Before you dive into Mason and Dixon, read John Barth's Sot-Weed Factor.
I'm a Pynchon fan. I anxiously awaited the publication of Mason and Dixon. But when it finally came out in 1997, I found I couldn't read it. Time after time, I tried, but I couldn't catch the flow of the story or the rhythm of the thoughts and kept having to back-track to try to figure out what was going on. But after finally having read Sot-Weed, the archaic spellings and the bizarre circumlocutions seemed natural.
The historical setting of Mason and Dixon is in the mid 1700s, about 50 years after that of Sot-Weed. And geographically, too, they are close: Sot-Weed in England and Maryland, and Mason and Dixon primarily in England, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. There is also at least one deliberate allusion to Sot-Weed in Mason and Dixon -- excerpts from a fictitious poem entitled "The Pennsylvaniad" in mock imitation of "The Marlandiad" from Sot-Weed.
But there the similarity ends. Sot-Weed is light and humorous, with a wild, complex plot to carry you along -- an easy, if lengthy read. Mason and Dixon has its humorous moments and passages of pure brilliance, but the story line is weak and hard to follow, with no clear conflict or antagonist. Individual scenes are fascinating. Individual characters are extraordinarily memorable. But the pieces don't seem to hold together. Missing is the marvelous paranoia that held together the wild fantastic episodes and characters of Pynchon's early books -- especially V and Crying of Lot 49, but also Gravity's Rainbow. In those books, the paranoid narrator found creative and convincing ways to link together events that otherwise would seem totally unrelated (rather like Nabokov's Kinbote in Pale Fire). Here there is a narrative frame, with an old friend of Mason and Dixon telling their story to his own extended family, after the American Revolution. But the narrator does not have a unifying vision. He seems to be telling one tale after another, almost Arabian Nights' style, rather than unraveling a mystery, making clear an elaborate plot, or speaking under a guilt-ridden compulsion to confess (like the Coleridge's Ancient Mariner). Although he is a character in the story he narrates, he doesn't seem to have any real stake in what happens; and the family chatter in the frame, while sometimes amusing, doesn't seem to add to the story.
Undoubtedly, graduate students will have fun trying to make sense of it all, and justify the author's strange choices. And undoubtedly, brilliant passages from this book will find their way into the very best anthologies used by colleges throughout the English-speaking world. But, as a whole, this novel simply doesn't work -- or rather it simply makes the reader work too hard for too little.
As in the Harry Potter books, magic and the supernatural suddenly appear in the everyday world, but instead of becoming a source of mystery to be pondered and solved, they are presented matter-of-factly, elicit no where near the surprise you'd expect in the characters who encounter them, and they disappear as quickly as they appeared. Such are Fang the talking dog in London, a flying coach, Emerson the magician who takes his class on flying excursions along the lines of ancient Roman roads, the ghost of Mason's wife Rebekah, a mechanical duck that comes to life, werewolves, and a coach and a building that are bigger on the inside than on the outside.
From the historical situation, Pynchon mines every conceivable source of the supernatural belief and superstition and presents them as comically real -- including the 11 days that were removed from the old style calendar to bring in back into line with the true solar year, and the unexplained mounds left behind by native Americans who pre-dated the "Indians" European settlers found. He makes much of historical details relating to astronomy and surveying at that time, such as how difficult and important it was to determine longitude (cf. that problem in Clavell's Shogun). And he makes a fascinating leap that associates the surveying of a line of latitude -- the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania, which became the famous Mason-Dixon line separating the free North from the slave South -- with lines of magical force, ways of tapping into enormous and dangerous natural power. At times the book feels like an orgy of the esoteric, along the lines of Foucault's Pendulum by Ecco, but, once again, without pulling these pieces together, without the forward momentum of a plot that you can get caught up in and care about.
On the plus side, there's humor galore -- not only in the diction and the outlandish characters and scenes, but also in the cameo appearances of well-known historical figures, like Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington.
On the negative side, Pynchon simply abandons many of the intriguing elements that he introduces with such flare -- including the notion that the Earth might be hollow and inhabited on the inside, and the paranoic notion that the Jesuits are in cahoots with the Chinese in some world power conspiracy (a notion that seems pregnant with the paranoia that made The Crying of Lot 49 work so well).
Students who have to write about this book will find many fertile themes -- such as the nature of slavery and its equivalents in England, South Africa, Maryland, and Pennsylvania; and Protestant images of Catholicism and Jesuits in particular in the 18th century. (NB -- you have to get used to the style before you can understand, much less appreciate the wit of circumlocutions like "into the embrace of the Painted Whore herself," p. 164, which is a Protestant's way of referring to the Catholic church).
But despite the weaknesses -- which I've probably over-emphasized -- this book is well worth the time and effort of reading simply for the pleasure of individual scenes and inimitable passages such as this:
"Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream? -- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen, -- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true, -- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments, -- winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair." (p. 345)
PS -- There's a minor geographic inaccuracy, on p. 341. Pynchon has his characters, travelling west from Philadelphia, cross the Susquehanna River at Wright's Ferry to get to Lancaster. But Lancaster is east of the Susquehanna. (My parents used to live in Columbia [formerly Wright's Ferry] and also in Lancaster. And I wrote a play about Wright's Ferry during the American Revolution, entitled Rights Crossing).
Discuss books at Blogging about Books http://www.samizdat.com/blog/
Other book reviews by Richard Seltzer
Published by B&R Samizdat Express, PO Box 320-161, West Roxbury,
MA 02132-002. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
Opus authors -- contemporary
writers whose entire work is great
The Readers' Corner
and Writers Showcase
Return to B&R Samizdat Express
American Literature CD
-- over 380 books on a single CD that sells for $29
World Literature
CD -- over 470 books, including both English translations and originals,
when available, on a single CD that sells for $29
British Literature
CD -- over 720 books on a single CD that sells for $29.
Children's Book CD --
over 200 books on a single CD that sells for $29
List of recent updates
to other book CDs from Seedy Press.
| Internet Business Showcase: | ||
|
|
|