| Thomas Pynchon's work has been widely focused upon by literary scholars and cultural critics alike -- and not without good reason: Pynchon's works are pleasantly erudite and imbued with a wonderful sense of humor and wonder. His latest, 1997's Mason & Dixon, is a "historical" novel toying with the contemporary reader's sense of history, and history's inhabitants. But this is a simplistic view of Pynchon's work, and no such thing is possible. Justin Scott Coe, in the following, provides one reading of Mason & Dixon, focusing on Pychon's predilection for the biblical, and mythological, and the possibilities of immortality. |  |
Haunting and Hunting: Bodily Resurrection and the Occupation of History in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon [printable version]
Justin Scott Coe
For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised:
And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.
Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.
If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.
I Corinthians 15:16-19 (KJV)These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one.
Rev. Cherrycoke, in Mason & Dixon (359)What?
John Calvin, Institutes
<1> Just before publication of Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
wrote a review of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera,
in which he says that "to assert the resurrection of the body [is] today
as throughout history an unavoidably revolutionary idea" ("Heart's
Eternal Vow"). That this revolutionary idea is essentially a religious
one is a fact that many Pynchon critics attempt to placate by identifying
in his works a secularization of religious themes. Robert Hipkiss identifies,
in place of religion, "a search for an operative spiritual force"
in Pynchon's previous novels, which he assures us is "not to say that
Pynchon finds no validity in religion," but that this "natural emanation
of man's desire for transcendence, an extension of the life force" no
less, is merely a setting for "ideals of conduct" (19,21) [1].
John Krafft blatantly asserts that Pynchon's religious "concepts...are
almost exclusively secular [even "grossly secular" later on], retaining
only the resonances of their formerly sacred significance," and leaving
us only with "a desire of transcendence no longer quite believed in"
(56, 63, 72). In Kathryn Hume's mythography of Pynchon, she finds that, though
he "certainly leaves open the possibility of an afterlife," Pynchon
faults religions for "try[ing] to make death palatable" (129). And
Molly Hite suggests that "Gravity's Rainbow confronts its readers
with the spectacle of a post-religious society committed to a vision
of apocalypse" (157, my emphasis), a spectacle that, as we can see, is
replicated in Pynchon scholarship [2].
<2> Such representative
recuperative exercises fly in the face of Pynchon's direct assertions, in
the above and in earlier essays, such as "Is it OK to be a Luddite?",
that he is not being "Insufficiently Serious" in his "violations
of the laws of nature," especially "the big one, mortality itself."
Again, in "The Deadly Sins/Sloth," he recalls us back to "the
long-ago age of faith and miracle, when daily life really was the Holy Ghost
visibly at work and time was a story, with a beginning, middle and end. Belief
was intense, engagement deep and fatal." In "Luddite", Pynchon
traces this age to just before the eighteenth century, the religious and historical
"setting" for Mason & Dixon when there was a
deep religious yearning for that earlier mythical time which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more or less literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so. Giants, dragons, spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then. What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery. As religion was being more and more secularized into Deism and nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of God and afterlife, for salvation -- bodily resurrection, if possible -- remained (my emphases) [3].
This statement, though flippant
on the surface, is evidence, not of any nostalgia Pynchon might have for this
Age of Miracles, but instead of the "deep religious yearnings" which
create nostalgia for historical times and places, including a need
to believe in future times and places that extend beyond the present life
[4]. Pynchon's latest novel takes up this
eighteenth century yearning and hunger for both history and "futurity,"
and demonstrates that any understanding of history, or of Pynchon, needs to
take into account his serious engagement with the deep-seated religious beliefs
on which America was founded, and which continue to determine our future as
a nation.
<3> The basic premise
of Mason & Dixon is the story of the two famous surveyors of the
American "Line," from their meeting to their deaths, as told by
their companion Reverend Cherrycoke to his relations in Philadelphia on a
night sometime near the Christmas of 1786. With frequent interruptions, explanations,
and interpolations from the Reverend's own writings, his audience, and the
mysterious The Ghastly Fop [5], the
Reverend recounts Mason and Dixon's careers from their voyage to South Africa
and St. Helena to view the first Venus Parallax, to their famous surveying
expedition that resulted in the fateful Mason-Dixon Line, finally ending with
their separate journeys to view the second Parallax. The observation of the
rare Parallax, when Venus's shadow crossed the face of the sun, made it possible
for contemporary scientists to finally measure the volume of the globe, and
thus to determine precise longitudes, a monumental feat for navigation at
the time. We are, however, more familiar with their work in surveying their
Line straight into the American wilderness, using astronomical observation
to "navigate" their way inland in order to settle a property dispute
between the Penns and the Byrds.
<4> The formerly "divine"
stars and spheres are used by Mason and Dixon, both men of science -- an astronomer
and a surveyor, respectively -- as quantifiable points of reference that can
be counted on to cross the zenith of the sky at an exact time when seen from
a corresponding point on the globe, thus making it possible to locate one's
coordinates, or position, on it. The Line's position in the story-line, however,
corresponds not just with a physical and latitudinal boundary but also with
a metaphysical force which, combined with the similar lines of longitude,
creates a rationally based but spiritually constrictive, all-encompassing
grid of right-angled linearity. Zhang, a Chinese feng shui master who
accompanies the surveyors, warns that such a project(ion) has serious spiritual
implications, both dangerous and diabolical: "To mark a right Line upon
the Earth is to inflict upon the Dragon's very Flesh, a sword-slash, a long,
perfect scar...How can it pass unanswer'd?...Tho' Degrees of Longitude and
Latitude in Name, yet in Earthly reality are they Channels mark'd for the
transport of some unseen Influence..." (542, 547). The "plot"
of the novel, therefore, paradoxically revolves around what the Line delineates,
inclusively and exclusively, in the history of its own creation, incorporating
the sources of its origination and recreating boundaries between the spiritual
and physical realms that were just then being conceived at the time of its
creation.
<5> Though referring
to Gravity's Rainbow, Hite is equally correct in reference to Mason
& Dixon when she states that "any comprehensive system for putting
everything together is ultimately a variant on the Judea-Christian myth because
it appeals from a time-bound order to a transcendent perspective" (105).
This "appeal" to transcendence in the eighteenth century Age of
Reason, however, did nothing to simplify the Christian belief in Jesus rising
from the dead, which became an increasingly difficult proposition to "put
together" with new scientific discoveries. Mason and Dixon, as eighteenth
century "Men of Science," are, as Richard Poirier describes their
twentieth century counterparts in Gravity's Rainbow, "haunted,
visited, obsessed and paranoid" (160), caught unawares in the intellectual
paradox of personal tensions between their faiths (Anglican and Quaker, respectively
-- the gamut of Anglo-American Calvinism) and their scientific longings, findings,
measurements, and doubts. Calvin, in the section of the Institutes
on the Lord's Supper, himself expresses this paradox in referring to the doubt
of "hyperbolic doctors" who try to substantiate the transubstantiation
of Christ's body in the Eucharist, and thus "transfigure Christ, after
divesting him of his flesh, into a phantom" (7) [6],
pulling his divinity down to our earthly level:
[I]t is impossible for the mind of man to disentangle itself from the immensity of space, and ascend to Christ even above the heavens. What nature denied them, they attempted to gain by a noxious remedy. Remaining on the earth, they felt no need of a celestial proximity to Christ. Such was the necessity which impelled them to transfigure the body of Christ (15, my emphasis).
