MDDM Ch.30: "Sailor....Beware" of Salty & Shaggy Dogs

[Terrance]

Mutualcode at aol.com wrote:
> 
> In a message dated 1/29/02 11:51:46 PM, johnbonbailey at hotmail.com writes:
> 
> << No, you're thinking of Moby Dick, perhaps, uh, wait, no, they do share a
> bed
> at one point, but not in 'Sailors Beware'


Certainly one of the most humorous scenes in M-D is the conning of our
"green" narrator into bed with the "savage."  A while back someone was
following the light/darkness motif in M&D--a fruitful endeavor no doubt
(Melville, Conrad, Hawthorne, ....). 
Coffin's conning of Ishmael is  a religious conversion (a major theme in
both M-D and M&D--secularization as the replacing of the Platonic
Perspective/conversion as metanoesis to a Platonic Perspective), a
conversion from the Fear of darkness into a Desire for the primal
experience of its heart. Of course, Unlike Melville in M-D, but  like
Shakespeare (and ironically Hawthorne--the Pynchon family), Pynchon
chooses to fictionalize the historical lives of men, men whose lives
have been recorded, much of it in their own hands. And so he must work
with the facts of history and the biographies of his protagonists.  Like
Shakespeare, as Dave Monroe noted, he straddles the centuries,
commenting on current events by fictionalizing history and biography. 

"`I am Richard II. know ye not that?' " 

http://www.engl.uvic.ca/Faculty/MBHomePage/ISShakespeare/Resources/Essex/default.html

Pynchon is faithful to many of the biographical/historical facts. And so
(and for many reasons as well), as Jobor said, the character comparisons
(with P novel characters or with Melville novel characters, so on...)
can't get us too far, but  Mason, like Ishmael,  is seduced, while
Dixon, like Ishmael, yearns for and is ever on a journey into the heart
of Darkness. Mason may also be compared with Ahab and Queequeg, Dixon
with Ahab's many parts and doubles. In any event, Dixon and Mason are
married in history and they seem to be falling in love in M&D. Like the
love of I and Q in M-D, it is a sensual love (homosexual), but more
importantly, it involves of a religious conversion--a pansexual embrace
of humanity. We might say, human Enthusiast. Dixon, after his father's
passing, spends time drawing maps of his mind, but goes into the Jolly
Pits of his father's dark world and learns and labors his way into the
darkness (or what is actually the Platonic Light).   Younger than Mason,
he has come to terms with darkness as Mason has not (recall how Mason
sits in silence like a Quaker (ironic), but more like a savage
(Queequeg) aboard the ship on the anniversary of his wife's death, but
he has not been converted, this meditation is solipsistic). But if Mason
is caught in his own morose mourning, Dixon's laborious and liberal
birth from melancholy can prove more perilous than Mason's gullibility
compounded with gloom, for Dixon desires the darkness are impetuous. So
we have a marriage of men who are an easy mark for every shaggy dog con
Pynchon can imagine.