Mason & Dixon & the ampersand

Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?--in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of those Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,--serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,--Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its way into the continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,--winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair. (345)

America as possibility--as the New World, as the place that allows what Europe cannot--is the dream of the Old World, and like a dream it is not true, but might be. But although it is Britain's dream, America keeps awakening itself, as it turns frontier into settlement into colony, curtailing its possibility, consigning hopes to its rubbish heap. The western frontier was only seemingly boundless. As long as it seemed so, America could be the place where the West in the larger sense could escape the Enlightenment reduction of possibility. When the western frontier's apparent boundlessness was revealed as only ostensible--when lines were measured and laid down across it, disproving its infiniteness--this escape route was cut off. Mason and Dixon run into a number of examples of the subjunctive, both before they begin their line and as they blaze it across the frontier, discovering what would seem impossible and its near-simultaneous disappearance or destruction--its absorption into the bare, mortal world. When anything seems possible, the Enlightenment certainties, it seems, reassert themselves.

In their travels, Mason and Dixon come across, among many other unlikely phenomena, a talking dog, a flying mechanical duck with a crush on an unwilling French chef, a giant cheese, the ghost of Mason's late wife, and a race of people living inside the earth. Each of these exceeds the conditions of Enlightenment understanding, as does Mason's experience of the 11 days "lost" when the calendar was switched from the Julian to the Gregorian in the "Schizochronick" (192) year of 1752:

'Twas as if this Metropolis of British Reason had been abandon'd to the Occupancy of all that Reason would deny Malevolent shapes flowing in the streets. Lanthorns spontaneously going out. Men roaring, as if chang'd to Beasts in the Dark. A Carnival of Fear. Shall I admit it? I thrill'd. I felt that if I ran fast enough, I could gain altitude, and fly. (559-60)

The occupancy of America by all that reason would deny dramatizes its status as the land of possibility. The loss of these phenomena, their eviction, dramatizes the loss of this possibility. Dixon's visit to Hollow Earth makes plain that it is eviction: