Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

First published: 1997

Type of plot: Historical

Time of work: 1761-1786

Locale: England, Sumatra, South Africa, St. Helena, and the North American Colonies

Principal Characters:

• Charles Mason, a British astronomer for the Royal Society
• Jeremiah Dixon, a British land surveyor
• Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, narrator of the novel and friend of Mason and Dixon
• Nevil Maskelyne, Astronomer Royal of England, 1765-1811
• James Bradley, Astronomer Royal of England, 1742-1761

The Novel

Mason and Dixon is divided into three unequal parts, the first providing a prelude to Mason and Dixon’s adventures in America, the middle and largest detailing those adventures, and the third serving as a brief epilogue. Though it is based on an important, though little-studied, event in American history—the running of the “Mason-Dixon line” that forms the boundaries of Pennsylvania and Maryland, and thus between the American North and South—the novel is largely fantasy.

The novel opens with a narrative frame introducing the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, who will relate the rest of the story as an evening diversion to his sister’s family in 1786 Philadelphia. As the story unfolds, the Reverend’s presence is maintained through forty-three separate narrative intrusions, ranging from a single word to four pages in length. His audience of nieces, nephews, and in-laws interact, making them a part of the story.

The first part of the novel, entitled “Latitudes and Departures,” describes the meeting of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in London in 1760 and their collaboration in a project for the British Royal Society to study the transit of Venus. The data Mason and Dixon collect would be valuable in determining longitude, a measurement not yet perfected in the 1760’s, and vital to navigation and commerce. Sent to Sumatra to make the astronomical observations, Mason and Dixon find themselves in the midst of a naval battle with a French frigate. Dispatching a letter registering their displeasure with the Royal Society at being placed in harm’s way, Mason and Dixon are branded cowards, their letter ever after being considered a barrier to Mason’s ascendency in the society. Dixon, a lapsed Quaker, has maintained his Quaker aversion to the institution of slavery. Both he and Mason are horrified by the slavery they encounter in the Southern Hemisphere, including, in South Africa, their being encouraged to have sex with black slaves, as lighter-skinned African babies fetch a higher price in the slave market. After making observations in Sumatra, Capetown, and St. Helena with Nevil Maskelyne, Mason is sent to America to settle a boundary dispute, while Maskelyne returns to England to be named Astronomer Royal. The boundary dispute was a long-standing one, arising eighty years earlier with the chartering of Pennsylvania to William Penn and of Maryland to Lord Baltimore. The charters had defined the boundaries geometrically, but those boundaries had never been laid out or measured, and many disputes had arisen. Mason and Dixon’s assignment, which constitutes the second part of the novel, called simply “America,” was to run a line, as geometrically straight as eighteenth century science could permit, from Philadelphia 244 miles straight west. As they move westward, they meet an assortment of odd characters, including historical figures such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson as well as fictional characters of varying degrees of believability: a French chef pursued by a mechanical duck that loves him, a farmer who turns into a beaver with the full moon, a mystical Chinese master of feng shui, a tribe of Welsh Indians, an African servant of George Washington who is also a Jewish stand-up comic, a talking dog, and a giant glowing Indian.

The farther west they go, the more they doubt the rightness of their endeavor, forcing an artificial and abstract order on the land and its people. Moreover, the farther west they go, the closer Mason and Dixon grow to each other. They begin as opposite numbers: Mason a tame Anglican melancholic (his wife’s pet name for him is “Mopery”), Dixon a lapsed Quaker given to distilled spirits, exotic food, and womanizing. As they come to rely on each other, they grow closer and begin to cancel out each other’s failings.

The final section, entitled “Last Transit,” is a brief summary of the last years of Mason and Dixon after their American adventure. They never again collaborate, and their time together consists of sporadic visits, but these two opposite numbers have managed, in old age, to converge. Dixon, who always dreamed of returning to America, dies in England in 1779. Mason, to whom the American years were a nightmare, emigrates there with his family after Dixon’s death, and he dies in Philadelphia in 1786.

The Characters

The title characters, Mason and Dixon, are the most fully developed of the virtually innumerable characters in this vast novel. Indeed, some reviewers have charged that all the other characters are mere cartoons and that Mason and Dixon alone display any depth. The charge is partially true; the historical characters tend to be the most cartoonish. George Washington becomes in Pynchon’s hands a real-estate schemer whose plantation grows hemp, both for ropemaking and for smoking. Benjamin Franklin emerges as a perpetual adolescent who cannot resist playing with electricity and flirting with the young ladies of Philadelphia. Yet many of the simplest fictional characters, even those who appear briefly, are among the most fully realized. For example, Frau Luise Redzinger, of the German pietistic faith that would later become known as “Pennsylvania Dutch,” is characterized in great detail by the observations of the Reverend Cherrycoke, who meets her on a coach ride in chapter 35. Thomas Cresap, brother to the militiaman whom Thomas Jefferson accused of murdering the Mingo Chief Logan, presents an unsympathetic but complete portrait of the “mountain man” of the western Pennsylvania frontier, acknowledging no civil authority and representing the sentiment of America on the brink of revolution.

