new article re M&D also mentions Vineland

[pynchonoid]

Postmodern Historiography: Politics and the
Parallactic Method in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon  

Christy L. Burns 
College of William and Mary 
clburn at wm.edu 

© 2003 Christy L. Burns.
All rights reserved. 

In 1997, Thomas Pynchon published Mason & Dixon, his
much anticipated history of America written from the
perspectives of the astronomer and surveyor sent over
from England to draw the famous boundary line. Their
work was necessitated by a long-standing dispute
between overlapping land grants of the Penns, of
Pennsylvania, and the Baltimores, of Maryland[1]; the
job took nearly five years, from 1763 to 1768, and
during that time the journals and letters of these two
men record alternating shock and fascination with the
functioning of society in the New World (see Mason).
Pynchon draws on this historical material to create a
fantastic, comedic, and at times seriously political
novel. Pynchon's work has always inclined toward the
voices of cultural dissent--the counterculture of the
1960s being one of his more obvious inspirations, and
the rebellion of the Luddites against mechanization a
subtle revelation.[2] In Vineland, however, Pynchon's
critique of governmental authority takes on a more
central role, and in Mason & Dixon--which was some
twenty-four years in the making--he develops an
important new method for postmodern political
insight.[3] Pynchon introduces a parallactic method
that allows him a full and yet contentiously
dialectical representation of "America" as it was in
the mid- to late eighteenth century and as it is now,
by various implications. In his use of parallax,
Pynchon interweaves a critical representation of
imperialism's oppressive practices alongside a history
of science and exploration. While other writers, like
James Joyce, have invoked parallax as a perspectival
method in order to challenge univocal narrative form,
Pynchon works the concept more radically into his
fictional treatment of historiography.[4] Avoiding any
semblance of an apolitical sketch of the past--or
simple didactic critique--he uses the same method that
Mason and Dixon employed to chart the transits of
Venus and to draw their boundary line, applying
parallax to a series of triangulated views, starting
with Mason's and Dixon's attempts to assess the New
World and eventually delivering a temporal form of
parallax, a synchronization of the past with the
present.

In her review of positions on postmodernism's
politics, Susan Rubin Suleiman identifies three
general clusters among intellectuals and writers:
those who pursue a "postmodernism of resistance"
through experimental work that allows previously
silenced groups to speak in contra-normative modes of
representation; those who argue that postmodernism
lacks a firmness of values and principles and so fails
to have any political effect (that is, it disavows
universals); and finally those whom Suleiman
identifies as "cultural pessimists," who believe
neither in the efficacy of decentered experimentation
nor in the claims of universals (the project of
modernity, and so on), leaving to the postmodernist
only the role of critic and never that of future
visionary.[5] Writers like Louise Erdrich and Ishmael
Reed would qualify for the first category, Jürgen
Habermas for the second, and Jean Baudrillard for the
last. Pynchon's work has straddled groups one and
three; while his novels have implicitly supported a
politics of resistance--and have employed experimental
and decentering forms of representation--they have
recently begun to engage not only in critique (the
"pessimist" block) but also in future re-visioning.[6]
Vineland moved more directly into political critique,
with its look back at the government's means of
breaking down the 1960s counterculture. But in Mason &
Dixon Pynchon creates a parallactic intersection of
perspectives and time frames, which allows him to
engage in critique while also pointing toward a
different possible future in which imperialist
elements of American history are not comfortably
edited out but are critically worked back in to
national awareness. [...] 

<http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/14.1burns.html>

Burns seems to have it right regarding the main thrust
of _Vineland_, too -- Pynchon-L remains the only place
I know of where this novel is rewritten as an
affirmation of the Nixon-Reagan-Bush assault on the
'60s counterculture. 

Apologies if this article has been mentioned here
before.   I'm barely keeping up with the P-list
digests these days.


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