Mason & Dixon & the ampersand

The relationship between Mason and Dixon is important because they connect across their difference. Just as their differences make for the texture of their bickering and, in the end, their friendship, so the division, rather than deserving only condemnation, is valued positively for making the connection possible. For the novel as a whole, then, lines are not simply to be condemned. They make possible many things, including the existence of connections across them.

Without lines, we would have a world without difference. And in some ways we are moving closer to such a world all the time. Louis Menand sees Mason & Dixon as a novel about colonialism and an adaptation of Pynchon's favorite multidisciplinary metaphor, entropy. He calls the novel an American Tristes Tropiques because Pynchon seems to be practicing an anthropology like that of Levi-Strauss, which Menand says might as well be called "entropology" because it sees history as the process of increasing homogenization through contact (24). Homogenization--a world without lines--is not for Pynchon a victory over division but a defeat of energy, of motion, of change. It is also, in the process by which it occurs, a victory for cruelty.

Seeing the American frontier as Britannia's dream, as the place where it seemed that the impossible might be possible, Pynchon explores the simultaneous opening up and shutting down of possibility that America as frontier came to represent and that the Mason-Dixon line symbolizes. As they travel westward, Mason and Dixon encounter the fantastic possibility of America beyond the New Eden of the New American Adam, the mysterious, mystical world both excluded and in a way created by the Enlightenment. As they encounter it, though, the line they blaze into the heart of this frightening and wonderful darkness brings a harmful light. Thus the moment of expansion is at the same time the moment of contraction, when that not normally seen is glimpsed and quickly domesticated. When Pynchon entertains us with tales of the impossible, and in so doing laments its loss, he might seem to be resigned to this inevitable process, as we all must be resigned to the final loss of possibility that ends the book, the deaths of its heroes. What happens in the fantastic lives of Mason and Dixon and in the fantastic life of America might seem inevitable, as might the cruelty that sometimes results from America's old binarism.

This sense of the inevitable--that people die, that cultural entropy occurs, that bad things happen to good people for no good reason--is undeniably part of Mason & Dixon. And the movement in Mason & Dixon on beyond what readers of Pynchon over the years have called paranoia or conspiracy certainly contributes to this sense of the inevitable. Rather than a grand conspiracy, there is simply history. Mason and Dixon are not pawns in some great game. Dixon does ask, "Are we being us'd, by Forces invisible?" and "Whom are we working for, Mason?" (347). But this is not a paranoid book. The Jesuits, the trading companies, Captain Zhang, Royalists, many different forces and causes and organizations try to influence history, and while there may be trends, no mysterious master plan is in evidence. As Menand writes of this sentiment in the novel, "This is just the direction human history happens to run" (25).