The Big Bad Final Paper

So here's the paper. Couldn't figure out a way to get it up here as a link or attachment, or anything convenient like that, but this isn't so bad.

Spelunking with Old Tom:

Comprehending the Underground in Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon

In the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, there are numerous departures to worlds beneath this one, and it’s easy to imagine that these expeditions down into the subterranean aren’t much more than quirky, surreal eccentricities, more like a literary tactic to toy with a reader’s sanity than anything thematic or contemplative – a fondness for trips down the rabbit hole for their own sake. But if you take a look at all these passages, with their insistence on a movement downward or beneath, certain patterns emerge, and these patterns begin to take on a moralistic, or at the very least, admonitory air. By examining a few specific episodes in Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, it becomes clear that “underground” is more than just a place for Pynchon – it’s a concept, intimately related to a sort of relegation that has been taking place, if you take Mason & Dixon’s word for it, ever since the Age of Reason. Collectively, what seem to populate Pynchon’s underground are, to be as simple as possible, things we’re afraid of, or that remind us of realities we’d rather not deal with. Granted that it’s Pynchon we’re talking about, and to speak “simply” is usually to speak “incompletely,” I’ll allow this notion to complicate itself the deeper and deeper we go into this Underground.

First Excursion: Slothrop’s Toilet Voyage

For the sake of organization, it makes sense to begin with the episode that appears first chronologically: Slothrop’s trip down the toilet. Early in part one of Gravity’s Rainbow, Slothrop is under the influence of Sodium Amytal. The session (or experiment) is being administered by PISCES. After a bit of halluci-narration that places Slothrop back in Boston, at the Roseland Ballroom with some Harvard friends, he ends up accidentally letting his harp fall out of his pocket and into the same toilet he’s spent the last few minutes using as a receptacle for his vomit. He decides, for one reason or another, that the only way to retrieve it would be to follow it into the toilet himself, but that decision leads to a rush of paranoia regarding a bunch of black guys who he fears will take the opportunity (his ass sticking up in the air and all) to sodomize him. This episode is one of the earliest examples of that Pynchonized form of the manic sublime: the all-important motif of Death arrives, incorporating the symbolism of shit and animality, pathological racism tied up in that symbolism, and most importantly for our purposes, a descent into some fantastical underground world.

What I’ll note first is that, essentially, the scene is structured around a move from one world – the Roseland Ballroom – to another world underneath the first – the plumbing of the club, and eventually, a surreal city with one of every living thing. But even in the “aboveground” section of the episode, there are hints as to where Pynchon is going. Pynchon/Slothrop makes a nod to Charlie Parker in New York, taking jazz to new places. But the allusion is not necessarily triumphant, or even resistant – there is something tragic going on as well: “Down inside his most affirmative solos honks the already the idle amused dum-de-dumming of old Mister fucking Death he self,” (65). The metaphor is introduced with the phrase “down inside,” which sets the passage up as clearly analogous to the journey Slothrop will take. And if we trust that under Parker’s “affirmative solos,” Death is waiting, the question then becomes, “Is this a/the universal quality of Pynchon’s underground – the presence of Death?”

The case for that hypothesis is in no way lacking, but it’s a bit more nuanced than that. After Slothrop gets his whole body into the plumbing, he starts to become aware of the omnipresence of shit: it coats the insides of the pipes; it’s inescapable, which is straightforward enough. The “weirdness” here is when Slothrop realizes that he can differentiate and even identify the, uh, various manufacturers of certain pockets of feces: “He finds he can identify certain traces of shit as belonging definitely to this or that Harvard fellow of his acquaintances,” (66). This specificity says even more when seen in conjunction with the fact that Slothrop sees the shit-barnacles as “patterns thick with meaning,” (66). He reminisces about a night of chop suey at Fu’s Folly, and even “read[s] the old agonies” of a friend with a flirtatious mother who had attempted suicide in the “mean blackness” of his shit. It would seem that what distinguishes this particular underground from its aboveground equivalent (i.e., Harvard) is the presence of some sort of hard truth, or perhaps “truer” reality. The façade of homogeny that students struggle to live behind, to be accepted as another of the upper-class, over-privileged intellectuals (or whatever Harvard kids wanted to seem like) is torn down in the “personalness” of their shit. Their shit better represents them – it’s “shit nothing can flush away,” (66).

But wrapped up in that last part, about not being able to “flush away” the reality of shit, is another idea. It is rendered just as convincingly, although in many ways, it is a sort of reciprocal. This idea being that “shit” is an unpleasant (and oftentimes traumatic) reminder of our own mortality, which would incorporate that lurking, subterranean Death a little more explicitly. Actually, in the sub-section “Shit ‘N’ Shinola,” late in the novel, after the narrative has really begun to disintegrate, whatever narrator-persona is active here tells us openly that “Shit…is the color white folks are afraid of. Shit is the presence of death.” (701) Parroting Freud in slightly cruder, maybe even angrier terms, Pynchon gives us a rare hand and relates this theorizing back to the Roseland Ballroom incident plainly: “Well there’s one place where Shit ‘n’ Shinola do come together and that’s in the men’s toilet at the Roseland Ballroom,” (701). This would be simple enough, but it isn’t the final thought; he elaborates. “You see many brown toilets?” Pynchon asks. “Nope…that white porcelain is the very emblem of Odorless and Official Death,” (701) But we know, based on Slothrop’s travelogue, that beneath the white fantasy of the porcelain is the black reality of shit. Therefore, in this passage where both white and black – shit and porcelain – are associated explicitly with death, we can identify the distinction. It’s not “just” Death that lurks underground – it’s the Death we are told to forget about. Consider also Pynchon’s recurring image of stark white paper as a symbol of death in relation to living trees. White is the color of that compassionless death as well.

It must also be acknowledged that the episode in the toilet is disturbingly racialized as well, which is hinted at in the language of that aforementioned allusion to Charlie Parker (“Mister fucking Death he self,” “affirmative solos,” etc.) Even before that, when Slothrop says “Sho nuf,” PISCES double-checks, and Slothrop gets uncomfortable: “Come on you guys…don’t make it too…” (66). This is the tame stuff. As the episode progresses, we are incorporated more and more into Slothrop’s gathering homophobic/racial paranoia. He thinks to himself that “with Negroes around,” it might not be the best idea to leave “his ass up in the air;” He imagines them “undoing his belt, unzipping his fly,” and for all intents and purposes, raping him.

