Mason & Dixon - Part 1 - Chapter 7.2: Shadow Leaders

Analysis of Mason & Dixon, Part 1 - Chapter 7.2: The Indifference-Draught, Ghosts, the Dagger, the British East India Company (EIC), Maskelyne's Nepotism, Resurrection and Redemption

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Not all men hold entirely evil intentions in their heart.

As Mason and Dixon begin discussing the events of Austra’s pimping (and to some extent, the pimping of all the women in the house), Mason reveals that while he does have certain uncouth desires, he is willing to go to certain lengths to suppress them so that he is not tempted to act. In this case, what he is asking Dixon to help him find among the native people is an ‘Indifference-Draught’ — an unconventional means to fight against the seduction plot. Though while these unconventional means may often serve righteous purposes, men will find a way to twist anything to their own desire. In this case, while Mason wants to use the draught to purge and eliminate his urges, it is revealed that the “[East India] Company seeks to continue all the Dutch of the Cape Colony behind a Boundary it has drawn, and to rule them radially from a single Point” (68). Well, what better way to ‘keep all tranquil’ than the use of an ‘Indifference-Draught’ — to use the African Natives’ own magic against them. To use the product developed by the Natives for the problems that the colonizers are now experiencing, along with gaining a little bit a profit made on the side.

However, “Mason is not seeking the Potion for himself” (68). Instead, he wishes to spike Johanna’s drink with it, believing that if this sort of desire were to be expunged from her mind, Mason would be safe to go about without the fear of giving into his own cravings. Thoughts of Johanna bring us to see a still of her being pampered by the slaves of South Africa as Cornelius watches lustfully erect. Slavery is not merely the entire possession of a person to harvest produce, create wealth, or to save time by cleaning house. It is to increase the menial comforts of day-to-day life while allowing one to live as a king or queen. It produces, to these colonizers, the appearance of pure luxury — where one is elevated to the level of a God being serenaded or cossetted by angelic seneschal of another land who were only placed here to serve you. Seeing this in the one whom you purportedly love (though is it really true love if you are being pimped out for the hope of profit?), brings an intense desire. You are married to a Goddess. You inhabit a land that has never been discovered by those who ‘truly’ deserve it — heaven on Earth. Therefore, why would you not be enraptured at the sight of these seneschal — these slaves — fanning and wiping the sweat from the brow of your wife?

Ghosts are believed to be spirits trapped on Earth, awaiting their ascent to heaven or descent to hell, for a number of potential reasons: the desire or need for revenge, emotional attachment and the unwillingness to move on, the need for help, religious ceremonies gone wrong, or a number of other possibilities. Mason does not see the ghosts at play. He believes that there is some typical form of desire in Johanna’s heart which he must suppress — that what matters to her is the foundational constructions of a person’s being. Dixon sees past this. He knows that base desires are long gone among the settlers of this land. It is now power, slavery, and the desire to suppress the revolt of the ghosts which have risen in this new country. The ghosts remain on this land for the first of the stated reasons — a need for revenge. But not necessarily in the way of a revenge thriller where one will move on when the person or people who had wronged them are killed. Instead, it is in the manner of a wrong gone unrighted — where the ‘ghost’ does not need to see true revenge, but merely the fixing of all that went wrong with the world, leading to their oppression and death. So, while Mason views things through the lens of pure psychological desire, Dixon realizes that the continuation of slavery is a necessity if the colonizers are to evade the ghosts for long. If the ghosts won, realized that what had occurred to them was now revenged and solved, and arose to heaven, then what does that mean for the colonizers. Certainly, they would have lost and would only have one destination which they were destined for. Therefore, the colonizers “need to keep the Ghost propitiated, Day to Day, via the Company’s merciless Priesthoods and many-Volum’d Codes” (68-69). If the Elite are to maintain their position, the system must continue. The ghosts in our modern era seek a similar revenge; those who have died of hunger, of treatable medical issues, of suicide brought upon by economic downfalls or general struggle through oppression, all seek to see the system overthrown. They wait, watching and praying that the slaves, be they literal slaves or wage-slaves or any other type of slave throughout the time between Dutch South African colonization and now, achieve freedom. And Mason eventually “comes to recognize the sorrowful Nakedness of the Arrangements here” (69). An Indifference-Draught is not enough, for the thing which drives Johanna, Cornelius, and all like them onward is not a desire — it is a need. It is something that cannot be let go or else all would crumble. To them, it is food, water, air.

