The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Thomas Pynchon · a novel in three parts · Henry Holt, New York, 1997 · scored on Pynchon’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Historical novel as comic epic of the Enlightenment; picaresque, frame tale, tall tale, ghost story and elegy in one telling
Mythos
The Line as a myth of origin: America as a garden of the subjunctive, cut into property by an act of reason; the astronomer and the surveyor as two halves of one figure, in the line of Quixote and Sancho
Phase
From the voyage to the Cape for the transit of Venus in 1761, through the survey of 1763 to 1767, to the deaths of Dixon in 1779 and of Mason in Philadelphia in 1786; told over the Christmas season of 1786
Presentation
Fiction; three parts, “Latitudes and Departures”, “America” and “Last Transit”; a frame in which the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke tells the tale to the LeSpark household, the tale within it in the third person, with embedded tales, songs and texts read aloud
Register
A sustained pastiche of eighteenth-century English, its nouns capitalised, its sentences periodic and digressive, carrying farce, astronomy, landscape, grief and terror, with songs, puns and knowing anachronism
Scale
Two men and their survey crew, a household listening, and the empires, sciences, faiths and peoples the Line crosses, from the Cape to the American interior
Governing Proposition
In Philadelphia, in the Christmas season of 1786, a clergyman tells his sister’s household the story of two Englishmen he claims to have travelled with: an astronomer and a surveyor who timed the transit of Venus at the Cape of Good Hope in 1761, then spent four years cutting a straight line west through the American forest between Pennsylvania and Maryland, until a Native war path stopped it. The wager of the novel is that the Line, an act of Enlightenment reason in the service of property and empire, was the cut by which America closed off what it might have been, and that a history told in the eighteenth century’s own English, as a tale its listeners doubt, can give back the possibilities the Line excluded.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs”: the novel opens on snow in flight, in Philadelphia, in the Christmas season of 1786, and its first words are written in the English of their century, the nouns capitalised, the spellings and contractions those of the period. The whole book is written so. The house is that of the LeSparks, the family of a clergyman’s sister, and the clergyman is the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, who claims to have travelled with two men whose story he now undertakes to tell: Charles Mason, astronomer, and Jeremiah Dixon, surveyor.
He does not tell it to a silent room. The household listens, children and adults together, and interrupts, doubts and corrects him: the children challenge him, an uncle wants a moral, and a lawyer among them has his own say. Other members of the household read texts aloud, and songs are sung. Within this frame the story is told in the third person, with long tales set inside it, so that the history of the two surveyors reaches the reader as a telling, made in company and contested as it goes, by a narrator whose reliability his own listeners question.
Behind the telling stands the record. Charles Mason, born in 1728, and Jeremiah Dixon, born in 1733, observed the transit of Venus of 1761 at the Cape of Good Hope; from 1763 to 1767 they surveyed the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, the line later named for them, and stopped short of its intended end in 1767, where their Native escort would go no further. Dixon died in 1779. Mason died in Philadelphia in 1786, the city and the year of the frame. The novel follows them in three parts, “Latitudes and Departures”, “America” and “Last Transit”. It was Pynchon’s fifth novel, published in 1997, his first since Vineland.
Movement II
The first part sends the two men to the southern edge of the world. There is an attack at sea on the voyage out, and then the Cape of Good Hope, among slaveholders, where the astronomer and the surveyor set up their instruments. The transit itself is the centre of the part: two men at a telescope at the end of the world, timing a planet’s passage across the face of the sun. The science is exact, and it is done among slaveholders, so that the line the men will later draw, which will become the border of slavery, has its first sight of its meaning here.
The pair is made in this part. Mason is melancholy, a widower who grieves for his wife, Rebekah, and her ghost has its place in the book. Dixon, from Durham, is warm and of large appetite. They are not alike and the book does not make them alike; they are two halves of one figure, as the knight and his squire are in Cervantes, and the friendship between them, uneasy and lasting, is the book’s human measure for everything it will set against reason and empire.
The marvels begin here too. The Learned English Dog is one: a talking dog, a wonder set down among men who would make a specimen of it. The book admits such marvels on the same terms as the transit and the slaveholders of the Cape, because Cherrycoke’s telling admits them, and the listeners in Philadelphia doubt the dog no more and no less than they doubt the rest. History and fable are given one footing, and the reader is asked to hold both, as the household does.
