- "For Skies grow thick with aviating Swine, / Ere
men pass up the chance to draw a Line.... Sharing a Fate, directed by the
Stars, / To mark the Earth with geometrick Scars." ¶¶ C. Mason
& J. Dixon have come to America to draw a Line fixing "the Boundaries
between the American Provinces of Pennsylvania and Maryland” (182). Both
conceptually and contextually, this line is suspended into a variety of
parameters, and it designates, for the various voices that make up the
multiplex harmonics of the narrative, a number of diverging frameworks. At
one point, for instance, the feng shui master Zhang accuses Mason &
Dixon--"you two crazy?" (542)--of the straightness of the Visto which he
sees as a "conduit for Evil" (701): "Ev'rywhere else on earth, Boundaries
follow Nature,--coast-lines, ridge-tops, river-banks,--so honoring the
Dragon or Shan within, from which Land-Scape ever takes its form. To mark
a right Line upon the Earth is to inflict upon the Dragon's very Flesh, a
sword-slash, a long, perfect scar, impossible for any who live out here
the year 'round to see as other than hateful Assault" (542). In this
description, the line is seen as a traumatic wounding of the body of
America; a "Telluric Injur[y]" (544).¶ It is in particular the
straightness of the tracing and its disregard of natural contours that
define the line as an incision into the body of the earth with the scalpel
of human rationality. The difference between "enlightened rationality"
(order) and "the earth" (chaos) is negotiated over "the distinction
between Blade and Body,--the aggressive exactitude of the one [and] the
helpless indeterminacy of the other" (545). As such, the line is a variant
of earlier historical lines, because already the Romans "were preoccupied
with conveying Force, be it hydraulic, or military, or
architectural,--along straight Lines" (219). In fact, "Right Lines beyond
a certain Magnitude become of less use or instruction to those who must
dwell among them, than intelligible, by their immense regularity, to more
distant Onlookers, as giving a clear sign of Human Presence upon the
Planet" (219). Yet the visto is also a specifically American line on "the
Boundary between the Settl'd and the Unpossess'd" (282) that will "in
futurity" become the dividing line between freedom and slavery. And, in a
flash-forward, it is the prototype of the 20th century Strip: "the Visto
soon is lin'd with Inns [read: motels] and Shops, Stables [read: parking
lots], Games of Skill [read: video-arcades], Theatrickals [read: movie
theaters], Pleasure Gardens [read: sex shops]... a Promenade,--nay,
Mall,--eighty Miles long" (701). [2]
- In all of its aspects, the visto
figures the
"line of progress," rational ideology and teleology, all of which cut
across "scatterbrained nature" and an originally multiplex history, which
has a much more disorderly structure, because it is "not a Chain of single
Links... [but]--rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and
short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only
their Destination in common" (349).¶ As one example of "the
inscription upon the Earth of... enormously long straight Lines" (546),
the line is also a variation of an originary line between the
transcendental, heavenly realm
and that of the earth. (This
juxtaposition is taken up by the character constellation with Mason [the
astronomer] representing the spirit and the sky and Dixon [the surveyor]
representing the body and the earth.) This originary line is the primal
scene of the many divisions that would come to define (not only) America
in the context of the Biblical story of genesis; a story used by
Jacques Lacan in his commentary to de Saussure's theory of language to
designate the separation of the signifier and the signified. As Lacan
states about de Saussure's famous diagram: "an image resembling the wavy
lines of the upper and the lower Waters in miniatures from manuscripts of
Genesis; a double flux marked by fine streaks of rain"
(Écrits. New York: Norton, 1977. 154). In Mason
& Dixon, Mr. Edgewise takes up this division, which makes of
the line also a "stroke of the letter" and thus a figure of the
signifier: "the second Day of Creation, when 'G-d made the Firmament, and
divided the Waters which were under the Firmament, from the Waters which
were above the Firmament,'--thus the first Boundary Line. All else after
that, in all History, is but [here the American and not the German mania
for] Sub-Division" (361). [3]
-
In this light, the visto is the emblem of every cultural demarcation and
ordering. As one can read in Walt Whitman's "Democratic Vistas" (in:
Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. Ed. J. E. Miller. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1959. 455-501), "of all dangers to a nation... there
can be no greater
one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by
a line drawn," and the parallel in Mason & Dixon: "Nothing will
produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in
particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst
of a People,--to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,--'tis the first
stroke.--All else will follow as if predestin'd, unto War and Devastation"
[615]: [4]
- in the context of the line as a
linguistic
line--in which the world becomes, as in so many other of Pynchon's works,
a text that has to be interpreted: "This 'New World' was ever a secret
Body of Knowledge,--meant to be studied with the same dedication as the
Hebrew Kabbala.... Forms of the Land, the flow of water... all are Text
[the "Real Text" of Gravity's Rainbow],--to be attended to,
manipulated, read, remember'd... a Tellurian Scripture.... A smaller
