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Volume 24, Number 3 (1999) reprinted by permission Oklahoma City University Law Review THEORIES OF LAND TENURE AND THE CHARISMATIC LINE IN MASON & DIXON ROBERT L. MCLAUGHLIN* All aspects of governmental jurisdiction and landed rights are related to space marked out upon the earth's surface, whether described definitively or vaguely.... Territorial demarcation--the space concept--is the most distinctive feature of both rights in land and governmental control.1 About midway through Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel about the marking of the Line separating Pennsylvania and Maryland in just-pre-Revolutionary America, surveyor Jeremiah Dixon wanders south, while his partner, astronomer Charles Mason, goes north during their first winter layover to explore this confusing country. Dixon finds himself in a Williamsburg tavern at a moment of potential danger to an employee of the British Crown: Virginians young and old are standing to toast the King's Confoundment. When it's his own turn to, Dixon chooses rather to honor what has ever imported to him,--raising his ale-can, "To the pursuit of Happiness."Less than a page later, Thomas Jefferson disappears from the book in a swirl of tobacco smoke and dancing. What seems at first to be a throwaway joke at the expense of one of the Founding Fathers, an example of Pynchon's sometimes vaudevillian, always iconoclastic humor, turns out to have significance to the development of the novel's ideas. Marshall Harris, in his history of land tenure--"the relationship among men in regard to the holding of rights in land"3--in the United States, argues that Jefferson's use of the words "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" in the Declaration of Independence to describe natural rights accorded all men marked an important departure from other rights documents of the time, which specified rights to "life, liberty and property."4 He explains: Jefferson had come to the conclusion that the right of acquiring and possessing property had to be protected by society in order to be enjoyed securely, and that property rights had to be abridged in the protection process, for it was necessary to levy taxes or to take property in the interest of the community.Pynchon's fictional suggestion that Dixon supplied Jefferson with the words he would eventually use to make a fine distinction between human and property rights can be seen to imply both that the novel is concerned with the conflict between governments and individuals over rights in property, and that Dixon, Mason, and the Line they are laying out are at the center of this conflict in the emerging new nation. I have argued elsewhere that the interpretive conundrum of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow--it is a narrative that constantly subverts narrative as a vehicle for conveying meaning, thus calling its own ability to mean into question--can be addressed through Bakhtinian theory. Bakhtin argues that every language or discourse is a manifestation of fairly specific worldviews or ideological belief systems. Novels bring together a variety of discourses in dialogue through which the implied worldviews can be seen to conflict, identify with each other, or synthesize into something new. It is through this dialogic interaction that a novel's meaning develops 6 In Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's uses his sources--historic, scientific, biographical, pop cultural, mythic, and so on--not just for information but for their discourses: their vocabularies, rhetorical strategies, and organizations of argument 7 These discourses are absorbed into the narrative voice and parodied or stylized; they and the ideological belief systems which they imply are put into dialogic relation with one another, with the narrator's voices, and with the reader's own worldviews. Out of this intertextual melange comes the opportunity for meaning. Although I am not prepared to argue that Harris or any other text is one of the sources for Mason & Dixon, I think a similar meaning-making process is going on in this new novel. That is, the novel is bringing together various worldviews and the languages through which they are expressed, setting them into conflict, and showing us what develops. Specifically, one of the things the novel does is to present various concepts of land tenure--ideas about the rights and responsibilities in owning land and concepts associated with these ideas--ideas about individual rights, the power of the government, how land can be acquired and given up, the use of the land's resources--and to use the laying out of the Mason-Dixon line to put them into a dialogic relationship. The three main concepts of land tenure are the use-based position of the Native Americans, the feudalistic position associated with the proprietor colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland, and the individualist position