𝓣𝓱𝓸𝓶𝓪𝓼 𝓟𝔂𝓷𝓬𝓱𝓸𝓷’𝓼 𝓗𝓸𝓵𝓵𝓸𝔀 𝓔𝓪𝓻𝓽𝓱

𝐻𝒶𝓁𝓁𝑒𝓎, 𝑀𝒶𝓈𝓀𝑒𝓁𝓎𝓃𝑒, 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒮𝓎𝓂𝓂𝑒𝓈 𝒾𝓃 𝑀𝒶𝓈𝑜𝓃 & 𝒟𝒾𝓍𝑜𝓃 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒜𝑔𝒶𝒾𝓃𝓈𝓉 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒟𝒶𝓎

*Will be digging some homeless work out of deep freeze in the coming weeks. I’ve got a couple projects from grad school that I’d like to update in light of stuff that’s happened since writing them (one on Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person,” another on Jonas Bendiksen’s Book of Veles). This one is untouched…I’ve been dabbling with Goethe/Leibniz’s proto-geology following Barrett Avner of the CONTAIN podcast’s discussion with Kylie White…and I’m sure there’s a link there…possible update in the offing I guess…

Literary Critic Edward Mendelson aptly describes Thomas Pynchon’s oeuvre in his 1976 essay, “Gravity’s Encyclopedia,” placing him in line with Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Melville, and Joyce as a practitioner of encyclopedic narrative. Mendelson defines encyclopedic narratives as attempts to “render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge” (MP162). They “include a full account of at least one technology or science,” serve as “encyclopedia[s] ranging from the most primitive and anonymous levels[…]to the most esoteric of high styles” and “appear near the beginning of a culture’s or nation’s sense of its own separate existence” (164). Mendelson’s essay makes specific reference to Pynchon’s 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow, which checks each of the above boxes: Pynchon not only fully accounts for the rise of rocketry at the end of WWII, but provides in-depth examinations of the implications of aromatic chemistry and the development of plastics; GR includes discourse that juxtaposes pulp western fiction and Plasticman comic books against the the esoterica of P.D. Ouspensky. The novel examines the rise of “a new international culture, created by the technologies of instant communication and the economy of world markets” (165).

Pynchon carried his eclectically encyclopedic use of primary sources into his later career; Mendelson’s assessment arguably defines Pynchon’s alternate histories, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day more accurately than it defines Gravity’s Rainbow. Where Pynchon made heavy reference to existing scientific texts and gave passing nods to historical and popular figures such as Werner von Braun, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, and Mickey Rooney in GR, his late novels, (M&D most notably) openly employ historical figures as main characters. Mason & Dixon is a (Fieldingian? Sterneian?) picaresque retelling of the 1763–1767 surveying expedition led by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to draw the dividing line between Maryland and Pennsylvania: the surveyors spend time with Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne, then-future-Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, along with Benjamin Franklin. Against the Day, set between the 1893 Chicago World’s Exposition and World War One, includes cameos from historical figures (Tesla, Lugosi, Houdini), but like GR, mainly deals with fictional characters.

More notably, Pynchon narrates ATD using a pastiche of genres. John Clute identifies four main “story clusters”: the “Airship Boys, which is told in boys’ adventure idiom;” the “Western Revenge cluster, which is told through an array of western narrative voices,” of which Oakley Hall is likely Pynchon’s main point of reference; “The Geek Eccentric Scientist cluster, which is told in an amalgam of styles;” and “The Flanuer Spy Adventuress cluster, told in any style that comes to hand, from the shilling shocker to Huysmans.”

Both novels incorporate primary sources to build major plot points. Mason & Dixon includes humorous treatments of a custody dispute recorded in the Proceedings of the Council of Maryland, Jacques de Vaucanson’s automotons, and Benjamin Franklin’s fascination with the glass Armonica. Against the Day similarly touches upon the Tunguska event, the Pythagorean cult, and 19th-century advertising. Pynchon also plays freely with alternate histories, incorporating popular-though-now-discredited pseudoscientific theories, such as the (anachronistic) appearance of Ley-lines for flight in Mason & Dixon, into the fabric of his worlds. In both M&D and ATD, characters visit one of the earth’s poles, where they find an opening to an inhabited hollow earth. Pynchon makes both implicit and explicit reference to several existing historical sources for his imagining of the possibility of an interior world beneath the earth’s surface: he directly name checks Edmond Halley, one of the first Enlightenment thinkers to posit a hollow earth (in 1692); the voyage to the opening echoes the research and theorizing of nineteenth-century explorer John Cleves Symmes Jr. Additionally, the episode in which Jeremiah Dixon visits the earth’s interior is framed within a chapter that takes place as Charles Mason travels to Scotland to assist Nevil Maskelyne and Charles Hutton in the Schiehallion experiment, which determined that the earth’s mean density is too great for Halley’s 1692 theory to carry water.

