." (p. 144)

One might respond here, well, duh, but ...

Mason, Charles and Jeremiah Dixon.
   The Journal of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon.
   Ed. A. Hughlett Mason.  Philadelphia: American
   Philosophical Society, 1969.

Do note that the Journal is quite handily included, albeit without most of 
the (largely unnecessary, for our, and perhaps, Pynchon's, uses here) 
technical data, and with certain other omissions, in ...

Clerc, Charles.  Mason & Dixon & Pynchon.
   Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2000.  153-229.

By the way ...

"The original document resides in the National Archives, Washington, DC, 
having reached this site by a very circuitous route.  It was carried with 
Mason during his entire travels in America ....  In 1860, the original 
journal showed up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 'flung amidst a pile of waste 
paper into a cellar of Government House'  [George W. Corner, preface to The 
Journal, p. vii].  How The Journal arrived at this precarious location is 
not known.  It was eventually purchased from Judge James Alexander of 
Halifax in 1877 and deposited in the National Archives.  Not until 1969 was 
the Journal made widely available to the public in an edition other than the 
Archives' microfilm version.   This edition ... is a transcription of the 
original by A. Hughlett Mason (no relation to Charles Mason) of the 
University of Virginia.  Most likely, Pynchon used this version ....
   "A. Hughlett Mason reports that The Journal was written in a single hand 
and is signed 'C:Mason,' evidence that it was Charles mason who wrote the 
entire diary...." (p. 145; A.H. Mason, introduction to The Journal, p. 1)

   "Other copies of The Journal exist.  One 'fair copy'  is in the Hall of 
Records of the State of Maryland.  A second 'fair copy' is owned by the 
Historical Society of Pennsylvania.  Each is an edited version of Mason's 
notes, composed by the astronomer himself and given to the proprietors of 
Maryland and Pennsylvania upon completion of the survey....  Pynchon makes 
use of these other versions of The Journal...." (p. 146)

But to rewind a bit ...

"Scientific essays by Mason and Dixon concerning their work in America were 
published in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions.  Nevil 
Maskelyne's interpretation of their data, also published in Philosophical 
Transactions, offers further insight into the pair's activities in the 
colonies."  (p. 144)

I will cite these as need be, but I will note a bibliography Foreman 
endnotes here that I haven't availed myself of (yet) ...

Burchard, Edward L. and Edward B. Matthews.
   "Manuscripts and Publications Relating to the
   Mason and Dixon Line and Other Lines in
   Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Virginias."
   Report of the Resurvey of the Maryland-
   Pennsylvania Boundary.  Harrisburg, PA:
   Harrisburg Publishing, 1909.  205-403.

"As for secondary historical analyses, much of what is available on the 
topic was published from the 1920s through the 1960s.  Of special interest 
is the large number of articles written by Thomas D. Cope." (p. 144)

And these are, indeed, of interest, immediately enough that I should be 
citing a few of them myself shortly.  But again to continue from Foreman ...

"Beyond these technical details, there remains a greater question to be 
resolved.  How does this preponderance of information, some of it true and 
some of it invented, affect the readers interpretation of the history of 
Mason and Dixon or of history in general?  What is the relationship between 
'the facts' and fiction?" (p. 144)

"... what apparently caught the attention of Pynchon is not the plethora of 
scientific information, but the incidental impressions related by Mason 
about his experiences in America.   In his introduction to A 'Gravity' 
Rainbow' Companion, Steven Weisenburger tells us that 'Pynchon's eye seems 
preternaturally alert for moments of personal testimony, comments often 
buried in footnotes or beneath heaps of technical data and objective 
detail.'" (p. 147; citing Weisenburger, Companion, p. 8)

"... one source for the distinctive upper-case punctuation of nouns in the 
novel.  Pynchon replicates the language of The Journal." (p. 148)

"I the instances of Pynchon's citations of the 'Field'Book,' we can 
generally rely on the narrator's authenticity.  direct quotations are 
faithful to the original.  However, Pynchon is not entirely accurate in his 
employment of temporal details ..." (p. 150)

