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The Improbable Education of Thomas Pynchon: Notes on Beat Slowness

Julián Jiménez Heffernan

Abstract

In his “Introduction” to Slow Learner (1985), Thomas Pynchon made two related claims. He confessed he “still” believed that On the Road was “one of the great American novels” and he pointed out that the male grownups in his stories “are still small boys inside.” Through a loose examination of the historic-biographical scope of the temporal adverb “still,” I try to assess the extent of the survival of a Beat persona (juvenile delinquent, slow learner, homosocial buddy) inside Pynchon’s more or less public premises of selfhood. This survival is predicated upon the never fully sublated queer temporality (the slow time) that is arguably a remnant of Beat historicity.

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How is a child possible in general?
Derrida 146

1.

  • 1 The opposition, established by Grassian (131-32), between Beat vitality and the postmodern lethargy (...)

1Published in 1984, the “Introduction” to Thomas Pynchon’s Slow Learner, a collection of stories written between 1958 and 1964, remains his most articulate critical statement about fiction to date. It is also—this is seldom noted—a remarkable contribution to the understanding of the Beat generation. The American novelist offers an autobiographical account of his early career that engages Beat temporality—namely, the rapid moving of those who grow slowly—in two related ways.1 First, he acknowledges the existence of a post-Beat era in which he was bound to produce his work. Second, this production proved arduous, he explains, because he had to dispose of a sluggish Beat persona that kept thwarting his attempts at reaching the heights of late-modernist sophistication. For Pynchon, Beat temporality spelled cognitive slowness, i.e. disinclination to learn and become whomever you wished to become. He affably blames the beatniks for the miscarried Bildung experienced by latecomers, like himself, but also for the dislocating effect that it had in the sequence of American cultural history. He became, he complains, a slow learner, tossed along the “up-and-down shape of my learning curve” (Pynchon, Slow 22). But this two-fold—both private and public—temporality was also interlaced with hospitable queerness. This we know because his Beat persona masquerades in the stories as a member of homosocial communities that shelter him and others from the hazardous hallmarks (professional stability, marriage, parenthood) of heteronormative time.

  • 2 The temporal early-late dichotomy generates an essentially paradoxical dialectic. Slow Learner is s (...)

2The possibility of outdistancing Beat temporality when your personal-artistic education has been productively compromised by it is at best uncertain. Thomas Pynchon, described by Louis Menand as “the unlikely offspring of Jack Kerouac and the Cornell English department,” is aware of this. All the comments he makes about the early stories in the “Introduction” are tinged with the moral compunction of an artist who passes judgement on the failures of taste and execution of an earlier (tendentially Beat) self while admitting that the overcoming of this premature persona has not yet fully completed itself.2 He speaks of “impulses” that have given way to “episodes of middle-aged tranquility, in which I now pretend to have reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was back then. I mean I can’t very well just 86 this guy from my life” (3). This is where the two levels of temporality meet: the late Pynchon cannot oust the early Pynchon—and its retained Beat persona—largely because the “transition point, [the] strange post-Beat passage of cultural time” (9), a passage marked by the interregnum stagnancy (Gramsci) sustained by Beat slowness, has not been properly expunged from America’s progressive temporality.

2.

3The remarks on Beat originality scattered in the “Introduction” to Slow Learner bespeak a tormented recognition of dependence. Pynchon observes that, in the late fifties, against tradition, “we were attracted by such centrifugal lures as Norman Mailer’s essay ‘The White Negro,’ the wide availability of recorded jazz, and a book I still believe is one of the great American novels, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac” (7). Note the temporal adverbial still: this is 1984 and Pynchon is forty-seven years old. The statement is shrouded in a mood of ironic defense. The reasons for this qualified appeal were diverse, and they involved aspects of cultural, linguistic, racial, and sexual politics. Pynchon’s allusions to the Beat movement fall broadly into two groups, explicit and implicit. Whereas the former, marked by the pronoun “we,” concern questions of public temporality, collective Zeitgeist and political crisis, the latter, centered around the “I,” portend issues of personal timing and private development. The explicit allusions are positive. The implicit ones are more critical. Both are, however, indissociable.

4Pynchon mentions the parallels between “the university environment” in which he dwelt at the time and the vagrant existence of young poets in the Middle Ages as depicted by Helen Waddell in a book reprinted in the 50s: The Wandering Scholars. These young men “left the monasteries in large numbers and took to the roads of Europe, celebrating the wider range of life to be found outside the academic walls” (7-8). The analogy establishes a significant equivalence between the interruption of formal education and being on the road:

Not that college life was dull, exactly, but thanks to all these alternative lowlife data … we had begun to get a sense of that other world humming along out there. Some of us couldn’t resist the temptation to go out and see what was happening. Enough of us then came back inside with firsthand news to encourage others to try it too—a preview of the mass college dropouts of the ‘60’s. (8)

  • 3 “Biographically,” explains Grassian, “Pynchon’s affinity for the Beat lifestyle seems apparent in h (...)

5On this reckoning, being out (on the road to social experience) presupposes having dropped out of college. Pynchon’s account covers various modes of new social-cultural experience, some of which informed his nomadic lifestyle3:

I enjoyed a glancing acquaintance with the Beat movement. Like others, I spent a lot of time in jazz clubs, nursing the two-beer minimum. I put on hornrimmed sunglasses at night. I went to parties in lofts where girls wore strange attire. I was hugely tickled by all forms of marijuana humor, though the talk back then was in inverse relation to the availability of that useful substance. In 1956, in Norfolk, Virginia, I had wandered into a bookstore and discovered issue one of the Evergreen Review, then an early forum for Beat sensibility. It was an eye-opener. (8)

6Of the many directions he and his contemporaries were encouraged from, Pynchon singles out “Kerouac and the Beat Writers.” Allowing their fluency to coexist with the diction of more traditional writers turned “exciting, liberating, … an expansion of possibilities” (6-7). These social possibilities were impaired by the “invisible class force fields” existing between “college kids” and “blue-collar workers.” “The conflict in those days was,” he argues, “like most everything else, muted. In its literary version it shaped up as traditional vs. Beat fiction” (6-7). The sharpness of this closing opposition—traditional versus Beat fiction—is equivocal. As we will see, Pynchon feels the need to move beyond Beat fiction toward a creative stage of higher awareness, not only as regards form, but also with respect to specific boundary-making political questions like class, race, and sex—to “psychological constructs that are themselves constructs of earlier constructs” (Hawthorne 515). And, as Hawthorne notes, “one such cluster of constructs includes what Sedgwick describes as the continuum of male homosexual and heterosexual desires” (515). Despite their audacious eagerness to speak out, Beat writers had left some of these questions unanswered, some constructs unturned.

