There are no Talking Dogs in The Age of Reason: Wonderment in 'Mason and Dixon''s Zany Universe

Originally pulbished on 10 November 2021

The moment I hear of ‘The Age of Reason’, I cannot but hark to the only relevant quote my memory of secondary education harbours - cogito ergo sum. If ‘The Age of Reason’ had a forehead, this iconic saying would be slapped at its very centre. For a start, it helped its maker, Rene Descartes, knock down three birds with one stone, as he not only coined a verbal equation describing the verity and tangibility of our surroundings, but also delivered a piece of mind to upcoming thinkers such as Newton, Lock, and Pascal. (not to mention the phrase somewhat sorted the motto for what is considered to be Europe’s departure from make-believe notions on human nature and understanding). 

In school, however, you would be spared the awkward truth that the Age of Reason does not put an end to an implied Age of Unreason in a luminous supernova of wisdom and enlightenment. To my disappointment, the above-mentioned gentlemen were not made overnight and perhaps few citizens of Europe woke up smarter on the day after The Age of Reason had been announced. There isn’t a known estimate of how many afforded to be Reasonable between the 16th and 18th century, but my god there must’ve been a decent number of awe-struck folk roaming the fringes where Reason seldom visited. Because, unlike those who could get hold of Reason, those awe-struck in the face of what’s alien and inexplicable for the lay mind may be promptly diagnosed with madness. Yet, awe-struck remains our denotation for those who have witnessed the supernatural with only circumstantial evidence at hand, for as we determined in our previous skimming of Slingshot, wonder is rarely located inside our own mental maps of worldly understanding.  

Though we can’t discredit America’s contributions to Reason, Pynchon offers a picture of nascent America stationed on ‘the cusp of Reason’s advent and Magic’s eclipse (Politics and the Parallactic Method in  'Mason & Dixon')’. Mason and Dixon is an encyclopaedia of ideas recorded by two learned men who, on their journey to map the boundary line between Pennsylvania and Maryland, meet those very same awe-struck folk for whom science and magic are not inimical opposites but kindred sources of wonderment. 

Wrapped in a 18th-century dialect, Pynchon’s 1997 epic of a Royal Stargazer named Charles Mason and Durham’s finest surveyor, Jeremiah Dixon, is a novel of subtle action, grand ideas, and quaint world-building. In the words of prof. Christy Burns, our two leading personages’ ‘odd and interesting relations suggest two opposite forces still present in the U.S. - Dixon’s pleasurable pragmatism and his Quaker values (equality, acceptance) in tension with Mason’s Puritan posing, his starkness and formality…’. (Politics and the Parallactic Method in  'Mason & Dixon').While Mason is busy brooding over his wife’s passing, the shockwave of which has captured him in adamantium bars of grief as he furtively seeks for a hidden exit, Dixon affords to dabble in his lustful appetites, guzzle liquor, and enjoy promiscuous female company. It could be said that both hold non-reciprocal views on this journey - ‘Mason’s melancholia aligns him with the Puritan side of American culture [and] Dixon’s outgoing enjoyment […] is the hedonistic side of the same culture’ (The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon); one is hard-put to enjoy the ride, whereas the other is hard-put to leash his enjoyment of it.

That’s the staff we work with. Regardless of their shortcomings, our flippant escorts will have the pleasure of showing us U.S.A’s blooming coffee-houses and opium dens, will let us scoff at Fop subculture, lend us a glimpse of Big G. Washington’s recreational weed use, and, just as I thought I was losing track of the article’s original purpose, open our eyes to awe-inspiring wonders. To readers, these wonders may manifest in the obtrusive and grin-inducing 20th-century attitude with which Pynchon impregnates his 18th-century America, leading us to believe that today’s U.S. bears some trademark semblance to its infant colonial past. For our characters, however, wonders appear in the shape of beings, gadgets, and venues which were gradually being rejected by The Age of Reason’s common sense. The first and most vivid example of this would be when our duo meets a talking dog at the Cape of Good Hope: 

This dog […] is causing me ap-pre-hension [Mason blurts]  But please do not come to the Learned English Dog if it’s religious Comfort you’re after [- the Dog replies - ]. I may be praeternatural, but I am not supernatural. ’Tis the Age of Reason, rrf? There is even an Explanation at hand, and no such thing as a Talking Dog, - Talking Dogs belong with Dragons and Unicorns. What there are, however, are Provisions for Survival in a World less fantastick.’ (Mason and Dixon, p.22)

 In spite of the surveyors’ scientific background and the overall rational air of the century, Pynchon takes note that unlike Europe, where the power of fairy tales and Romance literature has dwindled in favour of the Novel and the newsletter, America and the Rest of the World keep the fire of magic burning. Earlier it was mentioned that wonder is rarely native in our cognitive maps of comprehension. It takes, to a degree, a foreign object to arouse wonder within the most sensitive surfaces of our minds. Then, according to Descartes, wonder is permitted in the mental rooms of the Reasonable mind: 

