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4 - “America was the only place …”: American Exceptionalism and the Geographic Politics of Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

from Space and Power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Pedro García-Caro
Affiliation:
University of London
Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds
Affiliation:
SUNY Brockport
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Summary

But should [the poet] venture upon the dark story of their wrongs and wretchedness; should he tell how they were invaded, corrupted, despoiled, driven from their native abodes and the sepulchers of their fathers, hunted like wild beasts about the earth, and sent down with violence and butchery to the grave, posterity will either turn with horror and incredulity from the tale, or blush with indignation at the inhumanity of their forefathers.

— Washington Irving

IRVING OUTLINED THE TROUBLED, ambivalent attitudes toward the genocide committed against Native Americans by whites: incredulity — confirmed by a silence, which not always sounds condemnatory — or indignation — spoken through many acts of contrition — are only two, perhaps the most prevalent, of the many possible outlooks on the American Holocaust. Assuming the relentless impact of the Westward expansion of the country, Irving's prediction anticipates the destruction not only of the East Coast Indians, but of all the Native American peoples and their ways of life across the territory claimed by the United States in successive years: “They will vanish like a vapor from the face of the earth; their very history will be lost in forgetfulness” (361). With a mixture of liberal nostalgia and historical fatalism, Washington Irving endorsed the prevailing myth of the “vanishing Indian,” a theme that would pervade American culture into the twentieth century. The reverse trope of this historical fatalism — its photographic negative — is, of course, the grand narrative of Manifest Destiny: the American nation as a triumphant exception in a history of constant decline and depravation.

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Chapter
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The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon's 'Mason and Dixon'
Eighteenth-Century Contexts, Postmodern Observations
, pp. 101 - 124
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2005

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