The Transmigration of Timothy Archer: Explores madness, suicide, faith, the occult Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Philip K Dick’s Radio Free AlThe Transmigration of Timothy Archer: Explores madness, suicide, faith, the occult Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Philip K Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth (1985) and VALIS (1981) were strange but moving attempts to make sense of his bizarre religious experiences in 1974 when a hyper-rational alien mind contacted him via a pink laser from space. He then wrote The Divine Invasion (1981) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), both loosely connected titles in the VALIS TRILOGY, although the latter was posthumously substituted for the unfinished The Owl in Daylight. Sadly, these were the final novels that PDK wrote before his death in 1982. The Divine Invasion is a complex retelling of the second coming of Christ to an Earth dominated by the fallen angel Belial. If you crave deep philosophical discussions of Gnosticism, anamnesis, and salvation, you’ll be entranced. Otherwise, you may be completely lost.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) is a much more controlled, almost mainstream novel narrated by a female protagonist in the first person (perhaps the only example in PKD’s oeuvre?) about the complex relationships between an eccentric but extremely erudite Catholic Bishop named Timothy Archer, his lover Kirsten Lundborg, her schizophrenic son Bill, the Bishop’s son Jeff Archer, and his wife Angel Archer. The book delves into despair and suicide, questions religious faith, and shows the damage caused to loved ones who try to save troubled souls. It’s a big departure for PKD, and it’s sad to see that he didn’t have more opportunities to explore this direction.
The story is told by Angel Archer, the wife of Jeff Archer, who himself is the son of Episcopalian Bishop Timothy Archer. The Bishop is a highly-educated former lawyer, a Renaissance man who challenges many key Catholic doctrines, questions segregation, favors the ordaining of women, enjoys debates on controversial topics, reads Latin and Greek, and is a well-known public figure due to frequent public appearances. In fact, PKD based this character very closely on the real life of James Pike, the Episcopalian Bishop of California from 1958-1966, whose story very closely resembles that of Timothy Archer. In fact, PKD was close friends with him, and he officiated at PKD’s marriage to Nancy Hackett, the step-daughter of Maren Hackett, a woman who Pike was romantically involved with after his second marriage collapsed. This complex interweaving of PKD’s personal life and friends with his fiction is a trademark of his later period, as he increasingly used it to explore his own troubled life and departed from his earlier pulp SF origins.
In the novel, Angel Archer is married to Jeff Archer, the Bishop’s son. Angel Archer initially works at a small law office in Berkeley run by two political activists who represents drug pushers. She pays the bills since Jeff cannot, and eventually becomes manager of a Berkeley record store, something PKD did in real life. When Angel introduces her feminist activist friend Kirsten Lundborg to Tim, he agrees to give a free lecture for Kirsten’s feminist advocacy group. But unknown to Angel, Tim and Kirsten begin an affair as well. When she confronts the Bishop about it, he easily deflects her accusations with his legal skills, pointing out that he himself is not married and Kirsten is a single mother, so they are not adulterers. However, Angel is concerned that this romantic relationship with Kirsten, who becomes the Bishop’s personal secretary, will damage his credibility as a public religious figure.
Meanwhile, Angel’s husband Jeff Archer develops an attraction to the older Kirsten, and when he discovers she is having an affair with his father, this causes him severe psychological trauma. As time goes on, he begins to suffer from depression and signs of madness. Eventually he commits suicide, causing intense feelings of guilt in Tim and Angel. Subsequently, Kirsten develops cancer and starts taking barbiturates for the pain. She gets increasingly hostile and paranoid, suspecting Angel and Tim having an affair behind her back, and becomes very bitter and angry at life.
Events further devolve as strange ghost-like phenomena occur to Tim and Kirsten, such as objects in the house falling and breaking, Kirsten feeling the pain of pins being pushed under her fingernails, and finally they visit a spiritual medium who reveals in a séance that Tim’s son Jeff is trying to communicate with them and warns Kirsten that her life is in danger. To Angel’s dismay, Tim believes these supernatural explanations and decides to write a book about their experiences. Angel knows this will destroy all Tim’s remaining credibility, but he is determined to see it through. Eventually Kirsten kills herself with an overdose of barbiturates. This not only confirms the psychic’s prediction, but also adds further guilt and pain to the lives of Tim and Angel. They struggle to understand why their loved ones chose to take their own lives and why they could not prevent it.
