Analysis of Power: Think Small

If Mumbo Jumbo is a novel concerned with national and international power struggles between Jes Grew and the Wallflower Order, and Slaughter-House Five is about the effects of war (the epitome of international power struggles) on a generation of boys like Billy Pilgrim, then Kindred analyzes a very different type of power struggle, the power struggles in everyday human interactions and relationships.

Octavia Butler really focuses on the small shifts in power in the relationships between masters and slaves, and people from the future, in the ante-bellum south. Her book doesn't have as many slap-in-the-face postmodernist forms, in part I think because she is less interested in discussing the mega power struggles than she is in putting normal relationships under a microscopic and trying to understand how slavery affects people in the past, and how it still affects people in the future.

Is Rape Wrong When It's Not Wrong

All last week we kept coming back to the question, is Rufus' continual raping of Alice wrong when culturally it isn't really wrong? Can you judge a person based on the ethics and morals of another time? Are there absolute wrongs that transcend time and place?

I'm still not really sure how to answer that question. Sometimes I feel like Rufus must be totally wrong, even if to him it seems excusable. Other times I want to think he can't help but be a product of his time.

But what I find interesting in Kindred is that Dana seems to almost shift her position on this issue as time goes on.

For example, on her second trip back when Dana is almost raped by the patroller. Her response is immediately to defend herself, running and wrestling and eventually clubbing him (of course, minus the important first opportunity when she chooses not to gouge out his eyes). She believes rape is totally and completely wrong, a normal viewpoint in 1976 America, and so she flares up against it with a lot of anger and desperation.

She says:

He reached out and ripped my blouse open. Buttons flew everywhere, but I didn't move. I understood what the man was going to do. He was going to display some stupidity of his own. He was going to give me another chance to destroy him. I was almost relieved.

He tore loose my bra and I prepared to move. Just one quick lunge. (42-43)

On her last trip, Dana is also almost raped.

He pushed me back on the pallet, and for a few moments, we lay there, still. What was he waiting for? What was I waiting for?

He lay with his head on my shoulder, his left arm around me, his right hand still holding my hand, and slowly, I realized how easy it would be for me to continue to be still and forgive him even this. So easy, in spite of all my talk. (259-260)

Dana realizes that she has become so accustomed to 19th century ideas about rape and a man's right to do things to his slave women that she is in danger of silently accepting a rape. She had told Alice that she wouldn't go to Rufus, but she is right on the verge of giving in.

Dana of course then kills Rufus for trying, so at the last second it appears that her 20th century ideas about rape and what is acceptable behavior kick in and she physically defends herself. But it is dangerously close. Life in her ancestors' world almost took her from willing to defend herself from rape to silently accepting it. Almost.

What happens next?

So far in this English class we've read some pretty terrible and terrifying things. Coalhouse Walker's rampages were pretty scary and there were some tense moments when he was in the art museum. The secret orders in Mumbo Jumbo sometimes did intense things, like that bizarre killing of the official who caught Jes Grew at the beginning. And Slaughterhouse-Five was certainly not a light-hearted book, although it was sometimes funny. The killing of many innocent civilians and the horrors of war are not easy to brush off.

But so far, the book that scares me most is Kindred. While reading my back tenses up; my eyes don't leave the page. I stop hearing the music in my room and I want to ignore my brother when he asks me a question. All I want to know is does Dana escape safely? Is she going to be seriously hurt? How does she get home?

Octavia Butler is inspiring the kind of utter terror that the best books use to pull you into the story, to make you so nervous that you can hardly pick the book up for fear of what will happen while at the same time it calls to you from across the house making you itch to read it.

In no other book so far this semester have I been as intensely gripped by the story and compelled to continue reading. Not that I haven't enjoyed the other books, I have enjoyed them quite a bit. But this story is just calling to me, "Read me, read me! Find out what happens next!"

But I can't. I've finished tonight's reading and I must stop now or I'll be up all night finishing the novel and then I'll have to watch myself all week so that I don't spoil the plot for others. But I really want to know, what happens next?

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!