Webb Traverse

[Tore Rye Andersen]

In reply to Daniel Harper's suggestion that M&D and AtD were "originally 
conceived of as companion pieces," David Morris wrote:

>Would you care to elaborate?  So far I haven't read anything in AtD
>that illuminates MD, but I'd like to hear how it has for you.

Perhaps it would be better to say that AtD and M&D illuminate each other. 
Having read M&D one is much better prepared to read AtD, and reading AtD 
helps one to understand M&D better.
I think there are numerous formal and thematical similarities between the 
two novels, but rather than providing an exhaustive catalogue I'll just try 
to point to a few of them:

- Both are vast historical novels set on a cusp of historical change, and 
both novels are ambitious attempts to salvage numerous ideas from the 
dustbin of history. Pynchon tries to reproduce how people thought and what 
they believed in, and this includes describing ideas that posterity have 
more or less discarded as just as valid as the ideas that eventually won 
out. Both M&D and AtD in a sense try to show us different historical periods 
as the people living in them saw them, rather than as we normally see them 
from our privileged (?) retrospective vantage point.

- Both novels are to a large extent written in the literary style of the 
period in question. This stylistical choice seems partly designed to draw 
the reader into the mindset of the period described (as opposed to, say, 
John Barth's 'The Sot-Weed Factor', which seems to be first and foremost a 
pastiche - what Fredric Jameson has called "blank parody." While Pynchon 
certainly also has fun with the period style of M&D and AtD, he seems to aim 
much higher than a mere pastiche).

- The stories of "The Chums of Chance" function in a similar way to "The 
Ghastly Fop" in M&D: Characters in both novels read and enjoy these 
colourful adventure stories, AND they also interact with the characters in 
those stories. Thus, both serialized narratives-within-the-narrative blur 
the boundaries between fiction and reality in much the same way.

- Both novels depict central characters who abandon their families to take 
care of some higher purpose. Mason abandons his sons in order to go to 
America, and Webb abandons his family in favour of his anarchistic ideals, 
and in both M&D and AtD Pynchon shows us the devastating consequences for 
those left behind.

- The railroads in AtD are more or less depicted as the natural continuation 
of the Visto in M&D. Both are in a sense a rape of nature, and in both 
novels the characters are warned against continuing this rape (the ghosts in 
the woods try to get Mason and Dixon to turn back, and the Tatzelwurm in AtD 
try to warn the railroad engineers off).

The list of similarities could continue (and I'd be happy to supply more 
examples). Having said that, though, I don't so much see M&D and AtD in 
particular as companion pieces: rather, I see them as natural parts of 
Pynchon's work in general. While AtD has much in common with M&D, it has 
just as much in common with Vineland, and perhaps even more in common with 
GR. My guess is that both M&D and AtD were part of the larger plan conceived 
by the young and ferociously ambitious Pynchon back in the 60'es: a plan 
which also included GR. We know that Pynchon was working seriously on a 
novel about the Mason-Dixon line as early as 1975, and it seems very likely 
that he was working on AtD - at least researching it - concurrently with his 
work on M&D. My guess is that he has probably written the majority of AtD in 
the years since M&D's publication, but that he has thought about the novel 
and researched it for much longer than that.

/Tore

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