#82: Mason and Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon

Charles Mason was an astronomer active in the second half of the 1700s. Jeremiah Dixon was primarily a surveyor, though at the time the two professions, astronomer and surveyor, seemed to overlap quite a bit. You were either out in the field with a sexton or a theodolite at night to measure the altitudes of various stars, or you were out with those same instruments in the daytime to take the elevation of the sun and thereby to establish boundaries between territories. Mason and Dixon worked together over a period of several years after 1760.

Most people probably know that “the Mason Dixon line” is shorthand for the cultural border between the southern and northern US; historically, it was an east-to-west line that was surveyed by Mason and Dixon in the early 1760s to establish the border between Pennsylvania (a colony where slavery was illegal) and Maryland (a colony where slavery was legal).

Most of Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason and Dixon deals with the adventures of the two astronomer/surveyors as they work their way westward from the tidelands of Delaware, past the Susquehanna River and across the Allegheny Mountains, from settled farmland to what was then primeval forest traversed by Indian pathways. But some space is dedicated to the earlier adventures of the two as they observed the Transit of Venus in 1761 from South Africa, and then to a peculiar sojourn by Mason on the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic (which is where Napoleon Bonaparte was to live out his final years a couple of decades later). A Transit of Venus is when the planet Venus passes in front of the sun. They are rare, and have always been of interest to astronomers:

Venus transits are historically of great scientific importance as they were used to gain the first realistic estimates of the size of the Solar System. Observations of the 1639 transit provided an estimate of both the size of Venus and the distance between the Sun and the Earth that was more accurate than any other up to that time. Observational data from subsequent predicted transits in 1761 and 1769 further improved the accuracy of this initial estimated distance through the use of the principle of parallax. [Wikipedia]

You can pick up a lot of information about what was going on in the late 18th century from reading Mason and Dixon: about the two principal characters first of all, but also about various scientists, politicians and adventurers of that time, and about America, England, South Africa, and St. Helena as well. For example, if you didn’t know about Admiral of the Fleet Sir Cloudesley Shovell and how he came to grief on the Scilly Isles off the southwest coast of England in 1707, you could find out by reading Mason and Dixon. Wikipedia makes a wonderful companion as you read the book—useful for determining where history leaves off and Pynchon’s imagination begins.

Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson all make appearances. But this is not an historical novel in the usual sense. Rather, the period and its people are the raw material from which Pynchon crafts one of his peculiar entertainments. Pynchon, it should be said, does not write realist fiction; but nor does he dispense with reality altogether. Reality, in fact, might be Pynchon’s true subject, and in the course of trying to take its measure he routinely crosses into and out of the territory that we would describe as realistic historical fiction.

Though the book has a reasonably satisfying arc, giving us convincing and engaging summaries of the lives of its two major protagonists—leaving aside the question of whether the personalities Pynchon assigns to them correspond with their actual personalities; given how well he has immersed himself in their diaries and correspondence, it seems likely that he has captured some of the essence of the two men—the great pleasure of reading Pynchon is in endless series of humorous, fantastic episodes he presents. To begin a new chapter of Mason and Dixon is to wonder what sort of surreal amusement the author has in store.

Consider the matter of the missing 11 days. In 1750, England switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. The problem with the Julian calendar was that it failed to align perfectly with the earth’s annual rotation around the sun; by 1750, the progression of the seasons had moved 11 days ahead of what the calendar indicated. This was beginning to interfere with agricultural planning—planting and harvesting were occurring just a bit too late. There was also the fact that other countries were making the switch and it would be inconvenient to have to set your watch forward or back by 11 days depending on what country you happened to be in. In switching to the Gregorian calendar, Parliament decreed that the 11 days must be made up, such that the day after Wednesday, 2 September 1752 was decreed to be Thursday, 14 September 1752.

To the great majority of the population (likely not up to speed on the astronomical niceties of various calendar types) it was obvious that 11 days were being stolen from their lives; moreover, it seemed quite possible that the 11 days might have been stashed away somewhere for the private use of certain persons—September 3 could not just vanish. What if it was your birthday?

