Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon: A Deleuzian Crystal-Image, Embodying the Bergsonian Durée

Introduction: Thomas Pynchon have instinctively embraced cinematic techniques and images and have incorporated them into their own literary landmarks. This connection with cinema is palpable in his Mason & Dixon (1997) since it boasts of a filmic nature as well as diverse filmmaking techniques. Regarding this issue, the present article will demonstrate that this novel is a Deleuzian crystal-image, embodying the Bergsonian durée. To fulfill my quest, I will explore the liquefied nature of the novel and its brimming with water, the blurring of history and tale, as well as the folding of free indirect discourse upon its entire body, features which have made Pynchon's filmic venture crystallized.
Background of the Study: In an essay included in The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (2005) and entitled “Introduction: The Times of Mason & Dixon,” Elizabeth Hinds argues that Pynchon’s novel is concerned with the correction of time and that it expresses its awareness of the difference between pre-modern and scientific views of time. According to Hinds, in this novel, the same number of identical Seconds is opposed to labyrinthine time that is equivalent to Henri Bergson’s time as durée, directly shown in time-image films after the Second World War. Pynchon and Relativity: Narrative Time in Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novels (2012) by Simon De Bourcier is another work devoted to the concept of time in Mason & Dixon. De Bourcier’s study is in a sense, a time-machine because it does not address Pynchon’s novels in a chronological order. Its quest launches with his Against the Day (2006) and then travels back in time to Mason & Dixon. This involves, also, a journey in time from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the setting of Against the Day, to the eighteenth century.
Methodology: This study seeks to examine the concepts of crystal-image and durée in Mason & Dixon and Deleuze’s milestones Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985) will extensively be used to provide an in-depth analysis of Pynchon’s filmic novel. Cinema 1 introduces the concepts of the movement-image regime which according to Deleuze, dominated cinematic expression before the Second World War and subordinated action to what happens next or what must be found out. According to him, the post-WWII movies became crystal-images that resist the movement-image measures and their organic unity. In this book, he explores crystal and the power of the false (rather than the power of the true) through analyzing the cinema of the Italian neorealist filmmakers such as Federico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini as well as the Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu. Using extensively these two books, the present article will explore the concepts of crystal-image and the Bergsonian durée in Mason & Dixon.
Conclusion: In Mason & Dixon, as a liquefied crystal, water, in diverse forms, acts as a crystal and renders the entire novel become the zone of indiscernibility. Furthermore, the blurring of history and fiction has enveloped the whole text, as a giant crystal. Parallel to time-image landmarks such as Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour, in this novel, there exists no linear history of progress, because history and fiction, past and present, and true and false have already entered the state of crystal. Mason & Dixon, is, also, an ideal manifestation of free indirect discourse, a literary and a cinematic technique. This literary project is a giant flashback and is, also, brimmed with stream of consciousness, two techniques that, according to Mohammad Ghaffary, create free indirect discourse, which in turn, makes the whole novel crystallize.