Posthumanism in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Matter That Complains So 9780367858551, 9780367521646

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Posthumanism in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut

Posthumanism in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Matter That Complains So re-examines the prevailing critical consensus that Kurt Vonnegut was a humanist writer. While more difficult elements of his work have often been the subject of scholarly attention, the tendency amongst critics writing on Vonnegut is to disavow them, or to subsume them within a liberal humanist framework. When Vonnegut’s work is read from a posthumanist perspective, however, the productive paradoxes of his work are more fully realised. Drawing on new materialist, ecocritical, and systems theory methodologies, this book highlights posthumanist themes in six of Vonnegut’s most famous novels and emphasises the ways in which Vonnegut troubles human/non-human, natural/artificial, and material/discursive hierarchical binaries. Andrew John Hicks completed his undergraduate degree at Royal Holloway University of London, his MA at the University of Exeter, and his PhD at the University of Bristol, UK. His work focuses on American and postmodern literature and posthumanist critical theory. He currently resides in Exeter, UK.

Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture

Posthumanism in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut Matter That Complains So Andrew John Hicks Trauma, Gender and Ethics in the Works of E.L. Doctorow María Ferrández San Miguel Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel Joseph Conte Spectres from the Past Slavery and the Literary Imagination in West African and AfricanAmerican Literature Portia Owusu Articulations of Resistance Transformative Practices in Contemporary Arab-American Poetry Sirène H. Harb

Posthumanism in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut Matter That Complains So

Andrew John Hicks

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Andrew John Hicks to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-85855-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-52164-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction

vi vii 1

SECTION ONE

Comic Material

23

1

Cat’s Cradle: The Life and Times of Ice-Nine

25

2

Breakfast of Champions: Rebirth Suspended

52

SECTION TWO

Environment and Evolution

73

3

Mother Night: A Nation of Two

75

4

Galapagos: Writing on Air

100

SECTION THREE

Space and Time

133

5

The Sirens of Titan: Matter That Complains So

135

6

Slaughterhouse-Five: ‘Poo-Tee-Weet?’

177

Conclusion

216

Works Cited Index

221 237

Figures

6.1 6.2

Spencer-Brown’s ‘Mark of Distinction’ Spencer-Brown’s ‘Re-entry into the Form’

187 188

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Dr Ulrika Maude, for honing this baggy monster into a more streamlined evolutionary branch, and to Dr Theo Savvas, for his support, reassurance, research suggestions, and almost frightening attention to grammatical detail. Thanks also to the PGR community at the University of Bristol, who made the grad school something to look forward to in the mornings, and especially to ‘Mama’ Jen Baker, friend of frightened newbies (and not-so-newbies) everywhere. For Katie – always there, in the better times and in the utter depths – kinder, smarter, steadier, and gentler than I can adequately express and without whom this thesis would undoubtedly not exist, gracias, querida. For my Shepperton karass – I am fortunate enough to have a tribe, and I have more brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts than I might ever have hoped for. The terrible disease of loneliness has never afflicted me, and no matter where I go or where I roam, I will always have a home. For Sarah and Bill – as the proud first recipient of the Hartham Scholarship, I can only offer my deepest gratitude for your support (in every sense). Life over the last four years would have been considerably less enjoyable without your help and your company. For my family, and especially my parents, who made this thesis possible – your unflinching support, at all times and in every single thing, constantly astonishes and humbles me. I am luckier than I know.

Introduction Andrew John Hicks

I spoke at a Humanist Association memorial service for Dr Asimov a few years back. I said, ‘Isaac is up in Heaven now’. That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. . . . When I myself am dead, God forbid, I hope some wag will say about me, ‘He’s up in Heaven now’. Timequake (73)

Kurt Vonnegut, novelist, essayist, artist, public intellectual, and humanist, has been up in heaven now for just over a decade, and the years since his death in 2007 have seen a resurgence of popular and critical interest in the man and his works. Charles J. Shields’s biography And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (2011), a collection of Vonnegut’s letters edited by Dan Wakefield (Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, 2012), and Ginger Strand’s The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic (2015) – focusing on Kurt and Bernard Vonnegut’s years at General Electric in the 1950s – have drawn together disparate materials to provide compelling new insights into Vonnegut’s life, relationships, and working process. Kurt Vonnegut Drawings, a collection of previously unreleased drawings and paintings, was published by his daughter Nanette in 2014, providing ever more material for this as-yet understudied aspect of Vonnegut’s artistic career. Interest in Vonnegut’s work in the academic community, which, after an explosion of publications in the early 1970s, had returned to a steady stream of (often notable) critical editions and monographs throughout the remainder of the 20th century, has once again begun to pick up. Critical collections, such as Kevin A. Boon’s At Millennium’s End (2001), David Simmons’s New Critical Essays (2009), and Robert T. Tally Jr.’s Kurt Vonnegut: Critical Insights (2013), as well as full-length studies such as Donald E. Morse’s Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Imagining Being an American (2003) and Tally’s Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography (2011), demonstrate an ever wider variety of theoretical approaches to Vonnegut’s work. Perhaps most important, Vonnegut seems to have finally ‘arrived’ in the pantheon of canonical American

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authors, especially with the publication of a volume of his complete works by the Library of America (2016). As Tally notes, despite the proliferation of academic studies and dissertations written on Vonnegut since 1970, ‘there remains a nagging sense of defensiveness or even inferiority among Vonnegutians . . . [which] may simply be channeling the neuroses, fears, or worries of the master himself, who famously felt underappreciated throughout his lifetime’ (2012, 103). His stature as a figure worthy of serious study in academia is mirrored by the position in the American public consciousness that Vonnegut occupied in his final years and has continued to occupy in the decade since his death. His impassioned (and increasingly bitter) public protest against the Bush administration and the second Iraq war, both as a participant on news and late-night television shows and as an author of newspaper articles – collected in his final publication, A Man Without a Country (2005) – reintroduced his unique perspective to the public sphere. The obituaries that followed his death are representative of his reputation as a man of letters, a celebrated public speaker, and an arch humourist and moralist. The figure that emerges is that of a writer who was ‘one of America’s best loved national uncles’ who ‘managed to combine an exceptional humanity with a remarkably blasé pessimism’ (Baker); ‘a spokesman for [the] disillusioned’ (Rose) whose ‘watery, heavylidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain’ (Salazar); ‘gentle, funny and quick to laugh’ with ‘a wry, aphoristic voice that would lead to his career as a beloved novelist and moral sage’ (Walter). He was often compared (and often compared himself) to a kind of 20th-century Mark Twain and, to a lesser extent, a Voltaire or an Aristophanes.1 A short description of Kurt Vonnegut would roughly read thus: Vonnegut was a grouchy but wise, funny and kind-hearted figure, who held up a mirror to American culture for over fifty years. He was a writer who lingered in science-fiction-inflected obscurity for decades, who became a pop-culture icon despite critical unpopularity. He was also a famous selfprofessed humanist and honorary president of the American Humanist Association from 1992 until his death. As he declared in God Bless You, Dr Kevorkian (1999), ‘I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead’ (14). My aim is not to take issue with or contradict the preceding characterisation of Vonnegut and his work, whether it stems from critics, popular culture, or even the man himself. The conclusions that have been reached about the kind of person Vonnegut was, or what his work represented, are broadly accurate. Vonnegut was perfectly sincere when he demanded, with deliberate simplicity (though always, simultaneously, with complex irony) that people be decent to one another, that the needs of the vulnerable must always be met, that ‘gentleness must replace violence everywhere, or we are doomed’ (Happy Birthday, Wanda June, 19). Nevertheless, the route by which Vonnegut came to these seemingly

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simple pronouncements is not as simple as has often been supposed. Or, perhaps more accurately, the more ‘difficult’, complex, counterintuitive, and even more uncomfortable aspects of his work have often been overlooked or even explained away. Much has been written about Vonnegut’s use of irony, pastiche, and other postmodern rhetorical strategies and techniques. His often self-contradictory poses are notorious. In perhaps his best-known interview, with David Standish of Playboy in 1973, the topic turns to the notion expressed in The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) that ‘all moments in time exist simultaneously’; Vonnegut argues that ‘we do live our lives simultaneously. That’s a fact. You are here as a child and as an old man’, and then immediately adds that ‘what I’ve just said to you is horseshit’ (Conversations, 77). He would often speak of his ‘Christ-worshipping atheism’, explicitly disavowing God in ‘sermons’ that were often delivered from literal pulpits, while professing that the Beatitudes represent ‘the only good idea we have received so far’ (Palm Sunday, 297) and that ‘if it weren’t for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn’t want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake’ (Kevorkian, 14). Nevertheless, Vonnegut is most readily identified, both by himself and by others, with his ‘ancestral religion’ of free-thinking humanism. But which humanism? Justin Clark alone argues that Vonnegut’s humanism ‘may also be described as ‘Modern Humanism . . . or “Naturalistic Humanism, Scientific Humanism, Ethical Humanism, and Democratic Humanism”’, all defined as ‘“a naturalistic philosophy that rejects all supernaturalism and relies primarily upon reason and science, democracy and human compassion”’ (‘Shared Humanism’). Leaving debates about nomenclature aside, I might agree that Vonnegut ‘rejects all supernaturalism’ (except for a few strange flirtations with intelligent design), is generally admiring but broadly pessimistic about the primacy or efficacy of ‘reason’ and ‘democracy’, and has an at best ambivalent relationship with ‘science’ (especially as an institution).2 Indeed, only ‘compassion’ survives closer inspection relatively unscathed, and even then, the qualification of ‘human’ must be addressed. Perhaps a better approach to the question might be to ask where the ‘human’ fits in in Vonnegut’s ‘humanism’. After all, the term can be turned to the affirmation of the human – the insistence on the primacy and uniqueness of the human – just as easily as it can the disavowal of god(s), as in Vonnegut’s case.3 Indeed, when it comes to Vonnegut criticism, I believe that the equivalence ‘humanism = human-centrism’ is easy to make and, moreover, often made. But is this truly the case with Vonnegut? As usual, Vonnegut himself does not make it easy for his readers to discern a consistent attitude or ethic regarding humanity. Despite his professed humanism, Vonnegut nevertheless vacillated, in typically self-contradictory fashion, between an insistence on the primacy of the human (though almost always couched in varying degrees of irony) and,

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especially in his later years, a frankly misanthropic philosophical pessimism. So, for instance, in a commencement speech at Bennington College in 1970, Vonnegut would beg the students to ‘believe in the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrator of the grandest dreams of God Almighty’, and that while ‘military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe . . . I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation or appreciation of art’ (Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, 157–159). This is – despite its obvious irony and anti-militarist context – humanism in the existentialist mode. It is a call to reaffirm the power and dignity of humankind in an otherwise hostile universe, in opposition to the technocratic nihilism of the military-industrial complex and, perhaps, of science in general; it is also a defence of the liberatory, uniquely human capacity for artistic endeavour.4 Conversely, there is the Vonnegut who repeatedly, and quite seriously, suggests that Homo sapiens is far from the beauty of the world (and far less the paragon of animals). Instead, it is a failed evolutionary lineage, whose oftcelebrated brain is not ‘the crowning glory of evolution so far’ but ‘a very poor scheme for survival’ (qtd. in Archer), and a pestilence that the planet’s ‘immune system’ is trying very hard to get rid of (Brancaccio). In his later novel Hocus Pocus (1990), the protagonist, Eugene Debs Hartke, repeatedly refers to humans as ‘germ hotels’ rather than coherent, independent entities and considers his own humanity ‘embarrassing’ (172, 258); while he concedes that ‘William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of’, nevertheless, he frankly believes that ‘that’s not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. . . . Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are’ (120). So much for humanity. So much for the humanities. So much for humanism. This shifting position on the question of the human has led to some consternation on the part of readers and critics as to when to take Vonnegut seriously. To take a particular (and particularly problematic) example, his famously and consistently deterministic philosophy – with its concomitant denial of human free will – produces real difficulties when critics analyse his work. Surely he cannot, despite his repeated, open admissions, truly believe, with Niles Winston Rumfoord in The Sirens of Titan (1959), or the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), that free will is an illusion and that all time always already exists? Or that human beings are ‘robots’ or ‘machines’, spurred into action by ‘chemicals’, good or bad, which make them think, feel, and act in certain ways, as he confesses to believing in the preface of Breakfast of Champions (1973)? While virtually every critic writing on Vonnegut

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must negotiate this facet of his work in one way or another – it is near ubiquitous in his novels – perhaps the most extensively researched and thoroughly argued monograph on the topic is Bo Pettersson’s The World According to Kurt Vonnegut: Moral Paradox and Narrative Form (1994). Pettersson is meticulous in his comprehensive close readings of Vonnegut’s work, and his attention to detail is remarkable – as Peter Freese notes, the book is ‘the most detailed but highly speculative attempt at locating Vonnegut’s references’ to date (1999, 150n32). Further, Pettersson’s nearencyclopaedic knowledge and deployment of the philosophical, scientific and literary histories of theories of determinism and free will also serve to make the monograph perhaps the last word on the theme in Vonnegut’s work. For Pettersson, the driving ‘paradox’ in Vonnegut’s work is between determinism and moral responsibility; as he notes, the two contradictory views [in Vonnegut’s work] seem to hold true as paradoxical axioms: man’s behaviour is determined by various forces, including Fate and man should do good. . . . This moral contradiction I call ‘the Vonnegut paradox’: the two frames are incompatible, because, as philosophers time and again tell us, ‘the fundamental [moral] principle is that what you must do has to be something that you can do’. To some extent, then, Vonnegut’s two contradictory views conform to a definition of paradox: ‘[P]aradox opposes two literal frames. Once the contradiction becomes apparent, resolution must make consistent use of it’. However, the resolution in Vonnegut must be supplied by the reader, who should understand that such frames should not be taken as absolute: man is not entirely determined and should do good in so far it is humanly possible. (39) Pettersson, to his credit, does not dismiss Vonnegut’s determinism out of hand. He takes it quite seriously, recognising it as an integral element in the Weltanschauung of Vonnegut’s work. However, the distinction between determinism and responsibility – specifcally, the responsibility to do good – is premised on a particular set of assumptions that can nevertheless be interrogated. Can one do good even as one is completely determined (and what do we mean by ‘good’)? Is responsibility necessarily synonymous with at least some sense of ontological freedom or choice? Could responsibility not be located elsewhere, perhaps within the causal infuences, rather than at the break between causes and future effects? As noted, Pettersson has (quite literally) ‘written the book’ on the subject, and as such, I feel there is little to be added to his impressively exhaustive treatment. In any case, I consider the debate regarding the reality of free will to be an essentially settled issue. Though it is too large a subject to fully explore here, many posthumanist theorists (as well

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as philosophers, physicists, and neurobiologists) have noted that while simple, linear determinism is not a tenable position in explaining human behaviour, there is nevertheless little doubt that classical, libertarian free will has been quite thoroughly debunked.5 What is more important, to me, is the question of what the assumptions that produced the ‘paradox’ Pettersson detects actually are. This ‘paradox’ – which might be variously cast as the ‘tension’ between morality and nihilism, freedom and determinism, activity and quietism, responsibility and negligence, the human and the animal, the vital and the inert, or even hope and despair – is not inevitable, either in Vonnegut’s work, or in the wider world. Indeed, it only appears paradoxical when it is considered under the rubric and presumptions of humanism. Conversely, if we approach Vonnegut’s work from a posthumanist perspective, then we will be better able to discern how these seemingly irreconcilable oppositions instead overlap, produce, and reproduce each other. In so doing, we will also be able to appreciate how Vonnegut’s ethical perspective and explicitly moral vocation is produced because of, rather than despite, the more uncomfortable elements of his work. Indeed, as I will demonstrate in the fnal chapter, even if there are indeed paradoxes in Vonnegut’s work, they are not the result of implacably opposing positions. As such, they do not represent a diffculty, inconsistency, or deadlock; paradox, as Niklas Luhmann ceaselessly points out, is productive. If, in reading Vonnegut’s work, we try to peek around the always-eclipsing fgure of the autonomous human – that great and overriding preoccupation of humanism and the humanities – there can be detected, in that fgure’s corona, an interest in, and concern for, things of another kind.

Humanism and Posthumanism While there are not (yet) quite as many ‘posthumanisms’ as there are ‘humanisms’, the field’s burgeoning spectrum of definitions, propositions, subjects and concerns nevertheless necessitates some delineation of the approach within this work. A more exhaustive consideration of this subject may be found in Chapter 4; nevertheless, a broad outline of the kind of humanism I am questioning – and the overarching rubric of posthumanism that I am bringing to bear on Vonnegut’s work – will help to situate this work within the wider critical field and within Vonnegut scholarship. I will first identify some of the humanist assumptions which, to this day, remain generally unnoticed elements of our everyday experience. The first, and probably the most enduring and influential, is the concept of the individual as, in Tony Davies’s words, ‘a free-standing self-determining person’ (16). This is the single most pertinent feature of humanistic thought with regard to the debate between free will and determinism. Nevertheless, it is predicated on a deeper assumption,

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which informs almost every aspect of humanism, no matter how secular or religious. As Davies notes, We might call this the myth of essential and universal Man: essential, because humanity – human-ness – is the inseparable and central essence, the defining quality, of human beings; universal, because that essential humanity is shared by all human beings, of whatever time and space. (24) The unspoken corollary of this myth is that all things that are not Man must lack whatever qualities and essences defne him. The free-standing, self-determining universal individual stands alone in the cosmos. Whatever he alone has – whether consciousness, free will, speech, language, culture, tool-use, or even something as seemingly humble as humour – all else, animal or mineral, must necessarily lack. As Davies explains, this ‘Renaissance humanism’, expressive of an essential humanity unconditioned by time, place or circumstance, is a nineteenth-century anachronism. But it is an anachronism that is still deeply engrained in contemporary self-consciousness and everyday common sense, to the extent that it requires a conscious effort . . . [to recall] how very odd it would seem, in cultures historically or ethnologically unlike our own, to separate out and privilege ‘Man’ in this way. (25) Indeed, the fact that these humanistic tropes are culturally situated is partly why I suspect Vonnegut was aware of and responding to them, however obliquely. His anthropological training had alerted him to the fact that ‘culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth’ (Conversations, 104). Although this suspicion of universal culture does not necessitate a suspicion of a universal essence – a more sophisticated humanist would undoubtedly agree that there are rich and innumerable ways for humans to be and to live, while never questioning the idea that there is an essential difference between human being and everything else – I believe there is rich evidence to suggest Vonnegut was perfectly aware of the dangers of species-level chauvinism. As Sheila Ellen Pardee astutely points out, it is this anthropological training, combined with the ‘additional breadth of science fction’ in his novels, that is employed by Vonnegut ‘to view humanity from a feigned intellectual distance impossible to achieve by ethnocentric humans’ (188). Indeed, it is this countervailing tendency in Vonnegut’s work, the nonhuman yin to the more commonly commented upon human yang, that led to my decision to approach his oeuvre from a posthumanist perspective.

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It is important to note that just as this study is not intended to simplistically oppose the prevailing public and critical image of Vonnegut and his work but rather to detail and better illustrate the more difficult elements that have contributed to its creation, posthumanism, as presented here, is not intended to simply supersede humanism as a whole. Indeed, this has arguably been the approach of antihumanism rather than posthumanism. ‘Antihumanism’ and ‘posthumanism’ are difficult terms to disentangle, since in terms of beliefs and approaches they have much in common, and the terms are often used fairly interchangeably. Tony Davies defines antihumanism as Principled opposition to the idea that human values and interests should be central to our understanding of, and life in, the world. Antihumanism can have a number of groundings: religious (or quasi-religious): we owe our existence to a higher being or force, who/which demands our respect and obedience; philosophical: humanism is a delusion of freedom and significance, easily exposed as such by a proper understanding of language (Nietzsche), psychology (Freud) or history (Althusser); ethical: humanism is a form of collective narcissism, blind to its own folly, absurdity and cruelty (Gray); and scientific: on evolutionary and cosmological scales, human existence is too recent and almost certainly too short-lived to be either central or particularly significant in the history of the planet or universe. (147) Many of these groundings would, of course, be equally at home under the rubric of ‘posthumanism’. I would suggest, for a working defnition of the difference between the two terms, that anti- differs to post- in presenting a more active and hostile critique to humanism, while the latter is more concerned with an overall re-contextualisation of humanity. Rosi Braidotti argues for this view in her monograph The Posthuman (2013), noting that posthumanism is the historical moment that marks the end of the opposition between Humanism and anti-humanism and traces a different discursive framework, looking more affirmatively towards new alternatives. . . . The posthumanist perspective rests on the assumption of the historical decline of Humanism but goes further in exploring alternatives, without sinking into the rhetoric of the crisis of Man. (37) Braidotti includes the thinkers of the poststructuralist and continental philosophical movements – including Derrida and Foucault – within her defnition of anti-humanism (38).6

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Much of this book’s purview is based in the particular shade of posthumanism espoused by Cary Wolfe, particularly in his extensive monograph What Is Posthumanism? (2010). For Wolfe, the term ‘is not posthuman . . . but rather posthumanist’; that is, it ‘does not partake of the fantasy of the posthuman described by N. Katherine Hayles, which imagines a triumphant transcendence of embodiment’ (which might better be termed ‘transhumanism’) but instead ‘requires us to attend to that thing called “the human” with greater specificity, greater attention to its embodiment, embeddedness, and materiality, and how these in turn shape and are shaped by consciousness, mind, and so on’. As such, ‘intelligence and cognition . . . is no longer seen (as it is in philosophical humanism) as a well-nigh-magical property that ontologically separates Homo sapiens from every other living creature’ but instead ‘may now be viewed as an essentially non- or ahuman emergence from an evolutionary process’ (120). This does not mean that every humanistic discipline, philosophy, or ethic must be discarded, as an antihumanist might argue. Indeed, posthumanism by necessity must encircle and incorporate them, since they are, in a sense, elements of our own posthuman understanding; posthumanist concepts are temporally enmeshed with them. As Wolfe notes, we find ourselves in a strange but inescapable loop, in which our ability to understand – more fully and more thickly than humanism – ‘the human’ depends on “posthumanist” theoretical and methodological innovations that end up revealing, to paraphrase Lyotard, that the posthuman comes both after (chronologically) and before (as its robust material, embodied, and evolutionary condition of possibility) the human of humanism. (121) Rosi Braidotti reaches similar conclusions about the value of some humanist positions within a posthuman perspective. Braidotti argues that ‘the common denominator for the posthuman condition is an assumption about the vital, self-organizing and yet non-naturalistic structure of living matter itself’, based within a ‘nature-culture continuum . . . which rejects dualism, especially the opposition nature-culture, and stresses instead the self-organizing (or autopoietic) force of living matter’ (2–3). Nevertheless, Braidotti is willing to note that posthumanism and the humanist tradition often share certain ethical judgments, even as they are reached by very different theoretical routes: It [posthumanism] is the realm of producing socially relevant knowledge that is attuned to basic principles of social justice, the respect for human decency and diversity, the rejection of false universalisms; the affirmation of the positivity of difference; the principles of academic freedom, anti-racism, openness to others and conviviality.

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Introduction Although I am inclined towards anti-humanism, I have no difficulty in recognizing that these ideals are perfectly compatible with the best humanist values. (11)

I believe a similar dynamic is at work in the feld of Vonnegut criticism, and, like Braidotti, I do not wish to throw out the many valuable readings of Vonnegut-as-humanist. Instead, I wish to explore the ways Vonnegut elides the human and nonhuman, radically relativises human practices, and draws attention to contextual and situational rather than personal or volitional infuences in the unfolding of events and to consider the unique ethic that is produced by his approach. This is something like a ‘horizontal’ rather than ‘vertical’ approach to the question of the human in Vonnegut’s work. Rather than quibbling over the drives of characters (or, indeed, the author, which has been something of a constant in Vonnegut criticism), I will show how Vonnegut’s fctional worlds exhibit a kind of ‘fattened’ ontology; drawing attention to features that would usually serve as background detail, while denying human characters the foregrounding they so often enjoy in fction. I believe that this approach – this posthumanist approach – represents a new, and hopefully illuminating, interpretation of Vonnegut’s work.

The Critical Field The prevailing tendencies in Vonnegut criticism to date can broadly be summarised as approaching his work from postmodernist, psychoanalytical, or autobiographical and humanist theoretical backgrounds. Indeed, the temptation to attempt to psychoanalyse Vonnegut through the medium of his fiction has been perhaps the longest standing tic in Vonnegut criticism, as Robert T. Tally Jr. also acknowledges (2011, XIII). This is not altogether surprising, given Vonnegut’s predilection for appearing (either as ‘himself’ or as his erstwhile alter ego Kilgore Trout) in his novels from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) onwards or his tendency to write introductions in his own voice. As such, while some critics have explicitly written against this interpretation, such as Creed Greer, who notes that Vonnegut ‘can no more be identified with his narrator or with Kilgore Trout than he can be completely free of them’ (312), others have either made one-to-one correlations between events in Vonnegut’s novels and his own life or attempted to guess at Vonnegut’s own thoughts and feelings. While the former tendency, in my opinion, is mostly benign (if ultimately relatively uninteresting as an avenue of study), the latter can no longer be considered legitimate. Kathryn Hume, writing in 1982, argues that ‘Vonnegut’s main characters are usually straightforward projections of some part of his psyche’ (177), while Lynn Buck, in her 1975 paper ‘Vonnegut’s World of Comic Futility’, presents an extended reading

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of Vonnegut’s relationship with his father through the medium of his novels. Such readings are at once perfunctory and presumptuous. They are perfunctory in that of course characters, in any author’s work, are born of that author’s psyche (alongside his or her culture, interests, experiences, and innumerable other determinants) and presumptuous in that it is beyond our ability and remit to psychoanalyse an author. Nor can this tendency be considered a relic of an earlier critical period. As late as 1994, Lawrence Broer, in his monograph Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, argues that Vonnegut has really only written about ‘the spiritual evolution of one man, Kurt Vonnegut, battling his despair’, performing an extended psychoanalytical session on himself throughout his career (XI). In the interests of fairness, it must be said that Vonnegut himself wrote a letter to Broer agreeing with his assessment (XII). Nevertheless, I believe that Broer’s reading, in his quest to define Vonnegut’s more difficult or fantastical elements as impediments to Real Being, ironically drains much of the life from Vonnegut’s work – that is to say, when he does not simply try to excise them from the diegetic text completely. So, for instance, according to Broer, all of the space-going events in The Sirens of Titan are symbolic hallucinations on the part of the protagonist, Malachi Constant (31), as are the Tralfamadorians of Slaughterhouse-Five (94) and the various science fiction elements of Slapstick (1976), such as the Chinese discovery of shrinking technology (117). Broer’s overall argument, essentially, is that people who allow themselves to believe that their thoughts and actions are determined are complicit in disaster (60), that philosophical determinism is a sickness that leads to infirmity, apathy, cruelty, and death, a weakness that must be overcome by psychoanalytically and symbolically working out this ‘fatalistic voice’ in an attempt to reach a more authentic existence. Quite apart from the violence Broer necessarily inflicts on the texts to bend them to his thesis (a tendency also noticed by Donald E. Morse), I cannot help but object to the implicit judgementalism behind Broer’s argument – that, at least from a posthumanist perspective, he is asking far too much of people and for the wrong things in any case.7 The tendency to denigrate Vonnegut’s science fictional or fantastical aspects can also be found in other critics’ work. Oliver W. Ferguson argues that Leon Trout’s narrative in Galapagos is an escapist fantasy, invalidating the diegetic reality of almost every aspect of the novel (142). Susan Vees-Gulani’s paper ‘Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five’ (2010) dismisses its science fiction aspects as PTSD-induced hallucinations. A related tendency amongst critics is to emphasise the eminently humanistic value of autonomy (or free will) in Vonnegut’s work, usually by arguing that Vonnegut represents deterministic philosophy, or the characters that espouse it, in order to implicitly undercut them. So, for instance, in Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl’s oft-referenced paper ‘Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: The Requirements of Chaos’ (1978),

12 Introduction the authors contend that in his famously deterministic novel, Vonnegut subtly equates the Tralfamadorian perspective with militarism and complacency (72–73); they conclude that ‘the requirements of chaos demand human vigilance and not “resigned acceptance”’ and an ‘insistence on humane practices’ (75). Merrill and Scholl are not wrong per se, but they do not account for other possibilities beyond the binary of vigilance/ acceptance (is it not possible, as in the philosophy of Nietzsche or Spinoza, to speak of ‘active acceptance’?), or that an ‘insistence on humane practices’ might not necessarily depend on free will or indeterminacy. Gavin Miller agrees with Merrill and Scholl that Slaughterhouse-Five is a ‘continued satiric attack upon .  .  . “the wisdom of quietism”’ (310), while Thomas F. Marvin concurs that Tralfamadorian determinism is equivalent to the Nazi mentality that ‘allow[ed] them to avoid assuming responsibility for their actions’ (118). Similarly, Martin Coleman argues that by adopting the Tralfamadorian perspective, one ‘gains a sense of peace in the world but loses his or her soul. Indeed, Billy Pilgrim succumbs and loses time, sanity, and individuality. He becomes a cosmic plaything’ (691). Corinne Andersen, meanwhile, in a comparative study of Vonnegut’s Galapagos (1985) and the work of Arthur Koestler, concludes that ‘Vonnegut’s rejection of machine-driven technology and Koestler’s rejection of behaviorist psychology both call for a shift from mechanical to mindful behavior, emphasizing a need for moral development. Each advocates taking responsibility for actions and embracing free will’ (177). While I do not dispute the validity of such readings in and of themselves, I nevertheless believe that they all share a kind of reflexive tic that is worth commenting on. Why must each reading, no matter how insightful or sensitive to the features of the text, always resolve with an appeal to free will, responsibility, or human ingenuity, creativity, or potential? Why must these values be reaffirmed in the face of Vonnegut’s often blistering, uncompromising critique? Bluntly, what if we take Vonnegut at his word? To be certain, many critics have engaged with these more uncomfortable aspects unflinchingly. Jessica Lingel asserts that ‘Vonnegut never takes the assumption of human primacy for granted, recognizing all too well the absurdity and baseness of humanity without forgetting what it means to be (or how to describe) the human’ (155), while Hartley S. Spatt, in ‘Kurt Vonnegut: Ludic Luddite’ (2001), rightly argues that while ‘critics of Vonnegut’s early works consistently called him a closet optimist’, The overwhelming evidence of Vonnegut’s stories – the mindless destruction in Player Piano of even those machines that make our lives better, the inability of characters like Howard W. Campbell Jr. and Billy Pilgrim to free themselves from the embittering legacy of their traumatic experiences, the inescapable suicide of a world (Cat’s Cradle) or a universe (in Slaughterhouse-Five) – leads to a conclusion

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that the cosmic shackles that imprison us will never of their own volition fall off our limbs. (126) Crucially, Spatt does not consider this a conclusion to be railed against but rather a kind of productive de-centring of the self, noting that when ‘Billy Pilgrim stops thinking himself as the focus of Tralfamadore’s collective gaze and begins to think merely of what he is gazing at . . . he begins to accept the process of the universe’ and that ‘the moment Rabo Karabekian’s paintings disintegrate [in Bluebeard] he is free to become an artist’ (128). Bill Gholson, similarly, notes that Vonnegut’s ‘moral thinking and writing refect a rhetorical orientation – one for which the self is never disembodied from the community, the history, and the discourses of which it is a part’ (135); Vonnegut repeatedly extends the metaphor of the physical body to ‘literally give vital substance to his beliefs’ and work, referring to the various pieces in his essay collections Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons and Palm Sunday as ‘bodies’ with ‘connective tissue’ and referring to Fates Worse Than Death (1992) as a ‘creature’ (137). The latter metaphor is hardly unique to Vonnegut, but the point is that Gholson recognises and values the delocalisation and dispersion of the autonomous, self-contained human in Vonnegut’s work and ethic. And just as Vonnegut’s works become ‘creatures’, so do his characters become something less than human; Richard Todd notes that ‘Vonnegut, always interested in ideas and essences, has little ear or eye for nuances of voice and manners’ (Conversations, 37), and Lorna Jowett similarly notes that while ‘characterization . . . is often limited, subordinate to the demands of the idea or message’, it is nevertheless ‘also subject to leveling (no villains, no heroes)’ (137). It is this ‘leveling’, a fattening of the traditional novelistic art which, in Susan E. Farrell’s words, leads to a narrative ‘in which all characters are equally important, all facts are equally weighty, and life is presented in its chaotic, messy whole’ (148). Similarly, David Cowart perceptively notes that ‘persons, things, the earth . . . are valenced building blocks of Vonnegut’s moral and aesthetic universe, the elements, even, of a kind of ultimate family’ (172), drawing attention not only to the narratological strategy of Vonnegut’s novels, but also the materialist – indeed, almost pantheistic – continuity between the human and nonhuman that characterises Vonnegut’s worldview. In fact, though there are to my knowledge no explicitly materialist readings of Vonnegut to date, when critics read Vonnegut with reference to scientific theory (particularly in the field of physics), the results are usually illuminating. So, for instance, Loree Rackstraw reads Vonnegut alongside quantum mechanics, positing that Vonnegut’s fiction functions as myth designed to ‘attune the reader’ to the dynamic relationships between ‘chance and determination .  .  . adaptation and autonomy .  .  . between inner and outer, between self and the cosmos’, so that the reader

14 Introduction may become aware of the basic wholeness of the evolving universe, the indistinguishable context for our participations and choices within it . . . This is not to transcend the world . . . but rather to be in accord with or at one with its open, creative processes. (2001, 60) While perhaps occasionally stretching towards the tone of the quantum mystic in her pronouncements, Rackstraw nevertheless clearly recognises the naturalism that undergirds Vonnegut’s writing, even when it is at its most fantastical and imaginative. Papers such as Jeff Karon’s ‘Science and Sensibility in the Short Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut’ (2001) and, in a relatively early intervention, James Lundquist’s monograph Kurt Vonnegut (1977) also provide useful insights into Vonnegut’s use of scientific themes and imagery, demonstrating his keen interest in contemporary science and its philosophical and ethical consequences. It is certainly likely that the narratological and thematic elements of Vonnegut’s work that decentre the autonomous, essential human – an effect produced (in part) by representations of the continuity of the human or cultural with the inhuman or natural – were influenced by this interest, along with Vonnegut’s anthropological studies. Further, despite his noted tendency for irony and self-contradiction, some broadly consistent attitudes are evident in Vonnegut’s work. Rackstraw reports that Vonnegut considered the strong anthropic principle (that the universe is fine tuned for life, and, in particular, human life) and the oft-repeated mantra that ‘we are a way for the Cosmos to know itself’ to be self-centred and highly doubtful (2009, 204). Consciousness, after all, might just as easily be a random, contingent epiphenomenon, no more or less special or unique than the spectral signature of carbon or boron. And so might language. Vonnegut was given to claiming that the act of writing was automatic, or at least produced by something outside himself, claiming that he was ‘a certain kind of flower, and that’s just how I’m going to bloom’ (Conversations, 265), responsible for little more than sitting at a typewriter for hours ‘until the most intelligent part of me will finally make itself known and I will be able to decode what it is trying to talk about. It’s a little like a Ouija board’ (73). In characteristically Vonnegutian fashion, his coaching of student writers ‘was reaching into the mouth, taking hold of the piece of tape, pulling gently to see if I could read what was printed on it. . . . People are programmed, just like computers with this tape feeding out’ (166). For Vonnegut, the humanities were not necessarily all that human.

Subject – Matter Despite the valuable work that has been thus far produced on Vonnegut’s scientific and naturalistic interests (which I have sketched in only broad strokes here) and despite his own suspicions about anthropocentrism, no

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critic has yet brought the various features of Vonnegut’s work together under the rubric of posthumanism. This is neither surprising nor a criticism; the theoretical field is still relatively young and the term not much older. It is important to note that a posthumanist position is not based solely in materialism or naturalism and certainly not in naïve realism. It is no longer the era (if such an era ever really existed) of C. P. Snow’s famous ‘two cultures’, scientific and literary, the former purportedly objective and empirical, the latter subjective and self-referential.8 Rather, a posthumanist approach, while always remaining aware of the embodied, evolutionary, material nature of human existence, must equally incorporate rigorous critical inquiry, since there is, after all, no intrinsic or categorical difference between nature and culture. Fewer Vonnegut critics have so far engaged with the full spectrum of modern critical theory than might be supposed. Certainly, the most notable example to date is Robert T. Tally Jr., whose excellent monograph Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography is probably the most theoretically rigorous approach to Vonnegut’s oeuvre. By engaging with figures such as Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and in particular, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Tally broadly enlarges the scope of critical engagement in reading Kurt Vonnegut. Many of the critics mentioned have been included under the tentpole of posthumanism (or at least antihumanism), and the antifoundationalism and problematisation of the human subject that characterises their work are of particular value here. In many ways, I follow Tally’s lead, specifically, in that the third chapter, on Mother Night, takes Tally’s work on the novel as its starting point and more generally, in striving to incorporate critical material, in addition to new materialist or naturalist theoretical approaches, within my posthuman rubric. The three sections of this book, each containing two chapters, are thematically unified while chronologically Tralfamadorian. That is, I have eschewed the practice common to Vonnegut scholars of treating his work in sequential order, in favour of a nonlinear, distributed pattern. Specifically, within each section, the first chapter will analyse an early Vonnegut novel (here defined as pre-Slaughterhouse-Five) and the second a later novel (Slaughterhouse-Five onwards). The primary reason for this structure is that it is reflective of Vonnegut’s own work; the themes, ideas, and questions that are explored here appear repeatedly, but not always consistently, throughout his writing career. The preoccupations of Vonnegut and his work are readily apparent to even the casual reader; nevertheless, Vonnegut was a man of varied interests, and of a particular sensitivity to the events of the day. Rackstraw recalls his ‘compulsion . . . to historically contextualize almost anything he read’, keeping up an ‘almost continuous monologue of extemporaneous whimsy, editorializing, and historical backgrounding’ when reading the daily newspaper (56–57). Given his keen interest in contemporary events – which would often find their way

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into his work – there is no readily apparent ‘progression’ of themes in his work.9 For example, his final novel, Timequake (1997), is as much concerned with questions of temporality and human autonomy as the novel that made him famous, Slaughterhouse-Five; both novels similarly share the narrative strategy of blending science fiction with personal anecdote. Simply put, I do not wish to assign an arc or teleology to Vonnegut’s oeuvre and, indeed, would consider it something of a betrayal of my own themes to try to do so. With that said, while the novel selections are non-chronological, the three sections – ‘Comic Material’, ‘Environment and Evolution’, and ‘Space and Time’ – do work broadly chronologically. The first section is concerned with the early to mid-20th century thought of Henri Bergson and Mikhail Bakhtin, the second with the mid- to late-20th century work of Theodor Adorno and of ecocritical or evolutionary theory, and finally, in the third section, the late-20th- and 21st-century work of the new materialists and of systems theory, such as Karen Barad, Graham Harman, and Niklas Luhmann. It must be stated that it is not my primary goal to chart the evolution of posthumanist thought per se but rather the ways in which Vonnegut’s work might fruitfully be read through its prism. Nor do I wish to imply that all of the critics here included would identify with the label ‘posthumanist’. Indeed, while Bakhtin’s dialogical approach, his emphasis on the material, and his notion of hybridity share similarities with modern posthumanist approaches, Bergson’s dualistic ontology and strident defence of human autonomy make him something of a humanist exemplar.10 Regardless, the term ‘posthumanism’ would not have meant much to either critic. I also do not wish to imply that their work should be considered as prototypical or simplistic in comparison to more recent theorists. As I will demonstrate in Chapter 4, properly understanding the term ‘evolution’ is to understand that it is not synonymous with ‘progress’, since any adaptive entity is so within its own historical and environmental context. Nevertheless, the lines of influence and descent in critical history cannot be ignored. While it is my primary intention to highlight the posthumanist tendencies in Vonnegut’s work, I will also demonstrate new theoretical approaches to literary texts, beginning with the older and more familiar in the first and second sections and ending with the more recent and perhaps as yet underutilised. The first section, ‘Comic Material’, begins with ‘Cat’s Cradle – The Life and Times of Ice-nine’. In this chapter, I reverse the standard critical approach to Cat’s Cradle (1963). Rather than focusing on the doctrine of Bokononism and its adherents, or on the politics of Cold War science, I instead examine the potency, centrality, and pseudo-agency of the ice-nine molecule, charting its conception, development, and eventual apotheosis via the comedic action of the novel. To do so, I utilise Bergson’s famous theory of laughter, most notably detailed in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900). Bergsonian comedy relies on rigidity and stereotype, stemming from the conflict between spirit, equated with life

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and the organic and matter, equated with the inanimate and inorganic. As the characters and the world of the novel move inexorably toward permanent stasis, the comedic elements similarly dwindle. At its conclusion, a bizarre new inorganic ecology emerges, and the text remains suspended between humour and nihilism. I conclude that both Bergson and Vonnegut were reacting to scientific advancements that began in Bergson’s time and which were well advanced by Vonnegut’s. Bergson spent his career resisting what seemed to be an encroachment by empiricism and determinism into all other aspects of living. Vonnegut, by contrast, though clearly concerned with determinism’s consequences, seems to have largely accepted its conclusions. For Vonnegut, the question is not whether man is wholly subject to physical laws but what one is to do (or is capable of doing) in the circumstances of such inevitability. Is it enough to be aware of this fact? And what are the consequences of not being so? These questions are taken up in the second chapter, ‘Breakfast of Champions – Rebirth Suspended’. Whereas Bergsonian comedy ultimately derives its humour from a strict delineation between ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’, the individual and the outer world, Mikhail Bakhtin’s approach to humour, embodied in grotesque realism or the closely related carnivalesque, emphasises a form of interpenetrative materialism. Its comic exaggeration and scatological tone affirm the joyful continuity of man and world and highlight, by their focus on the lower body, the mutual fecundity of life and death. In this chapter, I argue that Breakfast of Champions (1973) is an excremental novel, a paradigmatic example of the Bakhtinian grotesque’s subject matter. Images of eating and excreting abound, and the barriers between the natural and artificial are frequently transgressed. Factories shit, living creatures eat petroleum, cars lay eggs, and human beings are explicitly programmed machines. I argue that while this profound intersection and relativisation between the organic and inorganic is ripe for affirmative Bakhtinian humour, the grotesque elements of Breakfast of Champions remain inert. The potential for symbolic rebirth and renewal, exemplified by the grotesque Kilgore Trout’s final plea to be made young again, is left suspended at the end of the novel. I conclude that this ultimate failure to consummate the Bakhtinian affirmation of and conciliation with interpenetrative materiality is representative of a fundamental lack of awareness on the part of the novel’s characters. Unaware of the material forces that constitute and drive their thoughts and actions and connect them to their surroundings, they remain trapped – as the text itself remains suspended – in a state of alienation. The theme of physical and mental adaptation to environmental contexts is expanded upon in the next section, ‘Environment and Evolution’. In the first chapter of the section, ‘Mother Night – A Nation of Two’, I examine perhaps Vonnegut’s most psychologically complex novel, Mother Night (1962), by exploring its use of ecological themes

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in questions of purity and authenticity. The novel details the life of the fictional Howard W. Campbell, an American playwright living in 1930s Germany who comes to act simultaneously as a public Nazi propagandist and a secret Allied spy. I take Robert Tally’s chapter on the novel, and his discussion of Sartrean authenticity in particular, as my starting point. In this chapter, I carry Tally’s argument forward, considering authenticity in its real, historically situated fascistic context and the ideological consequences of its strict delineation and exclusionism. Referring to the surprising history of Nazi ecology and naturalist ideology in examining the meta-historiography of Mother Night, I draw attention to the content of Campbell’s plays and poetry, arguing that while Campbell believes, and is invested in, the idea that a real and impermeable barrier exists between his inner artistic and outer propagandistic personas, these multiple selves are nowhere near as inseparable as he hopes or thinks. Rather, Campbell recapitulates fascist attitudes even as he consciously repudiates their gross consequences; condemns nationalism while living according to a metaphor couched in its terms; and disavows material history and even his own body in favour of the transcendental and authentic power of aesthetics. Whether the desire is to suppress (or rhetorically appropriate) materialism in favour of idealistic purity, or to suppress human subjectivity in favour of natural purity, the ultimate contradiction – the contradiction that causes Campbell’s final undoing – is to try to ontologically separate interdependent elements. While Campbell tries to treat life as self-authored art, in Chapter 4, ‘Galapagos – Writing on Air’, I consider the consequences of treating art as an artefact of life; or rather, as a biological phenomenon. With reference to posthumanist critics such as Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, and Cary Wolfe, and Gillian Beer’s seminal monograph Darwin’s Plots (2009), I examine Vonnegut’s treatment of the human/animal binary and the evolutionary nature of the literary impulse, in Galapagos (1985). The novel, in which a ragtag group survive human extinction on the titular islands, is a thoughtful literary work that paradoxically questions literature – and sapient thought in general – from an evolutionary perspective, and seriously considers the possibility that both may be evolutionary dead ends. I consider the history of human (and humanist) exceptionalism, paying particular attention to language and literature and misconceptions regarding Darwinian evolution – in particular, the misconception that reason, intellect, self-consciousness, or advanced culture are inherently desirable; that they are in some sense at the top of the evolutionary ladder; and that these qualities are in some sense ontologically separate from ‘nature’. I then argue that Vonnegut’s posthuman novel (in both senses of the term) is remarkably radical and destabilising. Unlike other far-future fables, Galapagos is not a drama of loss, fall, or degeneration; culture simply becomes evolutionarily defunct. In Galapagos, Vonnegut dares to imagine that what we have now is ephemeral, in the face of the grinding

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determinative processes and timescales of natural selection, and that what may come after us may have no need for that which we consider most sacred. In the final section, ‘Space and Time’, I examine the ways in which Vonnegut recontextualises human being and agency within wider systemic contexts. In Chapter 5, ‘The Sirens of Titan – Matter That Complains So’, I examine the novel that I consider Vonnegut’s first truly formative work, The Sirens of Titan (1959), through the prism of new materialist theory. Sirens, Vonnegut’s only unambiguously ‘science fiction’ novel, is a novel of objects in space. It is the solar system itself that provides Vonnegut with his subject and setting; it is a novel that particularly reflects Vonnegut’s interest in contemporary science and the questions that inform it. I begin by exploring the peculiar nature of materiality, as depicted in the novel, with reference to Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology. Contra to relational ontologies, Harman asserts the absolute primacy of objects, expanding Husserlian phenomenology and Heidegger’s tool-being to the non-human realm and claiming that all objects are irreducible to their features. It is this irreducible, unyielding, and alienating enclosure of objects that acts as a source of both distress and allure for the protagonist, Malachi Constant. Yet, with reference to Karen Barad’s remarkable, quantum-influenced theory of intra-activity – in which relations or situations (‘apparatuses’, in Barad’s terminology) in some sense precede the existence of matter – I argue that another way of understanding reality is also explored in Sirens. From this perspective, there are no detached observers, agency is spread across apparatuses, and systems are endlessly imbricated within one another. A newly affirmative posthumanist ethic emerges at the end of the novel – situational and communal rather than bounded and individualist, agentive rather than autonomous, and materialist/monist rather than transcendentalist/dualist. In Vonnegut’s time travel novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), systems are once more in evidence. However, in contrast to the material emphasis in The Sirens of Titan, they are here more abstract. In the final chapter, ‘Slaughterhouse-Five – “Poo-Tee-Weet?”’, I read Vonnegut’s most famous novel through the lens of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, in an attempt to explain its polarising critical reception. I suggest that the work’s unique power is a result of its unconventional form, which recapitulates its primary subject – the firebombing of Dresden – while simultaneously excluding it. In particular, Luhmann’s concepts of autopoiesis, in which a system reproduces itself recursively from its own primary organising principle, and observation, in which systems become ‘aware’ of a given subject via exclusion, are used to explain the novel’s form. Its famously non-linear structure is also recursive, bootstrapped into being by an event that, by its nature, cannot be properly portrayed. Observational blindspots are also evinced by the novel’s characters, who, bound as their own autopoietic systems, are fundamentally incapable of understanding others except by

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reference to themselves; suffering is the only universal, and even then, it is totally incommensurate. Ultimately, the recursive, self-enclosed depiction of time and of existence itself in Slaughterhouse-Five – in which there may really be nothing intelligible or useful to say about a massacre – is nevertheless founded on its unsaid, undepictable Other and thus on the kind of paradox Luhmann describes as ‘productive’. It is this unaccountable possibility of the Other that forms S5’s ‘aura’ and is, perhaps, the defining feature of Vonnegut’s oeuvre – the impossibility and necessity of action in an absolutely determinate universe, through the paradoxical action of observation and of art itself.

Notes 1. The comparison between Vonnegut and Twain is so commonplace as to be almost a truism, and certainly, Vonnegut did little to disabuse people of the notion. As Charles Shields notes, Vonnegut took to dressing like Twain on his speaking tours, having ‘the good fortune to be styled by commentators as another Mark Twain primarily by virtue of his birthplace, hair, and sense of humor’ (2011, 300–302). Vonnegut named his son Mark after the author and spoke at the 100th anniversary of the completion of Mark Twain’s residence in Hartford, Connecticut, recorded in Palm Sunday. Tom Wolfe referred to Vonnegut as ‘the closest thing we had to a Voltaire’ (Geller). Günter Beck notes that Vonnegut ‘stands firmly in a literary tradition of physical comedy that reaches from archaic trickster humor to Aristophanes, François Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, Nikolai Gogol, Wilhelm Busch, [and] Alfred Jarry’ (62); Vonnegut himself noted his admiration for Aristophanes and Rabelais (Conversations, 116–119) and considered himself, along with Swift, Voltaire, and Twain, to be artists ‘who respond to [their] own time’ (64). 2. As Loree Rackstraw notes, Vonnegut, in or around 2005, was a bit contentious about negative overreactions by evolutionists to the idea of ‘intelligent design,’ since for him, widely accepted evolutionary theory seemed to suggest a failure to fully understand certain puzzling biological characteristics. We had a phone discussion about this sometime in April, after which he sent me one of his new posters bearing the following statement: ‘There are organizing principles in the universe which we can no more understand than my dog can.’ This statement may have been as close as Kurt came to a direct articulation of a kind of mysticism. (2009, 253) 3. It is important that this specifically atheistically inflected ‘humanism’ is but one of many definitions of the word. As Andrew Copson notes, while within academia, ‘the use of “humanism” to refer to the Renaissance movement (often: “Renaissance humanism”) persisted and still persists’, the use of the term to refer specifically to ‘non-religious, non-theistic, or non-Christian’ humanism has otherwise ‘prevailed in the twentieth century’ (2). This has by no means always been the case. For example, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola – the archetypical Renaissance humanist – explicitly predicated his arguments on Christian mythology (see Chapter 4); as late as the Enlightenment, an arch-rationalist such as Descartes would base his philosophy on the existence of God. Ultimately, as Sir John Hale cautions,

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Renaissance humanism must be kept free from any hint of either ‘humanitarianism’ or ‘humanism’ in its modern sense of rational, nonreligious approach to life. . . . [T]he word ‘humanism’ will mislead . . . if it is seen in opposition to a Christianity its students in the main wished to supplement, not contradict, through their patient excavation of the sources of ancient God-inspired wisdom. (171) 4. Just as not all branches are non-religious, this is not to say that all branches of humanism are anti-scientific. Indeed, a preoccupation with rationalism or empiricism is a commonality in modern secular humanism, and its scientific roots lie in thinkers such as Francis Bacon. As Tony Davies notes, the ‘Baconianism’ that in the course of the seventeenth century was to find its concrete realisation in the materialist sociology of Thomas Hobbes and the systematic empiricism of the Royal Society, marks the historical terminus of ‘Renaissance humanism’; or rather one of its historical termini. (108)

5.

6.

7. 8.

Auguste Comte, in the 19th century, would attempt to found a ‘Religion of Humanity’, based on secularism and positivist philosophy (28–29). As ever, the term ‘humanism’ is extraordinarily heterogenous. The primary argument amongst many determinists – ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ – is that quite apart from the clearly causal nature of macroscopic reality, the frequent argument that free will may issue from quantum indeterminacy also cannot be valid, since random chance is equally hostile to traditional notions of free will. For a very simplified but wide-ranging overview of the subject, see Cris Evatt’s The Myth of Free Will (2010); for a psychological approach, see The Self Illusion (2011) by Bruce Hood and Derk Pereboom’s Living Without Free Will (2001) for a modern philosophical explication of a hard determinist position. Cary Wolfe also provides a fascinating and complex fourfold disciplinary schema, with the positions of ‘humanist humanism’, ‘humanist posthumanism’, ‘posthumanist humanism’, and ‘posthumanist posthumanism’ as the poles. In Wolfe’s estimation, Foucault and Slavoj Žižek might be counted as posthumanist humanists. Derrida, Luhmann, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Humberto Maturana, and Francisco Varela are included under the ‘posthumanist posthumanism’ rubric (2010, 124–126). See Morse’s review essay ‘Bringing Chaos to Order: Vonnegut Criticism at Century’s End’ (2000) for a full treatment of Broer’s method. Vonnegut knew Snow and seemed to agree with him on the matter; as Joseph Sigman notes, Snow’s critique of the complacency and insularity of literary culture appears to have articulated and reinforced perceptions that were already troubling Vonnegut. In 1961, while he was at work on his third novel, Mother Night, Vonnegut met Snow in London and later remarked: ‘C.P. Snow and I are both very smug on the subject of two cultures because we both have two cultures, you see’. (30–31)

9. Nevertheless, many critics have discerned evolutionary or teleological trajectories in Vonnegut’s work, through chronological readings. So, for example, Leonard Mustazza’s Forever Pursuing Genesis (1990) traces an ongoing struggle on the part of Vonnegut’s characters to reconstruct pre-Fall paradises, with Vonnegut’s vision considerably lightening in his later novels.

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Broer, as previously mentioned, reads Vonnegut’s oeuvre as an extended form of psychoanalytic self-therapy. 10. That said, Bergson’s lifelong project to create an ontology which allows for human autonomy and spirituality perhaps speaks of a sense of doubt, if in disavowal. As Ulrika Maude notes, Bergson ‘was anxiously indebted to neurological discoveries and especially the dyskinesia and the various automatisms that presented in neurological disorders and that figured so prominently in the performance culture of the period’ (195); as such, The question of free will is a central concern in Bergson’s work. . . . It is crucial, for instance, to his notion of duration (durée), whose flow is constantly threatened by habit, repetition and automatism. Bergson in fact appears determined to defend the faculty of free will to the point where his work frequently unveils a deep-rooted anxiety over its limitations. In his essay, Laughter, habitual, mechanical, ossified comportment, as we have seen, appears as a source of humour, but it is also a locus of intense anxiety, which persists throughout Bergson’s writing. In the essay, Bergson conceptualises laughter as ‘a bursting out of life and elasticity in the face of the intolerable stiffening of life into automatic or repeated gestures’ (Connor, 2008). As Bergson puts it, ‘rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective’ (1911, 21). However, as he often acknowledges, laughter itself can function mechanically, as an involuntary somatic reaction beyond intentional control. (195–196)

Section One

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1

Cat’s Cradle The Life and Times of Ice-Nine Andrew John Hicks

Cat’s Cradle (1963), Vonnegut’s fourth novel, has generally been held to be amongst his strongest and is certainly one of his best-known works. It has been variously termed a Cold War satire (Kunkel, V), a complex investigation into the dynamic relationship of truth and falsehood (Marvin, 87–88), a response to the ‘absurdities’ of religious and scientific discourse (Hobby, 57; Tally, 2011, 57), and an aesthetic statement on the mimetic value of art (Reed, 1972, 133). It is difficult not to read the novel as a product of its time. Published the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, a confrontation that brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction, Cat’s Cradle depicts an island proxy state in the Caribbean, the development and deployment of an omnicidal technology, and the eventual extinction of all life on Earth. Were it not for its self-conscious irrealism  – Kunkel, for example, calls it ‘a black cartoon, a grubby fantasia .  .  . a funny and despairing vision of the last judgment done in comic-book style’, that is ‘not a foursquare, detailed, [or] plausible construction’ (vii–viii) – the novel would seem an eerie alternative history, a fictionalised and absurd account of the fate the real world barely managed to avoid. Indeed, the narrator, John, though he insists that we ‘call [him] Jonah’ (1) is, like the later Wilbur Swain in Slapstick (1976) and Leon Trotsky Trout in Galapagos (1983), the last known historian of humankind. Originally setting out to document the development of the atomic bomb, in a book to be called The Day the World Ended, John writes to the children of the late Felix Hoenikker, one of the bomb’s ‘fathers’. Finding himself drawn into a complex web of social entanglements that lead him, inexorably, to the poverty-stricken island nation of San Lorenzo, John meets the despotic ‘Papa’ Monzano. A fanatically staunch ally of the United States, Monzano punishes all transgressions, major or minor, with impalement upon a hook. Chief amongst the crimes of San Lorenzo is the practice of Bokononism, a bizarre, ironic ‘religion’ based entirely on lies. Indeed, in true Bokononist fashion, the outlawed religion is in fact universally practiced, including by Monzano himself. Upon the death of Monzano, and through a string of highly unlikely circumstances, Jonah becomes the new president of San Lorenzo; his reign,

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however, is short-lived. In the presence of Hoenikker’s three children and a small gathering of unlikely characters – including an ex-Nazi doctor, a pair of disillusioned American diplomats, and a bicycle factory owner and his wife – John witnesses the real day the world ends, the result of a series of coincidences and accidents. As one of a small group of (likely temporary) survivors and as an avowed Bokononist, he writes the last history of mankind, now titled Cat’s Cradle. Most critics, when discussing Cat’s Cradle, have focused on Bokononism, and with good reason – much of the novel is concerned with its history, its practices, and its adherents. A pragmatic religion, Bokononism was invented by one Lionel Boyd Johnson (its name is derived from the San Lorenzan pronunciation of his surname), a shipwreck survivor who, along with his fellow survivor Earl McCabe, washed up on the island’s shores in the early 20th century. Recognising the utter destitution of the island’s society and the impossibility of raising the standard of living, Johnson and McCabe concoct the religion to make life bearable for the inhabitants. ‘Bokonon’ and McCabe also arrange for Bokononism to be outlawed and Bokonon himself to be persecuted, in the belief that ‘good societies could be built only by pitting good against evil, and by keeping the tension between the two high at all times’ (73). Bokonon terms this practice ‘dynamic tension’, after the muscle-building theories of Charles Atlas,1 and this tension – exercise for the social body – is recapitulated in the ‘cruel paradox’ of his religion. Bokononist thought, in essence, is based on ‘the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it’ (203). The epigraph of the first book of Bokonon (and indeed, of Cat’s Cradle itself) proclaims that ‘nothing in this book is true’2 but that one should ‘live by the foma [“harmless untruths”] that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy’ (CC epigraph). The contradictory but pragmatic aim of Bokonon’s teachings is to teach people to whole-heartedly believe in things that they nevertheless wholly acknowledge as untrue. True to the novel’s contemporaneity, this is of course a standard postmodern tenet, as several critics have noted. Since the religion (and the novel) ‘paradoxically offers a narrative for living without expressing a metanarrative’ (Davis 63), it ‘must always maintain its identity as arbitrary convention and never succumb to temptations of absolute truth’ in order to remain a successful artifice (Klinkowitz, 1992, 47). By refusing to resolve ‘the open-ended, unconfirmable dilemma of human knowledge and wisdom’ and ‘treating as interchangeable’ veracity and falsehood (Schulz 20), the novel paradoxically remains closed in its open-endedness. Whether this relativism about the existence or possibility of approaching ‘Truth’ (or indeed, the concomitant question of the desirability or possibility of mimesis in art) represents ‘the creative, playful, childlike aspects of human nature’ and ‘our enduring ability to invent meanings in an essentially meaningless world’, as John L. Simons argues (47); sheer nihilism, ‘a moral and physical petrification’ (Broer, 1994, 57);

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or an ‘inquisitional cruelty’ (Giannone qtd. in Simons 33) seems to ultimately hinge, appropriately enough, on the prior beliefs of the reader. Certainly, as Peter J. Reed notes, the novel’s combination of language, play, and artifice found accord with the youth generation of its time (144) and apparently continues to do so today.3 Nevertheless, in this chapter, I take a different approach to the novel; given the wealth of postmodernist readings already available of Vonnegut’s work in general, and of Cat’s Cradle and Bokononism in particular, another study is scarcely required. Instead, I will, in posthumanist fashion, concentrate on an aspect of the novel that is just as vital as its human drama yet rarely acknowledged as a force in and of itself – the strange, pseudo-agential material Ice-nine, and its relationship to the comedic action of Cat’s Cradle. To do so, I will turn to the perhaps unlikely figure of Henri Bergson, whose theory of humour incorporates the conflicting forces of the material and the vital. As I will show, in Vonnegut’s novel, the divide between these two elements is not as clear cut as it may first appear.

‘The Mechanical Encrusted Upon the Living’ – Bergson’s Theory of Humour Henri Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900) is, along with the work of Sigmund Freud and Arthur Koestler, one of the most influential theories of humour of the 20th century. John Parkin notes that it ‘was published with supreme good timing in the year 1900 . . . ushering in the modern study of humour’ and has since become something of a ‘shibboleth’ amongst theorists and comedians alike (6). Indeed, the canonical shadow that Bergson’s short study casts in literary studies still eclipses the work on humour that has since followed – ‘most authors who write on humor still discuss Freud and Bergson, while nobody bothers reading the scores of books on humor published perhaps much less than 90 [and now 115!] years ago’ (Attardo, 58). Certainly, later theorists have both criticised and refined Bergson’s particular ideas about the nature of the comic, as well as situating them in a broader and more encompassing field of types of humour. Nevertheless, Bergson’s original conception is incisive, internally consistent, and – at least for a certain kind of laughter – eminently recognisable, and still holds value as a critical approach to humour. Amongst the common approaches regarding humour, the theory of comedy and laughter that Bergson presents in Laughter is a mixture of incongruity and superiority theories, though the latter ultimately takes precedence in Bergson’s estimation.4 As with most of his philosophical claims, Bergson’s theory of humour stems from a concept he would later, in Creative Evolution (1907), call the élan vital.5 The élan vital is the creative and animate urge in living creatures to spontaneously self-organise and change in a complex, non-deterministic manner. In Laughter, Bergson

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describes it as ‘the very flame of life, kindled within us by a higher principle and perceived through the body’ (49). Humour occurs, according to Bergson, when this freeform essence is undermined, in an incongruous and unexpected manner, by the brute matter that encloses it. Bergson’s summation is worth quoting at length: our imagination has a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every human form it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it. This soul imparts a portion of its winged lightness to the body it animates: the immateriality which thus passes into matter is what is called gracefulness. Matter, however, is obstinate and resists. . . . It would fain immobilise the intelligently varied movements of the body in stupidly contracted grooves, stereotype in permanent grimaces the fleeting expressions of the face. . . . Where matter thus succeeds in dulling the outward life of the soul, in petrifying its movements and thwarting its gracefulness, it achieves, at the expense of the body, an effect that is comic. (28–29) For Bergson, the comic occurs when a certain rigidity of thought or habit causes a person to make an involuntary and usually surprising mistake. He gives, as an illustrative example, a man who stumbles and falls while running in the street – ‘it is not his sudden change in attitude that raises a laugh, but rather the involuntary element in this change . . . through lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a kind of physical obstinacy’ (9). In his famous phrase, laughter arises from observing ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’ (37). This model carries several surprising implications, and Bergson lists three ‘fundamental’ observations in particular. The first is that ‘the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human’ (3). We may laugh at a capering animal or an amusingly shaped tree, but we only do so by anthropomorphising the animal’s behaviour or by detecting some kind of human resemblance in the tree’s form. This claim is strikingly universal – Hurley et al. have been unable to discover a single joke, witticism, humorous image, or situation that does not involve an intentional agent (155). Since, for Bergson, laughter arises precisely from the loss of (distinctly human) agency, the presence of a willing consciousness is a necessary precondition. Bergson’s second observation is that laughter cannot occur without the absence of feeling, as ‘indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion’ (1900, 4). While we may laugh at a person for whom we feel affection or compassion, we nevertheless must momentarily put aside our feelings to laugh – ‘the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart.

