“’Tis the Age of Reason, Rff?” (MD 22), declares the Learnèd English Dog in Mason & Dixon (1997), and indeed the eighteenth century was marked in the Western world by a belief in “progress” in science, medicine, and the arts. Human life can be bettered, goes this Enlightenment thinking, by using reason to understand and improve upon nature through “establish[ing] rational and standardized ways to study and manage nature and society.” Overseen by professional organizations like the Royal Society in London and the Academy of Sciences in Paris, Euro-American ideology sought to “discover” the fixed “laws” of nature, which is to say observe and classify into categories the natural, political, and social world, all under the banner of “science”; in “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” Pynchon remarks of this era that the laws of nature became “strictly formulated.” Some high points of this trust in progress were the establishment of professional scientific organizations themselves; Fahrenheit’s mercury thermometer; Franklin’s experiments with and harnessing of electricity; radical improvements in time-keeping and geographical boundary-making; calendar reform; and the Linnaean classification of species. Mason & Dixon’s mechanical duck, built by Jacques de Vaucanson, is a fictionalized enhancement of one such experiment: The Duck evolves beyond machinery, gains life and sentience, and falls in love with and stalks Chef Armand. In historical fact, Vaucanson built several mechanical ducks; like others in Europe and America, he built automata to experiment with the growing body of knowledge about anatomy, hydraulics, and pneumatics, to educate and to entertain people at traveling exhibits. Such was the belief in progress during the era of Enlightenment that Vaucanson hoped to create a duck that would in fact have something like “life,” if not sentience.

IN DECEMBER OF 1998, the Modern Language Association hosted, in San Francisco, its first session solely devoted to Mason & Dixon, which had just been released in 1997. Having fallen utterly under its spell, I co-wrote, with my colleague John Loftis, a paper for that session, and after our early morning MLA presentation, all of the presenters — Terry Reilly, Hans-Joachim Berressem, Frank Palmeri, John and I — went out for breakfast.

Trained as an eighteenth-century Americanist, I had spent some years alternating between studies of eighteenth-century subjects and, as a kind of palate cleanser, publications on postmodern cultural subjects like Star Trek, heavy metal music, and increasingly, on Thomas Pynchon's novels. So when Mason & Dixon was published, I was ecstatic. I thought surely this novel was for me, in some scholarly-mystical way — that I was uniquely suited to study it because of my clever, switch-hitting, eighteenth-century and postmodern research agenda. The MLA post-session breakfast turned out to be a real eye opener: everyone sitting at that table, we all learned, had had the same rather solipsistic thought. All of us were eighteenth-century specialists, and all had “dabbled” in Pynchon studies over the years. But there was not a dilettante among us; we brought to the table a wealth of cultural-historical knowledge that seemed specifically positioned to unpack the bizarre, real-unreal, historical-modern landscape of Mason & Dixon.

Making the Rounds of History

THOMAS PYNCHON'S 1997 Mason & Dixon is a novel obsessed with time. A “postmodern” novel, it reconstructs a historical period, the mid- to late-eighteenth century, with both an accuracy surpassing many bona fide histories and a disregard for the actual past seldom met with in a historical novel. Its play of and with histories, along with its determinedly late-twentieth-century timbre, makes time — and especially its passing — a constant focus. From first to last, from character Charles Mason's melancholia associated with his wife's passing, to the deep and broad concern with calendar reform in the novel, to the very fact of its being an “eighteenth-century” novel, Mason & Dixon layers time periods and temporal themes to produce an uncertainty of reading bordering on vertigo; finally, and from the first page, this constant thrust of time passing sets up a nostalgia that progresses and deepens at the same time the novel mocks the ludicrous idea of nostalgic sentimentality.