Tim then learns that an archaeological dig in Israel has unearthed Zadokite Gnostic scrolls that refer to many of Jesus’s famous statements, but over two centuries before the birth of Christ. This throws most of Tim’s beliefs in Christianity into question, particularly the core doctrine of Jesus Christ being the son of God and not just a prophet. He is determined to go there himself to investigate these claims, and goes out into the Judean desert to recreate the experience of Jesus wandering in the wilderness. Alone and disoriented, he falls to his death and is not discovered for days.
Saddled with tragedy after tragedy, Angel Archer seeks spiritual help from a guru named Edgar Lightfoot, whose teaching focus on Zen Buddhism as a form of psychotherapy and healing. There she encounters Kirsten’s schizophrenic son Bill, who has survived all these deaths without feelings of guilt. As they spend time together, Bill one day reveals that the spirit of Timothy Archer now inhabits his mind, and divulges details about Tim that would not be easily known, and also speaks in tongues, quoting from Dante’s Divina Commedia, one of Tim’s favorite literary and religious works. Angel realizes that his mind has completely succumbed to madness, but is still drawn to the possibility of reconnecting with Tim’s spirit. The book ends on this ambiguous note.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer represents perhaps the most personal of PKD’s works other than A Scanner Darkly, Radio Free Albemuth and VALIS, and is the most mainstream of his later novels. Despite the painful and depressing subject matter, I felt it was a very courageous attempt to search for the reasons behind madness, despair, suicide, religious faith, and whether there is anything that can be done to prevent such tragedies. The sense of inevitability in the characters runs deep, and yet avoids cheap sentimentality. As you might expect, he does not arrive at a life-affirming realization at the end, but he has taken the readers for quite a ride. This book in not really SF or fantasy at all, and would not likely appeal to many genre readers, but for those PKD fans intent on knowing his final thoughts on life, it is an important work and well worth reading....more
Radio Free Albemuth: Divine messages via a pink laser from space Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Radio Free Albemuth was written in 1976 but onlRadio Free Albemuth: Divine messages via a pink laser from space Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Radio Free Albemuth was written in 1976 but only published posthumously in 1985. Even for Philip K Dick, this is a bizarre and partly deranged book. It’s a deeply personal autobiographical attempt for him to make sense of a series of bizarre religious experiences he collectively referred to as “2-3-74”. So if you are only a casual fan of PKD’s books or movies, this is probably not for you. However, if you love his novels and know something of his troubled life, it will provide an absolutely fascinating picture of a man struggling to extract meaning from it all, using every resource his powerful, wide-ranging and increasingly unstable mind can muster. It may be a confounding mess for many, but what a gloriously courageous attempt he makes. For me this book and his later complete rewrite VALIS (1981) provide a window into PKD’s mind that no other books can (other than the massive and unreadable Exegesis of Philip K Dick), and is a moving and profound experience if you go along with it.
The story starts out quite simply. Part one is narrated by none other than Philip K Dick, a struggling science fiction writer and friend of Nicholas Brady, a Berkeley dropout who works at local record store. It is the late 1960s, and the book humorously depicts the growing counter-culture in Berkeley, with its legions of anti-establishment intellectuals roaming the streets and coffee houses on Telegraph Ave. It turns out that this is an alternate history United States where despotic right-winger Ferris F. Freemont has become President after Lyndon B. Johnson (think a sinister amalgam of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy). He is determined to crush liberals, free speech, and communist conspiracies. There is also a citizens militia of sorts called “Friends of the American People”, which serve to investigate anti-government groups including a (perhaps fictitious) organization called Aramchek dedicated to overthrowing Fremont’s government.