Reverend Cherrycoke clearly
takes up Calvin and goes even further to express this dilemma in another form
of what he elsewhere calls his religion of "planet-wide Syncretism"
(356), meshing these paradoxical impeti in a riff on the heretical necessity
of an "Ascent to Christ" through doubt itself:
The Ascent to Christ is a struggle thro' one heresy after another, River-wise up-country into a proliferation of Sects and Sects branching from Sects...into an Interior unmapp'd, a Realm of Doubt...the America of the Soul.
Doubt is of the essence of Christ...The final pure Christ is pure uncertainty. He is become the central subjunctive fact of a Faith, that risks ev'rything upon one bodily Resurrection... Wouldn't something less doubtable have done? A prophetic dream, a communication with a dead person? Some few tatters of evidence to wrap our poor naked spirits against the coldness of a World where Mortality and its Agents may bully their way, wherever they wish to go... (510, my emphases; last two ellipses are his).
The Reverend's "Ascent"
into doubt, recasting the heretical "noxious remedy" of Calvin's
scientific doctors, is continuously demonstrated in Mason and Dixon's act
of surveying their various lines. They become less and less sure about their
"readings" the further they progress south to South Africa, west
into America's "Interior unmapp'd," north to Scotland and the Pole,
and finally East to home and their own pasts. Their doubts range from wondering
who they're working for, manipulated by agents of mortal power -- the Royal
Society, the East India Company, the Jesuits, Franklin's business cronies
-- to their own "desires" in making the Line, variously described
as a "Vector of Desire," a "Coaching-Road of Desire,"
or by its "Dimensions of Desire." The relationship of their desires
with those of other "interests" acts, as Stefan Mattessich observes,
"to fold desire and the object, the time that desire actualizes and the
space that the object defines, into one textual...surface." The message
of this space/time text is an "implication in a totality, an envelopment
of the subject in a pre-personal 'depth' that, beneath or coterminous with
geometric space, commits that subject to an existential immediacy irreducible
to acts of comprehension" (8-9). Thus, the Line that Mason and Dixon
draw onto (and into) the continent's space in turn draws their desires, and
especially Mason's desire for an afterlife, closer to the pre-personal depth
of the age of faith, in which miracles such as bodily resurrection and the
transfiguration of flesh into spirit are possibilities rather then mere theological
necessities. The Line which the novel presents and represents is a communal
desire bridging the corporeal and the spiritual in Western culture, housing
within it, as we find at the end of the novel, a stellar message, or "text,"
that envelopes its subjects [7].
<6> Pynchon's Message
is, in part, a "survey" of history itself, and in particular our
ability to survey time and space with the instrument of Christ's resurrection,
aiming at an exposition of "the Despair at the Core of History,-- and
the Hope" that this promise offers. Reverend Cherrycoke explains to his
listeners:
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 Consquences [sic], flowing from that one Event, design'd and will'd to occur (76-7, my emphasis).
If this is compared to the
passage from I Corinthians 15 cited at the beginning of this essay, we find
that the Reverend follows the latter part of Paul's logic, in which history
is based upon Christ rising from the dead, thus supporting the historical
-- even "secular" -- necessity that the dead also must rise again.
Mason, however, when reading further into this same chapter of Corinthians
(after, appropriately, being thrown from his horse), discovers that Paul's
"case for Resurrection" doesn't connect with Mason's eighteenth
century reading:
Recovering from his Fall, Mason in fact spends his waking time reading I Corinthians, in particular Chapter 15, in which Paul's case for Resurrection proceeds from Human bodies to Animal Bodies, and thence to Bodies Celestial and Terrestrial, and the Glories proper to Each, to Verse 42,-- "So also is the Resurrection of the Dead."
"Excuse me?" Mason aloud. "'So also'? I don't see the Connection. I never did" (409).
Mason, in attempting to
prove what Paul stipulates at the outset, that "the dead rise,"
stumbles on Paul's seemingly simple analogy between the human and the divine.
At this point, ironically, when Mason's Enlightenment rationality cannot connect
with the "Glories" proper to humanity, a voice from "Beyond"
tells him he's thinking too much, a voice that is not "exactly"
his deceased wife Rebecca's, but close enough for him to save it, along with
"Lesser Revelations" that he has "gathered" throughout
the novel, "in a small pile inside the Casket of his Hopes, against an
unknown Sum, intended to purchase his Salvation" (409) -- in other words,
the bodily reunion with his beloved. Yet without the assured salvation
of Christ's resurrection and return -- if the miracle did not/will not take
place, "in time" as it were -- then history can no longer be the
"Connection" between "Bodies Celestial and Terrestrial,"
nor the progression ("how we have far'd") to our cumulative, destined
salvation; it merely serves as a record at "the service of Darkness,--
with all the secular Consequences" thrown in. The hunt for Christ then
becomes the "unknown Sum" of all Western hopes, not just for an
afterlife, but for a history that is not in the service of darkness. Without
that assurance, as Paul says, "we are of all men most miserable."
<7> Mason, the ultimate
representative of this misery (the Reverend stipulates in the end that he
may have died from "Melancholy"), spends most of the novel simultaneously
seeking out and doubting a series of visitations from Rebecca. Her existence
in the world to come, however, becomes increasingly questionable as the novel
progresses -- even though her visitations do not cease. Joel Black says, concerning
the experience of the characters in Gravity's Rainbow, that "[a]s
the evidence of Order in the world becomes increasingly rare...such Order
nevertheless appears to them in increasing abundance" (244). This is
explained, apropos to the eighteenth century setting of Mason & Dixon,
by Leo Braudy: "As the order of God loses explanatory force, there arises
a longing for other orders....Before the Renaissance, God was the only Creator.
With the eighteenth century he became one of many" (622). By setting
his later novel within this time period, Pynchon calls attention to the shift
from a God-oriented to what Kenneth Burke would call a multi-"god-termed"
universe (106 passim), where any signifier of power and primacy can
replace -- and therefore replicate -- the significance of God and His powers.
The result is that Mason is left attempting to find, in whatever "order"
it might exist, any assurance about the possibility of life-after-death. His
investigation begins early in the novel with his question to the seemingly
miraculous anthropomorphic Learned English Dog, or "L.E.D.," who
sings and dances and also carries on extensive philosophical conversations.
Mason hesitantly asks it, "-Have you a soul,-- that is, are you a human
Spirit, re-incarnate as a Dog?" The L.E.D. replies by comparing Mason's
question to certain oriental "religious Puzzles known as Koan,"
for which it is "necessary for the Seeker to meditate upon...until driven
to a state of holy Insanity" when the answer comes up "Mu!"
(a la "moot"). The L.E.D. thus redirects Mason's search onto a more
"reasonable" path: "But please do not come to the Learned English
Dog if it's religious Comfort you're after. I may be preaeternatural, but
I am not supernatural. 'Tis the Age of Reason, rrrf?" Instead, Mason
is directed to rely on "Provisions for Survival in a World less fantastick"
(22).
<8> The L.E.D.'s off-putting
message can be read through the "raffish Gleam in its eye" (18)
[8], and his rendition of his and his kind's
evolution is thoroughly fantastic, employing the Scheherazade survival
motif by "nightly delaying the Blades of our Masters by telling back
to them tales of their humanity"(22). Significantly, this format had
already been introduced earlier as a condition for Cherrycoke's own storytelling,
that "as long as he can keep the children amus'd, he may remain,-- too
much evidence of Juvenile Rampage at the wrong moment, however, and Boppo!
