Despite the fact that Thomas Pynchon has continued to write long after the American countercultural era and has engaged with numerous different historical and geographical settings, critical consensus still associates his politics with that postwar radical movement. Such readings tend to operate on the basis of identifying opposed constellations of values to posit a binary distinction between the subjective, creative, and pleasurable, and the objective, rationalistic, and functional, associating the former with counterculture and the latter with a loose conceptualization of power. Molly Hite's “‘Fun Was Actually Becoming Quite Subversive’” exemplifies this critical consensus, reading Pynchon, and particularly Gravity's Rainbow (1973), through Marcuse and Freud to identify a politicized countering of technocratic and capitalist societies’ “death drive” with pleasure, purposelessness, and play.Footnote 1 Postmodern novelistic style is presented here as a literary version of the challenge to social order posed by play as exemplified by the Yippie social impulse. Many critics who argue for Pynchon as a political author situate his novels at such an intersection between postmodernism and postwar American counterculture. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (2012) has canonized such a perspective; Jeff Baker writes, for example, “The common critical assessment that Pynchon's politics tends towards the ‘oblique’ echoes this countercultural aversion to the polemical,” implying countercultural politics as a matter not only of particular values, but also of particular modes of expression which challenge totalization.Footnote 2 Similarly, David Cowart has argued that,
Pynchon … from the beginning of his career, has looked for ways to expose and subvert the great engine of Faustian desire, the drive toward more knowledge and more power that characterizes a world order shaped and sustained by what in Against the Day he calls the “capitalist/Christer gridwork.”Footnote 3
His analysis that Pynchon's politics and politicized aesthetics remain consistent throughout his career is made explicit when Cowart writes,
From V. to Vineland (1990), from The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) to Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and from Mason & Dixon to Against the Day, Pynchon insists on writing the history of the marginalized or, as he calls them, the preterite – those on whose backs an older idea of history unfolded.Footnote 4
The most recent book-length publications on Pynchon augment such identifications of an enduring countercultural politics in his novels. Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor, for example, adopt a familiar perspective, arguing that “the formal (and often elliptical) diffusion of encyclopaedic narrative does not obscure from his pages our sense of Pynchon's political and ethical concern; moreover, pace Mendelson, that concern is often most acutely articulated when the authorized national narrative is traversed by disruptive incursions and migrations.” For them too, “Pynchon's writing is born out of the social tensions of the 1960s, a decade which it frequently inhabits or ponders from a historical distance, either past or future.”Footnote 5 Most recently, Joanna Freer's Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture, as the title suggests, presents the postwar radical movement as the enduring foundation of Pynchon's politics.Footnote 6
Deborah Madsen, however, writing after the publication of Vineland in 1990, noted a drop in Pynchon's popularity with her students and considered,
In the seventies, what was called at the time Pynchon's paranoid vision of global conspiracy mounted by the military–industrial complex against the interests of the individual was very compelling. But in the nineties, this image of multinational cartels working towards global destruction is both so real as to be passé and, at the same time, inauthentic in the context of advanced postindustrial capitalism. Gravity's Rainbow presents an image of late corporate capitalism, dominated by multinational cartels engaged in a complex struggle with the forces of nature, over which they seek total control. Recent developments in management theory and public-sector initiatives like Al Gore's National Performance Review, however, indicate a trend toward decentralization, worker empowerment and diversification of “organized anarchy” in late capitalism.Footnote 7
Such consideration of changes in Pynchon's style and reception are not commonplace in Pynchon criticism. Instead, when Against the Day was released in 2006, one reviewer asked disparagingly, “What was he thinking?” and answered, “To begin with, he was apparently thinking what he usually thinks,” continuing to associate Pynchon's politics with countercultural values. As Heinz Ickstadt notes, however, “the critics, too, are thinking what they usually think.”Footnote 8
This article challenges dominant critical readings of Mason & Dixon (hereafter M&D) (1997) by situating the novel in the context of 1990s theoretical considerations of power and radicalism which foreground capitalism and possible oppositions or alternatives to it. Critics have argued that the radical politics of the novel inhere in their challenge to Enlightenment rationalism in the context of which modern America emerged and which they identify as the foundations of contemporary American dominant ideology. “Subjunctivity,” subjectivity, and irrationality are identified, then, as the counterculturally inflected values foundational to the novel's radicalism. This article, however, argues that M&D recognizes America's emergence alongside the ascendancy of global capitalism and amid nascent consumerism, and that Pynchon's characterization of power and potential radicalism therein is generated in response to the neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s rather than to the postwar and Cold War contexts of his early novels.
Building on Jason McEntree's analysis that M&D critiques America's lack of “a clearly defined moral structure,” this article argues that Pynchon develops a moral, intrinsic value system antithetical to capitalist, extrinsic value in both novels.Footnote 9 Not only is capitalism depicted as functioning on the basis of values associated with counterculture, as well as other radical movements, it also can function on the basis of any values which do not contravene the generation of profit; all individuals and actions are valued or disregarded according to their ability to generate profit. In contrast, Pynchon presents the intrinsic valuation of individuals or actions as a moral and radical way of life. M&D contrasts the functional and human values of Mason and Dixon in their paid work for the Royal Society in comparison with their vocational commitment to their practices.
Problematizing the critical association of Pynchon with the postwar American counterculture not only offers new directions for critical analysis in the field of Pynchon studies but also conceptually explores the contemporary nature of power and possibilities for resistance to it as they are discussed in his later novels. Furthermore, such problematization speaks to contemporary critical exploration of the character of contemporary America, its politics, and its place in the world. M&D is in many ways a specifically American narrative focussing on the drawing of the Mason–Dixon Line which is so central to American history, including details of slavery in America, and historical factors in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, as well as fictionalizing key figures from American history and national myth. Nonetheless, the novel challenges American exceptionalism, mapping contemporary America's multiculturalism, and its place in a network of global capitalism and foreign policy, frequently critiqued as neo-imperialist, onto an eighteenth-century America shown as being formed by European colonization, as well as strengthened by global trade and, in particular, slavery. As Heinz Ickstadt has argued,
Of all American contemporary writers, Thomas Pynchon has been the most consistently cosmopolitan. Even when his novels seem to be primarily concerned with the United States (or with a mythological “America”), as they evidently are in The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland and Mason &Dixon, their narrative range extends from the American continent to contexts, episodes and conflicts throughout the history of Western civilization, its beliefs, its scientific thought and its colonial conquestsFootnote 10
Driving the historical events understood as characteristically American, in M&D, is global capitalism embedding contemporary America in the context of its European colonial origins as well as its contemporary capitalist network. In M&D Pynchon posits that capitalism is something which is happening everywhere and all the time, making the novel relevant beyond its eighteenth-century and predominantly American setting, but also challenging concepts of insular and well-defined nation by foregrounding the global network structure which capitalism necessitates.
