--------------------- http://www.swarthmore.edu/ Humanities/pschmid1/ essays/pynchon/mason.html Line, Vortex, and Mound: On First Reading Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon [graphics drawn from Mason and Dixon's cover, with apologies and thanks to Raquel Jaramillo, the cover designer] by Peter Schmidt [1] ---in memory of Isaiah Berlin "There is a love of complexity here in America... pure Space waits the Surveyor,--- no previous Lines, no fences, no streets to constrain polygony however extravagant,--- angles pushing outward and inward,--- all Sides zigging and zagging, going ahead and doubling back, making Loops inside Loops,--- in America, 'twas ever, Poh! to Simple Quadrilaterals." In the summer of 1997 a force like a gravitational field drew me to reading Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon. Perhaps it was its subjects, Enlightenment science and the contradictions in American democracy that came to be marked by Mason and Dixon's famous line. Perhaps it was the rumored portraits of colonial America, especially Philadelphia, near where I live. Perhaps it was that I heard that in Mason Pynchon had created his greatest straight man, in Dixon his liveliest comic hero. At any rate, I bought the book soon after summer vacation began and read its first pages in a subterranean coffee shop in Philadelphia (without yet realizing how appropriate such a setting would be). Once I began reading Mason and Dixon I could not put it down for long. Not only was the humor irresistible, making me remember how much I'd enjoyed encountering the bad song lyrics or following that ricocheting aerosol can in the second chapter of 49. I also quickly discovered how much my poor cerebral synapses had missed Pynchon's patented mix of highjinks, metaphysics, and penumbras; I could feel all kinds of unused parts of my brain firing up again as paradoxes were posed and allusions and analogies multiplied on every page. But I also noticed that the book's humor was more thoroughly interwoven with melancholy and a sense of mortality than ever before in Pynchon's work. Gravity's Rainbow confronts the meaning of mortality as well (or the terrifying lack of meaning in anonymous warfare), but it is more concerned with mass obliteration than it is with individual aging and loss. Mason and Dixon makes us empathize with the dailiness of the lives of its protagonists to a far greater extent than any of the previous novels: it follows a relationship between two human beings in detail over several decades, giving us a sense of both its intimacy and its tensions in a way that is unprecedented in Pynchon, for heretofore his most memorable characters have been isolatoes (to use an appropriately Melvillean word). It is not fashionable to say this in these days of High Theory in literary criticism and cultural studies, but I think it is important for the record to confess that this is the first Pynchon novel that made my eyes fill with tears (in the "Last Transit" chapters, when the aging Mason and Dixon visit each other for the last time). And I have a hunch I'm not alone. Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon will join other immortal male pairs in literary history, as rich in their interactions and as unimaginable outside of their bond as Vladimir and Estragon, Ishmael and Queequeg, Boswell and Johnson, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise. And they will now be linked in our collective memory not because of obscure scientific achievements they were hired to do together but because of the irresistible and edgy talk that Pynchon has given them, their repartee and often comically incompatible ways of questioning and questing. I thought of Dickens and Fielding and Sterne more than I ever have before in reading Pynchon; with this novel he is not only writing historical fiction but allowing us to meditate on the deep connections between literary tradition and his postmodernism in ways that we have not before been encouraged to do. I also was reminded of Melville, not the Melville of Moby-Dick (the fullest American precedent for the ambition of Gravity's Rainbow) but the Melville of Pierre, Confidence Man, and particularly the underrated Israel Potter, a tragicomic historical novel which, like Mason and Dixon, is set in the Revolutionary period and features irreverent vignettes of Franklin and other historical figures while it chronicles the misadventures of "minor" players on history's stage. So yes, I love this new novel. For all of us in American studies in particular, it is an invaluable gift. I am aware of flaws in the novel and could be spend some very happy hours arguing about them. But Mason and Dixon is a book for the ages, not just one for our nervous and ungrateful time, and I would like here to offer one reader's gesture of thanks, a gift meant to be my own personal counter to the insult the novel recently received when it was not even nominated for the 1997 National Book Award. As a tribute this essay is meant to be both modest and ambitious---a culling of thoughts on a first reading of the novel taken from notes and cross-references I made as I read rapturously and steadily in it through June and then part of July 1997. First, I would like to consider the role of the "Captive's Tale" of Eliza Fields (chapters 53-54) in the larger context of the novel. A look at this inset tale will allow a consideration of the role that all of the novel's many set-pieces and subplots and digressions play within its "main narrative," the Reverend Cherrycoke's story of Mason's and Dixon's Line and lives. Eliza's story may not merely be a strange and comic interlude in the good Reverend's story. It is in fact quite difficult to define when the Captive's Tale begins and ends and what it means; it also appears to upset any stable hierarchy we may construct between primary and secondary narratives. Second, I will look at the significance of the surveyors' encounter in Chapter 61 with an Indian Mound in western Pennsylvania. Much of Pynchon's novel suggests that the "modern" world is a legacy of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its contradictions---both in the world of popular culture (pizza, sandwiches, sunglasses, stimulants and depressants, feng shui and orgone boxes, etc.) and in the world of "high" culture, particularly the natural and human sciences. Mason and Dixon's training exemplifies not only the world of Enlightenment science but also the emerging new understanding of cultural history created by Enlightenment thinkers and culminating in the philosophy of Kant and Hegel. Mason and Dixon's experiences while practicing science in the field, however, are another story, especially in Dixon's case. Dixon's encounter with the Mound exemplifies not only how modern science arose out of the limits of eighteenth-century science (particularly Newtonian physics); it also shows that Enlightenment science is intimately implicated in Enlightenment theories about the laws supposedly governing culture as well as nature, laws which allowed Europe to evaluate and make use of "foreign" civilizations. The Indian Mound's refutation of Enlightenment attempts to "know" it in Mason and Dixon coincide with contemporary theories of cultural and postcolonial studies. This essay will end with some brief ideas for further research, info on Vaucanson and his Duck (!), and a map of and directions to the White Clay Creek state park area that is the site of the "Arc Corner" and "Post Marked West" monuments, the Delaware "Wedge," etc. Topics covered (if you want to Leap to these, click here): on Oölite prisms on Vaucanson and his Duck Calender Reform, 1752 Eighteenth-century astronomy and surveying the Longitude problem precedents for the Ghastly Fop episodes, in 18th-century drama and earlier writers, such as Aphra Behn's stories histories of the Jesuits what is Feng Shui? Shan? Sha? Indian Mounds and 18th-century discourse the Mounds & Wilhelm Reich's "orgone boxes" [1950s] The piece is in three parts, with links, to ease download time. To continue, click on the '&' sign below: & Notes [1]. Some quick notes about myself, if it's of any interest. I teach American literature at Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In fact, I did a course on Melville and Pynchon in Fall 1998 which featured M-D at the start of the semester and M&D at the end; it was be repeated in Fall 2001, with Israel Potter and Lot 49 dropped to make room for a certain Leviathan called GR. Here's the 2001 syllabus. I confess I have tried several times to finish Vineland, to no avail, and have never got around to reading V., though I want very much to read these novels now that I have finished Mason and Dixon. I also confess guilt for deeply loving the novel that Pynchon fanatics tend to disparage, The Crying of Lot 49---and as an aside I would also suggest that Pynchon's off-hand comment on this novel in his intro to Slow Learner may not necessarily have to be read as a put-down, as it often is. (Forgetting or passing beyond what he thought was important to learn is a frequent motif in the intro essay describing Pynchon's sense of how he grew as a writer.) I am an admirer of Gravity's Rainbow, though my interest in it is defined more by astonishment, fear, wonder -- all necessary ingredients for the proper sense of readerly paranoia -- than affection. "Entropy" is pretty cool, despite Pynchon's dis of it in the intro essay, but TP's also right that "The Secret Integration" is his best story. I read it as the secret history of suburban whiteness encountering (or being "integrated" with) another America, its history of racial injustice. For this reason, it's also a crucial precedent for Mason & Dixon. One last point: a number of points