Mason & Dixon & the ampersand

Pynchon's allusion, then, is to a long history of American attitudes toward its original inhabitants, attitudes that led to results such as those of Metacom's War, which killed 40 percent of the local Indian population. This line is related, like all the others in this book, to one that many Americans were intent on fixing: between themselves and Europe, the Old World and the New. This line appears behind much of the intrigue and paranoia Mason and Dixon encounter on their arrival on America's shores, in the street and in coffee houses, conspiracies and plots they first hear of from Benjamin Franklin, who they meet in a drugstore running a brisk trade in opium, and then from a Colonel George Washington, between puffs from his hemp pipe. Like the plotting they have encountered and imagined in their earlier travels, these plots depend on division, on nations and factions; this line in particular, though, is one many Americans are soon to draw in indelible ink. The line between America and not-America, that which it will leave behind and that which it will exclude, has, like the line drawn between slave states and free, old roots. Of these shared roots, Tony Tanner writes:

"North and South" is just one more example of the pernicious binary habit of thought, which Pynchon sees as having been so disastrous for America. He traces it back to the Puritan division--or line of demarcation--between the Elect and the Preterite, the Saved and the Damned, Us and Them.

(American Mystery 288-89)

The significance of the Revolutionary line, like that of the line between Pennsylvania and Maryland, is one more example of what Tanner rightly identifies as binary thought, a phenomenon Pynchon has spent much time anatomizing elsewhere. Here it is the delineation of a New Eden; everything else is without, unsaved. The line between the elect and the damned preoccupied the Calvinist-descended early settlers, whose anxiety led them in their lay doctrine to work around predestination by sneaking the doctrines of work and faith back in under cover of signs of election. Their profound anxiety found some release, then, in works, faith, close attention to who would receive grace, and attempts to define their earthly version of paradise as open to those who could call themselves the English, as they referred to themselves, as us versus the various thems outside. The scrutiny on identity defined by group membership and the defensive stance against the external continue, 100 years later, to shape attitudes about nation , religion, race, and countless other arenas in which lines of exclusion could be drawn.

The line Mason and Dixon draw, then, shares two things with the line America draws both around itself and against those within its borders it would rather were without: an inheritance and an essential structure. Also related to the line that defines America is a line that appears and reappears throughout Mason & Dixon, a line that also can claim a long descent: that between what Pynchon calls the indicative and the subjunctive. This line is not so much grammatical as metaphysical, though the deep connection of the former to the latter is noted in the borrowing of terms: it distinguishes between what we can say "is" and what "might be." The connection of the American line to this line between what is and what might be--of America's self-definition and differentiation to the line between the known and the possible--is best seen in a passage set, fittingly, during the visit to Lancaster: