"Unfolded and Re-Folded a Hundred Times": Deleuze and Space in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

This paper re-evaluates Deleuze's spatial politics through a new reading of Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason & Dixon. While existing literary criticism often reads the novel through the supposed dualism of "smooth" and "striated" space, this binarist reading is inconsistent with Deleuze's monism. Smooth freedom offers no escape from the striated order, for the two can only exist in dynamic tension. Instead, the paper proposes that Deleuze's later concept of "the Fold" is the true locus of emancipatory politics. The Fold does not signal an exit path to some liberated 'outside', but encodes a play between surface and depth that complicates any clean separation between interiority and exteriority. True freedom is found not in the flight to smooth space but in the secret furrows and hidden recesses of topological space, which constantly disrupt the pursuit of rational mastery.