GRAVITY'S BOUNDARY

IN `MASON & DIXON,' THOMAS PYNCHON MERGES WILD BURLESQUE AND DESPERATE SERIOUSNESS TO CREATE HIS OWN MAP OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Author: By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, May 4, 1997

Page: D17

Section: Books

That's ``Mason & Dixon'' as in the line, the one drawn in the 1760s to demarcate Pennsylvania from Maryland, the one that traditionally divides American North from American South. By extension, you might say, the Mason-Dixon line stands for cartographic boundaries generally: the encrustation of the abstract on the organic.

Anyone familiar with Pynchon's fiction knows that encrusting anything on the organic qualifies as a grievous sin in his moral calculus. He is American literature's most commanding Luddite, as deeply suspicious of technology as he is of any form of organized control over human behavior. For Pynchon, the two are one and the same. The V-2 rockets whose ``screaming comes across the sky'' in ``Gravity's Rainbow'' (1973) epitomize this dire congruence -- state-of-the-art technology courtesy of state-of-the-art totalitarianism -- but along the same continuum also lies, courtesy of Pynchon's title characters, ``a line straight through the heart of the Wilderness, eight yards wide and due west,'' speeding up ``the slowly branching Seep of Atlantic settlement.''

Pynchon is also the poet laureate of paranoia, investing existence with a constant sense of threat and menace. In an age where technology and organization rapidly branch and seep, how could it be otherwise? Pervading all his books -- besides ``Gravity's Rainbow,'' they include the novels ``V.'' (1963), ``The Crying of Lot 49'' (1966), and ``Vineland'' (1990), along with the story collection, ``Slow Learner'' (1984) -- is a sense of 20th-century experience as a vast conspiracy, electric with secret meaning. Small wonder Pynchon makes such a fetish of his own anonymity (the most recent photograph of him dates from 40 years ago): It's a simple matter of literary conviction. If they are out to get us, then they're surely out to get him, too.

This vision of modern life as minatory cabal is as arresting as any in our literature. That is a bold statement, yet no bolder than the statement which underlies it. ``Gravity's Rainbow'' is the mightiest American novel since ``Moby-Dick,'' an immense, imperial, sometimes very nearly impenetrable achievement that's as likely to bring some readers to madness and rage -- assuming they're willing to stick with it -- as others to awe and wonder. (``V.'' and ``The Crying of Lot 49'' are pretty amazing, too.)

This is no place for a reconsideration of ``Gravity's Rainbow.'' Suffice it to say Pynchon's novel demonstrates that borders are not the only form of supreme fiction. Love ``Gravity's Rainbow'' or hate it (there are those who do both), one must acknowledge its looming presence on the literary landscape. More to the point, that presence hangs over ``Mason & Dixon'' like a V-2 over London, unseen yet unignorable.

Thirteen pages longer than ``Gravity's Rainbow'' (don't let anyone fool you -- in the matter of masterpieces, size counts), ``Mason & Dixon'' was two decades in the making; or, to be more accurate, rumors about it have been circulating on the Pynchon circuit since the mid-'70s. The intervening novel, ``Vineland,'' was an amiable mess. While clearly a disappointment, it had enough good things in it to reassure admirers that Pynchon was still with us. Maybe he was just keeping his hand in while readying The Next Big One.

Pynchon has structured ``Mason & Dixon'' as a story within a story. A member of the surveying party recounts to his family some 20 years later how Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the mismatched pair of English astronomers who surveyed the line between 1763 and 1767, ended up on such an odd mission, how it proceeded, and what became of them after returning to England.

That sounds straightforward enough, but Pynchon being Pynchon -- happily wayward, shamelessly circumlocutory -- the story within the story boasts countless digressions, tall tales, riffs. The abiding doominess of the other novels barely registers. It lurks around the edges, in forms either mundane (the Astronomer Royal's machinations against Mason) or melodramatic (fiendish Jesuits seeking global control). Instead, we get in abundance Pynchon's love of the preposterous and abstruse. There are ghosts and a talking Norfolk terrier named Fang and what can only be called a werebeaver (like a werewolf, only it builds dams). George Washington, who exhibits a fondness for smoking what is discreetly termed ``hemp,'' makes several appearances, as does Benjamin Franklin (``Strangers heed my wise advice,--'' he counsels Mason and Dixon at an apothecary. ``Never pay the retail price.'')

