Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five A Reappraisal, or, “There is ‘Something’ Intelligent to Say About a Massacre.”

Abstract

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five A Reappraisal, or, “There is ‘Something’ Intelligent to Say About a Massacre.”* Sadok Bouhlila (bio) We tend to think of experiments as cold exercises in technique. My feeling-about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in lovemaking. —John Barth “Once upon a time” crowds every fairytale with “magic mirrors” that augur the battle between “good” and “evil,” “beauty” and “beastliness,” reflecting a world of totalitarian terror and the arduous quest for escape to a utopian land. What is reflection? What is the matter of perception? Criticism turns into a madhouse of questions about reality and illusion. “What’s in a mirror?” Is what one sees what there is? Reading a narrative is entering a dream-world. The dream might be sinister, nightmarish, or a wonderland for the recreation of fantasies. One would venture to say that all works of fiction are mirrors of the worlds we live in. In fairytales, the mirror would speak to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Feigning to suspend disbelief in the fairytale, one would enter the house of fiction and experience the suspension with their own expectations. Today, like yesterday, creative art is “a fairytale” with uncanny reflections on a world always-already old, always-already new, yet, a world which again and again seizes us with wondrous fascination; the effect is each time, a new one, with fresh sensations. In the epigraph above, John Barth redeems “narrative technique” from the conventional qualification of “cold” craftsmanship and “aestheticizes” it by comparing it to the “technique of lovemaking.” As a matter of fact, “technique,” from Greek tekhnikos, “pertaining to art,” from tekhnē “art, skill,” requires a sensual relation to the object in the process of crafting a work of art. From this comes the obligation of handling with care what has been carried out conscientiously. In the epilogue to his Fabulation and Metafiction (1979), Robert Scholes writes that “the most interesting readings are mis-readings,” adding that “[t]he best books are the least readable” (199). Rereading Vonnegut’s [End Page 85] Slaughterhouse-Five numerous times within a span of forty years or so can only comfort the present reader that the experience was indeed worthwhile even if the gratification of doing so still remains unclear, due to the anxiety of misinterpretation. At the novel’s publication, Vonnegut considered it to be “a failure” as it was written by a “pillar of salt” in reference to Lot’s wife in Sodom and Gomorrah (Slaughterhouse-Five 22). However, Robert Scholes’s reading has shown it to be “an extraordinary success” despite Vonnegut’s objection (204). Indeed, far from concealing the atrocities brought about by the Dresden bombing, Vonnegut’s comic perspective allows us to look at them in a more bearable fashion. Scholes avers that, [I]t is funny, compassionate and wise. The humor in Vonnegut’s fiction is what enables us to contemplate the horror that he finds in contemporary existence. . . . Comedy can look into depths which tragedy dares not acknowledge. The comic is the only mode which can allow itself to contemplate absurdity. That is why so many of our best writers are, like Vonnegut, what Hugh Kenner would call “Stoic Comedians.” (204) In a later interview, published in 1996, to a question relative to the fact that despite his dissatisfaction with its final form, the novel proved to be his most successful book, Vonnegut rather humorously replied: “Well, at times you can get away with it or you can’t. In Slaughterhouse-Five, I got away with it. I’ve been very lucky that readers understand what I’ve been doing” (Rodriguez 483). Yet, it must have taken more than luck to achieve that “breakthrough” with the expectations of its readers. With Scholes’s astute reading in mind, how should one then read Vonnegut’s assertion of failure about his craft? Would a writer consider it a mess when critics hail it as a masterly artistic wonder? The writer is certainly aware that his novel, being “non conventional,” might appear as chaotically “unreadable”1 and “unnatural” (Nünning and Natalya Bekhta; Nielsen; Bernaerts; Richardson; Shen), unattractive and unenjoyable; Vonnegut...