Although Thomas Pynchon has continued to publish long after the postwar American countercultural era, his politics are critically characterized in relation to that movement's values. The dominant critical positions associate power with rationalism and functionality, and political opposition with creativity and pleasure, positioning Pynchon's novels at a politicized intersection between postmodernism and the counterculture. This article problematizes this dominant critical position, taking Mason & Dixon (1997) as exemplary of Pynchon's reconsideration of the nature of power and potential opposition to it in response to the countercultural movement's failures and successes, and to developments in capitalist social organization in the 1980s.

After the counterculture: American capitalism, power, and opposition in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

Through Pynchon-written songs, integration of Italian opera, instances of harmonic performance, dialogue with Plato’s Republic and Benjamin Franklin’s glass armonica performance, Mason & Dixon extends, elaborates, and investigates Pynchon’s own standard musical practices. Pynchon’s investigation of the domestic, political, and theoretical dimensions of musical harmony in colonial America provides the focus for the novel’s historical, political, and aesthetic critique. Extending Pynchon’s career-long engagement with musical forms and cultures to unique levels of philosophical abstraction, in Mason & Dixon ’s consideration of the “inherent Vice” of harmony, Pynchon ultimately criticizes the tendency in his own fiction for characters and narrators to conceive of music in terms that rely on the tenuous and affective communal potentials of harmony.

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Music in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon

Alfred Hitchcock‚s Shadow of a Doubt‚

Natural Acts Restore Linear Relationships in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

By drawing upon astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon for the unlikely protagonists of Mason & Dixon (1997), Thomas Pynchon develops a revisionist history of these two Englishmen as they come to terms with America in the so-called Age of Reason, which was informed by a European philosophical movement with its roots in rational discourse aimed at cultural and political intellect that eventually served as the foundation for American independence and democracy. But as Thomas Paine suggests, time wields a stronger power than does reason, and what history calls the Age of Reason may remind one of an ideal time in America when, in theory, rational discourse converted people into better citizens. However, as Mason and Dixon create their Line, recognizing that it will, in effect, divide North from South, they begin to realize that America consumes them with irrational discourse.

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Pynchon's Age of Reason: Mason & Dixon and America's Rise of Rational Discourse

In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), the ambassador, while plotting to kill the prime minister, orders the kidnapped American child Hank McKenna killed, telling his would-be gunman, Edward Drayton: “Don’t you realize that Americans dislike having their children stolen?” Earlier in the movie, Jo McKenna entertains her son and husband by singing “Que Sera Sera,” and its playfulness becomes darkly ironic when she sings “the future’s not ours to see” on the eve of her son’s kidnapping.

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Jason T. McEntee

Papers

Pynchon's Age of Reason: Mason & Dixon and America's Rise of Rational Discourse

“The Future’s Not Ours to See”: How Children and Young Adults Reflect the Anxiety of Lost Innocence in Alfred Hitchcock’s American Movies