Mason & Halley & Maskelyne

Mason & Dixon is a picaresque parody: though the surveyors’ observation of the Transit of Venus and mapping of Mason-Dixon line provide a loose frame, the novel’s structure consists largely of disparate conversations and encounters that take place during the expeditions. Pynchon first hints that the idea of a hollow earth is present though on the wane near the completion of the line late in the novel as Mason, Dixon, and members of their crew fall to arguing about the possibility following a day’s work. After Stig, a Scandinavian lumberjack suggests that he’s heard rumors of an opening to the earth’s interior from fellow countrymen living near the Arctic Circle, Mason responds, “Grant me Patience O Lord […] When ’tis not the Eleven Days missing from the New Style, or the Cock Lane Ghost, yet abides the Hollow Earth, as a proven Lure and Sanctuary to all, that too lightly bestow their faith” (MD603). After Dixon pushes back against his objection, Mason responds that “If Newton’s figure is correct, — if the density of the earth, on average, is between five and six times that of water, then the shelf this Hollow Earth of yours be it hundreds of miles thick, would have to possess some quite impossibly high density to make up for the empty interior” (603).

Mason, both in Pynchon’s novel and in historical reality, later plays a key role in confirming “Newton’s figure” by aiding the Royal Society in the Schiehellion experiment, which successfully calculated the mass and density of the earth and refuted the theory of a hollow earth, first posited Edmond Halley’s 1692 essay, “An Account of the use of the Change of the Variation of the magnetical Needle: With an Hypothesis of the Structure of the Internal Parts of the Earth: As it Was Proposed to the Royal Society in One of their Late Meetings,” originally published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions.

Halley developed the idea while observing magnetic declination (the deviation over time of magnetic north from true north from a given location). In the essay, Halley compares the change in minutes of compass readings in London, Paris, Cap d’Agulhas, St. Helena, and Cape Comorine, noting that magnetic north makes eastward or westward shifts over time. He goes on to hypothesize that the earth’s magnetic poles cannot be in fixed positions if magnetic north changes over time:

…no Magnet I had ever seen or heard of had more than two opposite Poles; whereas the Earth had visibly four, and perhaps more. And secondly it was plain that those Poles were not, at least all of them, fit in the Earth, but shifted from place to place, as appeared by the great changes in the needles direction within this last Century or years. (HA564)

Halley posits that beneath the “External Parts of the Globe,” which serve as a “Shell” contain an internal “Nucleus or inner globe” with a fluid medium between (568).

The nucleus (more correctly nuclei, as Halley posits a series of concentric spheres), rotates on a separate axis with its own polarity, which then accounts for the magnetic declination Halley observed in compass readings:

Hence, and from some other nature, I conclude, That the two Poles of the external Globe are fit in the Earth, and that if the Needle were wholly governed by them, the Variations thereof would be always the same, with some little Irregularities upon the account I but just now mentioned: But the internal Sphere having such a gradual translation of its Poles, does influence the Needle and direct it variously according to the result of the attractive or directive power of each Pole; and consequently there must be a period of the Revolution of this internal Ball. (569) Rather than attempting to solve the problem of declination by assuming that the poles of the outer crust are mobile, Halley believes that rotation of inner spheres cause the phenomenon. Halley developed his theory after Isaac Newton’s initial estimate for the earth’s mass and density and foresaw objections on the ground that “according to the general Principle of Gravity, visible throughout the whole Universe, all those Particles that by length of time or otherwise shall molder away or become loose on the Concave Surface of the External Sphere, would fall in, and with great force descend on the Internal” (574). To compensate, he argued that the magnetism of the inner sphere would provide a counter-force against the gravitational pull of the external sphere: “we know no other substance capable of supporting each other by their mutual Attraction but the Magnetical, and these we see miraculously perform that Office, even where the power of Gravity has its full effect, much more within the Globe where it is weaker” (574). After laying out his hypotheses for the possibility of an inner world, Halley then goes on to speculate on the possibility of interior life. He acknowledges the radical difference in the possible type of life forms that could possibly exist below the surface: “To those that shall enquire of what use these included Globes can be, it must be allowed, that they can be of very little service to the Inhabitants of this outward World, nor can the Sun be serviceable to them, either with his Light or Heat (575). He proposes a luminous aether within the earth to provide light and heat to its inhabitants:

But still it will be said that without Light there can be no living, and therefor all this apparatus of our inward Globes must be useless: to this I answer that there are many ways of producing Light which we are wholly ignorant of; the Medium itself may be always luminous after the manner of our Ignes fatui. The Concave Arches may in several places shine with such a substance as invests the Surface of the Sun… (576).