Pantograph copy down here, of Occurrences in the Higher World" (487)--the
most important cultural message of the line is control, because it changes
the meaning of the telluric sentence from the subjunctive and the
conditional (and thus from chaotic complexity) to the declarative and the
factual (and thus to ordered simplicity): [5]
-
with the frontier "the Membrane that divides their [the Native American's]
Subjunctive World from our number'd and dreamless Indicative," (677) [6]
-
while narratologically (in relation to the conceit of the world as a text),
the line is also related to the difference between fact and fiction, "for
as long as its [the country's] Distance from the Post Mark'd West remains
unmeasur'd, nor is yet recorded as Fact, may it remain, a-shimmer, among
the few final Pages of its Life as Fiction" (650). Ultimately, the line
changes language games (fictions) to protocols and to controls (facts).
In this context, the "fictional" America had served as "a very Rubbish-Tip
for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true" (345): [7]
-
The fictional, multiplex America had been a wilderness, "safe till the
next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in...
changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to
Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,--winning away from the
realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto
the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair" (345, emphasis
added). The world that Pynchon had described in Vineland as
"the spilled, the broken world" (Boston: Little Brown, 1990. 267). The
line of control, however, is embedded in the unaccountable changes brought
about by history, its tangled complexity (which was already too complicated
to compute for Brigadier Pudding in Gravity's Rainbow
[New York: Viking, 1973], and in which every situation, as Father
Fairing
had found out in V. [Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963. 470],
is already "An 'N-Dimensional Mishmash'") and thus, as one character
notes, to draw it is "an exercise in futility! I can't believe you
Cuffins! In a few seasons hence, all your Work must be left to grow over,
never to be redrawn, for in the world that is to come, all boundaries
shall be eras'd" (406). [8]
- "That failure of perfect Return,
that haunts all for whom Time elapses. In the runs of Lives, in Company as
alone, what fails to return, is ever a source of Sorrow"
(630).¶¶ A trauma is the effect of an incisive wound:ing, and
the tragedy of trauma lies in the fact that this violent event is, in its
sheer terror, an irretrievably lost moment that can only be treated
belatedly, that is, after the event. Within this traumatic logic, the
traumatic moment (the traumacore) comes to function as an "attractor," a
lost scene that will be psycho-pathologically repeated again and again, in
ever new variations and in ever new scenarios, without the hope of ever
either completely retrieving it or canceling it out. Without the hope of
escaping the scarification that any attempt at suturing entails. In terms
of the line, this traumatic moment designates the destruction of the
"single realm... that undifferentiated Condition before Light and
Dark,--Earth and Sky, Man and Woman,--... that Holy Silence which the
Word broke, and the Multiplexity of matter has ever since kept
hidden, before all but a few resolute Explorers" (523, emphasis
added). [9]
-
If the single realm was that of a time "before" (too early), everything
about the trauma is belated, missed and forever too late. Symptomatically,
Cherrycoke's story is irredeemably belated. He is the prototype of memory
itself, a highly unreliable narrator, or, in the back-projection of the
term into the 18th century, an "untrustworthy Remembrancer" (8). In fact,
like the real, multiplex historical moment, he is only virtually there,
as a yet to-be-written narrative, and thus as the events' unconscious:
"the Revd... was there in but a representational sense, ghostly as an
imperfect narrative to be told in futurity" (195).¶ In this light,
Mason
& Dixon charts out the loss even while describing the moment of
traumatic wounding, with the description of Mason's and Dixon's journey
becoming a slow-motion representation of the traumatic incision and of
its narrative suturing. The timelessness of this incision is taken up in
the repetitive movements of the book, which go from inn to inn, as well
as in the convolution of the stories that twine around the (not only narrative)
line.¶ If the drawing of the line equals the relentless traumatization
of a timeless and silent nature into human (especially Western) history
and representation, it is countered by a specific moment in the story that
describes a once more timeless moment within human time. Pynchon
very carefully relates this lost time to the topology of the line, because
he describes it as a "slowly rotating Loop, or if you like, Vortex" tangent
to the chronological and entropic time-line, "excluded from it, and repeating
itself,--without end" (555). This Loop results from the shift from the
Julian to the Gregorian calendar during the "Schizochronick year"
1752 (192, emphasis added), and it concerns the "Eleven Missing Days
[June 2nd to June 14th] of the Calendar Reform of '52" (554). As
Cherrycoke tells
his listeners, already linking time to space and to trauma: "Those of us
born before that fateful September... make up a generation in all British
History uniquely insulted, each Life carrying a chronologick Wound,
from the same Parliamentary stroke (555, emphasis added). At one point,
Mason finds himself in the vortex of this temporal maelstrom; an event
described as a traumatic "Tear thro' the fabric of Life" (555).