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Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple’ (5). Finally, laughter, according to Bergson, almost always only occurs in the presence of others, as a social activity – ‘however spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary’ (6). Overall, ‘the comic will come into being, it appears, whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one of their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into play nothing but their intelligence’ (8). These three factors combine to form the perhaps least palatable aspect of Bergson’s theory of the comic – that laughter is primarily and exclusively a punishment, a kind of social ‘ragging’ (135) on the part of the many against the erring individual. Since ‘what life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert attention . . . together with a certain elasticity of mind and body’ (18), the ‘rigidity of body, mind and character’ that is exposed in the comic figure must be removed ‘to obtain from [society’s] members the greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability’ (21). Even when one is not generally ill-disposed towards another, Bergson argues, this fellow-feeling is set aside to punish the other’s aberrant or eccentric rigidity: Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness. (197) Needless to say, there are many objections that could be raised to this assertion. Can it possibly be the case that all laughter, without exception, is derisory? Do comic eccentricities automatically incite disapproval, or can the laughter they provoke be celebratory, a sign of fellow feeling and group solidarity? An obvious counterargument to Bergson’s claim is Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque – a form of humour and laughter that, according to Bakhtin, opposes moralism and conformity while thriving on ambiguity and complicity. Indeed, as I shall note in the next chapter, Bakhtinian laughter treats the body, its materiality, and its contiguity with other physical phenomena as the very essence of carnivalesque humour. Bergson, by contrast, argues that ‘each living being is a closed system of phenomena, incapable of interfering with other systems’ (89). As such, ‘repetition, inversion, and reciprocal interference of series’ (89), being signs of material infuence, are the stuff of comedy precisely because they are antithetical to the movement of the élan vital, of life itself. It is perhaps this dichotomy that best illustrates the difference between the two approaches to humour. Where Bakhtinian laughter is based in a kind of interpenetrative materialism, a bodily humour that provokes passion

30 Comic Material and fellow-feeling, Bergsonian laughter insists on a distant transcendentalism that, for all its physical exertion and subjective feeling of mirth, is ultimately self-consciously detached, based in the cool and cruel contemplation of another’s faults.6 Indeed, were it not, it would betray Bergson’s own thesis. We instinctively feel that ‘genuine’ laughter is wholly involuntary,7 a somatic reaction that is not, in itself, ‘for’ something, but Bergson never acknowledges that laughter may be an example of the very thing he considers laughable.8 That said, neither theory is necessarily wrong, except insofar that Bergson (unlike Bakhtin) considers his theory to explain humour in its entirety, rather than describing only one of its many facets. As Parkin notes, ultimately Bergson’s conclusions describe the ‘category of satire, the comedy of victimisation’ (31), resting as they do upon ‘the satiric preconditions of distance, superiority and condemnation’ (32). Yet is there a necessary connection between Bergson’s theory of the comic (that which makes us laugh) and his theory of its function (that which it makes us do)? In the remainder of this chapter, I will examine the Bergsonian play of rigidity and fow in Cat’s Cradle, while questioning whether this particular form of humour necessarily leads to the kind of vituperative condemnation that Bergson considers to be its ultimate purpose. If the comic is the condemnatory result of the interplay between the (alleged) free-fow of the spirit and the rigidity of the material, what fnal effect occurs, comic or otherwise, satirical or not, when a work narrows its subject from mechanism to sheer inertia?

Ice-Nine – A Wampeter Bokononism is, as previously noted, more often than not the feature that most exercises critics when discussing Cat’s Cradle. However, I will here attempt to turn the usual critical focus inside out. One of the central concepts of Bokononism is that of the karass, a group of people ‘tangled up . . . for no very logical reasons’ which ‘ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial and class boundaries’ and does ‘God’s will without ever discovering what they are doing’ (CC 1–2). The instrument that brings one into their own particular karass is a kan-kan, and the kan-kan that leads John into the events of the novel is the atomic bomb – but ultimately, it is a wampeter that will become the focus of his karass, and of this chapter: A wampeter is the pivot of a karass. No karass is without a wampeter, Bokonon tells us, just as no wheel is without a hub. Anything can be a wampeter; a tree, a rock, an animal, an idea, a book, a melody, the Holy Grail. Whatever it is, the members of its karass revolve about it in the majestic chaos of a spiral nebula. (37)

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Cat’s Cradle is the story of a karass, but it is also the story of a wampeter – and it is the conception, development, and eventual apotheosis of a ‘crystalline form of water, [a] blue-white gem, [a] seed of doom called ice-nine’ (37) that best illustrates the comedic intentions of the novel. By focusing on the (often unmentioned or absent) hub of the wheeling social network of the novel, I will show that Ice-nine is at once a symbol and a result of the unexamined, mechanistic, stereotyped behaviour of its karass. It is this behaviour that leads to the end of human civilisation, but it is also – not coincidentally – one of the chief sources of humour in the novel. Indeed, ice-nine informs the overall form of the novel itself. Peter Reed, comparing Cat’s Cradle to its immediate predecessors, argues that The novel somehow lacks the substance of the two which precede it. Compared with them, the plot remains rather thin, the characterizations are more superficial and often fragmentary, and the reader’s involvement with characters, moral issues and human emotions are consequently shallower. (1972, 144–145) The ‘tone’ of the novel, in the sense of the non-representational and nondeclarative ‘affective relay between subject and object’ (Ngai, 87), is cool and ambivalent and its humour often brittle and sharp. Vonnegut would later note that ‘my books are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips; and each chip is a joke’ (Conversations 91), and Cat’s Cradle is the most mosaic-like of them all. Each of its 127 chapters ‘represents one day’s work, and each one is a joke . . . if I were writing about a tragic situation, it wouldn’t be necessary to time it . . . a joke is like building a mousetrap’ (A Man Without a Country 128). The unspoken implication in Vonnegut’s statement is that the formal structure of a book like Cat’s Cradle – fragmentary yet tightly bound, made up of a series of differently sized chapters with ‘deliberately off-putting’ titles (Klinkowitz, 2004, 61) – cannot support the tragic mode, which requires consistency, continuity, and a certain ingenuousness to achieve its effect. Like a mosaic made up of chips of ice-nine, Vonnegut’s novel, for all its humour and textual trickery, is ultimately gridlocked – rendered, at the end of its action, aesthetically, philosophically, and emotionally inert by its fundamental tension.

Ice-Nine – Conception Felix Hoenikker, father of the atomic bomb and of ice-nine, causes, more or less directly, the end of life on Earth in Cat’s Cradle. In a tragic novel, he might have done so in a noble but ultimately disastrous attempt to better the state of humanity. In a more traditional satire, he might have done so at the behest of bumptious, paranoid politicians and bloodthirsty

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generals or even to secure his own advancement in society. In Cat’s Cradle, he does so almost unconsciously, without forethought or intention, in an irresistible combination of automatism and creativity that foreshadows ice-nine’s terrible mix of potency and rigidity. An unplanned conception, ice-nine is the result of a chance cafeteria meeting between Hoenikker and a marine general. Felix, based in the Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company, is employed as a blue-sky thinker, ‘paid to increase knowledge, to work towards no end but that’ (CC 29). As a pure research man (and a man of undeniable genius, at that), he is considered by people like the general as ‘a sort of magician’, expected to ‘fill the little gaps’ in whatever ‘crackpot schemes’ they might bring in (30). Ice-nine is his answer, invented over lunch, to the general’s demand ‘to do something about mud’ – that is, to invent ‘a little pill or a little machine’ that could somehow remove mud from the battlefield, making it easier for marines to travel and move materiel (31). It is in response to a logistical (rather than offensive) problem that Hoenikker  – unbeknownst to the general; to his superior, Dr Breed; or to anyone barring his three children – invents the molecule that ultimately dooms humanity and inherits the globe. Ironically, it is the tool rather than the weapon that leads to extinction – and it is the tinkerer rather than the militarist who creates it. For all his frightening power, which is all the more frightening for being so indiscriminately wielded, Felix Hoenikker is one of the most comic figures of Cat’s Cradle. The very definition of the eccentric, he is an incongruous mix of ingenuity and ingenuousness, intelligence and unawareness. He is capable of extraordinary feats of imagination yet is unable to imagine or pay attention to anything outside of whichever technical or theoretical topic currently engages him. While these foibles may seem ultimately trivial or amiably amusing, Bergson sees within them all manner of dangers. The eccentric, in Bergson’s view, lacks the forces of ‘tension and elasticity’ that constitute the alert and adaptable character required by society. The eccentric, by contrast, is maimed, even degenerate. When tension and elasticity are lacking in the body, sickness and infirmity ensue and in the mind, mental deficiency and insanity. Worst of all, ‘if they are lacking in the character, we have cases of the gravest inadaptability to social life, which are the sources of misery and at times the causes of crime’ (Laughter 18). In Felix’s case, Bergson’s sounding of a note of danger in the eccentric is ultimately appropriate, but it is not because of lassitude or lack of adaptability on Felix’s part. Indeed, he is constantly engaged, constantly changing – but other forces propel him. Felix’s extraordinary single-mindedness is not a result of conscious volition. Instead, it appears to strike unbidden at any given moment. His youngest son, Newt, relates an amusing example from his childhood:

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I remember one morning . . . when the oil burner had quit, the pipes were frozen, and the car wouldn’t start. We all sat there in the car while Angela kept pushing the starter until the battery was dead. And then Father spoke up. You know what he said? He said “I wonder about turtles.” “What do you wonder about turtles?” Angela asked him. “When they pull in their heads,” he said, “do their spines buckle or contract?” (CC 11) This bizarre question comes to briefy dominate Hoenikker’s life; he stops working on the atom bomb, and his Manhattan Project colleagues are forced to appeal to his eldest daughter for help: She told them to take away Father’s turtles. So one night they went into his laboratory and stole the turtles and the aquarium. Father never said a word about the disappearance of the turtles. He just came to work the next day and looked for things to play with and think about. (12) Felix’s obsession is richly incongruous, in the best comic mode. It strikes at a moment when his technical know-how is very much required, a completely inappropriate response to a troublesome situation. His childlike fascination with the animals is almost endearing, while his seeming diffculty with object-permanence – once the turtles are gone, he seems to forget they ever existed – is similarly suggestive of infantile perception. Indeed, at another point, Newt recalls that Angela ‘used to talk about how she had three children – me, Frank and Father’ (11). The ludicrous contrast between the two obsessions – the atomic bomb, and the turtles – is only heightened by his obliviousness to the difference. Yet the humorous aspect of Felix’s condition itself seems incongruous at frst, from the Bergsonian perspective; while he certainly acts in a manner that is clearly out of his control, the force that determines his actions is (usually) not rigid, habitual, or mechanical but freeform and creative. His constant and single-minded search for novelty is protean and fckle. However, it is his devotion to this urge – or rather, his inability or unwillingness to notice, question, and properly consider it – that is inelastic. Felix is absentminded, in the sense that he lacks the second-order ability to examine his own examinations, to pay attention to what he is paying attention to – and for Bergson, ‘systematic absentmindedness . . . is the most comical thing imaginable’ (Laughter 146). The comic effect of absentmindedness is most richly born out in Felix whenever he does attempt to do the ‘usual’ or ‘normal’ thing – walking straight back into work as if nothing were amiss after the turtle escapade, abandoning his car in a traffc jam

34 Comic Material to continue to his destination on foot, or tipping his wife after breakfast (CC 10).9 As Bergson notes, ‘life delights to lie in wait’ for ‘simple souls’ or ‘child-like dreamers’ like Felix – [they are] organised around one central idea, and their mishaps are also quite coherent, thanks to the inexorable logic which reality applies to the correction of dreams so that they kindle in those around them . . . a hilarity capable of unlimited expansion. (Laughter 14) Tellingly, however, no-one in the novel fnds Felix funny at all, despite his comic social ineptitude and eccentricity. As a child, Newt is terrifed of him, traumatised by Felix’s frst and only attempt to relate to his infant son by spinning him a cat’s cradle (CC 8). His superior, Dr Breed, recognises that despite his seniority, he is completely unable to infuence the creative force that animates Felix: ‘If I actually supervised Felix,’ he said, ‘then I’m ready now to take charge of volcanoes, the tides, and the migrations of birds and lemmings. The man was a force of nature no mortal could possibly control.’ (15) Yet for all the dynamic vitality implicit in this description, it is up to Breed’s tombstone-selling brother, Marvin, ‘a smart and sentimental man’ (46), to express the darker side of Felix’s personality. Acknowledging how harmless and gentle and dreamy he was supposed to be . . . how he didn’t care about money and power and fancy clothes and automobiles and things . . . how he was better than the rest of us, how he was so innocent he was practically a Jesus Marvin nevertheless cannot help but ‘wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living’ (48). Alive but dead, fercely animate yet passionlessly mechanical, intelligent but unconscious, a child playing adult games, Felix Hoenikker is a comical fgure only insofar as these tensions remain in place. When he dies, shortly after he fnally brings ice-nine into the world, he dies ‘in his white wicker chair looking out to sea’ (176), and he is ‘stiff’ when his three children fnd him (179). The cause of his death is ambiguous; as Lawrence Broer points out, his stiffness may be the result of consuming ice-nine (1994, 60). In either case, the tableaux of his end – a frozen body, looking out upon the ocean – hints at the greater end to come. Bergson’s theory of laughter has nothing to say on the body once it has died. Once the interplay of spirit and matter ends, the potential for humour, based as it necessarily is in the exercise of human agency, is lost. The peculiar nexus of vitality and

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mechanism that once inhabited Felix Hoenikker, having split its kernel, instead becomes loosed upon the world, in the form of ice-nine.

Ice-Nine – Development Ice-nine itself is a form of crystallised (that is, frozen) water that has a different atomic structure to familiar water ice and as such, has very different physical properties. Just as ‘cannon-balls might be stacked on a court-house lawn’ or ‘oranges might be packed into a crate’ in many different patterns, the atoms of certain liquids can ‘stack and lock, in an orderly, rigid way’ (CC 32) in many different combinations. Describing an industrial incident in which a batch of unrelated crystals, grown for their use in manufacturing operations, were ruined, with their atoms stacking and locking to produce a useless end product, Dr Breed explains to John the nature of the culprit: The theoretical villain, however, was what Dr Breed called ‘a seed’. He meant by that a tiny grain of the undesired crystal pattern. The seed, which had come from God-only-knows-where, taught the atoms the novel way in which to stack and lock, to crystallize, to freeze. (32) The ‘seed’ in Breed’s example is localised in its effect, limited to local ethylene diamine tartrate, but its ability to ‘teach’ its fellow molecules is theoretically limitless. In the case of ice-nine, its scope encompasses every ocean, river, cloud, puddle, and living thing on Earth, and its properties – hard as wood, and with a melting point of 130 degrees Fahrenheit – ensure that its introduction would be essentially permanent. Angela, Frank and Newt Hoenikker, Felix’s other offspring, are the first members of ice-nine’s karass to encounter it after Felix’s death. Though all signs in his kitchen suggest that Felix had intended to destroy the ice-nine before it (possibly) killed him, the three children divide what remains of the substance between them, each carrying away a single chip in a Thermos jug. Tellingly, when questioned by John, they cannot remember how or why they acted in such a way – ‘so thoroughly had the three Hoenikkers obliterated their memories of the incident’, not one of the siblings can ‘remember that anyone said anything to justify their taking ice-nine as personal property’ (179). Just as their father did, and just as ice-nine eventually will do, the three children take enormously consequential action in an unaware and absentminded manner. As Stanley Schatt notes, ‘this cast of characters is notably myopic, none of them able to discern the consequences of their own actions, much less a larger pattern of meaning’ (qtd. in Klinkowitz, 2004, 63). The other members of the karass, meanwhile – the cast of characters who gather on San Lorenzo for the last day of civilisation – are, as Kunkel points out, stereotypes to

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the last. From the ludicrously militaristic banana-republic dictator ‘Papa’ Monzano to the Crosbys, a ‘bluff American capitalist from Indiana and his hideously chipper wife’, from Mona Monzano ‘the teenage sex goddess’ to the ‘hardboiled humanitarian’ Julian Castle (VIII–IX), each stock ‘caricature’ acts and reacts according to their type to a fault, regardless of circumstance. As with Felix’s absentmindedness, much of the comic action of Cat’s Cradle stems from the rigidity of the karass members; more darkly, as with Felix’s absentmindedness, the progression of icenine to its final destination depends on these characters acting in an automatic, stereotyped manner. Bergson discusses stereotype and caricature with specific regard to distortions of the face (in grimaces, ‘funny faces’ or caricature portraits), but his conclusions apply equally well to literary ‘types’ and their behaviour: a comic expression of the face is one that promises nothing more than it gives. It is a unique and permanent grimace. One would say that the person’s whole moral life has crystallised into this particular cast of features . . . Automatism, inelasticity, habit that has been contracted and maintained, are clearly the causes why a face makes us laugh. (Laughter 25) Most of the members of ice-nine’s karass are sublimely incapable of reacting constructively to the situations that encompass them – they reliably engage in the ‘stupidity in habitual behavior when more intelligent action would have been more appropriate’ (Keith-Spiegel, 7). Mr H. Lowe and Mrs Hazel Crosby are unfailingly enthusiastic and unfailingly stupid. On the plane journey to San Lorenzo, Hazel discovers that John is a fellow Hoosier and gleefully engages in a clearly age-old repetition: ‘You call me “Mom”.’ ‘What?’ ‘Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, “You call me Mom”.’ ‘Uh huh.’ ‘Let me hear you say it,’ she urged. ‘Mom?’ She smiled and let go of my arm. Some piece of clockwork had completed its cycle. My calling Hazel ‘Mom’ had shut it off, and now Hazel was rewinding it for the next Hoosier to come along. (63) John is clearly not receptive to this overfamiliarity – he is monosyllabic, obviously discomfted and guarded – but Hazel remains blissfully unaware of the tone of replies. The required response of ‘Mom’ is given

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to the habitual routine, and all other circumstances are ignored. Her industrialist husband is possessed of a similarly narrow feld of interest. Though, in his own opinion, ‘he wasn’t a terrible person and he wasn’t a fool’ and is generally content ‘to confront the world with a certain barnyard clownishness’, he is nevertheless eminently serious about only one thing – ‘what people were really supposed to do with their time on Earth’. In John’s estimation, ‘he believed frmly that they were meant to build bicycles for him’ (66), and H. Lowe is unceasingly garrulous about his obsession and enthusiastic about the business opportunities presented by the non-unionised, anti-communist island of San Lorenzo. The Crosbys are defned by their belief in the standard narrative of capitalistic progress, of patriotism, and of the superiority of Christian values and are completely incapable of imagining the wider possibilities (and dangers) of the events that surround them. Even after ice-nine fnally strikes, Hazel is unceasingly gay, excitedly viewing the survivors’ situation as like ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’ (198) and blithely – mechanically – starts to sew an American fag, though in the wrong colours and with ‘six-pointed stars of David rather than fve-pointed American stars’ (199). Not even the end of the world is enough to deter ‘Mom’ from her routine. She is a prime example of the ‘comic vice’ Bergson identifes in Laughter, which is ‘like a ready-made frame into which we are to step’ and which ‘we do not render complicated; [rather] it simplifes us’ (15), narrowing awareness until one is rendered incapable of noticing, let alone critically questioning, the frame itself. The Crosbys are not incapable of action. They are exuberantly active and engaged, enthused and driven. Nevertheless, their movement is confned to rebounding back and forth, like Bergson’s jack-in-the-box, along a single well-worn furrow.10 Though they are only tangentially involved in ice-nine’s ascendancy, their mixture of unfagging energy and complete unawareness is a mirror of its character. Other examples abound of characters acting in a repetitive, caricatured manner. The ill-adjusted, vaguely sociopathic Frank Hoenikker, who spent his childhood torturing insects and adolescence building models, is, as an adult, capable only of speaking in clichés – ‘I like the cut of your jib!’, ‘I want to talk cold turkey to you, man to man!’, ‘There’s no sense in beating around the bush’ (CC 138–9). Once he convinces John to take his place as Monzano’s successor, he ‘abruptly abdicates . . . from all human affairs’ (160). His manner changes instantly, becoming robotic and blandly obsequious, content to ‘receive honours and creature comforts while escaping human responsibilities’ by ‘going down a spiritual oubliette’ and giving himself over entirely to the role of technical director (161). As Bergson notes, ‘constant attention to form and the mechanical application of rules’ bring about ‘a kind of professional automatism’ (Laughter 53). In Frank’s case, his automatism becomes totally passive. He transfers his personal potency along with his political power, and as soon becomes clear, it is not the frst time he has done so; the potency he

38 Comic Material had traded to Monzano was his sliver of ice-nine. Even the ironists of the group, Julian and Philip Castle, the hard-bitten humanitarian doctor and son, are given to repetition and stereotype. For all Philip’s wit, there is something mechanical in his repartee, a constant stream of one-liners that reads more like a script than a natural human conversation (CC 107–110). Julian, the man of ‘saintly deeds’ who paradoxically thinks and says ‘satanic things’ (120) is an old and well-worn archetype, the gallows-humour doctor who presents a hard exterior to protect his sensitive self. He inhabits the role perfectly, ‘talking out of the corner of his mouth like a movie gangster’ (118). Whether he does so in a spirit of self-awareness or not, he is still performing according to a ‘readymade frame’, and his humanitarian actions, though well-intentioned, are ultimately powerless to prevent global catastrophe. Though he labours (futilely) to ease the hideous suffering of the natives of San Lorenzo, he is unaware of the greater catastrophe, ice-nine, until it kills his patients, his son, and himself. The scene in which ice-nine is finally released into the world is itself a summation of unexamined human action and presents Bergson’s readymade frame on a social as well as personal scale. In a ludicrous, cargo cult display of American-style militarism, the numerous players of Cat’s Cradle gather on the parapets of ‘Papa’ Monzano’s castle, to honour San Lorenzo’s ‘Hundred Martyrs to Democracy’. The ceremony is a grotesque parody of war memorial services. Bergson notes in Laughter that ceremonies inevitably hold a latent comic potential, since when we witness them, ‘we perceive [something] inert or stereotyped, or simply ready-made, on the surface of society’ (44): For any ceremony, then, to become comic, it is enough that our attention be fixed on the ceremonial element in it, and that we neglect its matter, as philosophers say, and think only of its form. (45) The ‘matter’ of the San Lorenzan ceremony is, predictably, risible – it commemorates one hundred conscripted sailors who, an hour after Pearl Harbour, are sent to fght for the United States, only to be sunk immediately by a German submarine (CC 106). With the subject of the event fatally undermined by its own inherent absurdity, the scene becomes overtly farcical. Its pomp and ceremony are revealed as misshapen clichés, and its seriousness is soon punctured by the material. Indeed, just as Bergson’s public speaker suddenly becomes comical by sneezing ‘at the most pathetic moment of his speech’, drawing our attention to his physicality ‘when it is the moral side that is concerned’ (Laughter 51), so the shoddiness of the materiel of San Lorenzo fatally interrupts the solemnities. Six ancient and barely functioning fghter planes, decorated ‘with childish bloodlust’ (CC 98), are set to fy overhead and machine gun

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cardboard caricatures of the ‘enemies of freedom’ – Hitler, Mussolini, Castro, Stalin, Marx, Mao, and a Japanese person (164). One plane, beset by engine problems, crashes into the cliff below the castle, literally undermining ‘Papa’s’ castle, sending a tower crashing down into the sea. With the ‘voices of the castle’s timbers lamenting’, and as the entire structure ‘groaned and wept aloud’ (185) over the sound of the karass’ panicked voices – the material already beginning to overtake the prerogatives of the living – the end of the human world begins.

Ice-Nine – Apotheosis The end, when it comes, is swift and violent, but there is time for one last moment of Bergsonian – that is, human – comedy before ice-nine finally strikes. The castle battlements cracks in two, and the compassionate, intelligent Ambassador Minton and his wife are left on the wrong side of the fissure: Panic was not their style. I doubt that suicide was their style either. But their good manners killed them, for the doomed crescent of castle now moved away from us like an ocean liner moving away from a dock. The image of a voyage seems to have occurred to the voyaging Mintons, too, for they waved to us with a wan amiability. (185) The Mintons tumble into the sea, soon followed by the grotesque, frozen corpse of ‘Papa’ Monzano, who, unbeknownst to all but John and the Hoenikkers, has committed suicide by ice-nine. Like a Rube Goldberg machine or a Laurel and Hardy sketch, the scene plays out with the inevitability of the physical. John steps back from the abyss; the teetering paving stone he stood on topples onto a wooden platform below; the platform falls forward, becoming a ‘chute’; and the chute dumps a xylophone, a bedside table, and ‘Papa’ Monzano out into the sea (186). In a heartbeat, a new ecosystem is born – ice-nine’s immediate apotheosis. The ocean freezes, the Earth becomes ‘a blue-white pearl’, and the sky is flled ‘with worms. The worms were tornadoes’ (187). Indeed, the outlandish new phenomena explicitly replace organic forms, taking up their functions: I looked up at the sky where the bird had been. An enormous worm with a violent mouth was directly overhead. It buzzed like bees. It swayed. With obscene peristalsis, it ingested air. (187) Ice-nine, ostensibly an innocuous confguration of water, developed for the innocuous purpose of leaving marines less muddy, is instead the kernel for an entirely new planetary confguration, one that reverses the

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Bergsonian hierarchy in which the living is superior to the material. We are used to thinking of water as a resource to be consumed, subsumed, and incorporated into our bodies. In Cat’s Cradle, however, water uses us in the same way, echoing the late 19th-century Russian scientist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky’s defnition of organisms as ‘special, distributed forms of the common material, water’.11 Like a virus, icenine endlessly self-replicates and consumes on a material level and even appears to exhibit agency or intention, ‘teaching’ the sea, the sky, and even human bodies to become like itself. As an endlessly self-replicating molecule that is, once established, essentially unbreakable, immovable, and irremovable, ice-nine is the successor of organic life on planet Earth, though one whose primary characteristics are rigidity and permanence, rather than adaptability and change. To adapt Bergson’s famous defnition of the comic, the physical has become perpetually encrusted upon the living. Given this permanence, is this juxtaposition still funny? With the interplay between the vital and the inert rapidly narrowing, what remains of the novel follows the small band of survivors – John, Mona, the Crosbys, and Newt – as they eke out a living in a place where death is as ubiquitous as water once was. As John warns Mona, ‘all you have to do is touch the ground and then your lips and you’re done for’ (193). They come across ‘thousands upon thousands of dead’, who have done exactly that, convinced by Bokonon that since ‘God was surely trying to kill them . . . they should have the good manners to die’ (195). Mona, a Bokononist to the last, laughs and joins them when John cannot bring himself to say that he would wish them alive again. The novel ends inconclusively, with Bokonon planning to make a statue of himself ‘grinning horribly’ and thumbing his nose at the sky (206). Bergson argues that ‘a laughable expression of the face . . . is one that will make us think of something rigid, and, so to speak, coagulated’ (Laughter 24) but that the comic ultimately ‘partakes rather of the unsprightly than of the unsightly’ (29). To be ‘unsprightly’ is to implicitly have the potential, albeit lapsed, to be ‘sprightly’, and Bokonon – or any of the characters of Cat’s Cradle, in time – will never be ‘sprightly’ again. As John notes, ‘the season of locking was over. The earth was locked up tight’ (CC 193) and will remain so forever. The mechanisms and stereotypes jam completely, the mosaic is set, and the virulent but inert ice-nine, created and brought to San Lorenzo by vital yet rigid people, achieves permanent dominion. The path that leads to this final configuration is often very funny and for reasons that Bergson articulates clearly: There are innumerable comedies in which one of the characters thinks he is speaking and acting freely, and, consequently, retains all the essentials of life, whereas, viewed from a certain standpoint, he appears as a mere toy in the hands of another. (Laughter 77)

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In this case, the ‘other’ is ice-nine – but is the laughter that Cat’s Cradle provokes along the way condemnatory, as Bergson argues is necessary? The novel is at best ambivalent, but usually derisive, about the possibility of people changing the unconscious forces that produce their behaviour. Bokononism, for example, is explicitly deterministic. The ultimate aim of the Bergsonian comic is to act as a corrective, to bend the aberrantly determined back into the shape of the acceptably free willed, to move from comic vice to virtue. Yet the stupid and the saintly in Cat’s Cradle uniformly wind up dead, killed by a material infuence that seems weirdly detached from whatever animating element they possess.

Determinism – Resistance and Acceptance This crucial difference regarding the efficacy of humour (or indeed any ‘corrective’ influence) is the major point of departure between Bergson and Vonnegut. The habitual behaviour and absent-mindedness of people is their shared concern; depicting the interplay between ‘life’ and ‘matter’, ‘awareness’ and ‘automatism’, or the various other antinomies that might fit this model is their shared comic technique. But the differences in their conclusions – the separate punch lines of the life/matter divide – represent a wider concern on the part of both writers. Both Bergson and Vonnegut share a preoccupation with the influence of physical determinism, as described by the natural sciences, on the behaviour of human beings. Their varying responses to this topic, the former resistant to its possibility and implications and the latter largely acquiescent, were perhaps influenced as much by the prevailing discourses of their respective times as they were by differences in individual belief or temperament. Bergson, born in 1859, wrote his major works in a period in which it seemed entirely possible that ‘an all-embracing deterministic science [was] advancing relentlessly towards its completion’ (Lacey 67). His life’s project was based in the desire to defend unalloyed spontaneity, novelty, and free will against an epistemological approach that appeared to be rapidly encroaching on traditionally philosophical terrain. By the time of the publication of Bergson’s first book, Time and Free Will (1889), Darwin’s theories of transmutation of species and evolution presented in On the Origin of Species (1859) had gained scientific and public acceptance, and The Descent of Man (1871) had explicitly applied these naturalistic influences to mankind with far less overt controversy.12 In the 1890s, the burgeoning field of sociology, established by Bergson’s former classmate Émile Durkheim, endeavoured to bring positivist methodology to bear on human social behaviour, arguing that human activity could be explained by naturalistic means.13 Sanford Schwartz ably sums up the contemporary debate of the late 19th century: [a] momentous battle over vitalism was being waged in philosophy and the human sciences, where the assumptions and procedures of

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Bergson would continue to engage with and question scientifc orthodoxies in the 20th century, producing his own vitalistic explanation for evolution in Creative Evolution and challenging Einstein’s theory of relativity and its implications regarding time in Duration and Simultaneity (1922). Certainly, Bergson still must have felt at this time that there was space outside of the naturalistic, mechanistic consensus for intuitionism and vitalism, respectively, the ‘philosopher’s time’ that he maintained was unaccounted for by Einstein’s physics14 and the creative, animating spirit that informs the evolution and organisation of life. Nevertheless, by the mid-1950s, when Vonnegut had begun to write in earnest, theories such as Bergson’s had fallen almost entirely by the wayside. As Ernest Mayr notes, ‘the last support of vitalism as a viable concept in biology disappeared about 1930’ (94). The discovery of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953 proved that information transfer in living organisms is a material, naturalistic process. The neobehaviourism of researchers such as Edward C. Tolman, Edwin Guthrie, and B. F. Skinner dominated American psychology in the mid-20th century.15 These theorists argued forcefully that free will is an illusion and considered human thoughts and behaviours to be determined entirely by environmental influences.16 Vonnegut was born in 1922, the same year that Bergson launched his ill-received attack on Einstein’s theory of relativity; by the time Vonnegut had reached adulthood, Einstein’s work was widely considered one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time. At the time of Cat’s Cradle’s publication, materialism and mechanistic determinism were in the ascendency in scientific America. Vonnegut’s own educational background in chemistry and his time as a PR writer for General Electric in the 1950s also undoubtedly helped to shape his worldview. Indeed, in a self-interview later in his career, he would note that while he was ‘no scientist at all’, he understood and enjoyed the methodology and company of scientists to a far greater extent than that of ‘literary people’ (Conversations 183). He also considered his own creative work to be a case of tinkering with ‘mechanisms’, a series of ‘technical problems’ that were to be worked out and experimented upon (185).

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Vonnegut, unlike Bergson, had no objection to the application of scientific praxis to traditionally humanistic areas, up to and including his own creative work; nevertheless, he held strong reservations about contemporary attitudes within the scientific community, as well as its products. Daniel Zins, reading Cat’s Cradle in relation to the Manhattan Project, records several extraordinary quotations regarding the attitudes of scientists and their superiors involved in the creation of the bomb: Shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dwight Macdonald wrote (p. 149): ‘The scientists themselves whose brainwork produced The Bomb appear not as creators but as raw material, to be hauled about and exploited like uranium ore.’ And Peter Abbs (p. 177) asks us to consider the kind of mindlessness that one leading American designer of nuclear weapons sees as representative of himself and his colleagues. According to Hank Schumacher, once they are engaged in military research ‘very few people think much about it. My colleagues who work on nuclear devices don’t do it for a reason. They do it because they are nuclear physicists. And that’s where the funds are. Any of us in analytical work could make important contributions in other fields. I know we could, but the money isn’t there.’ (174) The parallels with Cat’s Cradle are obvious; the equation of people with inorganic matter, the combination of incredible potency and lack of awareness that could as easily describe uranium ore as the scientists themselves. These attitudes represent a dangerous interpretation and instrumentalisation of materialistic/deterministic thinking. Zins argues that Vonnegut, in Cat’s Cradle, is not producing ‘a neo-luddite indictment of science itself’ but rather is ‘warning of the apocalyptic consequences of the apotheosis of science and technology’, the point at which the creation (whether ice-nine or nuclear weapons) overpowers the creator (173). Vonnegut accepts the validity of scientifc epistemology, even in areas traditionally held to be outside of science’s domain. He accepts determinism, uncomfortable as it may be. But he is resistant to the misuse of those notions, utilised to justify the combination of activity and passivity that produced such terrible creations as the atomic bomb. Technology as powerful and potentially all-consuming as nuclear weapons were beyond the horizon in Bergson’s time, and for Bergson himself, the theory rather than the application of science was of central concern. As Joseph Riccaboni notes, ‘Bergson’s interest in science focused mainly upon its method of knowing. How the scientist sees was his concern – not what he sees’ (159). While Bergson was not opposed to the scientific way of knowing, he considered it illegitimate in matters of human consciousness, especially with regard to the potential consequences of determinism for free will. Bergson’s philosophy emphasised

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the superiority of intuition as a method of knowing. Central to Bergson’s privileging of intuitional knowledge is the concept of duration, as elucidated in Time and Free Will. He argues that science erroneously translates time and sensation into spatial terms, applying to both discrete measurements of quantity that fundamentally mischaracterise their nature (90–1). For Bergson, time, in its actual, lived, non-abstract form, is qualitative rather than quantitative. We therefore live ‘with two different kinds of reality, the one heterogeneous, that of sensible qualities, the other homogeneous, namely space’ (97), and he names the former reality duration. Bergson does not deny that there exists ‘real’ space and (artificial) time or that we must necessarily engage with it in the medium of spatialised thought; rather, as Kleinherebrink notes, he cautions that ‘the more we affirm living in a world of extensive, distinct, concrete ideas and articulations, the more we remove ourselves from our deepest selves’ (222). This dichotomy, and its emphasis on the ‘real’ time of duration, is key to Bergson’s theory of freedom. Since determinism requires clear-cut causes and effects, divisions between things in time, it is simply incoherent under duration (TFW 180). Nevertheless, we are inclined to think of ourselves and our actions in terms of space, and so our actions are liable to spring from habit, conventions, and routine and are as such not completely free (167). In Burwick and Douglass’s pithy turn of phrase, ‘a doubling of the self arises, as an automatistic evil twin replaces the fundamental self’ (5), and it is this interplay between the free and determined ‘selves’ that gives rise to Bergson’s theory of humour. We spend much of our life negotiating between these opposing poles (though hopefully usually not so egregiously as to provoke scornful Bergsonian laughter). According to Bergson, true freedom, though it is rare, is possible as long as it is intuited and not intellectualised. As Kolakowski notes, ‘in Bergson’s analysis freedom is both unquestionably certain and utterly unprovable in the sense which the word “to prove” has acquired in scientific inquiry’ (22). We simply know that our actions, when they are spontaneous and unconsidered, are free. Under Bergson’s philosophical approach ‘intuition enables us to grasp whatever remains external to intelligence: movement, change in general, life, spirit, history, and, above all, “the absolute” – which, of course, is that which is not relative’ (Bunge, 12). To argue with Bergson’s epistemological approach on logical or rational terms (as Bunge attempts to do) is ultimately misguided. Scientific empiricism cannot meaningfully engage with his philosophical approach; their methods are fundamentally incompatible. Nevertheless, we can perhaps speculate as to why Bergson was so invested in defending spontaneity, creativity, free will, and subjectivity from the encroachment of positivist science. Where Vonnegut explicitly sought to imagine an ethics that might correct societal problems or deliver a prescriptive formula for

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living well, consequentialist approaches to philosophy were not a priority for Bergson. Indeed, in Creative Evolution, he argues that [t]he duty of philosophy should be . . . to examine the living without any reservation as to practical utility. . . . Its own special object is to speculate, that is to say, to see; its attitude toward the living should not be that of science which aims only at action. (206–7) Yet Bergson’s very opposition to the possible inroads of naturalism into the realm of free will, his constant insistence that the realms of philosophy and science remain utterly separate, is in and of itself an a priori resistance, even if he avows no reason, rationale, or polemical position. His philosophy is ultimately for freedom, intuition, and spontaneity, rather than against science and determinism as a whole. Nevertheless, his spirited defence implies an oppositional stance to the very prospect that freedom or absolute novelty may not exist. For all Bergson’s emphasis on the essential limitlessness of possibility, it is the only notion that cannot – must not – be admitted.17 Cat’s Cradle, in contrast, takes a more parsimonious view on the issue. Since, according to his epistemological approach, free will is unnecessary to explain why human beings act and think in the manner that they do, Vonnegut need not posit a fundamental divide between life and matter, space and time, or intelligence and intuition to portray the comedic (and catastrophic) potential of people acting in a state of diminished self-awareness. Vonnegut accepts the contemporary deterministic consensus. The central tension, that in Bergson’s philosophy exists between ‘two realities’, is translated into a single, naturalistic realm. As such, the knotty question of human action must be worked out without recourse to contra-causal vitalistic freedom and without brute matter to act as a scapegoat for human failings. As I hope to have demonstrated, lassitude or lack of drive are hardly an issue for the characters of Cat’s Cradle. Indeed, many suffer from an overabundance, as in the case of Felix Hoenikker, for whom the protean urge to think, act, and create is almost overwhelming. The characters are archetypal to the last, acting out stereotyped roles according to prescribed ideologies or powerful inner drives. They never stop to consider the motivations behind their actions, the influences that have affected their thoughts, or the possible consequences of what they are driven to do. In short, they display the same traits and biases that all human beings do in their myopic, everyday lives. From such a perspective, the difference between conscious and automatic behaviour would naturally appear to be categorical. It is only from John’s Bokononist perspective – a kind of ironic God’s eye view – that it becomes apparent that their every action is in the service of a mechanism that brings about

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the most potent agential element in the novel. Indeed, at one point, this mechanism is made explicit by John, quoting a Bokononist calypso: Oh, a sleeping drunkard Up in Central Park, And a lion-hunter In the jungle dark, And a Chinese dentist, And a British queen – All ft together In the same machine. Nice, nice, very nice; So many different people In the same device. (CC 2–3) That this calypso is found in the opening chapter of Cat’s Cradle only underscores the fact that, contrary to Bergsonian novelty, the end of the novel and its action are contained within its beginning. The worldmachine of the novel could not have produced any other result, and a static, mosaic-like series of cause and effect runs back and forth across the novel. In this way, Cat’s Cradle recalls The Sirens of Titan (1959) and its ‘rollercoaster’ that may be observed but must nevertheless be ridden, and it also prefgures the eternalism of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), the evolutionary timescale and proleptic death notices of Galapagos (1985), and the titular event of Timequake (1997). It is in these novels that Vonnegut most explicitly depicts something like a ‘block’ universe, one in which the future is as set in stone as the past. Needless to say, this is a vision of reality that is profoundly at odds with Bergson’s philosophy. It subjects human consciousness to the same naturalistic forces of space and time that are for Bergson (at least in Time and Free Will) strictly relegated to brute, duration-less matter. Nevertheless, Vonnegut does make a distinction between man and matter, human and ice-nine. It is not a distinction between vitalistic freedom and its material adulteration but between awareness and ignorance. The fundamental issue at stake in Cat’s Cradle (and in much of Vonnegut’s fiction) is that of attention rather than free action. Would the addition of second-order awareness, so often lacking in the novel’s characters, have made a difference to their behaviour, which would then act as an instructive example in the Bergsonian mode? In other words, would the message be ‘You are acting stupidly, pay attention and change your actions’, or would it be ‘You are acting stupidly, pay attention while you act stupidly’? The novel’s ambiguity on this point produces the same ‘dynamic tension’ that fuels the Bokononist religion and the ice-nine world it depicts and freezes it into its characteristic mosaic pattern of

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jokes. Although it remains, in and of itself, a closed system, it provokes the kind of questions that its characters are unable to articulate to themselves. Even the most hardened of determinists cannot deny that change and activity, in and of themselves, occur constantly in the world; the very nature of cause and effect implies a change of state. Often these changes appear under the ostensible guise of ‘choice’. If we assume (as Vonnegut does) that these choices are simply the conscious experience of a more basal form of cause and effect, then we must then ask why it is important to demonstrate that this is so. If we deny ourselves Bergsonian freedom, then can we allow that increased awareness (even if it is only awareness of our determined nature) might alter the changes and activities we engage in? In short, does conscious awareness have the causal power necessary to change the determinants of consciousness and activity, even if it cannot change the determination itself? This question of attention, and the concomitant question of the precise relationship between the ‘human’ and the material, runs throughout Vonnegut’s work, often (though certainly not always) in the comic mode. As such, in the following section, I examine Breakfast of Champions (1973) through the lens of the Bakhtinian grotesque – a form of humour that, contrary to Bergson, emphasises and celebrates the material – and attempt to discern the novel’s potential to depict the human/material dichotomy in the joyful and regenerative manner that the carnivalesque mode demands.

Notes 1. Charles Atlas was a bodybuilder almost as famous for his advertising techniques as his ‘dynamic tension’ technique, which innovatively sought to produce strength by pitting different parts of the body against each other. Dan Wakefield, in his introduction to Letters, notes that Vonnegut, ‘a tall, skinny, gangly kind of kid’, in high school, was once ‘awarded’ a subscription to Atlas’s course by a football coach – ‘it had hurt and embarrassed him, and it still rankled, even after all his success’ (IV–V). 2. Pleasingly – and, of course, ironically – Bokononism has been shown to be one of the few features of Cat’s Cradle that is based on fact rather than foma. Art historian Suzanne Preston Blier, following up on a hunch of anthropologist Michael Jackson, has confirmed that Bokonon religion does exist, though in West Africa rather than the Caribbean, and is practiced by the Fom of the Danhome kingdom (141). Further, she asserts that Vonnegut would certainly have known about [the religion] in his graduate training, since the most famous Africanist of the time not only had published extensively on the Fon religion . . . but also was teaching anthropology up the road a bit at Northwestern University. (142) Nor did Vonnegut simply lift the name for his own purposes. In the Danhome belief system, the diviner or bokonon ‘is seen to be at once a revealer of truth and a source of potential “lies.” The latter designation is based on the belief that no person, not even the bokonon, can ever know anything about the world, thus no one can ever really know “truth”’ (142).

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3. The ‘Camp of Bokonon’ is apparently a regular feature at Burning Man Festival – members spend their time teaching ‘foma’ to anyone willing to listen (Arbeiter par.10). 4. Traditionally, theories of humour have fallen into three broad categories: relief, superiority, and incongruity theories. Relief theory, championed by thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud, posit that humour and laughter result from the release of ‘nervous’ or ‘psychic’ energy, maintaining homeostasis. Superiority theorists, including Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Hobbes, argue that laughter issues from the joyous feeling of superiority over others. Incongruity theorists argue that humour and laughter occur when an incongruity is resolved – in Bergson’s case, the fundamental incongruity between the ‘living’ and the ‘mechanical’. For a detailed summation of these theories, see Chapter 4 in Hurley et al.’s Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (2011). 5. John Parkin notes that Laughter ‘functions as part of a very broad metaphysics which attempted to reconcile such vast questions as the mind-body dichotomy, the problem of free-will and determinism, and the mutual interrelations and categorical distinctions of space and time’ and finds it curious that while this larger philosophical project has been largely discounted and ignored in more recent times, the study on humour that it spawned remains well known (7). 6. It is worth noting, however, that the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, and its attendant mirth, may also play a socially regulatory role, even if it is more subtle than Bergson’s overtly censorious laughter. For all its anarchic and levelling humour, its open and fraternal laughter and scorn for authority, carnival ultimately only exists at the consent of the state. Anatoly Lunacharsky first made the argument that carnival acts as a kind of safety valve, redirecting the passions and frustrations of the common people away from revolutionary action (Holquist, 1984, XVIII). Terry Eagleton precisely sums up this contradiction: Carnival, after all, is a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art. As Shakespeare’s Olivia remarks, there is no slander in an allowed fool. (1981, 148) 7. In this case, our instincts appear to be correct; in cases of natural laughter, as Gowers notes, ‘the will is needed not to effect it, but to restrain it’ (qtd. in Ironside 593). Ironside notes that while smiling is ‘a more voluntary phenomena of facial expression’, genuine laughter recruits both the ‘somatic and autonomic systems’ (590). More recent studies have shown that smiling and laughter can be elicited voluntarily, but doing so activates a different (though interdependent) neural pathway to that of genuine laughter (Wild et al). Though more related to the act of smiling than laughing, Duchenne famously identifies the contraction of the zygomaticus major and orbicularis oculi as indicative of genuine mirth; fake smiles or laughter do not activate the latter muscle, and it is extremely difficult to voluntarily engage it (72). 8. Though this paradox, as noted, does not seem to occur to Bergson, Steven Connor presents a disturbing explanation of laughter laughing at laughter. In a lecture in which he proposes that ‘laughter is produced by the friction and fission of positive values . . . and the negativity . . . that intersects with them’, he presents an alternate explanation to the standard (and indeed, Bergsonian) ‘complacent assumption . . . that laughter has something to do with our triumph over the inert’. Instead, comedy (and in particular, mathematically or logically driven comedy) instead represents ‘some insurgence of the inert,

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an assertion of the purely quantical against the world of quality. Laughter represents the paradoxical expression of and attempt to escape from the threat of the paradoxical nothingness of infinite sequence; ‘[w]e work so hard at laughter in order to overcome it, rather than to overcome with it. If laughter comes from the eruption of nothing in the place of something, laughter is also the defence against the propagation of this nothing’. This detail was taken from Vonnegut’s real life experience (Conversations 247). While working at General Electric as a promo man, he became familiar with Dr Irving Langmuir, the prototypical Felix Hoenikker – ‘Langmuir was absolutely indifferent to the uses that might be made of truths he dug out of rock and handed out to whomever was around’ (233). As well as the wifetipping incident, Langmuir also wondered aloud about turtles’ spines and came up with the concept of ice-nine, in an attempt to entertain H. G. Wells. Much as the Hoenikker children take ice-nine from their dead father, Vonnegut considered the idea ‘finders-keepers’ after Langmuir died (182). The jack-in-the-box is one of Bergson’s primary examples in Laughter of the most simplistic, childlike examples of humour, ‘a struggle between two stubborn elements, one of which, being simply mechanical, generally ends by giving in to the other, which treats it as a plaything’ (70). Other examples include Punch and Judy shows, the Dancing-Jack, and even the snowball; the key to the humour of each toy or act is its repetition of mechanical elements (69–90). Quoted in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010, 8). The wording is that of Margulis and Sagan in What Is Life (2000, 50). Thomas Huxley remarked, in 1871, that ‘as time has slipped by, a happy change has come over Mr. Darwin’s critics. The mixture of ignorance and insolence which at first characterised a large proportion of the attacks with which he was assailed, is no longer the sad distinction of anti-Darwin criticism.’ (qtd. in Darwin, 1958, 289). Darwin himself was pleased at the financial success of The Descent and noted that on the whole, reviews of his book had been ‘highly favourable’ (288). Overall, as Cyril Aydon notes, the evidence that Darwin had amassed put the burden of proof on those who would disagree with him . . . so although the impact of the book was profound, the criticisms were more muted. His enemies still growled, but not many of them dared to bark. (251)

13. John Allcock notes that ‘although Durkheim and Bergson were old acquaintances, having studied together at the École Normale Supérieure, they were hardly friends’ (Durkheim 112n37), and this is perhaps unsurprising considering their very different methodologies. As Alan Swingewood remarks,‘there is a strong, mechanical element in Durkheim’s sociology as, for example, when he argues that ‘states of consciousness can and ought to be considered from without and not from the point of view of the consciousness experiencing it’ (101). Further, Durkheim’s positivism also necessarily implies a deterministic outlook. By searching for laws and causal relations in the behaviour of human beings, central to Durkheim’s method ‘is the assumption that what happens must happen: there is never any sense that some other course of action might have occurred, no possibility of alternate paths’ (108). Such an absolute dismissal of subjective experience is completely antithetical to Bergson’s thought – and indeed, Bergson would eventually directly reply to Durkheim’s thought in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). 14. The term ‘philosopher’s time’ was Einstein’s, as stated in his terse reply to Bergson’s challenge to the theory of relativity at their famous debate on 6

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April, 1922 – ‘Il n’y a donc pas un temps des philosophes’ (Canales, 5). Over the following years, the physicist and the philosopher would engage in a bitter dispute, with Bergson maintaining that Einstein’s theory was ‘a metaphysics grafted upon science’ and so ‘not science’ (6). 15. Kerry W. Buckley argues that the dominance of behaviourism in the United States during this period can be at least partially explained as a reflection of wider cultural concerns: Behaviorism helped legitimize experimental psychology among the natural sciences and provided scientific underpinning to the belief in American exceptionalism that characterized American social science in the twentieth century. Behaviorism’s ascendancy reflected a preoccupation with order and efficiency among the shapers of modernist America. (122) Though behaviourism has been largely overtaken by modern cognitive behavioural psychology, it is still thought to be highly significant in the evolution of psychology as a field. In particular, B.F. Skinner continues to be ranked as one of the most influential (and sometimes the most influential) psychologists of all time by modern practitioners (Hergenhahn and Henley, 431). 16. So, for example, B. F. Skinner argues in About Behaviorism (1974) that we must surely begin with the fact that human behavior is always controlled .  .  . his only hope is that he will come under the control of a natural and social environment in which he will make the most of his genetic endowment and in doing so most successfully pursue happiness. (201) 17. Bergson was characteristically non-confrontational when it came to opposing philosophical positions, but his anti-rationalist forebears were often less circumspect. Jack Haegar draws a convincing genealogical line between Coleridge’s vitalistic thought and Bergson’s. He notes that in Theory of Life Coleridge argues, as Bergson would a hundred years later, ‘that what biological science might interpret as an evolution of life forms resulting from progressively higher and more complex combinations and structures of organic matter was in reality the manifestation of a priori force’ (101). Coleridge identified this a priori force with God; Bergson with the elan vital. Nevertheless, Coleridge makes explicit the ultimate concerns that remain implicit in Bergson’s work, in an 1819 lecture titled ‘Dogmatic Materialism – Its Relations to Physiology as well as to the Religious, Moral and Common Sense of Mankind’: [A belief in God] cannot be destroyed without destroying the basis of all truth. That is, it destroys the possibility of free agency, it destroys the great distinction between the mere human and the mere animals of nature, namely the powers of origination and action. All things are brought, even the powers of life are brought, into a common link of causes and effect that we observe in a machine, and all the powers of thought into those of life, being all reasoned away into modes of sensation, and the will itself is nothing but a current, a fancy determined by the accidental copulations of certain internal stimuli. With such a being, to talk of a difference between good and evil would be to blame a stone for being round or angular. The thought itself is repulsive. No, the man forfeits that high principle of nature, his free agency, which though it

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reveals itself principally in his moral conduct, yet is still at work in all departments of his being. (Coleridge, 534–535) If one were to replace ‘God’ with ‘duration’ or ‘elan vital’, the preceding quotation might perfectly summarise the anxiety that can be read in Bergson’s work. Not coincidentally, Coleridge’s horrified vision corresponds exactly with Vonnegut’s own position.

2

Breakfast of Champions Rebirth Suspended Andrew John Hicks

Despite being his seventh novel, Breakfast of Champions (1973) represented something of a sophomore slump for Vonnegut, at least amongst his critics (and, to a certain extent, Vonnegut himself).1 Following the unexpected breakout success of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), the novel that made him famous, Vonnegut was at something of a loss. As he said in a 1971 interview, ‘for so long money motivated me . . . now there is nothing to move me off center. I don’t know what to do’. He had tried his hand at playwriting with Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970) – which received its own share of hostile criticism – and, on attempting a new novel, found himself feeling ‘like an animal in a wicker cage’ (Conversations, 32). Having wrestled with the first draft of Breakfast of Champions since 1969 (Shields, 2011, 267), by 1971, Vonnegut was frustrated enough to swear off writing novels completely, since he considered his first, unfinished draft of Breakfast of Champions ‘a piece of – ’ (33). Charles J. Shields similarly records that ‘Vonnegut thought his new novel was so asinine it embarrassed him’ (284). When the novel finally appeared, in early 1973, several critics were quick to disparage it, despite its strong sales. As Donald Morse notes, writing as late as 2000, of all Kurt Vonnegut’s novels to date, none has provoked such strong and diverse reactions as Breakfast of Champions . . . some critics love to hate [it] so much that they devote a disproportionate amount of space to denigrating it and pointing out its ‘weaknesses’. (2000, 143) In a contemporary review entitled ‘Is Vonnegut Kidding Us?’ – a relatively unsubtle clue as to the reviewer’s attitude towards the novel – Christopher Lehmann-Haupt found the novel’s refrains and illustrations repetitive and considered Vonnegut’s professed claim within the novel to be giving up literature ‘coy’ (par.6, 7). Robert Merrill, in a 1979 review, summarises the contemporary critical position regarding the novel: Where one reviewer speaks of the book’s ‘gratuitous digressions’, another refers to the ‘banality, the nearly Kiwanian subtly of [its]

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social criticisms’. Yet another describes it as a ‘deliberate curiosity, an earnest attempt to play after getting Dresden out of the way’. The reviews talk much about Vonnegut’s ‘stick figures’ and ‘facile fatalism’. Anyone who reads the reviews must conclude that Breakfast of Champions is an act of sheer audacity, that Vonnegut has apparently exploited his enormous popularity by throwing between covers nothing but ‘textual irrelevancies’. (99) While many critics considered the experimental elements of the novel to be excessive – William Rodney Allen notes that, although it is still an effective novel, Breakfast of Champions carries ‘the metafctional impulse in Vonnegut’s writing as far as it can go’ (105) – others disliked its tone. David Cowart, for instance, declares that ‘to read Breakfast of Champions a decade after its publication . . . is to be somewhat put off by the author’s crabbiness, effrontery, self-indulgence, and admissions of mental instability’ (173). The novel’s subject matter is similarly off-putting, a melange of contemporary American cultural and literal detritus; the ‘American landscape through which the characters move has been polluted, strip mined, and made horrifcally ugly with advertisements of all kinds’ (Allen, 107). In so vividly describing the decay, degradation and disintegration of the society that surrounded him, Vonnegut ran the risk of producing a simple (albeit quintessentially postmodern) jeremiad, just as the novel’s many critics surmised. As Shields astutely notes, ‘had anyone other than Vonnegut fulminated that when he was young life in America was better, he would have been called a reactionary’ (310). It is precisely this qualifer, however, that makes Breakfast of Champions a novel worthy of study. As with all of Vonnegut’s novels, its ambiguities complicate its bitter subject matter, and one of the novel’s central ambiguities is the subject of matter. As I will show, when Breakfast of Champions is read not only as a reaction to its immediate cultural context but within the long tradition of American grotesque, surprising new inferences may be drawn from this diffcult novel.

Modern Grotesque James Goodwin, in Modern American Grotesque (2009), notes that if one were to ask several different Americans what they find ‘grotesque’ about modern American life, one would receive several different answers. From ‘tabloid journalism, talk shows, celebrity gossip, network reality programs, Internet Websites, and extreme movie genres’ (1), the grotesque (in the idiomatic sense of the excessive, the distasteful, the shocking or unnatural) seems to permeate American culture. This notion of the ubiquitous grotesque is not a new phenomenon – Flannery O’Connor noted, in the 1950s, that the problem for any serious American writer of the grotesque ‘is one of finding something that is not grotesque’ (1957,

54 Comic Material 33) to write about. Nevertheless, the affective apprehension of the grotesque is inevitably bound up in subjective impressions, cultural norms, and political beliefs. While O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ (1953) still retains the power to shock the unwary reader, it is debatable that an enthusiast for modern ‘torture porn’ films such as the Hostel or Saw series would find its depiction of violence overtly uncomfortable or unnerving.2 More than one modern-day reader has found Poe’s grotesque and arabesque tales wanting.3 Conversely, as Wolfgang Kayser notes in his seminal study The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1933), those who are unfamiliar with the culture of the Incas will consider many of their sculptures to be grotesque, but perhaps that which we regard as nightmarish and ominously demonic . . . is a familiar form that belongs to a perfectly intelligible frame of reference. (181) The experience of the grotesque can be found where it is not intended and missing from where it is. If a universal definition of the grotesque is to be made, as several critics have attempted, then these subjective impressions ‘teach us not to define the grotesque exclusively on the basis of its effect’ (Kayser 181) and that the grotesque, for all its symbolic and affective potential, is still historically and culturally situated.4 The notion of incongruity or ambiguity, and the mixture of heterogeneous elements, is central to several theorists’ definitions of the grotesque. Contrasting the ‘superficial’ senses of the grotesque in contemporary culture, ‘noteworthy only for its bizarre or perverse qualities and only for its effects of shock and scandal’ (1), Goodwin argues that ‘deeper’ grotesque transposes a paradigm across logical boundaries even though such an application may seem at first irrelevant, incoherent, or anarchic. In the process the grotesque functions as a method ultimately for disclosing a deep, shared structure among political, spiritual, and aesthetic domains. (3) The modern American grotesque fgure, in Goodwin’s estimation, uncovers this structure through ‘pronounced, and often absolute contrasts . . . [enlarging] awareness of the social sphere through delimiting one’s perspective on it to antitheses such as perception/obscurity and light/dark’ (2). Similarly, Philip Thomson argues that the grotesque in literature and visual culture is ‘the unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and response’ (27, Thomson’s italics). Grotesque thematic and formal contrasts and incompatibilities may cross the axes of multiple dichotomies. Laura Quinney locates the grotesque on the boundaries of self/other and internal/external, noting that grotesque characters and plots represent

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‘shadowy remnants of consciousness, wavering presences that become uncanny because their residualized subjectivity appears as otherness’ (qtd. In Meyer, I). Indeed, the ornamental paintings that were uncovered in 15th-century Rome and gave rise to the term ‘grotesque’ (from the Italian grotto or ‘cave’) were themselves criticised at the time of their painting by Vitruvius, for freely crossing the real/imaginary and human/ animal boundaries: For our contemporary artists decorate the walls with monstrous forms rather than reproducing clear images of the familiar world. Instead of columns they paint fluted stems with oddly shaped leaves and volutes . . . the little stems, finally, support half-figures crowned by human or animal heads. Such things, however, never existed, do not now exist, and shall never come into being. For how can a stem of a flower support a roof . . . how can a tender shoot carry a human figure? (qtd. in Kayser, 20) If we are, for now, to take these categorical transgressions as the essential feature of the grotesque mode, then we must then ask what the purpose and effect of its deployment might be. Commonly, theorists of the grotesque argue that the mode points, even if necessarily obliquely, towards something ‘beyond’ normal human experience.5 Flannery O’Connor notes that the writer of grotesque fction is ‘looking for one image that will connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point in the concrete, and the other is a point not visible to the naked eye, but believed in by him frmly’ (1960, par.14). Only through the juxtaposition of phenomenal and noumenal knowledge can the writer approach ‘that realm which is the concern of poets and prophets’ (par.20). For the optimistic, these experiences beyond the mundane can represent ‘spaces of possibilities’, and grotesque texts can allow us to ‘remain open, multiple’, in a manner that ‘resists totalization, in all its many forms, and offers many routes into multiple readings’ (Edwards and Graulund, 3–4). The grotesque image can, in its essential indeterminacy, represent alternatives to established power structures or social norms.6 However, this indeterminacy can just as easily be considered threatening, anxiety-inducing, or even revolting or horrifying, and this certainly seems to be the sense that most closely aligns with the modern grotesque. Kayser traces the history of the grotesque, in work and in response, arguing that by the Renaissance, the fusion of human, plant, and animal in the Roman grottesco came to seem not only ‘playfully gay and carelessly fantastic’ but also ‘ominous and sinister in the face of a world totally different from the familiar one’ (21). By the Romantic era, the grotesque had become, in its gothic incarnation, a symbol of abyssal horror and alienation. Regarding William Hazlitt’s conception of the

56 Comic Material grotesque in literature in the early 1800s, Kayser notes that ‘its emotional correlate was no longer a somber mood but rather a feeling of hopelessness and disparagement before an increasingly absurd and fantastically estranged world’ (77–8). This, for Kayser, is ultimately the definition of the grotesque – it instils ‘fear of life rather than fear of death’ and ‘is not concerned with individual actions or the destruction of the moral order . . . it is primarily the expression of our failure to orient ourselves in the physical universe’ (185). In a similar manner to his contemporary Kenneth Burke, Kayser argues that the grotesque is at best adulterated by the inclusion of the humorous.7 He specifies the work of F. Th. Vischer as the ‘turning-point in the conceptual history of the term “grotesque”: its reduction to the fantastically comic’ and further notes that this development explains why the word ‘has lost its status as a technical term and is currently used in a rather vague and noncommittal manner’ (103). Alienation caused by estrangement, horror caused by intractable incongruity, the disintegration of ‘the belief .  .  . in a perfect and protective natural order’ (188), and an essential lack of levity, for Kayser, these are the elements of the true grotesque.