Nick’s career at the record store is going nowhere, though he has an encyclopedic knowledge of music. He begins to receive strange visions that he believes are signals from VALIS, a Vast Active Living Intelligence System. These signals come to him at 3am at night, delivered by a near-earth satellite firing a focused pink laser beam (I’m not joking here) straight to his brain. At first he is not sure what is happening, but gradually he understands that VALIS is a super rational alien collective mind that has chosen him (and a select few others) for a mission to overthrow the fascist dictatorship of President Freemont. This revelation is of course quite disturbing to his wife Rachel, but when VALIS warns him that his infant son Christopher has an inguinal hernia, something that did not show up in any medical exams, they rush him to the hospital and the doctors are shocked to discover his diagnosis was right, and do an emergency surgery to save his son (this actually happened to PKD in real life apparently). This causes their belief in VALIS to grow.
Eventually VALIS grants visions to Nick that he should move to LA and become a record producer for folk musicians. He moves his family to LA and very quickly finds success in his new job. VALIS then reveals that this is all part of his mission to embed secret anti-Fremont subliminal messages in the songs he produces, in order to overthrow the totalitarian regime and bring freedom to the masses, who do not realize they are trapped in the Black Iron Prison that is representative of the evil Roman Empire that persecuted early Christians and has never ended. We also learn that VALIS has made previous attempts to heal the world of its madness, including various early Christian Gnostics, Elijah from the Old Testament, Jesus, etc. However, the Empire has continued to prevail, but VALIS has not given up the struggle. PDK provides dozens of pages explaining the philosophy of VALIS and all the obscure historical clues as to why the world is ailing. He dives way down the rabbit hole into cosmogony and cosmology, explaining how the creator of the universe is irrational and separate from the Logos, or rational mind, that is the ultimate source of wisdom. VALIS has sent homoplasmates to bond with certain chosen humans and impart this secret wisdom. HAVE I LOST YOU YET? ONLY PKD COULD COME UP WITH THIS STUFF, AND HE ACTUALLLY BELIEVES IT TOO.
One day Nick has a vision of a folk singer named Sylvia, and soon after this she shows up at his office, asking for a clerical job. He hires her but convinces her she should be a songwriter instead, and they reveal to each other that they have been having similar dreams from VALIS. Having finally discovered a kindred spirit (which turns out to be part of the Aramchek movement), they seek to put VALIS’s plan into action, recording a hit song with the message “Join the party”, a subliminal appeal to revolution. His relationship with his wife is strained by his friendship with Sylvia (whose real last name turns out to be Aramchek). However, his good buddy Philip K Dick stays true to him despite being skeptical of this craziness. For some reason a lot of this weird 1960s conspiracy stuff and obscure underground societies reminded me of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).
Nick and Sylvia think they have successfully produced the song that will launch their revolution, but the FAPers (Friends of the American People) have actually been spying on them the entire time, and seize both of them along with PKD and throw them into a secret confinement facility outside the justice system. The FAPers reveal that they know about the plot, and that it has been foiled. There are some final events I won’t spoil, but suffice to say that the real PKD was clearly VERY PARANOID about the Republican Party, the FBI and CIA, and right-wingers in general. As everyone knows, they really are out to get us all.
Whether or not you buy into any of PKDs paranoid fantasies or strange religious experiences, it’s undeniable that he wrote this book with searing honesty, pathos for the struggles of his characters (himself, really), and out of a genuine desire to understand what exactly was happening to him with all these visions and hallucinations. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this book and its successor VALIS is that PKD separates himself into two characters, Nicholas Brady and PKD in Radio Free Albemuth, and Horselover Fat and PKD in VALIS. This essentially allows him to have an extended dialog with himself, as the Nick and Horselover characters undergo the strange visions and hallucinations, while the PKD characters are separate from this and serve as devil’s advocate. I’ve never seen a clearer fictional depiction of schizophrenia, but the fact that PKD could control the process and explore his own mental breakdown in a fictional narrative is simply incredible and to me was quite moving, particularly in VALIS. You can feel his struggles with sanity, even if you don’t believe in his gonzo religious philosophy. It’s a unique literary experience for any hardcore PKD fan, though it may make no sense whatsoever to most readers.
