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Volume 24, Number 3 (1999) reprinted by permission Oklahoma City University Law Review FICTION AT A BIFURCATION POINT: FROM NEWTONIAN LAW TO POSTMODERN UNCERTAINTY IN PYNCHON'S MASON & DIXON CARMEN PEREZ-LLANTADA AURIA* novel emphasizes the contingent, the random, and the unpredictable as discursive ways that escape traditional categorization. Significantly, the novel is set not in the twentieth century, but rather in the eighteenth century; namely, the so called Age of Reason. This is precisely a moment in which Newtonian beliefs have surpassed or even eradicated Newton's own unresolved doubts about the rigidity of his own mathematical laws to find the ultimate order of the Universe.1 The narrator, Reverend Cherrycoke, concentrates his account on the story of the life of the two historical astronomers Mason and Dixon who personify the acceptance of the Newtonian Principia and try to apprehend and understand their external reality through the lens of the Enlightenment project. The plot revolves about the fact that these two characters, being assigned to draw a line between Pennsylvania and Maryland, symbolically map the world into time sequences or intervals according to the rules of classical mechanics, as manifested in Newton's Principia.2 Thus, the reader is minutely--and ironically--told how each ten minutes of Great Circle before intersecting the invisible West Line, the surveyors "set up the Sector and determine their Latitude, then figure the offsets to the true Line over the distance they've just come."3 Quite significant at the very beginning of the novel is the reference to the classical conception of the irreversibility of time4 in the Newtonian clockwork universe that epitomizes the ideas of order, harmony, and mathematical precision. At a given moment, for instance, one of the surveyors addresses his colleague to overtly assert his belief in the Newtonian deterministic thinking: "'Mason, pray You,--'tis the Age of Reason,' Dixon reminds him, 'we're Men of Science. To huz must all days run alike, the same number of identical Seconds, each proceeding in but one Direction-- irreclaimable.'"5 As said before, the task of these two solitary "Men of Science" consists in determining every event and measuring it with absolute precision. Eagerly adhering to Newtonian deterministic certainty, Mason and Dixon are the servants of a universe conceived as a mechanical system that is sustained upon different categorical premises: the law of causality, the either/or principle, and the absolute coordinates of space and time as objective frames of reference to understand external reality. From the very beginning, the two astronomers are portrayed devotedly trying to apprehend reality by observing marks or delimiting points on a map so that these may help to orientate them. For mapping reality, they ground their calculi upon classical scientific premises which are echoed in the narrative in references. For example, to the "conservation of energy,"6 or to their predecessor-astronomer "Bradley upon the Topick of Perpetual-Motion,"7 clear hints for that other Pynchonian obsession, the Law of Entropy. But in fact, Mason's and Dixon's Cartesian mapping is only an attempt to impose some order to the chaotic world. As twentieth-century scientific premises explain, "[a] paradigm is not a theory as such, but a framework of thought--a conceptual scheme--around which the data of experiment and observation are organized."8 By devising a mental landscape or mental projection of the world the protagonists soon realize that their apprehension of external reality is so relative and uncertain that they become trapped in an intricate existential labyrinth. In the same way the heroine of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Mass, wondered whether to project a world while "teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum,"9 the astronomers also start a difficult quest for interpreting the complexity of the world surrounding them by means of some alternative parameters to the classical ones. As the novel progresses, the reader discovers that, contradicting the Enlightenment belief in a totalizing order, Pynchon's narrative reifies the scientific notion of a closed system far from equilibrium, and ironically presents an oscillation at the fulcrum of opposite elements: stability and instability, order and chaos, classical science vs. postmodern ethos; precisely what chaos theorists define as a spontaneous activity coexisting with the mechanic and deterministic.10 In this sense, the novel can be regarded as a narrative metaphor of what chaos theorists define as a bifurcation point, that is to say, a moment in which a system fluctuates and evolves towards a new and more complex organization; or, to use other words, a moment of apparent chaos which finally develops towards more ordered structures. Similarly, the narrative shows how the apparently stable eighteenth-century thought--represented in the novel by the measurements effected by the two men of science--is shattered when events and facts befallen to the two protagonists turn out to be ultimately incognoscible in the light of their own Newtonian beliefs. Put simply, a shift in the history of ideas is taking place, and this represents the collapse of a previous thinking and the birth of a new age. The Pynchonian reader easily finds across the narrative significant details and passages that implicit or explicitly de-stabilize the premises of classical thought. To be more precise, the two astronomers are randomly chosen to undertake "the most coveted Star-gazing Assignment of the Century,"11 and