Slaughterhouse-Five: Effing awesome

*Be warned:  Spoilers ahead!*

To  me, black humor is one of the trickiest things to pull off.  There is a lot of black humor that I don’t enjoy, and it is hard to put my finger on what contributes to a piece’s success or failure.  What I do know is that Kurt Vonnegut always does it right, and Slaughterhouse-Five doesn’t take a single misstep, in spite of the fact that it is exceptionally dark.

The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, has had the tar beaten out of him by life and World War II.  After the war, he slides right back into his life as a student of optometry and has a nervous breakdown soon thereafter.  Twenty years after the war, he is in a plane accident, of which he is one of two survivors and in which he has his head bust open.  There is so much senseless violence, suffering, and cruelty in the world that Billy recedes into his own mind and science fiction to make sense of it.

One of the things that makes Slaughterhouse-Five such an incredible read is the way that Vonnegut marries his form with the function it serves.  The simple sentence structures and short paragraphs make the writing itself seem like the product of a mind suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.  Everything is stilted and brief, like a man walking on wounded legs, unsure when a knee might give way and send him crashing to the earth.  Each element of the story is like a geometric proof, one laid out after another as though at the end something logical will be constructed and a Q.E.D. can be found.  But of course, logic falls apart, and B does not follow A, let alone C follow B.  In fact, due to Billy’s being unstuck in time, even the simple logic of chronology is unable to remain in place.

Billy’s getting unstuck in time is brilliant at every level.  From a pure storytelling perspective, it allows Vonnegut to place his climax in 1945 and the bombing of Dresden while at the same time telling us about the life Billy lived afterwards.  Even more meaningful, though, is the way it reflects the fracturing of Billy’s mind in the ugliness of human-made atrocities.  Billy is trying to find a way to come to terms with all the meaningless death and destruction around him, and through the help of Kilgore Trout’s science fiction novels, he dwells on the concept of time as the fourth dimension and the way in which events could be viewed with the permanence of a landscape.  If you were to walk over a mountain range, you would start at the foothills, where the mountain is “born.”  Then, you would move over the collection of peaks and crags as though experiencing the life of the mountain range.  When you come to the end, back into the foothills on the other side, the mountain has “died,” and if you could only walk in one direction, that mountain would be forever “dead” to you.  But we have the ability to step back and see the whole mountain range from a distance; we do not celebrate its birth or death in space because it is forever revisitable by us.  If time worked the same way, we would have no need to celebrate a birth or death in time because we could revisit any portion of the life as easily as we vacation in the Rockies.  This approach cleverly reduces “death” to a mere inevitability and just a small portion of an entire structure.

How perfect to put that in a novel, where time is literally fixed.  We can revisit any portion of Billy’s life in the novel, and it will always be the same, word for word.  Nothing will ever change between those two covers.

The ramifications of this approach to time is that it, like a mountain range, is a permanent structure, unchanging.  What has happened has always happened and always will happen.  You cannot do anything other than what you have always done.  Free will, and the notion that we somehow make decisions that influence the course of things to come, is done away with.  The solution, then, to one problem, forces us into another.  But for Billy, who feels out of control anyways, he much prefers the notion of permanence in time to the notion of free will. 

Slaughterhouse-Five is, of course, an anti-war novel.  And as I’ve said in my posts about Animal Farm, 1984, and The Grapes of Wrath, a political novel is only as good as its artistry.  Nobody wants to read a lecture, and nobody turns to novels for a collection of facts.  We want characters and drama and thought, and philosophy to chew on about how life works and how we are to live it.  If Slaughterhouse-Five were simply a collection of all the ways in which war destroys lives and culture, it would be a crappy book.  It is the humor and the characters and the messiness of life that make this such a wonderful book.

Early in the novel, Vonnegut discusses this idea of an anti-war book and is told by someone that he might as well write an “anti-glacier book.”   

What he meant of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.  I believe that too.  And even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.

He’s under no illusion that a book can stop wars, or that wars are the only source of death and mayhem.  Still, he knows that novels (and other forms of entertainment) do have an effect on people and their willingness to support or go to war.  Mary, his friend’s wife, is angry at the narrator for wanting to write a book about the war because he’s likely to ennoble the acts: 

You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men.  And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them.  And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.

So Vonnegut promises Mary that “there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne” in his novel.  And there is not.  Nothing is glorified about the war.  There are no great speeches or rousing of the troops.  There are no flag-waving moments of intense patriotism.  He observes in the final third of the novel: 

There are almost no characters in this story, almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.  One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

Which brings us back to the lack of free will in the Tralfamodorian construct of time.  Wars, like glaciers, advance on us, and the machinery cannot be stopped by any art or even any individuals for that matter—we are no more than “listless playthings of enormous forces.”  Nothing we do can change anything anyways.

