Mason & Dixon: narrazione, storia e verità

This paper highlights the relationship between history and fiction in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and their concern for truth, which appears to be “too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power”. From this point of view, fiction is a counter-narrative which – opposing the power structures' version of history – can open new spaces for critical, political and creative consciousness. Furthermore, the opposition to the official discourse (to its single version of events) is analogous in the novel to the critique of mapping and bounding the still unmapped and unbounded American territories: in fact, the straight boundary line (symbolized by the Mason-Dixon Line) reveals itself as an ideological act of violence towards the primordial, complex wholeness of those same territories.