Pynchon and the Political

Samuel Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135911416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Thomas Pynchon's writing has been widely regarded as an exemplary form of postmodern fiction. It is characterized as genre-defying and enigmatic, as a series of complex and esoteric language games. This study attempts to demonstrate, however, that an oblique yet compelling sense of the "political" Pynchon disappers all too easily under the mantle of postmodernity. Innovative and unsettling discussions of freedom, war, labor, poverty, community, democracy, and totalitarianism are passed over in favor of constrictive scientific metaphors and theoretical play. Against this current, this study analyzes Pynchon's fiction in terms of its radical dimension, showing how it points to new directions in the relationship between the political and the aesthetic.

Chapter One
Retro-Vertigo: Escaping the Enlightenment in Mason & Dixon

From the reflex of disgust at excrement or human flesh to the suspicion of fanaticism, laziness, and poverty, whether intellectual or material, there is a long line of modes of behaviour which were metamorphosed from the adequate and necessary into abominations. This is the line both of destruction and of civilization.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.¹

In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”²

The Mason-Dixon Line was (and for the most part still is) a boundary separating the American states of Pennsylvania and Maryland. In the early part of the Eighteenth Century, ambiguities in the Pennsylvania and Maryland charters led to a long-standing disagreement between the Penn and Calvert families (the respective legal proprietors of the two colonies). With valuable territory at stake and both sides unwilling to concede, the case was submitted to the English Court of Chancery in 1735. By 1760, after much hot air and chest beating, a settlement to satisfy all the interested parties had been agreed. A line was to be drawn—logical, precise and definitive. This resulted in the appointment of two Englishmen, an astronomer named Charles Mason and a land surveyor named Jeremiah Dixon, hired to undertake the job on recommendation from the Royal Society. After observing the Transit of Venus in 1761 at Cape Town, the accuracy and efficiency of their working partnership had been noted in high places. Because of the difficulties posed by trying to draw a line parallel with the latitudinal lines of the globe, lines that are actually segments of an arc, their expertise as stargazers was seen as ideal for the task ahead. Thus, Mason and Dixon landed on American shores in 1763. Slowly and thoroughly, they surveyed westward—running their Line across mountains, lowlands and swamp for a total of 244 miles. Upon reaching the border of present day West Virginia in 1768, the delegation of Mohawks escorting the two men informed them that their own commission from the six tribal nations would allow them to go no further and, as a corollary, the Line came to an end. Mason and Dixon considered their work done and returned home.³

The Mason-Dixon Line was a quiet triumph for Enlightenment science, all the more remarkable considering the specificity of their technical brief. The significance of the Line, however, stretches far beyond the advancement of astronomy and surveying. Before the American Civil War, the term “Mason-Dixon Line” popularly designated the boundary separating the slaveholding states from the free states and was cemented as such by the Missouri compromise of 1820. Indeed, it is still used to distinguish the South from the North to this day. The surnames of these two Englishmen, by accident or by conspiracy, perhaps a combination of both, have been imprinted into the public register and into world history. Moreover, just a few clicks online will reveal that Mason and Dixon have also given their names to a range of hot sauces, a semi-pro baseball league, a radio station, a wrestling club, a chapter of the American Rhododendron Society, a Barbershop Quartet—the list goes on. Their unwitting legacy, both serious and banal, continues to flourish in the age of informatics, global capital and, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term, radical “deterritorialization.”⁴ Their names are on the market now, part of the economy—exchanged and renegotiated in a system which is rooted in the very social, political and technological developments that made the Line possible in the first place. What is rather curious about this process is that the actual lives and experiences of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon are mysteriously blank. Their story, even though I have grossly over-simplified it here, begins and ends with the Line. That is to say, it is defined almost entirely by their work—by instruments and measurements, by degrees of latitude and positions of stars, by a handful of journal entries, articles and mathematical scribblings.⁵ Without a narrator, a Boswell-like figure to walk in their shadows, the Mason and Dixon that once existed before their names became currency are strangely neutral characters in the power games of the Eighteenth Century. My focus here, however, is on another text that bears the names of Mason and Dixon. It is a text that hovers in the margins between fiction and history, between reason and unreason, a text that sometimes blurs these distinctions altogether.

Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon is, loosely speaking, a kind of “updated” Eighteenth Century novel that re-animates the lives, loves and adventures of the two astronomer/surveyors as well as tracking the slow but relentless progress of the Line. The tale is narrated retrospectively⁶ by the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke in 1786—visiting Philadelphia for the funeral of Charles Mason and spinning a few yarns for the amusement of his niece, Tenebrae, and his twin nephews, Pitt and Pliny (named “so that each might be term’d ‘the Elder’ or ‘the Younger,’ as might day-to-day please one, or annoy his Brother,” M&D, 7). This, however, is no ordinary Age of Reason. Following the pattern set by each of his previous novels, Pynchon combines years of painstaking historical research with outrageous comical imaginings and supernatural flights of fancy. “The facts,” so to speak, are just half the story. Frontiersmen turn into beavers on full moons, the Jesuits appear to be responsible for the invention of the modern coffee machine and Benjamin Franklin gives demonstrations of electricity whilst dressed as the grim reaper. One will certainly not find these details in the snappily titled: “Astronomical Observations Made in the Forks of the River Brandywine in Pennsylvania, for Determining the Purposes of a Clock Sent Thither by the Royal Society.”⁷ The journey, like Mason and Dixon’s, is not an easy one and the dust has yet to settle on this lengthy, bewildering work. As the reviewer Anthony Lane notes, one almost feels that Mason and Dixon “deserve a medal for surviving not just the rigors of their professional task but the incalculable travails of Pynchon’s fiction.”⁸

Mason & Dixon therefore provides the backdrop (political, economic and fantastic) for my first exercise in “fragmentology,” the method inspired by Frankfurt School critical theory that I began to sketch out in the introduction. Framed by these wider forces, the analysis that follows will become the structural and conceptual template for each of the subsequent chapters. It is the “test case” on which the rest of my study is modeled. It is the most speculative of these six “cases,” the least concrete in its approach, but necessarily so. It prepares the ground for the work to come; it raises central questions about resistance, utopianism, economy, excess, magic and domination that will all be developed throughout the project. It is the point of departure, the origin, the beginning of the dialectic, the beginning of a line. By starting with the Enlightenment, the aim here is to demonstrate, as J. M. Bernstein asserts, that “modern enlightened reason” is “through and through a form of instrumental reason” and, secondly, “that this formation of reason now structures the dominant practices” of socio-political life today.⁹ Thus, Enlightenment will also function as a constant point of return, no matter how far away it may appear on the dialectical march “forward” (finishing over 200 years “later” with Vineland). Lines will become circles, bringing both text and world into their ambit—although what this process fails to incorporate, those moments which are left out of history and left out of narrative, negatively redemptive as they might be, will be just as important as what it includes. For now, however, the focus must be narrowed. The preamble is over, the dialectic is at rest and the first “fragment” can be introduced.

In the latter stages of Mason & Dixon, as the two astronomer/surveyors are visiting the frontier town of Cumberland, a young boy from Virginia appears and makes a playful declaration: “‘I can show you something no one has ever seen, nor will anyone see again.’” Squinting in thought and (as is often the case) “vaporous of Ale,” Mason can muster no response except a perfunctory “‘no such thing.’” The boy then produces an “unopen’d Goober Pea-Shell”¹⁰ from somewhere on his person and cracks it apart to reveal a pair of small red nuts within. The trick unfolds as follows: “‘Something no one has seen’”—“popping them into his mouth and eating them”—“‘and no one will see again.’” The two English Gents are left in astonished silence. They look for that brief moment “like a match’d pair of Goobers themselves” (M&D, 645). With echoes of the comic strip, the cinema and more (cross-textual forms that both define and disrupt Pynchon’s meta-historical environment), the episode closes on this vaguely surreal tableau. So begins the strange case of the Virginia Boy.

