These intoxicating leaps (one of the novel’s larkish inventions has students taught to fly along ley lines) are Pynchon’s signature, perhaps his scrawl, here secured within an age where such fresh infusions of knowledge were actively sought in common room and coffeehouse, the Renaissance cabinet becoming the experimental laboratory and the radical pamphlet, knowledge precipitated into the typographical boundaries of Johnson’s dictionary and Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Here Dixon’s teacher (the master of flight) lectures on the possibly druidic or Mithraic origins of ley lines:
“The Argument for a Mithraic Origin is encourag’d by the Cult’s known preference for underground Temples, either natural or manmade. They would have found a home in Durham, here among Pit-men and young Plutonians like yourselves,—indeed, let us suppose the earliest Coal-Pits were discover’d by Mithraist Sappers …? from the Camp up at Vinovia, poking about for a suitable Grotto,—who, seeking Ormazd, God of Light, found rather a condens’d Blackness which hides Light within, till set aflame … mystickal Stuff, Coal. Don’t imagine any of you notice that, too busy getting it all over yerselves, or resenting it for being so heavy, or counting Chaldrons. Pretending it solid, when like light and Heat, it indeed flows. Eppur’ si muove, if yese like.”
The pressure of history compounds the force of allusion, from the Roman army’s religious cults (Mithraism once rivaling Christianity for the empire’s soul) to Iron Age mining operations, from the obscure English measure for coal (a chaldron being from thirty-two to thirty-six bushels, depending on shire) to Galileo’s bitter, if apocryphal, aside after his forced recantation of belief in the Copernican system. Coal is another (unacknowledged) exemplar of the power of lamination: those densely compressed layers of decaying leaves, like gilt-edged leaves of a black book, were the source of the Industrial Revolution, the blackened miners slaves below to the temples of industry rising above. Dixon is from this hard-pressed country and only through education escapes a life in the pits or indebted to them (his father is a local baker): only knowledge of coal lets him flee the coal. The turn back to the themes of the novel, the private history of a character, anchors Pynchon’s whimsy in something more than whimsy, the random motions of imagination (their deft Brownian dance) serving laws otherwise invisible.
This improvement from detail to design is poetry’s conscious method—a poem’s metaphorical invention may confound logic or sense, moving crabwise across knowledge, but always returning to source (if poetry had a calculus, it would be integral). At such moments Pynchon’s imagination would otherwise seem out of control, firing off examples and suggestive metaphors without taking them to account, but with an elan almost comically Shakespearean. Most novelists invent their worlds by minute cross-reference to this one, meant to mirror our humdrum life with subdural shocks of recognition (genre writing, including science fiction, is the crudest form of such representation). Consider this quicksilver remark on politics (as well as fictions): “‘Yet Representation must extend beyond simple Agentry,’ protests Patsy, ‘—unto at least Mr. Garrick, who in “representing” a role, becomes the character, as by some transfer of Soul.’” This is followed by wit about “Actor-Envoys” and “Stroller-Plenipotentiaries.”
Pynchon never intensifies the familiar except to disrupt or destroy it; in his novels the realistic convention is merely convention, the fabric on which it is projected, like a movie screen, torn apart and patched together. It is not the denial of conventions that distinguishes his fiction so much as the layering of them: at any moment Howellsian realism underlies Dickensian farce, magic realism overlays Loony Tunes. What should be a conflict or comedy of manners becomes a Leyden pile of them: in this Pynchon is indebted to Joyce, though he has a curious way of disabling the anxiety of influence—by placing his own style so deep in history, he seems Joyce’s ancestor, not his descendent.
Pynchon’s most poker-faced inventions test this freedom from the shackles of genre (conventions operating like universal axioms). Hardly have Mason and Dixon been introduced in Portsmouth, to the reader and each other, than they meet a talking dog—not just any talking dog, but one that styles himself the Learned English Dog, one of great prepossession (“I am a British Dog, Sir. No one owns me”) and perhaps prophetic insight. In a few pages Pynchon uses him to comment obliquely on traveling animal acts, music-hall songs (the dog sings), Mesmerism, metempsychosis, the vices of sailors, the cooking of dogs on savage isles, the difference between preternatural and supernatural, the souls of animals, Zen koan, the Age of Reason, and pets as Scheherazades. At times the prose takes a Dickensian turn (the dog is exhibited by a married couple, the Fabulous Jellows, and Mr. Jellow warns of his Mrs.’s temper: “‘Do not oppose her,’ Jellow advises, ‘for she is a first-rate of an hundred Guns, and her Broadside is Annihilation’”). There is reeking description of the sailors’ dockside haunts before the dog vanishes for most of the rest of the novel (with only a small doggy encore many years later).
