By Ken Butigan

Published in The New Contemplative Review

“A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it was like outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other guards.  There was a fire-storm out there.  The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.  It wasn’t safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day.  When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke.  The sun was an angry little pinhead.  Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals.  The stones were hot.  Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.”   

“So it goes.”

 
The Dresden fire-storm, which took place on the night of February 13, 1945, was designed (probably by a real-life Felix Hoenikker, the protagonist in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five) to create a situation in which the air itself would burst into flames and indiscriminately fan death and destruction across the ancient city.  The fire-storm was no accident.  It had been carefully planned and calculated.  The logistical problems had been sizable.  There had been numerous untested variables—after all, this was the first time human beings had attempted to devise a combustible hurricane.  The outcome of this effort was, unfortunately, all too successful: at least 135,000 people were consumed, and some experts estimate that as many as 200,000 died in the attack.

Slaughterhouse-Five represents the attempt of one survivor of catastrophe to give witness to that experience by communicating its massive horror.  In so doing, Vonnegut faced a problem peculiar to an age in which events seem to outrun the imagination’s mastery of them: speaking the unspeakable, saying the unsayable.  Statistical profiles of carnage and journalistic sketches could not, Vonnegut held, grasp or convey what transpired in Dresden.  For, from a variety of viewpoints, the event was incomprehensible and therefore raw “data” were inadequate to the experience.  Michael Herr, writing of Vietnam, voices a similar concern which underlines this modern problem:

“Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it; all it could do was take the most profound event of  the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding…  In back of every column of print you read about Vietnam there was a dripping, laughing death-face; it hid there in the newspapers and magazines and held to your television screens for hours after the set was turned off for the night, an after-image that simply wanted to tell you at last what somehow had not been told.”

Dresden, for Vonnegut, is more than a problem.  It is more than a “phenomenon.”  It is, rather, a mystery, a permanent landscape of the inexplicable that draws to the surface the fundamental human questions:  What is life?  What does it mean to be human?  Why is there suffering?  What prompts gross inhumanity?  For Vonnegut, Dresden becomes an archetypal experience that echoes repeatedly in all experience—the mark of ineffability is traced on the contours of “before” and “after.”  The fire-storm at the center of experience seems to draw all experience into its vortex.

“In the beginning was Auschwitz,”  Elie Wiesel has written, indicating that formulations asserted about reality must now be stated in the face of the fact of a million and a half burning children—and that even our ancient origins, even our past, must be re-envisioned in terms of our most recent experience.  The bombing of Dresden, like another Holocaust, demands of Vonnegut a similar re-evaluation, as its hot winds and flat, sterile lifelessness coalesce to draw the past and the future into its compelling vortex.

The structure and imagery of Slaughterhouse-Five suggest that the mystery of Dresden—the mystery of evil and the mystery of good in the face of evil—echoes through the past, present and future personal experience of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim.  Billy, a survivor of Dresden like Vonnegut, is subject at any moment to becoming “unstuck in time”—he randomly moves across the past and future of his own life.  On the first page of Billy’s story, the narrator reports that “Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day.  He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another in 1941.  He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963.  He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.”  “Time travel,”  especially random time travel, underlines and advances the text’s apocalyptic character—it infinitely confuses and replicates ending and beginning, and it joins, in an immediate way, the primary apocalyptic event of the firestorm to the other parts of Billy’s life, as if the heat and ruffling wind of that cataclysm were able to radiate outward through the spontaneous channels and secret passages created by Billy Pilgrim’s flights through time.

Apocalypse is characterized, at least in one respect, by the destruction and re-creation of environments—physical, psychological, spiritual.  Billy’s time travel, like the “jump cuts” of experimental film, evokes an unrelenting cycle of destruction-creation-destruction of the settings that seem arbitrarily imposed on his life.  This evokes a reeling vertigo-of-place in which each milieu and its objects begin to mimic every other one and finally echo the environment of the fire-storm itself, as if it is an indelible presence only slightly disguised and hidden in every aspect of Billy’s life.