that Pynchon makes in the Slow Learner intro -- especially about accents and character -- provide crucial clues to his concerns while he was working on his novel about the Line. He definitely didn't want to repeat the form & style of GR, and didn't. I would like to cite here two intelligent reviews of Mason and Dixon that provided nourishing food for thought for this 1997 essay: T. Coraghessan Boyle, "The Great Divide," New York Times Book Review, May 18, 1997, p. 9; and Mark Feeney, "Gravity's boundary; in Mason and Dixon Thomas Pynchon merges wild burlesque and desperate seriousness to create his own map of American history," Boston Globe, May 4 1997, Book Section, D17. ---------------------- First, some quick summaries of the "Captive's Tale" interlude in chapters 53-54 of Mason and Dixon, plus chapter 56, which gives us a crucial analogy to use to consider the Captive's Tale. Chapter 53 opens by signaling itself as a clear break in the narrative, as Mason and Dixon take a Winter break from drawing their Line and the Reverend Cherrycoke tale-telling takes a break as well. A new figure, unnamed, is central; she later is discovered to be named Eliza Fields. These two chapters appear to be Pynchon's version of one of the most popular colonial American narrative forms, the captivity narrative: Eliza is captured by the Indians and then "escorted" by them to Quebec City and the Jesuits (by chance, or because the Indians have been commissioned to bring her by the Jesuits?). Eliza then later joins the camp of workers accompanying Mason and Dixon surveying their Line creating the Pennsylvania/Maryland border: again, by chance or by design and, if the latter, whose? Chapter 54 opens with Eliza Fields's first-person narrative of her stay in Quebec; it is the first time she has told her story directly (in 53 it was narrated in the third person). On the next page (526) we discover that this narrative is mysteriously not part of either the oral or the written version of the Rev. Cherrycoke's history of Mason and Dixon that has shaped the novel for over 500 pages. Rather, Eliza's story is being "read" in a separate volume by Tenebrae and Ethelmer, two young listeners in Cherrycoke's usual audience. The volume that Tenebrae and Ethelmer examine together is one of many published in the "Ghastly Fop" series, an invented (?) eighteenth-century popular fiction series mixing sex, death, and adventures featuring an aristocrat-rake who is also a ghost (526-27). Chapter 54 appears to be comprised of excerpts from this narrative (in first- and third-person) plus Tenebrae's and Ethelmer's comments upon and dreams about it. The chapter is also described as a "detour" "from the Revd's narrative Turnpike onto the pleasant Track of their own mutual Fascination, by way of the Captive's Tale" (529). Eliza's Captivity Tale also appears as a detour in the "Fop" narrative as well, for Eliza's tale is central while the Fop has only a ghostly presence in this episode. Chapter 54, the heart of the Captive's Tale, has the following parts to it: Eliza's desire to escape from the Jesuit Castle and her imprisonment, torture, and sexual initiation by the nuns Blondelle and Grincheuse. This first person narrative reads like a comic mix of Kafka (the "Before the Law" parable in The Trial) and de Sade, of which more later. Pynchon's parody of de Sade pervades the chapter; the Kafka allusion may appear in Eliza's dream of the Toll-house (529-30), which is about making crossings and transgressions on one's own rather than following the advice of gate-keepers on the borders. Eliza's tale continued in the third person (530- ). She unites with another outsider in the Jesuit Castle, the Chinese Mason/philosopher/mystic and possible madman Captain Zhang and together they plot a successful escape, Eliza disguising herself as an Indian boy. She and Zhang move through Six Nations territory south of Quebec. Eliza's disguise is discovered by Sir William Johnson, a local landowner and like Zhang a mason (532, 533). Eliza's name is revealed for the first time (532). Eliza and Zhang journey further south, fearing that the Jesuits are in pursuit, until they encounter the Line in Pennsylvania, follow it, and join the surveyors' group (535-41). Eliza stays with the only other female member of this party, Zsuzsa Szabo. Eliza resists both Zhang's designs on her (he has fallen in love with her on their journey together) and also, at the end of the chapter, Mason's (Mason hallucinates her to be the very image of Rebekah, his dead wife). Such a "survey" of the plot-line, however, must admit that it is not clear when the Ghastly Fop/Captive's Tale digression actually ends and Cherrycoke's main narrative resumes. There is a certain reference to Ethelmer and Tenebrae reading Eliza's tale on p. 533, but soon after the fugitives have joined the surveyors' party the Reverend suddenly appears to be narrating the tale again---and is in fact being teased by his audience for referring to himself in the third person (537). Mason's hallucinations of Eliza as his dead wife Rebekah are apparently part of Cherrycoke's tale. The last reference to Eliza in the novel appears to come near the end of the chapter, as Zsuzsa announces that Eliza is her "co-adventuress-to-be" (540): presumably Eliza and Zsuzsa eventually leave the surveyors' party to strike out on Adventures of their own, vanishing from the text. The last references to them come on 614 and 631, where they are mentioned incidentally; presumably they set out on their own soon after. Anyone out there beside me wish we had at least a chapter of their adventures splic'd in, either as told by someone else or by themselves after they make a return visit? Back to the mystery of Eliza. At some point in chapter 54 between pages 533 and 537 Eliza has crossed from inhabiting the Ghastly Fop written narrative to becoming a character in Cherrycoke's oral tale. This is a "transit" (call it the Transit of Eliza) even more difficult to measure from the unstable field of Pynchon's narrative that the Transit of Venus is to chart by our intrepid heroes Mason and Dixon. It appears possible to measure precisely the start of Eliza's path across the Line of the novel's narrative-- mark it at the opening of chapter 53---but it is impossible as far as this poor surveyor can tell to calculate the precise moment of Eliza's exit. Or rather, Eliza's several exits---for first she leaves the Fop's tale and then after being occluded for awhile she & Zsuzsa leave Cherrycoke's tale (631). Another way to think of Eliza's Captive's Tale is not as a curvilinear Transit but as a Vortex. To consider the larger implications of Pynchon using such a structure, we should turn to the very next chapter. Chapter 56 is destined to draw a good deal of commentary. It concerns the 1752 Gregorian "Calendar Reform" that cut eleven days from the calendar by an act of Parliament, the better to bring dating in line with new measurements of the earth's rotation and orbit undertaken by astronomers. (Pynchon does not go very deeply into the scientific rationale for this reform, focusing instead on the reasons why the "lost days" caused such consternation and superstition in the British populace: 554-555.) Mason describes these lost days in the following way: "'In a slowly rotating Loop, or if you like, Vortex, of eleven days, tangent to the Linear Path of what we imagine as Ordinary Time, but excluded from it, and repeating itself,--- without end." Dixon then comments: "as it is a periodick Ro-tation, so must it carry, mustn't it, a Vis centrifuga, that might, with some ingenuity, be detected....? Perhaps by finding, in the Realm of Time, where the Loop tries either to increase or decrease its circumference, and hence the apparent length of each day in it..." (555). These narrative Vortices seem in sync with other examples of time-warps and hauntings in this novel, interpolations that cause "rational" narrative and scientific time clock-time to somehow be stretched or suspended ("the Loop tries either to increase or decrease its circumference," thus causing either a slowing or a speeding up in the linear time to which it is tangential). Examples include Mason's many visions of his dead wife Rebekah, or the following visitation to the story-room after everyone has gone to bed and the "Hook of night" has descended of all those exiled from Cherrycoke's narrative focusing mainly on Mason and Dixon--- "slowly into the Room begin to walk the Black servants, the Indian poor, the Irish runaways, the Chinese sailors, the overflow'd from the mad Hospital, all unchosen Philadelphia...," a grouping that also includes the poet Timothy Tox, who here sounds less like Alexander Pope or Joel Barlow than Tom O' Bedlam... (759). Mason indeed has a vision of himself---the consummate man of science---wandering through a ghost-like London caught in the "Whirlpool"-like vortex of the eleven lost days of the calendar Reform (556-61). The Ghastly Fop adventure tales seem to be similar examples, for the Fop himself is described as a sort of "Wraith" or ghost in chapter 54 (527). The Captive's Tale (like the Ghastly Fop series of which it is a part) seems Pynchon's tribute to all forms of eighteenth-century popular narrative---on the stage, in street ballads, published narratives of capture and escape, and pornography---at odds with the worlds of reason and sentiment and moralism exemplified by the Reverend Cherrycoke and his scientific heroes Mason and Dixon. All these popular genres seem not so much about the powers of definition and line-drawing as they are about desire, the crossing of boundaries either volunarily (escape) or involuntarily (captivity). Accounts of being captured by Indians were very popular in