Mason & Dixon & the ampersand

Sammy Cahn

"It goes back," he might have begun, "to the second Day of Creation, when 'G-d made the Firmament, from the waters which were under the Firmament,'--thus the first Boundary Line. All else after that, in all History; is but Sub-Division."

--Mr. Edgewise (Mason & Dixon 360-61)

And wherever you may stand, given the Convexity; each of you is slightly pointed away from everybody else.... Here in the Earth Concave, everyone is pointed at everyone else,--ev'rybody's axes converge,--forc'd at least thus to acknowledge one another,--an entirely different set of rules for how to behave.

--Resident of Terra Concava (Mason & Dixon 741)

for the Times are as impossible to calculate, this Advent, as the Distance to a Star.

--Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke (Mason & Dixon 6)

The story goes that Thomas Pynchon was heavily involved in the graphic design of his 1997 novel Mason & Dixon, inside and out. In particular, he is said to have been involved in the making of the novel's cover (Mxyzptlk). The dust jacket comes in two parts, a paper jacket and a transparent overlay. The paper jacket features the title, in an eighteenth-century-looking typeface, magnified and spread across the front and back. On the front of the transparent overlay are the more legibly sized author name and title running across the top and bottom. It is a distinctive design, but it may also serve a purpose other than marketing. Without making too much of something as (by definition) superficial as cover design, we are given space to think about its significance by the fact of Pynchon's attention to its details. One particular detail that I believe is significant results from the way in which the title is expanded and placed--the ampersand that fills the space between author name and title. In effect, the centra lly placed ampersand is magnified to the point that it moves from the background to become the central element, more illustration than typography.

The emphasis on the ampersand is likely no accident, because it points to what I will argue is a central idea in the book, one that is essential to its vision and so, also, to its difference from its author's earlier works. Mason & Dixon's ampersand is more than historically accurate; it expresses the shift in Pynchon's thinking that the novel represents. As he spins a picaresque historical tale in Mason & Dixon, Pynchon also tells a new, more hopeful story about America, emphasizing relation, connection, and possibility. At the center of this new story is the ampersand.

Mason & Dixon is in many ways a novel about lines. It is the story of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, astronomer and surveyor, who from 1763 to 1767 were in charge of drawing and blazing the 233-mile latitudinal line dividing the Penns' Pennsylvania and Lord Calvert's Maryland, the line that later came to divide North from South, free states from slave. The novel follows them, in part 1, "Latitudes and Departures," from their meeting in 1760, when they travel to Cape Town to observe the Transit of Venus between the earth and the sun and help determine the Solar Parallax, to Mason's side trip to St. Helena for further measurement, to their return to London, and finally, in part 2, "America," to their acceptance and execution of a commission to chart the disputed southern border of Pennsylvania. The novel ends in part 3, "Last Transit," with their return to England, Dixon's death, and Mason's eventual relocation to America. The tale is told by the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, who was a member of the expedition and who has come to stay (and stay and stay) with family on the occasion of Mason's demise in 1786. Mason, as astronomer, and Dixon, as surveyor, are professionally dedicated to the measuring, charting, and drawing of lines. The task that occupies the majority of their time in the novel is to plot and cut an 8-yard-wide line.

But this is only the first and most obvious way in which Mason & Dixon is about lines. Pynchon's telling of their story and the story of pre-Revolutionary America contains many kinds of lines, as do the larger contexts within which the story is set. To argue for the ampersand's place as an important figure in the novel, I will first sketch the ways in which the novel is so marked, the ways in which Pynchon understands these stories and their contexts in terms of the metaphor of the line. This metaphor has thus far understandably dominated the novel's reception by reviewers and critics. It is, after all, the word most closely associated with the names of the title characters, in the name given the swath they cut (a name only given, interestingly, long after they created it, and never in the novel itself). I will first read Mason & Dixon in this way because it is has been the dominant reading in the few years since its publication, with good reason, and because it is in relation to Pynchon's use of the line tha t his use of the ampersand makes sense, and, ultimately, vice versa. The ways in which the ampersand responds to the line, the ways in which connection and possibility answer division and difference, make Mason & Dixon something truly new for Pynchon.

