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

Mark D. Hawthorne

In the stories collected in Slow Learner (1984) and in the uncollected "Morality and Mercy in Vienna" (1958), Thomas Pynchon deconstructs expectations of dominant male sex roles. He contrasts these expectations to fictional worlds where male protagonists consistently retreat from expected heterosexual responsibilities. Like Sal Paradise in Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and Gnossos Pappadopoulis in Richard Farina's Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me (1969), these protagonists retreat from women and social responsibilities by seeking the safety of intense male bonding. Though none of these authors directly suggests that the bonding may become genital (leaving that theme to Allan Ginsberg and William Burroughs), each constructs texts that call for decoding even while they insist that the subtextual eroticism is illusory. Balanced between desire and the desire to hide desire, the texts close in on themselves and create worlds of escape that deny their own foundations and thereby remain threatened by the rea l world that wants to collapse them.

Pynchon's short stories articulate the radical disruption that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick finds between homosocial bonding and homosexual genital activity. In Between Men, she assumes that "homosocial," a word used to describe nonsexual or nonerotic bonding between persons of the same sex, is sharply contrasted to "homosexual," a word usually used to describe same-sex genital activity. Furthermore, though she seeks "to draw the 'homosocial' back into the orbit of 'desire,' of the potentially erotic," she argues that any potential continuum between homosocial and homosexual has been "radically disrupted." As she sees it, patriarchal institutions enforce themselves through encouraging and, indeed, fostering homophobia (1-3; also see Sedgwick, Closet 8-9). In her scheme, to focus on that place in the continuum where homosocial and homosexual blend, merge, interact, and lose differentiation is unthinkable. But Pynchon pushes us directly into that space. While his protagonists consistently avoid--and indeed are not ope nly tempted by--genital homosexuality, they bond in tightly structured, homoerotic unions. Of course, we have a further problem of definition--especially after the rise of gay consciousness during the 1970s: How can we distinguish among homoerotic, homosocial, and homosexual? That is, how can we differentiate among kinds of same-sex bonding other than by taking the problematic position that discriminates only on the basis of genital activity? This discrimination neither fits the evidence of these stories nor belongs in the sensibility of the 1950s and 60s when Pynchon published them. Even recognizing this problem, we can position the stories in that unthinkable space which marks Sedgwick's disruption between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Pynchon repeatedly located and used it here and later in Gravity's Rainbow and Mason and Dixon.

When Pynchon forced these stories into a biographical grid for his 1984 introduction, he imposed on his reader an interpretation that views the stories as interesting, but not especially insightful, juvenilia. He supported this interpretation of himself as a poor apprentice, a "slow learner," both in his title and in the opening paragraph:

As nearly as I can remember, these stories were written between 1958 and 1964. Four of them I wrote when I was in college--the fifth, "The Secret Integration" (1964), is more of a journeyman than an apprentice effort. You may already know what a blow to the ego it can be to have to read anything you wrote 20 years ago, even cancelled checks. My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell upon. (3)

If this introduction is, as the self-deprecating tone seems to indicate, an ironic document, such as we might expect from the writer of V. and The Crying of Lot 49, both of which he treats disparagingly in it, then we need to recognize that an introduction may be both an "interpolation" that encourages us to read the stories from a particular vantage and an "instruction" that narrows our expectations. Thus we fall into the same sort of narrative entrapments that we find in The Crying of Lot 49. When Cedipa tries to determine the meaning of the muted horn, WASTE, or the suspicious lines in The Courier's Tragedy, she finds herself trapped in convoluted webs of misinformation. As Chris Hall recognized, "All of Pynchon's fictions involve problems of reading and interpretation, but perhaps nowhere is this more self-consciously so than in The Crying of Lot 49" (63). While we want to rely on Pynchon's introduction, he has confounded us by obscuring any reliable information with misinformation.

We may explain his omissions of "The World (This One), The Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas), and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity" (published in Esquire in December 1965) and "The Shrink Flips" (published in Cavalier in March 1966) by arguing that they were an earlier form of or an excerpt from Lot 49, but on this basis we do not know why he included "Under the Rose," which is clearly an early working of the material that he will use in V., chapter 3. Likewise, we cannot help but wonder why he omitted "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna," a story that seems as meritorious as "The Small Rain." Even if "The Small Rain" was, indeed, his "first published story" (4), its appearance was so close to that of "Mortality and

Mercy in Vienna," also published in Spring 1959, [1] that this omission seems to reflect Pynchon's inability to fit it into his hermeneutic frame.

