Section One

 Latitudes and Departures

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I suspect this chapter will be full of the boys departing for different latitudes! One of the latitudes they need to depart for is in South Africa to view the transit of Venus. Then they'll have to depart for a different latitude to go see a guy about a clock. Then they'll need to depart for another latitude which might be England or it might be America. I don't remember where they go after that!

"Latitude"
This also means "scope for freedom or action of thought." I think Dixon has more latitude than Mason because Mason is a big emo baby boy. Dixon is a happy Quaker who joyfully breaks Quaker rules when whimsy takes him, like wearing a big red coat or guzzling as much beer as possible. Mason just sits in the corner drinking sour wine and becoming a vampire.

"Departures"
Not only does "departure" mean leaving on a journey but it's the nautical term for the east-west distance between two points of a voyage. I don't know if that provides any insight into the subtext of the story but I thought I would point it out just in case.

The Dedication

 For Melanie,
and for Jackson

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Melanie is Pynchon's wife and Jackson is Pynchon's son. Apparently he wrote the book for them. Although if he'd never met Melania and Jackson was never born, I'm certain he would have written this book anyway. He probably figured he would have to dedicate a book to them at some point so why not dedicate this one about boundaries. The subtext is that they're the part of his life before the title page; everything past that point has nothing to do with them so stop trying to read into the occasional character who gets a boner because three young and horny daughters constantly fight to sit on his lap or how that other character falls in love with the daughter of the woman he's sleeping with or how that one character's name is Oedipa Maas which obviously means "I want to have sex with my mother, like, a lot!"

Anyway, this book is about borders and the dedication comes before the title page so I don't think it actually has anything to do with the book at all and I probably should have ignored it completely.

The Title

 Mason & Dixon

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That's the title! Not much to analyze, is there? It's just the goofy names of two old dead guys. If you were a person unfamiliar with Thomas Pynchon, you might pick up this book thinking it was going to be a historical biography. At worst, you might think it's historical fiction about the two, maybe even an imaginary romance. But if you're familiar with Pynchon, you know this book is going to have a ton of information about Mason and Dixon and how they did the things they did and where they traveled during the exact years they actually traveled there while also dropping some heavy scientific and historical knowledge on you. But you also know it'll be wrapped up in mythical beasts and paranoid conspiracies and throbbing boners and singing & dancing animals and dream-like hallucinations that may or may not be linear parts of the plot.

But those are things the author's name suggests! The title, Mason & Dixon, suggests, first and foremost, boundaries. After that, you might consider what the Mason-Dixon line was most famous for and that was separating the free Northern United States and the slave-owning Southern bastards. So now the title almost instantly suggests the divide between the races as well.

But mostly it suggests borders which means I should probably bone up on the definition of "liminal." I should do that anyway so that I stop using it incorrectly because I love using it but I don't really know when I should use it. There's probably something liminal with my understanding of it, right? No? Maybe?!

Charles Mason was an astronomer and Jeremiah Dixon was a surveyor (and also amateur astronomer). That's about all the research I want to do on them because I don't want to spoil the book! I mean, I've read it before but it's been over 20 years!