Nose-gaping: The Smells of Mason & Dixon The Smells of Mason & Dixon

Abstract

This article examines Pynchon’s evocations of smell in Mason & Dixon as a vehicle for critiquing notions of the rational subject and the bounded text. The nose is posed as a carnivalesque counterpart to the eye, the sense organ most readily associated with empiricism. The directional gaze, crucial to the eponymous characters’ work as astronomer and surveyor, often gives way to enveloping odors, producing an embodiment inimical to Enlightenment. Anthropologist David Howes has argued that smell is most vividly experienced in liminal spaces or at cognitive thresholds. I draw on his work to illuminate Pynchon’s association of smells with the dissolution of distinctions between abstract categories like civilization/wilderness, mind/body, past/present, and text/reader. I argue that this novel about the delineation of a boundary is primarily concerned with interpretive indeterminacy, figured and produced through textual smells.