Back to AtD. TRP & homos

[alice wellintown]

A defence of theory, including Queer Theory, or criticism generally,
something along the lines of Frye's "Polemical Introduction" to his
_Anatomy of Criticism_, might rest on the potential for misreading
Pynchon's lovers in AGTD as some kind of moral condemnation of sexual
liberty. The sex, it seems to me, is nearly beside the point. If we
want to read homosexual encounters we can do better than Pynchon.
Indeed, while Pynchon has his dog-eared copy of Rougemont down off the
shelf as he writes these scenes, as Updike and Marques do as well, he
has new equations, new films, new theories in play (Foucault, not
evident in GR). Like his master, Melville, Pynchon does put a cannibal
in a Christians bed, erects a harpoon, and squeezes sperm in the
heavens, but not because he wants to say anything about homosexuals,
not really, or because he hopes to sell his books in the basement
shops where proud gay men meet closeted ones, or anything the audience
is longing to read, but because these scenes further his artistic
objectives.