“Nose-gaping: The Smells of Mason & Dixon”

This article examines Pynchon’s evocations of smell in Mason & Dixon as a vehicle for critiquing notions of the rational subject and the bounded text. The nose is posed as a carnivalesque counterpart to the eye, the sense organ most readily associated with empiricism. The directional gaze, crucial to the eponymous characters’ work as astronomer and surveyor, often gives way to enveloping odors, producing an embodiment inimical to Enlightenment. Anthropologist David Howes has argued that smell is most vividly experienced in liminal spaces or at cognitive thresholds. I draw on his work to illuminate Pynchon’s association of smells with the dissolution of distinctions between abstract categories like civilization/wilderness, mind/body, past/present, and text/reader. I argue that this novel about the delineation of a boundary is primarily concerned with interpretive indeterminacy, figured and produced through textual smells.

This article examines Pynchon's evocations of smell in Mason & Dixon as a vehicle for critiquing notions of the rational subject and the bounded text. The nose is posed as a carnivalesque counterpart to the eye, the sense organ most readily associated with empiricism. The directional gaze, crucial to the eponymous characters' work as astronomer and surveyor, often gives way to enveloping odors, producing an embodiment inimical to Enlightenment. Anthropologist David Howes has argued that smell is most vividly experienced in liminal spaces or at cognitive thresholds. I draw on his work to illuminate Pynchon's association of smells with the dissolution of distinctions between abstract categories like civilization/wilderness, mind/body, past/present, and text/reader. I argue that this novel about the delineation of a boundary is primarily concerned with interpretive indeterminacy, figured and produced through textual smells. There is no preliminary description of the astronomers' search for the grove, or of their first sight of it. Instead, the reader simply finds them standing there, nosegaping. These optically-oriented scientists are enveloped by the scent rather than gazing at the grove. Of course, the term "to gape at" involves an astonished stare, but here the gaze is oddly displaced onto the nose. The nose is normally considered a passive receptor of sensory information, unlike the eye, which is generally thought of as actively observing. The ocular gaze is unidirectional and intentional -as is exemplified by the "Visto" that progressively appears as the Line is cleared -while olfaction is omnidirectional and involuntary. Thus, when Mason and Maskelyne are overwhelmed nasally rather than visually, they are positioned as being at the whim of their environment, not expressing mastery over it. In the moment in which we find them standing in awe of the orange grove, they are fully embodied, their powers of abstraction temporarily halted.
Phillips: Nose-gaping 3 As men of science, Mason and Dixon participate in the ideal of the Enlightenment subject, by default a male who possesses the rational self-restraint to focus his energies on intellectual pursuits. This ideal is inevitably posed in contradistinction to supposedly feminine passivity, capriciousness, and susceptibility to biological vicissitudes. 1 Pynchon's presentation of the nose as both protruding instrument of observation and concave site of ingestion raises simultaneously phallic and yonic connotations, disrupting these gender binaries. On the one hand, he regularly figures the nose as scientific apparatus, or vice versa. For example, Dixon protests strongly against lending out his Circumferentor, exclaiming, "'Twould be like letting someone else do my Smelling for me…?" (472). Conversely, astronomical instruments are repeatedly described as having "snouts" (98,146,209,446,492,648) and the many astronomers observing the Transit are described as "those attending Snouts Earth-wide" (97).
Often, though, the nose is vulnerable to penetration, as when Mason, "The Victim of a Cheese malevolent," is run over by the giant "Octuple Gloucester" and ends up with his nostrils full of grass (170, italics in original), or when Benjamin Franklin places a Y-shaped apparatus up Dixon's nose for the purpose of electrocuting him (764). 2 By troubling the gendered associations of the nose, Pynchon disrupts the notion of a disembodied, abstractly observing, necessarily male subject.