Now that is some dark shit right there.  I’m not sure you can get much darker, so why isn’t this the most depressing novel on the shelves?  Because Vonnegut fights against those enormous forces with humor, wit, and powerful observations about people.  In that humor and laughter that is thrown in the face of the inevitable, there is something incredibly uplifting.  It is the dance band on the Titanic playing as the ship scuppers.  There is an element of hope that says that if only enough people could see the ridiculousness of what is happening, maybe something could happen.  Okay, we know it won’t.  But, what if?!  But, it won’t. 

And that’s what makes Slaughterhouse-Five, and all the Vonnegut novels I have read, successful black humor stories.  That cycle of despair and hope . . . it’s so human.  He says in the first chapter that he loved Lot’s wife for looking back as Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, “because it was so human.”  That’s how I feel about Vonnegut through his writings: I love him because he was so human.  All his wisdom and wit never come as an attack from the outside, because he always knows that the massive mess that is humanity is his own lot, his own home.  He is the uncle at a large family gathering who is scathing in his comments, but who makes us all laugh and understand ourselves.  He can say what he says because he is part of the family; he still comes to the gatherings, unlike some other family members who have sworn us off completely.  And when I think of the human being I want to be in this life, I want to make Uncle Kurt proud.

The Meta-French Meta-Lieutenant's Meta-Woman

I usually open these posts with a warning that I will be spoiling a lot about the novel.  I want, as I head into this post about John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, to put emphasis on that warning.  I am not just going to be revealing a fact or two; I am going to be talking about the ending at some length, so if you haven’t read this book and have any desire at all to do so—and you really should want to read it, because it is absolutely wonderful--do no read this blog.  Bookmark it and come back after you have finished it.  My post will still be here gathering digital dust until you come back.

Not having read the book before, and having read nothing about it ahead of time, I had no idea what Fowles’s novel was about—except perhaps a woman who associated with a lieutenant from France.  It was great fun for me to watch the novel unfold as I scribbled notes on the four 4x6 cards that I keep with each book for that purpose.  On these cards, I keep track of characters, when they are first introduced and when information about them is revealed; I write down quotations that I feel are central to what the novel is doing or that I think are just cool; and I scribble down themes and revelations as they come to me.  My first note of substance here was “narrator conscious of the historical context of novel written from 1969 [as the novel is set in 1867].”  Little did I know how important the narrator was going to become.  I actually tried to keep track of when Fowles’s narrator broke the temporal fourth wall (fifth wall?), drawing attention to the historical nature of the novel.  Yeah, I abandoned that effort only a few chapters in, because of course the narrator never lets the reader forget that the novel is historical and artificial and a figment of the author’s imagination.  In fact, the thrust of the narrative is set aside entirely in Chapter 13.  The previous chapter ends with two questions: “Who is Sarah?” and “Out of what shadows does she come?”  Chapter 13, then, begins,

I do not know.  This story I am telling is all imagination.  These characters I create never existed outside my own mind.  If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and ‘voice’ of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God.  He many not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does.  But I live in an age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word.

How fantastic is that?!  I wanted to put all of chapter 13 onto my 4x6 cards!

So what we have in the end is a love story that, for the most part, follows the conventions of a Victorian novel, much like one Hardy would tell.  But in addition to that story, set in the late 1860s, we have a meta-experience of the novel from the narrator/author who unravels this tale in the late 1960s.  In lesser hands this would amount to little more than a gimmick, a tricky way to have his Victorian story and his modern sensibility at the same time.  But far from being a gimmick, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a moving and intellectual study of modern society both at its roots with the growth of the middle class and at the present time.  Fowles manages to imitate the voice and poise of a Victorian narrative throughout the novel, writing beautiful sentences and looking into the thoughts and behaviors of all his characters (at least when he wants to), laying them out sensibly, articulately, and artistically.  Then, sitting just on top of that narrative, like a clear overlay or like neatly written marginalia, Fowles adds humor and irony from his modern perspective and self-aware uses of convention.  The thing that makes it all work is Fowles’s refusal to romanticize either the past or the present.  He goes through great pains to illuminate the Victorian world in the 1860s, discussing such scientific, social, and political giants of the time as Darwin, Marx, Arnold, Tennyson, Rossetti, and many others.  Fowles displays nothing but respect for the times and his characters, even as he keeps a nearly clinical distance.

