Pynchon and Mason & Dixon 0874137209

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PYllcholl and ,'),fa-SOIi & D l:roll

Pynchon and Mason & Dixon

Edited by Brooke Horvath ana Irving Malin

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DElAWARE Newark: University of Delaware Press London: Associated University Presses

Pynchon and Mason & Dixon

© 2000 by Associated University Presses, Inc.

All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-87413-720-9/00 $10.00 + 8¢ pp, pc.] Other than as indicated in the foregoing, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except as permitted in Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law, and except for brief quotes appearing in reviews in the public press).

Associated University Presses 440 Forsgate Drive Cranbury, NJ 08512 Associated University Presses 16 Barter Street London WC1A 2AH, England Associated University Presses P.O. Box 338, Port Credit Mississuaga, Ontario Canada L5G 4L8

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pynchon and Mason & Dixon / edited by Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87413-720-9 (alk. paper) 1. Pynchon, Thomas. Mason & Dixon. 2. Biographical fiction, AmericanHistory and criticism. 3. Historical fiction, American-History and criticism. 4. Literature and history-United States. 5. Mason, Charles, 1728-1786In literature. 6. Dixon, Jeremiah-In literature. I. Title: Pynchon and Mason and Dixon. II. Horvath, Brooke. III. Malin, Irving. PS3566.Y55 M37 2000 813'.54-dc21 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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This book is dedicated to the best-kept secret

Contents Acknow ledgments Introduction

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11

BROOKE HORVATH

Foreshadowing the Text

27

IRVING MALIN

Mason & Dixon in the Zone, or, A Brief Poetics of Pynchon-Space

43

BRIAN MCHALE

"Cranks of Ev'ry Radius": Romancing the Line in Mason & Dixon

63

ARTHUR SALTZMAN

Thomas Pynchon and the Fault Lines of America

73

DONALD J. GREINER

Mapping the Course of Empire in the New World

84

DAVID SEED

Dimming the Enlightenment: Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

100

VICTOR STRANDBERG

The Sound of One Man Mapping: Wicks Cherrycoke and the Eastern (Re)solution

112

JOSEPH DEWEY "

Reading at the "Crease of Credulity"

132

BERNARD DUYFHUIZEN

Historical Documents Relating to Mason & Dixon

143

DAVID FOREMAN

Plucking the American Albatross: Pynchon's Irrealism in Mason & Dixon JEFF BAKER

167

8

CONTENTS

Plot, Ideology, and Compassion in Mason & Dixon THOMAS H. SCHAUB Mason & Dixon Bibliography CLIFFORD S. MEAD Works Cited List of Contributors Index

189 203 213 221 223

Acknowledgments Acknowledgments begin with our thanks to publisher Henry Holt for approving this foray in Pynchon studies and, certainly, to Thomas Pynchon, whose novel has occasioned this book and whose work we have been following Jlt least since the appearance of "Entropy" (the older and wiser of us having read this story first in the pages of the Kenyon Review, the younger but perhaps more polymathic of us in the pages of Nelson Algren's Own Book of Lonesome Monsters). We wish, of course, to thank the eleven contributors, each of whom made assembling this collection an experience as pleasurable as it was educational. Thanks, too, to Julien Yoseloff, Christine Retz, Melo,dy Sadighi, Jean Harvie, and Brian Haskell of Associated University Presses and to Donald Mell of the University of Delaware Press for seeing this project through into book form with care, interest, and a most efficient expertise. Both presses entertained more stupid questions graciously than we suspect they are usually called upon to answer, and did so without making either of us feeling less competent than we had already adjudged each other to be. Thanks as well to Seema Kurup for helping with proofreading when one more misplaced comma or typo was simply beyond our abilities to ascertain and concerning which we were unable to rouse the necessary corrective energy. The sample entries from Tim Ware's Mason & Dixon web guide are reproduced with the permission of Tim Ware; sample postings from the archives of the Pynchon List Server are used with the permission of their authors and site owner Andrew Dinn. We are grateful to be able to include these illustrations. Finally, we wish to thank Melanie Jackson for permission to quote from Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon.

9

Introduction BROOKE HORVATH

& DIXON IS AND DOUBTLESS WILL CONTINUE TO BE A book that matters. That much see~s clear already even from a quick survey of the almost 150 revi"ews the novel received, most ofthem thoughtful, seriously receptive, even though (or because) many reviewers seemed to have felt as did Laura Miller of the Village Voice: that the task was !'a bit like reviewing the Atlantic Ocean."l Righteously daunted but not put off, Miller found the novel Pynchon's "most grown-up and satisfying." Robert L. McLaughlin, writing in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, spoke for "old Pynchon hands" everywhere when he called Mason & Dixon "the novel we've been waiting for," as encyclopedic and esoteric as Gravity's Rainbow, as passionate in its opposition to "the forces of objectification and control," as filled with "outrageous jokes and passages so beautiful you want to cry." For McLaughlin, Mason & Dixon is "possibly the novel of our time." Similarly, Joel Stein of Time Out New York, if not ready to call Pynchon's longestin-the-works effort the Great American Novel, was prepared to find it "the Most American Novel we could ask for," an assessment echoed by Malcolm Jones of Newsweek-"a huge, ambitious book that may not be the Great American Novel but, hey, it walks like a great novel, it talks like a great novel"-and one with which Louis Menard, writing in the New York Review of Books, concurred. Comparing Mason & Dixon to Claude Levi-Strauss's great work of cultural anthropology, Menard wrote that Pynchon had produced "a Tristes Tropiques of North American civilization and an astonishing and wonderful book." With the publication of this novel twenty-four years in the making, Pynchon, in short, according to the Chicago Tribune's Melvin Jules Bukiet, has shown that he remains "the most emblematic literary figure of our era." Not everyone was on the bus, of course. Donna Rifkind, for instance, was not offering unqualified praise when she described Mason & Dixon as a "thrilling, sloppy monster of a novel." More MASON

