Thomas Pynchon’s novel is dominated by its historical disposition, an eighteenth century meticulously researched and wildly transformed.
The usual abundance of distractions and sub-plots, however, makes it virtually impossible to extract anything close to a unifying leitmotif.
In the following, we propose a reading of Mason & Dixon that has a specific, quite narrow focus. The compass of our approach will be the figure of the “mechanickal Duck” which appears as an uninvited companion of the line and its crew.
By isolating this creature, we submit our reading to the following claims: firstly, that the duck is not just one more member of the whole realm of dubious creatures in the Pynchon universe, but quite a particular one; one that is to be treated as a synecdoche or paradigm of many others. Secondly, that its literary status is multiple and overdetermined: on the one hand, the man-made creature is a rather conventional theme in literature since the Enlightenment; on the other hand, Pynchon gives this motif an unconventional rendering which subverts, conflates, and exceeds its various traditions. Thirdly, that the duck is a relevant topos, because it can capture something that lies at the heart of Mason & Dixon’s construction, namely a serious concern with the hybrid in its double sense: a concern with a technique of cross-breeding or a technology of superimposition which artificially transforms both shape and concept of life, as well as a concern with hubris, with megalomaniac man venturing beyond those boundaries
1 We would like to thank the participants of the International Pynchon Week for general inspiration and for important suggestions of direct concern to our topic.
Moreover, we’d like to express our gratitude to Simon Garnett for innumerable patient corrections, and to our principal and crucial readers, Julia Tonndorf and Jeanine Werner.
which he should not and must not transgress.2 For Pynchon, the hybrid is the double figure that can be said to describe the structure of modernity or Western technological civilization. In Mason & Dixon as well as in his previous novels, modernization and the progress of Western rationality appear as narratives of human overestimation and as continuous production of composite beings – Gravity’s Rainbow’s rocket metaphysics, V.’s prosthetics, The Crying of Lot 49’s technological conspiracies, as well as the media complex in Vineland, and the numerous questionable scientific projects of Mason & Dixon may serve as the most general points of reference.
But despite its pertinacity in Pynchon’s writing, these narratives of the hybrid do not simply highlight or interpret the more or less factual interdependence of mankind’s industrious naïveté and the monstrosity of its outcomes. Rather, the hybrid constitutes a space of its own within the narrative itself. It interferes thematically and formally with Pynchon’s protagonists, overturns their fictive biographies, and renders vague their human shapes. In Pynchon, we might assume, the oblique but omnipresent hybrid belongs equally to the thematic of his novels as to their composition. Thus, something else can be exemplified with this generalized hybrid figure. If we compare the “automatic Duck” to its later sibling, Pynchon’s other iron angel, the V2 missile, there is something to be said about Pynchon’s tone or humor: in contrast to his earlier works, Mason &
Dixon seems to adopt not so much an apocalyptic, but a melancholic stance. This means that it emphasizes irredeemable losses over imminent dangers.
With these preliminaries in mind, we will proceed in three steps.
First we want to briefly recount the historical as well as literary sources of Pynchon’s “automatic Duck.” We will then glance at the numerous other figures of the super-animal but non-human throughout Mason & Dixon that indeed contains a complete typology of creatures
2 That this is a rather obvious connection may be proven by the following remark during the conversation in which the duck appears for the first time: “’Twas his own Hubris,– the old Philosopher’s story, we all know, meddl’d where he shouldn’t have, till laws of the Unforeseen engag’d,– now the Duck is a Fugitive, flying where it wishes” (373).
“The Realm of Velocity and Spleen” 131 beyond nature: speaking animals, experimental hybrids that mismatch organism and machine, and an undead population which originates in a surreal conglomeration of witchcraft, totemism and animism. In a third step, we will try to “read the duck,” and ask whether this particular mechanical creature, this hybrid figure, can be read as a figure, a trope of hybrid life, or rather of hybridity itself.3
I
The idea of artificial life is one of the oldest dreams of humanity. In Greek myth, man himself is said to be constructed in a Promethean act of creation out of the non-organic. But this dream found its poignant fulfilment only with the rapid advancement of the mechanical sciences and the new realms of technological construction in the modern age.4 In the middle of the eighteenth century, the automaton epitomized the complex art of engineered imitations of life. The 1774 “Writer” by Swiss inventor Pierre Jacquet-Drosz and Baron von Kempelen’s famous and fake “Chess Player” from 1769 can figure as prominent examples. But the masterpieces of this genre between science, mechanics and stunning entertainment obviously were the artificial creatures of Jacques de Vaucanson, who lived from 1709 to 1782.5 His
“Flute Player” was presented in 1738; in the following year he finished his “Tambourine Player” and his famous artificial duck. The latter in particular won the praise of scientific experts and the Parisian
3 For good reasons, much of the secondary literature on Pynchon has focused on the issues of technology and the technological conditions of modern humanity.
The prominence of the figure of the “cyborg” is plausible for much of Pynchon’s work (especially for V.); cf. Brian McHale’s paradigmatic survey and analysis in Postmodernist Fiction. We take the term hybrid to designate the more comprehensive category which also includes the less complex (and non-biomechanical) automata of the period in view in Mason & Dixon, as well as hybridized existences in general.
4 For an overview see Jean-Claude Beaune 431–80.
5 Cf. the entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Scientists. Ed. Trevor Williams.
public alike, among them Voltaire and La Mettrie.6 Vaucanson and his duck even made a lengthy entry in the first volume of Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie under the heading “automate.” Its stunning features allegedly included a nearly perfect imitation of animal motion, swimming, cackling, eating, drinking, digesting, and defecating. Several mechanical models and illustrations of this duck exist in collections and museums all over the world; probably not all of them are authentic. The mechanical delicacy and fascination of this defecating machine was only surpassed by the intellectual finesse of this Faustian-Promethean project: to redouble an element of the animated world, to mirror natural physiologies and physiognomies by perfect human construction.
The most prominent literary genre imagining automata and artificial life dates from the various strands of Romanticism. We want here to recall those examples which seem most relevant in respect to Mason & Dixon, all of which stage the breakdown of constructive reason. In Pynchon’s novel, several emotional interferences occur with the strictly scientific experiment and the strictly rational construction of automatic life.
One of the most distinctive portrayals of such a conflict between the sentimental and the experimental side of the artificially animated is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, from 1818. Her novel depicts the effects of desire and despair on the self-sufficient but servile instrument itself. Contradictory composite of bodily replication and unique consciousness, the man-made creature becomes tragically aware of its isolated originality: man’s duplicate turns into a compulsive being. The monster is bound to project its all-too-human longings against its inventor, who fails to reconcile his creature with its autonomous desires.
Mary Shelley asks a crucial question about the reach of human responsibility (in which she sides with the monster). She concludes that humans do not only mutilate the harmonic features of natural or divine creation when they construct illegitimate representations of themselves, but inevitably destroy the equilibrium of creation and control over the product. This is the essence of the monster’s famous
6 Cf. Mazlish.
“The Realm of Velocity and Spleen” 133 warning: “You are my creator, but I am your master; – obey!” (167).7 And its spell is irreversible; the imminence and the urgency of the monster’s threat make it impossible for both, man and his creature, to return to a state of innocence. In Frankenstein, the hideous face of the monster is only a faint reflection of the monstrosity of human zeal.
E. T. A. Hoffmann elucidates a complementary perspective on this confusion. His Sandman, first published in 1816, tells of the ambiguous human fascination with the simulacrum. The chronicle of young Nathanael’s falling in love with the machine Olimpia, a puppet that can dance and play the piano, describes his successive involve-ment with the human pretension of the automaton. Unexpectedly, his fully-blossomed feelings even survive the moment when Olimpia’s artificial nature is revealed. But in a modern world, such a persistent fascination must remain a dangerous fantasy: as it can’t be reduced to reason, Nathanael’s irrational affair, or rather affair with irrationality, entails madness and, finally, suicide.8
Whereas, in Hoffmann’s story, powerful reverberations of magic and spells advocate the inexplicable, and thus express an implicit critique of reason, Edgar Allan Poe’s criminalistic essay Maelzel’s Chess-Player from 1836 aspires to disenchant a slightly different fascination with the actual artificial creatures. His detailed portrayal of the machine must hence present pieces of evidence which serve a distinct purpose: in attacking the illusionistic principle of man-shaped automata, he tackles a modern type of superstition, a naïve trust in the miracle-like possibilities of technology. In proving that the automaton
7 Compare Pynchon’s comments on Frankenstein in “Is it O.K. To Be a Luddite?” It is worth noting that for Pynchon, Shelley’s novel belongs to a tradition that points out the limits and effects of technology – the opposite could be put forward, which is to say, as he does, that the intent of mystifying technological invention is “to deny the machine” (40).