For me, the novel was an intellectual joy for the first three quarters, and I was thinking of the novel as a 4-star affair, leaving back that last star because I was not emotionally invested in what unfolded.  But the last 70 pages changed all that.  And here is really the part that you want to stop reading if you ever want to be able to experience the sense of discovery when you read this novel somewhere down the road.  Seriously.  Stop reading if you haven’t read the novel.  Go read the novel!  You will not regret it!

Okay.  From Charles’s breaking of his engagement with Ernestina to the end of the novel was a whirlwind for me that kept turning the screws, to paraphrase Henry James, pulling me more and more into the emotional center of the novel.  Actually, the last movement should date from Fowles’s first false ending, the ending that Charles imagines for himself.  And as everything fell apart for Charles and as Sarah was nowhere to be seen, I found myself caring more and more about his predicament and I wanted him and Sarah to have a happy ending.  I suspected that there was no way Fowles was going to allow the two to find happiness together, but damnit, I wanted it deep inside.  I knew this was partly because of my own expected conventions (just as I knew happiness was dubious because of different conventions) and partly because I liked both Sarah and Charles.  So much was riding on Sarah and Charles’s final encounter for me as a reader.  My entire evaluation of the book rested on what happened in that final exchange.  I suspect I was not alone.

The ending was  . . . brilliant.  Charles’s talk with Sarah is exquisitely painful.  Narrative desires dictates that Sarah realize that she loves Charles who has righteously pined for her.  But Fowles constructs the scene to mirror Charles’s dumping of Ernestina.  At that earlier scene we rooted for Charles to break it off no matter how painful it might be for Ernestina because he couldn’t chain himself to a life of unhappiness in the name of duty.  So here, as Sarah reveals that she is genuinely happy, that she in fact does not want to be married to anyone, my heart was pulled in two as I realized she was right.  And yet still I rooted for a union.  And I wanted Sarah to be free.  And I wanted a union.  The pull in both directions was equal and painful and so beautifully balanced that I had nothing but admiration as Fowles punched my heart again and again.  And then!  To give us two endings!  Neither one completely satisfactory, but together somehow more complete. 

I knew that Sarah would be something of a feminist hero when the first thing we encounter is her gaze, which “pierces” and “diminishes” Charles.  Any feminist scholar is familiar with the male gaze as a violent and dominating thing, so to have the strength of the gaze given to Sarah made me put a few exclamation points on my 4x6 cards.  Her determination to not marry at the end of the novel comes across as a truly transgressive act and not some half-assed attempt to be progressive.  Yes, she could have been even more aggressive in her drive for independence, but to make her such would change her very character and I think gain very little, because her final decision and her rejection of Charles would lose all its punch and meaning.  And I can see someone making the argument that Fowles’s own inability to pierce Sarah’s character and motives feels like an unnecessary continuation of the notion of woman as an unsolvable mystery, but again the protective shield around Sarah’s heart and mind seems complete when not even the narrator and creator can penetrate them.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a stunning and wonderful novel.

No Complaints but Portnoy's

*As always, there are spoilers in this post*

Portnoy’s Complaint is possibly the funniest and the most vulgar book on this reading list so far.  Well, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer might be more vulgar, but its vulgarity was infinitely less enjoyable than Philip Roth’s compelling creation.

Portnoy’s Complaint is the extended monologue  of Alexander Portnoy from the couch of his psychotherapist, Dr. Spielvogel.  Portnoy details every sexual compulsion, oddity, and desire he has ever felt with all the passion and enthusiasm of a sinner working through a final confession.  But unlike the sinner, there is defiance sewn in with his shame.  But even as the novel feels like a comedy routine that mines Portnoy’s life for every comic angle and that considers nothing too base to be a punch line, the novel has a depth and a power that raises it above a mere collection of humorous vignettes.  At some point in the middle of the novel, I doubted that there was anything in the plot that was going to develop into a huge revelation, and it became clear to me that the force of the novel lay entirely in Portnoy’s character.

Portnoy is a comic everyman, not in the sense that we all have bizarre sexual desires, but in the sense that we are all incredibly vexed by who we are and what we desire.  Warring in his mind are equal parts self-loathing and self-love, pride and shame, animal desires and intellectual analysis—and the war has left a bloody mess on the battlefield of his soul.  He is by turns disgusting and endearing.  It is a testament to Roth’s ability as a writer that Portnoy can be a hostile sexist pig and yet I found myself more sympathetic than critical.  His humor and his total forthrightness make him relatable and enjoyable to follow.  He is brutally honest, and in telling these scenes of humiliation and personal pain, he had me laughing out loud. Even though the neurotic Jew has become something of a caricature in our times (and I believe that it was not uncommon in 1969 either), there is nothing stale or hackneyed in Roth's depiction of Portnoy.