The peevish Uncle Ives would no doubt disapprove of all this peek-a-boo tomfoolery—one of the many rationalist voices to emerge from the novel’s polyphonic register of storytelling, recollection, commentary and debate. Indeed, the case of the Virginia Boy could be dismissed without a second thought as another one of those “‘irresponsible narratives that will not distinguish between fact and fancy,’” as a childish and shabby form of “‘mental excitement’” (M&D, 351). What is important here in socio-political terms, however, is the relationship between the Virginia Boy and the Line. This point must be established from the outset and it will govern the direction of the inquiry here. No matter how we might choose to judge the episode, the relentless progress of the Line remains undisturbed (as the central concept underpinning the whole novel and, more prosaically, as a day-to-day activity, as the novel’s narrative drive). The Line becomes the standard against which all things are measured. Whatever interruptions are thrown in its way—natural, supernatural and sometimes just plain odd—its momentum will not be curbed. Common ground continues to become private property. What the Line represents politically in the case of Virginia Boy can therefore be equated (at least provisionally) with Hannah Arendt’s critique of Platonic truth. The Line, in this sense, represents the “denunciation of doxa.”¹¹ It places a veto on play, improvisation and dissent. The Line is a rejection of all those insecure, debased and worldly formations that distract us from the rationalized purity of the truth (or rather, its truth). This truth wins a “lasting victory”—it becomes the dominant economy of meaning—but only at the expense of “the dignity of human action.”¹² By extension, the Line’s “victory” also comes at the expense of a legitimate socio-political reality, an assertion that I will analyze in greater detail both here and throughout the study as whole. For now, let us simply say that the Line has no time for the likes of the Virginia Boy. He is a fragment, a footnote, hot air, an anomaly left of the survey and left behind by historical progress. The Line is an instrument of reason; it does not yield for boys and their magic tricks, for “something no one has seen” and “no one will see again.” As Mason tells Dixon before their departure for America: “‘Philosophick Work, to proceed at all smartly … requires a controll’d working-space’” (M&D, 252). Retaining this speculative approach then, the relationship between the Virginia Boy and the Line can be developed a little further.

As I began to explain above, the case of the Virginia Boy can be framed politically using Arendt’s critique of Platonism. It is threatened, pushed into the margins, perhaps even nullified altogether, by the exclusion of doxa from the Line’s political economy. The Line is “‘the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People’” (M&D, 615). The truth of the Line is the lie of a manifest political destiny. However, if we are to understand the episode in opposition to enlightened reason, then the scope of the analysis here can be broadened. The Virginia Boy can be incorporated into what Adorno and Horkheimer call the “magical plane,” in the “milieu-bound practices” of the mystic and the medicine man. The “magical plane” is a “chance vehicle of significance” where “dream and image” are “not mere signs for the thing in question” but intimately bound up with it, where “relatedness” takes precedence over “intention.” Like science, “magic pursues aims, but seeks to achieve them by mimesis—not by progressively distancing itself from the object.”¹³ Indeed, by swallowing the Goober nuts, this is the basis of the Virginia Boy’s trick; he becomes the object of his own impossible proposition: “something no one has seen” and “no one will see again.” As a combination of mythology and folk culture, the magical plane produces both harmonious and deeply violent relations with the world. Thus, it would be going too far at this stage to cast the Virginia Boy as some kind of redemptive magical figure, seduced by a hazardous and uncritical nostalgia or the promise of some quick-fix, faux-mystic transcendence. At best, this produces an empty kitsch; at worst, it produces bloodshed. Nevertheless, it is precisely this “magical plane” that enlightened reason systematically erodes (one of the last refuges, though not necessarily a viable one, of the “non-identical”).

The Line, as an expression of Enlightenment, therefore imposes “the arid wisdom” of repetition, an objectified principle of sameness.¹⁴ As “magical illusion” fades away—like a disappearing nut trick—the dictum that “there is nothing new under the sun,” that “all possible discoveries can be construed in advance and all men are decided on adaptation as a means of self-preservation,” begins to take hold.¹⁵ The Line defines both itself and the world in terms of repetition and reproducibility; it “excises the incommensurable.”¹⁶ It must exclude all notions of “something no one has seen” and “no one will see again.” There is, as Mason himself states, “no such thing.” The Line must “extricate itself from the process of fate and retribution,” whilst at the same time “exercising retribution on that process.” It “relentlessly remakes what has already been.”¹⁷ It is precisely this process, I intend to show, that is dramatized across Mason & Dixon—not just dramatized, in fact, but actively disrupted by an oblique but radical utopian politics. Before these claims can gain substance though, the...

Table of contents

• STUDIES IN MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Text-Politics-Criticism-Methodology
• Chapter One Retro-Vertigo: Escaping the Enlightenment in Mason & Dixon
• Chapter Two Blank Checks: Economy and Invisibility in Mason & Dixon
• Chapter Three Theatre of Operations: Surgery, War and Questing in V. and Gravity’s Rainbow
• Chapter Four Memento-Mori: War-Life and War-Experience in Gravity’s Rainbow and V.
• Chapter Five (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding? Resistance vs. Withdrawal in The Crying of Lot 49
• Chapter Six Sir Yes Sir! Doing it to Yourself and Doing it for Yourself in Vineland
• Conclusion Pynchon-Politics-Everybody
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index