Mason & Dixon & the ampersand

The ampersand is an ancient Roman symbol derived from the ligature or combination into one character of the e and t in the Latin et, meaning and. In modern English usage, it continues to serve as shorthand for and. Its English name is a corruption of the words English schoolchildren used to recite at the end of the alphabet: "X, Y, Zed, and per se and." The last phrase refers to the ampersand character, which is per se (by itself) the word and, and which came to be pronounced "ampersand." Modern typefaces have variations on the ampersand in which the original e and t have become lost. Eighteenth-century typefaces, such as William Caslon's, preserved the distinction between the two letters, linking them only at the end of the second, bottom stroke of the cursive capital E and the t. The ampersand on the cover of Mason & Dixon is Caslon's.

Pynchon's choice of this variation of the character is worth noting because of its symbolic importance to the novel. A character whose meaning is equal to and, it is not, however, and itself. It is a character that means "and" but which has a physical form and a name that can both be read to express certain ideas of and-ness. The ligature of the two letters expresses combination, connection, while the separate recognizability of the letters in the eighteenth-century version expresses the preservation of distinct identities, of difference. The name, which again literally means that the character itself means "and," conveys both by itselfness and its opposite--because the ampersand is not and itself but rather is joined to and as signifier to signified, so that when we see it we think "and." In other words, the name of the ampersand holds the same potentially paradoxical meaning as its form, namely, the simultaneous coexistence of the ideas of distinctness and unity of difference and individual identity. This meaning is paradoxical, though, only if it is assumed that such a thing is impossible.

As I have tried to show, Mason & Dixon can be read as a book about the destructive prevalence of the setting up and maintaining of binary difference in American history. But from the choices made on its cover to the story told on its pages, it is also a book about the possibility of connection, relation, simultaneity about possibility itself, about the ideas expressed in the character that dominates its cover. A good place to start examining these ideas would be this first expression of them, paying attention not just to the particulars of the character itself but also to the immediate context in which it appears, the tide, between the names of the novel's heroes.

The binary created in the title could be said to capture the geometric form of the line, since what is emphasized is the line between the two names, the distinction between the characters. But by using the ampersand rather than the word and, Pynchon expresses something else: the connection between these two distinct characters, just like that between the e and t from which the ampersand derives. The differences between the two men are clear from the start. Mason is a top-flight astronomer from the south of England, a deistic Anglican. Dixon is a surveyor, a Geordie, a Quaker. Temperamentally, they are also quite different: one attuned to mystical possibility the other a good Enlightenment rationalist; one reserved, one loud and convivial; one a wine man, the other fonder of beer. However, as many reviewers noted, these differences do not drive them apart. Joined by circumstance, they become an instance of "the classic comedy team of straight man and flake" (Boyle), and the novel becomes "a buddy story" (Menan d 24) "like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses ... one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature" (Leonard 68).