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Mason & Dixon & the ampersand
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2002 by Sammy Cahn
Just as the unending road of Mason & Dixon's picaresque form lends a sense of unfinishedness, so too do its other borrowings from the past. The novel's intentionally anachronistic references and language are crucial to its sense of history not as simply unfinished but also as recrossing itself, as cycling back and crossing over its own past like the line of our contemporary ampersand. This sense of history can be seen in two of Pynchon's anachronistic uses of caffeinated beverages and other addictive luxuries: the last name of the narrating Rev. Cherrycoke and the Starbucks-like All Nations coffeehouse with its half-caf ordering. The first anachronism alludes to Coca-Cola, of course, the caffeinated stuff that empire now spreads around the globe. The second anachronism links the eighteenth century to the contemporary corporate homogenization exemplified by Starbucks. These two moments are connected across time and space to a present concern when Mason and Dixon stand before a tableful of coffee and sweets tha t a Quaker gentleman reminds them is "bought ... with the lives of African slaves, untallied black lives broken upon the greedy engines of the Barbadoes" (329). The Quaker's remark echoes the moment in Candide when Candide comes across a maimed slave lying at a crossroads, who says of the hand and leg he lost in the cane fields of Surinam, "this is the price of the sugar you eat in Europe" (40). When Candide breaks into tears and wonders for a moment if maybe this is not, as Pangloss has taught him, the best of all possible worlds, he cries not just for the slave (or for himself, finding another instance of Pangloss's error) but because he is confronted by this disturbing evidence of empire's effects. The eighteenth-century concern over the deleterious effects of globalism raised by Pynchon's allusion echoes our own contemporary concern over globalization and connects the substances that fueled empire and revolutionary thinkers like those in Pynchon's inn-the coffee, sugar, and tobacco firing their dreams of freedom, democracy, and untaxed profits--to the substances that fuel today's workers and their empire.
Pynchon's ampersandic history, connecting these different moments, enables further thought about how America has ended up where it has, and why, and whether it can go somewhere else. It asks whether the line of American history will endlessly recross itself as does the line that symbolizes the infinite, or whether the opening in one loop of our contemporary ampersand can be taken to signify the possibility of things taking off in another direction. The line of empire America has blazed across the North American continent and the world stage, according to Mason & Dixon, has not ended so much as paused, ready perhaps to loop back on itself once again and then continue on as before or, perhaps, head off on another path. Perhaps, this novel asks, the recognition in our post-Vietnam, post-Reagan, post-Cold War time that we have in many senses been here before will force the realization that we are more concave than convex, more pointed toward each other than away. Once that realization sets in, perhaps we will be forced not just to acknowledge each other, as the resident of Hollow Earth puts it, but to see that in our still divided yet ever more connected world, our axes converge.
