Engaging Foundational Narratives in Morrison’s Paradise and Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon

This essay examines how Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon construct foundational narratives as critiques of national imaginings. Setting up the idea of the nation as imagined communities coming together through shared narratives, Morrison and Pynchon probe the possibility of future national imaginings through narratives which continually breakdown in establishing the past. In the seeming paradox of narrating pasts that destroy and delimit the future, their novels display the disjuncture between the need to narrate the nation and the collective narratives that often emerge to define national boundaries. Their texts point toward the limits of national imaginings and spaces that unsuccessfully map onto the populations they purport to represent. In the context of the transnational turn in American studies, foundational narratives signal national narratives as self-destructive operations of power that can compel a populace to construct space–less histories and obscure social relations. Simultaneously, foundational narratives can also signal spaces beyond national boundaries, understandings of the nation as transnational and reliant on fictional modes in order to reestablish historical and social links.