Bakhtinian Grotesque In his influential monograph Rabelais and His World (1965), Mikhail Bakhtin answers directly to Kayser’s gloomy, abyssal description of grotesque imagery.8 While praising Kayser’s work for its analyses and insight, Bakhtin argues that it is ultimately incomplete: [Kayser] offers the theory of the Romantic and modernist forms only, or, more strictly speaking, of exclusively modernist forms, since the author sees the Romantic age through the prism of his own time. . . . Kayser’s theory cannot be applied to the thousand-year-long development of the pre-Romantic era. (46) Bakhtin’s fundamental claim in Rabelais is that the grotesque once held a cultural signifcance and mercurial character largely lost in the modern era; generally considered an aesthetic of bare negation, disgust, and death, the grotesque once combined these elements with themes of regeneration, lust, and life. Now so often considered a source of existential horror, the grotesque once placed expressive emphasis on convivial humour. Bakhtin locates this deployment of the grotesque in early folk culture, in the culture of the market place, and in particular carnival festivities (and further, argues that Rabelais’s work can only be properly understood within these contexts). Positing that ‘at the early stages of preclass and prepolitical social order it seems that the serious and the comic aspects of the world and of the deity were equally sacred, equally “offcial”’ (6),

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Bakhtin believes that elements of these comic rituals survived into the Middle Ages, taking the form of parodic, libidinous carnival counterparts to the austerity of Christian liturgy: The basis of laughter which gives form to carnival rituals frees them completely from all religious and ecclesiastical dogmatism, from all mysticism and piety. They are also completely deprived of the character of magic and prayer; they do not command or ask for anything. (7) The time of carnival, Bakhtin argues, was ‘a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part’ (7). It is a period in which ‘the offcial feast [that] asserted all that was stable, unchanging, perennial; the existing hierarchy, the existing religious, political, and moral values’ (9) was subverted and overturned. Bakhtin is, however, careful to point out that these inversions are ‘far distant from the negative and formal parody of modern times’, since ‘folk humor denies, but it revives and renews at the same time’, and his description of the specifcally complex nature of carnival laughter is illustrative: It is, first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some isolated ‘comic’ event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity. Third, this laughter is ambivalent; it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time, mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of carnival. (11–12) Already, the parallels between the carnival perspective and the depictions of the grotesque become clear – the transgression of previously stable categories, the relativism inherent in its social universalism, the unresolved tension in ambivalent laughter. Bakhtin makes this connection explicit with the concept of grotesque realism. Simon Dentith ably sums up the ‘historical institution of carnival and its related popular-festive forms’ as envisioned by Bakhtin as ‘the fowering of a gay, affrmative, and militantly anti-authoritarian attitude to life, founded upon a joyful acceptance of the materiality of the body’ (66). This emphasis on the body, exemplifed by Rabelais – ‘the writer who celebrates the body which eats, digests, copulates, and defecates . . . in a wild, exaggerated and grotesque way’ (67) – is central to the concept of grotesque realism. As with every feature of carnival, it is a collective concern.‘The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual . . . but in the people . . . who are continually growing and renewed’, Bakhtin argues, and that is why,

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in grotesque portrayals of the body, it ‘becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable’ (Rabelais, 19). Yet while the grotesque body represents the continuity and renewal of human life, it is also inextricably bound up with death, or, more specifcally, ‘degradation’, since ‘the essential principle of grotesque realism . . . is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity’ (20). Bakhtin maps this degradation or debasement, the movement along the topographical axis of ‘upward’ (heaven) to ‘downward’ (earth), to the body itself – ‘the upper part is the face or the head and the lower part is the genital organs, the belly, and the buttocks’ (21). To debase something, to hurl it down into the earth (and down to the ‘bodily lower stratum’) is ‘to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better’: Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth takes place. (21) This, then, is where Bakhtin places the grotesque. It is not in the void that so threatened Kayser, and that stands behind modern concepts of the grotesque but rather in the nexus of life and death, degeneration and regeneration, that composes and links the collective body and the earth. Further, grotesque portrayals of the body, in Bakhtin’s estimation, emphasise the junctures where outside and inside meet. Bakhtin compares the grotesque image of the body to that of the classical canon. Where classically the body is a ‘strictly completed, fnished product’, and ‘all signs of its unfnished character . . . its protuberances and offshoots were removed, its convexities (signs of new sprouts and buds) smoothed out, its apertures closed’ (29), the grotesque body is defned by its convexities and protuberances. The bowels and the phallus, as well as the mouth and anus, ‘subject to positive exaggeration’ in the grotesque, are the spaces where ‘the confnes between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome: there is an interchange and interorientation’. The acts of ‘eating, drinking, defecation and other elimination . . . as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment’ are all performative demonstrations of the body’s relationship with the outer world (317). Ultimately, Bakhtin argues that the grotesque body represents the fundamental connection between man and the entirety of existence: The grotesque body is cosmic and universal. It stresses elements common to the entire cosmos . . . it is directly related to the sun, to the

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stars. It contains the signs of the zodiac. It reflects the cosmic hierarchy. This body can merge with various natural phenomena, with mountains, rivers, seas, islands, and continents. It can fill the entire universe. (318) The alienation inherent in Kayser’s understanding of the grotesque is, needless to say, quite banished here. While death, fear, and violence are present in Bakhtin’s grotesque – the grotesque of the pre-modern era, which we are now able to discern only dimly – they are ultimately conquered by rebirth, carnival laughter, and bonhomie. This vision of the affrmative grotesque has not gone uncriticised,9 though Bakhtin himself is careful to note that carnival/grotesque realism was not the only attitude to life to be found at the time (Dentith, 66). Nor does he deny that other forms of the grotesque – its more fearful, revolting, cynical, or alienating aspects – did not or do not exist. The question that will concern the remainder of this section is whether the spirit of grotesque realism, weakened as it may be in modernity, survives in Vonnegut’s work. If not, its grotesquerie may be no more than ‘destructive humor’, the ‘reduced form of laughter . . . deprived of positive regenerating power’ (Rabelais, 42). Certainly, the novel is comical, perhaps the most comical of all Vonnegut’s novels – Peter J. Reed, one of Vonnegut’s earliest and staunchest supporters in academia, considers Vonnegut’s description of a rattlesnake his favourite joke in his entire body of work.10 But does the laughter that it provokes embody ‘one of the essential forms of truth’ that allows the world to be ‘seen anew, no less profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint’, as Bakhtin argues was the case in the Renaissance (66)? Or is it mere raillery, ‘a light amusement or a form of salutary punishment’ (67) – in a word, satire, ‘which was not actually laughter, but rhetoric’ (51)?

Breakfast of Champions Breakfast of Champions is a novel of excrement, if not an excremental novel – though Peter S. Prescott, in a scathing contemporary review, reckoned it so, describing it as ‘manure . . . pretentious hypocritical manure’ (15). Vonnegut himself described the book as what remained of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) after ‘distillation’, disjecta membra that separated from that work ‘like a pousse-café’ (Conversations, 108). Indeed, in the characteristically blunt introduction, Vonnegut plainly confesses that the book is a self-conscious attempt to ‘clear my head of all the junk in there’ (BOC 14). It is a ‘sidewalk strewn with junk, trash’, cultural detritus that is ‘useless and ugly . . . out of proportion with one another . . . out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head’ (15), an artistic expulsion that is intended ‘to make my head as empty as it was when I was

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born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago’. While there is a sense of renewal in this desire to start afresh, it nevertheless seems clinical in tone and intent, an attempt to become once again a closed body, free of ‘the things other people have put into my head’ (14). Nevertheless, the body of the novel itself complicates this turning-inward, consistently blurring the categories of inside/outside, organic/inorganic, and natural/cultural. It is a tentative attempt to rediscover, amongst the junk and trash, something resembling a productive relationship with the material world. In true grotesque realist form, Breakfast of Champions is saturated with images of the lower bodily stratum. Depictions of excretion and eating are a preoccupation of the novel. Within five pages, Vonnegut provides a picture of ‘an asshole’, in an attempt to demonstrate how ‘childishly’ he intends to perform.11 Midland City, where much of the action of the novel centres, is described repeatedly by various characters as ‘the asshole of the universe’ (122, 155, 182). Factories produce ‘shit’ and poison marshes (84), machines run on ‘dinosaur excrement’ (118), and books are used for toilet paper (123). Breakfast of Champions is also host to the largest concentration of stories by Kilgore Trout in Vonnegut’s canon (if only by virtue of the fact that he is one of its two protagonists). As Kathryn Hume points out, ‘Trout’s plots often have an anal or excremental slant, a way of viewing experience that is rarely found with innocence’ (1982, 185), and several of his stories are concerned with the complex confluence between food, excrement, and the inorganic. Sheltering in a pornographic movie theatre on his journey to Midland City, Trout is inspired by the images of ‘a young man and a young woman [sucking] harmlessly on one another’s soft apertures’ – Bakhtinian protuberances – to imagine a new novel. An Earthling astronaut arrives on a planet ‘where all the animal and plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids. The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal’ (BOC 62). The astronaut is treated to the aliens’ own version of pornography, beginning with a close up of a mouth eating a pear, its ‘lips and tongues and teeth .  .  . glistening with saliva’. Then the main feature begins  – a family eats a vast feast, ‘an orgy’, while ‘the camera rarely strayed more than a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam’s apples’ (63). When they are so stuffed that they cannot move, they dump ‘thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can’, to the audience’s ecstatic delight. One of the central images of carnival, according to Bakhtin, is the banquet – and while it is an image that suggests joyful abundance and fecundity, it is ‘a banquet for all the world’, a popular feast in which all take part (Rabelais, 278). Trout’s family feast is grotesque in its exaggeration and its oral imagery, but it is explicitly a private affair. The family is the image of the nuclear family – mother, father, two children – and they consume (and waste) more than they could possibly need. This, according to Bakhtin, is an image common in ‘early bourgeois literature’ that expresses ‘the contentment and satiety of the selfish individual, his

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personal enjoyment’ (301). Trout’s (and Vonnegut’s) intention is, of course, clearly satirical. The food that the family eat (and indeed, that the entire society must eat) is made of coal and oil and cannot sustain them. It is, quite literally, petrified dinosaur shit, excrement deprived of its life-giving properties. The performative act of eating, even to excess, is futile, despite the wilful self-delusion of the people. The banquet scene does not symbolise plenitude but desolation. Bakhtin is unequivocal on such a scene’s ultimate manifestation of grotesque realism; ‘whether it is represented as satire that is, as purely negative, or as a positive state of well-being’, images of private overconsumption only express ‘a static way of private life, deprived of any symbolic openings and universal meaning’ (302). The reproductive aspects of the lower bodily stratum are also well represented in Breakfast of Champions. Indeed, they are meticulously detailed. Beginning with a description of Dwayne Hoover’s penis – ‘unusually large’ at ‘seven inches long and two and one-eight inches in diameter when engorged with blood’ (BOC 137) – Vonnegut exhaustively catalogues the penis size of most of the male characters in the remainder of the novel. They range from unremarkable (Vonnegut is careful to exactly note the world average)12 to unusually large – a dishwasher named Eldon Robbins’s ‘nine inches long and two inches in diameter’ (198) – to plainly ridiculous and grotesque; ‘Kurt Vonnegut’, appearing partway through the novel to make his control over its action explicit, gives a man on the end of a telephone line a penis ‘eight hundred miles long and two hundred and ten miles in diameter’, although ‘practically all of it was in the fourth dimension’ (188). His own is ‘three inches long and five inches in diameter’, which is ‘a world record’ (261). While these grotesque exaggerations are undoubtedly funny, they are clinically scientific in tone. Their deadpan delivery contributes to the humour, but there is nevertheless an implicit sense of comparison, of measuring up and the potential for private envy. Certainly, these penises are almost always hidden by the characters; it is only Vonnegut’s explicitly omniscient perspective that grants us access. And while male organs are furtively hidden or measured, female genitals are displayed and commodified. Beginning with a helpful picture of a ‘wide open beaver’ (31), vaginas are never referred to by any other name, or in any context beyond the pornographic magazines Kilgore Trout is forced to publish in or the overall ‘madness about wide open beavers’ that grips men of Vonnegut’s generation. Here, secrecy spurs interest – ‘it was the duty of the police and the courts to keep representations of such ordinary apertures from being examined and discussed’, to make sure they ‘should be the most massively defended secret under law’ (32). Interest spurs sales, and pornography shops, movie theatres, and magazines litter the novel. All, to a fault, are concerned only with ‘wide open beavers’. Hidden or displayed, measured or sold, neither set of organs are ever related to their primary function – fertility and birth. Indeed, in Breakfast of Champions fertility is almost always a curse. In one Kilgore Trout

62 Comic Material story, a man discovers he can reproduce himself indefinitely by shaving off cells from his hands into chicken soup and exposing it to ‘cosmic rays’. Soon ‘he was having several babies a day’ – the authorities respond by banning chicken soup (30). In another, an alien race resembling human automobiles lay eggs in pools of oil, even though their planet is beyond repair (34). Earth itself is described as ‘dying fast’, partly because ‘there wasn’t anything to eat anymore, and still the people went on fucking’. While people desperately attempt to eat the inedible, in this case mud or gravel, ‘more babies were arriving all the time – kicking and screaming, yelling for milk’ (22). The universal body of humanity is enlarging exponentially, grotesquely, but in a manner that does not suggest organic fecundity and regenerative continuation as much as inorganic sterilisation and final extinction.

‘It’s All Like an Ocean’ Bakhtin would have it that in the exaggeration and lower bodily emphasis of grotesque realism, mankind rediscovers and celebrates its inherent connection with the material world; the body ‘can merge with various natural phenomena, with mountains, rivers, seas, islands, and continents. It can fill the universe’ (Rabelais, 318). Breakfast of Champions is striking in its consistent equivocation of man and world, organic and inorganic. Something like Bakhtin’s immanent concept is almost always present in the action and imagery of the novel but in a manner that is largely ignored or misunderstood by most of its characters. A central image of the novel is Sugar Creek, the only significant body of water near Midland City. It has been ‘polluted by some sort of industrial waste’, producing a thin layer of plastic ‘which formed bubbles as tough as pingpong balls’ (BOC 111) that stink when burst. They are filling up a local tourist trap, ‘Sacred Miracle Cave’, an underground grotto full of cheap plastic attractions and a cross formed by two cracks in its ceiling. The plastic polymer is described as going ‘on and on, repeating itself forever to form a sheet both tough and poreless’ (210). Life is compared to this plastic, ‘a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly’, and the narrator chooses to paraphrase Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ‘it’s all like an ocean!’ with ‘it’s all like cellophane’ (211). Life, scrupulously detailed plastic, and the boundless ocean are conflated here in an ambiguous nexus of abundance. Dostoevsky’s original quotation, from The Brothers Karamazov, is a striking example of universal animism, a joyful pronunciation of communion and interdependence with the natural world.13 Vonnegut retains the universality, but the joy – the Bakhtinian ‘gay relativity’ – is missing, even if it is not explicitly rejected. On his way to the Holiday Inn, Kilgore Trout is forced to wade through the creek, and his feet are covered in the hard-drying plastic. He fantasises about the messy footprints he will leave in the lobby, hoping he is challenged so that he may explain that

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footprints are ‘man’s first printing press’ and leave ‘a bold and universal headline, which says, “I am here, I am here, I am here”’ (209–210). But the thick plastic that covers his feet leaves no mark, and so, though he is ‘still the most grotesque human being who had ever come in there’, Trout nevertheless ‘entered the lobby as an inkless printing press’ (211–212). The oldest human message – not to mention the potentially universal grotesque – have been arrested in mid-transmission. Similarly, a crash between a milk truck and a Chevrolet on the road leading into Midland City results in a passenger landing in the ‘concrete trough containing Sugar Creek’. The Chevy’s passenger was bleeding blood as he lay dead in Sugar Creek. The milk truck was bleeding milk. Milk and blood were about to be added to the composition of the stinking ping-pong balls which were being manufactured in the bowels of Sacred Miracle Cave. (185) Plastic, an inorganic material, mixes with blood (in this case, an image of death) and milk (an image of new birth) and fows down into the Earth, to an underground grotto that acts as an ersatz church. This is the very image of the Bakhtinian grotesque, a potent symbol of man’s essential oneness with all other matter – but no-one is aware that it is happening. The only question ‘many human beings were asking themselves so frantically’ is ‘“What’s blocking traffc on the westbound barrel of the Midland City stretch of the Interstate?”’ (184). Iurii Murashov succinctly sums up the communicational nature of Bakhtin’s grotesque: The grotesque body does not function within oppositions (such as organic body versus material nature, or living body versus dead object): it is the corporeal origin of the act of communication itself.  .  .  . Bakhtin persistently emphasizes [the grotesque body’s] communicational and unifying aspect, while effacing all fundamental differentiations of the type human being-world, subject-object, inside-outside. (205) These oppositions have been elided in the preceding examples, but the communicative aspect is missing. Indeed, Robert Tally argues that the greatest tragedies of Breakfast of Champions are those of miscommunication (2011, 90), and many of these miscommunications are grotesque in nature. In perhaps the most broadly comic of Kilgore Trout’s stories, an alien from a species which communicates by farts and tap-dancing comes to Earth to ‘explain how wars could be prevented and cancer could be cured’, only to be immediately brained by a startled man with a golf club (BOC, 62). Harry LeSabre, Dwayne Hoover’s oldest friend

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and sales manager, is a secret transvestite – a transgressor of gender norms – and longs to tell Dwayne. He wears a grass-skirt and leotard for Dwayne’s Hawaiian week promotion, and ‘every molecule in his body awaited Dwayne’s reaction . . . each molecule waited to learn whether its galaxy, which was called Harry LeSabre, would or would not be dissolved’ (108). Dwayne ignores him completely. Blood, molecules, plastic, milk, and farts are consistently treated as ontologically equal by the text. The vast majority of its characters, trapped in their private neuroses and unable to properly send or receive messages, cannot recognise the commonality between themselves, each other, and the wider universe. The only group who approach Bakhtin’s grotesque ideal in Breakfast of Champions are the African American characters. True to Vonnegut’s track record with non-white ethnicities, they often swerve uncomfortably close to caricature – indeed, many of their grotesque realist credentials lie in their stereotypically closer affinity to the natural world.14 The African American characters of Breakfast explicitly parallel their white counterparts. The most prominent, Wayne Hoobler, is the double of Dwayne Hoover; Hoover is a wealthy and well-respected member of the community, while Hoobler is a naïve and ingenuous recidivist. He is descended from freed slaves who, until being forced from their land by Dwayne’s ancestors, ran a small and productive farm. Wayne spends most of the novel lingering outside Dwayne’s car dealership, in vain hope of employment. Though shut out of the institutions of social respectability, Wayne is able to relate, unself-consciously, to the world around him. He establishes ‘a sort of relationship with the traffic . . . appreciating its changing moods’, talking to the cars as they drive by, and the sun as it sets (176).15 The narrator suggests that a good epitaph for this ‘black jailbird’ would be ‘he adapted to what there was to adapt to’ (177), able, in his ignorance of social mores, to transgress categories in true grotesque fashion: He missed the bread and the stew and the pitchers of milk and coffee [in prison]. He missed fucking other men in the mouth and the asshole, and being fucked in the mouth and the asshole, and jerking off – and fucking cows in the prison dairy, all events in a normal sex life on the planet, as far as he knew. (176) Neither is Wayne alone and directionless for long. He is soon brought in off the street by Eldon Robbins, one of the black kitchen staff of the nearby Holiday Inn, in perhaps the most Bakhtinian scene of fellowship and brotherhood in the entire novel: “Welcome to the real world, Brother,” he said gently and with wry lovingness to Wayne. “When was the last time you ate? This mornin’?”

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Wayne shyly acknowledged this was true. . . . Eldon arranged for Wayne to get a free steak and mashed potatoes and gravy and anything else he wanted, all prepared by other black men in the kitchen. (198) Breaking bread together, the men are entertained by a television drama depicting Queen Mary of Scotland’s execution (a literal uncrowning) and by watching the high-minded artistic debates of the white people in the adjacent cocktail lounge – ‘the animals in the zoo’, in Eldon’s estimation (198). The comparison is apt. The occupants of the cocktail lounge are, almost to a person, guarded and solitary, artists and critics in various felds engaged in a polite but vicious game of intellectual one-upmanship. They are cut off from each other and from their social backgrounds. Beatrice Keedsler, the gothic novelist, is ‘petrifed’ of returning to Midland City, her hometown, preferring a modern state of sterile rootlessness, where ‘the past has been rendered harmless’ and home is ‘just a motel’ (183). By contrast, the ambulance driver Eddie Key, another African American, quite literally becomes Bakhtin’s ‘collective ancestral body’ (Rabelais, 19): Eddie Key had begun to store in his mind the names and adventures of ancestors on both his mother’s and father’s sides of his family when he was only six years old. As he sat in the front of the disaster vehicle . . . he had the feeling that he himself was a vehicle, and that his eyes were windshields through which his progenitors could look (BOC 248) The image of literally containing one’s own ancestors is not only one of historical and familial continuity. It also elides Eddie’s human/organic body with his inanimate/inorganic vehicle, an embodied connection between the individual, the social, and the environmental. Most important, it is a connection that is noticed, felt, if only for an instant. The African American characters in Breakfast of Champions are marginalised, socially and textually – the novel is explicitly ‘a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men’ (17). Nevertheless, they represent the traces of something like the libidinal, communicative, and communal Bakhtinian carnival spirit and are at least sometimes aware of the fact.

Baggy Monsters One of those two ‘skinny, fairly old white men’ is, of course, Kilgore Trout. The most physically grotesque character in the novel, a ‘baggy monster’, to use Michael Holquist’s term for Bakhtin himself (1981, XIII), Trout is nevertheless an ambiguous figure, a liminal character who accrues and sheds roles and symbols as he slouches his way across America. Snaggle-toothed, with tangled white hair and with legs like ‘pale white broomsticks  .  .  .

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embossed fantastically with varicose veins’ (BOC 39), wildly prolific but published exclusively in pornographic magazines, Trout is self-consciously grotesque, determined ‘to arrive in Midland City the dirtiest of all old men’ (59). He is bitterly contemptuous of sociality, to the point of being unable to tell the difference between people unless they, too, are ‘strikingly unusual’, yet his fellow freaks, including a ‘one-armed albino’ named Alfy Bearse and a ‘red-haired Cockney midget’ named Durling Heath, find his overtures of friendship distasteful and irritating (101–2). Possessed of ‘a life not worth living, but an iron will to live’ (72), at best ambivalent about his own life and his fellow humans, he is nevertheless surprisingly sympathetic towards animals. On receiving his invitation to the Midland City Arts Festival, Trout retrieves his baggy, ancient, and ill-fitting tuxedo, covered in ‘a greenish patina of mold’ and ‘growths that resembled patches of fine rabbit fur’ (41) but is loath to clean them off, declaring that ‘“Fungi have as much right to life as I do. They know what they want . . . Damned if I do anymore”’ (42). His late-life pessimism is ‘rooted’ in the grotesque remains, the ‘bittersweet mulch’, of the beloved Bermuda Erns of his childhood – now extinct thanks to the accidental introduction of athlete’s foot to their environment (38–9). His feet planted in the Erns’ fecund remains, clothed in rot, misshapen, old and decrepit but nevertheless possessed of an indomitable ability to persevere, Trout is very nearly a grotesque symbol of the ‘positive and negative poles of becoming (death-birth)’ (Rabelais 147). Yet the element of metamorphosis, the element of regeneration or rebirth, has been suspended in Trout. He is instead a figure of life extended beyond tolerance, without renewal, quite against his will. On being told by his only fan, Eliot Rosewater, that he will make him famous, Trout can only snarl, ‘“Keep the hell out of my body bag”’ (BOC 39). As Lawrence Broer notes, he is in a state of ‘sterile ambivalence, or spiritual stalemate, out of which either irresolution or nihilism [has] emerged as the dominant effect’ (1994, 107), a living death that falls short of the death/birth dichotomy of the Bakhtinian grotesque. Despite his constant protestations to the contrary, Trout is repeatedly cast in the role of saviour. Dwayne Hoover, on the edge of madness and despair, seeks ‘new truths’ that might ‘enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living’ (BOC 181) – the essence of the Bakhtinian grotesque. Reading one of Trout’s stories instead drives him to insanity and shocking violence. This is grotesque but in a purely negative sense. Rosewater, similarly, is quite convinced that Trout has the potential to provide universal renewal. Indeed, he believes Trout to be a messianic figure, the ‘greatest living American novelist’ (40) who should be ‘President of the United States’ (37), a man who will emerge from the wilderness and rejuvenate mankind. Improbably, this is exactly what happens. After the events of the novel ‘Kilgore Trout became a pioneer in the field of mental health’, a Nobel Prize winner ‘[who] advanced his theories disguised as science fiction’ and whose central discovery is that ‘“Ideas or the lack of

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them can cause disease”’ (24). But these revelations are outside the scope of the action of the novel. They are set in the unspecified future, and though they do indeed bring salvation of a sort, they are bloodless when considered from the grotesque perspective – concerned more with theory than practice, intellectualism rather than material interaction. Indeed, Trout specifically denies his role as representative of bodily, carnivalesque regeneration. When he finally arrives at the Midland Holiday Inn, he is greeted rapturously by Milo, the receptionist: ‘It’s time. Oh God, Mr Trout, we were starving for so long, without even knowing what we were hungering for . . . teach us to sing and dance and laugh and cry.’. . . “Open your eyes!” said Trout bitterly. “Do I look like a dancer, a singer, a man of joy? . . . Open your eyes! Would a man nourished by beauty look like this? You have nothing but desolation and desperation here, you say? I bring you more of the same!” (215–6) To sing, dance, laugh, or cry, all are aspects of the Bakhtinian carnival that are denied by Trout, despite his grotesquerie and, indeed, that of the novel itself. The regenerative aspect of the grotesque – the ‘gay relativity’ and universality of man in relation to his world – is not completely absent in Breakfast of Champions, but it is diffuse and misunderstood. It is absent in the countless lower bodily images of the novel, where food and excrement are equally stripped of their life-giving aspect, and fertility is considered a curse. It fnds limited expression in the communal, transgressive African Americans, though it ultimately overturns nothing and signals no time of misrule. The molecule-level nexus between human beings and their world is frequently commented upon at a textual level but passes unremarked and unnoticed by its characters. The elements of full-blooded, joyful grotesque realism are more or less all present, but they are suspended in the text – the spark that might ignite carnival ultimately does not materialise. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of Kilgore Trout, the most obviously grotesque character in the novel. Upon fnally meeting his creator ‘Kurt Vonnegut’ in the closing moments of the novel, he is ‘set free’, released from the bonds of narrative. As ‘Kurt Vonnegut’ disappears from Breakfast of Champions, he distantly hears Trout’s desperate last words: Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father’s voice: ‘Make me young, make me young, make me young!’ (270) The novel then ends with a solitary ‘etc.’. Trout, his material world, and all his fellow grotesques are left permanently suspended, denied the

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rebirth they are long overdue. If the regenerative, affrmative grotesque is ever to fower from the excremental novel, it will have to do so outside the body of its text.

Notes 1. In his 1981 essay collection, Palm Sunday, Vonnegut grades his works to date ‘from A to D . . . comparing myself with myself’ – Breakfast of Champions is awarded a C. For reference, of the other works examined here that were written before 1981, The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night are awarded an A, Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five an A-plus (286). 2. The term ‘torture-porn’, as Jason Middleton points out, ‘is itself contentious, with different artists and critics having articulated a variety of often opposing positions on the term’s meaning and its usefulness in describing and categorizing this recent cycle of horror cinema’ (2). While the violent set-pieces they depict (referred to as ‘numbers’) are undoubtedly extreme by contemporary standards, it is a matter of debate whether their grotesque scenarios represent something more than mere titillation or are instead, ultimately, as horror auteur George Romero believes, ‘lacking in all metaphor’ (Romero). 3. Sam Jordison, in a recent review of Poe’s works, notes that they ultimately leave him ‘cold .  .  . And not cold in a chills-up-the-spine sense: just a bit bored’, and that Poe’s style is, to the modern reader, irritatingly cliché – ‘the symbolism quickly becomes overbearing: the pathetic fallacy of the awful weather, the gothic archways, the wild guitar playing, the gloom, the doom, the adjectives pertaining to gloom and doom, the decayed trees. Too much!’ (Jordison). 4. John Ruskin, in his seminal treatise The Stones of Venice (1851–1853), makes a similar argument about the historically contingent nature of the sense of the grotesque. While he finds that ‘there is jest – perpetual, careless; and not unfrequently obscene – in the most noble [grotesque] work of the Gothic periods’, the spirit of the grotesque is degraded in direct relation to the decline of Venice: from pride to infidelity, and from infidelity to the unscrupulous pursuit of pleasure . . . the time, the resources, and the thoughts of the nation were exclusively occupied in the invention of such fantastic and costly pleasures as might best amuse their apathy, lull their remorse, or disguise their ruin. (236–7) The parallels with Breakfast of Champions here are clear; more broadly, the grotesque and its effects – whether ennobling or degrading – are produced and received within their contemporary cultural sphere. As Isobel Armstrong notes, Ruskin’s theory of the grotesque is a theory of representation based on a social and not a psychological analysis, seeing psychological experience as determined by cultural conditions . . . it is uncompromising in its understanding that the cultural production of a whole society and its consciousness will be formed by the nature of its dominant form of work. (240) 5. A notable exception is Michael J. Meyer, who, while acknowledging the ‘emphasis on the exceptional, the set apart or the aberrant’ in grotesque

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literatures, argues that our fascination ultimately lies with our recognising ourselves in its black mirror, forcing us to readily acknowledge the powerful ability it has to appear tangible and real and to force us to look deep within our buried psyches . . . ultimately our attraction to the grotesque is not based on its being an other-worldly hell but on its harrowing expression of our own human perception of ourselves as simultaneous victims and victimizers. (II) 6. Mary Russo approaches these possibilities from a feminist perspective in The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (1994) arguing that ‘in the history of carnival and its theory, the category of the female body as grotesque (in, for instance, pregnancy and aging) . . . might be used affirmatively to destabilise the idealizations of female beauty, or to realign the mechanisms of desire’ (65). Nevertheless, the ‘unruly woman’ of carnival is, according to Russo, an ambivalent figure – though she can transgress gender roles when the writer or artist ‘intends to baffle, intimidate, and shock the viewer or reader and to stimulate his own thought process’ (219), she may also reinforce the status quo precisely by the limitation of her transgressions to sanctioned carnival (217). 7. Kenneth Burke calls the grotesque ‘the cult of incongruity’, but unlike other theorists of the incongruous (such as Arthur Koestler) – and indeed theorists of the grotesque like Bakhtin – he stipulates that the incongruity must not generate laughter: The grotesque is the cult of incongruity without the laughter. The grotesque is not funny unless you are out of sympathy with it (whereby it serves as an unintentional burlesque). Insofar as you are in sympathy with it, it is deadly earnest. (58) 8. Simon Dentith notes that Bakhtin has performed several roles in the West since his work began to be disseminated in the late 1960s – he was ‘the celebrator of carnival, of the force that subverts and upturns everything official, authoritarian and one-sidedly serious’ in the France of 1968, ‘the supreme theorist of the novel’ as his work on the novel became known, a critic of the prevalent structuralism and formalism of the 1970s and 80s (IX). Julio Peiró Sempere similarly notes that since his introduction in America, the ideas of this Russian philosopher suffered multiple appropriations by different and usually conflicting trends. Bakhtinian concepts such as ‘dialogue’, ‘carnival’, ‘polyphony’, ‘unfinalizability,’ or ‘open-endedness’ were employed in diverse ways. From Marxist and Feminist criticism to Multiculturalism, the figure of Mikhail Bakhtin was treated as an ideologist, a sociologist, a literary theorist, a thinker, and so forth. (6) Sempere himself positions Bakhtin as a forerunner of the Yale school of deconstructive criticism. Terry Eagleton, meanwhile, has another explanation for Bakhtin’s popularity in academia, waggishly noting that the concept of carnival, looked at in another light, may be little more than the intellectual’s guilty due to the populace, the soul’s blood money to the body; what is truly unseemly, indecent even, is the apparent

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9. Caryl Emerson, noted early Bakhtinian critic, sums up her principle objections to Bakhtin’s project as his astonishing logos-centrism (that is, his presumption that if you can’t talk about an experience, you didn’t have it), his often naive personification of genres, his reluctance to analyze artistic wholes, his narrow and unsympathetic definition of the lyric, his idealization of carnival, and the general imprecision of his terms. (503–4) She is particularly scathing of his purely affirmative position on the carnivalesque and grotesque: To be grotesque is to be forever available for fundamental change. But openness and laughter – and this is the important point – do not necessarily affirm any new or significant value. Sometimes the most they can document is the potential for survival, and sometimes they signify the purest desperation. Yet Baxtin [sic] refuses to admit nihilism, absurdity, or pain into his Rabelaisian poetics of the body. Such bodies always embody positive and concrete meaning. (515) Ultimately, she is sceptical of the potential for carnival to seriously challenge the mechanisms that it parodies (52) – a fairly common objection to Bakhtin’s utopian vision. The ‘safety valve’ hypothesis of carnival was first proposed by Anatoly Lunacharsky, who argued that ‘carnival is a safety valve for passions that might otherwise erupt in evolution: the lower orders would let off steam in a harmless, temporary event’ (Docker, 171). David Danow also argues that the ‘new outlook on the world’ of carnival will likely bring its share of bad along with the good. That is, no matter how the argument gets loaded (‘consecrate’, ‘liberate’ vs. ‘cliche’, ‘humdrum’), there is still the potential for something to go awry, or askew, in the common slippage from theory to practice. So the carnival attitude promises joyous renewal but may well deliver something less desirable as well. (34) 10.

One of Kurt Vonnegut’s innocently simple drawings in Breakfast of Champions is of a rattlesnake. ‘The Creator of the Universe put a rattle on its tail. The Creator had also given it front teeth which were hypodermic syringes filled with deadly poison. Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe’. That has always been one of my favorite Vonnegut written jokes. You can almost hear the timing. (Reed, 2012, 21)

11. Vonnegut would come to refer to the infamous asterisk as his own asshole and in later life would often sign letters with the doodle. The symbolism of using one’s own asshole as a signature is beyond the current scope of this work. 12. ‘Five and seven-eighths inches long, and one and one-half inches in diameter when engorged with blood’ (137)

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13. The full quotation is as follows: My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side – a little happier, anyway – and children and all animals, if you were nobler than you are now. It’s all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love, in a sort of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to men. (384–5) 14. Robert Tally points out that Vonnegut has a bad track record when it comes to non-American (and to a lesser extent non-White) stereotypes, noting that his ‘nostalgia for a time in which the familial and communitarian bonds were much stronger . . . is often troublingly linked to less than salutary considerations of racial and ethnic identity’. Though Vonnegut is generally unstinting in his opposition to the racism of American society, African Americans ‘appear largely as almost minstrel show stereotypes’. Ultimately, Tally believes that ‘Vonnegut’s ambiguous position with respect to race, ethnicity and national origins deserves more nuanced and serious study’ (170n19). 15. Wayne Hoobler’s relationship with the material world resembles the ‘black mysticism’ of Sherwood Anderson, another writer of the grotesque. James Goodwin points out that in Anderson’s Dark Laughter (1925), the aspiring writer Bruce Dudley forms an ideal of a physical and elemental poetic . . . through his experiences of travel by riverboat on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, where he absorbs the work chants and blues hollers of black workers on the boats and along the waterways. To his mind, these workmen are . . . possessed of an ‘unconscious love of inanimate things lost to whites – skies, the river, a moving boat – black mysticism – never expressed except in song or in the movements of bodies.’ (73)

Section Two

Environment and Evolution

3

Mother Night A Nation of Two Andrew John Hicks

It is accurate to say that Mother Night (1962) is the closest Vonnegut ever came to a traditionally subject-centred novel in his early career – a work of psychological realism that, oblique bursts of absurdism aside, represents a serious and essentially ingenuous engagement with the inner workings of its protagonist, Howard W. Campbell Jr. Vonnegut’s third novel stands as something of an anomaly in his first decade of publication. The techno-futurist critique of Player Piano (1952) and the solar system-spanning burlesque philosophy of The Sirens of Titan (1959) precede it, and Vonnegut would immediately return to more familiar ground with the science fiction satire of Cat’s Cradle (1963). By contrast, Mother Night is historically situated. It eschews the third person omniscient narrator of the first two novels, and its adoption of the first person perspective and memoir form seems to have been an explicit attempt to appear at least superficially ‘realistic’.1 As Edward Jamosky and Jerome Klinkowitz point out, the first edition of Mother Night, printed by the pulp publisher Fawcett, was ‘presented not as fiction but as fact, “An American traitor’s astonishing confession – mournfully macabre, diabolically funny – written with unnatural candor in a foreign death cell,” according to the volume’s cover’ (216). In this edition, Vonnegut presents himself solely as the editor (rather than author) of Campbell’s text; Jamosky and Klinkowitz speculate that this ploy was intended to appeal to the contemporary taste for wartime memoirs and particularly to the ongoing public interest in the recent trial of Adolf Eichmann (216). If the work were to appear ‘authentic’ to the average reader, then, dystopic technology, flying saucers, and high concept preoccupations would have to be thrown out and ruminative, historically (semi-)plausible, self-centred psychologising would have to be brought in. Who could resist the possibility of a glimpse into the real, unmediated thoughts (written, after all, ‘with unnatural candor’) of a genuine historical monster?2 If the patent absurdities of Nazis playing ping-pong (MN 36) or the ‘Black Fuehrer of Harlem’ (50) were not enough to tip off the reader, the second edition of Mother Night makes clear that Howard W. Campbell Jr. is, of course, a fictional character and Vonnegut the author. Nevertheless,

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the general propensity to read Mother Night first and foremost as either a character study, an existential study of the concept of ‘character’ itself, or as a refraction of Vonnegut’s own inner psychology remains intact. So, one may diagnose in Campbell a ‘psychological split induced by conflicts of national loyalty and personal indifference to politics and responsibility’ which ‘add up to a schizoid imbalance’ (Hume, 1982, 179) or read Mother Night as an exploration of ‘the contemporary problems of guilt and identity’ that nevertheless with ‘disquieting inconclusiveness, blandly [suggests] the probable irrelevance of any answer we might conjugate to these important questions’ (Schulz, 21). Lawrence Broer describes Mother Night as a daring and painful venture into the inner ‘heart of darkness . . . the capacity for cruelty and moral blindness within the soul of man and woman’, suggestive of a ‘common identity and [a] common dilemma’ between the author and his creation (1994, 46). Peter J. Reed, similarly, notes that despite its awareness of meaninglessness and death, ‘page after page of the novel shows Vonnegut as a man who feels affection, hurt, indignation, compassion, injustice, and sorrow’ (1972, 118). I hasten to add that these are not in any way illegitimate or inconsequential readings. Further, I cannot help but recognise that the mediating figure of Campbell, and wider questions of selfhood and subjectivity, are inescapable elements of the novel. Nevertheless, I wish to highlight the external traces, both historical and diegetic, that inform and influence Vonnegut’s novel and Campbell’s memoir respectively and to do so from an angle that approaches the rudiments of their composition.

The (Eco-)Critical Topography My reading of Mother Night will focus on the intersection of art, nationalism, and ‘authenticity’ as presented in the novel and will be at least partly informed by the historical reality of Nazi ideology – in particular, the emphasis on nature, purity, and anti-rationalism prevalent in the Third Reich in the years leading up to the Second World War. I term this reading ‘ecocritical’, in the broader sense that Cheryll Glotfelty posits in her introduction to the seminal Ecocriticism Reader (1996): Literary theory, in general, examines the relations between writers, texts, and the world. In most literary theory ‘the world’ is synonymous with society – the social sphere. Ecocriticism expands the notion of ‘the world’ to include the entire ecosphere. If we agree with Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology, ‘Everything is connected to everything else,’ we must conclude that literature does not float above the material world in some aesthetic ether, but, rather, plays a part in an immensely complex global system, in which energy, matter, and ideas interact. (XIX)3

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To be sure, Mother Night is far from ‘nature writing’ as defned by Lawrence Buell – a ‘literary nonfction that offers scientifc scrutiny of the world . . . or refects upon the political and philosophical implications of the relationships among human beings and the larger planet’ (144). It is not ‘eco-’ or ‘bio-’centric.4 It is not a ‘green’ text. Nevertheless, as Robert Kern points out, ‘ecocriticism becomes most interesting and useful . . . when it aims to recover the environmental character or orientation of works whose conscious or foregrounded interests lie elsewhere’ (11). Ideas about nationalism, nature, and even pollution serve aesthetic and metaphorical purposes in Mother Night, and they are often confated, just as they were in 1930s Germany. All else aside, the etymological roots of the word ecology serve to stand for the central concerns of my reading. The Greek oikos is a word that could broadly be translated as ‘home’, combining the family and the ‘“household” in the comprehensive sense of residence and grounds’ (Buell 140); logos, meanwhile, signifes, amongst other things, a form of described or delineated order. Blood, soil, order, and exclusivity are my fundamental points of contention. The argument presented here is not only rooted in ecocriticism, however; the work of Vonnegut scholars Leonard Mustazza and Robert T. Tally Jr. also provides the ground on which I will build my argument. Mustazza’s Forever Pursuing Genesis (1990) is a penetrating and comprehensive account of how ‘the biblical story of the Fall’ is ‘an informing metaphor in [Vonnegut’s] fictions and, frequently enough, in his nonfictional writings as well’ (17). Mustazza identifies in Mother Night the dual motifs of the pre-Fall Eden and the post-Flood Mount Ararat in the ‘contrived universe’ of Campbell’s imaginative life (67). The unspoilt garden and the upstanding mountain are, according to Mustazza, not only spatial but temporal images, redolent of lost innocence and momentary purity respectively (68, 65) – values, as we shall see, that are central to Campbell’s Weltanschauung. I would only add that the garden is sharply bounded, and the mountain’s significance is predicated on global ethnic cleansing. What is excluded is at least as important as what is enclosed. From Mustazza, then, I borrow the concept of natural imagery specifically mediated by human preoccupations – desires embodied in myth – as they are presented in Vonnegut’s work. From Tally, meanwhile, I borrow and build upon questions of authenticity in Mother Night. In the chapter ‘Anxiety and the Jargon of Authenticity’ in his monograph Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel (2011), Tally tackles existentialism’s response to the difficulties and contradictions of identity. With reference to Heidegger and Sartre, Tally traces existentialism’s emphasis on authenticity, noting that in this approach, by ‘acting authentically, I affirm myself, taking ownership of the act and incorporating that act into my very being’. This approach, crucially, relies on the ‘angst-ridden freedom’ (my italics) that informs existentialist thought (41). Yet, quoting Adorno, Tally notes that this approach easily leads to a ‘logic of exclusion’, fetishising ‘a largely imaginary “real”

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or authentic experience’ that is often connected to themes of origin and homeland. This ‘jargon of authenticity’ carries the ‘discernible stench of fascism’ (42). Tally leaves this line of argument to pursue psychological existentialist questions and issues of unreliable narration, as exemplified in Campbell the character/narrator. I would like to pick up the baton at this point, however, and push Tally’s argument, with continuing reference to Adorno, further. I will consider the notion of ‘authenticity’ in its historically situated fascist context, its mediated but consistent link with nationalism and naturalism, and the ideological consequences of its strict adherence to delineation and exclusionism. These historical antecedents are generally only indirectly represented in the historiographical elements of Mother Night. It is a novel largely about Nazis and Nazism, but if it is not explicitly about Blut und Boden or das Volk, it is nevertheless the case that these ideas were inseparable from the core of Nazi ideology. I will then be in a position to consider questions about the relationship between this ideology and literary aesthetics and composition, as embodied in the literary figure of the artist/propagandist Campbell. Though Campbell pours scorn upon ethnic nationalism, he is not nearly as independent of these ideas as he might wish. The intersection of natural imagery, nationalist thought, and notions of purity and authenticity permeate Campbell’s art and life in Mother Night. By demonstrating the ultimate incoherence of these values, via Campbell’s experiences, Vonnegut is able to implicitly forward a critical appraisal of the notion that one can ever remain apolitical or ahistorical – in a word, to remain undetermined by current events.

Blood and Soil – Purity and Pollution in the Nation of Germany The term ‘Nazi Ecology’ seems, at first glance, a bizarre or even perverse juxtaposition. In modern colloquial terms, the word ‘ecology’ is nearly synonymous with ‘environmentalism’, and environmentalism is the ethical position du jour.5 What possible connection could be drawn between a socially and environmentally conscious activist movement, illustrated by Greg Garrard in the figure of the benign, ‘sturdy, sandal-wearing’ backpacker/political critic (2014, 1), and a regime that still stands as the icon of human evil, infamous for mechanised warfare and industrial genocide? The answer is unsurprisingly complex. As Peter Staudenmaier notes, the subject of conservationism in Nazi Germany is understudied by historians and critics, and certainly lacks traction in the popular imagination (14). It is therefore not surprising that we are surprised by the fact that Nazi ideas about nature, conservationism, and environmentalism often display striking (and perhaps disturbing) similarities with modern ‘Green’ discourses. As both Staudenmaier and Frank Uekoetter point out, ‘the lion’s share of conservationist publications between 1933 and 1945 could be printed again today without raising eyebrows’ (Uekoetter, 3).6

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The term ‘ecology’ itself was coined in 1867 by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, a man who ‘believed in Nordic racial superiority, strenuously opposed race mixing and enthusiastically supported racial eugenics’ (Staudenmaier, 18) and who ‘contributed to that special variety of German thought which served as the seed bed for National Socialism’ (Gasman XVII).7 Michael E. Zimmerman succinctly summarises the overall relationship between ideology and praxis during the period and its lingering effects on environmental discourse: In important respects, of course, Nazi green ideology was a nostalgic appeal to widespread yearning for allegedly simpler times before Bismark’s [sic] push for German industrialization. Praise for rural life and celebration of the countryside helped to bring Hitler to power, while concealing his aim of total industrial mobilization and militarization. Nevertheless, National Socialism’s positive attitude toward nature was not merely an instance of cynical political propaganda, because many Nazis did in fact make a connection between healthy races and healthy land. (398) The breadth and heterogeneity of Nazi green ideology, as well as the particulars of its practical implementation, relationship with preceding conservationist groups, and consequences for succeeding green discourses, are necessarily beyond the scope of this chapter.8 Instead, I will focus specifcally on the ecological/ideological element most peculiar to German Fascism: the ‘connection between healthy races and healthy land’, infamously summarised as ‘Blut und Boden’ (‘blood and soil’) by Richard Walther Darré, future Nazi Reichsminister, in 1930.9 The ideology of blood and soil broadly encompassed two interrelated (though often contradictory) beliefs. A connection was drawn historically in isolated human bloodlines and spatially/ontologically in terms of a deep, exclusive, and ‘mystical’ (Closmann, 26) bond between a pure, clean, and ‘natural’ environment and a similarly pure, idealised ethnicity. As Brüggemeier, Cioc, and Zeller note, this ‘Volkisch’ belief in the connection between members of an ethnic group and between that group and its homeland was deeply embedded in German culture by the 1930s, as ‘the concept of the Volk colored all aspects of German political, social, and intellectual life after World War I’ (5). The ties between blood and soil were binding specifically by their exclusive nature; ‘Folk, homeland, and nature were intertwined, each defining the other, and it was only by remaining bundled together that they could survive the universalizing onslaught of the industrial world’ (6). Landscape was considered to bear the imprint of culture, so that ‘Germany’s mountains, meadows, and rivers bore the peculiar imprint of German history, German culture, and German tastes’ (5). Correspondingly, foreign landscapes were often

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considered to be polluted by inferior races. A typical (though particularly invective) example is provided by the landscaper Heinrich WiepkingJürgensmann in his book Landschatsfibel (The Landscape Primer, 1942): The landscape is always a form, an expression, and a characteristic of the people [Volk] living within it. It can be the gentle countenance of its spirit and soul, just as it can be the grimace of its soullessness [Ungeist] and of human and spiritual depravity. In any case, it is the infallible, distinctive mark of what a people feels, thinks, creates and does. . . . The German landscape – like the German people – differs in every way from those of the Poles and the Russians. The murders and atrocities of the Eastern peoples are engraved, in a razor-sharp manner, in the grimaces of their native landscapes. (qtd. In Wolschke-Bulmahn, 251) This passage is typical of the absolutely exclusive character of blood and soil ideology. The German landscape perfectly refects the German people; the German people are different in every way from other ‘ethnic’ groups; the German people are different because they are inherently superior; therefore, any admixture, any transgression between national, topographical, or ethnic boundaries, will always constitute an adulteration or impurity. As Claudia Koonz notes in her excellent monograph The Nazi Conscience (2003), these sentiments were not necessarily couched in the belligerent tones of nationalist chauvinism. The values of homogeneity, purity, and authenticity lent themselves easily to the street-level politics of the ‘old fghters’ of the SA, but they were also easily adapted to a more genteel, bourgeois sensibility. As Koonz notes, ‘Hitler deployed the politics of virtue to detach his persona from party radicals and reach out directly to the Volk’ (45) and appealed, like so many earlier German racial theorists, ‘not so much to malevolence as to ideas of health, hygiene, and progress’ (3). Many leading academics of the period, including (most infamously) Martin Heidegger but also fgures such as Carl Schmitt and Gerhard Kittel, similarly lent the National Socialist movement a veneer of intellectual credibility (48). For Heidegger in particular, Hitler was ‘authenticity personifed’, and his movement a strike against the ‘homelessness of blind relativism’; as Koonz records, in his inaugural address as rector of Freiburg University, Heidegger’s speech was punctuated by the word ‘essence’, ‘as in “the essence of truth,” the “primordial essence of science,” a “will to essence,” and a “kind of knowing that has forgotten its own essence”’ (52). Once more, ideas of homeliness and belonging are linked with absolute conviction, essentialism, and a living, elemental exclusivity. Ambivalence, ambiguity, and openness are ‘blind’ and ‘homeless’, the opposite of the ‘manly self-reliance’ that Heidegger saw in the new regime that had ‘turned back to its roots’ (55). It is precisely this insistence on the supposed possibility of singular, heartfelt,

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intentionally simplistic certainty that Adorno utterly denounces in The Jargon of Authenticity: One needs only to be a believer – no matter what he believes in. Such irrationality has the same function as putty. The jargon of authenticity inherits it, in the childish manner of Latin primers which praise the love of the fatherland in itself – which praise the viri patriae amantes, even when the fatherland in question covers up the most atrocious deeds. Sonnemann has described this phenomenon as not being able to get rid of a benevolent attitude which at all costs defends order, even an order in which all these things are not in order. (21–22) An insistence on order and integrity at all costs, bound up in notions of nationalism and primordial ethnicity, infected with a combination of environmental conservationism and ersatz naturalism that are by turns couched in pseudo-scientifc or mythic terms, these are the conditions inherent in blood and soil authenticity. In a society like Third Reich Germany, which so closely elided the national identity with that of each individual citizen, the requirement for the conditions of authenticity apply equally and in the same manner to state and to Volk. As Trent Schroyer shrewdly notes, in contemporary German existentialism, the movement ‘to a radical inwardness and its expressions of authenticity, freedom, etc., is an attempt to actualize these ideals outside of the objective social context: to fulfl heroic cultural models independent of the society’ (XV). As such, ‘For Adorno, Heidegger’s existentialism is a new Platonism which implies that authenticity comes in the complete disposal of the person over himself – as if there were no determination emerging from the objectivity of history’ (XVII).

A Contextual Note – Vonnegut and Germany I must again reiterate here that Campbell’s art and life are ultimately entirely fictional, though in their own way emergent from the objectivity of history.10 While I believe there is an undeniable intersection of natural imagery, nationalist thought, and notions of purity and authenticity in Mother Night and further, that this intersection is largely centred around the figure of Howard W. Campbell, a decidedly less fictional (though more difficult to discern) presence nevertheless stands behind the text itself. Barring the possible commercial reasons previously detailed, quite why Vonnegut would choose Nazis and Nazism as the subject of his third novel is somewhat obscure. The extent of Vonnegut’s knowledge and understanding of both contemporary Nazi and 19th-century German culture, politics, and thought remains unclear. We simply do not know, at this stage, whether Vonnegut knew of the tenets of Volkisch

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ideology. Consequently, the degree to which Mother Night might represent a riposte, direct or indirect, to the elements of Nazi ideology identified previously is similarly difficult to discern. Nevertheless, his relationship with his German ancestry and cultural heritage is complex and may allow for some (necessarily) speculative hypotheses. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was a fourth-generation German-American, but unlike his father, who received his college education in Germany and was immersed in German culture and language (Palm Sunday, 57), the younger Vonnegut claimed to have ‘had no ethnic awareness whatsoever’ as a youth (Shields, 2011, 25), which often left him feeling isolated and resentful (24). As an adult, Vonnegut would similarly assert that though he was ‘a pure bred Kraut’, he never considered himself German ‘in sympathy or outlook’ (417). Nevertheless, a certain strand of German thought – an ‘ancestral religion’, as Vonnegut came to term it (PS, 187) – would remain endemic in Vonnegut familial history. Clemens Vonnegut, Kurt’s great-grandfather, was a ‘forty-eighter’ and Freethinker who immigrated to Indianapolis from Germany in 1850.11 The forty-eighters were political refugees of the failed March Revolution of 1848; they were, as a rule, highly intellectual and tended to range politically between liberal and radical and religiously between agnostic and atheistic.12 Clemens was a founding member of the Freethinker Society of Indianapolis and the Indianapolis Turngemeinde (Shields 420); as an adult, Kurt would come to greatly appreciate (and appropriate) Clemens’s materialist humanism and his pamphlet A Proposed Guide for Instruction in Morals from the Standpoint of a Freethinker (1900) in particular (PS, 185). It may be speculated that Freethinking, as a coherent movement that fermented in the political upheavals of 1840s Germany and developed branches in both domestic and immigrant German communities, represented a dichotomous position to the ethnocentrism, isolationism, and essentialism that were contemporaneously coming to define late 19th-century German culture.13 This cultural background may have subsequently influenced Vonnegut’s position in Mother Night, though it is just as possible that his outlook and approaches with regard to Nazi Germany were ultimately solely shaped by his wartime experiences.14 Still, Vonnegut seemed willing and able to discern heterogeneous aspects of German culture, which may be suggestive of a deeper understanding of varying ideological positions. Though again not an explicit denouncement of the specific values in question in this essay, Vonnegut would later note that while ‘everything there is to admire in German culture’ came from ‘several Germanies’, nevertheless ‘everything that I loathe about it came from one’ (Letters, XV). It is certainly the case that the Germany he loathed was Nazi Germany, and I believe it can be reasonably ventured that one of the Germanies he admired and identified with was that of his liberal, atheistic, materialist, and assimilationist forebears.