Even before the two title characters receive their assignment in the colonies, Mason & Dixon is filled with geometry. The first sentence of the novel begins: "Snow-Balls have flown their arcs" (5). The phrase seems a humorous allusion to the opening of Gravity's Rainbow (1973), "A screaming comes across the sky" (3). There is of course a bathetic drop from the latter to the former, or perhaps an ostensible lightening not just of mood but also of stakes. As becomes clear once the book gets rolling, though, Pynchon brings the reader past or more exactly through the playful and apparently (mostly) accurate eighteenth-century English of his narrator and other characters, and his almost compulsive punning, to arrive at the serious ideas he explores in the novel. (1) While he is clearly being playful--a mood hardly new for his work--and may be establishing a warmer tone than exists in his earlier work, Pynchon is certainly from the start creating a serious world. It is also, from the start, a geometrical world.

As has been noted by many readers, Pynchon's big novels have all had central geometric figures, which are even referred to in their titles:

V. (1963) has the chevron, Gravity's Rainbow has the parabola, and Mason & Dixon has the line. From the arc of the snowball to the Transit of Venus and the Solar Parallax to the equator Mason and Dixon cross in their travels to chart these celestial phenomena, the world of the novel is from its beginning crossed by these straight lines, curved along hemispheres or orbits.

An important aspect of this crisscrossing in the novel is that the lines do not in one sense exist independently of the astronomers and surveyors who chart them and so, in effect, create them. Geometry exists in the abstract, as do laws of gravity and movement; all are assumed to be independent in their own right. However, in their embodiment in concrete, particular instances, they depend on people believing in them, understanding them, and applying them. From particular positions and with precision instruments, Mason and Dixon are able not just to chart the movement of heavenly bodies but also to divide the earth by degrees, to establish where every part of the earth is in relation to every other part, but their ability depends in the end on their belief. Their ability, therefore, provides an apt metaphor for their times. In a nascent America, a creation of the Enlightenment, their applications of science to government, of rationality to the wilderness, embody the claims of the Age of Reason. While the draw ing of the line is on a (literally) mundane level, mere surveying and cutting (as the unhappy, stargazing astronomer Mason sometimes sees it), it depends on a belief in the human ability to domesticate the natural.

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.

As Mason and Dixon progress westward in their cutting of the visto, into the unsettled yet not unpopulated frontier and away from the fast-dividing East, the significance of the visto as embodiment of the Enlightenment is raised in stark relief. Among the more direct ways is the opposition of the Chinese feng shui expert Captain Zhang, who, upon learning of their project, asks Mason and Dixon, "you two crazy?" He continues:

Ev'rywhere else on earth, Boundaries follow Nature,--coastlines, ridge-tops, river-banks,--so honoring the Dragon or Shan within, from which Land-Scape ever takes its form. To mark a right Line upon the Earth is to inflict upon the Dragon's very Flesh, a sword-slash, a long, perfect scar, impossible for any who live out here the year 'round to see as other than hateful Assault. (542)

Zhang recognizes the brutal, incongruous regularity of the line as an attack on the very nature of things. The Dragon within the earth is dishonored and wounded by the incising of a right line into its flesh, into the living flesh of nature. The Enlightenment roots of the line are here expressly criticized from a non-Western perspective.

Zhang's criticisms go beyond the nature of the line itself to a more pointed indictment of its effects. He asks, "Shall wise Doctors one day write History's assessment of the Good resulting from this Line, vis-a-vis the not-so-good? I wonder which list would be longer" (666) and later characterizes the line as a "conduit for Evll" (701). The list enumerating the not-so-good effects of the visto--and of the other lines it comes to represent--can be drawn from many parts of the novel. Lines to which our attention is drawn include those between black and white, which we encounter early in Cape Town, later in the colonies, and in the backs of our minds whenever we remember what the Mason-Dix- on line came to divide; the related line between Native Americans and the settlers and colonists who pushed them westward; that between Old World and New, between hoary; tradition-bound Europe and the New Eden of America, which the founding-fathers-to-be and would-be Adams into whom Mason and Dixon run are intent on fixing; the line between those included in this new paradise and those excluded; the line between Elect and Preterite, Saved and Damned; the line between the empirically known and the possible unknown, what the novel calls the indicative and the subjunctive, the former of which they set out from in the form of the governed, measured world of bureaucratic administration, and the latter of which they quickly emerge into in the form of talking dogs, amorous mechanical ducks, the 11 lost days created by the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendars, the race that lives on the inside of the earth, the ghost of Mason's wife, and many other fantastic yet plausibly presented phenomena; and the line between fact and fiction, history and romance in eighteenth-century terms, a line highlighted by the form of the novel itself, which takes the strands of actual historical events and weaves fiction from them.

