|
Volume 24, Number 3 (1999) reprinted by permission by permission Oklahoma City University Law Review PYNCHON'S LEGAL LANDSCAPE: JUSTICE IN MASON & DIXON MARK SIEGEL* "Well I don't know what you may have heard about what we call Justice up here,' his Solicitor advises [the Devil], 'but don't set your Hopes too high."1 These days, few people in the arts have much to say about the American legal system that is not punctuated with a rim shot or laden with invective. Certainly the ever skeptical Thomas Pynchon, writing a complex novel about the spiritual foundations of this nation, could be expected to unload some pretty heavy rounds across this landscape. Mason & Dixon is set at a time when the Revolutionary War has been won but the "Nation [is] bickering itself into Fragments."2 Although full of fantastical lies and exaggerations, the Reverend Cherrycoke's tale, and Pynchon's, is one of moral instruction. What more auspicious format for a fictional examination of the role of law in American society? But while everything from cooking to feng- shui is fair game in Mason & Dixon, Pynchon spends few rounds on this easy target. The law is conspicuous in its absence. Is it just too easy a target? "Let Heller make fun of idiot rules." Is it that Pynchon has not been sued or divorced lately? Is his daughter in law school? The sad truth seems to be that the American legal system just does not matter all that much to him. Pynchon's primary concern always has been natural rather than man-made law. The act of Parliament most noted in this novel is its "stealing eleven days"3 from the English calendar--and even this occurs at the dictate of Science, itself in the thrall of the Natural Order. Further, if entropy does not get us, the inevitable geometry of human social organization will. From the bureaucracy at the Royal Academy of Science, incapable of giving its surveyors either instruction or sensible rationale, to the sexual politics of South Africa, formal organizations of people are incapable of helping themselves much less each other. Lawyers may serve as agents of these forces, just as businessmen, scholars, and surveyors may, but the law they serve is nothing more than a child's parody of these universal principles. "'Don't you have any, um, machinery for resolving this, out there in the Cosmos, wherever you come from?' the solicitor asks the Devil. 'A legal system? Us? Ha, ha, ha. What for? We're a Rubbish-tip, Sir! for all your worst Cases!"'4 Lawyers, in Pynchon's view, may contribute their ingenuity to the Devil's cause (for a fee), but they are merely minor players, deferential, glad to be of use, full of high sentence, fit perhaps to start a scene or two. This cosmological perspective makes the legal system a dot on Pynchon's horizon. In Pynchon's view, the law has limited potential for two reasons. First, man- made law is a mere shadow of the natural systems by which the world actually operates. Second, it is one more amoral system designed to limit potentialities. Mason & Dixon isa sympathetic recreation of the commission of a spiritual crime, the story of two good men who, in the hire of great powers, draw a line across a virgin land and so limit it. The America before Mason and Dixon is a land of supersonic mechanical ducks, of a giant American Golem, of Ghost Fish, Werebeavers, and Jack-and-the-Beanstalk produce, and their work is the beginning of the end for wonders and mysteries. Drawing lines not only starts wars, it limits possibility, and such limitation defines Hell for Pynchon, "reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments--winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair."5 The Mason-Dixon line inflicts on the world: A geometrick Scar, a sword-slash, a conduit for Evil. Mason and Dixon are aware, nearly from the beginning, of their complicity in a scheme they know is immoral, and know their excuses do not excuse them, that "Acts have consequences"6 which we dream away so that we can get on with our lives. Gravity's Rainbow abounded with paranoid explanations for the bizarre and cruel world in which we good burgers live. In both novels, history was a web of conspiracies among warring factions whose "Business [...] is Trade and Death."7 In Mason & Dixon, the Jesuits form a cabalistic technocracy and the British East India Company a world-strangling economic octopus, but they are, for the most part, removed from our immediate concern. We see paranoia as the personality defect we have used to deflect the obvious truth that we small figures, in our innocent, self- absorbed lives, are responsible for shaping this horror called history. And that responsibility manifests itself in this novel in personal rather than legal choices. Pynchon's legal landscape is dominated by the Scylla of amoral power-brokers and the Carybdis of spirit-stifling rules, and there is no implicit guarantee in the hazards of a redemptive passage between them. To the extent the law offers any hope to individuals, it must be informed by a humanism that generates its own values. This has always been Pynchon navigating by the seat of his pants. Pynchon recognizes that man tends to fudge on the math when he lays down the boundaries of human behavior in order to accommodate competing interests. Because those broader human interests (love, greed, procreation, security) often are as irreconcilable as the political self-interest dictating the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, we can only do our best and move on down the chain. Compared to Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon is a celebration of life, from the first paragraph, a comfortable domestic catalogue that is a self-parody of the earlier novel's apocalyptic opening, to the contemplative ending, in its Huck Finnish evocation of the possibilities of an America the