'twill be Out the Door with him, where waits the Winter's Block and Blade"
(6). The opening setting of both science and storytelling is a mode
of survival "in a World less fantastick," a world, ironically, that
requires fantasy for that very survival, or at least for one's sanity.
Followed logically, myth and science occupy this same plane of survival, for
which the messages from the L.E.D. (both on power line and on paw) and from
Reverend Cherrycoke, on whom the novel's tale relies for its own survival,
are both "but an extreme Expression of this Process" (22).
<9> Building upon
this early exchange, Pynchon sets up a controlling dialectic within the novel
between the different worlds of scientific reality and mythical fantasy, another
version of the troubled Christian dichotomy between body and spirit. Dialectic
may not be the correct term here, however, because, in proper Pynchonian fashion,
the worlds are increasingly commingled to the extent that it is hard in most
passages to tell the difference between the real historical experience of
Mason and Dixon, and the various fantastic worlds that swirl at their side.
In Hite's terms, Pynchon is again "undermining the stability of that
apparently rigid entity, the past" (139). Pynchon employs a variety of
methods to destabilize a chronological, linear rendering of history so that
a space is opened for events and people which exist within the outmoded
or forgotten structures, both religious and historical, of past times. There
is, in a sense, an occupation of the space of history in the novel
by those left out of a chronological, secular history which does not include
the "Event" of Christ's resurrection (via bread and/or flesh). Elizabeth
Jane Wall Hinds has explored already one such method, anachronism, which works
to destabilize the text and "erase" lines [9].
But as she sees slippage between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries as
primary, I suggest that even more so is the extreme tangle of corporal and
spiritual "Lines," as is explained in the prefatory passage to Chapter
35 from the Reverend's fictitious book, entitled Christ and History:
"History is not Chronology," but 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). This tangle of lines
cuts across not only chronology but also the boundary that was supposed to
exist between sacred and "secular" history, even, as we have seen,
in the critical appreciation of Pynchon's works.
<10> The destabilization
begins by what may be called a "transubstantiation" of historical
moments and personal destinies. While discussing the possible plots in the
Royal Society involving the East India Company, Mason and Dixon allude to
a "haunting" feeling they've had since their disastrous encounter
on the Seahorse with the French Frigate Defiant which made them
turn back from their first outing to the South. This horrific moment of irrational
violence causes them to doubt not only their scientific but also their personal
and religious eschatologies. Mason floats two possible, and equally fantastic,
explanations: one, that they mistakenly acquired "a piece of someone
else's History," or, two, that there may be "no single Destiny"
but an "unredeemable" teleological culmination in the choices one
makes, which is "reduc'd" to one's destiny as light through a lens
reduces a "vast Field of View...to a single Point" (44-5). Reverend
Cherrycoke describes this experience as "patently a warning to the Astronomers,
from Beyond. Tho' men of Science, both now confess'd to older and more
Earthly Certainties" (47, my emphasis), namely the immediacy and
irrationality of their original plan, and a need for contingencies in order
to placate the "Beyond" that seemed to be out to get them. But this
"Beyond" is exactly what the Reverend describes as the "Destination"
of history's tangled lines, and the moment seems an inverse replication of
Paul's encounter on the Road to Damascus, as well as his assertion in the
same chapter of Corinthians that "we shall all be changed, In a moment,
in the twinkling of an eye" (vs. 51-2). The event of Christ's resurrection
can be replaced by other events, and subsequent events "flowing"
from them may be less salvational and more horrific "secular Consquences...design'd
and will'd to occur."
<11> Mason and Dixon
are thus forced by such a momentous warning from Beyond to confess to less
earthly certainties concerning these disparate plots which they seem to be
experiencing simultaneous to their own:
"Yes, yes, upon the face of it, quite straightforward, isn't it?...[Mason says] And yet, d'ye not feel sometimes that ev'rything since the Fight at sea has been,-- not a Dream, yet..."
"Aye. As if we're Lodgers inside someone else's Fate, whilst belonging quite someplace else...?"
"Nothing's as immediate as it was... We might have died then, after all, and gone on as Ghosts. Haunting this place, waiting to materialize,--perhaps just at the moment of the Transit, the moment the Planet herself becomes Solid..." (75, my emphases, his ellipses).
This "moment,"
we find out near the end of the book through Dixon's trip to the Earth's hollow
center, is when the volume of the planet will be known and the creatures and
space below will disappear as a result of scientific measurement. Mason and
Dixon's disastrous "moment" behind them prefigures the one before,
and they at present haunt their own history, both in the past and future,
neither of which is fully theirs. History thus doubles as the haunting possibility
of both a literal (i.e. scientific) future as well as a mythical (i.e.
storied) past, with the former hunting the latter into nonexistence. And both
are archetypically prefigured in the haunting of (and "Hunt for")
Christ, who died but rose again, and therefore will, one hopes, reappear at
the appropriate salvatory and/or apocalyptic "moment" in history,
incorporating all destinies. It seems that Pynchon, in surveying the
intrusion of Western history into the American continent in the form of the
Line, is assessing in terms of this doctrine the definite secular consequences
of the eighteenth century's loss of faith as a loss of any salvational destiny
whatsoever.
<12> One secular consequence
of the conjunction between belief and doubt is that the callings or beckonings
from the Beyond that Mason is continually experiencing are matched with revelations
that there is, not only no Beyond, but a profound lack where it should
be. This revealing absence is illustrated in Mason's visit on St. Helena to
Jenkin's Ear Museum [10], which begins
with him looking at a miniature of a ship named Rebecca about to be
boarded. The scene forms a miniature of his transformation at the moment of
his own "metaphysickal escape" at sea, as if "the Event [was]
not yet 'reduc'd to certainty.'" This moment he terms a "Dispensation,"
but an ironic one which throws him out of his "certainty" (for a
reunion, or boarding, of the "real" Rebecca), away from "his
last morning of Immortality" into the profound New World of doubt --
"the America of the Soul." He is forced to face the realization
that his own "line," incorporating his life, his lineage, his science,
and his faith, will never "intercept" Rebecca, that she is irredeemably
lost, at least to his well-worn eschatology of other-worldly existence. The
Ear itself redoubles this ironic play on this now existential Dispensation
[11], signifying "the Void"
as "the very anti-Oracle," devouring "human speech" with
a "great Hunger, that never abates." Mason, caught up in "the
Metaphysicks of the Moment," faces the real possibility that all his
longings for an after-life, for the Christian promise of history as a redemptive
enterprise with a teleological and reunifying resolution on the other side,
is merely a "Calling into the Void" (his emphasis) of a divine
ear well-practiced at "revealing nothing, as it absorbs ev'rything. One
kneels and begs, one is humiliated, one crawls on" (177-9).
<13> This less-than-hopeful
"miracle" is among many which Mason and Dixon witness in South Africa
and on St. Helena which, combined, represent Europe's contemporary "death
culture" (Hume 89) and its communication, through colonial forays, into
"other worlds." The Town of St. Helena is a symbolic space of the
madness and darkness of the island's own history, typified best by the locus
of habitation:
A very small town clings to the edge of an interior that must be reckoned part of the Other World. No change here is gradual,-- events arrive suddenly. All distances are vast. The Wind brutal and pure, is there for its own reasons, and human life, any life, counts for close to nought (103).