Each of these lines can be read as Zhang reads the visto, as conduits for evil. The line between black and white is first examined during Mason and Dixon's stay in the Cape Town home of the Vrooms, where Mason is recruited to impregnate one of the family's slaves to help produce light-skinned stock. It reappears most plainly for them in America, prompting Dixon at one point to say:

--and now here we are again, in another Colony, this time having drawn them a line between their Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers, as if doom'd to re-encounter thro' the World this public Secret, this shameftul Core.... Christ Mason ... Where does it end? No matter where in it we go, shall we find all the World Tyrants and Slaves? America was the one place we should not have found them. (692-93)

Finding all the world tyrants and slaves means uncovering a shameful secret, a concealed truth of the Enlightenment world, namely that freedom is reserved only for some. Even an incipient America, a land soon to proclaim all men equal, hides this truth, and not very well. Near the end of their time in America, Dixon tears the whip from the hand of a slave driver busy beating his property; whom Dixon frees. The act is clearly heroic, and a judgment of the place in which it occurs. This line between black and white is most clearly represented by one significance of the visto that, because of chronology, can never be made quite explicit within the novel: as the popularly designated divider of Union from Rebel states in the Civil War. The absence from the novel of the name by which the line came to be known underscores this implicit knowledge.

The ill effects of the line drawn between Native Americans and colonists become clear as Mason and Dixon and their party progress westward. But it is not just a phenomenon of the frontier. Long before they stop the line rather than cross the Great Warrior Path--the crossing of which, their new Mohawk companions inform them (through a translator), "would be like putting an earthen Dam across a River"--the presence of natives and the effects of contact are clear. The division of Indian from settler was enforced from the moment of settlement, a fact to which Mason and Dixon's visit to Lancaster alludes (647). They are there to inspect the site on which an Indian massacre occurred the year before; however, as Cherrycoke mentions when explaining why Mason did not go alone as originally intended, Lancaster, the location of more than one Indian fight, is "a Town notorious for Atrocity" (341). Among the more notorious is the 1676 Indian attack on Lancaster, which took place during Metacom's or King Philip's War. Whil e the hanging of three Indians for the murder of another, converted Indian was the proximate cause of the war (still the most devastating, in terms of fatalities as percentage of population, in American history), the real cause was the encroachment of the settlers. The attack gained fame in America and especially in Britain from a book published as The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (in England, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson). A first-person narrative of Rowlandson's captivity, it provides a historical record of Puritan attitudes toward the Indians, including both the missionaries' desire to convert them and the belief of Rowlandson and others that the natives were a race of unredeemable savages. Rowlandson's book helped win the day, and many subsequent years of American history, for her racial attitudes.

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:

Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?--in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of those Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,--serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,--Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its way into the continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,--winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair. (345)

America as possibility--as the New World, as the place that allows what Europe cannot--is the dream of the Old World, and like a dream it is not true, but might be. But although it is Britain's dream, America keeps awakening itself, as it turns frontier into settlement into colony, curtailing its possibility, consigning hopes to its rubbish heap. The western frontier was only seemingly boundless. As long as it seemed so, America could be the place where the West in the larger sense could escape the Enlightenment reduction of possibility. When the western frontier's apparent boundlessness was revealed as only ostensible--when lines were measured and laid down across it, disproving its infiniteness--this escape route was cut off. Mason and Dixon run into a number of examples of the subjunctive, both before they begin their line and as they blaze it across the frontier, discovering what would seem impossible and its near-simultaneous disappearance or destruction--its absorption into the bare, mortal world. When anything seems possible, the Enlightenment certainties, it seems, reassert themselves.

In their travels, Mason and Dixon come across, among many other unlikely phenomena, a talking dog, a flying mechanical duck with a crush on an unwilling French chef, a giant cheese, the ghost of Mason's late wife, and a race of people living inside the earth. Each of these exceeds the conditions of Enlightenment understanding, as does Mason's experience of the 11 days "lost" when the calendar was switched from the Julian to the Gregorian in the "Schizochronick" (192) year of 1752:

'Twas as if this Metropolis of British Reason had been abandon'd to the Occupancy of all that Reason would deny Malevolent shapes flowing in the streets. Lanthorns spontaneously going out. Men roaring, as if chang'd to Beasts in the Dark. A Carnival of Fear. Shall I admit it? I thrill'd. I felt that if I ran fast enough, I could gain altitude, and fly. (559-60)

The occupancy of America by all that reason would deny dramatizes its status as the land of possibility. The loss of these phenomena, their eviction, dramatizes the loss of this possibility. Dixon's visit to Hollow Earth makes plain that it is eviction:

"Once the solar parallax is known' they told me, "once the necessary Degrees are measur'd, and the size and weight and shape of the Earth are calculated inescapably at last, all this will vanish. We will have to seek another Space." (741)

Even though we know such a world could not exist, we still feel its impending loss; it as if the loss of possibility is doubled.

