Indigenous Silence, White Universality, and the Question of Appropriation in Mason & Dixon

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mason & Dixon’s silences regarding violence against Native Americans demand reoriented investigation. Some readers may feel that the novelist makes little effort to capture the larger experience of Indigenous Americans in this period. But Pynchon’s seeming diffidence, I argue, in fact signals his acute awareness of the imperialistic assumption that any one subject position can apprehend or subsume all others. In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon explores with great subtlety not only how Western logics concealed and enabled various injustices, but also how the narratives we tell today about these pasts hold the power to reinscribe the logics that overlooked such violence originally. Restraint from appropriating representations does not permit ignorance of the subaltern’s sufferance of colonial violence, however. Rather, it seconds and amplifies a famous question posed by native Mohawks to the eponymous cartographers: “Why are you doing this?” Pynchon’s novel provides an answer highly critical of enlightenment and imperial logics, but he wisely leaves space for indigenous voices, whether ancient or modern, to expatiate on what it might mean to be on the receiving end of “this” (in all its permutations through history).