In short, because the introduction to Slow Learner judges the stories from a vantage of at least two decades after their publications, it encourages readers to misinterpret, or at least devalue, them:

It is only fair to warn even the most kindly disposed of readers that there are some mighty tiresome passages here, juvenile and delinquent too. At the same time, my best hope is that, pretentious, goofy and ill-considered as they get now and then, these stories will still be of use with all their flaws intact, as illustrative of typical problems in entry-level fiction, and cautionary about some practices which younger writers might prefer to avoid. (4)

The reading of the stories as supposedly offering biographical insights both distorts them and adds to our general ignorance about a writer who has adamantly sequestered himself from biographers and biographical critics. But as ironic fiction, the introduction collapses the stories into themselves. In writing about "Low-lands," for example, Pynchon projected a particular interpretation:

It is no secret nowadays, particularly to women, that many American males, even those of middle-aged appearance, wearing suits and holding down jobs, are in fact, incredible as it sounds, still small boys inside. Flange is this type of a character, although when I wrote this story I thought he was pretty cool. He wants children--why isn't made clear--but not at the price of developing any real life shared with an adult woman. [...] It would be easy to say that Dennis's problem was my problem, and that I was putting it off on him. Whatever's fair--but the problem could have been more general. At that time I had no direct experience with either marriage or parenting, and maybe I was picking up on male attitudes that were then in the air--more documentably, inside the pages of men's magazines, Playboy in particular. (10)

While offering insight on how he read the story in the 1980s and a tidbit of biographical information--information we cannot document in pre-1984 sources but that implies he remarried and learned parenting--the paragraph fits the story into his hermeneutic frame. At the same time, the tone, especially of the first sentence, is so distracting that it seems as if Pynchon wants us to overlook the ideological content of his statement while we revel in "wonderment."

Through the introduction runs a thread that points toward a preoedipal fixation. Ironically concluding the end of his "apprenticeship," this fixation supposedly terminates in Lot 49, a "story [...] marketed as a 'novel,' [...] in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then" (22). If we accept the introduction as an interpretative grid, we end much as we end our reading of Lot 49: although the introduction advocates a biographical mode that claims to reveal the lessons Pynchon learned during his apprenticeship, he tells us he discarded all those lessons by the time he wrote Lot 49. In other words, these were the lessons he failed to learn.

When we read the introduction ironically, we, like Pynchon himself, place the stories in a preOedipa(l) position. From this vantage we read the stories as Pynchon's apprenticeship in giving voice to the speechless and visibility to the invisible. Beginning from a modernist stance wherein he struggles through the application of certain humanistic values and assumptions, he would discover that those values and assumptions are themselves tenuous at best and support their opposites at worst. The postmodern ironic detachment that follows this apprenticeship grows from a desire to locate spaces that resolve the inherent problems of modernism and humanism. If the introduction is, indeed, an ironic evaluation of the stories, it illustrates what the postmodern Pynchon learned and indeed communicates to the reader through the stories--namely, that those sureties we most take for granted are themselves social and psychological constructs that are themselves constructs of earlier constructs. One such cluster of construct s includes what Sedgwick describes as the continuum of male homosexual and heterosexual desires.

In "The Secret Integration," the last of the five stories and supposedly the most mature, the male adolescents bond into a gang that accepts only girls who "prove" themselves by going along with the boys' rough fantasies. Such juvenile homosocial bonding frees the boys from adults who threaten their childhood. Although this story was the last in the collection and, according to the introduction, marks the end of Pynchon's apprenticeship, it clearly delineates Pynchon's contrast between the presexual world where "boys are boys" and the corruption of the sexed adult world. While children bond in a gang intent on infiltrating the PTA and shooting sodium bombs into suburban swimming pools, adults debase themselves to making threatening phone calls and trashing the yard of the new black neighbor. While parents fear what integration might do to their upscale New York suburb, their children have already "integrated" through their unquestioned acceptance of an imaginary black friend into their gang.