After a seven-year gap between GR and Vineland (1990), and after the markedly different style of the latter from the former, upon M&D’s publication critics keenly presented it as a return to form for Pynchon. This representation of the novel as a continuation from his early work is particularly oriented around analysis of his politics. For T. Coraghessen Boyle, writing in the New York Times, M&D heralds the return of “the old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all.” In this “subversive” novel, he continues, “Marvels abound. Anything is possible – even in the Age of Reason.”Footnote 11 Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds makes the academic case for a similar characterization, arguing,
In a century most noted in the West for its rationalism and cool scientific interests, it revivifies the fertility of imagination that could and did produce, in historical fact, both widespread reform of weights and measures and common sideshow-type exhibits featuring talking dogs, wax automata, and Jacques de Vaucanson's mechanical duck.Footnote 12
This focus on the creative within the rational, according to such argument, unravels the rationalist and positivist authority of eighteenth-century powers such as the Royal Society.Footnote 13 All such arguments, which each have their own nuances and do not aim at identical points, nonetheless include the basic premise that Pynchon values subjectivity and creativity as tools of counterculture beyond the postwar years, and that power, from the eighteenth century to Pynchon's own 1980s–90s setting of writing and publication, is conformist, homogeneous, and rational. These arguments base their conclusions on identifying a Pynchonian moral dichotomy between subjective and objective, wherein the former equates with freedom and creativity, and the latter with limitation and an oppressive, Foucauldian “will to truth.”Footnote 14
Both David Thoreen and Samuel Thomas concur with the identification of rationalism as the ideology of power in the novel and posit Pynchon's politics as embodied in his affronts to it. Their arguments, however, identify the same distinction between private and public which this argument foregrounds, although they interpret this feature differently. For Thoreen, Pynchon pits Mason and Dixon as “men of conscience” against themselves as “men of science” in a narrative wherein their recognition of involvement and responsibility in world politics, and particularly Dixon's impassioned stance against slavery, depict the triumph of the emotional individual over a rationalistic system.Footnote 15 The narrative, for Thoreen, presents the machinations of power as suppressing individual agency, creativity, and freedom, through the creation of the line, and other similarly rationalistic endeavours, which are limiting and divisive. Thomas focusses on play's interruption of the line, dwelling on diversionary moments in the narrative, collecting together the fragments which deny rationalistic totalization therein. He argues,
Mason and Dixon may be equipped with “Lenses that never lie, and Micrometers fine enough to subtend the Width of a hair upon a Martian's Eye-Ball” but they cannot measure everything. There are still objects, events and spaces, fantastical though they often are, that retain a “private” life – “shadowy, whispering, veil'd to be unveil'd, ever safe from the Insults of Time.”Footnote 16
The argument of this article builds on these notions of “men of conscience” and the retention of “private” lives, but focusses on Pynchon's evocation of capitalism alongside rationalism as constituting a hybrid form of power, emphasizing his recognition of the necessity to oppose both, which the postwar counterculture neglected to do. McEntree takes the opposite view to many critics, presenting the America of M&D as not rational enough, as failing to deliver on the promises of Enlightenment reason rather than as oppressing the irrational. He considers, “Does this make the Age of Reason an Age of Unreason? Perhaps not, but Pynchon's novel suggests that the Age of Reason – at least as we know it – never happened, and that rationality remains unstable, indeterminate, and applicable only case by case.”Footnote 17 He does not, however, fully consider the relationship between capitalism and irrationality developed in the novel and the implications for political radicalism entailed in this analysis are not explored. This article develops aspects of the arguments of Thoreen, Thomas and McEntree to offer another perspective on M&D.
As Martin Eve notes, although Pynchon returns constantly to the relationship between the powerful and the oppressed, his characterization of power is frequently obscure, rarely attributing power directly to “the State,” but instead drawing attention to the function of markets.Footnote 18 The relation between these two nodes of power is the focus of M&D in which Pynchon reevaluates the conformity/creativity binary distinction between the status quo and radical opposition to detail a dual function of power in a depiction of a state with boundaries, laws, and defined roles alongside capitalism based on fluidity, transgression, and change. The analysis of 1990s cultural theorists provides an illuminating context for this argument. Discussing William Leach, amongst other business theorists, Thomas Frank argues, for example, that
Leach points out that early ideologues of consumerism described the new regime not as one of repressive adherence to tradition or patriarchy but as a valorization of constant change, of individuality, and of the eternal new. Consumer capitalism, he notes, has taught a “concept of humanity” according to which “what is most ‘human’ about people is their quest after the new, their willingness to violate boundaries, their hatred of the old and the habitual … and their need to incorporate ‘more and more’ goods, money, experience, everything.” Consumer capitalism did not demand conformity or homogeneity; rather, it thrived on the doctrine of liberation and continual transgression that is still familiar today.Footnote 19
Arguably, the eighteenth-century setting of M&D evokes the founding of modern America on the very values of freedom, movement, transgression of boundaries, on the formation of global capitalism as we now know it, and offers an explication of the misorientation of the postwar counterculture which based its opposition on those very values. M&D presents the modern age, up to the point of its publication, as characterized both by an enduring relation between essentialized categories of power and the oppressed, and by power's paradoxical hegemonic operation through capitalistic, heterotopic values. Whilst critics have identified consumerism as a central theme in M&D, so far they have not considered the implication of the apparently liberating values of capitalism for radicalism based on concepts of subjectivity, freedom, desire, and transgression.
