ABSTRACT
Time to take stock. The dialectic is moving on and Mason & Dixon is now “behind” us. The Fops and Nabobs, the Quakers and Jesuits, the mechanical Duck and the giant Golem-they are all receding into the distance. The linear progress of the dialectic, however, has already been disrupted. It has been bent out of shape by an unexpected detour to the 1960s, a “wormhole” through the strata of history and the body of Pynchon’s work. Indeed, it will be disrupted again as other hidden symmetries come to light. Nevertheless, the dialectic continues to gather momentum. A graffitied message from “the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll” is not enough to knock it off course for
good. On the contrary in fact-one of the points I hope to communicate here is that at each stage of its development it reasserts itself like never before. What is beginning to emerge then is a great Line of force, “‘be it hydraulic, or military, or architectural,’” that is “‘of less use or instruction’” to those who must dwell on or around it, than “‘intelligible,’” by its “‘immense regularity, to more distant Onlookers, as giving clear signs of Human Presence upon the Planet’” (M&D, 219). This entire study in fact, can be conceived of as a way of sensing and reading this Line, “to learn exactly what it feels like to yaw too much to its port or starboard,” to understand its “Influence” and its legacy-“palpable as that of the Earth’s Magnetism upon a Needle” (M&D, 218).
