Kurt Vonnegut--Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death (1969)

I’m finding it hard to say more than, I like this book a lot.  It’s really well-written, and way easier to read than Judith Butler.  But that would be really shortchanging the novel.

This brilliantly readable novel is centered around the experiences of protagonist Billy Pilgrim leading up to and during the bombing of Dresden during World War II.  Using the frame story that the author himself was present and has been unsuccessfully trying to write about the tragic event for some time, Vonnegut then tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, who has become “unstuck in time.”  This allows him to present a very fragmented (and yet very readable) story of Pilgrim’s life, through his marriage and old age as well as his experiences in a German prison camp the bombing of Dresden to his being kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, where he is put on display in a zoo with B-movie starlet Montana Wildhack.  Pilgrim’s experience on Tralfamadore has a profound effect on him, as they explain their sense of time, which is quite different from Pilgrim’s.  To the Tralfamadorians, all time has already happened, so the dead are never fully gone, and it’s better to dwell upon the good times rather than on tragedy.

This perspective provides an interesting undercurrent to the novel, as Billy Pilgrim is bounced from time to time, though seemingly without much say in the matter.  This theme is emphasized by the refrain “And so it goes,” which one report claims appears 103 times over the course of the novel.  However, what could be a terribly depressing book about humanity’s inability to avoid tragedy is saved by a strong sense of satire throughout the novel, as well as a sense of compassionate humor about humanity’s insistence on perpetuating trauma.

John Updike--Rabbit, Run (1960)

This is the first in what would eventually be five novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.  John Updike is a master of language, and the novel has many beautifully evocative descriptions of landscapes, both rural and urban.  However, these descriptions pale compared to the horridly Freud-inflected story Updike tells of Rabbit, a 26-year-old man in Mt. Judge, Pennsylvania, married to the depressed, alcoholic Janice with a two-year-old and another on the way.  Throughout the novel, Rabbit is confronted with unhappiness and challenges which fail to live up to the promises of greatness he felt as a high school basketball player; his response in all of these situations is to run.  Asked by the pregnant Janice to pick up their son from her parents and bring home a pack of cigarettes, Rabbit instead takes the car and drives to West Virginia, before losing his nerve and returning to Mt. Judge, where he first stays briefly with his old high school coach, Marty Tothero.

Tothero introduces him to Ruth, a fat woman who accepts money in exchange for sex, with whom Rabbit sets up an uncomfortable domestic arrangement.  He stays with her long enough to convince her to perform fellatio on him; later that night, when he discovers that Janice is in labor, he leaves Ruth, as this sexual act is one which ultimately degrades her to him: “I need to see you on your knees” (161).  The birth of their daughter Rebecca June briefly restores a connection between Janice and Rabbit, which is then shattered by Janice’s drunken accidental drowning of the infant after Rabbit has left her once again.  After a funeral in which any possible sympathy for Rabbit is destroyed by his loud insistence at the graveside that it was Janice who killed the baby, not him, he returns to Ruth’s house, only to discover her pregnant as well.  Because she will not promise to return to him or carry the baby to term, the novel ends with, predictably, Rabbit once again running.

I find the Freud-inflected misogyny of the novel quite difficult to take.  I understand that Rabbit is supposed to reflect the failure for men in post-WWII America to find satisfaction in the family, in marriage, in work, and even in the church; however, while it may be a symptom of his own shortcomings, his inability to see women as anything more than “white, pliant machine[s] for fucking, hatching, feeding” (201), as Rabbit not only sees Janice as, but somehow sees her as accepting with “gratitude” such an understanding of herself is difficult for me to get over.  Even pre-adolescent girls, when Rabbit sees them can only zero in on their legs beneath their shorts, can only see through a sexualized lens.  The novel seems rather sexually graphic for 1960, in its frank depiction of sex and discussions of sex, as well as his rather up front discussion of abortion with Ruth. 

