American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon

AMERICAN POSTMODERNITY: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon

Ian D. Copestake Editor

PETER LANG

AMERICAN POSTMODERNITY

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ian d. copestake (ed.)

AMERICAN POSTMODERNITY essays on the recent fiction of thomas pynchon

PETER LANG OXFORD • BERN • BERLIN • BRUXELLES • FRANKFURT AM MAIN • NEW YORK • WIEN

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.ddb.de›. British Library and Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain, and from The Library of Congress, USA

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ISBN 3-03910-017-3 US-ISBN 0-8204-6286-1

© Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2003 Hochfeldstrasse 32, Postfach 746, CH-3000 Bern 9, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany

Contents

IAN D. COPESTAKE Introduction Postmodern Reflections: The Image of an Absent Author

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DAVID SEED Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49

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DAVID DICKSON Pynchon’s Vineland and “That Fundamental Agreement in What is Good and Proper”: What Happens when we Need to Change it?

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DAVID THOREEN In which “Acts Have Consequences”: Ideas of Moral Order in the Qualified Postmodernism of Pynchon’s Recent Fiction

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FRANCISCO COLLADO RODRÍGUEZ Mason & Dixon, Historiographic Metafiction and the Unstable Reconciliation of Opposites

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WILLIAM B. MILLARD Delineations of Madness and Science: Mason & Dixon, Pynchonian Space and the Snovian Disjunction

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MARTIN SAAR AND CHRISTIAN SKIRKE “The Realm of Velocity and Spleen”: Reading Hybrid Life in Mason & Dixon

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Contents

JOHN HEON Surveying the Punch Line: Jokes and their Relation to the American Racial Unconscious/Conscience in Mason & Dixon and the Liner Notes to Spiked!

147

ROBERT L. MCLAUGHLIN Surveying, Mapmaking and Representation in Mason & Dixon

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IAN D. COPESTAKE “Off the Deep End Again”: Sea-Consciousness and Insanity in The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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IAN D. COPESTAKE

Introduction Postmodern Reflections: The Image of an Absent Author

The title of this collection of essays could well have contained a question mark after its first phrase, for although the American context of Thomas Pynchon’s fictional, historical and cultural concerns is not in doubt, the terms of his relationship to that most nebulous of categories, “postmodernism,” continues to be. Gathered here are nine essays which, both directly and indirectly, strive to make sense of that relationship and so give substance to that absent question mark. The publication in 1997 of Mason & Dixon provided an opportunity for assessing critical lines of connection with Pynchon’s past work at a time when possible shifts in direction had been perceived.1 Furthermore his work’s relationship to postmodernism was especially helpful in bringing to light these perceived developments in Pynchon’s work not least because they appeared to mirror shifts in the currency and character of postmodernism itself. Hans Bertens, for instance, defines changes in the nature of the postmodern within the literary field from the 1960s to the present day which have led, he argues, to the emergence of two postmodernisms: 1

Recent book-length studies and collections of essays which have also surveyed these lines in Pynchon’s work include Joakim Sigvardson’s Immanence and Transcendence in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon: A Phenomenological Study. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 2002; Blissful Bewilderment: Studies in the Fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Eds. Anne Mangen and Rolf Gaasland. Oslo: Novus Press, 2002; Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins. Ed. Niran Abbas. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson, 2002; Pynchon and Mason & Dixon. Eds. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000; Charles Clerc. Mason & Dixon & Pynchon. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2000.

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Ian D. Copestake The first postmodernism is the familiar one: in this sense the term refers to a set of loosely connected artistic innovations and strategies that begin to manifest themselves in the early 1960s (Thomas Pynchon’s V. [1963]), reach their highwater mark in the course of the 1970s (with, for instance, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow [1973], Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra [1975], Robert Coover’s The Public Burning [1976] and George Perec’s La Vie: mode d’emploi [1978]), and go into decline after the mid-1980s. (10)

Bertens identifies a second postmodernism as “the postmodernism of difference,” (10) which reflects the impact of French postructuralist thinking within the academic confines to which postmodernism had retreated by the 1980s. The key point here is that Pynchon’s work is central to the marking out of such shifts and continues to be so in the wake of the sense of change which Vineland (1990), his novel of eighties America, seemed to confirm through its more overtly “realistic” and political style and content. Another critic with an eye on the changing nature of postmodernity, Frank Palmeri, also positions Pynchon (along with Foucault) as central to his sense of a movement, whereby a moment of high postmodernism dominant in the sixties, seventies, and eighties has been succeeded by two forms of cultural expression that have continuities with, yet depart from, this cultural mode and stand in contrast to each other. A new structure of thought and expression that I call other than postmodern remains the less prominent and popular mode, by contrast with a late postmodernism that has been the dominant form of production in the nineties and the first years of the new century. (para. 1)

For Palmeri postmodernism encompasses A set of concerns and formal operations – including a frequent use of irony, satire, and pastiche, an interest in the layering of historical interpretations, and a strong paranoid strand – while also signifying the period from the mid-sixties until perhaps the present when most, but not necessarily all, of these features have been prominent. (para. 2)

The shift to an “other than postmodern” which Pynchon’s most recent fiction helps him elucidate is signified by a move “away from the representation of extreme paranoia, toward a vision of local ethicopolitical possibilities” (para. 5). In this we come back to an earlier

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definition of literary postmodernism put forward, as Bertens reminds us, by Linda Hutcheon in The Politics of Postmodernism (1989): [Hutcheon] tells us that “postmodernism is a phenomenon whose mode is resolutely contradictory as well as unavoidably political” (1). It “ultimately manages to install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the conventions and presuppositions it appears to challenge” (1–2) and it can do so because in a further contradiction it “juxtaposes and gives equal value to the self-reflexive and the historically-grounded” (2). In other words, the postmodern art that is Hutcheon’s subject here is simultaneously referential and non-referential, political (because of its referentiality) and apolitical (because of its self-reflexivity). (7)

What the essays in this collection also argue for is the continued importance to Pynchon’s work of its political and ethical seriousness. Reinstated is an awareness of Pynchon’s acute sense of the ethical possibilities inherent in individual human action, over and against the passive acceptance of a sterile relativism. Reflected in Pynchon’s work is the movement which is seen to be occurring in perceptions of postmodernism, argued for by Palmeri and Bertens, which reinstate or reconfirms the relationship between the political and the postmodern. However, as the essays in this collection also reflect such lines of connection between Pynchon and postmodernism must be informed by an awareness of the author’s own positioning in relation to this and other forms of definition. The relationship between Pynchon’s fiction and the array of styles, strategies and questions which postmodernism embodies is one that he has had no responsibility for directly determining other than to have produced a body of work which for a generation of critics has resounded with significance with postmodernism’s perceived characteristics. Pynchon can thus claim to be as far removed from any adherence to critical assertions of literary postmodernism’s identity as he can equally claim to be one of its foremost practitioners. That he chooses publicly to do neither allows his work to flow freely across the boundaries and borders which such definitions place upon it. The aim of such categorical assumptions, of Pynchon as postmodern writer, is not, however, to kill the work by pinning it down, but to hold it stationary for long enough that its possibilities can

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be viewed and communicated for others to argue and agree with as they see fit. The work itself, reflecting Pynchon’s reclusive detachment from any conventional identification of himself with authorship and fame, is free from any obligations laid down by such definitions. The irony is, of course, that it is precisely that slipperiness which makes him for many the embodiment of a postmodernism which seeks to “install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the conventions and presuppositions it appears to challenge.” With Mason & Dixon came a novel about line-drawing and boundary-making, which, moreover, chose for its historical setting the impact of Enlightenment thought on the divisions and definitions which constitute America’s achievement of national self-identity. Postmodernity of course continues to gain both its impetus and identity from a reaction to (and hence an intimate relationship with) the same intellectual heritage. Pynchon’s most recent fiction is once again an open invitation for the exploration of such parallels. Of the nine essays which follow five look closely at Mason & Dixon, and these first cut their teeth as papers presented at King’s College, London between 10 and 13 June 1998, a conference which will live long in the collective memory of all who attended it. The remaining four offer connecting perspectives with Pynchon’s previous work through contexts which aid our understanding of his fiction in relation to evolving notions of American postmodernism. David Seed’s essay “Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49,” underlines the importance of cultural mediation to Pynchon’s fiction in general, and examines the particular relationship between The Crying of Lot 49 and the work of Marshall McLuhan. The tension between means of information transfer and the message conveyed is underlined by Seed’s focus on the role of such media in the novel as the telephone, film, visual and cultural spaces and finally fiction itself. The constant deferral of meaning which both Oedipa Maas and the reader experience in the course of the novel point towards the need to re-evaluate the relationship between media and meaning which McLuhan had been amongst the first to foreground. David Dickson writes on “Pynchon’s Vineland and ‘That Fundamental Agreement in What is Good and Proper’: What Happens when We Need to Change it?” Central to Dickson’s discussion of

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Vineland is the question of the viability of individual action when measured against the pressures of historical and cultural conceptions of social value and meaning. By referring to the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s views on history and cultural change, the author suggests that Pynchon’s novel offers a critique of the hermeneutic theory of experience while holding out the possibility for the renegotiation of value within specific historical moments. The relationship between individual action and history is also a vital concern in David Thoreen’s essay, “In Which ‘Acts Have Consequences’: Ideas of Moral Order in the Qualified Postmodernism of Pynchon’s Recent Fiction.” Thoreen refutes the critical suggestion that Pynchon’s oeuvre embraces postmodern challenges to historiography to the extent that he rejects ideas of cause and effect. Pynchon is positioned as a postmodernist for whom not all is indeterminacy in action or knowledge but rather the need to know and act are vital determining factors in the critical relationship to history which Pynchon’s fiction promotes. This is highlighted with regard to American history in particular through Thoreen’s subsequent reading of Vineland in relation to Washington Irving’s political parable “Rip Van Winkle.” With the following essays we cross a boundary-line into considerations of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. In “Mason & Dixon, Historiographic Metafiction and the Unstable Reconcilliation of Opposites,” Francisco Collado Rodríguez highlights the subversive character of Pynchon’s use of metafictional devices to disrupt objectives notions of history. Mason & Dixon is a novel in which historical knowledge and the art of the fiction-maker fuse. For Collado, what results is Pynchon’s attempt to negotiate the paradox whereby the human need to give order and meaning to reality through narratives is both a barrier to historical knowledge and a vital means by which individuals can empower themselves against the despotic imposition of lines of demarcation, categorisation and difference. William B. Millard’s argues in his essay “Delineations of Madness and Science: Mason & Dixon, Pynchonian Space and the Snovian Disjunction,” that Mason & Dixon is both a novel of science and anti-science which confirms Pynchon’s continued desire to run the line between debates on this issue, including C. P. Snow’s

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influential 1959 lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” As a writer Pynchon is acutely concerned at the antagonism between non-secular systems of belief and secular scientific reason, and Millard argues that Pynchon’s latest work confirms his distance from perspectives which are politically fatalistic or reliant solely on relativism. Instead Pynchon continues not only to resist and problematize the drawing of lines between notions of modern and postmodern, science and scientific Luddism, but that this provides the impetus for his own project of illumination. The essay co-authored by Christian Skirke and Martin Saar, “‘The Realm of Velocity and Spleen’: Reading Hybrid Life in Mason & Dixon,” underlines the central role of notions of hybridity in a novel which presents a typology of unreal creatures and composite creations. Throughout Pynchon’s work notions of progress and rationality have given rise to monstrous imaginings which combine the unreal with the historically all too real. In Mason & Dixon European and American history abounds with such creations, both humane and inhumane, and it is the memorable figure of the “automatic Duck” which Skirke and Saar highlight in this essay in order to read notions of hybridity in Pynchon’s novel. John Heon also looks at Pynchon’s utilisation of hybrid forms to disrupt categories of thought and convention, by focusing on the importance to his work of comic traditions exemplified by the work and career of Spike Jones. “Surveying the Punch Line: Jokes and their Relation to the American Racial Unconscious/Conscience in Mason & Dixon and the Liner Notes to Spiked!” sees Heon elucidate Pynchon’s project by analysing the role of laughter and the masking joker in giving credence to the shared seriousness of Pynchon’s and Jones’s “minstrelizing” of American history. “Surveying, Mapmaking and Representation in Mason & Dixon” sees Robert L. McLaughlin read Pynchon’s novel in relation to conceptions of mapmaking which reflect Pynchon’s own efforts to lay bare the power and prevalence of non-neutral and ideologically weighted processes of meaning-making. McLaughlin argues that a vital part of the drama of Mason & Dixon is the protagonists’ dawning realisation of their position as victims of the maps they are employed to draw. Their complicity in serving interests beyond the initially

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undoubted objectivity of scientific line-drawing, provides a spur towards moral action and resistance. Ian D. Copestake’s essay “‘Off the Deep End Again’: SeaConsciousness and Insanity in The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon,” highlights Pynchon’s fictional preoccupation with forms of insanity throughout his career, and through his analysis of Mason & Dixon charts its relationship to Pynchon’s entry into an American tradition of sea-writing. The history of delusion and its medical treatment is seen as central to this novel’s continuation of Pynchon’s career-long project of exposing the contradictions inherent in the human need for definitions and the insanity which results from their imposition across the globe. Taken together these essays constitute a further step towards understanding Pynchon’s evolving and ever-challenging oeuvre and offer a variety of perspectives which reflect the fascination he continues to hold for so many readers. This book will also appeal to those who are interested in Pynchon’s relationship to the ongoing debate over the status, currency and nature of American postmodernity at the end of that country’s century.2

Works Cited Bertens, Hans. “In Defense of the Bourgeois Postmodern.” Postmodernism and the Fin de Siècle. Eds. Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung. Heidelburg: Winter, 2002: 1–11. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989. Palmeri, Frank. “Other than Postmodern? Foucault, Pynchon, Hybridity, Ethics.” Postmodern Culture 12. 1 (2001): 39 pars. 02 December 2002 . 2

The editor wishes to thank Graham Speake and David Edmonds for their assistance in the production of this volume, and also John Krafft and Niran Abbas for their advice and encouragement. Every publication carries with it an untold story of the struggle it has gone through to see the light of day and this is no exception. Final heartfelt thanks go to Rocío Montoro and Diederik Oostdijk for their editorial expertise and support.

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DAVID SEED

Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49

To say that the sixties was the decade of the mass media is scarcely an exaggeration. American novelists complained repeatedly of being displaced. Bruce Jay Friedman introduced his 1965 anthology of black humour by declaring that “the satirist has had his ground usurped by the newspaper reporter” and in his 1960 essay “Writing American Fiction” Philip Roth described a related media-induced estrangement which brought the “writer of fiction to feel that he does not really live in his own country.”1 The writings of Marshall McLuhan pioneered the study of the media which were bringing about such perceptions and also provided an account of the “decentring of the subject” which Arthur Marwick has compared to the French neo-Marxists.2 McLuhan’s writings open up a productive line of inquiry specifically into Pynchon’s fiction since they help explain the latter’s concern with cultural mediation. The Mechanical Bride (1951), for instance, explores the “interfusion of sex and technology” promoted by advertising and the popular press, arguing: It is not a feature created by the ad men, but it seems rather to be born of a hungry curiosity to explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique on one hand, and, on the other, to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way. (94A, McLuhan’s emphasis)

The erotic attachment of characters in V. to high-speed cars and Pynchon’s juxtaposition of human actions to mechanisms reflect a process similar to that diagnosed by McLuhan where the self becomes extended into its own technology. Such extensions had already been described in the near-future world of Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo (1952) where prosthetic limbs are designed to substitute a rational means of 1 2

Friedman x; Roth 177. See Marwick 310.

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control over “natural” human aggression. Ironically, the attempt fails when the prosthetics emerge as even more powerful weapons, “arms” in both senses, than their originals. Wolfe describes designer limbs; Pynchon’s obsessive V-searcher Stencil imagines the latest embodiment of V as a designer construct where technology has achieved a new kind of beauty by displacing the body: skin radiant with the bloom of some new plastic; both eyes glass but now containing photoelectric cells, connected by silver electrodes to optic nerves of purest copper wire and leading to a brain exquisitely wrought as a diode matrix could ever be. Solenoid relays would be her ganglia, servo-actuators move her flawless nylon limbs, hydraulic fluid be sent by a platinum heart-pump through butyrate veins and arteries. (411, emphases added)

The value terms here suggest not only an ideal simulation of body functions but also a female construct to be enjoyed by male “operators.” The dramatization of such a figure in action had to wait for the cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s and after; here it remains a static image, a visual speculation on a technological possibility. In The Mechanical Bride McLuhan still retains the concept of an autonomous self gradually being invaded or displaced by technology. His sixties writings on the media move away from this by privileging the figure of the mosaic. Introducing The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), he describes the latter as the only viable approach to examining the contemporary cultural situation: The present book develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a mosaic image of numerous data and quotations in evidence offers the only practical means of revealing causal operations in history. (1)

McLuhan admitted in an interview that he was a compulsive “pattern watcher” and he weaves his concern with pattern into a series of works which develop Modernist collage into a medium of inquiry (Letters 117). In 1964 he was asked to write an essay on William Burroughs’s fiction and responded with enthusiasm to the “cut-up” method of Naked Lunch and Nova Express because they seemed to be using discontinuity to imitate the processes whereby the environment is perceived:

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To read the daily newspaper in its entirety is to encounter the method in all its purity. Similarly, an evening watching television programmes is an experience in a corporate form – an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative. Burroughs is unique only in that he is attempting to reproduce in prose what we accommodate every day as a commonplace aspect of life in the electric age. (“Notes on Burroughs” 69)

In Burroughs McLuhan found a confirmation of his own awareness of “media as environment” (Letters 312) and of the following process of externalisation: “In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness” (Understanding Media 57). Throughout Understanding Media (1964), the work that bears most directly on The Crying of Lot 49, McLuhan stresses how the media have extended – his key word – the human consciousness into the environment. Pynchon too in The Crying of Lot 49 describes motor cars as “motorized, metal extensions” (8) of their owners. McLuhan’s new emphasis comes with his insistence that the media are means above all of information transfer. Predictably this conviction leads McLuhan to privilege information in human life: “Under electric technology the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing.” (Understanding Media 58) This proposition helps to explain why, as several critics have noted, Pynchon draws on the detective genre in The Crying of Lot 49 since this is a literary mode which revolves around the gathering and processing of information. McLuhan’s famous division between “hot” and “cool” media is drawn according to the information of each medium, which, he stresses, has nothing to do with the content of messages through the respective media. The startling originality of his approach was firstly to draw scholarly attention to the mass media themselves and secondly to project a cultural model of interlocking systems for information transfer. This field of systems finds expression in The Crying of Lot 49, as we shall see, generating both its comedy and its darker side. McLuhan for his part in Understanding Media glimpses a utopian end-point of totally shared knowing. The final phase of the extension of man will come “when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society”; but in the meantime, we have to negotiate the solicitations of the

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media: “This is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric implosion that compels commitment and participation, quite regardless of any ‘point of view’” (3–4).. If this makes the present age sound like science fiction, so be it, McLuhan would say. In his “Notes on Burroughs” he recognises the contemporary threat of the most ominous technological form of the Cold War: “We live science fiction. The bomb is our environment” (73).3 For Pynchon too the bomb defines the Cold War situation. In V. he explores the cultural polarities which culminate in the super-power confrontations of that period; in Gravity’s Rainbow the bomb is the ultimate in a series of devices produced by a death-haunted technology. As befits its emphasis on media processes, The Crying of Lot 49 presents in Yoyodyne an instance of the aerospace corporations supporting military technology, similar to Boeing in Seattle where Pynchon himself worked for a year. The bomb, however, is only a focal object within a vast complex of networks and his sense of inter-connection leads McLuhan to stress again and again that we cannot understand one medium without considering its relation to others. Even the concept of understanding needs revision in the light of contemporary technology since, he declares: Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the whole situation, and not a single level of information movement (Understanding Media 26, McLuhan’s emphases).

Already it should be clear how McLuhan’s theories are beginning to approach a version of postmodernism. In developing his unified field theory of the media McLuhan drew on Kenneth Boulding’s 1956 study The Image, among other things for Boulding’s notion of boundary breaking where systems merge into other systems.4 Apart from the proliferation of signifying systems, McLuhan denies any referential ground in the media by arguing that

3 4

McLuhan described his own Mechanical Bride as “really a new form of science fiction” (Letters 217). By “image” Boulding means the locatedness of an individual in organisations, etc.

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the only way to understand one medium is in terms of another.5 He made sharply ironic comments on Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image (1962), despite the proximity of Boorstin’s material to McLuhan’s, accusing the other of giving a “literary,” and so anachronistic, interpretation of what was happening. Boorstin explains that The Image considers a CENTRAL PARADOX – that the rise of images and of our power over the world blurs rather than sharpens the outlines of reality […]. There is hardly a corner of our daily behaviour where the multiplication of images, the products and by-products of the Graphic Revolution, have not befogged the simplest old everyday distinctions. (228–29)

Boorstin’s use of the term “image” awkwardly focuses on the vocabulary of the media whereas McLuhan insistently stays with their syntax; but even more importantly, Boorstin implies an accessible reality against which commercialised representations can be measured. This assumption was being brought into question by US novelists in the sixties. For example, from at least 1959 (Time Out of Joint) onwards in works such as The Penultimate Truth (1964) and Dr Bloodmoney (1965), Philip K. Dick had been dramatising how the media were being used for reality management. In Dick’s writings the media are used again and again to promote political deception and commercial exploitation. McLuhan too argues that the media have always had such problematic effects as those Boorstin describes – and so therefore they cannot be unique to the present age – but then by minimising content he appears to make it impossible to recuperate meaning in any way other than transfer. We can only approach meaning, he suggests, by moving laterally across an endless sequence of media. It is appropriate that the protagonist of The Crying of Lot 49 should be a figure with a minimal past and social context since the narrative takes her through an extended present where she is constantly trying to decipher the cultural signs which bombard her. 5

McLuhan’s notion of content is problematic, though he never quite reaches the extreme position of Jean Baudrillard who extends McLuhan’s theories to justify a reading of cultural forms as simulations endlessly re-imaging each other.

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The first medium which Pynchon foregrounds in the novel, the telephone, had already been used in Burdick and Wheeler’s 1962 political thriller Fail-Safe which describes how the world moves to the brink of nuclear holocaust when a squadron of American bombers erroneously flies into Soviet air space with instructions to attack designated targets. Here the telephone supplies a means of communication between different sections of Strategic Air Command but, more importantly, between the American and Soviet premiers. Ironically, the crisis is brought about by technological failure, that of the so-called fail-safe mechanism which would order the bombers back to base. So one means of communication is used to counter the failure of another. The new “conference line,” the “hot line” as it became known, turns the limitations of the medium to political advantage in its abstraction of discourse into isolated verbal utterances. For Burdick and Wheeler the line frees the premiers from the scrutiny of public spectacle and hence from the need to adopt obligatory postures. It is also a double means of communication in the sense that the US President’s translator has to examine Krushchev’s tone and style for meta-messages which authenticate his spoken words. A year after Fail-Safe, the telephone figured once again in a nuclear drama, but this time one where communications break down and technology slips out of human control. Dr Strangelove subverts the decorum of political negotiation by opening up a grotesque gap of scale between the prosaic difficulties the US President has in communicating between his Soviet opposite number. In the film the President is told to try “Omsk information” for the premier’s number and, once he does get through, he discovers that the latter is drunk and almost inaudible over loud music. Later when an officer discovers the recall code for the bombers, there is more comic business when he almost fails to call the President from a pay telephone. In Dr Strangelove there is a mismatch between the comic familiarity of the difficulties of using the telephone and the scale of the mounting crisis. Such problems of connecting recur repeatedly in William Gaddis’s 1976 dialogue novel JR where the telephone becomes the means by which the protagonist builds up his paper “empire” of companies. Every telephone conversation in that novel falls victim to distortion,

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interruption and misconception – so much so that the medium becomes an entropic channel of disorder. Pynchon similarly shows the telephone to be a disruptive force, taking a lead from two perceptions from McLuhan. Firstly, it is an “irresistible intruder in time or place”; secondly, it “demands complete participation” (Understanding Media 271, 267). When Oedipa receives a call early one morning it induces horror, “so out of nothing did it come, the instrument one second inert, the next screaming” (10). Neither Pynchon nor McLuhan consider the variations in volume; the phone is either ringing or not. And just as it blanks out the physicality of the communicator, so it technologically stylises the voice, indeed becomes a substitute voice, hence the “screaming.” The ghost in Oedipa Maas’s machine is Pierce Inverarity who is perceived primarily as a remembered voice doing a performance over the phone which compels participation from Oedipa: there had come this long-distance call, from where she would never know […] by a voice beginning in heavy Slavic tones as a second secretary at the Transylvanian Consulate, looking for an escaped bat; modulated to comicNegro, then on into hostile Pachuco dialect, full of chingas and maricones; then a Gestapo asking her in shrieks did she have relatives in Germany and finally his Lamont Cranston voice (6).

The “call” is only one of the many instances where the media solicit Oedipa’s attention, “call” being one of the synonyms for the verbal noun in the novel’s title. Although voice is the only way identity can be established on the telephone, that of Oedipa’s caller is screened through a series of guises which range from comic pastiche through different degrees of (simulated) aggression. “Crying” then suggests a process similar to Althusser’s interpellation where Oedipa is constantly being offered gobbets of information and being drawn into the possible systems which make this information meaningful. As N. Katherine Hayles has shown, the initial figures of enclosure (room, tower, etc.) give way to metaphors of exposure and entrapment (102–5). The comic game of Strip Botticelli she plays in the Echo Courts motel mimes out this shift as an opening up of the self to the media. McLuhan describes clothes as offering a “means of defining the self socially” (Understanding Media

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119). Accordingly when Oedipa sheds her clothes, she is removing her assumptions of stable individuality and entering a network of relations which will disorient her more and more severely as the novel progresses. One commentator on McLuhan notes that “the spectator becomes part of the system or process and must supply the connections” (Johansen 263) and this is exactly what happens to Oedipa. Throughout the novel she is shown to be surrounded by a dynamic environment which bombards her with information. The final guise in Pierce’s quoted series, as a number of commentators have pointed out, is taken from Maxwell Grant’s Shadow stories which ran from 1930 to 1949 in magazine form, was revived in 1963 as paperback novels, and which also were broadcast over the radio. Lamont Cranston is a successful business entrepreneur heading a large organisation with a female side-kick named Margo (the role opened up for Oedipa in the performance quoted above) and described as follows: The guise of Lamont Cranston was the major alter-ego the black-cloaked Avenger presented to the world to disguise his activities in the never-ending war against all evil. (11)

The Shadow is figured iconically as a dark shape which can flit from place to place with limitless versatility. In other words, we have the case of Pierce simulating an artist of simulations, one of the earliest instances of recessive layering in The Crying of Lot 49. The urban cultural spaces are opened up for Oedipa by the fact that she steps outside her rented car and thereby places herself within fields of cultural data. Pynchon is far too sceptical not to question the traditional use of the car as a means of liberating discovery and presents it instead as an initial buffering of Oedipa against experience. Similarly the freeways described in the novel are abstracted into information highways where she speculates on connections or seeks new ones. The city replaces her initial familiar setting of Kinneret as the site for new and complex perceptions. Pynchon knew of Jane Jacobs’s 1961 analysis of town planning The Death and Life of Great American Cities which, as one commentator suggests, “shows that what makes American cities so unbearable is that one must live in

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complete isolation or in an intolerable promiscuity” (Dupuy 5). Oedipa’s urban experience also oscillates between these poles. At one point, as we shall see in a moment, she experiences a stream of encounters with city-dwellers; at another, she registers an ultimate, immobilizing isolation where irreconcilable interpretations of her experience paralyse her. Oedipa comes to experience what Michael Harrington designated the “other America.” In his 1962 study of American poverty with that title he discusses the invisible poor, those people never seen by the more prosperous “tourists.” “Middle-class women coming in from Suburbia,” he comments, “may catch the merest glimpse of the other America on the way to an evening at the theatre” (12); but it will remain just that – a glimpse. Oedipa is introduced to the reader as the very type of the suburban housewife attending Tupperware parties, i.e. the commercial simulations of social events. She responds to different urban scenes as if she is entering unknown cultural areas. Harrington points to a fragmentation of the USA into isolated regions of poverty which are sometimes visited by internal tourists. Oedipa too describes herself several times as a tourist. During her pivotal experience of San Francisco by night she enters the spaces of homosexuals, children, Chinatown and others, appropriating the city to herself without the usual insulation of tourism: The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safepassage tonight to its far blood’s branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameful municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. (81)

This sounds like an exhilarating sequence but her passage lies through an “infected city” whose operative codes she still has not quite penetrated. Here Pynchon conflates labyrinth with organism as if Oedipa is making her way through a single body. The shifting metaphors – typical of the novel’s discourse – destabilise her terrain while at the same time tantalizing her (and the reader) with its interconnections. In The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan lays down the general proposition that “every technology contrived and outered by man has

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the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization” (153). The resulting state of narcosis can be linked etymologically with the myth of Narcissus which in turn can be read as a parable of the following appeal: “men at once become fascinated by extensions of themselves in any material other than themselves” (Understanding Media 41). In The Crying of Lot 49 San Narciso becomes the site for Oedipa’s encounter with the film medium and with the reflected gaze. McLuhan was convinced that American culture reflected a “commitment to visual space and organization” (Letters 300). Questioning the reliability of the visual, therefore, would be tantamount to questioning the nature of reality, which is what happens to Oedipa. San Narciso firstly is described abstractly as a “group of concepts” (14) and embodied metonymically in the motel Echo Courts which has a “representation in painted sheet metal of a nymph” (16). This depthless simulation carries the expression of a “hooker” which complicates Oedipa’s recognition of herself in the figure. Once inside the motel she is joined by her lawyer Metzger who invites her to watch him act in a movie on the television. Here the doubling gets more and more intricate. As Metzger explains, our beauty lies […] in this extended capacity for involution. A lawyer in a court-room, in front of any jury, becomes an actor, right? Raymond Burr is an actor, impersonating a lawyer, who in front of a jury becomes an actor. Me, I’m a former actor who becomes a lawyer (21).

Who in court becomes an actor once again, he could have added. These closed cycles of roles undermine Oedipa’s common-sense assumption of a stable distinction between what happens on and off the screen, and the episode in the motel becomes a test case of how the media can penetrate her. This is expressed sexually (Metzger’s “radiant eyes flew open, pierced her” (27) where the gaze of the other functions phallically and as a transformation into process of Pierce Inverarity; and also electronically by synchronizing her sexual climax with that of a pop group playing in the motel. This episode at Echo Courts opens up the postmodern dimension of The Crying of Lot 49 by problematizing the nature of representation and the authenticity of social behaviour. As Linda Hutcheon explains,

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hostile commentators on postmodernism have accused its practitioners of a “narcissistic and ironic appropriation of existing images,” whereas “postmodernism works to ‘de-doxify’ our cultural representations and their undeniable political import” (3). Pynchon avoids vulnerability to the first charge by showing the materiality of the images and processes which bewilder Oedipa. Indeed, throughout the novel he strikes a balance between the “abstractifying” tendencies of the media and the materiality of their functioning and occurrence. Pynchon deploys figurative language throughout The Crying of Lot 49 to suggest that no image or process is autonomous, but always an aspect of another image or process. Similarly McLuhan argues in The Gutenberg Galaxy that “language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another” (5). Thus Oedipa’s experience is compared to film or, in another more famous example, she looks across a Californian cityscape and identifies a resemblance with the printed circuit of a transistor radio. In these metaphors Pynchon avoids contrasting the “natural” with the constructed in a way that might give priority to the former. Instead he uses metaphor as a means of mapping out cultural connections. This is made explicit when a scientist explains to the bemused Oedipa two meanings to the term “entropy,” asserting that it is a metaphor which “connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow” (72–73). The verb “connects” is the key term here since it signals to the reader an expansive mapping out of information which never concludes. Although Oedipa’s search might seem superficially to follow a linear trajectory, the discourse of the novel characteristically makes lateral moves where resemblances proliferate. The recurrence of the term “lot” (unavoidably foregrounded by the title) in semantic contexts suggesting marketable property, fate, an item in a series, and so on, is a lexical instance of this process. More typically, the figure of the muted horn (tantalizingly promising and witholding information) is repeated when Oedipa stumbles on an assembly of deaf mutes. By this stage in the novel every person she meets is viewed as a potential information source but here the key communicative faculty of speech is blocked for her. The most explicit commentary on metaphor in The Crying of Lot 49 comes when Oedipa encounters an ex-sailor sunk in alcoholism

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and suffering from the DTs. She realises: “Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind’s plowshare” (89). The paratactic sequence of this sentence assembles a series where each phrase extends the preceding one. Just as “metaphor” connotes a moving across, so the Latin phrase contains an embedded figure from ploughing which Pynchon makes explicit. Meaning is then spatialised as an ambiguity of metaphor itself: “The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost” (89). Needless to say, Oedipa’s disorientation has become so severe that she too feels lost, hence her identification with the old man. Then, through recall by association, the DTs remind Oedipa of dt’s in calculus from her university days and once again Oedipa experiences a kind of displacement: “Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years” (89). Pynchon here updates the root metaphor in “delirium” (in Latin, the displacement from a furrow) from plough to record player in order to articulate how Oedipa can share a common figure and therefore a common predicament with the sailor. This figure of transition through remembered time revises the polarity of inside/outside into an opposition between a lateral shift which might produce meaning but which might equally be disorienting on the one hand; and a linear movement along the determined grooves of her life which will probably not produce meaning but which will at least be safe. McLuhan’s attitude to the media oscillates between positive and negative positions. At one point he waxes enthusiastic over the possibilities of the computer which promises a “Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity” (Understanding Media 80), a notion which Pynchon parodies through ironic and ambiguous Pentecostal allusions to revelation. At other points McLuhan shows a much darker side to the media. For him advertisements are hidden persuaders working “quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing. The depth principle of onslaught on the unconscious may be the reason why” (227). In his conclusion to Understanding Media McLuhan generalises this point to include all contemporary media:

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The electric changes associated with automation have nothing to do with ideologies or social programmes. If they had, they could be delayed or controlled. Instead, the technological extension of our central nervous system that we call the electric media began more than a century ago, subliminally. Subliminal have been the effects. Subliminal they remain. At no period in human culture have men understood the psychic mechanisms involved in invention and technology. (352)

By the early sixties the term “brainwashing” had become routinely employed to describe the ideological pressures exerted on the individual by cultural processes. Writers as diverse as Sylvia Plath, Malcolm X and Allen Ginsberg all described the workings of American society as a form of indoctrination to norms which was not even being understood, let alone resisted. In 1964, for instance, Ginsberg described the myth of American prosperity as a “great psychic hoax[,] a mirage of electronic mass-hypnosis” (Deliberate Prose 6). William Burroughs chose a different medium to articulate his comparable sense of social manipulation. In Nova Express (1964) conditions of total emergency operate as his subversives try to undermine the repressive processes of society. One of his figures “breaks out all the ugliest pictures in the image bank and puts it out on the subliminal so one crisis piles up after the other right on schedule” (18). Burroughs again and again describes a distortion of expected signals, more lurid and dramatic than happens in The Crying of Lot 49, but having a comparable effect of disturbing estrangement. At one point a figure named the “Subliminal Kid” plants microphones and transmitters in bars so that their environmental noise itself becomes a bizarre message. Pynchon characteristically deploys quieter instances where discrepancies and discontinuities defamiliarise every aspect of Oedipa’s environment. The misprints on stamps described in chapter 3 whose main medium is that of postal systems draws her startled attention to the possibility that an underground organisation might be covertly using the national monopoly to send messages to each other. Because such processes do seem covert, Oedipa starts rationalizing her experience through an anonymous agency: late in the novel she suspects: “they are stripping away, one by one, my men” (105). Like Burroughs, Pynchon describes a state of “agency panic,” a phrase used by Timothy Melley in a recent study to designate a paranoid

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suspicion of a “whole system of communications” being covertly at work (2, 7–16). Oedipa herself experiences an “onslaught” of cultural signals throughout the novel which induces a mounting paranoia over her inability to verify or make final sense of this data. As Thomas Schaub has argued, the different religious allusions in the novel support this drama of perception, functioning as a “foil to the inverted, profane culture it describes” (49). The references to imminent revelation thus become the signs of semantic inadequacy. Schaub continues: As the world about her takes on more and more the character of information, Oedipa’s evidence seems less like truth than clue to something beyond it; this is because her medium and its message are identical. (48)

All media for her are subject to decay, a point which Pynchon dramatises by accelerating the mortality of her human sources of information. The religious analogies have the further effect of stylizing characters in ritualistic postures (her husband in his radio studio, the auctioneer with spread arms at the end of the novel) which reflect her new attention to style. At first Oedipa’s paranoia is thematised comically as belonging to others: the name of a pop group, the delusions of persecution by her therapist, and so on. Maurice Couturier has argued that Oedipa’s search for “truth” is doomed since her experience repeatedly alerts her to how such a truth might be mediated culturally in endless deferral. “The media’s chief function,” he argues, “is not so much to facilitate communication as to create an unfulfillable need for it” (7). A kind of negative insight emerges into the “importance of death in the economy of her world” (16). We should remember that The Crying of Lot 49 begins with a death and rehearses a series of narratives where death figures prominently. The recycling of dead GIs’ bones in cigarette filters grotesquely exemplifies this process. The routine indoctrination of American society by its media is pointed out to her by Mike Fallopian who says of the Yoyodyne engineers: “In school they got brainwashed, like all of us, into believing the Myth of the American Inventor […]. Only one man per invention” (61). This process is explicitly questioned by the way corporations like Yoyodyne buy up

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patents so that potential inventors find themselves reduced to minor functionaries in a commercial system. Earlier in the novel, Pynchon attempts to articulate the subliminal pull of the Pacific as a stimulusand-response just below conventional sensation: you could not hear or even smell this but it was there, something tidal began to reach feelers in past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding. (37)

The use of the hypothetical second person leaves it open and ambiguous how far Oedipa is registering this awareness. Nor can the human be separated from the technological. It is only when Pynchon describes Yoyodyne in more detail that we realise the twist in the reference to a microelectrode for this is exactly the kind of object the company would manufacture. Ironically, a metaphor of subliminal perception draws on the technology of a company which would have a vested interest in manipulating the public so as to promote its own ends. The one medium not considered so far is that of the novel itself. Pynchon closely identifies Oedipa’s quest with the reader’s processing of the novel’s text. As Tony Tanner notes, the very choice of the protagonist’s name estranges us from the text and blocks off a “transparent” realist reading (60). Possibly Pynchon took a lead in this from Catch-22 which he described in 1961 as “close to the finest novel I’ve ever read.”6 Here and in The Crying of Lot 49 characters’ names often link them to systems within the novels and Oedipa suggests at once a pathology and the confronting of enigmas. Her name at the same time functions as a cryptic sign which the reader tries to decode. Not surprisingly, a number of readings have emerged which stress the secrecy of text. For instance, largely on the strength of a detailed examination of its names, Charles Hollander has described The Crying of Lot 49 as “encrypted meditation” (61) on the Kennedy assassination. Probably unknown to Hollander, there is some justification for this view from Pynchon himself who in 1964 wrote to his then agent Candida Donadio that the shootings of Kennedy and 6

Letter to Candida Donadio. 2 November 1961.

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Oswald filled him with gloom about “language as a medium for improving things.”7 If these events had such a linguistic impact on Pynchon, this might help explain his projection of language as a manipulable medium operating within systems of control and surveillance. Pynchon dramatises the reader’s struggles with his own novel through Oedipa’s attempts to stabilise the text of The Courier’s Tragedy. Originally she experiences the play as performance but for the reader it is textualized from the start as a summary containing many incongruous formulations in colloquial American English. In other words, the reader gets no direct access to a pastiche text such as s/he might encounter in Nabokov other than through a few brief quotations which might remembered by another play-goer or reader. Indeed Oedipa herself quotes a passage later in the novel. The producer of the play Randolph Driblette articulates a kind of warning to the reader that the text is after all a script which can be altered in every performance, but, nothing daunted, Oedipa tries futilely to locate a version of the text which will verify her suspicions about the operations of the Trystero network. However, recession is always at work in the second half of the novel. A bookstore burns down, a version of the play proves to be locked away in the Vatican Library, and Oedipa, like the reader, is left juggling disparate fragments of information. Pynchon’s constant use of the term “clues,” as a number of critics have noted, misleadingly suggests that the novel belongs in the detective or whodunit genres and this effect is strengthened by the allusions to the Perry Mason television series which was running in the sixties. But we do not need to go far into the novel to realise that the generic category does not fit. Tzvetan Todorov has argued that the latter is defined formally by its double narrative: the “story of the crime and the story of the investigation.” The second is structured so as to give the reader gradual access to the first. It is therefore a means

7

Letter to Candida Donadio. 6 April 1964.

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to an end and the style of the investigative narrative should be “kept neutral and plain to stop becoming opaque” (44, 47).8 This is exactly what happens in The Crying of Lot 49. From the very first page the reader is confronted with a narrative packed with so much descriptive detail, with a discourse so rich in metaphor, that the style becomes “opaque” with a vengeance. The smog or haze of the southern Californian cities which Oedipa traverses is a variation of a traditional metaphor of obscurity. Pynchon’s references to eyes fill out this motif in the novel and play repeatedly on the ways in which Oedipa is herself a “private eye.” Typically, the very first occurrence of this motif is the “greenish dead eye of the TV tube” (5) in Oedipa’s living room which displaces the human faculty on to technology. Instead of being an organ through which things are perceived, the eye repeatedly emerges as an object to be looked at or to be obscured. Oedipa’s paranoia grows when she sees more and more characters wearing shades, shades which she herself wears to make her way through the Kafkaesque labyrinth of the Yoyodyne buildings. One of the most striking instances occurs with Driblette: She couldn’t stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn’t. (52)

The agency of the gaze itself becomes the object of her gaze, momentarily reified into an image of scientific investigation. Then this effect is reversed as Oedipa projects a knowingness on to Driblette which is never confirmed. The proliferation of references to the visual media and to mirrors, to technological devices like a scope, and the reversals in the gaze which repeatedly take place in the novel all problematise the act of seeing and therefore of understanding the novel’s text and narrative. The reader and Oedipa alike await a final revelation which is deferred beyond the end of The Crying of Lot 49. This deferral is the last in a series of strategies which direct the reader to pay more attention to the means of information transfer than the content of individual messages. 8

The generic contrast between The Crying of Lot 49 and traditional detective fiction is noted in Tanner 56.

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Works Cited Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Boulding, Kenneth E. The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1956. Burroughs, William. Nova Express. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Couturier, Maurice. “The Death of the Real in The Crying of Lot 49.” Pynchon Notes 20–21 (Spring–Fall 1987): 5–29. Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. “Myths of the Information Society.” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980: 3–17. Friedman, Bruce Jay. Ed. Black Humor. New York: Bantam, 1965. Ginsberg, Allen. Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000. Grant, Maxwell. The Shadow. Destination: Moon. New York: Belmont, 1967. Harrington, Michael. The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Baltimore: Penguin, 1963. N. Katherine Hayles. “‘A Metaphor of God Knew How Many Parts’: The Engine that Drives The Crying of Lot 49.” New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49. Ed. Patrick O’ Donnell: Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991: 102–5. Hollander, Charles. “Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49.” Pynchon Notes 40–41 (Spring–Fall 1997): 61–106. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. John M. Johansen. “The Experience We Derive.” McLuhan Hot and Cool. Ed. Gerald Emanual Stearn. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968: 258–67. Marwick, Arthur. The Sixties. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1998. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. —— The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967. —— Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. —— “Notes on Burroughs.” Eds. Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg. William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991: 69–73. Melley, Timothy. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000. Molinaro, Matie. Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye. Eds. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Toronto, Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. London: Pan Books, 1979.

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—— V. London: Picador, 1975. —— Letter to Candida Donadio. 2 November 1961. Heller Collection. Brandeis University. —— Letter to Candida Donadio. 6 April 1964. Book File for V. Jonathan Cape collection. Publishers Association Archive. Reading University. Roth, Philip. Reading Myself and Others. New York and Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Schaub, Thomas H. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981. Tanner, Tony. Thomas Pynchon. London and New York: Methuen, 1982. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977.

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DAVID DICKSON

Pynchon’s Vineland and “That Fundamental Agreement in What is Good and Proper”: What Happens when we Need to Change it?

What does it take for a person in the western world today to understand his or her own background? Although it has been claimed that Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland is a comparatively straightforward narrative, the way in which this question is given focus in the novel indicates a complexity in the scope of its understanding of history that needs to be recognized in criticism. As discussed in this essay, Vineland poses questions to its readers on two philosophical levels. On a level of ethics, it raises the question about the individual’s freedom in-between the coercions of culturally conceived historical designs. On the level of philosophy of history, it asks whether these historical designs are eternally given, or if the acts of individuals can subject them to change. In this essay I argue that Vineland begins a rethinking of the hermeneutic view of history. In acknowledging the fundamental role of culturally conceived pre-understandings and prejudgements, it highlights the part played by the individual, and in so doing suggests that the individual act can be instrumental in changing not only the course of history but, more specifically, the designs by which cultures shape people’s lives. I am aware that this might easily reduce the view of history either to simplistic messianism or to a no less simplistic vision of social and historical engineering. However, with Vineland these acts, although they are inspired, mystical and even transcendental in the sense that they do succeed in setting aside the predesigned understandings that a culture offers, they are the acts of everyday crises – acts of whose import in a larger perspective the individual is largely unaware.