I am not sure whether to take Halley’s musings on interior lifeforms as wild speculation or optimistic open-mindedness. Though he makes grounds his final hypothesis on no evidence whatsoever, he does so on the grounds that the lives of fish, birds, and reptiles would also “be to us incredible did not daily Experience teach us” (575).

The essay concludes on a humble note. Halley claims that he has “shewed a possibility of a much more ample Creation” and invites future thinkers to “find out a more simple Hypothesis, at least a less absurd even in their own opinions” (577).

Eighty-two years later, Charles Mason would travel to Scotland to help find a location to conduct the Schiehallion experiment. Pynchon includes Mason’s trip in M&D, using the visit as an opportunity to reunite the surveyors in County Durham. Mason explains his trip and the goal of the experiment in a letter to Dixon: “At the request of Maskelyne, I am coming North, a

Mountain of suitable Gravity to seek, whose presum’d influence might deflect a Plumb line clearly enough to be measur’d without Ambiguity” (MD733). He also jokingly alludes to Maskelyne’s trouble with his plumb line while observing the transit of Venus: “Tho’ given the A.R.’s difficult History with Plumb-lines, I feel Apprehension for the Project” (733).

This historical Mason makes an appearance in Maskelyne’s “An Account of Observations made on the Mountain Schehallien for finding its attraction,” which followed Halley’s entry in Philosophical Transactions nearly a century later. The article lays out in minute detail the techniques and methods Maskelyne and his crew implemented and very closely hews to the brief account Pynchon provides in Mason & Dixon. As in Pynchon’s account, Maskelyne credits Mason with observations that “scarce any hill” in England “was so well adapted to the purpose as our sanguine hopes had led us to expect” (MA502) and eventually settling on Schehallion as the ideal mountain from which to conduct the experiment.

Maskelyne’s article further mirrors Pynchon’s summary. He explains his hopes that measuring “the attraction of a mountain” will “hardly fail of throwing light on the principle of universal gravitation” and yield “new discoveries concerning the constitution of this earth which we inhabit, particularly with respect to the density of its internal parts” (504).

The bulk of the article rigorously lays out the procedure — most of which I have to admit went over my head for lack of an astronomical background. He is at pains throughout the article to make clear the methods he used to ensure that his plumb lines and other equipment are correctly prepared, that his geographical coordinates are accurate, and that the weather will not influence the plumb bob’s deviation. He also carefully explains how he and his crew obtained their measurement for the mountain’s mass and its density.

“Having thus come to a happy end of this experiment,” writes Maskelyne after furnishing his data, “we may now consider several consequences flowing from it” (532). The article concludes by summarizing the implications of the experiment’s results: “that the mountain Schehallion exerts a sensible attraction; therefore from the rules of philosophising, we are to conclude, that every mountain, and indeed every particle of the earth is endued with the same property” (532); “the law of the variation of this force, in the inverse ratio of the squares of the distances, as laid down by Sir ISAAC NEWTON, is also confirmed by this experiment” (532); and significantly, “that the mean density of the earth is at least double of that at the surface, and consequently, that the density of the internal parts is also much greater than near the surface” (533). The results prove that large bodies such as mountains demonstrate gravitation, that Isaac Newton was correct in his law of inverse squares, and that Halley’s theory of a hollow earth is inconsistent with scientific fact. Maskelyne writes that his findings are “totally contrary to the hypothesis of some naturalists, who suppose the earth to be only a great hollow shell of matter” (533).