It’s also a rather jaded look at the state of Christianity in America at the time, particularly through the character of Reverend Jack Eccles.  His name is reminiscent of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg in The Great Gatsby to me, and he does serve as a near-constant presence in Rabbit’s life once he first runs away.  Religion and religious belief is called into question, as Dr. Eccles himself is often presented as rather ineffectual, with an unhappy home life and marriage of his own.  His solution to helping the lost lamb of Rabbit is to take him golfing once a week.  Though this is an overt theme of the book, I’m more interested in what seems to be a more subtle commentary on nihilism, one expressed in the title of the book.  As the novel ends with Rabbit running away from yet another problem, one with yet another lack of solution, “he runs. Ah: runs.  Runs.”  I want to read this as a response to the end of Waiting for Godot, in which the characters say, “Let’s go,” but then stay seated.  It’s not clear to me whether running is better than stasis, at least in Updike’s opinion, or whether he’s perhaps trying to say that, in response to the existential angst of the previous generation who couldn’t move, who were stuck, the current generation’s response—having been taught only to run, to progress, to improve—is just as impotent a response.

Don DeLillo--White Noise (1985)

     A staple of “Intro to Postmodernism” courses (with sentences such as, “Is it possible to have a false perception of an illusion?”), DeLillo’s 1984 novel is at times an amusing period piece, from a time when the concept of “Hitler Studies” and “Elvis Studies” were considered equally absurd.  However, the “fear of death” subplot which takes over at the end really fizzles for me; I would have rather the novel stayed in the realm of ironic academia, rather than the intrigue of sexual politics and stolen drugs.  Still, it’s worth reading, if for nothing else than the spot-on description of the annual arrival of new students on campus which opens the novel.

     The novel opens with the arrival of station wagons on campus in the fall and tabular descriptions of the objects students bring with them.  Not only does this provide an entertaining insight into the life of mid-eighties college students, but such repeated lists demonstrate how such assemblies of commodities function as tribal demarcations in postmodern America.  The scene is narrated by protagonist Jack Gladney, professor and chair of Hitler Studies at the “College-on-the-Hill,” a middle-aged man who lives with his wife Babette and their children from previous marriages.

     A primary theme of the novel is fear of death as the constant modern state.  From the beginning of the novel, the idea of death appears again and again, as Jack’s children and stepchildren volunteer to be victims in simulated disasters.  Early on, Jack and Babette discuss whether wealth might provide a defense against death: “Maybe there is no death as we know it.  Just documents changing hands” (6).  Even more significantly, Jack finds himself saying in a lecture that “All pots tend to move deathward.  This is the nature of plots” (26).  This theme reaches its climax at the end of the novel, as Jack confronts the inventor of the pill which is alleged to combat fear of death.  Babette had sex with the man in exchange for access to the pills: interestingly, the drug’s side effect is that it makes the patient unable to distinguish between signifier (the words “speeding bullet”) and the signified (and actual bullet).  This seems to support a Lacanian understanding of language, that individuation (and, by extension, understanding of mortality and fear of death) is a result of the realization of the difference between signifier and signified, as a result of the separation from the parent and recognition of the self as a separate entity.

     The novel also provides a commentary on the state of the academy at the time.  In 1985, the idea of “cultural studies” was avant-garde enough to merit parody in White Noise through the existence of disciplines such as “Hitler Studies.”  Academia here is still a very masculine enclave, as Jack’s department is composed primarily of men who wear “rumpled clothes, need, haircuts, cough into their armpits.  Together they look like teamster officials assembled to identify the body of a mutilated colleague.  The impression is one of pervasive bitterness, suspicion, and intrigue” (9).

      In this reading, I was quite struck by the attitudes toward women in the novel, especially with respect to Babette.  Here is the first description of Babette in the novel:

Babette is tall and fairly ample; there is a girth and heft to her.  Her hair is a fanatical blond mop, a particular tawny hue that used to be called dirty blond.  If she were a petite woman, the hair would be too cute, too mischievous and contrived.  Size gives her tousled aspect a certain seriousness.  Ample women do not plan such things.  They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body. (5)

 Such “ampleness” is connected throughout to maternity, sensuality, and—as an outgrowth of these—a certain kind of ignorance and stupidity.  The description continues:

Babette, disheveled, has the careless dignity of someone too preoccupied with serious matters to know or care what she looks like.  Not that she is a gift-bearer of great things as the world generally reckons them.  She gathers and tends the children, teaches a course in an adult education program, belongs to a group of volunteers who read to the blind. (5)

Here, the tabular style gives Jack’s analysis of Babette—her guilelessness and lack of greatness—a certain tone of authority.  Babette is different from Jack’s former wives, whom he describes as “a self-absorbed and high-strung bunch, with ties to the intelligence community” (6).  Change “intelligence” to “intelligentsia,” and you’d have a decent description of Jack himself.

      Jack is not alone in his condescension toward women: his friend and fellow academic Murray has a similar attitude toward women: “it’s not the bodies of women that I ultimately crave but their minds.  The mind of a woman.  The delicate chambering and massive unidirectional flow.  What fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing stockings as she crosses her legs.  That little staticky sound of rustling nylon can make me happy on several levels” (11).  Men of the mind seem incapable of seeing women as anything other than Woman-with-a-capital-W—when it comes to women, these men can only see the signifier, and not the signified.

Thomas Pynchon--The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)

“There was that high magic to low puns”(105)

This would be a fantastic novel to teach as an introduction to postmodernism.  The novel follows a postmodern parody of a conspiracy, as the main character, Oedipa Maas, pursues what starts as a simple will executor duty into a labyrinthine conspiracy involving underground mail delivery which dates backs to eighteenth century Italy.  Following clues in play, in stamp watermarks, and a mysterious symbol of a muted horn which appears in stamps, bathroom graffiti, and doodles, Oedipa is driven near madness as she attempts to find order in this chaos, attempting to discover constellations among the clues.  The meaning of the enigmatic title is not revealed until the novel’s end, when one of the “lots” being auctioned off in the estate of the late Pierce Inverarity, Oedipa’s former lover whose vast estate she has been put partly in charge of.  Lot 49 contains the postage stamps which contain clues to the conspiracy; the “crying,” or auctioning, of this lot may reveal the authenticity of the conspiracy.  The novel ends with the crying of lot 49, never revealing the ultimate answers which Oedipa has sought.

One of the most metatextual elements in the novel is the play within the novel, the production of the Jacobean revenge play The Courier’s Tragedy described by members of the Paranoids and attended by Oedipa and Metzger.  The ridiculously complicated plot, so typical of a Jacobean play, itself forms a commentary on the very nature of plot itself.  Until this point, the plot of The Crying of Lot 49 has seemed rather outlandish: with this embedded narrative, the novel seems less postmodern and more in keeping with a much longer tradition of story-telling—“It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse” (58).  More specifically, the description of a particular moment in the plot of The Courier’s Tragedy¸ when “an ambiguity begins to creep in among the words,”  could also be describing the novel at this point: “Heretofore the naming of names has gone on either literally or as a metaphor.  But now,…a new mode of expression takes over.  It can only be called a ritual reluctance.  Certain things, it is made clear, will not be spoken aloud; certain events will not be shown onstage; though it is difficult to imagine, given the excesses of the preceding acts, what these things could possibly be” (55).

This is not my favorite novel I've read.  Part of the problem, I think, was going from Mango Street and Ellen Foster (not to mention Downton Abbey), all very emotional reads with well-developed characters, to this novel, where emotion and character are beside the point.  I kept wanting to read Flannery O'Connor--or Spider Robinson, whose books (at least the ones I've read, which are mostly in the Callahan's and Lady Sally series) have a similar Vonnegut self-consciousness about them but also usually have characters with some emotional depth.  I realize that emotional depth is not a literary requirement--and isn't always one for my enjoyment--but I think that this transition was a bit too jarring to be completely enjoyable.  (Though I still really like Cat's Cradle--it's very possible, though, that timing was involved in that as well.)