The most quoted passage of M&D describes the formation of America as a project both of extending rationalism from Europe to this new continent, and of projecting a dream onto it. Here the novel builds on the foundations laid in Vineland for exploring the successes and failures of the counterculture in the context of a long view of American history stretching back towards its foundation; the title Vineland recalls the name given to America by Vikings and has been read as evocative of its promise as a new society. Booker notes, for example,
The New World as a whole originally functioned in the European psyche as a locus of hopeful idealism. It is, for example, no accident that Spanish conqueror Vasco de Quiroga stalked about sixteenth-century colonial Mexico bearing with him a well-annotated copy of Thomas More's Utopia. But the cruelty with which de Quiroga and his fellow conquistadors subdued the native population of Mexico anticipates Pynchon's suggestion in Vineland that the American dream has become a nightmare.Footnote 20
In M&D, Pynchon explicitly presents America at its modern foundation as the product not only of the infliction of rationalism on the land and its indigenous population, but also of the infliction of subjective desires, of European dreams. Cherrycoke wonders,
Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream? – in which all that cannot pass in metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever ‘tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen, – serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true, – Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments, – winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.Footnote 21
This passage has regularly been interpreted as an overt statement of belief in a dichotomy between the creative, subjective, possible, and the limited, objective, defined. Most notably, for example, Tony Tanner characterized Pynchon's moral framework as structured around his understanding of the concept of the “subjunctive,” writing, “Among many other things, this novel is a celebration of America as a last realm of the Subjunctive, and an elegiac lament for the accelerating erosion of that subjunctivity.”Footnote 22 Earlier, however, Tanner evoked precisely the relation between such subjunctivity and definition which established America, writing,
America – a symbol for boundarilesnness; historically boundaried. The new country, the United States of America, depended for its existence both as entity and concept on two things – appropriated, surveyed, legally appropriated land; and a sense of an uncharted, inexhaustibly bounteous west, a plenitude of possibilities. Measurement and dream – in Pynchon's terms, the indicative and the subjunctive.Footnote 23
Tanner's characterization of M&D sees Pynchon pitting two Americas against one another, the indicative which belongs to power, and the subjunctive which belongs to radical opposition, yet the novel arguably suggests a more complex interrelation between these two categories.
Whilst the realization may be reluctant, and the countercultural attraction towards the subjunctive as opposed to the indicative still evident in the novel, this article argues that M&D sees Pynchon acknowledge that both “measurement” and “dream” constitute and maintain an essential power structure. As David Cowart articulates it, Pynchon “studies the great American paradox” in which “the United States seemed to exemplify the triumph of reason and faith in human potential, yet without sacrificing its identity as a place of spiritual distinction – a city on a hill.”Footnote 24 Particular characters worry about the loss of the imaginative to the rational in the age of territorial expansion of European thought across America. Such statements, however, are made through characters, or through the narration of Wicks Cherrycoke, and therefore represent subjective positions in the novel rather than defining its entire content. As Cowart summarizes, Pynchon offers characters which present “comically exaggerated” binary oppositions, though he himself “avoids simplistic representations of the mighty forces he charts.”Footnote 25
The former long passage is, indeed, characteristic of Cherrycoke's subjective position on the radicalism of creativity. Cherrycoke explicitly presents theories of history and narrativization which argue for the creative presentation and reimagining of historical fact as a means of wresting totalizing power from those who use discourses pertaining to truth to naturalize their particular worldview.Footnote 26 He defends his narrative style against criticisms advanced by his listeners, such as Uncle Ives, who states, “Facts are Facts, and to believe otherwise is … to behave perversely”; reading “storybooks” is dangerous, sending readers mad due to “irresponsible narratives, that will not distinguish between fact and fancy.”Footnote 27 Whilst Cherrycoke and other characters believe that the Age of Reason is defeating creativity and the subjunctive quality of potentially radical perspectives, the novel as a whole presents a liquidation of such dichotomous thinking which allows the eighteenth-century context to prefigure the “spilled and broken world” of Vineland.Footnote 28 As McEntree puts it,
By taking us over two centuries into the past, Pynchon suggests that the absurdity of the twentieth century actually makes more sense if we recognize that the Age of Reason replete with rational discourse never happened – that we have yet to experience a truly enlightened era of rational discourse.Footnote 29
In the Cape, for example, the business of transgression is epitomized in the sex slaves kept in the Slave Lodge. Here, Pynchon writes, “Lust is schedul'd, splashing outside the Church-drawn boundaries of marriage, as across racial lines.”Footnote 30 The lodge's interior is “a region without a map,” with spaces beyond the definition of cartography actual or metaphorical.Footnote 31 The experiences available are known only as rumours, the channels of knowledge about the Slave Lodge unofficial. Pynchon describes, for example, the whispered possibility of experiencing a reenactment of the recent tragedy of the “Black Hole of Calcutta” in which 146 Europeans were forced to spend the night together in a cell nine feet by seven feet and five inches. Although this sex trade preserves the master–slave relationship characteristic of Cape society, it also allows for the (false) experience of switched roles, the transgression of public norms and of marital vows. Slavery is simultaneously a site of social fixity and of social transgression. This paradox inherent to slavery metonymically represents the paradox of the relationship between colonialism with its conservative social roles, strict etiquette and rules, and capitalist global trade which transgresses national borders, and prospers through cultivating and satiating appetites.
The Vroom's household is characteristic of the capitalistic–transgressive as well as socially repressed dual structure which Pynchon depicts as constituting power in the modern world. The daughters, for example, use their childish innocence to stage inappropriate situations with Mason, climbing on his lap, asking him to brush their hair, acting suggestively precisely through their role as virginal (teenage) children. Pynchon describes Mason's first meeting alone with the three daughters, writing,
A moment later she's back, with Els, who comes skipping over to Mason, and without a word, lifting her skirts, sits upon his lap in a sinuous Motion, allowing the Lace Hems to drop again, before squirming about to glance at his Face. “Now then, my English Tea-Pot,” reaching to pinch his Cheek, by now well a-flame, “shall I tell you what she really wants you to do with that Hair-Brush?”
In response, Jet's insistence upon the propriety of Mason is in itself a provocation to transgress when she says, “‘Mr Mason is a Gentleman, who would never have such designs upon my bodily Comfort’ putting out her hand for the return of the Hair-Brush, ‘would you, Charles?’”Footnote 32 Cherrycoke, in his narration of the Cape, notes that “the only reason for anyone to endure church all day Sunday is to be reminded of the Boundaries there to be o'erstepp'd,” but the inverse is also true; the sexually subversive behaviour of the Vroom girls, implicitly sanctioned by their mother, is intended to perpetuate the defined social roles against which it seems to operate.Footnote 33 Mason, for example, is visited by Austra, a slave of the Vrooms, who has been sent by them to capitalize on the lust intended to have been generated by the girls. The sexual encounter is designed to create mixed-race children who can be sold at a higher price than their black counterparts at slave auctions, which would create profit for the Vrooms and augment their position in society.
