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Mason & Dixon & the ampersand
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2002 by Sammy Cahn
Even before the two title characters receive their assignment in the colonies, Mason & Dixon is filled with geometry. The first sentence of the novel begins: "Snow-Balls have flown their arcs" (5). The phrase seems a humorous allusion to the opening of Gravity's Rainbow (1973), "A screaming comes across the sky" (3). There is of course a bathetic drop from the latter to the former, or perhaps an ostensible lightening not just of mood but also of stakes. As becomes clear once the book gets rolling, though, Pynchon brings the reader past or more exactly through the playful and apparently (mostly) accurate eighteenth-century English of his narrator and other characters, and his almost compulsive punning, to arrive at the serious ideas he explores in the novel. (1) While he is clearly being playful--a mood hardly new for his work--and may be establishing a warmer tone than exists in his earlier work, Pynchon is certainly from the start creating a serious world. It is also, from the start, a geometrical world.
As has been noted by many readers, Pynchon's big novels have all had central geometric figures, which are even referred to in their titles:
V. (1963) has the chevron, Gravity's Rainbow has the parabola, and Mason & Dixon has the line. From the arc of the snowball to the Transit of Venus and the Solar Parallax to the equator Mason and Dixon cross in their travels to chart these celestial phenomena, the world of the novel is from its beginning crossed by these straight lines, curved along hemispheres or orbits.
An important aspect of this crisscrossing in the novel is that the lines do not in one sense exist independently of the astronomers and surveyors who chart them and so, in effect, create them. Geometry exists in the abstract, as do laws of gravity and movement; all are assumed to be independent in their own right. However, in their embodiment in concrete, particular instances, they depend on people believing in them, understanding them, and applying them. From particular positions and with precision instruments, Mason and Dixon are able not just to chart the movement of heavenly bodies but also to divide the earth by degrees, to establish where every part of the earth is in relation to every other part, but their ability depends in the end on their belief. Their ability, therefore, provides an apt metaphor for their times. In a nascent America, a creation of the Enlightenment, their applications of science to government, of rationality to the wilderness, embody the claims of the Age of Reason. While the draw ing of the line is on a (literally) mundane level, mere surveying and cutting (as the unhappy, stargazing astronomer Mason sometimes sees it), it depends on a belief in the human ability to domesticate the natural.