The line between subjunctive and indicative, then, is crucial both to the book's understanding of the Enlightenment--as the demarcation between what the Enlightenment can know and what it cannot, and so between what is and is not--and also to its understanding of America, as the demarcation between what America might be and what it can no longer be. The visto Mason and Dixon draw, as it cuts through America, is the vehicle through which the novel encounters the ways America is built on lines, and, more importantly, through which it--and we--are able to think about how America became marked by these old lines when at first it seemed open and unlimited. It was one place we should not have found them. The disenchantment of America, the turning of the New World into just another part of the Old, is the turning of subjunctive into indicative.

The fate of the Indians illustrates this aspect of the line. In the end, the mysteries of their world, while given a reprieve by Mason and Dixon's party, seem surely doomed. Mason and Dixon turn back East, giving up the visto, when they reach the Great Warrior Path, an ancient North-South road reported to have a power that science does not recognize. They learn of the Path from Hugh Crawfford, the white man who accompanies the band of Indians that joins them toward the end of their journey. He tells them that it is sacred, and that they will not be allowed to pass. At this point drawing the line becomes fraught with tension, as they do not want to stumble upon the Path and have only an inexact idea how far they are from it, because they do not know its precise location, and because, as Crawfford says, "Distance is not the same here, nor is Time" (647). Out in this still unmeasured wilderness, occupied by the Indians with their unerilightened worldview, the impossible is still possible, and the laws of Western science may not apply:

We all feel it Looming, even when we're awake, out there ahead someplace, the way you come to feel a River or Creek ahead, before anything else,--sound, sky, vegetation,--may have announced it. Perhaps 'tis the very deep sub-audible Hum of its Traffic that we feel with an equally undiscover'd part of the Sensorium,--does it lie but over the next Ridge? the one after that? We have Mileage Estimates from Rangers and Runners, yet for as long as its Distance from the Post Mark'd West remains unmeasur'd, nor is yet recorded as Fact, may it remain, a--shimmer, among the few final Pages of its Life as Fiction. (650)

As Cherrycoke notes when they reach the Path, the frontier is "the Membrane that divides their [Indians'] Subjunctive World from our number'd and dreamless Indicative" (677). As soon as they come to the Path, as soon as they are able to fix it in latitude and longitude, the dream will be over, it will be Fact. Like the Hollow Earth, it will cease to exist. Again, applying geometry is, in Michael Wood's words, an "imperialist gesture, an administrative onslaught by the numbered on the unimagined" (128). The unimagined, when seen and counted, must by definition cease to exist as such.

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.

The ampersand is an ancient Roman symbol derived from the ligature or combination into one character of the e and t in the Latin et, meaning and. In modern English usage, it continues to serve as shorthand for and. Its English name is a corruption of the words English schoolchildren used to recite at the end of the alphabet: "X, Y, Zed, and per se and." The last phrase refers to the ampersand character, which is per se (by itself) the word and, and which came to be pronounced "ampersand." Modern typefaces have variations on the ampersand in which the original e and t have become lost. Eighteenth-century typefaces, such as William Caslon's, preserved the distinction between the two letters, linking them only at the end of the second, bottom stroke of the cursive capital E and the t. The ampersand on the cover of Mason & Dixon is Caslon's.

Pynchon's choice of this variation of the character is worth noting because of its symbolic importance to the novel. A character whose meaning is equal to and, it is not, however, and itself. It is a character that means "and" but which has a physical form and a name that can both be read to express certain ideas of and-ness. The ligature of the two letters expresses combination, connection, while the separate recognizability of the letters in the eighteenth-century version expresses the preservation of distinct identities, of difference. The name, which again literally means that the character itself means "and," conveys both by itselfness and its opposite--because the ampersand is not and itself but rather is joined to and as signifier to signified, so that when we see it we think "and." In other words, the name of the ampersand holds the same potentially paradoxical meaning as its form, namely, the simultaneous coexistence of the ideas of distinctness and unity of difference and individual identity. This meaning is paradoxical, though, only if it is assumed that such a thing is impossible.