of the colonies' revolutionaries. In the resulting conflicts among these positions, the Line becomes both emblematic of the processes of control and consumerism that will go on to define the soon-to-be nation, and suggestive of the liberatory forces that seek to undermine these processes and define a different kind of nation. According to Harris, the Indians' concept of land tenure was based on occupancy: occupying the land made it yours. But the Indians' understanding of ownership was significantly different from that of the Europeans who came to inhabit the continent with them. For the Indians, whose worldview saw the earth as a mother with whom they had a sacred relationship, occupying the land gave one the right to use its plant and animal life. When tribes became less dependent for survival on hunting and gathering and more dependent on cultivating the land, this idea changed somewhat since it became necessary to occupy the cultivated land continuously. Still, the ownership of the land was held by the tribe, not the individual. As Harris explains: [E]very member of the tribe was an "owner." His ownership, however, was not obtained as a purchaser, a patentee, or an heir. He had nothing he could sell, and if he left the tribal territory permanently he lost his rights. Yet he had a right in the land, a right he could enjoy and one that his children after him could enjoy, not as heirs but as communal owners."8 Thus the practices of selling, giving, bequeathing, renting, or mortgaging land within or among tribes were not part of the Indians' land systems 9 It seems that when Europeans sought to purchase land by barter or treaty, the Indians did not understand that they were permanently giving up their rights to the land. On the European side, the colonizing powers claimed that the land in the New World belonged to the Crown by right of discovery. The Crown could dispose of the land as he or she wished. The British Crown disposed of the land in North America through different kinds of grants: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut were granted to corporations designed to promote settlement; New York and Virginia were Crown colonies, in which the land was owned by the Crown; and the rest were proprietary colonies, in which the land was granted by the Crown to a proprietor.10 These proprietary grants were based on a feudal system of land tenure in which the Crown gives rights in the land to a lord who may give rights in the land to various tenants; at each stage of this hierarchy (except, of course, for the Crown), the person holding land holds it at the pleasure of the person above him and owes obligation to that person. The colonies at the center of Mason & Dixon, Maryland and Pennsylvania, were the most feudal of the proprietorships, their charters having been based on the Bishopric of Durham, the most autonomous and powerful of British manors.11 Maryland was granted to the Calvert family and Pennsylvania to the Penn family out of obligations the Crown had incurred. As a result, in both cases, the Crown reserved only token rights in the land; wide-ranging economic and political rights were granted to the proprietors. In both colonies, the proprietor had the right to sell or give land to tenants in a socage tenure arrangement; here, even if they had purchased the land, tenants held few rights in the land. Tenants owed the proprietor quitrent, "rents, payable in cash or in produce, not on the basis of any lease agreement, but in perpetual recognition of the colony's superior ownership."12 The proprietor held the right to control the transfer of the land; generally, the tenant had no right to sell, give, or bequeath the land to another. The proprietor held the right to waste; that is, the tenant was required to maintain rather than use up the resources of the land. Politically, the proprietor had the right to establish courts and to make laws, "subject only to a general provision that they should be reasonable and not be repugnant to the laws of England."13 Opposed to thisposition of centralized land ownership was a position that stressed individual rights, best represented by fee simple tenure. In fee simple tenure the land is owned (in theory) by the person occupying it; this person holds rights to give, sell, mortgage, and bequeath the land. The government maintains minimal rights in the land: primarily the right to tax, to police, and of eminent domain. The desire for fee simple tenure in colonial America is understandable: those who worked the land wished to hold most of the rights to the land. In many of the colonies, quitrents aroused so much hostility that only infrequently could they be collected14 Moreover, proprietors and corporations discovered that to recruit settlers successfully, they had to diminish their own rights in the land and grant more rights to the settlers.15 Giving settlers rights in buying, selling, renting, and mortgaging the land was significant in the weakening