At its root, the novel is about masculinity and the idea of becoming a “man.”  What he is trying to free himself from as far as his mother is concerned is not his Oedipal desire for her but his status as a momma’s boy, a good rule-following kid who is an over-achieving academic.  He admires most the “men,” a word that he himself puts in quotation marks, who play softball on Sunday afternoons when he was a kid growing up in New Jersey.  His obsession with his penis is his obsession with maleness, for this is a coming of age story (pun intended) in which the protagonist is unable to come (pun intended) of age.  He may have grown to be a 33 year old public figure in New York, but he has never grown up, and for that, he mostly blames his mother.  He cycles through his past girlfriends to identify the moments at which he could have grown up and settled into manhood.  And Portnoy is merciless in his criticisms of himself and his treatment of the women in his life.

For as humorous as the novel is, it is also incredibly angry.  Behind all the jokes and self-deprecation, there lies a sometimes simmering and sometimes explosive hostility.  Whether Alex is jerking off of going at it with The Monkey, he is violent and unrelenting.  And even though I suspected, as I stated earlier, that the plot would prove to have no natural or insightful climax, I was wrong.  All this hostility erupts at the novel’s conclusion when Alex attempts to rape Naomi in Israel.   In that scene, Naomi takes from Alex his final and most dependable crutch, his humor.  She says of him, “And you are a highly intelligent man—that is what makes it even more disagreeable.  The contribution you could make!  Such stupid self-deprecation!  How disagreeable!”  Alex replies, “Oh I don’t know, . . . self deprecation is, after all, a classic form of Jewish humor.”  “Not Jewish humor!” Naomi erupts.  “No!  Ghetto humor.”   She then proceeds to say that Portnoy is everything wrong with the disapora of the Jews and that his humor is part of Jewish character that allowed the Jews to be destroyed by the Nazis.  It is only after this criticism that Alex jumps up and attempts to rape Naomi, proving to her and himself that he is a “man.”  But it is also at this moment that he is ultimately unmanned, since he has become impotent, which is what has led him to Dr. Spielvogel’s office.  His self-loathing has bested his self-love, and the delicate balance that has allowed him to continue is upset.

That is our hero who is not in the least way heroic.  Roth does an amazing job in capturing the complex machinery of anger and self-loathing that churns about in our brains at every level of consciousness, and he manages to do that with style, humor, love, and sympathy.  I may not want to hang out with Alex Portnoy, but I respect and understand him, feel his pain, and see myself in him.  I cannot imagine it was an easy thing to balance all the pieces of Portnoy’s soul.  If you are not comfortable with crass humor,  extended scenes of masturbation and sex, or swearing and vulgar expressions, then this is probably not the book for you.  But if you enjoy laughing in the face of what is sad and unchanging about the human condition, and if you love a sharply told story, beautifully written with laugh-out-loud passages, then I highly recommend Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.

An American Tragedy: The Confessions of Nat Turner

*As always, there are spoilers ahead*

The Heartland Film Festival plays for two weeks every fall here in Indianapolis.  In spite of the fact that we have lived here for ten years, this is the first year that Ann and I have been able to attend any of the screenings.  Our son was in California for his fall break, so we took a Friday off and saw three films in a row.  The last film for the night was We Are the Giant, a documentary by Greg Barker about three pairs of individuals involved in separate Arab Spring rebellions.  It was a fantastic film, and I highly recommend that you see it when it is released in theaters.  One of the striking features of the film is that all the people at the center of the narratives are still in the midst of the revolutions.  Nothing is settled, and these people are fighting against an institutional power with no assurances that they will be victorious or that their cause will not be undermined even if victory is attained.  This uncertainty of rebellion has been bouncing around in my head since the viewing.  The other aspect of the stories that resonated with me was the violence of any political uprising.  Some revolutions begin with bullets, but others are begun with a determination to employ only peaceful means.  At some point, however, those peaceful protestors are set upon by tanks and machine guns run by the national powers that are equally determined not to be overthrown.  Do the protestors avoid violence and offer themselves as sacrificial lambs and martyrs, or do they pick up arms and fight not only for freedom but for self preservation? 