the greater their effort to categorize external reality, the closer they approach to the ideas of ambiguity and uncertainty as inherent characteristics in nature. As said before, there are many situations in the novel in which the astronomers' rationalist principles do not allow them to decode external reality as they wished to, that is to say, objectively and precisely. This narrative bifurcative underpinning comes to a climactic moment when Mason and Dixon hesitate between either sticking to their rational Newtonian principles or, as the theory of chaos posits, accepting a new and more complex order in the evolution of nature. By opting for the second choice, the protagonists become involved in a parodic quest for knowledge as they start to face a new ontological reconceptualization which draws away from the rigid determinism of the so called clockwork universe postulated by classic physics. It is important to point out, for instance, that Cherrycoke ironically remarks how Mason's and Dixon's expectations while trying to run the Tangent Line and the Delaware boundaries are turned down by an unpredictable and random unraveling of royal mistakes: "Charles and James," the Revd sighing, "and their tangle of geometrick hopes,--that somehow the Arc, the Tangent, the Meridian, and the West Line should all come together at the same perfect Point,--where, in fact, all is Failure. The Arc fails to meet the Forty-Degree North Parallel. The Tangent fails to be part of any Meridian. The West Line fails to begin from the Tangent Point, being five miles north of it."12The failure to draw a precise delimitation results in epistemological confusion on the part of the historical surveyors once they realize that their enlightened premises are no longer valid to fully discover and explain the regularity of the universe. As the narrative voice overtly explains, they inevitably start to question the so-far-considered absolute taxonomies of eighteenth-century science and begin to face "[q]uestions whose Awkwardness has only increas'd as the Astronomers have come to understand there may be no way of ever finding the Answers."13 Similar epistemological implications can be found at the beginning of chapter thirty-five, which is introduced by a quotation from Cherrycoke's literary piece Christ and History. This decontextualized postmodern narrator significantly comments on the notion of History as contemplated in the light of modern scientific paradigms: no absolute time or space exist to validate an objective understanding of reality; and neither causality nor determinism are the only ruling principles of the universe. Anticipating twentieth-century chaotics, the narrative posits a harmonious balance between cause and determinism on the one hand and chance, probability, and disorder on the other: History is not Chronology, for that is left to Lawyers,--nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People [...] not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,--rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common.14In a gradual and effective manner, the young continent that symbolizes freedom teaches the two protagonists from the old continent how to detach from the principles of eighteenth-century rationalism. Eventually, the astronomers come to realize that, despite the fact that they are able to measure distances and map the continent, there is also a component of "[h]azard as deep as their souls may bear"15 that affects their apparently objective measurements and makes their scientific predictions and methods have some margins of error. Consequently, although the astronomers keep on imposing mathematical equations on their measurement of physical reality, they finally acknowledge that no representation of reality can be entirely valid and that there is no possibility of achieving absolute objectivity in the measurement of things. Twentieth-century physics--as shown in the celebrated Schrodinger's cat experiment, for instance--contends that the observer cannot be separated from the object of observation and that there exists, therefore, an inevitable component of subjectivity in any act of physical experimentation. The belief that the very act of observation affects our knowledge of physical reality is, once again, epitomized in Pynchon's fiction. Mason's and Dixon's realization that their rationalistic taxonomies are a conflicting source of enigmas raises in them a serious epistemological question: they wonder whether external reality only exists at the expense of their own subjective interpretation, that is to say, of their personal apprehension of the external world. Echoing Karl Popper's "propensity interpretation of probability,"16 according to which we can only know the probable behavior of things, the novel insists that probability has definitely blurred previous deterministic conceptualizations-- "'[a]s if ... there were no single Destiny ... but rather a choice among a great many possible ones,"'17 meditates Mason. In a closer analysis, Dixon's companion can be considered as a decontextualized believer in chaos theory, as he accepts the idea that causality and determinism peacefully coexist with probability and chance. In the following extract, for example, he ponders about a harmonious coexistence between probability and unpredictability, coming from a kind of holistic synthesis of two contradictory states: order and chaos.18 Far from Newtonian ideas, the astronomer suggests that there is no longer a single deterministic destiny but a fractalic and endless one: "As if ... there were no single Destiny," puzzles Mason, "but rather a choice among a great many possible ones, their