 In particular, in metahistorical romance, poststructuralist play invokes the "historical sublime" as defined in the work of Hayden White.Metahistorical romance--such as Thomas Pynchon's novel "Mason & Dixon"--attempts to recuperate the sublime untouchability of the past, to reach History and know it, but paradoxically in the context of the political.As with the Kantian sublime, the postmodern historical sublime is not the grasp of the sublime object itself but a kind of ironic awareness of the inaccessibility of the sublime object.