The deadpan description (“Out of the Murk, a dozen mirror’d Lanthorns have leapt alight together, as into their Glare now strolls a somewhat dishevel’d Norfolk Terrier, with a raffish Gleam in its eye”) goes a long way toward establishing the dog in the fabric of the fiction, and the reader’s belief wars with disbelief in proportions equal to those reported by Mason and Dixon. Pynchon’s ability to unite the expectations of his reader with his characters while constantly exceeding expectation lets him introduce talking clocks, a knife plucked from a dream, a severed ear (Jenkins’s infamous Ear) still capable of listening, an oaf who under the full moon turns into not werewolf but dandy, a perpetual-motion watch, a worldwide conspiracy of Jesuits, a mechanical duck with artificial intelligence and a taste for vengeance, and the Devil in need of a lawyer.
The astronomers inevitably confront the solar workings of the calendar and the upsetting moment, only a decade before the action of the novel, when England lost eleven days (September 3–13, 1752) in switching from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. Already in use in Europe, the Gregorian adjustment of leap years prevented the slow advance of seasons century by century (an advance that after millennia would have brought winter to July). Workers were not paid for those missing days, and banners of protest read “Give Us Our Eleven Days,” or so historians once believed—the calendar riots turn out to be one of history’s many myths. Pynchon suddenly proposes, in his offhand way, that Mason lived through those eleven days; and the premise raises matters from the difference between names and things to the remarkable books Mason discovers on secret shelves in the Bodleian: Aristotle on comedy (a nod to Umberto Eco as well as Richard Janko), the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and a lost Shakespeare tragedy. The consequences, for astronomy as well as the missing population (Mason is the sole inhabitant of those days), take only a few deft pages to work out; but they create, as so much of the novel does, a world behind our world—the world invented with each discovery by novelists as well as scientists.
At times it doesn’t seem to matter in which direction the novel advances. This indulgence in Keats’s negative capability operates within the text as a suspension of alternatives, as if there were no correct or deterministic way in which the fiction was destined to proceed. That Pynchon for so long staves off the suspicion that his novel doesn’t have anywhere to get to (years advance, the line will be completed, but the actions of the characters remain empty and purposeless—the purposeful dither is finally just dither) is a tribute to his ingenuity in the subatomic realm of the word, the phrase, the sentence. These are usually the proper concentrations of poetry, language for many novelists being merely the medium to advance character and plot. In Pynchon, character and plot have been mediums of an imagination elsewhere occupied and have therefore been treated farcically—but a farcical plot is still a plot.
Pynchon uses ideas—cultural counters, memes—the way a poet uses words, as objects of contemplation and gratification, whatever their meaning. The overstocked repository of his imagination is full of the cultural j
unk, as well as the minutiae of science and technology, of sadly little use to most fiction and poetry. To an extraordinary degree, one more common to poetry, his ideas come dense with symbolic opportunity—no wonder his metaphysical notions are Enigmas of hermeneutic coding, his main structures coincidence and conspiracy. The novel’s obsessive schemes swallow each unexpected invention, no matter how absurd, with insatiable and interpretive appetite.
In small, such ideas may be no more than imaginative sleight of hand. The country between York and Baltimore may be high in iron content. This ought to be just the trivia of encyclopedic reading, and yet:
The earth hereabouts is red, the tone of a new Brick Wall in the Shadow, due to a high ratio of iron,—and if till’d in exactly the right way, it becomes magnetized, too, so that at Harvest-time, ’tis necessary only to pass along the Rows any large Container of Iron, and the Vegetables will fly up out of the ground, and stick to it.
