GRGR(6) - section 8 (#3)

[Paul Mackin]

On Wed, 28 Jul 1999, rj wrote:

> "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?

I had thoughts which might possibly be related to those of rj. Could these
examples be seen as a mild rebuke to the commandeering of the word to one
specific usage. Actually the specific use and prominence in the media
of the word and  the event itself hadn't by 1973 become what most people
would consider excessive. That came later, starting around the  end of the
seventies with popular books, TV and movie treatments. 

First time I heard the word holocaust used in the upper case sense  was in
the early  sixties and it took a couple of seconds to register what was
being talked about. The thing itself was of course well known to everyone
by this time.


> 
> 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.

The declaration of war by world colonial powers Britain and France against
Germany in September 1939 insured that it would be a WORLD war in the
fullest sense of the word--going on in dozens of places in the
world--Europe, Africa, Asia. 

Of course Italy went to war with Ethiopia in 1935, or you could argue that
the world dimension of the thing started in the EARLY thirties with
Japan in Manchuria. Japan wanted to BECOME a world power as did of course
Germany.

Or you could argue that WWII was simply a continuation of WWI--the Great
War.

However I don't think P is playing with any of these possibilities.
And he certainly didn't misspeak himself.

	 P.