But to pretend that this racism is arbitrary, or even just a form of characterization, would be to ignore Pynchon’s potent symbolism of color that we’ve just identified. Edwin Treacle, member of Psi Section at PISCES and resident Freudian, only wants to show his coworkers that “feelings of blackness were tied to feelings about shit, and feelings about shit to putrefaction and death.” So it’s not just good ol’ American racism that Pynchon is taking on here. Rather, this color-conscious reading of coprophobia has historical and global implications. Consider the imperial-era nickname for Africa – the Dark Continent – situated directly below the “white” continent on the map: another “underground.”

The association of the underground presence of shit with racist fear is studied a bit more closely in the long section wherein we get the bulk of the backstory for the Herero, through the lens of Enzian, with some Blicero for spice. “Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit.” This little bit of analogy works as well as any other to tie up all this racial/fecal/mortal anxiety into something cohesive. The European colonies in Africa (specifically the German ones here) are imagined to be a place where all of the savagery that is quiescent in the colonizer is permissible, which leads to the anxiety that pops up every time some symbol of that savagery (shit, black people, King Kong, etc.) invades the clinical white world above the dark colonies. In this light, Pynchon’s racialized language, which is at the very least “difficult” for the reader, transcends the realm of social commentary by insisting that race problems have roots in that corporate appropriation of our mortality, an evil that has become so thoroughly internalized in the modern consciousness as to manifest itself in Freudian ways.

Down in the Mittelwerke

Although undergrounds abound in Gravity’s Rainbow, as evidenced by our foray into Slothrop’s toilet adventure, a second and possibly even more literal example of an underground world arrives early in “In the Zone”: the Mittelwerke. During the war, the Mittelwerke was “an underground factory complex, run mostly by the SS,” (287) which was where the German rockets were assembled. Post-war, the Mittelwerke has become a sort of tourist attraction in the Zone – Nick de Profundis, an American expatriate, has even set up a little souvenir stand where he sells odds and ends from the rocket assembly line to visitors (signaling toward the commercial reappropriation of an underground, which we’ll return to later).

Unsurprisingly, the most notable difference between Roseland’s plumbing and the Mittelwerke as underground locales is due to the Nazi presence in the Mittelwerke. Whereas the toilet (through Red the shoe-shine boy and the jazz musicians) utilized a circular symbology of race and color to speak about death, the Mittelwerke is said to have contained “secret doors to rock passages that led through to Dora,” (300) one of the most infamous Nazi concentration camps. But it’s easy to start speculating wildly about what a Nazi presence in a Pynchon underground might mean, so to combat that, it makes sense to remind ourselves of the initial question: “What’s down there?”

“Dead people,” wouldn’t be a bad answer. Since the Mittelwerke allegedly has these secret passages to Dora, visitors are given “instruction on what to do in case of any encounter with the dead,” and there is apparently reason to believe that the ghosts of those killed at Dora would be on a “spiritual rampage” against the tourists, (300). This information comes in the form of a local legend, but in a way, this “ghost story” depiction of Holocaust victims actually makes Pynchon’s commentary more acute. If there is a cultural consciousness of hostile Dora ghosts living beneath the Mittelwerke, it represents another relegation to the underground of truths (specifically, truths about death) that people cannot or will not deal with rationally. What should be one of the grossest examples of the barbarism of the War is transformed into a manageable mythology: we know what to do with ghost stories. The Mittelwerke as an underground is the Mittelwerke as a place where the “real dead,” not the “paper dead,” are hid. Tour guide Micro Graham assures the visitors that they can use the “natural balance of [their] minds” against the ghosts. “Natural balance” sounds a lot like rationalization.

But just as the toilet was not simply an underground relegation of shit, the Mittelwerke incorporates another aspect of the death-discussion as well. There is a very very bizarre passage about the “Raumwaffe spacesuit[s]” which precedes the description of a whole performance based on Nazi rocket attire, complete with a neon, dissonant space-waltz. The key for us comes when Pynchon/Micro suggests that “Perhaps Titans lived under this mountain, and their skulls got harvested like giant mushrooms,” (301). These skulls supposedly were the raw materials from which Nazi couturier Heini of Berlin fashioned the “Space Helmets.” This calls to mind the hundreds of other invocations of folklore in Gravity’s Rainbow, and to imagine that the bones of mythical creatures were so integral in the Nazi tactic is saying a lot about the nature of those two decades or so of Nazi success and of the War itself – but first it makes sense to take a look at what it means to say that giant mythological beasts also populate Pynchon’s most obvious underground.

Alright, giant mythological beasts might actually be kind of misleading, because the much more important distinction is that the beasts are mythological, folkloric, or fairytale in nature. In a passage a few pages later describing the construction the Mittelwerke, we are told that Etzel Ölsch, the plant’s lead architect, began insisting on being called “Master” because that apparently had something to do with what “an architect’s life should be down here,” as if he had to take on an underground persona. Master Ölsch’s workers are referred to as “gnomes,” more fairytale-isms, and these gnomes “sit out [on a loading bay], at night, with only their bulbs shining conditionally, precariously…it all might go dark so easily, in the next second,” (305). Hang on to that word, “conditionally,” because it introduces a concept we’ll address in a minute, but for now, just try to keep a running tab on all the bogeymen who live down under the mountain: ghosts, gnomes, Titans… And after Slothrop escapes Marvey’s Mothers via minecart, he hooks up with a Prof. Glimpf and describes him as an “oversize elf,” (313) to complete the set.

So it’s obvious that anything vaguely spooky gets buried underground. But it seems counterintuitive to suggest that ancient imaginary Titans are one-to-one analogous with shit. The answer is that it isn’t necessarily a separate metaphor, but that it has a lot to do with that idea of the gnomes’ existence being “conditional.” The more or less standard reading of the word would indicate nothing more than that the gnomes’ wellbeing is uncertain. It is more useful to identify that it is also a verb tense, which indicates a complicated relationship with both time and existence. If the bulbs of the gnomes shine “conditionally,” it would imply an essential potentiality that the gnomes hold. They themselves are not described as conditional, merely the light that they bear, which is a meaningful distinction for Pynchon: that their light (their essence? their power?) is conditional and precarious allows them to be understood as relegated, not necessarily extinct.

