Bonus Notes: Slaughterhouse-Five

 “You want to know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”

“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”

“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’” 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.

This passage from Slaughterhouse-Five is not one of Kurt Vonnegut’s more prescient moments. It’s terrifying that some forty years after Vonnegut wrote these lines, we live in a world where warfare is as healthy as ever, yet glaciers are terminally ill.

*          *          *

I’ve thought that, where available, I would supplement my readings this year with film adaptations. To my knowledge, what film versions may exist of the Oresteia or Prometheus Bound are hopelessly obscure. (There is at least one film regarding Iphigenia, and perhaps Prometheus is depicted in Clash of the Titans or something like that? And no, the recent Ridley Scott opus, Prometheus, does not count.)

However, there was a movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five released in 1972, just three years after the book was published. I was surprised at the mere existence of such a film.

I’ve heard some people say that this or that book is “unfilmable,” for example, Lord of the Rings. But why would this be so? It’s just a bunch of orcs and men fighting each other, right? Before the age of the special-effects extravaganza, perhaps genres like high fantasy would come off as cartoony rather than compelling.

But I’m persuaded that it’s the more conceptually challenging books that are most difficult to turn into films. Something like Slaughterhouse-Five, because of its frequent time shifts and disjointed narrative, as well as potentially staggering pitfalls like how to play violence and mental illness for comedy (without trivializing the biting social satire), and how to portray the alien Tralfamadorian race, is an example of a book that could turn into a disastrously silly movie.

Indeed, in many ways, the film is laughably dumb. The Tralfamadorians, described by Vonnegut with whimsical physical details, are portrayed as invisible to Billy Pilgrim and his mistress, Montana Wildhack, and even creepily prurient, with very little of the four-dimensional perspicacity they displayed in the book. The Paul Lazzaro character, relatively minor in the book, chews up an undeserved preponderance of screen time, and the actor is much too tall and world-weary to capture Vonnegut’s description of an ugly, rat-like, resentful sociopath.

And yet the movie is not as bad as I expected. I was rarely bored, which is something of a feat for a now forty-year-old movie that has little action. They picked the perfect dumbass-looking actor to play Billy Pilgrim, and events and details are largely faithful to the novel, though the tone seems off, maybe because it plays everything too straight.

Where the book reveals the lack of human connection among soldiers thrown together in a sanity-deprived prison camp, the movie earnestly attempts to create relationships among these characters. In trying to provide conventional motivations for the key events of the story, the movie seems to betray the book’s pervasive anxiety formed by terrors that have no clear explanation.

Movie rating: 2.5 stars out of 4 on its own merits; 3 stars in terms of its fidelity to the book

Final word: It’s a curiosity that’s worth watching if you’re a fan of the book, but don’t expect to love it. 

Reading Notes #3: Prometheus Bound

Title: Prometheus Bound

Author: Aeschylus (translated by David Grene)

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Form: Trade paperback (part of larger volume, Aeschylus II)

Pages: 49 (including Introduction)

Date of Publication: 5^th Century BCE

Source: Purchased from used book store

Dates of Reading: January 16, 2013 – January 17, 2013

The List: #244

Prometheus:

As soon as he ascended to the throne

that was his father’s, straightway he assigned

to the several Gods their several privileges

and portioned out the power, but to the unhappy

breed of mankind he gave no heed, intending

to blot the race out and create a new.

Against these plans none stood save I: I dared.

I rescued men from shattering destruction

that would have carried them to Hades’ house;

and therefore I am tortured on this rock,

a bitterness to suffer, and a pain

to pitiful eyes. I gave to mortal man

a precedence over myself in pity: I

can win no pity: pitiless is he

that thus chastises me, a spectacle

bringing dishonor on the name of Zeus.

Chorus:

Of iron mind he must be, must be made of stone

who does not sympathize, Prometheus, with your sufferings.

Myself, I would not have chosen to look on them;

now that I do, my heart is full of pain.

Prometheus:

Yes, to my friends the sight is pitiable.

Chorus:

Did you perhaps go further than you have told us?

Prometheus:

Yes, I stopped mortals from foreseeing doom.

Chorus:

What cure did you discover for that sickness?

Prometheus:

I sowed in them blind hopes.

Chorus:

That was a great help that you gave to men.

Prometheus:

Besides, I myself gave them fire.

Chorus:

Do now creatures of a day own bright-faced fire?