the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries [2]. Pynchon seems to see such captivity narratives as actually functioning as tales of escape---stories that may at least temporarily reverse what is thought to be proper relation between "home" and exile, civilization and barbarism. Yet such escape narratives for Pynchon also enact the desire for coercion and capture and return: Eliza is continually tempted to return to what she is running from, to imagine with pleasure the punishments she will receive for her transgressions (534). Her imprisonment in Quebec with the nuns Blondelle and Grincheuse seems Pynchon's satiric portrait not only of religion's attempts to sublimate desire but also of the Marquis de Sade as the repressed alter ego of the Enlightenment (as Foucault in fact argues in The Order of Things). Such a view of de Sade sees him as an experimenter who focused not on the laws of Reason or Nature but of Desire--- especially how desire is fueled by inequities of power. Consider the following passage describing Eliza's imprisonment in the Castle: her Gaze inclining to the Hothouse Rose, deep red, nearly black, whose supple, long Stem is expertly twisted into a Breech-clout, to pass between the Labia as well as 'round the Waist, with the Blossom, preferably one just about to open, resting behind, in that charming Cusp of moistness and heat, where odors of the Body and the Rose may mingle with a few drops of Blood from the tiny green Thorns, and Flashes of Pain whose true painfulness must be left for the Penitent to assess.... (520; Pynchon's ellipses) This mock [?]-pornographic episode holds Tenebrae and Ethelmer captive even as they are shy and cryptic in sharing their fascination with it: "Brae has discover'd the sinister Volume in 'Thelmer's Room, lying open to a copper-plate Engraving of two pretty Nuns, sporting in ways she finds inexplicably intriguing..." (526). In general, such a de Sadean interlude in the Reverend Cherrycoke's tale seems a comic parable about the omnipresence of the repressed in the age of Enlightenment. Except that unlike de Sade, Pynchon's narratives on the complicated nexus relating Desire and Power is not a series of mechanistic blueprints on domination but a comic fabulation of the erotics of escape and transformation: Eliza Fields is never captive for long, as de Sade's heroine/victims are, and she does not for long appear to confuse sexual pleasure with subjugation or self-hate. Thus the last reference to Eliza in the novel may be particularly appropriate: she is embraced "from behind" by Zsuzsa and is set to become her "co-adventuress" (540). After briefly intersecting Mason and Dixon's narrative line these two disappear from the novel entirely, spinning off on a narrative trajectory of their own. Another striking feature about Chapter 54 is that in its refusal to stabilize into a tale with a single narrative voice and stable set of characters it becomes a microcosm for Mason and Dixon as a whole. A first-person narrative suddenly switches to third-person; a popular and somewhat pornographic serial set of episodes focusing on Eliza Field displaces Cherrycoke on Mason and Dixon as the main narrative; Eliza's story is in turn displaced by Zhang's preoccupation with Jesuit theology and science and his determination to resist its hegemony via all the resources of Chinese science and culture. Zhang's Faustian obsessions continue to echo as the tale of Mason and Dixon's project is resumed in chapter 55---a process that Dixon with some amusement compares to Copernicus suddenly shifting the center of the solar system (545). Similarly, minor characters in the novel like Zsuzsu Szabo or Zhang or the Jesuit priest Zarpaso may have multiple identities and allegiances. Szabo may be Zarpaso in disguise (note the similarities in the sound of their names), plotting to capture Eliza and murder Zhang (552): if so, then the event to which I just alluded, Eliza's vanishing from the narrative in Zsuzsa's embrace, is sinister indeed. Zhang himself may also be Zarpaso, Jesuitically and cleverly disguising himself as his own nemesis: see 552, for instance. Zhang is Chinese and a spokesman for powerful alternative cultural and scientific traditions rivaling Western science and theology---yet he is also a Mason and well versed in all manner of Western thought and languages, speaking Spanish, French, and English as well as Chinese. In short, one of the ways we should read the narrative of Mason and Dixon's Line is by looking for what Dixon names the Vis centrifuga of narrative Loops whose forces warp the forward advance of a linear plot and multiply infinite alternative narrative universes that coexist alongside the chronicle of the surveying of the Line and the Progress of science. Characters like Eliza whose stories briefly occupy the "center" of the narrative universe are signs of such centrifugal forces impinging on the story of Mason and Dixon's Line and the triumphal progress of Enlightenment ideals that for the good Reverend Cherrycoke the Line is supposed to mark. It may be useful to distinguish among several different kinds of narrative Vortices in the novel. Some narrative Loops have their circumference quite clearly marked off from the main narrative, often via chapter divisions: the tale of the Lambdon worm, the saga of the Long Island milkmaid who always wears black and has pirates for friends, the stories of Hsi and Ho or of Mason's and Dixon's visit to George Washington at Mount Vernon, etc. Other peripheral figures and tales make irregular but important appearances over the course of the novel: Mason's dead wife Rebekah, the Welshman Capt. Shelby and Captain Zhang accompanying the expedition, Zarpazo the Jesuit, and others. In many cases these figures have a brilliant set-piece scene that causes all of the narrative briefly to revolve around them and their story; thereafter they tend to make only brief appearances---the Learnèd English dog and Armand and the invisible Duck are already legendary examples of this kind. These "secondary" tales and characters, besides being entertaining, provide a series of analogies---scientific, comic, etc.--- that may be used as lenses through which to interpret the "primary" narrative. Pynchon has always loved digressions and divagations that oscillate between being minor asides and microcosms or holograms for the "whole" narrative. But he has never indulged in his love for spin-off tales with greater élan than in Mason and Dixon, and he has never before signified so clearly his kinship with that great earlier predecessor who shaped an epic novel entirely out of digressions, Lawrence Sterne. With his theory of Vortices in Mason and Dixon Pynchon has provided his clearest analogy yet for understanding the possibilities of non-linear narrative. --------------------------- If readers accept that the analogy of narrative Loops complementing and competing with the main "Line" of the narrative is one useful way of following Mason and Dixon, then chapter 61 quickly looms in prominence and importance, for that is the chapter in which the two surveyors investigate an Indian Mound "quite in the projected path" of their proposed Line guided by one of their party who knows the local territory, a Welshman named Shelby. The Mound is a huge cone-shaped hill gradually illuminated by the morning light, with a passageway cut into it by a would-be looter that allows Mason and Dixon to see a cross-section of the Mound's structure as a series of layered rings, each being warmed successively as the morning sun rises. The layers are created using "Refuse": "dirt...ashes...crush'd seashells." Dixon comments: "alternating Layers of different Substances are ever a Sign of the intention to Accumulate Force,--- [...] perhaps, Captain, these Substances Mr. Mason so disrespects may yet be suited to Forces more Tellurick in nature, more attun'd, that is, to Death and the slower Phenomena." The Mound's layered Loops indeed accumulate such force that magnetic compasses are made useless for surveying: "the Needle is swinging wildly and without pause, rocking about like a Weather-Vane in a storm," and Dixon temporarily forgets who or where he is. Shelby then adds a comment that encourages us to see the Mound precisely as a Vortex or array of an infinite number of narrative Loops tangent to the Line: "'---When at length your Visto is arriv'd here, the Mound will become active, as an important staging-house, for...whatever it may be" (599). It would be an oversimplification to label the contrast between Line and Mound a contrast between modern and ancient ways of knowing, science and religion. A more accurate way to state the contrast would be between heaven-centered vs. earth-centered forms of knowledge, both ancient and modern. The "star-dictated" (601) absolutes of Mason's astronomy or Zarpazo's Jesuit theology, which thrive on neat geometries and stable hierarchies, are juxtaposed with what Zhang and Dixon call the ambiguities and "inner shapes" of earthly realities, including the sheer difficulty Mason and Dixon have making perfect celestial or magnetic measurements in the field and the myriad ways in which mortal human lives and understandings conflict with truths that science and theology claim are universal. Zhang associates these latter forces with "the true inner shape, or Dragon [Shan], of the Land," while for Dixon they represent Tellurick or earth-centered forces, especially magnetism. In the Indian Mound these forces find their most powerful centering, their most direct contact and conflict with the different energies embodied by the measuring of the Line. For Pynchon, the Indian Mound and the Dragon Shan represent not only ancient world views antithetical to Enlightenment