slaughterhouse-five

I first read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five when I was a senior in high school. I honestly don't remember the experience of reading it; it's just a fact I know, that I checked it off a to-do list somewhere and that I, quite unexpectedly, liked it.^[1]

Then I went years without really thinking about it again. It was a book I read, but I've read a lot of books. It didn't come back to me until I started working on trauma theory, and especially once I got into the temporality of trauma and its representation in genre fiction. I half-considered working it into an essay I was playing with, about trauma and non-linear time in DS9 and the Aeneid. I decided that if I was going to use it I really did need to reread it, so I dropped that aspect of the argument, but the idea of doing a reread was in my head now. Yesterday, I finally got around to it.

And however much I liked it before, I loved it more now by an order of magnitude.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a very weird book, in a way very similar to Sudden Death. Both books play with time, and with the form of the novel. Both have significant metatextual digressions. Both books use deliberate opacity to negotiate the sheer incomprehensible scale of their tragedies, to help the reader understand more without leaving them with the impression that they really understand anything at all.

But there's a real textural difference between the two books. Sudden Death was exploratory: it didn't avoid the horrific (there is a particular passage about the fall of Tenochtitlan that really sticks with me), but that's not what it's about. It's about human relationships, at the personal and societal scales both, and sometimes those relationships involve rape and torture and genocide, but they also involve art and food and genuine affection.

Slaughterhouse-Five is...I don't know what it is. To be fair, when I read it a month ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell you Sudden Death was, so give me four to six weeks and perhaps I'll be able to distill Slaughterhouse-Five's essential nature into a single word.

I'll start here with my most obvious observation, which is the centrality of Edgar Derby's lack of centrality.

Chapter one is something like memoir: Vonnegut's account of how the book came to be (a process which took twenty-three years). You get the idea that Vonnegut was desperate to talk about the war and unable to process it into a form that made sense and that, eventually, he leaned into the nonsense of it all. I don't mean that he makes it silly; I mean that he denies his readers sense.

But back in chapter one,^[2] when he still has hopes of making something of the story, Vonnegut says this to a friend from the war:

“I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby,” I said. “The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he’s given a regular trial, and then he’s shot by a firing squad.”

“Um,” said O’Hare.

“Don’t you think that’s really where the climax should come?”

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “That’s your trade, not mine.”

In this final, published version, though, Edgar Derby dies in three matter-of-fact sentences about a page from the end (chapter 10):

Somewhere in there the poor old high school teacher, Edgar Derby, was caught with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs. He was arrested for plundering. He was tried and shot.

So it goes.

I am reminded of Anne Carson's introduction to Hekabe:

Sacrificing virgins is an old trick in Greek tragedy, made use of by all three tragedians. But Euripides aims at a different effect than does Aischylos in Agamemnon (where Iphigeneia is slaughtered by her father) or Sophokles in Antigone (where Antigone is buried alive by Kreon). Iphigeneia and Antigone are sensationally significant victims: Iphigeneia’s sacrifice is the lynchpin of all that happens to Agamemnon afterwards; Antigone’s death is the transcendent culmination of Sophokles’ play. These deaths change the stories in which they are set, transform the lives around them and force moral reasoning to an extreme confrontation with itself. Polyxenas death is different. It is not placed at the beginning or at the end of the play but muffled in the middle; it does not constitute either cause or culmination of the action; it does not change the plot or other people in any substantial way; and it forces us to no moral conclusion at all except that such sacrifice is irrelevant to the world in which it is staged. Polyxena is a shooting star that wipes itself across the play and disappears. And Euripides wants us to notice this—this irrelevance of Polyxena.^[3]

Unlike Polyxena, Edgar Darby does die at the end of the book. He's also dead at the beginning, right there in the first chapter and arguably even in the first paragraph; we are reminded of his deadness almost every time his name occurs, any time he is called "poor old Derby". The impact of his death is stolen not by being buried but by being everpresent, by the fact that he is already dead while still living and breathing.

He is most tantalizingly dead-not-dead when he has his real shining moment in chapter eight:

Poor old Derby, the doomed high school teacher, lumbered to his feet for what was probably the finest moment in his life. 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. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters. But old Derby was a character now.

In another sort of story, in a play by Sophocles or the sort of war book Mary O'Hare disdained, Derby would have died for speaking up, for a speech about honor and righteousness and The American Way, in his moment of character-ness. Sophocles is "fascinated by people who say no, people who resist compromise, people who make stumbling blocks of themselves"^[4] and, as a tragedian, this fascination mostly ends with heroes who are righteously dead, but dead all the same. That sort of generic knowledge lays heavy over the scene.

In a novel by Vonnegut, Derby dies for his theft of a teapot. He's been so dead for so long that the reader can't help but look forward to the actual moment of his death, the culmination that Vonnegut has already told he wanted for a climax, a release of the tension inherent in the dead man walking. Instead, we get what is practically a footnote. This death can't make sense of this because there is no sense to be made and it can't release the tension because...well, how could you have ever imagined it could? And Vonnegut certainly wants us to notice this—this irrelevance of Edgar Derby.

The book is deeply aware of the absurdity of the whole affair, but it judges that absurdity as senselessness rather than meaninglessness. It is because things have meaning that they don't make sense. If human life doesn't matter, if nothing matters, then there is no conflict in this; it is only because we assign value to life that we demand that its end make sense and are frustrated when it doesn't.

What are we to do with the piling of bodies upon bodies, the extraneous execution of a man for the sake of property after the death of one-hundred and thirty thousand people in a war that killed an estimated sixty million, a full two percent of the human population?

Vonnegut's answer isn't in the book; it is the book itself.

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.^[5]