SOURCE: A review of Mason and Dixon, in The New Republic, August 4, 1997, pp. 32-8.

[In the following review, Wood offers unfavorable assessment of Mason and Dixon, finding fault in Pynchon's equivocal allegories and indeterminate multiple meanings.]

It is a problem for allegory that, while going about its allegorical business, it draws attention to itself. It is like someone who undresses in front of his window so that he can be seen by his neighbors. Allegory wants us to know that it is being allegorical. It is always saying: watch me. I mean something. I mean something. In this, it is very different from most great fiction. (It resembles bad fiction.) Why does anyone tolerate it? In literature, we rarely do. It is forgiven its hieroglyphics when it overcomes itself and behaves like great fiction (Kafka, some Dickens); when it elaborates complicated and deep truths (Dante, Kafka again); or when it explodes itself in the hunt for deep truth (Melville). It is tolerated when it is not only a map, but a landscape, too.

Thomas Pynchon is the most allegorical American writer since Melville and, for better or worse, the clear inheritor of Melville's broken estate. But his novels behave like allegories that refuse to allegorize. They pile up meanings and disown them at the same time; it is no accident that Pynchon so loves the shaggy dog story, which does the same. (His new novel is built on the shaggy dog story.) Thus he has created readers who think that he is a great occultist and readers who think that he is a visited hoaxer. His novels are huge manic factories that seem alive but are deeply static. They do not move. Yes, they twirl meanings around, they displace meanings; but they do not finally produce meaning. The factory has no products.

Pynchon's readers often mistake bright lights for evidence of habitation. One saw this in the reception of Mason & Dixon. It drew gasps: here is a novel set in the eighteenth century, wrote the reviewers, in which we see the first English pizza being made, and a dog that talks, and two clocks in conversation, and a vast octagonal Gloucestershire cheese, and George Washington smoking a joint, and a mechanical duck; and a crazed Chinese man who lectures everybody in sight on the magic of feng shui, and a giant Golem, and a severed ear that moves. They listed these things as if they were scenes and not objects, as if they constitute the movement, the workings, of the novel. But on the whole these occurrences do not move, are not scenes. They are fixed in a lively grid. Yet it was taken as brilliant that the book merely contains these things, like a cabinet of wonders; they were listed as simple natural marvels, whose presence was in itself evidence of significance. There was no need to ask what these marvels were for. They were read as signs; they were taken allegorically. Signs were taken for wonders.

There are delights in Pynchon's book, and some wonders. Chief among them is his language, which is notionally a pastiche of mid-eighteenth-century prose, but is in fact a beautifully flexible alloy, capable of bending calendrically, to take in early eighteenth-century styles as well as late-twentieth-century incursions. The novel's story is told by one Reverend Cherrycoke, who accompanied the surveyors Mason and Dixon on their trip to divide Pennsylvania and Maryland in the mid-1760s. Verbally, the reverend is metaphorical, sententious, rounded, periodical, lawless. All this is to the prose's good. It is the novel's achievement to create a prose, when it is working well, that seems not so much antiquarian as pristine—an American language before it knew itself as "an American language." Indeed, the capitalized nouns that are flaked all over the book begin to seem like the capitals of line-breaks: the prose is sometimes like a poetry that was written out in prose by mistake.

Below them the lamps were coming on in the Taverns … the wind was shaking the Plantations of bare trees, the River ceasing to reflect, as it began to absorb, the last light of the Day. They were out in Greenwich Park, walking near Lord Chesterfield's House.—the Autumn was well advanc'd, the trees gone to Pen-Strokes and Shadows in crippl'd Plexity, bath'd in the declining light. A keen wind flow'd about them.

Yet this language, despite its beauty, is only a refined game. On its own, it is not enough to make a novel great. And the limitations of Mason & Dixon are the limitations of allegory. Truly, Mason & Dixon is not a novel. It functions as an allegorical picaresque, rolling the brougham of itself from implication to implication, taking on extra implications at one town and throwing off a few at the next. It tamps its characters down into little plots of meaning, then uproots them. Its characters exist to dispense lessons, ideological or philosophical. They do not exist as people. As usual in Pynchon, there are scenes that mean too much and there are scenes that mean too little.

