What might Lot's wife have described?
Written: Oct 10 '06 (Updated Dec 31 '06)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: very readable
Cons: what is one supposed to take away from reading the book?
The Bottom Line: A threefer: golden oldies w-o, banned book w-o, and my Epinions book finale, all in one
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| Stephen_Murray's Full Review: |
The title page of Kurt Vonnegut. Jr.'s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death comes with a précis like those 18th-century books: "A fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much), who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden German, "The Florence of the Elbe," a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale. This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from." That is a pretty good plot summary, though it is more run-on than the prose in the book, so is not a preview of syntactical complexity of the sentences. It is a preview of the matter-of-factness of reporting extreme matters, notably time travel to the planet Tralfamadore, very black humor about being lost behind German lines during the Battle of the Bulge, and the nightmare of emerging from deep storage (the titular Slaughterhouse-5) to see the moonscape of incinerated Dresden after the saturation incendiary bombing of Feb. 13, 1945.
In the first chapter, Vonnegut relates that he had spent years trying to write about his experience as a POW witness of the aftermath of the incineration of Dresden. He expressed sympathy with Lot's wife, who couldn't keep herself from looking back at the incinerated city they had escaped (Sodom) and was turned to a pillar of salt. "People aren't supposed to look back," he wrote. His book is a failure "and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. Later in the book, his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, realizes that an intent of the bombing was to kill all the witnesses.
Shifting to the wikpedia analysis of the firebombing, it involved dropping large amounts of high-explosive to blow off the roofs to expose the timbers within buildings, followed by incendiary devices (fire-sticks) to ignite them and then more high-explosives to hamper the efforts of the fire services. The consequences of these standard methods were particularly effective in Dresden: the bombings eventually created a self-sustaining firestorm with temperatures peaking at over 1500 °C. After a wide area caught fire, the air above the bombed area became extremely hot and rose rapidly. Cold air then rushed in at ground level from outside, and people were sucked into the fire." Most people below-ground in bomb shelters were fried, and neither Vonnegut or his alter ego saw the fire. What both of them saw was the aftermath.
The slaying of 25-35,000 civilians is the hinge of Vonnegut's and Pilgrim's history,* but more of the book is about prosaic post-war life as an Ilium, N.Y. optometrist who married Valencia, the fat daughter of the head of the local optometry school, and of his/their absurd position clomping through the snow before being captured. Pilgrim was unarmed, not properly shod, a 6'3" beanpole asking the scouts who had found him to leave him behind. The rag-tag sub-platoon had a fourth member, Roland Weary whose animus toward Billy outlives Weary himself.
And then there is the time travel. During a blink of the eye during his daughter Barbara's wedding night Billy is abducted by space aliens (little green men with an eye on the palm of a hand that stretches up from the neck and suction-cup feet and who can see time) and put on display (naked with furnishings from a Sears store) in a zoo on Tralfamadore. He is supplied with a Hollywood starlet, Montana Wildhack, as a mate, and taught to time-travel, so that he experienced his death and returned to scenes of his captivity and earthly marriage many times.
Because of the simultaneity of time for the Tralfamadorians, death is no big deal.. Their response to a death is "So it goes," a phrase that recurs very, very (annoyingly) often in Slaughterhouse-Five, and in my opinion eclipses the horrors of the mass murder of the residents of Dresden (which had been an open city with no military facilities).
In the opening chapter, Vonnegut declared the enterprise of his "Dresden novel" was doomed to failure. Along the way.... there is another metafictional comment: "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters..."
Nevertheless, and despite the amalgamation of time-travel science fiction. unheroic war memories, prosaic postwar life, and such metafictional comments to readers, the book is gripping, often very funny, and a quick read... It can be read in 3 hours, but one may take much longer trying to understand what it is supposed to mean. (So it goes? Or like The Stranger, it is a novel, not an explication of a philosophical doctrine.)
I am not sure whether I read the novel during my early 20s. Images from the movie overwrote memories of reading it,,,,, though I think that I did. It seem too glib to me (yeah, yeah, that's Vonnegut, I know!). The cuts (flashback, flashforwards) are very cinematic, and the excellent movie adaptation (directed by George Roy Hill in 1972) added a great soundtrack of a fellah named Bach.
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The novel took an estimate current at the time (1969) of 135, 000 fatalities. The estimate has since been retracted, though the 25th anniversary edition of the novel did not change it. The magnitudes of fatalities from the Dresden raid and firebombings of Tokyo exceeds any German firebombing by quanta. In two separate raids in 1940. 1236 people were killed in Coventry, the most catastrophic of the German firebombings. BTW, there is also some question about what/when the "Children's Crusade" was and whether its initial aim was to sell Christian boys as slaves to Muslims.
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Censoring it
I was surprised to learn that Slaughterhouse-Five has frequently been a target for suppression. There is no sex, let alone graphic sex (not even in the "dirty postcard" from 1835 that is mentioned, but even the postcard did not portray sexual congress, only implied that it was going to start). I hadn't realized that anyone considered mentioning vibrating beds as obscenity (they were fairly common in US hotels of the late-1960s): the one at the Pilgrim home in the book has no connection with sex; it's exclusive use is to soothe the narrator (Billy Pilgrim). For a book about GIs, the language is remarkably unobscene (though Billy Pilgrim hears "motherf___er" for the first time). The primary violence is the RAF and USAF firebombing of Dresden, though the book only describes the bombed-out, lunar-looking after-effects, since Slaughterhouse-Five was sufficiently subterranean for the guards and prisoners who were in it to have survived. Here is a summary of banning attempts:
Challenged in many communities, but burned in Drake, N. Dakota (1973). Banned in Rochester, Mich. because the novel "contains and makes references to religious matters" and thus fell within the ban of the establishment clause. An appellate court upheld its usage in the school in Todd v Rochester Community Schools, 41 Mich. App. 320, 200 N. W 2d 90 (I 972). Banned in Levittown, N.Y (1975), North Jackson, Ohio (1979), and Lakeland, Fla. (1982) because of the "book's explicit sexual scenes, violence, and obscene language." Barred from purchase at the Washington Park High School in Racine, Wis. (I 984) by the district administrative assistant for instructional services. Challenged at the Owensboro, Ky. High School library (1985) because of "foul language, a section depicting a picture of an act of bestiality, a reference to 'Magic Fingers' attached to the protagonist's bed to help him sleep, and the sentence: 'The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the fly of God Almighty."' Restricted to students who have parental permission at the four Racine, Wis. Unified District high school libraries (1986) because of "language used in the book depictions of torture, ethnic slurs, and negative portrayals of women:' Challenged at the LaRue County, Ky. High School library (1987) because "the book contains foul language and promotes deviant sexual behavior' Banned from the Fitzgerald, Ga. schools (I 987) because it was 'filled with profanity and full of explicit sexual references:' Challenged in the Baton Rouge, La. public high school libraries ( 1988) because the book is "vulgar and offensive:' Challenged in the Monroe, Mich. public schools (I 989) as required reading in a modem novel course for high school juniors and senior because of the book's language and the way women are portrayed. Retained on the Round Rock, Tex. Independent High School reading list (1996) after a challenge that the book was too violent. Challenged as an eleventh grade summer reading option in Prince William County, Va ( 1998) because the book "was rife with profanity and explicit sex."
Other, more canonical classics of American literature that have been frequent targets of censors and that I have written about here are
Invisible Man
Of Mice and Men
The Sun Also Rises
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This review is proffered as a contribution to msmorvay's golden oldies writeoff, and to pestyside's banned book writeoff.
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© 2006, Stephen O. Murray
Recommended:
Yes
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