As I have tried to show, Mason & Dixon can be read as a book about the destructive prevalence of the setting up and maintaining of binary difference in American history. But from the choices made on its cover to the story told on its pages, it is also a book about the possibility of connection, relation, simultaneity about possibility itself, about the ideas expressed in the character that dominates its cover. A good place to start examining these ideas would be this first expression of them, paying attention not just to the particulars of the character itself but also to the immediate context in which it appears, the tide, between the names of the novel's heroes.

The binary created in the title could be said to capture the geometric form of the line, since what is emphasized is the line between the two names, the distinction between the characters. But by using the ampersand rather than the word and, Pynchon expresses something else: the connection between these two distinct characters, just like that between the e and t from which the ampersand derives. The differences between the two men are clear from the start. Mason is a top-flight astronomer from the south of England, a deistic Anglican. Dixon is a surveyor, a Geordie, a Quaker. Temperamentally, they are also quite different: one attuned to mystical possibility the other a good Enlightenment rationalist; one reserved, one loud and convivial; one a wine man, the other fonder of beer. However, as many reviewers noted, these differences do not drive them apart. Joined by circumstance, they become an instance of "the classic comedy team of straight man and flake" (Boyle), and the novel becomes "a buddy story" (Menan d 24) "like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses ... one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature" (Leonard 68).

The relationship between these two is one element of Mason & Dixon that makes it new in Pynchon's corpus. It is generally accepted that V., The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland (1984) are not marked by the creation of and attention to filly rounded characters. As one review of Gravity's Rainbow put it, "Pynchon doesn't create characters so much as mechanical men to whom a manic comic impulse or vague free-floating anguish can attach itself, often in brilliant streams of consciousness" (Locke 12).This reviewer finds the absence of more typically novelistic characters appropriate to the worlds their author creates in his fiction, worlds in which only mechanical men have a place: "In Pynchon's world there is almost no trust, no human nurture, no mutual support, no family life" (12). This characterization of Pynchon's fictional worlds is also generally accepted: though there is much humor in the novels, and much attention to the prevalence of human indecency and unkindness, there is not mu ch warmth. Though some demur, Pynchon's work up until Mason & Dixon has been largely seen as relatively cold; in its attention to large ideas, national and international histories of ideas and systems, and in its painting pictures of the world as a place riven by conspiracy or suspicions thereof, his work has had neither the time nor the inclination to present round, sympathetic, engaging characters. (2)

Mason & Dixon has been widely seen to have a warmth lacking in these earlier works, and this perception is due in large part to the way Pynchon draws these two men, separately and together. The stories of their lives before and after their partnership create sympathy for them as individuals, and their story together--stumbling across America, completing a task whose meaning dawns slowly upon them, and supporting each other as it does--creates sympathy for them as a pair. As Michael Wood writes, we see them

arguing, Anglican against Quaker, mystic against rationalist, and finally discovering that their need and respect for each other, in spite of the frequent acidity of their exchanges and their constant mutual fending off of real intimacies, the drawing of a sort of line between Mason and Dixon, add up to a form of passion, indeed the central passion and care of their lives. (124)

The line between them, the binary expectation set up by the juxtaposition of their names and the difference in their characters, becomes instead a connection, a relationship between two men who still remain distinct.

The possibility of connection across difference, illustrated in the relationship between these two men, is an important subject of Mason & Dixon. It is a possibility that applies not just to the main characters but also to America, not just to the line drawn between these two people or any two people but also to the lines drawn between kinds of people, between aspects of experience, between times and places and ideas, between what is and what might be. What Pynchon sees in the relationship between Mason and Dixon, he sees in American history, and what he sees in American history he sees in the American present: not just the age-old fact of division but also the possibility of something else.

The relationship between Mason and Dixon is important because they connect across their difference. Just as their differences make for the texture of their bickering and, in the end, their friendship, so the division, rather than deserving only condemnation, is valued positively for making the connection possible. For the novel as a whole, then, lines are not simply to be condemned. They make possible many things, including the existence of connections across them.