Thus the Mason-Dixon line, which the eponymous heroes are drawing, is made to stand for several things: the good rule of law and the tyrannical rule of law, freedom and imperialism. George Washington smoking cannabis is no doubt supposed to instruct us in the importance of liberality at the highest levels. But the octagonal Gloucestershire cheese and the mobile ear are just diversions, scattered throughout the book—they act like the money that politicians used to throw to voters from the cart: they distract us from the truth.

How we respond to such comedy will depend on our tolerance for these sorts of japes and frolics. Pynchon is famous for his fantastic comedy. But too much, even in this benign book, seems willed, unfree, a hysteria that he forces onto his scenes because without it they would not really exist. It is the difference between the comedy of character and the comedy of culture. Pynchon does not, or cannot, do the former; what he can do, sometimes powerfully, is to make the culture vibrate at high speed, and to whip comedy from the rotations.

To be fair, in this book, and for the first time in his writing, his two protagonists have some concreteness. Both are English. Charles Mason is from Gloucestershire, a melancholic deist in long mourning for his dead wife Rebekah, and essentially conservative in temperament. Jeremiah Dixon is from the north of England, near Durham. He is a Quaker, an instinctive radical and populist, who finds himself appalled by the cruelties of American life (Indian-killing and slavery) even while enamored of its rebellious volume.

Mason and Dixon are a double act; most of their reality is complementary. They are most full as characters when they are acting as halves to each other. Mason is gloomy, Dixon is cheery; Mason is sophisticated, Dixon a bumpkin; Mason is an astronomer (he looks up). Dixon a surveyor (he looks down); and so on. The comedy that Pynchon extracts from this is familiar, and occasionally touching. The novel opens with the pair voyaging to South Africa, to the Cape of Good Hope, to chart the Transit of Venus. (Since everything is always connected in Pynchon, the two also conduct some transits of Venus on land, in the shape of the highly sexed Vroom sisters, who tease them, Fielding-style.) At this time, Mason and Dixon are hardly on speaking terms, and cannot look each other in the eye. But they are not long in Capetown. By the end of the book, having spent more than four years in America and badged with all kinds of adventure, they have developed a deep fondness for each other.

This pattern has the guiltless banality of celluloid. It seems likely that Pynchon is burlesquing the buddy movie—the novel ends with the two men, now retired from their surveying labors, fishing together on an English river, grumpy old men, but learning to talk about their wives and children. This is a reduced comedy, comedy in prison. It relies entirely on fixed forms and the fixed escape from those forms. For example, the picaresque. The two heroes are invited to come to America to survey the state boundaries, and there they move from adventure to adventure—and this has the ridged, repetitive quality of the picaresque: however dissimilar each new adventure is from its predecessor, it resembles it in its mere adventurousness. Pynchon throws at us a giant Golem, the threat of Indian scalping, the lost tribe of Israel (apparently living in the Delaware forest), a mechanical duck, the long story of a French chef who moved from his native country to Pennsylvania, a story about rapacious Jesuits in Montreal, the late appearance of Johnson and Boswell, and on and on. The variety becomes homogeneous. One would like these fattened incidents to shrink into life; the road to become a current. The bloating is familiar from other Pynchon books, a weakness about knowing when to stop accumulating.