In this story, as in the other four in Slow Learner, Pynchon establishes male bonding as growing from a tension between mutually exclusive poles. On the one hand is an adult world of racism where adults freely lie to children to conceal their own pettiness and to vent their corruption. When Tim overhears his mother making a threatening call to the Barringtons, she explains that she was only "playing a joke, [. . .] a practical joke" (147). On the other is a fantasy world where boys act not like children playing games but like terrorists intent on revolution. Grover, a boy who has been expelled from public school partly because he is too intelligent and is thus seen as a threat to the status quo, has invented "a sodium grenade: two compartments, sodium and water, separated by a burst-diaphragm" (144); Etienne, another boy, "had managed to stop the paper mill last year for almost a week by messing up the water it used" (166); Operation Spartacus is a plan of the boys to take over and bomb their school. But whi le adult reality and the boys' fantasy may smack of similar deceit and violence, they are directed to radically different ends.

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.

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.

The homosexual's closet, such as we see in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956), provides protection from a hostile heterosexual world that partly defines sexuality in terms of social responsibilities. Significantly, in Baldwin's novel, the closet is a manufactured room within a manmade building. Of course, while the closet originally offered psychic safety, liberated gay men later identified it with another manmade room, the cell in a prison. Whether the closet is a place of protection or of incarceration, the homosexual who wants to escape from the enclosure also wants to flee the house that contains that closet; thus one direction taken by Gay Liberation in the 1970s was to overflow from the structure to the open street, a movement symbolized by "coming out." This movement is both coming out of the closet and, by extension, out of the building that contains the closet, out of the manmade structure and into a natural environment. In Pynchon's stories, escape tends to move from the natural outside and into the manmade structure as if hiding from the dominant society answers the psychic needs of the protagonists. That is, where the homosexual's closet is negative, Pynchon's homosocial retreat or hideout is positive. In this retreat, male bonding provides escape and relief from outside tyranny and is momentarily unthreatened by its subtextual homoeroticism.

In "The Secret Integration," the aging alcoholic and the boys, enclosed within a hotel room and thus protected from hostile adults, bond in an emotional union that dissolves the distinction between youth and age and between fantasy and reality. In this story, the alcoholic McAfee briefly recaptures his youth and the boys find a way other than terrorism to relate to the adult world. In this "closeted" space of the hotel room, the desires of the adult and children meld into precarious communication. The boys share their dreams with McAfee, who responds by treating them as adults until he, the actual adult, succumbs to his desire for alcohol and to his own ageism. Under these inevitable pressures, it turns out he marginalizes the children as completely as other adults have marginalized him.

That the boys also create this protective space with Carl Barrington, their imaginary black friend, marks both their adolescent comprehension of how the adult world has used them and a new level of revenge against that world. Only when the actual Mrs. Barrington rejects their attempt to demonstrate their desire to break from the racism of their parents is this space endangered. Her angry words collapse the boys' imaginary space:

"We don't need your help [...] I We don't need any of you on our side. I thank our heavenly Father every day of my life that we don't have any children to be corrupted by the likes of you trash." (191)

They have no alterative other than to send their "friend" to a closet hidden deep in a ruined mansion where he, like their experience with McAfee, can remain inviolate. Because desire is thus sequestered, removed to a space where it touches neither reality nor fantasy, the boys ironically conform to the stereotypical role that their parents have created for them. Unwittingly, the parents have ended the innocence of their children's desire:

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

For contrast, Pynchon introduces Callisto in this nurturing role: "The first thing he became aware of was a small bird he had been holding gently between his hands, against his body" (83). Like Meatball, Callisto treats women as objects. For her part, Aubade takes dictation from Callisto as if she had nothing to say on her own and obeys his commands as if he alone could reach a significant conclusion. In other words, he occupies the same sort of ambiguous gender space as Meatball for both men exercise masculine dominance even while they attempt to fill a feminine sustaining role. But in that latter role, when Callisto fails to save the dying bird, no "horrifying awareness" comes to him; rather, it comes to Aubade. "Impotent with the wonder of it," Callisto cannot understand why his nurturing has not saved the bird, but Aubade acts:

Suddenly then, as if seeing the single and unavoidable conclusion to all this she moved swiftly to the window before Callisto could speak; tore away the drapes and smashed out the glass with two exquisite hands which came away bleeding and glistening with splinters. (98)

Callisto moves toward feminization; Aubade is masculinized. Both movements are necessary for entropy; they cancel one another.

