Mason & Dixon & the ampersand

As do the Indians, at least the way they were, untouched by the Old World. When the party finally reaches the line, Mason wants to continue, thinking that the Indians who travel the path and live beyond it will not threaten them once they see that they are harmless. Dixon, on the other hand, wants to stop:

They don't want nay of thah'? They want to know how to stop this great invisible Thing that comes crawling straight over their Lands, devouring all in its Path... . A tree-slaughtering Animal, with no purpose but to continue creating forever a perfect Corridor over the Land. Its teeth of steel,--its Jaws, Axmen,--its Life's Blood, Disbursement. And what of its intentions, beyond killing ev'rything due west of it? do you know? I don't either. (678)

After some disagreement, the line is ended, and the party turns back, but the Indians by whose war parties they are surrounded at the end will not be able to turn back those who sent Mason and Dixon.

The unlimited possibility of America, of the New Eden, the land not just of the free but the equal, will not survive either. As is seen in the novel's frame, Wicks Cherrycoke's 1786 telling of the story of Mason and Dixon, its great promise will not be met. He says, "This Christmastide of 1786, with the War settl'd and the Nation bickering itself into Fragments, wounds bodily and ghostly, great and small, go aching on, not ev'ry one commemorated,--nor, too often, even recounted" (6).After the American Revolution, we see the failure of this promise, and this failure is seen specifically to take the shape of lines. The fragments into which the nation is dividing, the wounds that go aching on, existed long before the revolution, as Cherrycoke's story illustrates. Though he is not recounting the story of the contemporary wounds, the story Cherrycoke does tell clearly applies. The American mania for drawing lines, and for thinking them progress, is not specific to the 1760s.

Nor is it specific to the eighteenth century. Pynchon is reading not just a historical moment but also all of American history. The drawing of lines that characterizes the birth of the nation is explicitly linked to a more recent time, 100 years after the time of Mason & Dixon. The Civil War was another moment when the various lines dividing the country were contested. The racial lines drawn at America's birth remained, despite military, legal, and social efforts to erase them, and just as they persisted through Reconstruction and resurfaced in Jim Crow, Pynchon seems to believe, these lines are still evident today. His concern for racial prejudice and systemic discrimination can be seen in his novels, his early short fiction, such as "The Secret Integration" (1964), and even his nonfiction, such as his 1965 essay in the New York Times Magazine, "A Journey into the Mind of Watts." We are thus led to ask how the century of Mason & Dixon's writing fits into this pattern of Pynchon's, how in the second half of t he twentieth century we see possibility raised and unrealized. How does the tendency to draw lines, the binary habit of thought seen as dominating American history, exist in our time? To address this question, we need to go beyond a reading of Mason & Dixon solely as a novel of lines, as a reckoning of the costs of America's addiction to binarism. To do this, to get at other ways of thinking and being that Mason & Dixon might entertain, we have to focus on the other figure that dominates the novel.