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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
Earlier, when Porpentine drops below his "threshold" to discover that his partner is sexually impotent and briefly considers the implications of that discovery on his own sexuality, he acts as if he has learned nothing. Masquerading as Des Grieux, he continues to play the homoerotic courtship with his rival. But before he acts out the encounter in the opera house, he has lost his ability to stay above the threshold that separates the masculine and feminine. Coming back to his hotel room after setting up a circle of spies to trick Moldweorp into acting, he witnesses a scene in which his partner and Victoria Wren lie on his bed, and he hears the weeping Goodfellow confess, "I'm sorry [...] the Transvaal, a wound. They told me it was not serious." Though he doesn't know exactly what Goodfellow means, the experience makes Porpentine look into himself: he realizes for the first time that his threshold is vulnerable (127). Afterward, Victoria tries to clarify the nature of Propentine's relations with both Goodfello w and Moldweorp. First, she is the immediate cause for Propentine's discovery of Goodfellow's sexual "problem." Second, by tracking Moldweorp and his associates, she becomes the indirect cause for leading Porpentine to the Sphinx, where he is killed. In a world of adult responsibility--here, perhaps, the most profound, for the men are working for governments that are poised to spark the "Apocalypse" of world war--it is a woman who tears off the protective masks that allow "boys to be boys" and forces them to the crisis that can spill blood (a role in which the Victoria of V. will thrive). Because Victoria, like Cindy and Mrs. Barrington, acts as a rationalizing and threatening influence that gives voice to the unstated, she is threatening to males. In this threat, she suggests that when sexually mature women evoke the homosexual panic inherent in the space to which the males have fled, such women force the males back to socially accepted spaces.
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As I earlier suggested, Pynchon does not distinguish between homosocial, homoerotic, and homosexual desires; instead, on the continuum from homosexual to heterosexual, he constructs a space where binary opposition temporarily collapses. Here, men are unable to articulate rationally, for Pynchon most often associates rationality with women or with father figures who want to uphold patriarchal rules that bifurcate into discrete categories. For example, in "Low-lands," Dennis wants to escape "the relentless rationality of that womb [psychoanalysis] and that wife" (58), and, in "Under the Rose," Victoria Wren, who speaks to Porpentine with "a mustache of foam on her upper lip" (130), recognizes that because he is her sexual rival as well as her lover's partner, she thus enters the space that Porpentine himself refuses to articulate.