When our first encounter with some object takes us by surprise, and we judge it to be new, or very different from what we have previously experienced or from what we expected it to be, this causes us to wonder at it and be astonished. And because this can happen before we have any knowledge of whether the thing is beneficial to us or not, it seems to me that wonderment is the first passion of all. (The Passions of the Soul)

On one hand, there’s Mason whose Puritan humour has kept his mind away from off-the-wall sensations; and then there’s Dixon whose unceasing knack for readily available excitement has managed to numb his receptors at the cost of granting him immunity to sights of real wonder. Once we progress into the novel, Pynchon invites us over java to observe the ecstatic and intoxicatingly animated life of American coffee-houses: 

Servant lads in constant motion carry up from the cellar coffee sacks upon their shoulders, or crank the cup of the invigorating Liquid. By the end of each day, finely divided coffee-dust will have found its way by the poundful up the nostrils and into the brains of these by then alert youths, lending a feverish edge to all they speak and do. Conversing about politics, under such a stimulus, would have proved animated enough, without reckoning in as well the effects of drink, tobacco… (Mason and Dixon, p.329)

It’s not just talking dogs that make Mason and Dixon such a worthwhile undertaking. With a tight grasp Pynchon holds onto his belief that something got irreparably messed up in America’s trial period. Was it America’s predicament of being in the control of manic Kings and Queens: 

Indeed, a spirit of whimsy pervades the entire history of these Delaware Boundaries, as if in playful refusal to admit that America, in fanciful demand after another, either trying to delay and obstruct as long as possible the placing of the markers, or else,… (Mason and Dixon, p.337)

Or the colony’s error was that it was mainly brewed under invigorated minds aflame with passion and utopian ideas about U.S.A.’s evolution? Pynchon takes everything into account - from putting commonplace phenomena like the slave boots treading plantations in a metaphysical light: 

Men of Reason will define a Ghost as nothing more otherworldly than a wrong unrighted, which like an uneasy spirit cannot move on [. . .]. But here is a Collective Ghost of more than household Scale,--the Wrongs committed Daily against the Slaves, petty and grave ones alike, going unrecorded, charm'd invisible to history, invisible yet possessing Mass, and Velocity, able not only to rattle Chains but to break them as well. (Mason and Dixon, p.68)

To the utmost inventive breakthroughs of fictitious science involving an electric eel and a bright electric spark: 

I saw at the heart of the Electrick Fire, beyond color, beyond even Shape, an Aperture into another Dispensation of Space, yea and Time, than what Astronomers and Surveyors are used to working with. It bade me enter, or rather it welcomed my Spirit, - yet my Body was very shy of coming any nearer, - indeed wish’d the Vision gone…  (Mason and Dixon, p.433)

On every turn Pynchon addresses the chinks in America’s armour - one major vital point exposed to danger is our cast’s lack of introspection and blind certainty in The Age of Reason’s imported principles. As we are told numerous times, the novel takes place in the Age of Newton Transcended - the age of time marching to an ‘irreducible point’. This gives license to everyone to disregard the irrational and opt for theevidential. However, this has been this particular epoch’s most ironic folly. 

Instead of following his contemporaries’ footsteps by wasting his ink on reviewing the past, Kant made a short attempt to discuss the present as if its days have already passed behind him; much like Pynchon who engages the present through the seemingly distant past. Respected for not just its brief insight but also as one of the first attempts of intellectual critique of contemporary life, Kant takes on the uncomfortable delusion that not just the Age of Reason suffers from - complacency in an era when the audience was applauding itself: 

The question may now be put: Do we live at present in an enlightened age? The answer is: No, but in an age of enlightenment. Much still prevents men from being placed in a position. . . . to use their own minds securely and well in matters of religion. But we do have very definite indications that this field of endeavor is being opened up for men to work freely and reduce gradually the hindrances preventing a general enlightenment and an escape from self-caused immaturity. (Kant, What is Enlightenment)

If Kant's saying it, it must be true. No matter Mason and Dixon's efforts to surmount the passions the novelty of the New World produces, a Reasonable mind cannot substitute the one seasoned with experience. Or, in other words, The Age of Reason is to Kant, as much as it is to Pynchon, a pretence of maturity. In such a way does Mason and Dixon champion wonderment. In wonderment, Descartes writes, 

the soul is suddenly taken by surprise, which causes it to consider attentively the objects that it finds rare and extraordinary. Thus, it is caused first and foremost by the impression formed in the brain which represents the object as rare, and consequently worthy of close consideration  (The Passions of the Soul)

If Descartes be applied here and Kant’s words be adhered to, The Age of Reason was a herald of our new mode of thought - one that allows scrutiny of foreign objects that is not hampered by the excess of passions encouraged by wonder. And in Mason and Dixon, we are observing this rocky transition of our forefathers to abandon their sense of the illogical and spearhead a new rationale.  

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