Stefan Mattessich

University of San Francisco
hamglik@sirius.com

 

Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1997.

 

We ought to have topographers…

–Montaigne I, 31

 

If we are to believe Montaigne, what is near masks a foreignness.

–Michel de Certeau¹

 

Where am I?

–Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

 

The publication of Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973 has proved an object lesson for many in the deferring and repetitious temporal structure of trauma or, put a little less psychoanalytically, catastrophe. Gravity’s Rainbow was catastrophic in the sense that it jammed in advance the hermeneutic apparatuses that might read it, flooded the system Cs of interpretation to such a degree that it could not synthesize its object in time and space–that is, the novel could not properly be an object of interpretation.² Gravity’s Rainbow, in a sense that is not altogether metaphoric, did not happen; a non-event in a non-place, its effect in literary and social circles has been much like the auto-detonation with which it ends. The novel exploded and disappeared: it cleared a space in which its canonization would be instantly assured and, like the flowers that bloomed in the Ota estuary after the atomic blast incinerated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, left us wondering just what it meant.

 

The metonymic relation between the (non)event of Gravity’s Rainbow and the post-World War II period (non-period? post-period?) to which it belongs can be identified in the novel’s subsequent reception. It is a commonplace by now that many people “know” Pynchon but hardly anyone “reads” him (or, a variant on this theme, no one reads him “anymore,” as if some historical transformation has occurred which renders his brand of ironic fiction obsolete–a sentiment recently echoed by novelist David Foster Wallace in an interview on the Charlie Rose Show). The dissymmetry this implies verges on the bi-polar. Gravity’s Rainbow has generated, on the one hand, a plethora of more or less “bad” readings clustered around the academic banner of “Pynchon studies” and, on the other, a throng of fans who substitute for reading an exercise of nominalist decryption, asking who, what or where the “real” Pynchon might be, either in his books or out.³ The symptom under consideration here is this: a failure to read brought on by an unreadable flash, a vacuum into which readings that are non-readings (and readers who cannot or will not read) rush with all the resistless pressure of air or gas. Gravity’s Rainbow presides, from its 24-year-old vantage point, over a spectacle to which in fact it gave its best metaphors: equilibrium, inertia, entropy, a discursive practice (of writing and reading) implicated in the non-discursive field it modifies, a crisis of meaning indexed in the force with which the vacuum is filled or the “message” heard in a distinctly cybernetic society. In this society, systems of control, be they political, economic, technological or otherwise, take on a life of their own (become self-moving) and transform the subjects who manipulate them into manipulated “operators” in a fully functional technocratic order. The genius of Gravity’s Rainbow was that it grasped this transformation in “scriptural” terms, as a social inscription of inscription itself, a writing of the writer/reader that immobilizes us in the “text” of technical reason. Reading Gravity’s Rainbow is traumatic because it cannot be read without reference to this double writing that “frames” its reception and condemns us to a reflexive textual practice bent on discovering within itself the mark of its own historical location, its “place” within a period inaugurated by the traumas of the Second World War (Gravity’s Rainbow, it will be recalled, takes place nominally in the years 1944 and 1945).

 

To judge by the early reviews of Pynchon’s new novel, Mason & Dixon, not much headway has been made in resolving the antinomies of this peculiar catastrophe, and Pynchon has once again managed to drop a literary bomb on America, even if this time it’s not exactly thermonuclear in scope. The rhetoric in these reviews is characterized by a relief at the apparent retreat in Mason & Dixon from the excesses that made Pynchon’s earlier, pre-Vineland work so notoriously difficult to understand. Anthony Lane is gratified to report in the New Yorker that “Mason & Dixon really is about Mason and Dixon,” that its characters are “heroic” and “substantial,” and that Pynchon has at last managed to write a “real, honest-to-God story.” T. Coraghessan Boyle, on his authority as a practicing novelist, relates in the New York Times Book Review how well Pynchon’s “sublime” method “works,” delivering complete, well-rounded and sympathetic characters in a “time and place” that the novel, “for all [its] profuse detail, its jokes and songs and absurdities…nonetheless evokes better than any historical novel I can recall.” John Leonard, in the Nation, imitates Pynchon’s accumulative prose style and constructs a little linguistic bomb of his own by way of impressing his readers with Mason & Dixon‘s complexity, only to end by telling us how great a “buddy-bonding” story it is–a dud of a conclusion if ever there was one, at least where Pynchon’s complexity is concerned. What these reviews have in common is an enthusiasm for realist conventions of fiction as they peek through Pynchon’s “absurdities,” reducing these to stylistic traits that function to confirm the very substances they seem to traduce. At the same time that Pynchon’s deployment of essentially comic and parodic techniques is praised as “sublime,” the novel’s human nature comes to be attested by the skillful use to which these techniques are put. Unlike in Gravity’s Rainbow, it is implied, where manipulation by technocratic forces dehumanizes author, text and reader alike, Pynchon in Mason & Dixon manages to be a humanized and humanizing producer, one whose agency the reader can discern and identify with in the product itself.⁴

