Class Notes April 3: Vonnegut and the Ethical Cloud

The novel Slaughter-House Five seems implicitly preoccupied with how individuals are suppossed to react and create meaning from life after witnessing or experiencing horrible events, like Dresden. We saw a similiar attention to this in Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, but Vonnegut differs from Frankl and from Chris Hedges because he participated in war as a combatant, not a survivor-victim or a journalist. Even as Billy Pilgrim seems distant from us in the book, perhaps necessarily distant, Vonnegut nonetheless engages the concept of how individuals respond to horror at several different points in the novel, and in several different ways.

Throughout the pages when the Tralfamadorians first abduct Billy to their home planet, Billy asks them "why" him. It's a question that he could have, not incidently, asked about his entire war experience, or his entire life. It's a question we might ask ourselves after encountering some of the terrible headlines in newspapers recently. It's a question we probably asked ourselves after September 11, 2001, if we were young then, and fairly complacent about the consequences of history on the present.

Later in novel, in a POW camp, a prisoner asks a German guard, "why?". The German guard responds hastily and with contempt. "Vy you? Vy anyone?"

In the decades surrounding World War II, and especially afterwards, many philosophers grew haunted by the extreme brutality of the European concentration camps and the wrenching destruction caused by the American atomic bomb in Japan. For many, the wickedness of human depravity signaled conclusive evidence that the moral and ethical regimes once promoted by deomcratic government and the Christian religion had grown bankrupt in the shadow of an anti-humanist, technological modernity. Led by the French writer Jean Paul Sartre, the philosophy known as existentialism blossomed. At the risk of reducing it to a vulgar soundbite, I might summarize the philosophy as a system of thought that concentrated on the individual as an agent of free choice in a world without any over-riding beliefs, and in a reality defined ever more by expressions of cruelty and contempt for the soverignty of the human body.

Vonnegut published his novel at the height of the American war in Vietnam, when many young Americans began to ask themselves some of the same questions as young persons after World War II; these questions are probably quite similar to the ones we ask ourselves in class. For some characters in Vonnegut's novel, like Billy Pilgrim, it seems facing the hysteria of history induces a kind of punishment and shock. Dresden, for him, is too much.

For other characters in the novel, especially those that defend Dresden at the conclusion of the novel, Dresden was necessary, and the result of certain unavoidable consequences. They speak of the event in abstract platitudes. Billy, for a time, seems so shocked that he, too, cannot understand the event as anything more than a random constellation of statistics, or as a moonscape utterly charred and scorched. Then, he breaks down in a conversation with two vets about two horses he was riding around Dresden's barren aftermath. He sees the bloody mouths and hoofs, and their suffering 'catches' him.

Here, Vonnegut offers us a choice that we can understand, and that we discussed yesterday in class. Refering to the damages of war in abstractions makes those horrors invisible. Thinking about casualities in numbers obscures their meaning. When someone pushes Billy into "seeing" the horses, Vonnegut changes the language through which Billy understands the horses: as horses, not as 'means of transportation.' In a similar fashion, we might suggest, language can never explain the experience of war generally through abstractions, platitudes, or cliches. Understanding war means inventing an original language, just as understanding life and ourselves requires us to invent our original language. Without an original language, we are left with other people's words, and the translation of our perceptions will remain borrowed from another place, and another time.

Finally, when characters in Slaughter-House Five defend the actions at Dresden, they do so by invoking the "Allied" lives lost in the war. Hedges drew us to this phenomenom in his theory of "sacred victims," whose deaths most go unchallenged in order to justify the terrible violence of warfare. An appeal to sacred victims is an appeal to make an ethical equivilancy between the victims on one side and the victims on another, no matter their true relationship. Mathematically, it might read like 1+1=2. For Vonnegut and for our class, that equivilancy is broken by the specific losses of real, individual people. Now, 1+1=3, and 2+2=5. Once that equation is broken, we the surviors, we the knowledgable, and we the concerned are left in an ethical cloud. We attempt to configure some broad calculus that might explain horror to us, that might somehow account for the ceaseless additions of the past that made our future darker.

The conclusion of Vonnegut's novel might contain some gesture toward how we reconcile all this together. But that's tomorrow.

Class Notes April 3: Discussion Context for Vonnegut

As we've discussed Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughter-House Five the past two weeks, I've refrained from summarizing our discussions. I was anxious about solidifying our ideas about the novel before we finished it, but now that our discussions can account for his enigmatic ending, it's probably time to reflect on our readings of the novel.

At first, we were put off by some of the rhetorical flourishes he employs throughout his text, like ending every thought about someone's death with "so it goes." It also took time to adjust to his narrative, which skips around in time and place as it follows Billy Pilgrim's life before, during, and after his experience in Dresden, Germany, during the spring of 1945.

As we travelled with Billy through his outer-space adventures with the Tralfamadorians, through his battlefield duties, and through his laconic dental practice in a post-war American midwest, we learned that Vonnegut's novel departs from the systematic investigations of war life we read in Frankl and Hedges. For a main protagonist, Billy sure doesn't speak much. When asked about Dresden toward the novel's conclusion, all he can muster is "I was there."

We've framed our interpretation of Slaughter-House Five by comparing the world-views of Billy Pilgrim and the Tralfamadorians, which both seem defined by a stressless indifference about the responsibility of individual ethical desicions, and the influence horrible warfare has on how we should judge and interpret our being-in-the-world. The Tralfamadorians make it seem easy, since they're different life-forms altogether. For Billy, we know that his quiet refusal to make his experiences into a cogent language reveals just how traumatic Dresden probably was for him to witness.