‘Useful prophecy or bedlamite entertainment’ : dreams, heresy, and sovereignty in Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Mason & Dixon’

Abstract

This dissertation approaches Thomas Pynchon‘s Mason & Dixon with an interest in the recurring motif of sovereignty. Given Mason & Dixon‘s governing theme – and trope – of lines and boundaries, sovereignty becomes a question of who or what differentiates and excludes. However, it is also a question of what is bounded, and what lies beyond the boundary or over the horizon – the unmapped. Taking the unmapped as a metaphor for the geographical, temporal, and conceptual unknown, it becomes a question of the way in which sovereignty, (or the sovereign), grapples with the unmapped (whether it be that which lies over the horizon and further into the future), and the wistful dreams (or, as will be explained, heresies) that are projected into it: fancies of home, freedom and good futures. The introduction places Thomas Pynchon and his novel Mason & Dixon in various historical, cultural, and literary contexts. It focuses on the metafictional qualities of Mason & Dixon and the way in which the novel positions itself in relation to 21st -century fiction and the literary. The motif of sovereignty, central to the dissertation, is extracted from this framing discussion.

Chapter One approaches Mason & Dixon as a postmodern text, either engaged in an ironic revival of the past as a work of historiographic metafiction, or attempting an aesthetic of cognitive mapping. It also demonstrates how criticism of Mason & Dixon has routinely read it as a text which is in some manner other than postmodern. It is demonstrated how this question of something other than postmodern turns on questions of irony, paranoia (or their absence), a relation to the past, and ethics.

Chapter Two focuses on the way in which potentially heretical dreams of freedom and home are introduced in the novel as a form of ideological mapping of the world. It is noted how the tension between heresy and dream functions as a constitutive tension within the novel‘s poetics. This chapter also demonstrates how the novel depicts these dreams as projected into the future, or over the horizon – outside the demarcated boundary of the mapped and known. In doing so it also explores how Mason & Dixon‘s representation of this tension is inseparable from its characterization and representation of sovereignty and the ownership of land. Chapter Three takes an interest in Mason & Dixon‘s Jeremiah Dixon‘s attempt to free slaves. It reads this as an attempt at the representation of ethical action, and draws attention to ways in which Mason & Dixon‘s own poetics qualify the possibility of such ethical action. In doing so, it demonstrates a further constitutive tension, which operates in tandem with the first (described in Chapter Two): a tension which develops when a desire for home becomes opposed yet intertwined with a desire for freedom. In other words, it demonstrates how the desire to be free from the oppression of imposed boundaries clashes with the desire for the safety of those boundaries. In conclusion, this chapter demonstrates how Mason & Dixon‘s many dreams yearn for a stateless state – a romanticist, or anarchist, Eden.

The conclusion attempts to summarise the previous chapters. It also attempts to follow up, and reassess, the suggestion that Mason & Dixon is in some manner other than postmodern.