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Mother Night – Purity and Pollution in the Nation of Two When the young Howard W. Campbell Jr is approached by an American agent named Frank Wirtanen in 1938 Germany to act as a double agent for the Allies in the coming war, he is already a ‘fairly successful playwright’. His plays include The Goblet, The Snow Rose, and Seventy Times Seven, all, in Campbell’s estimation, ‘medieval romances, about as political as chocolate éclairs’ (Mother Night, 23).15 He considers it a ‘peaceful trade’, utterly unconnected to the surrounding political turmoil, and accordingly, considers himself as similarly independent. In the first of several similar instances in the novel, Campbell identifies the concrete realities of his life with the idealised position of the artist: When I go home, it will be to have a fine meal with my beautiful wife, to listen to music, to make love to my wife, and to sleep like a log. I’m not a soldier, not a political man. I’m an artist. If war comes, I won’t do anything to help it along. If war comes, it’ll find me still working my peaceful trade. (26) Wirtanen is wiser than Campbell on this point. He knows that such homeliness will not withstand the oncoming storm and tells Campbell so, but, more subtly, Wirtanen also recognises that Campbell’s art is already fatally compromised by values that will inform the ideological terms of the war. Wirtanen recognises the elements in Campbell’s work that will simultaneously render him manipulable as an agent and plausible as the propagandist he wishes him to become: ‘I think there’s a chance I’ve made it attractive to you,’ he said. ‘I saw the play you’ve got running now, and I’ve read the one you’re going to open.’ ‘Oh?’ I said. ‘And what did you learn from those?’ He smiled. ‘That you admire pure hearts and heroes,’ he said. ‘That you love good and hate evil,’ he said, ‘and that you believe in romance.’ (27) Campbell’s art betrays his values, and Wirtanen is able to repeatedly play upon them, promising that he can make Campbell an ‘authentic hero . . . a hundred times braver than any ordinary man’ (26, my italics). Though he does not seem to realise it, Campbell’s romantic, nostalgic, nationalistically infected chivalric plays, redolent with innocence, purity, and heroism, are anything but apolitical. They are not even particularly unique or original, diegetically or metatextually – for Vonnegut’s young, hackneyed

84 Environment and Evolution romantic bears an eerie resemblance to real-world counterparts. Peter Staudenmaier notes that in the post-World War I era, the ‘chief vehicle’ for carrying an ‘ideological constellation’ of ‘ethnocentric fanaticism, regressive rejection of modernity and genuine environmental concern’ was the youth movement commonly known as the Wandervögel (20). Subsumed into the Hitler Youth in 1933, this movement consisted of a ‘hodge-podge of countercultural elements, blending neo-Romanticism, Eastern philosophies, nature mysticism, hostility to reason, and a strong communal impulse in a confused but no less ardent search for authentic, non-alienated social relations’ (21). Avowedly apolitical, these young idealists chose romanticism as their form of protest against society, but this stance lent itself just as readily to the ‘unpolitical’ zealotry of fascism as it did to emancipatory liberalism. As Staudenmaier summarises, ‘eschewing societal transformation in favor of personal change, an ostensibly apolitical disaffection can, in times of crisis, yield barbaric results’ (22). And just as it was with the historical Wandervögel, so it is with Campbell. His heroic rhetoric is equally attractive to Wirtanen and to Joseph Goebbels. He agrees, eventually, to Wirtanen’s terms and becomes ‘a writer and broadcaster of Nazi propaganda to the English-speaking world . . . the leading expert on American problems in the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda’ (MN 18). Taking the role of double agent as ‘an opportunity for some pretty grand acting .  .  . [to] fool everyone with my brilliant interpretation of a Nazi, inside and out’, Campbell spends the war ‘strut[ting] like Hitler’s right-hand man’ and all the while, tells himself that ‘nobody saw the honest me I hid so deep inside’ (27). Campbell refers to his inner self repeatedly throughout Mother Night. Another indicative example is recounted in his dedication, where he refers to ‘a very good me, the real me, a me made in heaven, [which] is hidden deep inside’ (XI). As Adorno notes, with regard to the historical tendencies of contemporary German existentialism, ‘the hardened inwardness of today idolizes its own purity, which has supposedly been blemished by ontic elements’ (Jargon, 73). The figure of Campbell is an exemplar of this idolatry. His devotion to the ideal purity of his inner authentic self is absolute. He plays the part of double agent secretly and propagandist publicly, but neither are ‘real’. Taking on both ‘outer’ roles, neither of which he believes he is committing to in what could be described as Sartrean good faith, he believes that he keeps his essential self safe from the roles he plays.16 Indeed, Campbell believes, and is emotionally invested in, the idea that a real and impermeable barrier exists between his inner and outer self. It is this dialectic that accounts for readings such as the ‘schizoid imbalance’ diagnosed by Kathryn Hume (1982, 179) or the ‘schizophrenic splitting’ that Broer detects (56). I would argue, rather, that Campbell’s ultimate problem is not that he is unable to reconcile the separate parts of himself; rather, it is that he cannot keep them fully apart. The barrier between his outer political self, whether spy

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or Nazi, and his inner – which, as I shall soon demonstrate, is consistently identified by Campbell as an ‘artist’ – is not nearly as impermeable as he would like to believe. He absorbs traces of fascist attitudes even if he consciously repudiates their gross consequences. Campbell’s art mirrors his life, and his life mirrors his art. Campbell is aware of this correlation and even insists upon it. Nevertheless, his understanding of its significance is darkly ironic. An illustrative episode is concerned with a trunk left, at the beginning of the war, in the attic of the theatre in Berlin where Campbell’s plays were produced. Within the trunk are Campbell’s ‘collected serious works, almost every heartfelt word ever written by me. . . . There were poems, stories, plays, letters, one unpublished book’ (MN 77). Campbell, moved to remember this repository while in hiding in Manhattan by the recovery of his manuscripts and ‘wife’ (really his wife’s sister, Resi), considers it a ‘coffin’ for his younger self (80). Resi reminds him that his ‘last poem’ was ‘written in eyebrow pencil on the inside of the trunk lid’. Translated into English, it reads, Here lies Howard Campbell’s essence, Freed from his body’s noisome nuisance. His body, empty, prowls the earth. Earning what a body’s worth. If his body and his essence remain apart, Burn his body, but spare this, his heart. (80) For Campbell, his authentic self – contained within his work – is symbolically enclosed, locked away and hidden in a theatre, a time capsule to be reopened at war’s end. His body, meanwhile, will go about its business, and if it were to write a pageant like ‘Last Full Measure’, ‘honoring the German soldiers who had given their last . . . in putting down the uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto’ (12), then it need not be counted in the fnal reckoning of Campbell’s ‘essence’. The fact that this strategy fails – that he can only consider it the remains of a dead man, decades after the war – is testament to the foolishness of believing that the intervening years would leave no traces. Once again, Vonnegut emphasises that history and politics are inescapable and are always inevitably so. Even the art so carefully preserved by Campbell, in an attempt to transcend his wartime actions and shelter his aesthetic heart, is tainted by their terms. Campbell repeatedly expresses his contempt for the nationalism that surrounds him throughout Mother Night. At the very beginning of his memoir, he describes himself as ‘an American by birth, a Nazi by reputation, and a nationless person by inclination’ (3), and in one episode of his long ‘purgatory’ in New York, he demonstrates the meaninglessness of patriotism to his friend George Kraft. During a heated argument, he crudely sketches in dust a swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the Stars

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and Stripes to illustrate the value of patriotism to, respectively, a Nazi, a communist, and an American. His hearty, identical response to each – ‘hooray, hooray, hooray’ (54) – emphasises the energetic but qualitatively empty nature of other men’s devotion to their nations. Indeed, in terms reminiscent of Adorno’s, he elsewhere claims that he considers the capacity for ‘the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith’ to be ‘terrifying and absolutely vile’ (103). Campbell also finds little value or sense even in the basic concepts of states, borders, and boundaries: I can’t think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will. (86) As noted earlier, Campbell’s disgust for the constituent values of fascism is darkly ironic; he claims that he ‘can’t think in terms of boundaries’ but in fact does little else. His planned fourth play, interrupted by Wirtanen and the war, was to be named ‘Das Reich der Zwei’ – ‘The Nation of Two’ – and it was to ‘show how a pair of lovers in a world gone mad could survive by being loyal only to a nation composed of themselves’ (23). The lovers are Howard and his wife, Helga. Once again, art mirrors life and life mirrors art; the ‘nation of two’ is a formative metaphor for Campbell, a chauvinistic, enclosed, and pure construct that refects and constitutes his transcendent artistic, authentic self. And once again, Vonnegut demonstrates that this ‘self’ mirrors the fascism that Campbell believes himself impermeable to. The passage in which Campbell describes his own personal homeland is worth quoting at length: Das Reich der Zwei, the nation of two my Helga and I had – its territory, the territory we defended so jealously, didn’t go much beyond the bounds of our great double bed. Flat, tufted, springy little country, with my Helga and me for mountains. And, with nothing in my life making sense but love, what a student of geography I was! What a map I could draw for a tourist a micron high, a submicroscopic Wandervogel bicycling between a mole and a curly golden hair on either side of my Helga’s belly button. Oh, how we clung, my Helga and I – how mindlessly we clung! We didn’t listen to each other’s words. We heard only the melodies in our voices. The things we listened for carried no more intelligence than the purrs and growls of big cats. If we had listened for more, had thought about what we heard, what a nauseated couple we would have been! Away from the

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sovereign territory of our nation of two, we talked like the patriotic lunatics all around us. (30) Campbell is already talking like a ‘patriotic lunatic’. Their ‘territory’ is a Germany in microcosm, complete with plains and mountains, and its borders must be sharply delineated and defended. Helga’s bodily topography, encompassed in Campbell’s brief blason, is accompanied by its own romantic, nature-loving youth (a Wandervogel, no less!) as a kind of pseudo-Campbell in miniature, that is nevertheless to be tolerated within the borders for only so long (the term ‘tourist’ faintly echoes with the sense of ‘foreigner’). Finally, the nation of two is explicitly anti-rational, ‘mindlessly’ bound together, and the ‘big cat’ imagery implicitly denotes the kind of muscular vitality so valued by the Nazi authenticists. Some of the terms of his description are perhaps meant – by Campbell or Vonnegut – to be a bitterly self-aware and ironic appropriation from the jargon of Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, the kind of absolute, romanticised enclosure that clearly constitutes Campbell’s overriding desire would bear the traces of fascistic thinking no matter what terms he might use. Adorno’s criticism once again sharply analyses the dangers of such an inwardfacing, chauvinistic desire for privately authentic experience: But shelteredness, as an existential value, turns from something longed for and denied into a presence which is now and here, and which is independent of what prevents it from being. It leaves its trace in the violation of the word: the reminiscence of what is hedged-in and safely bordered remains joined to that element of short-sighted particularity which out of itself renews the evil against which no one is sheltered. Home will only come to be when it has freed itself from such particularity, when home has negated itself as universal. The feeling of shelteredness makes itself at home with itself, and offers a holiday resort in place of life. (Jargon, 26) The fantasy of the resort (or rather, the refuge) is treasured by Campbell and correspondingly acts as an essential element of his life and art. Indeed, Vonnegut consistently demonstrates that Campbell’s obsession with shelteredness precludes and even replaces his capacity to engage meaningfully with the outside world. As Leonard Mustazza notes, the operant myth in Mother Night is that of the Flood and the Ark (65), and Campbell makes two references to it – one explicit, the other implicit. Towards the end of his memoir, he recalls being twice bombed out during the war. He and Helga climb what remains of the staircase of their building on both occasions to fnd themselves under the open night sky. Campbell considers these moments ‘exquisite’. Though he acknowledges

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that ‘we loved our nests and needed them’, nevertheless ‘for a minute or two . . . Helga and I felt like Noah and his wife on Mount Ararat’, and ‘there is no better feeling than that’. The eerie, uncanny, almost sublime aspect of these scenes would seem, of course, to be the close coincidence of life and death; on one of the occasions, the contents of the house remain ‘magically undisturbed’ (MN 156). But, as Mustazza argues, it is not so much the dangers of what Campbell elsewhere terms ‘the food’, the proximate and very real threat of explosive ordinance, that he is concerned with. These things are of only marginal interest to him. Instead, he is not equating his life to Noah’s during the Flood, but rather to the periods before and after the great deluge. . . . Howard has long found the world to be a mad and corrupt place in which he takes little direct interest. (66) The transcendental but momentary separation Campbell feels in these instances cannot last; reality intrudes once more with the blast of air-raid sirens. Nevertheless, the absolute refusal to parlay or engage with the corrupting, impure outside world can at least be fxed and maintained in his art, as his 1937 poem (before, one notes, the ‘food’) demonstrates: I saw a huge steam roller, It blotted out the sun. The people all lay down, lay down; They did not try to run. My love and I, we looked amazed Upon the gory mystery. ‘Lie down, lie down!’ the people cried. ‘The great machine is history!’ My love and I, we ran away, The engine did not fnd us. We ran up to a mountain top, Left history far behind us. Perhaps we should have stayed and died, But somehow we don’t think so. We went to see where history’d been, And my, the dead did stink so. (MN 79) The topographical imagery of this particular piece of doggerel, entitled ‘Refections on Not Participating in Current Events’, is signifcant. Campbell envisages history as a piece of manmade apparatus, set upon a wider landscape. As a metaphor for ‘history’ in the narrow sense of the word

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– the study, analysis, and categorisation of past events relating to human beings, in either the folk or academic sense – it is not unreasonable. A rational rejection of prevailing ideological concepts of ‘history’ can obviously exist without the concomitant desire to disengage utterly. But the desire Campbell expresses in this poem is not only an escape from the contingent circumstance of Nazism nor from anthropocentric history as a whole but from the temporal and spatial feld of cause and effect – that is, what could be termed ‘natural’ history, the kind of history animals, trees, or rocks might share. History is not a small aspect of the landscape of time – it is time, and it cannot be withdrawn from. There is a tinge of disgust in the imagery of withdrawal presented in Campbell’s poem. Those not worthy of Ararat, those who are consigned to history, are ‘gory’, and they ‘stink’. And there is also a deep implicit sense of irrationalism and anti-materialism. Where is this mountain refuge, this city on the hill, situated? In which dimension does it inhere, if all else is to be escaped? How can such a complete escape from the determinants of history possibly be attained? The mountain is a naturalistic image, but it is deployed in the name of idealism. Moreover, as Frank Uekoetter points out, this contradictory combination of romanticised geography and ‘disdain for materialism’ was characteristic of the Nazi movement, in both its ‘green’ and political forms (41–2).17 Once again, Vonnegut demonstrates the fact that the border between Campbell’s life and art and his actual circumstances is not nearly as impermeable as he might wish. Quite to the contrary, his fantasied border, his self-proclaimed status as one of the only two members of the chosen people, once again precisely recapitulates that which he most rejects. Historical and material circumstances make themselves known precisely at the point at which they are most vehemently suppressed. Freedom from contamination also implies innocence, and Campbell is desperate to believe that his real-life romance, like his medieval stage romances, is as political as a ‘chocolate éclair’, a permanent vacation from the realities of socio-historical influence. Yet this vision of purity, gentleness, and incorruptibility – a vision that Campbell essentially stakes his own ‘innocence’ upon, in contrast to his Nazi activities – is easily shattered when its borders are impugned, its purity defiled. The importance of detached purity in the form and content of Campbell’s art/life is highlighted by his furious reaction to a postwar discovery regarding a particular work. Among the documents that Resi (masquerading as Helga) reunites Campbell with in New York is an ‘unpublishable’ manuscript named Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova. As Campbell notes, the manuscript is a diary ‘recording day by day for the first two years of the war’ his marital erotic life, ‘to the exclusion of all else. There is not one word in it to indicate even the century or the continent of its origin’. Campbell is blunt about the nature of the typically exclusionary, ‘self conscious experiment’; it is an attempt ‘to be to each other,

90 Environment and Evolution body and soul, sufficient reasons for living, though there might not be a single other satisfaction to be had’ (MN 82). The one excerpt (heavily censored with ellipses) which Campbell chooses to relate is saturated with allusions to nature, topography, and imperial conquest. His ‘calm, resourceful, thoughtful’ fingers are said to be ‘explorers . . . strategists . . . scouts . . . these skirmishers, [that] deployed themselves over the . . . terrain’. His wife is a ‘slave girl’ and Campbell an ‘emperor’ (83), and it is ‘Mother Nature herself’ that oversees and blesses their love-making (84). What is particularly evident in Campbell’s description is an assumption of unmediated, authentic experience, often closely aligned with natural imagery. In a particularly revealing passage, Campbell rhapsodises on ‘how simple, how sublimely familiar was the tale her . . . body told! . . . It was like the breeze’s tale of what a breeze is, like the rose’s tale of what the rose is’ (83). Adorno notes that in the jargon, the assumption is ‘that the whole man, and not thought, speaks’ (Jargon, 14). Authentic speech is not simply coldly linguistic or rational but an expression of one’s entire self, body and mind, a passionate statement based on ‘gut feeling’. What could be less complicated, or more originary, primal, or familiar than a breeze, a rose, or the whole female body, figured as topography, ‘struck dumb’ (MN 83) and presided over by an emperor? And how might such an emperor react if his borders were to be encroached upon? In his final meeting with Wirtanen, near the end of Mother Night, Campbell learns the truth; Resi is revealed to be a Soviet spy, sent to kidnap him, and her possession of his manuscripts the result of his trunk’s having found its way, circuitously, from Berlin to Moscow. A corporal and interpreter named Stepan Bodovskov, one of the first Russian troops to enter Berlin, discovered Campbell’s chest there and, in the words of Wirtanen, ‘decided that he had a trunkful of instant career’ (129). He translates and publishes the poems and plays as his own, and they become enormously popular, though at this point in his life, Campbell is unable to care particularly. It is only when he discovers that Bodovskov has illicitly published the Casanova manuscript, complete with illustrations and with tacit official approval as ‘an attractive, strangely moral piece of pornography . . . ideal for a nation suffering from shortages of everything but men and women’ (131) that Campbell is finally rendered distraught: The part of me that wanted to tell the truth got turned into an expert liar! The lover in me got turned into a pornographer! The artist in me got turned into ugliness such as the world has rarely seen before. (133) The public revelation of one’s private diary would certainly be a distressing experience, but what renders it so uniquely traumatic for Campbell is that his manuscript, a document of love in the Nation of Two, is rendered into ‘catfood, glue and liverwurst’ (133), mere mass market pornography,

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when it is apprehended by a foreign nation.18 It is almost literally a loss of territory, or a form of pollution, a natural or authentic landscape/art that is intruded upon and made impure. As Greg Garrard notes, ‘Pollution’, for example, derives from the Latin ‘polluere’ meaning ‘to defile’, and its early English usage reflects its theologico-moral origins: until the seventeenth century it denoted moral contamination of a person, or acts (such as masturbation) thought to promote such contamination. (2014, 8) There is a distinct sense of contamination in Campbell’s distraught rhetoric. The elision of the masturbatory and of a country spoiled by outside intrusion refects the contradictions and frailties of Campbell’s supposedly non-political, non-materialistic allegiances. He repudiates nationalism of all kinds while living and writing according to a metaphor – the Nation of Two – that is couched in its terms and saturated in its assumptions. He disavows material history and even his own body in favour of the transcendental and authentic power of aesthetics, only to fnd that the simple act of reproduction destroys the purity he craves.

Art as Authentic Life, Art as Authentic Death Throughout Mother Night, Campbell’s insistence on sharp delineation, whether between his outer propagandist and inner artist selves, between the Nation of Two and the nation of Germany, or even, in the abstract, between transcendental, aestheticised experience and the material realities of history, is inevitably doomed. It is destined to fail not only because of its sheer practical impossibility but because the desire that precipitates it and the form that it takes are in themselves a reflection of the political context Mother Night depicts – a longing for purity, authenticity, irrationality, and exclusivity. One by one, over the course of the novel, these borders collapse. His art is impugned and bastardised; Helga dies, and the Nation of Two is broken; and as Jerome Klinkowitz points out, ‘in this modern world’, the material world Campbell so longs to leave utterly, ‘the self can indeed be violated, and so is at every turn’ (1971, 43–44). The only option left to him, as he is pursued by Soviet spies and Israeli agents, isolated in a newly hostile New York, is the final (and bedrock) form of authenticity – that of death. According to Adorno, in the philosophy that Heidegger espouses in Being and Time (1927), ‘death, the negation of Dasein, is decisively fitted out with the characteristics of Being. Insofar as death is the ontological constituent of Dasein, death alone can give existence the dignity of totality’ (Jargon, 147). Heidegger is keen to suggest that authentic death is not simply an event; it is not for the ‘they’, a publicly ‘known . . . mishap which is constantly occurring’ (Being and

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Time, 296). Rather, it is the very culmination of a person’s own unadulterated existence, as Adorno explains, The loneliness of the individual in death, the fact that his ‘non-relatedness singles out Dasein unto itself,’ becomes the substratum of selfness. This attitude of total self-sufficiency becomes the extreme confirmation of the self: it becomes an Ur-image of defiance in selfabnegation. As a matter of fact, abstract selfness in extremis is that grinding of the teeth which says nothing but I, I, I. (Jargon, 152) Campbell refers to himself as a ‘death-worshipper’ (MN 33) at a relatively early point in Mother Night. Nevertheless, for a character like Campbell, death is not only a mark of authenticity, a fnal and unimpeachable marker of his own exclusivity. It is also, as ever, an aesthetic goal. Campbell’s search for artistic structure is never confned only to his poetry or romantic plays. It is a constitutive element of his lived experience. This dedication to a proper end is made explicit in his postwar conversation with Wirtanen, who is both surprised and pleased that Campbell did not kill himself upon learning of Helga’s death (since it would have been diffcult to replace him). Campbell, however, does not consider his endurance a strength but a weakness, a failure of nerve. Indeed, he considers it an artistic failure. He bitterly notes that he had missed the opportunity for the most important cue in the unwritten ‘Nation of Two’ play: You would think that a man who’s spent as much time in the theatre as I have would know when the proper time came for the hero to die. . . . I admire form, I admire things with a beginning, a middle, an end. (119) His postwar life instead consists of one long, unscripted denouement, added time that contributes nothing to the artistic project. When his boundaries and romanticism inevitably, fnally betray Campbell, his long inurement from reality leads to insensibility and complete paralysis. Released from police custody by Wirtanen, Campbell freezes on the busy street, unable to take a single step. He refects on all of the ties to the world that he has renounced during the course of his life – guilt, loss, the fear of death, anger, love, or simple curiosity (150) – and decides to surrender himself to Israel. Though he gains reprieve, at the last minute, from his death sentence, Campbell hangs himself regardless. Characteristically, he does so ‘for crimes against himself’ (175), simultaneously reiterating his isolationism while implicitly confating his death with that of humanity – the largest Volk of all. His lonely suicide is, paradoxically, the ultimate fulflment of his essential selfness (in Adorno’s terms). It is also

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the fulflment of his life’s artistic project. For better or worse, Howard W. Campbell Jr. fnally achieves the hermetic independence and transcendence he has always desired – from people, nations, and life itself.

Authenticity and Liberty Independence, authenticity, purity, and other similarly exclusive values are always essentially connected with a renouncement of necessity and outside influence. The influence may be historical, political, cultural, or material, and it may be couched in the terms of nationality, ethnicity, ‘naturalness’, or ideology. But what is most important is not so much the territory, literal or psychological, in which the division is enacted; it is in the absolute insistence on the divisionary boundary itself. An almost overwhelming concern with self-determination is evident in the fictional Nation of Two and in the historical Third Reich. It is to Vonnegut’s credit that the rhetoric of each is strikingly similar. A passage such as the following could be read in the defeated, shrinking tones of the memoir-era Campbell or in the triumphant, belligerent oratory of a fascist speechmaker, but in either case, the discourse is based solely in the notion of exclusivity: I view myself as the most independent of men . . . obligated to no one, subordinate to no one, indebted to no one – instead answerable only to my own conscience. And this conscience has but one single commander – our Volk! (qtd. in Koonz 4) The extract is taken from a speech made by Adolf Hitler in 1935, but if one were to replace ‘our Volk’ with ‘Das Reich der Zwei’ and switch the exultant exclamation mark for a defationary full stop, the words could just as easily have issued from Campbell’s embittered pen in his sordid New York apartment. If something is to be valued, if it is to be considered authentic under this kind of Weltanschauung, it must be originary to itself. More often than not, this is achieved via an appeal to a certain conception of ‘nature’ or ‘naturalness’ – a kind of literary or political symbolic order that appends to an otherwise materialist or scientifc discourse an extraneous, transcendental idealism, which then becomes internally contradictory. In fascist Germany, this impulse took the form of an insistence upon a ‘scientifc’ theory of primordial racial separation, which was nevertheless more often than not couched in mystical or idealist terms. As Zimmerman ably summarises, fascism specifically promises to restore dignity, nobility, purpose, and privilege to some unique people or race, whose members feel that their original mystical-organic unity and their ‘natural’ ties with the

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This was never a structured or reasoned ideology but rather ‘an amorphous conglomerate of concepts, notions, and resentments, where even key concepts like Volk and race, community and Fuhrer, were open to divergent readings’ (Uekoetter, 31). So, the ‘Aryan’ and ‘Jewish’ races were wholly separate – except Nazi scientists could fnd no practical way to distinguish between them (Koonz 170).19 Karl Haushofer’s essentially environmentalist ideas about geographic determinism were held in high regard by Nazi offcials and inspired the concept of Lebensraum, except that such determinism, being ‘materialist’, was anathema to Nazi theory and was so reconfgured from a ‘science’ to ‘a sort of “inner mood” or “spiritual attitude,” which offered an essentially metaphysical perspective on a Volkisch “spatial destiny” . . . formed by the timeless organic forces of “blood and soil”’ (Bassin, 228, my italics). As Adorno notes, ‘the jargon turns in a circle. It wants to be immediately concrete without sliding into mere facticity. It is consequently forced into secret abstraction’ (Jargon 92). Consistency and material details are ultimately irrelevant. The boundary that creates authenticity and its essential, exclusive origins is all. Vonnegut refects and recreates this inconsistent desire for boundedness in Mother Night. The Nation of Two (and Campbell’s ‘real’ inner artistic self, which ultimately amounts to the same thing) is presented as, in Spinoza’s famous phrase, ‘a kingdom within a kingdom’ (III Preface). In art and in life, it is discussed throughout the text in nationalist or topographical terms, while purportedly remaining unsullied by the infuences of nationalist politics or of material history. Campbell scoffs at the entire world, condemning its madness and denouncing his own propagandist persona, but in so doing – in so insisting on his own secret, sheltered authentic existence – he commits the very crimes and corruptions he despises: Until further notice, authenticity and inauthenticity have as their criterion the decision in which the individual subject chooses itself as its own possession. The subject, the concept of which was once created in contrast to reification, thus becomes reified. Yet at the same time reification is scoffed at objectively in a form of language which simultaneously commits the same crime. (Adorno, 115) This is precisely Campbell’s inescapable conundrum, and its contradictions prove crippling. As the fctionalised representative of the authentically self-possessive, Campbell desperately attempts to keep his art and life hermetically sealed from the political and historical reality that

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surrounds him, seeking ‘the absolute disposal of the individual over himself, without regard to the fact that he is caught up in determining objectivity’ (128). He is inevitably undone nonetheless, unconsciously recapitulating the values and metaphors that he is surrounded by, embedded within and determined by material history. Campbell chooses himself as his own possession, and the only satisfactory criterion for such a choice is complete self-suffciency and separation, but he could never only be thus. Since he cannot only be thus, then under his own terms, he cannot be at all, and death becomes the only ‘authentic’ option left available. Mother Night is a complex and multifaceted novel, and the explicit ‘moral’ that Vonnegut provides in his introduction (‘we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be’ [VII]) is but one of its concerns. It is also an exploration of deep anxieties about the place of the individual in society and in history, about aesthetics as a form of transcendentalism, about the overwhelming desire for an authenticity that is always exclusionary, at best illusory, and at worst, genocidal. The boundary conditions implicit in each of these concerns do not function, in Mother Night, simply to organise or differentiate. Nationality is not a shorthand for approximate place of origin, and the condition of authenticity is not simply an endeavour to express oneself in the best possible faith. Rather, these concepts are shown to be bent to serve Campbell’s attempt at ontologically separating interdependent elements in the name of idealism and purity. Diegetically, they serve to suppress (even as they rhetorically appropriate) the objective realities of history, in favour of a radical, transcendental independence. They are, in short, an attempt by Campbell to deny or at least escape materialist determinism, represented within the social spheres of war and nationhood. As I hope to have shown, Vonnegut implicitly portrays the futility of this effort. In Mother Night, Vonnegut demonstrates how the cultural infuences that surround Campbell’s self and art (so closely identifed as to be nearly inseparable) inexorably spread their roots into the Nation of Two, to the extent that Campbell’s imaginary community accepts their attitudes even as it denies them. But selfhood and art also have biological forebears, and in Galapagos (1985), Vonnegut would turn his attention to an ethological study of their role and nature, to fgure the human as animal and art as evolutionarily determined behaviour. The results of such an investigation are even more destabilising to human pretensions of independence than Mother Night’s political/artistic treatise; they strike at the very heart of humanistic ideas about the category of the human.

Notes 1. Charles Shields makes this comparison explicit, noting that Mother Night is more convincing than The Sirens of Titan because Campbell’s memoir is written in a real world where there is suffering,

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2. A fair few people, as it turns out. Mother Night went unreviewed on release, and the first edition was a commercial flop (Shields 173). 3. Removed from context, Glotfelty’s point here may seem broad to the point of unhelpfulness. After all, under this definition, what text couldn’t be termed ecocritical? Further, the explicit connection made between the literary and wider ‘world’ may strike 21st-century critics as obvious or banal. Nevertheless, one must bear in mind the formative and canonical nature of Glotfelty’s statement. At the time of writing, the methodology and values of continental philosophy still held a position of dominance in literary studies; as Greg Garrard points out, ‘[b]ack in the 1990s when Theory was identified primarily with anthropocentric, impenetrable French philosophers, ecocriticism was pleased to constitute itself as anti-Theory’ (2014, 9). This opposition has become more moderate in the succeeding decades. Nevertheless, positioning the study of literature within an explicitly materialist framework – and denying the free-standing nature of literary, theoretical, cultural, or linguistic practices – was, at the time, a fairly bold move on the part of the early ecocritics. 4. As I argue in the following chapter, these elements are readily discernible in many of Vonnegut’s other texts, however. 5. For better or worse, the prefix ‘green’ has become almost ubiquitous; regardless of political or economic realities, terms such as ‘organic’, ‘carbon neutral’, ‘environmentally friendly’, and ‘sustainable’ permeate the discourse of businesses and governments. At best, this symbolic emphasis may lead to genuinely improved environmental outcomes. At worst, it may represent a form of ‘greenwashing’ – ‘that is, deliberate attempts to communicate positive environmental information not matched by improved environmental impacts’ (Bowen, 3). Environmentalist (and particularly deep ecological) emphasis on the environment is also criticised as representing an anti-humanist, naïve, or ethically suspect position, both from the left and the right of the political spectrum, by social ecologists such as Murray Bookchin, on the one hand, and proponents of ‘wise use’ policy on the other. 6. Staudenmaier opens his chapter ‘Fascist Ecology: The Green Wing of the Nazi Party and Its Historical Antecedents’ with a quotation from Ernst Lehmann, a professor of botany who characterised National Socialism as ‘politically applied biology’. The tactic is undoubtedly effective at illustrating his central thesis. One finds oneself breezily agreeing with the ideas and sentiments of the passage, until the sudden and disorienting turn towards Nazism in the final line: We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought. (qtd. In Staudenmaier 13) 7. The inevitable question that arises is obvious and uncomfortable; is there an indelible trace of fascism in environmentalism? Uekoetter cautions against

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the ‘contagionist school of conservation history’ that follows ‘an exceedingly simple, three-step approach: There was a certain trend in the Nazi era; there is a similar trend nowadays; consequently, the latter is tainted by the former’ (206). Peter Staudenmaier has expressed his dismay at the ‘abuse’ of his work by modern-day conservative commentators and politicians, who have drawn simplistic and derogatory comparisons between modern-day environmentalists and Nazis (‘Greens and Nazis’). If one wishes to follow up on the subject in depth, studies such as How Green Were the Nazis? (Brüggemeier, Cioc and Zeller, 2005), The Green and the Brown (Uekoetter, 2006), Ecofascism Revisited: Lessons from the German Experience (Biehl and Staudenmaier, 2011), and Black Earth (Snyder, 2015) provide detailed accounts of Nazi conservation and agricultural laws and practices, as well as their ideological dimensions and lasting influence on the modern far-right. Anna Bramwell’s Blood and Soil (1985) is a rich source of factual information but has been severely criticised for its perceived sympathy for Richard Walther Darré and its depiction of the Reichsminister and SS officer as ‘a harmless peasant romantic’ (Gerhard, 130, Uekoetter, 202–3). Darré did not coin this phrase; it ‘had been circulating in völkisch circles since at least the Wilhelmine era’, but he was responsible for popularising its usage in Nazi discourse and propaganda (Staudenmaier, 31). This appears to have been a phenomenon mostly specific to German Fascism. Italian Fascism, at least in its early stages, was not as explicitly racially inflected as German; though the emphasis on nationalism (and attendant conservationism) was retained (Uekoetter 6–7), it seems likely that Mussolini only half-heartedly subscribed to Hitler’s obsessions with eugenics and racial purity (Montagu, 187n3). As De Grand notes, while the Nazis applied the racial principle ‘to the world of culture, science and even to economic and social relations, with devastating effect’, for the Italian Fascists, ‘the racial option was but one alternative amongst many others’ (83). Though he is of course fictional, this is not to say that Campbell was created ex nihilo for the novel. In a letter to one William Amos, Vonnegut explains that Campbell was ‘inspired by two people, neither one of them Ezra Pound’. One, somewhat predictably, was “Lord Haw Haw”, the Englishborn radio propagandist for the Nazis. The other was a ‘seeming American who tried to recruit American prisoners of war for the German Army’ that Vonnegut encountered during his period as a POW in Dresden. Vonnegut assumed he was a German actor but ‘played with the idea of his being what he claimed to be’ (Letters, 307). Incidentally, a similar figure appears in Slaughterhouse-Five. See ‘Vonnegut Family History – Clemens Vonnegut’ at www.vonnegutlibrary. org/vonnegut-family-history-clemens-vonnegut/ For a short history of the Forty-Eighter generation, see Carl Wittke’s ‘The German Forty-Eighters in America: A Centennial Appraisal’ (1948). I strongly suspect that confirming this speculation would require an extensive and detailed research project, which is, of course, far beyond the scope of this work. Nevertheless, a (necessarily) brief account of this potential connection is as follows. Freethinking (or Freigeistigkeit) originated in the liberal and anti-establishment congregations of the New Catholic and Friends of Light movements in 1840s Germany, which ‘became seedbeds for the revolution of 1848 and were subsequently suppressed by the monarchic states’ (Weir, 157). The leader of the New Catholics, Johannes Ronge, was notable for his opposition to antisemitism (Grieve 351), and his close collaborator, the left-wing radical Robert Blum, campaigned against German ethnocentrism and oppression in Poland, railing against the ‘untermenschen’ rhetoric

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Environment and Evolution that was even then taking hold (Newman, 132). Opposition to antisemitism, imperialism, and ethnocentrism were out of step with the official ideology of the time and were, of course, anathema to the later Nazi state. Freethinking would continue in Germany contemporaneously with the immigrant associations in America and other countries. Particularly of note is the freethinking philosopher Ludwig Büchner, who founded the German Freethinker’s League in 1881 (Gregory, 119–120). Büchner’s philosophy was explicitly materialist and monistic. His league was banned by the Nazis in 1933, along with most other freethinking movements that were condemned as atheistic or materialistic or would otherwise not cooperate with Volkisch associations (Weir, 157). An undeniably tentative conclusion may thusly be drawn: the freethinking movement, of which Vonnegut was a distant heir (in America) and cousin (in Germany), was politically, intellectually, and culturally inimical to Nazi ethnocentrism and antisemitism and had ties (of varying strength) to atheistic, materialist, and monistic thought. It is interesting to note that prior to his enlistment, the young Vonnegut was initially a vocal non-interventionist in the early stages of the Second World War, though for domestic and economic reasons rather than out of any sympathy for Nazi Germany (Shields, 2011, 41). This reasoning is supported by his equally vocal opposition to antisemitism during this period (40). Medieval romance was a popular artistic subject in the Third Reich. De Grand notes that ‘in place of art deemed degenerate, the Nazis drew on GrecoRoman classical models, German medieval and ruralist genre painting’ (72), and in the realm of theatre, ‘hundreds of open-air stages were designed for pseudo-medieval plays, called Thingspiels, that restored a ‘heroic spiritual force’ to ethnic theatre’ (Koonz 81). Martin Shichtman and Laurie A. Finke provide a detailed investigation of this aesthetic practice in ‘Exegetical History: Nazis at the Round Table’ (2014). Thomas C. Anderson summarises the person who acts in good Sartrean faith – ‘the authentic individual’ – as one who ‘(1) acts for freedom, (2) has at the same time “a true and lucid consciousness of the situation” in which he is, and (3) accepts responsibility for his act. The man of bad faith lacks one or more of these characteristics’ (61). Similarly, ‘good faith (authenticity) is the attitude of strict consistency, and is the choice of freedom itself . . . since human freedom alone is the source of all value’ (45). As was so often the case, official Nazi ideology on the subject was selfcontradictory. Though the terminology of Geopolitik was freely appropriated, Hitler himself rebuked its fundamental tenets in favour of racialist theory. As Mark Bassin explains, the ‘privileging of race over the conditions and forces of the external milieu was endorsed in the 1930s by the very highest authority, that is to say Adolf Hitler himself. The limited natural endowments of a particular region, Hitler observed, may stimulate one race to the highest achievements, but for another [the same space] may be the source of the bitterest poverty and inadequate nutrition, with all of consequences [sic] this brings. It is the inner predisposition of a Volk that determines the way in which external conditions influence it. (215) Actual ecological conditions or material influences could be rhetorically deployed to lend force or credibility to an argument but always under the auspices of idealism and mysticism. As Staudenmaier summarises, ‘The National Socialist “religion of nature,” as one historian has described it, was a volatile admixture of primeval teutonic nature mysticism, pseudo-scientific

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ecology, irrationalist anti-humanism, and a mythology of racial salvation through a return to the land’ (26). 18. The fact that it is a Soviet soldier who reproduces Campbell’s work, rather than a soldier from the Allied countries, seems relevant – Nazi ideology considered Slavs in particular to be non-Aryan Untermenschen, and so Bodovskov’s nationality may constitute an additional source of pollution. As John Connolly notes, Poles and Russians in particular were discriminated against, to a degree ‘not dictated by the logic of wartime strategy’ (9). Nazi plans for the Eastern lebensraum were based on what Gerhard Weinberg has identified as prewar general National Socialist consensus . . . the German leaders intended, within this newly won territory, to eliminate entirely or intellectually decapitate peoples perceived to be of ‘alien’ and ‘inferior’ race – and hence a danger to the German Reich – leaving behind a ‘residue’ to provide manual labor for German settlers. (Black 277) 19. Vonnegut was certainly aware of this discrepancy. In a letter to Harry James Cargas written in 1980, Vonnegut notes that when studying anthropology at the University of Chicago, he learnt ‘that there was no way a Jew could be described or identified. Jews in Europe were just more Europeans, physically and intellectually. Their skeletons and skulls were just more European skeletons and skulls’ (Letters, 275–276).

4

Galapagos Writing on Air Andrew John Hicks

If we were to take as fundamental to Vonnegut’s project the need simply to point out, as he does in Mother Night (1962), that the attempt to build and maintain hermetic barriers against sociohistorical determinants is not only futile but self-defeating, then we might still plausibly classify his thought and work as paradigmatically postmodern only. Howard W. Campbell Jr. may seek to separate politics from art, his ruthless propagandist persona from his idealist aesthete ‘self’, but this dichotomy nevertheless remains within the purview of the cultural and linguistic domain. The pseudo-naturalist rhetoric of nationalism that Campbell alternately appropriates and repudiates may make reference ‘to that great nature that exists in the works of mighty poets’ (Soper, 1) – that is, the ‘nature’ of mystical blood and soil and the imagery of landscape and territory – but these elements are still only rhetorical. Indeed, Vonnegut’s own rhetoric, such as the prefatory admonishment that ‘we are what we pretend to be’ (MN VII); the textual trickery regarding the author function of the novel; and the implicit criticism of notions of purity that permeate the text can all be read as the standard anti-foundationalist or -essentialist concerns and practices of postmodernism. As I argued in the preceding chapter, Campbell’s overriding desire is to treat his life as self-authored art, and Mother Night demonstrates the dangers of trying to do so (a concern Vonnegut would return to throughout his career).1 Just over two decades later, Vonnegut would once again turn to naturalistic imagery. However, where he had previously dealt with the problematic binaries of inside/outside, individual/society, and politics/aesthetics, in Galapagos (1985), he would move on to a binary that cannot help but admit to some form of foundationalism, however attenuated: that of the human/animal. The nature of the literary impulse is still a central concern of this latter novel, just as it was in Mother Night. However, in Vonnegut’s Darwinian tale, he tackles the narrativising compulsion on the scale of the species rather than the individual and in the context of the vast and impersonal complexities and time scales of natural selection. Campbell’s writing was supposed to be a guarantor of his purity and independence; humanity’s writing is supposed to be a guarantor of its exceptionalism. In Galapagos,

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Vonnegut reverses the formula from ‘life as art’ to ‘art as life’ or, rather, treats art as a biological phenomenon – and one that is only provisionally stable. This is a statement that requires explication. The complex and interrelated relationships between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, biology and consciousness, the material and the phenomenological, are hotly contested, often opaque, and always inevitably mediated. These relationships and debates can only be outlined here. Encompassing the heterogeneous positions contained within the varied literary theoretical schools of structuralism, poststructuralism, modernism, postmodernism, ecocriticism, and animal studies – notwithstanding the wider fields of ethology, neuropsychology, and evolutionary biology, to name but a few extra-literary schools  – would be a broad study indeed. However, a few broad summations will help to clarify my own position on Vonnegut’s treatment of the subject of the human/animal. As previously noted, the Vonnegut of Mother Night can relatively easily be subsumed under the category of the ‘postmodern’ writer. Mother Night fulfils most of the general criteria discerned by Marc Chénetier in 1960s American postmodern fiction, which he argues was ‘principally characterized by a move in theme and tone towards the absurd, contestation, the picaresque, marginalism, and by a certain amount of formal experimentation’ (59). These concerns are broadly based within the realm of questions of language and representation, especially insofar as they relate to art and authorship; in a more general sense, these elements are situated both within and against specifically cultural or ideological contexts, which are essentially linguistic in constitution. In Kate Soper’s terms, though ‘nature’ is present in its ‘lay’ sense (the ‘everyday’ concept of nature as trees, animals, and wilderness) in metaphor and imagery, it is far from the novel’s central concern. Nature in its ‘realist’ sense, meanwhile, ‘[referring] to the structures, processes and causal powers that are constantly operative within the physical world’ (155) is, for a Vonnegut novel, quite marginal. To speak plainly, Mother Night is mostly unconcerned with a ‘ground’ or foundation beyond the interplay of competing discourses. There is little inside the text that is outside the ‘text’ of Campbell’s memoir. This is, of course, amenable to the vulgar understanding of the postmodern or poststructuralist position. The reference to Derrida’s infamous ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ – commonly mistranslated as ‘there is nothing outside the text’ – is intentional.2 Rightly or not, for critics hostile to postmodernism or poststructuralism, the defining characteristic of either theoretical approach (insofar as either can be defined) is that they deny the existence of a world ‘out there’, a given or objective reality that precedes or exists beyond free-floating and self-referential cultural and linguistic systems. Poststructuralist arguments, such as those advanced by Derrida or Foucault, tend to be taken by critics such as Gerald Graff or

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Joseph Carroll to be ontological rather than epistemological in nature. The latter author provides a particularly indicative example of this tendency. The author of the first book in the field of evolutionary literary studies (or ‘literary Darwinism’), Evolution and Literary Theory (1995), Carroll’s approach adapts concepts from evolutionary biology to mount a strident critique of poststructuralist literary theory. In a discussion on Foucault’s ‘The Discourse of Language’, Carroll argues that The central phrase in ‘The Discourse on Language’ is ‘the reality of discourse’. This phrase is itself nowhere defined, but by opposing the reality of discourse to the founding subject, originating experience, and a rationally intelligible natural order, Foucault necessarily implies that by ‘reality’ he means constitutive or causal primacy. That is, discourse constitutes subjects, experiences, and the natural order and is not itself constituted by them. Foucault only implies this thesis . . . by both suggesting and denying that ‘discourse’ constitutes subjects and experiences, Foucault exempts himself from charges that his basic hypotheses are false while nonetheless continuing to presuppose them. (418) In reality (if we might call it that), neither Derrida or Foucault go so far as to imply that a world beyond human consciousness does not exist.3 Carroll’s theoretical version of Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley’s idealism (‘I refute it thus’) is somewhat mistargeted, but it nevertheless points towards a lacuna in the general critical discourse of the ‘theory wars’ era. This lacuna is perhaps best summarised by Carroll’s baldly stated thesis – ‘[that] knowledge is a biological phenomenon, that literature is a form of knowledge, and that literature is thus itself a biological phenomenon’ (1). Though generally acknowledging the diffculties and complexities inherent to the study of literary fction and its signifcance, Carroll nevertheless insists on a baseline, physical, and embodied substrate for human consciousness and experience, and, accordingly, of human cultural artefacts. He diagnoses a tautology within the poststructuralist insistence on the primacy of language in epistemology, since it neglects the realities of embodied, preconscious experience: The tautology is that we can speak or write of nature and human nature only in speech or writing. This is designed to suppress the recognition that perception, thoughts, and emotional responses are not exclusively linguistic in character, though it is of course true that they can be linguistically formulated only in linguistic formulations. The tautology – that we can refer to things only by referring to them – bends almost imperceptibly into the radical absurdity: the idea that we cannot refer to things, that nature and human nature, insofar as we can know them, are exclusively constituted or structured by language. (62)

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It can certainly be argued that Carroll overstates his case or that he misunderstands Derrida or Foucault’s positions. There are serious theoretical and even ethical issues with regard to his vision of ‘Literary Darwinism’, as numerous critics in the collection The Evolution of Literature (2011) have pointed out.4 Further, as in the case of Cheryl Glotfelty’s defnition of ecocriticism presented in the previous chapter, Carroll’s point may seem so obvious, universal, or commonsensical as to reach the point of banality or irrelevance. Nevertheless, as with Glotfelty, it is perhaps helpful for someone to make the gesture so plainly – especially in a context in which we may be liable to forget or downplay the material, ‘natural’, and ‘given’.5 At best, as Patricia Waugh points out, even now ‘what is surprising is the extent of the general indifference of the majority of literary critics and theorists to the implications of [Darwinism]’ (125). At worst, this indifference can slide into open hostility. As Pheng Cheah notes (at a similar time, incidentally, to Carroll), while ‘any cursory survey of contemporary cultural-political theory and criticism will indicate that the related concepts of “nature” and “the given” are not highly valued terms’, the antinaturalism that she considers endemic to the humanities, the ‘obsessive pushing away of nature’, nevertheless ‘may well constitute an acknowledgement-in-disavowal that humans may be natural creatures after all’ (108). Cheah identifes this ‘fear’ of naturalistic accounts of human behaviour as a reaction against the potential application of causal laws to human practices. Certainly, caution is warranted in this matter. Naïve or cynical appeals to ‘nature’ have often served to justify, post-hoc, already existing social iniquities, inequalities, and prejudices, and countless critics, including (but in no way exclusively) Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Frantz Fanon, Cary Wolfe, and Kate Soper, have spent considerable time unpicking the unspoken binaries, assumptions, and misapprehensions inherent therein. Indeed, we have seen, in the preceding chapter, the consequences of ill-conceived appeals to ‘blood and soil’ in nationalistic discourse. However, just as the theory of relativity cannot be rejected because of the atomic bomb – or, indeed, just as the theory of natural selection cannot be blamed for social Darwinism – the danger of an a priori rejection of biology is that much that is both instructive and even radical may be left out. We need not blindly subscribe to the ‘blank slate’, ‘tabula rasa’, or ‘SSSM’ (standard social science model) described by authors such as Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate (2002) or John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in The Adapted Mind (1992), in which human beings are held to have no innate traits beyond those inculcated by culture and language. Nor do we need to submit to vulgar forms of biological or genetic determinism, in which every human action is governed solely by organic systems moulded by the adaptive pressures of the Pleistocene.6 Bluntly, neither nature nor nurture alone is sufficient to account for the actions of human beings, and the challenge to the humanities – and literary and cultural criticism in particular – is to account for both in a

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new and truly integrative framework. I believe that the theoretical project of posthumanism, which includes such figures as N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe, and Neil Badmington, represents a crucial step towards this framework. Not coincidentally, their work, and Haraway and Wolfe’s in particular, also provides an instructive perspective from which to read Galapagos, Vonnegut’s most posthuman and posthumanist novel – literally, in the case of the post-Homo sapiens fisherfolk it obliquely depicts, and theoretically, in its deep misgivings about the value of self-consciousness and its equivocation of the human with the rest of the animal kingdom.

Humanism, Posthumanism, and the Human Animal It will be instructive to first ascertain exactly what is ‘post’ human (or humanist) about posthumanism as a general (and still disparate) theoretical school. Cary Wolfe, in his monograph What Is Posthumanism? (2010), argues that, contrary to popular belief, posthumanism should not be considered synonymous with transhumanism (a distinction which he accuses fellow posthuman theorist N. Katherine Hayles of eliding).7 He defines the latter as a movement aiming to release humanity itself, through technological mediation, from its biological heritage in favour of limitless virtualised/intellectualised existence. Indeed, his position within posthumanism is concerned with quite the opposite of this secularised apotheosis, as Wolfe makes clear in his discussion of the links between animal studies and posthumanism: I emphasize two crucial points regarding my sense of posthumanism in this book. The first has to do with perhaps the fundamental anthropological dogma associated with humanism and invoked by Balibar’s reference to the humanity/animality dichotomy: namely, that ‘the human’ is achieved by escaping or repressing not just its animal origins in nature, the biological, and the evolutionary, but more generally by transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether. In this respect, my sense of posthumanism is the opposite of transhumanism, and in this light, transhumanism should be seen as the intensification of humanism . . . the sense in which I am using the term here insists on exactly the opposite: posthumanism in my sense isn’t posthuman at all – in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended – but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasises of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself. (XIV–XV) As Tony Davies perspicaciously notes, the term ‘humanism’ is exceptionally diffcult to defne or to historicise – the term is ‘not reducible to one,

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not even to a single, tidy line or pattern’ (141).8 However, the features of humanism raised by Wolfe – that is, ‘fantasises of disembodiment and autonomy’ – are of particular relevance here and are themselves related to further notions regarding human values and practices. To demonstrate how this may be the case, and how these elements of humanism have come to prominence, I briefy turn to the work of Pico Della Mirandola and in particular, his ‘On the Dignity of Man’ (1486). Though only one example among many disparate texts at the root of only one of many disparate schools of humanism, it is a useful resource not only because of its subsequent popularity but because it will allow us to construct a conceptual axis which can plausibly (if provisionally) encompass the implicit valuative positions and judgements of humanism as a whole. Pico’s infuential oratory has been termed ‘the manifesto of Renaissance humanism’ by W. G. Craven (qtd. in Davies, 95), and as Davies notes, though it ‘consists largely of a defence . . . of the elevated calling of the philosopher’, its ‘fame, and its extraordinary prominence in later accounts of humanism, derive from its frst few pages’ (96). Pico here dramatises the encounter between the God of Genesis and the newly created Adam, in which the former announces and bestows upon man a status and condition that is unique in creation. Man is presented as ‘a creature of indeterminate nature’, placed in ‘the middle of the world’, and is told by God that Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam. . . . The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the world’s centre. . . . We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honour, as though the maker and moulder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. (224–5) Unlike the brutes of the Earth, who bring ‘from their mother’s womb’ all that they will ever be or possess, man is here in the precipitous, promethean position of complete self-authorship, able to rise, by virtue of reason and intellect, to the status of an angel, or descend, through sensuousness and sloth, to that of the beasts, which are slave to their unthinking biological drives (226). The ‘fantasises’ that Wolfe diagnoses in humanism are clear in Pico’s account, and it is particularly important to note that the humanistic virtues are specifcally identifed by Pico with the heavenly immaterial; love, intelligence, and justice are respectively the domain of the Seraphim, the Cherubim, and the Throne (227). Pico’s vertical axis, with man at its centre, presents two poles which man – and man

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alone – may move between. At the bottom of the axis lies the material and the determinate, identifed with bestiality, instinct, and sensuousness, and at the top, the disembodied and free, identifed with the heavenly and with reason, virtue, knowledge, and intellect. This dualistic account of the features of human existence is also, of course, implicitly valuative. Pico leaves his listeners in little doubt as to which pole he would prefer men to pursue. Of course, in the time between the 15th century and the present day, several of the assumptions on which Pico’s argument rests have undergone some rough treatment. Two revolutions in scientifc knowledge served to shake the religious foundations that underpin his axis. The Copernican revolution shook man from the centre of the universe, and the Darwinian revolution proved that it was natural selection that was the maker and moulder of humankind – just as it was for all other species.9 Though the original religious justifcations for Pico’s axis may no longer seem adequate to most – and in any case, its ideological foundations have fallen away in secular culture – the axis itself has remained a tacit element of post-Renaissance Western culture, albeit now as ethereal as its own higher pole. More specifcally, the assumption that man is still categorically separate to the rest of nature, by virtue of his reason, culture, and free will, remains generally intact. Even if it has become troubled and besieged in the succeeding centuries, this central tenet, especially in its liberal humanist guise, is stubbornly resistant to revolution. Cary Wolfe adroitly summarises the uneasy tension between humanist idealism and knowledge production when he notes that the subject of humanism is constituted by a temporal and evolutionary stratification or asynchronicity in which supposedly ‘animalistic’ or ‘primitive’ determinations inherited from our evolutionary past . . . coexist uneasily in a second-order relation of relations, which the phantasmic ‘human’ surfs or manages with varying degrees of success or difficulty. (2003, 3) We may intellectually acknowledge (to use Wolfe’s examples) our boundedness to circadian rhythms or more variously the physical frailties that stem ultimately from the physical determinants of a ‘fundamentally ahuman universe’ (3), but we nevertheless believe, implicitly or not, in the Cartesian distinction between mind and body, and, more relevantly in this case, the Cartesian distinction between human and animal. The question of whether humans are separated by degree or category from all other life on Earth has elicited much anxiety over the centuries. While various categorical separations have provided temporary barriers between the human and the non-human, as our understanding of animal life grows, each has been swept aside. I quote now from Donna Haraway’s wildly influential ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, which succinctly summarises this process:

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By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks – language, tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation. (72) It is this willingness to cross boundaries and dissolve beachheads that defnes Haraway as a posthumanist theorist, and her work is aligned with Wolfe’s in that they are inclined towards animal studies and in particular literary and theoretical subjects that work to elide the human/animal divide. As such, a major element of both theorists’ projects is to question essentialist notions and categorical distinctions concerning the fgure of the ‘humanist’ human. Specifcally, in light of the current topic, and bearing in mind Haraway’s argument regarding the shrinking territory of human uniqueness, we might similarly ask – what is the feature that absolutely separates Man from the Animal, and of what nature is this feature? A counterintuitive but instructive approach to answering this question is to reflect upon what we mean by the term ‘the Animal’ – especially if, as Tony Davies suggests, humanistic thinking tends to define the human ‘oppositionally, by contrast with what it is not’ (126). Derrida’s late lecture ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’ (1997) is invaluable when considering this distinction. As always, Derrida displays his usual distrust of reductive and implicitly hierarchical binaries. In this case, the binary is the division between the human and, essentially, everything else, and with customary élan, Derrida points out that the singular term ‘animal’ is a gloss of enormous scale and that we ‘have to envisage the existence of “living creatures,” whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity’ (47). Indeed, Beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than ‘The Animal’ or ‘Animal Life’ there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, or more precisely (since to say ‘the living’ is already too much or not enough), a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead. . . . These relations are at once intertwined and abyssal, and they can never be totally objectified. (31) This is an extraordinary insight, and although in Derrida’s long and complex lecture, it forms part of an argument that is slightly orthogonal to my own,10 its application here is crucial. Firstly, in place of a monolithic Other

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named ‘Animal’, Derrida draws attention to the extraordinarily numerous and various forms of life on Earth. Secondly, the attention that he pays not only to the living but to the dead, and the relations that exist between them, is allusive (in my reading) towards the eons of generations of organisms that have existed before the present time. These insights, when viewed under the light of Darwinian natural selection, emphasise two primary points that are crucial to the argument to follow. The frst is that Life (another capitalised term that is all too inadequate) consists of incommensurable and ever-evolving multitudes of creatures, each with their own particular temporarily adaptive niches. It is endlessly heterogeneous, and endlessly protean.11 The second is that natural selection, as a process, produces extraordinary complexity over extraordinary timescales. These two propositions, as well as the preceding questions about the nature/culture divide, allow for the formulation of two tentative conclusions. We may accept that while (as Haraway notes) the various proposed categorical barriers between man and beast have been breached, it cannot be denied that Homo sapiens is uniquely gifted with a degree of intensity regarding language, self-consciousness, forward planning, and cultural adeptness that no other species can currently approach. This would seem to be our particular adaptive niche. We may also consider it very possible – and in fact, given Derrida’s critique, potentially quite likely – that the uniquely linguistic or literary nature of Homo sapiens, despite being a product (adaptive or not) of natural selection, cannot adequately imaginatively deal with the aforementioned complexity and scale of evolutionary time.12 We may say ‘The Animal’ out of unacknowledged hubris or reductiveness, but we may also do so because neither language nor our cognitive faculties can possibly encompass the heterogeneous complexity and scale of the natural world.13 These are claims that the humanism expressed in Pico’s work, for example, cannot answer, because they imbricate the supposedly ethereal and unique human faculties within the evolutionary process. With both humanist and posthumanist positions now defined, we may here move back to Vonnegut and Galapagos. Given the preceding evidence, I propose two working points of contention in the vision of humanism which I have outlined and with which I argue Vonnegut’s novel engages. The first is the idea that reason, intellect, self-consciousness, or advanced culture are inherently desirable and are in some sense at the top of the pole – a goal to be linearly progressed towards, whether in a philosophical, theological, or evolutionary sense. The second is that these qualities, which are considered perfected if not unique in humanity, are poles apart from ‘nature’, whether that word refers to planets, plants, rocks, stars, animals, or any other Big Other against which we may care to define ourselves. Even if we now understand that language and culture are not entirely unique to humanity, we may still find solace in the notion that there is something valuable in the intensity of our imaginative self-consciousness and particularly – given the content of Galapagos and

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the current topic of study – our unique state of literariness. Vonnegut’s Darwinian novel tackles these assumptions head on, and its particularly posthuman ethos finds them wanting.

Vonnegut and Darwin Vonnegut was, in general, somewhat ambivalent towards Darwin and his theory. References to Darwin pepper his published interviews and essays, and the general tack of his expressed views tends towards a conflation of the theory of natural selection with social Darwinism. His 1973 interview with Playboy is typical of this ambivalence; while describing writers as ‘specialized .  .  . evolutionary cells’ in the body politic (which, notably, ‘aren’t in control of what [they] do’), he nevertheless expresses serious reservations about Darwin himself: I’m not very grateful for Darwin, although I suspect he was right. His ideas make people crueler. Darwinism says to them that people who get sick deserve to be sick, that people who are in trouble must deserve to be in trouble. When anybody dies, cruel Darwinists imagine we’re obviously improving ourselves in some way. And any man who’s on top is there because he’s a superior animal. That’s the social Darwinism of the last century, and it continues to boom. (Conversations, 76) On the one hand, Vonnegut is accurate here in his description of the assumptions of social Darwinism, an interpretation of Darwinian evolutionary theory that is popularly held to stem from Herbert Spencer’s famous ‘survival of the fttest’.14 The social concerns that he expresses here are wholly consonant with his usual deterministic views regarding deserve and blame. On the other, the lack of clarifcation regarding the drastic misuse of Darwin’s work as presented here, and in interviews later in his life in which much the same sentiment is expressed, is troubling. In as much as natural selection is directly relevant to the deterministic ethos that informs his moral outlook, it could even be taken as a missed opportunity. Darwin’s ideas, properly understood, could perhaps just as easily make people kinder. Nevertheless, Vonnegut would occasionally make clarifcations regarding his stance in a manner that would suggest a more nuanced understanding. In a 1987 interview, after the publication of Galapagos, he quotes his son Mark (‘We’re here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is’) while speculating that ‘The Darwinian answer, of course, would be that nature doesn’t approve of this sort of sentimentality, and that really you should rough other people up and test them some’. However, he here immediately reverses course, noting that ‘that’s social Darwinism; it has nothing to do with Charles Darwin. It’s a misreading of Darwinism’ (263).

110 Environment and Evolution It is hard to tell if these expressions of mistrust and doubt regarding Darwin are indicative of Vonnegut’s actual stance regarding evolution or whether they are an expression of his sardonic and often perverse sense of humour. He was perfectly capable of giving inflammatory responses purely for the sake of provocation. Nevertheless, unpublished evidence does suggest that the consequences and ramifications of Darwin’s work played on his mind from a far earlier age than previously recognised. The History 201 syllabus that Vonnegut undertook at the age of 23 mentions Darwin’s On the Origin of Species as an example of the imaginative faculty required for history (natural or otherwise) but does so in the introductory notes. Over a hundred pages (and presumably weeks or months) later, in a section on Roman historiography, and apropos of nothing in particular, can be found marginalia (accompanied by a typical doodle of a stern face) that reads, ‘Darwinism gave scientific fortification to “progress”’.15 Its incongruous position is perhaps suggestive that questions regarding Darwinism were a preoccupation of the young Vonnegut. Similarly, the inverted quotation marks around the term ‘progress’ appear indicative of Vonnegut’s usual dismissive attitude towards Whiggish ideas of historical progress. They may also serve a double purpose here; as with the back and forth positioning of his later interviews, the implied scepticism may also refer to the idea that ‘progress’ is somehow implicit in the mechanism of natural selection. Certainly, by the time Vonnegut began writing Galapagos in the early 1980s, it is clear that he had spent time reading and investigating the theory of evolution and Darwin’s actual writing. He was in contact with the famous palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, and science populariser Stephen Jay Gould, noting that ‘we tend to like each other’ and that Gould had ‘dropped me a note [about Galapagos], saying it was pretty good science’ (Letters, 316). He took an extended trip to the Galapagos islands before beginning work on the novel. A few months later, in a speech at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, he would note that what the visit impressed upon him (and on Darwin) was ‘how much time Nature has in which to accomplish simply anything. If we desolate this planet, Nature can get life going again. All it takes is a few million years or so, the wink of an eye to Nature’ (Fates, 145). Bo Pettersson, with characteristic attention to detail, notes that Vonnegut quotes verbatim (though without citation!) from The Voyage of the Beagle in Galapagos (355).16 Indeed, it seems reasonable to surmise that Vonnegut felt it necessary to remain as accurate as possible to Darwin’s actual theories (rather than their popular understanding). In a letter to Peter Reed, he explained that Galapagos was ‘a perfect son-of-a-bitch’ to write, ‘since I have to be responsible as a biologist as well as a storyteller’ (Letters, 303). It is perhaps this dedication to scientific fidelity that contributed to the muted response the novel received from critics and the arts; certainly Vonnegut suspected as much, noting that ‘frivolous

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scientific speculation is . . . little appreciated’ and that critics ‘who have come up through English departments don’t like science mixed in with novels . . . [since] it could so easily spoil a tale’ (309). Even as friendly a critic as William Rodney Allen could not help but note that Galapagos is as ‘coldly cerebral as a textbook in biochemistry’ (Conversations, XIII). This perceived incompatibility between literary merit and scientific accuracy is notable, and is not necessarily unfair. Even for a Vonnegut novel, Galapagos is particularly flat and affectless in tone. The contrast between the ‘contemporary’ action, which is mostly concerned with a very compressed period of time and the ‘future’ sections, which are concerned with the progression of natural selection across a million years, is disorientating; the structure of the novel does not allow for much in the way of reader identification with the novel’s small dramatis personae. This is, perhaps, inevitable given the novel’s subject matter. In the related context of ecological writing, Richard Kerridge notes that ‘conventional plot structures require forms of solution and closure that seem absurdly evasive when applied to ecological questions with their extremes of timescale and complexities of interdependence’ (99), and much the same can be said for ‘evolutionary’ writing. Vonnegut’s Galapagos, a hybrid text, may be scientifically semi-plausible, but its literary qualities are in danger of becoming vestigial. Whether this is a flaw, however, is dependent on the epistemological paradigm under which one views it. The novel may not be traditionally aesthetically satisfying, but its richly paradoxical status (as a literary artefact that problematises the very existence of culture itself) is nevertheless able to gesture towards, though never fully portray, a form of life radically different to our own.

Galapagos Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Galapagos is that it is a thoughtful literary work that questions the long-term value of thought and literature, a novel that scorns the ability to narrativise. Mother Night and Galapagos’s preceding and succeeding novels, Deadeye Dick (1982) and Bluebeard (1987), can be broadly categorised as being concerned with the inner workings and psychology of their protagonists – small in scale, limited in scope, and about as intimate and personal as a Vonnegut novel can be. Galapagos, by contrast, cleaves more closely to the synoptic Vonnegut of The Sirens of Titan (1959) or Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and despite its first-person narrative perspective, its characters are essentially (and almost explicitly) little more than gears in the mechanism of the novel’s plot – or, indeed, in ‘the earthling part of the clockwork of the universe’ (Galapagos, 233). This is appropriate, or even necessary, for a story focused on natural selection; even when questions of individual personalities or selves are raised in the narrative, they are almost always explicitly subordinated on the formal level to the novel’s overall structure and

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on the diegetic level to the selective pressures and timescales of evolution. Gillian Beer notes, in her seminal monograph Darwin’s Plots (2009), that the ethical problem of the individual in the context of natural selection can only be resolved via appeal to ‘selflessness’. The theory of evolution, in its vulgar form, lends itself easily to egoism and supremacist rhetoric; it can provide ‘a grounding vocabulary for colonialism’ (XXI), for instance, or for the libertarian capitalist practice that Vonnegut himself decries as American social Darwinism. Darwin’s answer was to distinguish between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ selection, remarking that ‘Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends’ (Origin, 69), which, as Beer notes, denotes an ethical selflessness, ‘the sustaining action of mother or nurse’ (XXII). By contrast, however, Beer also draws attention to the view presented by Daniel Dennett in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), in which Darwin’s theory is recast from the narrative to the ‘algorithmic’, which he characterises as having ‘substrate neutrality’, ‘underlying mindlessness’, and ‘guaranteed results’ (50–51). Here, ‘selflessness’ is not an ethical concept but instead refers (in Beer’s terms) to ‘impervious process, selfless because without self, automatic only’ (Plots XXII). Dennett is worth quoting at length on this point: Here, then, is Darwin’s dangerous idea; the algorithmic level is the level that best accounts for the speed of the antelope, the wing of the eagle, the shape of the orchid, the diversity of species, and all other occasions of wonder in the world of nature.  .  .  . No matter how impressive the products of the algorithm, the underlying process consists of nothing but a set of individually mindless steps succeeding each other without the help of any intelligent supervision; they are ‘automatic’ by definition: the workings of an automaton. (59) Something of this ‘dangerous idea’ is in evidence in Galapagos, and its mindless automaticity partly accounts for the lack of ‘human interest’ in the structure of its narrative. Indeed, as Paul Sheehan argues, narrative structure itself is a kind of battleground between the poles of Darwin’s humanist-infected description and Dennett’s inexorable mechanism. Sheehan argues that narrative is a complex and often uneasy combination of what he terms ‘voice’ and ‘machine’. Though narrative ‘works to the extent that it can replace contingency and uncertainty with necessity and inevitability’, producing ‘chains of events that compel and that stimulate anticipation’, these elements can nevertheless work to lessen the ‘human’ by ‘evacuating voice from its mechanical performance’ (2002, 11). For Sheehan, ‘voice’ consists of the element of chance, surprise, or unlikeliness in a narrative – the unexpected humanising, individualising features that separate a particular narrative from generic and linguistic expectations (12). Ultimately, ‘narrative is itself partly “inhuman”,

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partly mechanical: if there were nothing machinelike about narrative formations, they would not possess us the way they do’, but at the same time, because of its ‘vocal’ infections, ‘narrative cannot be compelled into supplying the structures needed’ to properly express para-human domains, including ‘animal-human evolutionarism’ (181). That is not to say, however, that different texts may not come closer to or further from either pole. Galapagos, by virtue of its being a text concerned with evolution and the narrativising instinct itself, attempts to recapitulate the devastating implication of Darwinian evolution – that there is simply no narrative, no meaningful progression, in the macroscopic process of natural selection. Paul Sheehan perspicaciously summarises the difference between ‘evolution’ as it is commonly understood (which he identifes with Lamarckian theory) and that of actual Darwinian thought: Firstly, there is the path of progress and purpose, presupposing if not a designer then at least some kind of design, a pattern of chances that can be made to mean. It is the path, in short, of one thing out of another. The second version abjures inherent meaning. It shows evolutionary change as pure contingency, based on mechanism – the mechanism of natural selection. Blind chance replaces meaning, in a series of (natural) law-abiding accidents, without necessity or automatic signification. It is, determinedly, one thing after another. (38) Contingency, in the Darwinian sense, is not the intervention of meaning or intention, as it would be under the category of ‘voice’; it is all ‘machine’ and no ‘voice’ .  .  . pure impersonality, pure mechanism.  .  .  . Without the anthropomorphic cognates of memory and teleology, there cannot be mutual implication of temporal changes. This is the sense in which Darwin took narrative out of nature. (38) Vonnegut’s text certainly assents to this powerful insight but does so by attempting, despite inevitable diffculty or even impossibility, to put nature into narrative, to give the ‘dangerous’ algorithm of Darwinian evolution as fair an airing as narrative might allow, and to resist the popular conception of ‘evolution’ that, in Sheehan’s words, ‘represents a concerted (and successful) attempt to give the random, blindly produced, nonhuman shape of our species development a human countenance’ (55). Galapagos, I argue, represents an attempt to express this underlying, purely mechanistic ‘clockwork’ (to use Vonnegut’s own phrase), both in narrative form and in narrative content. As such, the confluence between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ selection (or ‘voice’ and ‘machine’, or ‘ethical’ and ‘algorithmic’ selflessness) is one of

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the prime movers of the novel’s plot; the vast influences of both cultural and evolutionary forces conjoin to determine the future of humanity. And, in line with Dennett’s all-powerful algorithmic mechanism, the latter eventually utterly subsumes the former. The ‘contemporary’ parts of the novel tell the tale of a ragtag group of survivors who are shipwrecked on the Galapagos islands, after fleeing the mainland amidst violence and civil breakdown. This chaos is precipitated by a global financial crisis, and the (as yet unnamed) narrator, speaking from a future perspective, is quick to ascribe this deadly upheaval to ‘the only real villain in my story: the oversize human brain’ (G, 216). Here, the results of ‘artificial’ selection – or social Darwinism, as Vonnegut himself might term it – are plain to see, and while they are both as inexorable and contingent as ‘natural’ selection, they are also fatefully arbitrary: This financial crisis, which could never happen today, was simply the latest in a series of murderous twentieth-century catastrophes which had originated entirely in human brains. From the violence people were doing to themselves and each other, and to all other living things, for that matter, a visitor might have assumed that the environment had gone haywire, and that the people were in such a frenzy because Nature was about to kill them all. But the planet a million years ago was as moist and nourishing as it is today. . . . All that had changed was people’s opinion of the place. (28) This passage is a typical example of the prevalent motif of the novel – that the human brain, in its currently existing, ‘oversized’ state, may be approaching the end of its usefulness as an adaptive trait. The full ramifcations of this thesis only become fully visible from the far-future perspective of the narrator, and I will investigate this posthuman concept in the following. For now, however, it is important simply to recognise that this element of the catastrophic events that precipitate Galapagos’s plot is here coded as ‘artifcial’ only because it has originated from the opinions of human beings; that these opinions emerge from ‘brains’ rather than minds, however, hints at an overarching biological/materialist determinism. This is only made more explicit when the second, and more devastating of events to befall humanity, is made clear. The plot of Galapagos requires an evolutionary ‘bottleneck’ in the human population, which in turn calls for the widespread eradication of humanity.17 Several Vonnegut scholars, including as expert a critic as Jerome Klinkowitz (2004, 129), have assumed that the extinction of contemporary humanity in the novel was caused by nuclear war, a typical device that metonymically serves to emphasise human political or technological hubris or human aggression or stupidity. This is, overall, a reasonable assumption to make regarding Vonnegut’s numerous end-of-the-world scenarios. In Cat’s Cradle

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(1963) or Slapstick (1976), for instance, the precipitating cause at least begins in conscious, scientifc endeavour. In fact, the agent that wipes out humanity in Galapagos is avowedly non-human from its earliest conception. Instead of Ice-nine or the results of secret Chinese experiments, it is instead ‘some new creature, invisible to the naked eye’ (later confrmed as a bacterium) that, while generally harmless, ‘was eating up all the eggs in human ovaries’ and would remain untreatable, causing the slow but inevitable decline of the majority of humankind. Signifcantly, the frst case is recorded ‘at the annual Book Fair at Frankfurt, Germany’ (G, 132), a celebration of one of the crowning achievements of the human brain – the transcendent power of literature, intellect, and culture. The appearance of something wholly other, orthogonal to its originating context, signals the rapid decline of consciousness, literariness, and imagination in Galapagos, and Vonnegut demonstrates the rapidly withering adequacy of intelligence for survival in short order. To do so, Vonnegut employs two differing techniques and subjects, one constantly recurring and the other hinted at only obliquely. These two approaches map, roughly, onto the two time periods portrayed in Galapagos – that of the ‘present’ day and that of the far future. Each is worthy of extended discussion.

