Mason & Dixon & the ampersand

The structure of the novel, then, makes possible a way of thinking about America that crosses the lines between eras, making American history a single connected story. It also makes possible a way of thinking about history itself, about its connections and cycles. The picture of history we see in Mason & Dixon, like the relation of all the pasts and presents in the line of the novel, is not linear, nor is it progressive. The literary-historical argument implicit in Pynchon's use of forms from the eighteenth-century novel is that the road the novel takes through literary history is not one of progressive innovation but of recycings, repetitions, adaptations. It is itself ampersandic. The larger historical argument implicit in Pynchon's use of forms is the same. While it seems not to accept the traditional, Enlightenment, progessivist model of history, Mason & Dixon does not draw a downward line either. It does not tell a story of descent or degradation. The story this novel tells is one of repetition, of repea ted moments of potential change, of utopian promise, followed by failures to fully realize that promise. Each of these moments is at bottom about changing the ways in which America wants to deal with the lines it has drawn down the middle of itself and around itself, about the promise of constructing difference less divisively. And each of these subsequent failures of possibility--of these moments when the subjunctive is reduced to the indicative--is about the failure to remain open to alternatives, particularly to the alternative of connection.

As Tony Tanner notes, Mason and Dixon's 1760s, the important moments in the Trystero's history in The Crying of Lot 49, and the moment in the German Zone in Gravity's Rainbow can all be seen as "explosions of change" (American Mystery 235). (4) All are times when much seemed possible, when barriers were down, boundaries fluid. The American 1860s and 1960s were also explosions of change. Mason & Dixon's interest in slavery and the Civil War is clear. And while Pynchon's concern with the issues debated in and now identified with the 1960s may not be as evident in Mason & Dixon as it is in his earlier works, it is nonetheless at the center of this novel. (5)

Mason & Dixon is the product of Pynchon's continued exploration of the drawing of lines, an exploration apparently motivated in large part by the hopes raised and disappointed by the 1960s. It asks us to see the persistence of this American way of thinking by linking the 1760s, 1860s, and 1960s. What Mason & Dixon does not ask us to see, I am arguing, is its inevitability. Unlike Pynchon's earlier works, it accepts neither paranoia nor hopelessness nor unknowability. It does not accept the failure of the 60s to fully realize its utopian visions. Lines will always be erased and drawn again, but the way America deals with them has changed many times, and can continue to do so. It changes when America remembers that history, its history in particular, is not finished. Mason & Dixon is the first novel in which Pynchon can look back historically on the decade that raised so many of the issues at the center of his work: the Cold War has ended, the century's end approaches, and the 60s appears as the decade at the chronological and ideological center of the Cold War era in a way it could not have appeared at the time he wrote Vineland. In retrospect, the 60s have stood as a kind of running historical Rorschach test, with successive decades and different political orientations rereading the 60s according to their needs. (6) The retrospective stance on the 60s and on American history as a whole in Mason & Dixon is not nostalgic, as in Vineland, nor merely allusive. This novel is a reminder, in a post--Cold War America grown complacent in its ostensible victory, that history is not over. In the face of the triumphalist 1990s--characterized by announcements of the end of ideological contest made by Francis Fukuyama and others, nostalgic World War II anniversary celebrations, and the end not just of a century but also of a millennium--Mason & Dixon insists that history continues, that no telos has been reached, no real war won. (7) As America in the 90s experienced a national retrospective mood, (8) Pynchon's novel insisted that the past is still tied to the future, and utopias imagined and grasped for in the past can still be imagined and grasped for.