Entering the Poles: Jeremiah Dixon, The Chums of Chance, and John Cleves Symmes In Pynchon’s fantastic re-imagining of the Age of Reason, Jeremiah Dixon serves as a mystically inclined Quaker foil to Charles Mason’s mainstream, rational, secular-Anglican outlook. Throughout the novel, Dixon remains far more open to the miraculous and supernatural than Mason. While chatting about the upcoming project at Schehallion, Dixon regales Mason with a tale of a visit from a a mysterious stranger who summons him onto

“Sledge of Caribou Hide, stretched upon an ingeniously hinged framework of Whalebone, and from a curious black Case produced a Device of elaborately coil’d Wires, set upon Gimbals, which he affix’d to the vehicle” (MD739). After a quick computation to find magnetic north, the stranger sets off with Dixon, “faster and ever faster, with a rising Whine, over the Ice-Prairie” and northward until they reach “perpetual sunlight” at “the top of the World” (739).

Dixon’s account of his visit to the pole poses a challenge to Mason’s scientific skepticism. As he arrives “somewhere between eighty and ninety degrees North,” the stranger reveals to Dixon that the “Earth’s Surface, all ‘round the Parallel” is an open entrance that leads “downhill, ever downward, and thus, gradually around the great Curve of its Rim” (739). Dixon’s account of his visit to the pole runs counter to Newton’s predictions and Maskelyne’s findings: “And ’twas so that we enter’d, by its great northern Portal, upon the inner Surface of the Earth” (739).

In a similar episode that takes place in Against the Day, as the Chums of Chance, a group of teenage aeronauts, traverse the earth through its interior in their airship, the Inconvenience. Pynchon lays out the Chums narrative in a parodic pastiche of boys’ adventure novels and treats the hollow earth that Dixon visited as established fact, explaining that “Some of the greatest minds in the history of science, including Kepler, Halley, and Euler, had speculated as the the existence of a so-called ‘hollow Earth’” (ATD115).

In the world of ATD, adults speculate on future commercial application for the passage between the poles hoping to find it “useful in its way as the Suez or the Panama Canal had proved to surface shipping” (115). However, the Chums, Pynchon’s stand in for innocence in a disenchanted world, feel a sense of youthful wonder upon their entry: “At the time we speak of, however, there still remained to our little crew occasion for stunned amazement, as the Inconvenience left the South Indian Ocean’s realm of sunlight, crossed the edge of the Antarctic continent, and began to traverse an immense sweep of whiteness broken by towering black ranges toward the vast and tenebrous interior which breathed hugely miles ahead of them” (115).” Pynchon’s likely source for both Dixon and The Chums’ entry into the earth is almost certainly John Cleves Symmes Jr., an Army Captain who not only refused to let Halley’s theory die, but also argued that the interior of the earth is not sealed from entry, as in Halley’s theory, but open and accessible through the planet’s poles. Despite the success and general acceptance of Maskelyne’s experiment, Symmes remained a vocal member of a fringe group of scientists and explorers who held on to the idea of a hollow earth. In an 1818 circular which Symmes forwarded to universities, members of congress and governments both foreign and domestic, he wrote: I declare the earth is hollow, and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentrick speheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees; I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.

Symmes went on to request “one hundred brave companions” to depart from Siberia with “Reindeer and slays” in search of an entry point to the earth’s interior at “one degree northward of latitude 82,” where he expected to find “warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals if not men.” In the case of Dixon’s journey, Pynchon’s use of Symmes’ theory is an anachronistic twist; in the case of the Chums, Pynchon constructs an alternate world in which Symmes’ call to action was answered and his theory confirmed.

Symmes delivered a series of lectures and published several more circulars on the topic, but never published a comprehensive account of his theory. However, a disciple, James McBride, anonymously published “Symmes’ Theory of Concentric Spheres: Demonstrating that the earth his hollow, habitable within, and widely open about the poles” (1826), which summarized Symmes thought and offered guidelines for preparing an expedition in search of an opening to the earth’s interior.

McBride begins his survey with a preface addressing Symmes’ detractors. He complains that “the newspaper scribblers […] have almost uniformly appeared to consider it as a fit subject on which to indulge their wit, the sallies of which, clothed in all the humor and satire their fancies could suggest, have in some degree had a tendency to throw around it an air of levity very unfavorable to serious investigation” (CS12). In the survey’s introductory chapter, McBride pushes back against consensus and ridicule by invoking scientific mavericks who pushed back against epistemological dogmas of their day such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. He begins the work in earnest by asking readers to “give Captain Symmes a ‘gentle meeting,’ and a candid hearing” to “ascertain what his theory is, and on what principles he supports it; and then adopt or reject it as our reason may dictate” (33).

