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Article: PYNCHON'S MERRY `MASON & DIXON' A DISAPPOINTINGLY MUDDLED EFFORT.(Lifestyle)(Review)
- Article from:
- Seattle Post-Intelligencer
- Article date:
- May 8, 1997
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the Dialog Corporation by Gale Group. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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A border is the supreme fiction: an entity all acknowledge even though none can see or touch it. It lies there upon a map, like so many words in a book, minus any manifestation ``but the sleek Purity of Ink upon Paper,'' as Thomas Pynchon writes in ``Mason & Dixon.''
That's ``Mason & Dixon'' as in the line, the one drawn in the 1760s to demarcate Pennsylvania from Maryland, the one that divides American North from South.
Pynchon has structured ``Mason & Dixon'' as a story within a story. A member of the surveying party recounts to his family some 20 years later how Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the mismatched pair of English astronomers who surveyed ...