(2 of 2)
But for all its whimsical inventiveness, Mason & Dixon is basically a historical re-creation of the known deeds of the astronomer Mason and the surveyor Dixon. The line did not constitute their first collaboration, and Pynchon devotes more than 250 pages to the work they did together before arriving in the New World to take up the job commissioned by the British Royal Society.
Pynchon vividly recounts the dangers and struggles Mason and Dixon endure in carrying out their assignment. And it slowly becomes clear that this story is not about a triumph of 18th century scientific methods, which Pynchon explains in elaborate detail, but rather about a tragic desecration, a deadly abstraction imposed upon land once natural and truly free. Mason and Dixon cannot foresee the bloodshed that will rage across their line a century later, during the U.S. Civil War, but both men, in Pynchon's telling, come to believe that they did something wrong to the wilderness. Years later Mason tells Dixon that their work in America amounted to "Campaigning, geometrick as a Prussian Cavalry advance,--tho' in the service of a Flag whose Colors we never saw."
Pynchon's distinctive genius, as revealed again in this novel, is his ability to keep diametrically opposing opinions in a fascinating, jittery suspension. He loves the intellectual purities of science and understands them better than any American novelist ever. He also loathes the power that science bestows, since it always ends up in the wrong hands, i.e., those with a hunger for such power. At its most eloquent, Mason & Dixon becomes an epic of loss. The conquering of the wilderness means "reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,--winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair."
Are contemporary readers, beguiled by everything electronic, willing to do the hard, head-scratching work that Pynchon's uncompromising prose demands? Perhaps not; tough books are unfashionable at the moment. But those who beg off the long journey through Mason & Dixon will deprive themselves of a unique and miraculous experience.