The Improbable Education of Thomas Pynchon: Notes on Beat Slowness

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.