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A critical perspective on Pynchon’s writing is that of Heikki Raudaskoski who discusses it as a kind of transcendental “diving.” Pynchon, he says is a diver in the vein of Emerson, Melville, and Roland Barthes. This is a vein of writing in which “thought-divers […] have been diving & coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began” – coming up, as Melville would suggest, sometimes with transcendental “oracular gibberish,” sometimes with intimations of “landlessness” as “the highest truth” (124).1 With reference to Barthes, Raudaskoski asks whether Pynchon’s texts are “writerly” – suggesting that they hilariously “leave behind the world of conventions” (124), abandoning the “lisible” or “readerly” as a writing which is “afraid of diving into anything new and unexpected” (125). At the same time, however, Raudaskoski asks an interesting and perhaps non- or even anti-poststructuralist question about Pynchon’s writing from the zones of landlessness. Could there, he asks, be “a way back” (134) – a way back, not to the security of the lisibility of the settled “intertextual code” (125), but, as Raudaskoski puts it, to “a weakly Messianic, possibility” paving the way “for new […] constellations and matrices in which the other could be heard by displacing the logic of the Same?” (134). It is true that Vineland has at times been discussed in terms that would suggest it as a “way back.” For instance, this was the point made by Marc Conner, who claimed in 1996 that Vineland announces a major shift back to “the traditional domain of the beautiful” (70), and that the novel marks Pynchon’s return to the traditional aesthetics of the beautiful. In my own analyses of Vineland, I have rejected this, suggesting instead that the novel marks the beginning, in Pynchon’s work, of an innovation in the strategies of narration that points forward to a fundamentally new conception of beauty and new strategies by which this new sense of beauty is transmitted. While Pynchon’s strategies in Vineland acknowledge the need to stop the eternal deferral of meaning that the “landlessness” of poststructuralism would suggest, at the same time they succeed in breaking the cultural transmission of that “hatred of anything new” 1

Raudaskoski quotes here from Melville, Letters 79, and from Moby-Dick Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976: 594.

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(Vineland 273) that characterizes the settled intertextual code of those American cultures that Vineland portrays. I want to demonstrate how Vineland engages with the discussion on cultural change that I have mentioned above – a discussion that involves a critical view of poststructuralist thinking and traditionalist intertextualism alike. To accomplish this, I shall outline Vineland’s conception of change against the background of the hermeneutic view of history and cultural change as defined by Hans-Georg Gadamer. The transmission of historical knowledge is one of the great issues in the world portrayed in Vineland. When fourteen-year-old Prairie compels the former revolutionary activist Darryl Louise Chastain (also called DL) to comply with her yearning for her absent mother Frenesi and tell all she knows about her, the question how to fill the needs of the present moment in-between the conventions of cultural transmission turns into one of the novel’s main themes. DL’s experience in the 1960s of Frenesi’s close friendship, revolutionary comradeship and deep treason makes the telling an affair of great difficulty for DL herself. Moreover, Prairie’s own previous knowledge of her mother’s personal history does not predispose her for taking in much of what DL has to say. As an image of the class struggles in the Western states between US socialist revolutionaries and the reactionary thugs of roughshod Capitalism, Frenesi and her extended family of radicals represent an important aspect in the history of American domestic politics in the twentieth century. When Pynchon brings this up in 1990, it is true that he gives us this history through the perspective of the leftists – a somewhat rare perspective in US American literature. He does it, however, not so much to vindicate the American left – ranging from the IWW-movement with Joe Hill, the Union struggles among Californian farm hands and film industry workers up to the anti-war movements in the 30s and 60s – as to find ways of telling about these parts of American history and to tell about them in ways that bring out their relevance in the present. To find ways of telling about American domestic politics in the twentieth century is a problem of narrative form which is brought into focus by DL’s intricate communication of information to young Prairie. A problem of high priority for DL, in trying to satisfy the

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girl’s need to know about her mother is that “whatever story DL told this kid must not, maybe could never, be the story she knew”: Underground. Right. That’s the story DL should have known they’d tell the kid. Underground. Now, how could DL tell her what she knew, and how could she not? (101, emphasis in original)

The precise problem for narration in Vineland goes to the roots of narrative grammar. I have shown elsewhere, how American narratives in Emerson, Dos Passos and Pynchon continue to depend on or react to conventions that go all the way back to the polis or citystate in ancient Greece. In the terminology that I use, this notion of convention, and the conventional character of language are expressed by the terms contract and contractuality.2 My purpose in employing a different term is, mainly, to emphasize the element of human volition in the processes of language and concept formation. The widely accepted term “convention” has the tendency of emphasizing the determining (and even deterministic) elements of tradition. The term does denote a decision or decree taken in negotiations between individuals, but as can be seen more clearly in the inflexion “conventional,” the term tends to weaken or water out the connotations of human volition. In my analysis, the play of human will in Vineland in-between determining elements of culture and language is one of the novel’s most moving and challenging motifs. In using my own term – contract – for describing processes in language and thought, it is my intention to make it completely clear that among the determining elements that make up language, there is also the element of human volition. The classical narrative contracts, then, transform the sense impressions of calamities and adventures into experience through a politics of repression, aiming to protect the community from the most shattering aspects of new thought.3 In Vineland, Pynchon suggests a similar repression of newness in referring to the nineteenth-century 2 3

See Dickson. See Dickson, especially 76–82 and “Appendix” 191–202. My indebtedness on this point to Pease and his idea of an “adventurer’s cultural contract” (174) should be acknowledged here.

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phrenologist Cesare Lombroso and his “misoneism” (272) or “hatred of anything new” which operates “as a feedback device to keep societies coming along safely, coherently” (273). Lombroso’s “misoneism” is introduced in Vineland as Brock Vond’s philosophy, and its hatred of the new thus defines the fascism of this character and, to an important extent, that of his employers in the American State as well. Even more interesting, perhaps, is that, as portrayed in Vineland, the radical American left, too, incorporates a similar hatred of the new in its rhetoric. In between these “misoneistic” bodies of thought, narration about history becomes a highly problematic task for the characters. My analysis of Vineland makes use of the fact that, in Pynchon’s novel, the metaphors that language provides for the characters’ understanding of the present is a matter of conflict in the field of US American domestic politics. For those (e.g., on the traditional political left and right) who have knowledge about the near past to communicate to the twenty-first century, the forms provided by the “hatred of anything new” are too limited to make history a resource for living, perceiving, and acting in the present. These connections in Vineland between language, history, perception and human action make it relevant to bring the discussion back to one of the main recent thinkers on issues of humanism, language and history – Hans-Georg Gadamer. His hermeneutic theory of experience puts great weight on the transmission of preunderstandings, or the transmission (as he would also put it) of prejudices. His theory idealizes human caution in relation to new ideas at the same time as its point of departure is a fundamental trust in human creativity. It is my aim here, as I have mentioned, to suggest how Pynchon in Vineland begins to formulate a critique of the hermeneutic theory of experience. Pynchon’s critique does not try to do away with the idea of the hermeneutic circle. What it does, as I see it, is to introduce a question, asking whether, at some moments in history, there is not new energy to be brought into a situation by a breakage in the transmission of basic pre-understandings. The new energy thus introduced would facilitate new ways of understanding crucial experiences and the making of new concepts.

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In Gadamer’s view of history and the way in which experience and ideas are transmitted, the question of concept formation is important. In using Plato and Aristotle, the main drift of his discussion is towards Aristotle and the process of induction. As the Aristotelian process of induction is often understood, memory and the human ability of abstraction take their point of departure in “the general concept meant by the word.” With Aristotle, the general concept “is enriched by any given perception of a thing, so that what emerges is a new more specific word formation which does more justice to the particularity of that act of perception” (429). This Aristotelian “logical schema of induction and abstraction,” however, is “very misleading” according to Gadamer. Universals and classification of concepts belong to the “theory of logic.” Language, on the other hand, is a very different affair. In Gadamer’s view, the character of language is fundamentally metaphorical. In obeying the metaphorical character of language, what a person looks for are “similarities, whether in the appearance of things or in the significance for us.” Not universals. Not classificatory concepts, but similarities that are expressed metaphorically (429). “It is important to see,” says Gadamer, “that to regard the metaphorical use of a word as not its real sense is the prejudice of a theory of logic that is alien to language” (429). The metaphor, then, is the way in which human beings use language to express the real. And the perspective of language on reality is that of similarity in the appearance of things and similarity in significance for “us.” This is how I interpret Gadamer’s analysis of “language and concept formation” (428–29) and it should be emphasized that Pynchon’s Vineland is a demonstration of this view of language and truth. Gadamer concludes his discussion here by saying that “the particularity of an experience finds expression in metaphorical transference, and is not at all the fruit of a concept formed by means of abstraction” (429). But – and this seems important for how we regard the results of classificatory logic – “it is equally obvious that knowledge of what is common is obtained in this way” (429, my emphasis). Here, Gadamer acknowledges connections to Heidegger and, as Gadamer puts it, “the closeness of meaning between legein ‘to say’, and legein ‘to gather.’” Whether it is a perception of a thing or

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the understanding of a logical schema, thought does turn, and has to turn to the stock of metaphorical descriptions of similarities (i.e., similarities in appearance and similarities in significance for us) that language has worked out. In doing the work required for speaking, thought picks up or gathers among the similarity-metaphors that language has put in store. Even for logic, Gadamer says, this stock of metaphors is the “advance work that language has worked out for it” (430). So, whether one works through logic or through experience, one part of the work is for thought to “turn for its own instruction to this stock that language has built up” (429). Vineland describes the transmission of historical experience largely in line with the hermeneutical view of history. Language provides stocks of metaphors as an “advance work” for the narration of experiences that are relevant for subjectivation and action in the present, and we thus see Prairie caught in-between two such stocks of metaphors, both of which seem to be endorsed by her mother – that of the radical leftist movement and that of the repressive apparatus connected with the FBI, and with capitalism. In this way, Vineland exemplifies the hermeneutic structure of experience and understanding, the fundamentally metaphorical character of language, the fact that the metaphor is the way in which human beings use language to express the real. One key example that I will return to is Prairie’s session with DL and Ditzah in the revolutionary film archive, in which the forming of new metaphors helps Prairie begin to understand her history and her present reality. Another is the narrator’s description of Frenesi’s struggle with the mother-role through which patriarchal pre-understandings are transmitted between generations. Frenesi’s fate as well as Prairie’s exploration of it exemplify how thought does “turn for its own instruction to this stock that language has built up” (Gadamer 429) and how thought, in the Heideggerian sense, picks up or gathers among the similarity-metaphors that language has put in store. But however much Vineland proves the hermeneutic structure of experience and understanding, the raison d’être of this novel is not to repeat that truth. The novel indicates a complication in the transmission of experience as it pictures Prairie’s position between two political cultures, whose metaphors are opposed to each other in

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terms of twentieth-century political values but are in very basic agreement about the danger of new ideas and unexpected thoughts – an agreement that has existed within Western cultures for a very long time. In Vineland this agreement, then, is explicitly described as going back to nineteenth-century Lombrosianism. In my analyses of “thought-divers” in American literature such as Emerson, Dos Passos, and Pynchon, I have, as mentioned, traced a similar agreement back to ancient Greece. 4 Vineland’s criticism of hermeneutics takes its starting-point in the stalemate of Prairie’s position between two basically similar bodies of metaphors. She needs to take out the bearings for her own orientation in her world, but the instruction she can gather from either of these stores of meaning will conceal rather than illuminate what she needs to understand – her mother’s part in recent historical issues. At this juncture, Vineland indicates the need to come out of the stalemate in the creation of metaphors for American domestic politics that Prairie’s situation represents. Vineland aims its criticism at one particular point in the hermeneutic theory, namely its understanding of beginnings and the role of human creativity in beginnings. By beginnings, I mean the beginnings of what Gadamer refers to as “that fundamental agreement in what is good and proper” (431–32). Gadamer goes back to Aristotle for whom “speech and thought remained completely unified,” even as his main concern was “to reflect the order of things and to detach it from all verbal contingencies.” And the historical factor by means of which speech and thought are unified is this “agreement on which human community, its harmony with respect to what is good and proper, is founded” (431). According to Aristotle/Gadamer, then, the processes of formation of language, thought and community are all determined by – are expressions of – “that fundamental agreement in 4

In my book The Utterance of America, where Vineland is the object of analysis in one of the chapters, I have also analysed Sophocles’ “Ode to Man” – a poem in the tragedy Antigone. My analysis of this classical poem suggests a fundamental agreement on the communication of experience in the Greek polis (= city state) in which one of the basic elements is a similar fear of anything that is new.

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what is good and proper” (431–32). In the context of Vineland, the agreement is that of an age-old “misoneism” or “hatred of anything new.” With Gadamer, the question of the origin of the “fundamental agreement in what is good and proper” is dealt with in passing. He says that, although the Greeks usually thought of the agreement as “the decree and the achievement of divine men,” Aristotle speaks about this convention of language formation without implying anything about its origin (432). As a result, there is a gap left in Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory too, a gap in the understanding of how new agreements in what is good and proper as concerns the processes of formation of language, thought, community and identity are proposed and realized. Vineland does not, actually, try to fill this gap, or even try to formulate the questions, the answers of which might fill it. Vineland’s focus is on bringing onto the agenda the thought that a new fundamental agreement on the formation of concepts is at all possible in the present time. Vineland portrays Prairie’s captivity in-between two politically opposed world-views whose one point of agreement is this fundamental contract, stipulating the new as a danger to be warded off. At the same time, the novel’s peripety pictures the possibility of a new contract designed to illuminate what is otherwise supposed to be kept in the dark. This happens in the aftermath of the film sequence from the archives of the former revolutionaries and is the peak in Prairie’s quest for knowledge about her mother. It is a moment in which the narrative about her mother finally disposes Prairie to break through her earlier prejudgements: Prairie, reentering nonmovie space, felt like a basketball after a Lakers game – alive, resilient, still pressurized with spirit yet with a distinct memory of having been, for a few hours, expertly bounced. Her mom, in front of her own eyes, had stood with a 1,000-watt Mickey-Mole spot on the dead body of a man who had loved her, and the man who’d just killed him, and the gun she’d brought him to do it with. Stood there like the Statue of Liberty, bringer of light, as if it were part of some contract to illuminate, instead of conceal, the deed. (261)

The act of narration has this illuminating potential for Prairie. DL’s oral commentary orchestrates the scattered information about

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Frenesi into a narrative, and Prairie can make her own interpretation of it. There is, however, one crucial circumstance that gives DL’s narrative about Prairie’s mother (or, from a somewhat different perspective, about the history of American domestic politics in the twentieth century) its illuminating potential. The crucial circumstance is Prairie’s mother’s refusal, or avoidance, of playing the role of mother in Prairie’s childhood. This was the mother’s desperate line of action when Prairie was still a baby, at a time when she – Frenesi – was herself completely tied up by the coercions of left-wing radicalism and society’s crypto-fascism alike. Her refusal to play mother has the effect of introducing an element of uncertainty in the cultural line of transmission by which the hatred of the new is reproduced. As a mother in compliance with that fundamental agreement, Frenesi would have stayed with her new-born child. She would have become “just another mom in the nation of moms” (292), a patriarchal mother, obediently transmitting the fundamental agreement in what is good and proper, and obediently letting the story of her life be told inoffensively and without illumination. Frenesi does not know herself and her motives well enough to tell to anyone about her life and actions as a combined revolutionary, FBI infiltrator and frame-up agent. Moreover, anybody else that tried to tell her story, would tend to do so in compliance with what is agreed upon as inoffensive within his or her community, whether revolutionary leftist, fascist, or politically disillusioned. And this is exactly the way in which DL tells Prairie about Frenesi’s life. In Vineland’s point of view, this is the outcome of a vicious hermeneutic circle in which pre-understandings and prejudgements serve the safety of a community at the expense of new perceptions. However, the desperate act of abstaining from the care of her child – of rejecting her role as a link in the transmission of the hatred of anything new – creates the possibility of an opening in the closed hermeneutic circle of “misoneism.” By absenting herself from the family, she never turns into a teller of inoffensive stories about her life. Instead, this act introduces her as a space of silence that weakens the effect on Prairie of any prejudgements that others might want to impose on her. It whets the drive to explore the unknown that Prairie

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has in common with her mother and it turns Frenesi and her life into the irresistible object of her daughter’s explorations. What happens here from a hermeneutic point of view, is that “the agreement on which human community, its harmony with respect to what is good and proper, is founded” (Gadamer 431) is annulled in being thus counteracted. This annulment is perhaps temporary or conditional as is suggested by the ambiguous conclusion of the novel. The effect, however, is twofold. On the level of philosophy of history, it leads to the far-reaching questioning of the theory of hermeneutics, whether, at some historical junctures, it is perhaps both possible and needful to come to new fundamental agreements on what is good and proper. The effect, on the level of ethics, is to pose a real question about resistance to the reader, a question about his/her own every-day actions, whether they matter enough to be insisted upon in the face of coercive traditions. The key to the criticism that Vineland formulates against the hermeneutic theory, then, is the way in which the illuminating narrative is made possible. Through this criticism Vineland suggests that the good and proper must not be viewed as something that was agreed upon once and never again, but that it is a judgement of value that is renegotiated in certain historical situations. The focus in this essay is on the question that Vineland poses to the theory of hermeneutics. Although it may concern all production of knowledge, Pynchon is mainly concerned here with the transmission of historical knowledge. While this is posed as a general question in Vineland, it is also a more particular concern with the problem of writing the history of American twentieth-century domestic politics. What it means, for the writing of history to create a new agreement of what is good and proper is, however, not explicated in Vineland. It may be that Pynchon’s own explorations of the matter – both generally and with reference to American history – are further spelled out and practised in his great novel Mason & Dixon, where, according to one critic, strategies are practised which allow “conceptualization outside traditionally monologic conventions” (Troy 206). What does it mean, then, to come – from the everyday point of view that Vineland adopts – to a new agreement about the formation of concepts – a new agreement on which human community, its

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harmony with respect to what is good and proper, can be founded? The novel looks forward to an answer to these questions, and to a new conception of beauty – one that might allow the appreciation of relativity as well as closure that Raudaskoski suggests. Possibly, this is what Frenesi’s rejection of motherhood is about – an act of love that includes the insecurity of “landlessness” as much as the certainty of home. Could it be, even, that Vineland looks forward to an aesthetic “displacing the logic of the Same?” (Raudaskoski 134). Whatever the goal and aim of a new agreement on what is good and proper, Vineland strongly suggests that the individual act can be instrumental in changing not only the course of history, but specifically the agreements and designs by which history and people’s lives are shaped. In taking the point of Vineland’s ambiguous ending, I understand that these are things that remain to be accomplished in the everyday use of language – in the narratives of actual people. Finally, then, what Pynchon asks us – as people and as philosophers of language alike – is simply to pay attention to the question whether, and if so how a liberated conceptualization could be made possible. Raising these questions and indicating this possibility are Vineland’s main achievement.

Works Cited Conner, Marc C. “Postmodern Exhaustion: Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and the Aesthetic of the Beautiful.” Studies in American Fiction 24.1 (1996): 65–85. Dickson, David. The Utterance of America: Emersonian Newness in Dos Passos’ U.S.A. and Pynchon’s Vineland. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1998. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. 1960. 1989. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1999. Melville, Herman. The Letters of Herman Melville. Ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman. New Haven: Yale UP: 1960. —— Moby-Dick. 1851. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976. Pease, Donald E. Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.

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Pynchon, Thomas. Vineland. 1990. London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1991. Raudaskoski, Heikki. “Pynchon, Melville, and the Fulcrum of America.” Blissful Bewilderment: Studies in the Fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Eds. Anne Mangen and Rolf Gaasland. Oslo: Novus Press, 2002. Troy, Mark. “… ever in a Ubiquity of Flow, before a Ceaseless Spectacle of Transition.” Blissful Bewilderment: Studies in the Fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Eds. Anne Mangen and Rolf Gaasland. Oslo: Novus Press, 2002: 206–26.

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DAVID THOREEN

In which “Acts Have Consequences”: Ideas of Moral Order in the Qualified Postmodernism of Pynchon’s Recent Fiction

1. Not So Much Visited by Understanding as Allow’d Briefly to Pay Attention to What Had Been There All the Time Father, why did you work? Why did you weep, Mother? Was the story so important? (Simpson 37–38)

Since the publication of V., and particularly since the adoption of Gravity’s Rainbow as a central postmodern text, critics have attributed to Pynchon a denial of causality. The contributing factors to this denial are many: textual, cultural, and, insofar as the literary-critical world is hegemonic, institutional. For the most part, critics have assumed that Pynchon’s tacit rejection of cause and effect is consonant with that perennial poststructuralist project, destabilizing the bourgeois humanist subject, presumably in an effort to arrive at a less deceptive relation to subjective experience. Let Molly Hite, whose Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon was one of the earliest book-length studies of Our Author, articulate the now orthodox view: [I]n order to link the atoms of experience together, Pynchon’s characters and narrators look for causes. In this enterprise they resemble the classical physicist who aims to trace all the phenomena of his world to a system of laws [...]. The inhabitants of Pynchon’s worlds continually try to exchange their freedom for the security of a wholly coherent causal explanation. (38)

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Hite’s choice of language could not be more deliberate. By referring to “atoms of experience” which cannot be held together, she reflects the essential indeterminacy of a world view predicated on quantum physics. If only we could make ourselves resemble quantum physicists, Hite seems to say, we could, by abandoning causal explanation, secure our freedom. Although this critical approach would appear difficult to reconcile with either Vineland or Mason & Dixon, it has nonetheless persisted. As a more recent example of such wistful analysis puts it: Nowadays many cultural critics and philosophers of science coincide in pointing out that the twentieth century has brought about a new interpretive paradigm. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics [...] represented the first attempts of the century to warn humans that reality could no longer be explained by the mere recourse to “common sense,” Newtonian physics, and sensorial data [...]. In a sense, it can be argued that quantum mechanics entails such a tremendous shift from classical Greek and Newtonian notions that many people are not yet ready to accept it. (Collado Rodríguez 475)1

I admit to being one of the “many” not yet ready to accept metaphors from Relativity theory and quantum mechanics as models for living,2 1

2

A page later, Collado Rodríguez reveals the depth of his longing even more directly: “It seems clear that people are not ready to get rid of traditional common-sensical views about the character of a stable reality, but Pynchon’s readers know better: randomness, indeterminacy, fractal cartography, unstable selves, and early cultural announcements of the coming of chaos into commonsensical Aristotelian reality are all constantly repeated motifs in his fiction” (476). See also Collado Rodríguez’s essay in this collection in which he analyses Pynchon’s “latest attempt [in Mason & Dixon] to disrupt the still existing Newtonian confidence in categorical thinking” (72). Alan J. Friedman emphasizes that the three historical models of the universe are – and this is true even for scientists – only metaphors. Asking whether these metaphors have been helpful to their various adherents in Gravity’s Rainbow, Friedman admits that they have not been. Taking Slothrop as his test case, since “he has been exposed to each of the alternative world views from paranoia [the clockwork universe] to anti-paranoia [the universe described by quantum physics],” Friedman notes that Slothrop “reaches no ultimate conclusions” and reminds us that “we last see him with ‘not a thing in his head.’ None of the metaphors from science has remained with Slothrop” (95, quoting Gravity’s Rainbow 626). Friedman is careful to warn against the adoption of too narrow a

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particularly as applied to questions of morality and individual responsibility. More, I argue that Pynchon also rejects these models, and that he has gone out of his way in Vineland and Mason & Dixon to correct such mistaken critical explications. It is not that Pynchon fails to see the contradictions between historical methodology and the human desire for order, but that those philosophical objections are ultimately overridden because to refuse to make such causal connections is finally to exist in a moral vacuum. In “a moment of undeniable clairvoyance, rare in her life but recognized,” Vineland’s Frenesi Gates understands that she “must reenter the clockwork of cause and effect” (90, emphasis added). Since Frenesi obviously views her impending return to the earlier conception of the universe with such distaste, we should weigh carefully the “freedom” she is offered by the quantum model against the “responsibility” demanded by its clockwork counterpart. But it will first be helpful to rehearse some background regarding the status of cause and effect in Pynchon’s fiction. Postmodern challenges to historiography are at the core of the discrediting of cause–effect, and for readers of Pynchon such challenges appeared most directly in 1973. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon offered a historical novel that, strangely, defied traditional historical method and chastised its own readers: “You will want cause and effect” (663), the narrator says at one point, forcing us to acknowledge our own desires for order and then pandering to us: “All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took Slothrop from the Anubis ” (663). Many critics were caught off guard by such passages, but for the most part consigned themselves to using the novel’s various statements about cause and effect as metaphors to help world view: “Alternatives to the world views with science as metaphor are many, and are expressed by other characters [...]. No predominant pattern of earthly success follows any of the theoretical approaches, and neither salvation nor success is identified with any one theoretical system in Gravity’s Rainbow” (95–96). Finally, says Friedman, “The metaphors from science [...] reinforce the importance of the choices of world view made by the characters. It is harder to dismiss an unpopular choice [such as Pointsman’s mechanistic, Pavlovian world view] when we see that it is parallel to a major theme in the development of science” (99–100).

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account for its dizzying array of voices, narrative modes, and rapid shifts in time and space. Molly Hite, for instance, took her cue from Leni Pökler’s often quoted “Not produce [...] not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems” (Gravity’s Rainbow 159), and argued for “relations of resemblance” as a “structural principle in Pynchon’s novels and in the worlds of those novels” (40). But Hite’s thesis – that events need not be ordered through causality or chronology but can be ordered equally well through correspondence and metaphor – carries with it a moral problem, in that it removes time’s arrow, not only from Pynchon’s novels but from the real world to which they bear some mimetic relation:3 Hite’s idea of order conveniently leaves out magnitude. Though there may be no causal connection between the Germans’ extermination of “about 60,000 people” (V. 245) in 1904 and of six million during World War II, there is a chronology, and it is accompanied by an undeniable increase in magnitude. Hite’s “relations of resemblance” thesis has, unfortunately, taken on a life of its own, and despite passages in Vineland and Mason & Dixon which would seem to preclude the application of such a scheme, critics show no sign of abandoning it. Other alternative structuring principles have also been proffered, but these too shortcircuit Pynchon’s insistence on individual responsibility. In “Visible Tracks: Historical Method and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland,” Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, applying a typological model, argues that “Vineland’s historical method becomes something outside linear, causal history” (100), concluding that “what Pynchon’s history does not enact [...] is the historicizing gesture that places the past behind and subordinate to the present” (101). But what Douglas Keesey a decade ago dubbed “Pynchon’s newly explicit political activism” demands such a historicizing gesture (110). 3

This mimetic relation is, I would argue, an essential component of the experience of reading Pynchon. What’s terrifying about Gravity’s Rainbow is that the reader proceeds with foreknowledge of the V2’s evolution into the ICBM. What is tragic about Mason & Dixon is that the reader knows that the Line will eventuate in the Civil War.

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Although Hinds argues that Pynchon’s technique is to present his narrative in such a way that the past and present effectively coexist,4 the passages she marshals as evidence occasionally underscore the fact that Pynchon’s characters have no trouble distinguishing between past and present (e.g., “As DL acknowledges early on, ‘Brock ain’t in the past right now, he’s in the present tense again’” [99, quoting Vineland 103]): the one who pretends to have difficulty with this exercise is the critic. A close reading of the novel reveals the limits of the typological approach.5 An examination of Hinds’ discussion of the novel’s final scene will illustrate my point. I quote at length, to dispel any notion that I am being editorially unfair: As she has done throughout her search for the past through iconic screen media, Prairie-the-historian has formulated a method of history that actuates the past upon the same plane as the present. The temporal variants are literally 4

5

“Prairie’s historical quest,” Hinds writes, “does not invoke her own position as a progression from past history, but in fact ‘discovers’ a past that still exists. This past, further, is ongoing, both prefiguring and reflecting the present. Her historical method is based in reflexivity over time, bypassing the causality inherent in ordinary historiography” (94). In one of the most stunning revelations, which sounds like either the set-up or punch line for a hillbilly joke, we learn that “Prairie has indeed moved back to a time during which she can not only know her mother but can actually be her mother” (99). In “Sari, Sorry, and the Vortex of History: Calendar Reform, Anachronism, and Language Change in Mason & Dixon,” Hinds offers yet another scheme. Here, she offers persuasive evidence (the text’s profusion of anachronistic details) to support her claim that “Pynchon’s version of temporality resists the linear bias of ordinary historiography, and [...] this temporal structure, rather than partitioning data into isolated and manageable portions, instead links and complicates experience into webs of more complicatedly connected meaning” (205). Shortly thereafter, however, Hinds, who cannot resist playing a round or two of academic games, argues that “[w]ith his anachronisms fleshing out Mason & Dixon’s temporal compressions, Pynchon thickens this dialectic of time by reversing causality: the present interacts with the past, too” (207). That such statements are mere posturing becomes obvious when Hinds completes her inquiry by drawing a clear line of cause and effect: “Mason & Dixon makes the argument [...] that the machinations and mechanization of early market capital – political, economic, and psychic – have come to result directly in the postmodern culture of increased disorientation” (209).

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David Thoreen indistinguishable, just as Prairie is now indistinguishable from her mother and grandmother. “Obliged” or predestined, Prairie fulfills Frenesi’s early suggestion of a biological basis for typological interpretation; Frenesi has “felt in herself a fatality, a helpless turn toward images of authority, especially uniformed men […] and she further believed that it could be passed on, as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence.” (100, quoting Vineland 83)

Note that Hinds accepts Frenesi’s suggestion of “some Cosmic Fascist [...] splic[ing] in a DNA sequence” – she must accept it, for this is the only way in which Prairie can be said to be “indistinguishable” from her mother and grandmother. If, like Hinds, we take Frenesi’s belief seriously, how then do we account for it? Are we to believe that the stipulated “Cosmic Fascist” simultaneously inserted this genetic trait into every generation of the Becker-Traverse-Wheeler line? No, and this is the whole point of Frenesi’s consideration of heredity, of DNA. Such a DNA sequence would be an effect of evolution and could be traced along the maternal branch of the family tree, not only from Prairie to Frenesi to Sasha, but back on into pre-history. What more direct causal link between past and present could there be than a genetic one? The “temporal variants” are not only distinguishable, they are chronologically and causally ordered. But two other passages in Gravity’s Rainbow also devalued the currency of cause and effect among Pynchon’s readers. Early in the novel, Roger Mexico tells Pointsman that there’s a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less ... sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle. (89, emphases added)

Then, near the end of the novel, the narrator assures us that Pointsman will be “left only with Cause and Effect, and the rest of his sterile armamentarium...” (752–53, emphasis added).6

6

Another, more poetically just, meaning suggests itself here. As an oblique reference to the conditioned erections of Infant Tyrone, this late invocation of

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Although Edward Mendelson noted as early as 1976 that “[i]n Gravity’s Rainbow, as in life, people think about the world in ways related to the work they do much of the day” (179), this important observation has been forgotten. Despite Roger Mexico’s occupation (his work as a statistician would preclude consideration of causeeffect), and despite the explicitly limited subject matter of his remarks to Pointsman, critics have attributed an implicit authority to the above statement, as if Mexico is not merely one more subjective point-ofview character, but is really (heh! heh!) Thomas Pynchon. Taking “science” as signifier for humanity, they have too-often concluded that for “Postmodern Postman” to “carry on,” he must abandon the “sterility” of cause and effect. But what is really sterile, Pynchon makes clear in Vineland, is Frenesi Gates’s willingness to “go along in a government-defined history without consequences” (354). Here, in his fourth novel, Pynchon returns to the earlier model of the universe, applying it, significantly, not to the onto-epistemological framework adopted by his characters, but to – imagine, of all things – a moral system. When, roughly seventy pages into Vineland, we are first introduced to Frenesi and granted access to her point of view, we meet a character who has for all practical purposes been living according to a moral system constructed on the principles of the new physics. The result is far from ennobling. It would be difficult, in fact, to mistake this mode of existence as one that is in any way endorsed by Pynchon. Having “understood her particular servitude as the freedom, granted to a few, to act outside warrants and charters, to ignore history and the dead, to imagine no future, no yet-to-be-born, to be able simply to go on defining moments only, purely, by the action that filled them” (71–72), Frenesi becomes Pynchon’s dramatic presentation of someone who lives in a continuous present characterized by the absolute absence of cause and effect – that is, according to the world view based on quantum physics and championed by so many poststructuralists. The result? Nearly every reason human beings find it possible to get up in the morning and make it through another day the detestable Pavlovian suggests that Pointsman is impotent, thus his “sterile armamentarium.”

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has been sucked out of her existence, which has become an interminable series of disconnected moments. Far from being liberating – much less uplifting or transcendentally spiritual – Frenesi experiences the freedom of causal constraints as merely another form of “servitude.”7 In this regard it is interesting to see what has happened to the ideology espoused by Leni Pökler in Gravity’s Rainbow. Leni rails against being a “mother” to her daughter Ilse, because they want a great swollen tit with some atrophied excuse for a human, bleating around somewhere in its shadows. [...] “Mother,” that’s a civil-service category. Mothers work for Them! (219).

The radical arguments set forth by Leni, however, are essentially the same as those picked up by Brock Vond in Vineland; Brock, of course, uses the arguments with Frenesi not to free her from social mores but to bind her to himself. In the midst of a deep postpartum depression, and feeling guilty for her resentment against the newborn Prairie, Frenesi hears Brock’s voice assuaging her guilt, leaning darkly in above her like any of the sleek raptors that decorate fascist architecture. Whispering, “This is just how they want you, an animal, a bitch with swollen udders lying in the dirt, blank-faced, surrendered, reduced to this meat, these smells...” (287)

This is a clear reversal of the position set out in Gravity’s Rainbow. While Leni sees the maternal relation as a social construction aimed at 7

Dixon similarly experiences anti-Newtonian reality – emblemized by the watch given him by Emerson before his voyage to America – as constraint and servitude. As he or the narrator reflects, “If this Watch be a message, why, it does not seem a kind one” (318). As emblem for anti-Newtonian reality, the watch becomes “a Burden whose weight increases with each nontorsionary day” (320), until at last Dixon experiences it as a “curs[e]” (320), and shortly thereafter finds that “his only Thoughts are of ways to rid himself of it” (321), an event which Mason styles “release” (324). When at last RC, a “local landsurveyor employ’d upon the Tangent Enigma” (321) internalizes antiNewtonian reality by swallowing the watch, his personal relationships suffer; his wife “moves to another Bed, and soon into another room altogether” (324). In the end, the watch colonizes RC’s stomach.

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constraint and militates against it, Brock understands familial love, and perhaps particularly maternal love, as a bond that threatens state control. Employing a variation on the radical rhetoric of the earlier period, Brock encourages Frenesi to see the biological relation as a constraint; by severing it, he can reassert his own control. Thus the radical ideal of an earlier age (the child’s freedom from the maternal relation) has been twisted into the mother’s freedom from maternal duties. But because Frenesi has been released from these duties only in order to work for Brock and the State, her “freedom” translates into just another form of “servitude.” In contrast to Frenesi, Pynchon gives us DL Chastain, whose major action throughout Vineland is accepting responsibility for having mistakenly applied the “Vibrating Palm” to Takeshi Fumimota. And at the end of the novel, while assenting that human life consists of struggling against the inexplicable, against “unrelenting forces [...] simply persist[ing], stone-humorless, beyond cause and effect” (383), Pynchon counterposes an assertion of free will, highlighting a conscious choice made by DL and Takeshi. The annually renewed contract in which they dedicate themselves to each other bears certain affinities to a marriage contract. Their decision at the novel’s end to forego the no-sex clause in the contract signifies the ultimate acceptance of cause and effect – and in the manner that most affirms the human.8 That their union may produce a child is foreshadowed in the speculations of the Head Ninjette, who is “interested at least in a scientific way in [...] the Baby Eros, that tricky little pud-puller” (383). Given the object of the Head Ninjette’s “at least scientific” speculations, the passage also provides a correction to Pointsman’s “sterile armamentarium” of cause and effect. 8

If as exemplar of responsibility DL embraces cause and effect, Frenesi’s husband Flash and the other members of the underground community serve as Pynchon’s warning of what happens when an entire society or subculture adopts quantum physics as the basis of its moral system. The result is a nation of snitches, a society so lacking in community that there can be no counterforce, no family gathering capable of celebrating the “secret retributions [...] of the divine justice” (369). The very notion of such retributions lies outside – indeed, has been ruled out by – the onto-epistemological system to which the society has so enthusiastically subscribed, and on which it has based

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While one might argue that every Pynchon novel includes at least one scene dramatizing a moral act (Fausto Maijstral’s administration of the sacrament of Extreme Unction to the Bad Priest in V. [343–44], Oedipa’s mothering of the dying sailor in The Crying of Lot 49 [102], Franz Pökler’s gift of comfort and his gold wedding band to the “breathing” Dora survivor in Gravity’s Rainbow [433], Jeremiah Dixon’s attack on the slave-driver in Mason & Dixon [698–99]), DL’s acceptance of responsibility in Vineland is noteworthy both for its duration – roughly a dozen years – and for its evolution from externally imposed to voluntarily embraced.9 An evolution of similarly extended duration operates in Mason & Dixon. This evolution too details ethical transformation, in this case effected by a three-stage pun set up and delivered over 350 pages, in which “Men of Science” (343) become “m[e]n of conscience” (699). This transformation yokes the two great evils of the novel, the Lancaster Massacre of “26 Indians, Men, Women and Children” (340) and world-wide slave traffic, with the protagonists’ moral educations. At the pun’s fulcrum, Dixon perceives, in a moment of paranoid clarity, something of the purpose of the Line:

9

its morality. Happily, we have not all adopted quantum physics as the basis of a moral system, and we are not yet a nation of snitches. And so Jess Traverse can still celebrate a variety of religious experience in his annual reading of Emerson. It is significant that the passage he recites is an assertion of cause and effect, though Emerson’s conception is of a relation less mechanistic than transcendental. Less easily observable than pushing a button to call for an elevator, “the divine justice” Jess Traverse calls for, which operates through “secret retributions,” is nonetheless an effect in response to a cause. DL’s acceptance of responsibility for Takeshi marks a departure from these earlier scenes of moral action in another way as well; it is untainted by selfinterest. Maijstral admits to spending much of the night “pray[ing] for [him]self” (V. 345). Moments after comforting the sailor downstairs, Oedipa uses the squalid upstairs room in which he has been living as a launching pad for a fantasy featuring her own magnanimity; the fantasy is so involving that she doesn’t notice he has let go of her hand (The Crying of Lot 49 103). And Pökler, brought to tears and vomiting at his discovery of “the other side” of “his vaccums, his labyrinths” (Gravity’s Rainbow 432), engages a psychological defense mechanism of “Impotence, mirror-rotation of sorrow” (432) before locating, “[w]here it was darkest and smelled the worst,” the “random woman” upon whom he bestows his redemptive gesture (433).

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“A Global Scheme! Ah knew it!” Dixon beginning to scream, “what’d Ah tell thee?” “Get a grip on yerrself, man,” mutters Mason, “what happen’d to ‘We’re Men of Science’?” “And Men of Science,” cries Dixon, “may be but the simple Tools of others, with no more idea of what they are about, than a Hammer knows of a House.” (669)

With the question Pynchon gives Mason in this exchange – “what happen’d to?” – he cues us, with an elbow-nudge in the gut (watch what happens to this phrase), for the pun that will follow thirty pages later, when Dixon attacks a slave-driver and frees his slaves: “Dixon still greatly desires to kill the Driver, cringing there among the Waggon-Ruts. What’s a man of conscience to do?” (699). This pun, and Dixon’s meditation on the Line, recommend close examination of two additional passages which comment upon cause and effect. Returned from his solo visit to Lancaster Gaol, the site of “last Year’s Massacre,” Mason, who we are told is “not as a rule sensitive to the metaphysickal Remnants of Evil,– none but the grosser, that is, the Gothickal, are apt to claim his Attention,–” says, “Acts have consequences, Dixon, they must” (346).10 In the second passage, Mason considers the effects of the Line (and by implication himself and Dixon, its immediate causes), and “groans”:

10

The “they must” that Pynchon appends to Mason’s dialogue here serves several functions. First, it removes from the statement its categorical certainty, its dogmatism, which is, in Pynchon’s worlds, suspect at best – and at worst a marker for the presence of evil. In terms of “character,” Mason’s insistence that “they must” reveals his psychological depth. Although Mason speaks of “the Debt” these “Louts” have taken on, and claims to smell “Lethe-Water” (346), as if some Divine Retribution is at hand, the appended phrase reveals his doubts and represents his attempt to convince himself such injustice will not go unanswered. Most importantly, however, Mason’s insistence pushes us – and Dixon – toward personal responsibility. If forces unseen will not right the wrongs of the world, we must be prepared to right them ourselves; we must see to it that acts have consequences – putting it more kindly, that people are held accountable for their actions. Mason’s “they must,” then, should be understood as one of the several motives leading Dixon to attack the slave-driver in Maryland.

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Pynchon has again encoded an important moment in a pun. The truly “unlocaliz’d voice” here is the narrator’s, which is enveloped by the Duck’s dialogue. Mason’s question emanates from Mason, the Duck’s scoffing rejoinder emanates from the Duck, but whence the narrator’s voice? Two possible meanings of this sentence are that something approaching a Universal Human Conscience may yet – even at this late date – act powerfully as a moral Center, or that the narrator or author of a work of fiction may do the same. But to what extent does the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, narrator of the Mason & Dixon passages cited here thus far, speak for Pynchon himself? Why should Cherrycoke be understood as a more reliable mouthpiece for Pynchon than was Gravity’s Rainbow’s Roger Mexico? As an Anglican clergyman, for instance, Cherrycoke might be expected to have a vested interest in upholding cause and effect, since the sacrifice and redemption at the heart of Christianity depend upon it. Despite his self-interest, however, three factors recommend a provisional identification between Cherrycoke and Pynchon. First, there is the existence of the novel’s framing device, Cherrycoke’s tale itself being governed by an outer narrator, one of whose roles is to ironize Cherrycoke, even as Cherrycoke presents a catalogue of “Crimes of [his] distant Youth” (9). This outer narrator is significant because he in effect places constraints on the “Authorial Authority” accruing to Cherrycoke/Pynchon (354).11 Second, the “Crimes” of Cherrycoke’s “distant Youth” read as a metaphor for Pynchon’s career as a fictionist: 11

For David Cowart, Cherrycoke’s “joking about his ‘Authorial Authority’ (354) in one place and calling himself an ‘untrustworthy Remembrancer’ (8) in another, draws the reader/audience’s attention to his own possible unreliability as narrator” (356–57), one strategy by which Pynchon refuses “the imposition, more or less fascistic, of a single, official perspective” (356).

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Along with some lesser Counts [...] the Crime they styl’d “Anonymity.” That is, I left messages posted publicly, but did not sign them. I knew some nightrunning lads in the district who let me use their Printing-Press,– somehow, what I got into printing up, were Accounts of certain Crimes I had observ’d, committed by the Stronger against the Weaker,– enclosures, evictions, Assize verdicts, Activities of the Military,– giving the names of as many of the Perpetrators as I was sure of. (9)

Certainly that “anonymity” brings to mind Pynchon’s carefullyguarded privacy, and the Crimes he had “observed” and publicized find corollaries in the other novels: for “enclosures” we have the labyrinths of Gravity’s Rainbow,12 and for “evictions, Assize verdicts, and Activities of the Military” we have the War on Drugs’ civil RICO asset seizures referred to in Vineland. Finally, one thinks of Douglas Keesey’s ironic rejoinder to David Streitfield’s Washington Post review of Vineland: “True art is ambiguous about the source of threat; bad art names names” (Keesey 109). Third, and what finally establishes Cherrycoke’s role as Pynchon’s mouthpiece is that, unlike the Weissmanns, the Pointsmans, and the Vonds in Pynchon’s fiction, Cherrycoke never speaks categorically or monologically, never claims exclusive rights to the past, never trumps his prerogative at “having been there.” Quite the opposite. In his treatise on Christ and History, “part” of which appears as the epigraph to chapter 35, he sets down an historiography that sounds suspiciously Pynchonian: Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,– Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers,– nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,– her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,– that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,– not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,– rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long 12

See for instance, Francisco Squalidozzi’s history of Argentina: “Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is our national tragedy. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky” (Gravity‘s Rainbow 264), as well as the mental labyrinths of Franz Pökler (432).

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Far from claiming the sanction of Official Rembrance, or of The True Chronology, Cherrycoke insists that a History’s value lies precisely in being one subjective strand among others. Not surprisingly, when, in a parenthetical aside provided by the outer narrator, Ives challenges Cherrycoke’s narrative authority – or lack thereof – Cherrycoke playfully foregrounds the fictionality of history, even as he insists on his original plot line, merely providing support by way of additional improvised detail, saying, let us postulate two Dixons, then, one in an unmoving Stupor throughout,– the other [...] assum’d to’ve ridden [...] out to Nelson’s Ferry over Susquehanna, and after crossing, perhaps, tho’ not necessarily,– on to York [...] ever southing, toward Annapolis, and Virginia beyond. (393)

Pynchon is a postmodernist. But despite the fictionality of history, despite the historicity of his fiction, not all is Representation, not all is Indeterminacy – either in Pynchon’s novels or in the world to which they refer. In fact, it is in breaking the frame that separated the modernist work of art as an internally consistent and self-sufficient world from “the base mortal World that is our home and our Despair” (Mason & Dixon 345) that Pynchon performs his most crucial function as a writer and a citizen. Quantum physics may represent a better approximation of the physical universe, but in the moral realm, Pynchon would remind us, application of any but the Newtonian physics is disastrous. The Human Conscience “may yet act powerfully as a moral Center” (Mason & Dixon 666), but it must be carefully attended, provided with representations – and examples – of moral resistance in order for it to grow.

