Subversion Of Historical Discourse

Thomas Pynchon is one of the most important writers in postmodern American literature,and Mason & Dixon is one of his greatest novels.This novel is filled with funny spoof,quirky figures,subtle dialogues,and weird plots.Based on the setting of this novel,this thesis analyzes this novel from the perspective of history,holding that the grotesque figures depicted in the novel are a kind of subversion of the wrong American historical discourse of the eighteenth century which claims that science can bring reason,progress and civilization and that Pynchon,through combining fictive pretext of American colonial history and satiric subtext of Enlightenment ideology,attempts to write a new and mythologized history which can deconstruct the fallacies of the Enlightenment.This thesis is composed of three main parts: an introduction,a body,and a conclusion.The introduction section introduces Mason & Dixon and its research situation both at home and abroad,the theory of grotesque and the concept of historical discourse,and the layout of the thesis.The body of this thesis consists of three chapters.The first chapter analyzes some grotesque creatures,focusing mainly on the talking dog and mechanical duck.Although the Learned English Dog possesses richer knowledge than ordinary humans,it lacks the rationality bestowed by knowledge.The Dog not only introduces the two English scientists to so-called “oracle,” but also strongly yearns for blood,which fully uncovers its superstitious and barbaric side.The Duck is the work of a human and its capacity and behaviors surprise its master because it not only has language skills,transcending general mechanical products,but also possesses an awareness of freedom and emotional experience,not commonly found in average ducks.People try to explain what happened to it with fictional literary works and express their fever for machine manufacturing at that time,which is not a phenomenon of scientific progress.Instead,the Duck represents a kind of “regressed” progress.Such creatures bring the scientists living in the age of Enlightenment into a bizarre world and at the same time blurs the boundary between humans and animals,nature and unnaturalness,and reason and irrationality.The second chapter discusses two weird historical characters inconsistent with the images of the Founding Fathers described in the textbooks: Benjamin Franklin and George Washington,respectively.Franklin is always considered as a representative of American scientists.But the fact is that in his eyes science is only the tool that he uses to conquer nature and something he can show off and play with,but not to benefit humans.Washington is exactly a politician who has strong political ambitions and takes the economic interest as his goal.The readers see that they have lost some characteristics as average people and these lost parts are replaced by bad personality.Scientific progress,civilized society and other values illustrated in the “historical discourse” are substituted by profit and hypocrisy,which has an impact on readers in mind.The third chapter focuses on two English scientists who run through the novel,that is,Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon.During the course of their crossing three continents to carry out their scientific tasks,they gradually throw doubt upon their tasks and consequently exhibit some behaviors beyond their expected subject positions.Astronomer Mason is a quite contradictory man.On the one hand,he embraces rational life given by science;on the other hand,he often wants to seek for something beyond the boundary of rationality.Scientific tasks make him become extreme rational and depressed emotionally,and he shows lots of symptoms of spiritual illness,which lets him lose his reason and composedness.And the issue of race behind scientific tasks is mostly expressed by surveyor Dixon.Dixon surviving the slave trade in Cape Town finally has to confront the Native Americans during the process of surveying and delimiting the Mason-Dixon Line.Inner doubts and anger make Dixon lose his reason,whipping the slave holder and freeing slaves.Both Mason and Dixon realize the political and economic purposes of their scientific tasks,and that they do not behave as expected is exactly a telling exposure of the lie of scientific progress,civilization and freedom adumbrated in the historical discourse.The conclusion summarizes the main points of the body of this thesis,pointing out that the values embodied in these grotesque figures are contrary to reason,science,civilization and other concepts existing in the eighteenth-century historical discourse,showing Pynchon's subversion of the representational “historical discourse” at that time and indicating that Pynchon tries to awaken the American public who are unaware that the wrong national values shape the country from the very start.