For McEntree, the main critique offered in the novel is of the “Age of Reason's” hypocrisy in its apparent valorization of rationality but its perpetual irrationality. He describes slavery as an absurdity, for example, and argues,
The very notion that white Americans began eradicating Indians to conquer the land and held slaves in bondage to help manage the land would seem to negate any sense of rational behaviour. Furthermore, these processes of elimination and control suggest that “rational” discourse often takes the form of rationalization – political arguments as excuses meant to justify such atrocities.Footnote 34
For McEntree, the senseless killing that dominates American history also challenges the characterization of it as a nation built upon Enlightenment values. His argument makes clear that irrationality has not been the socially ameliorative or even positively revolutionary value that critics argue. He continues,
War, not rationality – or worse, war as rationality – has often dominated as the true form of American Reason throughout our history. Young men – “boys,” in many cases – eradicate the Indians; nearly eradicate themselves a century later; a century after that, eradicate scores of thousands of Vietnamese (not to mention the loss of 58,000 American troops); a generation later, eradicate tens of thousands of Iraqis – all in the name of a country that more than two centuries ago devoted itself to rational discourse.Footnote 35
The Vrooms are characteristic of this hypocrisy in relation to rationality; their behaviour undermines their professed allegiance to it. The Vroom household is exemplary of the hypocrisy of America as a colonial nation and the fact that this South Africa-colonizing Dutch family should stand for America is exemplary of Pynchon's challenge to American exceptionalism in the novel which focusses on what made and continues to make America, characterizing it as a fabricated, composite, heterotopic entity. The theme of slavery as underpinning the emergence of America as a wealthy, trading, capitalist entity is the macrocosmic analogue of the Vroom household, revealing a dark and irrational underbelly of the Enlightenment nation. As Cherrycoke considers,
What is not visible … is the Negro Slavery … In the shadows where the Forge's glow does not reach, or out uncomforted beneath the vaporous daylight of Chesapeake, bent to the day's loads of Fuel from the vanishing Hardwood Groves nearby, or breathing in the mephitic Vapors of the bloomeries, – wordlessly and, as some may believe, patiently, they bide everywhere, these undeclared secular terms in the Equations of Proprietary Happiness.Footnote 36
That slaves as “secular terms” are not represented in the rationalized “Equations of Proprietary Happiness” presents their condition as a violation of the apparent rationalism of society. The vision is affirmed through different characters’ perspectives. Later, for example, Dixon labels slavery the “shameful core” of the world, describing a subducted hell- and id-like region of slavery beneath apparent reality: “down there, down where it smells like warm Brine and Gunpowder fumes, they're murdering and dispossessing thousands untallied, the innocent of the World, passing daily into the Hands of Slave-owners and Torturers.”Footnote 37
In the Vroom household, Pynchon offers an example of the new operation of the individual behind the social role in the era, and the bifurcation between appearance and reality, community and self which modern individualism has afforded, according to his depiction. Across the novel, Pynchon explores the sociopolitical causes and effects of the ascendency of individualism in the eighteenth century. Whilst running the line in America, for example, Mason and Dixon stumble accidentally upon a hedonistic, secret party held by nobleman, Lord Lepton. Lord Lepton and Dixon discuss the “Great Chain of Being,” a fixed structure including earthly, celestial, and godly positions in a defined order of (dis)association. Whilst Lord Lepton worries about a potential unknown exterior to the system, Dixon reimagines it as an equalizing horizontal chain rather than a hierarchical vertical one. “Which shall go before, I wonder, and which follow, – aye and which direction shall it point in?” Dixon wonders, revealing his perception of imminent social restructuring. “You sound like one of those Leveler chaps,” the lord replies, anxious about the consequences for him of such radical reorganisation.Footnote 38 Tempering Dixon's optimism, however, Lady Lepton concludes the conversation by describing “that Chain, more imprisoning than the Captain's, more relentlessly fiduciary than Mr. Dixon's.”Footnote 39 Pynchon immediately follows her statement with a reference to the emerging coal industry so that her statement might be read as implying the enslavement to capitalism that liberation from a fixed social order will entail; Lord Lepton continues her point, “There's coal out where you're going, you see.” Lady Lepton's use of the word “fiduciary” is evocative of the conversion of human into financial value that Pynchon's characterization of capitalism foregrounds, referring as it does to the concept of trust in specifically business rather than personal contexts. Furthermore, it embodies the paradoxical proximity between both kinds of value in the capitalist dissolution of fixed social order and sees Pynchon question what kind of freedom and equality emerged through Enlightenment individualism. A greater degree of social equality was generated by the breaking of social bonds which defined individuals unalterably by their social role and ceded sovereignty to the private individual for self-determination and even self-creation. As such, whilst the names of roles and the status attached to them remained, their content and meaning were altered, and a gulf emerged between the role and the liquid, mobile self which inhabited it.
The emergence of the individual not tied to a position by birth, but able to move behind a nonetheless fixed structure of stock social characters, exemplifies the relation between the hybridized, mixed, and transgressive, and the fixed, defined, and conformist. The emergence of such a modern self as announced by Lady Lepton and its effect upon morality is the subject of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, where he writes,
In many pre-modern, traditional societies it is through his or her membership in a variety of social groups that the individual identifies himself or herself and is identified by others. I am brother, cousin and grandson, member of this household, that village, this tribe. These are not characteristics that belong to human beings accidentally, to be stripped away in order to discover “the real me”. They are part of my substance, defining partially at least and sometimes wholly my obligations and my duties. Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast.Footnote 40
He continues,
The conception of a whole human life as the primary subject of objective and impersonal evaluation, of a type of evaluation which provides the content for judgement upon the particular actions of projects of a given individual, is something that ceases to be generally available at some point in the progress – if we can call it such – towards and into modernity. It passes to some degree unnoticed, for it is celebrated historically for the most part not as a loss, but as self-congratulatory gain, as the emergence of the individual freed on the one hand from the social bonds of those constraining hierarchies which the modern world rejected at its birth and on the other hand from what modernity has taken to be the superstitions of teleology.Footnote 41
The freedom from definition by social role, and the alienation of the individual from their social function provide ideal conditions for qualities such as disingenuity, hypocrisy, and irresponsibility which rely on this kind of fragmentation of the subject. Such separation between surface appearance and depth constitutes a superstructural and theoretical backdrop to the consumerism presented in Vineland which exemplified the post-Fordist turn towards image-based strategies such as market segmentation (advertising through image association rather than on the basis of products’ functions).
