Entropology (2)

[Dave Monroe]

CONT'D

The novel has, in proper eighteenth-century style, a
narrator who poses as witness, editor, and historian.
He is a slightly sententious, vaguely unreliable,
rather sly old minister called Wicks Cherrycoke, who
claims to have traveled with Mason and Dixon and who
tells their story to assorted relatives (who freely
interrupt him to carry on their own banter) in a
Philadelphia family whom he is freeloading off during
the Christmas season of 1786. His story begins in
1761, when Mason and Dixon embark on an official
expedition to South Africa to observe the "transit of
Venus"—the passage of the planet Venus between the
earth and the sun. About a third of the book is taken
up with this adventure and with Mason's subsequent
experiences doing astronomical work on the island of
St. Helena; the rest concerns the business of
establishing the eponymous Line, which involved first
surveying the arc that now separates Delaware from
Pennsylvania, and then the cutting, by a team of
axmen, of an eight-yard-wide swath, or "Visto,"
through 244 miles of wilderness on a straight
latitudinal path from the Chesapeake Bay, over the
Alleghenies, to the Ohio River. There are a few pages
on the lives of the two men after 1767, and the book
ends with their deaths.

As a story, the novel is as desultory as it sounds. It
seems (on superficial inspection, but this sort of
historical verisimilitude is Pynchon's penchant) to
stick faithfully to the biographies of the real-life
Mason and Dixon and to the scientific details of their
work and the work of the other astronomers who figure
as characters—Nevil Maskelyne, who was indeed, as he
appears here, Royal Astronomer and the brother-in-law
of Clive of India; his predecessor and Mason's patron,
James Bradley, who was indeed the discoverer of the
aberration of light (the distortion caused, when
determining the position of a star, by the movement of
the earth and the time it takes for the star's light
to reach it); and so on.

There is a great deal of information about
eighteenth-century astronomy, metrology (the science
of measurement), and politics. The diction sometimes
seems a parody of eighteenth-century speech, but when
you look the words up in the OED, there they are. When
you read of children playing "Chuck-Farthing," you're
likely to assume that this is Pynchon's playful
back-formation from "Pitch-Penny," but the dictionary
makes it clear that the etymology runs the other way.
When Dixon, in the Dutch colony of Cape Town, becomes
addicted to a Malay sauce called "ketjap" and insists
on pouring it over everything he eats, you may take it
as a homophonic joke. But "ketjap" is the Dutch
spelling of the Malay word for what became ketchup.
You would not think there could be a town in the north
of England called Staindrop, but there is.

This historically meticulous account is shot through
with dozens of clearly fantastical tales, some
involving real personages and some involving invented
ones. As is also customary with Pynchon, none of these
tales ever develops into a significant subplot, and
characters can come into the story, hang around for a
hundred pages or longer, and then disappear, sometimes
for hundreds of pages more, sometimes forever. The
narrative machinery just seems to crank out one
fabulous yarn after another. The book is, in short, in
no great rush about getting nowhere in particular: it
is novelistically "on the road."
 
"What we were doing out in that Country together was
brave, scientifick beyond my understanding, and
ultimately meaningless," Cherrycoke remarks of Mason
and Dixon's mission at one point, and some readers may
feel this to be a fair summary of the book itself.
Putting aside the possible point of the whole
enterprise, though, the novel is, page by page,
extremely entertaining. The tone is comic without
becoming merely slapstick, and the prose never tips
over into the sort of arty and impenetrable
magniloquence that swamps the last section of
Gravity's Rainbow. Mason and Dixon are cleverly drawn
as temperamental opposites—Mason a mopey deist who is
obsessed with the ghost of his dead wife and his own
professional disappointments, Dixon a cheery Quaker
whose sorties in search of erotic adventure are
frequently spoiled by the effects of his colleague's
damp personality. They can stand each other's company,
but just barely, and their continual bickering becomes
one of the leitmotifs of the book, and forms, in the
end, the basis for a rather touching friendship of a
very inarticulate, very "guy" sort. This is, in
Hollywood terms, a buddy story.

Almost all the characters, even the bit parts, are
drawn with the same deft touch—as recognizable types
in eighteenth-century dress. They come onto the page
with an attitude, and Pynchon's success in getting
them to sound contemporary and colonial at the same
time is quite remarkable. One of the fabulous
characters, for example, is a talking dog, known
professionally as the Learnèd Dog, or, as he prefers,
Fang. The dog is chatting with Mason and Dixon and a
sailor named Bodine (the avatar of a certain naval
hipster who turns up in many of Pynchon's books,
though happily infrequently in this one) while "a
small, noisy party of Fops, Macaronis, or
Lunarians,—it is difficult quite to distinguish
which,—has been working its way up the street and into
Ear-shot." (Macaroni was an eighteenth-century term
for an effeminate young man who affected Continental
manners.) Mason has been twitting the dog by pointing
out that natives in the Indies enjoy a dish known as
"Dog in Palm Leaf."