Despite his epiphany, Mason is not fully ready to admit the horrors of the world to himself — the horrors which he is helping to enact. So, though things make more sense to him, “By picturing the colony as another planet, Mason differentiates it from England and from himself” (Biebel, 39).¹ While the first step that may bring someone to any form of radicalization — or merely disenfranchisement — is an epiphany of the world’s wrongs, this does not immediately render it easy to accept what the world has done. This is why Mason, instead of moving fully into this train of thought, pictures the Dutch colonies as another planet entirely, separate from England’s grasp — or his. He cannot bear the fact that the same people funding his endeavors are the ones causing such evil to arise. Dixon, who sees through this lie, wants to show Mason how the people of this country — the Natives, at least — really are of this world. He asks Mason to accompany him on a night out past the lines of the colonizers’ set border into the real country.

On the first trips, Mason proves an issue. He scuttles off with ‘Doxies’ (women), drinks excessively, blacks out in pots of ‘karis’ (curry), and makes a fool of himself in general. In other words, he probably acts how many tourists do when they arrive in a new country. And maybe this is the point of Dixon’s bringing him out here — to show the through line between what Mason viewed as the ‘alien’ world and the ‘real’ world. Yet, what about the ‘dream’ world? — a world that the Natives of this land believe to be the true world. Is this just another border? An abstract one? Ghostly, spiritual? Or natural? Perhaps there is, then, a separation between the world of the natives and the world of the colonizers, though it is not a distinction between alien and earthly. Instead, it is between material and spiritual — the land where all must be touched to be understood, and the one where it can merely be sensed. Where one person only sees and covets the resources available in a country and the other senses that which surrounds them, inhabits their conscious and subconscious, and utilizes those extrasensory moments to make better sense of the world around them.

Mason, however, does find some connection with that spiritual side. He, through his dreams, realizes that the Cape of ‘Good Hope’ is Hell. The view which has been presented to him and his comrade in the ‘real’ world has been one of something no worse than the average terrestrial world. But when dreaming, things are processed into metaphorical and symbolic bundles. His sleeping mind makes connections that his waking mind may be unwilling to see: the fact that whatever religious or literary texts he has read are now showing themselves to emerge in the real world, or in reality, show that these texts have been artistic recreations of the real world that are now only showing themselves to be said recreations. And given his search for meaning in these intangible realms — whether simply to reunite or find solace in his late wife, or because he genuinely wants there to be something more than science in this world — the vision of Hell allows him to begin having a sense of understanding in the project he is partially complicit in.

Dixon wonders if these dreams have been brought on the by intense foods and spices of the Native people, which leads the two of them to then contemplate the foods they will be leaving behind once they return to England. Mason points out that Dixon’s favorite new condiment, ketjap (ketchup, though a very distant version of what we know) will be hard to come by. However, it is this desire to have the foods, comforts, and flavors of a distant land which will soon increase international trade and thus a need for advanced and accelerated production. No longer would a group like the Natives in South Africa be producing a food product for themselves, but for the world. In coming centuries too, no longer would South American banana plantations, Ecuadorian flower farms, Thai shrimp hatcheries, and so on, be merely for the purpose of those nations. Instead, America and whichever other countries would be willing to exploit those natives would find a way to draw out that cheap labor to mass produce what should only have remained there.