It was not until I was half way into the novel that I realized the issues fresh in my head from We Are the Giant are also at play in William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner.  From the start, I knew that I was reading a fictionalized account of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, the largest slave uprising in history.  I knew that there is a real 20-page document of Turner’s confessions and that Styron, as he says in his Author’s Note that opens the novel, “rarely departed from the known facts about Nat Turner and the revolt of which he was the leader,” but that “in those areas where there is little knowledge in regard to Nat, his early life, and the motivations for the revolt (and such knowledge is lacking most of the time), I have allowed myself the utmost freedom of imagination in reconstructing events.”  Yet knowing those things, I had no idea how Turner would be created or how his rebellion would be imagined.  The details of those imaginings are the very things that make this novel incredible.

How many reasons could a slave possibly need for rising up and killing his oppressors?  I never expected anything impressive because no labor would need to be done to even imagine the motives.  But Styron does a beautiful job of making his world as messy and as complicated and as real as life itself.  His characters are complex jumbles of competing motivations and desires and the book stinks of their sweat and worry, their aspirations and longings.  The slave owners and white lawyers are as human as Nat and his inner circle of friends who help him execute his plan.  Styron, in short, takes no short cuts.  He does not let any of his or your assumptions about slaves, slave owners, whites, blacks, early 19^th-century Virginians dictate his story.  As a result, the reader is always on a voyage of discovery in this tragic world brought magically to life.

The novel begins in a jail cell where Nat and his friend Hark are imprisoned waiting for their trials and eventual executions.  In the first part of the novel, Nat meets with Thomas Gray, an attorney who takes down his confession and writes it up for Nat to sign.  In this section we learn the general facts of the matter, as Styron uses actual passages from the original text published as The Confessions of Nat Turner.  We learn that Nat is well versed in the Bible, that he is something of a reverend, that he is well educated and feeling separated from his God.  I assumed that his rebellion started as an impulsive act against a cruel overseer that gained unintentional speed, so it was with some shock that I read this offhand statement that Nat makes in the middle of a reverie:  

I had for going on to several years now considered the necessity of exterminating all the white people in Southampton County and as far beyond as destiny carried me, and there was thus available to me more time than I had ever had before to ponder the Bible and its exhortations, and to think over the complexities of the bloody mission that was set out before me.

The calm with which Turner referred to the mass slaughter of “all the white people” took me by surprise and made me uncomfortable.  Moreover his religious fervor and sense that the Bible was “exhort[ing]” him on a “mission” made me think to myself that Turner must be a little nuts and a dangerous religious zealot.  And as I said earlier, it was not until the middle of the novel that I began to understand how Nat could so casually insist of killing every white person, men, women, and children without being the least bit crazy. 

Nat may feel his religion strongly, but his thinking is always ordered and rational—there is no trace of insanity in his plans.  Nat’s goal is to lead hundreds of slaves to freedom in the depths of a nearby swamp from where they can defend themselves from whites seeking to re-enslave them.  It is a three day march through the countryside and along the way, he and his crew will need to amass an army, supplies, weapons, and horses to ensure their reaching the swamp and surviving once there.  As Nat tells his four disciples when first revealing his plan to them, “One or two niggers run off an’ they send out the dogs.  Three niggers run off an’ they sent out the army.”  In short, the white men react strongly to the smallest rebellion, so the reaction to something large will be astronomical.  If Nat and his followers are to survive three days, they will need to go undiscovered for at least two.  To go undiscovered, no one can be left alive to run and warn the other.  No one.  The reality of this necessity is brought to the reader slowly and subtly, and it becomes clear that Nat is correct—any betrayal can undo them, and to spare one white life is to create the argument that another should be spared, and mercy will result in their ultimate defeat.  In fact, it is one tiny act of mercy by Nat himself that does undo the rebellion leading to an alarm going up among the whites, which puts an eventual end to the rebellion.  As a reader you are in a no win situation, wanted Nat to succeed and wanting no one to have to die.

This necessity of death is the tragedy at the heart of the book.  The very institution of slavery and the violence (and continual threat of violence) by the whites needed to keep slavery alive is the very thing that necessitates the murder of so many innocents.  Just like those involved in the Arab Spring uprisings, in Virginia, 1831, there can be no peaceful rebellion if the rebellion has any hopes of ending in freedom.  Styron weaves this fact together through the slow building of the novel and the revealing of the characters and the character of the world they live in.  Styron does what I admire most of any writer, creating characters who are understandable, admirable in their own way, though flawed in equally understandable ways.  I don’t need to like a character, but I need to love something about them, to love that complicated knot at their heart that makes them incontrovertibly human.

The Confessions of Nat Turner is a heartbreaking and powerful novel, beautifully constructed and beautifully written.