The replacement of feudalism with capitalism facilitated social fluidity through its introduction of the widespread possibility of buying as well as being born into high social status. The positively inflected “melting” of fixed social roles enacted by the relationship between capitalism and social revolution is discussed by Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity published three years after M&D. He argues,
The famous phrase “melting the solids”, when coined a century and a half ago by the authors of The Communist Manifesto, referred to the treatment which the self-confident and exuberant modern spirit awarded the society it found much too stagnant for its taste and much too resistant to shift and mould for its ambitions – since it was frozen in its habitual ways. If the “spirit” was “modern”, it was so indeed in so far as it was determined that reality should be emancipated from the “dead hand” of its own history – and this could only be done by melting the solids (that is, by definition, dissolving whatever persists over time and is negligent of its passage or immune to its flow). That intention called in turn for the “profaning of the sacred”: for disavowing and dethroning the past, and first and foremost “tradition” – to wit, the sediment and residue of the past in the present; it thereby called for the smashing of the protective armour forged of the beliefs and loyalties which allowed the solids to resist the “liquefaction”.Footnote 42
To Bauman's presentation of a conscious “profaning of the sacred” by individuals seeking to remodel the social order, M&D adds a theoretical explication of capitalism as necessitating such a reconsideration of how and why an individual can be considered valuable. Pynchon explores this conceptual relationship between capitalism and a particular kind of equality in M&D, a kind of equality generated through capitalism's ultimate value of profit and its impartiality about the means of profit's accumulation. John Wade LeSpark, for example, deals weapons to all, even to conflicting parties engaged in the same battles. Pynchon describes this impartiality as serving a democratic function, with capitalist value of profit challenging essentialist notions of value based on race or gender. He writes, “Even the savages were [business's] creatures, – a merchant's Pipe-Revene, and, if consider'd as a class of Purchasers-at-retail, – well, – more admirable even than Dutch housewives, in the single-minded joy with which they brows'd and chose.”Footnote 43 The equality offered by capitalism is presented as uncaring; subjects can gain equality in this system when they are viewed as nothing more than consumers, as means to an economically profitable end, and cannot retain their particular identity if recognized as equal in this way. For Bauman, the result of the accession of individualism through capitalism amounted to,
as Max Weber put it, liberating business enterprise from the shackles of the family-household duties and from the dense tissue of ethical obligations; or, as Thomas Carlyle would have it, leaving solely the “cash nexus” of the many bonds underlying human mutuality and mutual responsibilities. By the same token, that kind of “melting the solids” left the whole complex network of social relations unstuck – bare, unprotected, unarmed and exposed, impotent to resist the business-inspired rules of action and business-shaped criteria of rationality, let alone to compete with them effectively.Footnote 44
Pynchon, too, presents individualism as a false triumph of the authentic individual and instead a triumph of capitalism. As Wade LeSpark's remark shows, the individual is valued beyond the dictates of social prejudice when his potential as a consumer is understood. It is an ability to consume, found to be equal across different social groups, which operates as a social leveller. Whilst the individuals conceptually formed by capitalism are apt to “profane the sacred” of social institutions and traditions, they are unable to challenge the very system which empowers them to offer such socially revolutionary critiques. Furthermore, by preserving the pejorative term “savages” within this depiction of capitalist democratization, Pynchon reveals the residual fixed social order in operation in parallel with the social fluidity introduced by capitalism. The new value afforded to the “savages” as consumers does not equate to a new social respect for that group, and the democratic implications of capitalism are thereby presented as false promises. That slavery underpins this new economic system which is mutually constitutive with individualism and generative of individual freedom of self-definition through profit is the ultimate example of the superficial and highly problematic nature of capitalism as a radical social force. Whilst Bauman's analysis challenges the worth of individual emancipation through the capitalization of society, Pynchon's novel offers further opposition by questioning the association of capitalism with individual liberation through the theme of slavery. M&D precludes forgetting that although Enlightenment individualism emerged through a mutually constitutive relationship with capitalism, so did slavery, and, according to the novel, both persist in altered forms up until the present day because of the persistence of the economic order.
Individuals are recognized as of equal worth under the capitalist system which Pynchon presents on the basis of what they might produce in economic terms, not of their particular identity or their very humanity; the individual as valuable only in economic terms paradoxically facilitates both the particular kind of equality discussed and the ultimate commodification of the human being in slavery. Dixon's stand against slavery sees Pynchon attempt to counter both the enslaving and the apparently liberating functions of capitalism. For Thill, the sequence in which Dixon confronts the slave driver in Baltimore is problematic in its failure to tackle the systemic nature of slavery.Footnote 45 Indeed the individual act of attacking one slave driver in one location and freeing one group of slaves does little to undermine slavery as systemic. Nonetheless, the narrative moment which this act constitutes sees Pynchon conceptually countering capitalism as both enslaving and liberating. This episode serves as a climax of Dixon's character development and presents his turn from pursuing his desires and engaging in transgressive behaviour towards moral integrity. As such, the episode microcosmically represents Pynchon's reevaluation of the radical political potential of transgression and presents his exploration of the personal values and characteristics as well as the behaviour necessary to counter power as he comes to define it in the novel. Early in the novel, when Mason and Dixon begin their overseas research, Mason accuses Dixon of “looking for occasion to transgress,” and indeed Dixon mixes both socially and sexually in their various locations, enjoying reaching across interfaces with different cultures.Footnote 46 Howard recalls, “As David Foreman points out, the historical Dixon was actually ‘disowned for drinking to excess’, which is consistent with the pattern of sensual indulgence Dixon displays throughout Pynchon's novel.”Footnote 47 Pynchon characterizes Dixon as consciously developing transgressive personal habits as means of subverting the boundaries of power as he perceives them. Whilst Mason stays in the Dutch hosts’ house in the Cape, for example, Dixon explores the edges of the colonial order and the indigenous cultures. Pynchon evokes this distinction as expressive of the characters’ different understandings of power and describes Dixon as seeking ways to transgress the boundaries of the power he perceives in their African post. Mason, for example, dismays of “the Dutch Company which is ev'rywhere, and Ev'rything,” but Dixon argues for the possibility of moving outside this seeming totality, saying, “I'm seldom all the way outside their Perimeter, – yet do I make an effort to keep to the Margins close as I may.”Footnote 48 Later, in America, Mason continues to struggle to fit in, whilst Dixon mixes with groups in differentiated cultural regions. Mason's wig, for example, is not “adventurous enough” for Molly and Dolly, the learned female friends of Dr Franklin.Footnote 49 Of Dixon, however, Dolly flirtatiously asks, “what sort of incautious Lad are you?” his characteristic adventurousness allowing for his easy transgression of cultural, national, and continental borders in parallel to his transgression of moral and social fixed value structures.Footnote 50 Mason prefers to find places all over the globe in which to preserve his isolation, such as the Fair Anchor, which “turns out to be Mason's sort of place nicely, – basic and bleak, discouraging ev'ry attempt, even grunting, that might suggest Conviviality.”Footnote 51
