Lit Up Read online

  Vonnegut’s solution was to write a mock-novel that at the same time is a genuine novel. If realism doesn’t make sense after a massacre, then throw out linear plotting (as Ike said), jump from one place to another, one kind of representation to another. Vonnegut turns to a goofy invention from earlier books, The Sirens of Titan, in particular—the Tralfamadorians, benevolent creatures who look like “plumber’s friends,” and who can see past, present, and future. They are gods who resemble toilet plungers. The Tralfamadorians kidnap Billy Pilgrim, and instruct him in their belief that linear time is meaningless. For them, everything that happened in the past, and everything that will happen in the future is happening now. They have entered another dimension, and they take him along. Once he’s theirs, Billy can remember the future. He may be the strangest protagonist in American literature, feeble and visionary at the same time.

  Structuring his book, Vonnegut enters a Tralfamadorian universe. Billy, helplessly moving forward and backward in his life, has become “unstuck in time.” The Battle of the Bulge, his captivity in Dresden, his domestic life after the war as a successful optometrist and family man in Ilium (i.e., Troy), New York—all of that is always present, in fragments, the pieces commenting on one another. The fragments make up his being, in which everything is present at once. The rhythms of Slaughterhouse-Five can be frustrating, even baffling, since Vonnegut intentionally avoids most kinds of momentum. Near the end, he does offer, in fragments, a kind of climactic moment, which he builds very carefully and then savagely throws away. The actual attack on Dresden occupies no more than a few pages. It’s an extraordinarily mischievous book, glancingly cruel and funny.

  “A lot of people read the ‘so it goes’ as ‘let it be,’” Mr. Leon said. “But this is an antiwar novel. Who goes off to war?” he asked abruptly.

  He meant who goes off to war in the present, not in 1945, when almost any man might have gone off to war. “They recruit people from the lower class,” Nino responded, “because they know they can control them.” The students were moralists, or at least moralizers—that much had been clear all along—and they dealt with Vonnegut’s puzzling novel by talking about soldiering and injustice. The United States was still engaged in two endless and largely pointless wars—Iraq and Afghanistan—and the students were angry about the way the armed forces glorified service.

  Mr. Leon talked sympathetically about poor kids in his Louisiana high school. Military recruiters, he said, preyed on low-income teenage boys who suffered from a sense of worthlessness. Maud, as if putting a final stamp on the issue, said, “The homeless are largely veterans,” which is not true (about 10 percent are veterans). Perhaps she meant the statement the other way around: “The veterans are mainly homeless.” But that wasn’t true, either. A minute later, she added, “The war”—by which she meant the Iraq War—“gives people a purpose. They get attention they might not get at home,” which was a remark meant in a kindly way but came out sounding patronizing. The students, cued by Mr. Leon, perhaps, made recruitment sound intrinsically evil—a form of seduction.

  The class was veering into liberal condescension. There were the Beacon students, who were presumably okay, and then there were “the poor,” who needed the armed services. It was a parochial Manhattan and Brooklyn view. In the South or the Midwest, and in the Bronx or Queens or Staten Island, too, many families—and not just poor families—would be happy if their sons and daughters entered the army or the navy. The children of middle-class Manhattan and Brooklyn didn’t know many such families; they might not know a single person who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan or even on an army base in the States. I knew only two myself, both college-educated officers who had served in Iraq.

  Of course, there was another possibility: Were the students unwittingly expressing not so much condescension as fear? They may have been from middle-class families, most of them, but poverty was something they were afraid they might fall into, and one of the aspects of poverty for them was that you became fodder for bad wars. It was hard to make out exactly what lay underneath their attitudes except extreme distaste for war.

  “Is war ever justified?” Mr. Leon asked, moving things along. In this context, it was a potent question. Most older people would say, “In the case of the Second World War, absolutely.” And yet Vonnegut writes about that war as a bedraggled ridiculous theater of mishaps, folly, and cowardice, with only occasional acts of valor—and those most likely to be punished by death. “War is never necessary,” said good-hearted Vanessa. “We should have arrested Hitler, put him in an insane asylum, taken away his power.” These wonderful suggestions were received with stunning politeness (Mr. Leon had forbidden derision under any circumstance). Both boys and girls in the class suppressed smiles and stoutly said that Hitler was implacable and had to be destroyed.

  * * *

  The structure of Slaughterhouse-Five was much harder to talk about than these gummy ethical issues. Vonnegut’s playful and wounding tone wasn’t easy to handle, either. The students understood the horror of the book, but the humor of it escaped them. As was clear from the Alanis Project, they were at home with parody, spoof, satire, SNL, The Daily Show, mash-ups, and media shenanigans of every kind. But black comedy and absurdism were new. They were not experienced enough as readers to know what awful things they could laugh at. They were, I supposed, too young for Slaughterhouse-Five. But how do you advance in understanding if you don’t experience things that you’re too young for?

