Project Hipster

From the first sentence, which is, let’s count them, 122 words long, it became clear that I would be in this novel for the long haul. A fair bit of my life has kind of fallen apart and shifted about and been rebuilt anew since I cracked that first page and read “Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware—the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen…” (that’s not a close approach to the first landmarking Period, not by a long shot) but never mind that collapse. We carry on the Project. You may notice in that Excerpt that there are a great many Letters of the Capital Variety. Apparently this was a Trend in real 18th-century Writing, that almost every Noun is capitalized for Emphasis on its Importance (Tumblr does this too sometimes.) Apparently I haven’t actually read much 18th century writing, because I had to look this up to figure out why the fuck there was so much uppercase. Pynchon throws this style on the reader hard at first, going harder on it than the actual documents he’s emulating or parodying, and it slowly ebbs. The sim-historical prose gets easier, but that’s merely an er; I’d never say it gets easy, but it does get captivating. Reading Mason & Dixon involves a bit of immersion, as the reader must by necessity put aside their modern tastes for the English language and accept a process of compartmentalization, each word understood for itself, assembling into a clause to then be understood, then a sentence composed thereof, a paragraph composed hence of sentences contained within’t, and a page, an assemblage of assemblages of assemblages, takes on the feel of a genuine achievement ‘pon completion. And there are 800 of the things.

History is a puzzle, a maze of sources that may have nothing to do with modern thinking, and it’s very hard to find a single definitive True Story in all the stories that are told. That’s a major theme of Mason & Dixon, and that’s why we start with a frame narrative. That wintery scene of the first sentence brings the reader into a cozy family Christmas in the early years after the American Revolution. The children gather around the chair of their favourite uncle and storyteller, the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke. Pynchon loves his funny names. Rev. Spritecranberry here has told the children stories about “the escape from Hottentot-Land, the Accursèd Ruby of Mogok, the Ship-Wrecks in Indies East and West,” all of which I would also like to hear. But this snowy afternoon, the youngsters ask, why haven’t you ever told a story about America?

And so Rev. Vanillarootbeer begins a story about America, not in America. In fact we remain not in America for a long time, not in America for a quarter-thousand pages. First we must meet our two America-makers, figures whose names echo through the States’ divided history and culture unto its contemporary sundering, but whose lives are known to history only really in outline, allowing Pynchon to sketch characters within the lines.

I’ve never seen the Mason-Dixon line. Odds are that I won’t, anytime soon. I don’t have much of an impression fixed in my mind of how the eastern states are shaped in their precise borders. This is to say, I didn’t know that it was a straight line, perhaps the first border to lie perfectly east-west along a parallel for hundreds of miles. I did know, although I haven’t known it for especially long, I didn’t learn it in school or anything, that it divided the slaving South from the nominally liberated North; I did know that it was the line along which the meth lab downstairs was sliced in twain in its deadly civil war; and I did know that it remains the line roughly demarcating a crowd of populism, simmering racism, and lingering resentment, currently being exploited by the villains of our day to tear open and bleed the sutures of that scar.

I didn’t know that it took its name from two English surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who laid out the line to settle a dispute between the Penn clan (aha!) of Pennsylvania, and the Marylanders who don’t seem to equally be named Mary, in the years before the Declaration. Pynchon chooses to cast Mason as the pessimistic, gothic widower, a somewhat dismal character to follow as he is literally haunted by his lost love, but one necessary to the contrast of any great bromance. To the point of that contrast, here comes Jeremiah Dixon, a Quaker, whom we as modern folk are inclined to think of as gentle yet conservative oatmeal-box Amish types, forgetting that the original Society of Friends were universalist, progressive, anti-slavery, anti-monarchy, anti-hierarchy pacifist radicals. In fact, with their deck retro hats, I’d hesitantly say that the Quakers of Dixon’s time could be called a sort of pre-Génération Perdue proto-hipster. Pynchon’s Dixon, then, is a bit of a party animal, hitting the town wherever the pair of friends may go, to cavort and sing and drink in taverns and learn all there is to learn of fun in the 18th century. A good chunk of the fun dialogue, once the reader can figure out what the fuck they’re actually talking about, contrasts Mason’s gloom with Dixon’s cheer. The two will amicably argue over anything, too: wine or beer, coffee or tea, and further even more philosophical arguments.