Like a moth to the dangerous yet entrancing flame, we as readers are draw, as Billy Pilgrim is, to the primary environment of the hapless protagonist’s consciousness, the fire-storm itself.  In a single night, the city whose “skyline was intricate and voluptuous and enchanted and absurd” became a plain of craters and curves that were smooth “only when seen from a distance.”  Where was Billy during this destruction?  “He was,” Vonnegut tells us, “down in the meat locker (of the pig slaughterhouse where the American POWs lived)…  There were sounds like giant footsteps above.  There were sticks of high explosives bombs.  The giants walked and walked.  The meat locker was a very safe shelter…The Americans and four of their guards and a few dressed carcasses were down there, and nobody else.  The rest of the guards had, before the raid began, gone to the comforts of their own homes in Dresden.  They were all being killed with their families.  So it goes.”  Billy’s primordial environment, his archetypal horizon, is shot through with irony: the slaughterhouse that saves; the womb in which he passes from life and liveliness into death and cratered sterility; the situation in which the living above are being indiscriminately snuffed out while carcasses of dead animals are being jealously guarded from destruction in the safe meat locker; the experience of being saved but  imprisoned by the giants that are walking around and by the actual physical enclosure of the “box” in which Billy and the others find themselves. 

Incapable of speaking in the face of this horror, the guards evoked for Billy an ironic image: “They looked like a silent film of a barbershop quartet”.  Only in a skewed world would someone make a silent film of a musical group.  This contradiction and irony tug disquietly at the edges of Billy’s awareness, a sensation replicated years later, when Billy becomes physically ill at a party as a real barbershop quartet takes the floor.

These qualities rooted in the archetypal experience of the fire-storm—womb and tomb imagery, paradox, irony, the dumb presence—constelate in and create the succeeding environments of Billy’s life, evoking repeatedly the reality of Dresden in new and subtle ways.  Billy, whether “time-traveling” randomly or consecutively, hustles from one box to the next, as though they fit snugly within one another.  Box cars, prisons, hospitals, his automobile, the Tralfamadorian flying saucer, the geodesic dome on Tralfamadore, the domed stadium in Chicago where Billy is killed, as well as traumatic encounters in childhood with two open-ended “containers”, a swimming pool and the Grand Canyon—each of these becomes a hostile, ambiguous Eden into which, like Billy’s experience of being thrown into the pool by his father as a child, he is dropped sporadically and powerlessly.  Billy, Vonnegut writes, is “in a constant state of stage fright…because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next” — nor, we might add, what stage from which he will have to declaim.

Such spaces share this with the theatre also: they are dressed with a variety of props that, when juxtaposed, suggest talismans and totems, objects that evoke mystery by means of their strange power, and, as in the case of the diamond and partial denture Billy discovers in his borrowed coat, “animal magnetism.”  The mysterious is evoked partly because of Vonnegut’s wonderful use of repetition.  Certain objects reappear in the random scenes of Billy’s life, including the face of a radium clock, bare feet that are ivory and blue, a bottle resembling a dinner bell (itself slightly ironic in that the bottle suggests a bell in all of its aspects save its most important: the ability to ring, to call attention, to warn), a dog barking “somewhere.”

Secondly, mystery is suggested in Vonnegut’s use of ordinary objects.  In this novel, the ordinary commands a certain power and unnerving presence.  Commonplace objects and idioms disturb the environments in which they are situated and, with recurrence, evoke a kind of uncanny and esoteric mysteriousness that slowly builds over the course of the narrative.  This is evident in Vonnegut’s use of “street language” and seemingly meaningless phrases such as “and so on” and “so it goes.”  What at first seems flippant and banal treatment of death and life takes on a liturgical insistence as cliché gradually gives way to a kind of metaphysical whisper of the universe itself floating (as it is set off in its own inviolable white space on the page) in a field of silence.  Given this new context, such phrases are liberated from their traditional settings in which they function as soothing breaks in conversation and mental filler.  In their new contexts, their power to shock, disturb, eulogize, “say the unsayable,” is unleashed.  This suggests that, though mystery is present everywhere, the experience of that mystery is articulated, in part at least, by a process of re-contextualization in which objects are “de-familiarized” and are thereby allowed to become autonomous presences.

