Most Popular White Papers
Content provided in partnership with
Mason & Dixon & the ampersand
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2002 by Sammy Cahn
Michael Wood interprets the tension in the novel between indicative and subjunctive in this way: Pynchon is suggesting that what we "miss is not a mystical revelation or an ancient wisdom, and not the grand conspiracy underlying all things, but a sense of 'Human Incompletion'" (129). This incompletion, he argues, is what we need to remember if we wish to avoid the errors and cruelties of American history, the ways of dealing with division that have led to so much that is regrettable in our past. Perhaps we need to remember that there are things we don't know, that what lies on the other side of the line is not inherently worse than what is on our side, that we ought to see America always as frontier, in its most hopeful sense. America as frontier does not have to be the America that acts as if everything is new, and that what is previously established--ideas, communities-does not matter. America as frontier can simply be America as possibility. What America remembers, when it remembers that it is unfinished, is possibility; what it forgets, when it forgets to see its past and present as continuous and ongoing, is that whatever is, is not inevitable, that the world may not be all that is the case.
This sense of incompletion, of unfinishedness, can keep us open to possibility, a way of thinking represented in Mason & Dixon by the imagined world inside the earth. As one resident says:
And wherever you may stand, given the Convexity, each of you is slightly pointed away from everybody else.... Here in the Earth Concave, everyone is pointed at everyone else,--ev'rybody's axes converge,--forc'd at least thus to acknowledge one another,--an entirely different set of rules for how to behave. (741)
This is also a set of rules for how to think, a way of seeing the world not just in terms of possibility but also in terms of relatedness. If each of us on the Earth Convex, in this Terra Concavan's terms, stands on the outside of an outwardly curving earth and so points slightly away from each other, then we can ignore each other and act accordingly; those on the inside of the inwardly curving Earth Concave are forced to act with others in mind. The former way of thinking and acting is presented in the novel as Mason and Dixon's: the line they draw ignores its effects on the lives they draw it through. By extension, it is an American way of being, an Enlightenment way of being, a Western way of being. The Earth Concave's alternative is thus presented not only as an alternative to American exceptionalism. Acknowledgment of the crossing of lines that is the world's reality, of the world's ampersandic actuality, is wanting everywhere. This acknowledgment is not an unfinished task only for America.