Conflating homosexual desire and misogyny, Pynchon's protagonists construct a masculine prerogative to control and vitiate the treat of femininity. In "The Small Rain," Levine's army buddies turn the "coeds" of McNeese into sex objects; in "Low-lands," Dennis tells his homosocial buddies a story about a female cadaver and the fraternity that uses it to embarrass a drunken brother (68-69); and in "The Secret Integration," Grover and Tim accept Kim Dufay only after Kim proves her masculine acceptability by outmaneuvering Hogan in spying on the PTA (155). In all these stories, males masculinize or objectify women to preserve supremacy, especially after they have themselves become feminized through the implicit homosexualization of their bonding. Such feminized males displace the internalized threat of being effeminate by reducing women to still more inferior positions. For these males, it is as if the (gender) threat of being feminine were greater than the (sexual) fear of being perceived as homosexual.

Still, there is little overt homophobia in these stories. Quite the contrary, fear takes the shape of the male's fleeing the responsibilities and limitations of heterosexual domination by escaping into homosocial bonding through which he maintains a fragile--though psychologically safe--space where he remains a boy. Though natural forces like hurricanes and rain, the changes of socially imposed rules and expectations, lack of communication, racism, and ageism threaten this space, the male protagonists find there the freedom to play out their fantasies, to indulge the feminine within their masculinity, and to indulge in same-sex bonding that excludes heterosexual desires.

Neither androgynous nor bisexual, this space is one in which binary categories, largely supported by and forming the content of adult authoritarianism, simply dissolve. The symbolism of "boys will be boys" is especially appropriate, for the space is, indeed, preoedipal. In "Low-lands," Dennis wants to return to mother (in his case, the mother sea) and escape his responsibilities as wage-earner, husband, and potential father; in the uncollected "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna," Siegel temporarily takes on the role of "Father" confessor but escapes the responsibility of trying to save the other people in the apartment from Loon; although in "The Secret Integration," the boys return to the protection of their homes, they had rebelled against the prejudice those homes engender. In each story in a variety of ways, adult or mature women threaten Pynchon' s males. When Cindy throws Dennis out of the house, he must try to find happiness with the childlike Nerissa; when Levine has sex with a nondemanding woman who cal ls herself "little Buttercup," he must wear during the sex act a baseball cap and puffs on a cigar as if he needs these props to be dominant (50); when Mrs. Barrington shocks Grover and Tim from their fantasy, she triggers their reversion to childhood; when, wanting a sex object, Debby Considine brings Irving Loon from the Canadian forests to Washington, he becomes a mass murderer.

In this space freed from sexuality, men neither exert their masculinity nor flee from their own femininity. It is a space that Pynchon particularly develops in the subtext of his next story. "Under the Rose" is unique in Slow Learner. Moving from Alexandria to Cairo, it is the only story that does not take place in the United States; ending on the night of 25 September 1898 with the assassination of Lord Cromer, it is the only one that takes place during an earlier historical period; and it is the only one that develops older characters interacting in adults ways in an adult world. Placing it in the collection just before "The Secret Integration," Pynchon refers to it in the introduction as marking the beginning of the final stage of his apprenticeship:

if only for its feeble good intentions, I am less annoyed with "Under the Rose" than with the earlier stuff. I think the characters are a little better, no longer just lying there on the slab but beginning at least to twitch some and blink their eyes open, although their dialogue still suffers from my perennial Bad Ear. (19)

The story is remarkable for Pynchon's developing the sort of double focus that he would later use in V. and Gravity's Rainbow. While elsewhere, I have discussed at length how V. "stands at a pivotal moment in the construction of modern American sexuality and sex role identification" (74), "Under the Rose" is a story that should be read in its own right. Not just an apprenticeship trial for the novel, in it Pynchon also establishes a contrast between public masculinity and private femininity.