Only a passing fancy, of no importance to the novel, even this reveals old patterns afresh: nature’s secrets illuminated by science, the Age of Reason commanding the motion of progress, and the ingenious application of old force to new invention, with tacit reference to other sites of earth’s magnetic power (the mysterious ley lines, for instance). Pynchon’s reckless ingenuity is a science in opposition to the science we know. That poetic touch of the shadowed brick wall (few poets show such delicate skill or darkening eye—not a brick wall in shadow but a new brick wall in the shadow) is passed over as swiftly as a reference to iron deposits by Squire Haligast some forty pages before: “For without Iron, Armies are but identically costum’d men holding Bows, and Navies but comely gatherings of wrought Vegetation.” The beauty of this epigrammatic idea, tossed off without comment, is how much Pynchon sees, not just in presences, but in absences: war becoming with the disappearance of guns a kind of parish cotillion, the men “identically costum’d,” the navies “comely gatherings.” Are the embroidered dresses of women not “wrought Vegetation”? Are those men, in a vicious pun, holding weapons or ribbons?
This exhaustive digestion of ideas, this poetic invention of the previously unimaginable (that is the fiction of poetry), culminates in the remarkable vision that, the Mason-Dixon line completed, closes the climactic section of the novel. What will Mason and Dixon do next, they are asked.
“Devise a way,” Dixon replies, “to inscribe a Visto upon the Atlantick Sea.”
“Archie, Lad, Look ye here,” Mason producing a Sheaf of Papers, flapping thro’ them,—“A thoughtful enough Arrangement of Anchors and Buoys, Lenses and Lanthorns, forming a perfect Line across the Ocean, all the way from the Delaware Bay to the Spanish Extremadura,”—with the Solution to the Question of the Longitude thrown in as a sort of Bonus,—as, exactly at ev’ry Degree, might the Sea-Line, as upon a Fiduciary Scale for Navigators, be prominently mark’d, by a taller Beacon, or a differently color’d Lamp. In time, most Ships preferring to sail within sight of these Beacons, the Line shall have widen’d to a Sea-Road of a thousand Leagues, as up and down its Longitude blossom Wharves, Chandleries, Inns, Tobacco-shops, Greengrocers’ Stalls, Printers of News, Dens of Vice, Chapels for Repentance, Shops full of Souvenirs and Sweets,—all a Sailor could wish,—indeed, many such will decide to settle here, “Along the Beacons,” for good, as a way of coming to rest whilst remaining out at Sea. A good, clean, salt-scour’d old age. Too soon, word will reach the Land-Speculation Industry, and its Bureaus seek Purchase, like some horrible Seaweed, the length of the Beacon Line.”
The vision continues toward the depredations of land speculators at sea, the founding of a “Coral-dy’d cubickal Efflorescence”—St. Brendan’s Isle, pleasure ground and pensioners’ home—to which Mason and Dixon will retire, holders in the scheme, under the watchful eye of the “Atlantick Company.” Each stage of this vision begets a new stage more outlandish and yet more plausible, part of Pynchon’s wry commentary (notice how masterfully, almost without detection, he modulates out of Mason’s speech into authorial narration) on the age’s chartered companies, the solution to the problem of longitude finally neither astronomical or horological but mechanical, the sea colonized like the land. The end returns to the provision for sailors’ vices with which the voyages of Mason and Dixon began.
If Pynchon’s invention in language mimics the inventions of science, where one explosion is always fuse of the next, it is no more than the way science mimics poetry. The problem of this overstuffed work, what makes it finally a spoil heap of a novel, is just the poetic method that works so well in the microcosm. It is easy to take the petty irritations of Pynchon’s mind as exuberance and recklessness—the bad jokes and worse puns, the cheap anachronistic references to contemporary phenomena. The pages are intercalated with songs and poems, but when Pynchon tries to write poetry, as opposed to embodying the methods of poetry, he shows a wooden and unschooled ear (even Jenkins’s ear could write better verse). His heroic couplets could not have been written by even a bad poet of the period, having little acquaintance with the age’s metrical practice, which would have been natural as breathing (even provincial poets could imitate Pope with success); but they’re masterful compared to his music-hall frolics, like this Jesuit recruiting song:
So,—
Have,—
A,—
’Nother look,—at the Army that
Wrote the Book,—take the Path that you
Should’ve took—and you’ll be
On your way!
