Mason & Dixon & the ampersand

Ultimately, if attention is paid only to the meanings of the line in Mason & Dixon, what is missed is the historical sense emblematized by the ampersand--awareness of the connections between disparate moments from across American history, the feeling that these explosions of change are repeated resurfacings of possibility, of alternative outcomes for an only seemingly inevitable future. These moments resurface in the midst of forgetting, a historical amnesia that results not only when America ignores its past entirely, or when it sees in that past only the glorious story of its founding followed by the upward path leading to its triumphant present, but also when it sees in its past only the inevitable cruelty attendant upon its persistent binarism. Rather than seeing our past as the story of failure to get this binary monkey off its back, Mason & Dixon wonders if we can learn to think in terms of possibility. Certainly, as Bernard Duyfhuizen writes, the book aims "to unravel the historical roots of the racial and social dislocations" of contemporary America. But its exploration of the past is more than a disinterment, an autopsy explaining the death of American promise. If a medical analogy is wanted, the psychotherapeutic might be more apt: Pynchon's talking cure aims to get America to realize the patterns of thought it learned in its youth, in order to get it to think differently in the future. Cherrycoke ends the paragraph in which he describes the America of 1786 as bickering itself into fragments: "for the Times are as impossible to calculate, this Advent, as the Distance to a Star" (6). Pynchon's contemporary America might also seem to be following an old pattern by bickering itself into fragments, and might seem as difficult to understand as Cherrycoke's times did to him. This phrase comes from the very beginning of the book; by the end, through telling his story, Cherrycoke may have figured a few things out. And they may be things Pynchon thinks applicable to our own era.

Mason & Dixon ends sadly, with Mason descending not just into senescence but also into paranoia. But he has, from his relationship with Dixon and his relation to the land through which they drew their line, learned some of the lessons I argue Pynchon is trying to teach. At the end of the American section of the book, they are both in flux, and have learned to like it:

Betwixt themselves, neither feels British enough anymore, nor quite American, for either Side of the Ocean. They are content to reside like Ferrymen or Bridge-Keepers, ever in a Ubiquity of Flow, before a ceaseless spectacle of Transition. (713)

While Mason has learned a new way to think about division, to reside in transition, he cannot hold on to it forever. When he regresses to his previous way of seeing things, it is the last moment of the subjunctive: "the Event not yet 'reduc'd to Certainty'... [a] last moment of Immortality" (177).The inevitability of death, though, is accompanied by a reminder of the magical possibility inherent in and symbolized by America. In the words of Mason's once estranged children, words that close the novel,