Pynchon elaborates on this theme by telling us, “It is hard down here in the Mittelwerke to live in the present for very long,” (307). On the very next page, he characterizes the Zone as “the new Uncertainty.” To live in a state of Uncertainty, outside of the present in a time “when there is no more History,” is consequently, to live conditionally. There is a push in these few pages to forget how closely he has already tied the underground to an idea of “real mortality,” but one should keep in mind that the passage begins by reminding us that the double integral shape on which Ölsch based his design for the Mittelwerke is also “the ancient rune that stands for the yew tree, or Death,” (306). So the two ideas – conditionality and death – are explicitly linked; the conditional creatures (the gnomes, Titans, elves, etc.) are in fact, reminders of mortality, insofar as they remind us of an era when man was a little less certain of his own dominion over the world: gnomes and elves might still exist. What was certain in that era, which is now being pushed underground, was Death with a capital D – it was coming for everybody, in the most mysterious and omnipotent ways – or as Pynchon puts it, the Mittelwerke provides “the comfort of a closed place, where everyone is in complete agreement about Death,” (303). Back surface-side, people are always trying to persuade you on any number of illusions about your own death.

Now, the young and crazy 1970s incarnation of Thomas Pynchon, his ideas about the conditional folkloric (which sounds pretentious, I know) were intimately tied up with identifying German Romanticism (Wagner, Faust, Rilke, etc.) as a clear source of inspiration and fuel for the Nazi party and the rise of Adolf Hitler. Without spending too much time in this department now, just consider the way Captain Blicero uses the Hansel and Gretel story to create a sadomasochistic power-dynamic between himself, Katje, and Gottfried, or that Pynchon refers to the pathology of those occupying the Mittelwerke as “Tannhäuserism,” in reference to a Wagner opera. Folk mythology (and the conditional, very mortal way of seeing the world that it harkens back to) were powerful tools for a movement that relied heavily upon the impression of wielding vast, I’ll say, “mythological” power. But this is more of a perversion of an underground, than the establishment of a new one, or of a commentary on “what they are,” so at this point, we’ll jump forward some twenty-four real-time years to Mason & Dixon, to watch the same relegation at work in both very similar and intriguingly differentiated ways.

Mason & Dixon’s Underground in Juxtaposition

Making the move from undergrounds in Gravity’s Rainbow to undergrounds in Mason & Dixon doesn’t require much of a stretch of the imagination. If anything, the key underground scenes in the latter are even more literal and extreme than in the former. But the subject matter, chronology, and vital stats of both novels create an interesting juxtaposition: can we easily apply the definition of “underground” gleaned from Gravity’s Rainbow, a book published in 1973 and set in the 1940s, to Mason & Dixon, a book published in 1997 which is set in the 1750s and ‘60s and still arrive at some sort of coherent and meaningful reading? Is there any reason to proceed that way, other than some level of laziness on the part of the reader?

You’re right, the answer is, “Yes, indeed there is.” Because of Mason and Dixon’s occupations as astronomer and surveyor, respectively, some pretty genius possibilities for subterranean exploration and philosophizing are available to Pynchon. But before getting into the zanier manifestations of the underground, it is perhaps in our best interest to take one of the simpler, more literal instances as a way into that other mammoth text.

Already pretty far west on the line, a Mr. Staphel Shockey tells the two adventurers of a “remarkable Cavern beneath the Earth,” and that “in the winter, English Church services are held in it,” (496). The party travels out to this cavern, and we are allowed a glimpse into Mason and Dixon’s official field log, wherein – after a detailed description of the Cave’s dimensions – they write, “[The cave strikes] its Visitants with a strong and melancholy reflection: that such is the abodes of the Dead,” (497). Immediately, one sees why it isn’t all that out of line to make certain connections between both novels’ conception of the underground – the presence of the dead haunts both incarnations. But as hinted at before, the clash between the personalities of the two adventurers elicits some interesting commentary. Mason “saw a Gothick interior,” but Dixon we are told (his Geordie superstition invading the moment), feels that “the Cave oppresses him,” (497). To understand this feeling of “oppression,” remember that Dixon, as a surveyor, is more in tune with Earth (and the “Tellurick forces”) than Mason, who as an astronomer is preoccupied with the sky. Mason does not get the sinister vibe he should in the cave because he claims that the Cave is “Text….and we are its readers,” (497). He abstracts the Cave into a text that he can read the way he reads the stars. Dixon, whose understanding of magnetism has more than once earned him the title of “Magician,” is immediately concerned with “what form of Life might be calling something spacious as this Home,” (497). Dixon intuits that whatever occupies this cave would not be pleased with what humans have done to the land (i.e., turned it into a church) and his anxiety is only reinforced when Captain Zhang, the Chinese Jesuit, shows up and tells the pair about the Sha, or “Dragon…within, from which the Land-Scape ever takes it form,” (542). This must be the presence oppressing Dixon, and it makes sense that Zhang’s description of the Sha leads into a discussion of the unnaturalness of the tendency of American “political” borders to ignore Nature: “to form a Line upon the earth is to inflict upon the Dragon’s very Flesh, a sword-slash…How can it pass unanswer’d?” (542).

Mason & Dixon sets up what is more or less a critique of the so-called “Age of Reason,” which it would seem Pynchon tries to finger for many of the same crimes as he did with German Romanticism in Gravity’s Rainbow (not the whole “being a catalyst for the rise of Nazism” thing, but for propagating a socio-political climate that condones the reappropriation of mortality…you know, all that). Now, this underground happens to be empty for the time being; most of its literary weight is in its power of suggesting what might live down there (an instance of the conditional, you say? almost…). But it isn’t total speculation: remember that one of the two visto-forgers wrote in the Field-Book that “such is the abodes of the Dead,” and the Dead just happen to be out to lunch, probably because the visit takes place in the daytime, but we’ll return to that later. As for right now, we move from maybe the most literal example to what is certainly the least: the “Missing Eleven Days,” a temporal underground, or perhaps better said, an “under-time.”

