Mason & Dixon & the ampersand

The relationship between these two is one element of Mason & Dixon that makes it new in Pynchon's corpus. It is generally accepted that V., The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland (1984) are not marked by the creation of and attention to filly rounded characters. As one review of Gravity's Rainbow put it, "Pynchon doesn't create characters so much as mechanical men to whom a manic comic impulse or vague free-floating anguish can attach itself, often in brilliant streams of consciousness" (Locke 12).This reviewer finds the absence of more typically novelistic characters appropriate to the worlds their author creates in his fiction, worlds in which only mechanical men have a place: "In Pynchon's world there is almost no trust, no human nurture, no mutual support, no family life" (12). This characterization of Pynchon's fictional worlds is also generally accepted: though there is much humor in the novels, and much attention to the prevalence of human indecency and unkindness, there is not mu ch warmth. Though some demur, Pynchon's work up until Mason & Dixon has been largely seen as relatively cold; in its attention to large ideas, national and international histories of ideas and systems, and in its painting pictures of the world as a place riven by conspiracy or suspicions thereof, his work has had neither the time nor the inclination to present round, sympathetic, engaging characters. (2)

Mason & Dixon has been widely seen to have a warmth lacking in these earlier works, and this perception is due in large part to the way Pynchon draws these two men, separately and together. The stories of their lives before and after their partnership create sympathy for them as individuals, and their story together--stumbling across America, completing a task whose meaning dawns slowly upon them, and supporting each other as it does--creates sympathy for them as a pair. As Michael Wood writes, we see them

arguing, Anglican against Quaker, mystic against rationalist, and finally discovering that their need and respect for each other, in spite of the frequent acidity of their exchanges and their constant mutual fending off of real intimacies, the drawing of a sort of line between Mason and Dixon, add up to a form of passion, indeed the central passion and care of their lives. (124)

The line between them, the binary expectation set up by the juxtaposition of their names and the difference in their characters, becomes instead a connection, a relationship between two men who still remain distinct.

The possibility of connection across difference, illustrated in the relationship between these two men, is an important subject of Mason & Dixon. It is a possibility that applies not just to the main characters but also to America, not just to the line drawn between these two people or any two people but also to the lines drawn between kinds of people, between aspects of experience, between times and places and ideas, between what is and what might be. What Pynchon sees in the relationship between Mason and Dixon, he sees in American history, and what he sees in American history he sees in the American present: not just the age-old fact of division but also the possibility of something else.