weird morning in america
Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" travels back to pre-Revolutionary
times to map the "cryptic & perilous" contours of a nation.
BY SCOTT McLEMEE
ILLUSTRATION BY GARY TAXALI
"Mason & Dixon"
By Thomas Pynchon
Henry Holt, 773 pages
the all-American lost poet Delmore Schwartz -- best remembered for the proverb "even paranoids have real enemies" -- also deserves credit for the Caffeine Theory of the Enlightenment. By this account, the Age of Reason owed its brilliance, energy and encyclopedic ambition to the arrival, in Europe, of the java bean. Schwartz meant it as a joke. Yet cultural historians have spent many happy years researching the economic, social, literary and political (if not gastrointestinal) consequences of the coffeehouse for the rising bourgeoisie. And the example of Voltaire -- who sucked down a few dozen cups a day whenever possible -- has long seemed to me to clinch the case. But the most eloquent statement of the Caffeine Theory, as adapted to American circumstances, appears about halfway into Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon." The year is 1761. Charles Mason (an astronomer) and Jeremiah Dixon (a surveyor) have reached Philadelphia, sent by the Royal Society in London to establish the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania. They have yet to put together a work team for the job. And their first trip to an American coffee shop reveals a murky den of iniquity: a "Combination, peculiar and precise, of unceasing Talk and low Visibility, that makes Riot's indoor sister, Conspiracy, not only possible, but resultful as well." Infusions of "the Invigorating liquid" and New World rowdiness give the place a decidedly revolutionary atmosphere: "An individual in expensive attire, impersonating a gentleman, stands upon a table freely urging sodomitical offenses against the body of the Sovereign, being cheered on by a circle of Mechanics, who are not reluctant with their own suggestions." Besides coffee, these Yankees wolf down sugary pastries and puff away on tobacco. (A few pages earlier, Mason and Dixon have sampled a little of George Washington's hemp crop.) The narrator wonders, "May unchecked consumption of all these modern substances at the same time, a habit without historical precedent, upon these shores be creating a new sort of European? less respectful of the forms that have previously held Society together, more apt to speak his mind, or hers, upon any topic he chooses, and to defend his position as violently as need be?" Let's see now. Fervent consumption of mood-altering substances ... a certain reckless vigor in the expression of opinion ... pothead humor ... It all sounds rather like the '60s of more recent memory. And that (as old-timey Communists used to say, and militia folk still do) is no accident!
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