Mason & Dixon - Part 1 - Chapter 3: Pythia's Song

Analysis of Mason & Dixon, Part 1 - Chapter 3: Mason and Dixon's First Meeting, the Learnèd English Dog, Hepsie the Fortune Teller

Audio Available Here

Rev^d Cherrycoke doesn’t exactly recollect Mason and Dixon’s first meeting, nor their own recollection of their first meeting, and not even his own recollection of how they believed they remembered their own first meeting to be. His story of how they met is through fatigue and many winding paths: how he listened to them tell the story about how they thought they remembered how they met, and then, given he was fatigued in his listening, how he remembered that they remembered how they thought they met. So, the events of their meeting are likely about to be presented in a manner not entirely accurate. However, though some may say this would also mean they weren’t represented in a historically accurate manner, isn’t that how much history is retold? Who is to say that many minor stories such as this were not obfuscated by these same layers of misremembrance, fatigue, and embellishment? The fact remains that the implications of this meeting, or of other less world changing historical events, are far more important than the minutiae that makes them up. Yet, one must also ponder on what is simply misremembered and what is being purposefully altered.

They met in Portsmouth, England, a port city south-west of London on the English Channel. Coming from a far less densely populated countryside, Dixon’s initial impression (on the city, not on Mason) is found in a question that he asks Mason: “How can Yese dwell thah’ closely together, Day upon Day, without all growing murderous” (14). Well, though it isn’t necessarily the proximity and density that does it, we will soon come to see that the English are, in fact, about as murderous as they come. Clearly, we will be seeing this abroad as Mason and Dixon travel outward whether to Sumatra or eventually to America. But also, until the mid-19th century, public hangings in Tyburn, as Mason suggests, were quite a crowded event. Hangings occurred for crimes such as burglary, forgery, murder, and so on. And even though the executions technically occurred to members of all classes, I’m sure you can guess who really got the brunt of it. Nonetheless, making death and violence such a front-and-center event, one that is not only expected but openly celebrated, would render the population desensitized toward violence in general. Mason himself seems as such, which is perhaps a part of the reason he does not act (at first) as repulsed when seeing it perpetrated elsewhere (in America) as Dixon does.

Through this discussion of proximity and violence, Mason flippantly mocks Dixon’s country accent, believes Dixon to be offended when Dixon mocks him back, only for Dixon laugh and tell a joke. Clearly, as we can see, Mason is the one who takes himself and his ego more seriously, while Dixon presents as the more light-hearted fun-loving of the two. Reasons are yet not revealed as to why, but we will see in time. All we do see for sure is that Dixon’s personality may occasionally lead him into some sticky situations such as unknowingly mocking the accents of some sailors who might be ones to actually take offense. Luckily for the both of them, none of these offences are yet acted upon.

Speaking of their differences, the power dynamic between the two has yet to be sorted out. What we know immediately is that Mason is clearly of a higher class, coming from a major city in the world’s then-current Imperial center, and working at just about the highest level one could work at: not just for the Elite, but for the Royal Elite.¹ If Dixon were to be viewed by someone who did not know the two, he would be thought to have more power given his stature, being “a couple of inches taller” and being “first to catch the average Eye, often causing future strangers to remember them as Dixon and Mason” (16). The two of them, right off the bat, are being given distinct personalities and distinct ways in which they will be interacted with in the world, thus allowing those personalities to show the varied ways in which people could interpret the actions they will be complicit in. Plus, given they are very well aware of these differences, being both conscious and self-conscious of what separates them or what ‘sticks out,’ we will see how they view themselves or each other in their own complicity.

Dixon is the first to bring up the disparity between their professions, stating that it “Takes an odd bird to stay up peering at Stars all night in the first place,” (16-17) in reference to Mason being an Astronomer. There aren’t as many Astronomers like there are Surveyors (as Dixon is) who, according to Dixon himself, are numerous, scattered over the lands creating borders whether they be political or merely ‘fences, hedges, and ditches.’ What Dixon, and probably Mason, do not know at the moment is how Astronomy will be commodified and utilized to enact the same ills as the act of Surveying — thus, the natural curiosity for knowledge of the cosmos will turn into something meant only to draw lines of power. Interestingly, Dixon, in his joining of Mason for the Transit of Venus, has given up his career in Surveying. He likely has become disenfranchised with that system of border surveying, seeing that it is only used for the commodification of the natural land and has been overtaking England at the time: “a historical moment where communal lands [were] being redistributed for corporate production and notions of ownership” (Biebel, 17).² Though, while this is a process that is now done everywhere, Dixon’s current disenfranchisement is nothing compared to what he will experience later when he comes to realize he is doing it for far more nefarious purposes.

