“Falling into the Sky”: Gravity and Levity in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon

Abstract

My argument follows geographer Gunnar Olsson when he asks, “What is geography if it is not the drawing and interpreting of a line? And what is the drawing of a line if it is not also the creation of new objects?” Using Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon ( MD), about the drawing of the Mason-Dixon line, I explore how the mapmaker’s productive power is never merely reflective, but generative too, constructing a world as much as representing one. I question the consequent relation between “above and below,” drawing on Farinelli’s insight that critique of such constructions must recognize an antagonistic humor in the production of maps and territories. Pynchon’s novel, I argue, is exemplary in the wit with which it pits the anomalous, strange, and contingent phenomena of the below against the homogenizing, categorizing power of above. His approach helps us understand the dark heart of Enlightenment cartography and society.