7The above-mentioned opposition of “traditional vs Beat fiction” is less formal than temporal. It involves a sense of progressive, but discontinuous, temporality, and Pynchon describes himself and others as latecomers—Nietzschean Spätgekommenen—to the critical stage of American history:

We were at a transition point, a strange post-Beat passage of cultural time, with our loyalties divided. As bop and rock ‘n’ roll were to swing music and postwar pop, so was this new writing to the more established modernist tradition we were being exposed to then in college … We were onlookers: the parade had gone by and we were already getting everything secondhand … This didn’t prevent us from adopting Beat postures and props, and eventually as post-Beats coming to see deeper into what, after all, was a sane and decent affirmation of what we all want to believe about American values. When the hippie resurgence came along ten years later, there was, for a while anyway, a sense of nostalgia and vindication. Beat prophets were resurrected, people started playing alto sax riffs on electric guitars, the wisdom of the East came back in fashion. It was the same, only different. (9)

8Pynchon’s enhanced awareness of temporal repetition and epigonality elicits the ironic undertone. To be sure, Pynchon secretly questioned the novelty of this “new writing,” but he also sensed that dabbling for too long in the magic of this newness prevented him from growing as an artist and disconnected him from other sources of originality—those of “the more established modernist tradition.” Make it new, said Pound, but how long does the new(s) stay new(s)? To Pynchon, this question was bound up with the mystery of the longevity of the artist as a young man. This is where the personal, more critical angle, sets in.

  • 4 Hegel conceives of sublation as an ambiguous term, holding both negative and positive meaning: “On (...)

9Sal Paradise described his affiliation to the Beat ethos in terms of slowness. Just as it took him time to enlist—“They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new Beat generation that I was slowly joining” (On the Road 54)—it took a while for Pynchon to defect. This failure of expedient sublation (Aufhebung: surpassing and retention) reads like an index of cognitive delay afflicting the novelist at “a strange post-Beat passage of cultural time” (Pynchon 9).4 On rereading his stories, Pynchon regrets “tiresome passages here, juvenile and delinquent too” (4), derides the “pre-adult” attitude toward death in “younger writers” who inhabit “an apprentice age” (5), reviles the stock “adolescent values” that made his grown-up heroes remain “still small boys inside” (10), and exposes “the quaintness and puerility of attitude” that fails to conform to “the class angle” (6). These charges of immaturity, technical inexperience, and political ignorance obviously tap anti-Beat prejudice. But there is more:

On the negative side, however, both forms of the movement placed too much emphasis on youth, including the eternal variety. Youth of course was wasted on me at the time, but I bring up the puerility angle again because, along with imperfectly developed attitudes about sex and death, we may also note how easily some of my adolescent values were able to creep in and wreck an otherwise sympathetic character. (9)

10The oddly termless temporality of youth is condemned as conducive to “overwriting” (15) and as an impediment to instruction: “The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything—or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance” (15). Pynchon’s immature persona is thus cloaked in the spatio-temporal trappings of the standard Beat roguish ingenu. Think of Dean, whose “final development” from “caring about anything” to caring “about everything in principle” (On the Road 188) is dismally compromised by irony and defeat.

11In conclusion, Pynchon’s strategic adoption of a zeitgeist temporality of teleological development for his Bildungsroman portrayal of creative-psychological growth, marked by the retarded transition from error to learning, allows him to modulate his confession into “a dreary chronicle of missed opportunities, expired deadlines, betrayed promises and thwarted hopes” (Comay 3). Although the ills of apprentice immaturity are sometimes taken up in general terms, with reference to a plural persona (we) caught in a transition temporality, Pynchon is rather openly scrutinizing his own failure at personal growth. And this failure is linked to his hasty adoption of Beat roles.

3.

  • 5 An account of Pynchon’s investment in homosocial bonding in Slow Learner can be found in Hawthorne’ (...)
  • 6 Hawthorne has rightly argued that “there is little overt homophobia in these stories. Quite the con (...)

12All of the stories in Slow Learner deal with male communities: young draftees involved in a post-hurricane rescue operation in Louisiana (“The Small Rain”), middle-aged buddies embarked on an outlandish night adventure (“Low-lands”), sailors, band players, and college students languishing in a D.C. party (“Entropy”), seasoned agents playing games of espionage and seduction in turn-of-the-century Egypt (“Under the Rose”) and teenage boys playfully conspiring in a small town in the Berkshires (“The Secret Integration”). Although patterns of occasional heterosexual infatuation (“The Small Rain,” “Low-lands,” “Under the Rose”), marriage (“Low-lands”) or partnership (“Entropy”) inform some of these tales, they are broadly sustained by a logic of male-male homosocial togetherness. In fact, the collection reads almost like a textbook companion to Love and Death in the American Novel, where Leslie Fielder memorably observed that “at the sentimental center” of American fiction “there is nothing but the love of males” (368). To be sure, homosocial is not necessarily homoerotic—let alone homosexual—but only by bearing in mind this whole spectrum of cultural signification can we make justice to the complexity of Pynchon’s reference to “adolescent values” or “imperfectly developed attitudes about sex.”5 Let me rerun my contention: in these five stories the homosocial community procures moral slowness and cognitive delay—the postponement, that is, of (hetero)normative duties. Such delay renders visible the grounding equivalence between homosocial communality and childhood temporality.6

“The Small Rain”

13In “The Small Rain,” some of the soldiers have interrupted their college education in order to do their military service. Dugan, for instance, was a draftee who “had busted out of the University of Virginia after two years (29), Pierre was “a ROTC, a graduate of MIT” (33), and the enlisted Bronx Private First Class Nathan Levine, the story’s protagonist, is derisively described as a “college graduate, highest IQ in the damn battalion” (33). They briefly discuss the value of college training. When Rizzo, the other “Joe College in the crowd” (38), proposes singing college songs, Baxter retorts: “I never could see this college crap. The way I figure nothing beats experience” (39). The formulation “beats experience” may not be accidental, and the balance between knowledge and experience is here tentatively tilted toward (unbeaten) Beat experience. “You got a college diploma,” Baxter challenges Levine, “and you’re still no better off than me, who never got past high school” (39). Later, after some group drinking, Levine, begins “to have a vague idea that Rizzo might not be such a Perennial Undergraduate after all” (43), that the “college kid” and “little sergeant did manage to get a glimpse of the truth” (43).