The triumph of characterization in Mason and Dixon, however, is the depth to which readers come to know Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. They are introduced through the formality of their first letters to each other, given in chapter 2. Immediately, that formality begins breaking down, as Dixon reveals that he wrote his letter sober (implying that such sobriety is not habitual), and Mason expresses his embarrassment at the deference Dixon showed him. In short, both men strike poses in their letters of introduction, poses they begin to relax when they get to know each other.

Dropping their guards is only the first step in growing closer for Mason and Dixon. There is much they still must learn about each other, and readers learn along with them. Their personal convergence becomes an ironic commentary on the implicit theme of the novel: the artificiality of the drawing of boundaries. The Mason-Dixon line is perhaps the most famous boundary in America, setting the slave-holding South apart from the North, which, as the Chinese Captain Zhang observes, hides a subtler kind of slavery. Yet it is the drawing of this line of separation that unites Mason and Dixon, both in lessening their differences and in building their mutual affection.

The picture of Charles Mason that emerges is that of a man paralyzed by melancholy. Haunted by the memory—and literally haunted by the ghost—of his first wife Rebekah, he cannot think of ever again achieving the intimacy he knew with Rebekah, even though she urges him to remarry. Dixon’s incessant sexual activity in America is a constant reminder of Mason’s solitude, a counterpoint to his self-enclosure. Yet counterpoint it is, not contradiction: The opposite qualities of Mason and Dixon are complementary, and though Dixon jokes at Mason’s gloom, he attempts to lift his companion out of it.

Critical Context

Many of the themes, ideas, and even character names of Pynchon’s four earlier novels appear in Mason and Dixon. V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Vineland (1990) all involve characters who suspect that their lives are being directed by vast and mysterious forces. Mason and Dixon continues Pynchon’s exploration of paranoia, with Mason and Dixon suspecting the Royal Society of manipulating their lives, the officers of the Royal Society suspecting French Jesuits, and various members of the Society suspecting the influence of Robert Clive and his East India Company.

Another element that Mason and Dixon shares with Pynchon’s other novels is a plot and setting that involves the construction of the modern world. In V., it was the intellectual ferment of Vienna at the turn of the century and the colonialism of that era; in Pynchon’s next two novels, the rise of an economy based on information is sketched. In Mason and Dixon, a quintessentially American novel, the forces that made the United States are depicted, resulting in an abundance of anachronisms, including Pynchon’s characteristic references to popular culture: Popeye, Star Trek, and borscht belt comedians all appear in the novel.

Pynchon has a Faulkner-like history of carrying over family names from previous novels, as if the characters are ancestor and descendent. The narrator of Mason and Dixon, the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, is presumably an ancestor of the Cherrycoke in Gravity’s Rainbow, and a foretopman named “Fender-Belly” Bodine in Mason and Dixon is likely a forefather of Seaman “Pig” Bodine in V. Even when there are no connections in plot or setting, little hints such as these names suggest the coherence of Pynchon’s fictional world. Pynchon’s yoking of his quintessential elements of paranoia and anachronism to a seminal event in the making of America makes Mason and Dixon a profoundly important novel.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. A collection of essays, some published in previous collections. Bloom’s introduction is an excellent brief overview of Pynchon’s major themes.

Chambers, Judith. Thomas Pynchon. Boston: Twayne, 1992. The best general study of Pynchon, containing a chapter on each of Pynchon’s novels before Mason and Dixon.

Horvath, Barbara, and Irving Malin, eds. Pynchon and “Mason and Dixon.” Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. A book-length study of Pynchon’s fifth novel.

Levine, George, and Leverenz, David. Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. Essays reprinted from a special Pynchon issue of the journal Twentieth Century Literature, as well as six original essays.

Mead, Clifford. Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials. Elmwood Park, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1989. An exhaustive bibliography with helpful annotations.

Newman, Robert D. Understanding Thomas Pynchon. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Though this study reduces Pynchon’s complexities too radically for most scholars, it is an excellent starting point for the general reader; its title is apt.

Seed, David. The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988. A study of the narrative complexity of Pynchon’s novels; for the advanced student.

Slade, Joseph W. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Warner, 1974. The first book-length study of Pynchon, this trade paperback can still be useful to the general reader.