Mason & Dixon & the ampersand

As Mason and Dixon progress westward in their cutting of the visto, into the unsettled yet not unpopulated frontier and away from the fast-dividing East, the significance of the visto as embodiment of the Enlightenment is raised in stark relief. Among the more direct ways is the opposition of the Chinese feng shui expert Captain Zhang, who, upon learning of their project, asks Mason and Dixon, "you two crazy?" He continues:

Ev'rywhere else on earth, Boundaries follow Nature,--coastlines, ridge-tops, river-banks,--so honoring the Dragon or Shan within, from which Land-Scape ever takes its form. To mark a right Line upon the Earth is to inflict upon the Dragon's very Flesh, a sword-slash, a long, perfect scar, impossible for any who live out here the year 'round to see as other than hateful Assault. (542)

Zhang recognizes the brutal, incongruous regularity of the line as an attack on the very nature of things. The Dragon within the earth is dishonored and wounded by the incising of a right line into its flesh, into the living flesh of nature. The Enlightenment roots of the line are here expressly criticized from a non-Western perspective.

Zhang's criticisms go beyond the nature of the line itself to a more pointed indictment of its effects. He asks, "Shall wise Doctors one day write History's assessment of the Good resulting from this Line, vis-a-vis the not-so-good? I wonder which list would be longer" (666) and later characterizes the line as a "conduit for Evll" (701). The list enumerating the not-so-good effects of the visto--and of the other lines it comes to represent--can be drawn from many parts of the novel. Lines to which our attention is drawn include those between black and white, which we encounter early in Cape Town, later in the colonies, and in the backs of our minds whenever we remember what the Mason-Dix- on line came to divide; the related line between Native Americans and the settlers and colonists who pushed them westward; that between Old World and New, between hoary; tradition-bound Europe and the New Eden of America, which the founding-fathers-to-be and would-be Adams into whom Mason and Dixon run are intent on fixing; the line between those included in this new paradise and those excluded; the line between Elect and Preterite, Saved and Damned; the line between the empirically known and the possible unknown, what the novel calls the indicative and the subjunctive, the former of which they set out from in the form of the governed, measured world of bureaucratic administration, and the latter of which they quickly emerge into in the form of talking dogs, amorous mechanical ducks, the 11 lost days created by the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendars, the race that lives on the inside of the earth, the ghost of Mason's wife, and many other fantastic yet plausibly presented phenomena; and the line between fact and fiction, history and romance in eighteenth-century terms, a line highlighted by the form of the novel itself, which takes the strands of actual historical events and weaves fiction from them.