Postmodernist Vonnegut
Before I venture further in discussing the postmodernist features found in Vonneguts works, I would like to first shed some light on the notion of postmodernism. The concept of postmodernism has been critiqued by some literary scholars saying that it has no definition and its existence only relies on the basis of challenging or surpassing the modernist model.
From an epistemological perspective, modernists believe in the existence of the concrete truth, but believed that the ways which end up to that are not divergent, but rather, in a variety of ways. Postmodernists, on the other hand, are more closely affiliated with poststructuralists and deconstructionists, in that they believe that there is no absolute truth and the universe has no center and consequently coherence and meaning does not exist, neither in the world, nor in a text (Meghdadi and Payam 27).
In his essay, Hassan (91) explains this further by presenting a table that shows the schematic differences between modernism and postmodernism. Several elements of the two literary movements are compared in order to highlight their differences. From a modernist view, some of the elements that can be seen in this literary movement include romanticismsymbolism, form (conjunctive, closed), purpose, design, hierarchy, distance and metaphor, among others. The postmodernist view challenges that by focusing on elements that counteract the modernist ones mentioned above. This would include pataphysicsDadaism, antiform (disjunctive, open), play, chance, anarchy, participation and metonymy.
In his academic essay, Tally (165) states that Vonneguts work features several elements that are associated with postmodern fiction, such as metafictional techniques, use of collage or pastiche, and many others. Also, his works give off a sense of postmodernism or a fellow-feeling for its place and time.
According to Allen (5), two messages recur through all the writings of Vonnegut the first is Be Kind the second is God doesnt care whether you are or not. This kind of thinking, and his insistence that writing is an act of good citizenship or an attempt, at any rate, to be a good citizen (cited in Davis 7), that has led many critics to dismiss his work. Davis (6) defends the works of Vonnegut by stating that unlike the assertion of so many modernist critics that art is autonomous (art for arts sake), Vonnegut is concerned not only with the form his writing takes--one that reflects postmodern conviction about the nature of reality and our ability to express that reality in language--but also with the positive work his artistry may engender.
The postmodernist qualities that can be found in Slaughterhouse-Five include the mixing of fantasy and nonfiction, which is shown through the use of time travel and the Dresden bombing. Another of its postmodernist quality is having a clear-cut moral position as it highlights the devastation of war. By highlighting the devastation of war, the novel illustrates its postmodernist quality by having a definite moral stand on things.
According to Marvin (10), by publishing the anti-war novel during the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut demonstrates how he views war and the aerial bombardment efforts of the U.S. as nothing but a purposeless slaughter of innocents with no military justification. According to Foerstel (241), the novel has a foundation in history and fact, but it is not a typical realistic novel. It mixes reality and science fiction, tragedy and slapstick .
Another Vonnegut novel that fits the postmodernist category is Cats Cradle (Vonnegut, 1963). In this novel, the main protagonist is John, a.k.a. Jonah, a writer, who is planning to write about the late Felix Hoenikker, a physicist and one of the creators of the atomic bomb.
Allen (x) states that, in Cats Cradle, satire, which is a postmodernist quality, can be found in the novel. The satirization of religious fundamentalists, who are rendered obsolete in the age of science, and scientists is seen in the novel.
Reed (1972) also observed that the novels main character, Jonah, can be compared to the biblical Jonah who gets swallowed by a whale. The whale can then be compared to the Bokonism religion that Jonah gets involved with in the novel, as he was sucked in to its practices and beliefs.
In Breakfast of Champions, Alsen (110) describes it as a novel that is essentially a work of romantic postmodernism, despite its disjunctive and manipulated structure. According to Waugh (8), the strategy presented in the novel is the invertibility of the science-fiction convention whereby humans are depicted attempting to comprehend the processes of an alien world. She relates how, in the novel, contemporary American society is the alien world as Vonnegut defamiliarizes the world that his readers take for granted, through the technique of employing an ex- Earthling narrator who is now living on a different planet and has set out to explain Earth to his fellow inhabitants (Waugh 8).
Alsen (113) states that Breakfast of Champions is different from other Vonnegut novels as it contain more humor, a more upbeat tone, and a more positive view of human nature. Some critics and readers picked apart the novel due to its deviation from its predecessors, proclaiming that Vonnegut is incapable of producing a novel with the same caliber as Slaughterhouse-Five and that the quality of the rest of his works continues to decline. Morse (60) argues that this is not the case with Breakfast of Champions stating that after dealing with such large, imponderable issues as the presence of evil in the world and unmotivated human suffering, Vonnegut turns to playing in a serious way with the nature of narrative and with his role as a writer which results in the wonderful exuberance of Breakfast of Champions.
Allen (xii) presented another side to considering the novel remarking that Vonneguts work has always been marked with his desire to break down the barrier between fact and fiction, which can be seen in the first and last chapters of Slaughterhouse-Five, but in Breakfast of Champions he seemed determined to show his characters were automatons before they ever came alive.
Marvin (10) states that there were plenty of clues that Vonnegut has provided with regard to the connection between his life and work. One clue is by weaving autobiographical details into his fiction and discussing the process of writing novels in the novels themselves. These novels are prime examples of what he means.