As always, Pynchon delights in the ridiculous. The narrator is named Rev. Cherrycoke, and the surveyors encounter a man named Redzinger. Nearly exceeding Pynchon's predilection for outrageous names is his weakness for dialect humor (the renderings of Dixon's County Durham accent can be a real trial). There are frequent citations of ``The Pennsylvaniad,'' whose decidedly unheroic couplets (``For Skies grow thick with aviating Swine, / Ere men pass up the chance to draw a Line'') come from the pen of the aptly named Timothy Tox. When not reciting poetry, Pynchon's characters are likely to burst into song. At times, ``Mason & Dixon'' verges on musical comedy (``Surveyin' in the Rain''?), but an even stranger affinity suggests itself: with, of all things, the Crosby-Hope ``Road'' pictures. Mason, the straight man and the more dignified of the two, is a gloomier version of Bing; and Dixon is Bob, ever randy and ready to make things worse with a snappy comeback. True, there's no Dorothy Lamour equivalent, but any number of Jerry Colonna candidates provide comic relief.

As if to ballast such unregenerate burlesque (or should that be unrepentant burlesque?), Pynchon also demonstrates just how thoroughly he has done his historical homework. To follow ``Mason & Dixon,'' it helps to know, among other arcana, a Jacobite from a Wilkesite, a smattering of Quaker theology, and some details of Britain's switch from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian in 1752. There is a wearying delight in obscurity, a cultivation of muzziness. Part of the appeal of ``Gravity's Rainbow'' was that it made World War II and its immediate aftermath seem like a giant head trip circa 1970. With ``Mason & Dixon,'' Pynchon does the precise opposite, striving to make the past seem, if anything, even more distant.

The most memorable thing about ``Vineland'' was its unexpectedly rhapsodic vision of America. In that respect, ``Mason & Dixon'' enlarges on its immediate predecessor, betraying a radiant affection for the miraculous promise of the New World. ``There is a love of complexity here in America,'' Pynchon writes, ``pure Space waits the Surveyor,-- no previous Lines, no fences, no streets to constrain polygony however extravagant,-- angles pushing outward and inward,-- all Sides zigging and zagging, going ahead and doubling back, making Loops inside Loops,-- in America, 'twas ever, Poh! to Simple Quadrilaterals.''

That is a remarkable sentence, at once classic Pynchon (with its verbal chicanes and rhythmic switchbacks) and typical of the faux-18th-century style he employs here, with erratically capitalized improper nouns, elided e's, and commas joined to dashes. This takes some getting used to. No one will ever mistake his style for that of Fielding or Sterne (albeit more than a whiff of ``Tristram Shandy,'' the gleeful, grinning granddaddy of all anti-novels, perfumes ``Mason & Dixon''). Neither, though, does it descend to the elephantine jocosity of John Barth's attempt at an updated 18th-century novel, ``The Sot-Weed Factor.''

Pynchon takes his historical setting seriously, for it is central to what ``Mason & Dixon'' is about. ``Isn't this supposed to be the Age of Reason?'' Mason wonders when he meets the ghost of his late wife. Yes and no, and that ambivalence drives the novel. On the one hand, the Enlightenment is . . . enlightened. ``These times are unfriendly to worlds alternative to this one. Royal Society members and French Encyclopaedists are in the Chariot, availing themselves whilst they may of any occasion to preach the Gospels of Reason.'' Yet all the rationality in the world can't eradicate every alternative world -- and it is into several just such worlds Mason and Dixon find themselves thrust.

They go to America after serving on an astronomical mission to Cape Town and St. Helena -- in other words, visiting a land whose settlement is predicated on the slaughter of its indigenous peoples, after visiting another whose settlement is predicated on the enslavement of its indigenous peoples, and an island that, 50 years after their visit, will prove the last, lonely outpost of the Age of Reason with the Napoleon's exiled death there.

``Geometry and slaughter!'' -- reason at its purest and irrationality at its grimmest -- these are what define Mason and Dixon's experience. Men of science and good will, they find themselves thrust into an Enlightenment anti-universe, their lives become ``a Parable about Slavery and Free Will.'' The 8-yard-wide line they survey divides more than just two British colonies rapacious for each other's real estate. It also separates dark from light, instinct from reason, oppression from liberty. Amid all its characteristic Pynchon merriment, ``Mason & Dixon'' harbors something equally characteristic of his fiction: a desperate seriousness. What is not characteristic is the quality of the vehicle he has chosen to convey them. More 18th-century ``Vineland'' than Enlightenment ``Gravity's Rainbow,'' ``Mason & Dixon'' is that not uncommon occurrence in our literature, a muddled book by a magnificent writer. A screaming comes across the sky? Sometimes only a line gets drawn in the sand.

THOMAS PYNCHON, from ``Mason & Dixon''