The Era of Big Brains Galapagos is easily Vonnegut’s most intertextual novel. Quotations spanning the entire history of Western literary culture, from Plato, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Johnson, and Rabelais to Byron, Tennyson, Conrad, Kipling, and Dickens, provide a constant counterpoint to the narrative. Formally, these quotations serve as a kind of ironic commentary, especially when they are directly utilised by the narrator, so, for instance, John Heywood’s ‘All is well that ends well’ immediately follows the narrator’s proleptic list of people who are about to enter ‘the blue tunnel’ to heaven (136). Diegetically, they stem from the portable computer named Mandarax, developed by the (soon to be late) programmer Zenji Hiroguchi, which, by chance rather than conscious design, accompanies the group of survivors to the Galapagos Islands. Mandarax is developed to act as a communication facilitator, a simultaneous translator capable of understanding over a thousand languages; serve as a highly accurate clock and perpetual calendar; diagnose diseases; ‘name on command important events which happened in any given year’; and ‘recall on command any one of twenty thousand popular quotations from literature’ (55). It contains, essentially, the sum total of human knowledge and culture. Nevertheless, it is of remarkably little utility to the beleaguered survivors, who each demonstrate, in varying ways, the rapidly increasing inadequacy of cultural interaction and advanced intelligence in the face of changing circumstances. Most of them, for instance, are liars, whether to others or to themselves, a trait that is indicative of higher orders of intelligence.18 James Wait, for

116 Environment and Evolution instance, is a consummate con man, a ‘millionaire . . . with interest-bearing savings accounts under various aliases in banks all over North America’ whose ‘three-kilogramme brain’ is ‘brilliantly duplicitous’ (15–16). Wait makes his living by swindling lonely widows and the compassionate. He is well adapted to the complexities of social interaction. Indeed, he is depicted, at the very beginning of the novel, as a kind of brightly coloured mimic, intentionally dressing as ‘a caricature of a North American tourist in the tropics’, a hapless ingénue, leaving the price tag on his clothes as ‘bait’ for kindly strangers (15). In the relative equilibrium of civil society, this human Peckhamian mimic,19 a kind of angler fish for the less cunning, is able to thrive. Yet his patter and habitual dissemblance is ultimately of little survival value. James Wait, ‘Nature’s experiment with purposeless greed’ (71), is laid low by an ‘inherited defective heart’ (196) during the chaos of the survivors’ escape from the mainland and dies as he lived, professing love and spinning complex fabulations to the widowed Mary Hepburn. It is only at the very end of his life that he realises the nature of the pitiless mechanism of natural selection, a mechanism that cannot be bargained with or lied to. He notes that I used to think I was [a survivor]. . . . Now I’m not so sure. I guess everybody who isn’t dead yet is a survivor. . . . There are all these people bragging about how they’re survivors, as though they’re something special. But the only kind of person who can’t say that is a corpse. (190) Here, at least, one of the fundamental tenets of evolutionary adaptation is laid bare – a trait or ability which, in Wait’s case generally consists of rhetoric, confabulation, and deceit, is only useful until it isn’t. There are no perpetually winning strategies. As noted, other characters turn this skill inwards, for reasons of vulnerability or pride. An instructive example is Adolf von Kleist, the vainglorious captain of the ship Bahía de Darwin, which the ragtag group use to escape the chaos of the mainland. In the words of the narrator, Adolf von Kleist ‘did not know shit from Shinola about navigation, the Galapagos Islands, or the operation and maintenance of a ship that size’ (114). His function on board the vessel (originally intended for a variety of celebrities) was to act as a glorified cocktail entertainer. Intending to head to the military base at Baltra after their escape, the captain attempts to navigate by the Sun and stars. Predictably, he becomes hopelessly lost, but his intelligence, far from providing a means to mitigate the situation, instead worsens it: Reality intruded now. A very real sun was coming up. There was one small trouble with the sun. The Captain had imagined all night that

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he was sailing due west, which meant that the sun would be rising squarely astern. This particular sun, however, was astern, all right, but also very much to starboard. So he turned the ship to port until the sun was where it was supposed to be. His big brain, which was responsible for the error he corrected, assured his soul that its mistake was minor and very recent, and had happened because the stars were dimmed by dawn. His big brain wanted the respect of his soul as much as he wanted the respect of his passengers. (189) The metaphorical split between the ‘brain’ and the ‘soul’ is used elsewhere in Galapagos, as well as in several other of Vonnegut’s novels, and seems to be generally analogous to the difference between ‘intelligence’ (in the narrowest sense) and ‘self-awareness’.20 So, for instance, Mary Hepburn’s frst husband, Roy, dying of dementia, has a moment of deathbed clarity similar to that of his successor James Wait, realising that ‘the human soul’ is ‘the part of you that knows when your brain isn’t working right . . . there wasn’t anything I could do about it, but I always knew’ (43). Signifcantly, he also says that animals do not have this awareness. What is remarkable about von Kleist’s case is that his immediate assumption is that reality itself is wrong, rather than his own interpretation. His attempts to ‘read’ the celestial bodies for information fails utterly, but his self-awareness – or perhaps in this case, selfconsciousness – can only accept that the trouble is with the sun. Roy’s soul can recognise that something is badly wrong, but can do nothing to change it; the captain’s cannot accept news that might be injurious to its ego. Animals do not have souls, and they also do not have big brains. The obvious assumption is that the two are linked. Though they may lack self-consciousness, any salmon, arctic tern, or monarch butterfy could easily achieve what von Kleist cannot, and in part, this may be because they lack self-consciousness. Despite (or rather, because of) his oafish incompetence and egotism, the captain’s mistake leads to the survivors landing on the Galapagos Islands. As the far-future narrator notes, although this was ‘the stuff of low comedy at the time, [it] has turned out to be of incalculable value to present-day humankind’, leading, inadvertently, to the survival and evolution of the species on Santa Rosalia. His conclusion is stark and indicative of the post-literary world to come, as generic conventions themselves become defunct – ‘So much for comedy. So much for supposedly serious stuff’ (114). The last vestiges of culture are rapidly shed by the remaining survivors. Amongst the group are several young girls of the (fictional) Kanka-bono Amazonian tribe, who speak only their own language and are considered inscrutable and indistinguishable by the others, as well as the Japanese-speaking Hisako Hiroguchi, the pregnant wife of the late Zenji, and the blind American heiress Selena MacIntosh. Few speak each

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other’s language or understand each other’s culture. Nevertheless, each, along with Mary Hepburn and the captain, contribute in varying ways to their small island community and to the ultimate evolution of Homo sapiens into their future, posthuman state. This process is haphazard and unplanned; the selection pressures are spatially and temporally widespread and ultimately amoral in providence. Hisako’s daughter, Akiko, is born on Santa Rosalia and bears a phenotypic mutation caused by her mother’s exposure to radiation at Hiroshima. Akiko is covered in a ‘fine, silky pelt like a fur seal’s’ (53). The narrator makes clear that she is but one of Zenji Hiroguchi’s offspring, along with the computer Mandarax. Yet her mutation, which on the mainland may seem an imperfection, is adaptive in a manner that the cultural repository can never attain: When Akiko became an adult on Santa Rosalia, she would be very much like her mother on the inside, but in a different sort of skin. The evolutionary sequence from Gokubi to Mandarax, by contrast, was a radical improvement in the contents of a package, but with few perceptible changes in the wrapper. Akiko was protected from sunburn, and from the chilly water when she swam, and the abrasiveness of lava when she chose to sit or lie down – whereas her mother’s bare skin was wholly defenceless against these ordinary hazards of island life. But Gokubi and Mandarax, as different as they were inside, inhabited nearly identical shells. (54) In a perhaps counterintuitive move, Akiko’s biological, adaptive exteriority is here contrasted with the synthetic, static inwardness of Mandarax, the novel’s synecdoche for human culture as a whole. Generally, we might consider culture to be endlessly malleable and rapidly shifting, with biology representing, for all intents and purposes, a near timeless constant. But in an environment and situation such as the one that confronts the survivors, trapped on a desolate island with severely limited opportunities for communication, the trappings of culture become rapidly obsolete. The medical diagnoses and apposite quotations contained within Mandarax are responsive to situations only within a wider cultural context. Bereft of the complex and multifarious social interactions of the mainland, all the higher learning in the world becomes stagnant and non-interactive. The most indicative episode occurs when Mary Hepburn and the captain mistake the small computer for a radio (one of the few functions it cannot perform). The captain speaks into Mandarax’s microphone, intoning the word ‘Mayday’ repeatedly: As it happened, they had tapped into that part of the instrument’s intellect . . . which knew so many quotations on every conceivable subject, including the month of May. On the little screen these utterly mystifying words appeared:

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In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, fowering Judas, To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk Among whispers . . . – T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) (199) Both Mary and the captain are momentarily ‘able to believe . . . that they had made contact with the outside world, although no response to an SOS could have come that fast and been so literary’ (200). However, on further experimentation and on receiving further fne quotations from Housman, Hammerstein, and Poe, the truth becomes clear to the survivors. No contact has been made, and no survival value salvaged. The signs and symbols that Mandarax produces do not correspond to their situation; they are outstripped by context. To the survivors, the machine’s contributions are at best irrelevant, and as the years progress, only Mary and Akiko fnd use for it as an amusement; ‘if it weren’t for them, the Captain or Selena or Hisako, feeling mocked by its useless advice or inane wisdom or ponderous efforts to be humorous, would have pitched it into the ocean long ago’ (221). Eventually, the captain does exactly that. As an old, dementia-riddled man, exclaiming that ‘I hate this little son of a bitch more than anything in the whole world’ (231), he pitches it into the sea – ‘as the new Adam, it might be said, his fnal act was to cast the Apple of Knowledge into the deep blue sea’ (56).

Writing on Air It is easy to read Edenic allusions in Galapagos, or, indeed, to read the novel as an Edenic tale as a whole. Leonard Mustazza in particular, in the appropriately titled Forever Pursuing Genesis (1990), notes in the chapter ‘Nature’s Eden’ that Galapagos represents something like ‘a backward mythic movement from the corrupt world to something like the Edenic state’ (173). Similarly, Robert Tally argues that in Galapagos, ‘Vonnegut at last overcomes his misanthropic humanism, not by abandoning the mis in “misanthropy,” but by abandoning the anthropos’ (2011, 132). This is quite right, and Tally is also quite correct in referring to Galapagos as ‘posthuman’; nevertheless, his argument that the novel embraces ‘a sense of hope and futurity that one normally associates with a utopian promise’ (132), depicting a ‘humanity [that] finally finds itself in vibrant harmony with the natural world’ (133), is an accurate reading but one that slightly misses what I consider to be truly unique about Galapagos. Tally argues that the novel is written in an ‘optative mood’ (144), a mood of hope, in which present-day folly might be overcome with the passage of time. As previously noted, I consider the tonal quality of the novel – shallow in affect and synoptic in perspective – belies this hopeful, wishful quality. As I will make clear, the novel does not depict a return to Eden or indeed a procession towards utopia. Nor does it necessarily depict a kind of reintegration with ‘the natural world’; questions of

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alienation from or identification with ‘nature’, whatever that may mean, are not only irrelevant but arelevant in Vonnegut’s posthuman future. It is not that it is or is not important that the future humans rediscover a form of the authentic, harmonious way of life. Rather, such questions are always-already a kind of category error, inescapably a consequence of cognitive and cultural structures that no longer exist on the Santa Rosalia of 1,001,986. At the risk of being glib, a utopia is a form of society, and that is not what is presented in Galapagos. Nor, I hasten to add, does Vonnegut present the future fate of humanity as a ‘retreat into the soulless oblivion of prehistoric life forms, engendering a loss of love, feeling, identity, and morality . . . a regression into a dehumanized state of being, where undifferentiated beings confuse wellbeing with a contentment of mindlessness’, as Lawrence Broer diagnoses (155). This kind of pearlclutching attachment to humanist values cannot help but miss the point of Vonnegut’s posthuman novel. Galapagos is more provocative when its posthuman future is read as neither a progression towards utopia nor a regression towards animality. Natural selection is far more alien, more ahuman, than either option suggests. To use a linguistic analogy, Galapagos is ultimately synchronic rather than diachronic.21 Were it not for the explicit historical timeline provided by the narrator, there would be no real way of discerning whether the ecological tableaux inhabited by the fisherfolk was based in the distant past, the far future, or even in some obscure spatial corner of the present-day Earth. The snapshots of humanity’s evolutionary future are not inherently embedded within a narrative progression. Indeed, there can be no narrative trajectory, no inevitable progress ‘up the evolutionary ladder’ in natural selection, and the possibility of this misunderstanding was a source of concern for Darwin himself. As David Knight notes, his follower Asa Gray, a Harvard botanist, believed that Darwin had ‘‘brought back teleology to natural history”’ (27), but this emphasis on progression was at odds with Darwin’s own understanding: the word ‘evolution’ was not used in the first edition of the Origin because to Darwin it smacked of design and purpose – it was a word used of the growth of the foetus, for example. He used ‘development’ instead, to indicate that he perceived not progress up some scale of nature (he disliked terms like ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ applied to organisms) but opportunistic filling of niches. (26) Darwin never gave ‘a glimpse of future forms: and rightly so, since it is fundamental to his argument that they are unforeseeable, produced out of too many variables to be plotted in advance’ (Beer, XIX). Vonnegut is not so circumspect, but the future that he envisions is just as possibly an image of the past or the present. It is ahistorical, not least because no-one

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in the distant future – barring the narrator – retains the narrativising trait required to historicise in the frst place. It is at this point that it is appropriate to examine more closely Vonnegut’s elusive narrator and the future over which he presides. He only obliquely refers to himself during the first ‘book’ of Galapagos, which is entitled ‘The Thing Was’; it is at the beginning of the second book, ‘The Thing Became’, that he is formally introduced. The narrator of Galapagos is Leon Trotsky Trout, son of the perennial Kilgore, and, in Vonnegut’s only concession to whimsy in the novel, he is a ghost (177). It is hard not to consider this supernatural element as a flaw in an otherwise scientifically semi-plausible novel. Nevertheless, his presence and nature are probably an intractable and unavoidable authorial concession in a work that at least attempts to subordinate the geological time and ahuman nature of natural selection to the demands of narrative fiction. As Vonnegut himself seemed to suggest, much like the process of evolution itself, Trout’s ghostly presence was the result of a long period of difficulty, experimentation, and iteration: That [writing Galapagos] was bashing and it was heavy bashing. The technical problems were very hard of how to make a story last a million years. Who’s going to observe it [point-of-view], because the reader is going to insist on knowing who the hell is watching this. As an atheist I couldn’t have God watch. So technically, it looked hopeless for a long time. The problems were enormous as to how the hell to get away with this. I had to kill everybody on the mainland, too, and get away with it. (Conversations, 251) Despite the slightly contrived element of his appearance, Leon is not only a reasonably effective device to get around the problems that timescale and complexity present to conventional narrative structure. The fact that he has existed, in one form or another, for 1,000,040 years, allows for comparisons between ‘contemporary’ humanity and their posthuman descendants; not coincidentally, it is Leon who colours the narrative with valuative judgements and is ultimately responsible for the moments of ‘optative mood’ that Tally detects in Galapagos. His lifetime experiences certainly explain his predilection towards casting the large human brain as the ‘villain’ of his story. The son of a bitter man, ‘Nature’s experiment with cynicism’ (G,71), Leon is a deserter from the United States Marines. He feels life ‘was a meaningless nightmare’ after shooting a grandmother in Vietnam. He remarks that ‘this episode made me sorry to be alive, made me envy stones. I would rather have been a stone at the service of the Natural Order’ (104–5). This emphasis on non-living materiality, coincident with his repeated references to ‘the clockwork of the universe’, is signifcant. Despite his position as the only remaining narrativising

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entity in existence in Galapagos, Leon identifes – as best he possibly can, given his intelligence and immaterial nature – with nonconscious, nonliving matter.22 Indeed, he haunts the Bahia de Darwin because of being decapitated in an industrial accident (34), literally losing his head, though remaining in thrall to his own ‘big brain’. It is unsurprising, given this narrator, that the history he ‘writes’ is a kind of hagiography for natural selection, its inevitable triumph over the evils of human intelligence, imagination, and culture. Nevertheless, this Manichean struggle is not quite born out in the events that Leon witnesses. Leon refers to the far-future, posthuman descendants of the original survivors as ‘fisherfolk’. They are seal-like creatures, with beaks and ‘arms [that] have become flippers in which the hand bones are almost entirely imprisoned and immobilised . . . studded with five purely ornamental nubbins’ (150–1). They came into being because ‘in the long run, the survivors [were] not the most ferocious strugglers but the most efficient fisherfolk’ (149), which is itself a more accurate demonstration of the notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ than the narrow, social Darwinist conception. As Beer notes, this simply means ‘the survival of those most fitted to survive; this implies not distinction, nor fullest development, but aptness to the current demands of their environment – and these demands may be for . . . [any] random quality’ (109). Most significantly, the most distinctive difference between the contemporary and future human (at least as far as a contemporary human might imagine) is the shrunken brain of the fisherfolk. However, strikingly, this is not because sentience has been directly selected against, in the way that Leon often implicitly or explicitly suggests: Those [fisherfolk] with hands and feet most like flippers were the best swimmers. Prognathous jaws were better at catching and holding fish than hands could ever be. And any fisherperson, spending more and more time underwater, could surely catch more fish if he or she were more streamlined, more bulletlike – had a smaller skull. (G, 234) Again, it is not that sentience, for all its evils or its virtues, has become maladaptive. It is simply a contingent casualty of the particular conditions of the environment that the generations of humans on Santa Rosalia encounter. The posthuman fsherfolk have no more ‘forgotten’ culture than modern humans have ‘forgotten’ tails or the ability to knuckle-walk. This is far more radical and destabilising an idea than other far-future fables of modifed humans – such as, for example, The Time Machine (1895) – which are concerned, implicitly or explicitly, with current social conditions and their consequences.23 In contrast, Galapagos is not a drama of loss, fall, or degeneration or indeed of redemption, of paradise regained. In this respect, it demonstrates its evolutionary descent

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from Darwin’s Origin. As Beer notes, ‘it would be easy to make either an optimistic or a pessimistic selection from The Origin. This poignant tension between happiness and pain, a sense simultaneously of the natural world as exquisite and gross, rank and sensitive, constantly subverts the poise of any moralised description of it’ (94). The evolutionary subject of Galapagos outstrips – or rather, sidesteps – traditional humanist (or, indeed, the humanities’) concerns regarding ethics, meaning, narrative, or the primacy of individual selfhood. This presents something of a problem when these ideas are explored in narrative fiction. As previously noted, the two interwoven elements of the novel – the near-contemporary and the proleptic far-future – are marked by differing textual features and focuses. The contemporary makes up the majority of the text and is marked by the contributions of Mandarax, the last repository of human knowledge, and its series of learned and literary quotations dwindling into insignificance. The latter, far-future element, meanwhile, is for the most part only glimpsed at, and the small tableaux that are presented are only barely fit for narrative. In the most practical sense, this is because there is so little of Sheehan’s ‘voice’, so little chance or individuality, in their composition. Vonnegut’s fisherfolk are recognisably human in a few rudimentary aspects – they still hiccup, comfort the sick with ‘soothing tones of voice’ (182), and find farts uproariously funny (165) – but their narrative function in Galapagos is inevitably minimal and opaque. In contrast to the contemporary human characters, they are usually referred to by Leon only obliquely. No fisherfolk drama, competition, scheming, or intrigue is recorded. They do not speak or have names. As Leon notes, ‘all that anybody has in the way of a reputation anymore is an odor which, from birth to death, cannot be modified’ (84), non-syntactical markers that are necessarily excluded from the text. Again, they are, essentially, a very poor subject for narrative, and mention of them is marked by a formal repetitiveness that recapitulates the algorithmic automaticity of Sheehan’s ‘machine’. Leon’s constant rhetorical questions, for instance, are a particular exemplar. Their repeated comparisons with contemporary humanity only highlight the paucity of ‘voice’ available with regard to the fisherfolk. It is as if narrative interest must be hedged by more familiar humanist concerns: It is hard to imagine anybody’s torturing anybody nowadays. How could you even capture somebody you wanted to torture with just your flippers and your mouth? (118) Even if they found a grenade or a machine gun or a knife or whatever left over from olden times, how could they ever make use of it with just their flippers and their mouths? (123)

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The arts and machinery of culture have been subsumed by the ‘machinery’ of evolution; they are inexorably made redundant by its vast algorithmic contingencies and timescales, and this is refected in Leon’s repetitive descriptions. In this, and in other repetitive sequences, the glimpses of the future in Galapagos can only dumbly, automatically respond to the present. Whatever uniqueness or vitality the posthuman fsherfolk may possess, it cannot be given proper voice in narrative, that hybrid medium that cannot help but betray its own complicity in humanist concerns. As noted earlier, Galapagos is not a traditionally entertaining novel. Nor is it edifying, in the sense of providing direct moral instruction. Its ‘point’, like its evolutionary subject, is difficult to discern upon casual perusal, and if one were forced to come to a conclusion, it would be tempting to read the novel as simply anti-rationalist in its purview; the moral one may derive from the novel for everyday living could (facetiously) be something like ‘don’t think so much, it’s ecologically unsound’ or even ‘stop being conscious; it’s generally painful’. These are both obvious absurdities. A more nuanced expression which might stem from the radically levelling, lateral perspective presented in Galapagos would perhaps resemble something like the argument Mary Midgley makes in her seminal Beast and Man (1978): What is supposed to be that good about cleverness? Being clever is not obviously so much more important than being kind, brave, friendly, patient, and generous that it inevitably confers an instant right of general massacre [of other creatures]? (255–256) Even here, however, the argument necessarily remains couched in philosophy and ethics, within the comforting human arena of right value and right action, even as the alternative values (or practices? Traits?) Midgley suggests have demonstrable roots in animal behaviour. Indeed, her argument is made in the form of a rhetorical question, an invitation for counterfactuals, which is echoed in Leon’s description of the ways in which the imaginative Big Brains of yesteryear endlessly, obsessively cogitated: [The compulsion to experiment], in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time brains: They would tell their owners,

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in effect, ‘Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It’s just fun to think about.’ And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it – have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular . . . and on and on. (G, 213) This is, of course, the darker side of the uniquely human ability to dream up scenarios, alternatives, possible futures, wishes, or fantasies. No equivalence, ethical or otherwise, between these cruelties and Midgley’s plea to remain open to the possibility of alternate values is intended. But again, the fact remains that, in light of the posthuman evolutionary perspective of Galapagos, all of these questions remain within the sphere of one particular, contingent, and almost certainly temporary niche; currently occupied by primates with a particularly large cerebral cortex and fully opposable thumbs, both of which are currently more useful than streamlined skulls and fippers. But only for now.24 Indeed, what is simultaneously maddening and provocative, unattractive and intoxicating about Vonnegut’s Galapagos is its paradoxical nature; its attempt to portray the end of imagination and culture through the medium of imaginative fiction; its uniquely cold, scientific tone juxtaposed with an (admittedly imperfect) narrative voice that is, despite everything, humane and humanistic; its posthuman and posthumanist subject matter obscured by its conventional narrative. All of these features are perhaps best summarised by Leon’s last address to the reader, at the end of his million-year stint on Earth: I have written these words in air – with the tip of the index finger of my left hand, which is also air. My mother was left-handed, and so am I. There are no left-handed human beings any more. People exercise their flippers with perfect symmetry. . . . Does it trouble me to write so insubstantially, with air on air? Well – my words will be as enduring as anything my father wrote, or Shakespeare wrote, or Beethoven wrote, or Darwin wrote. It turns out they all wrote with air on air. (233) Writing on air with air, Leon’s words are no sooner written than erased.25 Though, non-diegetically, they are nevertheless written with ink, on a page, by Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel Galapagos; Leon’s fnal salutation still gestures towards a radical re-contextualisation of writing, of cultural practice. His inclusion of the literary, musical, and scientifc greats with his own account is in no way egotistical, nor is his emphasis on the laudable meant as a complimentary valediction for humanity and its accomplishments. Earlier in the novel, he readily and directly equates

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Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with stock market-induced famine, both equally the product of creativity (27). Life, in its barest and most allencompassing sense, goes on, but all else human is air on air. In a sense, it may appear that we have here returned, via the long way round, to the original humanist vision of knowledge, culture, art, rationality, and consciousness as ephemeral, impermanent, or protean. However, this is not the case. By reaffrming the materialist basis for human life and by resituating, if only paradoxically and provisionally, the entirety of human existence within the grinding determinative processes and timescales of natural selection, Galapagos demonstrates, obliquely, a notion that is diffcult to fully conceive of, or to fully accept. Its message is that the cultural instinct may well become, contingently, an evolutionary deadend, but there seems little to be done about this hypothesis. Once more, Vonnegut’s aim is not necessarily to suggest that we would all be happier if we were no longer self-conscious or linguistic creatures – which would be impossible to achieve in any case – but rather to gesture towards the limits (in practical, semiotic, epistemological, or temporal terms) of our cultural intelligence, and the minimalist textual presence of the future fsherfolk mirrors this inexpressible fnitude. Galapagos, as a literary work, can necessarily only portray in the negative the notion that culture, imagination, literature, art – in a word, sentience itself – is, from the perspective of natural selection, utterly provisional and only potentially advantageous, and in so doing, it implicitly places all the practices and tenets of humanistic thought squarely back in the realm of the material, the multitudinous, and the animal. Evolution did not conspire to bring about its apotheosis in the wisdom and dignity of man, and there is nothing intrinsically or permanently superior about the current adaptive niche we inhabit. What may come after us may have no need – without reference to competing values, for who would do the valuing? – for that which we consider most sacred.

Notes 1. The paramount example is the novelist Beatrice Keedsler in Breakfast of Champions (1973), who had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end. (194) This, Vonnegut contends, leads to people ‘doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books’ and why governments treat citizens as ‘bit-part players in their made-up tales’ (195). The protagonist of Deadeye Dick (1982) laments ‘that so many people try to make good stories out of their lives’, since ‘a story, after all, is

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as artificial as a mechanical bucking bronco in a drinking establishment’, and that ‘it may be even worse for nations to try to be characters in stories’ (198). In Bluebeard (1987), the realist painter Dan Gregory argues that ‘Painters – and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians . . . are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil’, which Rabo Karabekian considers ‘delusions of moral grandeur’, musing that ‘maybe the most admirable thing about the Abstract Expressionist painters . . . was their refusal to serve on such a court’ (126). 2. As Arthur Bradley notes, the translation is Gayatri Spivak’s. Bradley instead chooses to translate Derrida’s claim ‘more literally as “there is no outsidetext”’, since ‘it at least avoids the most misleading implication of Spivak’s version, namely, that literally nothing exists except textuality’. He also notes Martin McQuillan’s view that a more faithful (if less literal) translation would be ‘“there is nothing text-free”: there is nothing, in other words, that is not also a text’ (143). Separately though relatedly, Derrida’s infamous phrase can also mean ‘there is nothing outside context’, which, as Kathleen Davis notes, ‘makes the point that meaning . . . is a contextual event; meaning cannot be extracted from, and cannot exist before or outside of a specific context’ (Deconstruction and Translation, 2001, 9). 3. Rather, it is perhaps closer to Derrida’s intent to highlight how language is the definitive human problem, one that limits and infects all of our horizons, including that of language itself. The opening paragraph from On Grammatology (1977) is illustrative in this regard: However the topic is considered, the problem of language has never been simply one problem amongst others. But never as much as at present has it invaded, as such, the global horizon of the most diverse researches and the most heterogeneous discourses, diverse and heterogeneous in their intention, method and ideology. . . . It indicates, as if in spite of itself, that an historical-metaphysical epoch must finally determine as language the totality of its problematic horizon. It must do so not only because all that desire had wished to wrest from the play of language finds itself recaptured within that play, but also because, for the same reason, language is menaced in its very life, adrift in the threat of limitlessness, brought back to its own finitude at the very moment when its limits seemed to disappear, when it ceases to be self-assured, contained and guaranteed by the infinite signified which seemed to exceed it. (6) 4. Saul and James note that if one’s only tool is evolutionary psychology, as Carroll’s often seems to be, then everything begins to look like a breeding strategy: Carroll often makes the literary text subservient to a dominant discourse of a version of evolutionary psychology. While Darwin’s findings now unarguably have more enduring empirical validity than the findings of Freud or Marx, Carroll’s – admittedly ingenious, erudite, resourceful – practice thus tends, like the vulgar Marxist or Freudian literary criticism of old, to reduce the cognitive product of the text to an allegory of the theory that has been applied to interpret it. (11) Similarly, Katja Mellmann notes that the actual practice, however, [of Carroll’s approach], has concentrated strongly on thematics and mimetic narrative. The preferred objects of

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Environment and Evolution examination are, for instance, male conflict behaviour in old epics and female mating behaviour in nineteenth century realism – in short: topics and texts that are especially well suited to supporting the findings of evolutionary psychology. (302) Jon Adams points out that Carroll’s literary taste is generally geared towards the strictly canonical and that under his own terms, Carroll’s claims are tautological – ‘assuming that evolutionary psychology offers even a broadly correct account of human psychology, establishing that canonical literature fits the pattern gives us precisely this conclusion: it was written by a human’ (169). Most worryingly, Adams also notes that Carroll is often reactionary, especially with his comments regarding Foucault’s sexuality – since Carroll ‘appears to have locked himself into an account which measures the quality of an individual’s mind by its biological normality’, he understands homosexuality as ‘deviant’ from ‘Darwinian fitness’, which in turn leads to philosophically destructive and malignant thought (166). As Adams notes, One needn’t be sympathetic to Foucault’s intellectual agenda to find this style of argument disturbing. . . . Here, then, is the other, seedier side of the evolutionary psychology program . . . the apparent attempt to derive a normative ‘ought’ from a naturalistic ‘is.’ (167)

5. Vonnegut notes in Palm Sunday (1981) that It has been my experience with literary critics and academics in this country that clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance and childishness and cheapness to them. Any idea which can be grasped immediately is for them, by definition, something they knew all the time. (293, my italics) The obvious implication, upon consideration, is that the obvious is only obvious upon consideration, even if that consideration is elicited by an ‘obvious’ statement. 6. This certainly seems to have been the assumption of early evolutionary criticism. Frederick Crews notes that ‘evolutionary criticism is just one among many avenues of legitimate inquiry in our field, and one that needs to branch out from its early, potentially monotonous, preoccupation with the survival of Pleistocene psychology in modern works of art’ (XIII). Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, as just one example, argues from a perspective based in the evolutionary pressures of the Upper Pleistocene, arguing that ‘storytelling is a sufficiently ancient phenomenon to have evolved through the process of natural selection, and that storytelling might serve an adaptive function’ during the period (177). 7. Wolfe notes that although Hayles does indeed criticise the work of transhumanists such as Hans Moravec for simply displacing the autonomous liberal subject into digital realms, nevertheless, the net effect and critical ground tone of her book [How We Became Posthuman, 1999], as many have noted, are to associate the posthuman with a kind of triumphant disembodiment. Hayles’ use of the term, in other words, tends to oppose embodiment and the posthuman. (XV) 8. Among the ‘several’ humanisms listed by Davies are the following: The civic humanism of Confucian sages and quattrocento Italian citystates, the Qur’anic humanism of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, the Protestant

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humanism of sixteenth-century northern Europe, the rationalistic humanism that served the revolutions of enlightened modernity, and the romantic and positivistic humanisms through which the European bourgeoisies established their hegemony over it, the revolutionary humanism that shook the world and the liberal humanism that sought to tame it, the humanism of the Nazis and the humanism of their victims and opponents, the antihumanist humanism of Heidegger and the humanist anti-humanism of Foucault and Althusser, the secularist humanism of Huxley and Dawkins or the posthumanism of Gibson and Haraway. (140–141) 9. Freud has anticipated this argument by a century and added a third revolution, arguing in ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’ (1917) that modern man’s narcissistic self-love has been struck ‘three severe blows from the researches of science’ – that is, the ‘cosmological’ blow of Copernicus, the ‘biological’ blow of Darwin, and the ‘psychological’ blow of psychotherapy (Standard Edition, 17, 139–141). Beer does note that, for all its dispelling intentions, ‘Freud’s formulation of man’s dilemma is itself mythopoeic’ and that his assertion ‘arrests history. The magical number three belies the possibility of a fourth great wound’ – re-asserting the stasis that evolutionary theory specifically denies (9). 10. Derrida’s overall argument about the animal, which is at this point generally concerned with the philosophical and religious misrepresentation of the human/animal relationship throughout history, is an ethical one, particularly with regard to the both literal and linguistic mistreatment and abuse that is done to animals when they are considered as an undifferentiated whole. Nevertheless, characteristically, these ruminations inevitably reflect on the ‘humanity’ of the human, on whether ‘what calls itself human has the right rigorously to attribute to man, which means therefore to attribute to himself, what he refuses the animal’ (135). 11. The question of the ‘species problem’ has exercised taxonomists and naturalists for centuries; Darwin himself noted in the Origin that ‘I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties’ (46). In more recent years, Richards A. Richards has noted that What has happened recently reinforces this pessimism. The more we learn about biodiversity and all its complexity, the worse the problem seems to become. Instead of resolving differences in the use of species concepts, new information seems to have resulted in the multiplication of species concepts. (4) The boundaries between and within species are distinctly permeable and are in any case almost certainly based within conceptual categorisation rather than genuine biological distinctiveness. As Brent D. Mishler notes, ‘Gene pools (potential horizontal transfer of genes at some level of probability) usually occur at many nested levels within one lineage, and the most inclusive level is often higher than anyone would want to call species’ (113). 12. The evolutionary role of art (or lack of same) is a hotly contested topic in evolutionary criticism. Daniel Nettle pithily summarises the central contention when he notes that ‘Hard-nosed Darwinism seems to suggest people should be ceaselessly preoccupied with the perpetuation of their genes. So is drama helping them to do this? Or is it like a virus, which creeps under their defences and colonizes their attention?’ (56). Brian Boyd summarises the four main evolutionary accounts of art, as they currently stand:

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Environment and Evolution There are many evolutionary accounts of art . . . (1) art is not an adaptation but a byproduct of the evolution of human brains by natural selection (Stephen Pinker); (2) art is a product not of natural selection but of sexual selection (Geoffrey Miller); (3–4) art is an adaptation, its chief function social cohesion (Ellen Dissanayake) or individual mental organization (John Tooby and Leda Cosmides). (150)

13.

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Relevantly, one of Boyd’s criticisms of Pinker’s ‘cheesecake’ theory (in which art is a kind of shortcut or cheat to gain the pleasure associated with adaptive behaviours without performing them) is that ‘art as cheesecake seems an indulgent extra. But if art were so superfluous, how could it not have been selected against?’ (154). To which we might answer, in the context of the argument presented here, that it hasn’t yet. Cary Wolfe’s fascinating (if remarkably complex) work in animal studies and posthumanism is exemplary with regard to exploring this possibility. While space does not permit a full summary of his argument and approaches, his monographs Animal Rites (and in particular the chapter ‘In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion’) and What Is Posthumanism? (especially chapters ‘Language, Representation and Species’, ‘“Animal Studies”, Disciplinarity and the [Post]humanities’ and ‘Learning From Temple Grandin’) are essential reading with regard to the epistemological consequences and systemic structures of language and cognition. Spencer’s actual relationship with the school of thought that would come to be known as social Darwinism is, in fact, more complex than one might anticipate. As Thomas C. Leonard notes, although he is ‘the historian’s prototypical social Darwinian’ (214), Spencer, while tending towards the laissezfaire in economic matters, was also a fierce critic of militarism, resented the use of his famous phrase in justifying imperial wars, and was, in fact, a Lamarckian rather than Darwinian evolutionist (215). He cannot properly be called a ‘Darwinist’, and many of his ideas were in circulation long before Darwin’s discovery. Essentially, the relationships between the two schools of evolutionary theory and individualist and collectivist politics are multifarious and not necessarily causally connected. As Gregory Claeys argues, ‘In social and political thought Darwin reinforced the individualism of Spencer and Maine but also clearly paved the way for more collectivist notions of state activity’ (225). Vonnegut, Kurt. Box 21, Folder 21. School Material; History 201. Syllabus and Problems. University of Chicago Bookstore, June 1945. 153 pages. Vonnegut’s college textbook, with his annotations and doodles. Various related pages laid in. Vonnegut mss., 1941–2007. Lilly Library, Indiana University. Another indirect detail may have originated from Vonnegut’s reading of the Beagle journal. Several references to the dietary habits and stomach contents of Marine Iguanas (which the survivors eat as a kind of fermented seaweed broth) in Galapagos echo Darwin’s own investigations of the animals and their anatomy (1909, 409). As Hein, Schierup, and Wiuf define it, a population or genetic ‘bottleneck’ is ‘a severe but short-lasting decline in effective population size’; they are ‘normally associated with external catastrophic events such as an ice age or severe disease, but they can also be associated with the colonisation of a new habitat by a species’ (104). Vonnegut’s Galapagos survivors fit this definition perfectly. As Simon Baron-Cohen notes, ‘true’ deception – that is, a proactive strategy to elicit favoured outcomes in a novel situation which precludes simple causalassociative linkages – requires significant cognitive ability. As he notes,

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True deception assumes the deceiver knows that (1) other beings have minds, (2) different beings’ minds can believe different things are true (when only one of these is actually true), and (3) you can make another mind believe that something false is actually true. Defined in this way, one can see that deception is no trivial achievement! The deceiver needs to have the mental equipment to juggle different representations of reality. No wonder that scholars of animal behavior are wary of elevating a single instance of behavior to genuine deception, and prefer to reduce it to simpler mental processes like learned associations. (2007) 19. Peckhamian (or, more simply, ‘aggressive’) mimicry is a less common form of mimicry in the animal kingdom, in which predators or parasites mimic other, harmless species in order to trick prey or hosts into approaching. The deception involved in this mimicry, however, is commonly held to be unintentional, in contrast to Wait’s very conscious dissemblance. 20. So, for instance, in Breakfast of Champions, an analogous relationship between the ‘meat machine’ of the body and the ‘unwavering band of light’ of awareness (208) which is inherent to any animal, human or otherwise (204). Similarly, in Bluebeard, Rabo Karabekian (who, as an abstract artist, is in fact responsible for the meat/awareness imagery in BoC) again frequently refers to his ‘meat’ and his ‘soul’ (220). 21. Ferdinand de Saussure, in his ground-breaking Course in General Linguistics (1974), argues that ‘everything that relates to the static side of our science is synchronic; everything that has to do with evolution is diachronic. Similarly, synchrony and diachrony designate respectively a language-state and an evolutionary phase’ (81). One of Saussure’s analogies is that of a tree trunk; the synchronic is a cross section of the trunk at any given point, whereas the diachronic represents the vertical axis of the tree, its overall growth structure (87–88). Something similar, I claim, is at work in Galapagos. 22. Leon’s stated desire bears a resemblance to the ‘death drive’ elucidated by Freud in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (2003). In Freud’s controversial later work, he posits that the previously described sexual instinct (Eros or Libido) is opposed by the death drive (or Thanatos) – two contradictory impulses within human beings, the former driving the subject towards pleasure, creativity, and reproduction and the latter towards repetition, aggression, and self-destruction. Freud speculates that ‘every living thing dies – reverts to the inorganic – for intrinsic reasons . . . we can only say that the goal of all life is death, or to express it retrospectively: the inanimate existed before the animate’ (78). This drive to return to the inanimate, inorganic, or the mineral is explicitly couched as a desire for peaceful nonexistence, a ‘universal endeavour in all living matter to revert to the quiescence of the inorganic world’ (101). It seems likely Vonnegut read some of Freud’s work – he makes reference to the Modern Library edition of The Works of Freud (Conversations 156) – but whether he was familiar with this element of Freud’s work is unclear, though in later years, he would frequently refer to mankind’s seemingly suicidal impulse as a species (A Man Without a Country). 23. Wells’s influential novel depicts a far future humanity which has been split, through evolution, into two subspecies, the childlike Eloi and the bestial, subterranean Morlocks, with the former both diegetically and symbolically representing the contemporary leisured classes and the latter the working classes. Simon J. James notes that Wells’s concerns were specifically proactive and focused on contemporary society, noting that His scientific romances evaluate culture and morals as a function of biology, only as enduring as biological reality will allow them to be.

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It is possible Vonnegut took some inspiration from Wells – he admired and read him in his youth (Conversations, 92, 114) and claimed him as a fellow native of both C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ (5). However, Vonnegut’s Galapagos does not, I claim, share the same allegorical or satirical intentions as Wells’s work. 24. It is worth remembering that Homo sapiens is an exceptionally ‘young’ species, in both relative and absolute timescales. Homo erectus was, to date, ‘the most successful and long-lived species of the Homo genus’ and existed for between one and two million years (Arrenillas and Arz, 19) – modern humanity’s approximate 200,000 years is both exceptionally short and recent in evolutionary terms. 25. A comparison may perhaps be drawn here with Derrida’s own concept of sous rature or ‘under erasure’. In On Grammatology, Derrida responds to the question ‘what is the sign?’ with the remark ‘One cannot get around that response, except by challenging the very form of the question and beginning to think that the sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: “what is”?’ (19). For Derrida, this is an existential question, one concerned with the interplay of presence, absence, and origination. As Simon Morgan Wortham explains, The trace [cannot] be thought in terms of the logic of presence. Since every sign in its manifestation or apparent ‘presence’ always includes traces of others which are supposedly ‘absent’, the trace can be reduced to neither side of the presence-absence opposition so prized by the metaphysical tradition. The trace thus redescribes the entire field which the metaphysics of presence seeks to dominate throughout history. The trace names that non-systematizable reserve which is at once constitutive and unrepresentable within such a field. (2010, 230)

Section Three

Space and Time

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The Sirens of Titan Matter That Complains So Andrew John Hicks

Seven years separate Vonnegut’s debut novel, Player Piano (1952), and his sophomore work, The Sirens of Titan (1959), a period of frustration and toil for Vonnegut.1 The former novel was not a success. Despite its relatively large print run, Player Piano sold only 3,600 copies, and reviews were limited and cursory; as Charles Shields notes, the lack of mainstream interest was likely in part due to its status as science fiction (the ‘Science Fiction Book Club ran a full-page ad in Popular Science listing it as a choice to its members’ [126]). Vonnegut would later lament the classification on several occasions, noting in 1974 that he had been so designated simply because he had ‘included machinery’ in the novel (Conversations, 157) and that its public reception had left him a ‘soreheaded occupant of a file drawer named “science fiction” . . . and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal’ (Wampeters, 25). Ironically enough, science fiction is almost the only point of contact between Vonnegut’s first novel and The Sirens of Titan. In every other respect, Sirens represents a definitive leap forward in Vonnegut’s artistry and style. As William Deresiewicz notes, where Player Piano is ‘apprentice work – clunky, clumsy, overstuffed’, by the time Vonnegut wrote Sirens, ‘it’s all there, all at once’: Kurt Vonnegut has become Kurt Vonnegut. The spareness hits you first. The first page contains fourteen paragraphs, none of them longer than two sentences, some of them as short as five words. It’s like he’s placing pieces on a game board – so, and so, and so. The story moves from one intensely spotlit moment to the next, one idea to the next, without delay or filler. The prose is equally efficient, with a scalding syncopated wit. (2012) Vonnegut would certainly agree with this assessment. He would claim (truthfully or not) that he extemporised the entirety of the novel’s plot at a New York cocktail party, and the novel represented a break in a multiyear period of writer’s block; Vonnegut was able to finish it within

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a few months (Shields, 159), and he would later remark that ‘Every mother’s favorite child is the one that’s delivered by natural birth. Sirens of Titan was that kind of book’ (Conversations, 35). Nor is this contrast between Sirens and its predecessor limited to the sudden development of Vonnegut’s signature technique. Player Piano is not only steadfastly conventional in form and generally workmanlike in prose style. As Vonnegut would later cheerfully admit, the novel was also relatively derivative. Though certainly much informed by Vonnegut’s own employment at General Electric, its futurist-dystopic theme – the effects of ever-encroaching automation in industry on the fortunes and selfworth of the working class – was ‘ripped off [from] the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Eugene Zamatin’s We’ (93). While elements of the novel, such as the provocative image of the titular piano, the chess-playing ‘Checker Charley’, and the fully sentient and near omniscient governing computer EPICAC, hint at a preoccupation with non-human agency, ultimately these features are subordinate to the novel’s distinctly liberal humanist bent. Player Piano is concerned, despite some interesting ambiguities, with the preservation of autonomous individualism.2 Men require the dignity of work to foster character and self-esteem; the state, which provides citizens with all their material needs, prevents them from striving to better their lot in life; and, as the protagonist Paul Proteus rather sentimentally opines on authenticity and belonging, whether in ‘a patch of desert, a red clay feld . . . a city street . . . every man had his roots down deep – in home’ (PP 222). Indeed, Proteus, a young factory manager and the son of one of the system’s architects, summarises the novel’s message when he argues that ‘we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them – the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect’ (166). Interestingly enough, something like this last formulation – the importance of personal usefulness, indeed, the importance of being used – reoccurs in The Sirens of Titan but in a context so different to Player Piano’s sensibilities that it becomes almost unrecognisable. Where Player Piano is relatively conventional in style and derivative in plot, Sirens is idiosyncratically ‘Vonnegutian’ and kaleidoscopically, bizarrely original. While the former novel is largely provincial in setting, Sirens is vast in scope. And while Player Piano is ultimately preoccupied with a somewhat reactionary concern for ‘what happens to the soul of man in the world of machines’ (Tally, 2011, 21), The Sirens of Titan is uncompromising in its immanent materialism. No longer must man regain his lost authenticity and human dignity from a world of treacherous, soulless machines. In the solar system of Sirens, the role of the matter called ‘man’ is to come to terms with its integration in wider, material systems of being. As Peter Reed notes, ‘again, the future provides the setting, but this time the actions, like the questions probed, are cosmic’:

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In this, the most science fictional of all Vonnegut’s novels, travel in space and time serves to explore the existential ‘whys’ only touched on in Player Piano. But the new dimensions of space and time do more than shift Vonnegut’s emphasis beyond the immediate social issues – they provide an appropriate context for his assertions that the answers to man’s questions exist not in the outer realms that science may help him explore, but within man himself. (58) While I agree, for the most part, with Reed’s assessment, the explicit distinction between the ‘outer’ and ‘inner’, between science and what might perhaps be termed philosophy, is, as I will argue, misleading. Further, were the dimensions of space and time merely contextual in the novel, a background of raw material for the inner conficts and resolutions of the rational and autonomous human to be projected upon, then Sirens could be relatively easily classifed as a straightforwardly humanist novel, for all its science fction trappings. Vonnegut himself noted at around the time of the novel’s composition that he was no longer content with writing about ‘a man, a love affair, or a trial’ but instead wanted to write about ‘the whole damned planet’ (Shields, 162), about systems as a whole. In Sirens, this approach is widened even further. It is the solar system itself that provides Vonnegut with his setting and subject. It is this sense of spatial scale, combined with the emergence of now familiar materialist/ determinist tropes, and the novel’s position as the frst truly formative work in Vonnegut’s career, that makes Sirens a kind of ‘stage-setting’ or ‘road map’ for the rest of his oeuvre and one of the richest seams of posthumanist tendencies in his work.

The Sirens of Titan The Sirens of Titan is a difficult novel to summarise. Douglas Adams, who counted Vonnegut (and Sirens in particular) as an influence on his popular science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979–1992), noted that the novel is just one of those books – you read it through the first time and you think that it’s very loosely, casually written. You think the fact that suddenly everything suddenly makes such good sense at the end is almost accidental. And then you read it a few more times . . . and you realise what an absolute tour de force it was, making something as beautifully honed as that appear so casual. (Adams) On the one hand, its plot is quite straightforward, and in a typically Vonnegutian move, the events of the entire novel are detailed in the very first

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chapter. As Winston Niles Rumfoord, the near omniscient antagonist (of sorts), urbanely explains to the protagonist, Malachi Constant, the latter will leave Earth and visit Mars, Mercury, and Earth again, before coming to his final destination on Titan. Along the way, he will marry Rumfoord’s wife, Beatrice, and sire a child, named Chrono, with her (Sirens 20–29). Needless to say, as in the later Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), this unambiguously deterministic prediction, issued at the beginning of the novel, is completely accurate. Yet the manner in which these events come to pass – and the manner in which they are embedded within each other and within multiple differing, often contradictory systems – is ambiguous and intricate. As such, for all the novel’s burlesque takes on contemporary science fiction genre conventions and tropes (interplanetary travel, rocket ships and flying saucers, kitsch mechanical robots, the titular sirens), The Sirens of Titan is a more complex, serious, and original work than some critics have suggested. Certainly, reviewers on release were unsure what to make of the novel. As Charles Shields notes, one likened it to an opera – a kind of outer space version of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann – while others considered it simply as ‘hokey’ or a ‘leg-pull’, a parodic but ultimately pointless take-off of the minor and fundamentally inconsequential genre of science fiction (2011, 161). Later critics, while more sympathetic to Vonnegut as a novelist, have nevertheless sometimes appeared squeamish about the novel’s unabashedly generic features. Perhaps the most notable example of this is Lawrence Broer. In line with the general thesis of his monograph Sanity Plea (1994), Broer explicitly dismisses the science fiction elements of the novel as a diegetic fantasy on the part of Malachi Constant, in favour of a purely psychologising reading, premised on the character’s supposed insanity. Comparing Sirens to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (a not in itself unsound reading), he argues that the novel ‘is more the story of Malachi’s growth, of his adoption of awareness and courage and his quest for psychic wholeness, than the story of his madness’ (30) – madness meaning here essentially the entirety of the novel’s events, since ‘Malachi is the only verifiable character in the novel’ (31). This is a highly original – some may say counterintuitive – reading of the novel’s action. Nevertheless, its explicit disavowal of most of the novel’s actual features leaves much of interest on the table. A similar approach from Kathryn Hume generalises this diagnostic bent to all of Vonnegut’s novels, Sirens included, and shifts the subject of analysis from protagonist to author, arguing that ‘Vonnegut’s main characters are usually straightforward projections of some part of his psyche, and they let him work out his inner conflicts’ (‘Vonnegut’s Self Projections’, 177). Jerome Klinkowitz, meanwhile, takes a different and oddly contradictory tack. Echoing Reed’s comments presented earlier, he notes that ‘no longer must the premise of [Vonnegut’s] writing be a variation of some social concern. In The Sirens of Titan the tinkerings are with time and space themselves’ (48),

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and that Vonnegut’s central science fiction device, the ‘chrono-synclastic infundibulum’, enables ‘narrative coverage of exceptionally vast range, with an almost entirely fluid point of view’ encompassing the entire solar system (47). Yet, despite the ontological and epistemological musings that are a central element (in my argument, the central element) of the novel, he nevertheless gnomically asserts that the novel is ‘anything but philosophical, though plenty of philosophies course their way through its complex action’ (47). I will argue, conversely, that neither approach quite captures the essence of Sirens. The humorously pulpy elements of the novel certainly represent a knowing pastiche of contemporary science fiction, but they do not undercut or subsume the novel’s serious and sustained philosophical meditations. Nor can the novel’s science fiction elements be jettisoned as irrelevant or somehow embarrassing, in favour of a more ‘serious’ reading that emphasises the importance of autonomy, free will and individualism in the face of the novel’s ‘chaos’ or determinism – which are all too easily considered, from a traditionally humanistic perspective, faintly pathological. For all its humour and freewheeling, picaresque action, The Sirens of Titan remains a science fiction novel, in the sense that it is responding, philosophically, to quite complex scientific and materialist theories. Mass, measurements, particles, and systems are recurring motifs, and the use of the quantum mechanical term ‘waveform phenomena’ to describe the character of Winston Niles Rumfoord demonstrates Vonnegut was aware of alternatives to his more commonly used Newtonian terminology.3 The questions that inform Sirens – what is the relationship between the particular and the whole? What can one ever truly know about an object, and what might it forever conceal? What possible action might one take, if action is even possible, when one is aware of one’s own status as an object with a pre-ordained trajectory? What are the ethical consequences of these concerns? – are questions that were also at the forefront of the contemporary debate between classical and quantum physicists.4 While these scientific debates are obviously beyond the purview of this work (not to mention beyond the competency of its author), many of these questions have come to the forefront in the work of several recent cultural theorists, critics, and philosophers. The relative youth of this trend is reflected in the heterogeneity of its varying approaches and terminology, a bewildering array of theories, schools, and approaches that include terms such as ‘speculative realism’, ‘new materialism’, ‘vital materialism’, ‘object-oriented ontology’, and ‘onticology’. Despite multifarious differences in methodology, approach, and tenets, all share a commitment to a marked anti-anthropocentrism and a reaffirmation of the significance of material objects and processes for criticism and philosophy, in reaction to the long ‘linguistic turn’ of the 20th century. As such, I argue that their work provides a new and fruitful perspective from which to reread Vonnegut’s work and Sirens – that novel of objects in space – in particular.