In perhaps the most memorable instance of nasal effrontery in this work, the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke describes the experience of spotted dick being forced up his nose during a maritime equator-crossing ceremony, to which Uncle Lomax adds, "And if it goes far enough up your nose… Well. Then it's in your Brain, isn't it?" (57, italics in original). This nasal grotesquerie exemplifies the transgressive power of embodiment identified by Mikhail Bakhtin in the work of Rabelais: "The grotesque body," 1 On European conceptions of gender and sexuality during the Enlightenment, see Hull 245-56.
2 Pynchon's treatment of the nose here is reminiscent of the famous nasal excursus in the fourth chapter of V., entitled "In Which Esther Gets a Nose Job." Esther hates her stereotypically Semitic, "figure-6 nose" and undergoes a procedure by Dr. Schoenmaker to turn it more retroussé. The surgery is presented as grotesquely comical and clearly a source of sado-masochistic pleasure for both doctor and patient, who later engage in a sexual liaison (Pynchon 1963, 95-110). It should be noted that one of the author's ancestors, Dr. Edwin Pynchon (1856-1914, was an inventor of surgical instruments and also published at least two articles on nasal operations (Winston 282).
Phillips: Nose-gaping 4 he writes, "swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world…" (317). The mouth, anus, genitals, nose, and other bodily "convexities and orifices have a common characteristic; it is within them that the confines between the body and the world are overcome: there is an interchange and an interorientation" (317). The boundaries that the grotesque body overcomes are not only between the body and the world, but between the body and the mind, as Uncle Lomax's jest suggests by positing a literal contiguity of nose and brain. As Abeer Abdel Raouf Fahim has shown, even vision is not immune to Pynchon's critique of Cartesianism: in Against the Day, "Pynchon gives a tactile quality to vision that subverts the idea that perception can be wholly disembodied" (10). If this is the case for the sense most aligned with empiricism, it must be even more so for olfaction. Addressing an embodied reader in this manner brings into question the mind/body dualism that underlies the formation of the modern subject. This is far from the only conceptual binary that Pynchon unsettles through textual smells. The orange grove is not simply a recrudescence of idyllic nature into the sterile lives of the astronomers, but a site of juxtapositions that decenter a key trope of American frontier narratives, the dichotomy between wilderness and civilization. 3 The valley in which the grove sits also contains houses, suggesting cultivation rather than wild growth, while the surrounding volcanic rocks, though described as "Peaks unnatural," are undeniably a result of natural processes. As Samuel Cohen has said of the ampersand that binds Mason and Dixon together, these interminglings of nature and civilization connote "the simultaneous coexistence of the ideas of distinctness and unity, of difference and individual identity" (278). In his study of the sensory aspects of novel-reading, Ralf Hertel likewise writes, "Olfaction […] permeates the boundaries of identities, of outside and inside in an act of incorporation" (130). Anthropologist David Howes makes a wider case in his essay "Olfaction and Transition": "smell is the liminal sense par excellence, constitutive of and at the same time operative across all of the boundaries we draw between different realms of categories of experience" (131-32). In Mason & Dixon, a book about a boundary, smells often arise in situations where boundaries are crossed or permeated or are even impossible to discern, whether those boundaries be between wilderness and civilization, between one individual and another, between the sacred and the profane, or between the past and the present.
All of these relationships are at play in the orange-grove scene. In response to witnessing this "souvenir of a Paradise decrepit", Maskelyne puts forth the theory that St. Helena had been the Eden that Saint Brendan claimed to have discovered, a claim that has been dismissed as legend by Enlightenment philosophers. "So," he proclaims, "will the Reign of Reason cheerily dispose of any allegations of Paradise." He goes on to suggest that the island has been ruined by greed (134-35). Here Maskelyne posits a two-pronged critique of the corrupt modern world: it is the transformation of St. Helena into a plantation that ruins it, and Enlightenment philosophy that denies that it had ever been a paradise in the first place. The fragrant grove is posed as a miraculous survival of a prelapsarian state amid the barren waste of an exploited island, "the visible and torn Remnant of a Sub-History unwitness'd" (162).