science, but are prophetic of how that same science already contained within it anomalies that could only be resolved with the invention in the twentieth century of quantum physics, fractals, and the sciences of chaos and "complex systems" combining both linear and non-linear iterations. Hence we are meant to see in the Mound's Vortex not a unique or exceptional occurrence but an emblem for the infinite number of narrative Vortices or alternative universes already present in any Linear rendering of either space or time. Pynchon's narrative also playfully raises questions about the origins of the Mound---who built it and what it signifies. Captain Shelby, supposedly a local expert, has decided opinions on the subject but their validity is questionable. To begin with, Shelby's views are self-serving and fantastical: a Welshman, he argues that the Mound was created by a visionary band of Welsh migrating from the East who left similar Mounds in Britain before (possibly) becoming the band of Indians known as the Tuscarora (600); in his opinion the Atlantic Ocean for them was not a barrier but "nearly irrelevant." Shelby also contradicts himself: he proposes Meso-European origins for Indian Mounds yet elsewhere concedes that the Indians in the area are heartily amused by whites' attempts to understand the Mound's meaning and origins: "This Mound is something they understand perfectly,--- that white people do not, and show no signs of ever doing so, is a source of deep Amusement for them" (598). The Indians have their own theories about the origins of the Mounds. They attribute them not to their own civilizations but to a great earlier civilization that preceded theirs---one that perhaps arrived from the sky and was constructed by giants (662, 671). For the Indians the Mound inspires hilarity as well as humility, a playful appreciation of the limits of all human attempts to define and measure. Although sky-centered, this "visto" is akin to Zhang's discussion of the inner realities and local contingencies embodied in the Earth-Dragon Shan. The Mound is perhaps the most discernible geographical structure in the novel representing this alternative, earth-centered point of view; it is arguably as important for appreciating the novel as a whole as the Line itself, and its centripetal and anti-entropic forces are operative at every moment in Mason and Dixon. Indeed, such a Mound is an analog for the printed Book itself, "'thin layers of pattern'd Ink, alternating with other thin layers of compress'd Paper, stack'd often by the Hundreds," producing an effect not unlike that of the Mound and other "Contrivances" which "quite multiply the apparent forces, often unto disproportionate results'" (390). [3] & The Mound may also be read as a primary model of how to do alternative cultural history. Mason's and Dixon's training exemplifies not only the world of Enlightenment science but also emerging eighteenth-century views regarding how to understand cultural history. The Enlightenment project sought to define universal laws of the history of civilizations comparable to those governing the physical world. These human sciences reach their fullest development in Kant's and Hegel's schemes for using universal standards for measuring the degree of "civilization" any culture has attained. [4] For Hegel, this led inevitably towards classifying world cultures both past and present into several different categories, including "world-historical," "emergent," and eternally child-like or primitive. Universal history for him meant the "development of the consciousness of Freedom on the part of Spirit, and the consequent realization of that Freedom" (70). But for Hegel only certain civilizations may participate in "universal history"; primitive cultures were by definition eternally outside of the dialectical progress of History toward the realization of freedom. Such a vision of cultural history also inextricably links the forces of market capitalism, colonialism, and a sense of racial and national superiority. The rules governing how to measure cultural superiority and inferiority created the right of superior civilizations and races either to raise inferior civilizations to their cultural level as part of the Progress of history or (if a culture were judged inevitably primitive) to take advantage of that culture's "undeveloped" natural resources, including human labor. If Enlightenment reasoning led to the belief that the right of personal liberty was "inalienable" for some, for others it justified their being defined as aliens and slaves. The strain of this contradiction shows itself most clearly in Hegel's contradictory use of his famous dialectic in constructing his theory of comparative cultural history. Although constructed as antithetical to Europe and thus seemingly part of any dialectic, truly primitive cultures for Hegel by definition can never be subsumed into the dialectic of history, for they cannot progress and their States will never be able to realize freedom. Their exploitation, however, is indispensable for other cultures to progress. Of course, this Enlightenment cultural project had its dissenters and other internal contradictions. The Marquis de Sade is the most notorious; I have already briefly mentioned one example of his relevance to Pynchon's novel. The Enlightenment project's most dangerous dissenter, however, is less well known. In Isaiah Berlin's opinion, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) was Kant's most serious contemporary opponent in cultural philosophy and the precursor of all attempts to understand and value the differences in cultures. As Berlin reads his work, Herder provides the most sustained argument before the twentieth century for the denial of cultural hierarchies and universal absolutes for evaluating cultural progress such as Kant and Hegel were determined to construct. Herder argued that each culture was a product of its geography and history and that its cultural inventions could only be fully understood from within that history. Even more, Herder argued that cultural values were incommensurate; one culture's cultural values could not be used to understand or measure another's, except as a starting point of reference, never as an absolute. (A very controversial claim, then as now.) In Herder's words as translated by Berlin: "the civilization of man is not that of the European; it manifests itself, according to time and place, in every people" (198). To use the terms Pynchon's novel has given us, this sense of cultural relativism is the novel's Mound or Shan, its "Tellurick" or earth-bound knowledges that pose an alternative to allegedly universal (whether Newtonian, Kantian, or Hegelian) absolutes as a way of defining cosmological and cultural realities. [5] Herder, as far as I can tell, is never mentioned in Mason and Dixon, but I would argue that his thought is deeply relevant to it, if only because without considering his thought it is impossible to re-evaluate the complex heritage of the Enlightenment--- and such an assessment is the deepest ambition of Pynchon's text. Pynchon's novels have always been concerned with the metaphysics used to create and justify power inequities, but with unprecedented power Mason and Dixon provides a cultural archeology of the links between Enlightenment science and European theories of racial and cultural superiority. In this the novel is profoundly Herderian, and never more so than when Jeremiah Dixon's point of view is central. Here, for example, are Mason and Dixon debating whether to accede to Native American requests and halt the drawing of the Line some forty miles short of its planned intersection with the Ohio river. Characteristically, Mason argues for the universal imperatives of their collective enterprise in the name of Enlightenment science, while Dixon takes the side of the Indians and imagines how they might see the enterprise of the Line differently. Dixon does this in part just to needle his partner and in part because, though trained as a scientist, he is curious about all world-views and all forms of knowledge that contradict what he has been taught. Dixon also voices his and Mason's growing unease with their project and what its unintended consequences might be. "They want to know how to stop this great invisible Thing that comes crawling Straight on over their Lands, devouring all in its Path." "Well! [Mason replies] of course it's a living creature, 'tis all of us, temporarily collected into an Entity, whose Labors none could do alone." "A tree-slaughtering Animal, with no purpose but to continue creating forever a perfect Corridor over the Land. Its teeth of Steel,--- its Jaws, Axmen,--- its Life's Blood, Disbursement. And what of its intentions, beyond killing ev'rything due west of it? do you know? I don't either. ...Haven't we been saying, with an hundred Blades all the day long,--- This is how far into your land we may strike, this is what we claim to westward. As you see what we may do to Trees, and how little we care,--- imagine how little we care for Indians, and what we are prepared to do to you. ...As the Indians wish, we must go no further." (678-79; ellipses are my own) If Mason is obsessed with categorical imperatives in science and philosophy, Dixon, though trained as Mason was, is by temperament drawn to ironies, ambiguities, and cultural contradictions. Mason and Dixon journey to South Africa or to Ireland or the American colonies primarily on scientific expeditions, but Pynchon uses their presence in these locales---and the astronomers' unease with the abuses of power that they encounter---to show us the contradictory consequences of Enlightenment cultural theories, their complicity with both the "Charter'd Companies" that marked the first stage of capitalism (252) and justified colonialism with theories of racial and cultural supremacy, not just a curiosity for different cultures or the necessities of trade. We see class and cultural warfare in rural Britain and in London; we see how British colonial violence and racism was first deployed not in the New World but against the Scots and the Irish.[6] And the novel's opening episodes