11

12

BROOKE HORVATH

severely, James Gardner, the National Review's "art critic," confessed he couldn't get past page 50 eSlate's Walter Kim did better, boasting of 400 pages read, 200 skimmed, and 100 "foregone," although I suppose he meant 173 left unread). Gardner's inability to make it very far into Mason & Dixon didn't, however, prevent him from dismissing the novel as yet another "heavy, boring, and unwieldy" book praised insincerely by mendacious critics who feign pleasure over obscurities they equate with profundity. Similarly, Kirn suggested the novel wasn't "intended for normal human beings" such as himself but for academics who earn their keep by untangling "linguistic complexity for its own sake." People magazine's Kyle Smith found himself unimpressed by a less-thancoherent fixation on slavery and genocide that was "no doubt cutting-edge when [Pynchon] began this project." Yet even these dissenting voices make a case for Mason & Dixon's significance insofar as it is the business of a great book to trouble and discombobulate in important ways. A fair-sized crowd could doubtless be rallied of folks who find neither genocide nor slavery old hat, and it seems a fair question to ask why Smith wishes to find these concerns no longer relevant. Similarly, Gardner's comparison of Mason & Dixon to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Harold Brodkey's The Runaway Soul, and William Gass's The Tunnel suggests that something more than length and difficulty troubled the National Review. That something more, possibly the subject matter Smith dismisses, is likewise perhaps implicit in Kirn's hope that such fiction as Pynchon writes will soon fall entirely out of vogue and that we can return to writers we "get": less a criticism of Mason & Dixon than a wholesale rejection of serious fiction that refuses to pander, that insists on telling us the sometimes difficult, disturbing things we need to hear rather than the lies we long to be told, fiction that refuses to dumb down either what needs saying or how it needs to be said. 2 But how many ofthose 148 or so reviews can or need to be cited to suggest why this book's appearance at century's end matters? Nor are those reviews the extent ofthe evidence suggesting that Mason & Dixon speaks strongly to our imaginations and concerns today. As I sit writing this introduction in mid-June 1998, the book-released in May 1997-has been the subject of several dozen published essays and news stories, a fair number of which, restless with anticipation, preceded the novel's publicat\on find only a few of which originated in the offices of publisher Henry Holt. 3 Meanwhile, the "International Pynchon Week" conference

INTRODUCTION

13

sponsored by the Programme for International Pynchon Studies (Antwerp and London, June 1998) saw quick-working scholars already taking the lay of Mason & Dixon: beginning to measure its scope; to map the grounds for its aesthetic success; to chart its connections to Pynchon's earlier work, to postmodernism, and to American literary traditions; to cut interpretive vistos every which way through it without killing the thing off or coming off themselves as ghastly fops.4 It is likewise telling that the growing number ofPynchon sites on the Internet have already consumed hundreds of megabytes disseminating Mason & Dixon lore. Surfing the net, one can find historical documents, facsimile letters from Mason and Dixon, reviews, critical commentaries, author biography, suggested discussion-group questions, and more. For instance, there is Tim Ware's Mason & Dixon Web G-I,lide, an annotated concordance that printed out only four months after the novel's appearance at seventy-five pages, with a standing invitation to users to submit additional entries, definitions, and the like. Or check out Andrew Dinn's "Pynchon Server List Archive," which houses thirty-six folders of one megabyte of mail each (again, as of June 1998), each containing the correspondence of several hundred subscribers "from prominent Pynchon academics to fanatical 'amateurs.'" At present, a mass Mason & Dixon discussion is underway.5 In short, forget Mason & Dixon's too-brief appearance on the bestseller lists, forget the prizes that went elsewhere (where is Professor Corey when you need him?), forget the quick remaindering of the hardback. In a decade of big books-from Don DeLillo, William Gass, Richard Powers, William T. Vollmann, David Foster Wallace-Pynchon has published another novel worthy of comparison to what Steve Moore once described as America's "huge, word-mad novels"6: from U.S.A. and Absalom, Absalom! to William Gaddis's The Recognitions, Jack Kerouac's Visions of . Cody, Leslie Silko's Almanac of the Dead, George Garrett's Death of the Fox, and Pynchon's own Gravity's Rainbow. If we apply Italo Calvino's definition of a classic-"a book that has never finished saying what it has to say"-Mason & Dixon is sure to become one. 7 Or as Irving Malin puts it in his essay here, Mason & Dixon is a book that will never for any reader offer itself as "the same text twice." The publication of this collection is, of course, another indication of Mason & Dixon's importance. Brought together here are some critics new to Pynchon as well as some of those "old hands" to

14

BROOKE HORVATH

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Sample entries from Tim Ware's Mason & Dixon Web Guide.

INTRODUCTION

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