The comedy is fixed in other ways, too. Pynchon's most usual trick is anachronism: to confront the apparently antiquarian eighteenth-century form with unexpected modernities such as pizza, or the Malayan ketjap, or ketchup, with which Dixon lathers his food, or a woman asking: "Hallo, d'you think he'll get much of a hard-on, then?" There are puns ("Suture Self, as the Medical Students like to say"), and some charming sillinesses (some twins "nam'd Pitt and Pliny, so that each might be term'd 'the Elder' or 'the Younger', as might day-to-day please one, or annoy his Brother"). The comedy is most funny when least knowing. But too much of it works simply at the level of reader-recognition, a ticket-punch whereby we acknowledge the prompt presence of a Pynchon joke: the writer of sea yarns called Pat O'Brian, or the moment when Dixon goes into a Philadelphia coffee-house and asks for "Half and Half please," the punch coming a second later, when he clarifies: "Mount Kenya Double-A, with Java Highland…." Or when a character called Mrs. Eggslap quotes Tammy Wynette: "Sometimes, 'tis hard, to be a Woman." (Again, this is rarely comedy about people; it is comedy between cultures, the old and the new, and between the writer and his text.)

One of the least funny and least likable scenes involves Mason's and Dixon's meeting with Colonel Washington at Mount Vernon. It is emblematic of Pynchon's comic vision elsewhere—its desperation, its desire to squeeze meanings, its inability to resist a kind of comedic harlotry. Washington is first seen "talking real estate." He offers the English visitors some dope, while dispensing realpolitik about why Americans will always kill Indians. Washington likes to say "Proclamation-Shmocklamation" and "It's makin' me just mee-shugginah," a habit traceable to his African servant, Gershom, who is Jewish. At first we see Gershom serving coffee, and Pynchon notes only that he has "an ambiguous expression."

A moment later, though, Gershom breaks in fondly: "Don't bother about that Israelite talk, anyhow … it's his way of joking, he does it all the time." The scene ends with Gershom singing "Havah Nagilah, a merry Jewish Air, whilst clicking together a pair of Spoons in Syncopation."

This moment feels characteristic of many others in Pynchon's work: the expected is disrupted by the zany, and a purchaseless benignity falls over the whole scene. At such a moment, one realizes why so many of Pynchon's characters, here and elsewhere, have an irritating habit of breaking into song: the principle of Pynchon's comedy is the principle of the stage-musical. Everyone gets to sing their song, however senseless. Pynchon's farce floats in the watery democracy of the musical, the idea that everyone sings as well as the next person and deserves a moment under the lights, that many tunes are better than one tune. Gershom turns and reveals that he is not really a slave, but a mild Jew. Good for him!

Of course, the novel-form is a warmly democratic form, in the sense that the smallest people are noticed—Nabokov, writing about Dickens, claimed this for it. But there is a difference between descriptive charity and comic subsidy, which is the difference between real comic sympathy and the lend-lease of allegory. For Pynchon wants something back from Gershom, for Gershom's twirl on stage. He wants Gershom to signify politically.

It is a moment of utopian wish-fulfillment: oh, if the whole world were like this! Gershom must pay us back by fulfilling our wish. And thus it is, in part, that this scene is not funny, and has no stringency. Since it is not human comedy, it is not freely given—characters are not allowed to exist in "the irresponsible plastic way" in James's lovely phrase. Indeed, the comedy is not given at all: it is extracted from the characters, at their expense. Pynchon does not seem to care for a Washington or a Gershom who might move us or truly interest us. And this is the burrowed agenda of Pynchon's writing; scenes like this one can be strictly meaningless on the surface, because they are supposed to represent something underneath their surface. The comedy is not about the people involved. It is about a cultural moment, about an idea or an ideal—not a moment of free fiction but of unfree allegory.

This is the principle of Pynchon's fiction, and it drives this book, particularly its politics. The America in which Mason and Dixon travel resembles the America of The Crying of Lot 49; there is not such a great distance between 1766 and 1966. Both are ruled by what Pynchon once called "an emerging techno-political order that might or might not know what it was doing." America is both pure possibility and deep degradation, in Pynchon's vision. His diagnosis veers between the wildly dystopian and the wildly utopian.