Commonplace phrases become koans, chants, and dirges.  Similarly, other, more complex fragments of language are given new contexts and therefore articulate new significance, including a limerick, an infinitely regressing song (“My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin…), Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the Bible, Mary Endell’s Dresden: History, Stage and Gallery, Erika Ostrovsky’s Celine and His Vision, an array of novels by Kilgore Trout (one of which recontextualizes the story of Jesus Christ), The Execution of Private Slovik, a prayer (“God grant me the serenity…”), an epitaph (“Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt”), a monograph on the American soldier by Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a speech by Harry Truman explaining the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and so on.

What Vonnegut does to texts, he also applies to physical objects of pop culture.  In this way he adapts a technique pioneered by the naive realists and surrealists of the visual arts.  Of these forms of modern art, historian Werner Haftmann writes that “even art had turned radically away from the world of things, and faith in the reality of this world had been undermined, the inanimate thing was not eliminated from psychological and visual experience.  At a deeper level, the thing was encountered again, experienced in a new dimension of reality… This experience…led to an entirely new conception of the world of things—to the discovery of the magical other.  It was discovered that the silent life of things possessed a special aura of strangeness, mystery, magic, which in the contemplating, reflective mind evoked a response expressing fear or irony.  ‘What constitutes the logic of our normal activities and our normal lives,’ Giorgio Chirico, one of the Italian metaphysical painters, wrote, ‘is an endless rosary made from recollections of our relationships with things.’  (Chirico then) asks what would happen if man (sic) were for once to leave the zone of this logic imposed on him by psychological considerations.  A man may sit in a room with a bird cage, books, etc., and everything seems ordinary, because everything is logically accounted for by the chain of our recollections.  ‘But suppose that one link in this chain breaks for a moment, for unexplained reasons independent of our will, and who can tell how this man, this bird cage, these books will appear to me?  terror and amazement…’”

Billy Pilgrim seems to undergo a similar experience.  Objects come to the fore of consciousness through Vonnegut’s peculiar treatment of them.  He deploys a prose style which appears to be explicit and clear to the point of overstatement — so much so that it suggests the “feel” of a children’s book, or perhaps a manual for Vonnegut’s outer space friends unfamiliar with 20th century American culture.  Neverthelesless, this style evokes, paradoxically, an underside of presence at the edges of awareness that is “incomprehensible, weird, mysterious.” 

Three scenes indicate this kind of encounter.  In the German camp with the English soldiers, “Billy moved along the screen and reached a point where he could see a message freshly painted on the tarpaper wall…Billy’s perceptions were so unreliable that he saw the words as hanging in air, painted on a transparent curtain, perhaps.  And there were lovely silver dots on the curtain, too.  These were really nailheads holding the tarpaper to the shed.  Billy could not imagine how the curtain was supported in nothingness, and he supposed that the magic curtain and the theatrical grief (he had heard before coming over in this direction) were part of some religious ceremony he knew nothing about.”  Or, when he was on a trip with his family to Carlsbad Cavern:  “Out went the lights.  Billy didn’t even know whether he was still alive or not.  And then something ghostly floated in air to his left.  It had numbers on it.  His father had taken out his pocket watch.  The watch had a radium dial.”  And still another example: “There was 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.”