  Clare, an earnest girl who was another of the students reticent early in the year but speaking more now; Clare, a warm presence in the room, her voice soft and low, came closest to the book’s strategy. “Vonnegut uses sarcasm so he doesn’t have to express his emotions fully,” she said. Clare may have used the wrong word. “Irony”—pitch-black irony—rather than “sarcasm” was the essence of Vonnegut’s deadpan wit. The book was actually exploding with rage. But Clare understood that Slaughterhouse was an act of displacement, in which Vonnegut expresses powerful feelings of disgust as casual jokes, deadly jokes. Here was a true alchemist! He turned rage into comic fiction. Vanessa, recovering from her noodling remarks about Hitler in an asylum, followed Clare by turning to the Tralfamadorians: “Billy invents them to escape the horror of his reality,” and she cited Billy’s epochal meeting, in a psychiatric ward, with Eliot Rosewater, an intelligent man who killed a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. “They were trying to reinvent themselves and their universe,” Vonnegut comments. “Science fiction was a big help.”

  “Is religion portrayed positively or negatively?” Mr. Leon asked. “Negatively,” said Vanessa. “Definitely negatively,” said Ike. Marina had been silent, but now she burst out. “Christianity versus science fiction is a big element in the novel,” she said, and she made it clear that science fiction, with its childlike made-up world, its arbitrariness and whimsy, had won out in Vonnegut’s mind over organized religion, whose insistence on a morally accountable universe was rudely and persistently violated by the arbitrary disasters of life, the casualness of death.

  “How could God allow the killing of thousands of people in Dresden?” asked Mr. Leon, with some heat. He had set out in that class to tie together the book’s structure, but the students noticed Vonnegut’s many needling jokes about Christianity, so he suddenly plunged back into ethics and the most troublesome of all ethical inquiries: How can a perfect God allow evil? The name in theology and philosophy for such an inquiry is “theodicy,” and people had been debating its leading question for two thousand years at least. No answer, putting it mildly, has been satisfactory. But Marco and Jose rejected the others’ acceptance of Vonnegut’s blasphemies. “I have to disagree with you,” Marco said, very politely, when the students expounded on Vonnegut’s jokes. He cited the small touches of belief in Vonnegut’s desolating landscape, the mentions of Jesus Christ and the Bible. The Latino students Marco and Jose could not—or at least would not—live in a world in which there was no disc
ernible moral order.

  Mr. Leon brought up Vonnegut’s use of the Serenity Prayer, which would seem to offer a daily method of coping with life’s outrages. Billy keeps it on his office wall. The Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had devised the prayer—in 1943, probably, though Niebuhr wasn’t entirely sure of the date. If that year is correct, he wrote it right in the middle of the war. By the seventies and eighties, the Serenity Prayer was turning up everywhere. Alcoholics Anonymous and many other therapeutic groups cited it; you could find it in car-repair shops, replacing naked Marilyn.

  GOD GRANT ME

  THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT

  THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE,

  COURAGE

  TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN,

  AND WISDOM ALWAYS

  TO TELL THE

  DIFFERENCE.

  “Courage to change the things I can” suggests power to make a difference in the world. But Vonnegut immediately follows the prayer with these words: “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future,” a chilling remark that Mr. Leon pointed out was a direct contradiction of the prayer itself.

  Yet even if Billy can’t change anything, he does experience a moment of real connection to his own life, a single moment of consciousness that redeems his entire blank, wiped-out passivity. It’s the closest thing to a climax that Vonnegut offers. At a party of optometrists in Ilium, a group of friends in a barbershop quartet sings “That Old Gang of Mine,” and Billy, mysteriously, “was pulled apart inside.” His face collapses, and some of his friends notice it. Later that night he realizes what moved him so much: In Dresden, in 1945, when he and a few other Americans were put in the meat locker under the pig slaughterhouse, the four Germans guarding them would climb to the surface now and then. They would look at Dresden burning, and then return, their eyes rolling. “They looked like a silent film of a barbershop quartet,” Billy remembers, and that’s why the barbershop quartet in Ilium wipes him out. Vonnegut tells us: “He did not travel in time to the experience.” At that moment, he’s not unstuck; he remembers.

  For an instant, Billy seems sound, even whole. But can Billy survive without his usual madness? Marina didn’t think so. “His relations to the Tralfamordians is the only thing he has,” Marina said, with some alarm. “He might really go insane without them.” A terrific remark, but Billy’s actual memory kicking in suggests that all is not lost—no perception completely fades into blankness. You may not be able to change anything, but, as Nino, summing up, said, “Your perceptions of the past can change.” That may have been no more than a minimal bit of hope to gather from Slaughterhouse-Five, but it was hope nevertheless. After their initial bafflement, the students understood Vonnegut’s pessimism, and his tiny movements away from it.