Film Version (2010): I was surprised to discover a film version of Radio Free Albemuth had been made as a low budget indie production back in 2010 starring Jonanath Scarfe as Nicholas Brady, Katheryn Winnick as his wife Rachel, Shea Whigham as Philip K Dick, and Alanis Morisette as Slyvia Aramchek. With great trepidation but irresistible curiosity I watched it on Netflix. Basically all the dream sequences are laughably bad, and the actors struggle to deliver all of PKD’s bizarre dialog with straight faces, but that is really due to the source material itself. Frankly, I don’t think this book was ever meant to be filmed, and is almost impossible to make convincing. So I don’t blame the filmmakers, but I think this would be impossible to watch except for die-hard PKD fans like myself who’ve read the book already. It seems the producers also have the rights to VALIS as well, but I sincerely hope they don’t try that one. It makes Radio Free Albemuth seem downright conventional. I do give kudos to Shea Whigham for portraying PKD as a smart and somewhat cynical SF writer, but the real PKD was actually a combination of both Nick Brady and SF writer PKD, which makes for a much more complicated and unstable personality....more
I Am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick: Reality is Stranger than Fiction Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Anyone I Am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick: Reality is Stranger than Fiction Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Anyone familiar with the SF novels of Philip K. Dick and the many films inspired by his works knows that he was one strange and visionary guy. Certainly the SF genre is filled with works of bizarre worlds, aliens, characters, and slippery reality. But it’s generally accepted by authors and readers alike that these fictional creations are just that — works of the imagination by writers who are generally considered sane and share the consensus view of reality. In the case of PKD, however, the line between reality and fiction, sanity and madness, redemption and damnation, revelation and delusion is very blurred indeed. In fact, the person most likely to question such distinctions would be PKD himself, if I Am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (2005) is to be believed.
If you have not read any of PKD’s major works, I would stop right now and rectify that situation. In my opinion, his most iconic and important works are The Man in the High Castle (1962), Martian Time-Slip (1964), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), UBIK (1969), Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and VALIS (1981). So assuming you have now read those books and been absolutely amazed by the reality-bending visions that this man has brought to bear while using some of the most hackneyed conventions of Golden Age SF, then perhaps you are ready to take the next step.
PKD was one of the most iconic, troubled, and hard-suffering SF writers ever to grace the field. His books subvert our everyday reality, question what is human, and explore paranoia and madness, all with a uniquely unadorned and blackly-humorous style. In classic starving artist fashion, he only gained recognition and cult-status late in life, and much of his fame came after passing away at age 53.
In his prolific career he published 44 novels and 121 short stories, and in 2014 - 2015 I read 10 of his novels, 7 audiobooks, and 3 short story collections. There’s something so enticing about his paranoid, darkly-comic tales of everyday working-class heroes, troubled psychics, bizarre aliens, sinister organizations, and obscure philosophical concepts. He was a very eclectic reader, showing intense interest a wide range of philosophies including Christian Gnosticism, Jewish Kabbalism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, anamnesis, and the dualistic nature of the ultimate divine being.
If you are keen to understand PKD himself and what kind of life and mind would create such works, there is a wealth of resources. I would recommend starting with Lawrence Sutin’s Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (1989). This is an excellent and well-structured book that takes the conventional approach of studying his childhood, early years as a writer, his messy romantic life, mysterious religious experiences, battles with depression and suicide attempts, and his final eight years pouring out thousands of pages of rambling, contradictory, deranged hard-written notes trying desperately to make sense of it all, which eventually was distilled by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem to just 944 pages as The Exegesis of Philip K Dick (2011).
Emmanuel Carrier’s I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (English edition 2005; original French edition published in 1993) covers the same biographical territory as Sutin’s book, and Carrère cites it as one of his resources, along with many interviews with people close to PKD and many of his at-the-time unpublished journal entries that make up the The Exegisis. Given such similar source materials, Carrère takes a different approach. Rather than a standard biography, he describes it as follows:
I have tried to depict the life of Philip K. Dick from the inside, in other words, with the same freedom and empathy — indeed with the same truth — with which he depicted his own characters. It’s a trip into the brain of a man who regarded even his craziest books not as works of the imagination but as factual reports. This is a book about the mind, its alterations, its remotest and most dangerous territories. It’s about drugs and mystics, about the Zeitgeist of the sixties and the seventies and its legacy to our New Age.
