Entropology (1)

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Review of Books
VOLUME 44, NUMBER 10 · JUNE 12, 1997

Review
Entropology
By Louis Menand
Mason & Dixon
by Thomas Pynchon
Henry Holt, 773 pp., $27.50

Thomas Pynchon is the unlikely offspring of Jack
Kerouac and the Cornell English department. He was
born in Glen Cove, Long Island, in 1937. He attended
Oyster Bay High School, and entered Cornell in 1953,
majoring in engineering physics before switching to
English. In 1955, he left college to serve for two
years in the Navy. He was stationed, for part of that
time, in Norfolk, Virginia, where he one day wandered
into a bookstore and picked up a copy of the Evergreen
Review. It was his first exposure to the Beat
sensibility—"an eye-opener," as he later described
it.[1] He returned to Cornell in 1957, took a
literature course with Vladimir Nabokov (who, when
asked about it years later, did not remember him), and
graduated in 1959.
At this point the trail becomes famously difficult to
follow. After college Pynchon seems to have spent some
time in New York City and then moved to Seattle,
where, from 1960 to 1962, he worked for Boeing as a
writer of technical material. He had published a
relatively conventional short story, "The Small Rain,"
in a Cornell literary magazine in 1959. Another story,
"Low-lands," exhibiting the Beat influence, appeared
in New World Writing in 1960. The same year, the
Kenyon Review published "Entropy." It was quickly
anthologized, it introduced the term "entropy" into
everyday conversation, and it established the popular
image of Pynchon as a writer of postmodernist
high-tech, a literary encoder of scientific arcana.
Two dauntingly idiosyncratic novels, V. (1963) and The
Crying of Lot 49 (1966), followed, but by then Pynchon
had disappeared entirely from public view. When his
third novel, Gravity's Rainbow (1973), won a National
Book Award (it failed to get a Pulitzer after the
trustees overturned a unanimous jury recommendation),
the prize was accepted by the comedian "Professor"
Irwin Corey, a specialist in pseudo-academic
doubletalk who was apparently mistaken by some people
in the audience for Pynchon himself. Since then,
Pynchon has simply declined offers of awards for his
work. His name occasionally turns up in unexpected
contexts—last year, Esquire published his interview
with the members of a rock band called Lotion—but his
whereabouts have been mysterious, and the most recent
photograph available is the one in the 1953 Oyster Bay
High School yearbook.[2]  
 
Authorial privacy cultivated to this degree tends to
compound, rather than deflect, the problem of
celebrity by turning ordinary fans into
cultists—people who read the novels as encryptions of
the author's "message" and personal life. In Pynchon's
case, the natural tendency is to identify him with his
typical protagonist, a social dropout who sets off
with some vague notion of making sense of the flux and
ends swallowed up by it, one more electron knocking
about the universal molecule. Benny Profane and
Herbert Stencil in the double-plotted V., Oedipa Maas
in The Crying of Lot 49, and Tyrone Slothrop in
Gravity's Rainbow are incarnations of this figure, and
they are all fairly identifiably the children of Sal
Paradise in Kerouac's On the Road (1957), a book
Pynchon called "one of the great American novels."[3]
They think they're getting somewhere, they think
they're looking for someone, and then they realize
they're already where they want to be, the only place
it makes any sense to be, which is on the road. They
disappear, in effect, into the ozone, just as Pynchon
seems to have done. These heroes belong to a
distinctly late-Fifties literary type: they're dharma
bums—into popular tunes, communal drinking, dope when
they can get it, casual sex, and the odd piece of Zen
wisdom. A fifty-nine-year-old writer who emerges from
the woodwork in order to interview a bunch of
musicians in an obscure rock band (and wearing, the
band reported, jeans and a Godzilla T-shirt) conforms
to the type nicely.

The Beat influence (and Henry Miller) is responsible
for the shaggy dog appearance of Pynchon's
narratives—the sense they give of avoiding resolution
at all costs, of always being ready to introduce
another eccentric character or to invent another
surreal episode. But no one would mistake Gravity's
Rainbow for Kerouac. This is not only because Pynchon
is an infinitely more versatile stylist than
Kerouac—he is a Nabokovian virtuoso of miniature
literary effects—but because he has coated the
low-life picaresque form with an astonishingly thick
patina of scientific information, historical detail,
mythic allusion, and Joycean wordplay. On one level
his stories slosh merrily along from one
farcical-tragical episode to the next, while on
another level an enormous web of symbolic implication
is continually being woven and unwoven. It is as
though the story of Popeye the Sailorman had fallen
into the hands of Richard Wagner. This is, presumably,
the effect of the Cornell genes in Pynchon's literary
inheritance, and it is what is responsible for his
reputation as an esoteric writer, a novelist with a
message which requires an advanced knowledge of
thermodynamics, modern political history, Rilke, and
the differential calculus to decode.
 
Pynchon's fourth novel, Vineland, was published in
1990, seventeen years after Gravity's Rainbow. The new
novel, Mason & Dixon, appears only seven years later,
but Pynchon is reported to have contracted to write
the book back in 1973, so he has evidently been
thinking about the project, at least, for almost
twenty-five years. The novel is nearly as long as
Gravity's Rainbow (which is a very long book); it is
written in a pastiche of eighteenth-century prose,
studded with capitalizations, contractions, and
archaic diction; and it is, as advertised, about the
lives of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the British
astronomers who, between 1763 and 1767, established
the southern boundary of Pennsylvania—the Mason-Dixon
Line, which eventually named the border between the
slave states and the free states.

TO BE CONT'D


 
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