Symptomatically,
his time travel is related to a "lapse of consciousness" (566). The
envortic'd
time, which Mason already links to lost space by describing it as "Tempus
Incognitus" (556), is a "mirror-time" outside of the realm of (the
age of) reason, defined by the fear of and the fascination with the relentless
return of everything irrational and unreasonable: "'Twas as if this
Metropolis
of British Reason had been abandon'd to the Occupancy of all that Reason
would deny. Malevolent shapes flowing in the Streets.... A Carnival of
Fear. Shall I admit it? I thrill'd. I felt that if I ran fast enough,
I could gain altitude, and fly" (559-60). In Mr. Bodley's library, he finds
in the shelves "unallowed books" (among them, of course, Eco's fictional
book "Aristotle on Comedy" [559]) and uncanny "Presences" (559) wishing
to communicate. Before he can enter deeper into this realm, however, Mason
is flung out of the vortex and pulled back into real time, drawn partly
by the "Presences" who turn out to have been: "Wraiths of those who had
mov'd ahead instantly to the Fourteenth, haunting me not from the past
but from the Future" (560). Sooner than he wished to be, he is back on
the line. [10]
- "Is not our own interior white on the
chart?... You may perhaps find some 'Symmes' Hole' by which to get inside
at last" (Henry David Thoreau, Walden).¶¶ Dr. Cyrus
Read Teed, also known as Koresh, was convinced that humans live on the
inside of a concave earth. In an attempt to prove his theory
scientifically, he built, in 1897, with the help of Prof. Morrow, a
measuring device he called the "Rectilineator." The Rectilineator is based
on the model of the perfectly straight line. The argument is as simple as
it is ingenious. If the earth is concave, a perfectly straight line,
starting a small distance from the earth at a perfectly level ground will,
after some time, have to touch the ground: "On January 2, 1897, the
Koreshan Geodetic Survey... arrived at the long, level beach of Naples,
Florida... they erected the Rectilineator and began their measurements....
It took the Koreshan Geodetic Survey five months to move the
Rectilineator, section by section, the distance of four miles. But on May
5, 1897, the line struck the water and a great cheer of thanksgiving arose
from Morrow and his men. Their work was not in vain; Koresh was right. The
earth was concave" (Krafton-Minkel, Walter. Subterranean Worlds:
100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost Races & UFOs from
Inside the Earth. Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited, 1989.
100).¶ Equivalent to Mason's lost time, there are a number of lost
spaces and free "Zones" in Mason & Dixon, such as the
Hollow Earth to which Dixon, the telluric part of the duo, travels. In
this concave world everything one sees is land and "to journey anywhere...
is ever to ascend. With its Corollary,--Outside, here upon the
Convexity,--to go anywhere is ever to descend" (740). The inhabitants of
this world are "Gnomes, Elves, smaller folk, who live underground" (740)
whose existence is endangered because "Once... the size and weight and
shape of the Earth are calculated inescapably at last [what Baudrillard
would call a state of
simulation, which coincides here with Adorno's image of the completion of
the project of the Enlightenment], all this will vanish. We will have to
seek another Space" (741). Maybe some of them will be able to adjust to
the broken, convex world, which is so "exposed to the Outer Darkness....
