MDMD: The Age of Unreason

[Paul Nightingale]

It is interesting to see how Unreason (Foucault's term in Madness and
Civilisation) flourished during the so-called Age of Reason. In terms of the
novel, I suppose, there are few texts that are less conventional than
Tristram Shandy. EP Thompson's history-from-below set out to give
working-class people a voice (saving them from the condescension of
history); he is scrupulous in describing as rational the kinds of behaviour
that earlier historians dismissed as irrational (dare I say, not so far
removed from the way terrorism is now described as irrational: the
suiciders - a new word has apparently been coined, I hasten to add not by
me - are fanatics and general all-purpose nutters, not brave warriors, all
of whom, of course, are on our side). What Foucault and Thompson have in
common is their interest in forms of popular resistance (which is not to say
Thompson's 'pastism' is the same as Foucault's genealogy).

Popular resistance is what Pynchon is writing about, certainly in M&D and
CoL49, if not quite so obviously in GR. What about the title: Mason-Dixon
hyphenates two individuals, at the expense of anyone else involved, in the
interests of 'Great Man history'. Pynchon separates, then joins. Someone
else on the list has already commented on the ampersand: it problematises
their relationship (as Cherrycoke will observe, who comes first?) and asks
us to address, not their history-making achievement but the way in which
their relationship unfolds (is made and unmade). In the opening chapters
their relationship forms in two distinct scenes: in London, then aboard the
Seahorse. In each scene, sailors are the embodiment of unreason. In Ch2 the
collective noun Pynchon uses to describe the sailors is "riot", which brings
me to Thompson's essay on C18th rioting as a form of popular
law-making/justice (ie not lawlessness) in "The Moral Economy of the English
Crowd in the Eighteenth Century":

"This four-letter word can conceal what may be described as a spasmodic view
of popular history. According to this view the common people can scarcely be
taken as historical agents before the French Revolution" - they simply react
spontaneously to, eg, "a bad harvest or a downturn in trade" (p185).

Thompson goes on to give examples of the popular riot as justice, what he
calls "the moral economy of the crowd". Magistrates, for example, were
forced to intervene on behalf of the crowd and force bakers to lower their
prices (pp221-3).

As an example of direct action: "After visiting the mills and markets around
Gloucester, Stroud and Cirencester, they divided into parties of fifty and a
hundred and visited the villages and farms, requesting that corn be brought
at fair prices to market, and breaking in on granaries. A large party of
them attended on the sheriff himself, downed their cudgels while he
addressed them on their misdemeanours, listened with patience, 'chearfully
shouted God Save the King', and then picked up their cudgels and resumed the
good work of setting the price' (pp227-8, quotation from a private letter).

Page refs to Customs In Common (London: Penguin, 1993).

And then, in Ch4 there is Captain Smith's introduction to his crew: "'Well,'
advised the young salt, 'you've got a good job, - don't fuck up'" (p35). I
think Pynchon deals with the situation Thompson described: the transition to
a capitalist free-market economy retains  older notions of duty (a clash
between what Raymond Williams would call residual and emergent cultures). If
Smith does fuck up, his crew will pay the price: his duty to them is one
capitalism, with its myth of the free agent, cannot tolerate.