These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This postmodernist masterpiece is in many ways the most accessible of Pynchon’s books.
It is of course a furthering of his inquisition into methods of telling (his)stories, and modes of representation, and hence assumes the quality, not of traditional historical fiction, but of what Linda Hutcheon calls ‘historiographic metafiction’.2 Concerned with de-naturalising the temporal relationship between past and present such fiction flouts historical verisimilitude, and brings to the fore that characteristic postmodern epistemological questioning of the nature of historical knowledge, and historical writing. For Pynchon’s book fans out from this event, using it as the basis of an enquiry into the reason (and madness) of the Enlightenment, the brutalities of slavery, the nature of time, the origins and futures (I use the plural deliberately) of America, and much more besides. To describe it thus, however, is to limit the breadth of the novel and diminish the author’s astonishing ambitions. It is more concretely historical than his other novels because at its core is the re-presentation of a singular significant act in the American past: the drawing of the Mason–Dixon line between Maryland and Pennsylvania.
To a greater or lesser degree each partakes in the discourse of history, but it is the 1997 novel Mason Dixon, with its eighteenth-century setting, language and typography (use of the em dash capitalisation of real nouns William Caslon’s ampersand, etc.) which is most deeply embedded in the past.1 As such it is, as most reviewers and critics have noted, the author’s clearest attempt at writing a full-fledged historical fiction. All of Thomas Pynchon’s novels have a deep vein of history running through them.
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