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2. Pynchon’s Political Parable: Parallels between Vineland and “Rip Van Winkle”13 I have argued elsewhere that postmodern assertions aside, historical trends do exist, and they are not merely the manufactured cabals of subjective and subjectivizing personalities. As a historical novelist whose subject is America and whose passion is politics, Thomas Pynchon is aware of “the imperial presidency.”14 Vineland (1990), his fourth novel, reflects the steady encroachment in the twentieth century of the executive branch on the legislative and dramatizes some of the attendant threats to Americans’ civil liberties.15 It is fitting, then, that Pynchon has embedded in his novel an extended parallel to an early American political parable, Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.” Although Irving’s style has been criticized as excessively British, the thematic concerns of “Rip Van Winkle” are distinctly American and are quite relevant to Vineland and the presidential usurpation of power in the 1980s.16 Because readers of Pynchon’s texts always stand the risk of “Stencilizing” those texts, that is, of succumbing to their own “unacknowledged desires for [order]” (Vineland 269) by forcing intertextual connections of their own device on a neutral, unsuspecting, and otherwise innocent text, I offer the following extensive treatment of the parallels between “Rip Van Winkle” and Vineland. In addition 13 14

15

16

This part of my article originally appeared in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews. 14.3 (2001): 45–50. The phrase is the title of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr’s study of executive aggrandizement, first published in 1973, the same year as Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel that features a Nixon look-alike driving a “black Managerial Volkswagen” like a mad führer down the Los Angeles freeways (755). For a concise history of executive aggrandizement, including an account of the judiciary branch’s reluctance to hear cases involving such issues, see Jules Lobel’s excellent discussion. For more detailed, although less contemporary discussions, see Rossiter and Schlesinger A more extensive discussion of the historical and thematic context surrounding this parallel appears in my article “The President’s Emergency War Powers and the Erosion of Civil Liberties in Pynchon’s Vineland.”

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to the thematic parallels, I shall mention a few parallels of plot and place. My goal here is not to belabor the point, but to establish definitively the connection between the two and to assure the reader that the novel is not, in my reading, being “Stencilized” (V. 228). Vineland is Pynchon’s wake-up call to the American voter, who, like Rip Van Winkle and Pynchon’s own protagonist Zoyd Wheeler, has been asleep for twenty years. Indeed, both texts involve scenes of awakening. The first sentence of Pynchon’s novel reads, “Later than usual one morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig [...] with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof” (3), an ominous updating of this mid-story passage from “Rip Van Winkle”: “On awaking he found himself on the green knoll [...]. He rubbed his eyes – it was a bright, sunny morning. The birds were hopping and twittering among the bushes” (776). Rip has obviously slept later than usual, and Irving points up this irony by having Rip say to himself that “Surely [...] I have not slept here all night” (776). Calling for his dog, Rip is “only answered by the cawing of a flock of idle crows” (777);17 these crows are replaced in Vineland by the blue jays that, in Zoyd’s dream, had been carrier pigeons, “each bearing a message for him” (3). The military formation of the blue jays, along with their arrogant “stomping,” the “creeping” fig, and the profusion of “messages,” evoke the manytentacled military and government bureaucracies that shape so much of modern life – and their publicly accountable apex, the president and commander-in-chief.18 But the parallel does not end here. Both texts also include arrival scenes wherein the protagonists, oddly dressed, are attended by the heckling of children and by feelings of disorientation. As Rip 17

18

After Rip’s twenty-year nap, his dog Wolf has “disappeared” (777). Similarly, Zoyd’s dog Desmond disappears for much of Vineland. Rumored a ghost dog, “spotted out by Shade Creek [...] with a pack of dispossessed pot-planters’ dogs [...] who were haunting the local pastures” (357, emphases added), Desmond returns “home” only on the last page of the novel (385). Readers of Gravity’s Rainbow will also recall the intelligence messages delivered to Pirate Prentice via V2 rockets and the grating high-ranking government voice that “tells Pirate now there’s a message addressed to him, waiting at Greenwich” (11).

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approaches the village, he notes with surprise the costumes worn by its habitants, and when we find that “[t]hey all stared at him with equal marks of surprise,” we must recall the outlandishness of Rip’s own outmoded dress. As he enters the village itself, “[a] troop of strange children ran at his heels, hooting after him” (778). Similarly, Zoyd, wearing a colorful dress (bought at a discount shop specializing in large sizes, called, appropriately enough, “More Is Less”19), and en route to a bar known as the Log Jam, gets stuck in “a convoy of outof-state Winnebagos [...] among whom [...] he was obliged to gear down and put up with a lot of attention, not all of it friendly” (5). One girl screams that Zoyd “ought to be locked up” (5). Rip’s feelings of disorientation (“The very village was altered – it was larger and more populous [...] his familiar haunts had disappeared [...] every thing was strange” [778]) are echoed by Zoyd’s experience at the Log Jam, where “right away he noticed that everything, from the cooking to the clientele, smelled different” (5). The Log Jam has been recently renovated and is now outfitted with “designer barstools” and a “jukebox [...] reformatted to light classical and New Age music that gently peep[s] at the edges of audibility” (5, 6). “[A]bout the only thing that ha[s]n’t been replaced [is] the original bar” (7). Not only is the architecture different, however. On returning to the village, Rip discovers that “[t]he very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility” (779). When a “short but busy little fellow [...] pull[s] him by the arm [...] and enquire[s] in his ear ‘whether he was Federal or Democrat?’” (779), the uncomprehending Rip gets himself in a tight spot by crying, “Alas [...] I am a poor quiet man, a native of the place, and a loyal subject of the King – God bless him!” (780). Rip has slept through the change in governments; Zoyd and the contemporary American voter have done much the same. Despite his somnolence, however, Zoyd recognizes that the Log Jam is only the latest in a long line of Vineland County bars to undergo gentrification and that the assiduous remodeling by so many 19

Pynchon’s pun here also reverses the 1980s mantra of minimalist fiction.

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bar owners has worked another kind of change in the “very character of the people.” As Zoyd explains to Buster, the owner of the Log Jam: [O]nly reason I’m up here is ’at the gentrification of South Spooner, Two Street, and other more familiar hellraisin’ locales has upped the ante way outa my bracket, these are all folks now who like to sue, and for big bucks, with hotshot PI lawyers up from the City. (7, emphasis added)

This new litigiousness takes the place, in the late twentieth century, of the early republic’s impassioned political discussion.20 The Vineland County locals are no less “busy” and “disputatious” than the citizenry that greeted Rip Van Winkle, but while that citizenry had fought and won a war for independence (and so cultivated an immediate interest in politics), the loggers Zoyd meets, “sipping kiwi mimosas” and clad in “three-figure-price-tag jeans by Mme. Gris” (5, 6), are interested only in maintaining the feverish materialism of the 1980s. Both Rip and Zoyd, then, wind up at drinking establishments, but even before entering both men experience a dislocation akin to finding themselves in foreign countries. For Rip, that dislocation is ironic and literal. He is, of course, in the same geographical area, but that area is now literally a new country: Instead of the great tree, that used to shelter the quiet little Dutch inn of yore, there now was reared a tall naked pole [...] and from it was fluttering a flag on which was a singular assemblage of stars and stripes – all this was strange and incomprehensible. He recognized on the sign, however, the ruby face of King George under which he had smoked so many a peaceful pipe, but even this was singularly metamorphosed. The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff; a sword was held in the hand instead of a sceptre; the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was printed in large characters GENERAL WASHINGTON. (779)

For Zoyd, the dislocation is ironic and metaphorical. The first of “several rude updates” he encounters at the Log Jam is the “collection 20

We see another sign of the litigiousness that has come to dominate American life later in the novel when, in a burst of nostalgia for “the malls [she’d] grown up with,” Zoyd’s daughter Prairie recalls that “there even used to be ice rinks, back when insurance was affordable, she could remember days [...] where all they did for hours was watch kids skate” (326).

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of upscale machinery parked in the lot, itself newly blacktopped” (5). In response to Buster’s claim that he and his clientele are “just country fellas,” Zoyd says, “From the looks of your parking lot, the country must be Germany” (7). This metaphor ironically and humorously introduces what will become one of the novel’s key themes, the movement in the United States in recent years away from democracy and toward dictatorship. Thus Pynchon’s novel updates Irving’s story, which marked the transition from monarchy to democracy. The basis for another parallel is Rip’s first view of his grown son. After asking about his old cronies, all apparently dead or gone away, the despairing Rip cries, “Does nobody here know Rip Van Winkle?” At this, two or three startled people exclaim: “[O]h to be sure! – that’s Rip Van Winkle – yonder – leaning against the tree.” Rip looked and beheld a precise counterpart of himself, as he went up the mountain: apparently as lazy, and certainly as ragged! The poor fellow was now completely confounded. He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man. (781)

The scene’s corollary in Vineland comes when Zoyd takes his infant daughter north. After hitchhiking to San Francisco, they take the bus the rest of the way. Meanwhile, Zoyd’s running buddy Van Meter has agreed to drive Zoyd’s car: Zoyd caught up with Van Meter in Eureka, at the corner of 4th and H, as, suddenly disoriented, he observed his ’64 Dodge Dart, unmistakably his own short, with the LSD paint job [...] and at the wheel a standard-issue Hippie Freak who looked just like him. Woo-oo! An unreal moment for everybody, with the driver staring twice as weirdly right back at Zoyd! (315)

In Irving’s story, Rip’s identity crisis is a synechdochic reproduction of the early republic’s crisis of political identity. The question of Federal or Democrat, first foregrounded by Rip’s arrival at the polling place on Election Day, is quickly overwhelmed by Rip’s pledged allegiance to King George, reminding us of the more fundamental shift from monarchy to democracy. In Vineland, the shift in the political paradigm is similarly fundamental. Although Zoyd’s moment of identity crisis occurs in a flashback to 1970 or ’71, the

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zeitgeist to which the flashback refers sets up an implicit contrast between the mid-sixties and 1984, when he arrives at the Log Jam. But rather than presenting the mid-sixties as the moment of ultimate freedom, Pynchon presents that time as the halfway point between a “green free America” and a “scabland garrison state” of the future (314). In San Francisco, the halfway point of his journey up the coast, Zoyd and Mucho Maas listen to and are comforted by The Best of Sam Cooke, “though outside spread the lampless wastes, the unseen paybacks, the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into” (314). More is involved, however, than the simple modulation of a Democratic administration into a Republican one. Indeed, the fact that the Vietnam War was prosecuted by the administrations of both parties (and dramatically escalated by a Democratic one) suggests that party politics has little to do with the real change in America’s political direction. As in Irving’s story, then, Zoyd’s identity crisis points to a shift from one political order to another – in this case, from democracy to dictatorship.21 In addition to these parallels, Pynchon counters Rip’s “naturally [...] thirsty soul” (776) with Zoyd’s once regular marijuana use and tubal intoxication, physiological manifestations of the political apathy displayed by the majority of Americans since the 1970s. That there are reasons for that apathy is beside the point: Pynchon is not interested in excuses, but effects. As Pynchon himself put it in “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee”: In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily political, a failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies and the rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920s and 30s being perhaps Sloth’s finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the Reagan-Bush years are not far behind. (57)

Neither is Rip’s invocation of the tyrant George III irrelevant, considering the Reagan administration’s systematic attempts to extend 21

In Pynchon’s view, this shift in political orders is not simply a parallel beyond good and evil. In Pynchon’s theology, this is precisely the sort of shift we are supposed to resist.

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its authority while avoiding accountability. The message sent to Zoyd “from forces unseen” is that Johnson is no longer in the White House, and it is time to start paying attention (3).22

Works Cited Collado Rodríguez, Francisco. “Trespassing Limits: Pynchon’s Irony and the Law of the Excluded Middle.” Oklahoma City University Law Review 24.3 (Fall 1999): 471–503. Cowart, David. “The Luddite Vision: Mason & Dixon.” American Literature 71 (1999): 341–63. Friedman, Alan J. “Science and Technology.” Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow. Ed. Charles Clerc. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983. 69–102. Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. “Visible Tracks: Historical Method and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.” College Literature 19.1 (February 1992): 91–103. —— “Sari, Sorry, and the Vortex of History: Calendar Reform, Anachronism, and Language Change in Mason & Dixon.” American Literary History 12 (2000): 187–215. Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983. Irving, Washington. “Rip Van Winkle.” Washington Irving: History, Tales and Sketches. Ed. James Tuttleton. New York: Library of America, 1983: 769–85. Keesey, Douglas. “Vineland in the Mainstream Press: A Reception Study.” Pynchon Notes 26–27 (Spring–Fall 1990): 65–73. Lobel, Jules. “Emergency Power and the Decline of Liberalism.” Yale Law Journal 98 (1989): 1385–433. Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Eds. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston: Little, 1976. 161–95.

22

The Great Society and the Civil Rights movement not withstanding, Johnson occupies no idealized (or even privileged) position in either Pynchon’s political reckoning or in the history of executive aggrandizement. I invoke Johnson’s administration not because he represents the high point of civil libertarianism in America but because Zoyd’s lack of attention and political responsibility can be traced to Johnson’s years in office. The earliest flashback dealing with Zoyd dramatizes his years in Gordita Beach, “shortly after Reagan was elected governor of California” (22), which would be 1966.

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Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1965. New York: Harper-Perennial, 1990. —— Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973. —— Mason & Dixon. New York: Holt, 1997. —— “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee.” New York Times Book Review 6 June 1993: 3FF. —— V. 1963. New York: Harper-Perennial, 1989. —— Vineland. 1990. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1991. Rossiter, Clinton L. Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1948. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Imperial Presidency. 1973. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton, 1989. Simpson, Louis. “My Father in the Night Commanding No.” At the End of the Open Road. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1963. 37–8. Thoreen, David. “The President’s Emergency War Powers and the Erosion of Civil Liberties in Pynchon’s Vineland.” Oklahoma City University Law Review 24 (1999): 761–98.

FRANCISCO COLLADO RODRÍGUEZ

Mason & Dixon, Historiographic Metafiction and the Unstable Reconciliation of Opposites1

I would like to start from the premise that with Mason & Dixon Thomas Pynchon has built a powerful and ideological postmodern artifact that fits into the literary category that, some years ago, Linda Hutcheon called “historiographic metafiction” (5).2 That is to say, Mason & Dixon is a novel where metafictional devices, by pointing out the self-referential quality of language, systematically erase any possibility of ultimately believing in the objectivity of the historical events that the book allegedly reports: in this way, episodes that – from a humanist and Newtonian stance – readers would have qualified as fantastic or unreal (the Learnèd English Dog, the automaton duck, the beaver-man, etc.), acquire the same epistemological status as those other historical events that are reported in the story (including the clearing of the Visto itself, or the very existence of the protagonists). The human propensity to narrativize reality thus stands as the ultimate insurmountable barrier in our necessity to know the historical real, but it also becomes, in Pynchon’s hands, a paradoxical liberating force that helps the reader to doubt and inquire into the official or historical discourse of authority.3 1

2

3

The research carried out for the writing of this paper has been financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education (DGICYT, Programa Sectorial de Promoción General del Conocimiento, 1998–2001: PB97–1022). The Canadian critic uses this expression to refer to “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Midnight’s Children, Ragtime, Legs, G., Famous Last Words [...] its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (5). On the notion of narrativity, see White.

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Many are the techniques that Pynchon uses in this novel to produce this subversive activity, and many of them can also be found in his previous writing, but Mason & Dixon incorporates an innovative element in the writer’s fictional approach: for here he disguises a postmodern understanding of life by referring to the first historical epoch that seriously questioned the ideology of modernity, that is to say, the (early) romantic period. This Pynchonian novelty adds to a story in which readers may, of course, discover some of the author’s favorite metafictional devices as well as multiple references to the twentieth-century’s new scientific paradigm (relativity and quantum physics, fractal geometry, and chaos theory). Some specific devices become, in my view, most effective in carrying out the writer’s latest attempt to disrupt the still existing Newtonian confidence in categorical thinking. I intend to concentrate my analysis, more specifically, on the unreliable character of the narrative voices, and on the overcoming of clear-cut discursive and ideological limits, an activity that is symbolized in – among other devices – the crossing of narrative boundaries, the use of doubles and impersoators, the intertextual winks to the reader, and the unstable characters of the two protagonists. In all these cases, the above-mentioned convergence of romantic and postmodern views, and the scientific understanding of the relativistic and chaotic quality of life help to highlight the subversive component of these rhetorical devices and, ultimately, of Pynchon’s project. As regards the unreliable character of the narrative voices, I decidedly oppose the simplistic views that some earlier reviewers of the novel were quick to defend (Menand’s “Entropology,” Pelovitz’s “Linear Pynchon,” Enterzone; or Bradbury’s derogatory “Is This the Greatest American Novel Ever”), who insist that the story of Mason and Dixon is only narrated by Reverend Cherrycoke.4 However, using a technique already present in V., the novelist introduces a first-level unknown narrator characterized by its ironic attitude when reporting on events: this voice soon comments about the fact that Cherrycoke is temporarily staying at his sister’s house in Philadelphia. Her husband, 4

Whose name intertextually evokes that of a minor character in Gravity’s Rainbow. The reader may also discover the appearance of some other names that belong to the Pynchonean cosmos, such as the celebrated Bodine.

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Mr J. Wade LeSpark, is ironically qualified as the Sultan by this mysterious narrator, who immediately confirms Cherrycoke’s role as the new Scheherezade, who can stay in Mr LeSparke’s house “for as long as he can keep the children amus’d” (6) by telling them tales and stories. Cherrycoke’s role as a second-level narrator and as an ironic and inventing fabulator starts soon after, with his report of the adventures of Mason and Dixon to his family audience, a report partly based on the fact that he was a witness in some of those adventures, but mostly created by assumptions, interpretations of written documents, or mere inventions whose doubtful status some of his relatives are quick to denounce. Here and there, the reader may also glimpse the first-level unknown narrator, a figure always ready to intervene and confuse the reader a little more in a reported quest where the metafictional devices of the mise-en-abyme (with its suggestion of rhetorical infinite regress),5 and the metalepsis or trespassing of narrative levels,6 further enhance the more than dubious truth of all narrated events – both the fantastic and the historical ones. Examples of these devices abound – as usual – in Pynchon’s latest novel. Let us consider one of them. Chapter 39 soon discloses a typical Pynchonian mixture of narrative levels and narratorial unreliability. The reader who has been paying attention to Cherrycoke’s report suddenly has to face the use of brackets, the assumption that a first-level voice is narrating the Reverend’s telling of the story, and the latter’s total disregard of historical truth: (“Dixon was first to leave,” the Revd relates, “and with no indication in the Field-Book of where he went or stopp’d, let us assume that he went first to Annapolis,–” “How ‘assume’?” objects Ives. “There are no Documents, Wicks? Perhaps he stay’d on at Harland’s and drove all of them south, with his drunken intriguing after ev’ry eligible,– meaning ev’ry,– Milkmaid in the Forks of Brandy-wine.” “Or [another unspecified character says] let us postulate two Dixons, then, one in an unmoving Stupor throughout,– the other, for Simplicity, assum’d to’ve ridden [...] out to Nelson’s Ferry over Susquehanna, […].”) (393)

5 6

On the concept of mise-en-abyme and its use in the contemporary novel, see Stonehill. On this notion, see Genette 234– 37.

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The reader then has to put up with the notion that what is being reported here is subject to the mixture of different narrative voices, and that assumptions are for those narratorial voices a valid means to report on the adventures of Mason and Dixon: the historicity of the two characters and of their celebrated line is thus counter-attacked by a human tendency strongly foregrounded in postmodern times: our insistent capacity to create fictional stories or interpretations of reality. The paragraph quoted above also discloses another motif that is frequently favored by Pynchon: the use of doubles, an old literary device equally related to the doubling quality of mirrors, to the concept of symmetry, and ultimately to the line (the frame of the mirror) that separates the human subject from its external double. The motif itself also became a favorite one in the fiction written by two genial predecessors of the American postmodern novel, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, and here Pynchon uses it again to enhance his ironic criticism of categorical thinking: lines or borders that would define the limits imposed by Western dualist thinking are also metaphorically blurred with the help of a number of mise-enabymic doubles that invade the different narrative levels of the book. Once the mysterious first-level narrator has introduced readers to Cherrycoke’s family, we face the first pair of twins, Pitt and Pliny, themselves believers in the condition of Geminity of the two protagonists in the main story: “Boys!” their Parents call. “Bed-Time.” “Us. To bed?” queries Pitt. “Who should be listening to a Tale of Geminity,” explains Pliny, “if not Twins?” “Your Surveyors were Twins,– ” “– were they not, Uncle?” (315)

Their uncle’s reply is uncertain: he advances the protagonists’ convergence at a certain point in their adventure, but also announces their eventually divided destinies: readers fond of chaos theory will probably recognize in Cherrycoke’s words a new hidden drawing of that celebrated letter, the v, that metaphorizes a bifurcation point.7 7

This is what the Reverend replies to the Twins: “‘Up to a point, my barking Fire-Dogs,’– the Revd having thought it over,– ‘as it seem’d to me, that Mason and Dixon had been converging, to all but a Semblance– till something…

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Later on in this tale of doubles the two protagonists will be impersonated by two members of their own team but, more surprisingly, readers will also discover a female version of the historical couple of astronomers in Franklin’s friends Molly & Dolly, whose very initials are clear evidence of their reflective nature. The Chinese astronomers Hsi and Ho also reduplicate Mason’s and Dixon’s roles within the embedded story Captain Zhang told about their legendary lives (chapter 64). Even Zhang’s belief in the earthly Dragon of his pantheistic interpretation of life also has its heavenly correlate in the constellation of Draco, that has traditionally ruled England from the sky. Early critics related this Pynchonian insistence on enhancing similarities to quantum theory and Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity,8 scientific notions that systematically take us to conclude the author’s rejection of dualist thinking and, correspondingly, of Western rationalism and of the clear-cut experiment of modernity.9 However, Pynchon’s book offers its readers a further ironic loop on categorical thinking: in Mason & Dixon the term line is frequently used to suggest its pernicious and finally useless condition. Lines are continuously trespassed not only in the main story but, as we have seen, also between narratorial voices and different narrative levels. This transgressive activity that scientific readers may also want to connect to chaos theory and fuzzy logic,10 is remarkably enhanced by the authorial use of a radical type of metalepsis as manifested in chapters 53 and 54 of the book. Although it is not the only example existing in the novel of the technical subversive device, however this particular moment of the narrative is especially interesting because it also incorporates the typical postmodern technique of introducing specific literary subgenres within the main frame of the story. In effect, chapter 53 starts with a quotation from Cherrycoke’s paradoxical Undeliver’d Sermons where the “postmodern” preacher discusses the possibility that Thomas and Christ were twins, and

8 9 10

something occurr’d between them, in ’sixty-seven or ’sixty-eight, that divided their Destinies irremediably...’” (315). See the seminal chapter on Pynchon’s fiction by Nadeau. For an extended analysis of this Pynchonean motif, see Collado Rodríguez. On the impact of these concepts in contemporary culture, see Kosko.

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defends the notion that the “final pure Christ is pure uncertainty” (511). This parodic device gives entrance to the story reported in the chapter, the kidnapping of a white woman, a certain Eliza Fields, by the Indians: the technique is parodic again, Pynchon is borrowing here from a sub-genre that has been recently recuperated by American literature programs, the narratives of captivity. The problem is that the reader ignores what that narrative is doing there and who is reporting it; is it Cherrycoke? Later on, this apparent story within the story discovers the conceited forces existing behind the kidnapping: the sect of the Jesuits, one of the hidden, unofficial powers of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and the reader is introduced to the ironized archenemy of the book, Padre Zarpazo, also referred to as “Lord of the Zero,” a wink to the reader that evokes the figure of that other criminal mind, Lt Weissmann, from V. and Gravity’s Rainbow. Chapter 54 surprises the reader with a homodiegetic or first-person report: the kidnapped woman, now being converted into one of the “Viudas de Cristo,” narrates her own experience. However, only one page later we are informed that this apparently embedded story is written in a volume of The Ghastly Fop that Cherrycoke’s nephew ’Thelmer is reading: Brae has discover’d the sinister Volume in ’Thelmer’s Room, lying open to a Copper-plate Engraving of two pretty Nuns, sporting in ways she finds inexplicably intriguing... (526)

Later, readers are also informed that The Ghastly Fop has already run into a series of more than a dozen volumes (including some Borgesian reflective forgeries, 527), eventually becoming a weekly. In the Captive’s Tale the reader also meets Zarpazo’s opposing double, the Chinese Capt. Zhang, a new Z, and expert in Feng-Shui, thus a believer in the integration of opposites. This character is also in love with the captive maiden and he is even capable of transforming himself into his fierce enemy, Padre Zarpazo. The logical transgressions represented by the Chinese figure add in this chapter to a series of narratorial interruptions where we know more about the relationship between ’Thelmer and Brae, the readers of this tale, till finally metalepsis operates again and the narrative of captivity fuses

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into Mason’s and Dixon’s main story: the Viudita and Zhang “arrive at the West Line, and decide to follow the Visto east, and ere long they have come up with the Party” (534). Obviously, at this moment in the narrative readers are forced to wander about the line that separates the reading of The Ghastly Fop from Cherrycoke’s oral report. Also characteristic of Pynchon’s novels is their play with different ontological levels that, by transgressing their boundaries, produce a continual impression of instability and uncertainty in the reader that tries to apply western logic to the act of reading. As we have so far considered, Mason & Dixon does not differ much from the writer’s earlier fiction in this sense. However, the historical period and the protagonists’ task further enhance this authorial obsession with blurring categorical limits. The metaphorical importance that the term line has in the novel is also paralleled by the presentation of two protagonists whose very job is to understand, control, and put to a practical use the so-called natural laws that the Enlightenment believed would eventually help humans to explain the mysteries of life.11 Servants of modernity, Mason and Dixon are however continuously presented as men suspicious of their own mission: there are times in which they hint at the political implications that their American line will eventually have (692–93), but it is in the depiction of their characters where Pynchon stresses again the necessity to escape categorical thinking. The two astronomers are frequently presented as having opposite characters, however they are also historical incarnations of the romantic cultural effects that, for a while, opposed the far-fetched pragmatism of the experiment of modernity. It seems to me that Pynchon’s choice of the novel’s historical settings and his description of the two protagonists as being on the one hand melancholic and gothic, and on the other romantic, are elements that also respond to his manifested and continuous ironizing of either/or categorical structures. The gothic and romantic period (re)introduced within a culture still dominated by Aristotelian, Newtonian, and humanist values, the alternative belief in the “reconciliation of opposites.” This is a notion that becomes epitomized in William Blake’s poetry and painting, for instance, and 11

On this matter, see Markley.

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that in the novel itself is also to be associated to the Eastern beliefs defended by Zhang.12 And similarly Mason and Dixon, far from showing two radically different characters from beginning to end, gradually start to exemplify in themselves the insistent postmodernist motif of the instability of the subject. Along the book’s totally unstable narrative line, the reader discovers many moments and circumstances that highlight the social differences existing between the two characters: the one is Anglican, an astronomer, likes wine and tea, and is frequently attracted to melancholic fits; the other is a Quaker, a surveyor, likes beer and coffee, and has a romantic and rebellious spirit. However, these differences and the continual disputes of the two men eventually account for nothing: quarrels are followed by reconciliation and mutual respect and, by the time they have to face the possibility of trespassing the Indian War Path, their characters have, at last, become textually interchangeable. Chapter 70 opens with Mason’s insistence that they must cross the Indian line and continue their own surveying activities: Mason, stubborn, wishes to go on, believing that with Hugh Crawford’s help, he may negotiate for another ten minutes of Arc. “But Mason, they don’t know what thah’ is...?” “We’ll show them. Let them look thro’ the Instruments or something. Or they can watch us writing.” (678)

Notwithstanding, only one page later readers are informed that the protagonists “at some point exchange Positions, with Dixon now for pushing on, razzle-dazzling their way among the Indians at least as far as Ohio.” (679) The obvious instability of their characters has produced their very interchangeability, thus adding to the continually transgressive ethos of the book,13 an ethos epitomized in the very 12

13

This mythic integrative notion is not strictly “positive,” though, as Pynchon frequently associates it to the notion of entropy. In agreement with my understanding of Pynchon’s oeuvre, I would suggest a linguistically impossible evaluation of this integrative notion as being both positive/negative. The issue is not new in Pynchon’s fiction: the emotional interchangeability of Stencil’s and Profane’s characters comes easily to mind. However, being a Spaniard I cannot stop thinking of the similar character flaws of the celebrated figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whose roles actually become interchangeable in the second part of Cervantes’s novel.

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linking & of its title. Ultimately, all the devices commented on here converge in Pynchon’s denunciation of the artificial and dangerous barriers humans invent, such as the ill-fated line drawn by his protagonists, a Visto – a new v –, devised for economic reasons and whose effects were to be dramatically felt in the Civil War. However, Mason & Dixon is above all a novel characterized by the decontextualization of its narrative. The book abounds in references to the poststructuralist interpretation of life as a Text, and frequently enhances the human activity of Representation, also insisting on that favorite metaphor of Michel Foucault: the mapping of reality.14 Not surprisingly the Mason and Dixon line had interested the author since, at least, the writing of his first novel:15 the activity of the surveyors is basically one of mapping reality but it also combines with that other celebrated Pynchonian motif, the human need for transcendence. “As above, so below” becomes a celebrated phrase in the book, suggesting not just the esoteric understanding of a fractalic reality, but the clear metaphor that situates the surveyors as draftsmen of the US map: however they are also the readers who try to make sense of the hidden message apparently written in the heavens. By the end of the book readers fond of Pynchon’s fiction should not be surprised to find again an ironic glimpse at transcendental revelation: Benjamin Franklin asks Mason whether he has already found or read a final Design in the skies, and Mason replies in the affirmative: Sir, you have encounter’d Deists before, and know that our Bible is Nature, wherein the Pentateuch, is the Sky. I have found there, written ev’ry Night, in Astral Gematria, Messages of Great Urgency to our Time, and to your Continent, Sir. (772).

An old madman or a real visionary, his mysterious answer will never be totally clarified because, again, Pynchon’s readers have to face an open ending. And that happens in a book that is saturated with references to story-telling: almost everybody, on every narrative level, 14 15

Many examples can be offered of this postmodern/poststructuralist understanding of reality. See, for instance 482, 497, 540, or 687. V. offers some references to the Line and to some of the technical problems the surveyors had in drawing it, see especially 419 and the very end of the novel.

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is ready to tell a tale or to experience a dream reported to the reader in the form of a tale, a notion that is furthered again in chapter 73, a bifurcative invented episode in which the narrator imagines an alternative ending. In it Mason and Dixon are together again, their mission now being to draw a line across the Atlantic Ocean: “A thoughtful enough Arrangement of Anchors and Buoys, Lenses and Lanthorns, forming a perfect Line across the Ocean, all the way from the Delaware Bay to the Spanish Extremadura” (712). Pynchon’s encyclopaedic knowledge and authorial irony are further enhanced by the fact that Extremadura – the place where, incidentally, I was born – is a Spanish region so named because it used to be the fighting, everchanging frontier that separated the Muslims from the Christians in medieval Spain.16 The remarkable combination of all the above-mentioned devices, ends up forcing the reader – or, in any case, my own reading – to reflect on the line that separates truth from falsehood, historicity from fiction, and on the way we construct our interpretations of reality. The fight against the limitations imposed by artificial – textual – barriers, Pynchon seems to suggest, is not limited to the Gothic and Romantic revolt against the rational excesses of the Enlightenment. The fight against despotic discursive lines and natural boundaries still goes on today, and, he seems to warn us, it is everybody’s task to suspend our categorical and pragmatic beliefs and so give a chance for a more understanding fusion of opposites where ideological values have no clear limits.

16

In a literal sense, Extremadura means “the limits of the Duero,” a large river that crosses Northern Portugal and Spain and where the actual medieval frontier stood for a while. Later on the Christians fought their way down the Iberian Peninsula but Extremadura came to represent the limits with the Muslim kingdoms, even if Extremeñean lands now stood very far from the river Duero.

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Works Cited Bradbury, Malcolm. “Is This the Greatest American Novel Ever?” Literary Review July 1997: 24. Collado Rodríguez, Francisco. “Trespassing Limits: Pynchon’s Irony and the Law of the Excluded Middle.” The Oklahoma City University Law Review 24. 2 (1999): 471–503. Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse. 1972. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1988. Kosko, Bart. Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic. London: Harper Collins, 1993. Markley, Robert. “Representing Order: Natural Philosophy, Mathematics, and Theology in the Newtonian Revolution.” Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science Ed. N. Katherine Hayles. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991: 125–48. Menand, Louis. “Entropology.” Rev. New York Review of Books (12 June 1997): 22FF. Nadeau, Robert. Readings from the New Book on Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in the Modern Novel. Amherst. U of Massachusetts P, 1981. Pelovitz, David. “Linear Pynchon.” Enterzone 11 (1997) . Pynchon, Thomas. Mason & Dixon. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997. —— Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Picador, 1973. —— V. London: Picador, 1963. Stonehill, Brian. The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1988. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.

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WILLIAM B. MILLARD

Delineations of Madness and Science: Mason & Dixon, Pynchonian Space and the Snovian Disjunction1

The deconstructionists have made the binary oscillation of Western decorum a desperate affair. It is not a desperate affair; it is an error-checking operation. It represents [...] a way in which style can control content, formal pleasure balance conceptual thought, self-consciousness satirically ventilate out hierarchical urges. (Lanham 84)

If the voluminous display of interdisciplinary knowledge in Thomas Pynchon’s fiction is to serve a reader as an open field for serious investigation and contemplation then the reader who senses that Pynchon’s work is substantial as well as impressive faces a correspondingly demanding task.2 Short of comprehending all the 1

2

An earlier version of sections I and II of this paper was presented as “Ducking the Snovian Disjunction: The ‘both/and’ logic of Mason & Dixon” at International Pynchon Week, London, 12 June 1998. The entire paper appeared in extended form as chapter 3 of my doctoral dissertation, “American Nonfoundationalism’s Triple Play: Emerson to Twain to Pynchon.” Diss. Rutgers University, 2000. It has been argued that Pynchon overwhelms the reader in a barrage of bewildering but poorly integrated information, displaying an “indexical intelligence [that] intimidates his readers [so that] few question the banality, or worse” of Pynchon’s ideas (J. Wood 210). Wood’s choice of the unusual term “indexical” in this context appears to be a direct (if snide) challenge to the more common description of Pynchon’s breadth of knowledge and interdisciplinary referentiality as “encyclopedic,” as described in Edward Mendelson’s influential “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” (Jed Rasula elaborates further on theories of encyclopedic narrative, citing Mendelson’s work as a paradigm of critical recognition of encyclopedism as a specific genre and Gravity’s Rainbow as a paradigmatic text.) Should a critical school generally antagonistic to Pynchon (and to the writers who claim him as an influence) ever develop, disparagement of the scale of Pynchon’s background knowledge as merely accumulative (as “indexical” implies), rather than meaningfully masterful, is a plausibly predict-

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diverse discourses that Pynchon outlines through his narratives and references, one needs at least to develop a well-defined sense of how, and why, Pynchon integrates such a cornucopia of information into his narratives. The ambitions and mysteries of the postmodern era’s most influential fiction writer call for a reading style that is both intellectually ambitious and receptive to mystery.3 Such a reading must be capable of apprehending the distinct qualities of forms of knowledge that rarely make an appearance in fiction, while resisting any formulaic or reductionistic claims to divine the inner structure of the writing or the ultimate truth-content of those forms of knowledge. Mason & Dixon, Pynchon’s most ambitious leap through the deceptive convolutions of history, presents an exceptionally strong challenge, one that may or may not ever be adequately answered in the languages of literary critical theory. I want here to present one of the possible responses to that challenge without pretending the response can be definitive. I also frankly acknowledge that its method of weaving between selected major and minor moments in the text of the novel and assorted critical, scientific, and philosophical texts external to it is, and perhaps ought to be, far from systematic.

3

able commonplace. A different anti-Pynchonian or post-Pynchonian position, a reaction against the proliferation of unstable social irony in his wake, appears in novelist David Foster Wallace’s comment to Larry McCaffery: “If I have a real enemy, a patriarch for my patricide, it’s probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon. Because, even though their selfconsciousness and irony and anarchism served valuable purposes, were indispensable for their times, their aesthetic’s absorption by U.S. commercial culture has had appalling consequences for writers and everyone else” (McCaffery 146). Rick Moody, reviewing Mason & Dixon for Atlantic Monthly, cites Pynchon as the solitary, inescapable influence behind an entire generation of writers’ anxiety: “The novelist Robert Coover, speaking of influences in American fiction, once remarked that apprentices of his generation found themselves (in the 1950s) grappling with two very different models of what the novel might be. One, Coover said, was Saul Bellow’s realistic if picaresque Adventures of Augie March; the other was William Gaddis’s encyclopedic Recognitions. Writers my age (mid-thirties), however, don’t have the luxury of a choice. Our problem is how to confront the influence of a single novelist: Thomas Pynchon” (Moody 106).

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Like Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition, unable to declare which component of its tactical arsenal is its “chief weapon,” Mason & Dixon offers too many descriptive possibilities to allow for coherent prediction of any single critical consensus. In the early stages of the book’s scholarly reception, the critical community has heard the following: that Mason & Dixon is a novel of the foregone possibilities that we call America; that it is a novel of friendship, placing its paired protagonists among “other immortal male pairs in literary history, as rich in their interactions and as unimaginable outside of their bond as Vladimir and Estragon, Ishmael and Queequeg, Boswell and Johnson, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise”;4 that it “is, among many other things, a book about learning, rather slowly, to care instead of wonder”;5 that it is a novel of deep ecology, or of Luddism; that it is a novel of religion; that, as Louis Menand in the New York Review of Books, has argued in one of the most insightful early assessments, it is a novel of colonialism and its discontents; that it transforms Pynchon’s longtime master-trope of paranoia, in the view of David Cowart, into a “pharmakon – at once the poison and its remedy” in that “the paranoia of Mason and Dixon, at first the measure of their inconsequence, becomes the gauge of their sensitive resistance to rationalist excess,” allowing them to “recognize in the Line an epistemic watershed, a boundary between dispensations”;6 that it is, as Stefan Mattessich describes it in his review for Postmodern Culture, “a novel about its own narrativity and, precisely through this reflexive turning around upon itself, about America too, about its delimitation and colonization, about the enclosure of space in proper places (or properties), and about its own (and our) complicity in that enclosure”;7 that it is a novel of the psychology and pathology of modernity, defining the cripplingly acute introspectiveness of the Romantic self through exploration of the mind of Charles Mason, in continuously useful contrast with that of Dixon; that it is, contrarily, a novel of the post-paranoid mindset, arguably a 4 5 6 7

Schmidt paras. 2–3. M. Wood 122. Cowart 359. Mattessich para. 14.

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kind of anti-Gravity’s Rainbow, conjuring its historical conspiracies (the Society of Jesus, the Royal Society, the British and French military interests, the East India Company) only to dispense with them or even make sport of them; and that it is manifestly a novel of language itself, both an elaborate text so polyvalently allusive that it forces a reader to take quite literally the overfamiliar Derridean precept that “there is nothing outside the text,” and also a vast language game, performing operations on the reader that make constructive use of the experiences of disorientation, saturation, resistance, obliquity, and irresolution. It has also been described, antagonistically and perhaps somewhat predictably, as not a novel at all but an “allegorical picaresque,”8 that compiles endless, disconnected comic set pieces in the interest of an ultimately nihilistic cultural politics. As I will later argue, there is some perverse value in this assessment, along with enormous misprision and oversimplifcation. In these respects and more, Mason & Dixon is both consistent with its precursors in the Pynchon canon and unique in its expansion and enrichment of that canon. For my own purposes, I would like to argue that Mason & Dixon is a novel of science and anti-science, a novel that asks its late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century readers to use the heuristic of history to rethink the Enlightenment’s dichotomy between scientific and non-scientific activities of the mind. Of the many polarities Pynchon has examined, this particular schism is of immense, enduring, and probably increasing social importance. This is because it not only cleaves the intellectual community in half, as C. P. Snow observed in his 1959 Rede Lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” but because it generates social divisions far deeper and more destructive than mere misunderstandings between academic specialties. Antagonism between secular scientific reason and non-secular systems of belief is intertwined with some of the most profound cultural conflicts of our time. Accelerated changes are being wrought by research in all fields of science and technology, including the arms industries. As a consequence, the fascinating and dangerous

8

J. Wood 201.

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dance of scientific and nonscientific ideologies would appear to be a component of most realistically envisioned models of the future.

1. A Field Guide to Comparative Luddisms Gravity’s Rainbow ranks with Finnegans Wake and A Brief History of Time among books that large numbers of readers have obtained, and perhaps begun reading, but never finished. Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture may hold pride of place in a related category: works that are cited as intellectual landmarks, touchstones, or even commonplaces by large numbers of commentators who have never actually read them. Judging from his New York Times Book Review essay “Is it OK to Be a Luddite?” Pynchon is one of the diminishing number who have read Snow’s text deeply and aggressively. Before moving on to consider Luddism itself, he strives to make sense of the problems Snow’s lecture crystallizes, even while taking Snow to task over the “immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion” that “[i]ntellectuals, particularly literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites” (Snow 22). Here, before examining the fictional bodying-forth of some of Pynchon’s ideas about science and its alternatives in Mason & Dixon, I would like to return momentarily to Snow’s text. This is in order both to differentiate his observation of a cultural chasm from some of the interpretations and accusations that have accumulated around it, but also to re-embed his best-known idea in the explicit context of its origin, much as Pynchon historicizes the concept and practice of Luddism.9 Snow’s explicit purpose in decrying the poor communications between the literary and scientific intellectual cultures was to remove obstacles to the spread of industrialism into the Third World for the express and singular purpose of alleviating poverty. He thus aimed to 9

An example of this is the charge by some contemporaries that Snow approved of the chasm, though his entire polemic expresses the opposite intent; his name is now historically linked with something he deplored.

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marshal more of the resources of intellect and opinion in the service of equalizing the worldwide distribution of wealth. He originally thought of calling the entire lecture “The Rich and the Poor,” the subhead for its final segment, and in his 1963 re-examination “The Two Cultures: A Second Look” he expressed the wish that he had used that title instead (79). Snow minces no words about these priorities, in either the lecture or the follow-up piece. Thus both writers, despite their glaring disagreements over the social benevolence of industrialism and secular science, share an antipathy toward the organized economic and political forces that are so eloquently and succinctly named, in Gravity’s Rainbow, as “Them.” Like Vineland’s Beckers and Traverses holding fast to family history, Snow directs his historical attention, at a highly personal level (discussing the views of his grandfather, a self-educated artisan, about the life of his own grandfather, a peasant), to the ways class shapes one’s tone toward industrialization: [My great-great-grandfather] was a man of ability, my grandfather thought; my grandfather was pretty unforgiving about what society had done, or not done, to his ancestors, and did not romanticise their state. It was no fun being an agricultural labourer in the mid to late eighteenth century, in the time that we, snobs that we are, think of only as the time of the Enlightenment and Jane Austen. The industrial revolution looked very different according to whether one saw it from above or below [...]. To people like my grandfather, there was no question that the industrial revolution was less bad than what had gone before. (27)

Snow also issues a challenge to American and English novelists to begin considering applied science and its attendant social structures as a worthy topic for fiction (31) – a challenge to which it is easy to imagine the Pynchon of the 1960s, with Gravity’s Rainbow in gestation, replying consciously and directly. Intriguingly, Snow even identifies the nascent field of molecular biology (72–73) as extraordinarily promising, anticipating Pynchon’s own enthusiastic predictions for the same discipline as part of a potentially revolutionary convergence. Snow and Pynchon obviously part company at important points. It is likely that Snow drastically underrated the responsibility of the scientific and engineering

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establishment for the bicultural breach and its human consequences, charging the literati with the chief responsibility for parochialism to an unbalanced degree. More importantly, his sanguinity over what industrialism would bring about in the Third World becomes ever harder to see through the smoke of an Indonesian or Brazilian forest fire. Still, the objectives and priorities he has in common with Pynchon are far from trivial. Leaving aside Pynchon’s comments about the proliferation of specialist cultures rendering the dualistic Snovian scheme obsolete,10 a gulf of incomprehension nevertheless remains between the worlds of empirical science and of literature or critical theory. Whether one identifies a dipole of cultures, as Snow does, or the Brownian motion of myriad microcultures, there are still a small number of broad personality categories defined by attitudes toward science, as Pynchon credits Snow with observing “with the reflexes of a novelist after all.”11 It may be tempting to relegate Snow’s delineation of the Two Cultures – or, as Pynchon dubs this line, the “Snovian Disjunction” – to the realm of bygone controversies, of enduring interest only to historians of the donnish disputes of the mid-twentieth century. Certainly Pynchon treats Snow’s lecture more as a launching point for his discussion of the historical Luddites, and of other iterations of his archetypal figure the Badass, than as the object of sustained examination. However, anyone who would dismiss Snow’s idea outright might find it productive to examine such contemporary documents as the manifestos of the online discussion group edge.org. This highly select group of futurists, digerati, techno-pundits, and interdisciplinary scholars, is affiliated loosely with Wired magazine and more closely with the science-publishing agent and entrepreneur 10 11

This is another point Snow took up explicitly and proleptically in the original lecture (8–9, 65–66). Pynchon, “Is it O.K. to Be a Luddite?”: 1. I should mention in passing that my own personal experience editing an interdisciplinary research magazine, pursuing an explicit mission of improving communications among disparate fields, provides ample anecdotal evidence that misunderstandings across the Two Cultures are rife. Sometimes this even extends to a reluctance to admit that another field’s most rudimentary terms of art may be admitted into the English language.

