“What Phantom Shape, Implicit in the Figures?”: Liminal Monsters, Paranormal Places in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon

By interrogating geodetic surveying techniques in the New World, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon produces a characteristic giddiness and mystical flux that reveals, uncharacteristically, the presence and purpose of anti-imperialist resistance. Pynchon’s vivification of monstrous bioregions keeps alive the contention that the U.S. has even now not reached its endgame, that there is still a chance for becoming a nation that embraces an environmental community of all life forms. Reading Mason & Dixon biocentrically challenges readers to see natural flora and fauna as beings analogous to hybrids or cyborgs, but within an evolutionary continuum that still leaves us time. The novel’s recasting of the celebrated surveyors for a contemporary audience challenges readers to look to America’s colonial past for not only environmental mistakes, but also strains of opposition that inform future policy and behavior. What emerges for natural environments unsettled by the boundary making of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon is not a melding of anthropocentric reason and the paranormal, but the creation of liminal zones that persist through mimicry until reclamation occurs to create entirely new spatial designs. Approaching plants, animals, and places in this novel as liminal makes possible a new Pynchonian paradigm for advancing the postcolonial Americas from impending crisis to ecological communitas.