The conversation between the two goes on, showing instances of Mason’s self-deprecating nature and anxiety, Dixon’s propensity for distilled or brewed grains and Mason’s for grapes, and both of their notions for the trip ahead. The day darkens as their mood rises from “what former Vegetation pleases him” (18). While they may be getting drunker by the moment, this next scene is anything but a vision. Though remember, the story is not a first-person view of Mason and Dixon themselves, but a story told through numerous warped lenses by Cherrycoke to the children of J. Wade LeSpark, so perhaps this former potential ‘revolutionary’ figure is attempting to instill a coded message to the children, showing something in the story that he would not typically be allowed to say in the house of an American Elite or a Military Industrial man.

What this vision or story is about is the Learnèd English Dog: quite literally a dog who can speak, sing, and think on a very anthropomorphically intellectual level. For some reason, throughout the dog’s song, Mason seems entirely enraptured by its performance. Dixon notices this and is curious as to why. This is the first instance where we see Mason’s true belief in (or hope for) the existence of the spiritual realm. He sees the dog as a possible oracle: “Why mayn’t there be Oracles, for us, in our time? Gate-ways into Futurity? That can’t all have died with the ancient Peoples” (19). He asks: could this be the Oracle of Delphi a couple thousand of years in the future. For, if they could have foretellers of the future, or oracles who could divine meaning out of the questions we asked and situations we prevented, then why could these mysticisms not have traveled through history with our race? The two are learning quite a bit about each other today, Dixon now realizing that despite Mason’s propensity toward the sciences, his viewing of the cosmos and of the oddities of the world around him are more than just an interest, they are a desire and a need. Mason, for a reason we and Dixon do not yet know — “Happen he’s lost someone close?” (20) — requires that something outside the realm of science exists. Not a God per se, but something. To him, at this moment, the Learnèd English Dog could be that oracle — that connection to the other side. While this is a clear historical elaboration, that is largely the point. It is getting at certain historiographic tendencies, making up myths and allegories that get the importance of the moment across more than actual historical fact.

As Mason and Dixon pass through the alleyways to meet this dog, they see “Sailors, mouths ajar […] puffing on Pipes, eating Potatoes, some who’ll be going back to the Ship, and some who won’t” (20) — in other words, men who are waiting to see if they will live, or be subjected once again to the ever-present chance at premature death. Dixon, despite being not as elevated as Mason is in their social strata, is nowhere near those lowly privates waiting to die, hoping to be awarded something resembling a life from a country that could afford to give it to them at the snap of a finger. And yet They won’t; this will lead the soldiers to live in squalor or die on the battlefield. Unless war calls, they will have no chance at travelling to other lands, to the Indies or to America, whether to achieve the goals of the Elite or even just to settle in a world that does not fully subjugate them. Instead, they will become indebted to a System that only has its own interests at heart. The soldiers will sit here, questions unanswered and destinies unknown, while Mason and Dixon, two men with at least a chance, go to speak to divine their future.

Upon arriving, the dog does not answer their desperate questions and instead leads them toward another group of sailors — one which includes none other than Fender-Belly Bodine, a predecessor to Pig Bodine. Pig Bodine was a major character in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and V. (1963), who has a predecessor-Bodine in Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006), both of whose ancestor is this Fender-Belly Bodine from Mason & Dixon (1997). In Gravity’s Rainbow, a close analysis will show that Pig Bodine represented a sort of humorous foreteller of a coming age, given that in that novel, taking place near the end of WWII, he enacted a parody of the war-hungry neoliberal order that was forming and that would come to power in the decades to come (among various other parallels).³

That symbolic trend follows through to this novel: “‘I’ve been out more than once to the Indies […] and I tell you a handful of Sailors with their wits about them, and that talking Dog to keep the Savages amused, why, we could be kings’” (21). He is telling them that if they had enough military force or personnel, plus a little bit of real or falsified magic as a distraction, the lands which they plan on visiting to further their own national interests could in turn become theirs in toto. They could be those playground colonies so aptly described in Gravity’s Rainbow. Bodine is not actually evil or of this belief though, hence the satirical foreteller analog.

