queerness in Thomas Pynchon

[matthew.percy at utoronto.ca]

On Sat, 23 Nov 1996, Vaska wrote:

> 
> 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
> 
Interesting stuff.  Clive and Sir Marcus definitely fit into the pattern
of homosocial desire, as it is defined by Sedgwick.   Which is definitely in
contrast to Crutchfield and The Westward Man (camp Western?).  I think most
of what we read in Pynchon is a nostalgia for "pure"
and "untainted" forms- i.e. Clive and Sir Marcus live in a grim parody of 
idealized love, having been tainted by 20th c technology and late capitalism;
the 20th c recapitulates fairy tales (Hansel & Gretel becomes the triad
of Blicero, Gottfried and Katje, where Blicero attempts to destroy what 
he calls Gottfrieds "innocence") in a corrupt way that perverts their 
original meaning and morality.  These themes of nostalgia run even deeper
in _V._ and _CL49_, I think...

Lalalala,

Matt