Mason & Dixon & the ampersand

"Once the solar parallax is known' they told me, "once the necessary Degrees are measur'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." (741)

Even though we know such a world could not exist, we still feel its impending loss; it as if the loss of possibility is doubled.

The line between subjunctive and indicative, then, is crucial both to the book's understanding of the Enlightenment--as the demarcation between what the Enlightenment can know and what it cannot, and so between what is and is not--and also to its understanding of America, as the demarcation between what America might be and what it can no longer be. The visto Mason and Dixon draw, as it cuts through America, is the vehicle through which the novel encounters the ways America is built on lines, and, more importantly, through which it--and we--are able to think about how America became marked by these old lines when at first it seemed open and unlimited. It was one place we should not have found them. The disenchantment of America, the turning of the New World into just another part of the Old, is the turning of subjunctive into indicative.

The fate of the Indians illustrates this aspect of the line. In the end, the mysteries of their world, while given a reprieve by Mason and Dixon's party, seem surely doomed. Mason and Dixon turn back East, giving up the visto, when they reach the Great Warrior Path, an ancient North-South road reported to have a power that science does not recognize. They learn of the Path from Hugh Crawfford, the white man who accompanies the band of Indians that joins them toward the end of their journey. He tells them that it is sacred, and that they will not be allowed to pass. At this point drawing the line becomes fraught with tension, as they do not want to stumble upon the Path and have only an inexact idea how far they are from it, because they do not know its precise location, and because, as Crawfford says, "Distance is not the same here, nor is Time" (647). Out in this still unmeasured wilderness, occupied by the Indians with their unerilightened worldview, the impossible is still possible, and the laws of Western science may not apply:

We all feel it Looming, even when we're awake, out there ahead someplace, the way you come to feel a River or Creek ahead, before anything else,--sound, sky, vegetation,--may have announced it. Perhaps 'tis the very deep sub-audible Hum of its Traffic that we feel with an equally undiscover'd part of the Sensorium,--does it lie but over the next Ridge? the one after that? We have Mileage Estimates from Rangers and Runners, yet for as long as its Distance from the Post Mark'd West remains unmeasur'd, nor is yet recorded as Fact, may it remain, a--shimmer, among the few final Pages of its Life as Fiction. (650)

As Cherrycoke notes when they reach the Path, the frontier is "the Membrane that divides their [Indians'] Subjunctive World from our number'd and dreamless Indicative" (677). As soon as they come to the Path, as soon as they are able to fix it in latitude and longitude, the dream will be over, it will be Fact. Like the Hollow Earth, it will cease to exist. Again, applying geometry is, in Michael Wood's words, an "imperialist gesture, an administrative onslaught by the numbered on the unimagined" (128). The unimagined, when seen and counted, must by definition cease to exist as such.