The dog finally gets Mason alone, needing to chat with him privately. But before the dog can really get a word in, Mason — being the scientist who needs something on the ‘other side’ to exist (whether that be supernatural, religious, or merely spiritual) — asks the Dog, “‘Have you a soul,— that is, are you a human Spirit, re-incarnate as a Dog?’” (22). The Learnèd English Dog, now referred to as the L.E.D.⁴ perhaps in reference to the fact that he is more likely machine rather than any sort of supernatural entity, responds with ‘Mu!’ Or, in Japanese, sometimes translated as “‘no,’ but also interpreted as nothingness, as the empty state between yes and no” (Biebel, 19). In other words, no, he is not a spirit, but he is also not not a spirit. It is more than being purely of the scientific, tangible, and explainable world or being of the unseeable, sensorily imperceivable one. His existence, which in times far past may have been readily accepted as a supernatural force, is now reduced to a preternatural phenomenon — i.e. one that is simply outside the norm. It is an oddity, but not something of the spirits or ghosts. The Dog states that all dogs in general were able to train humans, in a way, to survive in a world where humanity was hell bent on the destruction of the other.⁵ In order to do this, dogs had to become more human themselves, expressing their emotions in ways that a person could readily comprehend just as our pets today seem to smile, become excited, cry, or pout. With this evolutionary change, humanity accepted the dog as a part of its pack. Without acquiescing to humanity’s naturally murderous tendencies, dogs, like the contemporaneous natives of various lands, would have been “ever a step away from the dread Palm Leaf, nightly delaying the Blades of our Masters by telling back to them tales of their humanity” (22). The dog is thus “an extreme Expression of this Process,” (22) for now, seeming human is not nearly enough as we see with those ‘dusky natives.’ Not only does one have to literally be human, but one has to be a prototypical White European of a similar belief system as well. Not that we will bloodthirstily kill any- or everyone else for food (though, that will occasionally happen), but we will certainly do so if they pose even the most minor threat of standing in our way. So, this dog has evolved a step further, mimicking the ‘human’ even more than ever before. And because of this, Mason and other sailors around it, have placed it on a pedestal — as if being human were more important than being alive; as if evolution now occurs as a means of survival against one specific species; as if the spiritual world can only occur through some lens of our own tangible comprehension.

Fender-Belly Bodine (being a humorous foreteller of a coming age) set up a betting pool on a fight that is brewing between the Dog and a sailor, similar to Bodine near the end of Gravity’s Rainbow hosting Runcible Spoon Fights in Cuxhaven (Gravity’s Rainbow, 3.31).⁶ While in that novel his foretelling was an exposé of the fact that the outcome of many wars was already decided, or that they would simply be used to increase profit, or how the men fighting within the wars would soon realize the fact of their being used by those in power, this novel takes place in a time well before WWII and thus before the full evolution of that tactic. So, this fight, taking place between a British Dog who purportedly ‘has no owner,’ and a Lunarian, which references both an astronomer who uses the moon to travel the seas but more importantly someone of an ‘alien’ nature, is about to begin. The dog, being British, immediately believes in its absolute superiority against this alien from another land. However, it is quickly revealed that simply being a part of the Empire of Britain does not render one ‘ownerless’ or exempt from the Empire’s reign. Because the dog does possess an owner and a Master, just as we unfortunately do. However, before we see the outcome, the fight is cut off.

The group eventually goes back into the bar that the chapter began in, moving away from the humorous and absurd nature of the scene in the street, now to the gambling house with its “turf fertiliz’d with the blood and the droppings of generations of male Poultry” (24). The Learnèd English Dog, now wanting to be known as Fang, may very well have been saved due to its human traits, but the chickens here are used for sport. They resemble nothing close to humankind, and so their life has now been commodified in the cruelest of ways — for entertainment. But past the gambling tables and the gamblers symbolic hopeful desire to rise up in the world, past the cockfights fueled by British bloodlust, lies a labyrinth far more evil than the rest. In these hidden walls comes “assorted sounds of greater and lesser Ecstacy, along with percussions upon Flesh, laughter more and less feign’d, furniture a-thump, some Duetto of Viol and Chinese Flute, the demented crowing of fighting-cocks waiting their moment” (25). The further back one goes in this labyrinth of halls and rooms, the deeper one’s sin becomes. These sounds call to mind the trafficking of bodies, human and animal, all for two purposes: to be used and to be profited upon. It is the type of place Mason and Dixon will not dare venture just yet.⁷

