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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
Here, Pynchon establishes a more explicit relation between Dennis's heterosexual and homosexual desires. On the axis of Cindy-Nerissa (the fantasy woman in the dump), heterosexual desires contrast reality that demands Dennis fulfill an adult sex-role stereotype of the providing husband and fantasy that requires he accept the child-like woman as his peer and a rat she babies as if it were her child. By contrast, homosexual desires develop on an axis of past (Dennis's "adolescent" bonding with fraternal and Navy friends) and present (his equally "adolescent" bonding with Rocco and Bolingbroke, the keeper of the dump). Although the continuum between heterosexual and homosexual seems ruptured, it is not: at the time of Dennis's marriage, Pig had acted as the cause for breaking up the Flanges' honeymoon by carrying Dennis off for a two-week bachelor's party and now, seven years later, Pig serves as the immediate cause for Cindy's throwing Dennis out of the house. Similarly disruptive, Pig unites Dennis's memories of Navy life to his present descent into the dump with Rocco and Bolingbroke. A messenger of freedom from heterosexual responsibility, Pig is the link that puts Dennis in Bolingbroke's shack where he hears Nerissa's "voice, riding on the wind," and the advisor who tells Dennis to go to Nerissa to find "if she's any good [and] bring her back in and let the enlisted men have a go at it" (73). Because of Pig, then, Dennis escapes Cindy's threatening "rationality" (58), a space that has masculinized the female and consequently feminized him, and moves toward the dream of Nerissa, a fantasy space in which he can play a heterosexual role without taking on its stereotypical demands. By focusing on gender bending, Pynchon obscures sexual bonding. On the one hand, if Cindy has become masculine, then Dennis's return to homosocial bonding is the result of his becoming feminine. On the other, when Nerissa seduces him by taking him from his homosocial retreat, she leads him even deeper into the mysterious, irrational lab yrinth of the dump. In other words, he escapes heterosexual role demands while exercising heterosexual genital desire. He reaches an unthinkable position where the homosexual bonding that his wife rejects is the basis for heterosexual fulfillment.
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Although "Entropy" may be the most frequently anthologized, read, and discussed of the stories in Slow Learner, Pynchon is severe on it in the volume's introduction:
Disagreeable as I find "Low-lands" now, it's nothing compared to my bleakness of heart when I have to look at "Entropy." The story is a fine example of a procedural error beginning writers are always being cautioned against. It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it. (12)
