GRGR(11): TRP gay?

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

John Boylan writes:
> >Pynchon is gay?
> 
> To which I reply: One can deduce from GR that TRP 1) possesses a basic
> skill of the competent novelist -- writing from inside his characters
> (including his homosexual ones), and 2) has read Burroughs and Genet.
> Any other inferrence drawn is, I think, an overreaching one.

Having just read some echt Burroughs (i.e. not Cities of the Red
Night) I concur that all Tom needed to know was available in `Naked
Lunch'. And I agree that any further inference is highly speculative.

>   More praises to heap upon Pynchon's praise-heaped head, then, that
> in 1973 especially, a (presumably) straight novelist would have the
> daring to write from within a homoerotic orientation.

Absolutely, whether he is straight or not. The important thing is that
a serious novelist, an intellectual novelist, a great novelist would
do this. There was then (1973) and probably still is just as much now
a danger that any novelist who writes from such an orientation will be
dumped into a literary ghetto. Which really motivated the question. If
he were gay would he not want to avoid being so packaged by critics
and the reading public? Lack of public visibility for the author would
be a sine qua non for such a complex work to be judged squarely on its
merits were its author gay.

And even if we presume Pynchon's is straight we can also profit by his
anonymity and seriously contemplate the possibility that he is gay. No
need for any impossible things before breakfast in order to entertain
such a perspective and any shift of origin or axes that it might imply
(I think it does). Anyone care to entertain the hypothesis and
describe how it would affect their reading of the book?


Andrew Dinn
-----------
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To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
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