Use of Metafiction in His Novels
Metafiction, which is a feature of postmodern writing, has been an object of interest among the literary field. The term metafiction was first conceived in 1970 by American literary critic William H. Gass in his essay Philosophy and the Form of Fiction describing it as fiction somehow about fiction itself (Knuth 1). Patricia Waugh (2) gives a more precise definition of metafiction as a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. However, Waugh (5) states that, although the term is relatively new, the practice itself is as old as the novel itself and is what gives the novel its identity.
The concept of metafiction as a self-conscious fiction can also be associated with terms such as self-awareness, self-reflection, self-knowledge and ironic self-distance (Currie 1). Waugh (6) describes metafictional novels as having the tendency to be constructed on the principle of a fundamental and sustained opposition, which is, the construction of a fictional illusion and the lying bare of that illusion. She adds that, in metafiction, what is commonly seen is the creation of fiction and at the same time, the making of a statement about the process of fiction creation.
A work can be defined as metafictional when the concept of artificiality becomes obvious to the reader. Accordingly, a metafictional work knowingly lays bare the conventions of fiction and draws attention to the language and literary style it uses (Meghadi Payam 28). In support of this, Ward (31) characterizes how metafiction writers work within the tradition of novel as an art form, but do so with a critical, ironic awareness of that tradition.
Vachon (3-4) attempts to describe, in basic terms, the concept of metafiction. In her academic essay, she states that metafiction attempts to give us a sense of reading about ourselves in the act of reading. She further describes metafiction as
A constant movement in reciprocitya continuous reversal of reading and being readin order to catch reading itself. This is the nexus around which the reader and the text rotate, so that reading is always a splitting in the same moment that it is a unifying (4).
Another interesting topic that has been brought up in Vachons (21) essay is the comparison between metafiction and autobiography. This is in relation to the authors use of himself or herself as a fictional character in their works. According to Vachon (21), the author is rendered anonymous in metafiction, while in autobiography, the author is exposed. This means that the concept of metafiction is unbounded as it allows the title of metafiction to open up to the text to infinite possibilities through the use of the depersonalization approach. Meanwhile, authority is claimed and the text is closed in autobiography.
Accordingly, metafiction can be located on the dividing line between fiction and literary criticism, exploring the relationship between these two worlds. Thus, the mimetic illusion literature creates is often undermined or even destroyed. From the point of convergence comes a self-conscious vigour that influences both criticism and fiction (Currie 2) .
Another question that needs to be pondered is why it is common to use metafiction in science fiction novels. Most metafiction writers, including Vonnegut, uses the science fiction genre for their novels because it is an effective medium in addressing the concern of metafiction writing which is to lay bare the works artificiality. According to McHale (60), by using the science fiction genre, authors can stage close encounters between different worlds, and as the confrontation theme occur between the said worlds, the disparities can be seen in them as each worlds structures are placed in the foreground.
By looking at the distinction between modern and postmodernism, which was mentioned earlier, postmodern fiction faces a dilemma with regard to dealing with realities as it contradicts the postmodernistic tenet of fictionality. Metafiction is the answer to this dilemma as it addresses the issue between fiction and realism as metafiction tries not to hold a mirror up to human nature or reality but instead puts up a mirror to the art of novel writing itself.
With regard to the use of the metafiction strategy in Vonneguts novels, this can be explained by Martins (28) view that The death of the (realistic) novel, which attracted so much critical attention in America and France during the 1950s, coincided with the rebirth of narrative. The new novel in France (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute), what has been called fabulation and metafiction in American novel since the 1960s (John Barth, William Gass...), and South American writers such as Jorge Borges, Julio Cortzar, and Gabriel Garca Mrquez simply cannot be discussed adequately if one uses the critical apparatus associated with realism.
This view applies to Vonneguts strategy as Marvin (14) remarks that, in his writings, Vonnegut imagines other worlds because they allow him to point out what is wrong with contemporary society.
The selected novels of Vonnegut correspond to Waughs (2) claim that one of the major elements in all metafictional novels is that, they all explore a theory of fiction through the practice of writing a fiction.
In the novels of Vonnegut, two metafictive implications can be observed (Meghdadi and Payam 33)
1. Questioning the relationship between fiction and reality
2. The role of author in the text that he has written
According to Meghdadi and Payam, Vonneguts critique of the contemporary American culture could not have its present effect, if his novels had been other than metafictional. Moreover, this allows Vonnegut to distance himself from his contemporary culture and have a better overview of the disadvantages of being an American.
The second implication associated with metafictional novels is addressed by Waugh (6) as she suggests that the author in a metafictional novel loses his privileged position and almost becomes powerless in the realist tradition, especially in the case of nineteenth-century realism, where the authorial power is generally derived from a firm belief in a commonly experienced, objectively existing world of history. Waugh followed this by remarking that the forms of fiction, and the conflict of languages and voices, are resolved through their subordination to the dominant voice of the omniscient, god-like author.
According to Waugh (7), the god-like power of the author over the text refers to the well-made plot, chronological sequence, the rational connection between what characters do and what they are, the causal connection between surface details and the deep, scientific laws of existence.