The island is described
as a lost Paradise, beholden to the Serpent, the "great Worm of Slavery"
(147) that "Rules the Island, whose ancient Curse and secret Name, is
Disobedience" (135). The island, a "conscious Creature" in
its own right, we later find is exclusively the creation of the East India
Company, down to the very thoughts and dreams therein, which offer "the
only Choices within one's Control, those between Persistence and Surrender.
Within their first week upon the Island, all visitors have this Dream"
(108). It is "the visible and torn Remnant of a Sub-History unwitness'd"
(162), as described by its European occupant (and Mason's erstwhile friend)
Maskelyne, an astronomer who is doing observations there when Mason arrives.
Maskelyne's ravings create the impression of a land blighted by divine retribution:
"Aahckk! Mason, can y' not feel it? This place! This great Ruin,-- haunted...an
Obstinate Spectre,-- an ancient Crime,-- none here will ever escape it."
Yet Maskelyne's awareness of St. Helena's diabolical and contrived past is
itself cast into doubt by his own ambiguous semi-diabolical "place"
on this fallen typos, not only as the soon-to-be hereditary head of the Royal
Society (which, but for his low social status, would have been Mason's post),
but also as "the pure type of one who would transcend the Earth,-- making
him, for Mason, a walking cautionary Tale" (128-134). We are left uncertain
with the unpure knowledge of whether this European-contrived nether-kingdom
is an embodiment or a fantasy of moral corruption, due to the unreliability
of its translation into Christian archetypes by its seemingly demented Adam-like
occupant.
<14> Later, when Dixon
visits the East India Company Lodge in South Africa, he witnesses yet another
"fallen" typos in a classic Pynchonian scene of European debauchery.
The Dutch sado-masochism, represented already by the Vroom women's attempts
at seducing Mason (through multiple boddice-rippings and invitations to spank)
for the purpose of reproducing slaves, is further accentuated in a similarly
contrived orgy, which is described as a ritualistic opportunity to transcend
societal norms and delineations, where "Lust is schedul'd, splashing
outside the Church-drawn boundaries of marriage, as across racial lines."
The slave women serve as a "dangerously beautiful Extrusion of everything
these white brother, seeking Communion, cannot afford to contain"
(151, my emphasis). The search for transcendence in Western history is transmogrified
into a diabolical Christian Eucharistic "service." There is even
a Beyond, a horrific "one Room further" in which any bounds of decency
or sympathy are broken in the dark, morally and topographically ambiguous
space of miraculous ecstasy and persecution, ever attempting to connect the
"Bodies Celestial and Terrestrial" of which Paul spoke through pain:
The Penetralia of the lodge are thus, even to those employed there, a region without a map. Anything may be there. Perhaps miracles are still possible,-- both evil miracles, such as occur when excesses of Ill Treatment are transform'd to Joy,-- quite common in this Era,-- and the reverse, when excesses of Well-being at length bring on Anguish no less painful for being metaphysickal,-- Good Miracles (151, my emphases).
This miraculous dichotomy
with reversed attributes is further typologized in the crucificial reproduction
of the Black Hole of Calcutta, which Pynchon calls "some Zero-Point of
history" -- some colonial mythic touch-stone for the resultant sado-masochistic
fantasy which we call modern history -- literally, a "Horror,"
which, as the Rev explains, "If one did not wish to suffer [it] directly...one
might either transcend it spiritually, or eroticize it carnally" (152-3,
his emphasis).
<15> Thus, this first
section of the novel sets up not just the moral but the mortal, carnal scene
on which the West's search for transcendence ends up playing its dirty games.
Transcendence is but one option in relation to the horror of sexual
and racial slavery, the other following a debauched Eros into carnality on
a mass scale, something Pynchon not only does not dismiss out of hand but
lifts up to equal status with spiritual transcendence. Mixed together in the
metaphoric Hole, one has an analogue to the Anubis orgy in Gravity's
Rainbow, a communal apocalyptic orgasm, "some single slow warm Explosion,"
yet with heightened overtones of the terminal suffocation. The "Moral"
of the Hole (which is all the Reverend recounts to his listeners) is "a
small Metaphor of this continental Coercion...practis'd in Reverse" (153),
a recreational representation of victimhood writ large, communicating the
necessity of employing "evil miracles" such as the Black Hole of
Calcutta to "Reverse" the implication of slavery on those who inflict
it. The denial of a transcendent end is not so much a barrier but instead
a Zone in and of itself through which Mason enters personally the sexualized
miasma of Western culture's love-affair with Death. In South Africa and on
St. Helena, just like in the German-controlled Sudwest Africa of V.'s
"Mondaugen's Story," Pynchon "creates a space in which Pynchon
can stage 'orgies of the signifier,' which, in analogy, 'take the place' of
meaning, creating fetish countries of increasing complexity." In like
manner, here as in his earlier work, "Pynchon follows the sexually dead
body into its equally dead culture," thus representing "psychic
and cultural colonization" (Berressem 72). Mason's encounters with Rebecca
on St. Helena, "if sexual, were profoundly like nothing he knew,"
permeated as they were by the West's colonization of his sex life. But this
colonization doesn't quite take the place of meaning, but instead takes place
within the very meaning of the miraculous. Thus, colonization itself
is permeated by miraculous interventions of both the evil and good kinds.
Mason's experience, though thoroughly mediated by the "many-Lens'd Rebekah,"
is also mediated by other "mediating instruments" which turn out
to be mutations of Christian liturgical practice -- namely by commerce, slavery,
and the contrived morality of the gallows (195).
<16> The defining
frame of the South African scene, concentrically replicating Mason and Dixon's
first meeting at a London hanging, and defining the attributes of all their
other loci, is the gallows and slavery, which in turn frame Pynchon's overarching
concern with international human commerce, "for Commerce without Slavery
is unthinkable, whilst Slavery must ever include, as an essential Term, the
Gallows,-- Slavery without the Gallows being as hollow and Waste a Proceeding,
as a Crusade without a Cross" (108). The Christian reference, though
on the surface only a simile (like Paul's), is remarkably apt when the imagery
of crucifixion as a rallying cry of international military action is superimposed
upon the institution of slave commerce. Death as but another form of Christian
commerce -- Calvin's "diabolical" exchange of flesh for spirit and
vice versa -- works as a potent symbol, and part of its potency is the reassurance
that it is a redemptive death one seeks to buy, one which guarantees
to crusader and trader alike the gift of eternal life. Instead of redemption,
however, what is created is, as Mason finds when reflecting on South Africa's
slavery, a "Collective Ghost" incorporating all the "Wrongs"
inflicted on the Slaves and, "propitiated, Day to Day, via the Company's
merciless Priesthoods," which eventually "brings all but the hardiest
souls sooner or later to consider the Primary Questions more or less undiluted,"
leading to as high a suicide rate among Whites as Blacks (68).
<17> The divine carnality
that these southern regions represent is consistently replicated in Pynchon's
use of the Eucharist miracle to embody the fear of earthly violence entering,
or even originating from, the "other side." The intelligences that
exist in the realm of "death transfigured" in Gravity's Rainbow
are given liturgical agency through the most sacred and prophetic (for Western
history) of Christian rites -- the literal transfiguration of bread into flesh.