So if you have read Sutin’s book, much of the narrative is already very familiar, but written as if we are in PKD’s head as a character in a book. This means Carrère can take some major liberties that conventional biographers might hesitate to do. Granted, he is incorporating a lot of PKD’s own journal entries, essays, and interviews with friends, journalists, ex-wives, etc. It’s the mosaic approach, and he doesn’t pretend that he has an infallible perspective. Although I didn’t find it off-putting, it does blur the lines between reality and fiction, but we’re talking about PKD here, so if that were acceptable for anyone it would be for him.
I Am Alive and You Are Dead gets into very interesting territory when PKD has his bizarre religious experience with a pink laser beam of pure info in “2-3-74” and starts to write his Exegesis journals in order to understand this experience. This is where Carrère borrows liberally from PKD’s fictional account of his own life and this seminal event, Radio Free Albemuth (written in 1976 but only published posthumously in 1985), which is essentially a self-examination by PKD of his life via two alter-egos, Nicholas Brady (who has the bizarre religious experience) and the SF writer Philip K. Dick, who is skeptical but sympathetic.
As you might expect, this was not a very commercial book and only emerged as a by-product of Dick’s all-night writing sessions for the Exegesis. So he decided to re-write it after a publisher rejected it, and ended up with a masterpiece of sorts for hard-core PKD fans, VALIS (1981). This book, to my mind, is his most accessible and moving attempt to understand all the philosophical struggles he faced throughout his life. It’s remarkably similar in structure to Radio Free Albemuth, to the point that PKD’s alter egos are named Horselover Fat (derived from the German and Latin roots of his name) and the SF author Philip K. Dick. The big difference between the two books is that VALIS has a much stronger sense of irony and self-reflection. It treats with bittersweet irony topics such as drug abuse, suicide, mysticism, religious delusions, marital problems, and essentially mirrors the duality that Gnosticism and Manichaeism represent. I think that can only really be appreciated by readers who have already read and absorbed his most famous SF books, because they are much more biographical and probably don’t make much sense as fiction. But if you have read this far into the review, I’ll assume you are such a fan.
Another thing that struck me throughout I Am Alive and You Are Dead is that Carrère wasn’t afraid to show the sad and pathetic side of PKD’s relationships with women. He really was the most sad-sack hopeless loser when it came to romance and falling willy-nilly in love with almost every woman who stepped through the door. Charming and debonair one moment, withdrawn and depressed the next, desperate for love and shamelessly lecherous, but also so transparently vulnerable, it’s hard to imagine whether most women felt more revulsion or pity.
And yet PKD managed to get married five times (the first time hardly counts, though), as he could not function without a female companion to support his obsessions, and often seemed like a petulant child. It’s hard to view a man as both a brilliant writer and total sloppy emotional wreck, but it can’t be denied in his case. He was that and much more, and that’s why his life and works have inspired so much literary study and speculation. In my opinion, he is the most complicated, brilliant, deranged, and unique figure to ever grace the SF field, and though his life may not have been a happy or stable one, it was certainly unique and memorable....more
The Crying of Lot 49: This 60s post-modernist novel doesn't feel relevant today
I’ve always wanted to try Thomas Pynchon’s work. Back in high school I The Crying of Lot 49: This 60s post-modernist novel doesn't feel relevant today
I’ve always wanted to try Thomas Pynchon’s work. Back in high school I heard that his novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is either one of the greatest American novels ever written, or a completely unreadable and pretentious mess. It won the National Book Award in 1974, and was surprisingly nominated for the Nebula Award in 1973. I have a paperback copy (all gold cover, looks very nice) but it’s a door-stopper, and I suspect like most readers, it’s a book I aspire to read someday but will never get to, like James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan’s Wake (1939), David Foster Wallace’s The Infinite Jest (1966), and Roberto Bolano's 2666 (2008).
I am first and foremost a fan of science fiction and fantasy, and not particularly keen on what is generally categorized as ‘literature’ or ‘modernist fiction’. I don’t disparage those books, I just generally derive no pleasure from reading them. So it is only from a sense of duty that I decided to try The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), since it is very short and was chosen by David Pringle among his Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels.