What’s more real—the sun and the earth, or the calendar on the wall? The latter is supposed to be a perfect reflection of the former, but on this occasion, at least, it wasn’t. Here’s Pynchon’s riff on the matter, in the faux eighteenth century prose style he maintains throughout Mason and Dixon:

Mason for a while had presum’d it but a matter of confusing dates, which are Names, with Days, which are real Things. Yet for anyone he met born before ’52 and alive after it, the missing Eleven Days arose again and again in Conversation, sooner or later characteriz’d as “brute Absence,” or “a Tear thro’ the fabric of Life,” – and the more he wrestl’d with the Question, the more the advantage shifted toward a Belief, as he would tell Dixon one day, “In a slowly rotating Loop, or if you like, Vortex, of eleven days, tangent to the Linear Path of what we imagine as Ordinary Time, but excluded from it, and repeating itself, – without end.”

Mason goes on to relate that he, himself, has in fact stumbled into this displaced raft of time:

…the fact is that at Midnight of September second, in the unforgiven Year of ‘Fifty-two, I myself did stumble, daz’d and unprepared, into that very Whirlpool in Time, – finding myself in September third, 1752, a date that for all the rest of England did not exist, – Tempus Incognitus.”

Mason describes a world vacant of all other human life, his to roam for “the better part of a Fortnight”; Dixon wants to know: “Were there yet Horses about?” Mason elucidates:

“Animals whose Owners knew them, made the Transition along with them, to the fourteenth. ‘Most all the Dogs, for example. Fewer Cats, but plenty nonetheless. Any that remain’d by the third of September were wild Creatures, or stray’d into the Valley, – perhaps, being ownerless, disconnected as well from Calendars. I found one such Horse, a Horse no one would have known, as well as two Cows unmilk’d and at large.

The details, surreal yet specific, continue to pour forth. It’s a rabbit hole, in the Alice-in-Wonderland sense, and Mason and Dixon is a vast field of such absurd, comical holes.

Consider, for another example, the matter of Jenkin’s Ear Museum, on the island of St. Helena, as described in Chapter 17. There was in fact a Captain Robert Jenkins (not Jenkin, as Pynchon has it) who had his ear cut off when his ship was stopped and boarded by a Spanish privateer in 1731. Jenkins was later posted to St. Helena, but as far as I can tell, he did not bring the ear with him nor was it later displayed in a museum. But in Pynchon’s alternate universe, he did bring it,

…by then encasqu’d in a little Show-case of Crystal and Silver, and pickl’d in Atlantick Brine. … Eventually, at Cards, Mr. Jenkin extended his Credit too far even for Honorable John. There remain’d the last unavoidable Object of Value, which he bet against what prov’d to be a Cross-Ruff, whence it pass’d into the Hands of Nick Mournival, an Enterpriser of the Town.

And so this Nick Mournival, in the Pynchonian universe, opens a museum for purposes of displaying the celebrated ear. Mason encounters the museum in a somewhat remote corner of the St. Helena countryside. He is obliged to make a rather peculiar entrance:

Reluctantly at last he takes to his elbows and knees, to investigate the diminutive Doorway at close hand, —the Door, after a light Push, swinging open without a Squeak. Mason peers in. What Illumination there is reveals a sort of Ramp-way leading downward, with just enough height to crawl.

The proprietor has a rather elaborate presentation ready:

Mason: “Well,” brightly, “where’s the Ear then, —just have a look if I may, and be off?”

Mournival: “Dear no, that’s not how ‘tis done, I must come along to operate the Show.”

The show is elaborate and bizarre and involves something called a “Chronoscope.” Mason, increasingly desperate, is looking to terminate the episode, but “You ought not to leave, Sir, till you’ve spoken into the Ear. She’ll be a much better Judge of when you may go.” Mason is encouraged to whisper his “fondest Wish” into the ear, but reminded “that the Ear only listens to Wishes, —she doesn’t grant ‘em.”

In summarizing this episode I am skipping over pages of weird and wonderful detail—I have to restrain myself from retyping entire pages. The capper is that the ear is just slightly … animate:

All this while, the Ear reposes in its Pickling-Jar of Swedish lead Crystal, as if being withheld from Time’s Appetite for some Destiny obscure to all. Presently, ‘tis noticed by Mason, —he hopes, an effect of the light, —that somehow the Ear has been a-glow, —for a while, too, —withal it seems, as he watches, to come to Attention, to gain muscular Tone, to grow indeed quite firm, and, in its saline Bath, erect. It is listening. Quickly Mason grips himself by the head, attempting to forestall Panick.