And wherever you may stand, given the Convexity, each of you is slightly
pointed away from everybody else.... Here in the Earth Concave,
everyone is pointed at everyone else,--ev'rybody's axes
converge,--forcd'd at least thus to acknowledge one another,--an entirely
different set of rules for how to behave [a concave ethics]" (741).¶
Both journeys promise escapes, one from chronological time and the other
from the space of the "broken" world. As true utopias, both countries lie
in im:possible times and spaces; temporal and spatial "nowheres." They are
phantasms, belated, dreamed-up constructs that make up for a more
originary loss. Pynchon, however, has always been concerned with excluded
middles, and ultimately, the topology of Mason & Dixon's poetics calls
for a more basic intermingling of extremes (and these include the extremes
of body and soul, language and silence, chaos and control, feng shui and
rationalism, freedom and slavery, life and death, as well as inside and
outside). In this context, the "strange narrative loop" (the only truly
im:possible narratological embedding) of Eliza's tale is crucial, as a
textual figure of a moment when "Lies and Truth" (530) converge.¶
Such interminglings finds their figure in the topology of the
Möbius-strip, which can come to stand for Pynchon's poetics in their
celebration of ambiguities and their refusal to ultimately "take sides."
It might, therefore, be more than a throwaway reference when Pynchon
evokes the "invention avant-la-lettre" of the Möbius-strip
in the image of a möbial smoke ring. "The [Stogie's] Secret's in the
Twist they put into the handful of Leaves whilst they're squeezin' it into
Shape.... Gives the Smoke a Spin.... He sets his Lips as for a
conventional, or Toroidal, Smoke-Ring, but out instead comes a Ring like a
Length of Ribbon clos'd in a Circle, with a single Twist in it, possessing
thereby but one Side and one Edge" (345).¶ If the lost spaces and
times promised an (albeit phantasmatic) escape from the line, there are
also (probably less phantasmatic?) promises of an escape (of "lines of
flight") that are inherent in matter and its organization as such. The
materiality of the world and its complexity (the multiplexity of matter,
which is mirrored in the multiplicity of the voices and stories in
Mason & Dixon) is the link to the many references to
chaos theory and to the theory of complexity in the novel, a scientific
matrix that has taken over the more negative visions of entropic decay in
Pynchon's work, in a shift from an "entropics" to a "chaotics." [11]
-
The möbial topology of "strange attractors"--evoked, for instance,
in the expression "strangely attractive" (591)--can figure the "processual
topology" of Pynchon's poetics. In fact, Dan O'Hara has related, in a very
fitting image, the form of the ampersand in the novel's title to that of
a strange attractor, and one might indeed map the structure of the novel
onto the figure of a strange attractor, with Mason and Dixon representing
one of its leaves respectively.¶ In the novel, the American continent
is described as a multiplex field (a Deleuzian "body without organs") that
had promised to be too difficult to completely territorialize. As the surveyor
Shelby states, "There is a love of complexity, here in America... no previous
Lines, no fences, no streets to constrain polygony however extravagant...
all Sides zigging and zagging, going ahead and doubling back, making
Loops inside Loops,--in America, 'twas ever, Poh! to Simple Quadrilaterals"
(586). Ultimately, the fight over America is the one between complexity
(movements of deterritorialization, "lines of flight," and molecular
arrangements) and control (movements of territorialization, "lines of
segmentarity," and molar machines): the
fight between "the Age of Metamorphosis, with any turn of Fortune a
possibility" (53), and the Company (a.k.a. "the Firm"
and "They" from Gravity's Rainbow), "who desire total Control
over ev'ry moment of ev'ry Life here" (154). [12]
-
Chaos theory is itself born out of the foam of the theory of fluids. Fittingly,
it is particularly the movement of fluids that Pynchon uses as a juxtaposition
to the straightness of the line; with straightening-up invariably going
hand in hand with a relentless operationalization and simulation.¶
The theory of flows is taken up in Pynchon's discussion of mathematical
Fluxions, the 18th century equivalent to differential calculus and
infinitesimals,
and tools in the study of change (which is of course a favorite Pynchonesque
topic, especially from
Gravity's Rainbow). In the novel, fluxions
(a term taken from Newtonian infinitesimal calculus, where it designates
an infinitesimally small, digital difference) as opposed to fluctuations
(which designate analogue movement) are "pornographies of flow" rather
than of flight, agents through which it is possible to translate real movement
into its false representation. The narration relates fluxions to the--also
in the real-life version--highly ambiguous figure of Emerson, who
comments (in a flash-forward to Bergson) about this translation, "Flow is
his passion. He stands waist-deep in the Tees, fishing, contemplating its
currents.... Emerson has no patience with analysis. He loves Vortices, may
stare at 'em for hours, if he's the time, so far as they remain in the
River,--yet, once upon Paper, he hates them, hates the misuses,--and
therefore hates Euler, for example, at least as much as he reveres Newton.