Across the novel, however, Dixon is presented as coming to realize the supportive rather than oppositional role which transgression plays in relation to power. At the Slave Lodge, for example, there is “something a bit too Churchlike for Dixon, however – a devotion to ritual and timing, the Space under-lit, what light there is as White as Wig-Powder, flowing from pure white candles”; he realizes the presence of order in the sexual and social transgression available there.Footnote 52 In America, it is slavery which forces Dixon to cease transgressing the boundaries of values, and assimilating to various cultures through his search for the margins and beyond. Present at an event where a slave auction is advertised, he speaks against the “Herdsman of Humans.” The contrast of this encounter with encounters between Dixon and various cultures which have interested him previously is made clear by the remarks of a “neighboring Drinker” who seeks to entice him, saying, “Being one of our Sights down here, of interest to a Visitor, – you might find it diverting.”Footnote 53 In this statement, Pynchon presents the correspondence between apparently radical values and behaviours such as the pursuit of pleasure and the transgression of social and cultural boundaries, and capitalism. Dixon no longer wishes to transgress cultural boundaries in exploring local culture and accedes to integrity in his display of fixed belief and his refusal to enjoy slavery as “diversion.” The confrontation with the slave driver the following day, in this context, counters not only the supportive function of enslavement to capitalism, but also the model of individualism amenable to creating the consumer subject which valorizes subjectivity, desire, and transgression. If Dixon's act were real it might be of little use, but as a narrative moment it is loaded with dense conceptual consideration of the nature of capitalism and its opposition.
Here, Pynchon puts into contest “man as ‘end’ and man as ‘instrument’,” the parallel characterizations of the modern subject as expressed by Dardot and Laval, as well as revealing the kernels of neoliberal attempts to preclude alienation through the incorporation of not only the working but also the desiring subject into capitalist social organization.Footnote 54 The representation of the individual in M&D has frequently been posited as a site of political radicalism and this argument builds on such framing of the issue as central whilst challenging the conclusions of prominent critics. Wall Hinds has argued, for example, building on the analysis of Frank Palmeri, that M&D represents opportunities for radical opposition through the dispersal of focus to “a more diffuse set of subjects – two, or even three protagonists, counting Cherrycoke, for instance, all of whom are self-admittedly not the main characters – and a less ‘human’ kind of concern.”Footnote 55 The dismantling of the human subject, Palmeri argues and Wall Hinds elaborates, undermines the notion of the individual necessary to form a consuming subject. Indeed the critique of consumerism and the conceptualization of the individual necessary to support it is a key political feature of the novel. In neoliberal society, Dardot and Laval argue,
We are no longer dealing with old disciplines intended to train bodies and shape minds through compulsion to render them more submissive … It is a question of governing beings all of whose subjectivity must be involved in the activity they are required to perform … It is now not so much a matter of recognizing that a man at work remains a man, that he is never reduced to the status of a passive object, as of viewing him as an active subject who must participate fully, commit himself utterly, and engage completely in his professional activity.Footnote 56
Pynchon's novel, written from within the kind of neoliberal society evoked by Dardot and Laval, avoids countering alienation with full engagement of the active subject in paid work, seeking instead a more nuanced opposition. As Wall Hinds notes, despite its apparent binary opposition to their alienation, championing the individual would be a problematic response to the capitalist and abstract work which Mason and Dixon are employed to perform in the novel. When the precise nature of Mason and Dixon's marginalization in their own narrative, in their very existence, is interrogated, however, the conclusion that this operates to radical ends is questionable. The first mention of this marginalization occurs when both characters reflect on the attack on their boat by the French and their proximity to death in a situation which they do not know the cause of and over which they have no control. Pynchon notes, “It seems not to belong in either of their lives,” and Mason wonders,
Was there a mistake in the Plan of the Day? Did we get a piece of someone else's History, a fragment spall'd off of some Great Moment, – perhaps the late Engagement at Quibernon Bay, – such as now and then may fly into the ev'ryday paths of lives less dramatick? And there we are, with our Wigs askew.Footnote 57
The apprehension of appearing in a narrative which concerns them only incidentally and yet which could decide their fates in the most ultimate sense of causing their deaths produces a sense of alienation which intensifies throughout the novel. Whilst Mason initially understands abstract “History” to have intruded upon the “ev'ryday paths” of their regular lives, Mason and Dixon begin to consider more precisely who, or what body, is the author of their lives and fates. Pynchon describes, for example, Mason dreaming of “himself upon a dark Mission, whose details he can never quite remember, feeling in the grip of Forces no one will tell him of, serving Interests invisible.”Footnote 58 The pair come to regularly discuss potential conspiracies and cabals behind the projects which they are employed to enact, considering themselves “us'd,” with, as Dixon says, “no more idea of what they are about, than a Hammer knows of a House,” “working under a flag they never saw.”Footnote 59 The marginalization of Mason and Dixon, then, appears as an effect of the system of power in which they operate, exemplary of their alienation from control, rather than as a feature of opposition against this structure.
After the attack on the Seahorse carrying Mason and Dixon to the cape, Mason not only begins to suspect a larger order structuring their lives, but through conversation with Dixon shifts his notions of destiny from the religious to the secular. Pynchon writes, “‘Twas all out of the ordinary,’ Mason declares, ‘that it must have been intended, – an act of Him so strange, His purposes unknown.’/‘Eeh, – that is, I'm not sure which one tha mean.’/Mason instantly narrows his eyes. ‘Who else could – oh. Oh, I see.’”Footnote 60 Pynchon describes, particularly through the development of Mason's character across the novel, a shift in the conception of the individual from having an allotted place to fulfil in God's scheme, to having only a function to perform in the opaque scheming of transnational, capitalist-state structures of power. Early in the novel, when Mason and Dixon arrive at the Cape, Mason states, “we serve no Master but Him that regulates the movements of the Heav'ns, which taken together form a cryptick Message.”Footnote 61 The novel, however, juxtaposes this macrocosmic value system with that of the secular interest groups for whom the pair work so that later Mason has to acknowledge that he has two different duties, one to his notion of right and wrong, and one to the contract which he has signed. He discusses with Dixon, “If it were all true, – ev'ry unkind suspicion, ev'ry phantastickal rendering, – would we, knowing all, nonetheless go on? Do what's clearly our Duty?”Footnote 62 The construction of the private individual during the eighteenth century, a product both of Enlightenment philosophy and of Protestantism, but also of the emergence of particular capitalist–state relationships, sees the sociopolitical sphere emptied of moral content in M&D, which becomes a matter only of private personal opinion, and based instead on the value of profit.