"To claim that Pynchon 'sticks to the facts' is an overstatement.  For each 
shred of evidence in favor of th novel's historical authenticity, there is a 
moment of anachronism and absurdity." (p. 151)

"This conflation of truth and fantasy has the effect of calling into 
question the nature of history and historiography.   If we continue our 
reading of Pynchon with possible source documents in mind, we find that his 
manipulation of history and distortion of historical fact are not wholly 
inconsistent with traditional historical interpretations of Mason and Dixon. 
  Pynchon takes his case to greater extremes, but there is nonetheless 
evidence of creativity in the secondary historical documents." (p. 152)

"Pynchon expands the scope of his history to included examination of the 
perspective of science in th 1760s ....   He incorporates the setting of 
late-colonial America ... thereby addressing the philosophical an 
sociological questions which surround America's break from British colonial 
rule.... Pynchon highlights the persistent presence of economics ... 
conspiracy paranoia ... historical apocrypha ... and the presence of the 
supernatural ....   In light of the historical significance of the Mason and 
Dixon line as the boundary between North and South, we must also consider 
the question of slavery." (p. 153)

"... there are many instances in which the author takes great pains to stay 
loyal to the truth of history, t the real events.  David Seed [p. 128] has 
pointed out that in traditional historical fiction, such a device is 
employed in order to add verisimilitude to the author's elaborations ....  
Traditionally, the facts buttress the fiction.  In the case of Mason & 
Dixon, the opposite is true.
   "Mingled with Pynchon's attention to the historical record is a constant 
flaunting of anachronisms....  Instead of the facts adding authenticity to 
the fantasy, the fantasy corrupts the facts and disrupts the whole retelling 
of history, infecting it with the uncertainty of fiction.
   "Linda Hutcheon contributes to our understanding of the interplay between 
fact and fiction: 'historiographic metafiction refutes the natural 
common-sense methods of distinguishing between historical fact and fiction.  
It refuses the view that only history has a truth claim, both by questioning 
the ground of that claim in historiography an by asserting that both history 
and fiction are discourses' [p. 88].  By blurring the boundary between 
history and fiction, Pynchon forces us to see history as a construction....  
he good Reverend [Cherrycoke] himself echoes Hutcheon's claims about 
historical discourse as part of the epigraph of chapter 35:

Her Practitioners [History's], to survive, must soon learn the arts of the 
quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,--that there may ever continue more than one 
Life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in 
forever,--not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us 
All,--rather a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and 
strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in 
common. ([M&D] 349)

"The historian is like th gossip or the barroom comedian.  The practice of 
history is in the style of the telling, not really in the facts.  History as 
merely fact is a tenuous disassociation with the past at risk of being 
cut...." (pp. 162-3)

Citing ...

Seed, David.  The Fictional Labyrinths of
   Thomas Pynchon.  Iowa City: U of Iowa, 1988.

Hutcheon, Linda.  A Poetics of Postmodernism:
   History, Theory, Fiction.  New York:
   Routledge, 1988.

But to continue from Foreman ...

"Should this lead us to believe that a history develops from a mere mimesis 
of facts to a self-conscious process of retelling that it will eventually 
lose it factual basis?  Will history become entirely a fiction?  I do not 
think this is true, and the evidence as presented in Pynchon's novel seems 
to support my view.... 'the facts' are still important.... It is the 
temporal and cultural anachronisms, the invasion of twentieth-century 
concepts into Mason & Dixon, which offer truly valuable insight into the 
operation of 'the facts.'  Hutcheon writes that 'the meaning and shape are 
not in the "events," but in the systems which make those past events into 
present historical facts' [p. 93]....  The Line and its creation inform us 
about how it was constructed in the 1760s, how we reconstruct it from the 
twentieth century, and how our sense of history is constructed as well." 
(p.163)

Okay, on to Chapters 2 and 3 ...

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