The first book he publish'd was upon Fluxions" (220). Emerson--who at
other times is flying with his students over the English landscape--is a
rationalist, who separates clearly between the realms of life and of
science. In this context, his hatred of Euler might not only be related to
his mathematical beliefs and studies of fluid dynamics and topology, but
also to the latter's belief, itself taken over from Halley, in the
existence of a Hollow Earth.¶ If vortices and the chaotic theory of
flows are acceptable in the realm of life, in the realm of science,
everything must be reduced to Newtonian reason. In fact, Emerson "has
devis'd a sailing-Scheme, whereby Winds are imagin'd to be forms of
Gravity acting not vertically but laterally, along the Globe's Surface....
All the possible forces in play are represented each by its representative
sheets, stays, braces, and shrouds and such,--a set of lines in space....
Easy to see why sea-captains go crazy,--godlike power over realities
so simplified" (220, emphasis added), and his real scientific
resentments are about the creator's "lapses in Attention, the flaws in
Design... the failures to be reasonable, or to exercise common sense"
(220). Like differential calculus, fluxions allow for and underlie the
simplification, operationalization, and capitalization of the world, and
thus
bring about its dis-enchantment and de-fictionalization; the fact that
"the Flow of Water through Nature, along a Gradient provided free by the
same Deity, might be re-shap'd to drive a Row of Looms" (207). On the
other hand, as Wicks Cherrycoke suggests, fluxions open up a Christian
hermeneutics that attempts--like Pynchon's prose--to "measure even That
Which we cannot,--may not,--see" (721). As he states, "many of us in the
parsonical work... find congenial the Mathematics, particularly the
science of the fluxions. Few may hope to have named for them, like the
Reverend Dr. Taylor, an Infinite Series, yet such steps, large and small,
in the advancement of this most useful calculus, have provided us a
Rack-ful of tools for Analysis undreamed-of even a few years ago, tho'
some must depend upon Epsilonics and Infinitesimalisms, and other sorts of
Defective Zero. Is it the Infinite that tempts us, or the Imp? Or is it
merely our Vocational Habit, ancient as Kabbala, of seeking God there,
among the Notation of these resonating Chains" (721). And, ultimately,
even the Hollow Earth can be brought about in a precise topological manner
through fluxions: "Consider. We've an outer and an inner surface, haven't
we, which mathematickally, 'tis easy, using Fluxions, to warp and smooth,
by small, continuous changes, into a Toroid, with openings at either end,
leading to.... An Inner Surface? Are you by chance seeking analogy between
the Human Body and the planet Earth? The Earth has no inner Surface,
Dixon" (602). [13]
-
The most direct reference to chaos theory in
Mason & Dixon is
the reference to the possibilities of seemingly random change residing
in a chaotic system; a system that is, like history or a continent,
"sensitively
dependent on initial conditions." In an almost direct reference to Edward
Lorenz's image of a chaotic trajectory, which he illustrates by a ski-slope
(another image might be a the surface of a pachinko or a pinball machine,
both of which figure prominently in Vineland), Pynchon shows how
"Mr. Knockwood, a sort of trans-Elemental Uncle Toby, spends hours every
day not with Earth Fortifications, but studying rather the passage of Water
across his land, and constructing elaborate works to divert its flow....