 

There seems to be little patience nowadays for reflexive textual practices, for double and ironic anti-realist fabulations of the kind associated with Pynchon’s early work. A distinctly post-structuralist sensibility has failed to make its case for the value or utility of “writing about writing.” The essentially political point implied in this sensibility–about the effects of a functionalist rationality on the social field it now dominates to an unprecedented degree–is lost as much on the right-wing pundit content to see in it the elitism of an ivory tower invaded by multiculturalists, as by left-wing writers like Katha Pollitt and Barbara Ehrenreich, who diagnose it as a cause of the political inertia afflicting the left today. In both cases, what remains unanalyzed is a rationality that seizes us at the moment a position is staked out, and thus the usefulness for political thought and practice of an implicate or implicated metaphorics that frames politics itself within a larger inquiry into the nature of modernity. The predicament of non-reading evident in responses to Pynchon’s work finds its origin point in this inability to grasp implication as a social and political term. Efforts by critics to humanize Pynchon in Mason & Dixon, along with the re-humanization of American politics implicit in the contemporary critique of “postmodern” theory (clearly marked, for instance, in the recent Sokal affair in Social Text and Lingua Franca), and even the bad “postmodern” non-readings that inspire this critique (many of which can be found under the rubric of “Pynchon studies”) are all symptoms of this inability, imperfect attempts at grasping a social logic predicated on a principle of concentric reverberations around a fundamental displacement, a “hole” in space and time.

 

Pynchon’s work can be situated in this shift toward disjunction, toward the question of rationality itself as it determines how one writes or expresses oneself. The best review to date of Mason & Dixon, Louis Menand’s “Entropology” in the New York Review of Books, makes this shift clear by reminding his readers of the significance “entropy” as a concept has had for Pynchon, from his early short story of that name all the way to Mason & Dixon. Entropy in information theory, Menand reminds us, refers to the process by which “clarity and mutual understanding” are “purchased by a loss of diversity of opinion” (24). The more senders and receivers of messages approach certitude (or find themselves, like Mucho Maas with the world when he takes LSD in The Crying of Lot 49, “on the same wavelength”), the more transparent meaning becomes. The result is a homogenization of the field in which these exchanges occur, a levelling of differences catalyzed by a compulsion to “come together.”[5] Menand, quoting the Lévi-Strauss of Triste Tropiques, sees in this entropic compulsion the dynamic of imperialism that amounts almost to an obsession in Pynchon’s work; it is what “modernity” means, the stake in maintaining a relation to the history and assumptions of “enlightenment” at the level of practice or within one’s own mode of self-placement and identification. This is why Pynchon does not employ the reflexive techniques of comic or parodic fiction in order expertly to sustain a moment of humanist adequation to the truths we all share (the gist of most reviews of Mason & Dixon). On the contrary, he employs them to foreground an inadequation, an inexpert or even incompetent discursive operation that, for all its virtuousity, founds itself upon an apprehension of its own historicity, its own authorizing and authorized pretensions. Only to the extent that this apprehension is acknowledged in our readings does Pynchon’s text succeed in being a discourse without its own discourse, a meditation upon its own lawfulness as a literary artifact.⁶

 