Through their nights asleep, Dixon begins to mess with Mason a bit by moving a certain knife to new locations — a knife with scratches and stains which “overlie one the other in a Palimpsest running deep into the Dimension of Time” (72). The object, with its palimpsests, reaches “back into history, much like our ‘Wand’ring Heart’ card table” (Biebel, 40) in 1.1 (pg. 5). It is therefore representative of history, just as the card table was, in that though we can see where it is now, what purpose it currently serves, and the fact that it was marred to some extent, we cannot at all see exactly what caused that marring. We certainly can hear stories just as today we can read histories of times past, but we must ask ourselves which stories from which sources we are to believe, for all we can be entirely positive of is the current situation and state of the ‘knife’ or ‘table.’ Dixon moving this knife, therefore, calls these ideas to Mason’s mind who contemplates on “which, and which not” (72) will be stricken by the dagger — and as you could guess, there is a certain class of people immune to and predisposed to being stricken. Mason realizes that he and Dixon represent this type of disparity between classes (though to a lesser degree than any true Elect/Preterite relation), one of them being a true Astronomer working for the Royal Society and the other being a Geordie Surveyor who was educated in the ‘hillbilly’ country up North of the city proper. While Mason is only poking fun,² there is still truth to it: Mason for instance, will be the name most remembered and the one that comes first when saying their names together. Also, as we saw (1.0), the actual history which we know about Mason before the two met surpasses that which we know of Dixon. And finally, the idea of ‘shit’ is brought up when Mason accidentally curses. ‘Shit,’ in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, represented the historical ‘shit’ which made up the world: the scattered remnants left behind and forgotten which Slothrop had to wade through in the Roseland Ballroom toilet (Gravity’s Rainbow, 1.10) and symbolically throughout the rest of the novel in order to understand the horrors that really made up the world. Mason, here, realizes the taboo nature of this word, consciously apologizing due to the use of profanity, though subconsciously knowing the implications it also held.

Dixon understands these historical implications to an even further degree. He sees the oddities in someone like Mason having risen the ranks so quickly, and in a Geordie like himself being paired with Mason on such a coveted appointment. This brings back Mason’s inability to differentiate between ‘alien’ and ‘real’ world issues. Mason does not doubt his own capabilities and thus refuses to see any sort of conspiracy abound, such as how Dixon proposes, “are we being us’d, by Forces invisible even to thy Invisible College?” (73). For while the Royal Society may very well be the ones who sent Mason and Dixon out in the first place just as an entity like the American government may send soldiers out to war, there is something behind that ‘Invisible College’ which is utilizing these entities for other purposes. Thus, Dixon recalls the British East India Company (EIC), a competitor of the VOC, which surpasses the power of even the purportedly most powerful entity in the country but remains hidden. Whereas the Royal Society would be akin to the head of state and their cabinet, the EIC would be akin to a shadow-state like the CIA or the billionaire classes which hold true power over the actual government and thus are the true commissioners of these missions which are meant to solidify and increase the capital of Them. Even as far back as this era, entities such as this existed, and Dixon’s realization of this allows us to see his incredible astuteness in observation and societal analysis, while Mason’s refusal to acknowledge the possibility calls back to many of our Intelligence Officers at the beginning of Gravity’s Rainbow such as Slothrop or Pirate Prentice, all of whom admitted something was fishy, but who refused to look things in the eye (just yet) due to the discomfort and self-realized complicity it would cause.