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John Brockman. Edge’s ambitious essay “The Third Culture,” in particular, explicitly and aggressively identifies Snovian literary intellectuals as an irrelevant rump group whose exit from center stage in the public discourse is under way and long overdue: [T]he playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time [...]. [Snow] noted with incredulity that during the 1930s the literary intellectuals, while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as “the intellectuals,” as though there were no others [...]. How did the literary intellectuals get away with it? First, people in the sciences did not make an effective case for the implications of their work. Second, while many eminent scientists [...] also wrote books for a general audience, their works were ignored by the selfproclaimed intellectuals, and the value and importance of the ideas presented remained invisible as an intellectual activity, because science was not a subject for the reigning journals and magazines.12

Manifestoist Brockman, celebrating the thorough inversion of the situation he noted in previous decades, now identifies a “third culture.” This arises not from a synthesis of the other two or from improved communication between them, as Snow came to envision in “A Second Look,” but from the simple combination of intellectual vigor and direct communication with the public on the part of the ascendant scientific culture. Nonscientific intellectuals, according to this view of history, are practically Thanatoids, dead without quite being ready to admit it. The claim by Brockman and his Edge colleagues that science is now well within the purview of journalism, lowbrow and high-, finds unambiguous support in the steady proliferation of scientific bulletins and features for daily newspapers. Books on science are regularly 12

Anon. [John Brockman], “The Third Culture,” http://www.edge.org/3rdculture/index.html: paras. 2–4. Brockman frequently erases his own individual presence as an author for anti-individualist reasons best understood through examination of works such as By the Late John Brockman, available at the same website.

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considered in the book review sections of at least major newspapers and magazines, indicating an incursion of one Snovian culture onto the other’s media turf. Still, these developments hardly imply that the gap has been erased, that substantial proportions of the members of one culture speak the languages of the other. The merits of Edge’s broadly triumphalist position are best assessed in other contexts. This is also true of the various well-publicized interpretations of physicist Alan Sokal’s notorious hoax on the editors of Social Text and on the critical-theory community in general, to name another broadside fired from the scientific side of the chasm toward a purported cabal of antirealists across the way.13 At the very least, however, such writings and controversies indicate that the depth of the Snovian Disjunction persists and may even be increasing, no matter what shifts occur in the forms and degrees of cultural capital accrued by either side. None of this has ever been news to Thomas Pynchon. As the novelist most closely associated with the adaptation of scientific and technological ideas into fiction, he has crossed the Snovian Disjunction more often, with more expertise and more confidence, than any literary figure alive. One of the first inferences he draws from his aghast rereadings of his early stories is recounted in the introduction to Slow Learner. Acknowledged here is his realization of the fruitlessness of adhering to canonical literary values, such as conscious allusion to recognized and academically sanctioned precursors. In “The Small Rain,” he confesses, “I was operating on the motto ‘Make it literary,’ a piece of bad advice I made up all by myself and then took” (4). Though he would never shake his allusive habit, he has aggressively expanded it into non-literary realms. He has followed alternative versions of that motto to make it technical, make it 13

For background information on Alan Sokal’s initial parody of assorted postmodern theorists’ use of scientific terminology, useful online archives have been created by the historians’ consortium H-Net Humanities OnLine (), by computer scientist Jason Walsh (), by mathematician Gen Kuroki () collects articles occasioned by his hoax, not limited to commentators who share his critique.

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mathematical, make it chemical, make it musical, make it historical, make it cybernetic, make it cinematic and even televisual, make it mass-cultural, make it critical-theoretical, ad infinitum.14 The central question of whether the Enlightenment is ultimately a liberating or repressive idea, whether scientific rationality advances or retards human freedom, has occupied Pynchon’s attention throughout the progress of that career. About some matters he is maddeningly or delightfully obscure, and about others he has left little doubt: his allegiances and aversions regarding economics, politics, social organization, and the ethical gravity of humanity’s treatment of its planet need no explication to scholars of his earlier work. Pynchon’s take on science and anti-science, however, is complex, contextualized, and riddled with conflict. I believe he both is and is not a Luddite, depending on how one defines that loaded term, and the work he performs in the Luddism essay redefining the term and reclaiming it from its Snovian usage creates a conceptual foundation for both novels that have followed that essay. His texts clearly encourage suspicions about whether or to what degree it is inevitable that science and technology will be enlisted in enterprises that can only damage the biosphere and dull the noösphere, worsen the imbalances of class, and reduce the possibilities for human freedom, surprise, and love. At moments when those suspicions seem incontrovertible, when Enlightenment reason appears to lead only to the lies of the corporate state, a form of Luddism may be the only sane response. But Pynchon’s fascination with the physical sciences is too pervasive and too deep, too integral to the intellectual underpinnings of each book, to be compatible with technophobic or pastoral Luddism. Critiquing secular reason, science, and technology not by rejecting them but by historicizing them, he hints both that the Age of 14

Literary references remain part of Pynchon’s enormous database, but only one part, generally overshadowed (particularly in Gravity’s Rainbow) by other arcana; the privileged position implicit in the slogan “make it literary” was one of the first stages to be jettisoned as the multistage rocket of Pynchon’s career lifted off. By 1984, in the Luddism essay, he would note that American culture at large treats “literary intellectual” as a term of opprobrium, half-apologetically adding that “it doesn’t sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, ‘people who read and think.’”

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Reason is permanently at hand and that it has never existed (or even that it cannot exist); he would have it neither way, so he has it both ways. Pynchon closes his Luddism essay with an explicit wish not for any renunciation of scientific progress, but for a revolutionary technological change, the kind of revolution that he, as a longtime celebrant of the animate over the inanimate, might plausibly cheer on: If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come – you heard it here first – when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron’s mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It begins: As the Liberty lads o’er the sea Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood, So we; boys, we Will die fighting, or live free, And down with all kings but King Ludd! (41)

This is a surprising maneuver that should really surprise only those who retain Snow’s definition of Luddism in its Lawrentian form. It is possible to quibble that Pynchon ironizes his own statement by first making a prediction, “you heard it here first,” and then characterizing the result as “unpredictable.” One may more confidently note that after tracing the rise of “King” Ned Lud and the assaults of his troops against stocking-frames – and the frames’ worker-downsizing, capitalconcentrating owners – he has thoroughly reinscribed the term Luddite in a socioeconomic, not crudely technophobic, context. Pynchonian Luddism is not the same thing as Snovian Luddism; it is an attitude toward governance and class, not toward technology per se. We are back in the Zone with Enzian. There it is discovered or hallucinated that the bombing of the Jamf Ölfabriken Werke is merely a reconfiguring for future functions, the armies only mock-adversaries.

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Moreover, politics is deemed to be all theatre, “secretly [...] dictated by the needs of technology ... by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques.” But then the voice of Technology is heard, a voice impossible to ignore, urging a recognition of human responsibility on the part of both the obviously culpable and the would-be Counterforce: do you think we’d’ve had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn’t wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it’ll make you feel less responsible – but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are […] (Gravity’s Rainbow 607)

However problematically or unproblematically the reader of Gravity’s Rainbow might take this screed its rhetoric remains strong enough to make it impossible henceforth to take the simple position of the Snovian Luddite. It shares with other Pynchonian manifestomoments, including a few I would like to examine in Mason & Dixon, a discursive context in which it is uttered by a figure whose reliability is imperfect. Though Pynchon’s moments of moral suasion are never uncomplicated, it is safe to say that a position metaphorized as castration is no longer tenable. A Pynchonian Luddism will have to be a Luddism that acquaints itself with both history and hardware.

2. Omnia in Verba extra Credibilitatem After examining Western technoculture ascending toward its deathly apogee in Gravity’s Rainbow, then in various decadent and comic forms in Vineland, Pynchon extends his ongoing critique back to the origins of that culture in Mason & Dixon. It is also a period when the line that became the Snovian Disjunction was in the process of being drawn, with the implication that anatomizing the period when this culture and its ideologies took shape just might enrich our understanding

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of the mindsets and institutions that have developed. The assemblage of historical facts providing the novel’s framework and texture constitute a kind of hardware on which the “software” of the narrative can run. This is Pynchon’s familiar Baedeker strategy (Slow Learner 17, 21) for developing pre-existing reference sources into fiction. Considering the centrality of scientific inquiry as a philosophical focus for the novel as well as Mason and Dixon’s professions, this effort to apply the heuristic of history to the empire of reason carries radical implications. After all, one interpretation of scientific discovery, held not only by the more naive-realist contingent among scientists but by many humanists unfamiliar with real scientific practice, holds that science is essentially an attempt to escape from history. In other words, the history of science can be seen as a series of ever-closer asymptotic approximations to objectively true, rationally comprehensible, mystery-free knowledge, and if this complex but coherent goal could ever be reached, humanity could transcend and cast away the accidents, irrationalities, and woolly externalities of history. An implicit faith in the theoretical attainability of knowledge independent of human belief-systems underlies the processes of scientific method. This allows for the construction of plausible yet corruptible hypotheses, tested through observation and experiment, repeated studies confirming results by ruling out fluke, bias, and artifice. Finally the results and the conclusions based on them are shared through peer review and publication, so as to subject each new theory to the most thorough scrutiny and correction an expert community can provide. Thomas Kuhn’s observations of the actual practices by which the communal correctives of scientific method have led to paradigm changes between phases of “normal science” and “revolutionary science” obviously qualify any foundational assumptions or nontrivial truth-claims. But to the still-prevalent scientific positivists or objectivists, and those on the humanist side of the Disjunction who equate science with utter objectivity and rational control, the accidents of history are obstacles that science exists to overcome, and truthclaims are entirely within our reach. The Age of Reason thus had a beginning but can have no end. Historicizing science and reason is obviously dangerous to this pre-Kuhnian paradigm, since one invariably

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uncovers conceptual shrapnel, falsified and discredited dogmas that were once considered unassailable. The strengths of scientific method include its conduciveness to both imagination and sanity in hypothesis generation, precision in logic and measurement, and progressive improvements in the correspondence between theory and observation. Its weakness is its foundational hubris, which tends to yield egregious error whenever investigators encounter data approaching the limits of what their physical and cognitive equipment, including interpretive paradigms, can render sensible. The astronomer, Mason, an embodiment of the human consequences of such striving, pursues truths about sidereal phenomena with great accuracy but is driven to melancholy. The border of madness is reached over the impossibility of attaining other forms of knowledge, specifically regarding his deceased wife Rebekah and her imagined existence in an afterlife. Mason & Dixon is thus not only a novel of what we can know, but of what it does to us to try to know it. If the question “When was the Age of Reason?” is unintelligible to the scientific realist on account of its verb tense, to students of the humanistic disciplines it is unproblematic. It is merely an inquiry about a recognized period bounded by eras of, first, orthodox supernatural belief and divinely ordained authority, then Romanticist striving and the Gothic renewal of supernaturalism in the face of reason’s incomplete project. A requirement to redline the irrational, the supernatural, and the inexplicable does not automatically apply to historians, novelists and other artists, many philosophers (positivists aside), most critical theorists, and other types of intellectuals from Snow’s nonscientific sector. This populist view is older and more comprehensive, if less scrupulous over evidentiary matters, than upstart Reason, and it is this, with a few hedges and conditions, which Pynchon juxtaposes, and even superimposes, with secular rationality in Mason & Dixon. The consequent crossings, blurrings, curvatures, and erasures of the Snovian line generate some of the book’s most ingenious effects and intriguing interpretive challenges. There are numerous points in the text (particularly when matters Snovian are in the foreground) where Pynchon’s own voice appears to break through the narrative frames and make a direct declaration to the reader. This voice entangles itself within the frames, sporting in traditional

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postmodern fashion with the reader’s allegiance and making it maddeningly hard to determine which of these incompatible effects deserves emphasis. Chapter 35 is a goldmine, or minefield, of such disruptively fruitful passages, appearing in one of the anomalous chapters where Mason and Dixon themselves do not appear and attention focuses on the experiences and ideas of Reverend Cherrycoke. Pynchon sends his narrator into territory where all the weight of popular belief and lived experience, all the benefit of the doubt, is on the side hostile to secular reason. It is useful to recall the argument in the Luddism essay that the Gothic tropes of monsters, ghosts, and curses, religious revivals, and our own era’s analogous phenomena (such as obsessions with the paranormal) represent a broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason [with its] profound unwillingness to give up elements of faith, however “irrational,” to an emerging technopolitical order that might or might not know what it was doing. (1)

Cherrycoke’s account of Peter Redzinger’s “occasion of Godrevealing” in a pit of hops (358–59), along with making playfully anachronistic affinities with twentieth-century alien-abduction stories, echoes the assertions of the Luddism essay: These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one. Royal Society members and French Encyclopædists are in the Chariot, availing themselves whilst they may of any occasion to preach the Gospels of Reason, denouncing all that once was Magic, though too often in smirking tropes upon the Church of Rome,– visitations, bleeding statues, medical impossibilities,– no, no, far too foreign. One may be allowed an occasional Cock Lane Ghost,– otherwise, for any more in that Article, one must turn to Gothick Fictions, folded acceptably between the covers of Books. (359)

Cherrycoke delivers the same idea Pynchon himself expressed in The Times thirteen years before. Yet the reader’s sense of recognition, and possibly assent, is compromised by the awareness that this is Cherrycoke saying it, the same narrator who has already provided ample evidence that his reliability is questionable. The good Reverend, by relating events he could not realistically have witnessed, has already stretched his credibility with his listeners in the framing

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narrative. The thematic atmosphere throughout this chapter is suffused with religious creeds, financial credit, credence, credulousness, and incredibility, and thus with intimations that foundations for belief are scarce indeed. What are we to make, then, of two resonant passages on historical method and credibility at the outset of the chapter? We encounter first the epigraph from Cherrycoke’s Christ and History favoring a multiplicity of narratives, since “Facts are but the Playthings of lawyers” and history’s “Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit.” Then, in the heated LeSpark family debate on the same topic, the rather Rortean assertion by young Ethelmer that: Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,– who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish’d, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government. (350)

This practical skepticism toward truth-claims has much to commend it, so much so that it is easy to overlook its source. Ethelmer consistently raises skeptical and heretical points of view throughout the frame narrative, though he is checked by mature family authority.15 His skepticism, while often eloquent and rousing, also sees him tread close to blasphemy with his joke about history and Christianity, offensive to his host Wade LeSpark and thus detrimental to the bonds of family:

15

His name puns on the names of two toxic and harsh-smelling chemicals: ethyl mercaptan or ethanethiol, a flammable odorant found in rotten meat and used industrially to provide a warning odor in odorless fuels (e.g., propane gas), and 2-hydroxyethyl mercaptan or beta-mercaptoethanol, a sulfur-based solvent used to denature proteins, i.e., break their structural bonds. I am indebted to Paul Mackin and Spencer Thiel of the Internet discussion list PYNCHON-L for pointing out the chemical pun.

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“Brae, your Cousin proceeds unerringly to the Despair at the core of History,– and the Hope. As Savages commemorate their great Hunts with Dancing, so History is the Dance of our Hunt for Christ, and how we have far’d. If it is undeniably so that he rose from the Dead, then the Event is taken into History, and History is redeem’d from the service of Darkness,– with all the secular Consequences, flowing from that one Event, design’d and will’d to occur.” “Including ev’ry Crusade, Inquisition, Sectarian War, the millions of lives, the seas of blood,” comments Ethelmer. “What happen’d? He liked it so much being dead that He couldn’t wait to come back and share it with ev’rybody else?” “Sir.” Mr. LeSpark upon his feet. “Save that for your next Discussion with others of comparable wisdom. In this house we are simple folk, and must labor to find much amusement in Joaks about the Savior.” Ethelmer bows. “Temporarily out of touch with my Brain,” he mumbles. “Sorry, ev’rybody. Sir, Reverend, Sir.” (75–76)

A younger Pynchon might have given the irreverent youth a better outcome in this exchange, or at least a parting shot, but here Ethelmer’s pungent irreverence must bow to decorum. Later, when his courtship of Tenebrae, comes to nothing it becomes difficult to take him with much seriousness. But if Ethelmer is a clown figure, a foil, and in the terms of rhetorical theory an eiron, his undeniably strong rhetoric about the corruption of official history, like Cherrycoke’s, presents an interpretive conundrum. These passages condemning monopolies on truth have the ring of truth, yet they are voiced by characters hardly associated with truth-telling. Is Pynchon ironizing the statements about reason, faith, history, and truth and encouraging their mockery, and, as a corollary, the adoption of their antitheses? Or is he working in the tradition of jesters (reliable and unreliable) from Petronius Arbiter to Lear’s Fool to Twain to Lenny Bruce, licensing the speaking of truth to power under the safe guise of comedy? The line between these alternatives would seem consequential indeed, but the reader lacks the stars and sector that would ensure the straightness of such a Visto. Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Irony distinguishes between stable and unstable forms of irony. The former leaves little doubt about an eiron’s unreliability and cements agreement between the sender and receiver of an ironic message that the real message conveyed is anti-

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thetical to the eiron’s expressed message. Unstable irony, however, undercuts the possibility of any such agreement. The superimposing of incompatible interpretive frameworks is a powerful way to produce the disorientations of unstable irony, and when Pynchon executes this operation in the very passages that purport to deliver conclusions about rationality itself, the effort to identify true or false meaning must come to a halt. Moreover, if the text can have meaning within several interpretive schemes, yet those systems cancel each other out, meaning itself may not be the point. Brought to mind here is Wittgenstein’s famous drawing in Philosophical Investigations (IIxi [194e]) that can be viewed in one aspect as a rabbit, in another as a duck, but never simultaneously under both aspects, the visual analogue of textual aporia. Pynchon’s irresolvable positions regarding the accessibility of truth can lead to a host of unanswerable or meaningless questions, or to a more appropriate question: whether what this language is really for is something beyond the delivery of messages. The functions of language can go beyond purposive use to include non-communicative experiences, which Wittgenstein compared to “an engine idling, not [...] doing work” (Wittgenstein 132 [51e], Guetti 44); its grammatical, referential, and dramatic possibilities include some effects that drive the reader beyond coherent communication. In this spirit, I believe Pynchon’s moments of aporia gesture toward meanings but refuse to mean, instead evoking a koanlike metaproposition that the sanest thing one can do with a Line is to occupy both sides of it.16 A habitual refusal to allow either member of any dichotomy an unambiguously privileged position over its opposite pole characterizes the thematic and stylistic aspects of Mason & Dixon as well as the communicative. The book teems with doubled elements and images,

16

David Porush has also referred to Pynchon’s “play with the reader throughout his works – his penchant for posing paradoxes and unsolvable puzzles. To many of us literary critics, immersed in a rationalizing profession that is itself the expression of a rationalizing culture, these Pynchonesque koans tend to launch us on flights of scholarly and interpretative [sic] acrobatics that have served most to expose the limitations of the very rationality on which we depended” (Porush 33–34).

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inviting attention to the act and concept of division.17 Here Pynchon gives us not only Mason and Dixon themselves but Pitt and Pliny, Hsi and Ho, Eliza and Zsuzsa, Father Zarpazo and Captain Zhang, Mason’s sons William and Doctor Isaac, and Franklin’s interns in the electrickal arts Molly and Dolly, not to mention Dixon’s early reference to “two sorts of drinking Folk [...] Grape People and Grain People” (18). Abstract concepts, memes, and narrative channels, likewise, often appear in pairs: science and mysticism, sky (“as above”) and earth (“so below”), Pennsylvania and Maryland, slave and free, Stig’s “Yingle” and “Yangle,” Zhang’s chi and sha, the alternative endings of the story of Hsi and Ho (628), and, in Maskelyne’s quotation from Kepler, Astrology as “Astronomy’s wanton little sister, who goes out and sells herself that Astronomy may keep her Virtue” (136). If conceptual bifurcation is the elemental act of the rational mind, uncertainty over whether the thing divided would be better left whole is most acute when the similarities on either side of the line are strongest, and hence any twin is also a menace, a harbinger. Doppelgängers, as Karl Miller has painstakingly recounted in Doubles, are a dark Gothic or Romanticist device, an inescapable reminder for the mirror-maddened modern self of both its uniqueness and its interchangeability, its capacity for transcending (or delaying, or deferring) death and its inevitable susceptibility to death. Pynchon’s recurrent twinning suffuses the book with an aroma of the uncanny and a consciousness that nothing solitary, whether person or idea, will stand. Further complicating logical delineation is the superimposition of eighteenth-century idioms and twentieth-century references into a hybrid style that is both familiar and foreign, a natural extension of the polyvalent yet recognizable Pynchonese voice. This style combines features of eighteenth-century English prose. These include the prolonged, momentum-gathering Ciceronian periodic sentence, and the strategically capitalized noun, with knowing discursions into contemporary parlance, including the sly winks of conscious ana17

This is hardly a new device in Pynchon; Susan Strehle, discussing Vineland, observes sixteen plausible sets of paired characters and traces a coherent structural and moral scheme based on doubles and comparisons.

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chronism, which allow microscopic moments of history not only to recur as farce but to gain farcical effect in both their contexts. The border between centuries collapses, and the framing artifice becomes visible, in jokes about using Indian Hemp without inhaling (10); the Learned English Dog’s sharing an acronym with light-emitting diodes (when “The L.E.D. blinks” [22]), along with Fender Bodine’s question “would the li’oo Doggie be for sale?” echoing the lyrics of the postwar novelty song “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?” (23); the references to subatomic physics that flicker throughout the text, such as the string-theory and Higgs-boson joke involving “the Boatswain, Mr. Higgs” and his obsession with rigging (54–55); the complex verbal riffing on musical forms from Plato’s modal scales to Philadelphia soul and rock ’n’ roll at the end of chapter 26; the flavor of an upscale 1990s coffeehouse as Dixon orders what appears to be a Kenya AA and Java Highland latte (298); Mrs Eggslap providing a troupe of cheerleaders for Stig in his race with Zepho Beck, and sampling Tammy Wynette: “Sometimes [...] ’tis hard, to be a Woman” (621); Dixon’s gestures toward both Monty Python and Laurel and Hardy when snowbound near Lancaster: “Can’t say I’m too easy with this Weather,” Mason remarks. “Do tha mean those white flake-like objects blowing out of the northeast...?” “Actually I lost sight of the Trees about fifteen minutes ago.” “Another bonny gahn-on tha’ve got us into...?” (363)

In addition we have the cluster of pop-culture citations in chapter 50, where Kabbalists give Mr Spock’s “live long and prosper” hand sign and a Popeye doppelgänger translates the golem’s tautological utterance Eyeh asher Eyeh as “I am that which I am” (485–86); and what may be the most grammatically ingenious intrusion by our era’s pop vernacular, the teenage-mall-rat discourse of young black-clad Amelia in New York, substituting one century’s lax idiom for another’s: “I’m, as, ‘But I like Black,’ – yet my Uncle, he’s, as, ‘Strangers will take you for I don’t know what,’ hey, – I don’t know what, either. Do you?” (400). Amy’s reappearance seven chapters later, having eloped with her “Italian Waggon-smith” to Massapequa, L.I. (564) and thus set up an implicit subtextual joke about Amy

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Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco, may constitute the low-water mark of the anachronism strategy, but the overall pattern of anachronistic humor – reinforced, as in all Pynchon’s books, by song lyrics, in turn reinforces the practice of overlaying different signifying systems over each datum in the text. The reader is thus reminded that these data signify differently under different aspects, and that no single system can be taken for granted. Even the capitalizations reward scrutiny, executing subtle effects that differ from the simple Germanic practice of capitalizing all nouns indiscriminately.18 Pynchon did not begin capitalizing nouns with Mason & Dixon. He has long treated certain nouns or phrases in this manner, elevating them out of their ordinary lexical functions and rendering them perceptibly public and substantial, sometimes with a comic touch, and recognizable as proper nouns for deities or brand names. While Gravity’s Rainbow confers such a capital on the War, an obviously significant choice for this treatment, the ostensibly minor detail of Beaver/Jeremy’s Pipe also continually appears with such an anomalous capital P (49, 148). It marks this personal effect with a sign of the generic and thus produces an effect of impersonality, just as the lieutenant himself is so much less a defined personage than his rival Roger Mexico. In the Luddism essay, the salient features of the Badass – that he is “Big” and that he is “Bad” – take on additional scale and menace by virtue of their blatantly brobdingnagian Bs. The passage on Frankenstein’s monster also highlights a crucial visual difference between literary and pop-cultural iterations of this particular Badass when it refers to the “commonly depicted Bolt Through the Neck,” the cinematic signature that mechanizes the creature in a way Shelley’s text never did. In devising an adaptive mutation of eighteenth-century English for Mason & Dixon, Pynchon apparently found that century’s almost-regular capitalization practice 18

Of course, the fact of irregular and thus discretionary capitalization makes sense only for the written text; in the narrative frame of Reverend Cherrycoke’s Scheherazadic performance, the significances of discretionary capitals are incommunicable (unless Cherrycoke can somehow pronounce these emphases, which seems improbable). Undermining its own framing conceit of orality, this text thus draws attention to its own artifice, as the Pompidou Center renders its infrastructure visible.

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congenial, giving him even further license to create useful distinctions between ordinary terms and those attracting a shade more attention. He deploys capitals artfully and unpredictably, attaching them not to the more conventionally important nouns but to those whose ad hoc contextual importance appears to require momentary emphasis. Examples of the practice are virtually innumerable, but Mason and Dixon’s conversation with Colonel Washington, Gershom, and Martha affords one with particularly sharp contrasts, as the Washingtons recall how the Transit of Venus created a bubble of popular opinion: “Here,” the Colo beams, “more fame attaches to the Transits,– Observers station’d all ’round the world, even in Massachusetts,– Treasuries of all lands pouring forth gold,– ev’ry Astronomer suddenly employ’d,– and all to find a true value for the ‘Earth’s Parallax.’ Why, most of us here in Virginia wouldn’t know a Parallax from a Pinwheel if it came on up and said how-d’ye do.” “Yet, what a Rage it was! the Transit-of-Venus Wig, that several women were seen wearing upon Broad Street, Husband, do ye remember it? a dark little round Knot against a great white powder’d sphere,– ” “And that Transit-of-Venus Pudding? Same thing, a single black Currant upon a Circular Field of White,– ” (283)

They proceed to lament, then sing, the sailors’ song of the Transit of Venus, and our attention to these transitory fads quickly fades. But during that section of the conversation the observant reader will have noticed that the terms “fame,” “world,” “lands,” “gold,” “value,” “women,” and “sphere” do not appear capitalized. It is the more trivial and transient items, the dark little knots rather than the larger white spheres, that receive the emphatic capital here. Throughout Mason & Dixon the application of this convention reflects Pynchon’s tropisms toward the things, ideas, and personages that are customarily subordinated, lending plausibility to an inference that it is precisely these bubbles of readerly opinion, these telling details on the microscopic level, that carry value. In a perhaps deliberate fictive counterpart of Derridean critical strategies, Pynchon tends to give some compensating emphasis to the less privileged member of a binary pair on any level, not simply reversing the polarity but re-balancing it and forcing a reconsideration

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of the precision of its dividing line. Then in turning attention back to the dichotomy of scientific and non-scientific thinking, we find that the narrative intermingles them to the point where one may question the value of separating them in any context. The process of either discovering order in, or imposing order on, the wildness of nature may be integral to the world view that shaped America, but here it is also entwined with activities far from scientific. Without saying so explicitly, Pynchon reminds us that the term “philosophical” in Mason and Dixon’s century referred not to the linguistic and logical abstractions connoted by the modern term, or to the Socratic pursuit of wisdom. Instead it referred to a realm of investigations including study of the physical world and the heavens (hence the name of the Royal Society’s journal Philosophical Transactions). As in Swift’s Academy of Lagado, a perception of scientists or “natural Philosophers” as eccentric or worse was a cultural commonplace, and here scientific research is never far from madness. The division of territory into new entities called Maryland and Pennsylvania, guided by the geometry of the constellations, is on a par with Vaucanson’s invention of a mechanical duck: ingenious and impressive, but unnatural and quixotic. The sanity of both Mason and Dixon comes repeatedly into question: “star-gazing” can signify either astronomy or onanism (171); every astronomer has moonlighted as a Covent Garden astrologer (136); scientific professionalism does not rule out a proclivity for the paranormal; penetrating the wild new continent means encountering infinite and ancient forms of strangeness. Rational thinking in this context appears unreasonable. The further and more frequently these men of science venture into the realm of the giant vegetable and the tall-tale, the more the line separating reason from madness, miracle, or legend becomes self-erasing. Like Kuhnian practitioners of normal science facing data that require a revolutionary revision of the paradigms by which they have comprehended all data they have previously encountered, Mason and Dixon know no language that can bound and subdivide the Bigness and glorious Badness of the American frontier. Their America itself thus becomes the largest example yet of Pynchon’s master trope, which takes the form in time of a transitional moment, and in space, of an ungovernable place. Pynchon’s works present a recurrent historical

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concept, which I would term “Pynchonian space” or “the Pynchonian moment,” whereby political, socio-economic, and intellectual vectors intersect to create a temporary realm of augmented personal autonomy, political anarchy, epistemologic uncertainty, and narrative possibilities both comic and tragic. Such spaces and times appear in America’s beat-era bohemia, as well as certain moments in Maltese and Südwestafrikan history in V.; in the American 1960s in Pynchon’s California novels The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland; and particularly in the Zone in Gravity's Rainbow. The grounding of such moments and spaces in meticulously researched historical data hints that the concreteness of history may allow some resistance to encroaching political control, economic oppression, environmental degradation, and aesthetic degeneration. At the same time, the scarceness and evanescence of such moments, combined with the detailed rendering of the mechanisms whereby those imperial forces encroach, provides the tragic element in Pynchon’s vision.19 All of America and all of modernity is transfigured here as potential Pynchonian space and time, and the question of their evanescence is either answered coldly by history or left open by the text’s redemptive moments. Thus the only language appropriate to this space and time must be a language that creates vectors extending beyond language, a language evocative of awe. Like the languages of religions and transcendence, it must defy coherence. This marshaling of the possibilities of dubiously coherent language, encouraging the reader to step outside a language-game where distinctions defining meaning are essential, may be one of the underlying reasons the Snovian Disjunction has arisen. Secular reason needs communicative, utilitarian terms and repeatable experiments. If language is irreducible 19

Tragedy, I should add, exists on some level other than personal in Mason & Dixon. As natural as everything else in Dixon’s life, there is death. For Mason, in most of his late life and after his final meeting with Franklin, “eyes elsewhere, unclaimable” (772), there is a silence that the reader may forever try to interpret as either madness or private attainment of religious knowledge. But there is also hope of redemption, the old-fashioned way, through family. The tragic tone enters, for this reader, at Dixon’s dream of the song “It was fun while it lasted,” when one recognizes that the whole evanescent, pointless, transforming enterprise is soon to reach an end.

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to propositions and data, after all, the entire philosophy of the Royal Society, as encoded in its motto nullius in verba, is beside the point. But if I may express overt sympathies with Charles Mason for a moment and derogate the Royal Society, this august body has undoubtedly perpetrated and perpetuated the Disjunction in one way that is more than symbolic. Nullius in verba – abstracted from Horace’s Epistulae, xenografted with a crucial grammatical error, and interpreted as a cardinal principle of the scientific culture – has conventionally been translated as “there is nothing in words.” In other words, language itself is deemed untrustworthy and must be forever subordinated to quantitative data, which are presumably objective and open to the corrective processes of scientific method. One need not disparage those processes to note that the phrase as Horace originally wrote it means nothing of the kind. The distrust of verbiage that generations of scientists have inferred from this “canonical mistranslation” (Gould para. 2) amounts to an officially sanctioned error that has contributed mightily to the Snovian conduit of sha. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in a letter to Science in 1991, in Horace’s original Latin phrase (“Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri”), nullius was an adjective, genitive singular, modifying magistri, not a nominative nullus. A literal translation would thus be “I am not bound to swear allegiance to the word of any master.” What the Royal Society’s motto instructs the scientist to distrust is not words, but power. A technophilic Pynchonian Luddite would understand this instinctively. Pynchon’s ultimate project may be to restore a sense that written language is adequate, or more than adequate, to the challenge and scope of modern history, that it need not be superseded by other languages based on equations or digits. To this end he uses language that can comprehend both sides of the Snovian Disjunction and render it moot. In a little-discussed passage from “The Two Cultures: A Second Look,” Snow also complained of the disjunctions and hierarchies within the Royal Society, and the scientific community generally, whereby “[t]heoretical physicists tend to talk only to each other, and, like so many Cabots, to God” (66). There are indeed physicists notorious among their peers for claiming that all other sciences are ultimately reducible to physics, or to mathematics.

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Pynchon has used language to project a world where everyone talks to God, and to each other. Across the distances outlined by history, disciplines, and ideologies, this language cannot help but imply the following: that in our own world, some closer listening to the fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks, whose inclusive motto might well be omnia in verba, would foster more skepticism toward Lines, and less toward whatever lies on either side of them.

3. Foundational Nostalgia and the Agnostic Sublime Mason & Dixon’s pluralism arguably supports some degree of guarded optimism toward literary language’s capacity for creative improvisation and useful historical memory. However, it is by no means clear that the presuppositions of the Snovian literary culture (or what is left of it) always support an optimistic view of Mason & Dixon itself. One early critical response to Mason & Dixon, that of James Wood of The New Republic in The Broken Estate, stands out from the original wave of reviews. This is not only by virtue of its negative assessment but also by revealing features of Pynchon’s writing that defy comprehension by anyone operating under certain assumptions about the nature and purpose of fiction. Wood’s hostility to Mason & Dixon may be beside the point, as well-versed readers of Pynchon quickly recognized,20 but the particular point it is beside is a telling one. Wood’s other writings, particularly his personal meditation on the loss of religious belief in the essay (originally a sermon) that gives The Broken Estate its title, express a deep nostalgia for the certainties of a command-based belief system. Expressed here is anguish that he 20

Discussion of The Broken Estate among the combination of professional scholars and amateur Pynchon aficionados on PYNCHON-L in October 1999, for example, was remarkably if unsurprisingly devoid of praise for Wood’s assessment of Mason & Dixon, even among commentators who admired other aspects of Wood’s work.

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cannot sustain his old faith in religion’s truth claims, and a searing contempt for the rationalized Christianity of Renan, Arnold, and their descendants (285–311). Wood’s thought balances delicately between the necessity of a foundational belief and the impossibility of one. His aesthetic of fiction places the highest premium on the realistic rendering of an individual subjectivity that is separate, self-contained, and largely (even aggressively) ahistorical, one in which neither culture nor Zeitgeister nor the sportive complexities of contemporary authors dare intrude. The novelist’s chief task, in Wood’s view, is to generate “interiority” (206) on the part of characters so as to sustain credibility on the part of the reader. As he states in the introduction to The Broken Estate, “the reality of fiction must also draw its power from the reality of the world [...]. Fiction demands belief from us, and the request is demanding in part because we can choose not to believe” [xiii–xiv]. When public belief in a transcendental foundation has been rendered impossible, it appears all the more important for the private believability of realistic fiction, a kind of prosthetic faith, to provide stability in a different realm. History and fiction are set into irreconcilable opposition, and the larger vectors of history (secularism, rationality, the skepticism of the non-positivist sciences) convicted of corroding treasured and indispensable foundations. Thus any form of writing that subjects the realist paradigm to skepticism and frames its own truth claims as provisional, begs for derogation. It is no accident that Wood’s vigorous assault on Pynchon’s dramatic performance and implicit ideology omits any mention whatsoever of science and technology. By refusing to engage science on any level, Wood inadvertently emphasizes how science, viewed as an inevitably historicized and historicizing activity that can never fully crystallize into a timelessly believable orthodoxy, is at the core of Pynchon’s novelistic practice, and of the problems it confronts. Perhaps the irony in Wood’s failure to grasp Pynchon’s aesthetic is that in another sense Pynchon may in fact provide precisely the corrective to Renanian religious rationalism that Wood so desperately seeks. Here might be found the antidote to a humanist hubris that would subordinate both the deity and nature to the comprehension (and perhaps the control) of Faustian and fallible human reason. Pynchon, along with Norman Mailer, Joseph McElroy, DeLillo, cer-

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tain cyberpunk authors of the 1980s, and others, has given full-bodied fictional form to an idea Joseph Tabbi terms “the postmodern sublime.” This describes the transference of awe from a personal God. The latter is no longer deemed available for unironized belief, as no other totalizing narrative or foundational system can claim such belief. Instead, awe is transferred to the mysteries of science, and thus to “technological structures and global corporate systems beyond the comprehension of any one mind or imagination” (Tabbi ix). Though Tabbi’s readings of Pynchon are drawn primarily from Gravity’s Rainbow and antedate the more recent novel, they offer principles that I believe can be usefully applied to Mason & Dixon, to the Snovian problems it confronts, and to the challenging aesthetic from which both these novels draw power.21 Tabbi employs the theory of the sublime articulated and anatomized by Thomas Weiskel in The Romantic Sublime to define a new technology-based aesthetic of awe, replacing the awe with which divinity, nature, egoism, and other ungovernable forces formerly endowed literature. Where “the technological network, like the natural world and [Henry] Adams’s universe of force, remains separate, unfamiliar, other than the semiotic system” (17), the imagination responds either with a sense of inundation or an attempt (inevitably futile) to assimilate the otherness of technological reality into language and mind. Whether this sublimity takes the passive or active form (inundation or attempts at dominance, respectively), it inevitably partakes of a reaction beyond anything that could be termed understanding. Narrators and characters in Pynchon (and in other authors with a similar technology-focused aesthetic) must naturally “believe in” technological culture to the extent that it is the factual atmosphere in which they operate. It constitutes something they must grapple with or submit to, but belief in the sense of rational apprehension, conviction, and alignment is not available to them. Belief is simply not at the center of the aesthetic problem-situation at hand. Whatever their beliefs may be, belief in general as a convincing

21

Tabbi’s most recent work on Mason & Dixon can be found in his book Cognitive Fictions, in particular chapter 2, “Mapping the (Core) Text.”

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and unifying norm, a true foundation, is not a decision Pynchon’s characters or readers must make. They may, of course, mourn it: “Perhaps,” the Revd suggests, “we attribute to the Armies of old, a level of common Belief long inaccessible to our own skeptical Souls. Making the Prussian example all the more mystical,– whom or what can any modern army believe in enough to obey? if not God, not one’s King...?” (551)

The reader’s sense of sublimity issues forth from apprehension of the unbridgeable distance between the decisions the characters and narrative voices do make – the various interpretive systems they offer to make limited sense of the world – and the vast, uncontrollable reality systems that continually conquer and outpace interpretation. Since those latter systems are largely of humankind’s own making, turning to external (that is, divine and personal) authority offers no solace. The technological sublime is in an important sense a sublimity of emptiness. It is neither an irrationalist aesthetic nor a hyperrationalist aesthetic. Rather, it is a perceived effect at the border area of assorted rationalities, where none of the available interpretive discourses is adequate to comprehend or control experience. One can also venture a few steps beyond Tabbi’s chief concept into a loosely historicized analogy between different types of belief that carry implications for the aesthetics of fiction. If a personal God stands behind the physical world, to be either believed in by humans (with sublime awe) or disbelieved (with secular skepticism), then the whole matter of foundational belief, including the logical coherence of its supporting propositions and the apprehensibility of its evidence, deserves central and overwhelming human attention. The centrality of belief-decisions in the religious realm metastasizes into other realms as well; aesthetic questions are likely to hinge on questions of the credibility (formal, psychological, or philosophical) of a given work of art. A realist aesthetic will effectively command a reader to adopt the satisfactions of belief in a period when belief is in crisis, and thus on center stage. Hence the preferences of James Wood, and of the many readers who share his instinct for some credible foundation. Whether they have retained the religious structure of belief or have joined Wood in losing it, they hope to transfer some form of it to art.

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A different but coexisting system of thought, secular science, presents its own questions of credibility, perhaps modeled to some degree on the foundational questions of religion, but this system is not necessarily self-sufficient (or deeply involved in novelistic aesthetics) so long as the largest questions concern religious belief. The natural world and scientific incursions into it are available as metaphorical models of transcendental matters, or as metonymic microcosms, but nature and science are ultimately valuable more for reading-through than for reading. They point toward the sublime Other, but they are not that Other. To venture a pun that the music-obsessed Pynchon might approve, the sciences here are instrumental: mere accompaniment to an ultimate Text supplied by religion. On the other hand, the central foundational proposition of this world view, the existence of a personal and interested God, may yield entirely to the skepticisms of secular rationality – as has happened for large parts of the populace since the early period of science’s ascendance. If it does then the realist principle underlying Wood’s strongest claims is liable to be inverted. The importance of belief generally, not just the ultimate object of belief, drops away, or at best becomes a matter for irony or nostalgia. We see this as in the famous conclusion to Gravity’s Rainbow, a Puritan hymn wanly hoping for divine salvation, sung collectively – and abortively – in the shadow of the Bomb. Belief remains an available option, but belief anchored in certainty does not. In the sciences, a distinction arises between belief in truth claims and the practical, conditional acceptance of positivistic propositions as the best available grounds for continued work. In the words of science philosopher Bas van Frassen, “As far as the enterprise of science is concerned, belief in the truth of its theories is supererogatory” (Levine 15). In fiction, readers are likely to cease looking through material phenomena for metaphorized meaning, locating meaning within the phenomena instead. Both the enormous scale and the moral enormity of the material/technological world, the proximate causes of sublime awe, become visible in works such as Pynchon’s as the ultimate and sufficient causes as well. Characters in such a world may approach the immediacy of phenomena with a newly energized hubris, sensing (or hoping) that no God or God-equivalent stands in their way, but control

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is relocated into the material world, whose own myriad forms of resistance can readily substitute for an ineffable divine will. Questions of credibility remain, since no plot and no scientific discourse can be structured without them, but questions of belief may come to be decentered as a matter of relative importance by questions of communicative performance. Rupture of the frame of realism not only becomes admissible but is practically mandated. What makes this alternate form of sublimity possible is a sense that if one realm of thought can get along with radical foundationlessness, a more general foundationlessness might prevail in other realms as well, creating for the aesthetics of fiction an epistemological atmosphere that might be termed the agnostic sublime.22 It is appropriate here that even the principles of an unambiguous believer, such as Wade LeSpark’s extrapolations from the proposition that “History is the Dance of our Hunt for Christ” (75), be presented as conditionals, and that the inadvertent duplicity of their crucial terms not be overlooked. “Hunt,” for example, is shown by Cowart (358–59) to implicate the arms 22

The term “agnostic sublime” here is one I present with no small degree of caution, recognizing the ineradicable presence of assorted spiritual world views in Pynchon’s represented communities, arguably in Pynchon’s own thinking, and in a wide range of other postmodern fictions, as John McClure has discussed in some detail. Postmodern inclusiveness gives voice to “people who still speak the world in magical and religious terms” (McClure 148), particularly the terms of Third World cultures, colonized but not yet modernized (a category that conceivably still included colonial America, or at least Pynchon’s reimagined version of it in Mason & Dixon). Thus no fair definition of postmodernism can reduce non-rationalist perspectives to simple superstition or “magic.” The “post-secular project of resacralization” (144) that McClure finds in such canonical postmodern texts as Pynchon’s, DeLillo’s, Ishmael Reed’s, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s can be ignored only at the cost of granting secular reason a hegemonic position. This defines out of postmodernism the very anti-totalizing principle with which practically all definitions of the postmodern begin. The technological sublime, in other words, cannot be an atheistic sublime; atheism is in its way no less foundationalist or triumphalist than theism. But in locating the source of awe in worldly systems, making a religious reading-through from secular phenomena to spiritual realms an option rather than a mandate, I would argue that the postmodern mode of sublimity retains the uncertainty, the spiritual circumspection, of the true agnostic.

