Just the Way You Are

One aspect of Billy's non-war world that we haven't touched on in class is his relationship with his wife Valencia.

At some points, she strikes me as a very repulsive person. She is all about money and jewels and appearances and doesn't strike me as very authentic. She seems like a person who would wear too much make-up and is generally unpleasant to hang out with. Sometimes I think that Billy is wondering why he is married to her because she is insensitive or boring (seriously, how much does one need to talk about the pattern for one's silver?). Here are some of my favorite descriptions of Valencia:

She was rich. She was as big as a house because she couldn't stop eating. ... She was wearing trifocal lenses in harlequin frames, and the frames were trimmed with rhinestones. The glitter of the rhinestones was answered by the glitter of the diamond in her engagement ring. The diamond was insured for eighteen hundred dollars. (136-137)

She was one of the symptoms of his disease. He knew he was going crazy when he heard himself proposing marriage to her, when he begged her to take the diamond ring and be his companion for life. (137) 

He had been rewarded for marrying a girl nobody in his right mind would have married. (151) 

Valencia adored Billy. She was crying and yelping so hard as she drove that she missed the correct turnoff from the throughway. (233) 

At other points their relationship just makes me want to laugh. There is very little romantic about their relationship. For example, in the conversation recorded on their honeymoon Valencia starts crying because she "never thought anybody would marry [her]." "'Um,' said Billy Pilgrim" (153).

"Um." What kind of response is "um" to a bride on her honeymoon? That is just such an awkward moment when it seems like a great place for a romantic scene. But no, we just get Billy Pilgrim uncomfortably not wanting to audibly express his thought about no one in their right mind marrying her.

But at the same time there are a couple of very sweet moments with Valencia. My favorite is when Valencia decides that she will lose weight for Billy and become beautiful to please him. Billy responds, "I like you just the way you are" (153).

There is enough in the text that you can read this as just a detached Billy saying something without a lot of meaning or significance because he knew the marriage "was going to be at least bearable all the way" (153).

But I like to see it as a touching moment where Billy looks to her and affirms her as she is, not asking her to become someone else for him. Maybe they aren't the most loving couple ever, but he recognizes that their relationship means a lot to her and doesn't want to hurt her.

So while I sometimes nod my head along with Billy's realization that he might be crazy to marry Valencia, I also find their relationship satisfying as a model of love, more so than his relationship with Montana Wildhack, because he stays with her even if she isn't beautiful or enjoyable. He loves her just the way she is, as much as Billy can really love. Which makes me think of the song, but that is really just a side note.

Fiction lies about soldiers, says Vonnegut

URBANA 1969--

According to the New York Times, women are often being told lies by the media about what the ideal body shape is. Media tells them that the must be unreachably beautiful, perfectly attired and done up to the standard of photo-shopped models in magazines.

If you were an alien who only knew about earth from our written media, you might be shocked to meet a human woman.

"Where are the real women?" You might ask. "Where are the skinny, tall, shapely women? These earth women are too fat, too short, too plain to be real women."

According to Vonnegut's hidden message in his new novel Slaughter-House Five, fiction and media also lie about what a soldier really is like. They perpetuate an image of the soldier as a hero in uniform with superhuman courage who makes heroic gestures in the face of the enemy. They encourage readers to admire their strong arms and deep devotion to the American cause.

Vonnegut's war widow asks questions like the alien.

"Aren't you awfully old to be in the army? Aren't you awfully young to be in the army? Are you supposed to be in the army [directed at Billy]?"

The soldiers in front of her don't look like "real soldiers," she says. They don't match up to the image she has of soldiers as grand, strong men who can take on any enemy.

And that is the hidden message of Vonnegut's novel: There is no such thing as a "real soldier" just like there is no such thing as a "beautiful woman" as the media and fiction present them.

But shhhh, there is a reason Vonnegut has to write a whole novel to disguise that idea. The media doesn't want people to catch on. It is bad for recruiting and national security.

Going to War

The Children's Crusade, an alternative title for Slaughterhouse-Five, suggests that the people who fought in World War II were more babies than men. That they were innocent children not heroic warriors.

In chapter one, the "author" or character of the author, has a conversation with Mary O'Hare about how he should portray those who fought. Mary tells him:

"You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And War will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs." (18)

 Mary is thinking about who fights war, who leaves home and puts their life on the line. And I think that is an important question Vonnegut is trying to raise about all wars.

