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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
The mask or masquerade is a "performative" sign. For instance, according to Eve Sedgwick, the wearing of an ACT UP T-shirt with the text, "I am out, therefore I am," is not a constative sign reporting on the wearer's having come out but a performative sign marking the act of coming out (Epistemology 4). Likewise in "Under the Rose," when Porpentine masquerades as the operatic Des Grieux, however playfully, he performs an identity that protects him from a reality that he represses. Romantic but tightly controlled (because already completed as a work, i.e., an opera that can be repeatedly performed) and deterministic (though a tenor may interpret a role, he cannot change either its score or its script), the mask of Des Grieux is a contrast to Porpentine's actual espionage and intrigue in the brutally competitive, indeterminate world of modern Egypt. The story of the misery of the thwarted affair that leaves Des Grieux senseless with grief after the death of Manon mirrors Porpentine's homoerotic relations with Moldweorp and Goodfellow. When Porpentine sings Des Grieux's plea to the Comandante to let him join
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Manon in exile, Goodfellow ignores the content of Porpentine-Des Grieux's antic posturing, yet that content--the singer's desire that he be allowed to express his love physically--plays both on the level of the opera and in Porpentine's suppressed desire for Goodfellow (105). Later, Porpentine's homoerotic jealousy expresses itself both when he stops Goodfellow from singing Des Grieux' s passionate Donna non vidi mai, an act quite hypocritical in view of his sexual failure a few hours earlier, and when he completes the aria himself (128). At this point, mistaking Victoria for the rival who breaks into his sensual world, Porpentine wears the mask of Des Grieux to conceal the desire he feels for his partner. This desire, lest its genital implications overwhelm him, he forces below the threshold of consciousness.
In the opera house, Porpentine drops this mask when another "actor" sings the role--actually the same aria that he had sung while Goodfellow showered after his failure to reach orgasm with Victoria. Here, the rival spies clash in a moment of truth, one free from masks. Only afterwards, "at that moment of hopeless love," does Porpentine discover that Moldweorp, not Goodfellow, is his actual lover (133). At first rejecting the insight, Porpentine, just before he is killed and just after he has performed his "own fatal act of love" in saving Goodfellow's life (137), finally recognizes the identification of Moldweorp with Manon. Because the operatic mask Porpentine wears sublimates homoerotic desire, it has allowed the expression of that desire without evoking homosexual panic.
In Pynchon's stories in Slow Learner, the protection that such masquerade provides balances the resistance to it. Visibility (facing the fear and terror inherent in the sexed world) is worse than death. In "Low-lands," Dennis retreats into a dreamworld of the sea, escaping from expected heterosexual responsibility to his childhood identification of the sea and mother. His escape must elude rationality, for if he understood what he has done, the escape would no longer be an escape. Likewise, in "The Secret Integration," Carl retreats to the hidden room before the boys revert to the ordinary because they must hide him if they are to assimilate into the racist, authoritarian society of their parents. In "The Small Rain," Levine toys with taking on the role of the Wandering Jew as a way to continue his flight from self-identity (49), and in "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna," Siegel abandons the role of Father Confessor when, accepting his Jewishness, he flees after Loon has taken the "two crossed BAR's" from the w all and begun to load their magazines. But, ironically, perhaps, none of these characters recognizes that he is wearing a disguise or that he has traded one mask for another.
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