The degraded America is the country about which Pynchon wrote in a short essay on "Sloth," in 1993, in The New York Times Book Review. In the eighteenth century, he observed, America was "consolidating itself as a Christian capitalist state." In Mason & Dixon, the Christian capitalist state has been seeding itself, it seems, by laying waste the land. Both Mason and Dixon are shocked by the subjection of the Indians, and by slavery. In South Africa, they saw a similar tyranny. "Whites in both places," thinks Mason, "are become the very Savages of their own worst Dreams…." Dixon recalls "the iron Criminality of the Cape" and "the beefy contented faces of those whites," but decides that "far worse happen'd here," in America. The Reverend Wicks, narrating the novel, plunges this truth home: "the word Liberty … was taken in those Times to encompass even the darkest of Men's rights,—to injure whomever we might wish,—unto extermination, were it possible…."

As Mason and Dixon make their way along what they call "the Visto," the wide trench they cut from the Chesapeake Bay to the Ohio River, they meet various Indians and slaves. They are tutored in corruption. Near the end of the book, Dixon decides that he is no better than these white Americans, "having drawn them a Line between their SlaveKeepers, and their Wage-Payers…." For in cutting a line between a slave state and a free state, he has simply shared in the general illusion that slavery is "ever somewhere else"—in South Africa, or in Maryland—"but oh, never in Holland, nor in England, that Garden of Fools." "Where does it end?" he laments. "No matter where in it we go, shall we find all the World Tyrants and Slaves? America was the one place we should not have found them." This is the busted dream that Pynchon writes about in The Crying of Lot 49, a land "with the chances once so good for diversity."

What troubles is not the relative ordinariness of these ideas, but their lumpy deployment in fiction. Mason's and Dixon's blotter-like receptivity to every bloodstain of American capitalism seems a little convenient, artistically. His characters might be freer as characters if Pynchon allowed them to put up some resistance to Pynchon's view of things. But that would be fiction, not allegory. Of course, they do respond to the freedoms, the unscored music of early American life. Pynchon especially enjoys the democratic anarchy of American religious life. There are insane German sects and dour Puritans and strict Quakers and busy Catholics, all of them at stormy war with one another. Politically, there are British patriots and American rebels and mild indifferents. The Indians are fighting the Americans who are fighting the British; and beneath it all, the dried powder of slavery, ready to fire.

In the usual Pynchon way, this world is furrowed with paranoia. Each American suspects the next of being an agent or a spy. The Jesuit network is especially feared, and Mason's and Dixon's cutting party is joined by a mad Chinese, Captain Zhang, who is on the run from the Jesuits. Indeed, it emerges that most of the surveying group are agents of one power or another, including Mason and Dixon, as Dixon observes. To a skeptical Mason, he declares that both of them are paid employees, and therefore agents, of the British crown. They are servants of the oppressor of both black and white Americans.

So this is America in the 1760s. But really, it is the thickly sown lot of Pynchon's mind. For the wartime London of Gravity's Rainbow is a similar place, less a city of one noble British defense than the site of internecine paranoias, a city of shadowy groupings and official acronyms: "Everyone watching over his shoulder, Free French plotting revenge on Vichy traitors, Lublin Communists drawing beads on Varsovian shadowministers, elas Greeks stalking royalists, unrepatriable dreamers of all languages hoping through will, fists, prayer to bring back kings, republics, pretenders, summer anarchisms that perished before the first crops were in…." (Pynchon's inability to stop accumulating meanings finds its verbal embodiment in his fondness for lists and catalogs.) And this is the California of The Crying of Lot 49, where Oedipa Maas voyages among secret groups and inflamed syndicates, trying to read the signs and the clues that Pynchon throws to her.

Paradoxically, it is in this sea of paranoia that the drowning may be saved. Pynchon seems to cherish the contradictory energy of diverse paranoias because of their lust for confusion. Their busyness confounds the single ruling order, that "techno-political order." In Mason & Dixon, a young radical praises the jumbled street music of America, especially "the Negroe Musick … 'tis there sings your Revolution." In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa realizes that "the only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once…."

What is the vehicle of this plotlessness, this new music? It is the novel—more, the sliding chromaticism of Pynchon's novels. Against the plot of government stands the musical novel, with its many plots or tunes. In case we miss this. Pynchon uses his characters to remind us. In Mason & Dixon, a character informs us that

Who claims Truth. Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in interests that most ever prove base…. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, BalladMongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government….

