MDDM "these deep anachronisms"

[Doug Millison]

Thanks again, Dave.  The Hinds' review of M&D introduces some of the points
she makes in  "Sari, Sorry, and the  Vortex of History: Calendar Reform,
Anachronism,  and Language Change in Mason & Dixon."


http://www.electronicbookreview.com/reviews/rev8/r8hinds.htm
Making the Rounds of History
Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds

[...] Stranger and stranger becomes the linkage between the actual
eighteenth century and Pynchon's exaggeration of it. Timothy Tox, Pynchon's
"national" poet, author of the frequently "quoted" The Line, certainly
bears close enough resemblance to Joel Barlow, poet of the doggerel The
Columbiad to make one question whether exact quotation or sheer invention
is Pynchon's method here. The supernatural exists side by side with the
natural in the sense that Jésus Arrabal, a character from The Crying of Lot
49, describes "magic" as "another world's intrusion into this one" (88).

[... ]As history, Mason & Dixon resists, in fact rejects any conception of
the past as grand récit, as a linear chain of cause-and-effect to be
reconstructed and narrated. The networks of power in this novel are too
dispersed, too shadowy for such explanation. History here is not just the
"rational" and the "irrational" sciences of the eighteenth-century
Anglo-American world, but is a web of influence, and like parallel lines,
plots meet and cross only at an ever-receding horizon of vision; in this
history, "everything is connected" (GR 703): the exact nature of the
connection, however, is more suspected than seen. Such postmodern,
rhizomic, interlocking webs of causality, as historical method, are best
served by Mason & Dixon's device of anachronism, more present here than
even in his earlier novels. Disrupting ordinary causal presumptions,
anachronism hauls the present into the past, suggesting if not a reverse
causality at least a non-linear, contiuous "present" lasting over 200
years. We see anachronism from the very beginning when Cherrycoke (his name
itself anachronistic) is advised to avoid hemp during his coming journey,
and if he cannot avoid it, "do not inhale"; in the appearance of a
Popeye-like character, squinting and puffing "I am that which I am" (486);
in the satellite view of the earth by Dixon and fellow flying pupils of
Emerson; in the quick allusion to the "what-what"-ing King George of the
1994 film The Madness of King George; or the ubiquitous 1990's style coffee
gourmandizing everywhere Dixon travels. The historiography that
incorporates such anachronism asks the question, "if Mrs. Eggslap can
complain that 'Sometimes. . . 'tis hard, to be a Woman' (621), then has
Country and Western music been invented in the eighteenth century?" Added
to these cultural and pop cultural references to the twentieth century are
constant allusions to nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists. Melville
and Conrad and Kafka are lovingly incorporated, while our contemporary
sea-novelist Patrick O'Brien turns up, surely ironically, as a character on
board the l'Grand: "'Hey t'en, Pat. Scribblin' again, are ye? More Sea
Stories?' Not only does O'Brian know all there is to know and more 'pon the
Topick of Euphroes, and Rigging even more obscure, - he's also acknowledg'd
as the best Yarn-Spinner in all the Fleets" (54).

With these deep anachronisms, it isn't difficult to imagine that Pynchon is
rewriting historiography as well as history. The decentered nature of this
history and causality more resembles the anachronistically portrayed World
Wide Web of the Jesuits than any eighteenth-century-style narrative
history. When Emerson suspects a "number of Jesuit Observatories, flung as
a Web, all over the World it seems" (223), his paranoia merely matches
Pynchon's own, for in a novel in which a practitioner of the ancient art of
Feng Shui - ancient but also again popular in the 1990s - can criticize
Mason and Dixon's Visto for its evil placement ("Terrible Feng Shui here.
Worst I ever saw. You two crazy?" [542]), the anachronistic intrusion of
one world into another (another incarnation of Arrabal's "magic"?) induces
the suspicion that the twentieth-century already existed in the eighteenth,
that the postmodern world of Starbuck's, Feng Shui, and the remnants of a
slave culture in the US is very little removed from its roots in the
eighteenth century.

As anachronism unites the histories and mythologies of eighteenth and
twentieth centuries, it does not come as a surprise, then, that the Rev'd
Wicks Cherrycoke, a character anachronistically popping up out of Pynchon's
own past in Gravity's Rainbow (as does Fender-Belly Bodine of M&D, who of
course recalls Pig Bodine of V.) narrates with as little authority as a
narrator might have. No one believes Cherrycoke's complete reliability:
even his own extended family (with a shadowy plot of their own), listeners
to the long tale of Mason and Dixon, occasionally call Cherrycoke on
charges of untruthfulness: "No proof. . . . No entries for Days, allow'd, -
but yet no proof" (695). True, the Rev'd admits, never quite spelling out
that he was present only at the beginning and ending of Mason and Dixon's
adventure, that most of their story has been his reconstruction.

[...]These interpolations act as a kind of theoretical backbone, a
historiography for a novel that presumes to represent the most notoriously
"scientific" of Western centuries as madly unlinear, utterly noncausal with
only the finest of seams between natural and supernatural worlds. Inasmuch
as eighteenth-century science worked to rectify the natural to get it in
line with the intellectual, to hack out a "line" between Pennsylvania and
Maryland, for instance, Pynchon roundly pans the entire scientific
enterprise; yet his less one-dimensional, more realistic portrayal of an
eighteenth-century interest in crossing boundaries between the known and
the unknown turns out a respectable, pleasureable, even if sometimes campy,
eighteenth-century scene. The history that did happen and the history that
might have happened, then, merge in the "Tangle of Lines" of Pynchon's
historiography in an attempt to get the century "right." [...]