characters energetically embrace. Certainly, in Pynchon's opus, even an optimist cannot ignore his despair about the insignificance of human happiness in a universe which has other concerns, and there is as much Gatsby as Finn in Mason & Dixon. But, by and large, the characters in this novel act as if that was no concern of theirs. "What made them leave home and set sail upon dangerous seas [...] was not ... the Heavenly Event by itself, but rather that unshining Assembly of Human Needs...."8 As Reverend Cherrycoke's audience, we delight in the pursuit, we embrace the whole Whitmanesque tale. If Pynchon's saga of the formation of the American spirit occurs on this personal level, that is where we must look for the potential significance of the law. It is tempting to see lawyers as no more than a necessary evil fulfilling a necessary social function. When carriage passengers hear one of their number is journeying to Philadelphia to employ a lawyer in a land dispute, her fellow passengers are horrified: "[A] Philadelphia Lawyer? Good lady, surely there is some recourse less ... extreme? Your family, your congregation, the officials of your Church?"9 Yet, within moments of hearing the details of her troubles, all "fall to arguing about Land-Jobbery, the discussion growing at times spirited and personal. Everyone in the Coach, it seems, has suddenly become a Philadelphia Lawyer."10 Law, and legal conflict, is inevitable in human society. But even to the extent lawyers may be value-neutral, value-neutrality is a bad thing in a world where humans must struggle with all their might to behave humanely. Because they operate in the seats of power, lawyers often are coopted by the forces of government and big business that are antagonistic to individual freedom in Pynchon's work. "Ev'ryone lies [...] each appropriate to his place in the Chain.... We who rule must tell great Lies, whilst ye lower down need only lie a little bit," the Thief of Time, Macclesfield, tells Bradley, "the son of a lawyer who bought and then destroy'd in shame a once- honorable Title," leading him to "seek refuge in star-gazing."11 "'Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,--Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin,"' we are told.12 On the one hand we have Pynchon's natural suspicion of the law as an intrinsically valueless set of rules for arguing one's advantage. On the other hand is Pynchon's formulation of the law as a procrustean bed designed to destroy individualism. Pynchon hates rigid definition and formalistic arguments that fail the spirit while upholding the letter. The Mason-Dixon line, after all, is one of the most important demarcators of American society, delimiting everything from free and slave states, industrial and agricultural cultures, to tastes in music and food. Pynchon is antagonistic to lines because they limit potentiality; but he recognizes that the "Line" is also the "Visto," as Mason and Dixon call it, providing a way of seeing things. At best, the same is essentially true for the law; from the infinite number of individual variations on a particular human problem presented in common case law, we attempt to derive a bright line rule, a law by which to judge legal decisions, if not to guide human behavior. But, if "[a]ll History must converge to Opera in the Italian Style,"13 the law cannot be applied as a sober and stringent set of mathematical rules which are never quite the measure of mankind. In the end, it is not the law that strikes the only moral blow for freedom we see in this novel, but Dixon, acting as far outside the law of Dred Scott v. Sanford14 as he can. In a novel where the greatest crime is slavery, this scream from the gut that drives Dixon to physically attack the Philadelphia slaver is a deserved slap in the face to a legal system that sanctioned such inhumanity. The message could not be clearer: to the extent we use law--or science or religion--as a justification for cruelty, we deserve Pynchon's contempt. We deserve our own. In Pynchon's mind, is the law ever less than a tool of the oppressor, ever more than parameters for argument, more than a bad habit? The answer suggested by an over-view of Pynchon's intellectual landscape is that it can be when it is employed humanly to manage human affairs. In one incident in Mason & Dixon, the families of a young couple fall to feuding over a child born out of wedlock.15 The very speciousness of their first resort to the law, with one family obtaining a writ from the mischievous Justice Selby to recover the baby as stolen property, is instructive. Because obtaining the writ is merely a beard for the bald-faced aggression of one family against another, its application merely gives rise to confrontation and violence. Later, however, when the results of that violence come to be sorted out before a different justice, one informed by his wife's humanity and common sense, the families are reconciled and the couple married--a much more appropriate legal solution. In the end, this law, this good law, is where science fails and humanity begins. Pynchon often has been portrayed as an intellectual game-player with little emotional stake in his individual characters. If that was once true, Mason & Dixon gives the lie to it. Here Pynchon is completely devoted to understanding the world at a humanistic level--but that understanding does not come from faithfully compiling facts: "Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,--Tops and Hoops, forever a- spin.... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to Lawyers,--nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,--her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,-- that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,--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."16Pynchon opposes any study that is an attempt to limit our understanding of life to any single official version. Unfortunately, the law, like history, must define and limit just so in order to generalize about human experience. Pynchon's evocation of Henry Adams in his earlier work suggested it is both undesirable and impossible to achieve a definitive, meaningful analysis of an event, or to apply a scientific calculation to reduce human experience to a series of causative forces and predictable events. Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power[...]. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius [...]17The lawyer in Cherrycoke's audience responds forcibly to this attitude in his own son: "'Hogwash, Sir[...] Facts are Facts, and to believe otherwise is not only to behave perversely, but also to step in imminent peril of being grounded...."'18 As a lawyer, Uncle Ives is dedicated to precise facts; they are tools and must be kept sharp. But Pynchon's sympathies are clear. Uninformed facts are uninformative. Lawyers are of little use to him because they do not seek the Truth he pursues. When good burgers such as Dixon become preoccupied with "the metaphysickal Remnants of Evil,--none but the grosser, that is, the Gothickal, are apt to claim his Attention."19 But chaos, the anti-law, is also not a functional option. Hedonism, as the Surveyors South African idle illustrates, is amoral, and following natural impulses does not lead to a just and humane society. There are parties, and then there are hanging parties. As the Battle for Baby illustrates, the law yet has a practical function to serve in our lives. As individuals and as social units, we are involved on a daily basis with making choices directed to improving the quality of our lives. We may disagree about what qualities should be maximized and how to maximize them, but we are always looking to other people and to nature for suggestions. Paradoxically, Pynchon's fiction demands we invest our actions with moral values, not merely attend to the Rules. "Freedom" may mean the freedom to massacre helpless Native Americans,20 but somehow we must know this is wrong. Nature, as Pynchon tells us, is cold and recalcitrant. This observation is consistent from V. through Mason & Dixon. There may be consistent patterns to which natural forces adhere, but there is no good or bad unless a man believes it so. Law and literature are two of the major perceptual constructs by which we attempt to order physical reality into good and bad, presumably so that we can maximize the good and minimize the bad. No single perspective from either law or literature is universal, nor are the fundamental principles from which perspectives in each field derive. As John Steinbeck pointed out, behavior that is "good" for an animal's survivability, such as ruthlessness in dealing with competitors, may be what we call "bad" in our own social context.21 Literature provides, for the most part, an individualized perspective on what is good and bad; law provides a social perspective. That is not to say that social and individual perspectives do not inform each other; Steinbeck's observation begs the question of whether a specific individual's chance for survival may be enhanced by group-oriented social values, for instance. But Pynchon perceives any law, whether man-made or nature-made, to be value neutral. At first glance, Pynchon seems very different from socially oriented writers like Steinbeck, Norris, Zola, or Dos Passos. Nor does he, like Tolstoy or Dickens, attempt, if not to reconcile, to explore the relationship between the individual and social order. But in Mason & Dixon he embraces both. Perhaps the most satisfying quality of Mason & Dixon is the manner in which it goes beyond Gravity's Rainbow, the work to which it must be compared. Pynchon's early work was brilliant, it was dazzling--it was artifice. Mason & Dixon is those things, but it is also wise. There is a humanity invested in these characters, in this novel, that you do not get to see too often, and that I had never seen in Pynchon before. This novel is not just about our world, our history, our culture. It is about us, about the way we live and think and probably always will. The greatest evil in this book is not Entropy, it is slavery; the most heroic moment in the book is not the completion of the Line, it is Dixon, on the way back, after failing in his mission, striking down a slave trader in a dirty street: Here 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.22Pynchon's greatness as a writer may rest in his sheer ability, at even the most irrelevant moments, to communicate so much in an image or sentence that your jaw simply drops open. But what makes this the greatest of Pynchon's works is its overwhelming humanity, its compassion for the good, foolish, weak, and occasionally valiant human race. For the first time, this seems to be Pynchon's country and his children's, by which we mean the future. The law assures us nothing. When Mason tells Dixon, "[a]cts have consequences,"23 he is speaking metaphysically, not legally. At the awful site of the massacre of a Native American tribe, he prays to God to "make right" the murders, because he knows it must be done but does not see himself as suited to the task.24 Mason's limitation, his inability to act, is particularly significant in this discussion of the law. Not only is the law often in the employ of a status quo that may need changing, but in its very rationality it vitiates action. The law is designed to prevent action like Dixon's and to excuse inaction like Mason's. But we must not allow the legal system to be either a valueless argument in the service of Power or a set of procrustean rules rigidly applied. It may be naive to expect too much justice in this world, but it is criminal to accept too little. |