Unfortunately this folding back of discourse upon itself is precisely what arouses ire on the part of those critics who see in it no politically efficacious outcome. The price of communication today is more and more the displacement of questions about the form of communication, the bizarre presumption that the positivity or intense visibility of meaning constitutes a state of low social entropy, when in fact what we are witnessing is a profound vitiation of sense, an emptying of content, the contraction of depth into the various surfaces of social, political and economic inscription. This can be observed in the reviews of Mason & Dixon, the majority of which are in effect non-reviews, saying nothing clearly (or rather clearly saying nothing), beyond assuring the reader of the presence in Pynchon’s work of universal human values like “heroism” (Anthony Lane), sympathy and inspiration from the “breath of life” (T. C. Boyle). Partly this is due to the limitations of the review genre, partly to its subordination to the functions of advertising and markets. But either way, what results is transparent meaning indeed, a language of impressionistic escapism (“Awash with light and charm,” Paul Skenazy writes of Mason & Dixon in the San Francisco Chronicle, “rich with suggestion and idea, stuffed with all the minutiae of another time and world”) or triumphalist affirmation (Mason & Dixon is for Paul Gray of Time a “unique and miraculous experience….A tale of scientific triumph and an epic of loss”) that is conspicuous for the deftness with which it sidesteps any engagement with the “modernity” of the text.

 

Louis Menand does engage Mason & Dixon, curiously enough through a detour to anthropology, or rather to what Lévi-Strauss proposes as “entropology,” the study of cultural production as a stimulus to greater and greater disintegration (with colonialist expansion its most destructive feature). By this detour, Menand opens a space for reading the novel’s strategy of resistance to the rationalization of modern society, a strategy of defection and detachment that centers on the act of marking an earth coded as a writing surface or Numen. Pynchon’s move to the 1760s, the decade before the advent of democracy in America (mediated through the year 1786, one decade after the Revolution, when the story is narrated), alerts his readers in a stroke to his interest in founding acts and what they necessarily have to displace in order to take place. The long sojourn of Mason and Dixon at the beginning of the novel in South Africa, and later their proximity in the wilds of western Pennsylvania to the frontiers where the Indian wars of the 17th and 18th centuries were fought, further indicate in rough what Pynchon’s reading of his (and our) foundation will be: the American republic, and American capitalism–the American techno-political order in the broadest sense–could only come into being after the racist suppression of the Native Americans and with the institution of slavery. Americans could only establish democracy by losing the ability to confront colonialism (a legacy we still see today in the difficulty with which the issue of racism is entered into fields of discourse), and this sacrifice at the heart of what democracy “is” becomes the subject of Pynchon’s novel, what it elaborates in the dream-work of Mason and Dixon’s straight-line labyrinth through America.

 

The terrain here is, as Menand intuits, anthropological in nature. The America into which Mason and Dixon penetrate by way of marking a boundary and defining an orientation (a westward “Vector of Desire,” as narrator Wicks Cherrycoke puts it) is no ordinary “place” in the sense that this means delimited or enclosed, ordered according to principles of extension, causality and isotropy–in a word, Newtonian space. Pynchon proceeds not from a notion of coexistence (where each object, point or locus in space is externalized with respect to every other) but rather of palimpsests and Moebius strips, invisible Ley-lines and parallel universes. Pynchon offers perhaps his most ingenious metaphor for this America in the quartz prisms that Mason and Dixon place on the marker stones along the Line. These crystals disclose under a microscope “a fine structure of tiny cells, each a Sphere with another nested concentrickally within, much like Fish Roe in appearance” (547). Nested inside such nested structures is what the expedition’s “Quartz-scryer” Mr. Everybeet calls a “‘Ghost,’ another Crystal inside the ostensible one, more or less clearly form’d” (547). Mr. Everybeet explains:

 

“‘Tis there the Pictures appear . . . tho’ it varies from one Operator to the next,–some need a perfect deep Blank, and cannot scry in Ghost-Quartz. Others, before too much Clarity, become blind to the other World . . . my own Crystal,”–he searches his Pockets and produces a Hand-siz’d Specimen with a faint Violet tinge,–“the Symmetries are not always easy to see . . . here, these twin Heptagons . . . centering your Vision upon their Common side, gaze straight in,–” “Aahhrrhh!” Mason recoiling and nearly casting away the crystal.

