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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
Pynchon wrote the stories in Slow Learner before he moved to the postmodernism of V. and Gravity's Rainbow. Although, as Linda Hutcheon aptly describes it, Pynchon later would ironically question the very assumptions on which he constructed his questioning of modern values, in these stories he offers a window through which we may see his striking early deconstruction of the power politics within socially constructed expectations for sexual and gender roles. As a "slow learner," he grasps fundamental power relations but still does not evaluate his own position to find that it is possibly just as tenuous as the closets and masks that his characters use to protect themselves from the bifurcations that empower the social role of the male heterosexual. Thus these texts in Slow Learner turn in upon themselves. They create closed worlds where such binaries as youth and age, homosexuality and heterosexuality, feminine and masculine, and fantasy and reality collapse as if to posit a world outside linguistic parameter s, a world that we cannot articulate, for articulation implicitly affirms these binaries. After Pynchon moved beyond modernism and its attempt to find meaning in humanistic constructs, he could look back on these stories as forming his apprenticeship. From that later vantage, he could see that even his insight was a social and psychological construct and that the closing of the text into a hermetically self-reflexive entity was itself the construction of a space within a constructed space that was a space within a constructed space....
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Mark D. Hawthorne (hawthond@jmu.edu) was a professor of English at James Madison University from 1974 to 1999. During that time, he has published articles and books on Anglo-Irish (Beckett and Mary Lavine), contemporary literature (Durrell, Pynchon, Kosinski, and Coetzee) and Queer Theory. He is a Professor of Technical and Scientific Communication at James Madison University, where he currently teaches web design, applied ethics, and on-line documentation.
Note
(1.) Even though Walsh and Northouse cited "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna," in John Barth, Jerzy Kosinshi, and Thomas Pynchon: A Reference Guide, this choice is especially interesting in the light of their failure to include "The Small Rain."
Works Cited
Gilbert, Sandra M. "Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature." Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 391-417.
Hall, Chris. "'Behind the Hieroglyphic Streets': Pynchon's Oedipa Maas and the Dialectics of Reading." Critique 33 (1991): 63-77.
Hawthorne, Mark D. "A 'Hermaphrodite Sort of Deity': Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Blending in Thomas Pynchon's V." Studies in the Novel 29 (1997): 74-93.
Pynchon, Thomas. "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna." Epoch 9 (Spring 1959): 195-213.
_____. Slow Learner. Boston: Little, 1984.
_____. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper, 1990.
Sarotte, Georges-Michel. Like a Brother, Like a Lover. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Doubleday, 1978.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
