Meat man Pynchon

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Watching a program on the Gospel of Judas the other day brought to mind 
how GR's generally positive treatment of Gnosticism and the Nag Hammadi 
apocrypha (and the mention of Pynchon/Slothrop's ancestor's heretical 
tract sympathising with Judas Iscariot on pp. 555-6, interpolated into 
that pigs-into-pork digression) might also be seen as an allusion to 
the long history of religious anti-Semitism and stereotyping inculcated 
by the traditional, authorised Christian representation of Judas as 
thief and "evil" betrayer, which provided one of the justifications for 
the Nazi's persecution of the Jews.

Almost-certainly NP, but there's also that graphic pig-slaughtering 
scene in Part First of Jude the Obscure (1895).

best

On 24/06/2006:

> Yes, the pigs, the dodoes, the Herero. They're all likely to trigger 
> associations with the Holocaust in the reader's mind. But, again, 
> they're never explicitly connected to the Holocaust in the narrative, 
> or by the characters.
>
> It's good to be able to have these discussions finally. Despite that 
> initial stream of all-too-familiar outbursts, it seems as if the 
> near-total absence of descriptions of the Holocaust from the narrative 
> of GR, and the possible reasons for that, along with the various ways 
> in which Pynchon does constantly play on the reader's prior knowledge 
> of the Holocaust, have become legitimate topics for consideration 
> here.
>
> On 24/06/2006:
>
>> It may seem a little crass, but the slaughter of pigs IS yet another 
>> sly reference to the Holocaust in GR, the pigs being likened to the 
>> preterite (and by extension the Jews slaughtered by Hitler).  Pynchon 
>> is rumoured to have a deep affection for pigs, keeping stuffed toy 
>> pigs in his room during the writing of GR
>>
>> Ghetta
>>>
>>>>
>>>> I remember a public television history of Chicago that showed some 
>>>> diagrams of the mass-production slaughterhouses for pigs that were 
>>>> jaw-dropping in their carnage-per-minute.  Highly engineered 
>>>> machinery for mass butchery.
>>>> Now just imagine that those were people instead of pigs...
>>>>
>>>
>>> So now we're converting Pynchon family allusions into Holocaust 
>>> allusions?  (-;
>