in South Africa provide a key introduction to a history of slavery and cultural domination that sets the stage for the full exploration of these themes in America. Mason and Dixon's Line of course became a boundary marking not just the Pennsylvania/Maryland border but the fault-line in American democracy itself---all the contradictions between America's vision of liberty and equality and its constitutional validation of the color line marking some as citizens and others as aliens. Mason and Dixon's Line is also implicated in America's westward expansion, a violent, tree-clearing expression of cultural superiority made manifest both in slavery and in Indian wars. These doubts increasingly shadow Dixon as the Line is drawn farther and farther West. Yet it is too simple to say that Mason embodies the Line's energies and Dixon the Mound's, though this is partly true. In reviews of the novel, much was made of Pynchon's brilliant use of opposing temperaments in his two main characters---Mason's rage for order coupled with his melancholia; Dixon's optimism, gregariousness, and delight in play, improvisation, and risk-taking. What has not yet been sufficiently emphasized is how well this pairing allows Pynchon to explore the cultural contradictions of the Enlightenment embodied in each of his primary characters and in the country most famously founded in the name of Enlightenment truths, America itself. Mason is usually threatened by the new and the culturally different and most frequently seeks refuge in his scientific training in universal absolutes. In the wilds of Pennsylvania he is the one who is least able to adapt to the conditions of the frontier; he frequently (and sometimes unintentionally) insults both his white and Indian hosts, and Dixon has to patch things up. Yet Mason has his own "Tellurick" energies; he is a melancholic frequently assailed with visions of the uselessness of all his science, and in his dreams and visions of his wife Rebekah he journeys far into an alternative realm that can be explained neither by Newtonian physics nor by Enlightenment cultural or psychic history; like Newton, he has a visionary and mystical side that is fully developed but usually hidden behind his scientific face. Like Mason, Dixon is a good and steady scientist, indisputably a free-thinker, experimenter, and man of his age. But unlike Mason he is a gregarious optimist delighting in heterogeneity and chance, always willing to explore new foods, new adventures, and new cultures. Dixon is also a Quaker deeply disturbed by inequities of power and by injustice and cruelty; he too has a melancholic side and it is he, not Mason, who meditates most thoroughly on the contradictions between slavery and the Enlightenment. "Ev'rywhere they've sent us,--- the Cape, St. Helena, America,--- what's the Element common to all?" "Long Voyages by Sea," replies Mason, blinking in Exhaustion by now chronick. "Was there anything else?" "Slaves. Ev'ry day at the Cape, we lived with Slavery in our faces,--- more of it at St. Helena,--- and now here we are again, in another Colony, this time having drawn them a Line between their Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers, as if doom'd to re-encounter thro' the World this public Secret, this shameful Core...." (692; ellipses are Pynchon's) Dixon is really a Herderian, a proto-anthropologist who relishes rather than is threatened by cultural differences and the possibilities of cultural relativism. When Native American leaders explain with the Line must stop and not cross a Warrior Path that is a crucial boundary-line allowing contact yet separateness among Native American nations, it is Dixon who is instrumental in stopping the Line's "progress." This is the same Dixon who will confront injustice whenever he encounters it, most memorably when he publicly humiliates a slave-driver even though his actions put an important supplemental surveying project in jeopardy (696ff). [7] Dixon may be fascinated with cultural multiplicities, but he does appear to believe in some absolutes of ethical conduct. In the end Pynchon's novel does not resolve the conflict between the Enlightenment project and its contradictions and alternatives, just as it does not side with either Mason's or Dixon's world-views but rather presents them both in all their complexity and inter-relatedness. The novel is both Line and Loop, Loops infinitely expanding within the narrative of the Line. The full richness of Pynchon's deconstruction of Enlightenment cultural studies as well as its natural sciences will only emerge in the next millennium as the novel gets readings to match the complexity of those given Gravity's Rainbow. Moreover, just as Gravity's Rainbow proved so stimulating in the late 1970s and 1980s to testing the full range of possibilities in deconstruction as a theory of reading, so will Mason and Dixon be one of the crucial texts for testing the resources and limitations of current "cultural studies" and "postcolonial" critical theories. (In saying this, I don't mean to place Mason and Dixon as the unmovable center of these new critical paradigms, only as one of many possible centers. Mason and Dixon will greatly benefit from being read in contexts provided by writers such as Rushdie and Kingston, Marquez and Parmuk, Ben Okri and Charles Johnson, Michelle Cliff and the Bharati Mukherjee of A Holder of the World, not just novelists such as Burroughs and Barth and Melville with whom Pynchon is usually compared.) As well as focusing on the novel's brilliant comic set-pieces (talking dogs and walk-on parts for Washington and Franklin, etc.), we should be willing to unpack the full meanings of the laughter provoked by a knowledge of the Mound, the crises of understanding represented by Native America's "Interdiction" (678) of the Line in western Pennsylvania. & Notes [continued] [3]. The novel's magnificent opening paragraph gives us another such device figuring the work as a whole as well as the reader's encounter with it: in the room in the Philadelphia house in which Cherrycoke presides is "a sinister and wonderful Card Table which exhibits the cheaper Wave-like Grain known in the Trade as Wand'ring Heart, causing an illusion of Depth into which for years children have gaz'd as into the illustated Pages of Books ... along with so many hinges, sliding Mortises, hidden catches, and secret compartments that neither the Twins nor their Sister can say to have been to the end of it" (5-6; ellipses Pynchon's). [4]. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) published somewhat contemporaneously with the events of Pynchon's novel (Kant's "The Idea of a Universal History" dates from 1784, for instance), while G. F. W. Hegel (1770-1831) of course did not publish his work until after the period in which the novel is set. Pynchon is writing an ur-history of the Enlightment, however, not making a strict chronology of influences. Kant and Hegel brought to fruition in the philosophy of history many of the assumptions that governed Mason and Dixon's Enlightenment scientific training, in particular the belief in universal laws underlying and explaining the multifariousness of the perceived world. Also relevant is John Locke's Second Treatise on Government (1690), which contradictorily treats slavery as both a violation of natural rights and as acceptible within a social contract such as the Articles that governed the Carolina colony. [5]. Isaiah Berlin's most succinct account of the importance of Herder is in Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. New York: Viking, 1976. For Kant, see The Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, trans. Thomas de Quincey (rpt. Hanover, NH: Sociological Press, 1927); an excerpt is also in Patrick L. Gardiner, Theories of History: Readings from Classical and Contemporary Sources (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), 22-34, translated by W. Hastie. For Hegel, see especially the "Introduction to the Philosophy of History," in Gardiner, 60-73, translated by J. Sibree. For a central J. G. Herder text, see the selections compiled as "Ideas Toward a Philosophy of the History of Man," in Gardiner, 35-49, translated by T. Churchill. Contrast Herder's statement "one must enter the time, the place, the entire history [of a people]; one must 'feel oneself ... into everything'" (Berlin 186) with the following two statements by Kant and Hegel, respectively: "suppose we start from the history of Greece, as that by which all the older or contemporaneous history has been preserved, or at least accredited to us." [Kant's footnote on this passage: "It is only a learned public which has had an uninterrupted existence from its beginning up to our time that can authenticate ancient history. Beyond it, all is terra incognita; and the history of the peoples who lived out of its range can only be begun from the date at which they entered within it. In the case of the Jewish people this happened in the time of the Ptolemies through the Greek translation of the Bible, without which little faith would have been given to their isolated accounts of themselves"] (in Gardiner, 32). Or Hegel: "In the history of the World, only those peoples can come under our notice which form a state. For it must be understood that this latter is the realization of