In the story, Porpentine plays a public role as a stereotypic buffoon, given to strange masks while Goodfellow, his much younger partner, publicly assumes the role of womanizer. But as a master spy Porpentine founds his acumen on his "womanly nature":

He'd realized long before that women had no monopoly on what is called intuition; that in most men the faculty was latent, only becoming developed or painfully heightened at all in professions like this. But men being positivists and women more dreamy, having hunches still remained at base a feminine talent; so that like it or not they all--Moldweorp, Goodfellow, the pair from Brindisi--had to be part woman. Perhaps even in this maintenance of a threshold for compassion one dared not go beneath was some sort of recognition. (112-13)

Spy-spying-on-spy thus evolves into courtship: though Moldweorp and Porpentine act for enemy governments, their relations with each other are "tender and sheepish" (102), and, when, during a performance of Manon Lescaut, they finally come face to face at the assassination of Lord Cromer, Porpentine "glanced back, quickly at that moment of hopeless love, and saw Moldweorp there looking decayed, incredibly old, face set in a hideous though compassionate smile" (133). Though the "moment of hopeless love" directly describes how Des Grieux falls in love with Manon in the opera, it also acts as a metonym for the relation between the two spies. Hitherto, they have acted by rules, conduct established by gentlemen who know not to trespass the unmentioned threshold; now, however, Moldweorp breaks the rules: "'Please, dear fellow,' Moldweorp gasped, 'Don't go after them. You are outnumbered'" (133). The surface game remains civilized and civil only so long as its unspoken code remains gentlemanly.

Earlier, when Porpentine drops below his "threshold" to discover that his partner is sexually impotent and briefly considers the implications of that discovery on his own sexuality, he acts as if he has learned nothing. Masquerading as Des Grieux, he continues to play the homoerotic courtship with his rival. But before he acts out the encounter in the opera house, he has lost his ability to stay above the threshold that separates the masculine and feminine. Coming back to his hotel room after setting up a circle of spies to trick Moldweorp into acting, he witnesses a scene in which his partner and Victoria Wren lie on his bed, and he hears the weeping Goodfellow confess, "I'm sorry [...] the Transvaal, a wound. They told me it was not serious." Though he doesn't know exactly what Goodfellow means, the experience makes Porpentine look into himself: he realizes for the first time that his threshold is vulnerable (127). Afterward, Victoria tries to clarify the nature of Propentine's relations with both Goodfello w and Moldweorp. First, she is the immediate cause for Propentine's discovery of Goodfellow's sexual "problem." Second, by tracking Moldweorp and his associates, she becomes the indirect cause for leading Porpentine to the Sphinx, where he is killed. In a world of adult responsibility--here, perhaps, the most profound, for the men are working for governments that are poised to spark the "Apocalypse" of world war--it is a woman who tears off the protective masks that allow "boys to be boys" and forces them to the crisis that can spill blood (a role in which the Victoria of V. will thrive). Because Victoria, like Cindy and Mrs. Barrington, acts as a rationalizing and threatening influence that gives voice to the unstated, she is threatening to males. In this threat, she suggests that when sexually mature women evoke the homosexual panic inherent in the space to which the males have fled, such women force the males back to socially accepted spaces.

As I earlier suggested, Pynchon does not distinguish between homosocial, homoerotic, and homosexual desires; instead, on the continuum from homosexual to heterosexual, he constructs a space where binary opposition temporarily collapses. Here, men are unable to articulate rationally, for Pynchon most often associates rationality with women or with father figures who want to uphold patriarchal rules that bifurcate into discrete categories. For example, in "Low-lands," Dennis wants to escape "the relentless rationality of that womb [psychoanalysis] and that wife" (58), and, in "Under the Rose," Victoria Wren, who speaks to Porpentine with "a mustache of foam on her upper lip" (130), recognizes that because he is her sexual rival as well as her lover's partner, she thus enters the space that Porpentine himself refuses to articulate.