The alienation of Mason and Dixon from their work by the opacity of the larger scheme which is putting them to use depicts the layering of social structure onto the individual, supposedly freeing the individual from the definition and limitation of fixed position, but also thereby alienating the individual thus conceived from the activities which they take part in. As Thomas has noted, “the actual lives and experiences of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon are mysteriously blank. Their story … begins and ends with the Line. That is to say, it is defined almost entirely by their work.”Footnote 63 Near the end of drawing the line in America, Mason is so alienated from the pursuit that he experiences his subjectivity as suspended. He says to Dixon,
Our story may lie rather behind and ahead … never here in the Present, upon the Line, whose true Drama belongs to others … and when ‘tis all done I shall only return to Sapperton, no wiser, and someday wake up and not know if any of this “happen'd,” or if I merely dream'd it.Footnote 64
Indeed when Mason and Dixon have both returned to England, they sit together by the fireplace and Dixon dreams “of a Publick performance” in which
it is he and Mason who are up on the Stage, and whoever may be watching are kept invisible by the Lights that separate Stage and Pit. They are both wearing cheap but serviceable suits, and back'd by a chamber orchestra, they are singing, and doing a few simple steps.Footnote 65
This passage highlights the split between individual and role epitomized by Mason and Dixon's careers in the novel, wherein they are purely functional in their employment and the performance of their roles, and only truly themselves in their private thoughts, homes, and relationships.
Power becomes defined by its conversion of all characteristics into functional use towards the attainment of success in terms of profit to which the precise nature of those characteristics is immaterial and flexible. Whilst Thomas agrees with the near-critical consensus that posits Pynchon as opposing power conceived of as rationalistic with opposition that privileges subjectivity, his identification of instrumentality as a foundational value for the eighteenth-century power structure described distinguishes his argument. He writes,
By starting with the Enlightenment, my aim here is to demonstrate, as J. M. Bernstein asserts, that “modern enlightened reason” is “through and through a form of instrumental reason” and, secondly, “that this formation of reason now structures the dominant practices” of socio-political life today.Footnote 66
It is this instrumentality or functionality that unites both rationalistic and capitalistic–individualistic power structures. Opposition, in M&D, is based upon the refusal of individuals to function, and their constancy in relation to values which do not amount to success or profit, but are nonetheless – or rather because of this – valuable. In “Nearer My Couch to Thee,” Pynchon described the potential of “sloth” to counter the efficiency and functionality upon which capitalism thrives.Footnote 67 Whilst the essay sees Pynchon valorize relativistic employment of values, such as sloth against efficiency, M&D arguably continues to seek to combat functionality, but without recourse to such relativism. Ian Copestake corroborates, writing, “Reinstated [in M&D] is an awareness of Pynchon's acute sense of the ethical possibilities inherent in individual human action, over and against the passive acceptance of a sterile relativism.”Footnote 68 Whilst political opposition, for Pynchon, was previously characterized by a functional conception of values which an individual might embody, in M&D it emerges through individuals who refuse to alter their values for different situations, and instead possess the qualities of integrity, loyalty, and constancy. Pynchon seemingly becomes aware in the novel that it is impossible functionally to combat functionality.
Here I return to MacIntyre's depiction of morality within which he characterizes the relation between individual and “practice” as central to defining “good”. The way in which Mason and Dixon's employers use astronomy and surveying, and use Mason and Dixon themselves, is towards goods external to those practices, towards legal claims of land ownership, towards profit, and ultimately towards power. Pynchon draws the distinction between the Royal Society's value of astronomical observations and Mason's own in his description of disputes over the ownership of recordings. Upon Bradley's death, various parties fight for legal ownership of recordings which Mason helped him to collect. Mason wonders whether he should put in a claim but Pynchon writes, “He thinks not, as he was really giving them to Bradley, all, for nothing more than ‘Thank you, Mr. Mason, and well done.’”Footnote 69 For Mason, performing the observations had a value in itself, and he seeks no financial reward for them. In opposition to their marginalization by an abstract order larger than themselves which uses them, but also alienates them, Mason and Dixon, in their practices as opposed to their careers, represent a different value system which operates through a different conception of individual and role, and thereby offers a different model for society. For Mason, the study of astronomy is a vocation rather than merely a job undertaken for money; undermining the bifurcation of individual and role which individualism defines, Mason's personal life is interwoven with his pursuit of astronomy. Pynchon, however, distinguishes between such presentation of vocational occupation and the kind of neoliberal employment discussed by Dardot and Laval; vocational pursuit of a practice cannot coincide with financial reward.
Neither Mason nor Dixon succeed in their career, neither are appointed to the Royal Society, and their work dissipates from transnational commissions into local odd jobs. This lack of success, however, is not related to a lack of excellence in the practices of either Mason or Dixon, but relates rather to their inability to seek status or financial reward for occupations which were, to them, of value in themselves. Rather than their disappearance into private, local lives indicating Pynchon's championing of small-scale separatist enclaves, or private values against public ones, Mason's and Dixon's failure to achieve success in their careers points to the evocation of a different conception of individual and role which structurally challenges power as Pynchon represents it in the novel. This insistence on the value of actions in themselves and their inconvertibility to profit offers a new means of opposing the functionality which Pynchon depicted as central to capitalist power in “Nearer My Couch to Thee,” which avoids relativism, and precludes recourse to individualism to combat abstract structures of depersonalized power. Pynchon presents a radically anticapitalist version of the neoliberal subject evoked by Dardot and Laval who “must participate fully, commit himself utterly, and engage completely in his professional ‘activity’.”Footnote 70 Again criticism of the postwar counterculture is implied; whilst that movement accepted changes which left capitalist social arrangements intact, Pynchon argues that if that capitalist value system was replaced, radical social reorganization would inevitably result.
