re Re: Dixon's sex with Mason

[Terrance Flaherty]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> Where is the chapter, the passage, the sentence that I can read in M&D
> where Dixon has sex with Mason?
> 
> T:
> >Where is the chapter, the passage, the sentence that I can read in M&D
> >where Dixon has sex with anyone other than Mason?

So sorry, almost lost my head. Of course I was being a bit facetious. 
Didn't want to bring up Moby-Dick again, hell we have not even mentioned
Toby, that is Uncle Toby, no relation of Babs and Toby I'm sure, I mean
the fortifications and all, but Dixon appears to be with child and the
two are headed off in opposite directions again, they've  talked it all
out again, Mason "doesn't get out enough" (how did the translators deal
with that American English expression in the Spanish translation? page
one of chapter 39) and the boys are splitting up again, returning the
honeymoon quilt to the Harlands. The honeymoon quilt? 

Dixon and Mason are not lovers. That's not what I wanted to say at all.
I'm not suggesting that although they don't have sex in the novel they
are in fact lovers. No, no, not at all. It's something else with these
boys and again I'll have to lean very hard on that Melville crutch and
the tradition in American literature that I think Mr. P is exploiting
here. 

Before I get to that and the Baker's dozen on Dixon's bravery, let me
repeat my serious question, where does Dixon ever have sex in this
novel, with slaves or anyone else? We can't say that RC doesn't want to
include these salacious details because he is telling his tale to keep
the children amused because he does narrate a tale of sex with a slave
(well she only squeezes Mason's member). 

Anyway, I think that poor Mr. Dixon is not getting any. This is a
common  motif in the novel V. and this novel is very close to V. It
seems that when  Dixon and Mason go out looking for love, Mr. Mason
talks about gothic things and diseases of the body and mind and can
think only of his ex-wife who is ghostly dead. He drinks himself into a
state of, well drunkenness, he starts singing and carrying on. Dixon
smokes all this as Mason's deliberate plan to ruin his good times or
potential good loving. Mason's plan, if it is a plot, has worked. But
what about when Dixon goes out on his own? We read what happens with
Dolly, that is, she too feels that she is stuck in a relationship with a
gloomy partner and must always be cheerful, but she doesn't get wit it.
That is, Mr. Dixon doesn't get any, Dixon returns to the Cape alone. He
goes to the lodge and sees Austra. He suspects that she has been brought
in just for him. He looks, but doesn't touch. 
What's a man of conscience to do? 

Ishamael and Queequeg sleep together in the Coffin's honeymoon bed. It
is a big bed so there is enough space for "kicking about." Remember that
Ishmael admires Q's Poncho (is that a Sears Poncho or a Peruvian
Pancho?) or what is rally Q's Cassock (the vestment of a Bishoprick) and
is in fact, as we discover in Chapter 95, the skin of a whale's penis.
Well, it's also something else, at least I think it is when I read
Ishmael's description of it as  shaggy, thick, with a slit for the head
to pass through. 
Ish puts it on and looks in the mirror and is horrified, we are holding
our sides now, and he pulls himself out of it, kinking his neck during
the delivery. Ishmaels' aversion (subconscious) to sexuality here, will
eventually mature into a sensuality and a marriage that is universal. He
will deliver himself from the choirboy adulator of the redemptive soul
(like young Wicks), admit the wild cannibal into his bed (the owner of
the harpoon, the shrunken head the idol god, and of course the whale
penis skin poncho) and wake with wrapped in his arms. Ish's love for
Queequeg must be understood as his religious conversion. It is not a
matter of having sex for either Ish and Q or Mason and Dixon, but the
rhetorical effect of their love feast that takes them and us as readers
beyond gendered sexuality and toward a pansexual embrace of all humanity
by labor. Yes, by labor, by delivering the other out of the self and
shedding the narcissistic ego with communion and labor. He has vision of
the angels with their hands in jars of spermaceti.