It is the story of Oedipa Mass, a woman who is tasked with handling the massive and complex estate of her deceased ex-boyfriend Pierce Inverarity. She encounters a bizzare conspiracy of a secret alternate mail service called The Trystero, that has been battling the real Thurn und Taxis mail service for centuries. She continually encounters signs of the Trystero, specifically its muted post horn symbol and hidden mailboxes labeled W.A.S.T.E ("We Await Silent Tristero's Empire"). There are a host of eccentric and weird characters, dozens of allusions to 1960s pop culture, and a bunch of conspiracy-type elements. The story is very “post-modernist” based on it’s knowing self-references, and could be read as a parody of the need to bury symbolism and meaning in stories which amount to very little but an elaborate game for literary critics and coffeehouse pundits to argue over.
In general I found the characters names quite amusing (Mucho Mass, Dr. Hilarius, Mike Fallopian, Genghis Cohen, Randolf Driblette), and the events of the story were sometimes entertaining, but the references are buried so deeply in the world of the 1960s that it felt completely irrelevant to today’s world (speaking for myself, of course). The entire ‘play within a play’, the Jacobean revenge “The Courier’s Tragedy”, felt like an overlong assignment from college, and overall the story just seemed fairly pointless unless you are literature major who takes pleasure from identifying the various literary and cultural references he sprinkles throughout the text. If this is what Pynchon is about, then I'm pretty comfortable not reading anything further, and sticking to what I can appreciate....more
A Harsh Reaction to the Vietnam War and CIA Testing of LSD on People This is one of three books by Thomas M. Disch selected in Science Fiction: The 100A Harsh Reaction to the Vietnam War and CIA Testing of LSD on People This is one of three books by Thomas M. Disch selected in Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels : An English-Language Selection, 1949-1984, written in 1968 during the height of the social upheaval of the cultural revolution happening in the US, and its military involvement in the Vietnam War.
It's also about the CIA and its testing of LSD on unwitting subjects with various nefarious purposes, and about general distrust and loathing for the military-industrial complex. It's got a wicked sense of humor, its overweight poet narrator is very erudite and Disch packs his diary entries with literary and intellectual references to the breaking point. It's a novel about the frightening prospect of super-intelligence forced onto a prison population, that is also a death sentence, and what the consequences are.
It's a harsh and bitter story, but again is told with such black humor and panache that it will never bore you. There are some extended passages where the narrator, already suffering from severe physical and mental side-effects of the super-drug Pallidine, ceases to make much sense to mere mortals. But it's carried off quite well, as the narrator knows that his nemesis captors are reading his journal entries (they asked him to write them, after all), so makes all kinds of quips at the reader.
All in all, it is as another reviewer said the Evil Twin of Flowers for Algernon, and may be well be a brilliant book, very much of its time but with universal concerns on its mind, and some pretty dark conclusions along the way....more
Tried very hard but couldn't finish this one (on vacation, no less). Much more fragmented and hard to digest than the brilliant American Tabloid. Has Tried very hard but couldn't finish this one (on vacation, no less). Much more fragmented and hard to digest than the brilliant American Tabloid. Has been on hiatus for almost 2 years now. Reminds me of White Jazz, and not in a good way. Heard mixed things about Blood's A Rover, but not in the mood to try it anytime soon....more
Slaughterhouse-Five: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is probably Kurt VonnegutSlaughterhouse-Five: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is probably Kurt Vonnegut’s most famous novel, and has been analyzed and debated by readers and critics alike for almost 50 years. It’s been listed as one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century by several organizations, and it’s fatalistic catchphrase “So it goes” is an iconic expression of Vonnegut’s view of the death and destruction of World War II, embodied in the firebombing of Dresden that he survived as a POW in an underground slaughterhouse. The book has also been the subject of numerous attempts to ban it from libraries and literature courses as obscene or irreverent, which automatically piques my interest, and the US Supreme Court weighed in against censoring it based on content.