Prometheus:

Yes and from it they shall learn many crafts.

(Lines 230-256)

I decided to give Aeschylus an encore, as I had always been interested in the myth of Prometheus, the fire-bringer, the light-bearer, and Prometheus Bound was on my list. Prometheus Bound is the sole survivor of a Prometheus trilogy that is assumed to have existed, and is generally attributed to Aeschylus. It consists primarily of a series of speeches by the chained title protagonist and the visitors to his lonely rock. Though this prevents any true “action” from occurring in the play, it does not limit the dramatic tension.

The traditional telling of the myth has Prometheus lashed to a storm-blasted rock, punished by Zeus for stealing fire from the smith-god, Hephaestus, and giving it to man. Here, a giant eagle comes every night and eats his liver in most gruesome fashion, only to have it grow back the next day to be eaten again:

Hermes:

Then Zeus’s winged hound, the eagle red,

shall tear great shreds of flesh from you, a feaster

coming unbidden, every day: your liver

bloodied to blackness will be his repast.

(Lines 1022-1025)

Other aspects of the myth include the notion that Prometheus originally created man from clay, and that the punishment for the gift of fire also included the creation of the first woman, Pandora, who is sent by the Olympian gods to sow discord and evil gifts among men. These latter ideas do not figure into Prometheus Bound.

In some ways, I enjoyed this play more than any of the Oresteia plays. Some of this may be due to the lucid and stately translation by David Grene, who renders a Prometheus who is both weary and defiant, an almost modern portrayal – like something you’d see in a movie – of the wily veteran undergoing torture, laughing through his tears. The Titan does not so much argue in his own defense (this play has not the litigious quality of The Eumenides), but rather rails against the injustice of a Zeus who wields unchecked power, and moreover, who forgets those who have shown him loyalty (for Aeschylus’s Prometheus had sided with Zeus against his fellow Titans):

Prometheus:

Now look and see

the sight, this friend of Zeus, that helped set up

his tyranny, and see what agonies

twist me, by his instructions!

(Lines 307-309)

The chief appeal of Prometheus Bound lies in the weighty drama of a god tormented and punished because of his love for humanity. Prometheus is a Titan, and thus a god more ancient than Zeus and the Olympians, but he has little power in the face of Zeus’s overwhelming force. Power enough, though, to save humankind from obliteration by the supreme god’s lightning bolts. Why Zeus wished to destroy the human race, and how exactly Prometheus stopped this, are not clear in this play. What is clear is that his gifts to humanity are extensive, and the enlightenment they represent is perhaps the greatest threat the new gods have to fear.

Beyond the gift of fire mentioned above, Prometheus goes on to describe a litany of gifts he has brought to human society: the knowledge of construction, written language, sailing, agriculture, medicine, prophecy, religion:

Prometheus:

In one short sentence understand it all:

every art of mankind comes from Prometheus.

(Lines 504-505)

And for this, his recompense is an eternity of miseries:

Prometheus:

I knew when I transgressed nor will deny it.

In helping man I brought my troubles on me;

but yet I did not think that with such tortures

I should be wasted on these airy cliffs,

this lonely mountain top, with no one near.

(Lines 268-272)

The analogies to the story of Christ, though imperfect, are enjoyable and unmistakable. A great figure, part-god and (symbolically) part-man, and the savior of mankind, is affixed to a towering height, tormented by the powers that be, his only crime – his love for humanity.

Two thousand years later, the stories still exist – both the myths of Greece and the words of Scripture – but their status in our culture is markedly different. Why do the Olympians exist primarily as fodder for academic study and fanciful books and movies, while the legacy of the Hebrews endures as the preferred mysticism and superstition of human beings?

Of the various options available to the western world, was there something more true about the Abrahamic religions? Perhaps in the sense that benevolence and love, the hallmarks of Christ and Islam’s Allah, are more attractive in the long run than caprice and willfulness, as embodied in the Greek and Roman gods. By this measure, it’s no surprise that the former survive as doctrine, while the latter are the stuff of fairy tales.

Presumably, such echoes were not available to Aeschylus or his original audiences, nor were the impact that Prometheus Bound and its source myth made on Milton and, later, the Romantic poets of 18^th and 19^th century Britain. And when the spirit of Prometheus was conjured as a guiding light of the revolutionary era of the late 18^th century, well of course that’s also a universe apart from the small local world that the ancient Greeks understood.

