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‘Slothrop, you pig.’ ‘Oink, oink, oink,’ sez Slothrop cheerfully” (Pynchon
208). The connotation associated with being piggish in coitus that Katje
places on Slothrop is simultaneously abject and arousing. Katje’s words
infer that Slothrop is doing something dirty or uncivilized (and thus
inhuman), therefore acting more like an animal than a decent human
being. The tone and circumstances of her comment—being spoken while
under the covers presumably during a sexual act, in between groans, and
not attempting to stop Slothrop’s actions—implies that his piggishness
may also connote an insatiable sexual appetite that is welcome in bed.
Allon A. White’s essay on transgression, “Pigs and Pierrots: The
Politics of Transgression in Modern Fiction,” helps to illuminate
this duality. Studying the pig as a symbol of transgression in Gravity’s
Rainbow, he writes that “the ambivalence of the pig is that it stands for
both bodily enjoyment (the belly, genitals, excrement), and for odious
bestiality” (56), an applicable description for what takes place in the
previous passage. Katje knows Slothrop’s sexuality is perhaps abject, or
at least frowned upon by conventional standards, but it is enjoyable
and sexually satisfying nonetheless. Tyrone’s swinish act also exhibits
transgressive behavior and is therefore a subversive act against Them
(the elusive conspirers that the paranoiac narrator mentions through the
novel) and the rocket. The enjoyment of sex is akin to fertility (associated
with nature) and contradicts the sterility and/or death symbol of the
rocket; sexuality and reproduction are reserved for the living, while the
rocket, comprised of inanimate materials, is used to kill. White also
writes that the “pig is carnivalesque victim and king, [a] gigantic eater,
[and] procreator symbolizing fertility” (56), while its victimhood is its
sacrifice and consumption. Slothrop establishes his pig-like appetite
for sex throughout the text, indicated early on by his map of London
marked for every place he has slept with a woman (much to the awe of
his peers). This map representing his sexuality ultimately alerts Them to
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his connection with the V-2 bombings in the city and what eventually
leads to his sacrificial “scattering,” sealing his fate as both a victim and
king because of his sexuality.
The pig as Christian symbol of victim and sacrifice recurs throughout
Gravity’s Rainbow, ultimately bearing the most striking connection to
Norse mythological symbols. Seaman Bodine, an intertextual character
from Pynchon’s first novel V (1961) was known as “Pig” Bodine. Bodine
is nearly cooked and sacrificed like a pig in the alliterative feast scene.
Hurley states that this episode “unites the pig as an image of sacrifice and
escape with the pig image drawn from Grimm and with that forming part
of the more complex transgressive thread of the novel” (210). Hurley,
therefore, associates the pig with the self-contradicting symbol of sacrifice
to and in subversion of the system. Interestingly, Norse mythology
contains more illuminating insight on Pynchon’s use of the sacrificial
pig that Hurley seems to omit within his focus on Christian symbols of
salvation. The recurring motif of sacrifice and salvation among piggish
characters is related to the mythological swine, Saehrimnir. In his book
on Norse mythology, Peter Andreas Munch describes Valhalla, a warrior’s
heaven where the men, welcomed by the gods Odin and Freyja (like
Pynchon’s Frieda), get to play-battle all day and feast and drink all night.
Running out of food is not an issue in Valhalla:
The Heroes are a great company, constantly increasing; but
their number is never so great that they do not have enough
to eat from the flesh of the boar Saehrimnir. The cook,
named Andhrimnir, each day boils the boar in a kettle called
Eldhrimnir; but at evening the beast is just as much alive and
unhurt as before. (48)
Just as Saehrimnir never stops providing sustenance to the heroes of
Valhalla, Pynchon’s swine are similarly sacrificed and revived numerous
times.
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