Mason's disgust with sheep in South Africa is likened to the Eucharist which
in turn connects with his relationship to his father, a baker. This "communal"
element is shared by the novel's main characters, including Reverend Cherrycoke
(driven out of England by his father), who writes empathetically in his journal:
"Lamb of God, Eucharist of bread,-- what Mr. Mason could not bear, were
the very odors of Blood-Sacrifice and Transsubstantiation [sic], the constant
element in all being the Oven, the Altar wherebefore his [father] presided"
(86) [12]. As Calvin preached, God, by
serving up Christ as a "spiritual feast," "performs the office
of provident parent" (1) -- that is, for everyone except the son
being sacrificed. The connecting symbols of son-sacrifice and the oven are
not only symbolic of Europe's genocidal bent, but also suggests personal as
well as religious sources for the desires which lead to death-commerce. The
Reverend is later more explicit about the dubious efficacy of the Lord's Supper
as a "good Miracle," fearing that it might symbolize instead "some
ultimate Carnality:"
The question I cannot resolve is whether real Flesh and real Blood are themselves, in turn, further symbolick,-- either of some mystickal Body of Christ, in which participants in the Lord's Supper all somehow,-- mystickally, to be sure,-- become One,-- or of a terrible Opposite...some ultimate Carnality, some way of finally belonging to the doom'd World that cannot be undone,-- a condition, I now confess, I once roam'd the Earth believing myself to be seeking, all but asphyxiated in a darkling innocence which later Generations may no longer fully imagine (386, my emphasis, his ellipsis).
The reason why "later
Generations," namely us, might miss this is because, as many critics
suggest in reference to Gravity's Rainbow, the "Christian structure
of crucifixion" has given way to "something more frighteningly inclusive,"
a terrible Opposite melding Synthesis and Control into a "dangerous resurrection,"
one that leads not to an afterlife, but to "death transfigured"
(Hume 91-2; Poirier 157). This is what Calvin feared would happen to Christ
if the mind attempted to rise "above the heavens" and entangle Christ's
divinity in the earth-bound "immensity of space." The Reverend,
here, visiting this question of trans- or consubstantiation as pertaining
to a more-than-academic situation, sees in the blood-rite of Christ a threatening
transcendent carnality of Europe, a mutation of Western cultural archetypes
and its instruments, including ovens and altars and scientists, into divine
accoutrements, all performing very real "Blood-Sacrifice."
<18> The transformation
of bread to flesh is intertwined with the equally miraculous transubstantiation
of matter to measurement, and from starlight to message. Venus' Transit is
a symbol of the Enlightenment reversal or inversion of a corporeal and
mythic "body," when "all shall suddenly reverse" when
the "Goddess descended from light to Matter" (92). What actually
occurs is a double transformation from light to matter to the measurement
of the Parallax's "Arc," as Dixon later explains to the already
thoroughly corrupted Vroom sisters: "One day, someone sitting in a room
will succeed in reducing all the Observations, from all 'round the World,
to a simple number of Seconds, and tenths of a Second, of Arc,-- and that
will be the Parallax" (93). This transformation into what Pynchon calls
"Mathesis" is what functions as the ultimate hope of transcendence
as expressed by Maskelyne, all the stars making up "some single gigantick
Equation...to us unreadable, incalculable" (134). DePugh, the Reverend's
academic listener who "has shown an early aptitude for figures,"
earlier describes such encoding as the Parallax's "Vector of Desire,"
whereby, as the Reverend attempts to describe, "the Telescope, in mysterious
Wise, were transporting us safely thro' all the dangers of the awesome Gulf
of Sky, out to the Object we wish to examine" (96). Such a "transport,"
Dixon later explains to Mason, is exactly the same as the Quaker quietist
doctrine requiring one "to sit quietly" for the "Working of
the Spirit," which then abates, and so "another such Visit soon
becomes necessary:" "'tis all Desire,-- and Desire, but Embodiment,
in the World, of what Quakers have understood as Grace" (101). Though
Mason immediately and comically makes failed attempts at this "direct
experience of Christ" ("he keeps jumping up, to turn and interrupt
Dixon, who is trying to do the same, with news of his Progress"), Mason
later in the book cannot help but suffer from this doubled stellar
and spiritual phenomenon, feeling himself constantly projected into the stars
until he can no longer stand to look up at them (769) [13].
The calculations made by the astronomers and those "sitting in a room"
are to transform, both scientifically and religiously, with the help of the
stars, the nature of earth-knowledge, but it does nothing to change the actual
message of the stars -- which remains until the end unreadable. If the mantras
of Pynchon's previous novels were any help -- V.'s "Stay cool,
but care" and Gravity's Rainbow's "proverbs for paranoids"
-- Mason & Dixon's repeated claim that "as above, so below"
both establishes and destabilizes the grasp their numbers have on the earth.
Thus begins the reconfiguration of myth, through the "filling in"
of the earth with matter, to the architectonics of information, which again
become "light" in the form of electrical grids of L.E.D. and fiber-optics,
and (as Hinds and others point out) the internet.
<19> Luckily for the
surveyors, and especially for Mason, they never are quite able to attain this
ultimate and destructive knowledge. Mason's personal desire to eventually
earn his place in the Royal Society's "purer region, where Mathesis should
rule" is foiled by his father's lineage (one "line" failing
another), and he is packed off once again, this time to Scotland to observe
the second Transit of Venus, forced to continue his tedious exposure to "Stars
and Mud" (723-4). On the way back from Scotland, he experiences the dangerous
mixture of these motifs in a ship's hold where the fat of dripping and sliding
sheep carcasses creates a "frictionless" floor, "Mason instantly
recognizing the same proximity to pure Equations of Motion as he felt observing
Stars and Planets in empty Space" (736). The proximity of this farcical
situation to the Blood sacrament of the Eucharist is not lost on the reader,
nor is the realm of the Beyond to which such rites give access. The sacrificial
sheep themselves occupy "a category beyond Dead, in its pointless Humiliation,
its superfluous Defeat," all performing a very different but comparable
"Dance of our Hunt for Christ" in their zombie-like "Ball of
the Dead." The lambs also have their after-life, a further "Abasement"
(they are later thrown in the sea by a Food Riot) whose symbolic destiny,
beyond usefulness or liturgical value is, like Mason's, unclear. This image
can be compared with an earlier reference to the Eucharist by Armond, the
Line-drawing expedition's cook, in which he describes Mason and Dixon's time
in America as, literally and symbolically, sandwiched between the two Transits
of Venus: "Disks of secular Bread,-- enclosing whilst concealing slices
of real Flesh, yet a-sop with Blood, under the earthly guise of British Beef,
all,-- but for the Species of course,-- Consubstantiate, thus...the Sandwich,
Eucharist of this our Age" (367, his ellipsis).