The grove thus partakes of what Adam Lifshey has identified as Pynchon's "subjunctive" mode of historical fiction. Lifshey argues that the drawing of the novel's eponymous border constitutes an act of imperialist narration through cartography. In other words, the inscription of the line upon the earth is the spatial corollary of the teleological mode of telling history that undergirds European colonialism. Pynchon's critique of this ideological project is expressed through "a tension between declarative and subjunctive Americas, that is, between Mason and Dixon's inscription of a rationalizing, Western European narrative of the continent on one hand and the concomitant erasure of multiple hypothetical and unmapped Americas on the other" (5). 4 For Pynchon, interpretive indeterminacy is not a purely cerebral maneuver meant to call attention to the constructedness of discourse. As George Levine has written, "no multiplication of intellectual possibilities can quite do justice to the energizing experience of sustaining uncertainty," and so for Pynchon, "language is called upon to sustain the uncertainty it Yet despite the populace supposedly becoming sheltered from the bloody transformation of animals into meat (which, as we shall see, is deeply relevant to Mason's personal olfactory imagination), the city continues to stink. Mason and Dixon find it difficult to sleep in Philadelphia due not only to ineffectively muffled "cries of Beasts from the city Shambles" but also the "Smells of wood-smoke, horses, and human sewage [that] blow in the windows, along with the noise" (292). It is clear that "Country Realities" are not so easily separated from urban existence as Corbin's reformers would have liked to believe. Smell often provides the medium through which these material signs create meaning. A prime example is the Catholic Eucharist, which Howes cites as illustrating This ambivalence is shared by many of the novel's characters. The narrator (it is often unclear at any given point whether Rev. Cherrycoke, the ostensible narrator, is actually speaking) laments the "Royal Society members and French Encyclopaedists' […] denouncing all that was once Magic, though too often in smirking tropes upon the Church of Rome,-visitations, bleeding statues, medical impossibilities" (359). In a similar manner, Mr. Edgewise criticizes his sister's membership in the Moravian Church, "little to be distinguished from that of Rome,-having, indeed, its own Carnival, its gluttony and lustfulness" (357). In both instances, the critique of Catholicism is based on a too-close relationship of Spirit with the body rather than the mind. The transubstantial Eucharist epitomizes this relationship, as it carries with it not only the actual presence of Christ's body, but also the sensual odor of incense. For rational, enlightened subjects, the senses are to be used to collect evidence, not to provoke emotion or invoke transcendence. As Mason points out, however, the new regard for the empirical veracity of the senses spills over into nonrational, spiritual realms. No matter how intentionally one may utilize one's senses, there will always be some surplus stimuli that are irreducible to data.

Phillips: Nose-gaping 10
Anti-Catholicism among Mason & Dixon's characters takes on a more sinister form in their widespread suspicion of Jesuits. This is expressed mostly in the form of conspiracy theories, which proliferate to such an extent that Dixon feels obliged to snap at Mason, "I am not a fucking Jesuit" (73). However, the order's nefarious plot does eventually reveal itself, albeit by a very strange route. Eliza Fields is looking out of her kitchen window one day when she is kidnapped by Indians (511-12 where she is to be trained as a "Widow of Christ", essentially a concubine subject to the deviant pleasures of the priests and their associates. As she enters the College, she has "the black nidor of the Torches for her first Incense" (514). Note that Eliza, presumably Protestant, is greeted into the Jesuit cabal with a smell associated with popery. The unusual word "nidor", meaning the smell of burning fat, appears only once elsewhere in the novel, in relation to Mason's horror at the smell of lambs cooking in Cape Town.
Proceeding deeper into the College, Eliza witnesses the monstrous contraption that operates the "Jesuit Telegraph" through which, according to Benjamin Franklin, "they enjoy their d-'d Marvel of instant Communication" (287, italics in original).