The Calendar Has Other Plans: The Missing Eleven Days

“The Missing Eleven Days” is a fairly complex subplot to begin with, but it does a lot to establish itself as a Pynchonian underground, so I will provide a brief introduction to the historical event it depends upon. Apparently, in the year 1752, George Parker, the 2^nd Earl of Macclesfield, helped convert England to the Gregorian calendar, which demanded that as per the names of dates, eleven days would be “skipped.” September 2^nd, 1752 would, at midnight, become September 14^th, 1752, and all of England would be on the new calendar, simple as that. But what astronomers and scientists imagined would be nothing more than an administrative change elicited mass disapproval from the people. “Give us back our eleven days!” even became a popular, anti-Macclesfield slogan in or about 1755, when his son ran for a seat in parliament.

I’m aware there’s nothing even vaguely “underground” in that, but that’s just because the fiction of it hasn’t been introduced. The Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke finds a passage in the “Field-Journals” of Mason and Dixon wherein Mason confesses that he suspects, ever since 1752, he has been living in a continuous cycle of eleven day periods, a self-sustained tangent to the line of chronology, or a chronological “vortex,” (554). The narrative shifts to Mason, telling Dixon, of how on the night of September 2^nd, 1752, he somehow managed to wake up on September 3^rd, while the rest of Stroud was on the 14^th, as the calendar had demanded; September 3^rd did not exist for anyone but Mason.

The first clue that we should consider the mysterious “Whirlpool in Time” Mason stumbled into as a sort of underground comes from his comment about the animals that he finds stuck there with him. “Animals whose Owners knew them, made the Transition along with them, to the fourteenth.” This is immediately contrasted with the fact that, “Any that remain’d…were wild Creatures….being ownerless, disconnected as well from Calendars,” (557). There’s a lot of stuff wrapped up in that comparison, one of the more significant things being that the Creatures who occupy “Calendar Time” are the property of someone else, whereas those that occupy the Eleven Days are “wild” and “ownerless.” It stands to reason from that characteristic, that the humans who moved to September 14^th were the property of someone or something, too. “Time ye see…is the money of science,” (192) says the Landlord of the George, and it isn’t a far stretch from that to see that by submitting to what some would call an irrational regularization of time, humanity is submitting itself to a sort of slavery, another omnipresent trope in Mason & Dixon.

The animal theme is expanded upon later in the chapter. Mason recounts that all around him within the Eleven Days were fantastical bat-like creatures, who spoke in “Timbres, nearly Human,” (559) and of wild dogs that were probably something worse than dogs. Eventually he admits that

’Twas as if this Metropolis of British Reason had been abandon’d to the Occupancy of all that Reason would deny. Malevolent shapes flowing in the Streets. Lanthorns spontaneously going out. Men roaring as if chang’d to Beasts in the Dark. A Carnival of Fear. (559)

So this temporal underground it turns out, is specifically occupied by “all that Reason would deny,” a clear nod to the Age of Reason (which Pynchon makes sure we’re looking for in his little epigraph to the novel) and a specific “malevolent” effect of its progress. It is as if the things that Reason assures us do not live among us must be relegated somewhere else, and Pynchon’s trick here is to imagine that that relegation, the same relegation we witness in the Mittelwerke and in the Roseland Bathroom, might take place not just in space but in time. It is at its heart, another turning away from the truth of our mortality: all the things that, before the Age of Reason, made us cherish our mere survival have been taken away now, swept under the rug. By rewinding the clocks to a point almost two centuries before all that activity down in the Mittelwerke, Pynchon is able to say in a way, that all that stuff the Nazis “dug up” to fuel their integral fear, the Age of Reason put it there for them.

The phrase “Carnival of Fear” in the above passage also calls to mind a specific instance in Gravity’s Rainbow, that is, the scene in “Beyond the Zero,” when Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake stop into a Christmas Eve mass at a random church they’re passing. This passage is marked by some of Pynchon’s most frenzied, careening prose, mostly on the “cost” of the War (remember the toothpaste departure?) but take specifically a small section on page 136, when he writes, “It’s a lively game…to keep Grid Time synchronized with Greenwich Mean Time.” Apparently this concept, of the relations of ownership intrinsic in the way we perceive time, is something alive in Gravity’s Rainbow as well. But even beyond that, this business of monopolies of time is defined such: “It is Night’s Mad Carnival,” (136). The carnival in Gravity’s Rainbow is characterized by “merriment under the shadows of the minute-hands,” and “hysteria in the pale faces between the numerals,” (136). What’s interesting about these carnivals in comparison is that they are both caught up in harboring all the things that the gravity of their age will not allow (excuse the loaded wording). “Calendar Time” is thus the demand of the Age of Reason – a perfectly reasonable, universal system of dates and numbers – and what is found outside of Calendar Time is the irrationality of mortality: monsters and ghouls and the like. “Grid Time” is what the War demands – just as systematized, and fraught with the coldness of the war effort, that unnaturalness. It is merriment and hysteria that the War does not allow.

This idea of not being “allowed” something factors heavily into our larger definition of the Underground as well, in that there is always some entity in command of the way things are perceived. The toilet adventure, with its fixation on shit and color, is a glimpse at the real death we are not “allowed” to know about anymore, because “inside the Operation…there is no lower self,” (627) the lower self being the animal reality of our being – “mud, shit, the decaying pieces of human meat.” The War does not allow that self: it demands inhuman things, under the name of the “higher self,” whatever that may be. What’s underground is what’s impermissible, although the act of “not allowing” itself also plays a part. This is why when in the George, Mason tells the story of Bradley and Royal Astronomer Macclesfield discussing the problem of the Eleven Days, even though he understands the reason behind the change, Bradley says, “Yet we are mortal…would you spit, my lord, truly, upon eleven more days?” (193). It is precisely the irrationality of Bradley’s point that makes it so human. For Macclesfield to take eleven days “away” from the English, he is essentially relegating specific human life below the advancement of Science. People will be deprived (in their minds, although that is irrelevant) of eleven days of life, will be eleven days closer to death, purely because the calendars of scientists must match up. There is a cruelty in that that the general populace intuits, and the scientists call trivial, but it is exactly this lack of care for the human condition that Pynchon accuses of so much in Mason & Dixon.