Freedom.... It must further be understood that all the worth which the human being possesses---all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State... for his spiritual reality consists in this, that his own essence---Reason---is objectively present to him [as realized in a rational State of which he is a member]" (67-68). [6]. The Irish role in the origins of repressive colonial policies is stressed in Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little Brown, 1993), especially pp. 9, 24-50; and David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1993). [7]. This incident may be prophesied by Mason and Dixon's Native American guide during a night-time exploration of the Warrior Path that their Line will not cross (675-76). There they find a mysterious whip-like weapon in the path, either put their as a warning from Catawba Indians to the South, or a "find" staged by the Indians to give the white surveyors pause with a weapon that for Mason and Dixon may connote not so much Indian weaponry as one of the principal instruments of coercion in the slave system, the cat-of-nine-tails whip. A similar whip (though made of leather, not swamp cane) is wielded by the slave-seller whom Dixon later attacks (696). --------------   ----- Subject: MDMD: America Pynchon does hold out some hope for humanity in M&D, but I'm not sure about hope for America. "what America can still represent" seems to be the problem, because America-as-symbol seems so at odds with America-the-reality in M&D. Time and again, Pynchon points to specific ways that the reality undermines the dream -- genocide of the indigenous people, degradation of the environment, a "revolution" that's actually scam to shift control from one propertied class to another, etc. I'm not so sure about children being able to "redeem" America, either -- Mason's boys, at the end of the novel, are obviously seduced by the wildly Romantic vision of America that Pynchon has thoroughly undercut and exposed as a sham in the previous 700+ pages. I don't see Pynchon refusing to give up on what America can represent as much as I see him refusing to give up on what people, individuals and collectively, can do in the face of an array of forces -- economic and political (what Walter Wink calls the "domination system" in his three-volume work, _Naming the Powers_, _Unmasking the Powers_, and _Engaging the Powers_) -- that will turn a relatively unspoiled continent into the quasi-fascist US that Pynchon portrays in his earlier novels. I see this most clearly in Pynchon's choice to present Dixon's non-violent action to set free a group of slaves; considering that noble act in the context of the picture of race relations in the US that P has presented in "The Mind of Watts" makes it seem rather futile, however. The same sad arcs trail from so much of what Pynchon presents in M&D to the world he portrays in his other novels-- chartr'd corporations evolving into multinational companies responsible for the War that never ends, European genocide in Africa and America paving the way for the Holocaust , the Line just the first cut in what develops into wholesale environmental destruction for profits, etc. Pynchon's characters in M&D can find something ofa haven in their friendships and families, building on a theme that emerged strongly in Vineland, although it's no guarantee, as M&D is full of personal relationships that have gone sour or ended tragically. Rich: One of the things about M&D is its refusal, despite the evidence included within, to give up on what America can still represent. We can agree it's quite a pessimistic view, but there are small avenues to hope for, to find some small redemption, if anything represented by its children. Oh come now, get serious. America is exceptional. It is uncommon in so many ways and in so many things above average, in some ways extraordinary. And if we are talking about the USA and not America, it is clearly a very different nation than any other on the planet. It is not like China or Brazil (although is has much in common with both these giants) or any Nation I have ever been to and I've been to most nations in America. American Exceptionalism is not the subject of debate because the idea is clearly so wrong-headed and absurd that only fools and idiots would argue it. America is not a royal throne of kings, a sceptred isle, an earth of majesty. This is the seat of Mars, the Devil's own Dynamo and the flying Cross buttressed upon the cowering shoulders of misfits tossed cross every sea. It has been and may yet be for some that other Eden, a demi-paradise. And though it's towers are but dust, it remains always a fortress built by labor's thick rough hand, impenetrable but by some inside job underhanded and dastardly. America is guarded by the seas against the ships of war, guided by the rules of law, instructed by the farmer's toil, driven by the mad bus driver across the night's unwinding nihgtmares, spilled and broken and up off the floor swinging. Oh, Richard, blessed are we, we happy breed of men and women, with giant hearts pumping blood into the limbs of the infant and aging world. Oh, this prairie immense and fathomless, this manifestation of the dead hand of reason and clock time. Ever the envy of less happier lands, this blessed Mall, this Plot, this conspiracy, this America never was America to me. ----------- From: Doug Millison Subject: re MDMD: America Within the terms of discourse regarding non-violence, Dixon's act ("mythic" or not) is non-violent. He doesn't physically harm anybody; he puts his body on the line to prevent the slave-driver from using his whip to harm the slaves, and to let the slaves escape thus giving them at least the hope of a better life. "Non-violent" doesn't mean passive or non-reactive, it's action that stops short of injuring or killing. I wouldn't choose "nobel or selfish" either -- I'd call it humanitarian, the act of a peace-loving man who finally sees (as he didn't at the end of the chapter currently under discussion) the institution of slavery for what it is and who chooses to non-violently do what he can to prevent further suffering in the situation he confronts. It's a principled, moral act, one that exhibits bravery, and which opposes the received wisdom that it's OK to traffic in human beings and exploit them as factors of production. I suppose you could argue that people sometimes have selfish motives for their humanitarian acts, but even in the worst of cases I don't see how that undercuts entirely the good that accrues from the acts. For Dixon, there's little obvious upside to his action, after taking it he has to hustle to avoid becoming he victim of violence himself. Pynchon's use of this episode in the political and moral scheme of M&D is nuanced. Earlier in the novel, Dixon appears to be driven more by his physical appetites than anything else; he did nothing to stop any acts of violence against slaves elsewhere, and he appears guilty himself of sexually exploiting the local native girls in a way that's possible only in the context of an imperial occupation or colony. Thus Dixon's act has a certain redemptive value, it makes him a more serious person, representing a kind of moral awareness that hasn't been present, and perhaps this is why the story passes down through his descendants. As you note, it may be a legend or fabrication, not demonstrable as a historical fact, but it nonetheless points to a time in American history not many decades later when men and women will take such a stand to stop the slave trade and end the violence against slaves, when the "Maxon-Dixon Line" will have come to represent a boundary between "free" and slave societies. We can also read it in the context of the treatment P gives to racial issues elsewhere in his writings, where, it turns out, nothing is simply black and white. re American exceptionalism, one of the virtues I see in M&D is that it explodes the myth that America, the New World, is somehow different from Europe. America's nation-building has at its root Europe's commercial impulses and apparatus. Present here in America are all the evils found elsewhere -- slavery, environmental rape, religious feuds, etc. A dream it may have been for the Old World, by the time Mason and Dixon get here America has already been poisoned and is on its way to becoming the same old European nightmare. Manifest Destiny is nothing more than the local version of the imperial project that brought Europe to America in the first place. In the current circumstance, of course, the US is "exceptional" by virtue of its wealth and military power, but it's still just the latest purveyor of the same old terror, the latest in a series of rogue states that have spread death and misery across the globe. Rich: But that act represents, it seems to me, a mythic act, one to tell the young'uns or uninformed about right and wrong. And it's not really non-violent is it? Is it noble or selfish? ---------- 'Dixon, moving directly, seizes the Whip,- the owner comes after it,- Dixon places his Fist in the way of the oncoming Face,- the Driver cries out and stumbles away. Dixon follows, raising the Whip. "Turn around. I'll guess *you've* never felt this." "You broke my Tooth!" "In a short while thah's not going to matter much, because in addition, I'm going to kill *you*...?[...]"'