"Hi! My Name Is Arnold Snarb!": Homosexuality in the Crying of Lot 49 (Critical Essay‪)‬

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) has evoked a wealth of critical attention, but this attention has overlooked its frequent references to male homosexuality. J. Kerry Grant, for example, in his Companion to The Crying of Lot 49, ignores all but a couple of Pynchon's most obvious gaytalk or straight-slang references to homosexuality. On the one hand, Pynchon treats the hidden gay-world as an undesirable, almost unthinkable, underside of San Francisco, carrying the mark of the pariah; on the other hand, he makes it a necessary component of a distorted and distorting heterosexuality. Through her encounter with this homosexual underworld and its symbolic value system, Oedipa learns what it means to be a heterosexual woman capable of standing on her own in a world dominated by (supposedly) straight men. Cathy Davidson's 1977 essay "Oedipa as Androgyne" answered critics who ignored Pynchon's use of gender altogether. (1) But even before that, in 1974, Daniel Harris had thoroughly deconstructed the notion that androgyny was a cusp that joined the best of male and female characteristics and abilities, bluntly concluding, "That no woman should want to internalize the male myth in androgyny, except perhaps those who wish an easy accommodation with a masculine world they fear to offend, is plain" (172). I argue that, instead of seeing Oedipa as an androgyne, we should follow the steps of her feminist radicalization, a process in which male homosexuality guides and tutors her.