Then he stops, and the Reverend Cherrycoke warns us of "the danger of reading these storybooks,—in particular those known as 'Novel.'" It is the beautiful paranoids ("Cranks of ev'ry Radius") against the government; and fiction is a local branch of this beautiful paranoia. Pynchon is hippie-ish, a moist anarchist. Pynchon's fiction elaborates an allegorical politics. Partial truths are forced into a bent absolutism. It is a system whose vents and flaws seem only to make it stronger, more wrongly consistent, like medieval astronomy. Pynchon's world is a planetarium devised by a myope. The forces of evil, in Pynchon's vision, are the straight, the linear, the rule of governance. Mason and Dixon, though likable men, are agents of fixity. They are surveyors, and knowledge is power. Dixon recalls that, back in England, he laid out the boundaries that enforced the hated and unfair system of land-enclosures: "He had drawn Lines of Ink that became Fences of Stone."

Yet underneath the soil the anarchy of non-linear freedom lives. "Down Below, where no property Lines existed, lay a World as yet untravers'd." Captain Zhang, with his love of feng shui, reminds the surveyors that their line "acts as a Conduit for what we call Sha, or, as they say in Spanish California, Bad Energy…." The Mason-Dixon line is like a dragon's tooth across the free flesh of the land, he warns. The Reverend Cherrycoke explains that Pennsylvania and Maryland are white man's abstractions. They do not exist, but are merely "a chronicle of Frauds committed serially against the Indians dwelling there."

The forces of good—who may be as crazy as the forces of evil—are all those who drift out of the reach of governance and rule. Dream is the utopian space of resistance. The Crying of Lot 49 ends by praising "drifters" who live as if "in exile" from America. In Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop battles unseen enemy forces and is thrown back, as resistance, onto "dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity…." In the paranoia of dreams, there you feel free. In Mason & Dixon, all the uncharted America west of the Mason-Dixon line is the land of dream, "serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true…." And these dreams are "safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in…." Dreams are safe until they are ruled.

It is a sign of how greatly Pynchon's indexical intelligence intimidates his readers, a measure of his powers of evasion and self-subsidence, that few question the triteness, or the truth, of these notions. (And their ungainliness as fictional ideas.) But one of the advantages of the utopian is that it is impossible to fulfill. Pynchon's utopian good is good exactly because it is the uncharted. It is futurity or dream. It dwarves one's known littleness. Similarly, Pynchon's evil works in his fiction as an inverted utopia, a nightmare that has no streets or fixtures, that cannot be named. In Gravity's Rainbow, Slothrop, an American intelligence officer based in wartime London, is obsessed with the idea that "they" are out to get him. He wonders if "they" will explode a rocket over London with his name on it. But "they" are not the Nazis, who are actually sending rockets to London. No, "they" embrace "possibilities far beyond Nazi Germany." But we never find out who "they" are.

Only very occasionally does Pynchon become specific; only rarely does he come out of hiding. Perhaps it is just as well. For Pynchon's Times essay, in which he attempts to give body to the forces of evil and the forces of resistance, is dismayingly incoherent. In it, he suggests that, in mid-eighteenth-century capitalist America, time—clock-time—became a tyrannical linearity that ruled all citizens. Only the "ungovernable warp of dreams," or a secularized form of the old sin of sloth, could counter time. The modern equivalent of enforced linearity, he argues, is television. And how might we fight this televisual governance? With the VCR! "We may for now at least have found the illusion, the effect, of controlling, reversing, slowing, speeding and repeating time—even imagining that we can escape it." And then, in a characteristic move, almost as if Pynchon has seen that he has revealed too much, that he has been spotted, that without his novelistic clothes he looks only like a survival of Evergreen or a member or the editorial board of Social Text, he retreats. He seems to mock the very idea that he has proposed, to disown his own allegory. When he writes, for instance, that "sins against video time will have to be radically redefined," it is difficult not to hear Pynchon's snicker. He is having us on. Perhaps he is making fun of Andrew Ross; perhaps not. But he has certainly disappeared.