of the feudal socage tenure system. Harris explains, Commercial procedures were powerful in destroying feudal tenures, for every such act ... constituted a direct attack on the personal nature of feudalism under which alienation [disposal of property] was not allowed. The personal-- the man-man or lord-man--relations of feudalism under these actions were giving way to the man-society-thing relation of modern economy.16The conflicts among these three positions on land tenure and the worldviews implied in them are explored in Mason & Dixon. Indeed, these conflicts have a way of centering on Mason, Dixon, and their Line. Two situations they encounter early in their stay in America illustrate the potential power of their Line in these conflicts. The narrator, Dixon, and, more slowly, Mason recognize the touchy relations between the proprietors who own the land and the people living and working on it: "[A]ll the Line Commissioners, from both Provinces, being political allies of the Proprietors, are natural and obvious Effigy Fodder to a Mobility of Rent-payers [....]"17 The situation of Luise and Peter Redzinger offers a specific example: Peter has chosen land near the contested Pennsylvania-Maryland border ("The Proprietors of both Provinces have been offering lower Land prices, sometimes even exemption from the Quit-rent, to any who'll settle near Boundaries in dispute"18), but after his near-death experience in the hops kiln and his resulting transformation into a roaming evangelist, the land becomes threatened by the legalities of socage tenure: Grodt, one the farmers whose land adjoins the Redzingers', has long coveted their farm, and furthermore believes that both farms are located in Maryland. Under Maryland law, he knows he may get a warrant to resurvey his land, and in the process include any vacant land it happens to adjoin,--the property Line will be allow'd to stretch about and engross it,--by virtue of the Resurvey, it will become his. (Many were the elephantine tracts swallowed at one nibble, in those times, by the country Mice thereabouts.) Land defined as vacant includes land once settled but now "in escheat," meaning gone back to the Proprietor, usually for nonpayment of taxes,--Luise has been paying the Quit-rents to Pennsylvania, but Grodt, contending that she dwells in Maryland and owes more back taxes there than she can ever pay, believes the land is escheatable.19 Luise seeks a Philadelphia lawyer to protect her rights, but her rights, as a tenant rather than owner of the land, are ambiguous. The Mason-Dixon Line, once surveyed, will settle disputes like this one between the two colonies, but those who live on the land will still be at the mercy of the proprietors' rights. The second situation that illustrates the tension among the conflicting positions on land tenure is the December 27, 1763 massacre by the Paxton Boys of fourteen Indians, men, women, and children, who were being held protectively in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania jail. The Paxton Boys, a group of over 100 men settled on the western frontier of Pennsylvania, acted out of two conflicts. On the one hand, they had been in continual conflict with the Conestoga Indians over the land on the frontier; atrocities were committed by both sides as the whites tried to occupy new land westward and the Indians tried to keep what they had. On the other hand, the Paxton Boys resented the representatives of power in the more-settled eastern part of the colony: they were in financial thrall to the proprietor (who, incidentally, claimed exclusive right to purchase land from the Indians);20 they were under-represented in the colonial assembly; and they felt that the primarily Quaker assembly was lax in providing the frontier with defense against the Indians.21 Mason and Dixon are nearby when the news of the massacre inspires arguments and a near- riot in Philadelphia among those pro- and anti-Indian and pro-proprietor and pro-tenant.22 The next month, Mason and Dixon visit Lancaster to see the site of what Dixon calls an "Instance of the Catastrophick Resolution of Inter-Populational Cross-Purposes."23 The suspicious and hostile Lancaster men try to justify their actions and their hatreds without recognizing their contradictions. They rationalize the massacre in terms of blood vengeance, but beneath the rationalization is the simple desire for land, and, as one of them says to end the argument, "'Tis all ours now."24 But immediately they begin to complain that the land is, in fact, not theirs: "We're out here as a Picket for Philadelphia,--we've clear'd them a fine safe patch, from Delaware to Susquehanna. Now may they prance about foolish as they may."Mason and Dixon, recognizing the contradictions and the men's complicity in the power that oppresses them, wonder, after viewing the massacre site, about their own complicity in the horrors they are discovering in America: "Whom are we working for [...]