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merchant LeSpark in historical operations no less sinister than the biblical Herod’s original hunt for the infant Christ, driving the Holy Family into circumstances deserving such Pynchonian descriptives as paranoia and preterition – not be overlooked. The problems surrounding the crucial intertwined ideas of control and belief may explain why Wood overlooks science in Pynchon entirely. Perhaps, the assumption is that science is just one more of Pynchon’s ample sources of allusion and allegory, not something for a critic to treat differently from the way one would treat the specific historical references or political critiques. In the light of a more nuanced and receptive theoretical response such as Tabbi’s, it is possible to view any structure of belief, particularly belief about the implications of science, as a futile attempt to subordinate a world that is sublimely insubordinate. Tabbi finds Pynchon, in Gravity’s Rainbow, willing to treat the systems of science as disproportionate and external to human reason and imagination, resistant to the implicit dominance of our allegorizations and our belief systems alike. It is this which replaces the search for parallels between the mandated (even coerced) belief of revealed religion and the persuaded belief a reader derives from (or grants to) effective realist fiction. Tabbi anatomizes “Pynchon’s nonmetaphorical use of science” (86), by examining the psychology that characterizes Pynchon’s teams of aeronautical engineers in the Nazi rocket-state of Gravity’s Rainbow. Prevalent is as a constant functional awareness that scientific facts and technological processes, which include the grim and uncontrollable processes of politico-economic history, remain beyond the comprehension of all the fragmentary systems, be they semiotic, mathematical, political, or moral, by which individual human minds attempt to subordinate them. Pynchon’s extra-human and non-humanist world, in this view, is literally beyond belief. It renders beliefs and believability irrelevant, or at least places them at a distance from the preconditions of coherent reading. Such a world cedes no ground to any discourse that attempts to frame it within human truth-claims. Those claims are not thereby rendered meaningless or trivially relativized. The subjects within Pynchon’s technological state are neither granted a blanket pardon for their bureaucratic participation in the atrocities of that state (recalling, again, the “capitalize the T on technology” passage at the Jamf

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Ölfabriken Werke) nor treated to blanket credulity toward their systems of belief. Ethical centers of gravity exist in Gravity’s Rainbow, no matter how doomed, and sentimentalities of all sorts (romantic, erotic, magical) are pilloried, even as some forms of supernaturalism are allowed to coexist uneasily with science. Characters in the Zone assemble their own belief systems in efforts to come to grips with inconceivable phenomena.23 For the reader, however, the plausibility of any of these assorted beliefs is not the true question at hand. With no theological center available (outside a wan realm of hope) and no single interpretive system coming close to explaining experience, the reader can entertain Pynchon’s ominous implications only by abandoning both belief and control. Unlike Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon occupies a setting that practically guarantees disparate religious assumptions between the majority of its characters, narrator Cherrycoke included. The diverse theological opinions expressed are still largely united under the large umbrella of some form of monotheistic faith, (with the exception of Captain Zhang’s, assorted American Indians’, and perhaps the young freethinker Ethelmer’s). Its readers, however, about whom no such assumption can be made, are well aware of the various decenterings of belief that would follow in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The actions of the novel, in Cherrycoke’s description, occur in an era when “God has receded,” “Deism has crept in to make the best of this progressive Absence,” and “Royal Society members and French Encyclopædists [are] in the Chariot” (358–59). The clash between Enlightenment science and any form of received belief will be recognizable to today’s reader as imminent despite the near-universality of some form of belief (either foundational or foundation-seeking) within the bounds of the novel. Cherrycoke notes the proliferation of assorted religious unorthodoxies in Pennsylvania, in a litany that plausibly foreshadows the assorted sects, cults, and New Age charlatans of late twentieth-century America 23

These include technological “realists” like Pointsman or the Peenemünde engineers; mystically inclined anti-rationalists, like Leni Pökler or Geli Tripping; or a bit of both, like the heroic Enzian and the monstrously hubristic Blicero.

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(358). Here is implied a metastasizing social crisis of belief, a fragmented and somewhat desperate array of rearguard actions against the Enlightenment’s encroachments into the authoritative position formerly occupied by established (or at least majority) religion. Pynchon constructs colonial society as an eminently fluid conceptual space with regard to both specific concrete beliefs and the broader issue of belief-in-general. Perhaps non-coincidentally, our own postmodern period presents a kind of inversion of the belief-landscape that Cherrycoke describes in colonial and post-Revolutionary Pennsylvania. The crucial Enlightenment values of objectivity and factual correspondence are now subjected to an assortment of charges. These include cultural hubris, reductionism, naive realism, inattentiveness to the metaphoricity of its own language, failure to grasp the embeddedness of observations within theory or culture, and unavoidable implication in assorted capitalistic depredations and imperial interests, amounting to a reification of science into an uncritically positivist “scientism.”24 One historical crisis of authority, limned in fiction, may readily resonate with another that is under energetic, perhaps incessant debate in scholarly and journalistic venues. This particular cultural comparison appears as one of the most conceptually weighty of Pynchon’s many constructive anachronisms due to the era in which it is viewed. For postmodernists decry the hegemony of science, while scientific realists and objectivists respond with counter-attacks claiming reflexive irrationalism, naive relativism, a sentimental strain of 24

Mary Hesse enumerates a series of fundamental principles of both the “naive realist” and “antirealist” arguments (quoted in Levine 15–16) but adopts neither position herself, preferring a Habermasian hermeneutics that eschews the relativism commonly found among critics of positivistic realism. The essay in which she lists the opposing qualities is tellingly titled “In Defense of Objectivity” (Levine 31, 24 n). Richard Rorty and Ian Hacking are among others who find the polarity of “triumphalist” positivism and “diabolize[d]” social constructivism unsatisfying, preferring a pragmatist skepticism toward the usefulness of debates over foundationalism: “Scientists who agree with Kuhn are not about to do anything very different from what their colleagues who agree with [physicist and staunch realist Steven] Weinberg do [...]. In neither science nor politics is philosophical correctness, any more than theological correctness, a requirement for useful work” (Rorty, “Phony” 122).

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Luddism, and slip-shod use of borrowed scientific metaphors or philosophic arguments on the part of their opponents. The reader in search of Pynchon’s sense of truth and usefulness, and of his many clashing discourses, may get closer to those goals by asking whether the vibrant pluralism of Pynchon’s text implies a formless general relativism, an ultimate preference for some dominant discourse after all, or some subtler relation. Different intellectual disciplines, as science historians (particularly those working in the tradition of Kuhn) have documented, occupy drastically different positions in a diachronic hierarchy of prestige that is in constant historical flux (cf. Swerdlow, Levine, Limon). While strong opinions about the relative truth-value of different professions, positions, and discourses are neither a recent development nor a consequence of eighteenth-century efforts to establish a kind of proto-positivism as a procedural norm. Condemnation of disciplines that lack a mathematical basis, for example, dates back as far as Francis Bacon, or further. Science historian Noel Swerdlow, in an extensive discussion included in a Festschrift for Kuhn, finds such a theme strongly articulated as early as 1464 by the astronomer and mathematician Regiomontanus. Johannes Müller of Königsberg also hints at an early form of Renaissance humanistic science a full century before Bacon, disparaging that era’s scholastic philosophers in terms distinctly harsher than the motto nullius in verba (Swerdlow 148–49). Yet the interdisciplinary contentions that particularly concern interpreters of Mason & Dixon differ qualitatively from earlier debates on a crucial contextual point. Unlike his characters, Pynchon operates at a time when the sciences carries an authority that essentially equates with social dominance. It also carries the burden of providing foundational knowledge to which other discourses might ultimately appeal, or to which the postmodernist or poststructuralist practitioners of those other discourses strenuously object. The natural philosophers of Mason and Dixon’s day (let alone their predecessors among the astronomers and polymaths of the Renaissance) faced no similar combination of privilege and responsibility. They were in an early stage of a centuries-long effort to attain it, to wrest some of it away from the unexamined authority of religion.

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Pynchon’s anachronistic strategy in Mason & Dixon thus represents an exceptionally informative plunge into the “problemsituation” posed by the debates over Enlightenment science and reason that have continued to divide scholars up through the postmodern period. The mid-to-late eighteenth century appears here as the earliest of history’s uncertain Pynchonian moments yet to be fictionalized. It is one in which our contemporary interdisciplinary debates not only mirror the belief-crisis that animates Mason, Dixon, and their contemporaries but might even derive useful guidance from Pynchon’s treatment of that crisis. During the consolidation of the sciences as professions, and thus as discourses with some testable, credible jurisdiction over the foundations of truth-claims, anxiety over this discursive flux was predictably acute. This anxiety can be described at either a personal or a social level, and Pynchon does both. Mason & Dixon shows Mason in frequent agony over his own status within his profession. He aspires to his mentor James Bradley’s favor, Royal Society membership, and ultimately the position of Astronomer Royal, and endures searing jealousy when that position goes to the less competent and frequently unstable (but socially well connected) Nevil Maskelyne. Anxiety over the relative positions of entire professions, whose practitioners are uncertain of their relative prestige, also permeates the novel, generally taking comic form. But the problematic nature of Mason’s chosen field also animates his recurrent tensions with his father, a baker who sees no practical value in his son’s star-gazing and wants him in the family trade. The elder Mason holds unique and frankly mystical beliefs about the nature of bread, its transubstantiative religious status and complex physical/biological nature: He believes that bread is alive,– that the yeast Animalcula may unite in a single purposeful individual,– that each Loaf is so organized, with the crust, for example, serving as skin or Carapace,– the small cavities within exhibiting a strange complexity, their pale Walls, to appearance smooth, proving, upon magnification, to be made up of even smaller bubbles, and, one may presume, so forth, down to the limits of the Invisible. The Loaf, the indispensible point of convergence upon every British table, the solid British Quartern Loaf, is mostly, like the Soul, Emptiness. (204)

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For all its economic and political insecurities, the profession of astronomy offers young Mason a different form of safety, not so much a greater intellectual challenge as a lesser metaphysical dread: The baker’s trade terrified the young man. He learn’d as much of it as would keep him going,– but when he began to see into it,– the smells, the unaccountable swelling of the dough, the oven door like a door before a Sacrament,– the daily repetitions of smell and ferment and some hidden Drama, as in the Mass,– was he fleeing to the repetitions of the Sky, believing them safer, not as saturated in life and death? If Christ’s Body could enter Bread, then what else might?– might it not be as easily haunted by ghosts less welcome? Alone in the early empty mornings even for a few seconds with the mute white rows, he was overwhelmed by the ghostliness of Bread. (205)

Choosing to pursue a scientific career thus appears not as a step toward greater ambition but as a downward step in the direction of a kind of spiritual cowardice, a flight from realms of social utility and prestige, natural vitality, and even supernatural gravity. Much of the plot through the “America” segment of the book is driven by a dialectic between the unspoken (or never-quite-spoken) question “What is scientific activity really for?” and the relentless withholding of any answer that is both credible and socially respectable.25 A sense of both scientific enterprises and scientists as open to 25

Historically, “pure” or basic science (to which Mason is inclined) and applied, practical, utilitarian science (Dixon’s earthy variety) have rarely been as distinct as some mythologizers of scientific progress would hold. The late Donald Stokes, in Pasteur’s Quadrant (which is swiftly becoming an influential text among the executive branches of today’s scientific establishment), traced the institutionalization of this distinction in European and American science and technology. He noted that many of the discoveries yielding the most important reconceptualizations of basic scientific principles stemmed from investigations that were conducted not in the vacuum of abstraction. Louis Pasteur’s microbiologic discoveries are, instead, seen as examples of efforts to address specific “use-inspired” problems comprising both basic understanding and useful application. The eighteenth century in general, as Cowart observes toward the outset of his account of Mason & Dixon as a particular type of “Luddite novel,” was characterized by a proliferation of technological applications of principles discovered in the seventeenth. These included practical inventions like James Watt’s steam engine to assorted approaches to the measurement of longitude at sea and Adam Smith’s elucidation of the inner

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caricature, if not outright mockery, persists throughout Mason & Dixon from which the practical applicability of their knowledge does not always spare them. This reaches a pinnacle of absurdity in Dixon’s late tale of a northerly expedition into a concave realm invaginated into, through, and beneath the Earth’s surface, where he learns of electromagnetic “Tellurick Forces” from a host of gnome-like “innersurface Philosophers,” the fellows of a subterranean “local Academy of Sciences” (740). Such an explicit nod toward the Swiftian Lagado consolidates an atmosphere in which scientific activity, even prestige within the scientific profession, is positioned somewhere distinctly beneath respectability. Throughout the novel, the political machinations of the Royal Society and of their comically conspiratorial counterparts in the Society of Jesus emphasize that organized scientific establishments, no less than individual entrepreneurial scientists, operate so far from the ideal of disinterested objectivity as to make a mockery of it. Speculative reductio ad absurdum accounts of what the drawing of the Line might ultimately produce appear toward the end of the narrative. The overtly commercial nature of one such projection confirms the Line’s status as “some hir’d Cadastral Survey by its nature corrupt, of use at Trail’s End only to those who would profit from the sale and division and resale of Lands” (701). Dixon’s perverse vision of their survey’s purpose passes at this stage from his dialogue into Cherrycoke’s (Pynchon’s?) narratorial voice, and the extended Line elides any distinction between impure Pelf and pure abstract geometry as it foreshadows one of the twentieth century’s most familiar blights on the American land: the Visto soon is lin’d with Inns and Shops, Stables, Games of Skill, Theatrickals, Pleasure-Gardens ... a Promenade,– nay, Mall,– eighty Miles long. At twilight you could mount to a Platform, and watch the lamps coming on, watch the Visto tapering, in perfect Projection, to its ever-unreachable Point. Pure Latitude and Longitude. (701–02) workings of markets (Cowart 342). Mason and Dixon operate in an environment where a concept of knowledge for knowledge’s sake was as little a part of the working scientist’s vocabulary as a Wildean/Paterean “art for art’s sake” would have been to their romance- and novel-writing contemporaries.

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It is both a sublunary parody of cartography’s Platonizing impulse (perhaps even of the light-points of the heavens) and a shopping mall. If indeed “History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base” (350), Science at this historical moment fares no better than History. Yet it is difficult to argue that Pynchon seriously pretends that the process by which the sciences attained their hegemony might have transpired otherwise, that the term “progress” has no credible referent, or that competing systems for organizing experience are essentially interchangeable. He unmasks certain pretensions of the “Royal Society members and French Encyclopædists,” like any faithful postmodernist scholar in Cultural Studies or Science and Technology Studies, but he does not remove these parties from their historical chariot. He problematizes the relations of discourses, but by no means does it follow that he merely relativizes them, leveling all distinctions (useless or useful) into a morass of inconsequentiality. It is commonly argued, from the positivist side of today’s science wars, that anyone applying nonfoundational philosophies or discourse-centered historical analyses to scientific topics must inevitably slide down a slippery slope into relativism. However, in Consequences of Pragmatism, Richard Rorty usefully sets forth definitions of the terms “relativism” and “pragmatism,” which offer an alternative view: “Relativism” is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called “relativists” are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought. Thus one may be attacked as a relativist for holding that familiarity of terminology is a criterion of theory-choice in physical science […]. The real issue is not between people who think one view as good as another and people who do not. It is between those who think our culture, or purpose, or intuitions cannot be supported except conversationally, and people who still hope for other sorts of support. (Consequences 166–67)

Perhaps it is Rorty’s key term “conversationally,” that allows a reader to locate statements of authority (however provisional) in this gener-

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ally foundationless environment. Pynchon, if viewed as speaking guardedly through eiron figures like Cherrycoke, Ethelmer, and Zhang, aligns more plausibly with those who seek no philosophical support beyond conversational performance and persuasive historical rhetoric than with those expressing a faith that human claims can be shown to correspond neatly with natural realities. His sympathy is thus with the art forms of the “quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit” (349) and even of the “fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks” (350). Objective grounds for positive argumentative positions being in short supply, one falls back on the subjective observations of the fabulistic historians, the performative quality of their utterances. Regardless of the personal unreliability imputed to these speakers, the rhetorical force of passages such as Zhang’s muchquoted skeptical excursus on the Line’s violation of feng shui principles of ecologic balance (542) is itself difficult to answer, and goes unanswered by any counter-skeptical voice elsewhere in the text. The rejection of official, ostensibly truthful yet interest-corrupted history is as pervasive as the refusal to place history on a scientistic, factual footing. Ives LeSpark’s position in the historical-theory conversation of chapter 35, a rock-kicking Johnsonian naive-realist assertion that “Facts are Facts,” coupled with the claim that novels are even more corrupting than romances, is an obvious foil. While the hypothetical (or, to use one of the narration’s recurrent terms, “subjunctive”) revisionism toward the general wisdom of Linedrawing places true relativism (that is, philosophical and moral/ political indifference) a healthy distance away from any tenable interpretive position. From the recurrent linkage of commerce with slavery to the identification of Jesuit missionary work with empire, obsession, and subjugation, it is not difficult to separate Pynchon’s jaundiced view of worldly power from anything that could merit a description as relativism.26 The reader may not have positive grounds for knowing 26

The academic lecture by Padre Zarpazo, El Lobo de Jesús, on walls, lines, and general “Imprisonment” as his ideal model for an imagined future theocratic social organization, offers a coded gesture toward Foucault’s panopticon and its paranoia-inducing political implications (522).

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which systems to accept, but identifying which ones to reject is easy. One may also note in passing that the ultimate undesirability of the Line, like the derogation of sanctioned versions of history, is premised on the equation of propertied and official interests with baseness and injustice. This precondition is a broader concern than Pynchon’s wellestablished empathetic alignment with socio-political Preterites and antipathy toward elites and Elects. It is also an analogue of exactly the detached model of science that postmodernists in general oppose, and it problematizes any easy identification of Pynchon with postmodernist positions on matters Snovian. One of the most rhetorically uncompromising historians of science to enter the “science wars,” Paul Forman locates the errors of objectivist modernism in the denial of a Foucauldian linkage between knowledge and power. He speaks of objectivists (“paladins of science”) as entering the realm of moral action only reluctantly, intermittently, and under a faulty assumption of their own decontamination: their commitment is to a transcendent scientific truth, an end above all others and overriding all moral considerations. Individually they may (or may not) have political convictions strong enough to move them to support or subvert this or that structure of power and authority. But in so acting they always see themselves as expeditionaries, taking temporary leave from their realm of truth, sallying out over a drawbridge briefly let down and again drawn up only from science’s side of the chasm. Always there is – is permitted to be – only one direction of movement, action, influence, causation: from science’s side across the chasm to the wider social and cultural milieu. This uni-directionality, this “rectification,” is required by their concept of purity (and hence also of pollution) going way back beyond Plato, namely that no knowledge can be true knowledge if it is tainted by personal, social, or cultural interests [...]. Modern scientists were permitted their stance of irresponsible purity not merely because they insisted that only by proceeding so could society get from science the desired practical benefits, but equally because such a stance was compatible with the transcendence-oriented political, aesthetic, and cognitive ideologies of modernity. (paras. 4, 5)

A resemblance between these “expeditions” and those of Mason and Dixon into the contested territory of America may be more than a coincidence of metaphor. If a voyage from the realm of transcendence into that of interests is inevitably implicated in all the various

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irresponsibilities that have followed from Platonism, then local knowledge acquired from contact with the various interested parties appears to be a more compelling attainment than any transcendent, capitalizable Truth.27 That form of hard-won but richly textured experience among the colonials, American Indians, axmen, assorted fanatics, and others is exactly what Mason and Dixon accrue in exchange, or recompense, for the failure of their efforts to inscribe a geometric sign of transcendence upon the Earth. While thus working within a postmodern paradigm, Pynchon retains modernism’s historic position outside entrenched power, differentiating postmodern epistemologic humility from postmodern political fatalism, and continues the work of illuminating, elusively and elegiacally, the aspects of the world that power continues to destroy. Modern science seeks a foundation of Truth (modeled on pre-modernity’s Belief) in order to speak truth to power, yet postmodern science acknowledges that power has always determined the conditions under which any truths can be constructed. Pynchon’s fictional and historical practice insists on drawing from an impulse common to both. His complex relation to yet another line, that between the modern and the postmodern, thus becomes yet another conceptual oscillation indicating that problematizing the linedrawing impulse is not equivalent to erasing it.

Works Cited Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974. Cowart, David. “The Luddite Vision: Mason & Dixon.” American Literature 71.1 (June 1999): 341–63. Forman, Paul. “In Postmodernity the Two Cultures Are One – And Many.” History and Philosophy of Science website, Standford University (26 Jan. 1998) . 27

These include not only the interests of power but also the moral interests Forman advocates as frankly acknowledged guideposts for postmodern scientific work.

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Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. NY: Vintage/Random House, 1973. Gould, Stephen Jay. “Royal Shorthand.” Letter. Science 251 (11 Jan. 1991): 142. Gross, Paul R., and Norman Levitt. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Guetti, James. Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Literary Experience. Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1993. Hesse, Mary. Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. Johnson, George. “In Quantum Feat, an Atom in Two Places at Once.” New York Times (22 Feb. 2000): F1–F2. Kirn, Walter. “Z. Pynchon’s Tiresome Mind Games.” Rev. of Mason & Dixon. Slate (6 May 1997) . Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970. Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Levine, George. “One Culture: Science and Literature.” One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature. Ed. George Levine. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987: 3–32. Limon, John. The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Mattessich, Stefan. “Telluric Texts, Implicate Spaces.” Rev. of Mason & Dixon. Postmodern Culture 8.1 (September 1997) . McCaffery, Larry. Interview with David Foster Wallace. Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (Summer 1993): 127–50. McClure, John A. “Postmodern/Post-Secular: Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality.” Modern Fiction Studies 41.1 (Spring 1995): 141–63. Menand, Louis. “Entropology.” Rev. of Mason & Dixon. New York Review of Books (12 June 1997): 22FF. Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Ed. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976: 161–95. —— “The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49.” Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1978: 112–45. Miller, Karl. Doubles: Studies in Literary History. Oxford and NY: Oxford UP, 1987. Moody, Rick. “Surveyors of the Enlightenment.” Rev. of Mason & Dixon. Atlantic Monthly 280 (July 1997): 106–10 . Ozier, Lance W. “The Calculus of Transformation: More Mathematical Imagery in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Twentieth-Century Literature 21 (1975): 193–210.

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Porush, David. “‘Purring into Transcendence’: Pynchon’s Puncutron Machine.” The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon’s Novel. Ed. Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner and Larry McCaffery. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1994: 31–45. Pynchon, Thomas. V. 1963. NY: Bantam, 1964. —— The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966. —— Gravity’s Rainbow. NY: Viking, 1973. —— “Is it O.K. to Be a Luddite?” New York Times Book Review (28 Oct. 1984): 1, 40–41. —— Slow Learner. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. —— Vineland. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. —— Mason & Dixon. NY: Holt, 1997. Rasula, Jed. “Textual Indigence in the Archive.” Postmodern Culture 9.3 (May 1999) . Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982. —— “Phony Science Wars.” Rev. The Social Construction of What? Atlantic Monthly 284.5 (Nov. 1999): 120–22. Schmidt, Peter. “Line, Vortex, and Mound: On First Reading Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon.” Personal faculty web page, Swarthmore College . Slade, Joseph. Thomas Pynchon. NY: Warner, 1974. Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures: and A Second Look: An Expanded Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969. Sokal, Alan. “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Social Text 46/47 (1996): 217–52. —— “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies.” Lingua Franca (May/June 1996): 62–64 . Sokal, Alan D. and Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. NY: Picador USA, 1998. Rpt. of Impostures Intellectuelles, Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1997. Stokes, Donald E. Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997. Strehle, Susan. “Pynchon’s ‘Elaborate Game of Doubles’ in Vineland.” Ed. Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner and Larry McCaffery. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1994: 101–18. Swerdlow, N. M. “Science and Humanism in the Renaissance: Regiomontanus’s Oration on the Dignity and Utility of the Mathematical Sciences.” World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and The Nature of Science. Ed. Paul Horwich. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993: 131–68. Tabbi, Joseph. Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. —— Cognitive Fictions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. 2002

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van Frassen, Bas C. “Empiricism in the Philosophy of Science.” Images of Science. Ed. Paul M. Churchland and Clifford A. Hooker. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. Ware, Tim. “Hyper Arts Concordance: Mason & Dixon.” . Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime. 1976. Foreword by Harold Bloom. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. NY: Macmillan, 1953. Wood, James. The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999. Wood, Michael. “Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.” Raritan 17.4 (Spring 1998): 120–30.

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MARTIN SAAR AND CHRISTIAN SKIRKE

“The Realm of Velocity and Spleen”: Reading Hybrid Life in Mason & Dixon1

Thomas Pynchon’s novel is dominated by its historical disposition, an eighteenth century meticulously researched and wildly transformed. The usual abundance of distractions and sub-plots, however, makes it virtually impossible to extract anything close to a unifying leitmotif. In the following, we propose a reading of Mason & Dixon that has a specific, quite narrow focus. The compass of our approach will be the figure of the “mechanickal Duck” which appears as an uninvited companion of the line and its crew. By isolating this creature, we submit our reading to the following claims: firstly, that the duck is not just one more member of the whole realm of dubious creatures in the Pynchon universe, but quite a particular one; one that is to be treated as a synecdoche or paradigm of many others. Secondly, that its literary status is multiple and overdetermined: on the one hand, the man-made creature is a rather conventional theme in literature since the Enlightenment; on the other hand, Pynchon gives this motif an unconventional rendering which subverts, conflates, and exceeds its various traditions. Thirdly, that the duck is a relevant topos, because it can capture something that lies at the heart of Mason & Dixon’s construction, namely a serious concern with the hybrid in its double sense: a concern with a technique of cross-breeding or a technology of superimposition which artificially transforms both shape and concept of life, as well as a concern with hubris, with megalomaniac man venturing beyond those boundaries 1

We would like to thank the participants of the International Pynchon Week for general inspiration and for important suggestions of direct concern to our topic. Moreover, we’d like to express our gratitude to Simon Garnett for innumerable patient corrections, and to our principal and crucial readers, Julia Tonndorf and Jeanine Werner.

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which he should not and must not transgress.2 For Pynchon, the hybrid is the double figure that can be said to describe the structure of modernity or Western technological civilization. In Mason & Dixon as well as in his previous novels, modernization and the progress of Western rationality appear as narratives of human overestimation and as continuous production of composite beings – Gravity’s Rainbow’s rocket metaphysics, V.’s prosthetics, The Crying of Lot 49’s technological conspiracies, as well as the media complex in Vineland, and the numerous questionable scientific projects of Mason & Dixon may serve as the most general points of reference. But despite its pertinacity in Pynchon’s writing, these narratives of the hybrid do not simply highlight or interpret the more or less factual interdependence of mankind’s industrious naïveté and the monstrosity of its outcomes. Rather, the hybrid constitutes a space of its own within the narrative itself. It interferes thematically and formally with Pynchon’s protagonists, overturns their fictive biographies, and renders vague their human shapes. In Pynchon, we might assume, the oblique but omnipresent hybrid belongs equally to the thematic of his novels as to their composition. Thus, something else can be exemplified with this generalized hybrid figure. If we compare the “automatic Duck” to its later sibling, Pynchon’s other iron angel, the V2 missile, there is something to be said about Pynchon’s tone or humor: in contrast to his earlier works, Mason & Dixon seems to adopt not so much an apocalyptic, but a melancholic stance. This means that it emphasizes irredeemable losses over imminent dangers. With these preliminaries in mind, we will proceed in three steps. First we want to briefly recount the historical as well as literary sources of Pynchon’s “automatic Duck.” We will then glance at the numerous other figures of the super-animal but non-human throughout Mason & Dixon that indeed contains a complete typology of creatures 2

That this is a rather obvious connection may be proven by the following remark during the conversation in which the duck appears for the first time: “’Twas his own Hubris,– the old Philosopher’s story, we all know, meddl’d where he shouldn’t have, till laws of the Unforeseen engag’d,– now the Duck is a Fugitive, flying where it wishes” (373).

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beyond nature: speaking animals, experimental hybrids that mismatch organism and machine, and an undead population which originates in a surreal conglomeration of witchcraft, totemism and animism. In a third step, we will try to “read the duck,” and ask whether this particular mechanical creature, this hybrid figure, can be read as a figure, a trope of hybrid life, or rather of hybridity itself.3

I The idea of artificial life is one of the oldest dreams of humanity. In Greek myth, man himself is said to be constructed in a Promethean act of creation out of the non-organic. But this dream found its poignant fulfilment only with the rapid advancement of the mechanical sciences and the new realms of technological construction in the modern age.4 In the middle of the eighteenth century, the automaton epitomized the complex art of engineered imitations of life. The 1774 “Writer” by Swiss inventor Pierre Jacquet-Drosz and Baron von Kempelen’s famous and fake “Chess Player” from 1769 can figure as prominent examples. But the masterpieces of this genre between science, mechanics and stunning entertainment obviously were the artificial creatures of Jacques de Vaucanson, who lived from 1709 to 1782.5 His “Flute Player” was presented in 1738; in the following year he finished his “Tambourine Player” and his famous artificial duck. The latter in particular won the praise of scientific experts and the Parisian 3

4 5

For good reasons, much of the secondary literature on Pynchon has focused on the issues of technology and the technological conditions of modern humanity. The prominence of the figure of the “cyborg” is plausible for much of Pynchon’s work (especially for V.); cf. Brian McHale’s paradigmatic survey and analysis in Postmodernist Fiction. We take the term hybrid to designate the more comprehensive category which also includes the less complex (and nonbiomechanical) automata of the period in view in Mason & Dixon, as well as hybridized existences in general. For an overview see Jean-Claude Beaune 431–80. Cf. the entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Scientists. Ed. Trevor Williams.

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public alike, among them Voltaire and La Mettrie.6 Vaucanson and his duck even made a lengthy entry in the first volume of Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie under the heading “automate.” Its stunning features allegedly included a nearly perfect imitation of animal motion, swimming, cackling, eating, drinking, digesting, and defecating. Several mechanical models and illustrations of this duck exist in collections and museums all over the world; probably not all of them are authentic. The mechanical delicacy and fascination of this defecating machine was only surpassed by the intellectual finesse of this Faustian-Promethean project: to redouble an element of the animated world, to mirror natural physiologies and physiognomies by perfect human construction. The most prominent literary genre imagining automata and artificial life dates from the various strands of Romanticism. We want here to recall those examples which seem most relevant in respect to Mason & Dixon, all of which stage the breakdown of constructive reason. In Pynchon’s novel, several emotional interferences occur with the strictly scientific experiment and the strictly rational construction of automatic life. One of the most distinctive portrayals of such a conflict between the sentimental and the experimental side of the artificially animated is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, from 1818. Her novel depicts the effects of desire and despair on the selfsufficient but servile instrument itself. Contradictory composite of bodily replication and unique consciousness, the man-made creature becomes tragically aware of its isolated originality: man’s duplicate turns into a compulsive being. The monster is bound to project its alltoo-human longings against its inventor, who fails to reconcile his creature with its autonomous desires. Mary Shelley asks a crucial question about the reach of human responsibility (in which she sides with the monster). She concludes that humans do not only mutilate the harmonic features of natural or divine creation when they construct illegitimate representations of themselves, but inevitably destroy the equilibrium of creation and control over the product. This is the essence of the monster’s famous 6

Cf. Mazlish.

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warning: “You are my creator, but I am your master; – obey!” (167).7 And its spell is irreversible; the imminence and the urgency of the monster’s threat make it impossible for both, man and his creature, to return to a state of innocence. In Frankenstein, the hideous face of the monster is only a faint reflection of the monstrosity of human zeal. E. T. A. Hoffmann elucidates a complementary perspective on this confusion. His Sandman, first published in 1816, tells of the ambiguous human fascination with the simulacrum. The chronicle of young Nathanael’s falling in love with the machine Olimpia, a puppet that can dance and play the piano, describes his successive involvement with the human pretension of the automaton. Unexpectedly, his fully-blossomed feelings even survive the moment when Olimpia’s artificial nature is revealed. But in a modern world, such a persistent fascination must remain a dangerous fantasy: as it can’t be reduced to reason, Nathanael’s irrational affair, or rather affair with irrationality, entails madness and, finally, suicide.8 Whereas, in Hoffmann’s story, powerful reverberations of magic and spells advocate the inexplicable, and thus express an implicit critique of reason, Edgar Allan Poe’s criminalistic essay Maelzel’s Chess-Player from 1836 aspires to disenchant a slightly different fascination with the actual artificial creatures. His detailed portrayal of the machine must hence present pieces of evidence which serve a distinct purpose: in attacking the illusionistic principle of man-shaped automata, he tackles a modern type of superstition, a naïve trust in the miracle-like possibilities of technology. In proving that the automaton 7

8

Compare Pynchon’s comments on Frankenstein in “Is it O.K. To Be a Luddite?” It is worth noting that for Pynchon, Shelley’s novel belongs to a tradition that points out the limits and effects of technology – the opposite could be put forward, which is to say, as he does, that the intent of mystifying technological invention is “to deny the machine” (40). As is well known, the “official” psychonanalytic account of Hoffmann’s Sandman can be found in Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” For Freud, the motif of the automaton touches on the issues of infantile fears, castration fear, narcicissm, and projection. Freud also relates the fear of automata to the child’s (repressed) desire to treat its Puppen, its toys or dolls, as living beings. Does not even the mighty duck still display traits of a toy duck (cf. Mason & Dixon 449, 667)?

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is not self-sufficient, but in fact contains a human operator, Poe embraces the cause of man against those machines that unrightfully usurp human individuality. In Romantic literature, the theme of man-made creatures is staged as fatally attractive, as a clandestine but severe threat to the physical, moral, spiritual, and intellectual integrity of man. All of these motifs reappear in Mason & Dixon, together with their disturbing implications. In the narrative of Vaucanson’s duck we can recognize them in different shapes and dispositions: in the broad skepticism that answers to the advent of the mechanical duck and in her subsequent mystification, or in the grotesque affection between Armand Allègre and the automaton, and in the astonishing coexistence of automaton and line crew. And the Romantic imagery of automatic life is even taken up literally in one passage of the background story in order to become ironically reversed. Aunt Euphrenia remembers that once, doing a really odd job, she was best paid for pretending to be an actual Automaton Oboe Player (669–70). Another adaptation of Romantic artificial creatures adheres more directly to its model: when Mason first encounters the fugitive Eliza Fields, he takes her for a “Point-for-Point Representation,” (536) a simulacrum of his late wife Rebekah. His overt fascination and his desire to get involved with this bodily imitation dies away in a slow and painful process. He needs to be forced into acknowledging that Eliza Fields is an actual human being whose individuality he must respect; he needs to be forced into recognizing that she is no suitable object for his fetishistic pursuits.9 But the overall twist Pynchon gives to this literary tradition is crucial: he implants these Romantic motifs in the setting of the earlier Age of Reason which has not yet fully disposed of magic, superstition, and cosmological speculation. Possibly, this incongruence manipulates the horizon of the artificial: the premature appearance of hybrid creatures might affect the tragic dimension of their existence, whose unhappy impossibility is always measured against the routines 9

The character of Eliza Fields never fully rids herself of connections to the automatic sphere. Her friend Zsuzsa, with whom she plans some obscure career as “Adventuress,” runs a genuine mechanical puppet theater which represents the battle of Leuthen.

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of reason. In Mason & Dixon, they have been transposed to an age that still has to defend the seeds of reason against powerful intrusions of genuine myth and supernatural forces. This could mean that reason has not yet come to recognize its own products as its own possible enemies.

II Before we turn to the narrative of the “mechanickal Duck” itself, let us have a short look at Mason & Dixon’s gloomy world of not-quite real creatures, animals and simulacra. Our list is by no means complete. We can only suggest rather than prove that there is a fully fledged topology or ontology of living beings between nature and artefact, between reality and imagination: there are talking clocks and an animated ear (121, 175); we encounter the Learnèd English Dog, a preacher of human knowledge and morality who is reminiscent of a La Fontainean fable but has been relegated in person to the unprofitable public house entertainment circuit (18). And, there is a further “rational” exponent of human inventiveness, this time the harmless by-product of a mad professor’s dream, namely, Felípe, the wired electric eel, who bears his bizarre destiny as an electric cigarlighter with the well-rehearsed indifference of an experienced extra in a cheap magician’s show (426). Among the more enigmatic hauntings that visit the line are a Glowing Indian (496), and an American Golem who has found (together with his exiled creators) a new diaspora in the Pennsylvanian woods (485). The burlesque werebeaver Zepho originates in another spill-over of European occultism to the New World (618). As a persiflage of the Beast rather than the unleashed American Werewolf, he is even welcome to participate in a common sense contest: who will be more efficient in clearing Mason and Dixon’s vista from trees and trunks? A Swedish axman? Or the large-teethed creature of the moonlit night? An impressive scene: a surprising moon eclipse sweeps this episode into a ridiculous row over celestial foul play. There is also

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Eliza Fields who could be a Wiedergänger, a double of Mason’s dear wife Rebekah (511). There is Captain Zhang engaged in his mimetic battle with the shadowy “Wolf of Jesus” so that, in the end, they cannot be told apart (142). In short, cases of hybrid identity abound. There are animals that transcend animality either in intelligence or capabilities. There are humans whose humanity is called into question by strange transformations. There are cases of dubious personal identity: tricks and ruses of self-sameness seem to be played. Finally, no-one can distinguish between the original and the simulacrum. It is common to all these creatures that they belong to different worlds and different orders of existence at the same time. A chasm runs through them all, and it cannot be remedied by any reliable or universal ontology. And it is common to all of them that they touch on the border of the human. Animals with human traits or animalic humans, inspired machines and serialized humans: they all blur the clear-cut line between the human and its inferior or superior neighbors in the technologically extendable Chain of Being. After a quick appearance as the haunting “it” in chapter 36, Armand Allègre introduces the duck in the subsequent chapter as the exclusive topic of just another sub-story. We learn that the duck was planned by Vaucanson as a perfect imitation. After he succeeded in giving it the ability to digest and defecate he went on to work on an erotic capacity, in order to “make All authentic” (372). At this point, his ambitious endeavor is subverted by a grotesque accident: an unforeseen revolt of representation is taking place. It doesn’t just affect the machinery, but the concept of artificial life itself. It shakes off its materiality in order to give birth to an impossibly abstract consciousness which, in Mason & Dixon, is at first consistent with the tragic canon of hybrid life. Armand muses: “That final superaddition of erotick Machinery may have nudg’d the Duck across some Threshold of self-Intricacy, setting off this Explosion of Change, from Inertia towards Independence, and Power” (373).

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A modern nightmare: the apparatus becomes reasonable, superior to humans, and gendered.10 In a typical Frankensteinian reflex the duck turns to Allègre to ask him for intermediation in the service of Love: she demands to meet her so-called “Fatal Other,” Vaucanson’s duplicate of the prototype, of herself (376). Of course, Allègre fails to do his duty, and must suffer the duck’s constant caring supervision that turns into a dangerous but nevertheless ambivalent love affair. Soon, the Frenchman escapes from his obsessive and jealous admirer into an unfriendly exile, however without success. His only chance to return to ordinary life is neither his eluding the omnipotent robot’s affection, nor a satisfaction of the automaton’s strange desires. It is the ongoing process of the duck’s “’Morphosis” instead (374). As her technical abilities increase and her consciousness matures, she develops a tolerance unprecedented in the automatic sphere and finally lets go unharmed her human creators. So, when Armand has an affair with Luise, the duck takes only voyeuristic part in it. The duck’s biography of change presumably ends in her complete denaturalization and the extinction of her worldly desires. It ends in her selfdefinition as a satellite avant la lettre, a planet, or even an abstract physical (and metaphysical) point that first rotates around the earth and then leaves the space and time of the novel.

III Several effects of the line, we might even say of linearity, announce the duck’s disappearance. She gets tricked by the company to hover exactly over Mason and Dixon’s line according to that strange law of animal psychology that says: “Right Lines cause Narcolepsy in all Fowl” (666). But the duck redresses her being fixed to a single point. Without any effort, she substitutes the system which coordinates her 10

The delicate question of the automaton’s sex is settled in passing: “Moi? Female, as it happens” (377), it/she says. So we’ll go on referring to the duck as “she.”

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position. Her immobility ceases to coincide with the revolution of the earth around itself, but now appertains to the earth’s revolution around the sun. Remaining steadily within the small ribbon of dusk, she now watches the world spinning beneath her, giving a completely new and multiple connotation to velocity and motionlessness: the crew is preoccupied with a deeply rational geometry, with the perfect line and its reliable coordinates; but the duck confronts them with an incomprehensible premonition, a premature demonstration on the relativity of space and time. Hence, this short episode bustles with theories about her flying paths. All these considerations, however, are rendered futile by the next unpredictable manoeuvre of the automaton. While Mason and Dixon battle with the earthly problem of impossible straightness, the duck chooses to ride a bent trajectory into some unworldly “Realm of Velocity and Spleen” (667); she “enters and leaves the Stream of Time as she likes” (637). Still, the last enigmatic messages which the automaton communicates to the visto concern the two heroes and address the political-historical entanglement of their project: initially expounding her “simple, immoderate desire for the Orthogonal,” (667) she extends the graph of the American line over the entire circumference of the earth, at least into the Orient. Even though her ambitions seem to be merely touristic – she accounts for her travels with a casual “Interesting Planet [...] I can’t wait to do the Equator” – she is the only one who has actually seen “where else the Parallel goes” (669). She is the only one to possibly know which forces on the other side of America may control and mark this continent, using Mason and Dixon as mere puppets. We have to notice that the duck’s very existence is paradoxical. Technically speaking a perpetuum mobile, she contradicts any mechanical possibility: the duck turns transcendence into fuel. Her life-giving plummet falls against the laws of gravity, infinitely or infinitesimally. At the same time however, the intelligent machine forces us to witness her innate distortion of desire. The duck’s insoluble quest for a delusory “Fatal Other” lends expression to an essential dysfunctionality. The synthetic determination of any dialectical reconciliation presents her with the tragic tautology of solitude. Without precedence and partner, she is a prototypical being for whom archetypal answers will never hold: the hybrid has neither

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origin nor parentage in the strict sense. Her destination cannot be traced back beyond the chasm of hybridity. And “love” doesn’t solve this problem either. Whom is the hybrid to fall in love with? At first, the Frankensteinian pattern of the duck’s emotional disorientation appears to be obvious: the artificial creature seeks to blackmail its inventor into constructing its mate. But as we have seen, instead of engaging with the inevitable and tragic conflict for which Dr Frankenstein and his monster have become synonymous, their unwinnable duel about granting or denying emotional relief, Pynchon’s machine takes an experimental, almost anarchic approach to her unique sexuality. Dissatisfied with “clocktower Cocks,” (376) she starts to pursue humans not with wrath, but with jealous affection. When the automaton virtually proposes to Armand Allègre, the monster’s haunt turns overtly farcical: she is not even the simulacrum of a human being, but of a duck. The automaton’s recourse to a behavioristic cliché about her biological look-alikes adds to this bizarre episode: “We mate for life. Alas, my poor Armand,” she flirts (380). Allègre’s seriousness about this event and the compassionate interjections of his principal listener, Luise Redzinger, rather underline the ridiculousness of being sexually harassed by a clockwork-driven steel bird. Pynchon’s interpretation of the man-made creature puts a strong emphasis on the comic potential of the grotesque. Even though the conflictuous and unsettling qualities of the hybrid are vividly present throughout Mason & Dixon, story-lines scarcely follow the urge to resolve them or to confront them. The tragic human experiment that relies on powerful technological means is doubled and parodied by a powerful companion: the somersaulting experiments of the unexpected technological product itself. And indeed, the erotic career of the duck defines an interesting path. From loving her mechanical counterpart to loving a member of the human species that invented her, finally turning away her affection, even becoming – Armand himself names it – “autoérotique” (688).11 We do not learn much

11

Obliquely, the duck proposes her own almost psychoanalytic theory of her creation, once again invoking the Frankenstein or even Pygmalion theme:

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about this final stage – it could even be a case of mishearing on Armand’s behalf. But what else could we call the duck’s behavior? Is it not evident that she prefers solitary high speed flights to pursuing some kind of other half, imaginary as it may be? The intelligence and amorous ardor the duck displays is grafted onto but not reconciled with her mechanical nature, its complexity notwithstanding. In our view, the duck is a version, a gestalt of the hybrid, an impossible being that is rationally constructed but not fully mastered, the dream of a material machine that is to transcend mere materiality. Hybrids are those naturally and ontologically incoherent beings that seem to belong to two different orders of existence. And these two worlds usually interfere with each other in a tragic (or comic) way. At the beginning of modernity, certain creatures and “freaks of nature” were still thought of as belonging to both, the realm of angels and supernatural phenomena and the realm of earthly, natural creatures.12 While these species of hybrids became trapped in the immanence of an all-encompassing realm of natural laws and regularities, technological progress invented a new type: the manmade creature that transcends its nature by technical means. The hybrid figure, or creature in its different forms, we think can rightfully claim a central place in the overall organization of Mason & Dixon. But this is equally true of the figure of the hybrid, the trope (or concept) of hybridity itself which includes the aspect of hubris. Several clues underline this assumption: the whole of Mason and Dixon’s professional journey seems to succumb to a hybrid scheme. Nature is to be conquered by measurement, terra incognita must be rendered intelligible as well as geopolitically unambiguous. But the obvious predicament of the surveyors’ task is that they are tied to the order of a strictly super-earthly nature. They require the starry sky, an

12

Vaucanson himself, she suggests, was in need of a creature to love. “He wish’d to control utterly, not an Automaton, but a creature capable of love” (668). Cf. Davidson, “The Horror of Monsters.” Pynchon tells his own short and witty version of this process in “Is it O.K. To Be a Luddite?” In Mason & Dixon, several speculations concerning the automatic duck still emulate the pretechnological theme of the hybrid: “if Angels be the next higher being from Man, perhaps the Duck had ’morphos’d into some Anatine Equivalent, acting as my Guardian,– purely, as an Angel might...” (379).

