Queering Pynchon

[Jeff Severs]

Yes, queering Pynchon seems like an inevitable direction for criticism to
head. One complicated place to start might be the passage that ends "In the
Zone"  on p. 616 of GR (Penguin) and precedes the oft-quoted (though not in
context) "the real and only fucking is done on paper." I don't want to
quote the whole thing here, but some juicier bits:

"Here there is no whining, here inside the Operation. There is no lower
self. The issues are too momentuous for the lower self to interfere [...]
No joy, no real surrender. Only the demands of the Operation. Each of us
has his place, and the tenants come and go, but the places remain....
        "It wasn't always so. In the trenches of the First World War,
English men came to love one another decently, without shame or
make-believe, under the easy likelihoods of their sudden deaths, and to
find in the faces of other young men evidence of otherworldly visits, some
poor hope that they may have helped redeem even mud, shit, the decaying
pieces of human meat.... It was the end of the world, it was total
revolution [...]: [...] an English class was being decimated the ones who'd
volunteered were dying for those who'd known something and hadn't, and
despite it all, despite knowing, some of them, of the betrayal, while
Europe died meanly in its own wastes, men loved. But the life-cry of that
love has long since hissed away into no more than this idle and bitchy
faggotry. In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator.
Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the
real and only fucking is done on paper..."

A few thoughts, by no means exhaustive: this passage seems to me to be one
of many attempts by Pynchon to deflect readings of GR as a war novel. These
attempts to define the War with a capital W, the one that is "still killing
lots and lots of people... in ways that are too complicated [...] to
trace", find Pynchon, it seems to me, at his most didactic -- the Mr.
Information tour guide who narrates this passage (p. 645) to foolish Skippy
seems not all that ironic. So am I saying the 616 passage above is what
Pynchon "really" thinks about homosexuality? To call these passages
didactic is not to say that their meaning is uncomplicated. This one
gestures toward a new kind of War and, more importantly, a new kind of
Death, "operational death," unimaginable by the writers who memorialized
their dead comrades in WWI -- someone like Remarque in _All Quiet_. I see
this passage coupling homoeroticism between soldiers in wartime with an
effort to memorialize the dead; for Pynchon, who is _really_ writing about
"the end of the world" (i.e. nuclear catastrophe), there may be no
possibility for memorialization of any sort. A remainderless destruction:
after the big one hits, "there is nothing to compare it to" (3).

Much more to be done here. Any thoughts?

Jeff