<20> Finally, Mason's
vision of the occupation of the Eleven Days by a band of pygmies and then
by himself is another reversed religious "metaphor," a possible
redemptive inversion of the sado-masochistic Black Hole. The metaphor does
not offer the possibility of freedom or liberation or retribution, however,
but instead illustrates the metaphysical implications released once Time is
"denied its freedom to elapse" (his emphasis), becoming "occupied"
by the chronological colonization of calendar reform. In Mason and Dixon's
field journals (ominously printed by "an ingenious Jesuit device")
Reverend Cherrycoke finds that "cycles" of eleven day intervals
occur repeatedly, "suggesting," as he says, "a hidden Root
common to all...the famous Eleven Missing Days of the Calendar Reform of '52"
(554) [14]. Mason earlier in a frontier
bar drunkenly refers to this usurpation of time, offering to the revelers
a fantastic story about these outlawed days which were taken over by a band
of Pygmies who have since set up plantations of their own in Time, "eleven
days to the Tick behind us." The "more curious" Pygmies are
"ever pursuing us, as might Historians of Times not yet come," and
Mr. Hailstone's reported sighting of one Mason interprets as a mutual experience:
"You haunted each other" (197). We are to these dwarfed historians,
he stipulates, "a mystery Nation [...] a vast Hive of Ghosts not quite
vanish'd into Futurity" (196). The inhabitants of both worlds
are temporalized only in the relationship between being faithful and being
followed, which coalesce in the sense of being haunted and hunted, chased
by strange beings across the border of a doubly "occupied" time.
<21> Mason later gives
Dixon a dubious account of how he himself entered the "vortex"
of the missing eleven days in 1752, transforming their fictive space in the
novel from a drunken fable (with dwarves et al) to a temporal anomaly which
attaches itself to the present moment, both narrated in the story of
the Line and more abstractly considered: "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" (555). This vortex of unanswered insult visits the "Ordinary
Time" of the novel repeatedly as a periodic occupation of the present
by the forgotten, cut-off past. Eliminated by the scientific elites, this
time/space/place thus comes to haunt, by its very non-linearity, the further
scientific act of line-making. What's more, within this vortex Mason
finds "wild Creatures" who subsided into the missing days of magic
possibility because, like the L.E.D., they were "ownerless" and
thus "disconnected as well from calendars" (557). In contrast, Mason
does not find Bradley, the deceased Royal Society chief and his mentor, probably
because the "unexpected depth of his complicity in an Enterprise so passionately
fear'd and hated by most of the People" -- namely the Calendar Reform
-- places him firmly in the scientific elite (or, to use religious terminology,
the Elect), who seem not privy to the Time they exorcised and thus are not
among those who are able to haunt (and hunt others in) the alternate history
of the eleven days. These days are further claimed for the passed-over by
"the sensible Residue of Sin that haunted the place,-- of a Gravity,
withal, unconfronted, unaton'd for," harkening back to the centrifugal
significance of gravity in Gravity's Rainbow [15].
<22> In this propitious,
inbetween-life state, Mason seeks ancient wisdom on the Bodlein Library's
"Secret Shelves, where [normally] none but the Elect may penetrate."
He is haunted there, too, by "something I never saw," rummaging
with him in the "ancient Leaves" and seemingly trying to communicate,
saved from this fearful yet hoped for encounter by the most lowly, yet sacramental,
desire of all-hunger (think Jenkins' Ear's). He rushes into the streets endlessly
moonlit, filled with "all that Reason would deny," a veritable "Carnival
of Fear" with which he "thrill'd" in a fantasy of flight and
moral anarchy, to the point that he wishes to join in and make "a Druidical
Bonfire of the Bodlein." But, falling short of "Human Prey,"
his "Evil Appetite" falls away to melancholy, and he finds when
returning to the Bodlein that he is "Exil'd from the Knowledge"
by a "Barrier invisible," a silent suggestion of "Spiritual
Unease:"
I receiv'd, tho' did not altogether hear, from somewhere, a distinct Message that the Keys and Seals of Gnosis within were too dangerous for me. That I must hold out for the Promises of Holy Scripture, and forget about the Texts I imagin'd I'd seen (560).
Put together, Mason's fantastic
adventure exercises the cohabitation of corporeal hunger and spiritual faith
in the Eucharist, a need for certainty that both cannot and cannot help
but cross the Line into the realm of secret knowledge, through cannibalistic
consumption as represented by the West's colonial conquests of meaning, yet
must ever reside in a melancholic hope for a promised salvation, even without
"the Keys and Seals of Gnosis" to connect him to anything beyond.
As a result, after hearing this message, Mason himself becomes the
literal embodiment of the carnal/transcendent conjunction, briefly "Meditating
upon bodily Resurrection," and then resurrecting his paunch in a "Bacchic
interlude" (which was too good to recount), thus renouncing the gnostic
gleam of knowledge for the L.E.D.'s "raffish gleam," the naïve
scriptural promise of the integrity and the necessity of the flesh [16].
The disconnected and dispossessed, like Mason, are left to take care of their
body and not expect any "consumption" beyond simple nourishment
and promises. The typically Christian "moral" to his travels that
he tells Dixon is that his life, like the eleven days, will end and he (paunch
and all) will "be together again" with Rebecca.
<23> Simplistic as
the end of this tale is, the stipulated vortex offers a glimpse of how the
lines of the past and the future, and the corporeal and the spiritual, can
intertwine. Reflecting on this lost "Chance" at Gnosis, which Mason
describes as lying in the center of the vortex, he felt "oblig'd"
to aim across it "a bit upstream, or toward the Past" -- Pynchon's
"Age of Miracles." Instead he becomes aware at that moment that
the ghostly presences he'd been sensing at the corners of his vision were
"haunting me not from the past but from the Future," that is, from
the day ahead of the Eleven Days to which the rest of humanity had
already jumped. Whether Mason learned his lesson, or whether he missed his
chance, his exploration of the vortex outside of ordinary time sharpens his
and Dixon's ambivalent existence in the present, whose only function
serves, as with the Eucharistic sandwich, to define an unknown, unsubstantiated
knowledge at the center of their tale's spinning: "None of this may be
about either you or me. Our story may lie rather behind and ahead, and only
with the Transits of Venus, never here in the Present, upon the Line, whose
true Drama belongs to others" -- namely we Americans. Mason fears that
he has "merely dream'd it, even this very moment, Dixon, which I know
is real..." (610, his ellipsis). His fear is palpable in that his experience
in the eleven days, from which he drew his scriptural moral of redemption
and reunion, itself might be a dream (as Dixon suspects), and thus,
like the biblical myths, devoid of true flesh-like experience, and therefore
suspect, its "Promises" vain. For Mason's troubled religious sensibility,
if miraculous events are not allowed to occur, then reality becomes ever more
tenuous. Zhang calls this dilemma the "failure of perfect Return, that
haunts all for whom Time elapses" (629) [17].
<24> The pygmies later
reappear in Dixon's (equally dubious) account of his travels to the Inner
Earth, and identify themselves in response to Dixon's questioning in a way
eerily reminiscent of Gravity's Rainbow -- "They are We."
But this Zone of seeming equivalency never reached in Gravity's Rainbow
is exceedingly tenuous, and "will vanish" when the earth is "calculated
inescapably at last," forcing them "to seek another Space,"
perhaps "thy own Surface." They ask Dixon if he truly wishes to
"bet ev'rything upon the Body?-- this Body?", a question he leaves
"in abeyance" (741-2). Outside of these opportunities of transcendence,
we are left with the ambiguity of the novel's tale-telling, mediated by Mason
and Dixon's "Boswell," the Reverend, the real one whom he meets
in Scotland: "a sort of Shadow ever in the Room who has haunted you,
preserving your ev'ry spoken remark" (747). Yet beyond this is Reverend
Cherrycoke's own Boswell, or Boswells, the legion of those dispossessed
by Time and other desacralizing measurements, who haunt the "Room"
of his storytelling, caught in the "Hook of Night" during which
he tells his story -- significantly, a night near the "Advent" event:
When the Hook of Night is well set...slowly into the Room begin to walk the Black servants, the Indian poor, the Irish runaways, the Chinese Sailors, the overflow'd from the mad Hospital, all unchosen Philadelphia....They bring their Scars, their Pox-pitted Cheeks, their Burdens and Losses, their feverish Eyes, their proud fellowship in a Mobility that is to be, whose shape none inside this House may know (759).