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‘The Universe of Things’ – New Materialism, Speculative Realism The difficulty of succinctly describing or summarising the trend towards a reassessment of matter and its importance is not due to the movement’s heterogeneity alone; the arguments and theories presented can also appear complex or even counterintuitive, and they often become exponentially so when they are brought into dialogue with one another. One particular point of contention in these continuing debates – one particular dichotomy – will inform my analysis of Sirens, but it may be helpful to begin by first detailing what unites these disparate critics. Statements from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010) and Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects (2011), quoted in the following, could fairly safely and un-controversially be considered representative of the underlying assumptions of both the new materialist and speculative realist movements: The quarantines of matter and life encourage us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations. . . . I will turn the figures of ‘life’ and ‘matter’ around and around, worrying them until they start to seem strange, in something like the way a common word when repeated can become a foreign, nonsense sound. In the space created by this estrangement, a vital materiality can start to take shape. . . . By ‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. (Bennett, VII–VIII) Subjects are objects among objects, rather than constant points of reference related to all other objects. As a consequence, we get the beginnings of what antihumanism and posthumanism ought to be, insofar as these theoretical orientations are no longer the thesis that the world is constructed through anonymous and impersonal social forces as opposed to an individual subject. Rather, we get a variety of nonhuman actors unleashed in the world as autonomous actors in their own right, irreducible to representations and freed from any constant reference to the human where they are reduced to our representations. (Bryant, 22–23)5 The primary line of argument, represented in both quotations, constitutes a dual hypothesis: that in ontological terms, there is no ultimate or categorical difference between seemingly inanimate objects and living matter and that agency, figured as the capacity to demonstrate predispositions and to produce effects, can no longer be considered a solely organic domain. This is not to say that objects think or feel as living creatures do or that ontological equality necessitates a dubious kind of ‘political rights and equality for Stuff’. As Bryant notes, the titular democracy of his monograph

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is not a political thesis to the effect that all objects ought to be treated equally or that all objects ought to participate in human affairs. The democracy of objects is the ontological thesis that all objects, as Ian Bogost has so nicely put it, equally exist while they do not exist equally. The claim that all objects equally exist is the claim that no object can be treated as constructed by another object. The claim that objects do not exist equally is the claim that objects contribute to collectives or assemblages to a greater and lesser degree. (19) Bennett shares this conclusion, though in a slightly orthogonal manner. Bluntly, she notes that it is an inevitability of species that she identifes with her fellow human beings more completely ‘insofar as they are bodies most similar to mine’, even as she seeks ‘to extend awareness of our interinvolvements and interdependencies’. Instead, she emphasises, in an echo of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, that there is a need for a vital materialism that ‘is not the perfect equality of actants, but a polity with more channels of communication between members’ (04).6 This caveat – that we are perhaps inevitably attuned to pay close or even near-exclusive attention and attribute value to the being and actions of humans – is equally applicable when we turn to literary criticism. We are prone to reading cultural, personal, or discursive signifcance even in the most vividly portrayed landscapes and descriptions. Objects in and of themselves must be teased out from the very margins of literary works, a not easily discernible corona around the eclipsing human subject of tradition. Despite the similarities in the arguments of Bennett and Bryant, however, it is also at this point that the working difference between these two otherwise allied strands of theory, in the context of this chapter, begins to make itself known. The difference between Bryant’s ‘collectives or assemblages’ and Bennett’s ‘interinvolvements and interdependencies’ may seem nominal at best, but they represent a significant difference in the ontologies of their separate schools. While they share the commitment that matter ‘matters’, the way in which things actually exist – what things actually are, at the level of basal reality – differs sharply. At the risk of oversimplification but for the sake of clarity and brevity, the new materialists, who as a group tend to be more involved in fields such as cultural, literary, and feminist theory, are inclined to share an interest in hybridity, continuity, relationality, becoming, and process. Steven Shaviro lists critics such as Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, and Elizabeth Grosz as proponents of this form of all-pervading monism (11) – a continuum of constantly becoming being in which material actants come together from, and simultaneously produce, effects that are ‘emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to make something happen . . . is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality considered alone’ (Bennett, 24). Speculative realists and object-oriented ontologists, such as Levi

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Bryant, Timothy Morton, and, especially, Graham Harman, tend to reject this idea of objects as emergent from what the latter derisively terms ‘a cosmic lump of molten slag’ (2011, 299). Instead, they insist on the absolute ontological individuality of objects, irreducible and uncreated by any other, reviving the Aristotelian idea of Substance as ultimately distinct from any, or all, of its properties. To put this difference bluntly, the debate can be described as the difference between the multitude and the individual, the systemic and the particular. In the terms of physics, and not incidentally in The Sirens of Titan, this difference can also be expressed as that between the wave-function and the particulate (or ‘punctual’). Both sides of this dichotomy are, I argue, important elements in understanding the material undercurrents of Vonnegut’s novel. The work of Karen Barad will act as the exemplar of the new materialist perspective in this chapter. Barad is more qualified than most to comment on questions of reality and ontology, having earned a doctorate in theoretical physics before moving into cultural and feminist studies. Her intimidating monograph Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007) is a rare work. As scientifically literate as it is critically rigorous, it is an impressive attempt to bridge the gap (a gap she would consider illusory) between the material and the cultural. Central to her book’s argument is her complex and counterintuitive theory of agential realism. The first (and perhaps least difficult) element of her argument references a fundamental insight made by the eminent quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Contra to the Enlightenment tradition of the detached observer in science, the ‘view from nowhere’ that somehow stands outside the experimental situation, Bohr concluded that ‘we are part of that nature that we seek to understand’.7 While this may seem obvious, the consequences of this realisation are stark. As Barad explains, Bohr argues that scientific practices must therefore be understood as interactions among component parts of nature and that our ability to understand the world hinges on our taking account of the fact that our knowledge-making practices are social-material enactments that contribute to, and are a part of, the phenomena we describe. (26) This is as true of any other human knowledge-making practice as it is of scientific experiments or apparatuses and, indeed, as true for nonhuman events as it is for human activity. Put differently, the activities of consciousness are not only material phenomena – thinking itself is a material enactment. It quite literally effects and is effected by other physical processes, not via supernatural, psychic means, but by its entanglement within the same phenomena, always already a part of what thinking describes. It is not ‘a spectator sport of matching linguistic representations

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to preexisting things. Concepts .  .  . are not mere ideations but specific physical arrangements’ (54). All ‘interactions’ are, in Barad’s neologism, ‘intra-actions’; they are not interventions from pre-existing agencies but are produced within the phenomena that are produced. This leads Barad to a far more counterintuitive and outlandish claim. For Barad, objects – or matter, material, substance, or any other concept based in the metaphysics of presence – are not the bedrock of reality.8 They do not precede relations but are produced by them: A phenomenon is a specific intra-action of an ‘object’ and the ‘measuring agencies’; the object and the measuring agencies emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that produces them. Crucially, then, we should understand phenomena not as objects-in-themselves, or as perceived objects (in the Kantian or phenomenological sense), but as specific intra-actions. Because the basis of this ontology is a fundamental inseparability, it cuts across any Kantian noumenaphenomena distinction: there are no determinately bounded or propertied entities existing ‘behind’ or as the causes of phenomena. (128) The long, complex, and involved reasoning behind this stance cannot be fully explicated here. It must suffce to say that in Barad’s strange, topsyturvy material world, ‘apparatuses’ precede the material-discursive enactments and conditions that produce phenomena, determinate meanings, and material beings; distinctions are based not within the fundamental separability of things but on the ever-shifting intra-actions of apparatuses. As Barad explains, ‘In its causal intra-activity, “part” of the world becomes determinately bounded and propertied in its emergent intelligibility to another “part” of the world. Discursive practices are boundary-making practices that have no fnality in the ongoing dynamics of agential intraactivity’ (335). Agency and causality thus become at once diffuse and iteratively concentrated, determinate in certain ways within certain phenomena: Strict determinism is stopped in its tracks, but the quantum does not leave us with free will either, rather, it reworks the entire set of possibilities made available. Agency and causality are not on-off affairs. . . . Space, time, and matter are intra-actively produced in the ongoing differential articulation of the world. Time is not a succession of evenly spaced intervals available as a referent for all bodies and space is not a collection of preexisting points set out as a container for matter to inhabit. (234) In the interests of brevity, and at the risk of potentially doing violence to Barad’s subtle and extremely complex theory, a few conclusions relevant

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to the current discussion can be drawn from this short overview. The frst is that seemingly purely ‘mental’ phenomena, such as thoughts, information, messages, and communication – indeed, concepts themselves, including the concept of the preceding terms – are material enactments. Reality is ‘material-discursive’. The second is that all phenomena or ‘objects’ as we experience them are always-already entangled within ever-changing apparatuses, since they are literally produced by these apparatuses. This can, very simplistically, be considered a variation on the ‘cosmic molten slag’ model of ontology. Finally, human agency is not a mere epiphenomenon, an illusion separate from the true goings-on of reality but a productive part of the apparatuses it is entangled with. It is certainly not unbounded or transcendental, as in classical models of libertarian free will, but it is a signifcant element within ongoing material enactments. Against this systemic ontology, there is the opposite ontology of particularity. Perhaps the strongest proponent of the ultimate, irreducible primacy of objects is Graham Harman, who has propounded his theory of object-oriented ontology since the early 2000s. A member of the loose speculative realist movement, Harman’s lively and often deliberately provocative work aims to create a sense of estrangement – or even re-enchantment – with the world of objects that surrounds us and of which we are a part.9 Like Barad, Harman argues that philosophy and critical theory have, despite efforts to the contrary, retained the anthropocentrism that has historically characterised Western thought. A typical example of Harman’s criticism is demonstrated in his essay ‘ObjectOriented Philosophy’, in which he criticises the turn toward linguistics and ‘correlationism’:10 The ostensibly revolutionary transition from consciousness to language still leaves humans in absolute command at the center of philosophy. All that happens is that the lucid, squeaky-clean ego of phenomenology is replaced by a more troubled figure: a drifter determined by his context, unable fully to transcend the structures of his environment. In both cases the inanimate world is left by the wayside, treated as little better than dust or rubble. . . . Philosophy has gradually renounced its claim to have anything to do with the world itself. (2010, 94) As he notes soon afterwards, ‘beneath this ceaseless argument, reality is churning’, but the reality he describes is very different from that of Barad’s relational ontology. For Harman, objects are irreducible to their features, and the biases of continental philosophy have prevented us from appreciating, or even realising, the absolute strangeness of objects in themselves. Harman diagnoses two ‘vices’ in most of the critical philosophy of the 20th century:

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First, there is the bias that I will call ‘the philosophy of access’. Instead of discussing reality itself, we must first perform a series of sophisticated critical and self-reflexive maneuvers so as to ensure that we are only talking about objects as they manifest themselves to us, not about objects in their own inner life. In continental philosophy this has reached the point of tacit dogma, challenged by no one. Second, there is the related bias that I will call ‘the philosophy of contexts or networks’. The notion of independent substance or essence is supposedly naive. What comes first is the totality of meanings or objects in their reciprocal relations; any individual part of this network is nothing but an abstraction broken away from the system as a whole. (107) It is the need to try to theorise ‘the inner life’ of objects that drives Harman’s work, despite the problems of access that have preoccupied philosophy for so long (and it is important to note that Harman does not deny these problems as such). It is for this reason, incidentally, that the realism espoused by Harman and others is deemed ‘speculative’. As noted earlier, an object, for Harman, is a Substance in the Aristotelian sense, distinct from its properties. In object-oriented ontology (OOO), objects do not ‘touch’, and causation is ‘vicarious’; the autonomous object cannot directly contact or fully cause the other, because no interaction fully exhausts an object’s reality. This is as true of inanimate objects interacting, for Harman, as it is for traditionally intentional objects when they interact with either ‘brute matter’ or other living things. Harman’s theories are often best illuminated by physical example, and he provides multiple vivid images to illustrate his points, as in the following: It is not only theory that sees the thing from the outside, reducing it to a set of external qualities. Every one of our actions do this: no twoyear-old and no beetle will ever experience a library the same way I do, but neither will I be able to appreciate a rattle fully or explore the spaces under a sidewalk. Furthermore it is not only humans, dogs, and insects who objectify reality with their actions. The same is even true of inanimate things. When two rocks slam together in distant space, we can assume that they are not ‘aware’ of each other. And yet it is quite clear that they objectify each other anyway: the two asteroids do not fully come into contact with all the properties of the other. If one asteroid is green and the other red, this will probably be irrelevant to the collision. And yet it is far from irrelevant to the light waves bombarding the rocks, since some wavelengths of light are reflected by one and not the other. (113–114)

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There are, in Harman’s vision, ‘trillions of gaps: or rather, an infnite number’, between all objects, all Things, that exist. Objects are, in Harman’s parlance, ‘withdrawn’; they retain a reality in excess of any relation, and this excess is not virtual or potential but absolutely real.11 The image of reality that emerges here is very strange indeed – a universe of ‘sleeping’ objects, each of which exists ‘in its withdrawal from all forms of presence, whether as something seen, used, or just spatially present among other entities’ (125), withdrawing not only from humans – the sometimes familiar feeling of not being able to grasp what a tree or pen or planet really is – but from each other as well. Whatever relations exist between objects in their interactions are ultimately shallow and vicarious compared to the absolute, mysterious autonomy of their deep and unknowable reality. This is, to say the least, an ontology of almost the most extreme individualism imaginable. Harman addresses this criticism in an essay specifcally addressed to literary critics who might detect a conservative dimension to his work: The problem with individual substances was never that they were autonomous or individual, but that they were wrongly conceived as eternal, unchanging, simple, or directly accessible by certain privileged observers. By contrast, the objects of object-oriented philosophy are mortal, ever-changing, built from swarms of subcomponents, and accessible only through oblique allusion. This is not the oftlamented ‘naïve realism’ of oppressive and benighted patriarchs, but a weird realism in which real individual objects resist all forms of causal or cognitive mastery. (2012, 188) Whether this defence is tenable is beyond the scope of this work. For now, the relevant arguments of Object-Oriented Ontology are that objects, contra to Barad’s agential realism, pre-exist and always exhaust their relations. Objects in this sense – and in Harman’s ontology, everything in existence is an ‘object’ – are never truly accessible, whether to humans or other objects.12 Instead, they possess a kind of vacuum-sealed absolute autonomy, a ‘molten core’ (one of Harman’s favourite metaphors) encrusted by their sensual or temporal relations, and even when they vicariously relate, or even come together, these connections form a new and similarly essential object. A black hole is another suitable metaphor. As Harman argues, ‘its gravity is so strong that no information can escape, hence we never see the black hole or have direct access to anything about it . . . we can discover more about black holes by looking at their effects on other objects, but they are not reducible to these effects’ (2009, 184). Steven Shaviro, another speculative realist, ably summarises the difference between the weird ontologies of Harman or related theorists such as Manuel DeLanda, and those, such as Barad, who emphasise relations. Though

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Shaviro is comparing the process philosopher Alfred Whitehead to Harman, the general point still stands – while ‘Whitehead opposes correlationism [and anthropocentrism] by proposing a much broader – indeed universally promiscuous – sense of relations among entities,’ by contrast ‘Harman opposes correlationism by deprivileging relations in general’ (30).13 The focus on materiality and anti-anthropocentrism is central to both approaches, but the kind of material universe that is described is radically divergent. They might be described as a wavelike sea of diffracted objects, relata produced by pre-existing relations, fundamentally, ontologically entangled (and with our own epistemology just as imbricated in this ontology as any stone or cloud), or as an infnite number of inexhaustibly autonomous, hermetically sealed, individual objects, withdrawn behind the veil of their sometimes wildly energetic but ultimately superfcial interactions. The question that will inform the remainder of this chapter is this: what kind of material solar system is depicted in The Sirens of Titan? How are these differences depicted and dramatised, and what ethical consequences are entailed by Vonnegut’s curious, kaleidoscopic literary model?

‘In a Punctual Way of Speaking’ – Particulate Ontology Before the more esoteric matters of space travel, systems, and wavefunctions are even introduced, Vonnegut presents, in the first few pages, the basic dichotomy I have just described. The Sirens of Titan begins, strikingly, with the arrival of Malachi Constant, a nouveau-riche billionaire playboy and entrepreneur, to the grounds of Niles Winston Rumfoord. Within a page of his introduction in the narrative, and several pages before the description of his more superficial ‘outer’ qualities, Constant is depicted as being keenly aware of his own particulate individuality. Smiling at a warning to be ‘punctual’, Constant wryly reflects that ‘to be punctual meant to exist as a point’, and that he ‘existed as a point – could not imagine what it would be like to exist in any other way’ (SOT 11). As we later discover, his working environment, at the top of the Magnum Opus company’s skyscraper, is a potent symbol of this particularity, ‘spooky’ for its lack of continuity: The office was spookily furnished, since none of the furniture had legs. Everything was suspended magnetically at the proper height. The tables and the desk and the bar and the couches were floating slabs. The chairs were tilted, floating bowls. And most eerie of all, pencils and pads were scattered at random through the air ready to be snatched by anyone who had an idea worth writing down. (48) This strange tableau of free foating objects, a kind of microcosmic model of the solar system he is fated to wander, denotes the ephemerality

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and isolation of his punctual, isolated existence. The mansion that he approaches as the novel opens, however, is somewhat more substantial; it is ‘at ironic variance with the fact that the quondam master of the house, except for one hour in every ffty-nine days, was no more substantial than a moonbeam’ (15). Rumfoord, a man who (as we will see) has undergone a striking change, was an old money individualist, and his grounds, and mansion especially, testify to this permanence: The Rumfoord mansion was an hilariously impressive expression of the concept: People of substance. It was surely one of the greatest essays on density since the Great Pyramid of Khufu. In a way it was a better essay on permanence than the Great Pyramid, since the Great Pyramid tapered to nothingness as it approached heaven. Nothing about the Rumfoord mansion diminished as it approached heaven. Turned upside down, it would have looked exactly the same. (14–15) The mansion is a Harmanian object par excellence; turned around or upside down, no matter how its accessible features may change, it unmistakably remains the same object, the same ‘substance’. Spatially dense and temporally permanent, it is, seemingly, a ftting tribute to its owner and his class. It is in the shadow of this vast monument that a somewhat lesser object, named Malachi Constant, approaches. Constant is an isolated fgure in more than one sense. He is the only scion of the vast Constant fortune, created by his father, Noel, via the ‘idiotically simple’ (52) practice of investing in companies whose acronyms correspond to the letters that begin his Gideon Bible (so, for instance, ‘In’ leads to his investment in ‘International Nitrate’). Father and son meet only once, for a few minutes on Malachi’s 21st birthday, and this combination of random, purposeless accumulation of wealth and lack of familial relationships results in Malachi leading an extravagantly hedonistic but unfulflling life. What he yearns for, and what he hopes to achieve in his meeting with Rumfoord, is to play the role denoted by his name, the role of a faithful messenger: Constant pined for just one thing – a single message that was sufficiently dignified and important to merit his carrying it humbly between two points. The motto under the coat of arms that Constant had designed for himself said simply, The Messenger Awaits. What Constant had in mind, presumably, was a first-class message from God to someone equally distinguished. (14) Once again, we are presented with a ‘punctual’ model, a kind of Newtonian physics in which Constant moves from one mutually exclusive entity

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to another, beholden to carry his discrete message as much by nominative determinism as by his own particular desires. As will become clear, Constant does indeed carry a message of sorts in the novel, but God is strikingly absent, and the person who is nearly as equally distinguished, Rumfoord, already knows everything that was, is, or will be within the solar system. There are many instances in the novel in which Constant, or someone close to him – all of whom, it must be remembered, are objects themselves – are forced to deal with the unyielding, alienating strangeness of objects, and fnd these encounters either alluring or distressing. As he is compelled and propelled from planet to planet, by outside elements and by inertia, the punctual Constant is also, at least at the beginning of his journey, drawn forward, towards the ambiguous fgures of the titular Sirens. Despite the prominence afforded to them by the novel’s title, mentions of the Sirens themselves are few and far between in the text. Their purpose and true nature remain enigmatic and ambiguous. They are first mentioned when Rumfoord explains to the unimpressed Constant the attractions of Titan – the fine climate, the collection of art objects, and the beautiful women. Finding these attractions banal, Constant is nevertheless surprised to find that Rumfoord has slipped him a photograph – ‘no ordinary photograph’ – that depicts the shimmering depths .  .  . of a clear, shallow, coral bay. At the bottom . . . were three women – one white, one gold, one brown. They looked up at Constant, begging him to come to them, to make them whole with love. Their beauty is so great, in fact, that they are to Malachi’s previous conquests ‘as the glory of the Sun was to the glory of a lightning bug’, and he is hard pressed not to burst into tears (28). Amusing exaggeration aside, this superfluity of presence, of aesthetic attraction and seeming intentionality, conceals the Sirens’ true nature, which is revealed, finally, towards the end of the novel. They are not living creatures but statues made of ‘Titanic peat .  .  . painted with lifelike colours’ by the Tralfamadorian messenger Salo (195). What are we to make of these strange stone nymphs, afforded such importance by the metatext of the novel? Is Constant’s attraction simply mistaken, or do the Sirens embody a kind of power that needn’t be confined to living matter alone? A crucial element of Harman’s ontology is the concept of ‘allure’: The separation between a sensual object and its quality can be termed ‘allure.’ This term pinpoints the bewitching emotional effect that often accompanies this event for humans, and also suggests the related term ‘allusion,’ since allure merely alludes to the object without making its inner life directly present. In the sensual realm, we encounter objects encrusted with noisy accidents and relations.

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Harman’s terminology here is somewhat complex and is based on concepts originating in Husserlian phenomenology.14 For our current purposes, however, ‘allure’ may be more easily conceptualised by the lack that it signifes, rather than the complex phenomenological mechanisms the term encompasses in Harman’s metaphysic. As such, Harman argues that what we find in allure are absent objects signaling from beyond – from a level of reality that we do not currently occupy and can never occupy, since it belongs to the object itself and not to any relation we could ever have with it. (2005, 245) For Harman, there are ‘countless examples of allure’, and he provides the example of a sense of beauty. As Harman notes, ‘in instances of beauty, an object is not the sum total of beautiful colors and proportions on its surface, but a kind of soul animating the features from within, leading to vertigo or even hypnosis in the witness’ (2007, 216). It is this odd, unnameable ‘something’ within objects, the binding and essential substance beyond its sensual features (which Harman rhetorically terms a ‘soul’) that leads to attraction (or ‘allusion’) between objects. It is also this uncanny sense of seeming intentionality and essence, of elusive power and identity, that so attracts Constant to the stone Sirens; they are portrayed in agentive terms, ‘looking’, ‘begging’, essentially beckoning Constant across the solar system. In Harman’s ontology, these are not metaphorical descriptions but quite literal, since ‘allure belongs to ontology as a whole, not to the special metaphysics of animal perception. Relations between all real objects, including mindless chunks of dirt, occur only by means of some form of allusion’ (221). The fact that the statues turn out to be what is traditionally considered ‘inanimate’ is ultimately irrelevant. Above and beyond their surface-level beauty, the enigmatic, powerful but ultimately inaccessible ‘within’ of the Sirens acts upon Constant, drawing him forth. Objects are as liable to push away as to pull towards in The Sirens of Titan, however, rebuffing every effort on the part of Constant and his fellow humans to truly grasp them rather than enticing them forward,

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remaining frustratingly withdrawn rather than (seemingly) attractively available. A particularly dramatic incident occurs in Chapter 4, where the startling and even alienating independence of objects is brought to the fore. A notably short chapter, it depicts an execution on the planet Mars. The victim is named ‘Stony’ Stephenson (one of many references to stones that are spread throughout the novel), and his executioner is a man named ‘Unk’ (who is, in reality, a memory-wiped Malachi Constant).15 Unk, controlled by a radio receiver surgically implanted in his head, is forced to strangle Stony, his best and only friend on Mars. The chapter’s epigraph, uniquely in the novel, is attributed to an object, in this case a ‘Snare Drum on Mars’ that ‘had this to say . . . Rented a tent, a tent, a tent’ (69). Though it is not the only time an object ‘speaks’ in the novel (computers, vehicles, and robots consistently ‘think’ and ‘speak’ throughout), the place it is afforded in the text foreshadows the particularly object-oriented nature of the chapter.16 But for a few gasped words from Stony as he dies, the drum’s quotation is the only ‘dialogue’ that occurs throughout the chapter; the scene is conducted in silence but for the constant, insistent drums. The most striking passage of the chapter (and indeed of the novel) describes the prisoner and his dilemma, and it is worth quoting at length: The man at the stake tugged against his chains, craned his neck to judge the height of the stake to which he was chained. It was as though he thought he might escape by use of the scientific method, if only he could figure out how high the stake was and what it was made of. The stake was nineteen feet, six and five thirty-seconds inches high, not counting the twelve feet, two and one-eighth inches of it embedded in iron. The stake had a mean diameter of two feet, five and eleven thirty-seconds inches, varying from this mean, however, by as much as seven and one thirty-second inches. The stake was composed of quartz, alkali, feldspar, mica, and traces of tourmaline and hornblende. For the information of the man at the stake: He was one hundred and forty-two million, three hundred and forty-six thousand, nine hundred and eleven miles from the Sun, and help was not on its way. (71) There is a lot to unpack here. Even on a purely and prosaically formal level, the hierarchy of textual attention in this tableau is inverted from what one might expect in a novel. The interiority of the victim – his thoughts and feelings, which, in most novels, would be foregrounded here – are afforded less than half the space given over to the description of the stake and are in any case occluded by the text. We are only told he acts ‘as though’ he might be thinking a certain way, after all, and

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in contrast to the lavish enumeration of the stone’s features, the only description of Stony we are afforded throughout the chapter is that he is ‘red-haired’. This is the most obvious, evocative example of the novel’s recurrent tendency to foreground the object over the subject. And while the reader is made privy to all the details about the stone stake that one could possibly ask for, the details that Stony is specifcally denied, his desperate inability to truly grasp it, is refracted onto the reader’s own experience. The stake’s measurable but fundamentally unknowable nature – its Harmanian withdrawal – is, if anything, paradoxically emphasised by the narrator’s precise description of its height, composition, and position in the solar system. Vonnegut achieves something quite remarkable in this passage. The scale and perspective here are at once uncomfortably intimate yet vertiginously panoramic, indeed, almost sublime; two mutually unknowable objects in close yet forever vicarious proximity, set against (or, rather, within) the far larger system. Unlike the Sirens, the withdrawing object’s existence is emphatically vacuum-sealed, impervious to plea or probe, and help is most defnitely not on the way. This experience of alienation, if not the exact sort of object-encounter described here, is a major feature of most of Constant’s journey and of his particulate tendencies. Later, on Mercury, he fnds himself trapped in the deep caves with his former commander, Boaz, after their ship fies there automatically. In a characteristically Vonnegutian turn, the ship is equipped with two buttons, on and off, and while ‘the on button simply started a fight from Mars. . . . The off button connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of the Martian mental-health experts’ since human beings are happier when they think they are in control (119). Boaz rapidly feels at home in the subterranean tunnels and becomes particularly fond of the native ‘Harmoniums’, small, tissue-thin, kite-shaped creatures which exist in perfect equilibrium with their environment. They do not excrete, sexually reproduce, or die naturally; have no organs or circulatory systems; and feed on the mechanical energy of the vibrations of the planet, which ‘sings like a crystal goblet’, holding notes for millennia at a time (131). They have ‘weak powers of telepathy’, but their peaceful existence, measured in epochal, geological time, has lead them to ‘have only two possible messages . . . the frst is an automatic response to the second, and the second is an automatic response to the frst’, and these messages are simply ‘“Here I am, here I am, here I am”’ and ‘“So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are”’ (132). These creatures are an odd combination of the hermetic and the permeable, absorbing energy from their environment while producing little of anything. Their existence is near-infnitely sustainable but also somewhat sterile. They are in perfect harmony with their surroundings, while existing without anything like a complex ecology. The harmoniums straddle the traditional divide between the inanimate and animate, but their odd, somewhat enigmatic existence is one that Boaz comes to love and partake in. Stating to Constant (‘Unk’) that

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he has fnally found ‘a place where I can do good without doing any harm’, Boaz chooses to spend the rest of his days on Mercury, feeding the harmoniums with ‘concerts’ of recorded music and integrating himself with the planet’s environment (151). Constant, meanwhile, is once again portrayed as an object apart. He and Boaz ‘moved in very different circles. The circles in which Boaz moved were small. His abode was fxed and richly furnished. . . . The circles in which Unk moved were vast and restless’ (140). When Constant’s lonely orbit is interrupted by the inexplicable tracks of a dog (left, as we later discover, by Rumfoord’s dog Kazak), he is unmoved: The dog tracks did not excite Unk. Unk’s soul wasn’t filled with the music of sociability or the light of hope when he saw a warmblooded creature’s tracks. . . . And he still had very little to say to himself when the tracks of a well-shod man joined those of his dog. Unk was at war with his environment. He had come to regard his environment as being either malevolent or cruelly mismanaged. His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand – passive resistance and open displays of contempt. (141) In contrast to Boaz, Constant is repelled, consciously and unconsciously, by every aspect of his surroundings. There is something nuclear to Boaz’s cosy existence, ensconced in his home vault, rarely straying far from his central location. Constant’s peripatetic lifestyle, meanwhile, is based in a fundamental and energetic separability and individuality, a turninginwards that prevents him from reconciling with his situation. The fact that he misattributes intentionality to the planet is, indeed, a projection of his own refexivity, an inability to consider the tunnels as anything other than embodying an oblique variation of his own rage and frustration. Boaz may not have fully collapsed the subject-object distinction; he may not fully grasp the implications and complications of the way he has easily slotted into the Mercurian environment. Nevertheless, he has become a part of a new apparatus. Indeed, by the time Unk returns to him, he is literally encrusted by the local fauna, with two favoured Harmoniums wrapped around his upper arms, another on his thigh, and another ‘immature harmonium . . . clung to the inside of his left wrist, feeding on Boaz’s pulse’ (142). The promulgation of sound and vibration (which, it must be noted, are waveforms) straddles the internal/external divide, Boaz’s own bodily rhythms integrating with those of the planet and its inhabitants. Nor are these effects limited by distance. It is noted that the harmoniums are capable of locating him by his heartbeat from miles around (142), and Unk is able to tell, even at his great distance, when Boaz is holding one of his ‘concerts’, since ‘the walls of the caves were so extraordinarily conductive’ that the harmoniums surrounding him begin to behave erratically, in

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time with the distant music (146). Thus, happily embedded on Mercury, Boaz rejects the opportunity to escape and the particulate and individualistic lifestyles that characterise the Earth he has left behind. Having considered the possibility of ‘freedom’, he can only visualise the concept as a particulate crowd, a condition where ‘all I can see is people. They push me this way, then they push me that – and nothing pleases ’em, and they get madder and madder . . . and we all push and pull some more’ (151). Indeed, Boaz’s vision bears some resemblance to the liberal humanist ideal of ‘free’ society, a collection of autonomous rational actors, their individualist desires and freely willed plans ricocheting off the other. And what the liberal humanist might consider intolerable entrapment – a life spent in the caves of Mercury, amongst the harmoniums – is for Boaz something infnitely preferable to the ‘freedom’ of escape. For, as Boaz tells Unk at their parting, he has come to realise that he has ‘found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm’ (151). Boaz’s revelatory realisation is the frst, tentative step in the novel towards a full appreciation of the embedded nature of existence, of meeting the universe – or, in this case, at least the planet – half way. Constant, meanwhile, is once again propelled across the solar system, remaining a particulate ‘space wanderer’, fung ‘like [a] stone’ into ‘the colourless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end’ (7). It is only at the very end of the novel that Constant begins to come to the same conclusions as Boaz, to see things from his perspective. Perhaps more important, he also begins to understand the epic, systemic, chrono-synclastic vision of his sometime tormenter, Winston Niles Rumfoord, and it is to this vision that we now turn.

‘Everybody’s in It and Nobody’s in It’ – Waveform Ontology We return at this juncture to the opening chapter of The Sirens of Titan and Malachi Constant’s fateful meeting with Winston Niles Rumfoord. From the start, the two figures are presented in stark contrast. Whereas Constant is portrayed as vainglorious, shallow, and hedonistic, an upstart nouveau-riche, Rumfoord, as previously noted, is considered a man of substance, possessed not only of a vast inherited fortune and elite status but also of ‘un-neurotic courage’, ‘style’, and ‘gallantry’ (21). Indeed, the most direct comparison between the two not only reaffirms the contrast between vulgarity and urbanity but also hints, if only obliquely, at their differing ontological statuses: To contrast Malachi Constant of Hollywood with Winston Niles Rumfoord of Newport and Eternity: Everything Rumfoord did he did with style, making all mankind look good. Everything Constant did he did in style – aggressively, loudly, childishly, wastefully – making himself and mankind look bad. (21–22)

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The details here are small but signifcant. Constant’s actions make him and mankind, by proxy, look bad – once again, we are presented with a Constant who is unrelated, alienated from wider contexts, punctual and particulate. Rumfoord, meanwhile, is of ‘Eternity’, a part of the temporal whole. More specifcally, he is ‘of’ time and space, because of his unique condition of having become chrono-synclastically infundibulated. Announcing a trip to Mars with his faithful dog, Kazak, ‘as though a space ship were nothing more than a sophisticated sports car, as though a trip to Mars were little more than a spin down the Connecticut Turnpike’, he becomes trapped in a chrono-synclastic infundibulum (hereafter referred to as ‘CSI’). This phenomenon, the central plot point of the novel, is described in ‘the fourteenth edition of A Child’s Cyclopedia of Wonders and Things to Do’ thusly: Just imagine that your Daddy is the smartest man who ever lived on Earth, and he knows everything there is to find out, and he is exactly right about everything, and he can prove he is right about everything. Now imagine another little child on some nice world a million light years away, and that little child’s Daddy is the smartest man who ever lived on that nice world so far away. And he is just as smart and just as right as your Daddy is. Both Daddies are smart, and both Daddies are right. Only if they ever met each other they would get into a terrible argument, because they wouldn’t agree on anything. . . . There are places in the Universe, though, where each Daddy could finally catch on to what the other Daddy was talking about. These places are where all the different kinds of truths fit together as nicely as the parts in your Daddy’s solar watch. We call these places chronosynclastic infundibula. . . . Chrono (kroh-no) means time. Synclastic (sin-class-tick) means curved toward the same side in all directions, like the skin of an orange. Infundibulum (in-fun-dib-u-lum) is what the ancient Romans like Julius Caesar and Nero called a funnel. (11–12) Having entered this area of space-time, Rumfoord and Kazak now exist ‘as wave phenomena – apparently pulsing in a distorted spiral with its origin in the Sun and its terminal in Betelgeuse’ (11), scattered across space and time, materialising on different celestial bodies as they pass into and out of their waveform. Rumfoord can exist in many different places at once and can also see the future – or rather, he exists in the past, present, and future simultaneously, since upon his collision with the CSI ‘it came to me in a fash that everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been’ (19–20). As the novel progresses, it is revealed that Rumfoord not only predicts Constant’s journey but that he is also instrumental to it, manipulating material-discursive apparatuses in such a way as to ensure all occurs as he has foretold. This is not to say, however, that he is necessarily responsible for everything that happens in

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The Sirens of Titan. The bizarre and counterintuitive nature of Rumfoord’s new existence complicates ideas of causality, agency and separability, and as the novel progresses, it is revealed that he himself is entangled within ever wider circles of infuence. For all his seemingly godlike omniscience, Rumfoord is far from all-powerful or independent. Indeed, in the intraactive solar system of Sirens, the idea of anything being all-powerful or independent ultimately makes little sense. Throughout the novel, imagery related to Rumfoord emphasises this embedded, systemic recursiveness – akin, as I will argue, to Barad’s theory of agential realism. While Constant’s sense of particulate, individualist independence and the withdrawal of objects does not fall away completely in the novel, his gradual realisation of the Rumfoordian perspective re-orients and re-contextualises them within a wider, more spectral framework. Even before Rumfoord appears, this imagery is in evidence. Returning once more to the opening chapter and Constant’s approach to the mansion, we are told that he comes across a dry fountain, ‘a cone described by many stone bowls of decreasing diameters’ surrounded by a forked path. Characteristically, Constant chooses neither fork but climbs the fountain itself (13). The split path around the stone fountain and Constant’s unorthodox third option to choose neither – reminiscent of the classic two-slit experiment in quantum mechanics, whether intentional on Vonnegut’s part or not – is the first intimation of an alternative to the ‘punctual’ or particulate existence we (and Constant) are familiar with.17 Standing on the top of the fountain, Constant finds himself ‘rapt, imagining that the fountain was running. The fountain was very much like an hallucination. . . . Time passed quickly. Constant did not move’ (15). Even when he has had his memory erased, the image of the fountain reoccurs to Constant. It is as if the image itself is a kind of intimation or premonition of Rumfoord’s waveform perspective, a set of interdependent, recurrent circles, wheels within wheels, that he can, at these moments, only glimpse. Circular, helical, or cosmic imagery is also prevalent within Rumfoord’s mansion. The floor of the foyer is a ‘mosaic, showing the signs of the zodiac encircling a golden sun’ (15) and is dominated by a large spiral staircase. This recurrent nested spiral imagery, both in the mansion and throughout the novel (the caves of Mercury, the domes and minarets of Rumfoord’s dwelling on Titan, the rings of Saturn), has been well catalogued in detail by Lawrence Broer. However, for Broer, the suggestion is that Malachi has given himself over to the relentless clockwork power of the solar system, a mechanistic system of control . . . that he hopes to escape, and that, thus entrapped, he . . . will be sent spinning helplessly to his doom. (1994, 36)

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Broer claims that these spirals are a kind of representation of malign outside influences or the paranoid fear of such – a formulation, I would argue, that is ultimately predicated on the exclusive, inside/outside relationship of traditionally independent objects and which is not quite adequate to the ambiguity of the text itself. Significantly, after Rumfoord has conversed with Constant and dematerialised, Constant encounters Beatrice Rumfoord descending the spiral staircase. Beatrice is an ambiguous figure throughout Sirens. While the imagery pertaining to Constant is usually particulate (as noted earlier) and the imagery relating to Rumfoord is usually systemic, as befits his waveform existence, Beatrice shifts between these two poles. Sometimes her hermeticism is emphasised; Rumfoord later excoriates her for the ‘fear of contamination’ and ‘touch-me-not breeding’ (184) that characterised her younger years. As ‘Bee’, memorywiped and enlisted into the Martian army, she maintains this predilection for particularity, composing a sonnet about Schliemann technology (a method to maintain oxygen without breathing) which insists that ‘Every man’s an island as in/lifeless space we roam./Yes, every man’s an island:/ island fortress, island home’ (109). Yet, as the narrator describes Beatrice descending the staircase, it is noted that She wore a long white dressing gown whose soft folds formed a counter-clockwise spiral in harmony with the white staircase. The train of the gown cascaded down the top riser, making Beatrice continuous with the architecture of the mansion. (29) Notice here how Beatrice is fgured as literally part of the house, subject and object momentarily entangled; she is imbricated in its structure, matter and meaning merging. There is not a class, a house, and a person, but, if only briefy, a kind of class/house/person hybrid – in short, an apparatus. For all the mansion’s stolidity and seeming permanence, as examined in the preceding section, we are here able to discern, if only briefy, the systemic, material-discursive intra-activity at the heart of Sirens, the entanglement at the heart of Things (if Things could be said, under this rubric, to have anything resembling a ‘heart’ or ‘centre’). Interestingly, in a further show of continuity, it appears that this is something of a familial trait. Chrono, her son by Constant, is so attached to his ‘good-luck piece’ that it ‘became as much a part of him as his right hand. His nervous system, so to speak, extended itself into the metal strip. Touch it and you touched Chrono’ (102), and this good-luck piece is, in turn, entangled in an even more complex apparatus (which will be addressed shortly). Rumfoord, privier than most to ‘the great becoming that makes the light and the heat and the motion [which] bangs you from hither to yon’ (28), is keenly aware of these complications, and they inform his wry dismissal of

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‘punctual’ ways of thinking – which include, of course, the presumption of free will. In another materialisation, Rumfoord appears to his embittered wife, who demands that he explain to her what will happen in her near future, so as to be able to pre-empt and change it: ‘Look,’ said Rumfoord, ‘life for a punctual person is like a roller coaster.’ He turned to shiver his hands in her face. ‘All kinds of things are going to happen to you! Sure,’ he said, ‘I can see the whole roller coaster you’re on. And sure – I could give you a piece of paper that would tell you about every dip and turn, warn you about every bogeyman that was going to pop out at you in the tunnels. But that wouldn’t help you any.’ ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Beatrice. ‘Because you’d still have to take the roller coaster ride,’ said Rumfoord. ‘I didn’t design the roller coaster, I don’t own it, and I don’t say who rides and who doesn’t. I just know what it’s shaped like.’ (41) What Rumfoord can discern, and what Beatrice, punctually, cannot, is that while his actions – and those of Beatrice, Constant, and any other person or object in the universe – are certainly agential, they are not born of free or independent agency. Indeed, they are, as Rumfoord suggests, ‘as much a part of the natural order as Halley’s Comet – and it makes an equal amount of sense to rage against either’ (40). In Baradian terms, Rumfoord now recognises that all of their agentive capabilities are not contained within the bounds of the traditional humanist subject but diffused within the wider apparatus – that is, the solar system and its myriad phenomena. As Barad notes, The particular configuration that an apparatus takes is not an arbitrary construction of ‘our’ choosing. Which is not to say that human practices have no role to play; we just have to be clear about the nature of that role. Apparatuses are not assemblages of humans and nonhumans; they are open-ended practices involving specific intra-actions of humans and nonhumans, where the differential constitutions of human and nonhuman designate particular phenomena that are themselves implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity. (171) Barad’s formulation is complex, but it is apposite. Rumfoord here recognises that Beatrice’s existence (or his own, or Constant’s, or any other entity’s) cannot be shaped or led from ‘outside’ the apparatus she (or they) is a part of. It cannot be arbitrarily constructed, or indeed, ‘constructed’ in any kind of traditional sense, as an intervention from elsewhere but

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is instead an emergent phenomenon within the encompassing apparatus. Whatever Beatrice’s plans may be, they are still imbricated within this apparatus. Though she does her best to resist and elude the future that Rumfoord describes, avoiding Constant and doing whatever possible to prevent herself from going into space, her actions – in classic tragical fashion – only contribute to his prophecies coming true. To paraphrase Derrida, there is no ‘outside-agency’ or ‘outside-view’, contrary to the deepest intuitions of the majority of the characters in The Sirens of Titan. Barad and Boer’s exhortation that ‘we are part of that nature that we seek to understand’ is a reminder that observation or cognition is itself an active part of the system that it is trying to observe or cogitate. One of the most prominent targets of The Sirens of Titan’s satirical bent is, perhaps, the ultimate expression of the traditional subjectobject relation – the idea of a transcendental, all-powerful, all-knowing God, the humanist ideal of (masculine) authority, agency, and individuality writ large. Towards the end of Sirens, the Tralfamadorian robot, messenger, and friend of Rumfoord, named Salo, looks down on Earth from Titan and is fascinated by the odd way that human beings conduct themselves. What fascinates him is not ‘so much what the Earthlings did as the way they did it’, since The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big Eye in the sky – as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment. The big eye was a glutton for great theatre. The big eye was indifferent as to whether the Earthling shows were comedy, tragedy, farce, satire, athletics or vaudeville. Its demand, which Earthlings apparently found as irresistible as gravity, was that the shows be great. The demand was so powerful that Earthlings did almost nothing but perform for it, night and day – and even in their dreams. The big eye was the only audience that the Earthlings really cared about. (SOT 193) Malachi Constant is, in his punctual way, one of these Earthlings. His refrain regarding his extraordinary luck and privilege, throughout the novel, is that ‘somebody up there likes me’, to which Rumfoord acidly replies that ‘Luck, good or bad . . . is not the hand of God. Luck . . . is the way the wind swirls and the dust settles’ (177), the movements and intraactions of intrinsic forces, not the intervention of an outside agency. Salo, as aware of the apparatuses of the solar system as Rumfoord, fnds the Earthling assumption of an omniscient outside observer – a kind of easily bored child, experimenting with an ant farm – interesting. Rumfoord, however, considers it appalling, and his actions throughout the novel, including his manipulation of Constant and Beatrice, are bent towards extinguishing it.

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The Martian invasion that Rumfoord creates and which Constant and Beatrice are forced to join, is designed to unite Earth under the auspice of the ‘Church of God the Utterly Indifferent’. Its spectacular (and intentional) failure leads to a global revolution, designed to sweep away ideas of provenance and agentive separability. One of the more powerful passages in Sirens is the sermon of the Reverend C. Horner Redwine, which forms the epigraph of Chapter 10 – the chapter in which Constant, freed from Mercury, reaches the newly peaceful Earth and fulfils the role of the prophesised ‘Space Wanderer’, the third of his identities in the novel. The sermon is worth quoting at length: O Lord Most High, Creator of the Cosmos, Spinner of Galaxies, Soul of Electromagnetic Waves, Inhaler and Exhaler of Inconceivable Volumes of Vacuum, Spitter of Fire and Rock, Trifler with Millennia – what could we do for Thee that Thou couldst not do for Thyself one octillion times better? Nothing. What could we do or say that could possibly interest Thee? Nothing. Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our Creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last. No longer can a fool like Malachi Constant point to a ridiculous accident of good luck and say, ‘Somebody up there likes me.’ And no longer can a tyrant say, ‘God wants this or that to happen, and anybody who doesn’t help this or that to happen is against God.’ O Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain! (152) While obviously still written in a manner suggestive of personal identity – God is still, seemingly, extant but simply uninterested in the affairs of humanity – the confation of this fgure with specifcally material enactments of the universe is signifcant. The point is made even more explicit in the epigraph of Chapter 9, a quotation from the Winston Niles Rumfoord Authorized Revised Bible, which rewrites Genesis from a materialist perspective, so that ‘In the beginning, God became the Heaven and the Earth. . . . And God said, “Let Me be Light,” and He was light’ (139). Once again, the fgure of the deity is here associated with the material, but the association is taken one step further. No longer does God simply spit, spin, inhale, or trife; He becomes galaxies, vacuum, fre and rock, heaven, Earth, and light. In the terminology of Baruch Spinoza – whose immanent, monistic ethics and ontology Sirens repeatedly (but probably unintentionally) echoes – the creator is ‘Deus sive Natura’, ‘God or Nature’. The choice is not between two separate entities but simply two different designations or perspectives of one, and further, this entity is thus both ‘natura naturata’ (Nature ‘natured’ or already-created) and

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‘natura naturans’ (Nature ‘naturing’, in the active process of becoming).18 In essence, Rumfoord’s new religion, predicated on the revelations born of his unique situation, fgures God – by defnition, the ultimate conceivable entity – no longer as the dispassionate, objective observer of traditional Christianity, a kind of particulate aristocrat or idealised Enlightenment natural philosopher writ large. Instead, God is as at once singular and multiple, creating and created, individual and systemic, imbricated within the material-discursive apparatus of existence (it is worth noting that God becomes light by saying so). The proverbial ‘view from nowhere’, that is able to intervene or withdraw subjectivity from the object of its scrutiny, is explicitly denied by Rumfoord, and he includes himself in this pronouncement. Whenever any observation is made, including his own, it is inevitably an entangled element of a system. To return to Barad, not only does her formulation confrm that there is no possible ‘outside’ in this ontological perspective; she also draws attention to the fact that each apparatus is recursively contained within others, just like a set of nested circles: We don’t have an ‘outside’ view of the phenomenon itself, which is what is needed to observe the entanglement. To get such an outside view, we’d have to enlist a further auxiliary apparatus that can be used to measure the ‘original’ phenomenon in question. Of course, such an attempt entails the further entanglement of the new auxiliary apparatus and the ‘original’ phenomenon, constituting a new phenomenon. (345) And so it is for Rumfoord, though he is curiously loath to admit this much for the majority of the novel. As Salo notes, he is still ‘a surprisingly parochial Earthling at heart’ (191), as the fnal revelations of Sirens reveal. Salo is a Tralfamadorian, an eleven-million-‘Earthling years’-old representative of a machine race from the Small Magellanic Cloud, who has been stranded on Titan for eons. As in the later depiction of the Tralfamadorian race in Slaughterhouse-Five, and in true Vonnegutian fashion, his physical description is a ludicrous pastiche of pulp alien design – four and a half feet tall, with three eyes, no arms, skin ‘with the texture and colour of the skin of an Earthling tangerine’, infatable spheres for feet and ‘a voice that sounded like a bicycle horn’ (187–188). Nevertheless, his appearance and machine-nature belie his wisdom and compassion.19 Though Salo is punctual, he and his fellow Tralfamadorians seem better able to discern the non-local, spectral (in both senses of the term) nature of existence and to exploit it. As he tries to explain to Rumfoord, the message he carries was composed at A kind of university – only nobody goes to it. There aren’t any buildings, isn’t any faculty. Everybody’s in it and nobody’s in it. It’s like

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Even the chrono-synclastically infundibulated Rumfoord cannot quite grasp this ephemeral yet real and productive phenomenon, this strange displacement of cognition into an apparatus that is simultaneously composed of and separate from its individual parts. Similarly, we are told that Salo has ‘seen, living in a moment at a time, far more of the past and far more of the Universe than Rumfoord had. He remembered more of what he had seen, too’ (188). Salo conceals this from Rumfoord, since he ‘loves’ him and doesn’t want to offend him. He also conceals the truth of human history and the nature of his mission, lest Rumfoord ‘turn against Salo and all Tralfamadorians’ (192). These details are the very stuff of the next, even larger (but by no means fnal) material-discursive apparatus presented in the novel. Salo was chosen ‘as the most handsome, healthy, clean-minded specimen of his people’ and was tasked with carrying a sealed message from ‘“One rim of the Universe to the Other”’ – to ‘fnd creatures in [the Milky Way] somewhere, to master their language, to open the message, and translate it for them’ (189). However, in ‘the Earthling year 203, 117 B.C.’, Salo’s craft, which is powered, as all Tralfamadorian craft are, by the ‘Universal Will to Become’ (UWTB), develops technical diffculties and is forced down in the solar system (189).20 Holed up on Titan, Salo is forced to send messages home at the speed of light and receives his replies in an odd fashion: It is grotesque for anyone as primitive as an Earthling to explain how these swift communications were effected. Suffice it to say, in such primitive company, that the Tralfamadorians were able to make certain impulses from the Universal Will to Become echo through the vaulted architecture of the Universe with about three times the speed of light. And they were able to focus and modulate these impulses so as to influence creatures far, far away, and inspire them to serve Tralfamadorian ends. (191) It is ‘Earthling’ civilisation that Tralfamadore targets. Humans and their practices are embedded within the ‘vaulted architecture of the Universe’; indeed, they are identical with it. The UWTB, here and elsewhere, acts as a catalyst for several of the subject/object juxtapositions that permeate the novel. As a piece of ‘popular doggerel has it’, it can directly mediate

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and metamorphose between the animate and ‘inanimate’, the parochial and cosmic: Willy found some Universal Will to Become Mixed it with his bubble gum. Cosmic piddling seldom pays: Poor Willy’s six new Milky Ways. (99) Just as a single human can be transformed into entire galaxies, the practices of humanity as a whole are similarly shaped by the UWTB. The frst message Salo receives is written on Earth in huge stones on a plain in what is now England. . . . The meaning of Stonehenge in Tralfamadorian, when viewed from above is: ‘Replacement part being rushed with all possible speed’. Similarly, the Great Wall of China means ‘Be Patient. We haven’t forgotten about you’, the Golden House of Nero ‘We are doing the best we can’, the Kremlin ‘You will be on your way before you know it’, and the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva ‘Pack up your things and be ready to leave on short notice’ (190). Rumfoord has also been under this subtle infuence. The machinations on Earth, Mercury, and Mars; the manipulation of Constant, Beatrice, and eventually their son, Chrono; the Martian army and the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, all are part of the Tralfamadorian apparatus, ordered in such a way to bring the replacement part – Chrono’s ‘good luck piece’, which he mistakes for a small piece of nondescript metal – to Salo on Titan. As Rumfoord bitterly remarks, the scrap in Chrono’s pocket ‘is the culmination of all Earthling history’ (208). Indeed, Rumfoord, thanks to his vast spatio-temporal presence, has always been well aware of this fact, though he notes that he has tried to ignore the fact and act according to his own will, since a man will put off admitting [that he’s being used] to himself until the last possible instant. . . . It may surprise you to learn that I take a certain pride, no matter how foolishly mistaken that pride may be, in making my own decisions for my own reasons. (199) When the moment fnally comes to confront Salo with the matter, Rumfoord is affronted and enraged that ‘Tralfamadore . . . reached into the Solar System, picked me up, and used me like a handy-dandy potato peeler!’ (199). This is the parochialism that Salo detects in Rumfoord – the

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insistence, despite his extraordinary perspective and knowledge, on clinging to the old punctual, particulate idea that he is an ontologically separate, self-creating, and self-created individual. He still believes that he is a Harmanian object, unbound by outside infuence – a man of substance, just like the mansion that he left behind on Earth. As his time draws to close (in so much as it can, given his unique position), as ‘an explosion is going to blow the terminal of [his] spiral clear off the Sun, clear out of the Solar System’, Rumfoord can only say that ‘One gets tired, you know, being caught up in the monotonous clockwork of the Solar System’ (201). Unwilling to fully let go of his belief in local, detached, freely willed agency, he instead welcomes the potential oblivion that awaits him. Rumfoord’s angry, resigned response to the revelation that his actions are within a phenomenon that is itself subject to ever greater apparatuses is signifcant, because it obliquely refects the traditional humanist response to any perceived threat to free will or individualism. To use Baradian terminology, the revelation that his actions are only agential – that is, active and even, in a sense, ‘his’ but always interlaced in larger systems – rather than traditionally agentive, produced solely through libertarian free will and unmarked by outside infuence, leads him to a furious backlash, a near nihilistic disavowal of his very existence. At the risk of glibness, this response might be paraphrased as something like ‘if it’s not all mine, it’s not worth having’. This certainly resembles the response of several critics to Sirens and, given the exemplar nature of the novel that I previously posited, Vonnegut’s corpus as a whole. This is arguably the reason why a critic like Lawrence Broer expends so much effort to reframe the novel as wholly hallucinatory – a delusional daydream of Malachi Constant as he struggles to reassert his own primacy, identity, and self-control; a parable of the struggle to become the fully realised humanist human. It is the ‘depressingly popular’ view that Robert Merrill and Peter Scholl diagnose in much early Vonnegut work, as when they criticise Lynn Buck’s essay ‘Vonnegut’s World of Comic Futility’ (1975) as a typical distortion of what Vonnegut is trying to achieve, with the essay’s relatively surface-level readings producing charges of the ‘“deliberate mechanization of mankind,” “the cynicism of the comical world he has created,” and his “nihilistic message”’ (Merrill & Scholl, 65). Sirens, of course, often displays a satirical bent, and its targets are many and varied. Like all of Vonnegut’s work, an undeniable element of didacticism is present. Moreover, the novel rarely finches from its continuous engagement with the possibility that free will is an illusion or that man is nothing but matter, one more object among many. But the tendency either to read the portrayal of these concepts as blankly, frighteningly nihilistic or to read the novel as a whole as a kind of self-refexive jeremiad that simply must be implicitly criticising these ideas by depicting them, both miss the fascinating synthesis that The Sirens of Titan achieves. Rumfoord fzzles and disappears before this synthesis is fully arrived at. He and Kazak

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take their leave of the ‘clockwork of the Solar System’, and Rumfoord does so gladly, having resented his place within it. But those who are left behind on Titan – Malachi Constant, Beatrice Rumfoord, Chrono, and to an extent Salo – achieve, in their exile, some form of accommodation with their situation.

‘I Was a Victim of a Series of Accidents, as Are We All’ – Integration The ways in which some form of accommodation to the spiralling structures and schemas of The Sirens of Titan might be achieved represent tentative steps towards a posthumanist sensibility; and this sensibility in turn represents the beginning of a tendency that goes on to present itself throughout Vonnegut’s work. I have already touched upon a few episodes in Sirens that hint at this kind of understanding. Boaz’s communion with the semi-inanimate Harmoniums of Mercury, for instance, is predicated on a renunciation of the individualism and ambition of human society, in favour of simply finding oneself a place in an apparatus whereby one can ‘do some good without doing any harm’. Similarly, the small but significant textual detail of Beatrice’s momentary imbrication within a kind of class/house/person hybrid, the simultaneous contiguity of the social, the material, and the personal, is an example of the kind of posthuman entanglement that is elucidated in Karen Barad’s agential realist project, against the vacuum-packed, non-relational ontology of Harman’s objectoriented ontology. However, the episode that Rumfoord considers the most distasteful, the most offensive to human dignity – the manipulation of human history and practices for the purposes of Tralfamadorian messaging (and humorously inane messaging, at that) – provides the best approach to the closest thing to a normative ethic in The Sirens of Titan. It is, of course, easy to read the ‘true’ meaning of the various architectural masterpieces of humankind as belittling, a deflation of human achievement in light of what these structures ‘really’ mean. Certainly Rumfoord does, just as Rumfoord considers his own unwanted ‘tool-being’ as a ‘handy-dandy potato peeler’.21 But perhaps the most interesting feature of the way these structures are presented in The Sirens of Titan isn’t that they ‘actually’ mean one thing when humans thought they meant another. Rather, what is most interesting is that they carry different meanings depending on who is looking at them. Just as in a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, a phenomenon in which ‘both Daddys can be right’, Stonehenge can represent a place of religious worship and an idiotically cheery and banal service update at the same time. Or, to be more precise, they represent both and neither meanings, since meaning is neither fixed nor intrinsic to an object. Barad’s thought is once again a useful analytic tool here. It is, I argue, significant that Vonnegut chose architectural monuments as the Tralfamadorian messaging medium, rather than the perhaps more

166 Space and Time obviously discursive media, such as the fine arts, music, or literature. The sheer conspicuousness of the materiality of a building in comparison to a book, canvas, or record, like the many other examples explored in this chapter, highlights the thoroughgoing materialism of Sirens. The Tralfamadorian messages / Earthling monuments can be likened to what Barad terms ‘material-discursive enactments’. For Barad, crucially, this term does not denote a conjunction of two otherwise disparate spheres. For a start, in Barad’s theory, Discourse is not a synonym for language. Discursive practices are the material conditions for making meaning. In my posthumanist account, meaning is not a human-based notion; rather, meaning is an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility. Intelligibility is usually framed as a matter of intellection and therefore a specifically human capacity. But in my agential realist account, intelligibility is a matter of differential responsiveness, as performatively articulated and accountable, to what matters. (335) It is this ‘responsiveness’ – which certainly corresponds, in purview if not exact method, to Harman’s ideas about vicarious relations – that broadens the possibilities of what meaning is, and how it is produced. In the specifc ontology that underlies her critical theory, Barad notes that [in] summary, the primary ontological units are not “things” but phenomena – dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements/ relationalities/(re)articulations of the world. And the primary semantic units are not ‘words’ but material-discursive practices through which (ontic and semantic) boundaries are constituted. (141) Finally, the dynamism that Barad elucidates here ‘is agency . . . not an attribute but the ongoing reconfgurings of the world’ (141). The medium is quite literally the message. This provides a position to start to theorise not only the signifcance of the Great Wall, the Kremlin, and the other monuments in The Sirens of Titan but also why their treatment might seem so offensive to Rumfoord (and liberal humanist critics). It can also demonstrate how they might be reconfgured and appreciated from a posthuman perspective. The various monument/messages are materialdiscursive enactments. Though they still technically embody meaning in its most familiar, semiotic sense (albeit differing meanings within different apparatuses) and as such remain within the locus of what Barad terms ‘intellection’, their materiality still hints at broader, posthuman possibilities. Harman argues that

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The landscape of sensual things must be imagined in a primitive sense that does not imply high-grade human or animal access to the phenomenal realm, such as thought, memory, fantasy, dreams, and the like . . . the sentient sphere is merely different in degree, not in kind, from the primordial kingdom where dust collides with dirt. (Circus Philosophicus, 69–70) and does so to both conjoin and ‘fatten’ traditional hierarchies of relations. As he elsewhere notes, ‘[when] a dust-mote slams into a marble column, the relationship between these two objects is every bit as puzzling as that between a scholar and a papyrus text’ (‘The Revival of Metaphysics’, 115). Similarly, the Great Wall of China might be a wordless statement of the power of the Ming Dynasty, a Tralfamadorian travel announcement, a valuable refuge for birds’ nests, or a substrate for water to erode, depending (to return to Baradian terminology) on the differential apparatus one might wish to entertain. The last three of these possibilities are not subordinate to the frst. This removes the Great Wall (for instance) from the exclusive and rarefed sphere of intentional human practices, but intentional human practices remain relevant. Towards the very end of Sirens, Constant and Beatrice live out their lives in and around the now-deserted palace of Rumfoord. Salo has disassembled himself in despair, despondent over Rumfoord’s acrimonious parting. Chrono has run away to live among the Titanian bluebirds and of all the inhabitants of the moon seems best adjusted to his new life and knowledge. As far as he is concerned ‘everything seemed in apple-pie order’, and he ‘himself participated ftly in that perfect order’, since ‘sooner or later, Chrono believed, the magical forces of the Universe would put everything back together again’ (SOT 211). As seeming testament to his belief, and as the last example of nested circles within the novel, he builds hundreds of odd shrines, built of sticks and stones. . . . One large stone was at the center, representing Saturn. A Wooden hoop made of a green twig was placed around it – to represent Saturn’s rings. And beyond the rings were small stones to represent the nine moons.  .  .  . The marks on the ground made it clear that young Chrono . . . spent hours moving the elements of the system about. (214) Beatrice, now ‘a springy, one-eyed, gold-toothed, brown old lady . . . [who] was probably a little crazy’ has spent years writing a book named The True Purpose of Life in the Solar System. The reader is treated to two extracts, and the frst is as follows: ‘I would be the last to deny,’ said Beatrice, reading her own work out loud, ‘that the forces of Tralfamadore have had something to do

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While Beatrice may be overstating the case, she is nevertheless able to grasp the central dynamic that characterises human agency in Sirens. It is indeed the case that just because human practices have been infuenced by ‘outside’ forces, that doesn’t mean that they are not still human practices. While these Earthling monuments have been differentially produced by an interstellar apparatus, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t still theirs. It is simply that the way that the universe as presented in Sirens works and the way that the beings within it work – since they are a ‘part of that which they seek to understand’ – is far stranger than characters like Malachi Constant had anticipated and Winston Niles Rumfoord could accept. Needless to say, if Barad’s theory of agential realism is correct, then this is also something like the way our own universe works too (though, of course, even the separation of a fctional and ‘real’ universe under her ontology is problematic). What is required, and what Beatrice is grasping towards in her treatise, is a complete refguring of ideas of traditional agency. Barad lucidly explains what happens when we recognise the entangled, material-discursivity of what we do. For Barad, ‘crucially, agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has. It cannot be designated as an attribute of subjects or objects (as they do not preexist as such)’ (178). Further, Strict determinism is stopped in its tracks, but the quantum does not leave us with free will either. Rather, it reworks the entire set of possibilities made available. Agency and causality are not on-off affairs. . . . Space, time, and matter are intra-actively produced in the ongoing differential articulation of the world. (178) This is a threat to human happiness or dignity only if one equates human happiness or dignity, as Rumfoord does, with the values of liberal humanism (which, to be clear, this certainly is a threat to). This perspective also lends itself to certain positive as well as negative values or norms. That is to say, not only does it cast aside both free will and mechanical determinism, as well as the traditional values of humanism of autonomy and individualism; it also provides fertile ground for new, and possibly counterintuitive, normative ethics. Returning to the aged Constant and Beatrice on Titan, we are told that Beatrice, shortly after reciting her extract, pensively tells her companion that ‘I just had an idea that ought to go in

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the book . . . if I can just keep it from getting away’ (217). After a short period, the thought comes to her: ‘The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody,’ she said, ‘would be to not be used for anything by anybody.’ The thought relaxed her. She lay down on Rumfoord’s old contour chair, looked up at the appallingly beautiful rings of Saturn – at Rumfoord’s rainbow. ‘Thank you for using me,’ she said to Constant, ‘even though I didn’t want to be used by anybody.’ (218) With this, Beatrice passes away peacefully, and Constant is left alone. It is signifcant that she symbolically takes Rumfoord’s place at this moment, pronouncing a sentiment directly opposite to his own, beneath yet more circular imagery. It is also appropriate that this image – the vast rings of Saturn – is described as ‘appallingly beautiful’, since the implications of her fnal revelation could be similarly described. The ‘appalling’ implication is the humility and the recognition of the sheer fnitude of man that is required to relinquish the belief that one should not, or must not, be an element within a far larger system. It is too easy to read the word ‘used’ as ‘abused’, which is, perhaps, a hangover of the liberal humanist tradition, but what Beatrice means here is instead something more like ‘being of use’, of taking part in the ever-widening apparatuses of the universe, just as Boaz (whose words are obliquely echoed here) meant, on a far more local scale, in his identifcation with the Harmoniums. The ‘beautiful’, meanwhile, is precisely that which relaxes Beatrice – the realisation that being used / being of use does not denigrate human beings but integrates them; that, in the words of Robert Tally, ‘following unconsciously the mechanical clockwork that determines one’s actions is the best, most purposive, and meaningful action there is’ (2011, 34). Nor does this imply quietism or sheer inaction, as many critics have accused Vonnegut of endorsing. Rather, it is a call to strive to become equal to one’s fate rather than to master it. This is a goal that is, throughout the novel, presented as at once humble and cosmic in scope – humble because of its seeming insignifcance in the face of the interstellar apparatuses that engulf it but cosmic by virtue of the fattened, egalitarian ontology of Sirens, in which, to borrow a metaphor from Graham Harman, ‘the gods are present . . . with the reality of objects such as sailboats, grapefruit, wax, and platinum’ as much as human beings (‘King of Networks’, 92). Shortly after Beatrice’s death, as the newly rebuilt Salo ferries the dying Constant back to Earth, Constant realises that he misses Beatrice and that he loved her, telling the Tralfamadorian that it took nearly their entire span on Titan ‘to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is

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to love whoever is around to be loved’ (SOT, 220). Again, this is a defation of any traditional grand narratives about love and companionship, but in sacrifcing any delusions about the transcendental power of love, Constant instead discovers something far more vital and real. These fnal statements, as seemingly simple or even mawkish as they may appear, represent the affrmative normative ethic of the posthumanist solar-scape of The Sirens of Titan – an ethic that is situational and communal rather than bounded and individualist, agentive rather than autonomous, and materialist/monist rather than transcendentalist/dualist. As I shall note in the next chapter, this posthumanist tendency, and, in particular, the emphasis on the (non-existence of) free will and on the ethics of fnitude, reappears in full and perhaps more troubling and troublesome guise in Vonnegut’s novel of time, Slaughterhouse-Five. Nevertheless, in The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut’s novel of objects in space, these ruminations provide a positive, posthumanist ethic from which the rest of his oeuvre will come to spring.