But surely, attendees of the Great Dionysia watched Prometheus Bound and heard in its words a rebuke of tyrants, of men like Pisistratus, who only a generation or two ago had seized power over Athens, and his sons Hippias and Hipparchus, whose overthrow had led to the beginnings of Athenian democracy.

Though the other plays in the trilogy are lost to us, and lost is whatever evolving view Aeschylus had of the relationship and potential reconciliation between Zeus and Prometheus, taken on its own terms, Prometheus Bound is clear – Zeus is a tyrant, and his actions are inexcusable. Prometheus berates Zeus’s messenger, Hermes:

Prometheus:

Your speech is pompous sounding, full of pride,

as fits the lackey of the Gods. You are young

and young your rule and you think that the tower

in which you live is free from sorrow: from it

have I not seen two tyrants thrown? the third,

who is now king, I shall yet live to see him

fall, of all three most suddenly, most dishonored.

Do you think I will crouch before your Gods,

– so new – and tremble? I am far from that.

(Lines 954-961)

Though the Greek word, tyrannos, does not have the negative implications of our word, tyrant, given the pains the Athenians had taken to remove their tyrants and replace them with a democratic system, as well as the reverence bestowed on the tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, it seems justified to think that most Athenians would not have welcomed any attempt to revert to despotic rule.

Prometheus is a powerless captive, but he is on the side of the right, and that is enough to sustain him until the day of his deliverance (he has foreseen his own rescue by Heracles some thirteen generations hence). His words also contain the one threat that Zeus fears; his gift of prophecy holds the secret to Zeus’s downfall. Prometheus alone knows that an ill-fated amorous conquest will lead to “a son greater than his father.” Implicit is the sense that tyranny, by nature, is fleeting, and leads to its own demise:

Prometheus:

Worship him, pray; flatter whatever king

is king today; but I care less than nothing

for Zeus. Let him do what he likes,

let him be king for his short time: he shall not

be king for long.

(Lines 937-941)

The myth goes (not mentioned in the play) that the sea nymph, Thetis, is destined to bear a child who will be greater than the father. Eventually, Zeus will learn this and dodge the bullet by not coupling with her, and instead marrying her off to the mortal king, Peleus. The child of Thetis and Peleus is, of course, Achilles, greater than his father by far, but no threat to Zeus.

*          *          *

What we have inherited from antiquity is but a fraction of the plays written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and this is perhaps a source of endless anguish for classicists, philologists, and lovers of literature the world over. Aeschylus is thought to have written at least seventy plays, and among the lost are the two plays that would have completed our picture of his Prometheus (though the authorship of Prometheus Bound is debated).

Looking just at the play we have, however, we may set aside issues of what Aeschylus was trying to say, which may forever elude us, and focus more on what we actually hear.

In this incomplete story of a defiant old god and a merciless new god, I take away a message that if there is to come a time when Zeus is king no longer, his undoing will be humanity, educated and nurtured by Prometheus and the arts of civilization. It is reason that turns humanity away from religious superstition, as well as its inherent despotism of ignorance and dogmatic force. We are indebted to myths, but we are not enslaved by them. We rightly celebrate not the fantasies of Olympus or Golgotha, but rather the symbols.

For we are indeed “creatures of a day,” and if there is any future, any immortality, for us, it is only because we pass on our scraps of reason and knowledge to those that follow us. The ideals of the American Revolution and the French Revolution were not accomplished with the setting down of the Declaration of Independence or the storming of the Bastille, respectively. They continue to be accomplished, and humanity continues to crawl toward enlightenment, one candle at a time. 

Reading Notes #2: Oresteia

Title: Oresteia

Author: Aeschylus (translated by Richmond Lattimore*)

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Form: Trade paperback

Pages: 171 (including Introduction)

Date of Publication**: 458 BCE

Source: Purchased

Dates of Reading: September 2012 – January 12, 2013

The List: #66

From a book not yet 50 years old, we go to a trilogy of plays nearly 2,500 years old. What does Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five have in common with Aeschylus’s plays? Death, for one thing. Blood is everywhere in the Oresteia. Bloodbath leads to bloodbath in this rendition of the tragedies, sacrileges, illegalities, and depravities of the House of Atreus.

Blood is literally in the bath in Agamemnon, the first play of the trilogy. For the bath is where Clytemnestra murders her hated husband, Agamemnon, who has seemingly earned his fate by sacrificing his own daughter, Iphigenia, to pursue the conquest of Troy:

Clytemnestra:

I stand now where I struck him down. The thing is done.