The notion of the adherence to a particular value despite the context as a central aspect of defining morality in the novel requires a particular conception of time. Morality is presented as consisting in doing what is right rather than what is expedient; “It is of the character of a virtue that in order that it be effective in producing the internal goods which are the rewards of the virtues it should be exercised without regard to consequences,” as MacIntyre puts it.Footnote 71 The temporality of M&D has focussed much critical attention, which tends to identify temporal fragmentation and layering, denial of temporal linearity, and association of that concept with the power structures against which it situates itself, as loci for its oppositional politics. For Wall Hinds, for example, M&D embodies a desire to return to a point in time where America had not been defined, and thus struggles against temporal irreversibility and linear time. Such a characterization of time, Wall Hinds argues, depicts Pynchon's recognition of the futility of his own oppositional project and the location of it only within fictive exploits capable of doing what cannot be done in reality.Footnote 72 Close interrogation of descriptions of time and temporality in the novel, however, arguably reveal that power is not associated with linear time, but with compartmentalization of time which interrupts the natural flow of its movement. The novel, for example, describes the introduction of minute hands to clocks in the Cape and the desire to record the separate and specific instances of each moment; the recurring theme of the eleven days “stolen” out of the year by British calendar reforms depicts power as seeking to interrupt and alter linear temporality through compartmentalization of separate units of time; businessmen have to measure the allotted time for each specific activity and mind their watches throughout the day to make sure they run according to schedule.Footnote 73 Rather than the direction of time characterizing power and its opposition in the novel, it is arguably the contrast between temporal fragmentation and temporal unity that Pynchon stresses.
The fragmentation of time relates to the social structure which fragments the individual into different roles, promoting thereby the relativistic definition of “good,” referring constantly to context as opposed to enduring content of character. Mason, for example, enacts his integrity and constancy in his inability to forget his dead wife Rebekah and his frequent rehearsal in his own head and dreams, or to other characters, of narratives concerning her. Cherrycoke suggests these stories are “a way for him to be true to the sorrows of his own history … a way of keeping them safe, and never betraying them.”Footnote 74 Qualities such as constancy and faithfulness, which endure over time, deny linear temporality's equation with progress, yet require linearity to unfold their very consistency. Whilst Mason is depicted as exemplifying such qualities throughout the novel, Dixon comes to understand enduring values only towards the end of his life. This change of perspective is described specifically as a turn from capitalistic value of profit, as Dixon forgoes returning to America to profit in the coal trade because, as he tells Mason, “I was never like thee, never one for Duty and so forth, being much more of a flirtatious Bastard, tha see, yet I couldn't leave them [his wife and children] again. Thah’ was it, really.”Footnote 75 Arguably, then, Pynchon's opposition in the novel is simple and attainable; this different kind of individual, who operates on the basis of intrinsic value as opposed to the social value structure of success and towards profit, highlights the possibility of being and becoming a moral person, and in doing so, opposes the structure of power as Pynchon represents it. This is not so much an expression of the importance of separate enclaves wherein such a value structure operates, as a suggestion that anyone, through personal choice and action, can challenge power, and a recognition that if everyone genuinely held these oppositional values the whole structure of society and power would change.
Immediately prior to the publication of M&D, Vineland had interrogated the origins of essential characteristics of the 1980s in the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s, but the simultaneous failure of apparent similarities between the countercultural decades and the 1980s to amount to a radically improved society; whilst images and symbols of the postwar counterculture became prevalent in the 1980s marketplace, in Vineland Pynchon presents the counterculture as having failed to mount a structural challenge to the status quo. M&D examines the foundations of capitalism as the foundations of America to better understand why the counterculture failed, focussing on the role of capitalism in relation to power and a sociopolitical status quo in America. As Brian Thill argues, countering the critical focus on anachronism in M&D,
anachronism in Pynchon becomes less interesting than its narrative opposite, which is a commitment to rendering the ethical space between Mason and Dixon's culture of global consumerism and our own almost indistinguishable. As such, Pynchon is able to exploit for his ethical purposes the views expressed by cultural critics whose conception of the relations between an oppressed labor force and consumer society would be valid and recognizable to many social theorists today.Footnote 76
Much has changed since the eighteenth century, but, in terms of power and oppression, little has changed. Pynchon explores how, rather than simply stating that, the values on which the counterculture was built in the postwar era have supported oppression since the formation of modern America in their failure to oppose capitalism and specifically consumerism. McEntree argues that Pynchon not only reflects on his present historical moment, but specifically illuminates the postwar countercultural era in his depiction of the eighteenth century. He writes,
America saw (and continues to see) domination and power as negative constants. Mason & Dixon grounds us in the past and, with its foreshadowing and references to contemporary culture, takes us to the present. Cherrycoke comments on religion and power, “The New Religion had crested better than twenty years before … by the ‘sixties we were well into a Descent, that grew more vertiginous with the days, ever toward some great Trough whose terrible Depth no one knew”; and other comments concerning “the University man,” “an Awakening,” and “a Revolution,” point directly to the 1960s and their revolutions as parallel to the previous Age of Reason.Footnote 77
M&D is a novel which seeks to understand the successes and failures of the postwar American counterculture, and in doing so embarks on a project of conceptualizing the nature of power in America in order to facilitate political opposition which is truly counter to it.
M&D emerges alongside prominent social theories that seek to recentralize an understanding of capitalism in attempts to characterize, understand, and critique society, culture, and power. This article has considered the novel in the context of writers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Thomas Frank, Pierre Dardot, and Christian Laval, who all discuss the importance of fluidity, transgression, creativity, novelty, and change to contemporary power, rethinking the radical viability of postwar countercultural values. The neoliberal social and economic policies of the 1980s and 1990s are apparent forces behind Pynchon's reevaluations expressed in M&D as it seeks to understand the role of capitalism in relation to an essentialized oppressive power structure which Pynchon depicts as continuing from the eighteenth century to the present day. Not only have the values of transgression, subjectivity and change been found to support capitalism as much as counterculture, but the capitalist valuation of profit and toleration of any other value which can function towards its generation amount to an extrinsic value system. Pynchon posits intrinsic value of other people, of “practices” and vocational occupations, as alternatives to the capitalist power structure which he presents as emerging in the eighteenth century and continuing in different forms up until the present day. Although Pynchon's adoption of this new stance is a reaction to his recharacterization of power and as such continues his relativistic conception of political radicalism, in M&D Pynchon moves beyond the relativistic adoption of countervalues to represent a fixed moral value system as the only real means of political opposition.