number steadily diminishing each time a Choice be made, till at last 'reduc'd,' to the events that do happen to us, as we pass among 'em, thro' Time unredeemable--much as a Lens, indeed, may receive all the Light from some vast celestial Field of View, and reduce it to a single Point."19Within this battle-field in which the Newtonian Universal Laws are gradually losing ground to a much more unpredictable apprehension of the world, the narrative voice likewise insists on the infinite--or rather, fractalic-- possibilities of interpretation which result from the unavoidably uncertain and relativistic condition of all human perception. At this interpretive crossroads, the protagonists of the novel metaphorically find an open sea of probable interpretations while they are carrying out their measuring tasks: "The physickal World, from Gusts to Eclipses, must insist upon itself a bit more, so claim'd are the Surveyors in their contra-solar Return by Might-it-bes, and If-it-weres,--not to mention What-was-thats."20 Furthermore, the two scientific observers gradually realize, in their analysis of the world, that the coordinates they are supposed to measure turn out to be non-systematic, as they always escape from their restricted and restrictive categorical measurements--in another ironic hint to contemporary chaos theory. This is precisely what happens with the classical concepts of time and space. Contrary to Newtonian philosophy, these two coordinates are considered in the novel simply as mental frames of reference to grasp external reality. If at the end of V. the narrative voice suggested a mathematical calculus--to draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa,21--the recurrent references to maps in Mason & Dixon represent an attempt to metaphorize modern metaphysics, now strongly affected by the fact that precisely our subjective mental projections build up our "propensity knowledge"--to recall Popper's words again--of a probable world. Contrary to the astronomers' attachment to the classical Principia, in a map no absolute conception of time and space matters as there is a choice of mathematical probabilities or paths between one point and another: "[I]n Map-space, origins, destinations, any Termini, hardly seem to matter,--one can apprehend all at once the entire plexity of possible journeys, set as one is above Distance, above Time itself,"22 the narrator insists in the voice of one of his characters. Similarly, some pages before, when Mason is contemplating the Giant eel of Professor Voam's, he experiences some moment of revelation which he literally describes in his diary as "an Aperture into another Dispensation of Space, yea and Time."23 If we concentrate more particularly on the dissolution of the category of space as understood by classical science, it can be easily noticed how an absolute spatial conception is strongly rejected in the novel through constant references to converging lines such as Vistos or Vortices, tangent points, or interfaces. All of them echo twentieth-century scientific emphasis on the void: "Vacuum-Hemispheres,"24 "single Point,"25 or "Black Hole"26 become elements that reinscribe the old Pynchonian obsession with the domain of the zero, an entropic notion represented in this novel by the Jesuit Zarpazo.27 Likewise significant are the self-conscious references pointing out towards the dissolution of the classical concept of time. If at the beginning of the novel the astronomers posited an irreversible arrow of time in the clockwork universe, the narrative voice ironically remarks that after arriving at St. Helena, the astronomers notice that the movement of the Pendula of the two clocks they carry--the Shelton clock and the Ellicot clock--is not synchronous but arrhythmic. Besides, the narrator further explains how the Ellicot clock has no striking-train and therefore, ironically contradicting the law of cause and effect, there is no warning "before the Hammer begins hitting the bell."28 A highly--if fantastic--illuminating episode concerning the dissolution of the classical temporal paradigm appears in chapter fifty-six. In it Mason is trapped "[i]n a slowly rotating Loop, or if you like, Vortex, of eleven days, tangent to the Linear Path of what we imagine as Ordinary Time, but excluded from it, and repeating itself,--without end."29 This passage is relevant enough to understand the new conception of time put forward by modern science: not as a straight one-direction arrow but rather as a self-contained circularity. Mason overtly explains it as follows: "I myself did stumble, daz'd and unprepared, into that very Whirlpool in Time,--finding myself in September third, 1752, a date that for all the rest of England, did not exist,-- Tempus Incognitum."30 After this "a-temporal" episode, the astronomer is ready to accept the uncertainty inherent to the human condition and concludes, with an underlying pessimistic metaphysical undertone, that life is as empty as that eleven-day loop he experienced: "This Life," runs the moral he is able by now to draw for Dixon, "is like the eleven days,--a finite Period at whose end, she and I, having separated for a while, will be together again. Meanwhile must I travel alone, in a world as unreal as those empty September dates were to me then...."31As the novel reaches its end, the two astronomers have gradually learnt to accept the probable reality filtered through their personal minds and create interpretive systems that may, though temporarily, solve their gnosiological conflicts. Their restless progress in America makes them long for a strong "desire to transcend their differently discomforted lives"32 once they