(698) Not exactly Ghandi... Note that four times in this passage the word "you" (referring to the slave-driver) is in italics - mirroring the slave-driver's outbursts, when he accosts the slaves. Dixon's actions, imho, are motivated, not so much by a concern for the slaves' welfare, but by his own moral outrage and desire for violent, and personal, retribution. The same desire that he felt in Lancaster. Only the advice of one of the slaves stops Dixon from further assault and perhaps even murder. ------ Good point, Scott, but non-violenc is not passive or non-reactive. You can physically prevent somebody else from harming a third party without actually harming the potential perpetrator. In Dixon's case, it reads as if the slave owner ran his face into Dixon's raised fist -- that's hardly a punch. Certanly Dixon feels many impulses and motivations before and during his action -- moral outrage at the treatment of people as property significant among them. Even if he feels impelled to physical assault or even murder, the important thing, in my opinion, is that he refrains from doing so. ----------------- I've mentioned his name a couple of times now, and I'll recommend again the writings of Walter Wink. I'm nearly finished with a three-volume work, _Naming the Powers_, _Unmasking the Powers_, and _Engaging the Powers_, which amount to a theology for Christian-based nonviolence and social justice. Here's an excerpt from an interview with Wink: http://www.sojo.net/news/index.cfm/action/ display_archives/mode/current_opinion/ article/CO_010702w.html "[...] Wink: A police action might have been as successful as a military action. I distinguish, for better or worse, between police action and war-between force and violence. The police ideally are people who are engaged in a legitimate use of force that attempts to prevent someone doing harm to others-legitimate in the sense that it is endorsed by society and by the laws of that society, and that there are constraints that they can't use excessive violence and so forth. Violence and war go together. (Violence is defined as injurious or lethal harm intended to damage and destroy.) [...] Wallis: What are your thoughts on a global police force? Wink: I think it's absolutely necessary. I think that this situation shows how effective it might be. Already, [we've experienced] the cooperation between the police of different countries such as we've never seen before, [such as] sharing information. There've been arrests in every country that you can think of. Egypt has arrested 800 people already, which I guess could be its way of getting rid of political enemies too. Wallis: Can a pacifist support those arrests? Wink: I don't consider myself an absolute pacifist. I'd rather say I'm a violent person who wants to be nonviolent. So I [support] a global police force trained in the methods of nonviolence, but armed in case occasions come along -- let's say a killer with a submachine gun who's attacking children on a playground has to be stopped. There might be ways other than killing him. I do think that there is occasion for force if necessary in order to prevent someone doing harm to others. British bobbies did pretty darn well for a long time, and I would like to see our police forces trained in nonviolence. There is some effort in that direction. Police in St. Louis are being trained in nonviolent action. Wallis: Gandhi said that the first thing to do when a lunatic is harming a village is to lock up the lunatic and then deal with the lunacy. Wink: Yes, I think that's right. And I think Gandhi is not as consistent as a lot of people make him sound, and that would be a part of his flexibility. Wallis: What do you mean? Wink:  A lot of people think pacifism means that you can't use force at all, no coercion. I don't think that was true of Gandhi. He believed that force was necessary, but he used nonviolent forms of coercion. He said if someone's attacking someone you love, there is the right to self defense, but he would not exercise violence. He'd apprehend the person without doing violence. Wallis: Didn't he say that violent resistance is better than no resistance? Do you agree? Wink: Yeah. I think it's unfortunate that it has to be done in certain cases, but I think we haven't even begun to explore the alternatives to violence. Wallis: Would you say exploring alternatives to violence is what this is about, more than saying there is never a case where you'd support the use of violence? Wink: Yeah, but I think there's a trap there, and that is what I'd call the Bonhoeffer assumption. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was studying at Union Seminary in New York. He was about to go to India to study nonviolence with Gandhi when he decided he had to go back to Germany. And when he got back, he discovered there weren't any people who had committed to nonviolence except for the Bruderhof and a few others; there were no troops, in other words. The churches had failed their job in evangelizing people about nonviolence. So Bonhoeffer decided to join the death squad against Hitler because he could see no other alternatives that would be effective. American thinkers who have used Bonhoeffer as a way of justifying the just war theory overlook his clear statement that he does not regard this as a justifiable action -- that it's a sin - and that he throws himself on the mercy of God. He does not use his act as a legitimation of war. I don't want to take the position that if you use nonviolence and it doesn't work, you use violence. [...] ------------ This myth, as Walter Wink explains it, provides an interesting light in which to read the story of the Lambton Worm which Pynchon embeds in M&D. What Wink calls the"Domination System" shares some of the characteristics of the system ruled by They in GR. http://www.Bridges-across.org/ba/powers/ http://www.bridges-across.org/ba/powers/4_system.htm Faith in violence, Wink says, is the real religion of our time, its spirituality,because people believe violence "saves" and that it seems to be inevitable. He traces the development of the conquest state in history, which led tothe predominance of what he calls the Domination System: No matter what shape the dominating system of the moment might take from Ancient Near Eastern states to the Pax Romana to feudal Europe to communist state capitalism to modern market capitalism), the basic structure has persisted now for at least five thousand years, since the rise of the great conquest states of Mesopotamia around 3000 B.C.E. (TPTB 39-40) The result was large standing armies, high taxes, deterioration of the statusof women and the poor, slaves as booty of war, the consolidation of citystates into empires and a spiraling into cycles of ever greater violence. A parallel result was the spread of what Wink calls the Myth of Redemptive Violence, the notion that violence "saves," that it is successful and reallyrepresents the natural way things are. This persists as an unexamined assumption behind our thinking today: This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today. (TPTB 42) A supreme example and source of this faith is the Babylonian myth of creation. This tells of the god-hero Marduk slaying the serpent-monster mother Tiamat, and how the world was created from her slain body. There, Wink says, violence precedes creation. This myth spread throughout the ancient world. The biblical myth presents the opposite. In the biblical faith the creation is good, and Jesus taught love of enemies, not their extermination. We see the domination myth enacted again and again in comic books and TV cartoons: Helpless people are threatened or brutalized by evil creatures. A hero flies in to rescue them. At first he loses and suffers greatly but eventually prevails. The evil beings are defeated and usually destroyed. It is seen regularly in movies and books and reenacted in public life. This does not encourage support of democracy and law. It is a vigilante kind of justice, as when the lone western hero outdraws his evil opponent and leaves him in the dust. It reflects impatience with legal protections, a desire for instant justice, violent solutions, a yearning for a white knight on a great horse who will set all things right. This is infact a totalitarian fantasy. Wink writes: The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting uncomplicated, irrational and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known. Furthermore, its orientation toward evil is the one into which virtually all modern children (boys especially) are socialized in the process of maturation. (TPTB 53) The devastating result is that children are brainwashed into the faith of the dominator society. They are taught to locate evil outside of themselves and to scapegoat other peoples. The double effect is loss of ability to see evil in oneself and one's own system and the violent reaction to those whose ways are different. The myth of redemptive violence appears on the large screen in the nation state and its supportive religious idolatry. Such a system cannot tolerate a real and absolute God, only a tamed one. So if God can't be eliminated, He (sic) must be domesticated. Religious language is used constantly by the leadership of the nation in support of violence. It was fine men who tortured the woman we spoke to in Argentina. One insisted to her, "But I go to Mass every morning too." Another proposed marriage (they had tortured her husband to death two years before). These men were not sadists. They had merely surrendered themselves to the idol of the state. Once they had crossed that line, any evil was good if it served the idol... (ETP 97-8) For a nation to believe that it embodies the good is dangerous to itselfand others. Wink speaks of his love of country and the need for a more modestview by Americans of their calling from God. http://www.bridges-across.org/  ba/powers/8_practical.htm --------- Doug Millison wrote: Walter Wink [....]