 

“Huge, dark Eyes?” the Scryer wishes to know.

 

"Aye.--Who is it?" Mason knows. (442)

 

The face that Mason sees in the crystal inside the crystal “varies from one Operator to the next” according to who it is he or she wishes to see or is haunted by (in Mason’s case, this will be his dead wife Rebekah, whose eyes in fact he does “know” in the crystal). The doubly crystalline prisms that mark the Mason and Dixon Line, that mark the mark of boundary and location in Mason & Dixon, contain representations of “other Worlds” than the “ostensible one.” This spectral investiture of desire in the objects by which “place” is established clearly indicates a fundamental strategy of the novel to fold desire and the object, the time that desire actualizes and the space that the object defines, into one textual (but also telluric) surface. “Time is the Space that may not be seen,” says Dixon’s childhood teacher Emerson, and for Pynchon it is the invisible world that dwells in matter (quite literally, it turns out later in the novel, invaginated into the earth) and that canbe seen after all (for Mason in fact sees it), so long as perception finds the right balance between opacity (the “deep Blank”) and transparency (“too much Clarity”), the variable point of visual acuity that can never be fixed.

 

Pynchon is conceptually close in anecdotal narrative details like these to what Merleau-Ponty calls a “human” or “anthropological space.” Distinguished from a “geometrical” system of objective relationships between determined points that is experienced as perspective, convergence, depth and position by a synthesizing eye/I, “anthropological space” designates that spatial condition or frame that cannot be “put into perspective by consciousness” (256). Unlocatable and ungraspable, this “more primordial” dimension forms a kind of infinite set around the objective world which is not itself objectivizable, an “outside” in which Merleau-Ponty finds the “essential structure of our being [as a] being situated in relation to an environment” (284). This “relation” is one of 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. Anthropological space has the “thickness of a medium devoid of any thing” and indicates a “depth which does not yet operate between objects, which…does not yet assess the distance between them, and which is simply the opening of perception upon some ghost thing as yet scarcely qualified” (266). Such an experience of ghosts (and such a ghostly experience) precedes the differentiation of perception and dream, and as such it constitutes what Merleau-Ponty calls a “direction of existence,” an intention immanent to the world in which it orients itself, a desire which is not the property of a constituted subject but a direction taken, a velocity or rate of change in a fluctuating and multiple space. The way Mason looks into the piece of quartz and sees the “huge, dark Eyes” of a ghost (Rebekah) is a pure perception which does not presuppose an act of consciousness within an objective or even an ontological order.⁷ It cannot be that Mason sees a ghost in the crystal anymore than he can see the crystal without the ghost orienting his gaze or quickening his desire in it. This gyre-like implication of Mason in his world comes through most distinctly in the “recoil” which it produces in him, the terror that almost causes him to drop the crystal and which signifies that death, that nothingness, that infinite regress at the heart of time as it reduces “Mason” to no one and his world to a “non-place” of ghostly “pictures.” This is why Wicks Cherrycoke, commenting on Emerson’s homily about time as invisible space, adds “that out of Mercy, we are blind as to Time,–for we could not bear to contemplate what lies at its heart” (326).

 

But Mason & Dixon does contemplate what lies at the heart of time, albeit in modes of attenuated catastrophe, and its conjurations of that “non-place” unfold in the way that Emerson, his student Dixon, Mason and the narrator Wicks Cherrycoke all cease to be “characters” in a realist novel. They are “selves entirely word-made” as the foppish Son of Liberty Philip Dimdown puts it, woven into the texture of a massive pastiche that performs the spatial laminations it also thematizes in sly metaphysical exchanges like this one:

 

"Lo, Lamination abounding," contributes Squire Haligast, momentarily visible, "its purposes how dark, yet have we ever sought to produce these thin Sheets innumerable, to spread a given Volume as close to pure Surface as possible, whilst on route discovering various new forms, the Leyden Pile, decks of Playing-Cards, contrivances which, like the Lever or Pulley, quite multiply the apparent forces, often unto disproportionate results...." "The printed Book," suggest the Rev'd [Cherrycoke], "--thin layers of pattern'd Ink, alternating with other thin layers of compress'd Paper, stack'd often by the Hundreds..." (389-90)

