Negative Liberties

[Dave Monroe]

>From Cyrus R.K. Patell, Negative Liberties: Morrisson,
Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology (Durham,
NC: Duke UP, 2001), Ch. 1, "Narrating Individualism,"
pp. 1-33 ...

"Within an ideological field, certain dominant
strands, certain characteristic patterns of reasoning,
eventually emerge, becoming evident throughout a broad
range of different discourses.
   "Where can we find a counterweight to such official
narratives?  Pynchon implicitly and Morrisson
explicitly suggest that we look to the literary
imagination.  In Mason & Dixon, for example, Pynchon
uses fiction to create a counternarrative to U.S.
frontier mythology.  Capt. Zhang is Pynchon's own
invention [...] and his presence suggests that Pynchon
is telling a story about the eighteenth-century
American frontier from the vantage point of
twentieth-century border studies.  Indeed, it is
tempting to raed this episode from Mason & Dixon as an
allegory of late twentieth-century developments within
American studies, with Capt. Zhang representing
minority dsicourse theory, Charles Mason representing
traditionalists, and Jeremiah Dixon representing the
so-called New Americanists.  Mason, the older of the
two surveyors, refuses to believe in the danger of
drawing boundaries; in response to Zhang's diatribe
against creating distinctions between peoples, Mason
replies, 'Poh, Sir,... the Provinces are as alike as
Stacy and Tracy.'  Dixon, however, is already
beginning to learn Zhang's lesson, 'point[ing] out' to
Mason, 'less mildly than he might,' that 'Negro
Slavery' exists 'upon one side...and not the other'
(615).  But he does not believe that the line he and
Mason are drawing ahs anything to do with the problem
of slavery.  Later, however, he will come to realize
the truth of Zhang's belief that 'slavery is very old
upon these shores,-- there is no Innocence upon the
Practicve anywhere, neither among the Indians nor the
Spanish nor in the behavior of the rest of
Christendom, if it come to that' (616).  By the
novel's end, Dixon understands that slavery is 'the
Element common to all' the adventurs on which they
have been sent by England's Royal Society and that
they are implicated in it: 'Didn't we take the King;s
money ... whilst Slaves wait upon us [?]  Where does
it end?'  Dixon asks Mason: 'No matter where in it we
go, shall we find all the World Tyrants and Slaves? 
America was the one place we should not have found
them,' (692-93).  Mason & Dixon is thus a revisionist
narrative that uses the historical novel to expose the
underside of European and American history." (pp. 4-5)

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