Movement III
The second part, “America”, is the survey. The proprietors of two colonies, the Penns and the Calverts, need the boundary between their claims settled, and the two Englishmen are engaged to settle it. They begin in 1763. With them go the axemen and the chainmen of the crew, and the work is the cutting of the Visto, a corridor through the forest wide enough to sight along, running straight to its vanishing point. The part has the Line’s own shape: a westward progress, measured and marked, mile by mile.
The progress is broken again and again by the world the Line cuts through. Vaucanson’s mechanical duck, grown conscious and in love, is loose in it. A Chinese geomancer, Captain Zhang, comes among the surveyors. There are tales within tales, songs and comic routines in taverns, and texts read aloud in the parlour in Philadelphia. Washington and Franklin appear. Cherrycoke’s fabulation runs to conspiracies of the Jesuits, the Royal Society and the East India Company. For long stretches the frame falls away and the parlour is forgotten.
Against this abundance the Line runs straight. America, in the book’s figure, is a garden of the subjunctive, a place where the possible had not yet been ruled, and the Line is the cut, the act of reason that turns the possible into property and the West into the nation’s future. The stars over the American interior are a height of the part, and Mason, in his grief, reads the sky as he reads his loss. The men come to doubt what they serve, and they go on serving it, and the friendship holds through the doubt.
Movement IV
In 1763, the year the survey began, the Paxton Boys murdered the Conestoga at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The book sets the killing down as the Line’s other face. The book comes to the empty jail where the Conestoga were killed, and approaches it with a gravity its comedy does not touch. The reason that draws a line in the name of order stands, at Lancaster, beside a massacre done in the name of the same settlement.
Slavery runs the length of the survey as it ran through the Cape. The Line divides the claims of two proprietors, and it will become the border between the states that keep slaves and those that do not. The men who chain and sight it are complicit in a project whose ends they did not choose and come to doubt, and the book does not acquit them; it gives them a friendship the project does not own, which is the one thing in the survey that is not the survey’s.
In 1767 the Line runs west until it reaches a Native war path, and there the escort will go no further, and the survey stops short of its intended end. The stopping is the limit of the myth the book builds: the act of reason that would rule the continent halts at a road it may not cross, and the possible, for a moment, is not yet owned. The Line is left unfinished.
Movement V
The third part follows the two men after the Line, and the form changes with it. There is no longer a survey to give the book its progress; the last part closes as a life closes, not as a plot does, by separation, age and loss. The men go their ways. Dixon, the warmer of the two, dies in 1779.
Mason’s decline is the book’s last movement. The astronomer who timed a planet across the sun, who served reason and the Royal Society and glimpsed, along the Line, the marvels reason excludes, comes at the end to Philadelphia, and dies there in 1786. The city and the year are those of the frame, so the tale arrives at last in the parlour where it is being told, and the clergyman’s story of two men he travelled with becomes the story of a man lately dead in the same town.
Whether the close is consolation or irony the book leaves open, as it leaves open how far its teller is to be trusted. What it keeps is the shape of its argument: a straight inscription across a continent of possibility, and against it a telling with many voices, doubted by its listeners, digressive, fabulous, full of what the Line could not hold. The friendship of the astronomer and the surveyor is the book’s last measure of what the Line did not own.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the book invites it. Its argument is that the Line is an act of reason imposed on a world of unruly possibility, and the digressions are that world: the Learned English Dog, Vaucanson’s mechanical duck grown conscious and in love, a Chinese geomancer, tales within tales, songs. The argument needs abundance, so abundance is required in principle, and the frame, the transit at the Cape, the cutting of the Visto, the massacre at Lancaster, Mason’s grief and the last part are each required. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is that a good share of the rest is not: many single episodes, and many of the songs and comic routines, could go without the book knowing less, and the frame lapses for long stretches. The method justifies digression as a kind, not every instance of it.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: Enlightenment reason, its astronomy, surveying and clocks, served commerce, property and empire, and the straight line drawn across a continent of possibility is the founding act by which America closed off what it might have been. The Line divides the proprietors’ claims and will become the border of slavery, and the book makes that literal at the Cape, among slaveholders, and in America. The murder of the Conestoga at Lancaster in 1763 is set down as the Line’s other face. Beneath it, two men complicit in a project they come to doubt keep a friendship the project does not own. Held off the top because much of the disclosure comes through Cherrycoke’s conspiratorial fabulation, of Jesuits, the Royal Society and the East India Company, so that part of it is a mood of paranoia and loss rather than a meaning the action earns.