Get, up, and, wipe-off-that-chin,
You can begin, to have a
Whole new oth-er life,—
Soldj’ring for Christ,
Reas’nably priced,—
And nobody’s missing
The Kids or th’ Wife!
There is not a page of Mason & Dixon without its droll or disturbing invention, satires on colloquial speech (a milkmaid who uses “as” the way Valley girls use “like”), Jesuit coaches larger inside than out (a subtle slur on sophistry), a musical on the Black Hole of Calcutta, even a visit to the hollow Earth. Such lavish imagination (including his inventories—he’s a lover of lists) has not been so magnificently sustained since Joyce. The novel’s refusal to muster invention toward anything resembling plot, rather than just the spillage of events over time, seems finally a cowardice: by abusing the privileges of fiction (even picaresque’s frivolous motions and meetings are a moral commentary on emptiness), Pynchon loses control of the advantages. His inability to exploit the contrived meetings with Franklin, Jefferson, or Washington, for example—he might have deepened his designs by ignoring their didactic promises—is everywhere repeated in encounters with minor characters. It seems not realism but carelessness (a carelessness so winning in the details). He exhausts so many small opportunities with a master’s skill, it’s a pity he has no interest in larger ones.
The novel’s infinite deferrals, its postponed consummations (sex is on both Mason’s and Dixon’s minds, but every seduction is soured) finally become an aversion to any conflict or resolution. No one comes to grief; episodes both lethal and erotic collapse without consequence (a long-awaited confrontation between Captain Zhang, master of dark Chinese arts, and his Jesuit nemesis, Father Zarpazo, vanishes in thin air)—it’s as if Pynchon loses interest. A novel may need neither plot nor character alone—Joyce and Proust offered character in lieu of plot, and many novelists substitute plot in lieu of character. It’s difficult for a novel, even a novel everywhere touched by brilliance, to offer so little of either. Pynchon may have conceived Mason & Dixon as a supreme fiction, a poetic act freed of the slavery of plot and character; but conventions are cruel to those who betray them. As his stand-up comedy becomes merely a seven-hundred-page improvisation, the jokes grow hollow as the Earth itself. Here Pynchon’s poetics have seduced him: it hardly matters if most poems mean what they say. Poetry is the saying, but fiction (the drama, the action, the consequence, the regret) is the having said.
* According to my old Brewer’s, the Mac
aroni in their outlandish dandy’s costumes were the “curse of Vauxhall Gardens” in the years before the American Revolution, responsible for introducing macaroni to English cuisine as well as the word “bore,” applied to their critics.
Back to the Future (Thomas Pynchon)
Thomas Pynchon’s sprawling, untidy new novel, Against the Day, is only as frustrating as most of his fiction. It starts in the air, high-minded as a kite, and gradually flutters groundward, dragged down by subplots galore and characters thrown in willy-nilly, as if a novel’s only virtue were how many characters it could stuff into a phone booth (no doubt Pynchon, who has loaded the book with more Victorian mathematics than Carter had pills, has an algorithm up his sleeve).
The Chums of Chance
Against the Day opens aboard the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience, sailing in stately fashion toward the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The year is 1893. The crew belong to a “celebrated aeronautics club” called the Chums of Chance, which dispatches its fleet of dirigibles on heroic exploits. The narrator quietly identifies himself as the author of the dime novels that record these deeds of daring. This sidling revelation complicates the authorial voice; but, as so often in Pynchon, revelation has no relevance. It’s only an arpeggio from an author who specializes in red herrings and dead ends.
Behind the Chums, whose wanderings form the first thread of the tangled plot, lies a droll homage to boys’ fiction—to the technology of Verne, the allegorical futures of Wells (though Pynchon loves allegorical pasts even more), the manic improvisations of the Uncle Scrooge comics, and the hackwork of Tom Swift tales and Hardy Boys mysteries (Tom Swift and the Boys often referred to their friends as “chums”). Titles like Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship and Tom Swift and His Big Dirigible suggest that Pynchon is not alone in his fascination with giant gasbags, while Tom Swift and His Big Tunnel; or, The Hidden City of the Andes and Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders; or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold prefigure, or rather postfigure, those in the Chums of Chance series. The Chums are the Tom Swift books rewritten by James Clerk Maxwell and Buster Keaton.
Our Savage Art Page 28