The procession of "Mobility,"
of the dispossessed, in which Mason can grudgingly claim fellowship, come
to haunt the "Room" once reserved for Mathesis and European sado-masochistic
rites, telling by their very presence "tales of their own humanity,"
inspiring the Reverend's "host" (by now only his brother-in-law,
who is an arms dealer) to repeal the Scheherazade threat with an expression
of a humanity "less fantastick," namely aid for Mason's sons who
are left in America.
<25> Throughout, the
validity of these stories, of or by Mason and Dixon and the Reverend, is constantly
in doubt, but they nevertheless offer a very real alternative to "poor
cold Chronologies," reverting rather to the developmental and evolutionary
value of the preternatural "Tale," as opposed to supernatural History.
In defending his rendition of the all-too-familiar "family story"
in which Dixon frees slaves from a seller, the Reverend stipulates that such
tales must be "perfected in the hellish Forge of Domestick Recension,
generation 'pon generation, till what survives is the pure truth" (695).
Plugged into his theory of history (and in turn plugged into the role of Christ's
resurrection within Western history), Dixon's mosaic tale becomes part of
a quasi-biblical "common Duty of Remembering" which requires fantastic
events which inhabit the communal memory of humanity -- "how we
dream'd of, and were mistaken in, each other." Thus, the purpose these
tales, saved from their European pre-occupation in Europe and its death-kingdoms
of the South, is "resurrected" here by Pynchon as a controlling
motif through which quotidian dream-scapes can, if not occupy, be at least
radically summoned into "real" earth-bound, enclosed, and circumscribed
human experience. The Native Americans and other southern races, undreamed
of by us, through the extravagance of our violent and sexualized "occupations"
(marveling that we sell them guns to shoot us with), end up in turn occupying
our dreams, our repeated "Fears" (697), our occluded times
and places, including within them the Christian dream of reunion with
loved ones in the bodily resurrection. More immediately, Mason's Line is replaced
by the tangle of "lines" which he himself casts -- his sons, the
final "cast" of the novel -- who are, like himself, the progenitors
of and participants in "a Mobility that is to be." One could call
this "Pynchon's Dispensation," incorporating all that came before
into this future Mobility, even as we try to repress -- forget -- these other
histories of oppression, death, and ideology, by having them occupy a non-linear
vortex of ever-present storytelling tangential to our own violent past and
ominous future [18].
<26> Christ's death
and resurrection is writ large over the history of the West, particularly
as it is written over the histories of spaces considered blank, such as the
American wilderness. The historical texts, however, do not mesh with the grid-lines
and networks of points simultaneously plotted on the land with "enlightened"
rationality, creating what Zhang calls "Bad Energy," a series of
mutations on the Christian theme of redemption and the "new Dispensation"
embodied in Christ's resurrection and its prefiguration in the Lord's Supper.
As the eighteenth century Deistic God withdraws from the corporeal Earth,
the possibility of bodily resurrection takes on forms of horror, such as human
commerce and genocide, which emphasize the carnal rather than the miraculous
manifestation of Christ's (and our) transformation between flesh and spirit
on this continent, as on others. Thus, in conquering and mapping the earth
through rationalized methods of science, the West has infected the weighed
and measured globe with a religious sensibility gone horribly wrong.
<27> We should remember, however, that what drove Mason & Dixon to measure the Parallax, as described by the Reverend, is not "the Heavenly Event by itself, but rather that unshining Assembly of Human Needs, of which Venus, at the instant of going dark, is the Prime Object,-- including certainly the Royal Society's need for the Solar Parallax, -- but what of the Astronomers' own Desires, which may have been less philosophical?" (102, my emphasis). We might see in Pynchon's own practice, as he saw in Garcia Marquez's, a world "haunted less by individual dead than by a history which has brought so appallingly many down, without ever having spoken, or having spoken gone unheard, or having been heard, left unrecorded" ("Heart's Eternal Vow"). Pynchon's "record" itself exists in the interstices of Paul's situating of the promise of redemption in the raising of the dead, offering that promise in a new, literally transubstantiated form which holds all hope in abeyance but invests it with such power that it cannot be ignored. The occupation of History by the dispossessed, while threatening Mason and Dixon's Enlightenment sensibilities, lives on in their haunting presence on the American geopolitical landscape and, more importantly, in the dreams of Mason's children. In a temporally reflexive move at the novel's conclusion, Mason's sons haunt his dreams with their dreams of going fishing with their father, as he did with his. This mutual dreaming, if sentimental, can also be read as a radical restructuring of Christ's purpose in making his disciples, characters in another story, another kind of hunter -- namely, "fishers of men." What they, disciples and sons alike, end up fishing for is a history made of flesh and blood, caught in their tangled communion of lines "with only their Destination in common" (349).
Notes
[1] Charles
Hohmann's observation of Gravity's Rainbow applies equally (and as
disturbingly) to Mason & Dixon: "Either the values the novel
seems to promote are unfounded or at least far-fetched, or the humanist conventions
it flouts are judged inadequate. I believe the latter explanation applies."
This is based not on any religious values, but upon the "anti-rationalism
lying at the heart of the novel" (89). [^]
[2] Though
easily considered part of the spectacle, Joseph Slade in a way explains it:
"Among the many ironies of Protestant rationalization is that an impulse
originally religious has led to the secularization of the world" (66).
Harvey Cox makes the most forceful argument for secularization as the logical
and ultimate culmination of Protestantism in his groundbreaking work on postmodern
theology, The Secular City (1965). [^]
[3] David
Cowart, in "The Luddite Vision: Mason & Dixon," makes
this same connection between Pynchon's earlier essays and his newest novel
(344 passim). He, too, cites "the mounting evidence of Pynchon's spiritual
and metaphysical (even religious [!]) seriousness" (361) and establishes
a helpful, if by now conventional and slightly reductive, postmodern Americanist
alignment of Pynchon's work against technological hegemony and historical
metanarratives. [^]
[4] "Like
their earlier counterparts, 20th-century Luddites looked back yearningly to
another age -- curiously, the same Age of Reason which had forced the first
Luddites into nostalgia for the Age of Miracles" ("Luddite?").
[^]
[5] A fictional
serialized gothic romance which occasionally pops up in the Reverend's story
and then, at one point, takes up the narration of his story. Though not explored
in this essay, the Fop's "ghastly" presence, both in and as the
tale, further links the theme of haunting in the novel specifically to the
act of storytelling (as discussed later in my essay). It is also interesting
and somewhat ironic to note that the immediate critical reception of Mason
& Dixon was an almost universal sigh of relief that at least this
Pynchon novel seemed to follow a discernible narrative "line." For
instance, Rick Moody in Atlantic Monthly Review: "The action of
Mason & Dixon is refreshingly linear, compared with the complexity
of Pynchon's earlier work" (his and other reviews are helpfully linked
by HyperArts at http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/mason-dixon/reviews.html).
