From a review in Orbit of a book entitled Rewriting Early America:

[Mark Kohut]

>From a review in Orbit of a book entitled* Rewriting Early America: *

Coffman’s reparative place-based analysis, the text’s most significant
methodological contribution to studies of postmodern fiction, is maintained
in his deft readings of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Mason & Dixon,
as well as Susan Howe’s “Secret History of the Dividing Line” and “Souls of
the Labadie Tract.” While the spatiality of Howe’s poetry, and moreover the
expansiveness of her poetic lines, enables an “unsettling” of hegemonic
national histories through its conversation with (in contrast to the
“speaking for” of Berryman and Barth) the lost, silent figures of the
Labadists, Pynchon’s novels, according to Coffman, foreground a conception
of place as overrun with mediating systems and distinct histories.
Borrowing from ethnographic work on the Nahua and Tarahumara, Coffman reads
Frank Traverse’s hallucinatory flashback, engendered by his presence in
Mexico, as a means of negotiating seemingly incommensurable modes of
historical and literary representation—namely, the logos-centered
textuality of Western (written) history and the pictorial and ideographical
medium of Nahua representation. Thus, while Fathers and Crows conceptualizes
a recuperation of the past through the temporal flexibility of shared
spaces and places, Against the Day evinces an understanding of history that
demands for its interpretation a variegated set of signifying systems
employed in collaborative praxis. In the same vein, the continual obstacles
encountered by the surveyors of Mason & Dixon, along with the
inscrutability of the Delaware triangle and the abundance of supernatural
events, point to the oft-noted limits of Enlightenment-informed conceptions
of Cartesian space and linear, progressive time. But in Coffman’s
recuperative reading, these limits are not boundaries but thresholds,
“points of productive play, offering admissions to and transmissions from
alternative spaces” (96). In Coffman’s own words, Pynchon’s novel “thus
demonstrates the resiliency of narrative and serves as a demonstration of
the ways in which narrative overcomes restriction … by its tendency toward
the construction of alternative spaces” (103). The presence of other
worlds, other histories, encountered by the protagonists of Pynchon’s novel
thus render the “declarative plot” of the novel—the laying of the Line
itself—as only one plot among many (100).