In this space, men often don masks or disguises that separate them both from their own recognition of the unthinkable (genital homosexuality) and from intrusions from the outside, specifically from (heterosexual) authoritarianism. Although Porpentine dons such a mask consciously, others usually do not recognize that they are in drag, for to know would contaminate their safe space. Although, in "Entropy," Callisto does not see himself as "mother," his remaining in the hermetically sealed apartment and holding the dying bird to his chest form a mask that lets him express femininity without questioning whether it threatens his masculinity. Likewise, when Meatball carries the empty magnum "as if it were a teddy bear" (81), the identification of phallic pistol (here significantly unloaded) with the doll marks a sexual ambiguity that he never consciously recognizes, but it is one that turns him into a symbol of a nurturing mother by the story's end. In a similar ambiguity, in the uncollected "Mortality and Mercy i n Vienna," although Siegel dons the mask of "Father" confessor (a sexless role), he comes to Lupescu's apartment specifically to meet a sexual partner. So long as Siegel remains in the bedroom (the "confessional") and listens to the women's sexually explicit confessions, he frees himself from involvement and thus escapes Loon's murderous rampage. In "Under the Rose," Porpentine is the character who most obviously dons disguises; he not only dons "self-assumed roles" (109) as a spy but turns the entire spy-game into a complex series of roles that hide the sensuous nature of its homoeroticism. Whereas Victoria unmasks Goodfellow when they try to have sex, she also later strips Porpentine's disguise when she confronts him--"she'd sought out and found the woman in him" (129). Even Dennis Flange in "Low-lands" and Nathan Levine in "The Small Rain" escape into masks rather than face the pressures of authority: Dennis conceals himself behind the front provided by the mad psychoanalyst, his own "clumsy adolescent sex play" lost between the Ebbinghaus nonsense-syllable list and martinis (58), and Levine preserves his barracks escape by ignoring authority and later by assuming vaudeville playfulness (32).

For Pynchon's characters in these stories, the mask or masquerade serves two functions: first, it presents to the Other the appearance that the subject wants to project; second, it hides what the subject wants to conceal. For instance, when Porpentine dons the mask, he thinks it will distract attention from himself. He assumes that, in shaping this mask, he knows what the Other will believe and thus can manipulate the Other's actions toward him. At the same time, for Pynchon's male characters, the donning of a mask involves hiding his actual or naked face from the gaze of the Other. But neither mask nor nakedness is necessarily more true or more honest than the other. If the mask is a perception of self different from the actual face (as in the masquerade of a transsexual who may well believe that the cross-sexual appearance is a "truer" perception than the birth sex), it is, in itself, not a mere costume that conceals true identity but a means or instrument for revealing another self. Sandra Gilbert uses a similar distinction to distinguish between how male modernists and female modernists use costume imagery (394); in her distinction, Pynchon's treatment of masks and disguises seems more like Virginia Woolf s than James Joyce's, for like the female modernists Pynchon treats costumes as representing fluid selves. For him, unlike Gilbert's view of male modernists, the change of costume marks shifts in fashion, for any chosen costume projects of a true self (405). Because the masquerader or crossdresser wants to hide an appearance that belies his or her true gender, when any subject dons a mask, the mask reveals both desire and repulsion. Representing both an escape from one self and the adoption of another self, the "costume" allows the masquerader to manipulate the gaze of the Other to make it "see" the appearance the subjects want it to see.

The mask or masquerade is a "performative" sign. For instance, according to Eve Sedgwick, the wearing of an ACT UP T-shirt with the text, "I am out, therefore I am," is not a constative sign reporting on the wearer's having come out but a performative sign marking the act of coming out (Epistemology 4). Likewise in "Under the Rose," when Porpentine masquerades as the operatic Des Grieux, however playfully, he performs an identity that protects him from a reality that he represses. Romantic but tightly controlled (because already completed as a work, i.e., an opera that can be repeatedly performed) and deterministic (though a tenor may interpret a role, he cannot change either its score or its script), the mask of Des Grieux is a contrast to Porpentine's actual espionage and intrigue in the brutally competitive, indeterminate world of modern Egypt. The story of the misery of the thwarted affair that leaves Des Grieux senseless with grief after the death of Manon mirrors Porpentine's homoerotic relations with Moldweorp and Goodfellow. When Porpentine sings Des Grieux's plea to the Comandante to let him join

Manon in exile, Goodfellow ignores the content of Porpentine-Des Grieux's antic posturing, yet that content--the singer's desire that he be allowed to express his love physically--plays both on the level of the opera and in Porpentine's suppressed desire for Goodfellow (105). Later, Porpentine's homoerotic jealousy expresses itself both when he stops Goodfellow from singing Des Grieux' s passionate Donna non vidi mai, an act quite hypocritical in view of his sexual failure a few hours earlier, and when he completes the aria himself (128). At this point, mistaking Victoria for the rival who breaks into his sensual world, Porpentine wears the mask of Des Grieux to conceal the desire he feels for his partner. This desire, lest its genital implications overwhelm him, he forces below the threshold of consciousness.