[^]
[6] All
references to Calvin are to the paragraph numbers for this section. [^]
[7] A psychoanalytic
reading of these repeated uses of "Desire" to describe the Line's
peculiar energy, often likened to a great "Engine" and even a "Weapon"
is eminently, well, desired, and one could find much in Freud and Lacan (and
Derrida for that matter) to inform on this pathway of desire. Also apropos
would be the anti-psychological "desiring-machine" of Deleuze and
Guattari (cited in Baringer 45), which can be compared to the "Phantom
Shape" that Mason reads in the stars at the end of the novel, seeing
"a great single Engine, the size of a Continent" (772). Especially
relevant, and deserving its own comparison to Mason & Dixon, is
Deleuze's postulated rhizomatic "lines of flight" in A Thousand
Plateaus (1987), which offer a possible postmodern recuperation of organized
resistance to desire as a totalizing mechanism. [^]
[8] "L.E.D."
is, of course, also the ubiquitous Light Emitting Diodes we rely on at sporting
events and bank marquees. A technical internet manual gives an interesting
description that may be relevant to the dog's preternatural role: "In
electronics terms, a diode is a semiconductor device through which current
can go in only one direction. As a side effect, light-emitting diodes
produce visible light. LEDs require very little power and are often used as
indicator lights, including (most likely) the drive access lights on
your computer" ("Game Monitor Scoreboards," my emphases). [^]
[9] According
to Hinds, Mason & Dixon is "a most anxious exploration of
temporal possibility. Recorded time in Mason & Dixon keeps slipping
away, though it be so much an object of finer and fine recalibrations; this
kind of time does not perform consecutively, will not stay within prescribed
lines" (197). Later she states that the novel, "infused with anachronism,
warps the map of history to an extent that eighteenth- and twentieth-century
culture, action, and language are virtually inseparable" (205). One wonders
if, in addition to culture, action, and language, she sees the same anachronistic
cross-over between eighteenth and twentieth century religious belief. [^]
[10] Pynchon
invents this Museum to house the ear which Robert Jenkin reportedly lost to
Spanish torturers, a claim that started "The War of Jenkins' Ear"
in 1739. Jenkin in fact served as the governor of St. Helena for the East
India Company, leading Pynchon to imply a "quid pro quo" (175) for
his services to his "country" ("Jenkin"). [^]
[11] The
OED's theological definition of "Dispensation" is "A religious
order or system, conceived as divinely instituted, or as a stage in a progressive
revelation, expressly adapted to the needs of a particular nation or period
of time, as the patriarchal, Mosaic (or Jewish) dispensation, the Christian
dispensation; also, the age or period during which such system has prevailed"
(their emphases). The first example is from The Westminster Confession of
Faith (1877), an earlier version of which would have been Mason's Anglican
catechism: "There are not therefore two covenants of grace, differing
in substance, but one and the same under various dispensations." A few
lines below: "The Christian dispensation is the dispensation of grace,
a favour;" a still later writer clarifies: "Christianity is the
last dispensation." It seems that Mason's Dispensation is one past the
last. [^]
[12] According
to Hohmann, "there is only one genuine form of 'transformation' in Gravity's
Rainbow and that is the one enacted in 'the bitter intestinal oven'...,
the artificial oven man has created which appears as a 'Rocket' and for which
Weissman has 'fattened' Gottfried" (86). Mason's oven, though with more
paternal connotations, carries with it the "odors" of Gravity's
Rainbow. [^]
[13] What
he sees is the dark side of History's occupation by the dispossessed: "Mason
has seen in the Glass, unexpectedly, something beyond simple reflection,--
outside of the world,-- a procession of luminous Phantoms, carrying bowls,
bones, incense, drums, their Attention directed to nothing he may imagine,
belonging to unknown purposes...a conscious Denial of all that Reason holds
true. Something that knows, unarguably as it knows Flesh is sooner or later
Meat, that there are Beings who are not wise, or spiritually advanced, or
indeed capable of Human kindness, but ever and implacably cruel, hiding, haunting,
waiting,-- known only to the blood-scented deserts of the Night,-- and any
who see them out of Disguise are instantly pursued,--...Spheres of Darkness,
Darkness impure,--...of Spirits who dwell a little over the Line between the
Day and its annihilation, between the number'd and the unimagin'd,-- between
common safety and Ruin ever solitary..." (769, last ellipsis is his).
[^]
[14] In
1752, the British government officially switched the nation's calendars from
the Julian to the Georgian system, and all British subjects were required
to skip the eleven days between September 2 and 14. Pynchon makes great use
of the confusion and suspicion caused by this "stolen" time period.
[^]
[15] Black:
"Gravity represents the compacting and densitizing force that constitutes
the brute substance of History" (239). In a more recent recuperative
gesture, Alessia Ricciardi contrasts Pynchon's stylistic "values"
from those of Italo Calvino, and finds Pynchon's to be more "grounded":
"Rather than lightness, quickness, exactitude, or visibility, more appropriate
signifiers for Pynchon's writing might be "gravity" or, perhaps,
"rupture" (1071). [^]
[16] It
seems that, in this tale, Harold Bloom's famous formula, based on "The
Story of Byron the Bulb" in Gravity's Rainbow, that "Pynchon's
is a Gnosis without transcendence" (3) is itself reversed, as Mason is
made to transcend (at least momentarily) without gnosis, and seems
no worse for wear. Mason's alternate form of transcendence is suggested by
Thomas Moore's reading of Byron's story as a "parable of preterition,"
seeing Byron's "election for subversive, redemptive purposes is set against
the debased neo-Puritan sense of 'election' to serve entrenched power"
(146). Hohmann also sees a Gnostic root in the Deistic "hidden God"
of the story, thus leaving the earth ruled instead by "archons"
whose "Creation they administer is programmed to destroy itself"
in a "deliberate resurrection," a "staged and controlled holocaust."
In Byron's tale, Phoebus "sees to it that violent destruction and controlled
reincarnation is maintained" (182-3, qts. GR 415). However, Hohmann's
helpful gloss on the relationship between Gnostic and Christian salvation
seems in keeping with most of Mason and Dixon's experiences: "Redemption
[in Gnosticism] is found in gnosis, a kind of mystical knowledge or grace
which opens the Gnostic's eyes to his true destiny...[This] awakening causes
some to be tempted to liken Gnostic salvation to Christian resurrection. However,
the association would be fallacious. While Christian redemption is founded
on a teleological view of history, Gnosticism conceives of it in terms of
a sudden violent irruption into human time and history. For the Gnostic
true time proceeds 'by quantum jumps' and revelation is always subjective,
discontinuous and anarchic" (177-8, last emphasis is mine). [^]
[17] For
more complete treatments of Pynchon's use (and abuse) of Time in Mason
& Dixon, see Cowart (349 passim) and Pagano (Chapter 2). [^]
[18] Ricciardi
makes a similar point: "Pynchon's method of rescuing the postmodern for
himself and for readers of conscience is to reframe the story of Mason and
Dixon's explorations from the epistemological standpoint of a postcolonial
consciousness, making clear...the perils and the limits of ethnocentrism....In
Mason & Dixon it seems possible to recognize a minimalist form
of political commitment that may not lead to a call for action, exactly, so
much as a call for attention to human suffering, that most haunting and irreducible
link between past and present" (1072-4). [^]
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