However, Meghdadi and Payam (37) observes that the postmodernist author loses his god-like authority over the text, as in most of the novels, the author enters his own text in order to show his authority to his characters in a direct way. The author ends up losing all his authorial power as soon as he crosses the boundary of the real world into the fictional world by becoming a fictional character too.
This can be seen in Vonneguts two novels, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut is the omniscient narrator of the text and also a fictional writer figure in the text. Thus, the god-like position of the author in the text is challenged. In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut as the author of the book actually turns himself into one of the main characters in his novel.
Waugh (1984) named the three selected novels as typical examples of metafiction, in that, they employ intertextual references and allusions, violate traditional rules of narration, and use unconventional and experimental techniques. In Slaughterhouse-Five, by recalling the destruction of Dresden in World War II, it also connects history and fiction, a subject of historiographic metafiction. Metafictional writing, in the case of Vonnegut, gives him the opportunity to find a solution to the ontological dilemma of reality. Moreover, it allows him to communicate to his readers the examination of the relationship between social reality and fictional form by exposing the mirror of art to its own linguistic structures.
Vonneguts Philosophy as Seen Through His Works
Vonneguts major novels also provide readers with an idea of the philosophical struggles and beliefs that Vonnegut has followed his entire life. In his book Kurt Vonneguts Crusade, Davis (2) reflects on his encounter with Vonnegut when he and his wife listened to a speech delivered by the author. Davis describes that considering that many critics have labeled Vonnegut an indifferent philosopher of existentialism or a playful nihilist of comic futility, it was quite obvious that the Kurt Vonnegut who spoke compassionately and directly about such issues as violence and war, love and respect, was exactly the Kurt Vonnegut that the audience had come to see.
Schroeder (n.d.) posits that Vonneguts true philosophy can be seen in his works as he provides a dramatic and deliberate distinction between people and characters. This can be particularly observed in Slaughterhouse Five (1-2).
To get a deeper understanding of Vonneguts philosophy, one must understand how he views people. Schroeder (2) states the Vonnegut sees people as barely human automatons who never gave thought or consider their actions as they go through the motions of life. They are mere lifeless playthings, acting like slaves and showing no hint of resistance against the forces that control their lives, and if they do realize that they are being controlled, they do nothing about it, preferring to submit themselves to their collective fate.
However, he believes in free-will, but it has been blocked by those enormous forces, or what he perceives as the institutions of war and religion (2). Schroeder (13) describes him as not a fatalist he does not resign himself to the belief that all events are predetermined and therefore unalterable. On the other hand, he is a pessimist. He never promises a happy ending, and the world he depicts is so dominated by the enormous forces of society that the gloom clearly seems to overshadow the light (13).
His humanist views and desire to enact change can be seen in his novels. Vonnegut once mentioned that he deliberately keeps his books short because he wants to be read by men in power and he knows politicians have neither the time nor the inclination to read thick books (Allen 5). He is quoted as saying
Ive worried some about why write books when Presidents and Senators and generals do not read them and the university experience taught me a very good reason you catch people before they become generals and Senators and Presidents, and you poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world.
Davis (7) states that Vonneguts efforts to connect with his audience as an act of good citizenship are rooted in the bigquestions. He provides a connection which he hopes will ultimately lead to the construction of better realities for humanity. Davis remarks that
His work is philosophical in nature his stories often take the form of parables he struggles along with the reader, not in a position of author as omniscient creator but as one who is also wrestling honestly with the big question at hand (7).
Vonnegut possesses a strong social awareness which is reflected in his novels. This allows him to urge others not to see their work in terms of mere word play or philosophical theorizing. He also calls for each of us to examine our lives and to live in such a way that we minimize the harm we do to the earth or its inhabitants (Davis 7).
This social awareness can especially be seen in his novels, Slaughterhouse-Five and Cats Cradle. The release of Slaughterhouse-Five is timed at the height of the Vietnam War, and in it, he alludes to the harsh realities of war and its futility. According to Simpson (261), the novel shows the nature of humanity, specifically, the murderousness of man. Vonnegut, in an explicit manner, attempts to show what war and bad ideas can do to humanity. Cats Cradle, meanwhile, depicts the destructive acts of the human race and its consequences to Earth and its inhabitants.
Davis (12) gives a clearer perspective on the philosophy of Vonnegut.
It is true that Vonnegut often depicts the plight of humanity in brutally honest terms He is unwilling to wear rose-colored glasses in order to pander to those who wish only to hear euphemistic sound bites about our future. As he sees it, the uncontained growth of population, the destructive and costly wars that enliven an economic machine that uses human flesh for fuel, our blithe response to the devastation of the environment, and our continued mistreatment of one another, does not bode well for the future. Vonnegut, however, does not see himself as fatalistic or pessimistic.
Current Situation
Even after his death, Vonnegut has left a legacy that can be cherished by generations to come. It is undeniable that the works of Vonnegut, particularly his major novels, has solidified his reputation as an influential and noteworthy writer. Although his career has been marred by attacks on his literary works, his reputation remains secure.
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