In many ways I think this book is a culmination of Vonnegut’s views about the absurdity of war, the fundamental randomness of life, the lack of any divine being overlooking and directing people’s lives, and finally the pathos that Vonnegut has for people living with the harmless lies that make their lives bearable. Over 20 years after reading his books in high school, I chose to revisit them this year by listening to audiobook versions of The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, and finally Slaughterhouse-Five. For this book, Ethan Hawke is the narrator and he does a really nice job of capturing the resigned tone of Billy Pilgrim, who really doesn’t understand the events of his life, and at the same time capturing the ironic but knowing tone of Vonnegut the author and narrator, who uses humor to tackle a subject like World War II that would otherwise be too painful to confront.
You can see the steady progression in his meta-narrative, as he repeatedly explores his experiences of war and the absurdity of everyday life in fictional form, getting closer and more intimate until we are finally placed shivering in a pitch-black slaughterhouse, huddled with other US and British POWs, as US bombers drop incendiary bombs onto the German city of Dresden, a very deliberate strategy to cause massive civilian casualties in order to crush the German spirit and hasten the end of the war. The same rationale was put forth for the US dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut broke the rules of contemporary fiction and addressed the reader directly in the first chapter, stating “All this happened, more or less.” Furthermore, he apologies for the book, saying “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.” Vonnegut himself is the narrator of the story in chapter one, and it’s not until chapter two that he switches to omniscient third-person to tell the story of Billy Pilgrim, a hapless young man thrust into war with little idea what to do and no survival instinct whatsoever.
The most impressive literary technique employed by Vonnegut is the continual shifts between past and present since his protagonist Billy Pilgrim has got unstuck in time. It’s not the first time that a story moves in such fashion, but perhaps the first in which the protagonist himself (not just the narrator) is slipping back and forth continually without any control of the process. From moment to moment Billy finds himself in Dresden as a soldier, as a young man growing up, in his prosaic postwar life with his wife and children in Ilium, NY as an optometrist, getting in a plane crash, losing his sanity and claiming to be put in a zoo by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who we also met in his novel The Sirens of Titan.
It is through the Tralfamadorians that Vonnegut is able to deliver his most important messages about time, fate, and the meaning (if any) of our lives. The Tralfamadorians live in four dimensions, so all moments in time are available to them. They don’t see any purpose behind the random events of our lives, and are perplexed by human’s insistence that everything needs a reason or explanation. Here are some relevant passages:
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that 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 that 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. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”
All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.
There is a lot of debate about what Vonnegut’s message is in Slaughterhouse-Five. Is it completely pessimistic and hopeless? That mankind will forever be deluded by his lies and continue to make war and visit misery on himself? You could certainly take that interpretation if you think that the fatalism and passivity of Billy Pilgrim are the same as that of Vonnegut, but I don’t think that’s right. Although the horrors of Dresden and World War II are kept one step removed as Billy flits back and forth in time, and we are constantly reminded that we cannot prevent death, I still think Vonnegut cares very much about how people should view their lives. He strongly condemns the cruelty and absurdity of war, as this quote illustrates:
I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
He also has a lot of sympathy for the plight of all people who are desperately seeking meaning in their lives. And for those who’ve lived through a traumatic experience like war, perhaps it is best that they do not look back at all, if all that remains is pain. Instead, they should focus on the happier moments of their lives.
And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.
If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
I found this quote below particularly poignant, and something that really sums up Vonnegut’s view not only of life and how to live it, but the purpose of art as well, including books. It’s rare for him to spell it out, but this was very succinct:
There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time....more
This book marks a quantum leap forward in the ambition of James Ellroy to write the great American crime novel, something that is deeply entrenched inThis book marks a quantum leap forward in the ambition of James Ellroy to write the great American crime novel, something that is deeply entrenched in the corruption, crime and politics of the US in the late 50s and early 60s, centered around three very complicated protagonists. The book is also distinguished by the most sparse, staccato, boiled-down prose I've ever experienced, which lends to the reading experience. Actually, this prose becomes so minimalist in the sequel "The Cold Six Thousand" as to be unreadable, but in the book it strikes the perfect note. Excellent, engrossing reading....more
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