 

The Pynchon whose “dark” tactics stand revealed here at the “pure Surface” of writing opens the “space” of encounter with the American wilderness by locating it at the level of a language that is flush with its own specifically temporal ground. At stake is a kind of duration that refers “America” to an anterior plane of undifferentiated “pictures” or images on which perception becomes a function of pure transition, of a “lived present” defined always in terms of its own disappearance.⁸ Mason & Dixon is a “travel” story in the sense that Michel de Certeau maintains “all stories are travel stories” (Practice, 115), tissues of metaphors that move, metaphorai, “spatial trajectories” that make the “places” they traverse textual non-places in which the act of delimitation meets its own internal limit, the “ghost” of a figural or semiotic motility that haunts the geometrical structures it founds. (For an interesting visual representation of this ghostly investiture of objectivized (non)space, see William Blake’s painting Newton.)

 

De Certeau, building upon Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on spatiality in The Practice of Everyday Life, constructs an opposition between place (lieu) and a space (espace) linked to narrative tactics of inversion, quotation or doubling, ellipsis, metaphor, and metonymy. The ruses of rhetoric “describe” (“as a mobile point ‘describes’ a curve” [116], he writes) an element of almost Brownian motion that depends upon its “operation” in a multi-dimensional present that is always other to itself, furrowed internally by the specters of its own singularity. Space for De Certeau is “like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts” (117). Space is a practice of place, a putting into motion of one’s own time and contingency. Only in the grip of a such a practice, in fact, does “time” come to quicken in us a historical sense, a feeling for the historicity of our own actions as they play out symptomatically the displacement of time (or, to be more precise, the displacement of this sense for the displacement of time, usually in the name of history or of some more objective relation to the past, to a tradition, to a place). De Certeau makes this co-implication of time and practice explicit by asserting a certain non-distinction between spaces and places. The former (spaces) is the play in structures (places) that marks not an external but an internal difference, a non-self-identical “labor” at the heart of place (placement, position, positionality) that constantly transforms it into its opposite and vice versa.

 

This is why the turn to language and narrative is important to De Certeau: the “story,” he writes, incisively highlights the overlapping of space and place, their coextension in a practice of “moving” or ever-shifting signification. Under the pressure of a history consisting in the progressive technicization of space (and the strict regulation of time), “spatial practices”–those concerned with the remainders of a process of rationalization and colonization undergone since the Enlightenment–pass into the domain of literature, where they take the form of “everyday virtuousities that science doesn’t know what to do with and which become the signatures, easily recognized by readers, of everyone’s micro-stories” (70). The story, in other words, dissimulates the “invisible Space” or temporal nun that paradoxically dies beneath the instruments of its own delimitation and designation. This sacrifice underlies the “primary function” of the story to “authorize the establishment, displacement or transcendence of limits, and as a consequence, to set in opposition, within the closed field of discourse, two movements that intersect (setting and transgressing limits) in such a way as to make the story a sort of ‘crossword’ decoding stencil…[or] dynamic partitioning of space…” (123). Only through this “stencilization” does space come into being at all, and this is why it remains constitutively tied to a practice (of writing) that “nests” another practice “Concentrickally within” its own demarcative procedures.

 

With this we are clearly in the topography of Mason & Dixon, a novel about its own narrativity and, precisely through this reflexive turning around upon itself, about America too, about its delimitation and colonization, about the enclosure of space in proper places (or properties), and about its own (and our) complicity in that enclosure–a complicity that in turn conditions the possibility of seeing the imperialist history it reproduces within the ever-shifting boundaries of “anthropological space.” Pynchon hints at this textual overdetermination in the previously quoted passage on lamination, where the printed book becomes one more device (like the lever or the pulley) to extend our powers of control. Mason & Dixon is about a technological society only by first being technological, sustaining its own narrative desire to found, to originate, to be a world in its “disproportionate” multiplication of forces and effects. To use and be used is one obvious subtext of a literary practice as wedded to citation, parody, and encyclopedic “overstuffing” farce as Pynchon’s, and his novel clearly reflects this problem back upon its readers. The ingenuity of Mason & Dixon is that to read it well is almost necessarily to provoke the “ghost” of a spatiality that disappears beneath our interpretive tools, to involve us in a “Destiny…to inscribe the Earth” (221). But such an involvement in the story of Mason and Dixon must also entail an involvement in Mason & Dixon, its linguistic involutions, its opacities and transparences, its reflexivity defined not as abstraction but as the carefully constructed limit to the abstraction that governs the resistance to reading. What gets lost in this resistance is a time deeper than memory and thus an immemorial space (Pynchon calls it “America”) that does not ever appear except insofar as it alters reading toward a commitment to the polyvalences of language.

