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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
But when the men report to bivouac at McNeese State College, they find themselves plunged into the responsibilities they had tried to escape. In the form of a severe hurricane, Nature has caused the deaths of the 250 citizens of Creole; these deaths mark the intersection between the axes of fantasy-experience and irresponsibility-responsibility, on the one hand, and homosocial (maybe even homosexual though not genital) bonding and heterosexual activity, on the other. By entering the swamp for ten-hours to collect corpses, Levine takes on responsibility and later he goes with "little Buttercup," a real life "swamp wench," to a secluded shack where they have sex. But neither action is completely free of the homosocial desire of the barracks. First, because Levine does not ask permission to leave his post. he thus needs his friends to cover for him. Second, when he has sex with little Buttercup, "he assumed toward her that same nonchalant compassion which he felt for the heroines of sex novels, or the burned out but impotent guy rancher in a western." Levine is thus strangely divorced from the erotic. With Buttercup, for instance, "He let her undress apart from him; until, standing there in nothing but T-shirt and baseball cap, puffing placidly on the stogie he heard her from the mattress, whimpering." Even during the sex act, he is detached, "puffing occasionally at the cigar throughout the performance, the ball cap tilted carelessly" (50). Avoiding the anguish of Tennessee Williams's sexually haunted characters, Pynchon's inhabit the sort of space that Sarotte identified as "homoerotic without being homosexual" (116). In other words, except for genital activity, homosexual and heterosexual desires become so mixed that there is little to separate them. After leaving "little Buttercup," Levine, before falling asleep, half-heartedly agrees with the PFC that "it'll almost be a relief to get back" (51). The return to the barracks ensures that he will be able to escape the responsibility that heterosexual role-modeling forces onto him.
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A much more complex story than "The Small Rain," "Low-lands" sharply distinguishes between the adult world of heterosexual responsibility and the childish, homosocial world of escape. In the story, though Dennis Flange has been married for seven years, he has little in common with his wife and retreats from her by hanging out with his insane psychoanalyst and his unconventional male friends; in fact, neither the rationality of his law office nor the domesticity imposed by Cindy Flange has enough power to keep him from his drinking buddies. At first, Cindy bans Dennis and Rocco Squarcione, "a garbage man with a fondness [...] for Vivaldi": "You keep that weird crew down in the rumpus room. [...] You are a damned ASPCA, is what you are" (56). But when Pig Bodine, an old friend from the Navy, who "looked like an ape in a naval uniform," shows up after seven years, she can take no more and orders the "three musketeers" from the house (61). The adolescent force that comes between her and her husband, Pig is the ho mosocial power that she cannot overcome. Set adrift again, Pig and Dennis descend on the garbage dump, where they enter a world of male fantasy freed from middle-class responsibility and warmed by fantasy women, gypsies, and male camaraderie.
