Dixon Scoring Lines & Ladies

[Terrance Flaherty]

jbor wrote:
> 
> on 19/3/02 10:24 PM, Terrance Flaherty at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:
> 
> >
> > So did Dixon have sex with Lady Lepton?
> 
> Yes, I think it's pretty clear that he does, and I don't think Mason's the
Ø least bit jealous about it.

Just getting a few pawns out of the way here. 

I never said or meant to suggest that Mason is Jealous. I think David
Morris understood me to be saying this however and introduced this to
the thread. 

 Did it take him 42 chapters to score? Or was he scroring  all along,
but off stage?  Doug has suggested that Dixon had sex with women at the
cape. I've asked
for some textual Proof of this, but alas no Facts and no Evidence has
been
presented. The text suggests that Dixon is quite the lady-killer,
but we never get to see him catch his prey much less Eat it. That is
until we get to this very strange and very funny scene in Chapter 42 (if
I've missed other examples, very possible, please correct me). 


Chapter 42

This is a very odd chapter even for this novel. Isn't it? 

I want to go back to Chapter 35 for a minute. 

Chapter 35 

We have a discussion in the house about history & fact and fancy back at
chapter 35.  The family argues about fact and fancy and novels and
romances and madness and history. There is much pretense in these
conversations.   It's a superb example of P's talents
and it demonstrates just how very complex human communication is even in
or especially in a clan or family or marriage or among intimates.  The
family dynamics are quite intertwined and the shades of meaning, the
subtle and not so subtle taunting and sexual banter, the puns and
parables, the generation gaps, gender gaps, gendered ploys,
the house power-politics, the contesting allusions, the texts and
subtexts, so on
kinda like the Pynchon List sometines
.

And all these are under the theme History & Fact and Fancy
 

Anyway, I want to consider the distinction between fact and fancy. At
page 351 Ives says that novels are bad because they can drive people
crazy with 

"irresponsible narratives, that will not distinguish between fact and
fancy." 

Fancy: The mental faculty through which whims, visions, and fantasies
are summoned up; imagination, especially of a whimsical or fantastic
nature. See Synonyms at  imagination. 2. An image or a fantastic
invention created by the mind. 3. A capricious notion; a whim. 4. A
capricious liking or inclination. 

Fancies: Amorous or romantic attachment; love. 

Fancies: Enthusiast.  


I have called attention to this word. I'm certainly not going to hang it
out from a bloody root and start whipping it like a punch drunk slave
driver, but... and I read you Jbor at M&D 425.4, but I can't help
but imagine that fancy is every bit as important as fact in this chapter
and if it is a fact that Dixon scores with Lady L, why can't it be a
fancy of Mason's too? 
Also, why would Mason fancy this scene? Why Dixon & Lady L? A Bodice
ripping? Musical Bodice? 
Ghastly! 


Thanks for your analysis here Jbor. 

> After he "detects the smell of" Dixon's blend of pipe-tobacco, 

Of course I was joking about what Mason actually inhaled (joking that it
was Hemp and  of course the text gives us the facts, it is Dixon's pipe
tobacco, tobacco being historically one of the most important
commodities at the time and the RC and the other narrators are calling
attention to it as we journey South,   but tobacco  is also associated,
that is, in Mason's fancy and remembrance, the particular  brand that
Mason smells, with Mr. Dixon. Mason, who is after all, sharing close
quarters, including not only a bed but a honeymoon quilt with Mr. Dixon,
is familiar with Dixon's smells. And we do have this ongoing connection
between smells and tastes and stimulants and memory and fancy and
tale-telling and fetish. 


Recall that young Wicks, when he has been condemned to ship away from
England, is warned to avoid these substances. The relationship between
these and memory, tale-telling, tall-tale-telling, political debate,
arousal of the spirits,  even the general disposition of the Americans,
is a common enough motif in the novel. We learn that smoke is something
the women don't particularly care for and some Fops from NYC don't much
like it (I am tempted to read the scene with the stove salesman and the
Fop as a typical NYC debate, one of millions one could hear when the
smoking laws were a hot topic in restaurants and bars in  in 1994-5). 


Recall how the Lady in the Jesuit Carriage gets to spilling her guts as
she is primed with coffee or how the RC is primed with coffee and wine
and how, for example, the Claret kicks off a tale about Lancaster and
Brandywine. 


Mason
> "fancies he can hear Dixon's voice", and then Lady Lepton's - "if he is not
> mistaken" - and then he does hear the sounds of furniture overturning,
> fabric tearing, sighs, a squeal, and then, "unmistakably", the melody from
> the Handel aria, allegro to prestissimo. Everything, including Mason's
> certainty about what he senses is going on outside the room, proceeds to the
Ø point of consummation. Then, silence.


Yes, excellent! All reminds me of a Pynchonesque film. Did Ivan say
French films? Two actually.
1. http://www.salon.com/march97/shreve970321.html

                  "Delicatessen" thrusts us into
                   post-apocalyptic disaster -- and gives us hope,
                   in a way that is both darkly moving and
                   strangely uplifting. While the butcher is having
                   sex with his girlfriend, the springs of his bed set
                   a squeaky tempo -- and before long all of the
                   building's residents are going about their
                   routines to the lovers' sexual pace. It's a wildly
                   comic scene that resonates with a sense of
                   human connectedness. Another apartment
                   resident creates complex suicide machines that
                   continually and comically fail.

2. I'll have to think of the other one. 




> 
>And I don't think Mason's jealous here at all.
> Once he realises what's
> happening he calls out "Ripping Tune!" - which is yet another dastardly pun
> - and he seems more concerned about the fact that Dixon has left him there
> holding the enormous and precariously-balanced tub: "He's out there having a
> leisurely Smoke whilst Mason, squinting upward nervously, struggles to keep
> the Tub upon its Axes." (424.34) When Cha. begins to correct Voam at 426.14
> it's because the professor had put Dixon's name first, and referred to them
Ø both as "Astronomers" - not because he feels jilted.

Right. 



> 
> The use of the Harlands' "Honeymoon Quilt" (393.4), the boys' incessant
> bickering, and Mason's sudden - though "far too late" - schoolboy crush
> (697.31) notwithstanding, I don't think there is anything like the
> undercurrent of homo-eroticism in this novel that there is in _Moby Dick_.
> Indeed, apart from the fact that they are male, the characters
> (Mason-Ishmael, Dixon-Queequeg) don't match up at all, nor do the cultural
> or vocational juxtapositions which are disclosed by the respective
> partnerships. Dixon's joke about being pregnant (392.7) is nothing more than
Ø that, a joke, as is his response to Dolly at 300.16.

We can agree to disagree here. 

Digressions, digressions, oh, shall I say I have gone at dusk and
watched the smoke rising from the pipes of  surveyors in perfumed
dresses rising out of bathtubs? I could have been a contender, but for
these jagged jaws fluttering across the seas of silence desperately. 

I'll be back with more on the strange & fancy filled chapter 42.