 

This “space” is the stake in Pynchon’s mode of writing and in any reading of it, a history, a continuing legacy, a haunting, a repetition upon which no reflection is possible except by way of acknowledging its precessionary grip upon every act of writing and reading. Pynchon understands this as a logic of implication, of texts that are “general” in a Derridean sense and that form vortexes into which the reader is plunged. Mason & Dixon is an attempt to bring this logic into a clear literary focus, to tell a story about founding acts that takes as its own foundation a kind of textual vortex. Pynchon affords a glimpse of this vortical structure in passages like this one, an extended riff on the specific inscriptive desire that both Mason and Dixon and Mason & Dixon act out:

 

Does Brittania, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?--in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,--serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,--Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Government,--winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair. (345)

 

This long sentence is destined to become a signature piece for the whole novel, and indeed many of its reviewers have quoted from it, although not often in its entirety. What gets excluded from the various attempts to highlight in selected parts its exemplary force is the way its convoluted syntax is its exemplarity. The almost vertiginous experience of this sentence suggests (phenomenologically, as it were) the movement of the text as a whole, orthogonal and yet at the same time devious, drifting through qualifications, meandering to its final resting place in the word “Despair.” Pynchon, that is, works here at two levels: semantic, where Mason and Dixon’s “West-ward” momentum is glossed in terms of a “declarative” desire for the “subjunctive” space of America; and syntactic, where that desire is made to circulate through an essentially sinuous writing. The transformation of the subjunctive into the declarative on the first level is inverted on the second level: Pynchon’s diction takes the reader back to a state of “unmapped” disorientation and ambiguity, back to the overdetermined realm of dream. The dreamer, Brittania, moves toward the dream of America as the dream itself returns to the dreamer, agitating at the center of the latter’s intention to “see,” “record,” and “measure.” This double and deviating movement in fact organizes the entire novel: Mason and Dixon penetrate the wilderness and then withdraw back into already penetrated zones of civilization (they construct the Line in spring and summer, then wait out the winter back in Philadelphia), and in addition they make brief excursions above and below the Line (north to New York, south to Maryland and Virginia). Mason & Dixon “triangulates its Way into the Continent” in spider-like fashion, assimilating invisible spaces into the ordered places of empire in order to evoke the space of rationality itself, the scene of empire as it materializes in the practice of language.

 

Michel de Certeau has written elegantly on this rhythm of departure and return in discourse. The sleight-of-hand by which discourse about the other becomes a discourse authorized by the other has for its basic structure the travel story: narrative’s constituent relation to limits, to what de Certeau calls “frontiers” and the “bridges” that mark their cooptation (127), underscores its function in the process of legitimating a disciplinarian organization of knowledge. The urge to delimit is also an urge to narrate; the urge to narrate, in turn, cannot be differentiated from a de-temporalizing rationalization of space. This is why Pynchon writes as he does, creating “Net-works” of complex association, rhizomatic surfaces into which he flattens the depth-effect of meaning. That the above-quoted passage is in fact elaborate parody, not meant to be taken as exemplary of any hidden intent except insofar as it exemplifies precisely the nothingness that adheres in levity, indicates the method of the text’s meta-commentary upon American colonialism. The latter envelops the text and the text of its reception (our reading) as well. It happens in the most basic assumptions of representation and truth, transforming “Borderlands one by one” into interiorized limits, internal differences that open the inside to its “Sacred” other.⁹

 