Thus have I wrought, and I will not deny it now.

That he might not escape nor beat aside his death,

as fisherman cast their huge circling nets, I spread

deadly abundance of rich robes, and caught him fast.

I struck him twice. In two great cries of agony,

he buckled at the knees and fell. When he was down

I struck him the third blow, in thanks and reverence

to Zeus the lord of dead men underneath the ground.

Thus he went down, and the life struggled out of him;

and as he died he spattered me with the dark red

and violent driven rain of bitter savored blood

to make me glad, as gardens stand among the showers

of God in glory at the birthtime of the buds.

These being the facts, elders of Argos assembled here,

be glad, if it be your pleasure; but for me, I glory.

Were it religion to pour wine above the slain,

this man deserved, more than deserved, such sacrament.

He filled our cup with evil things unspeakable

and now himself come home has drunk it to the dregs.

(Agamemnon, 1379-1398)

Aeschylus creates an intensely intellectual parable that traces the evolution of Greek justice from the blood-feud mentality of the tribal unit to the polis, invested with authority through the law. In times of darkness and barbarity, personal vengeance was tantamount to law in The Libation Bearers:

Chorus:

It is but law that when the red drops have been spilled

upon the ground they cry aloud for fresh

blood. For the death act calls out on Fury

to bring out of those who were slain before

new ruin on ruin accomplished.

(The Libation Bearers, 400-404)

And so it is enacted by Orestes, who kills his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus:

Orestes:

My purpose is to kill you over his body.

You thought him bigger than my father while he lived.

Die then and sleep beside him, since he is the man

you love, and he you should have loved got only your hate.

(The Libation Bearers, 904-907)

It’s not hard to see that under such a system of retribution, there will be no end to the cycle of violence. Sadly, the Middle East has not taken this tale to heart.

In the concluding play, the trial of Orestes takes place, and the action is remarkable in its similarity to modern trials, at least as presented on episodes of Law and Order. The Furies prosecute, ask questions, bray to the jury of Athenians when they think they’ve made a damning point. After their ultimate defeat and the acquittal of Orestes, the Furies are only mollified through Athena’s persuasive offer to welcome them back into the society of new gods and new men. The Furies are implicitly transformed into the Eumenides, or “Kindly Ones”:

Chorus of Furies:

This is my prayer: Civil War

fattening on men’s ruin shall

not thunder in our city. Let

not the dry dust that drinks

the black blood of citizens

through passion for revenge

and bloodshed for bloodshed

be given our state to prey upon.

(The Eumenides, 976-983)

The Eumenides fully buy into the new world order, and they make clear that murder is not a private affair, but a public problem. These goddesses come to their senses and have themselves become a symbol of the civilizing power of the law, which has vanquished the cycle of retributive violence and assuaged their anger.

I won’t venture any additional critical analysis of these plays, mainly because I haven’t thought deeply enough about them to offer any other intelligent commentary. If I’m going to read a book a week, until the end of time, I’d rather spend more time reading and less time writing. More importantly, it’s unlikely that I’ll be doing much repeat business, so I intend for these reading notes to capture the essence of my experience of reading each book, rather than a fully developed critical understanding of the work.

If more “understanding” is wanted, consult the introduction to my edition by Richmond Lattimore, which has plenty of insightful nuggets, like the following:

“Each act of blood has been avenged in a new act of blood. The problems of public good have been solved through private murder, which is no solution, until the situation has become intolerable to the forces that rule the world, and these must intervene to see that the contestants and the impulses in nature which drive the contestants become reconciled and find their places in a scheme that will be harmonious and progressive, not purely destructive.” (Introduction, pp. 29-30)

*          *          *

The University of Chicago Press edition, though a beautiful object, lacks footnotes, which would have been genuinely helpful, since Lattimore has a habit of including references, especially character epithets, that would have been familiar to an ancient Greek audience, but are meaningless to modern readers. It’s one thing to refer to commonly known figures like Persephone or Hades without explanatory notes; it’s quite another to reference “Pallas-before-the-temple” without any explanation that Pallas is Athena (regular readers of Greek literature probably already know this) and that “before-the-temple” comes from the Greek, “Pronaia,” (I’m sure very few people know that) and signifies . . . well, that’s what a footnote would have been good for. I can’t speak to the original Greek, and whether Lattimore is staying strictly faithful to the original versions of these names, but there is no context in the play for some of these references, so I’m thankful for the extensive annotations in the other two translations I consulted.