Notes 1. After the disappointing sales of Player Piano, Vonnegut was plagued with ‘money worries . . . and anxieties about what he didn’t have in comparison with other men his age’ (Shields, 2011, 139). He suffered from long periods of writer’s block and would engage in abortive money-making schemes, including designing board games (140) and opening a short-lived, ill-fated Saab dealership (144). In 1958, one year before the publication of Sirens, disaster struck the extended family – his brother-in-law and beloved sister Alice died within a few days of each other, the former in a freak train accident and the latter of breast cancer, necessitating the adoption of their four children by Vonnegut and his wife and further increasing money problems and tensions at home (146–153). 2. Interestingly, at the end of the novel, after Paul Proteus has led a group of the dispossessed former workers to revolt against the automated society, destroying the factories and machinery, the men begin to repair the machines, in an almost automatic and nonconscious fashion. This wrinkle in the story’s otherwise straightforward plot is a more sophisticated and complex depiction of man’s interdependence with technology than the near-ludditism that is usually suggested in Player Piano. 3. While Vonnegut’s use of the term ‘waveform phenomena’ could conceivably be based in more conventional physics – such as electromagnetic or acoustic waves – the nature of Rumfoord’s nonlocal, counterintuitive existence is strongly redolent of quantum mechanics. I have been unable to conclusively ascertain Vonnegut’s knowledge of quantum physics, but several factors suggest he is likely to have been aware of the (relatively) new science. General Electric, where Vonnegut was employed in the early 1950s, had a long history of pure physics research (Kragh, 122), and Irving Langmuir, who worked with Vonnegut’s brother Bernard and served as the inspiration for Felix Hoenikker in Cat’s Cradle (1963), was present at the 1927 Solvay Physics Conference, along with Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, and Niels Bohr (Coffey, 188–190), though he decided not to incorporate quantum theory into his own work, recognising its inherent difficulty (Reich

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219). Vonnegut may also have been familiar with quantum mechanics simply from popular culture – for a cogent exploration of the theory’s introduction to the mainstream, see Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber’s The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty (2014). 4. The Bohr-Einstein debates of the 1920s are generally considered the beginning of the long and complex process of trying to ascertain whether the bizarre behaviour of matter on the quantum level was an epistemological or ontological problem – that is, whether such elements as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle were a matter of being unable to measure the velocity and location of a particle or whether particles are genuinely nonlocal. A corollary to this is the question of whether the universe is deterministic (as described by Newtonian and relativity physics) or probabilistic (as described by the new quantum mechanics). Corey S. Powell, in ‘Will Quantum Mechanics Swallow Relativity?’ (2015), provides a lively and readable account of these debates, as well as their continuation throughout the 20th century. 5. Though Bryant conflates anti- and posthumanism here, it should be noted that the terms are not strictly synonymous. Francesca Ferrando notes that while the ‘deconstruction of the notion of the human’ is central to both movements, a major distinction between the two movements is already embedded in their morphologies, specifically in their denotation of ‘post-’ and ‘anti-.’ Antihumanism fully acknowledges the consequences of the ‘death of Man,’ as already asserted by some post-structuralist theorists, in particular by Michel Foucault. In contrast, posthumanism does not rely on any symbolic death: such an assumption would be based on the dualism dead/alive, while any strict form of dualism has been already challenged by posthumanism, in its post-dualistic process-ontological perspective. (31–32) 6. Actor-network theory (or ANT) was developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law in the early 1980s, as a means to explain how things other than humans – objects, ideas, processes, physical forces – have equal importance in creating social situations. Steve Bruce and Steven Yearley provide a concise example in their entry on ANT, noting that central to its claims is the idea of ‘translation’, in which ‘innovations succeed because other actors’ interests are translated into the new enterprise’. As such, Latour argues, for example, that Pasteur’s famous work on disease prevention succeeded because Pasteur translated the interests of vets, farmers and livestock into his research programme: pasteurisation came to appear to be in the interests of them all. Latour and Callon stress that innovations typically work because their proponents are skilled at building alliances (actor-networks) between many heterogeneous agents; such alliances can include human actors (such as vets) and non-human ones (such as bacteria and sheep). (4) 7. Karen Barad argues that the idea of the detached observer is a particularly 17th century one and one that she often equates with Descartes, Newton, and the practice of ‘Representationalism’: Representationalism and Newtonian physics have roots in the seventeenth-century. The assumption that language is a transparent medium that transmits a homologous picture of reality to the knowing mind

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The idea of a situation-independent observer was dealt a serious blow in physics by the quantum revolution. Interestingly, other fields of study came to similar conclusions; as N. Katherine Hayles notes, the debates regarding ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ came to the forefront in the developing field of cybernetics during the late 1940s and early ’50s, and second-wave thinkers, such as Niklas Luhmann and Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, developed concepts of reflexivity in systems theory (1999, 10, 17, 131–159). Finally, for a concise summation of questions of objectivism, relativism, and the ‘Cartesian Anxiety’, see Part I, Section 2 of Guy Axtell’s Objectivity (2016). 8. Derrida, in dialogue with Heidegger, defines the metaphysics of presence (often simply ‘metaphysics’) thusly: The enterprise of returning ‘strategically’, ‘ideally’, to an origin or to a priority thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, selfidentical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent. (1988, 93) Put simply, this metaphysics is defined by a constant insistence on what uncomplicatedly, indivisibly, self-presently is – in the example in the main text, it is matter, the bare and indivisible ‘stuff’ of reality, that is taken as a bedrock for particulate ontology, with all succeeding interactions to stem ultimately from these self-identical substances. Against this philosophical tendency, Derrida argues for – in as much as Derrida can ever be seen to take any one side – among other things, the concept of finitude, which I will explore in more detail in the next chapter. 9. As Robin Mackay records in his introduction to Collapse II (2007), the ‘Speculative Realism’ movement takes its name from a conference held at Goldsmith’s College in 2007; among those present were Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux (3–13). 10. The originator of the term ‘correlationism’, Quentim Meillassoux explains this ‘philosopheme’ thusly: the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant seems to be that of correlation. By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other. We will henceforth call correlationism any current of thought which maintains the unsurpassable character of the correlation so defined. Consequently, it becomes possible to say that every philosophy which disavows naïve realism has become a variant of correlationism. . . . Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another. Not only does

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it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object ‘in itself’, in isolation from its relation to the subject, but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that would not alwaysalready be related to an object. (5) 11. Harman gives the example of plutonium abandoned in the desert as an exercise in the concepts of relationality and potentiality. As he notes, ‘while the sand and dead weeds now surrounding the plutonium fail to sound the depths of its lethal radioactive quality’, any living creatures that were nearby would be killed in minutes. In short, ‘there is an additional reality in this strange artificial material that is in no way exhausted by the unions and associations in which it currently happens to be entangled. . . . The reality is unexpressed’. However, he cautions against the ‘usual’ response to this situation: The usual easy way out of this predicament is the appeal to ‘potentiality’ to explain the status of the radioactivity prior to the arrival of any animals. It will be said that the plutonium is not ‘actually’ lethal, but potentially so given the right circumstances. What is weak about this approach . . . is that the theme of potential allows us a sneaky way to evade the difficult question of what the actuality of the lethal quality is. To speak of a quality in terms of its potential is already to speak of it from the outside, to objectify it rather than to clarify its ontological status. (‘Object-Oriented Philosophy’, 103) Given Harman’s philosophical goals, as described in the main body of the text, this is obviously inimical to his overall project. His tentative conclusion is that the actuality of the plutonium can be found neither in the current total state of the world [a form of relationism], nor in an isolated lump of enduring transuranian substance. The object known as plutonium is neither material nor relational, which means that it must be both immaterial and substantial, in a sense yet to be determined. (104) 12. For example, Harman lays out his five ‘rules’ for objects in ‘Space, Time and Essence: An Object-Oriented Approach’ (2008): 1. Relative size does not matter: an atom is no more an object than a skyscraper. 2. Simplicity does not matter: an electron is no more an object than a piano. 3. Durability does not matter: a soul is no more an object than cotton candy. 4. Naturalness does not matter: helium is no more an object than plutonium. 5. Reality does not matter: mountains are no more objects than hallucinated mountains. (2010, 147–148) 13. Central to Whitehead’s concept of universally promiscuous relationality is the notion of prehension, first fully defined in Science in the Modern World (1925). As Shaviro summarises, prehension ‘can be defined as any process – causal, perceptual, or of another nature entirely – in which an entity grasps, registers the presence of, responds to, or is affected by another entity’. Prehension also includes both causal relations and perceptual ones and makes no fundamental distinction between them; this process may be cognitive, as in the case of human perception and cognition, but is not necessarily so (29).

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14. For Harman, a ‘sensual object’ is basically similar to Husserl’s ‘intentional object’, an object presented in consciousness that is unified, despite its adumbrations. Harman notes that if Husserl were to walk around a water tower at dusk, one would encounter it in a variety of different perceptual configurations – differing angles, differing shadows and shades and light conditions – but that the tower does not become a new tower in each instance. As such, the intentional object always appears ‘in more specific fashion than necessary, frosted over with accidental features that can be removed without the object itself changing identity for us’ (The Quadruple Object, 24–25). However, as Harman notes, in Husserl’s thought, the ‘object itself’ is never withdrawn from us – objects may be adorned with frivolous details and surface-effects, but they are grasped as unified objects, first and foremost. The problem arises when these intentional objects are falsely assumed by later philosophers to be ‘those lying outside of human consciousness’, whereas Husserl situated them firmly in the phenomenological sphere. For Harman, the phrase ‘sensual object’ more effectively conveys that ‘we do not speak here of the real world beyond human access where only real objects belong. In all phenomenal experience, there is a tension between sensual objects and their sensual qualities’ (26). This is the first rift, the phenomenal rift. The second is between the sensual object and its real qualities, and it is here that object-object access becomes difficult. Harman summarises the two simultaneous polarizations thusly: The sensual object is something less than its sensual qualities, since these superfluous additions can be scraped away without affecting the underlying sensual object. But the sensual object is something less than its real qualities as well, since it deploys these qualities only in a certain specific way. On the one hand we have the sensual object and its sensual qualities, half-welded together in experience. But on the other hand, to articulate what makes this particular [object] be what it is requires an analysis of real qualities that can only be hinted at allusively or obliquely by the intellect without ever becoming nakedly present. (29) Another way of approaching this is to consider sensual qualities as ‘encrusted’ on the surface of a sensual object, while its real qualities are ‘submerged’, ‘inferred indirectly rather than witnessed’ (29–30). It is also worth noting that in Harman’s ontology, these dynamics need not be confined to conscious, human experience – all object-object relationships undergo analogous mediation. 15. Stones (or, particularly, minerals, materials and objects) are constantly conflated with humans or human practices throughout Sirens. The novel’s opening epigram, by one ‘Ransom K. Ferm’, plays with scale and perspective, producing a kind of parallax depiction of the cosmic and parochial, the human and inhuman: Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules – and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress. Soon afterwards, we are told that ‘Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward [into space]. . . . It flung them like stones’ (7), and this also bears a resemblance – probably coincidental, but nevertheless interesting, considering the current topic – to Spinoza’s famous metaphor regarding free will, elucidated in a letter to an anonymous correspondent:

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Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined. (2012, 390) The epigraph of the second chapter, occurring shortly afterwards, is a quotation from Rumfoord that makes this connection even more manifest: Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic. (Sirens, 33) Stones and discourse are also closely linked. Later in the novel, Unk discovers a letter he had written to himself, a kind of peripheral memory to mitigate his constant mind-wipes, under a ‘big blue stone’ (Sirens, 88). On his return to Earth, we are told that ‘all living things were brothers, and all dead things even more so’ – another conflation of supposedly ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’ matter – shortly before Unk finds the words ‘pro patria’ on ‘stones that were squared and written on by men’ (153), cementing his return to society. 16. So, for instance, a ‘computing machine’ is used to prove that Constant’s cigarette franchise caused sterility and grows ‘tremendously excited .  .  . obviously telling to try its operators something’ and doing everything it could to express itself’ (60). The ship that brings Unk and Boaz to Mercury is portrayed as ‘talking nervously to itself’ (134). Then there is, of course, Salo, a machine who is nevertheless the most expressive character in the novel. 17. In the two-slit experiment – a key piece of evidence in the development of quantum physics – a series of photons are fired at a light sensor, with a light blocking sheet between the emitter and the sensor. The sheet has two slits cut into it. One would expect the light detections to be clustered in two groups, as each photon passes through one of the two slits. Instead, light is also detected between these two clusters. The same result occurs with electrons, which is astonishing; what this experiment shows is that matter exhibits wavelike as well as particulate properties (Barad, 82–83, 103–106). The consequences of this are far-reaching, but the relevant conclusion here is that a) this is not an epistemological problem but an ontological one (matter is not substantive, as we are used to imagining it and is not pre-existent to apparatuses) and b) differing apparatuses change, under Barad and Bohr’s ontology, the matter that is differentially produced by them. Constant’s choice of both/neither here, if we are to assume this imagery is intentional, perhaps points forward to the more explicitly ‘wave-like’ Rumfoord’s existence. 18. The only recorded exposure Vonnegut may have had to the work of Spinoza is very briefly detailed in a 1969 interview with Wilfred Sheed, where he notes that ‘Philosophy does interest him [Vonnegut] in an amateur way. A friend told him he had hit upon Spinoza’s theory of time by accident in Slaughterhouse-Five’ (Conversations, 13). The implication of the wording here is that Vonnegut had not heard of, or at least read, Spinoza before the

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composition of S5 and so certainly not before Sirens. For a detailed explanation of Spinoza’s concept of ‘God or Nature’, see Part One of the Ethics (1677), though the actual phrase is not used until the preface of Part Four. 19. Several critics have noted the supposedly incongruous juxtaposition of Salo’s robotic nature and his ‘human’ warmth. For instance, Peter Reed points out that there is ‘sentimentality .  .  . in the depiction of this lovable tangerine of a Tralfamadorian’ but that it is ‘balanced by ironic undercutting’ (1972, 80–81). 20. Vonnegut describes the Universal Will to Become (or UWTB) as ‘what makes universes out of nothingness – that makes nothingness insist on becoming somethingness’ (99). This name – as well as the nature of this particular force – may be a reference to Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy as described in The World as Will and Representation (1818), specifically, the idea of the Wille zum Leben or ‘Will to Live’, a blind force that drives all observable phenomena. 21. The reference to Heidegger’s concept of ‘tool-being’ and ‘being-at-hand’ is not casual; his philosophy is central to Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology and is also an important point of reference in Barad’s agential realism. Harman makes much hay of tool-being; in many ways, it is a central plank of his philosophy. However, for Harman, as opposed to Heidegger, it is universal; as he notes, ‘The problem is that Heidegger only allows objects to withdraw from human Dasein, never from each other as well. For this reason, he never reaps the dividends of the weird realism he inaugurates’ (‘Physical Nature’, 126); as he elsewhere argues, tool-being is universal. . . . The tool-analysis, to repeat, does not give us information about a certain class of entities that serves as a means to an end. It tells us instead that no entity is exhausted by its series of encounters with other entities. . . . If we recognise that ‘tool’ means ‘reality’ rather than ‘usefulness’, there should no longer be any compunction about saying that human Dasein is also ready-to-hand, despite Heidegger’s explicit statements to the contrary. To say that human beings are zuhanden does not mean that we successfully manipulate them in Machiavellian fashion. It only signifies that the reality of each of us is something quite different from what we or anyone else will ever be able to know about it . . . even human being is tool-being. (‘A Fresh Look’, 54)

6

Slaughterhouse-Five ‘Poo-Tee-Weet?’ Andrew John Hicks

A decade separates Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) from Vonnegut’s previous foray into overt science fiction, The Sirens of Titan (1959). Tralfamadorians and flying saucers are not, however, all that links the two novels, which are otherwise separated by the (relatively) grounded Mother Night (1961) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) and the primarily satirical Cat’s Cradle (1963). Sirens, and in a more attenuated manner, S5, both evince a keen interest on Vonnegut’s part in the scientific debates of the period, particularly in the realm of theoretical physics. Perhaps more important, however, both novels are concerned with the philosophical and ethical questions that were introduced to the public sphere by the disjunctions and revelations of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Loree Rackstraw – who, as a student of Vonnegut’s at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, was proximately present during the composition and publication of Slaughterhouse-Five – draws special attention to this aspect of Vonnegut’s writing. Noting that Vonnegut has ‘shaped this [S5] and a number of other novels around concepts and insights deriving in part from the physical sciences’ (2001, 50), she argues that S5 ‘became a brilliant and accessible example of complex new insights into holism and the crisis of perception and meaning that were arising at the same time out of postmodern literary theory and quantum physics’ (54).1 Indeed, in a recursive twist, appropriate to both quantum theory and, as I will explain, to S5’s form/content, Rackstraw recounts an anecdote in which the quantum physicist Fred Alan Wolf appropriated the imagery of the novel in order to better explain quantum mechanics in his own work. As Rackstraw wryly notes, it is ‘a case of a mythic story invented by a fiction writer [influenced by “the physical sciences”] influencing the vision of a quantum physicist’ (50).2 C. P. Snow’s famous ‘two cultures’ appear, at least here, to become superimposed, and Rackstraw reads in Slaughterhouse-Five, ‘through the curious amazement of the friendly Tralfamadorian extraterrestrials’, the irony that humans, by nature and accident, have evolved as participants in the undifferentiated flux of the cosmos through a special

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Interdependency, fux, dynamism – this is certainly as much the language of quantum physics as it is of contemporary literary culture, and their interrelation, noted not only by Rackstraw but by, among others, Susan Strehle and Karen Barad, proves a fruitful locus for reading Vonnegut’s work. Indeed, Rackstraw, writing at the turn of the century, is not the frst to point out the links between Slaughterhouse-Five and the new physics; James Lundquist, writing in 1977, similarly notes that Vonnegut’s method accords well with the major changes in the conception of physical reality that have come out of contemporary science. ‘Change, ambiguity, and subjectivity (in a sense these are synonyms) thus become ways of defining human reality,’ Jerry H. Bryant writes in commenting on the relationship between twentiethcentury physics and recent fiction. ‘Novelist after novelist examines these features, and expresses almost universal frustration at being deprived of the old stability of metaphysical reality.’ But not Vonnegut. His Tralfamadorian scheme enables him to overcome the problems of change, ambiguity, and subjectivity involved in objectifying the events surrounding the fire-bombing of Dresden and the involvement of Billy Pilgrim and the author in them. (193) Lundquist’s innovative essay goes on to further link S5 with the science of the era by deploying the attractive simile that, through his constant movements back and forth in time, ‘we see Billy becoming his history, existing all at once, as if he is an electron. And this gives the novel a structure that is, to directly state the analogy, atomic. Billy whirls around the central fact of Dresden, the planes of his orbit constantly intersecting, and where he has been, he will be’ (194). I consider this an exemplary posthumanist reading, not least for its blurring of the subject/object distinction. Nevertheless, my own study will not follow Lundquist’s lead directly. Indeed, following this scientifc line of inquiry when analysing Slaughterhouse-Five, in a similar manner to Rackstraw and Lundquist’s able and insightful commentaries, may seem the most obvious direction for the present chapter. As previously noted, many of the elements present in The Sirens of Titan that make it particularly amenable to such a reading all return in S5, not least in Billy Pilgrim’s famously becoming ‘unstuck in time’, the Einsteinian ‘block universe’ conception of reality embodied in

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the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, the watchful Tralfamadorian extraterrestrial observers, and the pastiches of classic ‘fying saucer’-style pulp science fction. But if The Sirens of Titan can be considered Vonnegut’s novel of objects in space, then Slaughterhouse-Five can equally be considered his novel of time, and time, as thinkers from Zeno onwards have noted to their frustration, is simply not as amenable to empirical study as space, the domain of ‘real’, tangible things. As such, while I will draw on the themes of subjectivity, ambiguity, and paradox that are so essential to physics-based readings (readings like Rackstraw’s, Lundquist’s, and my previous chapter), I will do so from the perspective of a decidedly ‘softer’, less ‘material’ science – that of general systems theory and, in particular, Niklas Luhmann’s autopoietic systems theory. As I hope I will make clear, the Luhmannian approach essentially necessitates a formal analysis of the novel, rather than the more content-based readings utilised thus far. That said, the paradoxical nature of Luhmann’s concepts of form and distinction ultimately renders this opposition meaningless. Reading Slaughterhouse-Five through the lens of Luhmann’s complex, counterintuitive but fascinating methodology, I argue, will help to clarify both the peculiar power and popularity of Vonnegut’s most famous novel and its disparate – sometimes near trenchantly oppositional – critical interpretations.

Slaughterhouse-Five It is widely accepted that the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969 was a watermark in Vonnegut’s career, not least by Vonnegut himself; as Peter J. Reed notes, ‘he achieved a feeling of completion with Slaughterhouse-Five, he said, and found little that provided stimulation in the society of that period’ (2007, 10). The novel also represented an exorcism of sorts for Vonnegut. Jerome Klinkowitz argues that although S5 was the culmination of decades of abortive attempts to adequately represent and confront his wartime experiences, nevertheless in general the matter of Dresden furnished the world picture of Player Piano, the psychological barrier for The Sirens of Titan, the backdrop for Mother Night, the informing principle of Cat’s Cradle, the climax for God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and finally the essence of Slaughterhouse-Five. (1975, 25)3 Vonnegut’s stalwart student readership – the only contemporary demographic that paid any real attention to the author’s earlier works – contributed to the novel’s burgeoning success. Published during the height of the Vietnam War, ‘at a time when youth admonished one another not to trust anyone over thirty’, Slaughterhouse-Five became a manifesto of sorts for the anti-war movement, and Vonnegut himself became an

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unlikely spokesman for the younger generation (Mustazza, 2011, 3–4). Critical responses followed shortly afterwards. Among the first was Robert Scholes’s front-page article in the 6 April 1970 New York Times Book Review. Scholes, one of the few academics (along with Jerome Klinkowitz and Peter J. Reed) who was already familiar with Vonnegut’s work and broadly sympathetic towards the writers’ techniques and aims, set the tone for much of the following critical engagement. If there was a message in S5, then Scholes read it thusly: ‘Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot’s wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them’ (qtd. in Klinkowitz, 2011, 24).4 This, I will argue, is a valuable insight, especially at so early a juncture. Nevertheless, Scholes was also responsible for introducing the term ‘quietistic’ while discussing the novel. For Scholes, this was an admirable aspect of Vonnegut’s work. For other critics, it would be a primary, sometimes near unforgivable fault. Even before Scholes’s article, mere months after S5’s publication, the novelist Michael Crichton had attacked Vonnegut ‘because he will not choose sides, ascribing blame and penalty, identifying good guys and bad’ (qtd. in Klinkowitz, 2011, 24). The relativity of the novel – the refusal to say who is wrong, not even to say, as Crichton recommends, that everyone is wrong but the author(!), the ability to put all presuppositions aside and to be as ‘non-judgemental as any human work can be’, in Klinkowitz’s words (1990, 41) – was cause to label Vonnegut an ‘offensive writer’ for Crichton. In the succeeding years, S5 would be attacked by Josephine Hendin for its general nihilism and its ‘pessimistic and humiliating passivity’, by Pearl Kazin Bell for its celebration of ‘unreason, chaos, and inexorable decay’ (qtd. in Klinkowitz, 2011, 25), and by Tony Tanner for the ‘culpable moral indifference’ embodied in the ‘guilt-free’ Tralfamadorian perspective represented by the novel, best summarised by the famous refrain of ‘So it goes’ (199). Anthony Burgess would note that ‘Slaughterhouse is a kind of evasion – in a sense like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan – in which we’re being told to carry the horror of the Dresden bombing and everything it implies up to a level of fantasy’ (74). Lynn Buck, writing in 1975, argues that Vonnegut’s overall oeuvre, and S5 in particular, is rife with ‘cynicism’ and ‘nihilistic message[s]’; in a deft circumvention of the is/ought distinction, she argues that human beings are subjected to ‘deliberate mechanization’ by Vonnegut in his ‘world of comic futility’ (183). In a somewhat depressing turn, many of the critics who defend Vonnegut against such charges do so not by engaging with the intractable difficulties and paradoxes that confront the reader when reading the novel. Instead, their strategy is to undercut or avoid the very real quandaries of what the Tralfamadorian question (as it might be termed) represents. So, in an otherwise lucid, comprehensive direct response to Buck, Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl argue that Slaughterhouse-Five cannot be read as ‘quietistic’ because the novel implicitly undercuts not only

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Tralfamadorian ideas but ‘the status of the Tralfamadorians themselves’ (68). If I were to (perhaps unfairly) paraphrase their argument, it would be that not only does Vonnegut not really believe what he is saying; it is that large swathes of the novel must be read as illegitimate in order to keep liberal humanist presumptions intact. As Susan Strehle argues, this is a very common critical response to what she terms ‘actualist’ fiction. Caught between the self-imposed dichotomy of ‘realism’ and ‘antirealism’ (usually synonymous in critical circles, respectively, with either ‘the realistic representation of life’ or ‘the antirealistic exploration of artistic processes’), critics struggle to engage with ‘actualist’ writers, who happily exploit the fabulist devices of science fiction or fantasy to better capture the actual (rather than simplistically ‘real’) nature of existence.5 Again, and perhaps to be glib, since what Vonnegut seems to be saying in Slaughterhouse-Five is wholly unpalatable to liberal humanist values of autonomy and responsibility, then the novel must be considered either a) thuddingly, unsophisticatedly, sophomorically nihilistic or b) a clever subterfuge. In the latter case, the non-realistic elements are read as signposts towards the latent, real message of the novel, which is a refutation of the manifest, supposedly nihilistic, tendencies. So, for instance, Susanne Vees-Gulani – in a manner similar to Merrill and Scholl – argues that Billy’s time-travelling experiences and deterministic philosophy are clearly fantastical manifestations of PTSD (‘Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim’, 2003). Lawrence Broer, characteristically, gladly pitches everything vaguely extraterrestrial in S5 overboard, arguing that Pilgrim’s experiences are simply a manifestation of the automating influence of institutions, cultures, or computers (1994, 94–96). Arnold Edelstein argues that ‘the only way [Billy] can live with his memories of the past and his fear of the future and find meaning in both is to withdraw from reality into a pleasant but neurotic fantasy’ (138). Dolores K. Gros Louis, writing from a (self-admittedly) Christian perspective, argues that ‘Vonnegut clearly rejects – and wants us to reject – the Tralfamadorian view of time and its implications for human life’ and that only ‘unfeeling and unthoughtful readers[!] could find anything of positive value in the guilt-free, passive Tralfamadorian gospel’ (173, 178). Maurice J. O’Sullivan Jr. comes closer to one of the truly interesting aspects of the novel, noting that it ‘could be praised or damned as apologue, satire, novel, or autobiography depending on the needs of the reviewer or critic’ (179). However, he nevertheless argues that the ‘aversion to a careful scrutiny of motives’, evinced by Billy and the Tralfamadorians, ‘leads to the adoption of easy rationalizations and facile, self-justifying philosophies, escapes which form the essential object of the author’s protest’ (186). It is therefore unfortunate, in the critic’s opinion, that it ‘is a characteristic folly of the age that Billy has become for so many a hero’ (187). This is not to say, however, that many critics have not grappled with the difficulties of Slaughterhouse-Five resolutely and in good faith, choosing

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neither simplistic condemnation nor evasion of the novel’s difficult or fantastical elements. Donald J. Morse, in his excellent The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Imagining Being an American (2003), offers to the Tralfamadorian sceptics the pithy rejoinder that ‘one might as well suggest Gregor Samsa only hallucinates being a cockroach’ (89). More generally, he argues that Vonnegut’s perspective is based ‘neither in continued bitter reproaches nor in invective and threat, but in the acceptance of human limits’, which is not, in Morse’s estimation, quietism (21). Robert Uphaus, presenting a broadly sympathetic reading of Vonnegut’s oeuvre, strikes a balance between quietist/nihilist and libertarian/humanist readings when he notes that an adequate paraphrase of Vonnegut’s work is that people, including Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., are free to self-actualize but they must never expect such self-actualization to alter, fundamentally, the course of human history. As a consequence, what we see in Vonnegut’s fiction is a continuum of imagined alternatives – a spectrum of people self-actualizing – which at the same time preserves our sense, to use Vonnegut’s phrase, that ‘the fix is on.’ (166) For Uphaus, the argument that Vonnegut – and, more specifcally, his humour – ‘represents a perceptual slant that makes destruction a bit more tolerable’, a kind of ‘mode of consciousness which permits the reader to accept his apparent condition with some detachment, if not with good cheer’, is by no means pejorative (170). Likewise, in an article appropriately titled ‘Vonnegut’s Humor and the Limits of Hope’, John May argues that it is ‘absolutized hope, utopian greed, and absurd pretense’ that are the societal issues Vonnegut diagnoses and that ultimately ‘the only hope for man is that he will not lie, that he will accept the fact that he is a moral and religious midget’ (32). Both rejoinders highlight the fact that what seems to offend hostile critics in S5 (and much of Vonnegut’s work) is not nihilism per se but the recognition of human limits at all. Vonnegut himself noticed this tendency among critics. In a private letter to Jerome Klinkowitz, he agreed with Klinkowitz’s suggestion as to why ‘so many of the critical crowd, educated like gentlemen at prep schools and elitist universities, disliked his work’ and confrmed – with characteristically arch irony – that the ‘reason was simple. . . . Gentlemen know of the void, he reminded me, but do not speak of it, lest they alarm the lower classes, who might run amok’ (2012, 18). Perhaps the most perspicacious critical response to SlaughterhouseFive, in my opinion, is Robert T. Tally Jr.’s chapter in Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography (2011). Here, Tally – in an approach that is otherwise unfortunately uncommon in Vonnegut criticism – reads S5 through the lens of Nietzschean philosophy and, in particular, the metaphor of the eternal return.6 Noting that ‘the abject horror of the quintessentially American ideology of freedom and opportunity,

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in Vonnegut’s view, is that it blames people – or rather, causes people to blame themselves – for situations largely beyond their control’, Tally argues that ‘Billy Pilgrim’s salvation, and by extension our own, comes with the recognition of fate, the love of fate, and thus the affirmation of [Nietzsche’s] demon’s challenge: the affirmation of life that is the eternal return’ (74). After all, in a Tralfamadorian, a Nietzschean, an Einsteinian, or even quantum universe, what other possible response could there be which would not be mendacious at best (and it is worth noting that Nietzsche considered idealism mendaciousness at its height) and cruel at worst?7 Nor does this represent tacit approval either for evil action or of passive acceptance of it. The tactic is often to array these two negative stances against their implied positive opposite – which I might characterise as a crusading, muscular libertarian humanism, certain in victory (though occasionally stumbling) through the power of free choice, morality, and rationality – and then to criticise the novel for falling on the wrong side of this divide. This is to commit a basic category error regarding the quandary that the novel explores. The Amor Fati that Tally correctly detects in Slaughterhouse-Five, the decision or even compulsion to accept and embrace everything that is, is neither bloody-minded, adolescently rebellious nihilism nor querulous acquiescence. It is an unfortunately recurring tic in Western thought that effective action and determinism are intrinsic opposites, though some (including Nietzsche) have worked against the grain.8 Another unfortunate tic is that opposites must be mutually exclusive. What is at the heart of Slaughterhouse-Five – or rather, what is at once at the heart of the novel and missing from it – is an intractable paradoxicality that is also an intractable element of conscious (and very possibly unconscious) existence itself. As such, approaching the novel through a theoretical structure that is, in many ways, generated by paradox itself may help us to better characterise the uniquely divisive nature of Slaughterhouse-Five and to better explain how so wide a range of critical responses may have come about. That structure is the sociologist and philosopher Niklas Luhmann’s autopoietic systems theory, a theory that is complex, counterintuitive, and even, in a sense, self-contradictory, though, as I hope to show, under its own rubric, this is no great sin.9 I will first provide an overview of Luhmann’s central structural insight and highlight particular elements that I consider relevant to the study of the novel.10 That achieved, I then hope to illustrate how S5 itself can be read as a kind of pseudo-autopoietic system and the consequences and insights that might result from doing so.

‘A Difference That Makes a Difference’ – Autopoietic Systems Theory Niklas Luhmann’s particular strand of systems theory does not necessarily lend itself easily to literary studies – and to English literary studies in particular. As David Roberts notes, the mostly German language

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literary scholarship that engages with Luhmann does so under the guise of two generalised responses, neither of which are concerned with literature itself: In the short history of the reception of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory by literary scholars two responses can be discerned. The one – represented by Siegfried J. Schmidt’s book Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (1989) – analyses, as the title indicates, the emergence in Germany in the second half of the 18th century of an autonomous or self-organising literary system in the course of and as part of the process of the functional differentiation of society. The interest of this study . . . lies in the constitution of literature as a social system and accordingly in a switch from a hermeneutics of the text to a sociology of the literary system. The other line of reception – represented by Dietrich Schwanitz (1990) – takes as its organising theme the self-reference of literature, which is seen as operating by means of a difference in information between the observer and the observed. Here the self-organisation of literature is approached not through the socio-historical process of functional differentiation but in terms of observation and self-observation. The two perspectives are complementary since functional differentiation is dependent on the feedback given by self-observation. The underlying difference is nevertheless significant. Schmidt’s formula for paradigm change – ‘from text to literary system’ – is directed to a new conceptual framework for the sociology of the literary system, whereas Schwanitz’s ‘new paradigm’ is oriented to the evolution and differentiation of literary forms (genres). (75–76) On the one hand, there is the emphasis on the development and differentiation of the social system we now call ‘Art’, and on the other, the development and differentiation of genres. The former approach can perhaps justifably be left to the realm of sociology or art history, at least for our present purposes. The latter, while coming closer to the elements of Luhmann’s theory I wish to utilise, is still overtly concerned with a more narrowly literary but still extratextual subject of study. To put it bluntly, the ‘autopoietic’ part of ‘autopoietic systems theory’ is the sticking point when it comes to using Luhmann’s work to perform a ‘hermeneutics of the text’. To understand why, and as a means to introduce Luhmann’s theory, it is important to explain the concept and why Luhmann chooses to use it. The term ‘autopoietic’ – ‘self-creating’ – was coined by the biologists and second-order cyberneticists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, in their influential study Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1979), to characterise the means by which living cells (and, by extension, multicellular life) organise, maintain, and reproduce

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themselves. Maturana and Varela often refer to cells as ‘living machines’ or ‘living systems’, to emphasise both that their view is ‘non-animistic’ (there is nothing ontologically special about living as opposed to nonliving things) and that ‘a living system is defined by its organization and, hence, that it can be explained as any organization can be explained, that is, in terms of relations, not of component properties’ (76). Allopoietic machines – that is, the machines, such as factory equipment, computers, or automobiles, with which we are most familiar – are organised in such a way that the use to which they are put ‘is not a feature of the organization of the machine, but of the domain in which a machine operates’ (77, my italics). They have, in short, a purpose beyond themselves, though self-maintenance, through the means of feedback loops and other similar mechanisms, may be included in their organisational structure. An autopoietic machine, by contrast, is a homeostatic machine whose ‘fundamental variable’ is ‘peculiar’ to it: An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their network of interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. (78–79) It is important to note that an autopoietic machine is not a simple, Rube Goldberg-esque device, designed to maintain a purposeless dynamic process from frst principles and components. An autopoietic system is usually a kind of Ship of Theseus – it self-generates the organisational structure which makes up the organisational structure that self-generates its own organisational structure over time. The constant is the organisational principle, rather than the individual components. As noted earlier, this is why it is not strictly possible to consider a novel, in and of itself, a literal autopoietic system; the organisation that makes a system self-creating is necessarily temporal, unfolding over time rather than remaining unchangingly static. Further, autopoietic systems are autonomous. This does not mean that they are self-made or independent in the libertarian-infected manner that is, perhaps, more readily associated with the term. They are not pure, hermetically sealed, or undetermined untouchables. However, and perhaps counterintuitively, they ‘do not have inputs or outputs’, because, while ‘they can be perturbated by independent events and undergo internal structural changes which compensate these perturbations . . . they [the changes] are always subordinated to the maintenance of the machine organization’, and, as such, ‘any relation between these changes and the

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course of perturbations to which we may point to, pertains to the domain in which the machine is observed, but not to its organization’ (81). One of the defning aspects of an autopoietic system, in other words, is that it is not organisationally created by its environment, as we may, from a perspective of linear determination, perhaps expect. Instead, an autopoietic system creates its own environment, rather than vice versa. Perhaps counterintuitively, this is because autopoietic systems have no meaningful interaction with – indeed, they remain mostly ignorant of – the immediacy of their surrounding environments. This is because, as a necessary element of their operational closure, an autopoietic system must select only a few elements of its surrounding environment with which to engage. Charles Devellennes, himself a scholar in the humanities (rather than a cyberneticist, systems theorist, or biologist), provides the most concise explanation of this process: All autopoietic systems operate on the basis of their operational closure. This closure of the system, however, is never absolute and refers only to the system’s organizational structure. Systems still operate within the world – autopoiesis is an immanent theory rather than a transcendental one – but, as with the blind spot experiment, they are unable to have direct access to the outside world and instead interpret it within their operational closure. Self-reference is an activity of a system that selects information – in the form of perturbations – from the environment, constructing its own order to reduce complexity. (903) Different autopoietic systems select, and are infuenced by, the ‘perturbations’ (often also appealingly referred to by scholars as ‘irritations’) that are relevant to their internal self-organisation. However, as Levi Bryant summarises, any information value the perturbation takes on is constituted strictly by the distinctions belonging to the organization of the autopoietic machine itself .  .  . although this distinction refers to two domains (system and environment), the distinction itself originates from one of these domains: the system. The distinction between system and environment is a distinction drawn by each system. (141–144) Autopoietic systems refer to themselves – recursively and repetitively, over time. And they do so via the means of a distinction. I shall turn to Niklas Luhmann’s 1991 lecture ‘System as Difference’, in which Luhmann expounds on G. Spencer-Brown’s calculus of distinction to explain the importance of this insight. The first and most important symbol in Spencer-Brown’s calculus is the ‘mark of distinction’ (Figure 6.1):

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Figure 6.1 Spencer-Brown’s ‘Mark of Distinction’

This mark can be read as an indicator or pointer, implicitly indicating one side (which we might here term the ‘inside’) against the other (or ‘outside’). Here, at its most basic, is the beginning of any system – the distinction between system and not-system (the environment) and the indication towards the ‘inside’ or ‘marked’ space. Spencer-Brown names this boundary ‘form’, and it is important to note that ‘form’ is here considered to be two-sided. Again, the ‘mark of distinction’ can be read as both an indication and a distinction, at the same time. With regard to systems, what this means is that ‘a system is the difference between system and environment’, or, more parsimoniously, ‘a system is difference – the difference between system and environment’ (my italics). That the term system occurs twice in this formulation, as Luhmann notes, ‘sounds paradoxical and perhaps even is paradoxical’ (38), but it is this paradoxicality, in Luhmann’s thought, that is itself productive and is central to the development of self-referentiality and eventually of observation. The question of observation is central to Luhmann’s autopoietic theory. In Spencer-Brown’s calculus, it is termed ‘re-entry into the form’ and is symbolised in Spencer-Brown’s calculus thusly (Figure 6.2). As David Roberts explains, To observe is to draw a distinction . . . observation presupposes, however, an observer, but where, after having drawn a distinction, are we to place the observer? The observer is not distinct from the distinction. He cannot as yet be placed either side of the distinction. To decide where he belongs requires a second observer. In other words: observation uses a distinction but cannot distinguish the distinction

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Figure 6.2 Spencer-Brown’s ‘Re-entry into the Form’

it uses. The operative unity of distinction and indication conceals a second distinction, the distinction between distinction and indication i.e. the distinction between the observer and the observed. (76) As such, while the frst distinction marks the previously undifferentiated form into a form with two sides, the seen and the unseen (or marked and unmarked, and so on), the ‘second distinction (observation) – the re-entry of the form in the form, of the distinction in the distinction – divides the seen in turn into the seen and the unseen i.e. the observed and the observer’ (77). The frst observer is only visible to the second observer, because, as Luhmann notes, ‘every distinction presupposes itself and thus excludes itself from what it can distinguish’ (1990, 526), and while the second observer ‘makes visible . . . the invisible observer and the invisible re-entry into the form which is the presupposition of all observation’ (Roberts, 77), it is itself blind to its own observation. Only a third observer would be able to observe the observer and the re-entry into form but would itself be blind to its presupposed distinction and so on to infnity. As Roberts notes, The paradox is this: what is outside the form is accessible only inside the form. The world observed is always the world in form. Luhmann thus arrives at his concept of system rationality. A system separates itself from its environment and achieves operative closure by means of the difference between self- and external reference. This difference

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makes the system indifferent to its environment and serves as the basis for the elaboration of its own complexity. Rationality is thus to be understood as the ongoing self-production or autopoiesis of a system by means of its own operations which elaborate its ever more improbable complexity. (80) For any observing system, re-entry ‘is the process by which its environment, the outside of the system, is registered on the inside of the system’; it is the means by which cognition is ‘bootstrapped’ from distinction, and it is also the reason for ‘Varela’s insistence that an autopoietic system has no inputs and outputs, [and] Luhmann’s statement that “only closed systems can know”’ (Clarke, 7). In a self-referential system, ‘all reference beyond the system will necessarily be self-constructed by and within the system’ (8). Finally – and crucially, with regard to Slaughterhouse-Five – the consequence of this self-reference and of the distinction/observation model is that every system necessarily has a blind spot. As Devellennes notes, just as we do not perceive the blank area in our feld of vision where the retina connects to the optic nerve, no autopoietic system can perceive its own closure; ‘we do not see that we do not see’ (902). For our present purposes, then, a few relevant conclusions may be drawn. The first is that all observation of the world originates in difference, which makes all difference – any undifferentiated, unified world in toto can, by definition, never be observed. Secondly, the organisation of autopoietic systems is based on self-observation, or second-order observation; it is characterised by recursivity and by repetition of organisational elements. Finally, the latent paradox in this calculus means that any and every observing system has a blind spot that can only be identified via re-entry into form (which then produces a new blind spot). As Luhmann notes, ‘World is no longer a totality of things, an aggregatio corpororum, a universitas rerum . . . the world must be invisibilized so that observations become possible’ (1996, 517). We are now able to ask this preliminary question: what does the system known as Slaughterhouse-Five ‘invisiblize’ in order to make its observations, and what might this ‘blind spot’ tell us about the novel’s form/content (remembering that, in the calculus of distinctions, these are nearly synonymous)?11 And what effect might this have on the autopoietic systems that happen to read it?

Recursion, Repetition, Observation, Blind Spots – Form and Content/Non-Content in Slaughterhouse-Five Slaughterhouse-Five, as previously mentioned, does not strictly meet the criteria created by Maturana and Varela, and explicated by Luhmann, of an autopoietic system. The self-organisation of living cellular systems (the primary interest of Maturana and Varela) and the propagation of

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communicative systems, which lead to functional societal differentiation over time (Luhmann) – each an example of autopoiesis – are developmental models and have a necessarily temporal aspect.12 This comes across particularly strongly in Luhmann’s thought since, as David Siedl notes, Luhmann ‘radicalises the temporal aspect of autopoiesis’ (Siedl’s italics). While Maturana and Varela generally conceptualised the elements of their systems as relatively stable chemical molecules, for Luhmann, for whom elements are duration-less events, there is no structure whatsoever except that which unfolds over time (6). It is for this reason, incidentally, that artefacts like novels themselves are of far less interest to Luhmann than the ongoing, developing sociological category of ‘art’ itself; once written, they are – reader response or authorial editorialising notwithstanding – finished and so a kind of ‘dead’ system. That said, the putatively atemporal, finished nature of the novel has never prevented readers and critics from treating them as dynamic or somehow ‘living’, or, indeed, as systems. S5 is no exception. Indeed, erstwhile Vonnegut scholar Jerome Klinkowitz argues that S5 is a system rather than an entity, because it is ‘a combination of differences rather than identities’, ‘juxtapositional’ and relational rather than ‘additive and progressive’ (1990, 86). Harold Bloom, meanwhile, in the introduction to the Vonnegut edition of his Modern Critical Views series (2008), rather pleasingly refers to the novel as a ‘whirling medley’, deftly characterising the novel-as-read with a musical metaphor (and what could be more temporal than music?) and a verb that emphasises not only movement and action but repetitive, circular action (1). Nor are these insights necessarily recent. In 1971, Tony Tanner compared the novel to a painting by M. C. Escher, noting that its nonlinearity and more fantastical elements make it difficult to simultaneously hold its various fictional planes in perspective (195). My own view is that the novel can be read as a kind of simulated autopoietic system, or as a model of one. For all the seemingly timeless rigidity of its form and, indeed, its Tralfamadorian content, it nevertheless creates the impression of an organised and reproducing, though nonlinear, system. Further, its recurrent concern with questions of observation dramatises the very operation of recursive, autopoietic self-production. Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel whose ending is bound up in its very first words; it destroys its own sense of narrative and, correspondingly, any sense of teleology or purpose. It is also a tale spun out from a real world, a Something that remains a virtual Nothing within the text itself, which recursively and repetitively circles – whirls – around an absence that is, nevertheless, constitutive of its own presence. It is a novel written by someone who compares himself to Lot’s wife, a pillar of salt who has turned back to witness, to observe, but in so doing renders little beyond content-less (for human autopoietic systems, at least) bird song – ‘poo-tee-weet?’ (S5, 157). The opening chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five is often, mistakenly, considered to be an Introduction by readers and even several critics.13 It

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is easy to understand why. For a start, it would mark the beginning of an ongoing tendency on Vonnegut’s part to write ‘in his own voice’ in order to (relatively) uncomplicatedly introduce a novel to the reader, in an explicitly nonfictional format. As such, it is natural to retroactively read the beginning of S5 as a similar device. Further, the familiar, conversational tone of the first-person narration, the details of the novel’s composition and publication, and the seemingly random and irrelevant asides, jokes, and anecdotes conspire to exactly resemble what would be, in almost any other work, an introductory, factual segment, separate from the fictional, narrative body of the text. The same does not hold for S5. As Peter Freese notes, The chapter introduces both the book’s major thematic concerns and its basic narrative strategies in a seemingly casual, digressive, and dysfunctional monologue, the random surface of which hides a subtle and carefully constructed subtext that provides a kind of builtin ‘instructions for use’ and prepares the reader for an appropriate reception of the story proper. (2013, 115) I am indebted to Freese for this insight. I would only add that the opening chapter does not only act as a preparation or road map for the rest of the novel, but that it also functions as a kind of ‘seed’ – an organising principle that reproduces itself – that is constitutive of the rest of the novel. Without overt comment, the frst chapter introduces images, themes, and motifs that, though seemingly drawn from ‘reality’ – from Vonnegut’s own experiences, as related to the reader – return as constituent elements of the ‘fctional’ story of Billy Pilgrim. Nor is this practice a simple case of ‘writing what you know’, of superfuous details included for verisimilitude or local colour. In autopoietic fashion, they instead defne constitutive elements for the overall system of S5, from which the greater complexity of the work as a whole might be bootstrapped. I argue that Slaughterhouse-Five does not really refer to the world that we may, as naïve realists, consider ‘factual’; it refers to, and repetitively produces, its own organisation. Indeed, the basis of the novel’s very composition is detailed on the second page, and it is recursive. Complaining that ‘not many words about Dresden came from my mind then . . . And not many words come now, either’, Vonnegut notes that the ‘useless’ yet endlessly ‘tempting’ Dresden part of his memory brings to mind both a limerick about infertility and a song: My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a lumbermill there. The people I meet when I walk down the street,

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In terms of content, this fragment is obviously doggerel, but the content itself is ultimately irrelevant. What is important about the fragment – indeed, its only remarkable element – is its form, which is not only recursive but self-generating. The (unseen) interlocutor asks the question; the answer answers the question by re-entering its own form, asking the question on behalf of another interlocutor, which necessitates an answer which answers the question of another interlocutor, and so on, and so forth. The purpose of the fragment is to repeat itself from its own frst principles. While generating (literally) endless iterations, in an everwidening gyre, the fragment is also, beyond the most basic distinctions (I am Yon Yonson, not someone else; I work in Wisconsin, not somewhere else, and so on), virtually content-free. Like any autopoietic system, it points to nothing beyond itself. The phrase ‘My name is Yon Yonson’ is repeated twice more in the novel, both in the frst chapter. In the frst instance, it is preceded by the similarly repeated assertion that ‘[I have become]/I’m an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls’ (2/4). The second appears immediately after the phrase ‘eheu, fugaces labuntur anni’ – ‘alas, the feeting years glide swiftly by’ (8). What connects the turning of the years, of time passing and age increasing, with the theme of recursion may simply be the repeated, frustrated effort to write what he facetiously termed ‘my famous Dresden book’ (3). But why might Vonnegut consider this relevant to his own failed attempts to narrate his experience in Dresden? A clue might lie in another repeated phrase in the novel, uttered both by his protagonist Billy Pilgrim and by Vonnegut himself – ‘I was there’ (49, 140–141, 156). While I will comment on this in detail later, for now, it suffces to say that this seems to be all Vonnegut could fnd to say about his wartime experience; ‘my name is Kurt Vonnegut, I was at Dresden, I worked as a POW there . . .’, repeated to infnity. Simply by virtue of the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, it would nevertheless seem natural to presume that Vonnegut had succeeded in moving past the loop of years of thwarted drafts. If his years as ‘Yon Yonson’ meant he could think of little satisfactory to write, then at least the cost ‘in money and anxiety and time’ had ultimately been repaid with a breakthrough of self-expression and eloquence, and Vonnegut managed to fnd something more to say about the massacre, perhaps even something useful (2). As I hope to show, Vonnegut never did break free of this recursive pattern. Nor should he have, since doing so would betray the very subject that he

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is unable to portray. S5 is ‘Yon Yonson’ writ large, though its loops are more fragmented and nonlinear. The fragment in the frst chapter is to the novel as ‘system’ is to the phrase ‘a system is the difference between system and environment’ – the organisational principle that reproduces the organisational principle. With the autopoietic system framework established, it is now possible to explore the formal strategies and recurrent content that make up the elements of said system. While both the broader narrative strokes and the more specific textual details could be termed the internal ‘content’ of the novel, for clarity, I here define ‘formal’ as the disjunctions in linear narrative (Billy Pilgrim’s famous time jumps) and ‘content’ as specific imagery and phrasing. Once again, many of the latter features originate in the first chapters, before reappearing at key moments in the Pilgrim narrative. A rich seam of scholarship has developed over the years to detail and try to interpret these recurrent phrases and images. I once again turn to Peter Freese, who provides a painstaking (though not necessarily exhaustive) list of these images: The onomatopoeic ‘Poo-tee-weet?’ (19) of the birds, which is known from previous Vonnegut novels, is taken up in different contexts (22, 100, 215) and gradually accumulates an ever deeper meaning. The recurring references – to ‘blue and ivory feet’ (28, 65, 75, 73, 75, 80, 148), to the ‘nestling like spoons’ (31, 70, 71, 72, 78, 126, 144, 148), to the colors orange and black (69, 72), and to the baying of a hound as a ‘big bronze gong’ (48, 82) – punctuate the text as chains of iterative images and reveal to the attentive reader an artfully constructed deep structure below a seemingly disordered surface. (2013, 113)14 Freese does not go into detail about the nature of this ‘deep structure’, but from a systems perspective, we can here begin to discern the elements that are constitutive of the novel’s autopoietic organisational principle. As previously noted, several critics have attempted to interpret these images, to try to read signifcance in either their particularity or their repetition. It is often diffcult to meaningfully interpret some of these elements, because they seem so markedly arbitrary, though some critics have attempted to do so. For instance, the phrase ‘Three Musketeers’ appears throughout the novel, referring both to the candy bar – eaten by a female reporter colleague of Vonnegut’s in the frst chapter and by Billy’s fancée (S5 7, 77, 79) – and as a term of (illusory) comradeship by Roland Weary (30–37, 57, 113). A connection could, perhaps, be drawn between the children’s confectionary and Weary’s childish, romanticised conception of war, but the women associated with the former have little in common with each other or with Weary. Jerome Klinkowitz, meanwhile, considers the repetition of images to be a kind of subliminal messaging on the part

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of the text. For instance, the combinations ‘blue and ivory’ and ‘orange and black’, which refer to the feet of Billy and a dead POW and the POW train and a caterer’s tent at a wedding respectively, are used to trigger the reader’s own time travel . . . because these specific colors are repeated, readers feel the passages belong together, even though they are two hemispheres and nearly a quarter of a century apart in terms of the conventional ordering of time and space. (1990, 77) Klinkowitz argues that ‘it is even better if the reader does not make the association consciously’, since this will give ‘the deep impression that this novel does have a principle of order to it, even if that principle cannot be articulated’ (1990, 77). I believe that this is a better approach to the imagistic and linguistic tics of the novel than attempting to read them as meaningful symbols in and of themselves. As Klinkowitz notes, their arbitrariness is precisely what makes them so useful as structural components. They are a kind of literary detritus incorporated into the system of the text not because of their appropriateness but because of their to-handedness; they are constitutive of an organising principle without partaking in that organisation. In fact, only the novel’s most famous refrain – ‘So it goes’, which inevitably follows the death of anything, whether human, animal, microbe, or even concept – breaks this pattern of repeated but arbitrary images and phrases. Essentially functioning as a circular reaffrmation of itself, especially in block Tralfamadorian time in which every moment is a ‘bug trapped in amber’ (55, 62), having always already having happened, ‘so it goes’ might just as easily (though more clumsily) be rephrased throughout S5 as ‘so it is so’. It is a recursive statement that only reproduces its own meaning, despite its appellation to so varied a series of events. As such, it alone recapitulates, in miniature, the novel’s organising principle. It is the more macroscopic, ‘formal’ level of the novel that provides better insight into how and, perhaps more important, why, the novel revolves within its time-displaced, recursive loops. In particular, the movements of Billy Pilgrim through time, from his childhood, experience as a soldier and POW to his postwar career and death are central to the novel’s technique. Kevin Alexander Boon, in ‘Temporal Cohesion and Disorientation in Slaughterhouse-Five’ (2013), presents an impressively exhaustive ‘chronicle’ of the novel’s narrative jumps, as well as the specific techniques by which the novel maintains, amidst these shifts, ‘a sense of temporal cohesion for readers’ (37).15 While space does not permit me to fully detail Boon’s table of transitions here, Boon does provide a short summation that is illustrative of the novel’s overall structure:

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This [Billy’s] series of leaps can be divided into forty parts that comprise two sections: parts 1 through 31, which tracks Billy’s leaps in time, occur in an orderly fashion and are facilitated by form cuts and other filmic transitional devices; in parts 32 through 40, which takes us to the end of chapter 9, Vonnegut’s use of transitional devices unravels as he begins to confront more directly the atrocities of the Dresden firebombing. Parts 1 through 36 and 38 through 40 are structured around Billy’s leaps in time, like the previous thirty-one parts, but part 37 is structured around Billy’s experiences in the coma, which contains several time leaps in itself. Significantly, it is here that description of the firebombing occurs. (38) We are now able to discern what lies at the ‘centre’ of S5, the event around which the novel’s form and content swirl, and it is very nearly absent. The means by which the novel’s jumps eventually reach the frebombing of Dresden are convoluted in the extreme. As Boon notes, our journey into Billy’s mind has become like nesting dolls; Billy is in a coma dreaming/time traveling of falling asleep in Dresden the night before the bombing and having a dream. . . . It is within this dreamwithin-a-dream while in a coma that Billy eventually remembers the firebombing of Dresden. (58) Vonnegut himself said that neither he nor his fellow POWs were able to remember what happened on the night of Dresden’s destruction; ‘there was a complete blank where the bombing of Dresden took place’, Vonnegut states, and while there were all kinds of information surrounding the event . . . as far as my memory bank was concerned, the center had been pulled right out of the story. There was nothing up there to be recovered – or in the heads of my friends either. (Conversations, 94) Further, as Jerome Klinkowitz points out, the Dresden raid was ‘frst classifed as “top secret” and then . . . allowed to be forgotten’ (1990, 3). This lack, manifest in the memories of both Vonnegut and of Cold War America, is reproduced in the text. It seems a kind of black hole, gravitationally warping the surrounding novel while remaining unobservable. When the few short paragraphs that are concerned with the fre-bombing are fnally reached, after the convolutions Boon details, it is further obfuscated by the indirectness of its description. It is worth drawing attention to just

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how sparse Vonnegut’s description is, how prosaic and simplistic its language. Billy is said to remember ‘an experience he had had long ago’ (a notable euphemism): He was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked. The meat locker was a very safe shelter. All that happened down there was an occasional shower of calcimine. . . . 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. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn. (129) The sheer paucity of synonyms, the repetition of simple elements, again reproduces – here, at the absent ‘heart’ of the novel – the organisational structure of the novel as a whole. In an autopoietic system, as defned by Luhmann, a system is as much defned by what it necessarily excludes as what it may include. As we have seen, they are subject to external irritation but produce their own ‘environment’ in the process of their own autopoiesis, and the means by which systems do so is reducing complexity. Ilana Gershon ably summarises this dynamic when she notes that one of the ‘basic divisions between a system and its environment is that a system is always far more ordered than its environment, and an environment is always far more complex than its system’. As such, ‘a system is constantly reformulating the noise and chaotic complexities that leave the environment and enter the system into order. But creating order is also always creating a simplifcation; it is reducing complexity to what is manageable’ (102). S5 was, undoubtedly, written in reaction to the Dresden frebombing – not only to the trauma of being caught up in the event but in reaction to its sheer enormity, its incomprehensibility, and (signifcantly) its subsequent suppression, its absence in the sphere of public discourse. Dresden is the environmental ‘irritation’ (the term is used technically; it is not meant to downplay the event) from which an entire novel sprang. The novel itself, however, is operationally closed, a system that uses its own elements to reproduce itself, bootstrapped from and iteratively producing recursion but incapable of reacting directly to the precipitating event. Such is the nature of the system of Slaughterhouse-Five as organising principle. However, there are other hearts of darkness in autopoietic system theory. Luhmann is clear that observing systems (self-reflexive or otherwise) create their own blind spots in the very operation of observing. Even if they are able to point out the proverbial mote in the eye of another observing system, they do so not only in spite of, but because of, the plank in theirs. As Luhmann puts it, ‘an observer can see that the observed system cannot see that it is unable to see what it cannot see’

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(1990, 139), but it can do so only because it is in the very same state. S5 is rife with examples of failed observation, moments where the act of observation is either insufficient, compromised, or catastrophic. Vonnegut himself states that the novel ‘is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt’, and he singles out Lot’s wife for praise because her act of observation ‘was so human’ (S5, 16). At the end of the second chapter, Billy is beaten in a frozen ditch by his fellow soldier, Roland Weary, both for his general uselessness as a soldier and because Weary, having been ‘ditched’ by the more professional army scouts shortly beforehand, is ‘filled with a tragic wrath’ at his humiliation (36). It is notable that shortly before this episode, we are told that Weary, bundled up in the clothes that he has received from home, a spoiled child amongst his freezing companions, is so well apparelled that ‘his vision of the outside world was limited to what he could see through a narrow slit between the rim of his helmet and his scarf from home’ (30). He is literally near blinded by and to, his own privilege, which is part of what makes him act in so spiteful a manner. As far as Weary is concerned, ‘it was entirely Billy’s fault that this fighting organization [the ‘Three Musketeers’, Weary’s term for the relationship he believes he shared with the scouts] no longer existed . . . and Billy was going to pay’ (37). Lacking the self-awareness necessary to realise the real cause of his embarrassment and consequent anger, Weary lashes out at Billy, who is ‘involuntarily making convulsive sounds that were a lot like laughter’; the seeming incongruity of Billy’s reaction further confuses and antagonises him. Just before Weary attempts to break Billy’s spine, however, another level of observation is introduced: But then Weary saw that he had an audience. Five German soldiers and a police dog on a leash were looking down into the bed of the creek. The soldiers’ blue eyes were filled with a bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another one so far from home, and why the victim should laugh. (37) Each step of this fractal set of observations contextualises the next, while at the same time remaining blind to its own preconditions. Weary is unaware that he is angry because he is insecure and feels humiliated; the German soldiers observe this scene but are unable to consider it from any perspective other than bemusement at the inscrutable actions of foreigners (there are many reasons one soldier might try to murder another). Even the supposedly ultimate observers, the Tralfamadorians, are incapable of recognising their own blind spots. The creatures are privy to all of the temporal dynamics of all systems simultaneously. They can ‘see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are flled with rarefed, luminous spaghetti’, can see ‘all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains’ (63, 62). They compare the human perspective in this metaphor to being ‘strapped to a steel lattice which

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was bolted to a fatcar on rails’, forced to see what should be a panorama through a single eyehole welded to six feet of pipe, unable to turn away or move, so that ‘whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, “that’s life.”’ (83). Yet for all the paucity of perspective they (correctly) diagnose in Billy and humanity, the perspective they ascribe to themselves is still perspectival – it is still conscious, still based on the fundamental double action of simultaneous distinction/ indication. There seems to be an implicit admission of wilful blindness on the part of the Tralfamadorians when they tell Billy that they too ‘have wars as horrible as any you’ve ever seen or read about’, but, since ‘there isn’t anything we can do about them . . . we simply don’t look at them’ (85). While this admission is often taken as evidence of moral cowardice by hostile critics on the part of the Tralfamadorians (or S5, or Vonnegut), what it also shows is that even the supposedly omniscient creatures have to observe some things and not others. The equation of sentience or cognition and non-distinction making omniscience is logically impossible, a problem that has not escaped the attention of many philosophers and theologians.16 This is not necessarily a fault on Vonnegut’s part, however. As Mads Thomsen wryly points out, the Tralfamadorians possess the ability to both live in linear time that comes to an end, and to move around in this otherwise mechanical time, as though they had been given the remote control to the movies of their own lives. This setup creates the possibility for new paradoxes and explanations, for which a writer of fiction cannot be held accountable, even if one were to see this conception of time as a way of describing a utopia that takes the best of two irreconcilable concepts of the world. However, this interpretation is implicitly commented on by Vonnegut, as he presents the Tralfamadorians as a particularly bored species. (75) The Tralfamadorians are not as different from humans as they might like to think – or as much as they would like to convince Billy. For all their undoubtedly widened perspective, the fact that they are able to think at all suggests that they, too, are trapped in their own individual and collective autopoietic systems, discerning events by means of selection that undercuts their own discernment. They, too, like Billy, Weary, Lot’s wife, and Vonnegut, are operationally closed systems, observing by means of blind spots. But what is the result of these closures and aporias?

