“In Full Holocaust”: Gravity’s Rainbow and the Absent Atrocity

Leo Bersani has noted that when a novel uses the word paranoia as often as Gravity’s Rainbow does, it is “likely to make the reader somewhat paranoid about the very frequency of its use” (145). There is another word that appears with unusual frequency in the novel which also has the potential to make a reader if not paranoid, at least alert: holocaust. Interestingly, although the word appears eight times, it is never used with the decisive article. In this epic novel of the Second World War and its aftermath, it is always a holocaust, small ‘h’, never the Holocaust, big ‘H’.
Despite this insistent repetition of the word ‘holocaust’, as Katalin Orbán has argued Gravity’s Rainbow has not generally been read as a work of Holocaust fiction, or even in relation to the genre. The holocausts of the novel are more often taken to refer to, as for example in Steven C. Weisenburger’s companion to the novel, “the atomic holocaust of August 6, 1945” (265). The most notable exception to this may be Harold Bloom, who describes it as “the first authentic post-Holocaust novel” without, typically enough, developing this thought in detail (1).
This paper will address itself to this gap by reading Gravity’s Rainbow as a Holocaust novel, or as a novel which is at a fundamental level about the Holocaust, despite, or more accurately because of, its textual reticence. I will further argue that the novel aligns with a number of the key tendencies in, and strategies of, Holocaust fiction, while at the same time anticipating recent developments in the historiography of the Holocaust, particularly the association of its atrocities with a longer tradition of German, and European, colonialism (Stone 205).