Pynchon is often presented as an artifact of 1960s counterculture—a writer tainted by self-indulgence. Difficult in a way calculated to appeal to a certain kind of nerdy male reader (ahem). So when I reread Pynchon, as I do from time to time, I wonder if I’ll be disillusioned, if I’ll feel the need to repudiate my youthful enthusiasm.

Mason and Dixon, along with V and Gravity’s Rainbow, holds up. I would not care to defend Against the Day from 2006; Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, his most recent books, are fine, though they lack the intensity of the earlier books. Mason and Dixon bears the strongest resemblance, among Pynchon’s books, to his grand opus, Gravity’s Rainbow. I wonder if the author was challenging himself to see if he could write a second book with the density of erudition and wit of the earlier book? The major difference is that Mason and Dixon has a warmth and charm that the earlier book is largely lacking. Gravity’s Rainbow is a fierce book, as horrific as it is funny. During the course of it, its major character, Tyrone Slothrop, essentially disappears: his essence seems to gradually leak away. The book isn’t without emotion, but the love affairs are all doomed and no connection or alliance endures. The presiding science is Behaviorism, as per Pavlov and B.F. Skinner; conditioning, manipulation.

I’m not sure there is a similar presiding science in Mason and Dixon, though the book is permeated with scientific concepts: maybe just the idea of measurement, the notion of imposing a Cartesian framework upon the world. The concept of parallax comes up quite a bit. What’s noticeably different this time around is the attention Pynchon pays to relationships, particularly that between Mason and Dixon. They feel a connection with each other, and they “have each other’s backs,” as we would say today. But, like many career partnerships (not to mention life partnerships), their relationship is defined as much by low-level sparring as it is by harmony:

“Why am I doing this?” Mason inquires aloud of no one in particular. “—Damme, that is an intriguing Question. I mean, I suppose I could say it’s for the Money, or to Advance of Knowledge of, —"

“Eeh, , —regard thaself, thou’re reacting,” says Dixon. “Just what Friend Cresap here said not to do, —thou’re doing it…?”

“Whine not, as the Stoick ever says? You might yourself advert to it profitably, —”

“What Crime am I charg’d with now, ever for Thoo, how convenient?”

“Wait, wait, you’re saying I don’t take blame when I should, that I’m ever pushing it off onto you?”

“Wasn’t I that said it,” Dixon’s Eyebrows headed skyward, nostrils a-flare with some last twinkling of Geniality.

“I take the blame when it’s my fault,” cries Mason, “but it’s never my Fault, —and that’s not my Fault, either! Or to put it another way, —”

“Aye, tell the Pit-Pony too, why don’t tha?”

(It will be observed that certain rhetorical flourishes in this exchange have a distinctly 20th century ring to them. And certain authorial tics, such as ending bits of spoken dialog with an unexpected question mark are also much in evidence? Pynchon’s writing style is decidedly relaxed—it’s not that he’s trying to interfere with your suspension of disbelief, it more that he was never much invested in that suspension in the first place. And yes, there is, as always with Pynchon, a certain self-indulgence at work here.)

Mason is the senior partner, and the more serious of the two, a worrier. He is occasionally visited by the spectre of his dead wife, and he ruminates on episodes from his personal and professional history, worrying where he might have gone wrong. Dixon is a more unbuttoned character, more receptive to the strange notions of the various oddballs the two encounter. Scores of other characters, some historical, some fantastical, most mundane, intersect their course as they do their work. They get winters off: One year Mason goes south to Williamsburg while Dixon goes north to New York. The next year it’s Dixon who goes north, and Mason south. On all such journeys, strange thing happen.

Pynchon seems quite at home in the eighteenth century—the century of Tristram Shandy, Gulliver’s Travels, Johnson’s dictionary, and Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Empiricism was taking hold thanks to Newton and his ilk, yet a certain elusive antic madness also prevailed. You could tame the world during the day, write straight lines onto the uneven ground. But at night, who knew what visitor might decide to drop in?