Finitude – Suffering and Closure The first and most basic consequence of the unfortunate sequestering of autopoietic systems into their own, operationally closed loops is ignorance. As Gershon explains,

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Luhmann’s theory of distinction is one of radical distinction – logics are not mutually accessible to each other. He does acknowledge that a system can perceive another system as a set of processes operating according to alternative principles – systems can recognize that other possibilities, other ways of being autopoietic can exist. But from a system’s perspective, the other systems are inferior. (103) This statement is not necessarily as pessimistic as it may at first seem; ‘inferior’ should (usually) be read more as a question of relevance rather than superiority, and systems are perfectly able to adapt elements of others into their own closed organisation. However, the twain can never truly meet. Each system cannot help but encounter the next as anything except something to react to, according to its own organisational principle. As Luhmann notes, ‘everything that happens belongs to a system (or to many systems) and always at the same time to the environment of other systems’ (1995, 177, emphasis in original). Communication across the unbridgeable gaps that separate systems, therefore, is fraught with difficulties and misinterpretations at best and total incommensurability at worst. Perhaps the most significant failure of communication in Slaughterhouse-Five is between Billy Pilgrim, convalescing in hospital after his coma, and his roommate, Bertram Copeland Rumfoord. Rumfoord is a ‘retired brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve, the official Air Force Historian, a full professor, the author of twenty-six books, a multimillionaire since birth, and one of the most competitive sailors of all time’ (S5 135). As is to be expected, he feels little but contempt for his quiet, unassuming companion, since ‘all he does in his sleep is quit and surrender and apologize and ask to be left alone’ (134). Rumfoord is writing a 27-volume history on the US Army Air Force in World War Two; discussing his latest research on the Dresden firebombing with his wife, he bemoans the fact that it was kept secret for so long ‘for fear that a lot of bleeding hearts . . . might not think it was such a wonderful thing to do’: It was now that Billy Pilgrim spoke up intelligently. ‘I was there,’ he said. It was difficult for Rumfoord to take Billy seriously, since Rumfoord had so long considered Billy a repulsive non-person who would be much better off dead. Now, with Billy speaking clearly and to the point, Rumfoord’s ears wanted to treat the words as a foreign language not worth learning. (140) William Deresiewicz has argued that this is the central or climactic moment of S5, rather than the bombing itself (2012), or, indeed, the event that Vonnegut himself pitches to Bernard O’Hare as the climax in the

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frst chapter, the execution of Edgar Derby for taking a teapot from the ruins (4). While I would still argue that it is Dresden that remains the absent source, the gravitational centre of the novel, there is little doubt that Billy’s simple declaration essentially encapsulates what can be taken for the novel’s positive content. ‘I was there’, as previously noted, is the only statement Vonnegut could produce about the subject. Remarkably enough, Rumfoord reacts to Billy in a manner analogous to the critical response to the novel; he decries Billy’s seeming listlessness, his inability or unwillingness to contextualise his experience (or the event) into a coherent, morally instructive system. Indeed, in addition to shedding light on the organising principle of the novel itself, systems theory also allows us to better understand the dynamics of the two characters’ interaction. What is notable about Rumfoord’s reaction to Billy is that he is, at frst, unable to recognise Billy’s words as the elements of a different system. They are received as pure noise, preferably to be attenuated to the point of inaudibility, or at least incomprehensibility. When Rumfoord asks his wife, Lily, to repeat what Billy just said and to ask Billy where he was, Billy replies, simply, ‘Dresden’, and Rumfoord decides that ‘He’s simply echoing what we say . . . he’s got echolalia now’ (140). The action of a closed, autopoietic system is more obvious here than almost anywhere else in the novel, because Rumfoord explicitly assumes that Billy’s responses are elements of Rumfoord’s own system. His response dramatises the incorporation of an environmental ‘irritant’ into an autopoietic system by responding to it as if it is already part of said system. Genuinely understanding Billy’s statement, or Billy more generally, is always-already impossible for Rumfoord, and this inability is only heightened by his subsummation in the ‘military manner’ that decrees ‘an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease’ (140). Similarly, Rumfoord and the staff of the hospital fnd themselves systemically incompatible: Nobody took Rumfoord’s diagnosis seriously. The staff thought Rumfoord was a hateful old man, conceited and cruel. He often said to them, in one way or another, that people who were weak deserved to die. Whereas the staff, of course, was devoted to the idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, that nobody should die. (141) Luhmann calls this kind of mutual professional incommensurability – the binary opposition of the military and the medical feld – functional differentiation, and he considers it the defning feature of social modernity. While there is not space to fully explain Luhmann’s sociology here, his primary conclusion is that institutions are also autopoietic systems and cannot understand other institutions except by recourse to their own internal rules.17 Once again, miscommunication, aporia, and category

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error are not only features of, but defning principles of, any autopoietic system in relation to its environment, and there is simply no way around this. Rumfoord is an extreme example, in that he is unwilling to even try to imagine another systemic perspective, let alone come to the realisation that any such attempt, noble as it may be, is doomed to failure. But these inevitable and complete closures, and the terrible, necessary isolation that so often accompanies them, are endemic to S5. What more, then, could possibly be said or could provide even the illusion of real communication or solidarity between any two closed systems? Perhaps the only thing that links all things, however closed, is their isolation, fragility, and finitude, that they engender familial similarities, if direct lines of communication or interaction are always-already closed to autopoietic systems. This is, perhaps, another interpretation of the recurrent phrase ‘So it goes’, that follows the death of anything at all in the novel, whether human, animal, bacteria, structure, mineral, or even concept. Whatever is, after all, will one day not be. As Vonnegut ruefully states in the first chapter, ‘even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death’ (S5, 3). Further, even if the question of death is momentarily put aside, the fact would remain that in its being, every cogitating system is defined and enclosed by its own lack. Cary Wolfe has written on the concept of finitude with regard to both Luhmann and Jacques Derrida; in essence, he notes that Luhmann and Derrida’s respective projects ‘converge on their central concept of difference from opposite directions’; both, according to Wolfe, nevertheless ‘emerge as exemplary posthumanist theorists . . . because both refuse to locate meaning in the realm of either the human, or, for that matter, the biological’ (XXVI).18 Wolfe argues that it is crucial . . . that the dynamics described here [systems theory and deconstruction] are not, for Luhmann or for Derrida, limited to the domain of the human. It is thus also in this precise sense . . . that ‘the animal question’ is part of the larger question of posthumanism. (XXII) since, for Derrida, these dynamics form the basis for deconstruction the various ways in which we have presumed to master or appropriate the finitude we share with nonhuman animals in ways presumably barred to them (as in the ability to know the world ‘as such’ through our possession of language that is barred to animals, according to Heidegger). (XXII) We not only share with other animals ‘the radical passivity and vulnerability announced in Jeremy Bentham’s famous assertion that the question

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is not “can they talk?” or “can they reason?” but “can they suffer?”’; our necessarily limited systems of meaning, despite our pretensions, cannot overcome the overriding finitude that exceeds and encompasses the human/animal divide (XXVIII). All autopoietic systems share a ‘vulnerability and passivity without limit as fellow living beings’ (95); as Wolfe notes, ‘the duty of thinking is not to deflect but to suffer . . . what Cavell calls our “exposure” to the world’ (71). A deflection, when considering S5, might be to attempt to make the novel an allopoietic machine, a humanist moral generator that might serve to overcome the sheer inevitability of death. What might happen if we instead read the novel as an ‘exposure’? I argue that Donald Morse provides at least the beginnings of an answer when he emphasises that a primary theme of S5 is the ‘universal reality and pivotal place of suffering in human experience – suffering that may be as total as the fire-bombing of Dresden or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’. It is this ‘authority of suffering’ that ‘underlies all of Slaughterhouse-Five’, according to Morse (21). As Donald Shriver writes, Suffering is the chief equalizer of human experience, and the authority of suffering . . . goes far on the way toward convincing us that there is such a thing as a ‘human community.’ Whatever the anthropologists tell us about human differences, a touch of suffering makes the whole world kin. (qtd. in Morse, 21) Yet even this gesture is too narrow – suffering makes all creatures kin. It is here that the posthumanist promise of the novel’s systemic organisation comes to fruition, in one of its most affecting scenes. Billy Pilgrim, despite all his hardships and despite all the horrors that he bears silent witness to, weeps openly at only one point in Slaughterhouse-Five. As Vonnegut states (once again freely interrupting his story with paratextual detail), the reason that ‘the epigraph of this book is the quatrain from the famous Christmas carol’ – that is, ‘Away in a Manger’, and the quatrain ‘the cattle are lowing/The Baby awakes/But the little Lord Jesus/No crying he makes’ – is that Billy, as ‘a middle-aged optometrist . . . would weep quietly and privately sometimes, but never make loud boohooing noises’ (S5 144). The sole exception occurs towards the end of the novel and narratively after he and his fellow POWs are abandoned by their guards after the firebombing. They are left to pick over the remains of Dresden, which the reader is told ‘was like the moon now, nothing but minerals’ (129). Having taken an abandoned, ‘coffin-shaped green wagon’ in the suburbs of Dresden, Billy and five other Americans are ‘drawn by the clop-clop-clopping horses down narrow lanes which had been cleared through the moonlike ruins’ (141). While his companions search for souvenirs, Billy happily snoozes in the wagon, until he is disturbed by ‘a man

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and a woman speaking German in pitying tones. The speakers were commiserating with somebody lyrically’: Billy opened his eyes. A middle-aged man and his wife were crooning to the horses. They were noticing what the Americans had not noticed – that the horse’s mouths were bleeding, gashed by the bits, that the horses’ hooves were broken, so that every step meant agony, that the horses were insane with thirst. The Americans had treated their form of transportation as though it were no more sensitive than a six-cylinder Chevrolet. (143) Billy is scolded by the couple, and ‘when Billy saw the condition of his means of transportation, he burst into tears. He hadn’t cried about anything else in the war’ (144). It may seem remarkable that it is this incident that provokes such a strong reaction in Billy. He has witnessed the extreme death and destruction of the Dresden raid, just a few nights beforehand. He has experienced the pain and extreme discomfort of the death march he is subjected to immediately after capture. He has endured the privation, humiliation, and claustrophobia of being forcibly crammed into a crowded railway boxcar that becomes, for its German handlers, ‘a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators’ – itself a grotesque parody of an autopoietic organism where ‘in went water and loaves of blackbread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language’ (51). Why would Billy so strongly emphathise with the horses and not the thousands of Germans who had been turned, by the frestorm, into ‘seeming little logs lying around’ (130)? It is notable that the city of Dresden (and by extension, its inhabitants) are converted, in a characteristic Vonnegutian phrase, into ‘nothing but minerals’, but this is an event that occurs essentially outside of Billy’s direct experience and outside of the novel’s systemic purview. In any case, as the survivors pick their way across ‘the moon . . . There was nothing appropriate to say’ except that ‘one thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a faw in the design’ (131). This is the blind spot of the novel, the triggering environmental event that, in its enormity, leads to little more than recursion within its autopoietic system. Billy’s shocked response to the horses, however, represents at once a more sudden and more intelligible conversion – the recognition that what was considered an allopoietic device (‘a six-cylinder Chevrolet’) must be another system, by virtue of its seeming suffering. Billy will never, indeed can never, know what it is to be a horse or how a horse might suffer. He is (as all organisms are) forever constrained by the organising principle that produces the autopoietic system ‘Billy Pilgrim’.

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Nevertheless, as Wolfe notes, this does not necessitate absolute closure, Rumfoord’s example notwithstanding: Crucial .  .  . to posthumanism in general, I would argue .  .  . is the fundamental principle of ‘openness from closure’ that Luhmann’s work helps us theorize: that taking seriously the phenomena of selfreference and autopoietic closure in disciplinary systems leads not to solipsism but, quite the contrary, to the ability for the system to increase environmental contacts and, in the process, produce more environmental complexity for other systems. (117) The shock of Billy’s recognition of the horses’ vulnerability and fnitude, the sudden shift in his environmental contact with them from allopoietic tool to autopoietic system, prompts his emotional response. Tellingly, the reader is not informed of the specifc reason for Billy’s tears, whether it be guilt, identifcation, or even refected self-pity. It is left to the organisational principle of the reader to decide how best to interpret and incorporate this information. Nevertheless, I would conjecture that what is portrayed in this moment is not a feeling of shared suffering but rather a recognition that suffering, maybe uniquely, is at once universal and incommensurable. Vulnerability, pain, decay, fnitude, and death are the only guarantees for any autopoietic system striving to maintain itself by relation to itself, and there may be little more to say or do about this fact precisely by virtue of the fact that the system exists. As Donald Morse noted, suffering is universal in Slaughterhouse-Five. It is an inevitable (and recursive) reason for and consequence of being in the novel. Another repeated structural element of the novel is the question ‘Why me?’. It is asked both by Billy and by a fellow POW, to the Tralfamadorians and to a German guard respectively, and the answers are essentially the same – ‘Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything?’, and ‘Vy you? Vy anybody?’ (55, 66). Slaughterhouse-Five’s overall message may well be analogous. Suffering is what it is because it is what it is. Indeed, it is the means by which the question may be asked in the frst place. That is all.

Paradox – The Impossibility and Necessity of Action As Mads Thomsen notes, Niklas Luhmann is careful to warn his reader that autopoietic systems theory ‘is not an edifying theory that lauds human individuality, but merely states the conditions under which individuality may be described, while simultaneously doing away with all ideas of a privileged human reason or subjectivity’ (19). In Luhmann’s own words, this is not a nice theory, neither a theory of perfection nor even of the perfectibility of the human race. It is not a theory of health states.

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Autopoietic systems reproduce themselves; they continue their reproduction or not. . . . And there is nothing more to say. (1990, 119) The situation, as described by Luhmann, is not bleak per se, but it is certainly no particular cause for hope; systems theory has little to say with regard to humanist concerns, ideals, or ambitions. Indeed, as Luhmann notes, The most important consequence may well be that the theory of autopoietic systems seems to bar all ways back to an anthropological conception of man. It precludes, in other words, humanism. The reason is simple: there is no autopoietic unity of all the autopoietic systems that compose the human being. (117) This emphasis on the incommensurability and separation of different autopoietic systems also does not entail metaphysical idealism. There are certainly categorical splits between the body, the mind, and communicative society in autopoietic system theory, but Luhmann is almost completely uninterested in questions of ontology; as Thomsen notes, Luhmann is not a Cartesian dualist in the sense that he believes there is a realm of meaning that is independent of material conditions, but he leaves it to others to solve what a consciousness is, and treats it as an empirical reality and an emergent phenomenon that cannot be understood by claiming that the mind is part of the body. (20) The operational functions and closures of systems are, essentially, the only area of concern here. Few, if any, existential speculations or moral conclusions may be drawn from the field of fractal, repetitive, operationally closed recursive systems that characterise the Luhmannian Weltanschauung, and I would argue that this is yet another point of convergence between autopoietic system theory and Slaughterhouse-Five. Indeed, the novel is quite explicit on the subject. In the first chapter, Vonnegut describes an encounter with the film-maker ‘Harrison Starr’, who remarks that when he hears of people writing ‘anti-war’ novels, his response is always the same – ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’ – which Vonnegut frankly agrees with (S5 3). Shortly afterwards, addressing his publisher, Vonnegut explains why his novel is the way it is: It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything

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As Donald J. Greiner correctly surmises, the ‘Dresden experience forced home to Vonnegut the truth that appropriate responses to death do not exist’ (48). Indeed, if Luhmann is correct, then they cannot exist. Death is certainly an ontological reality, but it is not a psychic one. Minds, after all, ‘operate as if they were immortal’ (Thomsen, 22), and so, as Luhmann explains, This is the reason why an autopoietic system cannot produce its own end. Humans can commit suicide because the conscious system can interfere with the organic system. But the autopoietic system of consciousness cannot think of death as the last autopoietic element. Autopoiesis is the reproduction of elements that take part in the reproduction of elements, and all attempts to think of a last moment will only produce a reproductive element. We can be sure that all of this presupposes and has reference to individuality in the sense of a closed, circular, self-referential network, in which the elements of the system are produced by the elements of the system. But beware: this is not a nice theory, neither a theory of perfection nor even of the perfectibility of the human race. It is not a theory of healthy states. Autopoietic systems reproduce themselves; they continue their reproduction or not. This makes them individuals. And there is nothing more to say. (1990, 118–119) Indeed, whether massacre or ‘plain old death’, whether of humans, animals, plants, or yeast, there is nothing more to say except, perhaps, ‘Pootee-weet?’. Further, to explicitly use this psychic blind spot for the sake of a pat positive moral would be a betrayal of the very subject that cannot be portrayed; one should probably not even attempt to do so. Gavin Miller notes that the possibility of providentially reading his experience in Dresden . . . haunts Vonnegut: ‘The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned lots of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is’. Had Vonnegut lent his experience ‘the complacent teleological interpretation’ that Miller argues characterises ‘realist’ fction, then ‘his “true and

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essential” welfare as a writer would, by an enormous moral inversion, bloom in the fertile ash of Dresden’ (305). This inability or refusal on Vonnegut’s part to so indulge, to draw an ethic or moral from the gaping absence of Dresden’s destruction – to neither approve nor condemn its perpetrators or victims – is, along with the novel’s operationally closed structure, the primary irritant for hostile critics of the novel or of its author. As Vonnegut himself freely admits, his purpose was not ‘to argue with people who thought Dresden should have been bombed to hell’ but simply to show that ‘Dresden, willy-nilly, was bombed to hell’ (Conversations, 176). Confronted with the fattened, operationally self-referential, recursive structure of S5, and with its refusal to operate allopoietically as a moralproducing machine, it is doubtless easy to settle on the interpretation that it is ultimately little more than an expression of quietism, or even nihilism. Here again, however, Luhmann’s theory provides the means to better interpret the novel. In particular, Luhmann’s later work on paradox explains how S5 is able to rise above purely meaningless statement. As Thomsen argues, when writing on literature and its engagement with paradox and meaninglessness, it seems reasonable to say that ‘pure nihilism and misanthropy do not generate form, but the attempt to overcome paradoxes – such as finding the meaning of a world that ultimately makes no sense – does so’ (85), especially when the paradox is insurmountable. For Luhmann, paradox is the means by which production can occur. Indeed, it is the foundation on which all non-trivial action is based. Luhmann explains this operation at length: Observations are asymmetric (or symmetry-breaking) operations. They use distinctions as forms and take forms as boundaries, separating an inner side (the Gestalt) and an outer side. The inner side is the indicated side, the marked side. From here one has to start the next operation. The inner side has connective value. For example, it is the immanent (and not the transcendent), the being (and not the nonbeing), or the having property (and not the not having). The inner side is where the problem is – the problem of finding a suitable next operation . . . it has a positive (designative) but not a negative (reflective) value. Nevertheless, all observations have to presuppose both sides of the form they use as distinction or ‘frame’. They cannot but operate (live, perceive, think, act, communicate) within the world. (1993, 769) As such, Luhmann argues that something always has to remain unsaid, and if one then ‘tries to observe both sides of the distinction one uses at the same time, one sees a paradox – that is to say, an entity without connective value. The different is the same, the same is different. So what?’ (769). This is, roughly, as far as we have so far come with SlaughterhouseFive. The Dresden event is the unmarked side, the novel the inner side

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that contains the inner/outer distinction within itself. So what? Well, as Luhmann suggests, First of all, this means that all knowledge and all action has to be founded on paradoxes and not on principles; on the self-referential unity of the positive and the negative – that is, on an ontologically unqualifiable world. And if one splits the world into two marked and unmarked parts to be able to observe something, its unity becomes unobservable. The paradox is the visible indicator of invisibility. And since it represents the unity of the distinction required for the operation called observation, the operation itself remains invisible – for itself and for the time being. . . . It is the wisdom of Greek and Roman rhetorics, flourishing again in the sixteenth century, that grants paradoxes the function of stimulating further thought. The normal ‘doxa’ is questioned by a para-doxa, and then you have to make a decision. . . . Today logicians say that tautologies and paradoxes need unfolding – that is, they have to be replaced with stable identities. In one way or another one has to find distinctions that protect from the error of identifying what cannot be identified. But distinctions again become visible as paradoxes as soon as one tries to observe their unity. (770) Since the world as observed by any autopoietic observing system is always already unqualifable, the paradox of observation can only be deparadoxifed – if only provisionally – over time. The re-entry of distinctions within further distinctions, the resolution of each paradox by means of a new paradox, recursively but productively repeats indefnitely. When observers (we, at the moment) continue to look for an ultimate reality, a concluding formula, a final identity, they will find the paradox. Such a paradox is not simply a logical contradiction (A is nonA) but a foundational statement: The world is observable because it is unobservable. Nothing can be observed (not even the ‘nothing’) without drawing a distinction, but this operation remains indistinguishable. It can be distinguished, but only by another operation . . . the condition of its possibility is its impossibility. (Luhmann, 1995, 46, my italics) This is the ethic that Slaughterhouse-Five necessarily cannot articulate, because to do so would re-enfold it within a binary that would render it inactive. No stated, allopoietic principle can possibly resolve (paraphrasing from Cat’s Cradle) the heart-breaking necessity and impossibility of preventing war, atrocity, and death. No positive, active stance can withstand the glacier; all action and all knowledge are dependent on the intractability of paradox. Though Cary Wolfe is discussing Luhmann’s ideas

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by reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the perspective that he articulates is directly relevant to the paradox that Slaughterhouse-Five formally articulates: Paradoxically, as I have been arguing, the only way for the Emersonian self to ‘stand’ is to not stand, to not stand still but to move in ‘abandonment’ beyond the self of ‘apprehension’ that one was only a second ago. The only way to ‘stand,’ then, is to ‘under-stand,’ to ‘stand down,’ if you like. And the achievement of the self is now to be seen not as an active willing but as a maximally (and paradoxically) active passivity. (262) This may seem thin gruel indeed to any critic for whom the active mastery inherent in the stated principle is the highest good to which literature might attain. The passivity that characterises Slaughterhouse-Five’s structure, its temporal mechanics, and even Billy Pilgrim, its protagonist, will inevitably appear to be nihilism or quietism when viewed from a more traditional, humanistic perspective. When the novel is read from (and as) an autopoietic system perspective, however, the unspoken, unarticulatable power that Slaughterhouse-Five has undoubtedly exerted on readers becomes more discernible, if only obliquely. It is a fact that the novel, in and of itself, is not an autopoietic system, though it bears many resemblances to one. Taken alone, as an artefact only, it lacks the temporal dimension that an autopoietic system requires to reproduce itself. Nevertheless, its paradoxical nature – its depiction of the undepictable blind spot that produces its self-referencing form, the unspoken pull to impossibly active passivity, palpable even in its completely determinate universe – is a function of its being written, quite explicitly, as the recursive, meagre, failed observation of ‘a pillar of salt’. It is certainly true that death cannot be articulated, and it cannot be halted, and it cannot be shared, even as it remains the only conclusion all autopoietic systems hold in resemblance. But the very essence of observation is paradox, and the very essence of paradox is the autopoietic production of as-yet undiscernible future possibilities.

Notes 1. In Fiction in the Quantum Universe (1992), Susan Strehle argues that ‘actualist’ writers are those who try to ‘express and address the new reality’ brought about by the quantum revolution in physics (14). Authors (at least those who are roughly contemporaneous with Vonnegut) included under the ‘actualist’ rubric by Strehle include Robert Coover, William Gaddis, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, and, especially, Thomas Pynchon. Strehle also lists John Kuehl, Robert Siegle, Robert Nadeau, N. Katherine Hayles, David Porush, and Tom LeClair as critics who have, to

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greater or lesser extents, engaged with the relationship between literature and physics in the latter half of the 20th century. 2. Rackstraw presents the following quotations – the first from Wolf’s Star Wave (1984), the second from Slaughterhouse-Five – as evidence for the similarity between the physicist’s and the novelist’s presentation of the temporal present: It does not need space, feeling, knowledge, sensation, emotion or others to be experienced. Here needs no object for itself.  .  .  . Everything that is, is, was, and will be. It remains ‘out there’ forever. Things do not pass away in time. Every moment remains lifeless, motionless and frozen forever. We – that is, our being-time – sweep across the landscape of all experiences as an airplane passes over the Grand Canyon. Past, present, and future represent a map for the perusal of the all-seeing being-time. When a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. (50) Needless to say, the comparison is convincing – it is clear that Wolf uses similar spatial metaphors to Vonnegut, even to the point of the metaphorical use of geographical US landmarks. 3. Vonnegut would note to Loree Rackstraw that whenever he would meet with his fellow former POWs, ‘nobody had the same story or could remember details’; in its early stages, Vonnegut considered depicting this phenomenon by having the pages of the novel become progressively darker until the Dresden scenes, at which point they would become completely black (Rackstraw, 2009, 30). In contrast, the surrealistic scene of Eliot Rosewater’s breakdown in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) is far more explicit. While riding a bus, Eliot experiences a hallucination that reminds him of the ‘description of the fire-storms in Dresden’ contained in The Bombing of Germany by Hans Rumpf: Eliot didn’t look up again until the bus reached the outskirts of Indianapolis. He was astonished to see that the entire city was being consumed by a fire-storm. He had never seen a fire-storm, but he had certainly read and dreamed about many of them. . . . Eliot, rising from his seat in the bus, beheld the fire-storm of Indianapolis. He was awed by the majesty of the column of fire, which was at least eight miles in diameter and fifty miles high. The boundaries of the column seemed absolutely sharp and unwavering, as though made of glass. Within the boundaries, helixes of dull red embers turned in stately harmony about an inner core of white. The white seemed holy. (153–4) It is notable – though perhaps outside the remit of this chapter – that Vonnegut chose Indianapolis, his hometown, for Eliot’s vision. In any case, it is notable that this very descriptive, evocative imagery does not seem to have been considered an adequate depiction of the Dresden experience for Vonnegut; Slaughterhouse-Five would follow in 1969. 4. References here and for the following are collected in ‘The Critical Reception of Slaughterhouse-Five’ (2011) by Jerome Klinkowitz, to whom this section is heavily indebted.

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5. Strehle argues that the metaphor proposed by Ortega y Gasset to explain the difference between realist and anti-realist fiction – that authors ‘direct readers to observe either the garden outside the window or the glass through which the garden appears – is ‘too simple a model of perception’, since ‘vision can accommodate awareness of both garden and pane’ (2–3). Strehle instead proposes a dichotomy between ‘realist’ fiction, which is based on the Newtonian paradigm of linear determinism and relational continuity and ‘actualist’ fiction. She explains at length her choice of terminology thusly: I’ve called the new mode actualism to suggest both kinship with and difference from realism. My term derives from a distinction Heisenberg makes as he discusses the dubious reality of particles as mathematical forms. ‘Would you call such mathematical forms “actual” or “real”? If they express natural laws, that is the central order inherent in material processes, then you must also call them “actual,” for they act, they produce tangible effects, but you cannot call them “real,” because they cannot be described as res, as things.’ With its roots not in things but in acts, relations, and motions, actualism describes a literature that abandons the old mechanistic reality without losing interest in the external world. Where ‘real’ evokes the thing fixed in space, ‘actual’ refers to the ‘action or existence’ of phenomena in space-time . . . Indeed, with the notion that the laws of nature form an order ‘inherent in material processes,’ Heisenberg rejects a spatial, static idea of order for one oriented to time and interactive process . . . Finally, the dual meaning of ‘to act’ as both ‘to make’ and ‘to fake’ gives ‘actualism’ special relevance for a fiction that describes and embodies both sorts of acts. (14) 6. As Tally himself notes, his overall approach is ‘somewhat less psychological and biographical than many other studies of Vonnegut’, and ‘unlike many Vonnegut scholars who have frequently eschewed such areas, my argument draws on works of literary and critical theory’. Instead, Tally hopes ‘to show that the formal analysis of Vonnegut’s novels, combined with philosophical or theoretical examination of the modern and postmodern conditions, will disclose a more interesting image of Vonnegut’s project as well as a more useful vision of the role of the writer in grappling with the contradictions of his age’ (2011, XIII). I wholeheartedly agree with his characterisation of the field of Vonnegut criticism and consider his approach not only laudatory but (in the finest Tralfamadorian sense) necessary. 7. Nietzsche expresses this opinion in Ecce Homo – the full quotation is as follows: My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it – all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary – but love it. (quoted in Tally, 2011, 84) 8. While Tally’s use of Nietzsche in reading Slaughterhouse-Five is excellently reasoned and highly illuminating, I am of the opinion that the philosophy of Spinoza could potentially present an even more appropriate avenue for analysing the amor fati aspects of the novel. While both philosophers embraced determinism, Spinoza’s thought was, in general, more rigorously structured than Nietzsche’s and – for want of a longer, more detailed explanation – more equanimous, laconic, and ‘gentle’ than Nietzsche’s sometimes bombastic, confrontational approach. Spinoza and Vonnegut, in short, are more temperamentally and ethically aligned than Vonnegut and Nietzsche.

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Nietzsche could hardly be accused of being quietistic, whereas Spinoza has often, like Vonnegut, been accused of being so. I hope to produce a fuller explication of this quibble in a future publication; I believe reading Vonnegut with Spinoza would be an illuminating venture. 9. A particular criticism that has been levelled against Luhmann’s work is the seeming contradiction that his theory is, in a sense, the grandest of ‘grand’ theories, while at the same time eschewing any claims to universality per se and eliding any elements that are not deemed directly relevant to said theory. As Matej Makarovič notes, for example, Luhmann’s theory is a clear example of the grand theory. Some of its fundamental principles are developed from some quite universal and interdisciplinary principles and as such it might function as a general theory of society. Unfortunately, in this respect Luhmann does not seem to be enough ambitious. From describing the general principles, he almost always implicitly or explicitly turns exclusively to the characteristics of modern societies without any attempt of systematic consideration of pre-modern societies. (62) However, this criticism may be based more in expectation than in presentation; Luhmann is rarely anything but explicit about the limitations or foci of his theory, and in any case, since his systems theory is based on closure, blind spots, and difference and on the absolute impossibility of objective, comprehensive knowledge, it would, if anything, be more incongruous if his work did not embody the ‘paradox’ of ‘ambitious modesty’ that Michael King and Anton Schutz argue characterises his work (261). 10. Unfortunately, while Luhmann’s interests were, to say the least, eclectic and certainly included a range of books and articles on the subject of the arts – including, but not exclusive to Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (1995, translated as Art as a Social System, 2000), ‘A Redescription of “Romantic Art”’ (1996), and the chapters ‘The Work of Art and the Self-Reproduction of Art’ and ‘The Medium of Art’ in Essays on Self-Reference (1990) – I have found little evidence in any interest on Luhmann’s part in the hermeneutics of art reception or critical theorising. Bluntly, Luhmann is very interested in the social category ‘art’ and, to a certain extent, the way that individual works within that system interact, reflect, and work to develop the organising principle of that category. He offers little, however, on art interpretation or criticism. 11. This is perhaps best elucidated – albeit obliquely – by reference to the relationship between distinction (form) and creation, which Luhmann, paraphrasing Spencer-Brown, explains by way of theological metaphor: In logic, in mathematics – whatever one wants to call it – in Spencer Brown’s calculus, this fact assumes the form of an injunction: ‘Draw a distinction!’ Draw a distinction, otherwise nothing will happen at all. If you are not ready to distinguish, nothing at all is going to take place. There are interesting theological aspects that pertain to this point. However, I will not work them out in this space (cf. Luhmann, 1987). Nonetheless, I would like to point out that advanced theology (e.g., the theology of Nicholas of Cusa) contains the proposition that God has no need for distinguishing. Evidently, creation is nothing but the injunction: ‘Draw a distinction!’ Heaven and earth are thereby distinguished, then man, and fnally Eve. Creation is thus the imposition of a mode of distinguishing, if God himself is beyond all distinction. (2006, 43)

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What is produced is a product of the distinction/indication which differentiates it; form and content are inextricably intertwined. 12. Siedl explains the importance of temporal procession, as explained in Social Systems, thusly: Luhmann conceptualises the elements as momentary events without any duration. Events have no duration but vanish as soon as they come into being; they ‘are momentary and immediately pass away’. . . . Through this shift from a reproduction of relatively stable elements, to a reproduction of momentary events, Luhmann radicalises the concept of autopoiesis. Because the elements of the system have no duration the system is urged to constant production of new elements. If the autopoiesis stops the system disappears immediately. (6) For an explanation on Luhmann’s sociological theory of functional differentiation in modern social systems – perhaps his most central contribution to the field – see note 19. 13. See Peter Freese’s ‘“Instructions for Use”: The Opening Chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five and the Reader of Historiographical Metafictions’ (2013); Freese expounds at length on the integration of the first chapter with the rest of the novel, in opposition to tendencies among critics. 14. Page references are preserved from the original quotation. In the edition of S5 used for this novel, the equivalent references are as follows – ‘Poo-teeweet?’ (14, 16, 72, 157), ‘blue and ivory’ (20, 47, 52, 53, 54, 57, 107), ‘nestled/nestling like spoons’ (51, 52, 91, 105, 107), ‘orange and black’ (50, 52), ‘big bronze gong’ (35, 59). 15. Boon notes, in particular, the use of ‘form cuts’ in Slaughterhouse-Five. The form cut is a cinematic technique ‘in which visual elements are used to smooth the transition from one scene to the next . . . largely associated with visual images’; he includes the cut between the bone tool of primitive man thrown into the air and a space station in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as a prominent example. However, Boon argues that while film is mostly limited to visual transitions, literature has no such restriction and can set up transitional devices on concepts. In film, we can cut from a round object to another round object. In literature, we can also set up a conceptual comparison, such as moving from a deathbed to a gravestone. (40) Boon argues that these ‘literary form cuts’ are used extensively in S5’s time jumps – examples include Leap 1’s ‘liquid womb to liquid tomb’, ‘Billy dying of water in lungs to Billy’s mother dying of water in lungs’ (Leap 2), ‘Expecting war to being in war’ (Leap 9), and the repeated image ‘Nestling like spoons’ (Leap 12) (41–45). 16. Spinoza’s metaphysics, for instance, decree that existence is one monistic substance (his famous ‘Deus, sive Natura’, ‘God, or Nature’), with particular or individual things as nothing but ‘affections of God’s attributes, or modes by which God’s attributes are expressed in a certain and determinate way’ (Ethics, Ip25c). As such, a personal, interventionist or actively desiring God is logically impossible. God cannot act towards any external ends, since God is by definition everything – all thought, all spatial extension, and all other attributes besides – and therefore, cannot have goals, ends, or make distinctions. Everything that exists or occurs proceeds by the necessity of the internal rules of God/nature; for our purposes, since God/nature encompasses all

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cognition, then God/nature in toto cannot cognise (I, Appendix). Luhmann also approaches this concept, though from a more traditionally Christian theological perspective – see note 13. 17. Central to Luhmann’s sociology of modernity is the idea that in modernity society has split from singular, hierarchical power-authority into innumerable autopoietic systems that are mutually unintelligible to each other. Briefly, in his own words, I propose to characterize modern society as a functionally differentiated social system. The evolution of this highly improbable social order required replacing stratification with functional differentiation as the main principle of forming subsystems within the overall system of society. In stratified societies, the human individual was regularly placed in only one subsystem. Social status was the most stable characteristic of an individual’s personality. This is no longer possible for a society differentiated with respect to functions such as politics, economy, intimate relations, religion, sciences, and education. Nobody can live in only one of these systems. (1990, 112) As is so common in Luhmann’s thought, this differentiation paradoxically reaffirms a kind of recursive unity within differentiated systems, even as they become operationally closed. As Gila J. Hayim lucidly explains, The steady process of differentiation and the erosion of hegemonic centers of institutional behavior, creates a shift in our conception of a social unity. But this does not mean that the moving reality of today ought to be conceived in terms of disunity or cultural and organizational decentralizations. To the system today there is a new and a different unity. For, every new layer of society and every new subsystem expresses the whole system on its own terms (Luhmann, 1989, 107). Newly emergent political, gender, health and other languages, operate as specific languages but with generalizable ‘formulas and horizons’ that are indispensable for the reconstruction of the totality of society. Every emerging subsystem ‘is and is not society at the same time’ (Luhmann, 1989, 107). The idea here is that the autopoietic process (the self production of society) brings forth unity, in terms of tolerance and openness for continuous differentiation, as well as difference. (1994, 321) An exhaustive account of this process is the primary subject of perhaps the most essential sociological text of Luhmann’s extensive oeuvre, Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie (1984, translated as Social Systems, 1995). 18. As Wolfe explains, [T]he similarities between systems theory and deconstruction have been hard to see because both converge on their central concept of difference from opposite directions. While Derrida’s work begins by confronting a logocentric philosophical tradition in which difference must be released in its immanence through the work of deconstruction, for Luhmann, difference names an evolutionary and adaptive problem – specifically, the fact of overwhelming environmental complexity – that any system must find a way of addressing if it wants to continue its autopoiesis . . . both insist on the crucial disarticulation of what Luhmann calls psychic systems and social systems, consciousness and communication, in ways famously insisted on in Derrida’s early critique of the self-presence of

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speech and autoaffection of the voice. For both, the form of meaning is the true substrate of the coevolution of psychic systems and social systems, and this means that the human is, at its core and in its very constitution, radically ahuman and constitutively prosthetic. (2010, XXVI) Luhmann himself engages with Derrida’s work at some length in ‘Deconstruction as Second-Order Observing’ (1993).

Conclusion Andrew John Hicks

All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so. The Sirens of Titan (153)

Given Vonnegut’s half-century long career, it is perhaps inevitable that the concerns, themes, and techniques I have identified in his work are shared by many of his contemporaneous literary peers. In responding directly and explicitly to the perpetual ferment of the 20th and early 21st century – the Great Depression, the Second World War, the technological revolutions of the 1950s and the Cold War, Vietnam, the rise of financialised capitalism, and through to the Iraq War – Vonnegut was always embedded in the apparatuses of his time. Despite his early estrangement from the wider community of American writers (and lifelong estrangement from academia), the determinants that led Vonnegut to write as he did were equally felt by his fellow novelists. As Joseph Heller records, Without being aware of it, I was part of a near-movement in fiction. While I was writing Catch-22, J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man, Jack Kerouac was writing On the Road, Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Thomas Pynchon was writing V., and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cat’s Cradle. I don’t think any one of us even knew any of the others. Certainly I didn’t know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us. The feelings of helplessness and persecution in Catch-22 are very strong in Cat’s Cradle. (314) A range of similar parallels might be drawn. Vonnegut’s concern with the ways in which lives are imbricated in shadowy, conspiratorial systems is apotheosised in the work of Thomas Pynchon; metafictional writers such as John Barth and Donald Barthelme have highlighted the ways in which language produces, complicates, and multiplies the self or represents an uncanny, ahuman prosthetic entity all its own. Some have highlighted the

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ways in which history is discursive, merging fact and fction to emphasise the theatricality of public life – Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977) is an exemplar of this approach – and others have satirised the insanity of war (Heller), the inanity of American life (Don DeLillo), and the degradation of the environment (Rachel Carson). Few, however, have brought so many disparate concerns together in the way that Vonnegut was able to or dissected them with the trained eye of a chemist, an anthropologist, and a naturalist. Moreover, Vonnegut’s unflinching attention to the ways in which human beings are materially, intellectually, and culturally determined by their continuity with nature – indeed, of the ways in which they are nature – was nevertheless leavened with a genuine sympathy and humanitarianism that his fellow ironists and black humourists often lacked. As Charles J. Shields notes, ‘Vonnegut’s humor is recondite, multi-layered, and seriously compassionate, too; cradling human frailty, not sneering at it the way black humor does’ (2012, 27). Similarly, Robert Tally refers to Vonnegut as ‘a reluctant postmodernist’. While he cannot ‘escape his own postmodernity . . . he remains a modernist who desires a form of completeness and semic stability that remains elusive’ (2011, 3–4). The endless self-referentiality of linguistic play has never been Vonnegut’s subject, but he also never succumbs to a naïve or simplistic positivism. As I hope to have demonstrated, the unique blend of postmodern rhetorical strategies, naturalistic perspective and subjects, and frank ethical concern that characterises Vonnegut’s work is not coincidental. It is a result of its posthumanist themes and techniques. It is the synthesis in Vonnegut’s work – the never uncomplicated or unmediated elision of binaries such as culture and nature, discourse and materiality, human and ahuman – that epitomises his posthumanist understanding, which is as alive to the movement to rocks as it is to the intricacies of human interaction. These complexities have unfortunately gone largely unnoticed, perhaps partly due to the relative simplicity of Vonnegut’s prose. As Vonnegut himself groused, ‘it has been my experience with literary critics and academics in this country that clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance and childishness and cheapness to them’ (Palm Sunday, 293). One might hope that we are now better able to discern his work for what it really represents. It is also a timely period to reassess the wider relevance of Vonnegut’s work. Even as we produce ever more sophisticated technologies, ever more knowledge-producing apparatuses, and ever more complicated social and cultural systems, the issues with which Vonnegut contended are just as present today as they were in his heyday. Only three out of ten Americans believe in the theory of evolution by natural selection; the majority believe that angels exist (Rozsa). Anthropogenic climate change is often dismissed in the USA as being beyond the scope of our ability to cause, not a real phenomenon, or simply not of concern.1 Freedom, in its liberal, humanistic guise, remains the default assumption regarding the

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behaviour and fortunes of human beings.2 For all our seeming sophistication, Pico’s axis retains its grasp on the popular imagination in much of America, and in the West more generally. Man is still set apart from base nature, not by degree but by category wholesale, neither meaningfully affected by nor affecting the environment. The non-human world remains a resource to be exploited, rather than a complex, intra-active system of which we are but one element. The grinding determinative processes that time and again are addressed in Vonnegut’s fiction are ignored or ill-understood. This status quo – which, philosophically speaking, has essentially held sway for over four hundred years – is unlikely to survive the opening of the Anthropocene, or rather, it must not, or it will only intensify the now inevitable devastation. If there were ever a time to turn away from the incessant self-obsession of humanism and to develop a mature understanding of the ways in which human beings are imbricated in apparatuses that far exceed us, it is now. We must develop a posthuman perspective, even if (or even because) it is almost certainly already too late. At the end of his life, Vonnegut was unequivocal in his opinion of humanity and its heedlessness and of its chances – ‘we are killing this planet as a life-support system with the poisons from all the thermodynamic whoopee we’re making with atomic energy and fossil fuels, and everybody knows it, and practically nobody cares. This is how crazy we are’ (A Man Without a Country, 121–122). Vonnegut was probably right to be so pessimistic. Nevertheless, the essential power of Vonnegut’s work lies in the paradox in the call for ethical behaviour, even if (or even because) it is useless or even impossible. John L. Simons, with reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald, is particularly perceptive regarding this element of Vonnegut’s work: “One should, for example,” Fitzgerald continues, “be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” Kurt Vonnegut could easily have penned these words. What’s more, Vonnegut’s own rhetoric follows Fitzgerald’s in the latter’s summation of his hope-against-hope philosophy: “I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle: the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to succeed.” This is, of course, the language of Vonnegut’s “cruel paradox.” (48) As Luhmann consistently emphasised, paradox is productive, even if we are always disbarred from knowing how its unfolding will proceed over time. The normal doxa of liberal anthropocentrism could, conceivably, be questioned by the para-doxa of Vonnegut’s posthumanist challenge, and then, with the contradictions laid bare, ‘[we will] have to make a decision’ (Luhmann, 1993, 770).

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Whether or not Vonnegut’s insights could ever contribute to real social or political change (they almost certainly cannot), the value of his work – and particularly the elements I have explored here – is nevertheless of real value within the narrower field of academia.3 I have argued that Vonnegut is an unlikely exemplar of a posthumanist synthesis and that this powerful, vital inclination has so far remained mostly unremarked upon. As such, his perennial position as an outsider to academia – a voice in the wilderness, estranged from the theory wars that consumed literary criticism while he was writing – might ironically contribute to his value as a provocative new subject for study. Properly understanding Vonnegut’s work, as I have argued, calls for interdisciplinarity almost by definition. It requires us to discard not only the old skins of humanism but the old skins of postmodern/poststructuralist anti-humanism too. It necessitates attending to every aspect of human existence, even those that have previously been ignored or even derided as a serious subject of investigation. Again, this is not inevitable. Future debates or directions in academia are near impossible to predict (if you are not a Tralfamadorian or trapped in a Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum, of course). Further, Vonnegut is not a traditionally ‘interesting’ writer. His didacticism cannot be denied, his characterisation is perennially weak, and his plots are often subservient to his message. But the messages of his work, and the topics he has seen fit to explore in literature, have rarely been at the forefront of the humanities’ concerns to date. We would do well to pay heed to his voice now. More broadly, but still speculatively, I suspect that defining and refining a posthumanist literary critical approach will be the work of many academics yet to come; in my opinion, it would have the potential to spark a re-evaluation of the canon as thorough and paradigm-shifting as the postmodernist revolution in the humanities. Posthumanist criticism would call attention not only to the unsaid or unacknowledged discourses of texts but the ways in which their natural as well as their cultural backgrounds constitute the apparatus of the text. The ‘background’ details, the raw material on which all interactions, no matter how rarefied, are based would share the attention that the play of human drama has so far monopolised. This emphasis should not be mistaken for pathetic fallacy. These elements are not inert non-entities onto which human subjectivity or emotion is projected but objects in their own rights, as mysterious, agentive, and ontologically significant as any character. Vonnegut is a writer particularly amenable to this kind of reading, but such an approach may yield exciting new interpretations of any given author, and this specific, materially focused example is but one facet of posthumanist theory. A rubric that erodes the binaries of the discursive and materialistic, the particulate and the systemic, the artificial and natural – the human and the nonhuman – is almost limitless in scope. I hope, in this respect, that this study might contribute to this exciting and developing field and might provide at least a signpost to a literary

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critical movement that will become only more relevant in the coming decades. More important, I hope that it will provide a new approach to reading Vonnegut for a new century, one that incorporates the humour and wisdom and kindness that has thus far been so valued in his work and extends these attributes beyond the human sphere, to the world yet unconsidered.

Notes 1. Forty-eight per cent of American adults say climate change is predominantly anthropogenic, 31% believe it is due to natural causes, and 20% do not believe in the phenomenon at all; see ‘The Politics of Climate’ (2016) by Cary Funk and Brian Kennedy. 2. Baumeister et al. found that the majority of experimental participants believed that agents act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions; more recently, Sarkissian et al. conducted a cross-cultural study that reveals that these beliefs display a ‘striking’ degree of convergence across cultures. 3. Vonnegut himself equivocated on the potential for art to drive social or political change. In his1973 interview with Playboy, he noted that I’ve worried some about, you know, why write books . . . why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it’s been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with . . . humanity, and however you want to poison their minds, it’s presumably to encourage them to make a better world. (Conversations, 123) Vonnegut also expounded a theory that artists ‘are useful to society because they are so sensitive. . . . They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas’; nevertheless, ‘on the other hand, artists are keeling over by the thousands every day and nobody seems to pay the least attention’ (Wampeters, 100). In a 2003 interview, Vonnegut reiterated this pessimism, noting that during the Vietnam War ‘every respectable artist in the country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high’ (Hoppe, par.21).

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Index

Adams, Douglas 137 Adorno, Theodor 15, 16, 77, 81, 84, 87, 90, 91–92, 94 agential realism see Barad, Karen Allen, William Rodney 53, 111 Animal studies 101, 104, 107, 130n13; see also Haraway, Donna; Wolfe, Cary anthropocentrism 3–4, 7, 14, 144, 147, 218 antihumanism 15; and environmentalism 96n5; and humanism 128–129n8; and irrationalism 98–99n17; and posthumanism 8–9, 140, 171n5 Aristotle 48n4, 142, 145 autopoiesis 9, 19, 183–186, 191–192, 200–202; see also Luhmann, Niklas; Maturana, Humberto; Varela, Francisco Badmington, Neil 104 Bakhtin, Mikhail 16, 17, 47, 56–59, 64, 65, 69n8, 70n9; carnivalesque 29, 48n6, 56–57, 60, 67, 69n7; grotesque realism 56, 57–58, 60–61, 62–63, 66–67; Rabelais and his World 56–58 Barad, Karen 16, 142–144, 146, 156, 164, 175n17, 178; apparatuses 143, 144, 157, 158–159, 161; intraactivity 19, 143, 168; materialdiscursive enactments 165–166; observation 159, 161, 171–172n7 Beer, Gillian 18, 112, 120, 122, 123, 129n9 behaviourism 12, 42, 50n15 Bennett, Jane 49n11, 140, 141 Bergson, Henri 16, 37–38, 41–42, 46–47, 48n4, 48n6, 50–51n17; Creative Evolution 27, 42, 45;

Duration and Simultaneity 42; durée 22n10, 44, 51n17; Einstein, debate with 41–42, 49–50n14; élan vital 27–28, 29, 51n17; and free will 22n10, 44; Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic 16, 27–30, 32–34, 36, 40, 48n5, 49n10; and science 43–45, 49n13; Time and Free Will 41, 44, 46; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 49n13 Bloom, Harold 190 Bohr, Niels 142, 159, 170n3, 175n17 Bokononism 16, 25–26, 30–31, 40, 41, 45, 47n2, 48n3 Boon, Kevin A. 1, 194–195, 213n15 Boyd, Brian 129–130n12 Bradley, Arthur 127n2 Braidotti, Rosi 8, 9, 141 Broer, Lawrence 11, 22n9, 26, 34, 66, 76, 84, 120, 138, 156–157, 164, 181 Brüggemeier, Franz-Josef 79, 97n8 Bryant, Levi 140–141, 142, 171n5, 186 Buck, Lynn 10, 164, 180 Buell, Lawrence 77 Burgess, Anthony 180 Burke, Kenneth 69n7 Butler, Judith 103 Carroll, Joseph 102–103, 127n4 Cheah, Pheng 103 Chénetier, Marc 101 Cioc, Mark 79, 97n8 Crews, Frederick 128n6 Crichton, Michael 180 Coleman, Martin 12 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 50–51n17 Connor, Steven 22n10, 48n8 Conrad, Joseph 115

238

Index

Copson, Andrew 20n3 Cosmides, Leda 103, 129–130n12 Cowart, David 13, 53 Darré, Richard Walther 79, 97n8, 97n9 Darwin, Charles 18, 106, 109–110, 120–121, 129n9; The Descent of Man 41, 49n12; natural selection 108, 111–113; The Origin of Species 41, 110, 120, 124, 129n11; The Voyage of the Beagle 110, 130n16 Davies, Tony 6, 8, 21n4, 104–105, 107, 128–129n8 Davis, Kathleen 127n2 De Beauvoir, Simone 103 DeLanda, Manuel 146 Dennett, Daniel 112, 114 Dentith, Simon 57, 59, 69n8 Deresiewicz, William 135, 199 Derrida, Jacques 18, 101, 102–103, 132n25, 159, 172n8, 201, 214–215n18; ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’ 107–108, 129n10; as anti/posthumanist 8, 21n6; and language 127n2, 127n3 Descartes, Rene 106 determinism 17, 109, 137, 168; and Bergson 41–42, 43–45, 48n5; evolutionary 103, 106, 114, 126; historical 81, 94, 95; and quantum mechanics 143; in Vonnegut’s work 4–7, 11–12, 42–43, 46–47, 137, 138–139, 158–159 Devellennes, Charles 186, 189 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 62, 71n13 Duchenne, Guillaume-Benjamin 48n7 Durkheim, Émile 41, 49n13 Eagleton, Terry 48n6, 69–70n8 ecocriticism 76–77, 96n3, 101, 103 ecology 96n5; environmentalism 78, 96n5, 96–97n7; etymology of 77; Nazi environmentalism (see Nazi ideology) Eichmann, Adolf 75 Einstein, Albert 42, 49–50n14, 178, 183 Eliot, T. S. 119 Emerson, Caryl 70n9 evolutionary biology 102 evolutionary criticism 18–19, 102–103, 128n6

evolution, theory of 16, 108; and ‘Social Darwinism’ 109, 122, 130n14; see also Darwin, Charles; Spencer, Herbert Farrell, Susan E. 13 Ferrando, Francesca 171n5 forty-eighters, the 97n12, 97n13 Foucault, Michel 15, 101, 102–103; as anti/posthumanist 8, 21n6, 128–129n8, 171n5; sexuality 127–128n4 Fanon, Frantz 103 Freese, Peter 5, 191, 193, 213n13 freethinking see forty-eighters, the free will 4, 139, 168; and Bergson 43–44, 48n5; and humanism 6–7, 106; philosophical 21n5; in Vonnegut’s work 11–12, 158–159, 164 Freud, Sigmund 27, 48n4, 127n4, 129n9, 131n22 Garrard, Greg 78, 91, 96n3 Gershon, Ilana 196, 198–199 Gholson, Bill 13 Glotfelty, Cheryll 76, 96n3, 103 Goebbels, Joseph 84 Goodwin, James 53–54, 70n15 Gould, Stephen Jay 110 Graff, Gerald 101 Greer, Creed 10 grotesque 17, 53–56, 66, 68n4, 68n5, 69n6, 69n7 Haeckel, Ernst 79 Hale, Sir John 20n3 Haraway, Donna 18, 103, 104, 108; as posthumanist 21n6, 106–107, 128–129n8 Harman, Graham 16, 19, 148, 164, 165, 169; ‘allure’ 149–150; and Heidegger 176n21; ObjectOriented Ontology 19, 139, 141–142, 144–147, 173n12; ‘real’ objects 173n11; ‘sensual’ objects 166–167, 174n14; and speculative realism movement 172n9 Haushofer, Karl 94 Hayim, Gila J. 214n17 Hayles, N. Katherine 9, 104, 128n7, 172n7, 209–210n1 Heidegger, Martin 15, 19, 128–129n8, 172n8; and authenticity 77, 91; and

Index Nazi ideology 80–81; tool-being 176n21 Heller, Joseph 216 Hitler, Adolf 80, 93, 98n17 Hobbes, Thomas 48n4 Holquist, Michael 65 Hood, Bruce 21n5 humanism 16, 120, 137; and animals 106–109; and evolution 123; liberal 166, 168–169, 183, 217–218; and posthumanism 9; renaissance 20n3, 104–106; secular 21n4; types of 128–129n8; and ‘universal man’ 6–7; values/ideology 125–126, 159; and Vonnegut 3 Hume, Kathryn 10, 60, 76, 84, 138 Hurley, Matthew M. 28, 48n4 Husserl, Edmund 19, 150, 174n14 Huxley, Thomas 49n12, 128–129n8 Ice-nine 16, 27, 31–32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39–40, 46, 115 Ironside, Redvers 48n7 Jamosky, Edward 75 Jowett, Lorna 13 Karon, Jeff 14 Kayser, Wolfgang 54, 55–56, 59 Kern, Robert 77 Kerridge, Richard 111 Klinkowitz, Jerome 26, 31, 35, 75, 91, 114, 138–139, 179, 182, 190, 193–194, 195, 210n4 Knight, David 120 Koestler, Arthur 12, 27, 69n7 Kolakowski, Leszek 44 Koonz, Claudia 80, 94, 98n15 Kunkel, Benjamin 25, 35 Latour, Bruno 141, 171n6 Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher 52 Lingel, Jessica 12 Luhmann, Niklas 16, 172n7, 179, 212n9, 212n11, 214–215n18; and art 183–184, 212n10; autopoiesis 19–20, 186–189, 190, 198–199, 204–205, 206, 213n12; functional differentiation 200–201, 214n17; observation 19, 187–189, 196–197, 207; paradox 6, 20, 187, 189, 207–208, 218; as posthumanist 21n6; see also Autopoiesis

239

Lunacharsky, Anatoly 48n6, 70n9 Lundquist, James 14, 178 Makarovič, Matej 212n9 Manhattan Project 33, 43 Marvin, Thomas F. 12, 25 Marx, Karl 127n4 materialism 13, 18, 43, 136, 137, 139; new materialism 15, 19, 139, 140–142 Maturana, Humberto 21n6, 172n7, 184–185, 190; see also autopoiesis Maude, Ulrika 22n10 May, John 182 McQuillan, Martin 127n2 Meillassoux, Quentin 172n9, 172n10 Mellmann, Katja 127–128n4 Merrill, Robert 11–12, 52, 164, 180 Meyer, Michael J. 68–69n5 Midgley, Mary 124, 125 Miller, Gavin 12, 206 modernism 101 Morgan Wortham, Simon 132n25 Morse, Donald E. 1, 11, 21n7, 52–53, 182, 202, 204 Morton, Timothy 142 Murashov, Iurii 63 Mussolini, Benito 97n9 Mustazza, Leonard 21n9, 77, 88, 119 nationalism 85–86, 97n9, 100, 103 naturalism 14–15, 18, 42–43, 45, 100 Nazi ideology 12, 18, 89, 98n15, 98–99n17; Blut und Boden 77, 78, 79–80, 94, 100, 103; and environmentalism 17, 78–81, 89, 97n8; Lebensraum 94, 99n18; Purity and/or Authenticity 80, 93, 94; Volk/Volkisch 79–81, 93, 94, 98n17; Wandervögel 84, 86–87 Nettle, Daniel 129n12 new materialism see materialism Ngai, Sianne 31 Nietzsche, Friedrich 12, 15, 182–183, 211n7, 211–212n8 object-oriented ontology 19, 139, 144–146, 176n21; see also Harman, Graham; speculative realism O’Connor, Flannery 53–55 paradox 5, 6, 20, 26, 183, 209, 218; see also Luhmann, Niklas Pardee, Sheila Ellen 7

240

Index

Parkin, John 27, 30, 48n5 Pereboom, Derk 21n5 Pettersson, Bo 5–6, 110 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 105–106, 218 Pinker, Steven 103, 129–130n12 Plato 48n4, 115 Poe, Edgar Allen 54, 68n3 posthumanism 15, 16, 27, 140, 170, 178, 217–220; and animal studies 104, 107–109, 130n13; and antihumanism 8, 171n5; critics 21n6; and determinism 5–6; and evolution 18, 122–123, 125–126; and finitude 201–204; and humanism 9, 106; and new materialism 19, 140; and Vonnegut 119–120, 217–218 postmodernism 26–27, 53, 100, 101, 216–217 poststructuralism 101, 171n5, 219 quantum mechanics 171n4, 183; and literature 209–210n1; twoslit experiment 156, 175n17; and Vonnegut 139, 170n3, 177–178, 210n2 Quinney, Laura 54–55 Rabelais, François 20n1, 57–58, 115 Rackstraw, Loree 13–14, 15, 20n2, 177–178, 210n2, 210n3 Reed, Peter J. 25, 27, 31, 59, 70n10, 76, 110, 136–137, 176n19, 179 renaissance 7, 20n3, 55, 59, 105–106 Roberts, David 183–184, 187–189 Ruskin, John 68n4 Russo, Mary 69n6 Sartre, Jean-Paul 18, 84, 98n16 Saussure, Ferdinand de 131n21 Scalise Sugiyama, Michelle 128n6 Scholes, Robert 180 Scholl, Peter A. 11–12, 164, 180 Schopenhauer, Arthur 176n20 Schroyer, Trent 81 Schulz, Max F. 26, 76 Schwartz, Sanford 41–42 Sempere, Julio Peiró 69n8 Shakespeare, William 115 Shaviro, Steven 146–147, 173n13 Sheehan, Paul 112–113, 123 Shields, Charles J. 1, 20n1, 52, 53, 82, 95–96n1, 96n2, 98n14, 135, 136, 137, 138, 170n1, 217

Siedl, David 213n12 Sigman, Joseph 21n8 Simmons, David 1 Simons, John L. 26, 218 Skinner, Burrhus Frederic 42, 50n15, 50n16 Snow, C. P. 15, 21n8, 131–132n23, 177 Snyder, Timothy 97n8 Soper, Kate 100, 101, 103 Sophocles 115 Spatt, Hartley S. 12–13 speculative realism 141, 144, 172n9 Spencer-Brown, G. 186–189, 212n11 Spencer, Herbert 48n4, 109, 130n14 Spinoza, Baruch 12, 94, 160–161, 174–175n15, 175–176n18, 211–212n8, 213–214n16 Spivak, Gayatri 127n2 Staudenmeier, Peter 78, 84, 96n6, 96–97n7, 97n8, 97n9, 98–99n17 Strehle, Susan 178, 180, 209–210n1, 211n5 structuralism 101 Tally, Robert T. 1–2, 10, 15, 18, 25, 63, 71n14, 77–78, 119, 121, 136, 169, 182–183, 211n6, 211–212n8, 217 Tanner, Tony 180, 190 Thomsen, Mads 198, 204, 205–206, 207 Tooby, John 103, 129–130n12 Tralfamadorian 12, 159, 161–163, 177, 179, 180–183, 197–198 transhumanism 9, 104, 128n7 ‘Trout, Kilgore’ (fictional character) 10, 17, 60, 62–63, 65–68 Twain, Mark 2, 20n1 Uekoetter, Frank 78, 89, 94, 96–97n7, 97n8, 97n9 Uphaus, Robert 182 Varela, Francisco 21n6, 172n7, 184–185, 189, 190; see also autopoiesis Vees-Gulani, Susan 11, 181 vitalism 41–42, 45, 46, 50–51n17 Vitruvius 55 Vonnegut, Clemens 82, 97n11 Vonnegut, Kurt 131n22, 170n1, 216–220, 220n3; A Man Without A Country 2, 31, 131n22, 218; ancestry 82, 97n11, 97n13; anthropological training 7, 14,

Index 47n2, 99n19; Bluebeard 13, 111, 126–127n1, 131n20; Breakfast of Champions 4, 17, 47, 52–53, 59–68, 68n1, 68n4, 70n10, 126n1, 131n20; Cat’s Cradle 16–17, 25–27, 30–41, 43, 45–46, 47n2, 75, 114, 177, 208 (and Bokononism (see Bokononism); and ice-nine (see ice-nine)); Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut 3, 7, 13, 14, 31, 42, 49n9, 52, 59, 109, 111, 131n22, 131–132n23, 135, 136, 175–176n18, 195, 207, 220; and Darwin 109–110, 130n16; Deadeye Dick 111, 126n1; Fates Worse Than Death 13, 110; Galapagos 12, 18–19, 25, 46, 95, 100, 108–110, 111–126, 130n16, 131n21, 131–132n23; and General Electric 42, 49n9, 136, 170n3; God Bless You, Dr Kevorkian 2, 3; God Bless You, Mr Rosewater 10, 177, 210n3; Happy Birthday, Wanda June 2, 52; Hocus Pocus 4; Letters 47n1, 97n10, 99n19, 110; Mother Night 15, 17–18, 21n8, 75–78, 81, 82, 83–95, 95–96n1, 96n2, 100, 101, 111, 177; Palm Sunday 4, 13, 68n1, 82, 128n5, 217; Player Piano 75, 135–136, 170n1, 170n2; psychoanalytical

241

readings of 10–11, 22n9, 76; and science 17, 42; Slapstick 11, 25, 115; Slaughterhouse-Five 3, 4, 11, 12, 16, 19–20, 46, 52, 59, 97n10, 111, 138, 161, 170, 175–176n18, 177–178, 179–183, 189–204, 213n14; The Sirens of Titan 3, 4, 11, 19, 46, 75, 95–96n1, 111, 135, 137–139, 142, 147–170, 174–175n15, 176n16, 177, 178, 179; Timequake 1, 16, 46; Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons 4, 13, 135, 220; wartime experience 97n10, 98n14, 192–193, 210n3 Vonnegut, Mark 109 Vonnegut, Nanette 1 Wakefield, Dan 1, 47n1 Waugh, Patricia 103 Wells, H. G. 122, 131–132n23 Whitehead, Alfred 147, 173n13 Wiepking-Jürgensmann, Heinrich 80 Wolfe, Cary 103, 128n7, 204, 208–209, 214–215n18; and animal studies 18, 104, 130n13, 201–202; definitions of posthumanism 21n6; and humanism 106; What is Posthumanism? 9, 104 Zimmerman, Michael E. 79, 93 Zins, Daniel 43