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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

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That was how they left the lights of the shopping center and took leave of Carl Barrington, abandoning him to the old estate's other attenuated ghosts and its precarious shelter; and rollicked away into that night's rain, each finally to his own house, hot shower, dry towel, before-bed television, good night kiss, and dreams that could never again be entirely safe. (193)

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Although "The Secret Integration," the last published of the stories, is the only one in which Pynchon directly treats childhood, the introduction to Slow Learner locates the stories in a space where the adage "boys will be boys" carries unusual, because pregenital, connotations of homosocial bonding. This space is a boy's world shaped not only by Playboy (10), boys' adventure tales (11), and spy fiction and novels of intrigue (18) but also by a generous sprinkling of classics. It is a space where males talk much about women but keep them at arm's length so that they can indulge in their imaginations. Pynchon identifies this space as the military in "The Small Rain" and "Low-lands." In neither story does he clearly mark this space as fitting onto an axis of homosexual-heterosexual, but in both he intersects this continuum of male desire with female intrusions that either deflate or negate it.

As ironic in its contents as in its title, "The Small Rain," a story centered on the Signal Corp's cleaning up after a hurricane has devastated a bayou town, is remarkable for what it does not say. In his introduction, Pynchon is especially harsh in his discussion of this story, perhaps because it is the first in the collection and marks the first step in his apprenticeship. When we compare it to "The Secret Integration," we cannot fail to agree that the story, in Pynchon's words, is marred by "quaintness and puerility" (6); still, it develops a male space safe from responsibility and, most important, from women. In the story, except for his leaving the base for a weekend in New Orleans or shirking from suggestions that he better his status, "Lardass" Levine never clarifies what he finds desirable either in the Army or specifically in his billet at Fort Roach. That is, Pynchon categorizes the desired space by identifying its opposites--freedom for adult sexuality on his leave and freedom from responsibility in his refusal to better himself. In the "safe" world of the barracks, a space similar to the hotel room's "closet" of "The Secret Integration," Levine loses himself in The Swamp Wench, a pornographic novel, and avoids responsibility (arriving at the meeting after the lieutenant has briefed the others). Like Tim and Grover's sharing of their imaginary friend, the vicarious sharing of pornography and the "pairing" of the men (a pairing parodied by their acting as members of a vaudeville team) bond the men, channel homoerotic desire toward the "acceptable," and thus vitiate the homosexual implications of living in the all male barracks.

Homoerotic Bonding as Escape from Heterosexual Responsibility in Pynchon's Slow Learner - Thomas Pynchon

Style, Fall, 2000 by Mark D. Hawthorne

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