acknowledge their failure as human beings to acquire absolute knowledge.33 The parodic and mythic quest of the two protagonists towards a probable understanding of their external reality ultimately serves to validate the notion that Newtonian law no longer constitutes an absolute paradigm to apprehend the world. As the novel portrays, the apparent coexistence of randomness and predictability is in fact the source of a more complex organization in the macrocosms. It is what Prigogine and Stengers define as a moment in which the universe, renouncing the law of entropy, experiences a process of self-organization.34 This is precisely the reason why the apparent irregularity that so often disrupted Mason's and Dixon's rationally- patterned observations is nothing else but the prelude--the metaphorical bifurcation point--of a more complex conception of the universe furtherjustified in narrative terms by overt references to the theory of catastrophes, fractalic symmetries, butterfly effects, and a long list of probable scientific events that take place in far-from-equilibrium systems. Now that science rejects predetermined patterns and accepts an uncertain and indeterminate nature, literary works such as Mason & Dixon suggest that any attempt to unravel such complicated nature involves, metaphorically speaking, a labyrinthic complexity. Enriched by the symbolic journey of the historical, social, political, and religious aspects of the America of those times, Mason's and Dixon's personal desire to transcend their existential doubts leads the reader, at the end of the novel, towards deep philosophical and metaphysical conclusions. It seems, for Pynchon the philosopher, that the only way out of the existential void of the self is the one posited by the theorists of chaos: the reconciliation--or holistic synthesis--of opposites, namely chance and determinism, order and chaos, subjectivity and objectivity, self and world. Running parallel to the decontextualized deployment of chaotic notions all along the book, and in order to convey such metaphysical concerns also through narrative devices, the novelist self-consciously questions the conventional premises for writing fiction. Instead of the classical linearity, the plot dissolves into a multiplicity of coexisting narrative episodes. The novel is built upon a highly complex framework where the main story is frequently interrupted by other, embedded narratives told by a multiplicity of characters, but also by other metafictional devices such as iconic mise-en-abymes, dreams and fantasies, references to real history and real characters, all of them techniques that complicate ad infinitum the narrative horizon.35 At the level of the story, readers may also be puzzled by the fact that the historical astronomers come across some peculiar characters whose apparent fictionality helps to confuse the boundaries of the real, characters such as The Learned English Dog,36 "an imaginary invisible [and robotic] female Duck"37 in love with the Frenchman chef Armand Allegre, or a giant specimen of Guyana Torpedo with "mysterious and often life-altering abilities."38 At other times, the frontiers between reality and other possible ontological levels become blurred due to the authorial deployment of other metafictional techniques, such as the reiterative use of dreams within the fiction. No wonder that the narrative voice also reports how, in their journey to America, Mason and Dixon meet a Malay tribe called the Senoi whose belief is "that the world they inhabit in their Dreams is as real as their waking one."39 Or, to put another example which would clearly shock the enlightened readers of the time, gothic Mason experiences some relief from his fragmenting self and talks in dreams to his dead wife Rebekah in a clear anti-Newtonian "wordless Transgression of Cause and Effect":40 "He tries to joke with himself. Isn't this suppos'd to be the Age of Reason? [...] But if Reason be also Permission at last to believe in the evidence of our Earthly Senses, then how can he not concede to her some Resurrection?--to deny her, how cruel!"41 In addition, Pynchon's prose is again characterized by doppelganger or doubling characterizations, descriptive passages of excessive details, a highly pungent irony in the use of language--from the parodic names of characters and places to linguistic misunderstandings, double meanings or recurrent V-signs of ambiguous signification--and some other metafictional techniques. In the same way the boundaries between fiction and reality are blurred, the process of artistic creation is laid bare to allow the writer to insist on the artificiality of anything constructed by means of any arbitrary code--in this case, language. If the process of science is a process of interrogation of nature, it seems, at least for Pynchon, that the process of fiction-writing is likewise a process of interrogation of the world. As happened in his previous novels, the American writer has brilliantly managed to combine his broad scientific knowledge with his literary consciousness to produce an impressive but entertaining novel which reifies the author's mastery in reconciling so many facets of human life, from the social, the ideological, and the scientific to deep epistemological and moral reflections, ultimately urging the reader to adhere to a more just hierarchy of values. Corollary: Flap's Law (randomly circulating in the world wide web) warns us that "any inanimate object, regardless of its position, configuration or purpose, may be expected to perform at any time in a totally unexpected manner for reasons that are either entirely obscure or else completely mysterious." |
