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Mason & Dixon & the ampersand
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2002 by Sammy Cahn
One important context for the story of this line, then, is the story of the Enlightenment. Pynchon's telling of it is less celebratory than the traditional version and more nuanced than the usual revision. One way to think about Pynchon's version is, conveniently, in terms of lines. The understanding of the Enlightenment that in the twentieth century came under attack saw the eighteenth century as the time, in Kant's words, of "man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity," as a time when reason reigned supreme, and when, as a result, civilization built up a great, improving head of steam called progress. Fundamental to this story are at least two kinds of lines. First is the line of progress, the inexorably upward-moving line charting intellectual, social, and material improvement. The second kind consists of the lines drawn between concrete things and people. There are the lines of classification and division with which Western science understands the world. These are the lines between the enlightened and the unenlightened, the civilized and the uncivilized, the included and the excluded--and those drawn between abstract ideas--the provable and the unprovable, the rational and the mystical, fact and fiction. The Enlightenment, not just in its intellectual projects--Diderot's Encyclopedia, Johnson's dictionary, Linnaeus's taxonomy--but also in its revolutions, French and American, and its imperial and colonial manifestations, depended on and in fact championed the drawing and maintaining of lines. The upward-tending line of progress, then, depended on the drawing of lines of division. As this kind of "progress" continues to be made, this story of the Enlightenment continues to be told.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer told a different story in the middle of the last century. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, they argue that what has been called Enlightenment and hailed as progress in fact led to the gas chambers. With roots in Marx and Nietzsche, Adorno and Horkheimer and others in and outside of the Frankfurt School saw the belief in human mastery through reason and attempts to impose it on the universe, or "instrumental reason," as the root of the miseries of their contemporary world, miseries that they could not cite as evidence of progress. As Walter Benjamin (also associated with the Frankfurt School) wrote in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History'" "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" (Illuminations 256). Earlier, Max Weber had told his own version of this story, noting that the classification of the natural world and organization of the human world, what he called the "rationalization" of the world, in effect "disenchante d" it. By drawing lines across experience, Weber argued, the Enlightenment project of understanding and domesticating the world had the unfortunate effect of robbing it of its magic.
Both versions of this story, the traditional and the revised, are recognizable in Mason & Dixon. The question of what to think of these ideas follows closely behind, carried most prominently in the question of what to think of the line, or "visto," but present also in many of the novel's factual and fantastic, tangential and strangely germane subplots, incidents, and mysteries. However this question is raised, at stake ultimately is the value of the drawing of lines, and all that this action comes to symbolize in the novel, including not only division and classification of the natural and social worlds but also the rationalization of space and time. A focus on the line as the dominant figure in the novel can lead to a reading of Pynchon as squarely on the side of Adorno, Horkheimer, and others in condemning the Enlightenment as the cause of many modern ills. This condemnation would square with the readings many have made of V. and Gravity's Rainbow as depicting worlds disfigured by science and modernity. Read ing Mason & Dixon only through the figure of the line yields this same reading, as I will show first. Reading it through both the line and the ampersand, however, complicates things. A thorough condemnation of the period in which he sets this novel is not, I will argue, what Pynchon is making.
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