'You don't smoak how it is,' he argues, '--all that has to happen is some
Beaver, miles upstream from here, moves a single Pebble,--suddenly, down
here, everything's changed! The creek's a mile away, running through the
Horse Barn! Acres of Forest no longer exist! And that Beaver don't even
know what he's done!'" (364). Pynchon relates this freedom of choice and
the possibility of "unaccountable" change to the chronology of human life,
relating it thus to the trajectory from youth to maturity--one might turn
Lorenz's image upside-down and write death at the bottom! Again, one might
refer to the tangled lines of history converging onto death as a final
attractor "on this side": "As if... there was no single Destiny... but
rather a choice among a great many possible ones, their number steadily
diminishing each time a Choice be made, till at last 'reduc'd,' to the
events that do happen to us, as we pass among 'em, thro' Time unredeemable"
(45). [14]
-
Against openness and unaccountability, the project of the line is to reduce
to certainty. As Cherrycoke notes, "Conditions hitherto shapeless are swiftly
reduc'd to Certainty" (636). Ultimately, it is "out There, the Timeless,
ev'rything upon the Move, no pattern ever to repeat itself" against
the order of the straight line (209). Maybe even more than Mason and Dixon's
respective journeys, the utopian counterweight to linear history and to
control is thus the multiplex, differently "timeless" moment in its sheer
complexity and potentiality; the moment traversed by "the tangle of purposes"
(79). [15]
-
During the passage from the Northern to the Southern hemisphere--always
a crucial moment in Pynchon's fictions--Mason & Dixon experience:
"the Gate of the single shadowless Moment" (56). Similarly, the second
transit of Venus is seen in the context of the "Purity of the Event" (247),
a moment, as Mason states, "redeem'd from the Impurity in which I must
ever practice my Life" (247). History, like narrative in general, zooms
in onto such pure events, which, in Pynchon's universe, are invariably
promises: "the Event not yet 'reduc'd to certainty,'... [a] last moment
of Immortality" (177). In particular children are (quite literally, because
they do not yet know death and are thus "eternal and free" [701,
my emphasis]), immortal and eventual. They still "jump, flapping
their Arms in unconscious memory of when they had wings" (296). As such,
the young "allow their Elders release, if only for moments at a time,
from Its [Death's] Claims upon the Attention" (37). The innocence of children
is also "The Innocence of Unconsciousness" (759). For the adults, a return
to childhood is possible only as a (once more Deleuze & Guattarian)
"becoming-child," or a "becoming-animal."¶ Culturally, the American
West has always promised such an unconscious innocence, which is a topos
as old as America itself, while the East figures the way "into Memory,
and Confabulation" (618). Mason and Dixon's journey further West,
therefore,
is only a subjunctive; an "if" taken up by the narrative itself, which
can imagine their going further West only as subjunctive, "conditional"
projects and dreams. (See in this context the many "embedded subjunctives"
such as: "All subjunctive, of course,--had young Mason gone to
his father, this
might have been the conversation likely to result"
(208). It is Mason's & Dixon's (but also, in a sense, the narrative)
line that "ifs" these other worlds. If they had, and the narrative with
them, gone on "Westering" (711), Mason & Dixon might have reached the
state of "becoming animal": "Supposing Progress Westward were a Journey,
returning unto Innocence,--approaching, as a Limit, the innocence of the
Animals" (427) and the narration might have reached silence. But
they re-turn, like Mason from his journey into the eleven days, Dixon from
the Hollow Earth, and the narrative from the idea of giving itself up to
silence. [16]
-
With
Mason & Dixon, Pynchon has created a complex of (more or
less) subjunctive worlds, all suspended between fact and fiction. A
multiplexity
of real:ized stories (stories transferred from Deleuzian "virtualities"
into--if only written--"actualities"). In his retrospection of the genesis
of America, he has charted out the complex discursive and topographical
spaces which would build themselves up, according to a "logic of emergence,"
into the construct, or better aggregate,
called America. In surveying a multiplex, turbulent space rather than
excavating
a point of origin, he affirms the underlying multiplexity--the tangle
and the knot--on which all orders--lines--are constructed. Charting
the climate of (not only!) America during its beginnings, he also affirms
the belief in America as a "far from equilibrium" system in which
change--and chance--still have their place.¶ In the complex
narrative intertwinings
of chaos and order, rationality and irrationality, fact and fiction, trauma
and jouissance, Pynchon refrains, as always, from easy,
"predictable" answers.
He never argues on just one side, although one can easily detect inclinations
and "attractions" (which point to a neo-materialism, to eco:logics,
and to subaltern studies, amongst others): His "pachinko poetics" remain
fundamentally möbial, ambivalent and, in the best sense of the word,
turbulent, as turbulent as the life-stories of C. Mason & J. Dixon.
[start]
Dept. of American Literature and Culture
University of Cologne
hanjo.berressem@uni-koeln.de
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