Furthermore, I am not a fan of Lattimore’s non-standard (though more orthographically correct) spellings of some Greek names that already have well-established English renderings (Athene for Athena, Clytaemestra for Clytemnestra), a predilection he also indulges in his translations of Homer (Achilleus for Achilles, Aias for Ajax, Hektor for Hector). But of the translations I consulted, his Aeschylus has the most poetic grandeur, which does justice to the immense arguments and ebullient violence of the Oresteia. (By contrast, Meineck is almost too unadorned, too easy to read, too journalistic; Fagles translates as though he were shouting commands the entire time.)

*          *          *

Reading the Oresteia, and reflecting on its bloody violence, as well as the gruesome images in Slaughterhouse-Five, I am reminded of our ongoing controversies concerning the role that art supposedly plays in perpetuating bloodshed.

In the aftermath of the Newtown school shootings, a person (“person” is of course generous) like NRA Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre has the nerve to suggest that America’s real problem is not guns, but rather, violent movies and video games. Of course, this is a man (again generous) who spends his time preaching to the country a fiction that guns don’t kill people. This tall tale, this elaborate fantasy, has become so pervasive, you might say LaPierre is something of an artist himself!

We the people are supposed to revere some romantic notion of the centrality of gun ownership in American values. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of more ammo. Perhaps in his gunslinger’s paradise, dollar bills have machine guns instead of eagles on them, and the Statue of Liberty wears a bandolier.

I wonder whether the ancient Athenians worried about the corrupting influence of violent drama and epic poetry on their children. Clearly, philosophy and knowledge are corrupting influences and must be eradicated without mercy. But art? In the Republic, Plato famously promulgates the banishment of poets, but Plato was arguably something of a poet, an artist, himself, so we may not want to interpret his words as being single-layered.

In Clytemnestra’s speech above are, if not quite instructions, at least the bare facts of how to murder someone as he bathes. And moreover, Clytemnestra glories in the act as justified and even pleasurable. In Greek drama, violent action was carried out offstage, but there is nothing tame about their language. Was there a vocal segment of the Athenian populace that bemoaned such excessive violence and linked it to the crimes of the day?

Vonnegut, too, was well aware that many people, among them intelligent people, feared that violence in art encouraged violence in real life. He quotes a friend in Slaughterhouse-Five, who “thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.” She says, “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.”

A decent amount of scientific research has been conducted on what kind of effect violent video games have on people, and of course the video game industry will tell you that games don’t make people more violent, just as the gun industry will probably tell you that shooting guns doesn’t make a gun owner more violent.

I have played many violent games, including those with realistic (or quasi-realistic) violence, so I am aware that there are many, many heinous video games out there. Anything called Call of Duty is probably among them, if only for the shamelessness of calling it a “duty” to lay waste to human lives.

The violent games I enjoy tend not to be the ones that ask you to kill other people. In Resident Evil, guns, though certainly glorified, are the necessary tool for taking out zombies, and anyone who would shoot at a human being is a villain through and through. The Gears of War games are sort of exonerated, again, because you’re not shooting at human beings (you shoot aliens, which is a cop-out, I know). But the one moment in the Gears series that sticks in my head is the one scene that remarks on the fragility and preciousness of human life, and the profound sorrow when even one (especially one) life is lost.

Some have argued that video games are inherently different and uniquely damnable because they put you in the position of committing the violence. But by that logic, it’s okay to watch a violent play, but no one should ever act in one? And crime novelists who come up with horrific ways to murder people in their books are sickos on the inside, right?

I think the only game whose violence has affected my life outside of the game is Grand Theft Auto (III and IV, specifically). Here is a game where steering a car is so fraught with peril and pedestrians so plentiful that it practically begs you to commit multiple, repeated acts of vehicular manslaughter just to drive the three blocks to Ammo-Nation.

I played GTA III and IV years apart, but after each one (and only about a week or two of each), I must admit that it did seem to affect my experience as a driver of a real car in the real world. I would go out driving some days and be wonderstruck at the sight of so many pedestrians crowding the sidewalks. Didn’t they realize they were a hair’s breadth away from a bloody death under the grinding wheels of my car? The ease with which I could have mowed these people down should have discouraged them from walking about so brazenly, no? I wouldn’t say I came close to blurring the barrier between game and reality, and no, I was never close to hitting anybody. Even so, I can’t pretend that violent games don’t have some desensitizing effect. That being said, Grand Theft Auto is hardly what I’d point to as a specimen of ennobling art.

