Mason and Dixon

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Paul Mackin quoted James Wood:

>Furthermore says M and D's
>"blotterlike receptivity to every bloodstain of American capitalism
>seems a little convenient, artistically. They might be freeer as
>characters if Pynchon allowed them to put up some resistance to Pynchon's 
>view of things. But that would be fiction, not allegory." 

By calling M&D an allegory James Wood seems to be making the same mistake as
all German reviewers of M&D whose pieces I've read. The basic assumption
here is that Pynchon's pessimism towards history is absolute. Which is just
not true for "Mason & Dixon". This necessarily brings us back to "Dixon's
intervention": Every German reviewer who mentioned the episode has claimed
that it is represented as an heroic but nevertheless futile attempt to
oppose history. The line, then, is the truth, and this, perhaps, would be
the allegorical part, and doubtless it is there. But M&D is foremost, and
quite often explicitly, a celebration of possibilities, a celebration of the
imagination, which integrates the historical facts, so to speak, but fills
up the empty spaces between them. Dixon's intervention is such an empty
space filled up by the imagination: It is POSSIBLE that Dixon attacked the
slave driver, and this possibility contains the only hope we are presented
with in M&D, and perhaps the only lesson we find anywhere in Pynchon: That
we, under corresponding circumstances, should look at the possibilities, the
contingency, of the given moment, and not at history (represented,
ironically, tragically, by the M-D-line). The Muse of History, as Derek
Walcott once put it, is Medusa.

Thomas

P.S.: Has already been mentioned that "Dixon's intervention" is an
"exemplum", "a moralizing tale or parable; an illustrative story", and thus
perfectly fit for a tale told by a reverend?