Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon provides ample proof, if further proof be needed, that the most profound story in Western literature—at least so far as our cultural life is concerned—is the one about the emperor and his new clothes. It has always seemed to me that if someone writes a novel that is long, obscure, and pretentious enough, the fashionable world will rise in a body and proclaim it a masterpiece, and this is exactly what happened with Pynchon’s eight-hundred-page, all-but unreadable tome.

Henry Holt’s peppy marketing team has characterized the book with grotesque inaccuracy as being reader-friendly, a happy “buddy” story accessible not only to Pynchon-nerds but to the common reader, whoever he or she might be. Fawning reviews in the daily New York Times, the Times Book Review, and The New York Review of Books supported that specious claim, and sales boomed, making Mason & Dixon one of the most unlikely bestsellers of all time. I don’t know whether I qualify as a common reader, but I found the novel to be aggressively inaccessible, not only to myself but to each of the various highly educated people whose opinions I solicited. It’s not that any of us would be ultimately incapable of knuckling down and penetrating the gauze of obfuscation in which Pynchon delights to shroud every scene; but then again, why would we want to? The rewards are not commensurate with the effort, and there are far too many really interesting books one might be reading instead.

Mason & Dixon, much like John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, is a mock-eighteenth-century novel. That means it conforms loosely with the stylistic conventions of the day and is rich with period spellings and dialogue, rhetorical sallies, and decorative bombast. The problem is that Pynchon has adopted only the annoying qualities—the verbosity, the digressiveness, the repetitions and affectations—of the genre and left out its freshness, energy, and outrageousness. This is the kind of prose that results:  

“Sirs, attend me,” the coins having silently vanish’d, “— Since last year, the Year of Marvels, when Hawke drove Conflans upon that lee shore at Quiberon Bay, the remnants of the Brest fleet have been understandably short of Elan, or Esprit, or whatever they style that stuff over there,— excepting, now and then, among the Captains of smaller Frigates, souls as restless to engage in personal Tactics as dispos’d to sniff at national Strategy. Mortmain, Le Chisel, St.-Foux,— mad dogs all,— any of them, and others, likely at any time to set sail out from Brest, indifferent to Risk, tête-à-tête as ever with the end of the World, seeking new Objects of a Resentment inexhaustible.”

It’s archaic all right, but no reader of Mason & Dixon would be likely to mistake it for real eighteenth-century writing. Aside from the fact that Pynchon slips in countless self-conscious anachronisms, the novel is too full of the telltale intellectual sin of our own age: compulsive irony. Pynchon’s unrelenting irony makes Mason & Dixon a very postmodern piece of work.

Mason & Dixon tells Pynchon’s version of the story of Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779), the British astronomers and surveyors best remembered in the United States for having established the boundary line between Pennsylvania and Maryland. It is narrated by a skeptical Philadelphia parson, the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, who as a young man accompanied the astronomers on their several joint expeditions, and his asides to the young people listening to his tale give the author the opportunity to slip in a few wry, ironic takes on the self-delusion of Christianity, the irrationality of Reason, and the vanity inherent in the pursuit of knowledge.

The melancholy widower Mason, assistant to the astronomer royal at Greenwich, is sent with his second, the more jovial (albeit Quaker) Dixon, to observe the transit of Venus in Sumatra. Their ship is attacked by the French navy and the astronomers are rerouted to the Cape of Good Hope, where they stay for some time, observing not only the transit but the strange life of the Cape’s white and black populations. From there they proceed to the island of St. Helena and eventually to the North American colonies, where they are hired to establish the boundary that will eventually become the Mason-Dixon line.

In America, Mason and Dixon, naïf picaros, take in the sights and meet the celebrities. In Philadelphia, they come across Benjamin Franklin and assist with some of his scientific experiments; in Virginia they meet up with Colonel George Washington, who is more interested in real estate than in politics and possesses a Jewish-African slave who performs schticky borscht-belt routines for his master’s guests. They also encounter another Virginian, a tall young redhead, who eavesdrops on their conversation and asks whether he might use Dixon’s throwaway remark about “the pursuit of happiness” in his future writings.