"Oh I say, Dog in Palm Leaf, what nonsense," comments
one of the Lunarians, "—really, far too sensitive, I
mean really, Dog? In Palm Leaf? Civiliz'd Humans have
better things to do than go about drooling after Dog
in Palm Leaf or whatever, don't we Algernon?"

"Could you possibly," inquired the Terrier, head
cocked in some Annoyance, "not keeping saying that? I
do not say things like, 'Macaroni Italian Style,' do
I, nor 'Fop Fricasée,'—"

"Why, you beastly little—"

"Grrr! and your deliberate use of 'drooling,' Sir, is
vile."

The Lunarian reaches for his Hanger. "Perhaps we may
settle this upon the spot, Sir."

"Derek? You're talking to a D-O-G?" 

"Tho' your weapon put me under some Handicap," points
out the Dog, "in fairness, I should mention my late
feelings of Aversion to water? Which may, as you know,
signal the onset of the Hydrophobia. Yes! The Great H.
And should I get in past your Blade for a few playful
nips, and manage to, well, break the old Skin,—why,
then you should soon have caught the same, eh?"
Immediately 'round the Dog develops a circle of
Absence, of about a fathom's radius, later recall'd by
both Astronomers as remarkably regular in shape. "Nice
doggie!" "'Ere,—me last iced Cake, that me Mum sent me
all 'e way from Bahf. You take i'." "What think yese?
I'll give two to one the Fop's Blood'll be the first
to show."

"Sounds fair," says Fender Bodine. "I fancy the
Dog,—anyone else?"

"Oughtn't we to summon the Owners
?" suggests Mr.
Dixon.

The Dog has begun to pace back and forth. "I am a
British Dog, Sir. No one owns me."
 
This play between twentieth-century tone and
eighteenth-century form is maintained throughout.
Sometimes the joke gets rather broad. Mason, at one
point, takes a walk in Battery Park in New York, where
he picks up (or is picked up by) a "Milk-Maid of
Brooklyn" named Amy, who

is dress'd from Boots to Bonnett all in different
Articles of black, a curious choice of colors for a
milkmaid, it seems to Mason, tho', as he has been
instructed ever to remind himself, this is New-York,
where other Customs prevail. "Oh, aye, at home they're
on me about it without Mercy," she tells him, "I'm,
as, 'But I like Black,'—yet my Uncle, he's, as,
'Strangers will take you for I don't know what,' hey."

She turns up again a hundred pages later married to an
"Italian Waggon-smith" (the eighteenth-century
equivalent of an auto mechanic, presumably) and living
in Massapequa—a kind of colonial Amy Fisher.

Occasionally, broad is not the word for it. When Mason
and Dixon visit George Washington, still a colonel, he
turns out to have a black slave who moonlights as a
Jewish stand-up comedian specializing in truly
dreadful "King-Joaks"—as in: "The King is jesting with
one of his Ambassadors. 'Damme,' he cries, 'if you
don't look like some great dishevel'd Sheep!'
Ambassador replies, 'I know that I've had the honor,
several times, to represent your Majesty's Person."'
"You can see what I have to put up with," Washington
confides to Mason and Dixon. "It's makin' me just
mee-shugginah."

Mason and Dixon encounter Benjamin Franklin, wearing a
pair of sunglasses of his own invention and dispensing
extremely poor Poor-Richardisms ("Strangers, heed my
wise advice,—Never pay the Retail Price"). They meet
Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Dr. Johnson.
There are fanatical Jesuits who plot to construct a
secret global communications network using giant
balloons as satellites; fanatical anti-Jesuits,
principally a former Chinese convert named Captain
Zhang; women with names like Frau Luise Redzinger and
the oversexed daughters of a Dutch family in Cape Town
called the Vrooms. Popeye himself shows up to offer
Mason a helpful gloss on a Hebrew passage he is trying
to make sense of: "'That is, "I am that which I am,"'
helpfully translates a somehow nautical-looking Indiv.
with gigantick Fore-Arms, and one Eye ever a-Squint
from the Smoke of his Pipe." There is a mechanical
duck who is amorously smitten with a French chef, a
performing electric eel, a man who turns into a beaver
when the full moon is out, a huge evil worm, talking
clocks, a watch that runs on perpetual motion, and a
Golem. There is a series of Gothic romances everyone
seems to be reading called The Ghastly Fop, one
installment of which mysteriously becomes part of the
main story.

Dixon has learned, as a young man, to fly. As an older
man, he visits the people who live underneath the
surface of the earth. Mason talks with the ghost of
his dead wife. When eleven days are added to the
English calendar to make it conform to the New Style,
he manages to enter into and live through the missing
eleven days. Mounds made by Indians, or possibly by
extraterrestrial visitors, are shown to possess
strange magnetic powers. Mason & Dixon is, in short, a
kind of bricolage of eighteenth-century science,
religion, philosophy, myth, fable, and superstition,
all treated on the same narrative plane, as equally
true and equally fantastic.

TO BE CONT'D


 
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