There are numerous such “still-lives” throughout the book in which disparate objects are juxtaposed like the things strewn about on the stage set for Cinderella: “azure curtains hung from arches which were shocking pink.  There were golden thrones and the dummy clock, whose hands were set at midnight.  Cinderella’s slippers, which were airmen’s boots painted silver, were capsized side by side under a golden throne.”  So too is there an incessant juxtaposing of experience—from 1957 to 1941 to 1963, and so on—in which Dresden slips through the doors of time travel: it appears in the 1960s (echoed in the unrestricted bombing of North Vietnam, which is described approvingly by a major in the Marines at the Lions Club, and in the devastation of Ilium’s ghetto), in the 1970s (Dresden masquerading as Chicago which is bombed by the Chinese), in the no-time/every-time “ontological peak” of the “American Dream” prison on Tralfamadore.

 
Two tendencies are at work in Slaughterhouse-Five.  The first is the impulse to deal with the incomprehensibility of Dresden and the myriad of ominous, mysterious images and experiences it constelates and generates by 1) being dominated by the experience, and then 2) creating or accepting an “explanation” of the unexplainable.  The second tendency operating in the novel is the impulse to not explain the mystery of Dresden—which might rationalize and therefore blaspheme that horror—but to enter it and become a living “Why?” and “Why not?”  The book’s clear sense of warning emerges out of the tension of these two conflicting responses to the experience of massive and unparalleled destruction.

Dresden and its effects dominate Billy—to that extent the “boxes” which are the random environments of his life are unbidden closed systems.  Never does he display the courage that, say, Edgar Derby demonstrates in standing up to American-turned-Nazi Howard W. Campbell, Jr. in which “poor old Derby, the doomed high school teacher, lumbered to his feet for what was probably the finest moment in his life.  There are,” Vonnegut continues, “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.”

Unlike Derby, Billy Pilgrim doesn’t challenge the givenness of his universe.  Instead, in the end he canonizes it by accepting the theological premises of the Tralfamadorians which contend that all moments, past, present and future, have always existed and always will exist.  “When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse,” Billy explains in his Second Letter to the Ilium News Leader, “all he thinks is that the dead person is just fine in plenty of other moments.  Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’”

Billy deals with Dresden—and the thousands of Dresdens that litter human history—by adopting a Tralfamadorian explanation that he then announces to the world with evangelic fervor.  Indeed, Billy is prophet and theologian of a new gospel: his is a theology that coolly explicates and (paradoxically within a framework of discourse rich in mystery) negates and disposes of mystery.  “Tralfamadorian detachment consoles by denying death,” critic Richard Giannone writes, “but the absence of Billy’s terror is itself a terror.  Only by removing emotion can he deal with the world.  Tralfamadore is a grim world of mechanical wizardry and moral impoverishment, a World’s Fair writ large without anyone sensible enough to question its appalling impassiveness.  we can see why Billy is drawn to the new Gospel: it reinvents his person according to the functional specifications of technology.  At the same time, we are alerted that Billy’s desire to free himself from the destructive forces of actual earthly life with a Tralfamadorian reduction to it.”

The narrator, on the other hand, does not avoid the incomprehensible.  Indeed, the book itself represents one way of articulating, but not defining or trivializing, the mystery of evil, the mystery of  life, the mystery of death, and their metaphorical/analogical experiences: irony, paradox, coincidence, disturbing presence.  Vonnegut, in the first chapter, admits the unstatable will be a failure.  The failure, however, does not come from an unwillingness to enter the mystery of the experience about which he writes.  Instead of opting for a metaphysical version of the Great Society as Billy does, the narrator chronicles Billy’s choice, but also stays close to the interrogative voice.  “Poo-tee-weet?” a bird asks at the very end of the novel.  “Why?” “How?” “To what purpose?”

Slaughterhouse-Five’s warning is to those of us who would gloss over the horrifying presence of events like the Dresden fire-storm and would deny its life in our lives.  More parochially, but no less importantly, it is a warning to theologians who would seek to neatly “explain” the world, God, evil, good, and even the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from.