Mason & Dixon & the ampersand

"The Stars are so close you won't need a Telescope."

"The Fish jump into your Arms. The Indians know Magick." (773)

Any times, especially those times of retrenchment following explosions of change, can be as difficult to calculate as the distance to a star. Mason & Dixon reminds us that there have been times when we were closer to the stars, that they may come again, that in some ways our distance to them is always in flux. Impossibly far or unimaginably close, the stars will always be separate from us, but, like the residents of the Earth Concave, we can lean toward them, and each other.

Notes

(1.) For the accuracy of Pynchon's language, see Menand.

(2.) Some argue that Vineland, with its focus on family, is an exception; see Moody and Berger, who notes, "The novel ends with a family reunion; its final word is 'home"' (par. 3), though he gives more weight to the relationship between two other (unrelated) characters, Prairie and Weed (par. 45).

(3.) Ricciardi also sees a turn away from total resignation in Mason & Dixon. She cites Richard Rorty's argument in his recent essay "Achieving Our Country," in which he

argues that Pynchon's novels in general, and Vineland in particular, merely articulate a desperate pessimism unaccompanied by any impulse to outrage or protest and exemplify a "rueful acquiescence in the end of American hopes"

and disagrees, arguing that "Mason & Dixon deviates from the sense of resignation that permeates Pynchon's earlier works insofar as the novel responds to an urgent consciousness of the need for historical witnessing" (1072). While failing to take issue with Rorty's overstatement or specify the content of this need, Ricciardi does identify the turn taken by Pynchon in Mason & Dixon.

(4.) For a description of a similar meaning in the representation of a single historical moment, the 1960s, in Vineland, see Berger, who likens Pynchon's understanding of later interpretations of the 60s to Walter Benjamin's jeztzeit, "the critical moment of historical, redemptive possibility which continues to erupt into the present even after many previous failures" (par 5).

(5.) As David Cowart has pointed out, the connections between the 1960s and Pynchon's work have not been much explored by critics, a failure only slightly redressed by reactions to Vineland ("Pynchon" 12).

(6.) See Miller for the ways in which the 1960s have been reimagined by subsequent decades.

(7.) For the way in which the dissolution of the Soviet Union was incorporated into the triumphalist reading of American history, see Engelhardt, End and "Victors."

(8.) The national mood of retrospection--which can be ascribed not just to the end-of-an-em sense imparted by the close of the century and the millennium but also to the end of the Cold War and the 50th anniversaries of World War II--era events--can be seen in a number of ways: the works of Ken Burns; the rise of the History Channel, which was launched in 1995; the growth of the Biography series in the mid-90s; the popularity of historian Stephen Ambrose; war movies such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Thin Red Line (1998), and Pearl Harbor (2001); CNN'S 1998 24-part history of the Cold War; the 1998 miniseries The Sixties; and decade--specific revivals in popular music and television (That Seventies Show, 1998).