They find political malcontents and revolutionaries aplenty, but true to Pynchon’s unrelentingly revisionist project these turn out to be nothing more than unsavory riffraff. And they also become enmeshed in a wholly absurd Sino-Jesuit conspiracy: the well-known Pynchon paranoia, this time in eighteenth-century terms. Describing the journey to his grandchildren, Cherrycoke recalls that

what we were doing out in that Country together was brave, scientifick beyond my understanding, and ultimately meaningless,— we were putting a line straight into the heart of the Wilderness, eight yards wide and due west, in order to separate two Proprietorships, granted when the World was yet feudal and but eight years later to be nullified by the War for Independence.

Postmodern writers and theorists love to play with the notion of meaninglessness, and Mason & Dixon’s principal and most exhaustively belabored irony is that the Age of Reason, of which the surveyors are representatives, was anything but reasonable. During the course of their travels the men of science are forced to confront an articulate and learned dog; a mechanical duck who begs its inventor for an erotic life; a were-beaver; an ear which, though severed from its head, continues to hear; and an assortment of religious enthusiasts from German Pietists to Bavarian Rosicrucians.

“I may be præternatural, but I am not supernatural,” says the talking dog. “’Tis the Age of Reason, rrrf? There is ever an Explanation at hand, and no such thing as a Talking Dog.” We get the point; we get it again five pages later; and we get it each of the many times it is made as the novel wears slowly on.

Of course, the talking dog and the severed ear are not just a talking dog and a severed ear: they are symbols for the larger irrationality of “reasonable” human society, in particular the institution of slavery. The three territories to which Mason and Dixon travel together, South Africa, St. Helena, and America, are all slave societies, where whites “are become the very Savages of their own worst Dreams, far out of Measure to any Provocation.” The guileless astronomers observe the depredations of slavery with horror. Mason, for example, is shocked when the women of the Boer family with whom he boards at Cape Town urge their luscious slave woman, aptly named Austra, to slip into his bed at night; it seems that an African child sired by a white man will fetch a great price at the slave auctions. America, Dixon points out, was the one place they should not have found slaves (though this is in itself an anachronistic notion: during Mason and Dixon’s time America was not yet the self-styled cradle of democracy but an assortment of European colonies).

But America as metaphor has always been irresistible to intellectuals, and Pynchon goes to town with it.

Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?— in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow’d Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever ’tis not yet mapp’d, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,— serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,— Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ’s Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur’d and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, 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.

The fact that he has created heroes who are somewhat innocent, easily shocked by the naked inequities of the society they are visiting, allows the ever-ironic Pynchon to pile irony upon irony. Mason and Dixon, early examples of the “bleeding heart liberal,” were to give their names to the infamous boundary dividing the slave-holding Southern states from the free northern ones. The Mason-Dixon line thus became an integral element in the ugly history of American race-relations.

The problem with all of this is that Pynchon has taken a genuinely interesting topic and turned it into a Pynchon novel. Again and again during the long and weary course of Mason & Dixon, I found my interest piqued by some passing observation, and wished that the volume I was reading provided a trustworthy guide to the heroes’ historical period and their engineering feat, both fascinating in themselves. What a marvelous piece of nonfiction a book about Mason and Dixon might make! If only Robert A. Caro or Shelby Foote had written this story!

Instead, and in spite of the demonstrably extensive historical knowledge he has acquired while writing Mason & Dixon, Pynchon shows himself to be less in love with his subject than he is with his own talent and intellect. Every potentially acute historical observation is turned into a silly Pynchonesque joke, every event seen through the lens of smug postmodern irony and contemporary political cliché. In the end, Mason & Dixon turns out to be a self-regarding stylistic exercise without sincerity or passion—and monumentally boring to boot. All its author has succeeded in doing by dressing it up in the garb of the age of Fielding is to expose the fatuity and self-indulgence of the age of Pynchon.

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