Mason & Dixon is thus a profoundly heterological novel, concerned with the strangeness of its own authority in a world founded upon the displacement of limits. Pynchon’s is a discourse without its own discourse because even this registration of the arbitrariness of authority resonates with the violence it finds so strange. America (both as democratic critique of power and as its extension in the form of a technologically advanced capitalism) is synonymous with this violence, and the “strangeness” of this overlap conditions another kind of critique, one focussed less on asserting the “entropological” values of pluralism and communication than on exposing, at their heart, the sacrifice that drives them. Mason & Dixon‘s singularity–its parodies and pastiches, its unstable ironies, its puns and jokes, all the elements that a more humanist reading can see only as techniques for the transmission of messages in a shared social context–consists in recognizing the peculiar immediacy with which the history of colonialism in America is always experienced, and the impossibility of reflecting upon that history without perceiving it in our own practices. Far from merely celebrating parody, pastiche or irony as transgressive ends in themselves, Pynchon in Mason & Dixon makes them the vehicle of an implicated relation to the past and to place, a duration exactly calibrated to the time of reading which then raises the stakes of interpretation immeasurably.

 

Notes

 

1. The quote from Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals” occurs at the opening of De Certeau’s essay, “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’,” which begins with the sentence quoted subsequently here. De Certeau’s essay is collected in the volume entitled Heterologies.

 

2. I am echoing here the language of Freud’s speculations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle on traumatic repetition and the liminal structure of consciousness. By the term system Cs Freud designates in living organisms the ectodermic or cortical surface where consciousness resides and which is susceptible of rupture either by internal or external excitation. When such a rupture effectively floods the organism’s capacity to make sense of its own experience, a repression occurs which paralyzes any affective response and generates the attempt to master the stimulus symptomatically through repetition. See in particular Chapter 4 (pp. 26-39) of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

 

3. Time magazine, in its review of Mason & Dixon, exploits this nominalist desire by including a photograph of Thomas Pynchon as a young man over a text box that reads Where is he now? This question is followed by a series of phrases detailing his current whereabouts and situation.

 

4. The humanist slant present in these reviews suggests a transformation in the concept of production brought on by technological development since the 18th century. I follow here a discussion of this history by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life. As artistic or artisanal techniques became detached from art itself in the form of machines that “do the work for you,” producers lost the objective determination of a practice and withdrew into a purely subjective knowledge or “savoir-faire.” This intuitive know-how became the domain of a new kind of producer to whom practice reverted in newly technologized forms. The subject became an “engineer” equipped with a “taste,” “tact” or “genius” that was simultaneously unconscious and “logical,” original and automatic.

 

Judgement in the Kantian sense (mediating a practical art that knows but does not reflect upon what it does and a theoretical science that provides this obscure knowledge with a reflective language, however supplemental it might be) was the skill this new “engineer” had to offer, but at the cost of internalizing a technological relation to the means of production. “Genius” as a concept presupposes this technicization even (perhaps especially) when it implies a denigration of knowledge that is self-conscious. This denigration paradoxically indexes the privilege of consciousness by founding the modern distinction between practice (art) and theory (science). De Certeau sees this practice/theory distinction as heterological in nature: know-how signifies the incorporated (and idealized) “other” of theory, that object of the “engineer’s” theoretical knowledge that supports and authorizes it. Pynchon, to the extent that he is a “genius” who operates the machinery of fiction toward the end of securing a “human” value, is thus only an avatar of this “engineer,” so long as he is not also read as undoing the practice/theory distinction and exposing the heterological relation at its heart. It is indeed a testament to Mason & Dixon‘s self-reflexive brilliance that it more or less tackles this problem head on, as I hope to show in the reading that follows here. See The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 61-76, for a fuller discussion of the relation between technology and practice since the 18th century.

 

5. This reading of entropy, suggestive in its qualification of the value modern societies place upon communication, nonetheless leaves untroubled its own assumption about the value of “diversity of opinion,” as if pluralism were in fact the value that Pynchon does assert in Mason & Dixon. Menand, that is, does not graft onto his reading a clear account of the role a rhetoric of pluralism plays in the very process of homogenization he calls entropic and that involves a proliferation of perspectives within well-defined social spaces.

