A cock and bull story

Well over a year ago (probably nearer two), Kenny set out to document his experience of reading Thomas Pynchon’s beast of a novel ‘Mason & Dixon’. No doubt he won’t thank me for saying that the series of posts petered out long before the end had been reached. It’s that kind of book, exhaustive and exhausting.

And so here I endeavour to do in one post what Kenny tried to do across several: give some impression of what ‘Mason & Dixon’ is about, and what it’s like to attempt to read it.

First of all, it’s worth noting that it took me a good six months to get through it, though it was off and on and I was reading other things alongside it, partly as a means of retaining my sanity. And as someone who loves ‘Ulysses’, I don’t say that lightly.

The most daunting aspect of the novel is its sheer length. It sat on my shelves for over a year before I ventured to take it down, its thickness more than equal to two or three contemporary novels (which are themselves often pretty lengthy).

But it’s also written in a stylised archaic language, in which clause piles upon clause and sentences stretch on for line upon line, barely held together by the idiosyncratically liberal dashes and punctuation marks. It certainly becomes easier to deal with over time, but picking it up to read in fits and starts is far from ideal.

So, what’s it about? In basic terms: Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the former a Gloucestershire astronomer and the latter a Geordie surveyor, who were commissioned in the mid-eighteenth century to demarcate an essentially east-west boundary between states in America, which subsequently became known as the Mason-Dixon line. Pynchon’s novel – its opening and concluding sections aside – essentially focuses on the dramatisation of the progress of this demarcation.

But if that makes it sound like a dusty-dry historical chronicle, then nothing could be further from the truth. Though there is plenty of evidence of meticulous research into the real-life duo’s movements and into the technical detail, Pynchon – in typically postmodernist fashion – makes no pretence of the fact that it is a work of fiction and has no claim to historical “truth” (whatever that might be, he might add). History is stretched, manipulated, toyed with. It’s an act of myth-making and mirth-making. As the characters lurch from predicament to predicament (led as much by their thirst for alcohol and women as by their work), absurdities continually irrupt into the narrative – as one might expect of a novel narrated by one Rev Wicks Cherrycoke, Mason and Dixon’s sometime companion, who at one point recalls a ritual at sea during which he got spotted dick lodged up his nose…

Less than fifteen pages in, the pair come across a talking dog – that pretty much sets the tone. Over the course of the next 760 pages, the reader encounters (in no particular order):

* Clocks which chat to each other

* Benjamin Franklin, who accompanies our intrepid travellers to an apothecary to stock up on drugs, and George Washington, who is growing a large patch of hemp behind his house (naturally they indulge and are subsequently grateful when Mrs Washington appears “carrying an enormous Tray pil’d nearly beyond their Angles of Repose with Tarts, Pop-overs, Ginger-bread Figures, fried Pies, stuff’d Doughnuts, and other Units of Refreshment the Surveyors fail to recognise”)

* A pickled ear in a jar which listens into conversations

* Lively discussions about pizzas, feng shui, whether tea or coffee is the superior hot beverage, the relation of a meat sandwich to the Eucharist, and the art of making realistic effigies

* Mason’s reminiscences of having met his late wife Rebekah at an annual cheese-rolling event at which he narrowly escaped being crushed by an enormous ball of Double Gloucester, and of later beginning “his practice, each Friday, of going out to the hangings at Tyburn, expressly to chat up women”

* A duel over a lady’s honour enacted not by means of pistols at dawn but a game of quoits

* A bodice which plays a musical tune when ripped open by Dixon, Mason having been left carrying a bathtub the pair are in the process of stealing (the bathtub is later a temporary home to an electric eel called Felipe who becomes “the camp Compass, as often consulted as the Thermometer or the Clock”)

* A conversation between a Philadelphia lawyer and a miserable put-upon Beelzebub

* A mechanical duck equipped with a beak made of Swedish steel and “‘a Digestionary Process, whose end result could not be distinguish’d from that found in Nature’” which furiously pursues a French chef (Armand Allegre – say it aloud…) famous for his duck-based dishes and then falls in love with him

* A ghostly horse and carriage which gets held up in traffic over the skies of County Durham

* A man who transforms himself into a beaver, and another who is a werewolf

* Mason’s entrapment amongst lamb carcasses in the meat-hold of a ship

* A valley in which, owing to particularly fertile soil (the result of volcanic activity), monstrous vegetables and flowers grow (“Single Tomatoes tower high as Churches”)

* Dixon’s account of how he entered the inner core of the Earth via a hole at the North Pole

In other words, it’s safe to say that Pynchon’s allusion to Lawrence Sterne’s eighteenth century novel ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ – packed full of absurd digressions and the most widely acknowledged forefather of postmodern fiction – is very definitely not accidental.

That’s not to say that the humour is all ‘Monty Python’ esque surrealism – there’s plenty of good old-fashioned eminently sniggerable smut and puerility too: characters piss their names in the snow, axemen on the exhibition exchange “Your Mum” type school playground jibes (“‘I saw your Mother, and I Quiz you not, - / Drinking penny-Gin from a Chamber-Pot’”) and there are a fair few chucklesome gags (“‘King decides he’ll journey to the Sun … Alchemist says, ‘Your Majesty! The Sun? – it burns at thousands of Fahrenheit’s Degrees, - far too hot there for anything to remain alive’. King says, ‘So, where’s the Difficulty? – I’ll go at Night’’”).

Particularly amusing on this score is the discovery of an illicit publication “lying open to a Copper-plate Engraving of two pretty Nuns, sporting in ways … inexplicably intriguing” and the young man in question’s fumbling attempt at self-defence: “‘Why … sure they may be Renderings more pleasant to look upon … the Western Country at Sunset, probably, - Scenes of Religious Life, Hunting-Dogs, a Table-ful of Food … yet if one of you [women], beheld intimately, be all but unbearably fair, you see, imagine the sentimental Delight into which a Man might be thrown, at the sight of two of you’”).

But amidst all the absurdity and bawdy humour, drunken debates and bizarre tangents, there are also passages of unexpected lyricism: “Night over all this watershed how vast, that covers each soul in it like a breathing Mouth, humid, warm, carrying the odors of living and dying, that takes back ev’rything committed upon the Land that Day, without appeal, dissolving all in Shadow”.

And of course it wouldn’t be a postmodern novel if there wasn’t also some winking self-reflexivity. At one point the characters to whom Rev Cherrycoke is telling the story discuss the pernicious influence of fiction and its relation to reality. One asks “‘What of Shakespeare? … Those Henry plays, or the others, the Richard ones? are they only make-believe History? theatrickal rubbish?’”, and another maintains of the real Hamlet “‘All in all, a figure with an interesting Life of his own, - alas, this hopping, quizzing, murderously irresolute Figment of Shakespeare’s, has quite eclips’d for us the man who had to live through the contradictions of his earthly Life, without having it all re-figur’d for him”. It’s an argument directed against the central premise of the very book in which it appears – but for Pynchon all the fun is in using reality as a springboard for the imagination.

Reading ‘Mason & Dixon’ is something of an endurance test and demands perseverance – but it’s certainly not without its rewards.