Where they go, by the way, is first to Portsmouth, where… hang on, a fucking talking dog?

Yes, a talking dog, a sophisticated and intelligent Learnèd English Terrier, hanging out in a showroom at the back of a Portsmouth tavern and singing for meat. That’s a strange aside into surrealism that seems totally out of place in the early chapters, although we’ll come to learn that the magical and unscientific and impossible is pretty important in this hipper version of history. We’ll return to that.  Remember: per the frame story of Reverend Gingerale, this is a story told to entertain a motley family crowd by the fire in dark post-solstice days. So our narrator might just be adding in some silly stuff for entertainment’s own sake—right?

From Portsmouth, the pair trauma-bond when their ship, bound for Sumatra to observe the transit of Venus over the Sun, is fired upon by a marauding French frigate. Rather than Sumatra, the royally contracted astronomers (not yet surveyors, not at this moment at least) land in Dutch Cape Town. Here we see colonialism at its worst: morally bankrupt Dutch townies keeping slaves from beyond their walls while never venturing to discover if there might be any beauty or worth to that further country. In this walled isolation, slaves and children seem to seek pleasureless sexual sadism because what else is there to do when you’re too afraid of the land you’ve stolen and raped to actually venture into it? 

This admittedly harder to read early section builds to the Transit of Venus itself. Something is made here, I think, of how planets alone in the sky are deified points seemingly glowing from their own light, sources of magic and zodiacal force through all preceding human history; but in front of the Sun, the deity becomes a solid, dark, earthly sphere. The pursuit of science grants objective knowledge, but is something of the magic lost?

After South Africa, we sail to remote St. Helena, not yet the site of the yet-unborn Napoleon’s exile, where the relentless wind drives men insane. Then it’s back home to London, where there’s frankly somewhat dull politics and family drama.

But that’s where we are, thematically, when the contract arrives for Mason & Dixon to lay out the borders of the fledgling American colonies. We’re thinking about colonialism and the relationship of the colonizing class to the colonized land; we’re thinking about science in the Age of Reason and its imposition in a way on the preceding world of medieval magical mystery; we’re thinking about the worlds of the maddening wild vs the dull political civilized.

And off we go.

In Philadelphia there are some fun meetings with figures of later importance. Benjamin Franklin is of course a hipster magician-scientist, playing with electricity and eels. Even Pynchon can’t make George Washington all that interesting, if I’m being honest, although there’s some emphasis on his slaves. And Dixon gets a “Say that again?” moment with Thomas Jefferson.

And then, we come to it at last: the line, the line! Chains stretched between marked theodolite-sights, following the stars to find a perfect latitude, and a swath of trees chopped down around it in a perfect “visto,” at first through farms and flatlands, and then— look at those ripples—up and over the forested ridges of the Appalachians.

Here’s where the weirdness starts to creep into the story in force, and the book really takes off for its unpredictability. I don’t want to spoil all the delightfully surreal aspects—the aliens and anachronistic technology and impossible botany and geological revelations and secret colleges. The Swedish lumberjacks are not what they seem. It makes sense, looking back, that this would come in here. Even if it is Reverend Pineapplefanta adding in some storytellers’ liberties, it meshes well with our Surveyors and their ever-growing-and-then-dwindling camp of followers pushing into the wilderness beyond the coastal plain, passing over the mountains they never could in South Africa into the world of the wild, the uncivilized, the unscientific past.

Oh, and the invention of Star Trek.

Into the travelling party, as the ridges grow wilder, comes then a Chinese mystic to lay down some feng shui truth: an unnatural straight line is a conduit for bad energy, and the longer the line, the stronger its power. All of nature follows contours, but our surveyors are cutting the very representation of enclosure and geometric determinism into old, mystic mountains, dividing them, cutting it all in half like a fine-honed razor over the great turtle’s throat. The journey takes them into realms of magic, but its purpose is to slice it into civilized monotony, and so the mystic becomes tragic as its observers can only see it in bringing about its end. 

Maybe that’s the American tragedy.

I give this hipster book four miles, three chains, and seven links.

Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.

This review comes from the sixth result for "Hipster," "Hipster Lit: If You Haven't Read 'em, Pretend You Have;" which is to say, the list of books printed in Lanham, R, The Hipster Handbook, 2003.

Up next: it's milk again.