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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
Hermeneutically, these axes of deceit-honesty and violence-cooperation link these poles so that we can judge one in the light of the other. But the intersection of another axis--youth-age--suggests a space free from reality-fantasy, a space that collapses the other axes because, like a black hole, it absorbs polarity. As a malicious racial insult, the adults send the boy Hogan Slothrop, "who at the age of eight had taken to serious after-bedtime beer-drinking and at the age of nine got religion, swore off beer and joined the Alcoholics Anonymous" (151), to sit with Carl McAfee, a black man who had phoned AA for help. The AA's sending children to help McAfee, because he is marginalized--black and poor and hence to them despicable--momentarily creates a space that disrupts the boys' terrorist plans by asking them to assume adult responsibility. By playing the unknowing boys as pawns in their racial insult, the adults ironically undermine their own responsibility.
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Wearing masks or donning disguises is a device male characters use to protect themselves either from their own recognition of the sexually unthinkable or from being "outed" by outside authoritarianism. Like the closet in which a gay man may hide from public to escape the public acknowledgment of his sexuality, masks fabricate safe spaces wherein the boys can escape by denying (though not rejecting) binary sexual and gender roles. In "Entropy," in fact, Meatball considers sequestering himself in a closet until everyone in his apartment has left, but when he decides that the closet would be "dark and stuffy and he would be alone" (96), he accepts responsibility and openly assumes a nurturing role. Meanwhile, Callisto, who tries to sequester himself and Aubade in a hermetically sealed space, is "outed" by Aubade, who "moved swiftly to the window before Callisto could speak; tore away the drapes and smashed out the glass" (98). Meatball willingly chooses to play a role contrary to that of the people around him; giving up his pretension to the empty magnum, he brings order to the chaos of his house-guests. In contrast, Callisto has no choice. After he fails to be a nurturing "mother," Aubade forces him to face the "tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion" (98). Wearing another sort of mask in "The Secret Integration," Hogan pretends to be an adult, making himself visible in AA, where by definition he should be anonymous. He does not realize until too late how visibility plays into the hand of the actual adults who use him as a pawn in their own racism. Unlike Tim, who tries to achieve invisibility by diving in his scuba gear into the bathtub, Hogan finds his visibility leads to rejection--and finally to his inability to protect McAfee from the adults' racism. In contrast, Operation Spartacus is so obvious that it is invisible: Kim Dufay, masquerading as an adult to spy on the PTA, "put on lipstick, did her hair in a French twist, dolled up in her most sophisticated clothes and a size 28A padded bra she' d conned her mother into buying for her, and [.. . became] the new infiltrator" (155), and when Tim and Etienne buy "a couple of mustaches you could clip to your nose and two little tins of blackface makeup," the salesman jokes, "You guys must be reactionaries or something," hardly realizing the irony of his supposition (186). Because from an adult perspective it is unthinkable, Operation Spartacus is safe; it is free from adult interference.