So, the dog does not take them to these rooms. They are too much for just now. They have not learned enough about this world to get the full glimpse yet. Instead, it takes them to Hepsie, a fortune teller — one who can achieve what Mason so desired from the dog: an answer to his questions for the beyond. It is revealed now (with a parenthetical peek into the future) that all of this desire for the existence of the spiritual realm, this lack of fulfillment with being purely of the Earthly and Scientific, “has to do with Rebekah, his wife, who died two years ago this February next” (25). Mason, up to the point of her death, was likely of a purely (or nearly so) Scientific mind. He had risen in the ranks of a scientist and astronomer, making it close to as high as one could go, and yet the answers and comforts that science could provide were not enough. These people of science would love to think it was, nowadays avowing a strict and hostile atheism, a disregard of anything resembling a spirt, and proclaiming that consciousness ended at the animal. And yet, when one experiences something as troubling as grief and loss, or when one sees a glimmer of something beyond the tangibly explainable in something as simple as art, it calls us to question what more there could be. Mason, for example, cannot fathom that she is gone. Death, to him, cannot be the end. And who is to say whether it is or is not.

Hepsie begins the prophecy, stating that the ship they will be leaving on to Sumatra will depart on a Friday, then asks for some payment in order to predict how that departure will fair. Her prediction, once paid (for, while Mason makes it out to be like he doesn’t want to capitulate to sorcery, we all know he needs to know) comes in some obscure language with names and locations, some real, some not. But the gist is that after the previous year (the supposed Year of Marvels) French ships have been out on the seas looking for British ships to raid. Her inference is that one of these French vessels will be attacking their British vessel, putting their very lives in danger. Mason, trying to hold onto the little that he can of the spiritual world, immediately believes in this prophecy. Dixon, not necessarily against those types of beliefs, is far more of the fun loving, go-with-the-flow types, and so tries to both make light of the prophecy while consoling Mason’s worries. They can’t talk for long though, as a line filled with gamblers, cheaters of all sorts, sailors, and so on, are all waiting for a prophecy as well. It turns out, despite the many lies told throughout these moments of Mason and Dixon’s first meeting, that the prediction may be the one truth that has been told, for their ship, as we will see next chapter, will be attacked.

Finally, returning to Bodine, the two are told that Hepsie gave this same prediction to his girlfriend, Mauve, for free. Mauve also happens to be Hepsie’s roommate, giving the two of them pause since Hepsie just took some money off of them for a fortune that was already well known. So, what gives? Who are we to believe? Is Fang the Dog an oracle, a part of the supernatural world, merely an anomaly in the real world, a lie or misremembrance by our storyteller? Does Rebekah live on after death, or has she gone for good? Does magic exist, or is it a lie that we tell ourselves to find solace in a world built on suffering? And if magic does exist, is it itself becoming commodified to make a quick buck? The answer is ‘Mu.’ Not a yes, not a no, but the between realms. Of course, science exists, but it would be ignorant to say that all things are explainable through this and this alone. Mason and Dixon, however, are slowly seeing that this between realm is retreating quickly to one side. The magic in the world may very well have at one time, been widespread. But day by day, year by Miraculous Year, the magic is retreating. Soon, we will “find no trace […], search as [we] may” (29).

---

Up Next: Part 1, Chapter 4

1. There are levels even above this one, though we won’t get much into that until 1.7.

2. Biebel, Brett. A Mason & Dixon Companion. The University of Georgia Press, 2024.

3. An elaboration on this occurs in the Gravity’s Rainbow analysis in 3.31 (specifically 3.31.2).

4. As in the Light Emitting Diode which L.E.D. represents in the modern world.

5. See Frans van der Groov’s extermination of the dodos in Gravity’s Rainbow (1.14).

6. As I move on in this project of analyzing Pynchon’s works, I will likely heavily reference Pynchon’s other works, especially ones that I have already analyzed. So, since Gravity’s Rainbow is the only other one, I have currently analyzed, I will be citing it as such. The first number will of course reference the Part, and the second will reference the Chapter (though, the chapters in Gravity’s Rainbow are not numbered, so please see my previous analysis to know which one exactly).

7. It is also reminiscent of the room with ‘high-backed chairs’ that Slothrop found in the Casino Hermann Goering (Gravity’s Rainbow, 2.2).