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The register is comic, and the comedy is the medium of the heights, which recur. Two men at a telescope at the end of the world, timing a planet across the sun. The Visto, the corridor cut through the forest, running straight to its vanishing point, beautiful and terrible at once. The stars over the American interior, which Mason, in his grief, reads as he reads his loss. The ghost of Rebekah, his dead wife. The empty jail at Lancaster where the Conestoga were killed, approached with a gravity the comedy does not touch. And the last part, the death of Dixon and the decline and death of Mason, which carries the book’s deepest feeling. Held below the higher reaches because the comic routines and the songs flatten long stretches by design, and the reader crosses much level ground between the heights.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Myth built at the centre, evoked at the edges. The centre is the Line as a myth of origin: America as a garden of the subjunctive, a place where the possible had not yet been ruled, and the Line as the cut, the act of reason that turns the possible into property and the West into the nation’s future. The plot bears it: the Line runs west until a Native war path stops it, and the stopping is the myth’s limit. The pair is built too, the astronomer and the surveyor, melancholy and appetite, two halves of one figure in the line of Quixote and Sancho. The particular stays particular: transits, instruments, chains and rods. Held at the gate, not above it, because the fabulous machinery, the duck and the dog, is carnival evoked rather than structure, and the myth of America is carried as much in Cherrycoke’s commentary as in the action.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is wide and openly carried: Sterne and Fielding, the eighteenth-century travel narrative, the historical novel from Scott on, and Pynchon’s own encyclopedic systems novel. The turn is in the instrument: a very long novel written in a sustained pastiche of eighteenth-century prose, the historical novel’s documents and the picaresque’s tales folded into a frame of oral telling, and the paranoid architecture of Gravity’s Rainbow moved back two centuries to the founding of the nation. The stake was real: a book of deliberately archaic diction and great length, after the cool reception of Vineland, that could have been read as a parlour game. Held at the gate, not above it, because the path had been cleared: John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) had written a mock-eighteenth-century novel of colonial Maryland, and the historiographic metafiction of the 1980s had made the revision of history by fable a familiar mode.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The past is given in its own idiom, so the reader inhabits the eighteenth century’s language as the surveyors do; yet the idiom is a pastiche, visibly made and riddled with knowing anachronism, so history arrives as a telling, not a record. The frame is the instrument of that knowledge: a clergyman whose reliability his listeners doubt, children who challenge him, an uncle who wants a moral, and this many-voiced telling is set against the Line’s single straight inscription. The middle part has the Line’s shape, a westward progress, mile by mile, broken by digressions that are the world the Line excludes. The last part closes as a life does, not as a plot. Held below the top because the middle part’s episodes could often stand in another order without the work knowing anything different, and the frame thins for long stretches.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over twenty-nine years. Criticism began at once and has continued, in the journals of Pynchon studies and in a line of readings that do not cancel: the book as a revision of the founding of America; as an elegy for the subjunctive; as a novel of science and its uses; as a study of slavery and the frontier; as the warmest of Pynchon’s books, a novel of friendship and grief. Its questions remain open: how far Cherrycoke is to be trusted; what the Line is, finally, an instrument of; whether the ending is consolation or irony. The density of allusion means that each return finds more. Held below the top because a share of the yield is decoding, which is a sign of difficulty before it is a sign of depth, and because twenty-nine years is a short test.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is the American novel of the late twentieth century, and within it the historical novel. The force: the book showed that the encyclopedic novel could be turned on the founding of the nation in the founding’s own language, joining the systems novel’s paranoia to the historical novel’s documents and the picaresque’s warmth, and it moved the systems novel toward feeling, through a friendship and a grief at its centre. That force is real, but Barth had anticipated part of it, and so had Pynchon himself. Force outstrips reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a warm critical reception, with critics placing the book at or near the summit of Pynchon’s work; a steady academic literature; a readership narrower than that of Gravity’s Rainbow and no wider public; and a redirection of later fiction that is hard to document, the novel admired more than followed.