Darkness and Night: A Quick Look

Let’s dial it back to that long quote from Mason & Dixon, the one that ends with “A Carnival of Fear.” Mason notes “Men roaring, as if chang’d to Beasts in the Dark,” (559). His mention of a sort of nocturnal transformation seems to be only an image in passing here, but it actually speaks to a much larger notion of the power of darkness, and of the night, and both of these ideas play on underground themes, helping to flesh out a fuller definition of what it means to live in the Pynchonian Underground.

Mason is describing his experience in a place (in time) that we have already established as a functioning Underground. When he says that in this underground, men can change to beasts in the dark, he is identifying a particularly disturbing power of darkness, that is, to give the impression that one thing is another. It’s not a particularly novel idea – when it gets dark outside, things lose their shape and seem like other (generally more frightening) things. Darkness allows us to make irrational associations between the appearance of shapes and shadows, even when our rational mind is telling us, “No, that’s not a twelve-foot, rail thin, hooded creature with kitchen-knife fingers, it’s the same tree that’s on your front lawn every day.” To recall an idea we’ve set aside for a while, the darkness creates a potentiality of being: it puts shapes in the conditional tense.

So with that in mind, we’ll return to the Mittelwerke, because our gnomes are getting lonely. You’ll remember that said gnomes “sit out [in the open] at night, with only their bulbs shining conditionally, precariously,” (303) but previously, much of the attention was directed toward those weighty closing adverbs. The gnomes’ foray out into the open is also specifically done at night, which implies that something about the night allows them either the freedom or the ability to emerge in some way from the underground. But it is not necessarily a crossing over, from one world into another; in a way, the gnomes never make it “aboveground,” because the night itself is an underground as well. Or, perhaps more accurately, at night, the aboveground takes on some of the characteristics of the underground, and the things we’ve relegated to the underground are allowed some purchase topside. In reference to the Dora prisoners, the tour guide narrator notes that “Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead, or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone, categories have been blurred badly,” (308). This “blurring” effect is extremely reminiscent of the optical trickery that the goes in the darkness, at night – a blurring of lines to destabilize shapes and renew the (well-founded) fear that all this relegation has caused us to forget.

Jeremiah Dixon, and the Biggest Underground of Them All

For what is possibly the grandest trip down into a Pynchonian Underground, this final example requires the least amount of mental gymnastics to visualize. In their old age, Mason and Dixon meet up to chat, and Dixon tells Mason of the time he spent getting “Obs” on Hammerfrost Island at the North Cape. But he claims also to have been “visited” by a strange man with large eyes who ushered him up over the great glacial north to a huge hole in the Earth: “We enter’d, by [this] great northern Portal, upon the inner Surface of the Earth,” (739). So in the final pages of Mason & Dixon, Pynchon pulls out all the stops and imagines an Underground that takes up the entire space inside the Earth; the “Hollow Earth” theory did have some sway back in Colonial times, actually. It stands to reason, then, that we could use an underground of this magnitude, placed in this position plot-wise, as to be a sort of grand finale for the novel, to distill a more comprehensive idea of the Pynchonian Underground.

Predictably, when Dixon asks his “visitor” whether he bears any relation to the things in “Tales of Gnomes, Elves, smaller folk, who live underground and possess…magickal Powers,” the visitor responds, “They are we,” (740). These creatures of folklore also warn Dixon that “Once the solar parallax is known…all this [i.e., the world inside the Earth] will vanish. We will have to seek out another space,” (741). This conversation simultaneously characterizes the inhabitants of the underground as specifically creatures from folk tales, and identifies the essential conditionality of their existence. Dixon also claims to have spied these creatures “when the light of the Day’s tricky enough,” i.e., at night. These little people depend on uncertainty to exist, so you could say that they are conditional beings in that their existence on/in this Earth is both potentially impermanent, and also dependent on the perpetuation of human uncertainty. If Science progresses past a certain point, they will be relegated again.

Taking in his surroundings, Dixon notes that because the curvature of the Earth is reversed for all who manage to live on the inside, “to journey anywhere…is ever to ascend,” whereas out here, “to go anywhere is ever to descend,” (740). Simply, for us living aboveground, the surface of the Earth is convex, and concave for those who dwell inside it. The Gnome-Guide also instructs Dixon that by the same science, everyone topside is “slightly pointed away” from each other, and that once again, the opposite is true down with them. There seems to be a sort of humanity in the way that because of this being pointed toward each other, the underground dwellers are “forc’d…to acknowledge one another,” and in fact, the Gnome tells Dixon that this “forced acknowledgement” creates “an entirely different set of rules for how to behave,” (741). What’s notably absent from this characterization of the underground, is the clear presence of death, although it could conceivably be argued that the same “reminders of mortality” are inherent in the way these undergrounds parallel. But it probably has less to do with leaving more to infer, and more to do with the general difference between Gravity’s Rainbow’s Undergrounds, and those of Mason & Dixon.

The undergrounds in both novels are undoubtedly cautionary in nature, but it seems as if in his old age, Pynchon in Mason & Dixon prioritizes the sense of wonder and magic that we surrendered when all those Reasonable men set out to explain everything away, as opposed to the more frightening-than-melancholy idea in Gravity’s Rainbow, that if we keep trying to forget our own mortality, it will build up under the surface until it becomes something terrible, à la Nazism. Consider that the Gnomes Dixon meets do not threaten to “retaliate” or something like that when the Solar Parallax is known – they only say that they’ll need to “seek out a new space.” That possibility is sad more than anything, and maybe it’s simply because Pynchon, writing in his 70s and that much closer to his own death, is less capable of addressing it as brutally as he did with Gravity’s Rainbow. But at the end of the day, the Underground is equally important in both incarnations of Pynchon’s fiction, and never gets away from the fact that us humans, for whatever idiotic reasons, are perpetually burying all the good stuff. With a wink toward what we know about his personal life, I’m willing to say that this is Pynchon’s rebellion: to keep finding ways to live underground.

End of the Line

Well, I finished it. And it was great. Trying to think about the book in a comprehensive way, I can't help feeling that everything was executed in a much...maybe "softer" way? than Gravity's Rainbow. I don't know, maybe the best way to articulate the sense would be to say that GR seemed written by a mad scientist, whereas M&D's author seemed like more of a careful craftsman.