Mason continues on, stating how he believes that his association with men of power such as Walpole — “often called Britain’s first prime minister” and who has “a long established track record of being close to power” (Biebel, 42) — is the reason why he so readily deserved this position. In response, Dixon brings up Mason’s failure to account for figures such as Robert Clive, an enormously wealthy British man who conducted the exploitation of Bengal (Eastern India) via the EIC. Because Clive, who is brothers-in-law with one Nevil Maskelyne (soon to be the new Astronomer Royale), has given Maskelyne a more ready rise to power than he has to Mason. While Mason may think he was given the best position, it is actually anything but. Dixon states that Maskelyne was originally intended to be Mason’s partner but was soon replaced with Dixon who himself knows he is not necessarily the most up-to-snuff scientific mind. Maskelyne is instead given Robert Waddington as a partner, someone who helped perfect the use of ‘Hadley’s quadrant,’ a technique which would be further refined on the journey that Waddington and Maskelyne would be taking to their destination for the Transit of Venus and which would help refine the calculations of longitude.³ Perfecting this technique would lead them to procure the “reward ranging from £10,000 to £25,000,” (Biebel, 42) along with the massive attainment of scientific notoriety the discoverer would receive. So, Maskelyne being given this partner as opposed to Mason ensures that Maskelyne is going to be the co-founder of this discovery, giving him a closer chance to a higher place in the Royal Society than Mason likely could have attained. And with that revelation, Mason finally does begin to see that Dixon may have a point. For, “’twas Maskelyne who’d given [Clive] Mr. Waddington’s address” which forced Mason “to proceed in a single unprotected little Jackass Frigate, instead of his own giant Indiaman, in a Convoy, with half the Royal [Navy] there as well to keep them safe” (75). So, Maskelyne being familiar with Clive gives him the full ability to take the position of someone who might be more worthy than him in order to move up more quickly in the world and in order to ensure his own safety at the expense of another. In other words: nepotism.

With Mason’s epiphany, he and Dixon picture themselves “As if [they’re] Lodgers inside someone else’s Fate, whilst belonging quite someplace else” (75). And aren’t we all? We very well may have free will within our acute individual lives as in day-to-day doings, our interactions with friends and family, etc. But the trajectory of our life as a whole is more subject to the will of the dreamer, be that people such as Clive, Maskelyne, and Waddington, or the ambiguous capital-T Them.

Back at the LeSpark’s, the Reverend discusses this scene with the children. He tells them that Mason and Dixon “could have settl’d for much more than they ended up getting” (75) because while those like Maskelyne were clearly of a higher status, our two astronomers still had quite the position of power. And yet, despite pushing the Elites’ project further and further, Mason and Dixon do not end up as wealthy or powerful individuals. Whether this is because they did not realize their own level of power or simply because they did not desire such excessive elevation via the process of exploitation, is yet to be observed, but conclusions regarding this will be able to be made as the book moves on.

Ethelmer wonders why it even matters if we all end up dead at the end anyway — whether that be Mason and Dixon or the more powerful like Clive and Maskelyne. The Reverend responds, stating that this is the common fear in the history of man, that independent of one’s social standing or of what we accomplish in life, we will end up dead and buried. And this is why we look to Christ and his return from the dead as a form of Grace and redemption through resurrection, though Ethelmer sees the irony in this as well. Is it just to redeem “ev’ry Crusade, Inquisition, Sectarian War, the millions of lives, the seas of blood” (76)? That is likely what Ethelmer sees and what Cherrycoke is trying to get the children to understand with this story, but that is something that J. Wade LeSpark cannot listen to, for this is a direct condemnation of the thing which he has most contributed to as an arms dealer. Any admission of this sort would solidify his life as a sinful one against God, the exact thing that every self-proclaimed Christian military industrial man still refuses to admit. The same sin which these men in high places commit, day upon day, elevating their own kin above the common man at the expense of ‘the millions of lives’ which are deemed even less worthy than them.

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Up Next: Part 1, Chapter 8

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

2. Keep this in mind. Mason will continue to poke fun at Dixon not being a true Astronomer throughout the entirety of the novel. The way he does it and the way Dixon reacts every time is a testament to their friendship.

3. Their destination is Saint Helena, an incredibly small island in the middle of the Atlantic between Africa and South America, parallel with the border between Namibia and Angola. We will be travelling there in a few chapters.