?"26 The Reverend Cherrycoke, off-and-on narrator of the novel, shortly thereafter implies the role of the Line in the process most crudely enacted by the Paxton Boys: there exists no "Maryland" beyond an Abstraction, a Frame of right lines drawn to enclose and square off the great Bay in its unimagin'd Fecundity, its shoreline tending to Infinite Length, ultimately unmappable,-- no more, to be fair, than there exists any "Pennsylvania" but a chronicle of Frauds committed serially against the Indians dwelling there, check'd only by the Ambitions of other Colonies to north and east.27Although the Mason and Dixon Line may be a fraud, the novel also makes clear its power. As the novel explores the socage and fee simple land tenure systems that are, as we have seen, at the heart of many of America's conflicts, the former becomes associated with the process of control, whereby everything-- nature, human beings, knowledge, belief--is broken down into constituent parts and labeled so as to better serve the needs of power, and the latter becomes associated with the process of commercialism, whereby everything can be turned into something to be bought or sold. These two processes, the novel suggests, will be thedefining qualities of the nation that is about to be born. The Mason and Dixon Line becomes the manifestation of both: in its westward movement it represents the process of control, and in its dividing the North from the South it represents the process of commercialism. Clearly, the socage land tenure system, which defines the proprietorships in Pennsylvania and Maryland, is an example of the desire to control, in this case to control centrally the land and the people who live on it. At one point, Dixon, remembering a childhood incident, says, "'Twas the only time in my life I have felt that Surrender to Power, upon which, as I have learn'd after, to my Sorrow, all Government is founded."28 Governments exist because of their ability to impose their power on others; control is the process by which power is imposed. This process is most explicitly explained by Father Zarpazo, one of the novel's mysterious Jesuits: "The Model [...] is Imprisonment. Walls are to be the Future. Unlike those of the Antichrist Chinese, these will follow right Lines. The World grows restless,--Faith is no longer willingly bestow'd upon Authority, either religious or secular. What Pity. If we may not have Love, we will accept Consent,--if we may not obtain Consent, we will build Walls. As a Wall, projected upon the Earth's Surface, becomes a right Line, so shall we find that we may shape, with arrangements of such Lines, all we may need, be it in a Crofter's hut or a great Mother-City,-- Rules of Precedence, Routes of Approach, Lines of Sight, Flows of Power,--."29In the New World this involved taking "uncivilized" land and defining it (drawing boundaries, giving it names), making it habitable (subduing or driving out the indigenous inhabitants), and making it "civilized" (imposing the home country's social, political, economic, and religious systems on it), in short, to make the land useful to or able to serve the colonizing power. This, Dixon discovers, inspired the need to model the colonial proprietorships on the medieval charter of the Bishopric of Durham: "Any Bishop-of-Durham Clause in America [...] suggests a likeness, in the British Mind, between your Indians West of the Allegheny Ridge, and their Scots beyond Hadrian's Wall,--as the Bishop Prince's half of the bargain, is to defend the King against whatever wild cannibal Host lies North of us [....]30As we saw in the example of the Paxton Boys, to defend the frontier is only the first step in a process of expanding the frontier, subduing the inhabitants, and assimilating new lands. The novel specifically links the Mason and Dixon Line to this process of control. The narrator remarks, as his characters debate the Redzinger farm dispute, "It goes back [...] to the second Day of Creation, when 'G-d made the Firmament, and divided the Waters which were under the Firmament, from the Waters which were above the Firmament,'--thus the first Boundary Line. All else after that, in all History, is but Sub-Division."31 At another point the narrator imagines America as a continent of hope ineluctably lost: [O]n West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,--serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,--Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments [....]32The drawing of the Line is both an act of division and a mapping of the unmapped, a naming of the unnamed. In this, it is a tool of the ideology of control that will define and then come to dominate the new nation and its people. As Captain Zhang, Chinese geomancer, explains: "To rule forever [...] it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call ... Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,--to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,--'tis the first stroke.