... ------ Overcoming the natural desire to kill or injure, and instead find other ways to resolve differences, is what nonviolence is all about, and I expect that Pynchon is quite conscious of this as he creates this scene. Dixon may want to play executioner, he obviously feels a mix of impulses and desires, but he manages to stop himself from injuring or killing (Pynchon is quite clear that the slave driver runs into the upraised fist). That's what the Paxton Boys were unable to do. People who teach nonviolence and who use it for social change are quick to acknowledge that this is precisely the struggle: how to overcome the desire to kill or injure and instead find creative, nonviolent ways to effect the desired change, reconciliation instead of combat. I find it interesting that Pynchon creates this episode, freights it with ambiguity, gives the reader the opportunity to contrast it with the earlier massacre, and comes back to this theme of fighting to kill the evil other in the Lambton Worm story later. ------------ Very interesting book(s), like to read more, but Dixon is not an advocate for non-violence or a pacifist. The context for his actions? We might look into M&D and then at what was going on in America at the time. If we go to M&D we discover that Dixon's actions are not non-violent. Moreover, he never says he is a non-violent man or that he would like to be (he does ask God to bring the hand of justice down upon men he believes have committed great sins, should be punished by God, since, given the circumstances, he can't (not would not given the opportunity) punish them himself. He is a hot headed man and he has trouble controlling his temper and his other passions as well. I wonder if he's a red head? The point is, the character in M&D, named Dixon is not a pacifist and he doesn't act like one. Dixon and Mason are not Saints by a long shot. Why do they lie to the Harlands? ------------- I guess I am more inclined to read the passage as a slightly euphemistic description of a punch (sorta' like Philip Marlowe's line in Murder My Sweet, "I assaulted his fist with my face"...or something like that), though I certainly won't argue that Pynchon isn't ambiguous. In any case, my point is that Dixon's DESIRE and intent is to both injure and kill. And the fact that he doesn't continue his assault is due, for the most part, to impending injury to himself - as pointed out by one of his "benefactors". Further, it is not simply justice that Dixon seeks, but he also wants to play the part of executioner. And, it isn't slave-drivers in general, or a particular system, that he acts against, but this individual slave-driver - this other human.- that Dixon DESIRES to hurt and kill. Scott Badger ---------- Dixon has a temper. He's also frustrated (it's been said that he exploited woman at the at the Cape, but this is not in the book, unless we using Jimmy Carter's "lust in the heart" definition or we're talking about his visit to the Dutch club, but he doesn't (not on camera) have sex there. If he did engage in the slavery within slavery there, I'd like to read the pages or passages in M&D that support this. Also, the the Twins are off to bed and Dixon still hasn't gotten any. Does all sex, like murder sometimes in the theatre, take place of stage? So we should see Dixon in bed smoking a cigarette or something, right? Of course he is very interested in having adventure. He is jolly and gets on with strangers. He tends to leap before he looks, speak before he thinks, and he can also be very swift with a punch or a punch line. Dixon is no pacifist. The Quakers did put an end to slavery in the Society of Friends. Quite an accomplishment because they owned a lot of slaves and they were big traders of Africans. The Friends owned slave ships and the financed the trade. Even the the most pious men were not outraged by slavery or tainted by owning slaves. Owning slaves had become customary and custom can give false consecration to great crimes. Slaves were imported to Pennsylvania by Quakers and sold like cattle in the streets of Philadelphia and for a long time no one did anything to stop it because most people didn't think it was a sin and a crime. Slavery is not something that began in America, it is as old as man. When George Fox, founder of the Quakers came to America he saw slaves and he did not condemn it, but only advised the Quakers to Christianize their slaves and treat them as best they could as Christians and free them within a years time. In 1727 the Quakers called for an end to slavery in the Society. It took a while, but they did it and their "Work" was to rid the planet of slavery and to reform the prison system and..... -------- Re: Preterit & Subjuctive Tensions in America http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1473 O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath-- America will be! Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain-- All, all the stretch of these great green states-- And make America again! A cat looking at a King? Good Luck for Kings, but not for all the King's men and all the King's fools in America. Why you so WEIRD, Sista? Yes, tension dear King. The tension is in the Nature of the thing. It's what makes for a Marriage (Blake's heaven&hell) or a Ring (Schopenhauer's voice in Wagner's, says Nietzsche). And tension is the whole Bow and Arrow and String. That's how Heraclitus gave existence to things, like dancers or boxers or cocks in a ring, like P-listers sometimes (is it worse or better when it rhymes?). Things exist only so far as they embody a tension. So the world is at war or in conflict, but don't worry, it is simply the way of things. It is how babies are born and how seeds become corn and how America is America, after all. It is tension in the U.S. Constitution, that secures liberty and gives rise to the fall of Kings. A tension of competing interests. Now that's very Machiavellian. But what happens when the tension is broken, dear King? Oswald says, "If I had a monopoly out, they would have part on't." AND It's a cold and brave new world Nuncle; I'm cold and hungry, dirty and ragged too; but Blake is reading his prophecy; and I can't clean it up for you; Here's another: When priests are more in word than matter; When brewers mar their malt with water; When nobles are their tailors' tutors, No heretics burn'd, but wenches' suitors; When every case in law is right, No squire in debt nor no poor knight; When slanders do not live in tongues, Nor cutpurses come not to throngs; When usurers tell their gold i' th' field, And bawds and whores do churches build: Then shall the realm of Albion Come to great confusion. Then comes the time, who lives to see't, That going shall be us'd with feet. This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time. Very tricky that Fool, who does, by the way, in one sense, live before Merlin, the play being a history by Shakespeare and thus full of fabulous nonsense sounds and fury and fools and idiots too. we call it a history play and the first four lines describe the situation in England during Shakespeare's life, but the next six describe some impossible utopian England that tosses Albion (England) into great confusion when those that live to see it will walk with their feet. Kinda reminds me of TRP, in fact TRP seems to have much in common with Shakespeare. Perhaps it's the tension. Agonistic P! ----------- much later in the same month (after many posts on nonviolence) ---------- I thought about this a bit more at lunch. We don't really know -- Pynchon or another narrator doesn't appear to comment specifically on Cherrycoke's tale, although his listeners challenge its veracity -- how much of this Cherrycoke might be making up in order to prove his own points. We might assume that Cherrycoke has some sort of vested interest -- Christian that he is -- in presenting Dixon as a man who lives up to his Quaker background by heeding his conscience and resisting his urge to whip or kill the slave driver. Cherrycoke may somehow know the historical record that we know of -- that reference Dave Monroe dug up -- and change it to suit his purposes. Pynchon doesn't tell us anything about this in the text here, of course, and certainly it's Pynchon who writes the novel and creates Cherrycoke and puts these words in Cherrycoke's mouth in the first place. But it's conceiveable that Pynchon assumes that his serious readers will mine the historical record and dig up the same info about Dixon's history as Dave Monroe has done, that we will know that Pynchon (via Cherrycoke) is rewriting the historical record re Dixon's encounter with the slave driver -- Cherrycoke changing assault to "accost", equivocating about a punch being thrown or pulled or not or what, describing Dixon's threats and failure to follow through with same. At any rate, Pynchon does give us quite a bit to consider, regarding history and how it's made and transmitted and for what purposes, in this episode. -Doug P.S. Keith, I'll let you conduct that Rube Goldberg experiment with your son and report the results, complete with the relevant physics calculations -- my son is at school today, I don't own a whip, and I need to get on with another project. Good luck, and don't forget: "...Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,-who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers 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..." (p.350) "Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,-Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin.... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers,-nor is Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,-her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy and Taproom Wit,-that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forbears in forever,- not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,-rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common." (p.349)