GRGR(6) - section 8 (#3)

[rj]

Terrance wrote:
> What about the holocaust, the war?

"fuel consumed in the metered winter holocaust" (112.5)

"his tongue's a hopeless holocaust" (118.11)

"Up in the city the arc-lamps crackle, furious, in smothered blaze up
the centerlines of the streets, too ice-colored for candles, too
chill-dropleted for holocaust . . . " (134.5)

Are these holocaust metaphors significant in that they are deliberate
*non*-references to The Holocaust? (Reminds me of those S-shaped
spokes!) Do you think Pynchon's jolting the *reader's* conscience here a
little? When was the term first applied to name the Nazis' attempted
Jewish genocide in Germany during the 30s and 40s? Who coined it?

With the "seventh Christmas" thing I was thinking more in terms of
Roger's pov, and about the prior wars in the 1930s -- Spain and
Sudetenland particularly, flareups in the Balkans, Novi Pazar etc --
which the British War Ministry might have been interested in. It seems
feasible to me that Roger was employed sometime in 1938. And, likewise
to the above, when did history bestow the title WWII and declare the
dates 1939-1945 as definitive? Perhaps from the vantage of the
mid-to-late 30s, particularly in Western Europe, the notion of the
'start' of The War was a little looser than the one we've got now, with
the benefit of hindsight and our ethnic and political agendas wrt
history.

best