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enigmatic source of reference, in order to achieve geographical accuracy. And this fundamental dependence can turn against the rational construction itself. It succeeds in blurring the line between astronomy and astrology, geography and geomancy, rational experiment and alchemy. Mason & Dixon can be read entirely as a fable that reveals reason to be inextricably intertwined with its magic other. Most of the troubles Pynchon’s two travellers have to face along their route – from theological-political partisanship to Indian rituals – belong to the order of the prerational or surrational. Mason and Dixon experience “pure” technological success (remember the Torpedo lighter), and they must testify to the sheer power of the ungraspable. In between, however, they behold the realm of the ambiguous which suspends linear time or warps the earth into its concave counterpart. Returning into the light of reality necessarily means to forget some dark experience that cannot stand the light of day. Let us suggest some connections between Pynchon’s portrayal of the hybrid and what should be one of the most pressing questions during this assessment of the recent stage of Pynchon’s work: what is the original and singular contribution of Mason & Dixon to the Pynchon universe? Has his writing changed in tone, in complexity, in rigor? All we can say on the basis of our reading of just one figure from Mason & Dixon, is to offer the following comparison. In the beginning we stated that there is some sense of déjà-vu about the picture of the duck turned satellite. In fact, the V2 rocket from Gravity’s Rainbow was a similar mad scientist’s fantasy, a similar fetishistic dream of a supernatural being. It was also destined to transcend its material layout, to multiply its lethal capacities, and to backfire relentlessly on its inventors – recall the deadly eroticism of this sadomasochistic implementation, the plastic Schwarzgerät, whose transgressive properties only Blicero and Gottfried could fully comprehend. Another hybrid creature, the missile exhibits this mad eroticism of technology itself. But this isn’t constrained to a symbolic level. The autonomous device perverts, in its very corporeality, the organizational patterns which man invents in order to materialize his visions of power and control; the autarkic technological body subjects

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man physically to its autonomous rhythm and traps him inside its steel cavities.13 But how does the flying robot of Mason & Dixon measure up against this disturbing manifestation of twentieth-century technological omnipotence? Even though the duck, too, is a machine gone astray and having assumed unforeseen symbolic and physical powers, we can already note a couple of differences: first and foremost her readiness to engage into dialogue with her human counterparts, her amiability, her protective instincts, and her grotesque falling in love with the French chef. All this is certainly indicative of a temper that sharply contrasts with the mercilessness of her younger sibling. We have also seen that, under her supervision, premature experiments with relativity do not amount to just another self-assertion of instrumental rationality. They come along as the capricious mood of some inspired robot that is free to fool around with her “extra-natural powers,– invisibility, inexhaustible strength, an upper Velocity Range that makes her the match, in Momentum, of much larger opponents” (448). But simultaneously, her playfulness contradicts this human 13

Gravity’s Rainbow contains a multi-layered set of “lessons” about technological culture. First, there are mathematical and physical basics and their technological interpretation, e.g., a simple electronic circuitry that is used to control the V2 missile (301). The workings of counter-measures against the rocket are elucidated in the same way: strange statistics, obscure and more obviously sexualized neuro-psychological experiments, e.g., Slothrop’s erections (83–86). Then, there are the complex backgrounds and implications of polymerization, touching on their economic potential (165–67) and their suitability for creating hallucinogenic drugs (344–48). Finally, the technological process gains an imaginary dimension when the highly advanced “erectile” plastic Imipolex G makes its appearance (486–88). Only at this point does polymerization become the ambiguous technological-sexual procedure that adds the crucial erotic device to the phallic shape of the metal rocket. Only at this stage is there a convergence of technological and natural “laws” and sadomasochistic “rules.” This is expressed in the last disturbing scene of Gravity’s Rainbow: Gottfried is encapsulated in the famous coat fashioned from Imipolex G and has been strapped to the missile’s belly in order to be literally part of this orgasmic metaphor, the rocket blast; the imperturbable pulse of some steering module interrupts or (dis-)organizes his last thoughts: “CATCH [...] CATCH” (759). Technology, in this account, never ceases to be an imaginary domain of ritual and domination.

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logic of opposition. She can refrain from being a threat to man. Thus the duck, this unfamiliar piece of eighteenth-century prototechnology, is effectively breaking with the tragic notoriety and fatefulness of Hybrid Harbingers of Doom of which Gravity’s Rainbow’s missile is an extreme example: she does not simply turn her back in contempt on her creators, but uses her powers to invent an idiosyncratic space (the “autoerotic” dimension) that suits her hybrid demands. In conclusion, Pynchon’s automatic duck is obviously the representative of a different and forgotten type of technological craze whose bizarre charm merits being characterized by the obsolete word “Spleen.” This peculiar sort of obsolescence which we can also observe in the Baroque language of Mason & Dixon, in the attitudes and attires of its characters, can be said to design a special and “new” perspective on modern culture. It is neither by accident, nor by mere affinity to the topic that Pynchon returns to the automaton motif even in a pre-modern context.14 His “historical” novel on a grand endeavor of rational science and politics includes the Romantic tradition of the mechanical grotesque which is already riddled with suspicions against the progressivistic doctrine and the unsettling effects of modernization. His openly humoristic interpretation of this critique could be read as a thorough and specific strategy of (re-?)romanticizing a contemporary disposition. After dismantling the traditional paradigms of man-made creatures – the desperate and tyrannical monster, the fatal automatic affair, the organized mechanical charlatanism – Pynchon reassembles the hybrid as the hilarious grotesque whose high spirits get constantly out of hand. If the hybrid can be read as a structural metaphor for the development of Western technological civilization as it appears in 14

Already in V., set roughly between 1850 and 1950, strange and in all cases fateful references to man-machine connections abound. Just a short list: the importance of plastic surgery (chapter 2) and psychodentistry (153), BongoShaftsbury’s switch implant (80), the biomechanoids SHROUD and SHOCK (chapter 10), the death of the “Bad Priest” revealing that he/she is entirely made from prostheses (342–45), the Chinese dancer automata (chapter 14).

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Pynchon’s work, this becoming of modernity must experience a restructuring, too: under the peculiar romanticizing perspective of Mason & Dixon, it is subject to an epic historical speculation which is not just characterized by its semi-fictional eighteenth-century point of view. It is also defined by its puzzling over what it will discover in a fictitious future. And these estimations and divinations are populated throughout by the fantastic beings, and largely take place in the improbable realms, which early nineteenth-century literature invented against the austerity of an emerging rational culture. Therefore, this obsolescence does not only convey the sense of historical distance and the atmosphere of historical opportunity; it is both, a retrospective and prognostic accentuation that converts temporal distance – between the plot and “us,” between the protagonists and their future – into an unusual reading of historical chance. The historical indeterminacy which underlies Mason & Dixon’s speculations is not just openness to those decisions yet to come, its narrative is not just an impartial look at the being-not-yetresolved of what we, as contemporary readers, would still identify as the course of Western civilization. Unlike the closed cage of our modernity, the land unconquered, the continent on the verge of being measured and seized, still carries some options which put the sovereignty of reason itself at stake and put into question its triumphant march through the past two centuries. When Mason and Dixon take us back to this point in history that has proven decisive in so many ways, they give us the opportunity to experience a world in which not all circumstances have yet been “reduced to Certainty;” (45) a world where many powers lay their conflicting claims on Mason & Dixon’s reality – politics, rationalist technology, Protestant heresy, global trade and local bargaining, as well as numerous local deities and the ancient powers of magic, madness, and superstition. But their coexistence is granted throughout by mutual insecurity, by precise formulations of ambiguity. As it seems, Pynchon invests all his narrative sympathy when he tries to rescue these short and ambivalent episodes. Perhaps to gain – for a short while – a warped and prismatic perspective on our time by recovering technology from its genuinely modern alliance with destruction and annihilation. Perhaps for merely anamnetic purposes,

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to save and to relive this brief moment in history where the powerful dualism between reason and its other has not yet been dissolved in favor of one of its poles. Rather a time where, sometimes, even the rational turns back on itself and mutates into something foreign. That is when mechanical Ducks start to speak and get horny. As the Learnèd English Dog asserts in a grandiose gesture of ironic selfnegation: ’Tis the Age of Reason, rrrf? There is ever an Explanation at hand and no such thing as a Talking Dog,– Talking Dogs belong with Dragons and Unicorns. What there are, however, are Provisions for Survival in a World less fantastick. (22)

Works Cited Beaune, Jean-Claude. “The Classical Age of Automata: An Impressionistic Survey from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century.” Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One. Ed. Michael Feher, Ramona Naddaf, and Nadia Tazi. New York: Zone Books, 1998: 431–80. Davidson, Arnold I. “The Horror of Monsters.” The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals. Ed. James J. Sheenan and Morton Sosna. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991: 36–67. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny,” Trans. J. Strachey. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17. London. Hogarth, 1971: 217–52. Hoffmann, E. T. A. “The Sandman,” The Golden Pot and Other Tales. Trans. R. Robertson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Mazlish, Bruce. The Fourth Discontinuity. New Haven. Yale UP, 1993: 14–58. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London. Methuen, 1987. Poe, Edgar Allan. “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” Tales, Essays and Reviews. Ed. David Galloway. Harmondsworth. Penguin, 1991. Pynchon, Thomas. V. 1966. London. Pan, 1975. —— Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. London. Pan, 1975. —— “Is it O.K. To Be a Luddite?” New York Times Book Review (28 Oct. 1984): 1, 40–41. —— Mason & Dixon. New York. Henry Holt, 1997.

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Williams, Trevor. Ed. Biographical Dictionary of Scientists. London. Harper Collins, 1994. Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. Ed. M. K. Joseph. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980.

JOHN HEON

Surveying the Punch Line: Jokes and Their Relation to the American Racial Unconscious/Conscience in Mason & Dixon and the Liner Notes to Spiked!

America is a land of masking jokers. (Ralph Ellison 1547) What the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benjamin Franklin was also a Mason, and given to cosmic forms of practical jokersterism, of which the United States of America may well have been one. (Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow 663–64) Does not this agreement suggest the conclusion that joke-work and dream-work must, at least in some essential respect, be identical? (Sigmund Freud 205)

In 1994, just three years before the long-awaited Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon published the liner notes for Spiked! The Music of Spike Jones, a Catalyst compact disk. At first glance, writing liner notes might seem like an odd task for one of America’s foremost highbrow authors, and writing liner notes for a clown like Spike Jones might seem not only odd but decidedly lowbrow. Then again, Pynchon’s modus operandi has always been the hybridization of high and low, so this subject and genre are not really unusual at all. Moreover, Jones’s work, like Pynchon’s, is a study in hybridity. His “music” is a madcap collage of rapid-fire jokes, virtuoso solos, dialect humor, comic impressions, hot jazz, bizarre sound effects, punning lyrics, and form parodies of everything from pop to opera. Its eclectic nature is evident in record stores, where it is found under categories as diverse as swing, jazz, comedy, novelty, and children’s music. Jones himself was a hybrid of several roles and professions: stand-up comedian, radio show host, band leader, vaudevillian, song writer,

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percussionist, television show writer and host, musical instrument inventor, and master of slapstick. And a Spike performance was a veritable comic Gesamtkunstwerk. As Pynchon explains, Jones’s traveling show, The Musical Depreciation Revue, “was always as much a visual as an audio act, with Spike running around deploying his pistol shots like a symphonic conductor waving a baton, with giants, midgets, animals, and tap-dancers chasing on and off stage, Slickers in fright wigs, chicken outfits and suits of reckless plaid [...] and the lady harpist smoking a cigar” accompanying trombone player Joe Colvin, “whose [...] pants used to go up and down in rhythm to his playing” (10–11). Despite all of this apparently mindless silliness, Pynchon sees great depth in Jones’s music and persona: Yet there remains about Spike’s work what is sometimes an almost uncomfortable complexity. We’d like him to be simpler – how much can a purveyor of impolite sound effects be allowed in the way of depths? Traditionally the drummer is supposed to be the weird guy, the holy fool, the lowest pulse, the one in touch with the demonic forces and deep primitive brain levels – but not also, as in Spike’s case, a conceptual artist with a head for business (liner notes 2–3).

This hybridization of high and low in Jones’s art is reflected in the form and content of the liner notes. Far from the standard, promotional paragraph (such as Pynchon did in 1995 for the rock band Lotion), these “notes” are a 2,500 word essay thoroughly examining the evolution of Jones’s humor and its relation to the social and cultural changes of postwar America. Coupled with Art Spiegelman’s cover illustration (an appropriately fractured, semi-cubistic portrait of the maniacally grinning Jones wearing “reckless plaid”), they place Spiked! in that very small group of albums whose explanatory text and cover art are both worthy of The New Yorker. Clearly, these are liner notes that seek and find a decidedly ambiguous cultural status. On one level, they could be taken as a nose-thumbing prank on the literati who were expecting the next “big book,” the one to justify Pynchon’s relative silence at the time. They might also be seen as an ironic postcard from the reclusive writer, a reminder to us that he was still there, watching and thinking about American culture. Whatever the

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case, it is safe to say that the notes are also an ardent fan’s tribute to and close analysis of an artist who had a deep influence on him. Certainly, Jones’s work was an important and distinctive component of the America Pynchon grew up in; it enjoyed enormous success from World War II to the 1960s, the time when a good portion of Pynchon’s postmodern Bildung was taking place. Jones had his first hit, “Red Wing,” in 1941, when Pynchon was four, and gained true nation-wide celebrity with his rendition of “Der Fuehrer’s Face” (1942), a song so loved that it was used to promote the sale of war bonds (Young 5). Jones continued to be a huge presence in American popular culture and the “underground of child wit,” (liner notes 9) up to the time Pynchon published V. During those twenty-two years, he sold 30 million records on Victor and RCA alone, went on countless national and international tours, had long playing radio shows during the golden age of radio, and two television shows during the early years of that medium (12). Spike Jones was a phenomenon comparable to “The Simpsons,” and like “The Simpsons,” his unique send-up of American culture was both inane and profound, giving it remarkable cross-generational appeal. Although it grew out of underground child wit, it reached far beyond it. Doubtlessly, Jones’s work reached Pynchon, both culturally and artistically, and this seems especially true when its jokes and parodies center on group identities, particularly race or ethnicity. As David Ocker observes, what is most interesting about the notes are “comments about social currents of Jones’s time that this music either reflects or offends against” (187). Pynchon states in the first paragraph that Jones’s humor presents “more than enough material for that interesting subset of folks actively looking to be offended,” and “what today we would unquestioningly call acts of racism seemed, for Spike and the Slickers and indeed postwar America, as pure and unpremeditated as the breathing of a Zen monk” (1). He lists some of these “offensive” songs and those whom they might offend: “The Russian Dance” makes fun of Russians. “Granny Speaks” is an insult to older people. Elsewhere, “Pal-Yat-Chee” manages to offend country people and Italians, “Deep Purple,” featuring Paul Frees’s impression of Billy Eckstine,

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At the end of the piece, Pynchon discusses Jones in terms of Zen and humor again, saying of the last phase of Jones’s career, “This is the way characters end up in Zen stories illustrating deep lessons, though, as in Zen, wisdom cannot always be separated from a peculiar sense of humor” (9). What kind of wisdom is Pynchon suggesting there might be in Jones’s peculiar and perhaps racist humor? What separates humor about race from humor that is racist? And why did Pynchon write this apparent apologia for Jones’s humor when he was soon to publish a comic novel that would focus much of its own humor on the evils of racism and slavery in America? In answering these and related questions, I will compare Pynchon’s evaluation of Jones’s humor about race with the ostensibly more politically correct humor of Gershom, George Washington’s Jewish-African-American stand-up comedian/slave in Mason & Dixon. Although I will focus primarily on Gershom, I will extend this analysis to other characters in Mason & Dixon whose humor addresses racial, ethnic, or national identity in order to demonstrate the overarching importance of jokes and their relation to the American unconscious and conscience in this novel. Following Bergson’s lead, I will “place laughter in its natural environment, which is society,” in order to “determine the utility of its function, which is a social one” (72). The examination of these “comic transactions” (English) and their Freudian “jokework,” will reveal who is allowed by various communities to generate humor about race and how their punch-lines survey, inscribe, and blur the lines of community identity and moral responsibility. Three of the racial communities that function as foci of jokes, and humor in general, in Spiked! also do so in Mason & Dixon: Native Americans, African Americans, and Chinese. The depictions of these groups might seem racist, but in both Jones’s work and Pynchon’s there is more than meets the eye in this “dialect humor.” In “Red Wing,” ostensibly a song about a stereotypical “Indian maid, a shy little prairie maid” longing for her “brave,” we see a classic case of the type of humor that is easily misread by that curious “subset of folks

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actively looking to be offended.” If we find it funny, and are presumably not offended, what, exactly, do we find funny – or not? The answer will of course depend on who you are and how you understand American pop culture depictions of race at the time the song was written. If you see “Red Wing” as a song that honestly expresses the belief that Native Americans are like this, i.e., simple, innocent, and sentimental, and if you yourself hold this belief, you might not find it funny at all; you might even be moved. Or you might laugh at this depiction of Native Americans, seeing only the message, “Gee, aren’t those Indians ridiculously simple and sentimental?” Or you could see that this song is about laughing at the sanitized, sentimental depictions of this group in the “Indian lovesongs” of the Thirties and Forties, that it is a parody of a racial stereotype and a musical sub-genre. As Pynchon states, Spike’s preferred structure was first to state the theme in as respectably mainstream a manner as possible, then subversively descend into restatement, by way of sound effects, crude remarks, and hot jazz. (8)

“Red Wing” does precisely this, taking a standard, tame melody and hokey lyrics and then performing a kind of musical Freudian substitution joke, undermining them with eruptions of Dixieland jazz and goofy sound effects (cowbells, gunshots, the “farting tuba”). The song laughs at a type of bad music, at its banal, simplistic form and reductive racial characterizations. Although Jones was by no means a crusading racial reformer, and this comic ditty certainly does not directly point to American guilt for the systematic annihilation of almost every Native American tribe, “Red Wing” does at least point to the laughable falseness and stupidity of a myth that has been used to repress that guilt. Interestingly, there is a passage in Mason & Dixon that discusses the importance of laughter to Native Americans. While standing by the cone-shaped, “Tellurick” mounds, Dixon asks Captain Shelby, “How do the Indians here about fancy Spectators like huz?” (598) Shelby responds, “They laugh” (598). He then explains, They but appear a solemn People,– worshipping laughter, rather, as a serious, indeed holy, Force in Nature, never to be invok’d idly. This mound is

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In Pynchon’s fictional world, Native Americans are masking jokers; they put on the appearance of solemnity but actually sanctify the comic; they know the mounds transmit a mystic “Force, not necessarily Electrical,” something akin to the power of laughter (599). Like the “holy fool” Jones, they see in laughter a kind of enlightenment, just as in Zen, where “wisdom cannot always be separated from a peculiar sense of humor.”1 Pynchon’s mention of Zen in the liner notes resonates in Mason & Dixon, which, as Joseph Dewy points out, is an explicitly religious novel that explores the damaged legacy of Christianity, the emerging muscle of the Enlightenment and, finding both systems wanting for largely the same reasons, turns to a most unexpected source – the mysticism of the East – for (re)solution. (113)

Although this “(re)solution” definitely has an Eastern orientation, Dewey notes it is actually a melting pot of mystic traditions, “a freewheeling hybrid of Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, African tribalism, Native American primitivism, ancient Druidism, Quaker quietism, and the Taoist practice of Feng Shui” (117). Jones looks to the East in “The Chinese Dance,” where his peculiar sense of humor performs joke-work similar to that in “Red Wing.” Every Chinese vocal and musical cliché is trotted out in this song. Again, as with “Redwing,” it is possible to be offended, but the parody is so extreme that it becomes clear that it is a caricature of a caricature, a mocking of the mocking American concept of the stage Chinaman rather than a mockery of the Chinese. As Pynchon observes, Spike’s work is “music that is about music,” and it is one of the first examples of music that began to comment on popular culture concepts of race and show the “postwar loss of faith in the pop-lyric consensus” (8). The Chinese, like the Native Americans, have been forced into the American myth of the simple-minded, happy minority, 1

In fact, in the Zen tradition, the moment of satori, or enlightenment, is often marked by profound laughter.

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and Spike’s humor punctures this myth (without making this its primary intention). “The Chinese Dance” is part of a larger parody, “The Nutcracker Suite,” Spike’s longest composition and an undisputed comic masterpiece devoted to bringing high art low. Thus the mockery in “The Chinese Dance” is directed not only at the general American version of the stage Chinaman but also at Tchaikovsky’s famous work, which is, especially in America, one of the most overproduced and blindly worshipped pieces of “classy” Christmas kitsch. Pynchon argues that Jones’s “class hostility,” his hatred of highbrow audiences and “society psuedos,” was behind much of his humor (5). This indicates, according to Pynchon, the conflict in Jones himself: Unable to respect highbrow audiences, Spike nonetheless wanted to claim inspiration from highbrow music. Both wanting and rejecting those connections at the same time seemed to generate a useful energy. (5)

In many ways, Jones’s entire oeuvre can be seen as an extended Freudian “hostile tendentious joke” against high culture snobbery and low culture stupidity, both of which, of course, he saw in himself. Pynchon might be said to harbor this same basic conflict and profit artistically from its “useful energy.” In Mason & Dixon he produced a caricature of a Chinese caricature, Captain Zhang, another hybrid of high and low, another holy fool. Zhang, a martial arts and feng shui expert, is apparently a stage Chinaman in many respects, and he seems quite settled in this role of quintessential “Eastern-ness.” After a long period of denial of any connection with or similarity to his Occidental nemesis, Father Zarpazo (the Jesuit “Wolf of Jesus”), Zhang suddenly sees in a moment of paranoid illumination that he must hybridize himself with his enemy. One day he emerges in a Jesuit soutane, which he has embroidered with a “gigantick and Floridly rendered Chinese dragon in many colors” (549). He produces his cross-cultural clown’s costume through his Freudian condensation of opposites. Zhang reveals what to him is the greatest joke of all, “‘For suppose I was never Zhang, but rather Zarpazo all the Time! HA!,– ha-ha!’ His laugh, though hideously fiendish enough, seems practic’d” (552). Thus, this seeming caricature of Chineseness,

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Eastern mysticism and general “Asian-ness,” originally in stark opposition to the “Jesuitness” and “Europeanness” of Zarpazo, plays a joke on himself by becoming his own Doppelgänger, revealing his repressed Westernness. Orient and Occident are comically unified, and the kung-fu fight to the death with Zarpazo is averted through this comic self-hybridization. As suggested above, comic self-hybridization figures largely in Jones’s artistic development. As his music evolved, it went from, as he himself described it, “a subtle burlesque of all corny, hill-billy bands” to a more general burlesque of all kinds of American corniness (liner notes 3). Jones worked his way through all types of postwar American popular music, systematically lampooning its form and content. His success stemmed at least in part from the fact that he, like “The Simpsons,” showed America how to laugh at itself. In “Deep Purple,” Paul Frees’s parody of the Jewish-African-American singer Billy Eckstine, Spike undermines the same comfortable pop consensus on race that he went after in “Red Wing” and “The Chinese Dance.” Here, the reassurance and security of “safe songs,” and “safe” roles for black artists are subverted with the same techniques of musical caricature, exaggeration, and disruptive sound effects. Jones’s “Deep Purple,” shatters the mellow melody of this hit tune with the jarring sounds of jackhammers, cowbells, breaking glass, automobile horns, whistles and gunshots, and thus shatters the image of the “Negro crooner” who sings soothing songs to a white world that wants its illusions verified (“How can those colored people be angry at us if they sing songs like this?”). It should be noted that Jones started as a jazz musician and continued to rely heavily on jazz for his unique collage of styles. Years before Mailer wrote “The White Negro,” Jones, a white, took on a black art form, jazz, and hybridized it with his smart-man-playing-dumb, mock hill-billy humor. As I will demonstrate in more detail later, Gershom, who takes on whiteness and hybridizes it with his blackness and Jewishness, is in many ways a mirror image of Jones (with a little Sammy Davis, Jr. thrown in). The humor of Jones’s music springs from his juxtapositions of the different regional, racial, socio-economic, and aesthetic groups that make up America. It is a site for the conflicting voices of the heterogeneous American population and the problematic of ever-

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shifting community identity lines; it reflects the motley of American origins and the turbulence of rapid change. Jones himself was a quintessentially American motley fool, a self-confessed “hayseed” and at the same time a consummately wised-up, and successful music industry insider. After years of capturing the essence of American comic polyphony and dissonance, he reached a final, one might even say “postmodern,” phase, characterized by Pynchon in the closing paragraph of the liner notes as the way characters end up in zen stories [...], out there like the Flying Dutchman on the great urban ultimate – the freeway, cruising nowhere special, reluctant to come to any rest or closure, out there among the mobility. (12)

This curious word, “mobility,” was used as far back as 1690; its original meaning was “the mob; the lower classes,” and it was a decidedly pejorative term (OED 2nd ed.). Yet, it contains a comic, oxymoronic combination of “mob” and “nobility,” and this plays a crucial role in the liner notes and in Mason & Dixon. “Mobility” is a fascinatingly multivalent word. The many of the mob can challenge the few of the nobility and become “noble” themselves. But the Mobility can also still behave like an ugly, mindlessly violent mob, for with e pluribus unum, goodness is by no means assured. Finally, in the word “Mobility” is also the word “mobility,” the ability to move (like Spike on that urban ultimate, the freeway). America is the place of social mobility via the Mobility; a place where lines between classes and races can be crossed – though not without difficulty. Pynchon repeatedly uses the word “Mobility” in Mason & Dixon to denote the growing ranks of people coming together to form the new nation. Nascent America is, at least in many parts of the novel, the government of the mobility, by the mobility, and for the mobility – with all of its internal divisions, conflicts, denial, and strife. In his 1958 essay, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” Ralph Ellison examines masking and jokes in this American Mobility, finding them to be pervasive national preoccupations: America is a land of masking jokers [...]. Actually it is a role which Negroes share with other Americans, and it might be more “Yankee” than anything else.

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John Heon But basically the strategy grows out of our awareness of the joke at the center of American identity. (1546)

This joke, according to Ellison, is that there is no central American identity, no essential “American-ness.” We keep looking for the origin but keep finding multiple, often contradictory origins. Ellison explains this joke by going back to America’s “origins,” recounting one of the better known stories about how the country was founded upon the mask and the political practical joke: Americans began their revolt from the English fatherland when they dumped tea into the Boston Harbor, masked as Indians, and the mobility of the society created in this limitless space has encouraged the use of the mask for good and evil ever since. (1546)

He then traces the masking joker role, and the “Mobility” and mobility it confers, through various American historical, political and literary figures: Nonetheless, it is in the American grain. Benjamin Franklin, the practical scientist, skilled statesman and sophisticated lover, allowed the French to mistake him as Rousseau’s Natural Man. Hemingway poses as a nonliterary sportsman, Faulkner as a farmer; Abe Lincoln allowed himself to be taken for a simple country lawyer – until the chips were down. Here the “darky” act makes brothers of us all. America is a land of masking jokers. We wear the mask for purposes of aggression as well as for defense; when we are projecting the future and preserving the past. In short, the motives hidden behind the mask are as numerous as the ambiguities the mask conceals. (1547)

For Ellison, Pynchon, and Jones, masking and hybridization are very American traits. And indeed, the source of so many of the laughs in Mason & Dixon is the protagonists’ constant confrontation with the permutating racial and ethnic groups in the fecund flux of colonial America. One of the most complex and amusing examples of comic hybridity is Gershom, George Washington’s African-AmericanJewish slave/manservant/comedian. Certainly, on one level this is Pynchon simply having some creative fun with incongruity, but he is also making some of his most profound statements about race and humor in America. Pynchon confirms Gershom’s importance in the epigraph to chapter 35 by allying the hybridizing function of the

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masking joker with that of the historian. Pynchon’s frame tale narrator, the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, writes that, “History” and “her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit” (349). They must do this so that there may ever continue more than one life line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,– not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,– rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common. (349)

As Ellison says, we use the comic mask when we are projecting the future or preserving the past. This is a crucial task, and one that is often denied, and as Douglas Keesey observes, many readers (or at least reviewers) of Mason & Dixon seem to think that history and comedy are diametrically opposed (171). Keesey suggests that “subsequent studies of Mason & Dixon might profitably begin with this assumption that comedy is not incompatible with history, but a key route to other pasts and futures–an alternative history” (171). In “The Author as Producer,” Walter Benjamin posits, “There is no better start for thinking than laughter” (236); in Mason & Dixon, there is no better start for thinking about the multiple lines of American history than laughter. This linking of the comic practices of masking jokers to the creation of multiple histories rather than a single History is, of course, not unique to Pynchon, Ellison, Keesey, or Benjamin. The hybridizing power of laughter and the comic has been of the utmost importance in modern intellectual history (ies), and Nietzsche is one of the most important sources of it. Throughout The Gay Science, The Genealogy of Morals, and Zarathustra, Nietzsche asserts the primacy of the comic view of modern man as a Mischmensch, literally a “mixed man,” a hybrid, a man of multiple origins. This Mischmensch is a motley “buffoon of history” who constantly changes masks, laughing at monumental History and at the myths of single origin (Genealogy of Morals). Nietzsche stresses that the philospher must “laugh out the whole true,” (Gay Science 7), “laugh at all tragic plays and all tragic seriousness” (Zarathustra 42) in order to laugh at the tragic self and overcome it. This “self-overcoming” [Selbstüberwindung] through

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laughter is, according to Nietzsche, what the gods did when one of them claimed that he was the one true God, i.e., they got the joke of monotheism, and they laughed themselves to death (Zarathustra 183). And this, in part, is what leads Nietzsche to proclaim in the epigraph to The Gay Science, “I laugh at every master who does not laugh at himself.” The influence of Nietzsche’s “god-killing laughter” on literature, philosophy, and art has been enormous. His ideas about the philosophical uses of laughter and humor were one of the sources of inspiration for Jarry’s mad comic genius and were a driving force behind the comic aesthetics of New York Dada as manifested in the works of Duchamp and Man Ray, the writings of Benjamin de Casseres and the “absolute caricature” of Marius de Zayas. It was Nietzsche who led Bataille to assert that “every theory of laughter is integrally a philosophy, and, similarly, every integral philosophy is a theory of laughter” (Sur Nietzsche 186). And Derrida tells us that “Nietzsche pointed the way” toward the view of the act of interpretation as that which “affirms play” in “a field of infinite substitutions” (91) and “is no longer turned toward the origin” (93). Likewise, Barthes’s use of laughter as a methodology to disrupt all interpretive metalanguages (in later works such as A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments) owes much to Nietzsche (Saper, Artificial Mythologies 11). In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History” Foucault expanded on Nietzsche’s concept of the laughter inherent in genealogy: “What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity. History teaches us how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin” (79). Of course, Mason & Dixon is about laughing at the solemnities of origins and boundary lines of all kinds, especially the origin of the line that divided free from slave states in America. And the character who figuratively straddles that line and so many others in Mason & Dixon is Gershom, the American Mischmensch. As a busybody, spy, and tavern stand-up comedian, Gershom is a type of historian, a Touchstone and touchstone of the American Revolution who lives just below the Mason-Dixon Line and often crosses it in the course of his travels as an itinerant masking joker. He uses the mask for “projecting the future and preserving the past”; he snoops around in disguise,

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getting into other people’s business and cracking jokes, delivering punch lines that cross lines and try to make their audiences question history and identity. Just as Jones sowed some of the seeds of the cultural irreverence that would grow into the rebellion of the 1960s, so Gershom cracks jokes that will help spawn the American Revolution. One of the ways in which Gershom’s masking joker act “projects the future,” or attempts to direct American racial history, is by figuratively putting one of the most important Founding Fathers into blackface. Twice we are told before we meet Gershom that Washington is in some ways “African.” In the excerpt from Cherrycoke’s Spiritual Day-Book that functions as the epigraph to the chapter Washington first appears in, we are informed that in Virginia, the whites, among other strange customs, “gaily dance the steps their African slaves teach them” (275). A page later, we learn from the mouth of the Virginia slaveholder and future First President: Up in Pennsylvania they tell me I talk like an African. They imagine us here surrounded by our Tithables, insensibly sliding into their speech, and so, it is implied, into their Ways as well. Come. Observe this pitcher upon the Table, an excellent Punch, the invention of my Man Gershom. (276)

Comic racial hybridization through language is clearly Pynchon’s strategy here. In fact, Washington’s first words to Gershom in this scene are, “Here then,– Gershom! Where be you at, my man!” (276). The fact is that Gershom is his “man” in terms of being both his manservant and his property, but he is also his “man” in modern African-American parlance, and we are meant to pick up on this in Washington’s 1760s/1960s “colonial jive.” Curiously, one of Washington’s jokes about Gershom’s mixed racial/religious identity offends Dixon, himself a British subject. When Washington quotes John 1:49, telling Mason and Dixon that Gershom is “Truly, Gentlemen, ‘an Israelite in whom there is no guile’” (278), Dixon is stung, and he tells Washington and Mason why: “At Raby Castle,” he informs them, Phiz aflame, “Darlington liked to joak of his Steward, my Great-Uncle George, using thah’ same quo-tation from the Bible. Yet only from Our Savior, surely, might such words be allowed to pass, without raising suspicions as to amplitude of Spirit...? From the Earl of

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John Heon Darlington the remark was no more than the unconsider’d Jollity one expects of a Castle-Dweller,– but to hear it in America, is an Enigma I confess I am at a loss to explain...?” (278)

Washington, embarrassed that his joke has insulted Dixon, apologizes and then tries to salve the wound by saying, “The two Conditions are entirely separate, of course” (278–9). Dixon clearly does not see the difference between the “condition” of servitude and the “condition” of slavery, but Gershom tells him not to “bother about that Israelite talk, anyhow [...] it’s his way of joaking, he does it all the time” (279). When Dixon asks him in disbelief, “Thou aren’t offended?” Gershom reveals the shocking and comic truth: “As I do happen to be of the Hebrew faith,” tilting his head so that all may see the traditional Jewish Yarmulke, attached to the crown of his Peruke in a curious display of black on white, “it would seem a waste of precious time.” (279)

This episode seems to place Dixon in “the curious subset of folks actively looking to be offended,” while at the same time acknowledging that Washington is still a slave-holder, and therefore similar to any serf-holding “Castle-Dweller,” or colony-holding imperialist nation. Yet, as if to further undermine Dixon’s righteous rage at the “bad” joke, Washington interrupts in his “black” voice, and he and Gershom do a master-and-slave minstrel routine with a dash of schlemihl schtick: “Say,– and cook?” beams George Washington. “Gersh, any them Kasha Varnishkies left?” “Believe you ate ’em all up for Breakfast, Colonel.” “Well, whyn’t you just whup up another batch,– maybe fry us some hog jowls, he’p it slide on down?” (279)

Gershom’s response is pure minstrel mask: “One bi-i-i-g mess o’ Hog Jowls, comin’ raaight up, Suh!” (279). Both the slave who is and is apparently not truly a slave, and the master who is and is not truly a master, seem to have fun. Gershom is obviously playing a part, but there is evidence that Washington is not really aware of how he

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himself slides in and out of “African” speech and how he is still prejudiced against blacks. Both Gershom and Washington live in a state of hybridization of and oscillation between black and white. It is apparent from the start that Gershom, “an Israelite in whom there is no guile,” is completely guileful; like Jones, he is a smart man who can play dumb. However, it seems not so much that Washington has put on blackness but rather that he has had blackness put on him by Gershom. His speech, his food, his drink, are controlled by Gershom, the black Jew whose “traditional Jewish, Yarmulke, attached to the crown of his Peruke” makes “a curious display of black on white,” reflecting the problematic nature of this particular master/slave duality (279). After Gershom’s mock “darky act,” it is Mason’s turn to be offended for him. Referring to the hog jowls, he asks, “Do the Jews not believe that [...] the Article you speak of is unclean, and so avoid scrupulously its Flesh?” (279). And once again, Gershom undercuts the righteousness, switching back to a scholarly, British “white” English: “As it happens, the Sect I belong to, is concerned scarce at all with Dietary Rules” (279). To further hybridize the historical periods, Pynchon lets us know at that point that hipster, hippie, and colonial Washington is smoking a pipe full of his homegrown hemp – and all are sharing. Pynchon then has Washington respond to Mason’s offense by presenting the final comic incongruity in Gershom’s identity: Yet if a Jew cooking pork is a Marvel, what of a Negroe, working a Room? Yes, my Oath,– here is Joe Miller resurrected,– they applaud him ’round a circuit of Coaching-inns […],– indeed he is known far and Wide, as a Theatrickal Artist of some Attainment, leaving him less and less time for his duties here,– not to mention an income per annum which creeps dangerously close to that of his nominal Master, me. (279)

Gershom, like Spike Jones, is revealed to be a comic “conceptual artist with a head for business” (Minstrelsy was in fact one of the first roads to wealth open to American blacks). Humor, like history, grows out of conflict and contradiction, both internal and external, and Pynchon’s and Jones’s minstrelizing of American history recognizes this. The history of minstrelsy confirms this too, for as Houston Baker

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argues, despite the fact that the minstrel mask was a site of “the deepseated denial of the indisputable humanity of inhabitants of and descendants from the continent of Africa,” it is “first and foremost, the mastery of the minstrel mask by blacks that constitutes a primary move in Afro-American discursive modernism” (17). The minstrel mask was and is a place of “nonsense, misappropriation, or mishearing,” and its effect was and is to deform language, remove its conventional restraints, and ultimately question authority (Baker 17– 18). Baker, seeing black minstrelsy as one of the vital sources of avant-garde humor in America, considers it a type of proto-Dada practice that paved the way for the wider use and acceptance of this kind of comic practice in the twentieth century (17–18). Gershom is a fictional portrait of one of the earliest masters of this artist-fool trade, and Jones, the white jazzman/minstrel who used “nonsense, misappropriation, or mishearing” to create his comic art, was a significant influence on Pynchon’s conception of this and other artistfool figures. But as much as Pynchon wants us to see that Gershom’s talent impresses Washington, and as much as he wants us to see that Washington grants him the freedom to pursue it, he also wants us to see that Gershom is still Washington’s property. Gershom is quite aware that he is still a slave, and his series of Fool and King jokes are designed to make George Washington see that he is just as much of a tyrant as King George: Gershom is presently telling King-Joaks,– “Actually, they’re Slave-and-Master Joaks, retailor’d for these Audiences. King says to his Fool, ‘So,– tell me, honestly,– what makes you willing to go about like such a fool all the time?’ ‘Hey, George,’ says the Fool,– ‘that’s easy,– I do it for the same reason as you,– out of Want.’– ‘What-what,’ goes the King, ‘how’s that?’– ‘Why, you for want of Wit, and I for want of Money.’” (284)

Gershom inverts the slave/master relationship, retailoring the fool’s motley and the king’s mantle and attempting to teach one and all to “laugh at every master who does not laugh at himself.” This apparent role reversal raises some questions: Is Gershom just wishful thinking on Pynchon’s part? Is this what he hopes a slave could have been? Does he want us to believe that any slave could have had this degree

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of freedom? Is he giving us a way to feel good about ourselves as Americans by placing the father of our nation at the mercy of his clever slave who is “freed” by his own wit? In other words, what is behind Gershom’s mask after he has been so frequently unmasked, i.e., revealed to be that which he is not? Is he free? Is he really in control? At least at this point in the narrative, the comic symbiosis between Gershom and Washington seems too benign and jovial to be believable, and it indicates the need for a closer look at the politics of Gershom’s jokes and Washington’s responses to them. Although he does not appear again for almost three hundred pages, Gershom returns to perform one more crucial act of comic identity confusion. Gershom plays this Taproom Wit/historian’s role most fully in the scene in a Maryland billiard room and tavern shortly before the outbreak of war. The prelude to his performance is the last two lines of the song of the Traveling Sons of Liberty: “Americans all, / Slaves ne’er again!” (571). This sets the tone for the political discussion that takes place in the proverbial smoke-filled room, swarming with agitated Americans abuzz with the impending revolution. Pynchon creates a literal smoke screen around his characters in this scene; although Mason and Washington are definitely present and sometimes the speakers, it is impossible to be sure who speaks many of the crucial lines of the interchange. Nevertheless, it seems from context that Washington delivers the following: Even as Clearings appear in the Smoke of a Tavern, so in Colonial matters we may be able to see into, and often enough thro’, the motives of Georgie Rex and that dangerous Band of Boobies... Henceforth it seems, the Irish and the Ulster Scots are to be upon the same terms with them as the Africans, Hindoos, and other Dark peoples they enslave,– and so, to make it easier to shoot us, with all Americans,– tho’ we be driven more mystically, not by the Lash and Musket, but by Ledger and Theodolite. All to assure them of an eternal supply of cheap axmen, farmers, a few rude artisans, and docile buyers of British goods. (572)

This outrage is expressed in racist terms by the next speaker, who might be Mason, Gershom, or some unidentified “patriot” and aleswiller in the carnivalesque polyphony of the crowded room: “Not only presuming us their Subjects, which is bad enough,– but that

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we’re merely another kind of Nigger,– well that’s what I can’t forgive. Are you sure?” (572). This statement, though largely out of character for him, might be coming from Mason. The response to this utterance, presumably from the slave-holder Washington, is ambiguous indeed: “Civility, Sir! The word you have employed here in this quiet Pool of Reason, is a very Shark, which ever feels its Lunch-Hour nigh” (572). Apparently, the word “Nigger” is not so much uncivil as it is dangerous; it could truly set off revolution if white men saw that it was being applied to them – and it could disrupt the slave-based economy. This is just what Gershom wants (so perhaps he did say it in one of his many voices), and it is at precisely this point that he reveals himself with a witticism: “Excuse me, do I hear that Word again? In this Smoak, ’twould seem, so are we all” (572). Washington is shocked at the realization of who the speaker is: “That voice, Mason! ’tis my Tithable, Gershom!” (572). At this pregnant moment, Gershom launches into his schtick that lampoons both King George and the hypocritical masker George Washington: “And furthermore, here’s the latest news of the King.” Several hoots and whistles. “King goes into a Tavern, bartender says, what’ll it be George, King says, I’m in disguise here, how’d you know who I was,– bartender says, that Crown on your Head,– King says, Only a Madman would walk around wearing a Crown,– bar-tender falls on his knees,– Your Majesty!” (572–3).

The Gershom’s joke sets off racial confusion and spreads a contagion of “King Joaks” that cause racial identity to shift constantly behind the mask of black smoke: Half the Company seem to believe this is a white Customer, impersonating an African. Others, having caught Gershom’s act before, recognize him right away. “Hey, Gersh, do the one about the Crocodile that can talk.” “The Rabbit in the Moon!” “Wait a bit, somebody say there’s a real Negroe in here?” “Hell, maybe even more’n one.” For the rest of the evening, ev’ryone suspects ev’ryone else of being Gershom. Now and then someone, tho’ the Bellows are never quite fast enough to reveal who, tells another King-Joak. (573)

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In the confusion of mistaken identity, everyone takes on the role of the minstrel, Taproom Wit, and comic historian – at least for a while. Gershom’s humor infects the Mobility, sets it in motion. He has, with his minstrelsy, elicited both expressions of hostility and confessions of guilt from the American (yet still very British) racial unconscious. His joke-work exposes the inner workings and contradictions of the psyche of child America breaking away from mother England. Even one of Mason’s former surveying assistants, “Baby-Phiz Nathe McClean,” who as seen the evil inherent in the Mason-Dixon line, becomes a masking joker in the smoke: “King’s Alchemist presents him with a Philtre that can transport him where’er he wishes.– ” […] “King decides he’ll journey to the Sun,” the invisible Youth continues, “– Alchemist says, ‘Your Majesty! The Sun?– it burns at thousands of Fahrenheit’s Degrees,– far too hot for anything to remain alive.’ King says, ‘So where’s the Difficulty?– I’ll go at Night.’” (573)

Nathe, a student at William and Mary, and a 1960s college protester/merry prankster surrogate, has taken on blackness (and redness) through the minstrel role, and he feels emboldened to upbraid his former mentor, Mason, and himself: “Surveying a Property Line, that may be one thing,– clearing and marking a Right Line of an Hundred Leagues, into the Lands of Others, cannot be a kindly Act” (573). From behind the mask of smoke that gives him anonymity, and with the aid of Gershom’s instigating jokes, Nathe is able to tap into the repressed guilt he has felt about the project. He then disappears into “Nickotick Vapors, opaque as futurity, leaving Mason feeling as guilty as foolish” (574). As reassuring as this scene might be, it is a bit too nice and neat. As a result of the well-placed act of minstrelsy by Gershom, the racists all get their noses twisted. Washington is once again shown to be a tyrant and bigot despite his gentility and “nobility,” and Mason is revealed as the desecrator of Native American lands. Everyone gets their just deserts via the comic spirit of the Revolution and the Mobility. But elsewhere Pynchon does show us how this “revolutionary” comedy can be much more problematic and how masking jokers are not always so benign.

