Hitting Below the Mason -Dixon Line

[Dave Monroe]

The recently issued Mason & Dixon, like all Thomas
Pynchon novels, is a load of crap. He has nothing to
say and often says it clumsily. His sense of humor is
lame and sophomoric. He writes to exhibit what he
thinks is his erudition and cleverness, but is a
boring clod. Yet Pynchon's among the most highly
praised writers of our time by academics and other
literary pundits. How can this be? Why do people rave
about this guy's sodden, turgid books?

Well, for one thing, he writes long novels. Critics
often equate lengthy with profound. Like the first
Pulitzer Prize in music granted to a jazz-related
person went to Wynton Marsalis for a three-hour long
piece that a friend of mine saw people walk out on.
The recording hasn't even been released yet. In any
case, Marsalis is an imitative, reactionary composer
and improviser. To give him the first jazz-related
Pulitzer is a slap in the face to great composers,
living and dead, including Duke Ellington, Thelonious
Monk, Tadd Dameron, Benny Golson, Wayne Shorter, and
Herbie Hancock. It's comparable to choosing the
trivial, sentimental, manipulative, pseudo-profound
Forrest Gump as best film of the year. The people who
vote for these awards are middlebrows with delusions
of grandeur. Think I'm kidding? James Joyce didn't get
a Nobel Prize, but Pearl Buck did.

Anyway, the longer Pynchon's novels are, the better
critics like them. The 887-page Gravity's Rainbow has
gotten the most praise, followed by V. at 463 pages,
Vineland at 385 pages, and the slim The Crying of Lot
49 at 138 pages. Quite possibly, Mason & Dixon (Henry
Holt, $27.50 hard) at a hefty 773 pages, will supplant
V. in second place.

Another reason academics are so crazy for Pynchon is
that his work contains so much obscure information,
like about World War II weapons technology. (Pynchon
had a background in science, worked for Boeing prior
to making it as a novelist and contributed a piece to
the December 1960 issue of Aerospace Safety.) He makes
a lot of references to pop culture, which endears him
to readers who believe that even though he's got an
immense store of knowledge, he's no stuffed shirt.
Like, doesn't he write about rock & roll? He throws so
much shit into his novels that people don't know what
he's trying to do. But they love to speculate.
Academics are crazy about interpreting his work. To
accommodate all the factual data he wants to stick
into his novels he devises labyrinthine plots
involving conspiracies. This fires up university
teachers; they get a huge kick out of referring to the
"paranoia" in his writing. Pynchon hands them plenty
to write about, a chance to publish so they don't have
to perish.

Many commentators mistakenly refer to Pynchon as an
avant garde-ist. Among others who have anticipated his
work are Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Terry
Southern, and Joseph Heller. Burroughs, Kerouac, and
Southern employed plays, poems, and song lyrics in
their work before Pynchon, and other novelists did it
far before all of them. The technique of blending
poems, playlets, and other forms with straight-ahead
prose fiction was employed by Russian experimenters in
the early part of the century and labeled
"ornamentalism." Joyce also blended forms. Pynchon's
combining fact and fantasy isn't anything new, and he
didn't invent absurdism, which he sometimes uses. He's
synthesized some relatively modern styles and
techniques that readers of conventional fiction don't
often run across, so they give him credit for being
more far-out and original than he really is. Pynchon
uses long, complex sentences, but they aren't
innovative grammatically or syntactically. He didn't
invent the encyclopedic novel either. Ulysses, for
example, was published over 40 years before V.

The way Pynchon jams information into his books
doesn't have much purpose, other than to attempt to
dazzle readers. Joyce, on the other hand, uses his
immense knowledge far more subtly in the process of
creating symbols. Merely citing a bunch of product
names like Stacey Adams shoes and Count Chocula, as
Pynchon does, isn't a great feat, nor is his giving
cutesy names to people and places like Benny Profane
and the Bohdi Dharma Pizza Parlor. Anyone can just sit
around for 10 years and read, like Pynchon; his
reclusiveness has aided in building his reputation,
and then write a novel filled with the factual
information picked up.

In Mason & Dixon Pynchon employs his old gimmicks and
uses one that's new to him, though not to 20th-century
novelists: He uses deliberately archaic prose, as
Charles Portis did more skillfully and humorously in
True Grit. The book's a fictionalized biography of
British surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon,
who drew their famous line between Pennsylvania and
Maryland in the 18th century. According to a blurb,
it's supposed to be "...a grand tour of the
Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, from their first
journey together to the Cape of Good Hope to
pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into
the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later
lives." Along the way they meet Benjamin Franklin,
George Washington, a Chinese Feng Shui master, a
talking dog, and a robot duck. Feh! If Pynchon
deserves any prize it's for being the world's most
overrated trivia buff. He's the literary equivalent of
the Piltdown Man.

But I ain't kidding myself about convincing readers
that Pynchon has no clothes, old or new. More than
likely his fans will believe jealousy inspired me to
write this article. After all, didn't Mason & Dixon
get a great review in Time? Doesn't your English
teacher think he's fabulous? Yeah, yeah.

But just remember, literary fashions change. One day
people will realize that Pynchon has feet of clay. And
then they'll think, "Ol' Harv saw through him years
ago. He knew what was happening all along!"

"Yes he did!" - Harvey Pekar

http://rachel.auschron.com/issues/vol16/issue41/books.pynchon.html


		
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