At the machine, Chinese attend to the rigging, and specially train'd Indian Converts tend a Peat-fire so as to raise precisely the Temperature of a great green prism of Brazilian Tourmaline, a-snarl as Medusa with plaited Copper Cabling running from it in all directions, bearing the Pyro-Electrickal Fluid by which ev'rything here is animated. More intense than the peat-smoke, the smell of Ozone prevails here, the Musk of an unfamiliar Beast, unsettling even to those who breathe it ev'ry day (516-17).
Compare this with Lord Lepton's brightly lit and odorless "Iron-Plantation", where colonists operate an industry sanitized of human sweat and mercantile Phillips: Nose-gaping 11 exchange: "All noxious smokes and gases [are] vented someplace distant, invisible" (411). This description recalls Corbin's deodorization project, about which Pynchon seems skeptical, as has been noted. Lepton's ironworks are presented as a fantasy of pure, modern efficiency: "this was how the world might be" (411).
The gruesomely violent purpose of the weapons produced there is obfuscated by the sensory alienation of the industrial process. In the Jesuit College, conversely, people and goods from all over the globe commingle amidst the "harsh, sexual smell" of ozone. In an inversion of the situation at Lepton's, here the toil is real, but the product is imaginary. Whereas Lepton's workers are described as keeping a "monastic silence" and never "moon[ing] about in states of Erection for hours at a time" (411), the technicians of the Jesuit Telegraph labor in a stifling miasma of sexualized stench.
As Eliza begins her training, she admits to her desire having been aroused by her Indian captors, for which she is punished by being forced to wear the "Las Viudas Cilice", a "Breech-clout" made of a rose. It sits "in that charming Cusp of moistness and heat, where odors of the Body and the Rose may mingle with a few drops of Blood from the tiny green Thorns, and Flashes of Pain whose true painfulness must be left for the Penitent to assess…" (520, ellipsis in original). Pynchon often presents sado-masochistic sexuality as odiferous; for instance, in the scene of Brigadier Pudding's domination in . Here, there is the added element of the fragrant Eucharist: "Later they give her soothing Gums to rub into the tiny Wounds. The odor rises as the rubbing goes on, a single churchlike odor of incense, ungrounded by candle-wax or human occupancy, meant for Heaven, a Fume rising in Transmutation…" (521, ellipsis in original). This scene of pain and pleasure, filtered through the recurrent trope of transubstantiation, again enacts embodiment through smell.
The straightforward relationship between odor and embodiment is troubled, however, by the rampant reflexivity revolving around Eliza. Her captivity narrative is revealed to be taken from a book in the Ghastly Fop series that Cherrycoke's niece Brae has discovered in her cousin Ethelmer's room during a break in the Reverend's story. Eliza eventually escapes and, perplexingly, arrives in Mason and Dixon's camp.
This transition, incidentally, is marked by the "smell of wood-smoke [being] more and more with" her as she approaches the Line (534). Normally, such a mise-en-abîme would suggest self-referentiality, but what Pynchon does here is more complex. When Eliza is abruptly introduced in Chapter 53, she is referred to in the third person.
This chapter is also headed by an epigraph from Cherrycoke's Undeliver'd Sermons in which he writes, "Doubt is of the Essence of Christ.
[…] The final pure Christ is pure uncertainty" (511). This indicates a continuation of the story that Cherrycoke has been telling, but in the previous chapter, Mason and Dixon are about to cease surveying for the winter, and when Eliza appears, it is autumn. At the beginning of Chapter 54, Eliza is telling her story in the first person. There is then a section break to reveal Ethelmer catching Brae with his book, and they begin to read together. The narrative continues in the first person for one more section, then switches back to the third, remaining in this mode through the transition back into the story of the surveyors.
The elaborate game being played in these two chapters goes beyond reflexivity.