14Although he professes to have “a broad” waiting for him in New Orleans and begs the lieutenant not to cancel his leave with the cry “Give youth its day” (33), when encouraged by Picnic to “find a nice quite girl and live up north,” he replies that “it’s the Army” he is “in love with” (35). The sources of joy are ungendered and equivocal: “I like to see young people get together. It’s real exciting,” says Picnic (48). Finally, Levine’s sexual encounter with a girl named Buttercup nearing the close of the story, a scene that owes much to Kerouac’s description of Sal’s sexual encounter with the Mexican girl who took him, remember, for “a nice college boy” (On the Road 82), is shrouded in misrecognition and deception. She realizes that “what was hazarding this particular plowboy was deeper than any problem of seasonal change or doubtful fertility” (50). In the end, he re-embraces the safety of masculine conversation, with Rizzo, about Eliot’s and Hemingway’s obsession with rain. Death by water, infertility, Tiresian androgyny: these Eliotian symbols color the story’s finale with a sense of paralysis and apathy. Pynchon argued in the “Introduction” that characters are found “dealing with death in pre-adult ways. They evade: they sleep late, they seek euphemisms” (5). The moral: the interruption of learning promotes indolence.

“Low-lands”

15Dennis Flange, the protagonist of “Low-lands,” is only one small step ahead of these late sleepers on the way to adulthood. He is—and this is a great deal, for Pynchon, in the way of social existence—a married man. But his marital being is dismally threatened by importunate friends, Rocco Squarcione, the “garbage man,” whom he entertains at home for hours, before old buddy Pig Bodine shows up at his doorstep with plans for the evening. He is, in Hawthorne’s apt terms, “a messenger of freedom from heterosexual responsibility” (520). The doleful wife reacts angrily—“You, Rocco, and Pig. The three musketeers. Get out” (61)—with the proviso that Flange should never return: “Out is what I said and out is where you are going. Of my life, is what I mean” (61). She is resentful. Their wedding reception had been stormed by this “wino friend” (62) who managed to drag Flange for a “few beers” round the corner. They spent two weeks together before Flange, broke, returned to his wife. No return this time. The scene echoes closely similar ones of domestic storminess in On the Road, particularly Dean’s banishment from his San Francisco house (Part 3, chapter 2). But Flanges’ extrusion from the discipline of marital life is anticipated by his decision “not to go to work after all.” In a sense, he is already out, way out into an odd temporality of indolence, symbolically prefigured by his “pre-adolescent” sense that “the sea was a woman” (58), a modernist trope fostered by early exposure to psychoanalysis, his three-year experience “off the Korean coast” on a destroyer as a communications officer, but also, perhaps, by sheer heterosexual panic. “Wife is a nuisance sometimes,” Pig corroborates. “I got three or four scattered around the country and glad to be rid of them all. Somehow you never seem to learn” (62). This slowness to learn lies at the core of a story characterized by masculine exposure to the outside, and it is there, on this outside looking out (Ashbery), that the story takes on a sudden Beat trepidation. On board the truck, asked where to go, Flange replies, evasively: “I don’t know … Maybe I’ll go into New York and find a hotel or something. You might as well drop me off at the station” (63). As it happens, the three buddies end up in a dump where gypsies “[come] out at night” (71). The overlap, common in Kerouac, between ethnic otherness and alternative temporality furnishes the story with an epiphanic sexual occasion. The Mexican girl is here replaced by a Gipsy girl with the name of a seaborne Shakespearean heroine, Nerissa. The unreality of their sexual encounter prompts a meditation—“I wonder why Cindy and I never had a child. And: a child makes it all right” (76)—that confirms his feeling of detachment from a right world that accepts you only on condition you enter the post-adolescent stage of working, marrying, and parenting. In the “Introduction,” Pynchon singled out this story as an illustration of the way “the puerility angle” and the “adolescent values”—the “emphasis on youth” along with the “imperfectly developed attitudes about sex and death”—could “wreck an otherwise sympathetic character” like Dennis Flange: “Old Dennis doesn't ‘grow’ much in the course of it. He remains static, his fantasies become embarrassingly vivid, that's about all that happens. A brightening of focus maybe, but no problem resolution and so not much movement or life” (9-10). Then follows a sociological reflection on American-male aging that is reminiscent of Fiedler’s classical thesis:

It is no secret nowadays, particularly to women, that many American males, even those of middle-aged appearance, wearing suits and holding down jobs, are in fact, incredible as it sounds, still small boys inside. Flange is this type of a character … He wants children—why isn’t made clear—but not at the price of developing any real life shared with an adult woman. His solution to this is Nerissa, a woman with the size and demeanor of a child. (10)

16Fiedler rightly emphasized the American male writer’s near-pathological attachment with pre-pubescent and nubile girls. Here, the Lolita-attachment is indirectly reasoned away as a surface symptom of a deeper malaise of un-development and stagnant male-to-male fondness. To be sure, Pynchon’s direct reasoning is less concessive, less daring, less accommodating—to the prim facts of homosociality. But his sociology remains tolerably perceptive:

It would be easy to say that Dennis’s problem was my problem, and that I was putting it off on him. Whatever’s fair—but the problem could have been more general. At that time I had no direct experience with either marriage or parenting, and maybe I was picking up on male attitudes that were then in the air—more documentably, inside the pages of men’s magazines, Playboy in particular. I don’t think this magazine was the projection, exclusively, of its publisher’s private values: if American men had not widely shared such values, Playboy would have quickly failed and faded from the scene. (10)

  • 7 The term retardation is here used in a primary, etymological sense (from re- “back” + tardare "to s (...)

