Report (Gabriel 1) on the Seminar-Session of March 26

Report on the Seminar Session of March 26, 2001

We started out with a basic discussion about the nature of the novel and found out that all writing is fiction because, in one way or another, everything we write is invented. Furthermore, the novel is narrated by someone, a narrator. That narrator is the source of one of the crucial problems in literary criticism because the narrator has to be distinguished from the author. However, at the beginning of the novel in the 18th century, Robinson Crusoe, for example, was told in the first person and therefore similar to an autobiography. The novel and the autobiography are not necessarily two distinctive forms. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography was intended as a model for Americans to come because he had made his way “from rags to riches.” So, the autobiography has an overarching thematic concern and every single experience is related to this concern. In contrast to this one story line based on a certain concept or theme, a memoir concentrates on the individual experience; it relates what may be termed gossip.

As the novel tells a story, it is built up from the beginning to the end, where at least the central conflict is brought to a solution. One story line is always foregrounded, but if a narrator likes to spin several yarns, there are also minor story lines. “Good” novels solve the conflicts of the minor story lines, too. In many cases, however, minor threads are abandoned or brought to a rather violent closure. If a minor character dies at the end of the novel, the question arises if the author has not killed him off just to get rid of him because, basically, characters do not act on their own. Additionally, the novel has always an implied audience to which the overarching concern is addressed. Franklin's Autobiography, for instance, was originally cast in the form of a letter addressed to the author's son. But at the time the first letter was written, his son was not—as might have been expected—an adolescent anymore. He was President of Princeton College. Consequently, the implied audience of Franklin's letters was more far-reaching than officially expressed. The strategy of this dedication to his son transmits subliminally the feeling that, as the author wants only the best for his son, it is also the best for the rest of us.

By looking at its title page, we started the discussion of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. The title page invokes the title pages used in the 18th century and might refer back to, say, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, in a way the first postmodernist novel because of its sheer playfulness in terms of perspectives used. The story begins with Tristram’s conception and keeps talking about his own birth and early childhood. In contrast, Slaughterhouse Five starts with a frame which does not stand in line with traditional frames, such as the one of Dietrich Knickerbocker in Washington Irving's Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. A frame story usually serves to give credibility to a very unlikely story and to bridge the distance between the reader and the strange happenings related. This is generally the case in tall tales of the 19th century, where an urban, civilized character relates his experience made in the wilderness. He assumes for himself the position of a cultural mediator who even translates the vernacular or explains uncommon behavior. In the frame of Slaughterhouse Five we are given a rather precise temporal setting, which is early June 1968, by the reference to the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. This precise timing of the frame is done by the means of a concept of time we are familiar with. This linear concept of time stands in contrast to the middle part, which seems random and follows the Tralfamadorian concept that all events are now. That concept seems unusual at a first glance, but in terms of consequences, the Tralfamadorian concept reflect simply our awareness of the events which is always one of now. In the course of the story, the Tralfamadorians prove more and more to be us, the readers, particularly in the scenes of sex and violence.

Time and place traditionally form a union, and one person therefore cannot be in two places at once. The setting is very important for a novel; Henry James, for instance, was extremely careful in placing his novel The Portrait of a Lady. Slaughterhouse Five introduces a different concept of place, and Billy Pilgrim travels between four stages of action which seem to exist simultaneously. These are the battlefield in Luxembourg, Dresden, Cape Cod, and Ilium (a reference to Ilium, the site of the Trojan war). Nevertheless, all references that are linked to the Second World War could also be linked to the Vietnam War. Discussing Dresden as a stage of action in more detail, we talked about Vonnegut's participation in the war and the particularity of Dresden. In fact, Dresden as the actual place of destruction is not so important; it could have been any other city that was destroyed in the war. Kurt Vonnegut just happened to be in Dresden as a prisoner of war when the city was destroyed. Now critics keep returning to his autobiography and wonder why he ended up behind the enemy lines, as sons of prominent families usually did not end up in a uniform at all, or if so, they were at least at a safe distance from enemy lines. It is worth mentioning that the Vonneguts' family fortune had been lost during the depression and that Kurt Vonnegut did not obtain such a good education as his brothers. So the question, if he had been foolish and did not know what the whole war was about, remains open.

Julia Gabriel