Date
7-15-2024
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Master of Arts in English (MA)
Chair
Mark Harris
Keywords
Thomas Pynchon, Twentieth-Century Novel, Archaism, Finnegans Wake, Mason & Dixon, Historical Fiction, Harold Bloom, Postmodern Literature, Rationalism, The Enlightenment
Disciplines
English Language and Literature
Recommended Citation
O'Connor, Timothy Perry, "The Tongue Schizochronick: Linguistic Archaism in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon" (2024). Masters Theses. 1181.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/masters/1181
Abstract
In Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon, Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke regales his family with tales of the titular pair. The novel is written in a pastiche of late-Enlightenment-era English, which expresses an attack on modernity. Modernity, according to Pynchon, explores entropy and excludes Christ. Subjunctivity and storytelling provide a way to make contact once again with a more hopeful paradigm. The novel joins premodernity and postmodernity through its language's aurality, variability, and polysemy. The pastiche serves to undermine modernity's ambitions by satirically embracing archaic language; adopting Enlightenment parlance gestures ironically at the outmodedness the era's -theorized progress. Aurality appears in both the pastiche's orthography and narratology. In line with oral storytelling, Mason & Dixon is constructed as a series of orally delivered tales within a frame story, and frequently includes both song and poetry. Rules governing the novel's language vary, gesturing at a pre-systematized world. They undermine hegemonic rationality, and evoke a time prior to widespread linguistic standardization. The novel's language is also polysemic. It uses puns, which unite disparate meanings without rational justification. The text builds out key images into condensed and overdetermined meaning, operating similarly to puns on a larger scale. Mason & Dixon's aural texture and framing respect and innovate pre-literate conventions; its variable rules defy the logocentric efficiency of Enlightenment categorization; and its polysemic play with language transgresses institutional standardization as well as causality. Altogether, Mason & Dixon's language forms an important portion of the novel's sophisticated joining-together of premodernity and postmodernity against Enlightenment modernism.