In this way, Pynchon covers his allegorical hide. At first sight, he seems to avoid a too-schematic war of good and evil by confiscating the identity papers of both sides. Maybe, Pynchon asks, good and evil are one side, not two. How would we ever know? The real forces of government are as invisible as the unreal forces of dream, and it is the fate of Pynchon's characters to search a landscape of toppled signs. This, Pynchon suggests, is the real terror of modern society, this cloud of unknowing. Pynchon appears to free his allegory into fiction. In Mason & Dixon, the English surveyors are good men serving a bad King. The line they draw is a gesture of imperial rule, yet it also rules between good and bad, between free men and slaveholders. Captain Zhang, who complains so bitterly that the Mason-Dixon line is a bad force, is himself a bad force, a monomaniac in a world that should be plural and drifting. All this would, on the face of it, seem to be properly contradictory, negatively capable, and so on. Pynchon believes in the importance of plurality. He resents lines and therefore struggles to diversify his own sometimes schematic fictions. He fends off any single allegorical direction or reading. He wants his people to have many choices, including his readers, and he thinks that this is pluralism. Oedipa Maas is waiting for the end of normative America, "waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew …"

The problem is that Pynchon's allegories are themselves tyrannical. This is his great failure. His belief in plurality is itself an inflexible bolus. His characters do not move us, because they are not free. They are serfs to allegory. They exist to generate meanings or to dissipate meanings. Even in Mason & Dixon, where character is given much greater play, one sees Pynchon forced to award his characters an extraneous flamboyance—as with zany Captain Zhang—because they cannot generate interiority. They must be the-atrical, because all they are for is to enforce meanings. They are not human, they are agents; they not only think of themselves as agents of various forces, but they act as agents for their author. This is a vision that bullies not only its characters but also its readers into paranoid hunting. (Tony Tanner, the critic whose generous reading of Pynchon is now influential, argues that it is one of Pynchon's achievements to force his readers to read him paranoically.)

Pynchon may long for the polyphonic music of the fabulist, but his novels enforce a strict binarism even as they congratulate themselves on deconstructing this binarism. Oedipa may want "a symmetry of choices to break down," but Pynchon's very fiction is built on a symmetry of choices. Either utopia or dystopia; either governance or dream; either too much meaning or not enough meaning. At the end of The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon offers Oedipa a choice: if the shadowy organization ("The Tristero") that she has been tracking exists, she will join it and escape, because she cannot wait any longer for America to mend its ways. And if the organization does not exist, then she must live in America. And if she must live in America, then she will have to be paranoid.

At first, Pynchon seems to be suggesting that this ordeal of choice is what is wrong with America: it is America that forces us to choose between exile or madness. But since we cannot verify that such a choice need exist (the novel leaves open the possibility that The Tristero is merely Oedipa's hallucination), since Pynchon's vision is itself so ungrounded, all we can say is that this ordeal is Pynchon's problem, not America's. It is Pynchon, not America, that offers secrecy or dissolution as the only choice.

Pynchon's novels have a certain power—the agitated density of a prison, a closed system. But can one construct and disown allegory without producing incoherence, and an incoherence that seems evasive rather than suggestive? In Moby-Dick, Melville came close to destroying his book, by loading its circuitries of significance with so much energy that the novel was in danger of meaning too much and therefore too little. In Moby-Dick, the whale is good and evil, it is truth and it is blankness. It is a thousand things. But what is at stake in the novel is supremely human; it is the fate of one's soul. Melville used allegory to hunt down truth, and in so doing he exploded allegory into a thousand pieces. Pynchon uses allegory to hide truth, and in so doing he expands allegory into a fetish of itself. Melville raced with the danger of nothingness while running after truth. Nothingness was a wound in truth's side. But what is left when allegory does not believe in the possibility of truth is merely the allegorical; or a dogmatic faith in it. What is left are novels that draw attention only to their own significations, which hang without reference, inflamedly pointing like a severed arm to nowhere in particular.