17Plowboy, playboy, layboy: “I had no direct experience with either marriage of parenting.” This diagnosis of retardation, puerility, and greenness also describes Pynchon’s case: the autobiographical dimension of all the stories is something Pynchon reluctantly admitted.7 Like that of pre-marital Flange, Pynchon’s only direct experience was one of continued male-bonding (at school, college, the military). He confesses that “the counterpart in real life to this unwholesome bluejacket,” Dennis Flange, was his “starting point. I had heard the honeymoon story when I was in the navy, from a gunner's mate on my ship” (10). So far, then, what our three equivalent characters demonstrably share is exposure to the kind of male homosocial bonding that is common between shipmates, officers, and draftees during peacetime service (Levine, Pynchon) or war (Flange).

“Entropy”

18Whereas in “Low-lands” the characters, “though problematic in other ways, were at least where I began from, bringing the theoretical stuff in later, just to give the project a look of educated class” (12), “Entropy” is impaired, Pynchon grumbles in the “Introduction,” by the procedural error of beginning with a theme, “and then [trying] to force characters and events to conform to it” (12). Readers of this much-quoted observation tend to overlook the relevance of the closing phrase, “a look of educated class.” The slow learner errs when trying to accelerate, when replacing, that is, education with the appearance of an education. This is, of course, a Platonic conundrum: who truly learns when and what? Pynchon’s entire aperçu on his most anthologized story interestingly turns around the apprentice’s untimely (excessively early) attempt to write a story about creative loss along the arrow of time. “A pose I found congenial in those days,” he observes, “—fairly common, I hope, among pre-adults—was that of somber glee at any idea of mass destruction or decline” (13). Note the recurrence of denotation (pre-adults, pre-adolescent) of these happy few marooned on the intemporal cloud of unknowing. “But do not underestimate the shallowness of my understanding” (13), he adds, still harping on the question of ersatz education. Then comes the temporal-generic marker: “I suppose it is as close to a Beat story as anything I was writing then, although I thought I was sophisticating the Beat spirit with secondhand science” (14). Although Pynchon doesn’t bother to clarify why exactly should the Beat spirit need sophistication, he obviously appeals both to readerly anti-Beat prejudice and to critical preconceptions about the imposing author of demanding novels like V and Gravity’s Rainbow. Reconsidering “The Small Rain,” he confides: “Apparently I felt I had to put on a whole extra overlay of rain images and references to ‘The Waste Land’ and A Farewell to Arms. I was operating on the motto ‘Make it literary,’ a piece of bad advice I made up all by myself and then took” (4).

  • 8 For Pynchon, Grassian argues, “the Beat movement is a very brief pocket of time in the 1950s” (127) (...)
  • 9 Joanna Freer briefly examines, apropos of “Entropy,” the contrast between “post-war quietude and st (...)

19Despite the irony, the moral is unmistakable: ignorant Pynchon is Beat Pynchon, and to learn is to shed off an early Beat skin. Learning is slow because the skin won’t come off. We have already noted that Pynchon imputes the lethargic pace of this transition to some kind of generational infirmity, but his grasp of the timing is oddly uncertain. His remark that around 1956 he and his coevals “were at a transition point, a strange post-Beat passage of cultural time” (10) reads like an overstatement, for much canonical Beat work remained then still unpublished.8 What counts, at any rate, is his resolve to make the reader believe that his pre-adult lassitude was synchronized with Beat delay, and that both coincided with a timeless time of “aimlessness” predating the frantic sixties9:

I wrote ‘Entropy’ in ‘58 or ’59—when I talk about ‘57 in the story as ‘back then’ I am being almost sarcastic. One year of those times was much like another. One of the most pernicious effects of the ‘50’s was to convince the people growing up during them that it would last forever. Until John Kennedy, then perceived as a congressional upstart with a strange haircut, began to get some attention, there was a lot of aimlessness going around. While Eisenhower was in, there seemed no reason why it should all not just go on as it was. (14)

20When he observes that “the trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything—or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance” (15), he wants the reader to assume that the early stages of his life matched the aimless and apparently eternal infancy of American life. And “Entropy” is very much a story about aimlessness and wrong aims. As it is a story about the arrow of time and the evils of temporal dilation: “Downstairs, Meatball Mulligan’s lease-breaking party was moving into its 40th hour” (81), so runs its memorable first sentence. Whereas in the downstairs apartment prevails an entropic temporality of mounting stagnancy, delay, and dereliction, Callisto’s apartment is sheltered in negentropic time—“that private time warp” (85). The opening paragraph captures the morbid languor of overextended partying that is the stock-in-trade of some Beat chronicles. But Pynchon adds an ironic twist, conveying the “look of an educated class.” The signature of higher-order knowledge is first visible in the way he organizes the communities inside the story. Upstairs, a couple inexorably part “their separate lives:” again, heterosexual mating is either mystified or doomed. Downstairs prevail rich varieties of “Togetherness” (91). There are musicians wearing “hornrimmed sunglasses and rapt expressions,” smoking “funny-looking cigarettes which contained not, as you might expect, tobacco, but an adulterated form of cannabis sativa” (81). Such celebration of group-worshipped adulteration over family-making adulthood is of course ferociously Beat. But Pynchon knows better, or different: his forte is ironic resistance. To the gathering crowd of government girls, sailors, errant merrymakers, and prospective American expatriates, he adds “three coeds from George Washington, all of whom were majoring in philosophy” (86), addicted to “undergraduate cant” (87) and smart academic banter. Saul and Meatball argue that the triumph of semiotic noise (“Ambiguity. Redundance. Irrelevance, even. Leakage”) proclaimed by “communication theory” testifies to the shortage of “‘successful’ marriages” (91), to the inefficiency, that is, of the dyadic heterosexual community. Pynchon’s protagonists belong here to an all-men community of ignorant knowers who compensate their lack of worldly experience with a surplus of theoretical wisdom.

  • 10 The over-implications, in this story, of lexemes like closet and out have been noted by Hawthorne ( (...)

