I’d understood the function of art to be primarily descriptive: a book was a kind of scale model of life, intended to make the reader feel and hear and taste and think just what the writer had. Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what’s inside the box bears some linear resemblance to “real life”—he can put whatever he wants in there. What’s important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.
Your real story may have nothing to do with your actual experience, Vonnegut seemed to be saying. In constructing your black box, feel free to shorthand those experiences, allude to them sideways, or omit them entirely. Joke about them, avoid directly exploiting them, shroud them in an over-story about aliens: you know what you know, and that knowledge will not be shaken out of your stories no matter how breezy or comic or minimalist your mode of expression, or how much you shun mimesis.
I began to see, for example, that my knowledge of Hatchet — his casual cruelty, his unquestioning belief in his own right to run roughshod over others — could be used in fiction without needing to get bogged down in the burden of representing Hatchet in slavishly realistic terms. I could riff on Hatchet, instill his mind-set in a totally invented character (a space alien, a duck, a talking paper clip), could, in other words, use that portion of my mind labeled “Hatchet knowledge” in any way I saw fit. Hatchet’s existence staked out a certain ontological space (cruelty is real, say), and the fact that I had known him gave me the right to use this cruelty-awareness in a story, even disassociated from his person.
In fact, Slaughterhouse Five seemed to be saying, our most profound experiences may require this artistic uncoupling from the actual. The black box is meant to change us. If the change will be greater via the use of invented, absurd material, so be it. We are meant to exit the book altered.
As for the exact nature of the alteration, Vonnegut’s goal seemed to be to soften the heart, to encourage our capacity for pity and sorrow. Whatever would most soften the heart, is what belonged in the book. The sci-fi elements could be understood as a form of dramatic compression, meant to urge us more directly toward the truth of our existence: Do we travel in time? We do. Are there aliens that see us and judge us? There are, although they are in our heads, and sometimes we call them “Gods,” or “our conscience,” or “the superego.”
I’d like to say I found all of this liberating but at the time I didn’t. I couldn’t stop reading the book, went back and read it again — but in the way earnest young idiots have, I was anxious to discount it. Why? The aliens, the aversion to conventional drama, the jokes, the humility of the book, scared me. I was, then even more than now, a control freak, and the book felt like an ode to the abandonment of control, a disavowal of mastery. The young, Ayn Randish Republican that I was, discounted Vonnegut as one of them: A former hippie, maybe, or proto-hippie, someone who, unlike me, wasn’t earnest/tough/focused enough to be huge, classic, and utterly pure.
It would be years before I grasped the real power and beauty of the book, but a seed had been planted, and whenever I wrote or read something phony-baloney, there in the back of my mind was the Vonnegut of Slaughterhouse Five, looking askance at that false thing, waiting for me to see the falseness of it too.
Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to. The comic is the truth stripped of the habitual, the cushioning, the easy consolation. An “auditorium filled with two thousand men and women eagerly awaiting a night’s entertainment” could also correctly be described as “two thousand smiling future moldering corpses” or “a mob of bodies that, only hours earlier, had, during the predressing phase, been standing scattered around town, in their underwear.”
This rapid-truthing is what Vonnegut does with the war. He takes an unusual vector through it. He refuses the usual conceptual packaging we associate with “war” and “soldiers” and “battles” and “prisoners of war.” “Soldier” is taken apart with a sad, sharp eye: “Billy was wearing a thin field jacket, a shirt and trousers of scratchy wool, and long underwear that was soaked with sweat. He was the only one of the four who had a beard. It was a random, bristly beard, and some of the bristles were white, even though Billy was only twenty-one years old. He was also going bald. Wind and cold and violent exercise had turned his face crimson. He didn’t look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.” Even the German soldiers are mere guys in uniforms. Even the German attack dog is real and pathetic (cowering, stolen from a farmer, named Princess).
At the heart of Vonnegut’s voice is a humility my earnest young self didn’t feel comfortable with: In it, I heard evidence of real humiliation. War really was hell, with hell being the place where whatever you normally counted on or leaned on was taken from you, absolutely. Billy Pilgrim is a skinny virginal dork, and when he gets to war, war leaps on his skinny dorkitude and devastates him unglamorously, and haunts him ever after. Wild Bob is just some guy from Wyoming who gets all forty-five hundred of his men killed, then dies insane in a boxcar. Roland Weary, a Hemingway stand-in, all self-control and stealth, ends up trudging along on feet bloodied from the little boy’s clogs he’s forced to wear, sobbingly begging Pilgrim to “Walk right! Walk right!”
Vonnegut seemed to have been in a place where all the comforting verities had been stripped away, and was now cautiously trying to reconstruct a meaningful language out of what scraps of certainty he had left. Better to say too little, he seemed to feel, than too much, if, in saying too much, you might say something false. He’d been rendered a minimalist by aversion to bullshit and, if anything, was more of a purist than Hemingway in this regard.
Early in the book, Vonnegut is confronted by Mary, the angry wife of his old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare. She knows the kind of war novel he’s going to write. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies,” she says, “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.”
He makes her a promise: in the movie of his book, there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. In fact, he’ll call his book The Children’s Crusade. It will be, really be, an antiwar book.
And it is.
It didn’t, of course, stop any wars. As Vonnegut reminds us early on, war will not be stopped. When a director friend asks if his book is an antiwar book, Vonnegut replies that he guesses it is.
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing antiwar books?” the friend says. “‘Why don’t you write an antiglacier book instead?’”