In the opera house, Porpentine drops this mask when another "actor" sings the role--actually the same aria that he had sung while Goodfellow showered after his failure to reach orgasm with Victoria. Here, the rival spies clash in a moment of truth, one free from masks. Only afterwards, "at that moment of hopeless love," does Porpentine discover that Moldweorp, not Goodfellow, is his actual lover (133). At first rejecting the insight, Porpentine, just before he is killed and just after he has performed his "own fatal act of love" in saving Goodfellow's life (137), finally recognizes the identification of Moldweorp with Manon. Because the operatic mask Porpentine wears sublimates homoerotic desire, it has allowed the expression of that desire without evoking homosexual panic.

In Pynchon's stories in Slow Learner, the protection that such masquerade provides balances the resistance to it. Visibility (facing the fear and terror inherent in the sexed world) is worse than death. In "Low-lands," Dennis retreats into a dreamworld of the sea, escaping from expected heterosexual responsibility to his childhood identification of the sea and mother. His escape must elude rationality, for if he understood what he has done, the escape would no longer be an escape. Likewise, in "The Secret Integration," Carl retreats to the hidden room before the boys revert to the ordinary because they must hide him if they are to assimilate into the racist, authoritarian society of their parents. In "The Small Rain," Levine toys with taking on the role of the Wandering Jew as a way to continue his flight from self-identity (49), and in "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna," Siegel abandons the role of Father Confessor when, accepting his Jewishness, he flees after Loon has taken the "two crossed BAR's" from the w all and begun to load their magazines. But, ironically, perhaps, none of these characters recognizes that he is wearing a disguise or that he has traded one mask for another.

Pynchon wrote the stories in Slow Learner before he moved to the postmodernism of V. and Gravity's Rainbow. Although, as Linda Hutcheon aptly describes it, Pynchon later would ironically question the very assumptions on which he constructed his questioning of modern values, in these stories he offers a window through which we may see his striking early deconstruction of the power politics within socially constructed expectations for sexual and gender roles. As a "slow learner," he grasps fundamental power relations but still does not evaluate his own position to find that it is possibly just as tenuous as the closets and masks that his characters use to protect themselves from the bifurcations that empower the social role of the male heterosexual. Thus these texts in Slow Learner turn in upon themselves. They create closed worlds where such binaries as youth and age, homosexuality and heterosexuality, feminine and masculine, and fantasy and reality collapse as if to posit a world outside linguistic parameter s, a world that we cannot articulate, for articulation implicitly affirms these binaries. After Pynchon moved beyond modernism and its attempt to find meaning in humanistic constructs, he could look back on these stories as forming his apprenticeship. From that later vantage, he could see that even his insight was a social and psychological construct and that the closing of the text into a hermetically self-reflexive entity was itself the construction of a space within a constructed space that was a space within a constructed space....

Mark D. Hawthorne (hawthond@jmu.edu) was a professor of English at James Madison University from 1974 to 1999. During that time, he has published articles and books on Anglo-Irish (Beckett and Mary Lavine), contemporary literature (Durrell, Pynchon, Kosinski, and Coetzee) and Queer Theory. He is a Professor of Technical and Scientific Communication at James Madison University, where he currently teaches web design, applied ethics, and on-line documentation.

Note

(1.) Even though Walsh and Northouse cited "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna," in John Barth, Jerzy Kosinshi, and Thomas Pynchon: A Reference Guide, this choice is especially interesting in the light of their failure to include "The Small Rain."

Works Cited

Gilbert, Sandra M. "Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature." Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 391-417.

Hall, Chris. "'Behind the Hieroglyphic Streets': Pynchon's Oedipa Maas and the Dialectics of Reading." Critique 33 (1991): 63-77.

Hawthorne, Mark D. "A 'Hermaphrodite Sort of Deity': Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Blending in Thomas Pynchon's V." Studies in the Novel 29 (1997): 74-93.

Pynchon, Thomas. "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna." Epoch 9 (Spring 1959): 195-213.

_____. Slow Learner. Boston: Little, 1984.

_____. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper, 1990.

Sarotte, Georges-Michel. Like a Brother, Like a Lover. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Doubleday, 1978.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

_____. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Walsh, Thomas P., and Cameron Northouse. John Barth, Jerzy Kosinski, and Thomas Pynchon: A Reference Guide. Boston: Hall, 1977.

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