Thomas Pynchon: Mason & Dixon
$265
Thomas Pynchon’s novels are chaotic combinations of ideas, puns, characters, subplots, facts, fictions, and words. Set in the eighteenth century, Mason & Dixon includes all of the above plus a talking dog. Its plot is organized around the efforts of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, two Englishmen tasked with surveyed the disputed 233-mile line between Pennsylvania and Maryland. If history had unfolded differently, of course, the Mason-Dixon line might not have been all that important—but it came to bifurcate the United States in fundamental ways.
Like all of Pynchon’s works, though, the novel is about much more than Mason and Dixon’s efforts at mapping. Like Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, it challenges readers to consider modernity’s priorities, while navigating digressions and details that often overwhelm the very possibility of forward narrative progression. Mason and Dixon were attempting to introduce order (over nature, in the law) and yet, ironically, the “line” they created contributed to further chaos and disorder (enslaved vs. free, South vs. North).
Historical fiction always relies on a reader’s general knowledge of what happened—the Mason-Dixon line exists after all—to explore what could have happened (or not) along the way. They play with history’s contingencies, its ‘what-ifs.’ In Mason & Dixon, this play is extended to the basic ideas of the Enlightenment: faith in order, in science, in reason. His “Age of Reason” is unreasonable, unpredictable, and hilarious.
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Elizabeth Duquette
Elizabeth Duquette has been teaching nineteenth-century literature for more than twenty years, formerly at Gettysburg College and now sometimes at Portland State University. She is an editor for American Art, and the author of American Tyrannies in the Long Age of Napoleon (2023) and Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America.
