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

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).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Seed and Harris both note the affinities between Pynchon’s imaginative creations and the thinking of Edward Said. Seed reads Mason & Dixon as primarily concerned with the mapping that “forms part of the process of territorial appropriation, which is the very basis of empire” (84), while Harris, who observes that “Pynchon consistently returns to the colonized” (202), traces themes of “postcoloniality” (199) from V., “a text that deals directly with colonialism” (201), through his subsequent work up to Mason & Dixon.

2. Platt and Upstone’s recent Postmodern Literature and Race stands as one of the few prominent sustained discussions of race in postmodernism.

3. Robert Holton also suggests that Pynchon is a product of, and responds to, the “new and more homogenous subjectivity” (37) crafted by postwar American culture that looked “to conflate white men with the Universal” (38).

4. Race figures most prominently in Pynchon scholarship in critical discussions of the Western (white) subjectivity that masquerades as universal perspective. Thomas H. Schaub emphasizes this singular and limiting perspective as seen through the framing narrator Cherrycoke, and he reads Mason & Dixon as emphasizing “the way that Old World institutions (enclosure and slavery, to name two) reproduce themselves, in the newly discovered land” of the New World (196). Schaub argues that Pynchon understands “‘humanity’ as a story we tell ourselves,” and “seems to recognize the novel’s complicity in the creation of the modern subject” as problematically homogenous (197). Kyle Smith engages similar questions, suggesting that Mason & Dixon investigates “the questions of identity, space, and time, in terms that finally, and most importantly, confront the question of Whiteness” (189).

5. See Cohen and Cowart for strong examples of these analyses.

6. See García-Caro, p. 179.

7. See McHale for a connection of these spaces to the “Zone” of Gravity’s Rainbow, and see Huehls for a discussion of the temporal connotations of such unseeable spaces.

8. See Cohen, p. 40 and Freer, p. 386–389 for further discussion of Rowlandson’s narrative in relation to Mason & Dixon.

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Greg Deinert

Greg Deinert is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of South Carolina. His research focuses on 20th Century and Contemporary Anglophone historical literature.