To take this exercise to its logical end, I come to Star Trek, and its innovation of the Holodeck. These are the computers that generate virtual worlds within a small room. The people of the 24^th century enter convincingly realistic customized worlds where they are encouraged to live out their fantasies, whether that includes romance, adventure, consulting Leonardo da Vinci, or whatever.

However, I don’t remember any of the shows depicting a fantasy of murder (or other sordid crimes, most prominently, rape). Correct me if I’m wrong, but the closest such thing I remember was Lieutenant Barclay taking out his frustrations (sexual and otherwise) on Holodeck versions of the ship’s crew, even clashing swords with Holodeck-generated Captain Picard and company.

Reader, I ask you: if Holodecks existed, would you create a program where you could kill people? Just to see what it was like? To blow off steam? More to the point, would doing so necessarily mean that you were a monster worse than Hitler? If not, would engaging in that kind of behavior eventually turn you into a monster?

*          *          *

*I also made extensive reference to the notes and translations of Robert Fagles and Peter Meineck.

**I’ve added a category called “Date of Publication” to the list of crucial facts at the top of the post. Obviously, works from antiquity, especially drama, were not “published” in the modern sense, but when I was deciding what to name this category, I figured that the relevant date was not so much when the author created the work, as this cannot be known with precision, but rather the date that it was presented to the public, whether in written or performed state. In this sense of the word, I think “publication” works well enough for my purposes. 

Reading Notes #1: Slaughterhouse-Five

Title: Slaughterhouse-Five

Author: Kurt Vonnegut

Publisher: Dell

Form: Mass market paperback

Pages: 215
Date of Publication: 1969

Source: Borrowed from the Neutron Bar

Dates of Reading: 1/1/13 – 1/3/13

The List: #121

The skull and crossbones are a clue . . .

“He’s a pretty big man,” said Derby, who, of course, was a pretty big man himself.

            “Size don’t mean a thing.”

            “You’re going to shoot him?”

            “I’m gonna have him shot,” said Lazzaro. “He’ll get home after the war. He’ll be a big hero. The dames’ll be climbing all over him. He’ll settle down. A couple of years’ll go by. And then one day there’ll be a knock on his door. He’ll answer the door, and there’ll be a stranger out there. The stranger’ll ask him if he’s so-and-so. When he says he is, the stranger’ll say, ‘Paul Lazzaro sent me.’ And he’ll pull out a gun and shoot his pecker off. The stranger’ll let him think a couple of seconds about who Paul Lazzaro is and what life’s gonna be like without a pecker. Then he’ll shoot him once in the guts and walk away.” So it goes.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a book about death. It is undoubtedly about other things as well: the passage of time, the absurdity of war, the loss of will to live in a world gone mad. But for me, it is death, in its many shapes and sizes and numbers, in all its peculiarities and permutations, that dominates this book. Death casts its eerie shadow over every idea and object; it is by turns frivolous, fatigued, and horrifying, and usually, it is all of these at once.

He asked Billy what he thought the worst form of execution was. Billy had no opinion. The correct answer turned out to be this: “You stake a guy out on an anthill in the desert – see? He’s facing upward, and you put honey all over his balls and pecker, and you cut off his eyelids so he has to stare at the sun till he dies.” So it goes.

It’s not all about peckers, though:

They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the firebombing of Dresden. So it goes.

Whether a boy or an entire city, death treats them all the same. Even the inanimate are not exempt:

There was a still life on Billy’s bedside table – two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes.

“So it goes” is this book’s funny catchphrase, the refrain of death, both “poignant and hilarious,” as the Boston Globe says on the front cover of my copy. In general, I regard cover blurbs with disdain, but these words are quite apt. Vonnegut’s lines, the beautiful ones at least, are at once “poignant and hilarious,” sincere and satiric. By the directness of his art, sadness is somehow elevated to unbearable acuteness when transformed into humor.

The colonel imagined that he was addressing his beloved troops for the last time, and he told them that they had nothing to be ashamed of, that there were dead Germans all over the battlefield who wished to God that they had never heard of the Four-fifty-first. . . . He said all this while staring into Billy’s eyes. He made the inside of poor Billy’s skull echo with balderdash.