--All else will follow as if predestin'd, unto War and Devastation.''33One might assume that if the socage land tenure system is associated with the ideology of control, then the fee simple system, which offers liberal rights to the individual land owner, would be connected with freedom and opposition to control, but that does not seem to be the case. Significantly, the rights associated with the fee simple system are all rights in transferring the land: giving, buying, or selling it. Indeed, buying and selling are emphasized here, as the fee simple system comes to represent the larger process of commercialism. Buying and selling are everywhere in the America Mason and Dixon find. The first sights and sounds that greet them as they disembark are those of vendors trying to sell them food, drink, entertainment, and religion.34 The importance of commercialism to the American character is suggested by the novel's presentation of the Fathers of the Country. Benjamin Franklin offers Mason and Dixon one of his aphorisms, "Strangers, heed my wise advice,-- Never pay the Retail Price."35 When they meet with Colonel George Washington at Mount Vernon, he is obsessed with land speculation, hoping for inside information: "No reason you fellows shouldn't turn a Shilling or two whilst you're over here."36 Far from being opposed to the ideology of control, American commercialism is dependent on it. Washington, in talking about one of the companies established to settle the west, compares these new lands to "a piece of tricky weaving [...] order, I mean to say, in Chaos. Markets appearing, with their unwritten Laws, upon ev'ry patch of open ground, power beginning to sort itself out, Line and Staff,--."37 The Line's role in this process--imposing the order needed by the ideology of control so that markets and products may be defined and buying and selling begin--seems clear. And it seems especially important in this sense that the Line divides North from South. Returning from the southward journey during which he met Jefferson, Dixon ponders his experiences, hoping "for some kind of sense to be made of what has otherwise been a pointless Trip."38 The narrator tells us, "[i]n all Virginia, tho' Slaves pass'd before his Sight, he saw none. That was what had not occur'd."39 The Reverend Cherrycoke, commenting on another character's description of an ideal iron plantation, expands on this: "What is not visible in his rendering [...] is the Negro Slavery, that goes on making such no doubt exquisite moments possible,-- the inhuman ill-usage, the careless abundance of pain inflicted, the unpric'd Coercion necessary to yearly Profits beyond the projectings even of proud Satan."40 The Line divides those colonies where human beings are bought and sold from those colonies where, generally, they are not. Just as the murdering of enemies marks the ultimate moral failing of the ideology of control, the turning of human beings into property marks the ultimate moral failing of commercialism. These two practices, so indicative of the processes of control and commercialism, are the dual Original Sins from which America will never recover. And there, emblematic of both and pointing like an arrow into America's future, is the Mason and Dixon Line. But the Line, or, more specifically, the process of marking the Line, also becomes suggestive of resistance to these processes. Like the V-2 Rocket in Gravity's Rainbow, the Line is charismatic: people are drawn to it, and around it grows an ad hoc social structure. Moreover, the people drawn to the Line are frequently, to put it bluntly, oddballs: Professor Voam and his gigantic electric eel; French chef Armand Allegre and the mechanical duck hopelessly in love with him; Zsuzsa Szabo, who runs a street show representation of the Battle of Leuthen; Eliza, escapee from the Jesuits and dead ringer for Mason's late wife; Zhang, the geomancer; Stig, a secret agent from an unknown northern country; the Vasquez Brothers' Marimba Quartet; and many others. As Mason characterizes the group to Professor Voam: Now perhaps may I direct you to Safety,--any number of Refugees having become attach'd to our Party,--all traveling under the joint guarantee of the Proprietors, and their Provincial Governments as well. To my knowledge, tho' there be Tailors, Oracles, Pastrymen, Musicians, Gaming-Pitches, Opera-Girls, Exhibitors of Panoramic Models, bless us all, there is not yet an Electric Eel.41The narrator later says of the group that "some will develop a taste for the exquisite discomforts of Rejection."42 Indeed, the people drawn to Mason, Dixon, and the Line are generally refugees or rejects from the "official" America Mason and Dixon are helping to define, people who are not going to fit in to the new country and its defining processes of control and commercialism. The resulting party is both democratic--as Dixon remarks, "[a]s Christians, have we any choice but to allow all who wish, to enter freely?"43--and structured in