GRGR(5): note on Katje

[rj]

Mark, Scott

> Peit, Wim and the rest of Katje's resistance cell are aware of and
> complicit in the 'three Jewish families sent east' to establish Katje's
> credibility with the SS; she didn't have to hunt them up herself.  It
> is Weissman/Blicero who thinks Katje has 'smelled them out'.  That she
> fails to call the bombers down on Blicero himself may be ascribed to
> her fear for her own personal safety and is understood even by her
> masters in the British SOE, else Pirate needn't have made the effort to
> bring her out.  I think it is a misunderstanding of the nature of
> reality to think that anyone could join the anti-Nazi resistance out of
> concern for personal safety.  Katje could have gotten along quite well
> on her own, anywhere. 

> I even read a bit of nobility in her refusal to present the DU with
> information about SchuBstelle 3. Though I don't mean to suggest that Katje
> was "in love" with Blicero, I do think she comes to recognize Blicero's
> "measly little life", his humanity, and holds off the bombers for this
> measly, but real, love that is simple recognition.
> 
> Rather than amoral, as has been suggested, I see Katje as repeatedly held in
> tension between different moral levels - the individual vs. the greater
> good.  A tension that displaces her between levels and causes her to
> *appear* autonomous, while, in fact, it is her inability to limit herself to
> a single moral directive that causes her apparent lack of moral compass.
> And in this, I think, we find *her* humanity. 

Yes, Pynchon casts the Resistance and the Allies as complicit in the
death of these three families, particularly in that passage about the
"real conversion factor" between information and lives written down in
the War Department Manual, which Doug cited previously.(105.23) I
certainly don't think Pynchon's saying "that's war" and shrugging. The
ironic tone is incredibly bitter, scathing, as Doug mentioned. But
whether the Resistance did or didn't set up the three families isn't
really the point as far as Katje's involvement is concerned. In order to
have "smelled" them out, or even appeared to've, she still had to get to
know them. And knew the fate they were being consigned to. Just like she
got to know the German soldiers -- "kids, neurotic, lonely, pilots and
crews, they all loved to talk"(105.18) -- whose locations she betrays,
raining down the Spitfire strafing and bombs. She brings death to
"families" and "kids", and yet we can still construct and announce our
sense of her 'humanity' and her 'nobility', even her 'idealism'. It's
really quite an exceptional effect Pynchon has rendered. 

What we do get of Katje's motives in the text never convinces me of her
idealism or altruism:

"How seriously is she playing? In a conquered country, one's own
occupied country, it's better, she believes, to enter into some formal,
rationalized version of what, outside, proceeds without form and decent
limit day and night ..., the War, the absolute rule of chance, their own
pitiable contingency here, in its midst." (96.5)

Bombs are dropping and people are scared on *both* sides of the Channel.
Each individual tries to bring order to the chaos, to take *control*,
even if only of her or his own life, or the lives of these they "love"
...

Why Katje joined the Nazi Party, why the Resistance (and which first),
why she didn't reveal the location of SchuBstelle 3: all of this remains
supposition. Blicero's, Gottfried's, Wim's, Pirate's, ours.

When she and Pirate rendezvous (beside a windmill known as "The Angel"),
her past involvement in the War becomes a (figurative, oil) painting in
the house near the racecourse. As well as tying her to the
Frans-and-dodo egg Vermeer and further reinforcing her status as an
image, or simalcrum in the text, this analogy demonstrates the extent
and continuance of her duplicity:

"centuries passing like the empurpled clouds, darkening an infinitesimal
layer of varnish between herself and Pirate, granting her the shield of
serenity she needs, of classic irrelevance. . . . " (106.17)

She leads Pirate to believe she had been "only witnessing the
Oven-game". In other words, she lies. She was *always* a player.

A couple of other things:
How does she get her SOS note to Pirate? Someone else on the German side
(who puts the note and canister into the rocket and fires it), and
someone else on the British side (who knows about Pirate's fetishisation
of Scorpia Mossmoon) have to be involved.

And, if you don't think Katje "loved" Blicero, check out that meeting
between Enzian and she, "the true Golden bitch", later on.(658 ff)  She
is inscrutable, like David sez, a latter-day Gioconda.

Michael, Paul:
> I think, though, with a little thought to the time _GR_ was written,
> part of the point of the book could have been that the "Good War" had
> not been so good after all.  During the time a war was being fought
> that was, even while it dragged on, becoming increasingly thought to be
> less than noble, comes a book showing the less noble side of what many
> have considered the noblest of wars.

>  in the late sixties.
> There was a group of revisionist historians as they were called who very
> much picked up on the idea that WWII and  the Cold War growing out of it
> were not all that noble from the American and British standpoint. One was
> named [Gabriel] Kolko and his book was _The Politics of War_. 

I'm not sure who, apart from the war-mongers themselves and perhaps
Hollywood scriptwriters of the era, would have referred to WWII as "the
noblest of wars." I remember my history professor railing against a crop
of American WWII historians of the 60s and 70s -- "apologists" he called
them. Kolko's name rings a bell, but there were others too, I think. And
maybe in this -- the time _GR_ was published, the theme that the "Good
War" wasn't such at all -- there is more to the anti-US in Vietnam
sentiments Doug sees as possibly operating in the text. Totally
submerged, of course: necessarily so. Another case of leaving it up to
the reader to make the (obvious) connection?

best