I'm compelled to make these comparisons, I guess because they're the 2 books in the syllabus that seem to compete the most directly: length/scope, early vs. late, which one is "better," etc. But the distinct impression that I kept getting during "Last Transit" was that there was a very serious concern for the relationship between fathers and sons. Someone suggested it had something to do with Pynchon's relationship with his own father, after the birth of Jackson Pynchon. I'd buy it. The scene with Doc Isaac at Dixon's grave was just so beautifully rendered and unexpected; it was almost powerful enough to suggest its own centrality in the task of the novel...an awfully roundabout way to get there, but hey.

As for the Underground stuff, I'm beginning the process of paging thru my notes and highlighting some candidate-episodes for inclusion in the paper. Concurrently, I'm starting to see the edges of the thesis-region on the horizon. I think I want to say something along the lines of the Underground -- in all of its associations with the Night, with revolt, with folklore, with hiding, with magic, etc. -- being not just a haven for Counterforces/-ers, but also a node of potentiality, oftentimes a dangerous one (a la the way Dixon fears that whatever lives in the Cave will one day seek revenge on the Anglicans that use it as a church). I think Pynchon also creates "Undergrounds" at the level of the texts themselves, systems and shapes that in our discovery of them as readers, and subsequently in our discovery of their often contradictory and "incomplete" natures, which subvert/reimagine the act of reading. I think that under that same controlling theme, I would also have room to comment on Pynchon's reappropriation of scientific language, which creates levels of meaning (in this sense, it creates an "underground" level of meaning below the surface level) in language that is supposedly "strictly factual" -- perhaps using the epigraph from Cherrycoke about what exactly "History" is, in relation to fact and memory.

Lately, I've begun to wonder if Pynchon might object to the idea of academic papers being written on his novels. Each of the 4 novels I've read for the course so far have been at least partly a polemic against the idea of humanity being "used." I think at some earlier point, during the posts on GR, I made a reference to Oscar Wilde's intro to Dorian Gray: "All art is quite useless." I think I wanted to say that it seemed to me, Pynchon was in agreement here, and that the idea of "uselessness as resistance" and as a method of survival in our world greatly informs his aesthetic vision. Does it follow that to "use" his novels for a grade in the (dare I say it) overwhelmingly bureaucratic and commercial education system would be antithetical to their message? Obviously, I only half-think this, because otherwise, I probably wouldn't be posting on the site. Actually, now that I think about it, the form of the class (blog-post, independent reading/thinking, etc.) is pretty removed from all that stuff that gets in the way of education. I guess it's just the idea of using Pynchon in the standard "college paper on literature" fashion. This is also probably very closely related to a rationalization of my rising vernal laziness.

So this post is shorter than normal, and not really full of close-reading like the others, but don't worry, I'm keeping busy. At this point, I think a lot of it would probably just look like annotating and asterisk-izing the notes that are already mostly annotation and asterisk. I am kind of excited to get working on this paper though.

A few clarifying questions.

1. What is a "Ley"? I have a sort of idea (read: I have read the Wikipedia article on "Ley lines") but I didn't know if you might be able to give me a more simplified definition?

2. How am I supposed to read the inflection in Dixon's voice when he ends a statement with "...?" Is it just a sort of inquisitive rise in pitch? Just looking for your preference here.

3. Would you say Against the Day is "worth reading"? Trying to put together a little summer reading list. Very unrelated, I'm sorry.

4. Even more unrelated, but...I remember reading a story in your Short Fiction class about a weird creature that lives on the stairs in some man's house and its presence is a source of weird unresolved anxiety. It was by either Borges or Kafka (strange not to be able to figure out which one) and I can't remember the title.

Matt

P.S. -- I'd be really interested in that stuff about Shakespeare and dolphins that you mentioned...? If I've got to wait till it's officially published, that's cool, but it just struck me as really interesting.

"a ceaseless Spectacle of Transition"

Endings get interesting in late Pynchon, starting with the bizarre funding-cut deus ex in Vineland.  M&D has a few different endings, including the sentimental final pages.  But the one I like most is the fantasy that, for project #2, the Ley-borne boys will "inscribe a Visto on the Atlantick Sea" (712).  First it solves longitude & navigational problems, then it gets co-opted by real estate developers and other disreputable capitalists: "Too soon, word will reach the Land-Speculation Industry, and its Bureaus seek Purchase, like some horrible Seaweed, the length of the Beacon Line" (712).  Love that image of seaweed as industrial predation...

But the close of this great mini-scene is M&D on this new salty Line --

'Tis here Mason and Dixon will retire, being after all Plank-Holders of the very Scheme, having written a number of foresighted Stipulations into their Contract with the Line's Proprieter, the transnoctially charter'd 'Atlantick Company.'  Betwixt themselves, neither feels British enough anymore, nor quite American, for either Side of the Ocean.  They are content to reside like Ferrymen or Bridge-keepers, ever in Ubiquity of Flow, before a ceaseless Spectacle of Transition.  (713)

Great stuff there -- political / national refusal, an ability to play capitalism's structures against itself, a commitment to "flow" and "transition."

Is St Brenden's Isle an underground place, in the terms you're putting together?

I used some quotations from this section in an article I wrote last year on dolphins and humans in Shakespeare & other 16-17c writers (out next year, perhaps, in a collection called The Indistinct Human).  But really it's part of a larger project, about fantasies of human-ocean mixing and collaboration.  There might be a chapter on Pynchon's ocean someday...

Under Draco, Above the Sha

Well I took a second to look at the placement of my bookmark in M&D today, only to find I’m much further along than I thought. Only about 200 pages left to go I guess…what is that, 4-5 days of reading? I guess I’ll be done with M&D by the end of next week at the latest. Crazy really, which gives me a week before Easter break to sit and stew on it. I think I’m going to take those 3-4 days to do a rough outline of the paper, before sort of breezing through Inherent Vice the next week, while I’m writing. I’m imagining that the posts might get a bit more bare-bones once they move toward outlining the paper, so…just a word of warning.