This colonel embodies the bravado and war glory that Vonnegut has consciously avoided. Vonnegut vows in Chapter One: “If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.” I’m not sure if John Wayne was the motivating force behind naming the main character Billy Pilgrim, but it makes sense. Here is the naïve, listless boy-man who represents the reality of war, “fought by babies,” swept aside by a cultural reimagining of war as some grand enterprise for heroes.

This is the willing blindness that allows some viewers of history to take a crime like the fire-bombing of Dresden (or the Trail of Tears, or enshrining slavery in the American Constitution, etc.) and try to justify it on moral grounds. The irony being that the actual governments that perpetrated this crime did it fully understanding its heinous criminality, without feeling any need to justify it to the public, and having made their peace with it long ago.

*          *          *

When I started reading the book, the person from whom I borrowed it warned me that it was “hard to follow,” as the narrative jumps around often and disconcertingly. Explaining here what happens in the book seems hardly necessary, as Vonnegut helpfully outlines the entire book in the first two chapters. Moreover, he writes, “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.” But perhaps it is a service to the reader of this post to distill the book’s events down to a few lines.

Billy Pilgrim was in World War II and was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the Allied fire-bombing of the city. His life afterward includes wealth and a family. At some point (it seems hardly relevant when), he becomes “unstuck in time,” meaning he travels from one point of his life to another against his will. Aliens from the planet Tralfamadore abduct him and he learns about their four-dimensional way of living, where moments in time can be seen all at once and will always exist.

That’s about it. Everything else is stories about death and the morality that attends it. The disjointed narrative, jumping from time to time, is a way of avoiding a traditional narrative, and thus undermining the traditional narrative of the Second World War, and indeed, all wars and massacres.

Just as Billy Pilgrim is always lost between times, the reader is lost between actions. The morality is clear, yet the choice of action is murky. War is terrible and life is full of pain. But what do we do about it?

Vonnegut’s book is different from a book like Les Miserables, which comes down firmly on the side of social justice and presents a scathing view of how the world is, while working off the rational, even quasi-scientific, premise that human problems have human solutions. Slaughterhouse-Five seems to throw up its hands, crying aloud, How can the world be so screwed up even though we know how it ought to be?

I find something very comforting in the Tralfamadorian ability to stand outside of time and look at its wholeness, not its fleetingness. Knowing that whatever the most beautiful moments of your life were, they will always exist, that not even death can take them away. Billy announces to the world:

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”

And Billy again, as he announces that his death is imminent:

“If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I’ve said.”

Yet I don’t know if Vonnegut sympathizes with this view. Death is inevitable, and so our only way of facing it is to accept its power over us. But is war the same thing? What about cruelty and selfishness? Are they as immutable and predetermined as death?

“So it goes” is the Tralfamadorian, not the human, response to the fact that everything that happens, no matter how terrible, simply exists and cannot be altered. The terrible becomes mundane when we accept that we are not free to choose how we live and die. But if we adopt that view, what does that make us? Are we supposed to resign ourselves, when the tale of Dresden’s demise seems to require that we rage against injustice?

“If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”

By this alone, I believe that Vonnegut thinks there is something valuable, if slightly ludicrous, about free will and the humans who thrive on it. Removing the possibility of free will takes away Billy’s responsibility to make moral choices, and I don’t think we are to admire him for evading either tough choices or difficult experiences. On the other hand, he does endure a litany of traumatic events and injuries without becoming bitter or defeated. Ultimately though, this may be a sign of an elaborate psychic wall he has built up to defend himself.

My instinct is to reject the comfort of the Tralfamadorian eternality because it ignores the evanescence and uncertainty that are part of what makes life precious – knowing that we can’t relive the past, accepting that we can’t control the future, not because it is written, but precisely the opposite – because it is unpredictable. Yet there is value in trying to steer the future in a better direction than what the past has seen.

The Tralfamadorians are the book’s Chorus, commenting on human life, and their adage, “So it goes,” tries to encourage humanity toward their way of existence. But I think there is another phrase in Slaughterhouse-Five that captures more comprehensively the book’s spirit of outraged resignation.

In the most ordinary of settings and circumstances, sitting alone in his office staring out the window at cars in the parking lot, a middle-aged Billy Pilgrim wonders to himself, “Where have all the years gone?”

