Thomas Pynchon's Post-Colonial Critique in Mason & Dixon - abstract

[Doug Millison]

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/eng/pynchon/madsen.htm
Thomas Pynchon's Post-Colonial Critique in Mason & Dixon
Deborah L. Madsen
Professor of English, South Bank University, London
ABSTRACT
In this paper I argue that in Mason & Dixon, as in Gravity's Rainbow before
it, Pynchon seeks to place America at the very heart of the colonial
enterprise and its history, from the seventeenth century to the present. If
Gravity's Rainbow addresses the re-colonisation of Europe by America, then
Mason & Dixon represents that first colonial enterprise, the first
transplantation of the European will to dominate to the New World. First, I
set out some of the ways in which issues crystallising around colonialism
have characterised all of Thomas Pynchon's work. Then I go on to discuss
how, in Mason & Dixon, as elsewhere in his fiction, Pynchon explores
colonialism as a culture, a psychosis, and an epistemology. Colonialism is
represented as a will to control, to dominate and to possess. It is this
psychology of power that underpins colonialism. I look at his 1966 essay,
'Journey Into the Mind of Watts', to see how the colonial psychology still
informs race relations in post-colonial America and then go on to discuss
the representation of enslavement in Mason & Dixon. In Mason & Dixon,
Pynchon finally brings home the meditation on modern western history and
his unfolding history of 'America-in-the-world' that has consumed his
earlier texts like V, Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland.