Pynchon and 'Mason & Dixon' by Brooke Horvath, Irving Malin

Abstract

MLR, 98.2, 2003 451 publishing in which monographs are out, and textbooks are in. Whereas Tanner was allowed to survey a wide range of writers and at the same time develop a detailed and sophisticated thesis, Millard is clearly constrained by the format of the book he is writing, and by the market he is addressing, so that we are only allowed brief glimpses of where his interests might have taken him. This becomes particularly apparent in the conclusion, when he writes that 'the United States has been examined in this book in terms of the discrete cultures of the continental interior, but the inclusion of a chapter on the American protagonist abroad (omitted due to limitations of space)' (p. 268) would have pursued a 'thesis about the United States as part of a world culture' (p. 269). As it stands, Millard's book will be a very useful guide forstudents, but one senses that it might have been more than that. University of Reading David Brauner Pynchon and 'Mason & Dixon'. Ed. by Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin. Cran? bury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2000. 228 pp. $39.50; ?32. ISBN 0-87413-720-9. Like the are transcribed by a German V-2 rocket across the sky of wartime London that begins Thomas Pynchon's major novel, Gravity's Rainbow (1973), the MasonDixon line of his latest work is asked to generate a similar half-million-word narrative. Yet half a million words are nothing compared to the scholarship that had accumulated just thirteen months afterMason & Dixon was published in 1997. The volume under review prints eleven major critical essays written to order by leading scholars, all the work submitted by June 1998. An accompanying bibliography lists over 250 additional printed items (on this new novel alone) and an editor's introduction de? scribes an abundance of Internet sources (three dozen of them, each holding hundreds of entries) accessible by the Pynchon Server List and consisting of everything from home pages for the novel's publisher and the journal Pynchon Notes to a site called 'Gen-X Susan's Pynchon Links' (another fifty-threeofthem, ifanyone is still counting ). As far as critical response is concerned, it would seem Pynchon's Mason-Dixon line has done its job. Generating commentary is, of course, a principal aim of an encyclopaedic novelist, and his choice of lines this time gives scholars an even greater field day for source studies. The Mason-Dixon line was surveyed in 1763-67 to establish the boundary between colonial Pennsylvaniaand Maryland; in the century leading up to the Ameri? can Civil War, it was extended theoretically westward as the dividing line between slave states and free,and ever afterwards has indicated the cultural boundary between the North and the South as regions ofthe USA. To Pynchon, whose ideas were first expressed within the radical examination of American traditions during the 1960s, the Mason-Dixon line and all it has stood for are exceedingly rich materials, as the contributors to this volume establish. Co-editors Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin contribute, respectively, a summary introduction and a close reading (in the form of a nine-day journal) that put Mason & Dixon in perspective. Brian McHale treats Pynchon's narrative as one of spatialized desire, a hallucinatory exercise of the sub? junctive impulse in human nature. David Seed finds territorial impulses to be under the novelist's review, impulses that the text destabilizes. Bernard Duyfhuizen expands the virtue of narrative unreliability to privilege all the more Pynchon's worldly instability, something Joseph Dewey understands as an attempt to replace Christian? ity with the wisdom of Eastern religions (a common project of the hippies and the beats), and which Victor Strandberg attributes to the author's ongoing posture as a 'hippierebel' working against 'tradition, convention, and all forms ofsocial hierarchy' 452 Reviews (p. 103). Yet what can be taken apart can also be put back together, as evidenced in the volume's other essays. Hence Arthur Saltzman's contribution credits the efforts of the Enlightenment to overcome true chaos, while Donald J.Greiner finds that the novel's fictive treatment of history does a good job of...