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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, men often don masks or disguises that separate them both from their own recognition of the unthinkable (genital homosexuality) and from intrusions from the outside, specifically from (heterosexual) authoritarianism. Although Porpentine dons such a mask consciously, others usually do not recognize that they are in drag, for to know would contaminate their safe space. Although, in "Entropy," Callisto does not see himself as "mother," his remaining in the hermetically sealed apartment and holding the dying bird to his chest form a mask that lets him express femininity without questioning whether it threatens his masculinity. Likewise, when Meatball carries the empty magnum "as if it were a teddy bear" (81), the identification of phallic pistol (here significantly unloaded) with the doll marks a sexual ambiguity that he never consciously recognizes, but it is one that turns him into a symbol of a nurturing mother by the story's end. In a similar ambiguity, in the uncollected "Mortality and Mercy i n Vienna," although Siegel dons the mask of "Father" confessor (a sexless role), he comes to Lupescu's apartment specifically to meet a sexual partner. So long as Siegel remains in the bedroom (the "confessional") and listens to the women's sexually explicit confessions, he frees himself from involvement and thus escapes Loon's murderous rampage. In "Under the Rose," Porpentine is the character who most obviously dons disguises; he not only dons "self-assumed roles" (109) as a spy but turns the entire spy-game into a complex series of roles that hide the sensuous nature of its homoeroticism. Whereas Victoria unmasks Goodfellow when they try to have sex, she also later strips Porpentine's disguise when she confronts him--"she'd sought out and found the woman in him" (129). Even Dennis Flange in "Low-lands" and Nathan Levine in "The Small Rain" escape into masks rather than face the pressures of authority: Dennis conceals himself behind the front provided by the mad psychoanalyst, his own "clumsy adolescent sex play" lost between the Ebbinghaus nonsense-syllable list and martinis (58), and Levine preserves his barracks escape by ignoring authority and later by assuming vaudeville playfulness (32).
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For Pynchon's characters in these stories, the mask or masquerade serves two functions: first, it presents to the Other the appearance that the subject wants to project; second, it hides what the subject wants to conceal. For instance, when Porpentine dons the mask, he thinks it will distract attention from himself. He assumes that, in shaping this mask, he knows what the Other will believe and thus can manipulate the Other's actions toward him. At the same time, for Pynchon's male characters, the donning of a mask involves hiding his actual or naked face from the gaze of the Other. But neither mask nor nakedness is necessarily more true or more honest than the other. If the mask is a perception of self different from the actual face (as in the masquerade of a transsexual who may well believe that the cross-sexual appearance is a "truer" perception than the birth sex), it is, in itself, not a mere costume that conceals true identity but a means or instrument for revealing another self. Sandra Gilbert uses a similar distinction to distinguish between how male modernists and female modernists use costume imagery (394); in her distinction, Pynchon's treatment of masks and disguises seems more like Virginia Woolf s than James Joyce's, for like the female modernists Pynchon treats costumes as representing fluid selves. For him, unlike Gilbert's view of male modernists, the change of costume marks shifts in fashion, for any chosen costume projects of a true self (405). Because the masquerader or crossdresser wants to hide an appearance that belies his or her true gender, when any subject dons a mask, the mask reveals both desire and repulsion. Representing both an escape from one self and the adoption of another self, the "costume" allows the masquerader to manipulate the gaze of the Other to make it "see" the appearance the subjects want it to see.
