Overview:
Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair--one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic--from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.
Mason and Dixon is another epic Pynchonian tale. As many other reviewers have said, it isn't that easy to read. It takes time and patience and a lot of perserverance, but it is definitely worth it. The basic philosophy of the novel is dualism. There are opposing twins of everything - Mason and Dixon themselves; the stories of Mason and Dixon within that told by Rev Cherrycoke; Cherrycoke's relations, Pliny and Pitt, either Elder or Younger; Northern and Southern states of America; the differing philosophies of the Western world and the Eastern world; the differing attitudes of Art and Science (very much of importance in the 18th century); the Romantic and Gothic; the straight man and the comedian; Johnson and Boswell (who appear at the end and who are foreshadowed by Cherrycoke in the Boswellian role); Britain and America; European philosophy versus Native American philosophy; war and peace - the list goes on. A very good article to read on this is Ken Rosenbaum's in the New York Book Review. He saw this dualism as a metaphor of the zeroes and ones that obsess Pynchon: the hot and cold atoms as sorted by the Maxwell's Demon of CL49, the hot and cold states of America divided by Mason and Dixon. And through it they create the perfect "line" that is neither one nor the other, that exists but doesn't really. Pynchon is interested in the difference between the extremes of life, such as noise and silence, light and dark, being and nothingness. Mason and Dixon has apparently been on Pynchon's mind since the 70s, and it is very much a culmination of his life's obsession.
We have to search the novel for references and echoes. Look at the cover of the book. I'm sure it cannot be a coincidence that the "&" is the main symbol. Mason and Dixon is about the things that join us and divide us, the "&" between us all. And surely there is an echo in the fact that "Mason", "Dixon" and "Pynchon" all end in "-on", and that they line up on the book's spine. Pynchon, with his curious eye for detail and coincidence, could not have ignored that.
Like in his other works, Pynchon manages to create a link between his books. They form a great bustling world. Pig Bodine (from V) has an ancestor who appears in Mason and Dixon, and Cherrycoke's descendent appears in Gravity's Rainbow. Characters link in again, forming a total corpus of Pynchonian achievement.
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
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