21This places them, Pynchon seems to suggest, above the arrogance of educated ignoramuses—the Beats. Whereas the latter are caught in webs of cyclicity and prolongation—“The weather will not change” reads the closing sentence of the Henry Miller epigraph—the former seek to escape the “spell,” the “stretto passage in the year’s fugue: haphazard weather, aimless loves, unpredicted commitments” (83). In a sense, the Beats explore a natural solution to the shocking lack in nature (déficience dans la nature) that is human ignorance, while the post-Beat college-boys resort to the substitution (suppléance) or supplement that is culture. This makes the Beat solution more consonant with the Rousseaunian agenda that paradoxically seems to inform Pynchon’s programmatic musings in the “Introduction.” But more on this later. For now, let me stress that the stretto passage of “months one can easily spend in fugue” (83) is also the transition point of post-Beat time Pynchon refers to in the “Introduction.” Meatball has a foot in both camps: he can relapse to the languor of Beat in-temporality—the tale construes this drive as entering a closet—but he can also, like Callisto, labor to keep his party (his life) “from deteriorating into total chaos” (97), a goal that demands a certain amount of outing.10

“Under the Rose”

  • 11 McHale shows how the ironic appeal, for Pynchon, of the imperial romance (Buchan’s Greenmantle, Chi (...)

22The next story in the collection appears to have less to teach in the way of slow learning and post-Beat sublation. Indeed, the spatio-temporal dislocation (Egypt, the 1890s) offers no clear points of connection. But the symptoms linger—the fascination with things “dear to adolescent minds” (18), the inability to let go of “[pieces] of puerility” (19)—in particular the way the crafty worldliness of recruited males in “the spying’s freemasonry” (102)—the English intelligence agents Porpentine and Goodfellow—fails to compensate for their hetero-erotic inexperience. They both “share in [the girl’s] presence a common evasiveness” (110). They have been trained not “to feel any more than a vague esprit de corps towards the agents [they] are working with.” Above all, Porpentine muses, “you do not fall in love. Not if you want to succeed in espionage. God knew what pre-adolescent agonies were responsible; but somehow Porpentine had remained true to the code” (113). But these “pre-adolescent agonies” were sociologically public as much as psychologically private. After all, these spies belong to a passing “tradition in espionage where everything was tacitly on a gentlemanly basis, where the playing-fields of Eton had conditioned (one might say) premilitary conduct as well” (102). This is an understatement, since nobody ignores the reach of turn-of-the-century public-school conditioning—a certain slowness to overcome the puerile joys of masculine camaraderie, and a resulting difficulty to make “progress of feminine attachments” (103).11 The tale ends with the Thackerayan icon of a “simple-minded Englishman, not much good in bed but liberal with his money” (137). “Under the Rose” can be read, I believe, as a conte à clef about the behavioral effects of exposure to Beat temporality. Replace “he” with “47-year-old Pynchon” in the next sentence—“he did not know if this were old age beginning to creep up on him at last or some flaw in the generation itself” (114)—and you have cracked part of the code: it is (it was) both things at the same time.

“The Secret Integration”

23The stories we have so far discussed deal with young male characters that come through as versions of early Pynchon. But it is this last one, with children as protagonists, that prompts his most sustained reflection on the dilemmas of autobiographical fiction. His retractation reads like a code-praise of Beat literature:

Part of this was an unkind impatience with fiction I felt then to be ‘too autobiographical.’ Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one’s personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth … is nearly the direct opposite. Moreover contrary evidence was all around me, though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then and now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live. (21)

24That he has in mind something like On the Road is confirmed in the subsequent elaboration of his point:

Then again, maybe another factor in it was just claustrophobia. I wasn’t the only one writing then who felt some need to stretch, to step out. It may have gone back to the sense of academic enclosure we felt which had lent such appeal to the American picaresque life the Beat writers seemed to us to be leading. Apprentices in all fields and times are restless to be journeymen. By the time I wrote ‘The Secret Integration’ I was embarked on this phase of the business. I had published a novel and thought I knew a thing or two, but for the first time I believe I was also beginning to shut up and listen to the American voices around me, even to shift my eyes away from printed sources and take a look at American nonverbal reality. I was out on the road at last, getting to visit the places Kerouac had written about. These towns and Greyhound voices and fleabag hotels have found their way into this story, and I am pretty content with how it holds up. (22)

25If one reads “The Secret Integration” to confirm Pynchon’s retrospective reading, the result will be disappointment. This is a story about disaffected teenagers drifting in local spheres of calculated exclusion. The regional accents owe as much to Kerouac as they do to Faulkner, and are concentrated in the figure of McAfee, a black bass player musing in a seedy hotel room about a west-bound bus journey in company of “another girl” (180). Still, the children do embody the trials of slow learning that mark the rest of the stories, oscillating between defective knowledge (knowing a thing or two) and first-hand experience (the American picaresque life led by beatniks). The children “hang around together” and tell “practical jokes” to sabotage “the scaled-up world adults made” (143), a world plagued by self-interest, hypocrisy, and racism. The revolutionary zest of these outcast adolescents marooned in their own sad tropics is animated by the same romantic “anarchism that deliberately confounds law and oppression” (Derrida 131). If beat means “down and out but full of intense conviction” (Kerouac, “Aftermath” 24), then these teenagers are disarmingly Beat. Their hopes, however, are defeated by ignorance. Grover, for instance, wrongly assumes that “Hogan knew most about the kinds of meetings grownups had” (154). But their miscalculation runs deeper: the alternative temporality they court through games—they meet to draw up “timetables” (165)—is an extension of their “lamentable tendency to dilatoriness” (148) and fails to shake the routines of adult time: “Yeah, said Tim. That’s how it always was. Things never went off the way they should’ve; nothing progressed … and everything would be the way it was” (167). The sad moral of the story is that this dilatoriness, this lack of progress, this ambulatory sluggishness—the Doctor is called Slothrop, McAfee is an “alcoholic” (175) and a “vagrant” (184)—may not be that bad after all, for it allows the neutral time of grownups to secure the shelter the children might eventually need when the principle of reality dawns on them. Experience, Mr. McAfee’s case has taught them, is unpleasant, and the prospect of “[living] all your life in a house like [they] did, with a mother and father” (183) takes on a sinisterly positive light. This is, again, a story about the dubious bliss of un-development, about slow learning inside an alternative homosocial community whose moral utopia is courageously open to blacks—but not to women.

26Pynchon extols this last story, whose composition illustrates the time in which “the writer … seemed … to be emerging” (22). He explains:

What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux. Maybe this small attachment to my past is only another case of what Frank Zappa calls a bunch of old guys sitting around playing rock ‘n’ roll. But as we all know, rock ‘n’ roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever. (23)

  • 12 But McAfee “was in during Korea,” stationed Stateside in an army band at Fort Ord, California (172)
  • 13 The “non-familial, often sex-segregated environments” were young men (and women) were deposited in (...)