Here it is not simply a question of establishing distanciation between text and reader by foregrounding textuality, as Pynchon does with the many references to the imaginary Jacobean drama A Courier's Tragedy in The Crying of Lot 49. Rather than establishing fictionality beyond any doubt, Eliza's ontological indeterminacy disrupts the diegetic boundaries among the Ghastly Fop universe, the Mason & Dixon universe, and the actual scene of reading. As Hertel notes, even literary texts contemporary to The Ghastly Fop, such as Tristram Shandy, "prefigure postmodernism" by utilizing textual smells to "resist traditional forms of representation and introduce an element of the irrational, the carnivalesque, and the corporeal" (131). For Hertel, reading is as much a sensory experience as a mental one: "the reader creates new perceptions from his imagination. Thus, in literature, to sense is quite literally to make sense -a creative act rather than passive perception" (9, italics in original).
The smells of Mason & Dixon prompt the reader's body to interact with the fruits of Pynchon's labor, negating the separation of author, text, and reader. The smells that surround Eliza act in the service of creating a connective tissue among these three planes, none of which is ontologically privileged. Like a smell, Pynchon's text has no Phillips: Nose-gaping 13 center and no discrete limit but is rather an indeterminate field. Rather than establishing an absolute separation between textuality and materiality, Pynchon imbues his verbal text with a sense of the contingency of concrete existence.
Not only does Pynchon's text smell, but it contains other texts that smell. The Macaroni whom Mason and Dixon encounter while snowed in for the winter is later discovered not to be a fop at all, but a revolutionary pamphleteer. As the soldiers come in to arrest him: He looks up from the fragrant Sheets, some so new that one might yet smell the Apprentices' Urine in which the Ink-Swabs were left to soften, bearing, to sensitized Nasalia, sub-Messages of youth and Longing,-all about him the word repeated in large Type, LIBERTY. (390) Again Pynchon disrupts the Age of Reason, particularly the distinction between public and private laid out in Kant's essay, "What Is Enlightenment?". Kant argues that subjects must be free to assert their opinions on religious, philosophical, and political matters in public, by which he exclusively means in print. In private, that is, in the civic and domestic realms, the individual must obey his duty. This abstract distinction between the public and private has its material reflection in the dichotomization between the text as the depository of rational thought and the body as the instrument of empirical experience. The uric odor of the fop's pamphlet irreverently refutes the separability of texts from the bodies that create them.
The same idea is expressed upon Dixon's completion of his task of charting the surveyed territory: "Mason is able to inspect the long Map, fragrant, elegantly cartouch'd with Indians and Instruments, at last. Ev'ry place they ran it, ev'ry House pass'd by, Road cross'd, the Ridge-lines and Creeks, Forests and Glades, Water ev'rywhere, and the Dragon nearly visible" (689). This fragrant map is not merely the pictorial representation of the boundary line, it is the record of a portion of Mason's and Dixon's lives and of their relationship to each other. On seeing it, Mason responds: "So,-so. This is the Line as all shall see it after its Copper-Plate 'Morphosis,-and all History remember? This is what ye expect me to sign off on?" (689). Mason's reluctance to let go of the map is analogous to his uneasy relationship with the Eucharist in that he cannot concede that the trials that a body experiences could be faithfully reproduced in an abstract form. He knows that reproductions of the map will not smell the same as this one.
Pynchon's poetic use of smell, filtered through Cherrycoke's theology of pure uncertainty, is an attempt to evoke this notion of unique sensory experience, of "Sub-History unwitness'd". Smell is ineffable yet corporeal, mysterious yet utterly real. When smells enter a text, they also elude it. They are ultimately intangible, temporary, and personal. Near the end of the expedition, Cherrycoke has the "[f] irst dream [he] had that ever smell'd of anything," in which he is flying above the Visto, observing the camp below. Recounting this dream, he thinks of the end of the Line, whose distance has been estimated but not yet "recorded as Fact" and will not be until they reach it. He writes, "[M]ay it remain, a-shimmer, among the few final Pages of its Life as Fiction" (649-50). This indeterminacy, this unknowability, is also expressed in relation to smell, the most transitory of the senses and one that cannot be recorded. For Pynchon, the certainty of data is also the destruction of possibility.
Smells, as irreducible to data, are a figure for the indeterminacy produced in the material scene of reading.