  Vonnegut’s greatest moment, however, was not something the students could possibly grasp. At least not fully, since they hadn’t grown up, as I had, with documentary footage from the Second World War constantly playing on television. In chapter 4, Billy, at home in Ilium, comes unstuck in time. He sees a movie on television, a movie about “American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them.” Billy’s mind, well, encroaches upon the film. Unstuck, he sees the movie backwards, which Vonnegut renders as follows. I quote it at length because it’s one of the most moving things ever written about the Second World War:

  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 American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. This wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

  From the Dresden bombing to the innocence of creation—the passage is a reverse dramatization of the fall of man. What it expresses, of course, is a wish that the bombing run had never happened, a wish rendered in tragicomic form that reinforces the truth that it did happen. The students may not have understood the passage when they read it—we never mentioned it in class—but after a month or so of discussing Slaughterhouse-Five, they appreciated the aggressive humor of Vonnegut’s toilet-plunger gods and the value of his bizarro science fiction as a way of dealing with everything that was inexplicably awful in life. Without understanding that comedy and tragedy were mixed together, you had little chance of a reaching a halfway sane attitude toward existence. Vonnegut, the grief-struck joker, makes us face the seeming contraries. Billy may have come unstuck in time, unstuck in his life, but we were stuck in ours, and Vonnegut wanted us to know it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BEACON, MARCH: VIKTOR E. FRANKL

  Where Was Joy?

  Rebellion (If That’s What It Was)

  Viktor E. Frankl and the Meaning of Life

  Hier ist kein Warum

  A Death in the Family

  Sophomoric

  Okay, this was enough. Enough.

  The students needed a break from grim books. I needed a break from grim books. Slaughterhouse-Five was black comedy, and funny in its morbid-whimsical-fantastical way, but death ran right through it, and I wondered, Where was the exhilaration of the body in movement, the triumph of heroes and heroines, the happiness of youth as well as the strivings of youth? Mr. Leon’s moral intensity was powerful, but where was the rest of life? Joy? Exhilaration? Art as delight? The pleasures of story? I agreed that middle-class students in a privileged atmosphere needed some shaking up, but they needed happiness, too. Along about this time, the students could have used, well, some Shakespeare. Much Ado About Nothing, say, with its dueling Beatrice and Benedick, its play of ridicule and intrigue, and its ruling notion—the ruling notion of all romantic comedy—that “the world must be peopled.” Yes, the notion that banter and flirting and quarreling between men and women leads to romance and bed and the perpetuation of the race. But never mind the perpetuation of the race. Exuberance, play, nature, sex, life in the world, narrative—where were they?

  Somehow, Mr. Leon did not respond to my desires. He did not hear my silent complaint. Instead, he pressed ahead. Earlier in the year, he had written a sentence of Nietzsche’s on the board: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Now he brought it up again: if you have a purpose in your life, you can put up with almost anything. Nietzsche’s sentiment was central to the next book on the reading list, Viktor E. Frankl’s The Search for Meaning, an account of Frankl’s time in several Nazi concentration camps. With a sigh, I read the book, which was new to me.

  Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist and neurologist with general medical training, and therefore of some value to the Nazis, who kept him alive despite his Jewish identity. Arrested with his wife in 1942, he survived and even flourished in Theresienstadt, the “model” camp near Prague that the Nazis used as a propaganda tool to demonstrate their “benevolent” treatment of the Jews. In 1944, he was transported to Auschwitz; he survived there, too, but got moved again, to a Dachau subsidiary camp, and was finally liberated by the American Army in April 1945. His brother, parents, and pregnant wife, Tilly, all perished in the camps.

  Later that year, he wrote a short memoir (allegedly in nine days). The original title (in translation) was Say “Yes” to Life: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. When Frankl published the book in America, in 1959, he added a new section, and the title beca
me From Death-Camp to Existentialism. Sometime later the title morphed into Man’s Search for Meaning. In the 2006 paperback edition, the book had acquired a foreword by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People. The “message” of the book (it may seem vulgar to use that word in relation to the camps, but this book does have a message) is that even in the most extreme situations, life has meaning, and it’s precisely that search for meaning—the “why” in Nietzsche’s formulation—that helps people stay alive.

  Frankl’s book posed the most essential questions about identity. How do you react to extreme experience? How do you make a self when you have been stripped of everything—work, family, home, possessions, clothes—and just reduced to a number and likely death? What do you live for? Why do you live? That last question was Mr. Leon’s, and once again he wanted the kids to challenge their own lives. He turned to Luisa, a girl who had not contributed much up to that point, and said, “No one has ever lived that life before [meaning her life], and it will never be lived again—that’s a wild idea.” Luisa looked a little startled. And then, to the class: “Do you have a purpose to live, a why?”

  Vanessa raised her hand. “We don’t have a purpose, but we enjoy many things. We’re fifteen, we don’t have a concrete purpose.” As she had told me earlier, she was breaking away from her family, defining herself, and she couldn’t yet say what she lived for. “I want to revolve around thoughts,” she told me. “Being so obsessed with actions can lead to decay in yourself”—a remarkable sentence, a little puzzling, but remarkable. “I don’t read enough,” she admitted. “I see the value of literature, but I need to think apart from a book.” Vanessa, who no longer wept in class, wanted to be a therapist. “Thoughts” were active agents for her. In her own way, she was reacting against Sean Leon’s insistent vitalism.