8 As is well known, the “official” psychonanalytic account of Hoffmann’s Sandman can be found in Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” For Freud, the motif of the automaton touches on the issues of infantile fears, castration fear, narcicissm, and projection. Freud also relates the fear of automata to the child’s (repressed) desire to treat its Puppen, its toys or dolls, as living beings. Does not even the mighty duck still display traits of a toy duck (cf. Mason & Dixon 449, 667)?
is not self-sufficient, but in fact contains a human operator, Poe embraces the cause of man against those machines that unrightfully usurp human individuality.
In Romantic literature, the theme of man-made creatures is staged as fatally attractive, as a clandestine but severe threat to the physical, moral, spiritual, and intellectual integrity of man. All of these motifs reappear in Mason & Dixon, together with their disturbing implications. In the narrative of Vaucanson’s duck we can recognize them in different shapes and dispositions: in the broad skepticism that answers to the advent of the mechanical duck and in her subsequent mystification, or in the grotesque affection between Armand Allègre and the automaton, and in the astonishing coexistence of automaton and line crew. And the Romantic imagery of automatic life is even taken up literally in one passage of the background story in order to become ironically reversed. Aunt Euphrenia remembers that once, doing a really odd job, she was best paid for pretending to be an actual Automaton Oboe Player (669–70). Another adaptation of Romantic artificial creatures adheres more directly to its model: when Mason first encounters the fugitive Eliza Fields, he takes her for a
“Point-for-Point Representation,” (536) a simulacrum of his late wife Rebekah. His overt fascination and his desire to get involved with this bodily imitation dies away in a slow and painful process. He needs to be forced into acknowledging that Eliza Fields is an actual human being whose individuality he must respect; he needs to be forced into recognizing that she is no suitable object for his fetishistic pursuits.9
But the overall twist Pynchon gives to this literary tradition is crucial: he implants these Romantic motifs in the setting of the earlier Age of Reason which has not yet fully disposed of magic, super-stition, and cosmological speculation. Possibly, this incongruence manipulates the horizon of the artificial: the premature appearance of hybrid creatures might affect the tragic dimension of their existence, whose unhappy impossibility is always measured against the routines
9 The character of Eliza Fields never fully rids herself of connections to the automatic sphere. Her friend Zsuzsa, with whom she plans some obscure career as “Adventuress,” runs a genuine mechanical puppet theater which represents the battle of Leuthen.
“The Realm of Velocity and Spleen” 135 of reason. In Mason & Dixon, they have been transposed to an age that still has to defend the seeds of reason against powerful intrusions of genuine myth and supernatural forces. This could mean that reason has not yet come to recognize its own products as its own possible enemies.
II
Before we turn to the narrative of the “mechanickal Duck” itself, let us have a short look at Mason & Dixon’s gloomy world of not-quite real creatures, animals and simulacra. Our list is by no means complete.
We can only suggest rather than prove that there is a fully fledged topology or ontology of living beings between nature and artefact, between reality and imagination: there are talking clocks and an animated ear (121, 175); we encounter the Learnèd English Dog, a preacher of human knowledge and morality who is reminiscent of a La Fontainean fable but has been relegated in person to the unprofitable public house entertainment circuit (18). And, there is a further “rational” exponent of human inventiveness, this time the harmless by-product of a mad professor’s dream, namely, Felípe, the wired electric eel, who bears his bizarre destiny as an electric cigar-lighter with the well-rehearsed indifference of an experienced extra in a cheap magician’s show (426).