According to McBride, Symmes, like Halley, believes that all spherical bodies are “constitute in a greater or less degree, of a collection of spheres, more or less solid, concentric with each other, and more or less open at their poles” (34). Between the spheres is an aetheric substance which is “uniformly distributed throughout; differing from common air, and from the elastic fluids […] existing in our atmosphere” (35). Each of the “five hollow concentric spheres” has “an atmosphere surrounding each” and is “habitable as well upon the concave as the convex surface” (36).

Symmes radically departs from Halley’s theory in which each concentric sphere is wholly unreachable from the others, instead claiming that each sphere is “widely open” at its pole and that these openings are the size of large countries (four thousand miles in diameter at the north pole; six thousand at the south). He argues against latitude and longitude determining the meteorological conditions of a given location and instead claims that the “heat and cold of the different climates are governed by their distance from the verge of the polar opening” (40). The openings also account for the “tides of the ocean flowing in different directions and appearing to meet; the existence of volcanoes” along with phonemena such as underwater “ground swells” and the appearance of the northern lights in the south.

Between the spheres, in what Symmes calls the “mid-plane spaces” is a “very light, subtile, elastic substance” which he calls the “aerial fluid” (44). He argues that gas escaping from the mid-plane spaces is “no doubt, the cause of earthquakes; and supply the numerous volcanoes” (44). The aerial fluid also “may possibly be adapted to the support of animal life; and the interior surfaces of the spheres formed by them, may abound with animals, with organs only adapted to the medium which they are destined to inhabit” (44–45).

Aerial fluid serves as one of Symmes’ most radical diversions, not only from Halley’s modest proposal for a hollow earth, but also from general scientific consensus by proposing an entirely new conception of gravity. According to McBride, Symmes believes that “gravity consists of a certain expansive quality in the molecules which constitute the aerial fluid called aether, which fills universal space, and creates a pushing, instead of pulling power” (46). Aether does not violate Newton’s laws of gravity, but instead attempts to account for what McBride and Symmes see as a problem with Newton’s method: that the “Newtonian philosophy appears to contemplate a globe at rest. I really, really had a difficult time making heads or tails of what the problems with Newton’s calculations were — to the best of my understanding, it seems that Symmes argued that a gravitational force that pulled would not be strong enough to keep everything on the planet from being flung from the surface due to centrifugal force, and instead proposed a type of pushing gravitation to compensate for the planet’s rotation.

The survey they provides a few brief examples of what Symmes and McBride believe to be a tendency in nature towards “hollow cylinders” (59). Citing bones, stalks of wheat, and “aerolites” (rocks “composed of hollow concentric circles” [60]), — and curiously ignoring tree trunks — Symmes argues for a disposition in nature towards hollowness. McBride summarizes with the claim that the earth should follow suit, claiming that “a construction of all the orbs in creation, on a plan corresponding with Symmes’s theory, would display the highest possible degree of perfection, wisdom, and goodness — the most perfect system of creative economy” (62). McBride’s survey of Symmes’ work provides several other specious pieces of evidence for an accessible interior to the earth. He speculates on the hollowness of other celestial bodies, claiming that the unexplained rotation of Jupiter’s atmospheric “belts” at differing rates can be explained by the rotation of its interior concentric spheres. He also cites anecdotal accounts of animal migration patterns which move from north to south in search of a warmer climate, and argues that the claims of sailors and fisherman who don’t see them migrating back to their northern home as proof that they might be finding alternative (subterranean) routes of return to the pole.

Pynchon makes a nod to McBride and Symmes’ argument from animal migration in Against the Day: “Skyfarers here had been used to seeing flocks of the regional birds spilling away in long helical curves, as if to escape being drawn into some vortex inside the planet sensible only to themselves” (ATD115).

In the survey’s seventh chapter, McBride attempts to counter “several objections, made to the Theory of Concentric Spheres” by laying out a series of arguments against Symmes’ work and offering counter-arguments. This chapter contains a brief acknowledgment of Maskelyne’s work, which McBride dismisses as inconclusive (quoted in full below):

The experiments made on the density of the globe, by observations with the plumline, at the foot of a mountain, are very ingenious; but they must be subject to great uncertainty. The true deviation of the plum-line, the exact quantity of matter in the mountain, or indeed, the quantity of matter between the plummet and the centre of gravity, are points difficult, if not impossible, to be ascertained with mathematical precision. (CS106)

