Chapter 5: 42-46
Contents
Page 42
Him so strange...All that Coal-mining, I guess
actually they are referring to the Devil. The joke is that Mason is referring to God and Dixon thinks he means the Devil.
Page 43
Raby Meeting
Most likely referring to a meeting in Raby Castle.
Page 45
As if...there were no single Destiny
This paragraph echoes a common them in Pynchon's work, the collapsing of many possible realities into a single Reality through time, a concept that is also echoed in quantum mechanics with the collapse of the wave function, where a haze of possibilities is collapsed into a single state when observed. Or alternatively, as the "many-worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics would have it, perhaps there isn't a collapse into one single reality, but each possiblity continues to form a thread in an infinity of realized outcomes.
This theme is revisited numerous times in M & D, with reality either collapsing or diverging:
- "the event not yet 'reduc'd to certainty' (p. 177)
- "Transition between Two Worlds" (p. 180)
- "Or let us postulate two Dixons, then, one in an unmoving Stupor throughout,— the other, for Simplicity, assum'd to've ridden [...] out to Nelson's Ferry" (p. 393)
- "I myself did stumble [...] into that very Whirlpool in Time,— finding myself in September third, 1752 [...] as ev'ryone else mov'd on to the Fourteenth of September." (p. 556)
- "Suppose that Mason and Dixon and their Line cross Ohio after all..." (p. 706)
On page 258, Pynchon uses the nautical term "single up all lines" in what could be interpreted as a metaphor for the reduction of many lines into a single line. "Single up all lines" also appears in V., p.11; The Crying of Lot 49, p.31; Gravity's Rainbow, p.489; and Mason & Dixon, pp.258 and 260; and Against the Day where Pynchon deploys the term as both a positive ("Cheerily now [...] Prepare to cast her off!") and a negative (cattle "rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing-floor"). (p. 10)