I’ve pretty much decided that I want to focus on notions of the “underground” in the whole oeuvre, with the emphasis being placed on GR and M&D (although I envision using Lot 49 and Vineland for their more social executions of the Underground). Don’t really have anything that even resembles a thesis right now, but I’m hoping one will appear during those outline days before Easter.

So with that in mind, I want to direct this post on recent instances of Underground significance in M&D, since after all these are essentially what are pushing me toward the paper topic. Something I’ve been struggling to understand is just exactly what Dixon’s relationship is with “the Tellurick.” In Chapter 48, at Harland’s Farm, Mr. McClean tells M. & D. about some “Iron deposits” they might meet, which are “underground mountain-ranges … burning down there for centuries, known to the Indians, perhaps us’d as well in connection with their mysterious Lead Mines in the Mountains. Right up your Street, Mr. Dixon.” (468) That, in conjunction with a comment in Ch. 51 about Ben Franklin and Dixon being understood as “magicians” because of their understanding and use of Magnetism. That, and the flying over Ley-Lines with Emerson’s school of Witches in Durham. The list goes one.

What complicates this image of Dixon as the Earth in the analogy “Mason : Dixon :: Sky : Earth (Astronomer : Surveyor, obv)” is that elsewhere in Chapter 51, when Mr. Shockey takes M. & D. out to the “remarkable Cave beneath the Earth” that even “the Indians…stay’d away from,” we are told that “the Cave oppresses [Dixon].” (496-7) Well, at first this confused me, because I figured Dix. Should be embracing this place. But after some thought, I’ve decided that it actually does make sense for Dixon to feel oppressed by this Cave of sub-earthly secrets, precisely because he is the one of the pair more in-tune with the Earth. M&D’s Field-Book submission from this episode asserts that the Cave is “the abodes of Death,” and Dixon’s primary apprehension stems from “trying to imagine what form of Life might be calling something as spacious as this Home.” (497) Eerie stuff.

Dixon’s anxiety is only reinforced when Captain Zhang shows up, and tells the pair about the Sha, or “Dragon…within, from which the Land-Scape ever takes it form.” (542) This must be the presence oppressing Dixon, and it makes sense that Zhang’s description of the Sha leads into a discussion of the unnaturalness of the tendency of American “political” borders to ignore Nature: “to form a Line upon the earth is to inflict upon the Dragon’s very Flesh, a sword-slash…How can it pass unanswer’d?” (542)

The thing is that once Dixon sort of makes sense in these contexts, what does it mean to say that Mason, after visiting the same Cave, is super-excited and going on and on about “‘Text.’” He says that “‘it is Text,–– and we are its readers and its Pages are the Days turning. Unscrolling, as a Pilgrim’s Itinerary map in ancient Days. And this is the Chapter call’d ‘The Subterrenean Cathedral, or, The Lesson Grasp’d.’” (497-8) Is it worth it to say that a “text” is made up of “Lines” upon a page, which are attempts to represent unnamable thought (making it an “unnatural” impulse, as all language)? I don’t know, that seems pretentiously pomo, especially in the light of what’s been side about M&D as a turn toward wonder and awe. I really just don’t know what to make of the “subtitle” of Mason’s proposed chapter, “The Lesson Grasp’d.” What lesson did he learn?

I did want to say that I’m finally beginning to understand the phrase “against the day,” which is exciting. As I’m seeing it, a “day” is a concept which, astronomically, incorporates both time and space – the Earth physically rotates on its axis, but it also marks the passage of a period of twenty-four hours (i.e., actions occur and immediately begin their move into the realm of “the past”). To move “against the day” would be to move East perpetually. It’s all pretty much spelt out at the beginning of Ch. 48, but hey, it felt good. The next move I guess is to see the day as a “text” and one could theoretically “read the text of the day” right to left (East to West) like a Kabbalic text. Insert tie-in to Tarot here (“‘We are Fools,’ proposes Dixon one night.” 478). Anyway.

So at this point, are you in support of having the Underground be the focus of my paper, or do you think there are more relevant, erudite things I could be investigating? I think that with what I’ve been told is to come in M&D, the Mittelwerke, the W.A.S.T.E. system, 24fps, and that’s just off the top of the ol’ Dome, I should have a lot to work with. I’ll try over the next few days to assemble a more complete list of entry-points, and then maybe you can remind me what I’m overlooking.

Until then.

Along the Visto

My favorite lines from M&D, & possibly from Pynchon's tout court --

Newcomers to the Ley-borne Life are advis'd not to look up, lest, seiz'd by its proper Vertigo, they fall into the Sky.--  For 't has happen'd more than once, -- drovers and Army officers swear to it, -- as if Gravity along the Visto, is become locally less important than Rapture.  (651)

The obvious thing to say is that he's meta-speaking his own shift from GR's paranoia to a more capacious sense of wonder & amazement.  "Rapture" is also a theological term, & perhaps we see a shift in old Tom's attitude toward things unseen.  I also would emphasize the new value of communal experience, the shared "swear[ing]" of the drovers and Army officers who feel and know the new American Visto-world, against the solitude and solipsism of the Zone.


Maybe he's trying to write a sequel to the song that ends GR: "Now everybody--"?

I'll post later about my other favorite episode, St Brenden's Isle (712-13), about which I've recently written in an article about early modern ideas of dolphins and the ocean. 

We should also start thinking pretty seriously about your final paper project.

"What,-- seek the Truth and not tell it! Shameful."

Excuse the ensuing schizophrenia.

I haven't yet reached the Ghastly Fop sub-text -- I stopped for the night at Ch. 40, and that episode apparently occurs somewhere in the early 50's. With any luck, I'll hit it tomorrow night, Thursday at the latest. I think the only mentions made of it thus far have been as insults directed at Dixon by Mason. Possibly one other time of which I can't recall a context. Either way.

