Mason & Dixon & the ampersand

But Pynchon's paranoia has not been replaced by an equally unknowable, unalterable historical inevitability. In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon presents a different sense of history. The old search for the conspirators in Pynchon's work is here, at bottom, explicitly what it was sometimes only implicitly in its earlier incarnations: a search for the answer to the question of the impossible. As is made clear in V., when Weissman deciphers an atmospheric message spelling out Wittgenstein's proposition, "the world is all that is the case," Pynchon is concerned with how we know, with the implications of whether we accept only what we see or are open to more. All the searches for transcendent patterns or forces or impossible things in Pynchon's work ask if indeed the world is all that is the case. This question is asked in Gravity's Rainbow--where Roger Mexico sees no transcendent meaning, while Slothrop is open to anything. becomes Rocketman, and eventually fragments into many possibilities--and in The Crying of Lot 49, w here Qedipa Maas must decide whether or not, beneath the surface of everyday life, there lives a great conspiracy. In the end the questions go unanswered: The Crying of Lot 49 ends as the title event, which should reveal all to Oedipa, is about to happen. We cannot know if the world is all that is the case. The implication of this argument, which Pynchon seizes on in Mason & Dixon, is that we also cannot rule out other possibilities. And if we cannot rule out other possibilities, we cannot rule out different historical outcomes. Pynchon insists in Mason & Dixon on the possibility that other worlds might exist in order to ask if things might have turned out differently, or might still. If this is the way history has happened to run, it does not follow that it has had to. The cruelty that fills history does not always, in every instance, have to happen. Those who try to stop it--as Dixon does when he challenges the slave driver--are not fools. They are simply open to the possibility of what might seem historica lly impossible. (3)

This is openness not just to difference--to recognizing both the existence of difference and also the possibility of connecting across it--but also to a history that could have turned out differently and can still. Seeing this kind of history in Mason & Dixon requires seeing not just the line but what the line makes possible, seeing not just an anatomy of loss but also a celebration of continued possibility.

The course of history runs, in Mason & Dixon, up to a present that is multiple. There is the present of the novel's frame, that is, the 1786 from which Cherrycoke looks back and thinks about the lost promise of prerevolution America. There is also Pynchon's present, about 200 years later, the implicit frame around Cherrycoke's frame, which is all that has happened since. Thus the retrospective takes on a wider focus, including the Civil War and the postbellum years as well as the turmoil of the 1960s and the years between that turmoil and the time of the novel's publication. All of America's past between then and now, from Lancaster to Gettysburg to Kent State to Oliver North, is part of the story.