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Homoerotic Bonding as Escape from Heterosexual Responsibility in Pynchon's Slow Learner - Thomas Pynchon
Style, Fall, 2000 by Mark D. Hawthorne
In this space freed from sexuality, men neither exert their masculinity nor flee from their own femininity. It is a space that Pynchon particularly develops in the subtext of his next story. "Under the Rose" is unique in Slow Learner. Moving from Alexandria to Cairo, it is the only story that does not take place in the United States; ending on the night of 25 September 1898 with the assassination of Lord Cromer, it is the only one that takes place during an earlier historical period; and it is the only one that develops older characters interacting in adults ways in an adult world. Placing it in the collection just before "The Secret Integration," Pynchon refers to it in the introduction as marking the beginning of the final stage of his apprenticeship:
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if only for its feeble good intentions, I am less annoyed with "Under the Rose" than with the earlier stuff. I think the characters are a little better, no longer just lying there on the slab but beginning at least to twitch some and blink their eyes open, although their dialogue still suffers from my perennial Bad Ear. (19)
The story is remarkable for Pynchon's developing the sort of double focus that he would later use in V. and Gravity's Rainbow. While elsewhere, I have discussed at length how V. "stands at a pivotal moment in the construction of modern American sexuality and sex role identification" (74), "Under the Rose" is a story that should be read in its own right. Not just an apprenticeship trial for the novel, in it Pynchon also establishes a contrast between public masculinity and private femininity.
In the story, Porpentine plays a public role as a stereotypic buffoon, given to strange masks while Goodfellow, his much younger partner, publicly assumes the role of womanizer. But as a master spy Porpentine founds his acumen on his "womanly nature":
He'd realized long before that women had no monopoly on what is called intuition; that in most men the faculty was latent, only becoming developed or painfully heightened at all in professions like this. But men being positivists and women more dreamy, having hunches still remained at base a feminine talent; so that like it or not they all--Moldweorp, Goodfellow, the pair from Brindisi--had to be part woman. Perhaps even in this maintenance of a threshold for compassion one dared not go beneath was some sort of recognition. (112-13)
Spy-spying-on-spy thus evolves into courtship: though Moldweorp and Porpentine act for enemy governments, their relations with each other are "tender and sheepish" (102), and, when, during a performance of Manon Lescaut, they finally come face to face at the assassination of Lord Cromer, Porpentine "glanced back, quickly at that moment of hopeless love, and saw Moldweorp there looking decayed, incredibly old, face set in a hideous though compassionate smile" (133). Though the "moment of hopeless love" directly describes how Des Grieux falls in love with Manon in the opera, it also acts as a metonym for the relation between the two spies. Hitherto, they have acted by rules, conduct established by gentlemen who know not to trespass the unmentioned threshold; now, however, Moldweorp breaks the rules: "'Please, dear fellow,' Moldweorp gasped, 'Don't go after them. You are outnumbered'" (133). The surface game remains civilized and civil only so long as its unspoken code remains gentlemanly.