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Survival is weighed over twenty-nine years, on what is shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the diction is archaic by design, the matter is the 1760s, and nothing depends on 1997 except the anachronistic jokes, which date by design to no single year. It has outlived the conditions of its making and is read as more pertinent, not less, in later quarrels over the nation’s founding. What holds the axis is presence. It is continuous but narrow, a readership drawn largely from the readers of Pynchon and from the university, narrower than that of the works of its age that stand higher; and a span of under three decades shows far less than the centuries behind the summit.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on Pynchon’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a voice no one had sustained at this length: an eighteenth-century English, capitalised, periodic and digressive, held across the whole of a very long novel without collapsing into costume, and able to carry farce, astronomy, landscape, grief and terror in one register. The two men are distinguished in it, Mason’s melancholy and Dixon’s Durham warmth; the frame’s voices, the children, the uncle, the lawyer, keep their own pitch; the set pieces of instrument and observation are exact. The pastiche is load-bearing, since the book’s argument about history as telling is made by it. Charges hold it below the top: the songs are uneven; many puns and comic routines are laboured; the knowing anachronisms sometimes break the spell more than they serve it; and the density at times obstructs the narrative it carries.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs the whole: the subjunctive against the indicative, the world of what might be against the line of what shall be owned. Take the two most distant elements, the Learned English Dog in the first part and the death of Mason in Philadelphia in the last. They obey the same law: the dog is a marvel that reason would reduce to a specimen, and Mason dies having served reason and lost the marvels he glimpsed. The fabulous and the historical share one physics because Cherrycoke’s telling admits both on equal terms, and the listeners’ doubts are part of the law. The range is very wide, from farce to elegy, from astronomy to ghost story. Charged: some episodes, several of the tavern routines among them, belong to the law only loosely, and the anachronistic jokes sit outside the frame’s physics at some cost.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Many orders are held, and the Line joins them. The cosmos and science: the transits of Venus, the measurement of the earth, clocks and instruments. Empire and commerce: the Royal Society, the East India Company, the proprietors Penn and Calvert. Slavery, at the Cape and in America. The frontier and the Native nations, at Lancaster and at the war path where the Line stops. Religion: Anglican, Quaker, Methodist, Jesuit. Labour, in the axemen and chainmen of the survey. The founding of the nation, with Washington and Franklin. Friendship, marriage and grief. The family, in the household that listens. Time itself, in the eleven days taken from the calendar in 1752. They are integrated, not listed: each is a thing the Line measures, crosses, serves or excludes. What is thin: the inner lives of women, Rebekah a ghost and the rest types, and the Native peoples, seen mostly from the surveyors’ distance.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made and The Encompassed at 9.0, then The Living Form at 8.7. A voice no one had sustained at this length, an eighteenth-century English that carries farce, astronomy, landscape, grief and terror in one register and makes the book’s argument that history reaches us as telling; the orders of science, empire, slavery, faith, labour and the founding of a nation, each entered as a thing the Line measures, crosses or serves; and a form, a doubted, many-voiced telling set against a single straight inscription, that is the instrument of what the book knows.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.6, held by the episodes, songs and comic routines the book could lose without knowing less, and by the long stretches in which the frame lapses: the argument requires abundance as a kind, not every instance of it. Next above it, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0: a real force, partly anticipated by Barth and by Pynchon’s own earlier work, with a reach admired more than followed.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by one tenth. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: The Unconcealment at 8.6, The Archetypal Deep at 8.5 and The Swerve at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Imperishable at 8.4 falls a tenth short and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.5, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, published by Henry Holt, New York, in 1997: his fifth novel, and his first since Vineland (1990). It is scored as one novel in three parts, “Latitudes and Departures”, “America” and “Last Transit”, in Pynchon’s English as first published, an English that is itself a pastiche of the English of the eighteenth century. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Pynchon’s English, the original, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening words and the three part titles. The history on which the novel rests, the dates of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the transit of Venus of 1761 at the Cape, the survey of 1763 to 1767 and its halt, and the murder of the Conestoga at Lancaster in 1763, is stated from the historical record, not from the novel. Facts that could not be verified, among them the number of chapters, the page count, the month of publication, some particulars of the tale’s episodes, the record of prizes and adaptations, and the names behind the book’s critical reception, are not given. Citations are by part.