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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
When we read the introduction ironically, we, like Pynchon himself, place the stories in a preOedipa(l) position. From this vantage we read the stories as Pynchon's apprenticeship in giving voice to the speechless and visibility to the invisible. Beginning from a modernist stance wherein he struggles through the application of certain humanistic values and assumptions, he would discover that those values and assumptions are themselves tenuous at best and support their opposites at worst. The postmodern ironic detachment that follows this apprenticeship grows from a desire to locate spaces that resolve the inherent problems of modernism and humanism. If the introduction is, indeed, an ironic evaluation of the stories, it illustrates what the postmodern Pynchon learned and indeed communicates to the reader through the stories--namely, that those sureties we most take for granted are themselves social and psychological constructs that are themselves constructs of earlier constructs. One such cluster of construct s includes what Sedgwick describes as the continuum of male homosexual and heterosexual desires.
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In "The Secret Integration," the last of the five stories and supposedly the most mature, the male adolescents bond into a gang that accepts only girls who "prove" themselves by going along with the boys' rough fantasies. Such juvenile homosocial bonding frees the boys from adults who threaten their childhood. Although this story was the last in the collection and, according to the introduction, marks the end of Pynchon's apprenticeship, it clearly delineates Pynchon's contrast between the presexual world where "boys are boys" and the corruption of the sexed adult world. While children bond in a gang intent on infiltrating the PTA and shooting sodium bombs into suburban swimming pools, adults debase themselves to making threatening phone calls and trashing the yard of the new black neighbor. While parents fear what integration might do to their upscale New York suburb, their children have already "integrated" through their unquestioned acceptance of an imaginary black friend into their gang.
In this story, as in the other four in Slow Learner, Pynchon establishes male bonding as growing from a tension between mutually exclusive poles. On the one hand is an adult world of racism where adults freely lie to children to conceal their own pettiness and to vent their corruption. When Tim overhears his mother making a threatening call to the Barringtons, she explains that she was only "playing a joke, [. . .] a practical joke" (147). On the other is a fantasy world where boys act not like children playing games but like terrorists intent on revolution. Grover, a boy who has been expelled from public school partly because he is too intelligent and is thus seen as a threat to the status quo, has invented "a sodium grenade: two compartments, sodium and water, separated by a burst-diaphragm" (144); Etienne, another boy, "had managed to stop the paper mill last year for almost a week by messing up the water it used" (166); Operation Spartacus is a plan of the boys to take over and bomb their school. But whi le adult reality and the boys' fantasy may smack of similar deceit and violence, they are directed to radically different ends.
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