Mason & Dixon

Mason & Dixon
1st edition cover
Author(s)	Thomas Pynchon
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Post-modern Novel Historical Biography
Publisher	Henry Holt and Company
Publication date	1997
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	773 pp
ISBN	0-8050-3758-6
OCLC Number	36430653
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 21
LC Classification	PS3566.Y55 M37 1997
Preceded by	Vineland
Followed by	Against the Day

Mason & Dixon is a postmodernist novel by American author Thomas Pynchon published in 1997. It centers on the collaboration of the historical Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and along the Mason-Dixon line in British North America on the eve of the American Revolutionary War.

Intermingled with Mason and Dixon's biographies, history, fantasy, legend, speculation, and outright fabrication, the novel is based on the focal point of one Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, a clergyman of dubious orthodoxy, who attempts to entertain and divert his extended family on a cold December evening — partly for amusement, and partly to keep his coveted status as a guest in the house.

Plot structure

Main article: List of episodes in Mason & Dixon

The novel's scope takes in aspects of established Colonial American history including the call of the West, the often ignored histories of women, Native Americans, and slaves, plus excursions into geomancy, Deism, a hollow Earth, and — perhaps — alien abduction. The novel also contains philosophical discussions and parables of automata/robots, the afterlife, slavery, feng shui and others. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Nevil Maskelyne, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Jefferson, and John Harrison's marine chronometer all make appearances. Pynchon provides an intricate conspiracy theory involving Jesuits and their Chinese converts, which may or may not be occurring within the nested and ultimately inexact narrative structure.

Quotation

" ... Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,—who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government.... "

Mason & Dixon (p. 350)

Rather than a mistake or flaw on Pynchon's part, this narrative structure is constructed to be inexact in a (perhaps paradoxically) precise fashion; it demonstrates the fragility, rather than the secure foundations, of any historical record, and indeed, history itself. The Cherrycoke narrative shifts internally from one point of view to another, often relating events from the view of people Cherrycoke has never met. His story shifts its emphasis based on which members of his family are in the room — veering toward the adventure-heroic when the young twin boys are listening, veering away from the homoerotic at the insistence of more prudish (and richer) relatives. Also, a parallel story read by two cousins, an erotic 'captured by Indians' narrative, works its way into the main thread of Cherrycoke's story, further blurring and finally obliterating the line between objective history and subjectivity — what "really happened" is nothing more than a construction of several narrators, perhaps one of whom directly is the author.

Pynchon employs the spelling, grammar, and syntax of an actual late 18th century document, further emphasizing the novel's intended anachronism.

In the end it is a story of two people who were "mates", as Doctor Isaac Mason puts it. John Krewson, writing for The Onion A.V. Club, observed "Whatever meanings and complex messages may lie hidden in Pynchon's text can, for now, be left to develop subconsciously as the reader enjoys the more immediate rewards of the work of a consummate storyteller. Pynchon is one, and he never quite lets you forget that while this might be an epic story, it's an epic story told to wide-eyed children who are up past their bedtime."

Reception

Mason & Dixon was one of the most acclaimed novels of the 1990s. According to prominent American critic Harold Bloom, "Pynchon always has been wildly inventive, and gorgeously funny when he surpasses himself: the marvels of this book are extravagant and unexpected." English author John Fowles, writing in The Spectator said of the book "As a fellow-novelist I could only envy it and the culture that permits the creation and success of such intricate masterpieces." T. Coraghessan Boyle of The New York Times Book Review wrote, "This is old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all, Mason & Dixon is a groundbreaking book, a book of heart and fire and genius, and there is nothing quite like it in our literature," New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani said, "A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring... a book that testifies to Pynchon's remarkable powers of invention and his sheer power as a storyteller."

See also

• Mason-Dixon Line

External links

• Mason & Dixon @ ThomasPynchon.com
• Mason & Dixon Wiki
• An academic dissertation on structure and sentiment in Mason & Dixon
• New York Times book review of Mason & Dixon

Secondary Sources

Clerc, Charles. Mason & Dixon & Pynchon. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000.

Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall, ed. The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon's 'Mason & Dixon': Eighteenth-Century Contexts, Postmodern Observations. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005.

Horvath, Brooke, and Irving Malin, eds. Pynchon and Mason & Dixon. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000.

Kopp, Manfred. Triangulating Thomas Pynchon's Eighteenth-Century World: Theory, Structure, and Paranoia in 'Mason & Dixon'. Essen, Germany: Die Blaue Eule, 2004.

Sigvardson, Joakim. Immanence and Transcendence in Thomas Pynchon's 'Mason & Dixon': A Phenomenological Study. Stockholm, Sweden: Almquist & Wiksell International, 2002.