Homoerotic Bonding as Escape from Heterosexual Responsibility in Pynchon's Slow Learner - Thomas Pynchon

In the stories collected in Slow Learner (1984) and in the uncollected "Morality and Mercy in Vienna" (1958), Thomas Pynchon deconstructs expectations of dominant male sex roles. He contrasts these expectations to fictional worlds where male protagonists consistently retreat from expected heterosexual responsibilities. Like Sal Paradise in Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and Gnossos Pappadopoulis in Richard Farina's Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me (1969), these protagonists retreat from women and social responsibilities by seeking the safety of intense male bonding. Though none of these authors directly suggests that the bonding may become genital (leaving that theme to Allan Ginsberg and William Burroughs), each constructs texts that call for decoding even while they insist that the subtextual eroticism is illusory. Balanced between desire and the desire to hide desire, the texts close in on themselves and create worlds of escape that deny their own foundations and thereby remain threatened by the rea l world that wants to collapse them.

Pynchon's short stories articulate the radical disruption that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick finds between homosocial bonding and homosexual genital activity. In Between Men, she assumes that "homosocial," a word used to describe nonsexual or nonerotic bonding between persons of the same sex, is sharply contrasted to "homosexual," a word usually used to describe same-sex genital activity. Furthermore, though she seeks "to draw the 'homosocial' back into the orbit of 'desire,' of the potentially erotic," she argues that any potential continuum between homosocial and homosexual has been "radically disrupted." As she sees it, patriarchal institutions enforce themselves through encouraging and, indeed, fostering homophobia (1-3; also see Sedgwick, Closet 8-9). In her scheme, to focus on that place in the continuum where homosocial and homosexual blend, merge, interact, and lose differentiation is unthinkable. But Pynchon pushes us directly into that space. While his protagonists consistently avoid--and indeed are not ope nly tempted by--genital homosexuality, they bond in tightly structured, homoerotic unions. Of course, we have a further problem of definition--especially after the rise of gay consciousness during the 1970s: How can we distinguish among homoerotic, homosocial, and homosexual? That is, how can we differentiate among kinds of same-sex bonding other than by taking the problematic position that discriminates only on the basis of genital activity? This discrimination neither fits the evidence of these stories nor belongs in the sensibility of the 1950s and 60s when Pynchon published them. Even recognizing this problem, we can position the stories in that unthinkable space which marks Sedgwick's disruption between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Pynchon repeatedly located and used it here and later in Gravity's Rainbow and Mason and Dixon.

When Pynchon forced these stories into a biographical grid for his 1984 introduction, he imposed on his reader an interpretation that views the stories as interesting, but not especially insightful, juvenilia. He supported this interpretation of himself as a poor apprentice, a "slow learner," both in his title and in the opening paragraph:

As nearly as I can remember, these stories were written between 1958 and 1964. Four of them I wrote when I was in college--the fifth, "The Secret Integration" (1964), is more of a journeyman than an apprentice effort. You may already know what a blow to the ego it can be to have to read anything you wrote 20 years ago, even cancelled checks. My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell upon. (3)

If this introduction is, as the self-deprecating tone seems to indicate, an ironic document, such as we might expect from the writer of V. and The Crying of Lot 49, both of which he treats disparagingly in it, then we need to recognize that an introduction may be both an "interpolation" that encourages us to read the stories from a particular vantage and an "instruction" that narrows our expectations. Thus we fall into the same sort of narrative entrapments that we find in The Crying of Lot 49. When Cedipa tries to determine the meaning of the muted horn, WASTE, or the suspicious lines in The Courier's Tragedy, she finds herself trapped in convoluted webs of misinformation. As Chris Hall recognized, "All of Pynchon's fictions involve problems of reading and interpretation, but perhaps nowhere is this more self-consciously so than in The Crying of Lot 49" (63). While we want to rely on Pynchon's introduction, he has confounded us by obscuring any reliable information with misinformation.

We may explain his omissions of "The World (This One), The Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas), and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity" (published in Esquire in December 1965) and "The Shrink Flips" (published in Cavalier in March 1966) by arguing that they were an earlier form of or an excerpt from Lot 49, but on this basis we do not know why he included "Under the Rose," which is clearly an early working of the material that he will use in V., chapter 3. Likewise, we cannot help but wonder why he omitted "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna," a story that seems as meritorious as "The Small Rain." Even if "The Small Rain" was, indeed, his "first published story" (4), its appearance was so close to that of "Mortality and