I think it is likely that he is thinking about the Vietnam War in his mind, because it was going on as he wrote the novel. The Vietnam War was fought by generally younger men than those who fought in WWII. People disagree about the average age of a Vietnam soldier, but it appears to be somewhere between 19-22.

One of the things that many interviewees in our counterculture oral history project mentioned is that they didn't know anything other than John Wayne. It was an accepted idea that if America was in a war, the young men went and served just like their fathers had in WWII. Or it was until the anti-Vietnam movement took off.

One of the interviewees, Joseph Miller, who served during the war, said:

We didn’t know anything about war, really, it was all movies, it was all John Wayne. Nobody really bled, nobody really got hurt.

 I think perhaps this is what Vonnegut is trying to do with his novel. He wants to put out a war novel that isn't about John Wayne, that doesn't paint pictures of heroism and glory without showing the real cost and pain of war.

I really agree with what he is trying to do. My friend's brother and his best friend have both joined the National Guard, and I hear they are planning to go active in the army (meaning they could be sent overseas) when they graduate from college. They want to make a career in the military. My cousin is also going to school to be a pilot in the air force. I worry about them because I'm not sure if they know what war is like, that they are as likely to come back in a casket or with PTSD than as a hero whose name will be in the history books. I think they may be more like children, more like Billy Pilgrim, than they see themselves as.

So maybe writing an anti-war novel is kind of like writing an anti-glacier novel. But at least Vonnegut is trying to show young people the other side of the movies.

 

Postmodernist Parallels

I'm sure that I'm not the only one who kept seeing parallel topics and ideas in the postmodernist books we've read this semester - Ragtime and Mumbo Jumbo and now the beginning of Slaughterhouse-Five.

Let me just start a basic list of parallels ideas/topics I've seen in at least two novels so far:

• Houdini (Rag +MJ)
• Slumming (Evelyn and Thor Wintergreen (MJ 89))
• Ragtime music (Rag+MJ 89)
• Minstrelsy (Rag+MJ 136)
• The idea of a Negro experience (Rag+MJ 117)
• Ford Motor Car Company (Rag+SF 23)

Obviously a lot of these parallels come from the fact that Ragtime and Mumbo Jumbo were written about the same time period so major events and historical people are the same in both books. But I wonder if there is some reflection of the time that the books were written in the authors' choice of events and characters.

For example, let's look at the issue of the Ford Motor Car Company and Henry Ford which are mentioned in Slaughterhouse-Five and carefully examined in Ragtime. Ford is an epitome of the hard-work-gets-you-somewhere philosophy and his cars are a prime example of American consumerism in the 20th century. Fast forward to the 1960s and 70s, when our postmodernist novels were written, and there is a growing movement that rejects both of those philosophies. Young people are just chilling, hanging out, listening to music. They may not have a career goal in mind, in fact "career goals" sound pretty ludicrous next to images of hippies and the youth of the counterculture. These young people also rejected consumerism to some degree, moving to communes or living off the land. If you watch a couple counterculture movies in World since 1945, you may also think they all ditched the general rules of personal hygiene!

So maybe one reason that Ford comes up in these postmodernist novels is that he and his car company stand in such stark contrast to some of the things that are going on as the novels are being written. The contrast helps the authors distinguish the 1910s and 1920s from the time of writing. Just as when a modern reader notices the strangeness of certain values in a historical novel about puritans, the 1970s reader (and others since then) would feel a certain distance from the mindset and values of the 1910s and 1920s as encapsulated in Henry Ford.

I could go on about some of the other parallels, like how the Negro experience concept is very reflective of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but I hope the explanation of Ford gives you the idea. Plus, I know there are more parallels that I marked or noticed but can't find now that I am trying to write about them. If you notice any, let me know!

New Grammatical Thinking

Semicolons have always been my grammatical weakness. When I was younger, I knew that I didn't know how to use a semicolon so I just didn't use it. But I thought I knew when to use commas.

Because I thought there was a RIGHT way to use commas. You know, like the way the grammar book tells you.

Obviously, Ishmael Reed needs to go back to elementary school grammar class or else there is a totally different way of looking at the rules and conventions of writing that I never learned. Here is one of his "sentences."