McBride dismisses Maskelyne’s work at Schehallion on the grounds that he obtained his figures through rough estimates, but offers little evidence for problems with Maskelyne’s estimations. McBride ends his survey of Symmes’ work with a call to action urging the United States congress to “authorize and fit out an Expedition for the discovery of the Interior Regions” (122). He argues for Symmes’ theory as worthy of “serious investigation” (124) and claims that the scientific community as a whole will benefit from exploration: “a voyage to the polar regions, with an eye to the accomplishment of Symmes’s purpose, might be productive of incalculable advantages to the cause of science in general” (122). He makes a patriotic appeal for America’s need to ascend to the world stage by emphasizing the connection of knowledge and power, claiming that a nation, like an individual, ”acquires a knowledge of literature and science” possesses “a power and influences over those among whom he resides” (125). The survey concludes by offering practical advice on ideal locations from which to begin the expedition such as the Oregon River or Hudson Bay.

Conclusion:

Brian McHale calls Pynchon’s use of alternate realities in his later novels “subjunctive space”, in which “the space of wish and desire, of the hypothetical and the counterfactual, of speculation and possibility.” McHale’s subjunctive spaces appear throughout the course of Pynchon’s oeuvre as he sifts through history for “the fork in the road America never took” (GR556). Several characters in his earlier work, Gravity’s Rainbow treat the wake of World War II as “a route back […] while all the fences are down, one road as good as any other” and search for a second chance to make a different decision at the “singular point [America] jumped away from” (556).

Characters in Pynchon’s later novels take a more tempered approach to subjunctive space; rather than trying to turn back the clock on past decisions, they seek to learn from missed opportunities. For reasons unexplained, the inhabitants of the earth’s interior caution Dixon that following the experiment at Schehallion, “once the necessary Degrees are measure’d, and the size and weight and shape of the Earth are calculated inescapably at last, all this will vanish. We will have to seek another Space” (MD741). In Mason & Dixon, the Royal Society’s encroaching secular worldview is a double edged sword that not only clarifies the world, but closes doors to alternate ways of thinking. The underground dwellers shudder at the thought of moving to the surface and lament what they believe to be an atomizing physical existence on a convex surface where everyone “is slightly pointed away from everybody else, all the time, out into that Void that most of you seldom notice” (741). Instead, they prefer their present arrangement on the earth’s concave, where “everyone is pointed at everyone else, — everybody’s axes converge, — forc’d at least thus to acknowledge one another, — an entirely different set of rules for how to behave” (741). Pynchon’s play with interior and exterior surfaces serves as a visualization for an alternative approach to collectivist and individualist societies and underlines the foreclosure of imagination that accompanies the erasure of subjunctive spaces.

While I hardly think that one should take Pynchon’s treatment of Halley and Symmes’ ideas as a call to re-litigate Schehallion or to take seriously any and all crank scientific theories, I do think he is correct in offering a critique of Enlightenment hubris. His quirky incorporation of bygone science is an attempt to re-enchant a sterile world and remind readers to remain open to alternative ways of thinking which might best summed up in a conversation between Mason, Dixon, and a talking dog they encounter at a tavernearly in the novel:

“I may be preternatural, but I am not supernatural ’Tis the Age of Reason, rrrf?

There is ever 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” (22).

Works Cited

Clute, John. “Excessive Candour: Aubade, Poor Dad.” Sci-Fi Weekly. 27 Nov. 2006.

Halley, Edmond. “An account of the cause of the change of the variation of the magnetical nee- dle. with an hypothesis of the structure of the internal parts of the earth: as it was proposed to the Royal Society in one of their late meetings.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Vol. 17. 1692.

Maskelyne Nevil. “An account of observations made on the mountain Schehallien for finding its attraction.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Vol. 65. 1775. 500–542

McBride, James. “Symmes’ Theory of Concentric Spheres: Demonstrating that the earth his hol- low, habitable within, and widely open about the poles.” Cincinatti, Ohio. Mor- gan, Lodge, and Fisher. 1826.

McHale, Brian. “Mason & Dixon in the Zone, or, A Brief Poetics of Pynchon-Space.” Pynchon

& Mason & Dixon edited by Brooke Horvath & Irving Malin. University of Delaware Press. Newark. 2000. 43–62

Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pyn- chon. edited by George Levine and David Leverenz. Little, Brown and Compa- ny. Boston. 1976. 161–195.

Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York, New York. The Penguin Press. 2006.

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York, New York. The Penguin Press. 1995.

Pynchon, Thomas. Mason & Dixon. New York, New York. Henry Holt. 1997.

Symes, John Cleves. “Circular №1.” 10 April 1818

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