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Hovering above all of this ferment, operating on a higher level of political knowledge and power, is another Taproom Wit, Ben Franklin (whom Ellison recognized as a masking joker). The possibility that America was founded by this masking joker is pointedly raised in Gravity's Rainbow: “What the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benjamin Franklin was also a Mason, and given to cosmic forms of practical jokersterism, of which the United States of America may well have been one” (663–4). In Mason & Dixon, Mason is shown to be linked to Franklin when the Freemasons in a Philadelphia tavern inform Mason that “anyone whose name is Mason is automatickally a Member [...] a member ex Nomine” (290). Thus, Mason is in on Franklin’s Practical Joak of America, whether he knows it or not and whether he likes it or not. Mason’s nature as a masking joker is also asserted by Cherrycoke, He gives away his solemn confidence snappily as another might the Punch-Line of a Joak (for as I often noted, no matter what Sentiments might lie ’pon his Phiz, Mr Mason was in the Habit of delivering even his gravest Speeches, with the Rhythms and Inflections of the Tap-room Comedian). (247)

His link to Franklin is confirmed when, just after Mason learns of his membership in the freemasonry, Franklin enters the makeshift stage of the tavern to perform as “the Harlequin of Electricity” (294). “A voice thro’ the Vapors,” like Gershom’s voice through the smoke, announces: The Moment now ye’ve all been waiting for... the Saloon of The Orchid Tavern is pleased to Present, the famed Leyden-Jar Danse Macabre! with that Euclid of the Elecktrick, Philadelphia’s own Poor Richard!, in the part of Death. (294)

Franklin enters, “a Scythe-bearing figure in Skeleton’s Disguise,” a masking joker in Aquamarine colonial/hippie glasses “allowing his eyes to be viewed, yet conveying a bleak Contentment that discourages lengthy Gazing” (294). There is something sinister about him – and his ensuing prank. He gathers a line of “a dozen or so heedless Continentals,” has them hold hands, with the last grasping one terminal of the Leyden Jar, and he then reaches out with the blade

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of the scythe and touches the other, setting off the jerking, laughing, screaming Danse Macabre (294). Dramatic as it is, this prank is merely a prelude, and Franklin sums up his performance, “So much for Harlequin” (295). A thunderstorm is breaking, and Franklin gathers his Electrophiles for what seems to be a real dance of death, exhorting them: Let us get out into the night’s Main Drama! [...] this Scythe here is the perfect Shape to catch us a Bolt, perhaps a good many,– better than a Key upon a Kite, indeed,– think of it as Death’s Picklock [...] felonious Entry, into the Anterooms of the Cre-a-torr... (295)

When he asks, “Not Joining us tonight, Mr. Mason?,” Franklin is hinting at Mason’s secret complicity as a Mason, a co-founder of the American Joak, the American Experiment, via his creation of the Joke of “the Line.” Following this, we get a greater sense of the dark side, the aggression and hidden agenda of Franklin’s electrical pranks: Before Mason, from whom all comfort has flown, can quite reply, the Figure has turned and taken a hand at the end of the Line, the Door opens and the Wind and Rain blow in, Thunder crashes, and with odd, strangled cries of Amusement, the Party of Seekers are plung’d out into the Storm, and vanish’d. (294, my italics)

There is a feeling here that Franklin is indeed in the business of pulling pranks of cosmic proportions, and that “the Line” of Electrophiles he creates for his Main Drama is connected, by many tangled threads, to the Mason-Dixon Line. He is a Taproom Comedian, a Harlequin, but his “playful” Totentanz, his “mere prank,” seems to be leading to a prank that will in fact mean death. But this sinister aspect of his nature appears to be hidden from the motley American masses; they “esteem Franklin a Magician. A Figure of Power,” for “to the Mobility, he is the Ancestor of Miracle– or of Wonders” (488). If the United States of America is a joke played by the Masonic prankster Franklin, it is a very ambiguous one. He could be both a holy and unholy fool. Just as Franklin leads the Elecktrophiles into the Storm and possibly toward death, he will also help lead the revolution that will result in certain death for many of the American Mobility and

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the English. There is a carelessness about human life in this comic and cosmic “act” that scares Mason, and it confirms Ellison’s assertion that masking jokers can have very mixed motives. Gershom’s taproom witticisms, like the anti-establishment, anti-racist pranks of the boys in “The Secret Integration,” seem to have a fairly clear moral direction, but Franklin’s humor has something of the cold detachment of the scientist, perhaps the mad scientist, for whom “we the people” are lab rats. Pynchon seems to be suggesting that for Franklin the American Revolution is like a hilarious “Elec-trick-all” experiment that just happens to use people and history. He wants to discharge the Leyden Jars and see what happens. Unfortunately, like the Americans who do not understand the Tellurick mounds and their “Force, not necessarily Electrical,” perhaps Franklin is playing with a power that he does not fully comprehend. His experiment might backfire; the joke might be on both him and us. There are strong indications that the Line is indeed a joke – played on Mason and Dixon and the emerging country. The creation of the Line is referred to as “a fool’s errand” (51), and at the beginning of this fool’s errand Mason and Dixon are passengers on the Seahorse, which is attacked by the Saint Foux, the saint of fools. Despite its bloody outcome, this confrontation ends with a joke. The song the sailors of the Saint Foux sing as they cease attack, “France is not at war with the sciences,” we are told, “will someday join the company of great Humorous Naval Quotations” (40). And after the horror, Mason and Dixon go up on deck, “laughing at nothing,– or at ev’rything” (41). The idea of the Mason-Dixon Line (and the US) as a joke is bolstered later, “Indeed a spirit of whimsy pervades the entire history of these Delaware Boundaries, as if in playful refusal to admit that America, in any way, may be serious” (337). Although often unquestioning of the mission, Dixon begins to see that the Line is a kind of prank played on them, “We are Fools [...]. We shouldn’t be running this Line...? [...] something invisible’s going on” (478), to which Mason replies, “American politics” (478). He, too, starts to see the larger mask. Despite the moral ambiguity of masking jokers and their jokes, there is still a strong indication that they can have positive effects on society and history. For it is Dixon, the man called “fool” by his

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mentor Emerson and “Harlequin,” “Punch,” and “Mirth” (346) by Mason, it is Dixon, the man “whose repertoire in jest is second only to what resides in the Vatican Library” (115), it is Dixon, the aleswilling Quaker clown and man of the Mobility, who will take away the slave-driver’s whip. According to Freud, behind humor there is often hostility, more precisely, Schlagfertigkeit, a “readiness to strike” (be it justified or not). This is what the masking joker Dixon finally displays, showing literal and figurative Schlagfertigkeit when he “places his Fist in the way of the oncoming Face” of the slave driver (698). Despite having been instrumental in creating the line that would divide North and South, slave and free, Dixon, at least in Pynchon’s “history,” is also the “Punch” who begins to erase that line with a punch that is the punch-line of the whole “joco-serious” book. In the 1960s it was popular to say, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” Dixon, a colonial Everyman, is Pynchon’s fictional “proof ” from the 1760s that everyone can be both part of the problem and part of the solution. Of course, one must first realize what the problem is and that one might be part of it. These are two of the things Pynchon and Spike Jones do, albeit in very different ways. They demonstrate Bergson’s tenet: “Our laughter is always the laughter of the group […]. However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary” (64). Jones and Pynchon not only make us laugh, but force us to confront our laughter, to look at its motives and origins, to identify its complicities and the moral consequences of those complicities. In doing so, they prove that jokes as social acts, and jokers as social actors, can “represent an idea of action and agency more complex than either the nihilism of despair or the Utopia of progress” (Bhabha 255).

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Works Cited Baker, Houston. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken, 1986: 226–40. Bergson, Henri. “Laughter.” 1900. Trans. Wylie Sypher. Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956: 61–190. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Trans. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. The Critical Tradition. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. 959–70. Dewey, Joseph. “The Sound of One Man Mapping.” Pynchon and Mason & Dixon. Eds. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000: 112– 31. Ellison, Ralph. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” 1958. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie McKay. New York: Norton, 1997. 1541–48. English, James F. Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherri Simon. Ed. Donald Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977. 76–94. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1960. Keesey, Douglas. “Mason & Dixon on the Line: A Reception Study.” Pynchon Notes 36–39 (1995–96): 165–83. Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro.” 1957. Advertisements for Myself. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. 337–58. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. 1882. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. —— On the Genealogy of Morals. 1887. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and Roger Holingdale. New York: Vintage, 1967. —— Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1884–5. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1978. Ocker, David. “Spike Jones and Lotion: Connected by a Fragile Thread.” Pynchon Notes 36–39 (1995–96): 184–88. Page, Tim. Ed. Liner notes. Spiked!: The Music of Spike Jones. CD. Catalyst/BMG. 1994. Pynchon, Thomas. “The Secret Integration.” 1964. Slow Learner. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.

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—— Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. New York: Penguin, 1987. —— Liner notes. Ed. Tim Page. Spiked!: The Music of Spike Jones. CD. Catalyst/ BMG. 1994. —— Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Saper, Craig. Artificial Mythologies: A Guide to Cultural Invention. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997. Young, Jordan. Spike Jones Off the Record. San Francisco: Past Times Publishing. 1994.

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ROBERT L. MCLAUGHLIN

Surveying, Mapmaking and Representation in Mason & Dixon

Near the end of the “America” section of Mason & Dixon, the title characters, after four years of running the line marking the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, sit down to draw a plat or a map – a “Pen-and-Paper Representation” (687) – of their work. When Dixon finishes the plat and offers it for his partner’s inspection, Mason is immediately struck by the north arrow, “an eight-pointed Star, surmounted by a Fleur-de-Lis” (687). Mason fears that this sign will be interpreted as a show of support for France; Dixon responds with the etymology of the sign. The fight continues: “This has been my North Point,” Dixon declares, “since the first Map I ever drew. I cannot very readily forswear it, now, Sir, for some temporary Tradesman’s Sign. It does not generally benefit the Surveyor to debase the Value of his North Point, by lending it to ends Politickal. ’Twould be to betray my Allegiance to Earth’s Magnetism, Earth Herself if tha like, which my Flower-de-Luce stands faithfully as the Emblem of...?” Making no more sense of this than he ever may, Mason shrugs. “It may sit less comfortably with the Proprietors, than with me.” “Oh, they’re as happy to twit a King, when they may, as the next Lad,– ” “Hahr! So that is it!” (688–89)

Beyond being yet another example of Mason and Dixon’s tendency to argue over almost anything, this episode is significant in that it makes explicit two interconnected intellectual processes that have been implicit in the project of drawing the Line: representation and interpretation. In accomplishing their charge in America, Mason and Dixon enact a double interpretation and representation. The first is in the survey itself. As Curtis M. Brown, author of two seminal books on principles of surveying, writes, surveyors “transcribe the written words of a deed into a monumental location on the ground”

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(Boundary Control vii). Mason and Dixon must interpret the words of the two colonies’ charters and the directions of the two colonies’ commissioners and then represent that interpretation through the monuments that mark their Line. The second comes in the episode quoted above, when they create the plat of their work. Of this process, Brown writes, “A plat should tell a complete story; it should show sufficient information to allow any other surveyor to understand how the survey was made, and why the survey was correct” (Evidence and Procedures 384). Clearly, in making a plat, in telling the story of their survey, Mason and Dixon are interpreting the line they have marked on the earth and representing it in the form of a text, the map. Of course, representation and interpretation are not simple, closed intellectual processes. As Mason and Dixon’s disagreement about the north arrow suggests, maps are not value-neutral reproductions of the world. Denis Wood, author of the groundbreaking study of maps and mapping, The Power of Maps, argues: “Mirror,” “window,” “objective,” “accurate,” “transparent,” “neutral”: all conspire to disguise the map as a ... reproduction ... of the world, disabling us from recognizing it for a social construction which, with other social constructions, brings that world into being [...]. (22)1

The mapmaker uses signs in an attempt to represent the world, but these signs – also representing choices about what to include and what to leave out, about relative importance, about social value – are ideologically charged, as the north arrow debate illustrates. Concomitantly, maps, being made up of signs, are infinitely interpretable, interpretable far beyond the control of their author. It is hard not to read Mason & Dixon through the frames of the interpretive strategies we have used to read Gravity’s Rainbow. I have argued that the interpretive conundrum of Gravity’s Rainbow – it is a narrative that constantly subverts narrative as a vehicle for conveying meaning, thus calling its own ability to mean into question – can be addressed through Bakhtinian theory. Bakhtin argues that every language or discourse is a manifestation of fairly specific world views 1

Wood’s use of ellipses is even more unusual than Pynchon’s. (He also italicizes eccentrically.)

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or ideological belief systems. Novels bring together a variety of discourses in dialogue through which the implied world views can be seen to conflict, identify with each other, or synthesize into something new. It is through this dialogic interaction that a novel’s meaning develops. In Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon uses his sources – historic, scientific, biographical, pop cultural, mythic, and so on – not just for information but for their discourses: their vocabularies, rhetorical strategies, and organizations of argument. These discourses are absorbed into the narrative voice and parodied or stylized; they and the ideological belief systems they imply are put into dialogic relation with one another, with the narrator’s voices, and with the reader’s own world views. Out of this intertextual mélange comes the opportunity for meaning. Although I am not prepared to insist that Brown or Wood or any other text is definitely one of the sources for Mason & Dixon, I think a similar meaning-making process is going on in this novel.2 That is, the novel is bringing together various world views and the languages through which they are expressed, setting them into conflict, and showing us what develops. Specifically, among the conflicting world views in the novel are two we can see defined in Brown’s books on surveying and Wood’s book on maps. Brown insists on a separation between the hard sciences, which can speak definitively about the world, and the law and language, which are always fuzzy, ambiguous, and inadequate in their versions of the world. For him, the surveyor is a person of science who, through knowledge and proper procedures, can enclose and define the world. Wood offers a poststructural approach to maps, revealing that, despite their ostensible goal of neutrally reproducing the world, they are in fact arbitrary, embedded in the social and cultural codes of their times, and ideologically 2

I do not have a smoking gun to prove that Brown and Wood are sources; however, it seems likely to me that they are. Brown’s books are widely available, have gone through several editions, and are considered fundamental texts in the training of surveyors. Wood’s book was widely reviewed and was considered to be on the cutting edge of the theory of maps. But even without conclusive evidence, we can use these books to help identify and define competing world views implied in the practices of surveying and mapmaking that are central to the novel.

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interested. These conflicting world views swirl around and complicate Mason and Dixon’s American project – running the Line – and also are manifestations of larger conflicts at work in the novel: the ideology of control versus the possibility for liberation. Curtis Brown’s two books, Evidence and Procedures for Boundary Location (written with Winfield H. Eldridge) and Boundary Control and Legal Principles (written with H. Frederick Landgraf and Francis D. Uzes), both of which have gone through several editions, are important texts for the professional surveyor. They cover the history of surveying in the US, the scientific procedures with which surveys are made, and the legal and ethical contexts within which the surveyor operates. The distinction between these last two, scientific procedures and legal and ethical contexts, becomes especially important in Brown’s books. He writes: The English language is composed of many words with dual meanings. The word “north” may mean “astronomic north,” “magnetic north,” or “north relative to the bearing of the monumented line,” depending upon the contents of the remainder of the deed. “Blue” may mean a color or a personal feeling. Mathematics, in contrast to written English, is an exact science. Two plus two always equals four. The surveyor, being a man of science, is apt to develop an exact viewpoint. The attorney, on the other hand, utilizes a language that can have various meanings, exceptions, and modifications, depending upon the surrounding circumstances. Law is not looked at as an exact science. (Boundary Control vii–viii)

But this separation is hard to maintain, given Brown’s definition of the duties of a professional surveyor. These are: “(1) to locate property lines in accordance with a written description, (2) to locate encroachments on written title lines, (3) to create new land divisions, and (4) to describe by map or writings the divisions created” (Evidence and Procedures vi). Of these activities, certainly locating and creating fall into the scientific end of the science/interpretation conflict. But what about locating “in accordance with a written description” and describing “by map or writings”? These activities seem to undercut the distinction Brown needs to make in order to support his claim that surveying is an exact science, a factual and pure way to know the world. He tries to dismiss the interpretive problems

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connected with locating in accordance with a written description by appealing to the surveyor’s expertise: “The surveyor is a professional specialist who knows how to read and interpret deed words, and how to set monuments in accordance with the words” (Evidence and Procedures 25). But he doesn’t make clear why words, so multiply interpretable for lawyers and courts, are stable for the surveyor. Brown also tries to remove the interpretable from the activity of describing by map or writings by paring down the description to its simplest but still sufficient form, thus, apparently, making the map as impersonal and objective as possible. For example, he advises, “The north arrow need not be elaborate. The ancients were sometimes carried away with embellishments on their compass rose, but plats made today can be best served with a simple efficient arrow” (Evidence and Procedures 385). What would Dixon say to that? Brown’s hedging on the scientific-fact-vs.-interpretive-ambiguity distinction opens the door to reflections on the limits of science. That is, surveying as a tool for drawing and defining parts of the world is compromised by the nature of the world it seeks to know. This is illustrated by two problems Brown discusses, which are especially relevant to Mason and Dixon’s east-west Line. The first has to do with azimuth, or “the angle measured clockwise from the meridian” (Boundary Control 19), usually true north. Brown explains: Strictly speaking, any straight line other than a true north line or the equator has a changing azimuth or bearing as you travel along the line. This is caused by the fact that azimuth or bearing is determined by the angle from the described line to a true north line. Since all true north lines converge toward the north-pole, the angle turned at each point along a line is being turned to a true north line, which is not parallel with any other true north line at any other point on the line. (Boundary Control 19)

For small areas, this variation is insignificant, but for large areas, like that covered by the Mason-Dixon Line, the variation is large enough to create confusion. Brown explains the solution: “within a definite zone, all bearings are referred to true north as defined relative to one datum line in the zone” (Boundary Control 19). In other words, the surveyor creates a convenient fiction. The second problem results from the surveyor’s “assumption that the earth is flat” (Boundary

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Control 20). A flat earth would allow for a perfect east-west, northsouth coordinate system to measure, define, and map a plot of land, but as a sphere, the earth complicates matters. Brown explains: An orange peel, a sphere, cannot be flattened without tearing, compressing, or folding the skin. Similarly, the surface of the earth cannot be represented on a flat plane surface, such as a map, without distortion. A long narrow strip of orange peel can be flattened with a minimum of distortion. If coordinate systems are limited to long narrow strips of land, a minimum of mapping error results. (Boundary Control 20)

All this is not to suggest that surveying is hopelessly flawed as a method and manner of knowing the world or that Mason and Dixon are on some kind of a fool’s errand. Indeed, Mason and Dixon performed their charge so well that Brown, writing 200 years later, praises their accuracy (Evidence and Procedures 77–79, 86). Rather, my point is that Brown’s contention that surveying is a science, exempt from the ambiguity and interpretive multiplicity of language, able to know and represent the world as fact, is subverted by his own admissions of the errors and distortions that seem to be inherent in the processes of interpreting deeds so as to plot them out on the earth and of representing these plottings on a map. As even Brown is forced to admit, “Measurements can never be made without an error of some magnitude, though it may be insignificant. For every survey, the surveyor should know how much uncertainty can be tolerated” (Evidence and Procedures vii). As we will see, Mason and Dixon’s faith in their science will be similarly undercut as they face their own areas of uncertainty. Denis Wood’s take on mapping and representation implies a world view very much at odds with Brown’s. Brown, as we have seen, assumes that the earth is knowable separate from the means we employ to know it. Further, he assumes that the means of knowing the world are separate from the ambiguous and confusing language, signs, and means of representation that articulate that knowledge. Wood begins with much different assumptions. For him, our means of knowing the world create the world we know. He argues that the power of maps comes from the notion that they are neutral but that

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when that notion is exposed as false, their power can be seen in a whole new way: As long as the map is accepted as a window on the world, these lines must be accepted as representing things in it with the ontological status of streams and hills. But no sooner are maps acknowledged as social constructions than their contingent, their conditional, their ... arbitrary character is unveiled. Suddenly the things represented by these lines are opened to discussion and debate, the interest in them of owner, state, insurance company is made apparent. Once it is acknowledged that the map creates these boundaries, it can no longer be accepted as representing these “realities,” which alone the map is capable of embodying (profound conflict of interest). (19)

Concomitantly, Wood recognizes that the means for knowing the world are inseparable from the means of representing that knowledge. Thus knowledge is intertwined with language, and language, like maps, is ideologically interested. This intertwining can be seen in the complex process by which a mapmaker seeks to represent the world in a map. Wood argues that maps are as much about the mapmaker as they are about the world. He says, “the map is about the world in a way that reveals, not the world – or not just the world – but also (and sometimes especially) the agency of the mapper. That is, maps, all maps, inevitably, unavoidably, necessarily embody their authors’ prejudices, biases and partialities” (24). Wood’s attitude toward knowledge and representation and, more specifically, toward maps as a means of knowing and representing the world can help us understand how maps function in society. Two of the qualities of maps that Wood identifies – their ability to create the world they describe and their ability to mask the interests they serve under the guise of neutrality – are especially important in maps’ function as instruments of control. They do this in several interconnected ways. First, as they create the world, maps also create property and a means of claiming the right to that property. As Wood says, “the map does not map locations so much as create ownership at a location” (21). This ownership is confirmed by the distribution of the map and its presumably neutral representation of the world. Second, just as maps provide a means of controlling land, they provide a means of controlling people. Wood explains:

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Robert L. McLaughlin In growing societies, the continuing need for increasing hierarchic integration produces first a simple enlargement of the mapping function, but then it’s ceaseless branching. Thus the state, in its premodern and modern forms, evolves together with the map as an instrument of polity, to assess taxes, wage war, facilitate communications and exploit strategic resources. In Brian Harley’s words, “Stability and longevity quickly became the primary task of each and every state. Against this background, it will be argued that cartography was primarily a form of political discourse concerned with the acquisition and maintenance of power.” (43)

Third, maps, because of the invisibility of their interested positions, function as means to interpellate people into the officially sanctioned symbolic order of their societies. Wood argues: maps are required for us all to keep track of each other and what we’re up to. They manage this by connecting us through them to all the other aspects of the vast system of codes, laws, contracts, treaties, covenants, deals and so on in which we have immersed ourselves. (38–39)

To sum up, maps function as an Althusserian ideological state apparatus, helping to establish and maintain social control and helping to set up an imaginary relationship (imaginary because the means of control are invisible) between people and the social order in which they live. But the ideological function of maps, Wood emphasizes, is dependent on that function remaining invisible, and this pretended neutrality is vital to the map’s powers: “The interest unavoidably embodied in the map is thus disguised ... as natural; it is passed off as ... Nature itself ” (76). In order for the map to convince us that it is Nature itself, it must make us forget that it had an author with his or her own interested positions. Wood explains: the map is powerful precisely to the extent that this author ... disappears, for it is only to the extent that this author escapes notice that the real world the map struggles to bring into being is enabled to materialize (that is, to be taken for the world). As long as the author – and the interest he or she unfailingly embodies – is in plain view, it is hard to overlook him, hard to see around her, to the world described, hard to see it ... as the world. Instead it is seen as no more than a version of the world, as a story about it, as a fiction: no matter how good it is, not something to be taken seriously. As author – and interest – become marginalized (or done away with altogether), the represented world is enabled

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to ... fill our vision. Soon enough we have forgotten this is a picture someone has arranged for us (chopped and manipulated, selected and coded). Soon enough ... it is the world, it is real, it is ... reality. (70)

This illusion, Wood argues, is insidious, not only because it renders the inevitable interest invisible to those who view the map, and who have been induced by a profound cultural labor to accept it as the territory, but because it renders this interest invisible to the cartographers as well who manage in this way to turn themselves into ... victims of the map. (77)

Much of Mason and Dixon’s story in America is of their growing awareness of themselves as victims of the map. Brown’s attitude toward science – that it is a vehicle for pure and complete knowledge of the world and that it transcends the ambiguity associated with other, language-laden means of knowing the world – is the dominant world view in Mason & Dixon, dominant not only in the sense of its pervasiveness but also in the sense of its association with the power elite, the amalgamation of controlling agencies that seek to impose the world views most beneficial to themselves on the rest of the human race. In the novel the agency most obviously connected with pursuing and enforcing this world view is the Royal Society. Reverend Cherrycoke, off-and-on narrator of the novel, explains at one point: These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one. Royal Society members and French Encyclopædists are in the Chariot, availing themselves whilst they may of any occasion to preach the Gospels of Reason, denouncing all that once was Magic. [...] One may be allowed an occasional Cock Lane Ghost,– otherwise, for any more in that Article, one must turn to Gothick Fictions, folded acceptably between the covers of Books. (359)

As Wood pointed out, in this point of view, to admit that knowledge is anything but pure and absolute, to admit that it is a version of the world and not the world itself, is to declare it a fiction and therefore worthless. The novel is most concerned with the astronomical branch of the Royal Society, that branch of science which seeks to know the workings of the clockwork universe Newton proposed. Nevil

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Maskelyne, Mason’s temporary partner on St Helena and eventual royal astronomer, is the novel’s best personification of this world view; he is “the pure type of one who would transcend the Earth,” seeking “his realm of pure Mathesis” (134).3 Maskelyne speaks to Mason of his faith in the knowability of the universe and of his intellectual ambitions to know it: For if each Star is little more a mathematickal Point, located upon the Hemisphere of Heaven by Right Ascension and Declination, then all the Stars, taken together, tho’ innumerable, must like any other set of points, in turn represent some single gigantick Equation, to the mind of God as straightforward as, say, the Equation of a Sphere,– to us unreadable, incalculable. A lonely, uncompensated, perhaps even impossible Task,– yet some of us must ever be seeking, I suppose. (134)

This same point is made to Maskelyne’s predecessor as royal astronomer, James Bradley, by the president of the Royal Society. He says of the stars: They betray us not, nor ever do they lie,– they are pure Mathesis. Unless they be Moons or Planets, possessing Diameter, each exists as but a dimensionless Point,– a simple pair of Numbers, Right Ascension and Declination... Numbers that you Men of Science are actually paid, out of the Purses of Kings, to find. (194)

The ostensible purpose of understanding the workings of the heavens is to better understand the earth; the hidden purpose is hinted at by Mason as he talks to Martha Washington: the ev’ryday work of the Observatory goes on as always, for the task at Greenwich, as at Paris, is to know every celestial motion so perfectly, that Sailors at last may trust their lives to this Knowledge. (283)

3

Foucault defines mathesis as “a universal science of measurement and order” and sees it as a vital element of the Classical episteme, in which, according to his scheme, Mason and Dixon are operating. He says that because of mathesis, “it is always possible to reduce problems of measurement to problems of order. So that the relation of all knowledge to the mathesis is posited as the possibility of establishing an ordered succession between things, even non-measurable ones” (56–57).

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Mason is referring to the problem of the longitude – how to measure accurately on land or sea one’s position relative to north–south meridians. Several decades of work went into this project; it was the motivation for building the Observatory at Greenwich; and it marked a conflict between astronomers, who insisted, as Mason suggests, that the answer could be found only through knowledge of the stars, and mechanists, who argued, correctly as it turned out, that the answer could be found through the creation of a clock that could keep accurate time at sea. This conflict was enacted most bitterly by Maskelyne and clockmaker John Harrison, to whose rivalry Pynchon refers several times.4 My point here is that this pursuit after knowledge is far from pure: accurate measurement of longitude is important because it will serve more efficient mercantile systems and colonial enterprises. The Royal Society world view about science and knowledge serves the interests of commerce and control. That these interests are served in the surveying of the Line between Pennsylvania and Maryland is evident in the novel. Drawing the Line is part of a process of taking land, creating boundaries, naming: in short, creating the conditions under which power – the power to tax, to control land, to enforce laws, to privilege specific religious, social, and cultural codes, to enslave or kill those who are different – can be established and maintained. And because of the scientific nature of the survey and the maps that will result from it, the process, as Wood argues, has the potential to be invisible. This point is made by William Emerson, Dixon’s teacher: The Romans [...] were preoccupied with conveying Force, be it hydraulic, or military, or architectural,– along straight Lines. [...] Right Lines beyond a certain Magnitude become of less use or instruction to those who must dwell among them, than intelligible, by their immense regularity, to more distant Onlookers [...]. (219)

The same point is made more strongly by Fr Zarpazo, a representative of the Jesuits, like the Royal Society, one of the novel’s controlling agencies: 4

See Sobel for a fascinating rendering of the problem of the longitude and the dispute between Maskelyne and Harrison.

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Robert L. McLaughlin “The Model,” the Wolf of Jesus addressing a roomful of students, “is Imprisonment. Walls are to be the Future. Unlike those of the Antichrist Chinese, these will follow right Lines. The World grows restless,– Faith is no longer willingly bestow’d upon Authority, either religious or secular. What Pity. If we may not have Love, we will accept Consent,– if we may not obtain Consent, we will build Walls. As a Wall, projected upon the Earth’s Surface, becomes a right Line, so shall we find that we may shape, with arrangements of such Lines, all we may need, be it in a Crofter’s hut or a great Mother-City,– Rules of Precedence, Routes of Approach, Lines of Sight, Flows of Power,– ” (522)

One of the reasons for establishing this kind of control is to create conditions for commerce and to make sure profits flow in the right direction. George Washington explains to Mason and Dixon his experiences in the Ohio country, beyond the settled eastern seaboard, and why it is vital to establish control there. He compares the country to a piece of tricky weaving [...] order, I mean to say, in Chaos. Markets appearing, with their unwritten Laws, upon ev’ry patch of ground, power beginning to sort itself out, Line and Staff. [...] As the East India Company hath its own Navy, why, so did we our own Army. Out in the wild Anarchy of the Forest, we alone had the coherence and discipline to see this land develop’d as it should be. (281)

The Mason-Dixon Line is an important symbol of these interconnected processes of control and commerce: in its westward movement it represents the process of control whereby the continent will be taken from its indigenous inhabitants and put to the uses of its colonizers; in separating north from south, the place where human beings generally are not bought and sold from the place where they are, it represents the ultimate and hateful ends of commercialism. The rationalization of America into something that will serve the ends of power and the Line’s place in this process is described in a key passage narrated apparently by Cherrycoke: 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,–

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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. (345)

Mason and Dixon begin the novel with the Royal Society point of view, confident in the purity of scientific knowledge, certain that scientific knowledge is separate from the interests of the world. Mason’s melancholy results from his being unable to reconcile his faith in the rational with his emotional need to believe in some sort of reunion with his dead wife Rebekah. On St Helena Dixon introduces himself to Maskelyne by saying, “Newton is my Deity” (116). They are shocked when the French ship l’Grand attacks the Seahorse, refusing to recognize – despite its claim, “La France ne fait pas la guerre contra les sciences”5 – the distinction between a scientific mission and a military or political one. At Cape Town they are offended by security official Bonk’s assumption that their mission involves spying as well as astronomy. Mason indignantly replies, “we serve no master but Him that regulates the movements of the Heav’ns, which taken together form a cryptick Message [...] we are intended one day to solve and read” (59). When they encounter something fantastic – like the watch that never needs winding or Rebekah’s ghost on St Helena – they respond to it much as the Royal Society responds to fantastic Jesuitical inventions: they are results of knowledge, not different from or in conflict with their own, but currently beyond their own; they assume that their own systems of knowledge will eventually account for and assimilate these phenomena, just as in the quotation from Cherrycoke above, the ideology of control inexorably absorbs and rationalizes all the wonders that exist subjunctively beyond the horizon. 5

This phrase (summarized here) is taken from part of a song sung by the sailors on the French ship (40).

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From this initial epistemological position, Mason and Dixon, through their adventures in America, enact two, interconnected movements: as they come to recognize and embrace the uncertainty of their science, they become aware of themselves serving the interests of that science and of their own roles as victims of the map. We saw earlier that Brown, despite his faith in science’s ability to know the world and in surveying’s ability to represent on the earth the terms of deed and then to represent on a plat the story of the survey, had to admit that the survey will always contain some error and that the surveyor has to decide how much uncertainty is acceptable. Mason and Dixon come to admit this uncertainty, though, unlike Brown, they do not try to pretend that this uncertainty does not affect their faith in science. The two take great care to make the survey of their Line as accurate as possible, but as they proceed, they discover, as Brown suggested, that forces human and earthly make absolute accuracy impossible. The human forces take the form of Darby and Cope, the chainmen, who, to the surveyors’ horror, have confused two methods of keeping the chain count. Darby says reassuringly, “thro’ some dark miracle of Mathesis [...], our Errors have ever exactly cancel’d out” (473). But if they have not and the distance has been measured incorrectly, the result, Darby admits, would be “a very Hole in Space” (473). The earthly forces include not only iron lodes, which interfere with compasses, but the mass of large mountains, which affects the plumb line, “Obliging us,” says Mason, “to take symmetrical readings on the opposite sides of the Crests, and hope that the two errors will cancel out” (475). Another force that adds to the uncertainty of the enterprise is the language of the original Penn and Calvert charters. These charters granted land in language irreconcilable with each other and the landscape. For decades the two colonies have argued over the wording of their borders, and Mason and Dixon have the job of interpreting from language to lines on the earth the resulting compromises. Their greatest challenge is the points where Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware meet. Mason and Dixon survey the terms of the deeds and manage to reconcile them with a minimum of necessary error, except for a spot where the north-south border of Maryland runs inside the twelve mile arc centered at New Castle, “producing now, between

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them, two boundary lines, one ‘straight,’ and one, about a thousandth of a Mile longer, ‘curv’d’” (468). This wedge of ambiguity is significant because of the inability of scientific knowledge and the ideology of control to account for it fully: Yet there remains to the Wedge an Unseen World, beyond Resolution, of transactions never recorded. [...] Anybody may be in there, from clandestine lovers to smugglers of weapons, some hawking contraband,– buckles, lockets, tea, laces from France,– some marking off “Lots” for use in some future piece of Land-Jobbery. [...] Nearby, withal, is Iron Hill, a famous and semi-magical Magnetick Anomaly, known to Elf Communities near and far, into which riskers of other peoples’ Capital have been itching for years to dig,– but being reluctant to reward more than one set of Provincial Officials at a time, are waiting until the legal status of the Wedge becomes clear. [...] ’Tis no one’s for the moment. A small geographick Anomaly, a-bustle with Appetites high and low, their offerings and acceptances. (470)

This place that eludes Mason and Dixon’s charge and their science also eludes, at least temporarily, the forces of control and commerce their Line is meant to serve. The necessary uncertainty of the survey opens the way, as the party moves west, for other challenges to the Royal Society world view. As they move farther from the rational eastern seaboard and more into Cherrycoke’s subjunctive west, Mason and Dixon encounter the fantastic more and more frequently – the werebeaver, the Glowing Indian, the Black Dog, Timothy Tox’s Golem, the Leyden Jar battery – so frequently, in fact, that the ability of their sciences and their knowledge to account for and assimilate them all has to be called into question. This breaking-down of the scientific world view is best represented in Captain Zhang, the Chinese geomancer fleeing the Jesuits. His science of feng shui directly challenges the surveyors’ science. He criticizes their work: Ev’rywhere else on earth, Boundaries follow Nature,– coast-lines, ridge-tops, river-banks,– so honoring the Dragon or Shan within, from which Land-Scape ever takes its form. To mark a right Line upon the Earth is to inflict upon the Dragon’s very Flesh, a sword-slash, a long, perfect scar, impossible for any who live out here the year ’round to see as other than hateful Assault. How can it pass unanswer’d? (542)

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In Zhang, Mason and Dixon encounter a world view different from their own, an alternative world view that exists simultaneously with their own but is not assimilable into their own. They are learning here a new attitude toward knowledge: that we err when we seek one system of knowledge to explain the world completely and absolutely; rather, different systems of knowledge – agreeing, conflicting, synthesizing – exist side-by-side, simultaneously, no one complete, but together offering us a way to know the world contingently. Mason warns the Sons of Liberty he encounters about his employers, “they will not admit to Error” (408). In the wilderness the members of the party discuss Captain Zhang’s presence: “Too many possible Stories. You may not have time enough to find out which is the right one.” “Best thing’s to draw up a Book, for there’s certain to be wagering upon the Question?” (552)

In the woods Mason and Dixon seem to learn that the uncertainty, discussion, debate, and even wagering that result from having available multiple stories about the world is preferable to the social, economic, and physical violence that results from the insistence on a single story. Connected with this recognition of multiple world views is Mason and Dixon’s growing awareness of the interests they are serving in drawing the Line. As early as Cape Town, Dixon suspects in an unfocused paranoia that the two are pawns in a game they don’t understand. He asks “are we being us’d, by Forces invisible even to thy Invisible College?” (73). This suspicion becomes more urgent as the two visit Lancaster and view the results of the Paxton Boys massacre. Now Dixon asks, “Whom are we working for, Mason?” (347). Later, when the two are far into unsurveyed, unrationalized America, they have the following exchange: “We shouldn’t be runnin’ this Line...?” Mason regards his Cup of Claret. “Bit late for that, isn’t it?” “Why aye. I’ll carry it through, Friend, fear not. But something invisible’s going on, tha must feel it, smell it...?” Mason shrugs. “American Politics.” “Just so. We’re being us’d again. It doesn’t alarm thee...?” (478)

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Interestingly, they come to different conclusions about the nature of the interests using them, Mason believing it to be a conspiracy of Maskelyne, the Jesuits, and the Masons, Dixon thinking it to be the East India Company. Their stories conflict but together suggest the forces of control and commerce, which, as we have seen, are represented in the drawing of the Line. With this growing awareness of themselves as victims of their own map, Mason and Dixon increasingly desire to act in some way, to rebel, to change their status as victims, but, like most of us, they act not at all or in contradictory ways. Still, they manage a few triumphs. Their earliest reaction, as they move from being oblivious to being aware of the forces they are implicated in, is resigned inaction. In Lancaster, Dixon prays for revenge to be taken on the murderers but also “that I be spar’d the awkwardness of seeking them out myself ” (347). On the west Line, when they theorize about the forces they are serving, the two agree that they nevertheless must proceed with the job: “We’ve no choice, but to go on with it, as far as we may” (479). Closer to the end of their time in America, they attempt to extricate themselves from the effects of their job. On a side trip in Maryland Dixon frees a group of slaves from the man trying to auction them: Here in Maryland, they had a choice at last, and Dixon chose to act, and Mason not to,– unless he had to,– what each of us wishes he might have the unthinking Grace to do, yet fails to do. To act for all those of us who have so fail’d. For the Sheep. (698)

But this rebellion is balanced with another action stemming from their awareness of what they have done: Mason and Dixon understand as well that the Line is exactly what Capt. Zhang and a number of others have been styling it all along– a conduit for Evil. So the year in Delaware with the Degree of Latitude is an Atonement, an immersion in “real” Science […]. (701)

As the narrator’s quotation marks around real suggest, this is not so much an atonement as a return to the state of obliviousness to the interests science serves in which the pair began. The scene with which I began this chapter, the drawing of the plat, seems to contain a

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synthesis of these different reactions to their situation: ostensibly, the plat serves the interests of those in power; subtly, it challenges them by offering, or at least hinting at, stories beyond the official story of the survey the plat is supposed to tell. This complex nature of representation – that representation, as Wood argues, always serves interests but that in its multiplicity representation is not completely controllable: other stories beyond the official one creep in – is central to the novel. Representations are everywhere, from Cherrycoke claiming to impersonate a parson to Dixon dressing in a “Representation of Authority” (49) to St Helena being a “Representation of Home” (133) to Cape Town’s replication of the Black Hole of Calcutta to Mason sending a misleading picture (“’Twas but a Representation” [186]) to his bride-to-be to a lawyer claiming that “ev’ryone needs Representation” (202) to the American colonists complaining about virtual representation in the British Parliament. But the most curious, ambiguous, and intriguing representation of all is the novel itself. Seeming to be the story of Mason and Dixon, it really is the stories of Mason and Dixon, told through various narrators-omniscient, Cherrycoke, Wade LeSpark, even the weird midcourse loop the loop where the narrative becomes confused and conflated with an episode of The Ghastly Fop – and even more, Mason’s journals, Cherrycoke’s sermons and day-book entries, Timothy Tox’s poems, and so on. The form and purpose of the novel itself seem to be the subject when the characters in the Cherrycoke frame argue about truth and fiction. Ethelmer asserts that multiple stories are to be preferred to one story that claims to be the absolute and only truth: Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reaches of anyone in Power,– who need but to touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish’d, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government. (350)

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Ives LeSpark rejects this theory because, as he says, “No one has time, for more than one Version of the Truth” (350) and because fiction threatens the distinction between “fact and fancy” (351). Its own form, then, suggests that, while the novel is about the drawing of a Line that promulgates the ideology of control, it is also about the erasing of lines, the blurring of distinctions, the proliferation of possibilities that offer a challenge to this ideology. Mason & Dixon’s presentation of surveying and mapmaking and the world views that become associated with them leads to ideas that are central to the novel’s representation of America – Mason and Dixon’s America and our America. Moreover, it leads us to a sense of how the novel’s form, its many layered and competing stories, offers the possibility of liberation from the totalized and totalitarian world view of the ideology of control, which, unfortunately, has dominated the America Mason and Dixon helped to define. No wonder Uncle Ives thinks novels are dangerous.

Works Cited Brown, Curtis M., Frederick Landgraf and Francis D. Uzes. Boundary Control and Legal Principles. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley, 1969. Brown, Curtis Maitland, Winfield H. Eldridge. Evidence and Procedures for Boundary Location. New York: Wiley, 1962. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1970. New York: Vintage, 1994. Pynchon, Thomas. Mason & Dixon. New York: Holt, 1997. Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The True Story of the Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York: Walker, 1995. Wood, Denis, and John Fels. The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford, 1992.

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IAN D. COPESTAKE

“Off the Deep End Again”: Sea-Consciousness and Insanity in The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon

I want to draw a line of connection between The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon by noting the particular use the author makes of references to madness and the sea. Furthermore, I wish to place Pynchon’s concern with these elements in relation to a specifically American literary and historical tradition. Madness as both a blanket description for a host of abnormal mental states and the way in which those states are perceived by the sane, have been recurrent presences in Pynchon’s work throughout his career. His fiction of the 60s and 70s established a particularly powerful and enduring association with paranoia.1 More recently 1

Recent cultural and historical studies of paranoia build on Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1965: 3–40. These include Patrick O’Donnell. Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 2001; Timothy Mellor. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000. Frank Palmeri has revived the importance of paranoia as a focal point for assessing the whole of Pynchon’s output through to Mason & Dixon, in “Other than Postmodern? Foucault, Pynchon, Hybridity, Ethics.” Postmodern Culture 12. 1 (2001): 1–24. See also Jon Simons. “Postmodern Paranoia? Pynchon and Jameson.” Paragraph 23. 2 (2000): 207–21; A. Hescher. “Postmodern Paranoia and Thomas Pynchon, Forms of Discourse in American Literature: The Opening of Constellations of Binary Metaphors in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 22. 1 (1997): 53–68; D. Kolesch. “A Creative Paranoia Against Televized History: A Loss of History and Recollection in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 20. 2 (1995): 275–305; John Johnson.“Towards the Schizo-Text: Paranoia as Semiotic Regime in The Crying of Lot 49.” Patrick O’ Donnell. Ed. New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991: 47–78; L. Bersani. “Pynchon, Paranoia and Literature.” Representations

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Pynchon’s novel of the 1980s, Vineland, saw Zoyd Wheeler struggling to assume a post-radical state of socialised normalcy in the Reagan era through receipt of a “mental disability check.” The novel opens with Zoyd contemplating the fact that “unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits” (3). Pynchon’s concern with the sea has prior to Mason & Dixon been peripheral, but The Crying of Lot 49 serves as an interesting corollary to the later work through the role of sea-consciousness and in particular Oedipa Maas’s projection on to the sea of her own idealism.2 At times of confusion in the face of the unravelling of Oedipa’s sense of normality she turns to the sea and becomes aware of its presence. The novel can be seen to chart the progress of her relationship to the idealism the sea embodies for her as she struggles to find a release from the perplexities, confusions and paranoia she feels increasingly in the grip of. Paranoia in particular quickly becomes a way of life for Oedipa in the wake of revelations about Pierce Inverarity’s business dealings which she has delved into to execute his will. From this starting point

2

25. (1989): 99–118; Robert Kiely. “Being Serious in the ‘Sixties: Madness, Meaning and Metaphor in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Crying of Lot 49.” Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 12. 2 (1984): 215–37; L. Mackey. “Paranoia, Pynchon and Preterition.” Sub-Stance 30 (1981): 16–30; L. Braudy. “Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel.” English Language Notes 48 (1981): 619–37. Though the author does not mention Pynchon’s work directly Sheldon W. Liebman’s “Still Crazy After All these Years: Madness in Modern Fiction.” Midwest Quarterly 34. 4 (1993): 398–415, provides an overview of the continuing appeal to twentieth-century writers of the theme of madness. Liebman states that the intensity of twentieth-century writers’ interest in this subject sets the age apart from a very long tradition: “What is noteworthy is that they have chosen madness as a metaphor. In so doing, they have made the twentieth century so prolific in its fictional studies of insanity that it far overshadows the seventeenth century in England and the fifth-century BC in Greece. The question of why that is the case should both give us pause and encourage us to search for an answer.” (414–15). Similarly neglectful of Pynchon but a useful study of the attraction of insanity for writers of contemporary American fiction, is B. T. Lupack. Insanity as Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction: Inmates Running the Asylum Florida: UP of Florida, 1995. See Kiely 215–37; Guzlowski 48–60.

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Oedipa’s quest for meaning begins to suggest answers to more personal questions, including her suspicion that she has been enclosed in a tower throughout her life and that exposure to potential revelation suggests a way of regaining contact with some more significant and revelatory meaning. Such a summary of Oedipa’s motivations and expectations as she begins to soak up references to Pierce’s businesses throughout the city of San Narcisco, only really does justice to the ambiguity of what it is she hopes to find, and what her sense of enclosure really signifies. Both Oedipa and the reader are continually teased by the shared possibility of confrontation with significant information, of gaining insight into the connections which she is unable to stop making between Pierce and an illegal underground postal system given the name of Tristero. It is gradually revealed that this organisation has a heritage stretching back centuries, in which time it has offered secret channels of communication to all who have felt disinherited, left out of, and peripheral to, the society of their day. Resolving the question of whether this unofficial postal system exists or not is one threat to Oedipa’s sanity. The other is whether she is able to cope with the implications of its existence and accept the profound changes in her perception of everything around her which its existence seems to demand.3 Reluctantly Oedipa throws off her sense of buffering insulation from her own life, famously picturing it enclosed within a tower from which she now desires escape. The image embodies what is at stake for her as she confronts the provisional and fictive nature of the comforts she has clung to in support of her distance from anything other than a superficial engagement with the life around her. From the starting point of her first act of metaphor-making, her picturing herself 3

Robert Kiely extends the locus of Pynchon’s concern with insanity when he states, in his comparative study of Pynchon’s work and Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, that “though certain symptoms [of insanity] are concentrated in the characters of the Big Nurse and Oedipa Maas, it is understood that the true source of madness is the Combine or some nefarious network of miscommunication. The author places himself (and the reader) precariously close to the situation of the protagonist since the questions posed for all are: how do I get out of this madhouse and will I know the difference if I do?” (216).

