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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
Despite this severity, the ironic tone of the introduction should again lead us to question Pynchon's seriousness, for, even assuming that the story began with its theme and that Pynchon merely wrote it to illustrate it, the story is more carefully constructed than "The Secret Integration." Like "Low-lands," "The Secret Integration" is a triptych; in both, Pynchon builds the story around contrasting episodes separated by a climatic center panel. But in "Entropy" he interweaves two narratives--the events downstairs in Meatball's apartment and those upstairs in Callisto's--by jumping back and forth between them. Though disconcerting at first because it appears disruptive, this technique forces the reader to make immediate connections between the events in the two apartments. The downstairs apartment is open to the outside; during the story various characters--Saul (whose wife has left him after he slugged her), "three coeds from George Washington, all of whom were majoring in philosophy" (86), "five enlisted pe rsonnel of the U. S. Navy, all in varying stages of abomination" who think they have found a brothel (92)--all wander in to join Meatball's lease-breaking party. The scene is the epitome of chaos. The upstairs apartment is "hermetically sealed [...,] a tiny enclave of regularity in the city's chaos, alien to the vagaries of the weather, of national politics, of any civil disorder" (83-84). Here for three days Callisto has helplessly held against his body a sick bird hoping to restore its health (83); at the same time, he dictates to Aubade his horrible discovery that all systems are subject to entropy. This apartment is an escapist's hothouse
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A conflation of gender and sexual roles, similar to what we saw in "The Lowlands," forms a significant subtext in "Entropy": the feminization of the male results in the masculinization and objectification of the female. While his apartment deteriorates into chaos, Meatball carries "an empty magnum [...] as if it were a teddy bear" (81). The sexual ambiguity this image suggests, like the adolescence of the boys in "The Secret Integration," allows Meatball to control a space that identifies itself through a male-bonding that uses women as objects whether they are the "coeds," Saul's estranged wife whom the men cannot understand, or the nonexistent prostitutes whom the enlisted men are seeking. In this space, significance comes, not from philosophy as the coeds imagine but from male dominance: when be slugged her, Saul and his wife had been arguing about communication theory, and Meatball tries to explain to him that perhaps she was using language differently:
"By 'human being' [he explains] you meant something that you can look at like it was a computer. It helps you think better on the job or something. But Miriam meant something entirely--" "The hell with it." (91)
That Saul disregards his opinion so abruptly again calls attention to how Meatball represents that unthinkable space where genders blend. Although he inhabits a male world, he grows increasingly feminine. Later, while he listens to the Duke di Angelis's explanation of why music must be silent, Meatball undergoes a "horrified awareness" and perceives the chaos in his space. Though he could retreat into a closet, "he started thinking about that closet. It was dark and stuffy and he would be alone" (96), so "he decided to try and keep his lease-breaking party from deteriorating into total chaos" (97). In order words, he assumes a feminine role of a nurturer.