27I mentioned above the Rousseaunian streak in a text that seems to work against Pynchon’s most explicit convictions—against the assumption, that is, of the superiority printed-source culture. Indeed, this prodigious finale courts the proto-romantic fancy of cool, near-natural, developmental temporality. We know, argues Derrida, “what importance Emile gives to time, to the slow maturation (maturation lente) of natural forces. The entire art of pedagogy is a calculated patience (un calcul de la patience), allowing the work of Nature time to come to fruition, respecting its rhythm and the order of its stages” (151). But in Pynchon’s closing statement we are less drawn to the congruity of the conclusion—that the slow time of learning is virtually timeless—than to the homosocial condition (from young folks to old guys) of the quality of the education therein nuanced; a condition which, unsurprisingly, was taken for granted by Rousseau, whose interest in the education of women was not exactly gripping. More important still is that his own “past” is fictively construed as a time of missed opportunities. When McAfee is asked whether he fought in World War II he replies: “No, I missed that … I was too young.” “We missed it too” (172), Hogan tells him.12 These characters’ inability to enter “the untimeliness” of genuine “historical experience” (Comay 5) condemns them to a transitional temporality devoid of heroic energy. Their only defense against such a-historicity is to remobilize through alternative modes of masculine togetherness (music band, conspiracy group). In fact, much in the all-male communal ethos of the Beatniks depicted in On the Road can be explained as a reactive counterweight to—or reaction-formation against—demobilization.13

5.

  • 14 For recent work on this topic, see Gourley.
  • 15 The “gap in scholarship” Grassian (126) detects remains open with respect to Slow Learner. Grassian (...)
  • 16 But irony may also lead to the paralysis (and parabasis) characteristic of skepticism. See Grassian (...)

28There has been a sustained output of scholarly research on the function and significance of time motifs in Pynchon’s narrative work.14 To be sure, you do not choose, in the post-Einsteinian era, to title your novels Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) or Against the Day (2006) if you only have a passing interest in the physics of time. The same could be said of “Entropy,” although the rest of the stories in the collection are less informed by this concern, and science-alert critics have accordingly neglected them. In this article I have tried to prove that time is a central motif in these stories, but the temporality that matters is less that of spacetime curvature and thermal death than the parallel timing of psychological development (Pynchon’s slow learning) and generational maturation (America’s coming of age). In both cases, I have argued, the opportunity of right timing is predicated upon the sublation of slow time. I have also suggested that for Pynchon slow time is Beat time, and that this historically situated mode of temporality is inherently queer in that it challenges the incompliant and conformist timetables of adult, heterosexual, Capitalist-Protestant America. It is no accident that the most exciting theoretical elaboration of the notion of slow time has emerged from the academic quarters of queer studies. Nor is it casual—though it remains decidedly overlooked—that most of the critical clues scattered by Pynchon in his 1985 “Introduction” to Slow Learner fall under the sign of the Beat generation. Critical attention to Pynchon’s relation to the Beats is scarce, and it has failed to establish the Beat factor in his slow learning.15 Grassian rightly observes that “while Pynchon praises the original, life-affirming, positive values of the Beats, V. can be read as a critique of the social Beat movement, as immature, unrealizable and unproductive” (126). What he doesn’t say is that some tales in Slow Learner—“The Small Rain,” “Low-lands” and “The secret integration”—reveal a fondness for young all-male homosocial immaturity that has much to do with Pynchon’s unbeaten Beat infatuation, and that the irony of the rest of the tales (“Entropy” and “Under the Rose”) works like a reaction formation against this juvenile pathos.16 In Pynchon’s critical consciousness (the “Introduction”) and in the sexual-political unconscious articulating the tales, a continuum links questions of slow time, the Beat generation, immaturity, and homosocial queerness. This I hope to have already proved. What remains to be done is to apply the findings of scholars like José E. Muñoz, Elizabeth Freeman, and Jack Halberstam to the early work of a slow learner whose investment on the existential poetics of homosocial communities is perhaps stronger than it has been hitherto acknowledged.

29Let me show how this can be done. Discussing in the “Second Preface” to his Science of Logic the convenience of teaching abstract logic to young men, Hegel explained that

  • 17 This idea is already in Aristotle: “A sign of what has been said [about the unclarity of what prude (...)

youth is not yet involved in the practical affairs of concrete life but lives a life of leisure so far as these are concerned, and it is only for its own subjective ends that it has to busy itself acquiring—at the level of theory at least—the means that will eventually enable it to become actively engaged in the objects of those practical interests. (14)17

  • 18 McHale speaks of a repression and dissimulation of homoeroticism in the intensely homosocial Agains (...)
  • 19 Pynchon’s endorses Benjamin Franklin’s conception of sloth as directed against uniform, one-way, un (...)
  • 20 “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee” is the title of the essay Pynchon contributed to a collection of articl (...)

30What Hegel calls “practical affairs of concrete life [die Interessen des konkreten Lebens]” are not liberal-humanist invariables, but rather the scripted episodes of historic-material middle-class existence underpinning “the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (Halberstam 1). Prior to and against the pragmatic temporality of this advanced life-stage, the philosopher posits the “life of leisure [in der Musse]” characteristic of the youth, a uchronic age inured to both heavy drinking and abstract theorizing. In her analysis of Graves’s poem “It’s a Queer Time!,” Freeman identifies a “fantasy of rubbing up against the past” that is indissociable from the survival of a queer “inner child” (Sedgwick) driven by a libidinal economy of “leisurely, slow, sacred, cyclical” activities (12). This is the economy of slow time that emerges in dialectical opposition to modern, bourgeois, “heteronormative timing” (45): “being normatively ‘modern’ is a matter not only of occupying an imagined place at the new end of a sequence but also of living a coordinated, carefully syncopated tempo between a quick time that seems to be enforced and a slow time that seems to be a matter of free choice” (12). Slow time is admittedly the tempo of early Pynchon’s immature characters. They could all conceivably countersign the message left once by American artist Fred Herko: “Sorry I’m Slow_FH” (qtd. Muñoz 154). But they do not apologize. It is Pynchon who caters remorse in their (and his) name. Their motto is rather that of the Athenian mechanical Snug’s in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “I am slow of study” (2.2.63), shrewdly chosen by Freeman to illustrate her point about premodern timing: “The mechanicals are not ‘men:’ apparently unmarried, failed in their effort to accumulate wealth, unsynchronized with one another and with dramatic conventions of pacing, they live in the slow time of delay and deferral” (17-18). Indeed the retarded temporality of Shakespeare’s “crew of patches, rude mechanicals” (3.2.6) prefigures the deceleration of Pynchon’s post-Beat transition time. And, needless to say, the latter slowing-down occurs too within the bounds of (modern) homosocial communities (crews, companies, units, bands, groups) as yet “unthreatened by [their] subtextual homoeroticism” (Hawthorne 517).18 The aim of such deceleration is at bottom biopolitical. According to Haines, in Against the Day Pynchon links the utopian reinvention of the United States to “an aesthetic and politics of idleness,” to “anticapitalist versions of sloth” that involve “a negation of capitalist discipline” (30) and a willful refusal of “the time of capital” (164).19 As early as 1993 Pynchon had enlisted the deadly sin of sloth against the forces of regular timing: “Sloth was no longer so much a sin against God or spiritual good as against a particular sort of time, uniform, one-way, in general not reversible – that is, against clock time, which got everybody early to bed and early to rise.”20

  • 21 Mortenson’s discussion on the configurations of temporality in Kerouac’s On the Road—reading the no (...)
  • 22 Misogyny is a latent force in Pynchon’s early stories. See Hawthorne, 521-23. This poses a “sublime (...)
  • 23 Recall that Dean tells Sal that he wants his lost father “to tell me things I’ve forgotten in my ch (...)

31In my opinion, this Utopian drive to “break through the constringing notion of time” (Mortenson 52) can be traced back to his short stories and is a legacy of the Beat existentialist ethos as well as a foreshadowing of important reconfigurations of temporality in the contemporary feminist agenda.21 Freeman rightly grounds her point in the notion of amateur delay—slow learning—that transpires in Kristeva’ essay “Women’s Time:” “the slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting” (31). Still, the resulting “love for another” (33) is, in Pynchon’s case, sharply scaled down to same-sex otherness.22 Developing “a male space safe from responsibility and, most important, from women” (Hawthorne 518) takes slow attentiveness towards the inner child, the outer child, the other children—including the black boy Carl—“left out at the edges of towns” (“The Secret Integration”). This decelerated care is inured to other, viler, modes of slowness, particularly the “slow, distinctive two-stage progression from schoolboy desire to adult homophobia” (Sedgwick 177).23 And yes: the gentleness of such queer time remains irresistibly Beat.

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Bibliography

Comay, Rebecca. Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution. Stanford UP, 2010.

De Boucier, Simon. “Time and Relativity.” Thomas Pynchon in Context, edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 239-246.

D’Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970. The U of Chicago P, 1998.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by G. Ch. Spivak, The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.

Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. Stein and Day, 1975.

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke UP, 2010.

Freer, Joanna. Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture. Cambridge UP, 2014.

Gourley, James. Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. Bloomsbury, 2014.

Grassian, Daniel. “Bright Lights Fade Fast: The Beat Influences of Thomas Pynchon’s V.” Journal X: A Journal in Culture and Criticism, vol. 5, no. 1, 2001, pp. 125-137.

Haines, Christian P. A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons. Fordham UP, 2019.

Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. NYU P, 2005.

Hawthorne, Mark D. “Homoerotic Bonding as Escape from Heterosexual Responsibility in Pynchon’s Slow Learner.” Style, vol. 34, no. 3, 2000, pp. 512-528.

Hegel. G.W.F. The Science of Logic. Edited by George di Giovanni, Cambridge UP, 2010.

Hegel. G.W.F. The Encyclopaedia Logic. Edited by Theodore F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, H. S. Harris, Hackett Publishing, 1991.

Hillis Miller, J. Communities in Fiction. Fordham UP, 2014.

Kerouac. Jack. On the Road. 1957. Penguin, 1991.

---. “Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation.” Esquire, March 1958.

Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time.” The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, Columbia UP, 1986, pp. 187-213.

McHale, Brian. “Genre as History: Genre as Poaching in Against the Day.” Genre, vol. 42, no, 3-4, 2009, pp. 5-20.

Menand, Louis. “Entropology.” The New York Review of Books, 12 June 1997. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/06/12/entropology.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2025.

Mortenson, Erik R. “Beating Time: Configurations of Temporality in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road,” College Literature, vol. 28, no. 3, 2001, pp. 51-67.

Muñoz, José E. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU P, 2009.

Petillon, Pierre-Yves. “A Re-cognition of Her Errand into Wilderness.” New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49, edited by Patrick O’Donnell, Cambridge UP, pp. 127-70.

Plimpton, George, ed. Beat Writers at Work. The Harvill Press, 1999.

Pynchon, Thomas. “The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee.” The New York Times Book Review. 6 June 1993, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-sloth.html. Accessed 15 oct. 2025.

Pynchon, Thomas. Slow Learner. Vintage, 2000.

Sedgwick, Eve K. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia UP, 1985.

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Notes

1 The opposition, established by Grassian (131-32), between Beat vitality and the postmodern lethargy seems inexact, for many characters in the Beat narrative canon are, like the Mexican girl, “slow and hung-up about everything” (On the Road 83). There is also the “slow beat” (On the Road 198) of band players, social drinking and drug use informing much of the generation’s existential music. Sal extols the “slow, easy-going Gary Cooper movements” (258) and Dean is mesmerized by the “cool slow walk” of the Mexican man and, by extension, of Mexican society: “There’s no need to hurry around here” (282).

2 The temporal early-late dichotomy generates an essentially paradoxical dialectic. Slow Learner is subtitled “Early Stories”: where are the “Late Stories”? Is Pynchon’s earliness always-already a belated acquisition? Perhaps modernists, and late-modernists, only profess to write early texts—which proves perhaps why the “introjection of earliness” remains, according to Harold Bloom, a major antithetical trope in post-Romantic literature. One thing is sure: in the “Introduction” to Slow Learner Pynchon is processing, whether introjecting or extrojecting, his (slow) earliness.