 

6. In fact only in the reading of the text does it live out this extra-legality, this discursive eccentricity to the literary power structure through which its dissemination is assured. Mason & Dixon, for instance, clearly bears in the manner of its publication all the marks of literature as a center of power, and only its readers can rescue it (or not) from this determination. Even when ironic or parodic fabulation can be seen as ideologically neutral with respect to the institution of literature, its politicization consists not in locating in a given text some specific ideological content so much as grasping clearly the reflexive dimension of its language and asking whether it raises the question of discursive rationality.

 

7. By pure perception I mean to echo Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis upon a non-thetic or “pure description of phenomena prior to the objective world…giving us a glimpse of ‘lived’ depth, independently of any kind of geometry” (258). The anterior “depth” at which neither objects nor the I/eye have been posited becomes the enveloping or engrossing “situation” of the existential subject, who is grasped in terms of implication and motivation rather than production or causality. Phenomenal space for this subject “is neither an object, nor an act of unification on the subject’s part; it can neither be observed, since it is presupposed in every observation, nor seen to emerge from a constituting operation, since it is of its essence that it already be constituted…” (254). Even though phenomenal space, pre-objective and pre-logical, is distinguished for Merleau-Ponty from being (nothing in it is or exists as determined), phenomena do have a “significance” that can be “recognized” if not “thematized.” This non-thematic recognition–or a version of it linking its independence from a thetic order to the “being” of language–is what the designation “pure” perception is meant to convey here.

 

8. When Merleau-Ponty maintains that “geometrical space” is “temporal before being spatial,” he means that its necessary pre-condition is the (no)thingness of an always passing present (or nun). “Things coexist in space because they are present to the same perceiving subject and enveloped in one and the same temporal wave. But the unity and individuality of each temporal wave is possible only if it is wedged in between the preceding and the following one, and if the same temporal pulsation which produces it still retains its predecessor and anticipates its successor. It is objective time which is made up of successive moments. The lived present holds a past and a future within its thickness….We know of movement and a moving entity without being in any way aware of objective positions, as we know of an object at a distance and of its true size without any interpretation, and as we know every moment the place of an event in the thickness of our past without any express recollection” (275). What Merleau-Ponty calls a “lived present” in which knowledge happens without a rational knower (i.e., “only with the help of time,” he writes) is understood here in a distinctly catastrophic or “catastropic” register: the lived present is never self-present or proper to itself and cannot secure even a phenomenological description from the slippages of meaning that index themselves in the language of its expression.

 

9. Apropos of the functions of the “frontier” and the “bridge” in the “story,” De Certeau maintains that the “bewildering exteriority” accessed via the “bridging” of the frontier causes its conversion into an “alien element” previously arraigned (by this very process) in the interior. By virtue of a coming into contact with the outside, that is, the subject of narrative (the “traveller”) “gives ob-jectivity…expression and re-presentation…to the alterity which was hidden inside the limits.” As a result, his or her departure from the fold of the familiar ends with a return experienced as a discovery, in objectivized form, of the very exteriority sought beyond the frontier. “Within the frontiers, the alien is already there, an exoticism or sabbath of the memory, a disquieting familiarity. It is as though delimitation itself were the bridge that opens the inside to its other” (128-29). By internal difference, then, I mean the incorporated “other” or limit that conditions this repetitition and that constitutes the text’s implicated relation to a colonialist history.

 

Works Cited

 

• Boyle, T. Coraghessan. “Mason & Dixon.” New York Times Book Review 18 May 1997: 9.
• De Certeau, Michel. Heterologies. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
• —. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
• Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1961.
• Gray, Paul. “Drawing the Line.” Time 5 May 1997: 98.
• Lane, Anthony. “Then, Voyager.” The New Yorker 12 May 1997: 97-100.
• Leonard, John. “Crazy Age of Reason.” The Nation 12 May 1997: 65-68.
• Menand, Louis. “Entropology.” The New York Review of Books 12 June 1997: 22-25.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge, 1962.
• Skenazy, Paul. “Pynchon Draws the Line.” The San Francisco Chronicle 27 April 1997: 1, 8.