The dazzling parodying punning mischievous pre-Joycean style-play of your Cakewalking your Calinda your Minstrelsy give-and-take of the ultra absurd. (152)

Pardon me, the humble unpublished student, but if I ever wrote that in a paper I would be murdered by my English teachers.

"Use commas!" they would say. "You need a clear subject and a verb!"

"Clarify, clarify, clarify."

But here I am, reading this sentence in a book in an English class and it isn't being used as an example of poor grammar. Instead it is praised as an example of cleverly stepping outside the bounds of grammatical and structural conventions to question why they exist in the first place.

Welcome to the world of postmodernist writing where you can no longer call bad grammar, "Bad grammar." No, you have to appreciate the courage it takes to break the mold and believe that there is no absolute right or wrong even in grammar.

Maybe it is a good thing, a way of bringing new thoughts into the world. But whatever it is, that sentence still doesn't make a lot of sense. What is a "give-and-take of the ultra absurd"?

Traveling Art Detention Centers

During today's assembly did anyone else think about our discussion about Centers of Art Detention (a.k.a. museums) from this morning?

Not that Uni Gym is like a museum, but the idea that western civilization has a way of removing people and artifacts from their native environment to "showcase" and "educate" people about the rest of the world, or rather, to devalue and weaken the original culture.

When I think about the assembly, I think it is kind of sad. Our western culture has swept away so much of what culture was here before Europeans arrived that now people from those original cultures have to perform their culture in front of other people for "entertainment."

For example, over the summer I took a trip to South Dakota. We visited a reservation on our way, and we learned from our leaders, and from what our eyes saw, about the huge problems that the people living there faced. We learned about unemployment, the way our government treats the people, the living conditions, the schools, and the battles they have fought for rights we take for granted. Going to visit their world, to inhabit their world for a few hours, challenged my ideas and my understanding of their culture.

The assembly, on the other hand, taught me very little about Gene's world and may have increased some of my stereotypes. I said "awesome" a few times, I learned that I am "awesome," that I am a "storyteller," and that I should follow my heart. I watched Gene do a dance and play some music that in Uni Gym seemed ridiculous. Were I walking with him in Alaska, watching him do those same acts in the environment in which they have true beauty and meaning, I think I would have found it moving and beautiful. As it was, I had to stop myself from seeing him as a fulfillment of many stereotypes I have about Indians.

Isn't this what Reed implies by using "Centers of Art Detention"? That museums remove art from a context in which they have true beauty and significance and put them in places where school children can point at them and say, "that is so weird"? That western civilization must keep other cultures safe from their own artifacts and rituals?

A disconcerting idea, but it kind of explains the guilty feeling I get when checking out exhibits on Africa in a museum. Do you get it too? The kind of feeling like something just isn't quite right about you standing on that marble floor starring at an Egyptian mummy? Do you get it when you look at artifacts in museums about your own culture? Because I don't. I don't feel wrong when I stare at a diorama in the Abraham Lincoln Museum. Is it because museums about my own culture are just celebrations and educational exhibits, while exhibits about other cultures are designed to diminish those ways of life in my eyes?

If you weren't in 2nd hour for this discussion, you might check out page 15 in Mumbo Jumbo. I think it might make you question what was really going on during today's Uni Period.

Too much of a good thing

You know how when you are a little too enthusiastic about putting sprinkles on sugar cookies, your mother usually says something like, "Remember, there can be too much of a good thing"?

That's what I feel like telling Ishmael Reed.

It isn't that I don't like his book, because I think I do. I mean, it is very weird different and unusual (notice the Reed style lack of commas) but I'm finding it creative and engaging as well.

It's just all his unexplained allusions. There are just WAY too many.

Tonight alone I have three full notebook pages of things I looked up, and I didn't write paragraphs about each one! I just wrote something like, "Black Herman=stage magician (Benjamin Rucker). Sold patent medicine early. Harlem=home base. Buried alive a lot."I googled 32 people phases songs places and religions. And I still feel like I'm missing stuff.

It's like Reed is just POURING allusions out of his mind onto the page instead of sprinkling them lightly around to add hints of extra sweetness. I'm a little overwhelmed, 42 pages in and I already have over six pages of reference information, information that is essential to understanding his meaning.

Maybe it is just me, but I feel like Reed needs a little help remember the common adage about too much of a good thing!