Among the more enigmatic hauntings that visit the line are a Glowing Indian (496), and an American Golem who has found (together with his exiled creators) a new diaspora in the Pennsylvanian woods (485). The burlesque werebeaver Zepho originates in another spill-over of European occultism to the New World (618). As a persiflage of the Beast rather than the unleashed American Werewolf, he is even welcome to participate in a common sense contest: who will be more efficient in clearing Mason and Dixon’s vista from trees and trunks? A Swedish axman? Or the large-teethed creature of the moonlit night? An impressive scene: a surprising moon eclipse sweeps this episode into a ridiculous row over celestial foul play. There is also
Eliza Fields who could be a Wiedergänger, a double of Mason’s dear wife Rebekah (511). There is Captain Zhang engaged in his mimetic battle with the shadowy “Wolf of Jesus” so that, in the end, they cannot be told apart (142).
In short, cases of hybrid identity abound. There are animals that transcend animality either in intelligence or capabilities. There are humans whose humanity is called into question by strange transformations. There are cases of dubious personal identity: tricks and ruses of self-sameness seem to be played. Finally, no-one can distinguish between the original and the simulacrum. It is common to all these creatures that they belong to different worlds and different orders of existence at the same time. A chasm runs through them all, and it cannot be remedied by any reliable or universal ontology. And it is common to all of them that they touch on the border of the human. Animals with human traits or animalic humans, inspired machines and serialized humans: they all blur the clear-cut line between the human and its inferior or superior neighbors in the technologically extendable Chain of Being.
After a quick appearance as the haunting “it” in chapter 36, Armand Allègre introduces the duck in the subsequent chapter as the exclusive topic of just another sub-story. We learn that the duck was planned by Vaucanson as a perfect imitation. After he succeeded in giving it the ability to digest and defecate he went on to work on an erotic capacity, in order to “make All authentic” (372). At this point, his ambitious endeavor is subverted by a grotesque accident: an unforeseen revolt of representation is taking place. It doesn’t just affect the machinery, but the concept of artificial life itself. It shakes off its materiality in order to give birth to an impossibly abstract consciousness which, in Mason & Dixon, is at first consistent with the tragic canon of hybrid life. Armand muses: “That final superaddition of erotick Machinery may have nudg’d the Duck across some Threshold of self-Intricacy, setting off this Explosion of Change, from Inertia towards Independence, and Power” (373).
“The Realm of Velocity and Spleen” 137 A modern nightmare: the apparatus becomes reasonable, superior to humans, and gendered.10 In a typical Frankensteinian reflex the duck turns to Allègre to ask him for intermediation in the service of Love: she demands to meet her so-called “Fatal Other,” Vaucanson’s duplicate of the prototype, of herself (376). Of course, Allègre fails to do his duty, and must suffer the duck’s constant caring supervision that turns into a dangerous but nevertheless ambivalent love affair.
Soon, the Frenchman escapes from his obsessive and jealous admirer into an unfriendly exile, however without success. His only chance to return to ordinary life is neither his eluding the omnipotent robot’s affection, nor a satisfaction of the automaton’s strange desires. It is the ongoing process of the duck’s “’Morphosis” instead (374). As her technical abilities increase and her consciousness matures, she develops a tolerance unprecedented in the automatic sphere and finally lets go unharmed her human creators. So, when Armand has an affair with Luise, the duck takes only voyeuristic part in it. The duck’s biography of change presumably ends in her complete denatural-ization and the extinction of her worldly desires. It ends in her self-definition as a satellite avant la lettre, a planet, or even an abstract physical (and metaphysical) point that first rotates around the earth and then leaves the space and time of the novel.
III
Several effects of the line, we might even say of linearity, announce the duck’s disappearance. She gets tricked by the company to hover exactly over Mason and Dixon’s line according to that strange law of animal psychology that says: “Right Lines cause Narcolepsy in all Fowl” (666). But the duck redresses her being fixed to a single point.
Without any effort, she substitutes the system which coordinates her
Without any effort, she substitutes the system which coordinates her