As Pennsylvania and
Maryland are compared and contrasted throughout
Pynchon’s novel, Mason &
Dixon,
it might be worth the effort to compare and contrast also two epic
poems: The
Marylandiad of
Ebenezer Cooke and The
Pennsylvaniad
of Timothy Tox.
In John Barth’s novel The Sot-Weed
Factor (1960) the
life of the Poet Laureate of Maryland,
Ebenezer Cooke, is used as a lens through which the larger issues of
the British colonial enterprise is seen. Cooke’s life and death are so
to speak the outer frame of the book, which begins with his birth and
ends with his death as a proper Künstlerroman
should.
In Pynchon’s Mason &
Dixon
(1997) the life, apotheosis and haunting return of Timothy Tox, the
author of The
Pennsylvaniad,
is perhaps marginal to the main portraiture of its protagonists Mason
and Dixon, but no more so than the many other characters the pair
encounters. In fact, Tox’s textual presence is felt throughout the
novel, and his two epic texts (the other being The Line) are repeatedly quoted –
by Tox himself, by the prolix narrator Cherrycoke, and in a sense also
by Pynchon, as when Tox’s lines are brought to function paratextually
as the epigraph to the first chapter of Book Two, “America”.
I therefore propose that of
all the ghosts in Pynchon’s monstrous
gallery of textual presences none is more haunting than Timothy Tox.
Not only does his work always seem to supply an apt commentary on the
action of the novel, but a mere quote from it may conjure up other
significant presences that speed the plot along (the Golem, for
instance). When Tox enters the novel as a character in his own right,
he not only performs a major role in the reader’s work of orienting
her/himself among the many real and/or fictitious intertexts of
Pynchon’s work, but Tox also has to make his final ghostly bow, before
the night of the Revd Cherrycoke’s telling can end, and the novel come
to closure.
Comparisons between the two
Poet Laureates are, of course, complex:
Cooke, after all, exists also outside Barth’s book, while this does not
(yet) seem to be the case with Tox. Tox, however, seems obviously to be
modelled in part on the real Cooke – as well as on Barth’s fictive
Cooke. One might even speculate that part of the reason why Pynchon
held off finalisation and publication of Mason &
Dixon is due to a
form
of anxiety of influence on Pynchon’s part, since after all both the
manner (pastiche of the English Baroque novel in the vein of Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy) and subject
matter
of these two great postmodern historiographic metafictions are as close
in the realm of the literary canon as the states of Maryland and
Pennsylvania are in the geo-political world. The work of Mason &
Dixon is in this sense paralleled by the work of Barth & Pynchon,
‘collaborating’ in drawing the line that (seemingly) once and for all
separates the two states: Tox’s Pennsylvania and Cooke’s Maryland.
My paper therefore proposes
to work “Between the Line, in all its
Purity”, and examine the complex web of intertextual references between
Cooke’s work, Barth’s fictional rendition of Cooke’s life and work, and
the pastiche of all of the above which Pynchon performs in creating
those fragments of Tox’s poetry and life to which he gives us access in
Mason
& Dixon. To help
me
in this endeavour, I shall employ the notions of palimpsesting and
paratextuality, both set forth by Gerard Genette in his on-going work
on transtextual relations: hyper- and hypotexts in Palimpsests:
Literature in the Second
Degree, and
paratexts in Paratexts:
Thresholds of Interpretation (both published in English in
1997).