an informal, contingent manner: As the Visto has grown longer behind them, the Philadelphiaward Fringe of the nightly Encampment has lengthen'd to a suburbs dedicated to high (as some would say, low) living. Gaming, corn whiskey, Women able to put up with a heap of uncompensated overtime, Stages knock'd together each nightfall and lanthorn'd into view, to a Murmur as of a great Crowd in Motion, only to be struck again each dawn [....]44Connected with this growing community of oddballs and outcasts is Mason and Dixon's realization that as they move west, farther and farther away from the settled, rationalized, and controlled east, the marvelous, the fantastic, and the supernatural more frequently arise to challenge their faith in reason and control. As Mason says: "[O]bserve you not, as we move West, more and more of those Forces, which Cities upon Coasts have learn'd to push away, and leave to Back Inhabitants,--the Lightning, the Winter, an Indifference to Pain, not to mention Fire, Blood, and so forth, all measur'd upon a Scale far from Philadelphian,--whereunto we, and our Royal Commission, and our battery of costly Instruments, are but Fleas in the Flea Circus. We trespass, each day ever more deeply, into a world of less restraint in ev'rything,--no law, no convergence upon any idea of how life is to be [....]"45Among the things they encounter that the rational world cannot account for are the enormous Black Dog, whose name is not to be spoken, a huge glowing Indian, a giant Leyden battery embedded in an Indian burial mound, a were- beaver, and an American Golem, created by poet Timothy Tox. This last is representative of the others in that it "takes a dim view of Oppression, and is ever available to exert itself to the Contrary."46 That is, these things, by their existence, challenge the ideology of control and the certainty that everything can be known, named, and used. Significantly, the Line's liberatory possibilities, the opportunity it offers to escape, resist, and oppose the ideology of control and consumerism, are grounded in its not being stationary, its not being a piece of property, a lot to which theories of land tenure can be applied. Mason at one point declares of the Line, "[w]ell! of course it's a living creature, 'tis all of us, temporarily collected into an Entity, whose Labors none could do alone."47 Later, the narrator imagines what would have happened had Mason and Dixon continued west across the continent: The under-lying Condition of their Lives is quickly establish'd as the Need to keep, as others a permanent address, a perfect Latitude,--no fix'd place, rather a fix'd Motion,--Westering. Whenever they do stop moving, like certain Stars in Chinese Astrology, they lose their Invisibility, and revert to the indignity of being observ'd and available again for earthly purposes.48The possibilities for liberation exist only as long as the Line is temporary rather than permanent and moving rather than settled; once it is permanent and set, the Line is assumed completely into serving the needs of power. This is underscored when, as Mason and Dixon return to the east, the members of their entourage, one by one, abandon them, the marvelous gives way to the mundane, and the astronomer and surveyor are absorbed back into the power structures by which they are employed. Does the novel, then, find resistance to power impossible? Can all land, all people, all of nature be defined, labeled, bought, and sold? Is the America defined by Mason and Dixon's Line the only possible America? Though the power of control and commercialism is relentless and liberation is temporary, the novel offers some hope. Before leaving America, Dixon, this time with Mason, takes another trip into the South. Where before slavery remained invisible to him, this time he confronts a slave trader, hits him, and frees the slaves. The narrator explains, "[h]ere in Maryland, they had a choice at last, and Dixon chose to act, and Mason not to,-- unless he had to,--what each of us wishes he might have the unthinking Grace to do, yet fails to do. To act for all those of us who have so fail'd. For the Sheep."49 This act, not great in the global scheme of things, is nevertheless a blow against control and commercialism, an act made possible by the education gained while laying out the Line. Mason & Dixon, then, takes a historic issue, conflicting theories of land tenure, and turns it into a vehicle for meaning. The Mason and Dixon Line, central to these conflicts, is shown to be complicit in the processes of control and commercialism they imply. Yet, as it is being laid out, it offers escape and the possibility of temporary liberation from those processes. If in the end those possibilities are absorbed back into the systems of control and commerce, the Line nevertheless functions both to educate Mason, Dixon, and the reader about the nature of these systems and to inspire them, even in small ways, to act in opposition to them. |