3 “Biographically,” explains Grassian, “Pynchon’s affinity for the Beat lifestyle seems apparent in his own early, restless wanderings. Pynchon joined the navy (as did Jack Kerouac) in 1955 after his first two years at Cornell and briefly rejoined after his college graduation. Subsequently, Pynchon lived in Greenwich Village in 1958, right around the apex of Beat publications and the subsequent emergence of Village Beat-style bohemianism. After a two-year stint as an engineering aide at Boeing in Seattle, Pynchon resumed his travels in 1962, dividing his time between the two famous Beat locales of California and Mexico” (1).

4 Hegel conceives of sublation as an ambiguous term, holding both negative and positive meaning: “On the one hand, we understand it to mean ‘clear away’ or ‘cancel,’ and in that sense we say that a law or regulation is cancelled (aufgehoben). But the word also means ‘to preserve,’ and we say in this sense that something is well taken care of (wohl aufgehoben)” (Encyclopedia Logic §87, 154).

5 An account of Pynchon’s investment in homosocial bonding in Slow Learner can be found in Hawthorne’s article, where he argues that “we can position the stories in that unthinkable space which marks Sedgwick's disruption between heterosexuality and homosexuality” (512). For questions of homosociality in Pynchon, see also Brian McHale’s reading of Against the Day.

6 Hawthorne has rightly argued that “there is little overt homophobia in these stories. Quite the contrary, fear takes the shape of the male’s fleeing the responsibilities and limitations of heterosexual domination by escaping into homosocial bonding through which he maintains a fragile—though psychologically safe—space where he remains a boy” (522). Interestingly, Kerouac has some dismissive things to say about Beat communitarianism: see the PR interview in Beat Writers at Work, 135.

7 The term retardation is here used in a primary, etymological sense (from re- “back” + tardare "to slow"), as “the process of making something happen or develop more slowly” (Collins Dictionary), “slow development, or development that is slower than it should be” (Cambridge Dictionary).

8 For Pynchon, Grassian argues, “the Beat movement is a very brief pocket of time in the 1950s” (127). Kerouac himself wrote in 1958 that “while I am asked to explain the Beat Generation, there is no Beat Generation left” (“Aftermath” 25).

9 Joanna Freer briefly examines, apropos of “Entropy,” the contrast between “post-war quietude and stability” and the frantic motion encouraged by the Beats (16-17).

10 The over-implications, in this story, of lexemes like closet and out have been noted by Hawthorne (516).

11 McHale shows how the ironic appeal, for Pynchon, of the imperial romance (Buchan’s Greenmantle, Childers’ Riddle of the Sands) draws on the intensity of the young men’s “devotion to each other, rooted in all-male public-school culture and reinforced by the homosocial model of the Boy Scouts” (15).

12 But McAfee “was in during Korea,” stationed Stateside in an army band at Fort Ord, California (172).

13 The “non-familial, often sex-segregated environments” were young men (and women) were deposited in through mobilization during the II World War “created a substantially new ‘erotic situation’ conducive both to the articulation of homosexual identity and to the more rapid evolution of gay subculture” (D’Emilio 23-24). The end of war forced those thus “articulated” to examine new strategies of homosocial bonding.

14 For recent work on this topic, see Gourley.

15 The “gap in scholarship” Grassian (126) detects remains open with respect to Slow Learner. Grassian’s essay focuses on V., and Freer’s chapter (14-39) on V. and The Crying of Lot 49. Grassian’s essay has the merit of offering a very comprehensive overview of critical disinterest in “the connection of the early Pynchon of V. and Beat writers” (127), where he cites work by Judith Chambers, David Seed, Robert Newman, and Christopher Ames. Grassian doesn’t mention Pierre-Yves Petillon’s important essay on the influence of Kerouac in The crying of lot 49.

16 But irony may also lead to the paralysis (and parabasis) characteristic of skepticism. See Grassian, 12.

17 This idea is already in Aristotle: “A sign of what has been said [about the unclarity of what prudence requires] is the fact that whereas young people become accomplished in geometry and mathematics … prudent young people do not seem to be found” (Nicomanean Ethics Book VI.8).

18 McHale speaks of a repression and dissimulation of homoeroticism in the intensely homosocial Against the Day (24).

19 Pynchon’s endorses Benjamin Franklin’s conception of sloth as directed against uniform, one-way, unreversible time: see Haines, 177.

20 “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee” is the title of the essay Pynchon contributed to a collection of articles on the seven deadly sins published in The New York Times Book Review.

21 Mortenson’s discussion on the configurations of temporality in Kerouac’s On the Road—reading the novel as “an attack on the corruption of time by capitalism” (52)—is particularly illuminating.

22 Misogyny is a latent force in Pynchon’s early stories. See Hawthorne, 521-23. This poses a “sublime” obstacle, perhaps, to the possibility of a “democracy to come” scholars like Hillis Miller (232) see as part of the story’s promise. For the complicity between “male homosocial (including homosexual) and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power,” see Sedgwick, 25.

23 Recall that Dean tells Sal that he wants his lost father “to tell me things I’ve forgotten in my childhood” (On the Road 216).

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References

Electronic reference

Julián Jiménez Heffernan, The Improbable Education of Thomas Pynchon: Notes on Beat SlownessEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 20-4 | 2025, Online since 07 December 2025, connection on 10 March 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/25414; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15oy2

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About the author

Julián Jiménez Heffernan

Julián Jiménez Heffernan is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Universidad de Córdoba, Spain. He holds a Ph.D in Philology from the University of Bologna (1994), with a thesis on Giordano Bruno. He has published on Renaissance literature, deconstruction, and modern fiction, with a focus on the work of Richardson, Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, Waugh, Gordimer, Naipaul, Murdoch and Pynchon. He has also published extensively on Spanish literature and culture. His articles have appeared in journals like Comparative LiteratureComparative Literature StudiesNOVELStudies in American FictionArizona QuarterlyNarrative Theory, Contemporary Literature, The Henry James ReviewTextual Practice and Representations. He has co-edited Community in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Palgrave, 2013) and is the author of Shakespeare’s Extremes (Palgrave, 2016), Limited Shakespeare (Routledge, 2019), Unphenomenal Shakespeare: Pending Critical Quarrels (Brill, 2023) and Prepossessing Henry James: The Strange Freedom (Routledge, 2023). He is currently working on a book on Thackeray and Marx for Palgrave.

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