Without lines, we would have a world without difference. And in some ways we are moving closer to such a world all the time. Louis Menand sees Mason & Dixon as a novel about colonialism and an adaptation of Pynchon's favorite multidisciplinary metaphor, entropy. He calls the novel an American Tristes Tropiques because Pynchon seems to be practicing an anthropology like that of Levi-Strauss, which Menand says might as well be called "entropology" because it sees history as the process of increasing homogenization through contact (24). Homogenization--a world without lines--is not for Pynchon a victory over division but a defeat of energy, of motion, of change. It is also, in the process by which it occurs, a victory for cruelty.

Seeing the American frontier as Britannia's dream, as the place where it seemed that the impossible might be possible, Pynchon explores the simultaneous opening up and shutting down of possibility that America as frontier came to represent and that the Mason-Dixon line symbolizes. As they travel westward, Mason and Dixon encounter the fantastic possibility of America beyond the New Eden of the New American Adam, the mysterious, mystical world both excluded and in a way created by the Enlightenment. As they encounter it, though, the line they blaze into the heart of this frightening and wonderful darkness brings a harmful light. Thus the moment of expansion is at the same time the moment of contraction, when that not normally seen is glimpsed and quickly domesticated. When Pynchon entertains us with tales of the impossible, and in so doing laments its loss, he might seem to be resigned to this inevitable process, as we all must be resigned to the final loss of possibility that ends the book, the deaths of its heroes. What happens in the fantastic lives of Mason and Dixon and in the fantastic life of America might seem inevitable, as might the cruelty that sometimes results from America's old binarism.

This sense of the inevitable--that people die, that cultural entropy occurs, that bad things happen to good people for no good reason--is undeniably part of Mason & Dixon. And the movement in Mason & Dixon on beyond what readers of Pynchon over the years have called paranoia or conspiracy certainly contributes to this sense of the inevitable. Rather than a grand conspiracy, there is simply history. Mason and Dixon are not pawns in some great game. Dixon does ask, "Are we being us'd, by Forces invisible?" and "Whom are we working for, Mason?" (347). But this is not a paranoid book. The Jesuits, the trading companies, Captain Zhang, Royalists, many different forces and causes and organizations try to influence history, and while there may be trends, no mysterious master plan is in evidence. As Menand writes of this sentiment in the novel, "This is just the direction human history happens to run" (25).

But Pynchon's paranoia has not been replaced by an equally unknowable, unalterable historical inevitability. In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon presents a different sense of history. The old search for the conspirators in Pynchon's work is here, at bottom, explicitly what it was sometimes only implicitly in its earlier incarnations: a search for the answer to the question of the impossible. As is made clear in V., when Weissman deciphers an atmospheric message spelling out Wittgenstein's proposition, "the world is all that is the case," Pynchon is concerned with how we know, with the implications of whether we accept only what we see or are open to more. All the searches for transcendent patterns or forces or impossible things in Pynchon's work ask if indeed the world is all that is the case. This question is asked in Gravity's Rainbow--where Roger Mexico sees no transcendent meaning, while Slothrop is open to anything. becomes Rocketman, and eventually fragments into many possibilities--and in The Crying of Lot 49, w here Qedipa Maas must decide whether or not, beneath the surface of everyday life, there lives a great conspiracy. In the end the questions go unanswered: The Crying of Lot 49 ends as the title event, which should reveal all to Oedipa, is about to happen. We cannot know if the world is all that is the case. The implication of this argument, which Pynchon seizes on in Mason & Dixon, is that we also cannot rule out other possibilities. And if we cannot rule out other possibilities, we cannot rule out different historical outcomes. Pynchon insists in Mason & Dixon on the possibility that other worlds might exist in order to ask if things might have turned out differently, or might still. If this is the way history has happened to run, it does not follow that it has had to. The cruelty that fills history does not always, in every instance, have to happen. Those who try to stop it--as Dixon does when he challenges the slave driver--are not fools. They are simply open to the possibility of what might seem historica lly impossible. (3)

This is openness not just to difference--to recognizing both the existence of difference and also the possibility of connecting across it--but also to a history that could have turned out differently and can still. Seeing this kind of history in Mason & Dixon requires seeing not just the line but what the line makes possible, seeing not just an anatomy of loss but also a celebration of continued possibility.

The course of history runs, in Mason & Dixon, up to a present that is multiple. There is the present of the novel's frame, that is, the 1786 from which Cherrycoke looks back and thinks about the lost promise of prerevolution America. There is also Pynchon's present, about 200 years later, the implicit frame around Cherrycoke's frame, which is all that has happened since. Thus the retrospective takes on a wider focus, including the Civil War and the postbellum years as well as the turmoil of the 1960s and the years between that turmoil and the time of the novel's publication. All of America's past between then and now, from Lancaster to Gettysburg to Kent State to Oliver North, is part of the story.

