GRGR(5) Katje and the Nazis

[rj]

Doug, right at the beginning of this thread:

> "Golden swine" and "pigs of gold" (108) play with two
> deep-seated stereotypes of the Jews. In a neat reversal, it's the "Dutch
> pigs" who take "care of the eggs and younger birds," a sentence that
> reminds me -- stretching a bit here, perhaps, but what the heck --  of the
> Nazi collaborators who betrayed the young Anne Frank in her hidden
> Amsterdam nest.

I don't even think you need to go outside the text to make the
connections here. In Occupied Mauritius Frans' "golden swine" are the
Dutch pigs who sniff out the Dodo chicks and eggs, the ones hidden away
in nests. In Occupied Holland 300-odd years later Frans' descendant,
Katje, is one such golden swine or Dutch pig herself, "smelling out"
crypto-Jewish families in their nests, to the same genocidal end.
Captains Blicero and Prentice (and Wim, too, I guess), like Frans, are
the keepers of the pigs, somewhere in the middle of chains of command
going up to the likes of Brigadier Pudding and Dr Pointsman and whoever
their counterparts might be in the Dutch Resistance and the Nazi High
Command -- Mussert and his cronies perhaps -- or the Imperial Dutch
court in Frans' case: these are the "Someones-Over-There" Pirate
suspects. They're all 'measly little lives', though, all human, and we
can pity them and see their reasons for what they believe and do
(Rilkean and Pavlovian and Christian idealism); yet still the Holocaust
happened, and individual humans just like these these played their parts
in it. But, beyond them all are the corporations, industries, trade
agreements and economic systems, the *inhuman* and thus immortal
behemoths which these "games" of control and death -- ongoing over
centuries in all human civilisations, *and* the specific ones of
Mauritius, Sudwest, WWII -- are really all about. 

I don't think the Holocaust is a metaphor in GR. Or, it's not only a
metaphor. It's there, a fact in the text, an always-present aspect of
one -- several -- of the central and ongoing narrative threads in the
novel; but apprehensions of it are refracted through personal lenses,
through the various characters' points of view about what's going down,
rather than through historical interpretation, statistical analysis or
cinematic stereotypes. And, of course, the realities of daily life for
the individual, in and out of wartime -- ducking, fucking, eyebrow
plucking -- are the selfish or mindless pleasures which occupy much of
the characters', and our (and human, I think Pynchon is saying)
consciousness and travail.

After quitting Der Kinderofen game "for good" Katje decides that "from
here on in she will be Katje", her own mistress (104). Her amoralism is
now complete, and this attitude connects with Slothrop's selfish
indulgences and solipsistic paranoia as well. I think back again to
Jess's instinctive horrified recoil from the thought of Slothrop's
uncanny ability to rain down the V-2 bombs on innocent young women all
over London. Katje has this same power in Holland, raining down the
British bomb raids on whatever targets she chooses, on all of Blicero's
young Rauhandel's. (96-98) Both Katje and Slothrop can predict where the
bombs will fall. The ancestral narrative recounts are also
neatly-balanced.

The only differences in all of these pairings: Captain Blicero/Captain
Prentice, Katje/Slothrop, Katje/Frans' hogs; is the extent to which each
individual is aware of the consequences of their wartime occupations,
and to what purposes their 'unique talents' are actually being put.

best