GRGR(5): note on Katje

[rj]

Hi Nicole

> There's been some speculation on Katje's name--possible puns like 
> `catch ya' or `got ya' were suggested. Fwiw: `Katje' is not a dutch 
> girl's name, though `Katja' is. `Katje' actually means `little cat', 
> or, umm, `pussy'. Another low pun?

Her entrance is quite cat-like, too, moving "deliberately nowhere" about
the rooms. The pun on pussy is very apt, and just the sort of 'low pun'
Pynchon is renowned for. Wasn't there a suggestion that "Maas" (as in
Oedipa and Mucho) has some significance in Dutch? I'm liking the sound
of "Gotcha, b'jesus", too.

> I think Katje has been judged overly harshly on the whole. Why would 
> she have risked her life joining the Resistance in the first place if 
> not for some idealistic motive?

Everyone wants to like Katje. Pynchon even gives us Blicero's
contemplations about why Katje became a Nazi, a sort of reverse-mirror
to our own trust/hope that she did have an "idealistic motive" for
joining the Resistance:

"She appears to have reasons for being in the Party. A woman with some
background in mathematics, and with *reasons*. . . . " (97.16)

But the bottom line as far as I'm concerned is that she, personally, in
the 'real' life of the historical narrative, consigns "three
crypto-Jewish" families to the concentration camps in the full knowledge
that this will result in their deaths. The fact that she "smelled out"
(like a cat? or a snuffling pig?) the families suggests to me that she
had to get to know them first in order to discover their "crypto-", or
hidden, Jewishness. Heinous. On top of this, consciously or
sub-consciously, she suppresses any knowledge of the Holocaust she has,
or had, at the time and later on in London; quite completely and
deliberately so. Der Kinderofen game never recalls the concentration
camp ovens to her as it automatically does for Blicero, and as it
certainly does for the reader. It is just so obvious and yet Katje
refuses to countenance it, despite all the other connections she does
make. (94.36 - 95.13) Classic guilt-reflex denial imo.

Katje judges herself pretty harshly, too, I think, without ever
enunciating it. Certainly, she's human, flawed, a survivor, like all the
other chars. But, to condemn Blicero or Pointsman and not Katje seems to
create quite a large ethical dilemma, and it's the envelope Pynchon
seems to be pushing imo.

best