The structure of the novel, then, makes possible a way of thinking about America that crosses the lines between eras, making American history a single connected story. It also makes possible a way of thinking about history itself, about its connections and cycles. The picture of history we see in Mason & Dixon, like the relation of all the pasts and presents in the line of the novel, is not linear, nor is it progressive. The literary-historical argument implicit in Pynchon's use of forms from the eighteenth-century novel is that the road the novel takes through literary history is not one of progressive innovation but of recycings, repetitions, adaptations. It is itself ampersandic. The larger historical argument implicit in Pynchon's use of forms is the same. While it seems not to accept the traditional, Enlightenment, progessivist model of history, Mason & Dixon does not draw a downward line either. It does not tell a story of descent or degradation. The story this novel tells is one of repetition, of repea ted moments of potential change, of utopian promise, followed by failures to fully realize that promise. Each of these moments is at bottom about changing the ways in which America wants to deal with the lines it has drawn down the middle of itself and around itself, about the promise of constructing difference less divisively. And each of these subsequent failures of possibility--of these moments when the subjunctive is reduced to the indicative--is about the failure to remain open to alternatives, particularly to the alternative of connection.

As Tony Tanner notes, Mason and Dixon's 1760s, the important moments in the Trystero's history in The Crying of Lot 49, and the moment in the German Zone in Gravity's Rainbow can all be seen as "explosions of change" (American Mystery 235). (4) All are times when much seemed possible, when barriers were down, boundaries fluid. The American 1860s and 1960s were also explosions of change. Mason & Dixon's interest in slavery and the Civil War is clear. And while Pynchon's concern with the issues debated in and now identified with the 1960s may not be as evident in Mason & Dixon as it is in his earlier works, it is nonetheless at the center of this novel. (5)

Mason & Dixon is the product of Pynchon's continued exploration of the drawing of lines, an exploration apparently motivated in large part by the hopes raised and disappointed by the 1960s. It asks us to see the persistence of this American way of thinking by linking the 1760s, 1860s, and 1960s. What Mason & Dixon does not ask us to see, I am arguing, is its inevitability. Unlike Pynchon's earlier works, it accepts neither paranoia nor hopelessness nor unknowability. It does not accept the failure of the 60s to fully realize its utopian visions. Lines will always be erased and drawn again, but the way America deals with them has changed many times, and can continue to do so. It changes when America remembers that history, its history in particular, is not finished. Mason & Dixon is the first novel in which Pynchon can look back historically on the decade that raised so many of the issues at the center of his work: the Cold War has ended, the century's end approaches, and the 60s appears as the decade at the chronological and ideological center of the Cold War era in a way it could not have appeared at the time he wrote Vineland. In retrospect, the 60s have stood as a kind of running historical Rorschach test, with successive decades and different political orientations rereading the 60s according to their needs. (6) The retrospective stance on the 60s and on American history as a whole in Mason & Dixon is not nostalgic, as in Vineland, nor merely allusive. This novel is a reminder, in a post--Cold War America grown complacent in its ostensible victory, that history is not over. In the face of the triumphalist 1990s--characterized by announcements of the end of ideological contest made by Francis Fukuyama and others, nostalgic World War II anniversary celebrations, and the end not just of a century but also of a millennium--Mason & Dixon insists that history continues, that no telos has been reached, no real war won. (7) As America in the 90s experienced a national retrospective mood, (8) Pynchon's novel insisted that the past is still tied to the future, and utopias imagined and grasped for in the past can still be imagined and grasped for.

Michael Wood interprets the tension in the novel between indicative and subjunctive in this way: Pynchon is suggesting that what we "miss is not a mystical revelation or an ancient wisdom, and not the grand conspiracy underlying all things, but a sense of 'Human Incompletion'" (129). This incompletion, he argues, is what we need to remember if we wish to avoid the errors and cruelties of American history, the ways of dealing with division that have led to so much that is regrettable in our past. Perhaps we need to remember that there are things we don't know, that what lies on the other side of the line is not inherently worse than what is on our side, that we ought to see America always as frontier, in its most hopeful sense. America as frontier does not have to be the America that acts as if everything is new, and that what is previously established--ideas, communities-does not matter. America as frontier can simply be America as possibility. What America remembers, when it remembers that it is unfinished, is possibility; what it forgets, when it forgets to see its past and present as continuous and ongoing, is that whatever is, is not inevitable, that the world may not be all that is the case.