It would be nice to say that the years haven’t gone anywhere, that indeed, he will visit them over and over and be reassured by their permanence. But if beauty is to be permanent, then so is horror. And yet if all things are fleeting, then we are left only with a dwindling hourglass.

Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni – Alas, the fleeting years are slipping away

(quoted in Slaughterhouse-Five from Horace)

The specter of death is relentless in this book, and if there is value to four-dimensional vision, it is perhaps because it allows us to see that death, the inevitable, is not the enemy; rather, the enemy is to put one’s life in the service of death, when death needs no help from us.

*          *          *

As I tried to figure out what to say about Slaughterhouse-Five, I was reminded of one of my first memories from my days as a college student at the University of Chicago. I was browsing the Seminary Co-op Bookstore with a new friend I had met that first week, and she pulled out a book called An Unsentimental Education. The book is a collection of interviews in essay form with various literary lights who had either studied or taught at Chicago. One of the interviews is with Kurt Vonnegut. Along with some repeats of stories he tells in Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut reflects on his career as a novelist:

The novelist is in a funny position: utterly unqualified. Having no badge or rank, and cracking off about this or that. It peeves a lot of people. How dare we do what we do?

Yet novelists can have a great effect on young people. When I was between the ages of fourteen and twenty and starting to read just about anything, I had no immunity whatsoever to ideas. I would read Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, and James T. Farrell – and their political opinions would become mine.

I assume that some kids have become pacifists because of me. Actually, I’m not even sure what my message as a novelist is. But I would like to infect people with humane ideas before they’re able to defend themselves.

I had never read Vonnegut before commencing my readings for this year with him. But I am lucky to have encountered in my youth many writers whose nobility of spirit were equal to his. Among the many humane passages in Slaughterhouse-Five, my favorite describes a gung-ho war movie that Billy watches in reverse, having become unstuck in time again:

            American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

            The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

            When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The List

In college, I made a list of books I wanted to read. This is the first page:

There are nine more such pages, full of titles selected based on some combination of the following reasons:

1. They were vaguely canonical and famous enough that I had heard of them and was interested.
2. They were “other books” by authors I had read and enjoyed. 
3. They were recommended by colleagues and well-wishers.

                                                                                                                                       

From the first, I consciously specified that these works were listed “in no particular order”; I wrote them down as I thought of them, with the natural consequence that most of the heavy hitters are loaded onto the first few pages.

However, looking back on just page one of the list, I feel myself raising an eyebrow at the person I was back in 1998.

Whatever their merits, I no longer feel any urgency to read such works as An American Tragedy or Nostromo (the former, at least, inspired the excellent film, A Place in the Sun – can I substitute watching that for reading the book?). I tried to read Catch-22 and found that its brand of insistently ironic humor was lost on me, and I am unlikely to revisit it. I’m rather bemused that The Jungle Books and Winnie the Pooh found their way on here (can the Disney adaptations really suffer by comparison?). And fourteen years later, my inability to get through Homer’s Odyssey continues to be the secret shame of my literary life.

Other works, of course, have become the cornerstones of my intellectual existence – Walden, Lolita, Ulysses, Brave New World, 1984.

Anna Karenina (despite the hyperbolic recommendation a friend of mine scrawled on the list) bored me; it was like reading only the “Peace” half of War and Peace. If I wanted purely domestic drama, I’d read Jane Austen. But nevertheless, I’m glad I read it.

As indicated by the completion dates next to highlighted titles (and though I’ve demolished half of the books on this page, later pages are almost pristine), I’ve been deplorably leisurely about tearing through the list.

Once written down, the books constituted a sort of trophy hunt, and I cannot deny the thrill of scratching a book off the list with a glowing highlighter. And though I am reluctant to view great works of literature as merely challenges to be defeated, part of the raison d’être of such a list is to give oneself a concrete reminder: this is the work you have left to do, or more pointedly, don’t die before you finish these!

And so, one of my goals for the new year is to read at least a book a week. I don’t require that the book be on my current list. I actually stopped adding to the list in 2002, when I realized I wasn’t reading fast enough to justify adding more titles. But I have little doubt that most of this list is still worth reading, and if I can bag 50 titles this year, I’ll consider adding more contenders.

In the meantime, as I make progress, I’ll probably post some reading notes, which will be invaluable for helping me accomplish another goal for the new year: writing at least one blog post a week.