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in her tower, further revelations are desired so that she can picture the manner of her relationship to her own life more clearly. Her realm of comfort, of protection from enquiry, is thus left far behind when she decides to examine what she calls the “formless magic” (13) keeping her where she is. Her quest sees her begin to doubt all that she had held to be true, and to attempt to turn back from this path of revelation and to her world of comfortable isolation means that she must deny the existence of desires she has already identified. If she does attempt to do this, these desires must be seen as fictions. As figments of her own imagination they must be dismissed, ignored or painted over by her conviction that they do not exist and that she is, therefore, happy to “fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad or marry a disc-jockey” (13). It is not possible for her to backtrack without taking advantage of the most powerful of these options, namely by embracing a delusion, by going mad. Thus paranoia itself begins to be seen as an indicator of the world of questions without answer she has entered, and not something that should be rejected as delusory. To deny the truth which paranoia puts her in contact with would not constitute a return to reality but rather return her to the madness of a deluded existence. Her desire for meaning is at least, via the Tristero, given a name. This postal system represents the desires of a community of people who, like herself, want to keep open a channel of communication with their own desires for something different and more hopeful than the set of ideals and values realised within the conventional society of America with which they have become disenchanted. Proving the existence of the Tristero seems to restore the possibility and viability of hope itself in the face of hidden and controlling forces. However, confirmation of its existence would also confirm the frightening reality of the powers which necessitate its existence, a stark reality reflected in the bleak options facing Oedipa at the end of the novel. At the auction awaiting the revelatory crying of lot 49, she confronts the need to recognise which state of insanity she is now irrevocably a part of: Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or

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there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia. (126)

Frank Palmeri is right to argue that there is in Pynchon’s work a progression “away from the representation of extreme paranoia, toward a vision of local ethico-political possibilities” (para. 5). The key to this is the cultivation within each individual of an awareness of his or her relationship to the determining factors and powers which seem to render individual action insignificant. In The Crying of Lot 49 Oedipa’s awareness of her relationship to the world around her undergoes a sea-change, and it is this which must come before any subsequent action can be taken to improve that relationship. The possibility of action is explored in Mason & Dixon, whilst the earlier novel charts Oedipa’s first steps to an emergent realisation of the need to confront her own responsibility for understanding the life around her: The position of Mason and Dixon more nearly resembles that of Oedipa Maas, who comes to see more than she saw at first, to whom revelations happen which may or may not add up to evidence of a wide-ranging conspiracy, but which are nevertheless historically significant and demand an ethical response. (para. 31)

An alternative to the madness at the end of every avenue of possibility open to Oedipa had potentially been envisaged by the role of sea-consciousness within the book. Early in her quest Oedipa senses the presence of the Pacific, and the narrator describes the comfort she derived from the significance she gave to it when in the past she viewed the Pacific as an “inviolate” embodiment of “some more general truth,” (37) a hope that life in Southern California could become less ugly than it appeared to be on the surface.4 The narrator also, however, immediately undermines the integrity of Oedipa’s vague sense of hope by stating that though she “had believed in some principle of the sea as redemption for Southern California” this excluded “her own section of the state, which seemed to need none” (37). Re-instated here is the prevalent self-absorption and insulation 4

I am grateful here to John Krafft for his suggestions concerning the ambiguities inherent in Oedipa’s view of the sea.

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from reality which Oedipa is only now beginning to challenge. The change of tense here, the fact that she “had believed” in the sea as an embodiment of redemptive hope, suggests not only that her idealism belongs to a time before her quest began, but it also allows the narrator to suggest the very different nature of the enlightenment both she and the reader should expect to confront at the quest’s end: “Perhaps it was only that notion, its arid hope, she sensed as this afternoon they made their sea-ward thrust, which would stop short of any sea” (37). The sea’s role in the novel changes and becomes a means of assessing the degree to which Oedipa is willing to accept the changed status of meaning in her world. For her to achieve a true sense of the reality around her and her own relationship to it necessitates resisting any desire to retreat to her former state of insulation. Her willingness to continue will thus be reflected in her attitude to the sea which, the narrator implies, should no longer indicate to her the comforting possibility of redemptive meaning, but reveal to her the presence of its absence. Oedipa’s quest inevitably leads her to a choice between her nostalgia for the comforts of her past idealism, and hence to a delusion, or else to a new world of deconstructed truths and textual meanings in which she must try to make herself at home. Subsequently throughout the novel we are given reminders of the sea’s peripheral presence via, for instance, the role the various lakes play in revealing the identity of the Tristero. Oedipa’s prior sense of the sea as an incorruptible model of a spiritual life which she wanted affirmed on the land finds another representative in the person of the aptly named Driblette. As director of a Jacobean play which gives Oedipa her first clue to the existence of the Tristero system, Driblette is frustrated at Oedipa’s seemingly obsessive textually grounded search for meaning at the expense of “the invisible field surrounding the play, its spirit” (105). He soon rejoins the appropriate symbolic realm of his own vision of meaning when he commits suicide by walking into the Pacific. The suggested division between the land and the sea, between the possibly fruitless pursuit of texts and some more spiritual perception of truth, is also made to stand out when Oedipa reaches the lowest ebb of her quest. With the disappearance of a voice on a phone, seemingly her last possible contact with vital information about the Tristero, she

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faces the prospect of never finding out whether it was all a joke, whether such a system really existed or whether it was a nightmare of her own concoction. At this moment the narrator describes Oedipa’s sense of loss in terms which confirm her irrevocable distance from the sea and her past idealism: She stood between the public booth and the rented car, in the night, her isolation complete, and tried to face towards the sea. But she had lost her bearings. She turned pivoting on one stacked heel, could find no mountains either. As if there could be no barriers between herself and the land. (122)

Oedipa’s absorption by the land seems complete, and this unsettling but revelatory experience of isolation and disorientation informs her encounter with the novel’s final representative of the sea, the sailor suffering from delirium tremens. The genuine emotion and sense of loss conveyed in the scene is reflective of Oedipa’s recognition of the need to abandon, not the sailor, but the nostalgia which preserved the sea for her as a realm symbolic of a vaguely defined and flawed sense of hope.5 Through a quite literally touching act of recognition, Oedipa’s desire to comfort the sailor demonstrates the distance she has now come from her prior state of insulation from the world around her: She was overcome all at once by a need to touch him, as if she could not believe in him, or would not remember him, without it. Exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing, she came the last three steps and sat, took the man in her arms, actually held him, gazing out of her smudged eyes down the stairs, back into the morning. (87)

While she can give physical comfort to this damaged and washed-up representative of the sea’s symbolic realm she can no longer offer him the same hope which that realm had formerly signified to her: 5

Guzlowski suggests that Oedipa in fact desires “to further the estrangement” which exists between herself and the physical sea in the novel, and which, furthermore, cuts her off from the “inner sea of emotions” which it is seen to represent (51). Using this meeting to support his claim that Oedipa does not desire contact with the redemption that the sea represents, Guzlowski sees her as failing to respond to the cries of the sailor by abandoning him “and the inner emotional seas he might have guided her to” (52).

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The symbolic identification of the sea which Pynchon plays upon in the novel is in part informed by romanticism and concepts of the sublime, in which the spectacle of nature offers man a means of affirming the interconnection between selfhood and Godhead. But more influential is a longer and specifically American tradition which Pynchon is well aware of and subsequently brings to the fore in Mason & Dixon. What is over-looked in accounts of the fascination the sea holds for many writers, especially of the romantic period, is that the gradual credence given to notions of sublimity in the eighteenth century was aided by the undermining of Stoic fears particularly in America of the sea’s chaotic power.6 This is indicated by the revival of interest in ancient medical authorities who first argued for the restorative properties of exposure to the sea for treating abnormal states of mind. As W. H. Auden and Kathleen Grange have noted, historical changes have occurred in the iconography of the sea which underline a movement away from the fear, hostility and suspicion expressed in classical views of the sea, whereby, as Auden notes, The sea or the great waters – are the symbol for the primordial undifferentiated flux, the substance which became created nature only by having form imposed upon or wedded to it. The sea, in fact, is that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilisation has emerged, and into which, unless saved by the efforts of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse. (Auden 18–19)

The sea was thus viewed as anathema to mankind, an embodiment of chaotic emotions man should strive to define himself in opposition to. 6

Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s illuminating study of this shift in sensibility focuses on changing attitudes in English writing to mountains, rather than the oceans. She acknowledges, however, that “Insofar as ‘ocean’ attitudes can be isolated, there are parallels, though the English – an island people and a seafaring race – never seem to feel the same distaste for the sea as for the ‘hook-shouldered’ hills” (xii). My focus on an America tradition of writing draws on formative differences in historical and religious perceptions which set the two nations apart in terms of their relationship to the sea.

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The romantic or modern view of the sea, however, offered a gradual but complete reversal in attitude to the emotional symbolism of the sea, the first decades of the eighteenth century marking a transitional phase in its iconography with writers such as Pope and Defoe glorying in the very tempestuousness of an element which the classical and Stoic of mind had feared. This attitude is exemplified for Auden in the writings of Herman Melville, for whom the sea is the real situation, and the voyage the true condition of man. These changes also run parallel to and are influential in determining transitions in attitude towards the insane. Michel Foucault argues that the classical perception of the sea as the metaphoric realm of the insane’s own chaotic and violent impulses, reflecting the “ceaseless unrest” of “the great turbulent plain” (9–10), sanctioned changes in perceptions and definitions of the insane which distinguished the medieval from the classical mindset and ushered in a new era of control and treatment of the mad. As Foucault noted, “water and madness have long been linked in the dreams of European man” (9), an association marked out, to give one instance, by the mythic relationship between melancholia and the Roman god, Saturn: Nearly all the writers of the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance considered it an incontestable fact that melancholy, whether morbid or natural, stood in some special relationship to Saturn, and the latter was really to blame for the melancholic’s unfortunate character and destiny. (Klibansky 127)

The conception of Saturn as “a divinity who, apart from his other attributes, stood in some special relationship to water” derives in part from texts which describe Saturn as “accidentaliter humidus,” call him a voyager over many seas, and attribute to him the patronage of those who live by the sea […]. There was also the fact that since the Middle Ages men had become accustomed to imagine Saturn like this; in the Roman Mirabilia, one of the two ancient river gods which stand in front of the Senatorial Palace was taken for a statue of Saturn. (Klibansky 212)

Such associations between madness and the sea eased the sanctioning as medical fact throughout the Enlightenment of neglected ancient practices for the treatment of the insane through the use of sea

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travel. Records from the second century BC preserve advice given by the Greek physician, Rufus of Ephesus, for the eclectic treatment of mild to strong melancholic states.7 Travel was deemed a particularly effective means of altering a patient’s physical constitution, improving digestion, and distracting from morbid or obsessive preoccupations. Such notions responded to ancient humoral theories of the body which continued to influence ideas of human health and treatment until the end of the seventeenth century. Amongst such theories was the belief that vapours from the spleen or contaminated blood resulted in black bile, precipitating the onset of dejected states. In relation to treating such states, notions of the sea’s utility regained currency despite the waning of the humoral theories which first gave them medical credence. In The Use of Sea Voyages in Medicine (1771) Ebenezer Gilchrist wrote of the revival then underway in utilising the restorative properties of sea travel: Sailing, living at sea, though for many ages past scarce mentioned in relation to medicine, seems nevertheless to have held a distinguished rank among the great remedies of antiquity. How it came to be disused I cannot say; nor is it easy to foretell what reception it will meet with now that an attempt is made to bring it again into practice. (xii)

The revival of this notion is strongest in the wake of the greater credence seemingly given to them by the impact of changed perceptions of nature and ideas of sublimity introduced in the West at the end of the eighteenth century and current throughout the nineteenth.8 The revival of the sea journey for use in the specific treatment of melancholia was strongly advocated by Johann Christian Heinroth at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Textbook of Disturbances of Mental Life: Or Disturbances of the Soul and their Treatment. Again, though, it is Melville who provides the age’s most memorable expression of not only, as Auden noted, the changed iconography of the sea, but its confluence with revived notions of the sea as a restorative for the disturbed mind. Ishmael’s turn to the sea at 7 8

See Jackson 35–39. See Nicolson; see also Wharton “The Revolutionary and Federal Periods” 46– 48.

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the outset of Moby-Dick is steeped in his knowledge of both the sea’s restorative properties and the humoral theories which account for his melancholia: It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily passing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially, whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. (12)

Ishmael’s subsequent confrontation with the monomania of Ahab confirms Melville’s awareness that America’s historical relationship to the sea had been anything but a harmonious wedding of meditation and water. The seventeenth-century sea deliverance narratives of America’s first settlers reflected the predominant classical and Stoic perception of the sea as a fearful realm of hidden dangers which man should under normal circumstances shun completely. The belief in Providence common to all writers of such narratives, be they Puritan or fiercely anti-Puritan, informed the value of these dramatic accounts of deliverance from the horrors of death at sea, and exemplified the power and prevalence of a typological view of the world in which such escapes confirmed both the presence of God’s will and His blessing on individual settlers’ calls to faithfulness.9 The particular Providential designs of which the Puritan settlers felt themselves to be part were satirised by critics in the late eighteenth century who made use of the growing number of medical tracts investigating the nature of religious enthusiasm. Meric Casaubon’s Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm (1655) and the writings of Henry More, helped make current a view that the religious enthusiasm of sects such as the Puritans was the result of melancholic vapours, and that delusion rather than Divine blessing was at the heart of their Providential schemes. Pynchon, like Melville before him, is aware of the confusions inherent in America’s historical relationship to forms of idealism and delusion which its Puritan heritage has continued to influence. For 9

See Wharton “The Colonial Era” 32–45; Stein 17–37.

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Sacvan Bervovitch the “sacred drama of American nationhood” (132) is constituted by the confluence of sacred and secular history, in which The Great Migration and the War of Independence are linked by evolved perceptions of Providence in the wake of the growth, power and influence of scientific rationalism. While the Divine Order remained reflected in the laws of nature which science brought to light, this revised cultural framework facilitated the emergence of an American national self-identity which outgrew its origins in the outmoded typology of Providence, and yet preserved in adapted form a cultural authority which endorsed the myth of America’s manifest destiny. What is so often at stake for American writers and their fictional characters when they confront the sea or water, what draws Thoreau to Walden Pond, or gives significance to the final sight of the sea at the close of The Great Gatsby, is the repeated need to find an answer to the question of whether a conception of America is necessary for it to exist, or whether a society is possible outside the delusions or ideals which historically have determined its identity. Oedipa Maas confronts this question at the end of her personal quest for answers, and finds avenues towards different forms of insanity awaiting her. In Mason & Dixon Pynchon moves back into history to expose the larger delusions at the heart of America’s quest for national identity. At the heart of Mason & Dixon is Pynchon’s concern to chart the movement man can hope to make away from the prison-house of paranoia to a home within the changed world such paranoia is indicative of. The supposedly enlightened age which the drama of Mason & Dixon illuminates is one in which madness abounds. Mason suffers from hyperthrenia, or excess in mourning, brought about by the death of his wife, Rebekah, casting him under the shadow of a deep melancholia. Cherrycoke, as the Reverend himself is keen to point out is not unacquainted with mania, having avoided imprisonment for his crimes by allowing himself to be declared insane. Among the many realms both ghostly and geographic visited in the book is the island of St Helena from which, due to the incessant beating of the sea against its mountainous sides, all are said eventually to go mad. The southeast winds of Cape Town are another element responsible, the narrator tells us, for legendary examples of insane behaviour. We can add to this list of conventional insanities the more fabulous examples which

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are never more than a page away throughout the novel, of characters, realms, rituals and inventions the absurdity of which break through any prolonged pretence at historical realism. From the mechanical duck and talking dog to the Lambton worm, Pynchon celebrates through them the colourful diversity of imagination’s realms, and sets them against the cold line drawing and divisiveness which bring Mason and Dixon into history. The dividing line between sanity and madness in the age of reason is rendered less clear by the reactions of “Sunny, bustling and order’d” Cape Town to the bouts of madness it experiences among minds seemingly “in the rosiest fullness of Sanity” (151–52). When deemed too dangerous the mad “are kept as a responsibility of the Company, confin’d in padded rooms in the Slave Lodge” (151). The dehumanisation of the mad goes hand in hand with the heritage of slavery on which “order’d” Cape Town was built. The interrelatedness of reason and its supposed opposite is given an ironic twist by the image of democracy among the confined mad of the Slave Lodge, who are “of every race, condition, and degree of Affliction, from the amiably delusionary to the remorselessly homicidal” (152). The confinement allows for sadistic pleasure to be taken by Cape Town’s hierarchy who revel in their sense of difference from the mad through displays of power which serve only to confirm their own inhumanity: Sometimes for their amusement the Herren will escort a particularly disobedient employee to a Madman’s cell, push her inside, and lock the door. Next to each cell is a Viewing Room where the gentlemen may then observe, through a wall of Glass disguis’d as a great Mirror, the often quite unviewable Rencontre. (152)

The sea is again perceived as the metaphoric realm of the mad, a fact which serves to underline the definition of them as other from the order desired on the land: Some of them hate women, some desire them, some know hate and desire as but minor aspects of a greater, Oceanick Impulse, in which, report those who survive, it is unquestionably better not to be included. Again, some do not survive. When the Herren cannot return their Remains to their villages, they dispose of them by sea, that the Jackals may not have them. (152)

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Pynchon, like Foucault, is aware of the historical changes in the perception of the mad.10 In Mason & Dixon he utilises a wide variety of perceptions of the insane which serve both to foreground their provisionality and underline the intimate relationship between the human need for definition and the imposition of inhumane division which this can foster. The fate of the mad in Cape Town reflects Stoical conceptions of the sea as a realm of fearful chaos and uncontrollable power. However, by being returned there the dead confirm that in return for hegemony over the fate of the mad the enlightened authorities have thrown their own humanity into the sea, and conform to Lillian Feder’s definition of insanity as: A state in which unconscious processes predominate over conscious ones to the extent that they control them and determine perceptions of and responses to experience that, judged by prevailing standards of logical thought and relevant emotion, are confused and inappropriate. (5)

The madness of the Age of Reason is, as Pynchon figures it in Cape Town, confirmed by its failure to distinguish between the symbolic product of unconscious processes which turn the sea into a symbol, and its own conscious authoritative acts. There are parallels here with the manner in which Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon comes to be related by its narrator, the banished Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke. The tale is made possible by Cherrycoke’s escape from imprisonment in England, which he avoids by claiming to be insane and so taking advantage of the authorities’ endorsement of the belief that “Sea voyages in those days being the standard Treatment for Insanity, my Exile should commence for the best of Medical reasons” (10). Cherrycoke’s liberty is thus made possible by medical Reason’s imposition of fact on a perception of the sea as a restorative to mental health which is steeped in mythic associations and outmoded ancient medical speculation. Mason is also aware of the sea’s regenerative influence. His desire to alleviate his hyperthrenia makes him “eager to be aboard a ship, bound somewhere impossible,– long voyages by sea being thought to help his condition” 10

Palmeri notes extended patterns of similarity between Pynchon and Foucault’s work, while both Palmeri (para. 38) and Collado Rodríguez (500) note explicit references to Foucault’s work in Mason & Dixon.

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(25). Such views have gained currency in the world of the novel. Outside it this power to misconceive myth as reality, fiction as medical fact, mirrors Thomas Szasz’s condemnation of the practices of twentieth-century psychiatry in the wake of Sigmund Freud’s impact upon it. Szasz argues that Freud’s work dramatically influenced perceptions of the insane which gave credence to forms of treatment which were not only ineffective but inhumane. In relation to Pynchon’s novel, Szasz’s theories offer a historical model for the “literalization” of the treatment of mental illness which the Enlightened authorities fall back on in their efforts to assert control over a seemingly unknowable condition. Szasz claims that when the early (nineteenth century) psychiatrists spoke of mental diseases or diseases of the mind, they understood, and often explicitly stated, that these expressions were figures of speech or metaphors. (140).

For Szasz, a change occurred with Freud’s success in jettisoning “the linkage between insanity and somatic illness and [his substitution of] an analogy or putative identity between insanity and a normal, everyday feature of inner (mental) experience, namely, dreaming” (141). A consequence was the “literalization of the metaphor of mental illness,” which for Szasz was exemplified by Freud’s cryptochemical theories of actual neurosis (and other mental illness) and by the neurochemical fantasies of contemporary psychopharmacologists […]. After the Freudian revolution got under way […] psychiatrists began to insist – as they now typically do – that mental illness, far from being a metaphor, is literally an illness like any other illness (that it is always and without doubt a disease of the brain). (141)

In Szasz’s view the status of medical treatment also changed, for “if the conditions psychiatrists seek to cure are not literal diseases, then the procedures they use cannot be literal treatments” (163). By viewing insanity as related to the brain rather than the body highly invasive medical practices from lobotomy to electrotherapy gained credibility.11 For Szasz the nature of such treatments reflected the 11

See also Valenstein.

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spurious fantasies which the Freudian revolution had given credence to and made legitimate. Pynchon’s depiction of Cherrycoke’s “insanity” brings to the fore further recent models used in the definition of mental illness which differ from those of Feder and Szasz. For R. D. Laing, “true sanity […] entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality” (The Politics of Experience 144–45). As Feder explains, A central idea in Laing’s The Politics of Experience is that human beings having lost their “selves,” have “developed the illusion that we are autonomous egos.” He contrasts the “transcendental experiences” which are “the original well-spring of all religions” with what he calls the “egoic” approach to reality of most people; the experience of “the world and themselves in terms of a consistent identity, a me-here over against a you-there, within a framework of certain ground structures of space and time shared with other members of their society.” To Laing, “egoic” experience […], is essentially a form of “socially accepted madness,” on the other hand, a state of “ego-loss” generally regarded as psychotic, may be for the person involved “veritable manna from heaven.” (Feder 281–82)

Aspects of Laing’s contentious but influential views inform Cherrycoke’s explanation of the circumstances leading to his exile at sea. The narrator of Mason & Dixon relates that he had committed “one of the least tolerable Offences in that era, the worst of Dick Turpin seeming but the Carelessness of youth beside it, – the Crime they styl’d ‘Anonymity’”( 9). He goes on to declare that I left messages posted publicly, but did not sign them. I knew some nightrunning lads in the district who let me use their Printing-Press,– somehow, what I got into printing up, were Accounts of certain Crimes I had observ’d, committed by the Stronger against the Weaker,– enclosures, evictions, Assize verdicts, Activities of the Military,– giving the Names of as many of the Perpetrators as I was sure of, yet keeping back what I foolishly imagin’d my own, till the Night I was tipp’d and brought in to London, in Chains, and clapp’d in the Tower. (9)

Cherrycoke is seen to have lost the self he felt he had, and in its place is confronted by the fact that what he had considered his own (his name, his freedom), was nothing next to the power the Enlightened authorities of his age had over all these elements. The

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challenge he offered these authorities, through the moral act of his exposés, was to withhold his own name and so attempt to assert a form of selfhood unsanctioned by them. The realisation that the autonomy of his own self was a myth in the face of the repressive and all-pervasive power of Reason’s authority, is brought home to Cherrycoke in an ironic vision of transcendence: It took me till I was lying among the Rats and Vermin, upon the freezing edge of a Future invisible, to understand that my name had never been my own,– rather belonging, all this time, to the Authorities, who forbade me to change it, or withhold it, as ’twere a Ring upon the Collar of a Beast, ever waiting for the Lead to be fasten’d on… One of those moments Hindoos and Chinamen are ever said to be having, entire loss of Self, perfect union with All, sort of thing. (10)

Here Cherrycoke’s experience of, to use Laing’s term, “ego-loss,” confirms that his own former belief in the autonomy of his ego was indeed a form of “socially accepted madness.” From the moment in Cherrycoke’s account that this bleak realization is reached the tone of his narration changes, as with growing relish he begins to recount the manner of his escape from this plight: Strange Lights, Fires, Voices indecipherable,– indeed, Children, this is the part of the Tale where your old Uncle gets to go insane,– or so, then, each in his Interest, did it please ev’ryone to style me. (10)

Realising he has no autonomous selfhood that is not the property of Reason Inc., he embraces the epithet “insane” and the non-identity it infers, and in doing so enters a state which in the eyes of the authorities is one in which the self is truly lost. For Cherrycoke it is a state which perfectly reflects his new realisation that in the world of the sane he was never free. Insanity, therefore, as is it did for Zoyd Wheeler in Vineland, offers a means of escape from hegemonic forces and social control, and provides the narrator of Mason & Dixon with a passport to a new form of selfhood. What Pynchon recognises in Mason & Dixon is the need to acknowledge the validity of the delusions of others, to recognise the legitimacy of values and beliefs which by their very existence contradict conventional assumptions and beliefs. The fact

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that Zoyd Wheeler’s social conformity is outwardly confirmed through an act of irrationality highlights the prevalence of an order of values which can only be defined by its perceived distance from such acts. Figured here is Pynchon’s recognition that the opposed states of rationality and irrationality are intimate bed-fellows, as the existence of one depends on the existence of the other. Wheeler’s recognition of this fact turns his act from one of mere conformity to a deliberate and positive compromise, allowing him to maintain his freedom through his role as madman. To fail to make such compromises is to insist on oppositions and a drawing of boundaries which define out of existence all that is on the other side. In Mason & Dixon’s Cape Town the imposition of a privileged selfhood by the town’s authorities dehumanises them at the same time as it deconstructs the opposition between sane and insane. The claim for the exclusive legitimacy of its own power is based on the annihilation of that which it perceives to be other. Cherrycoke’s new identity is, however, one which sees him make a home in the contentious spaces which boundaries create, while attaching himself to no side but his own. Liberty is again associated with madness, but both Wheeler and Cherrycoke consciously embrace it as a role which allows them to highlight and transcend the divisions within their respective societies while retaining their freedom. Cherrycoke’s sea-bound exile as family loon, if we compare it with the Laing model of insanity, sees him embrace a status consistent with what Laing terms man’s “inner” or “true” self. This state, which exists in opposition to the “egoic self,” is seen by Laing to be “occupied in maintaining its identity and freedom by being transcendent, unembodied, and thus never grasped, pinpointed, trapped, possessed” (94–95). Cherrycoke’s new identity is appropriately shifting and changeable. As the “nomadic Parson” and “Family outcast” (10) his seaborne life makes him both exotic and mysterious, providing him with license to fulfil his role as storyteller, while his fabulous histories leave his audience continually aware that the territory he patrols is the boundary between truth and falsehood. Mason & Dixon is Cherrycoke’s tale and it continues to embody the characteristics of the exposés for which he was condemned by taking the form of an account of the perverse ethics inherent in the Age of Reason which underlay the divisive product of Mason and

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Dixon’s partnership. His status as a wanderer by sea and land, and a teller of fantastical tales, his melancholy following the passing of Mason (8), and his role as the timekeeper of the novel, make him a true child of Saturn. Such associations are bolstered by the acronym of the book’s title, M. A. D. In such ways Pynchon underlines the importance of the history of insanity to his memorialisation of man’s need for division and definitions which nevertheless give credence to the inhumanity of conflicts such as the one the Mason-Dixon Line will forever be associated with. To recognise complicity is, in Mason & Dixon, a vital sign of the awareness which Pynchon looks to promote as offering hope of the possibility of ethical action and resistance amid a world of division and conflict. The role of the sea in the novel brings to the fore Mason and Dixon’s own recognition of their responsibility as the novel concludes with an acknowledgment that the sea is also the means by which the spread of reason’s authority is assured, and with it the evil being perpetuated in its name all over the globe. At the end of the novel Dixon asks of his cohort: “Ev’rywhere they’ve sent us,– the Cape, St. Helena, America,– What’s the Element common to all?” “Long Voyages by Sea” replies Mason, blinking in Exhaustion by now Chronick. “Was there anything Else?” “Slaves. Ev’ry day at the Cape, we lived with Slavery in our faces,– more of it at St. Helena,– and now here we are again, in another Colony, this time having drawn a Line between their Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers, as if doom’d to re-encounter thro’ the World this public Secret, this shameful Core… Pretending it to be ever somewhere else, with the Turks, the Russians, the Companies, down there, down where it smells like warm Brine and Gunpowder fumes, they’re murdering and dispossessing thousands untallied, the innocent of the World passing daily into the Hands of Slave-owners and Torturers, but oh, never in Holland, nor in England, that Garden of Fools? Christ, Mason.” (692–93)

The sea which Oedipa longed for but never came near to, and the hope embodied within it, is also, prior to Mason and Dixon’s last transit, the subject of their projected hopes and dreams for the future: “[…] what’ll yese do now?” “Devise a way,” Dixon replies, “to inscribe a Visto upon the Atlantik Sea.”

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Ian D. Copestake “Archie, Lad, Look ye here,” Mason producing a Sheaf of Papers, flapping thro’ them,– “A thoughtful Arrangement of Anchors and Buoys, Lenses and Lanthorns, forming a perfect Line across the Ocean, all the way from the Delaware bay to the Spanish Extremadura,”– with the Solution to the Question of the Longitude thrown in as a sort of Bonus,– as, exactly at ev’ry Degree, might the Sea-Line, as upon a Fiduciary Scale for Navigators, be prominently mark’d by a taller Beacon, or a differently color’d Lamp. In time, most Ships preferring to sail within sight of these Beacons, the Line shall have widen’d to a Sea-Road of a thousand Leagues, as up and down its Longitude blossomed Wharves, Chandleries, Inns, Tobacco-shops, Greengrocers’ Stalls, Printers of News, Dens of Vice, Chapels for Repentance, Shops full of Souvenirs and Sweets,– all a Sailor could wish,– indeed, many such will decide to settle here, “Along the Beacons,” for good, as a way of coming to rest while remaining out at Sea. (712)

This imagined utopia at sea is soured in the instant that it is dreamed, for the narrator’s extended contemplation on this vision of Mason and Dixon’s retirement finds the outstretched hand of Reason Inc. acquiring the rights to the oceans: Too soon, word will reach the Land-Speculation Industry, and its Bureaus seek Purchase, like some horrible Seaweed, the length of the Beacon Line. Some are estopp’d legally, some are fended directly into the Sea, yet Time being ever upon their Side, they persist, and one Day, in sinister yet pleasing Coral-dy’d cubikal Efflorescensce, appears “St. Brendan’s Isle,” a combination PleasureGrounds and Pensioners’ Home, with ev’rything an Itinerant come to Rest might ask, Taverns, Music-Halls, Gaming-Rooms, and a Population ever changing of Practitioners of Comfort […]. ’Tis here Mason & Dixon will retire, being after all Plank-Holders of the very Scheme, having written a number of foresighted Stipulations into their Contract with the Line’s Proprietor, the transnoctially charter’d “Atlantic Company.” Betwixt themselves, neither feels British enough anymore, nor quite American, for either Side of the Ocean. They are content to reside like Ferrymen or Bridge-keepers, ever in a Ubiquity of Flow, before a ceaseless Spectacle of Transition. (712–13)

Such a projected retirement at sea suggests Mason and Dixon’s complicity in the appropriation of the many realms they have encountered. As a result their own identity is left to merge with the ceaselessly flowing element which has facilitated the world’s transition into sameness. With madness taking over the land and insane reason seemingly also setting its sights on the sea, there is a need for a new refuge which

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can hold out the possibility of resistance to the divisive and inhumane values taking root fast throughout history. In Mason & Dixon the motif which is promoted in the light of the threat both to insanity and the sea as embodiments of escape or redress is the value of fictionmaking itself. As in The Crying of Lot 49, the act of metaphor is still very much “a thrust at truth and a lie” (89), reflecting as it does in Mason & Dixon the capacity for the authorities of the Enlightenment to believe in the fictions they inherit, and so impose their beliefs through the etching of dividing lines across the globe. A part of Mason & Dixon’s own thrust at truth is carried by the novel’s celebration of the absurd, the puncturing of its historical realism with flights of fantasy, in which the human imagination is allowed free reign. Palmeri states that Pynchon’s earlier novels, including The Crying of Lot 49, resist suggesting a way forward from the paranoia which grips these novels’ characters: [Pynchon] implies instead that it is necessary if almost impossible somehow to combine the urge to order and meaning with a skepticism that recognizes the fruitfulness of disorder and unpredictability. (para. 24)12

A way forward from this point is through the promotion of an awareness which recognises the delusory nature of all ideals and so sees us follow Cherrycoke to the liminal states and boundary lines enabling us to see more clearly our own relationship to the contending positions of power which dominate society. By not rejecting the form and order which beliefs and ideals give to a society we are all responsible for the injustices which result, but by recognising that fact and the provisionality of the ideals and values which define and legitimise them, independent ethical action remains possible. To recognise and accept the inevitability of delusion is the key, and it is this which turns Pynchon’s celebration of the imagination in his novel into a stance of ethical resistance as he populates his novel with creations of the human imagination which do not insist on being seen as anything other than unreal and fantastical. 12

Reflected here are Pynchon’s continued efforts to locate the modern self between extreme polarities of order and chaos which Tony Tanner identified as a vital characteristic of American fiction from the 1950s to the 1970s. See Tanner 153–73; O’Donnell 10–11.

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Works Cited Auden, W. H. The Enchafèd Flood: or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea London: Faber & Faber, 1951. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978. Collado Rodríquez, Francisco. “Trespassing Limits: Pynchon’s Irony and the Law of the Excluded Middle.” Oklahoma City University Law Review 24 (1999): 471– 503. Feder, Lillian. Madness in Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. 1961. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Tavistock, 1967. Gilchrist, Ebenezer. The Use of Sea Voyages in Medicine. London: T. Cadell, 1771. Grange, Kathleen M. “The Ship Symbol as a Key to Former Theories of the Emotions.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 36 (1962): 512–23. Guzlowski, John Z. “No More Sea Changes: Hawkes, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Barth.” Critique 23. 2 (1981): 48–60. Jackson, Stanley W. Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. Kiely, Robert. “Being Serious in the ’Sixties: Madness, Meaning and Metaphor in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Crying of Lot 49.” Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 12. 2 (1984): 215–237. Klibansky, Raymond. Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art. London: Thomas Nelson, 1964. Laing, R. D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness.1960. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1971. —— The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise.1967. Middlesex: Penguin, 1981. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. 1851. New York: W.W. Norton, 1967. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite.1959. New York: Norton, 1963. O’ Donnell, Patrick. “Introduction.” New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49. Ed. Patrick O’ Donnell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 1–20. Palmeri, Frank. “Other than Postmodern? Foucault, Pynchon, Hybridity, Ethics.” Postmodern Culture 12. 1 (2001): 39 pars. 02 December 2002 . Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1965. London: Picador, 1979. —— Vineland. 1990. London: Minerva, 1991. —— Mason & Dixon. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997. Stein, Roger B. “Seascape and the American Imagination: The Puritan Seventeenth Century.” Early American Literature 7 (1972): 17–37. Szasz, Thomas. Insanity: The Idea and its Consequences. New York: John Wiley, 1987.

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Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970 New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Valenstein, Elliot S. Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Wharton, Donald B. “The Colonial Era.” America and the Sea: A Literary History. Ed. Haskell Springer. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. 32–45. —— “The Revolutionary and Federal Periods.” America and the Sea: A Literary History. Ed. Haskell Springer. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. 46–63.

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Notes on Contributors

FRANCISCO COLLADO RODRÍGUEZ was educated at the universities of Extremadura and Edinburgh and is Professor of American Literature at the Department of English and German at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. He is the author of a number of articles on Thomas Pynchon, Bharati Mukherjee, Kurt Vonnegut and E. L. Doctorow. In addition to editing two books on recent fiction, he has written extensively on the influence of fantasy, myth and scientific discourse on twentieth-century American and English literature. He is at present writing a book on the complete works of Thomas Pynchon. IAN D. COPESTAKE teaches English and American literature at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt. He gained his PhD from the University of Leeds completing a dissertation on the poetry of William Carlos Williams. He is the editor of Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams (2003), and is currently writing a book on madness and the sea in American literature. DAVID DICKSON has a PhD in English literature and is an independent scholar. He works as an upper-secondary school teacher of English and philosophy in Bengtsfors, Sweden. His publications discuss language and innovation, and include articles on Stanley Fish, Emerson, Bakhtin, Pynchon and Susan Howe. His dissertation was published in 1998 and is entitled The Utterance of America: Emersonian Newness in Dos Passos’ U.S.A. and Pynchon’s Vineland. He is currently working on a project on Bahktin and mental change. JOHN HEON is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught postmodern literature and

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received the Distinguished Teaching Award. His dissertation is entitled “The Dionysia of Science: Faustian Fools, Experimental Humor, and Comic Ecologies in Bruce Nauman and Thomas Pynchon.” His publications include “History and Change” (2000, Te Neues), “Delays in Clay” (1999, Helsinki Art Museum), and excerpts from a novel in progress (in Combo, 2001). ROBERT L. MCLAUGHLIN is Associate Professor of English at Illinois State University. His work on Thomas Pynchon has appeared in Pynchon Notes, the Oklahoma City University Law Review Symposium on Thomas Pynchon and the Law, Germany and German Thought in American Literature and Cultural Criticism, and Visions of War. He edited Innovations: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Fiction and is Senior Editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction. WILLIAM B. MILLARD, PhD, works at Columbia University’s Center for New Media and Learning. He edited Columbia’s research magazine 21stC and has written literary and cultural commentary for Postmodern Culture, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and other publications. His most recent scholarly publication is “The Fable of the Ants: Myopic Interactions in DeLillo’s Libra” in Critical Essays on Don DeLillo, eds. Ruppersburg and Engles (2000) MARTIN SAAR is writing a dissertation and teaching at the department of philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt. He has published articles on Nietzsche, Foucault and contemporary aesthetics and co-edited with Gerald Echterhoff Kontexte und Kulturen des Erinnerns: Maurice Halbwachs und das Paradigma des Kollektiven Gedächtnisses (2002), and, with Axel Honneth, Michel Foucault: Zwischenbilanz einer Rezeption. Frankfurter Foucault-Konferenz 2001 (2003). DAVID SEED holds a Chair in the School of English at Liverpool University. His first book was The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (1988), and he contributed an article on

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surveying to Pynchon and Mason & Dixon (2000), eds. Horvath and Malin. He has also published books on Heller, Joyce, and American Science Fiction and the Cold War, among other topics. He is the editor of the Science Fiction Texts and Studies series of Liverpool University Press and is currently completing a study of representations of brainwashing in fiction and film for Kent State University Press. CHRISTIAN SKIRKE is a part-time teacher in philosophy at the University of Essex. Before turning to philosophy, he studied architecture, urban planning, and architectural theory in London and Stuttgart. He has an MA in the history and theory of architecture from the University of East London and an MA in philosophy from Essex where he is currently completing doctoral research. DAVID THOREEN is Chair of the English Department at Assumption College, Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches creative writing and twentieth-century American literature. His essays have appeared in Pynchon Notes, the Oklahoma City University Law Review’s symposium on Pynchon and the Law, and ANQ, as well as Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins (2002), ed. Niran Abbas.

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Index

Adams, Henry 110 Aesthetics 35–46 Althusser, Louis 21, 180 Aristotle 40, 42, 43, 77 Arnold, Matthew 109 Auden, W. H. 200, 202 Bacon, Francis 117 Baker, Houston 161–62 Bakhtin, Mikhail 174–75 Barthes, Roland 36 Bataille, Georges 158 Baudrillard, Jean 19 Benjamin, Walter 157 Bercovitch, Sacvan 203–04 Bergson, Henri 150 Bertens, Hans 7–9 Bhabha, Homi 169 Blake, William 77 Boorstin, Daniel J. 19 Booth, Wayne 99–101 Borges, Jorge Luis 74, 76 Boulding, Kenneth 18 Brockman, John 89–91 Brown, Curtis M. 173–91 Burroughs, William 16–17, 27 Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) 29 Causabon, Meric 203 causality 49–57 chaos theory 72, 74, 75 Collado Rodríguez, Francisco 50 Colvin, Joe 148 Conner, Marc 36 Couturier, Maurice 28 Cowart, David 85, 113 cyberpunk fiction 16, 110

Davis Jr, Sammy 154 deconstruction 83 DeLillo, Don 109 Derrida, Jacques 86, 104–05, 158 de Vaucanson, Jacques 131–32 Dick, Philip K. 19 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 78, 85 Donadio, Candida 28–29 Dos Passos, John 28, 42 Dr Strangelove (film, 1963) 20 Duchamp, Marcel 158 Ellison, Ralph 155–157, 166, 168 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 36, 38, 42, 58 Enlightenment 76, 77, 80, 83–124, 129–45, 201, 204–13 ethics 9, 35, 45, 115, 197, 210–11, 213 Fail-Safe (film, 1962) 20 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) 41–44 Feder, Lillian 206, 208 Forman, Paul 123 Foucault, Michel 79, 123, 158, 182, 201, 205–06 Frankenstein (Shelley) 132–35, 143– 44 Franklin, Benjamin 166–68 Freud, Sigmund 133, 150, 153, 207 Friedman, Alan J. 50 Friedman, Bruce Jay 15 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 35–46 Gaddis, William 20 Gilchrist, Ebenezer 202

222 Ginsberg, Allen 27 Gould, Stephen Jay 107 Grange, Kathleen 201 Grant, Maxwell 22 Harrington, Michael 23 Harrison, John 183 Hayles, N. Katherine 21 Heidegger Martin 40, 41 Heinroth, Johann Christian 202 Hill, Joe 37 Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall 52 historiographic metafiction 71–80 Hite, Molly 49, 52 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 133 Hollander, Charles 28 Horace 106 Humanism 71, 77 Hutcheon, Linda 8–9, 24–25, 71 hybridity 129–45, 147–69 insanity 133, 135, 141, 144, 193–213 Inestone, E. W. 204 intertextuality 36–37, 72, 175 irony 80, 99–100, 112 Jacobs, Jane 22 Jones, Spike 147–69 Jacquet-Drosz, Pierre 131 Keesey, Douglas 52, 61, 157 Kennedy assassination 28–29 Kuhn, Thomas 95–96, 105, 113 Laing, R. D. 208–10 Lombroso, Cesare 39 Mailer, Norman 109 Malcolm X 27 mapping 25, 79, 173–91 Marwick, Arthur 15 Mattessich, Stefan 85 McElroy, Joseph 109

Index McLuhan, Marshall 15–31 melancholy (melancholia) 78, 130, 201–04, 214 Melley, Timothy 27–28 Melville, Herman 36, 201, 202–03 Menand, Louis 85 Mendelson, Edward 55 More, Henry 203 morality 49–69 Müller, Johannes 117 Nabokov, Vladimir 29, 74 narrative techniques 60–61, 71–80, 102–05, 122 Newton, Sir Isaac 181 Newtonian physics 71, 72, 77 Nietzsche, Friederick 157–58 Ocker, David 149 Palmeri, Frank 8–9, 197, 206, 213 paranoia 8, 27–28, 31, 50, 85, 193– 213, 204, 213 Perry Mason (TV series) 29 philosophy 35–46, 83–124 Plath, Sylvia 27 Plato 40 Poe, Edgar Allan 133–34 postmodern historiography 51, 62 postmodernity and science 55, 83– 124 poststructuralism 8, 36–37, 49, 56, 79, 83–124, 175 Puritanism 203 Pynchon and humour 99, 102–03, 147–69; and politics 37–45, 63–69; and postmodernism 7– 13, 24–25, 49–69, 71–80, 83– 124; and science 72, 75, 83–124, 173–91; Gravity’s Rainbow 18, 51–52, 54, 55, 56–57, 60, 61, 62, 65, 76, 88, 93–94, 106, 110, 112, 114–15,

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Index 130, 141, 142, 146, 166, 174– 75; Mason & Dixon 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 45, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 58–63, 71–80, 83–124, 129– 45, 147–69, 173–91, 193–213; Slow Learner 91, 95; The Crying of Lot 49 10, 12, 15– 31, 58, 105, 130, 193–213; V. 15, 16, 18, 58, 64, 72, 76, 79, 105, 130, 149; Vineland 8, 10, 11, 49–69, 88, 94, 106, 130, 194, 209 quantum physics 50, 55, 56, 62, 72, 75 racism 149–169 Raudaskoski, Heikki 36, 46 Ray, Man 158 relativism 121–22 relativity 50, 72 religion 83–124 Renan, Ernest 109 “Rip Van Winkle” (Washington Irving) 63–69 Romanticism 72, 77, 80, 101, 110, 132–35, 143–44, 200 Rorty, Richard 121 Roth, Philip 15

Schaub, Thomas 28 science 55, 58–59, 204 sea-consciousness 193–213 sea deliverance narratives 203 Snow, C. P. 83–124 Sokal, Alan 91 Sophocles 42 Spiegelman, Art 148 Streitfield, David 61 sublimity 108–14, 200, 202 Swerdlow, Noel 117 Swift, Jonathan 105 Szasz, Thomas 207–08 Tabbi, Joseph 110–14 Tanner, Tony 28 Tchaikovsky, Piotr 153 The Simpsons (cartoon) 149, 154 Thoreau, Henry David 204 Todorov, Tzvetan 29 van Frassen, Bas 112 von Kempelen, Baron 131 Weiskel, Thomas 110 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 100 Wolfe, Bernard 15–16 Wood, Denis 174–91 Wood, James 108–14