Since this is kind of an outdated thought at this point, I'll get it out of the way first: I'm stuck thinking about how it feels to read this novel, as compared to how it feels to read, say, GR. There are certain pairings/assemblies of characters and certain conversations that I feel primed to read a certain way (not even analytically -- just on a base, experiential level). I do what I can to shake off that influence when it seems particularly manipulative, but it has yielded some interesting trains of thought too. The most succinct and relevant train having to do with Mason & Maskelyne out at St. Helena, "doing each other's charts," etc. These interactions had a totally pre-informed shape while I was reading those chapters, and I think it's the shape of Roger Mexico and Pointsman. You have the old doctor, obsessed with the integrity of his science, so totally self-involved and self-righteous, to an almost villainous effect (moreso for Ptsman). Then you have the young melancholy protegé, and it almost feels right to make Jessica and Rebekah analogous in this context. The most blatant difference, I think, is that Maskelyne's "evil" is so immediately transparent and comedic, whereas Pointsman, barring the toilet-bowl-foot incident chasing the dogs, retains a nefariousness for a pretty substantial portion of the novel.

So I guess the question is that if Mask&Mas are Old Tom's version of Young Tom's Ptsman&Rog, what happened between '73 and '97? Or maybe the better question is, "What happened between 1761 and 1944?" The progression seems to be from "occasionally-weird-but-essentially-harmless loony" (Maskelyne) to "weird-and-sinister-but-when-it's-all-said-and-done,-essentially-harmless loony" (Pointsman). In the end, I'm reminded of Pointsman's final scene out on the promontory, face to the wind -- much like how Maskelyne is left in M&D. [Side note: after writing this, I'm struck with the uncanny sense that my facts are wrong, but GR is hiding from me right now...]

As for more "contemporary" stuff. You brought up the notion of people becoming things, as in V., and I was thinking about that while Cherrycoke, snowed in with M. and D., the German girls, the French chef, etc., is thinking about the nature of the Eucharist. He is revisiting questions of whether "the Body and Blood of Christ are consubstantiate with, or transubstantiated from, the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist." (385) I think this dilemma is pretty well-tied-up-with that (maybe original?) Pynchon problematic of animate-becoming-inanimate. Does living flesh become "non-living" foodstuffs? (If so, which is implicit in the vocabulary of the liturgy, the Christian mass would hinge on this very transition from "alive" to "not alive" -- and back to "alive" again? although I guess that last transition isn't directly reflected in the ceremony of the mass...) Cherrycoke posits at last that "the outward Forms are given to bread and wine as an act of God's Mercy, for otherwise we should be repell'd by the sight of real human Flesh and Blood." (385-6)

This hypothesis of his seems to resonate with and expand upon the ways Pynchon has already identified that people live with the fact of violence done to other people. It is given forms that seem more humane to mask a "terrible reality" -- something of GR's old "paper death"?? The violence is still there, but in a digestible form (or at least a form we've learned to digest without much trouble). It's really interesting that (a) Cherrycoke settles on an answer that is actually heretical, and that (b) this heresy is pushed one step further to imagine that even the Body and Blood might only be digestible metaphors for an "Ultimate Carnality." Seems bleaker now than the passage had initially let on...

With that in mind (or without it: probably doesn't matter), I want to get to that long epigraph from Cherrycoke's book that begins Ch. 35 (pg 349). I think it's a fairly famous passage in the novel; most I've read about the book has at least made mention of it, no doubt because of the way it seems to be, almost too simply, a clear definition of "History" in Pynchon-terms. "History is not Chronology," but "nor is it Remembrance....[It] can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other." That's just straight-shooting: history can't be the factual record that Uncle Ives insists upon, but neither is it memory, because "[that] belongs to the People." So if History belongs to someone other than "the People," it must belong to the Historian. Later, in the argument with Ives, Cherrycoke asserts that "It may be the Historian's duty to seek the Truth, yet must he do ev'rything he can, not to tell it."

On the one hand, I think it's pretty easy to say, "This is Pynchon's artistic goal! This is how we should read Pynchon!" and I don't think that's entirely wrong either. I think in a lot of ways, he did intend this passage to be a clear explication of some previously vague distinctions between terms that Pynchon had secretly reappropriated decades ago. There is definitely an analogy between why "Aesop was oblig'd to tell Fables," and why Pynchon is "oblig'd" to write historical fiction of this variety. (350) The truth is in the fiction.

On the other hand, which is not really in contradiction to the first hand, I think there is also something here that deals with the voice Pynchon uses to narrate his novels, as opposed to his authorial imperative: the technique vs. the motivation. In that same epigraph, Cherrycoke* says that "Practitioners [of History, i.e., Pynchon] must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit." Now I won't pretend I didn't have to look up "quidnunc", but apparently, a quidnunc is a gossip. Spy is obvious. "Taproom Wit" to me, seems the most complex component; in my mind, its a sort of blend of stand-up comedy and lewd drunken humor. All of these things, when considered retrospectively, are pretty directly at play in Pynchon's prose. Gossip, espionage, and inappropriate comedy. The syntax of the second half of the epigraph was a little more difficult, but I essentially interpreted it to say that holding on to this "tangle of Lines" that together make up "History" (as opposed to a "Chain of single Links") is our best chance at avoiding the collapse into the abyss. If we held onto a chain of single links (read: "facts") the debunking of one so-called "fact" would be too traumatic and destructive to bear.

Chapter 39 ends with a cryptic look forward to the problem of slavery in the Americas, which I know is something you want me to keep an eye out for as I keep moving. For Mason, "In all Virginia, tho' Slaves pass'd before his Sight, he saw none. That was what had not occurred." (398) To be honest, I really don't feel like I have much of a clue as to how to read that second sentence. Hopefully, some illumination follows.

Realizing now also that I forgot a semi-major point about Pynchon being a "subjunctive" historian ("what may yet have happened") that I guess I'll relegate to the next post.

Till then.

"Doubt is of the essence of Christ" (511)

The "mindless pleasures" (to borrow a draft title of GR) of M&D seem always to circle around flows and uncertainties, as in the Ghastly Fop sub-plot (or sub-text), the vertigo of the Ley-borne life, the Jesuit/China paranoid explanatory system, etc.  I often think of the novel as an extended send-up or comic inversion of the projects of Science and perhaps also Reason.  But a gentle, sympathetic comedy, as opposed to GR's biting tragic anger.

It's a novel to be lost in, but perhaps less dangerously than the earlier novels.  Has old Tom mellowed in his 60s?  Does it matter that this book is dedicated to his wife (Melanie, his once & future agent also) and his son?  The po-mo radical as family man?

I'll have some things to say about the ocean in this novel before too long, also.