This sense of incompletion, of unfinishedness, can keep us open to possibility, a way of thinking represented in Mason & Dixon by the imagined world inside the earth. As one resident says:

And wherever you may stand, given the Convexity, each of you is slightly pointed away from everybody else.... Here in the Earth Concave, everyone is pointed at everyone else,--ev'rybody's axes converge,--forc'd at least thus to acknowledge one another,--an entirely different set of rules for how to behave. (741)

This is also a set of rules for how to think, a way of seeing the world not just in terms of possibility but also in terms of relatedness. If each of us on the Earth Convex, in this Terra Concavan's terms, stands on the outside of an outwardly curving earth and so points slightly away from each other, then we can ignore each other and act accordingly; those on the inside of the inwardly curving Earth Concave are forced to act with others in mind. The former way of thinking and acting is presented in the novel as Mason and Dixon's: the line they draw ignores its effects on the lives they draw it through. By extension, it is an American way of being, an Enlightenment way of being, a Western way of being. The Earth Concave's alternative is thus presented not only as an alternative to American exceptionalism. Acknowledgment of the crossing of lines that is the world's reality, of the world's ampersandic actuality, is wanting everywhere. This acknowledgment is not an unfinished task only for America.

Just as the unending road of Mason & Dixon's picaresque form lends a sense of unfinishedness, so too do its other borrowings from the past. The novel's intentionally anachronistic references and language are crucial to its sense of history not as simply unfinished but also as recrossing itself, as cycling back and crossing over its own past like the line of our contemporary ampersand. This sense of history can be seen in two of Pynchon's anachronistic uses of caffeinated beverages and other addictive luxuries: the last name of the narrating Rev. Cherrycoke and the Starbucks-like All Nations coffeehouse with its half-caf ordering. The first anachronism alludes to Coca-Cola, of course, the caffeinated stuff that empire now spreads around the globe. The second anachronism links the eighteenth century to the contemporary corporate homogenization exemplified by Starbucks. These two moments are connected across time and space to a present concern when Mason and Dixon stand before a tableful of coffee and sweets tha t a Quaker gentleman reminds them is "bought ... with the lives of African slaves, untallied black lives broken upon the greedy engines of the Barbadoes" (329). The Quaker's remark echoes the moment in Candide when Candide comes across a maimed slave lying at a crossroads, who says of the hand and leg he lost in the cane fields of Surinam, "this is the price of the sugar you eat in Europe" (40). When Candide breaks into tears and wonders for a moment if maybe this is not, as Pangloss has taught him, the best of all possible worlds, he cries not just for the slave (or for himself, finding another instance of Pangloss's error) but because he is confronted by this disturbing evidence of empire's effects. The eighteenth-century concern over the deleterious effects of globalism raised by Pynchon's allusion echoes our own contemporary concern over globalization and connects the substances that fueled empire and revolutionary thinkers like those in Pynchon's inn-the coffee, sugar, and tobacco firing their dreams of freedom, democracy, and untaxed profits--to the substances that fuel today's workers and their empire.

Pynchon's ampersandic history, connecting these different moments, enables further thought about how America has ended up where it has, and why, and whether it can go somewhere else. It asks whether the line of American history will endlessly recross itself as does the line that symbolizes the infinite, or whether the opening in one loop of our contemporary ampersand can be taken to signify the possibility of things taking off in another direction. The line of empire America has blazed across the North American continent and the world stage, according to Mason & Dixon, has not ended so much as paused, ready perhaps to loop back on itself once again and then continue on as before or, perhaps, head off on another path. Perhaps, this novel asks, the recognition in our post-Vietnam, post-Reagan, post-Cold War time that we have in many senses been here before will force the realization that we are more concave than convex, more pointed toward each other than away. Once that realization sets in, perhaps we will be forced not just to acknowledge each other, as the resident of Hollow Earth puts it, but to see that in our still divided yet ever more connected world, our axes converge.

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,

"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).

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Samuel Cohen teaches at Baruch College of the City University of New York. His dissertation is on American historical novels of the 1990s. He has published on contemporary American and world literature and culture, and on the history, politics, and practice of teaching writing.

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