queerness in Thomas Pynchon

Vaska vaska at geocities.com
Sat Nov 23 22:58:06 CST 1996


>Like the antisemitism of Lawrence and Eliot, homophobia was part of the 
>(counter)cultural air Pynchon breathed when he was writing GR. Wish it 
>were otherwise, but there you have it. 


Maybe so.  I'm still not sure, however, that any of Pynchon's novels play
out as straightforwardly homophobic.  Or even as homophobic, tout court.
Depictions of exploitative and emotionally void love affairs which happen to
be between two people of the same sex does not constitute homophobia; at
least not to my understanding.  And comparisons with Lawrence and Eliot,
both of whom were outright bigots, doesn't throw any light on what Pynchon
seems to be doing.

I don't know if anyone else shares this reading of GR, but I've always felt
that Pynchon introduces the different homosexual motifs and relationships
here very much as a way of tackling and condemning not homosexuality itself
but rather its manipulation by and historical complicity with -- at least in
the West -- some particularly insidious forms of domination and power.  
Think of Plato, and the noble lie, as well as the Symposium of course, and
than think of Weissmann and Gottfried.  Look at the language in the
Pre-Launch section at the end of the novel, for example, and the way Pynchon
enlists the reader's compassion for Gottfried.  It comes right on the heels
of the Isaac section: two boys being sacrificed (though one of them at least
is spared at the last moment) to some very strange and malignant concepts of
transcendence.  I've always found these and some other, related parts of the
novel quite moving.

Much of the feminist critical theory of the last 30 years has had a lot to
say about the intersections between what Eva Sedgwick calls homosocial
desire, or love of the Same, and the political uses of myths of
transcendence.  Paradigms of transcendence -- and not only the Western ones
-- typically involve some form of that Platonic love of the Same, which is
not identical to homosexuality as such.  Oddly enough, given the
reservations I voiced few weeks ago about some aspects of _Vineland_, it
also contains some quite overt references to the feminist writing I have
mentioned.  I'd be interested to hear what other people on the list think
about all this.

Vaska




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