I will draw on Marxism and postmodernism to analyze Kurt Vonnegut’s character Howard W. Campbell, Jr.
On the one hand, Vonnegut reflects Marxist ideas. Vonnegut’s character Howard Campbell observes that the elite benefit from an illusion the underclass perceives as real. In addition, Vonnegut uses at least one term that Marx also uses, ruling class. The following quote is Howard W. Campbell’s words being read aloud in Slaughterhouse Five:
“‘Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class
since, say, Napoleonic times.’”†
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse Five; 1969Vonnegut creates an idea parallel with Marx, examining a subordinating idea of America’s ruling class:
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force…The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships…”
--Karl Marx, Ruling Class and Ruling IdeasVonnegut has Howard W. Campbell, Jr. discuss Marxist ideas in Slaughterhouse Five. I more trenchant exploration of Marxist ideas can be found in Mother Night where Vonnegut first introduces Campbell. Originally published in 1961, Vonnegut rededicates Mother Night to his lead character in the 1966 edition where Vonnegut also creates a new introduction which begins:
“INTRODUCTION/ This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be…”
--Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Mother Night; 1966In other words, pretending makes reality, which echoes Marx’s concretization of illusions:
“…active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood”
--Karl Marx, Ruling Class and Ruling IdeasIllusion. The ideas of a ruling class are not empirical but illusions actively cultivated by conceptive ideologists. Who are conceptive ideologists? Publicists, advertisers, politicians and everybody involved in communications.
Vonnegut stated that Mother Night was his fictional, metaphorical autobiography where a Nazi radio personality is actually conveying secret codes to the allies.
“This book is rededicated to Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a man who served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his times.”
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Mother Night; 1966Vonnegut was a publicist before becoming a novelist and appears to be putting himself on trial for his work as a full-time publicist and part-time humanitarian storyteller. As a publicist for General Electric, Vonnegut was an active, conceptive ideologists who helped this hegemonic multi-national company craft its illusions and make its points through spectacle and rhetoric. Vonnegut must have been inspired by his corporate strategist colleagues and forefathers who concepted the electric chair to visually demonstrate the dangers of direct current, the product of a competitor. Mechanized murder for profits made adorable by the names of liberty and democracy is the role of the propagandist, who in 1961 was not yet called a publicist but a pressman.
Campbell, Vonnegut’s proxie, is tried for crimes against humanity and Mother Night ends with Campbell being nauseated that he is allowed to walk free so he chooses to take his own life. As an autobiographical character, that’s being tough on himself. But the story of Howard Campbell doesn’t end there.
Vonnegut employs techniques Fredrick Jameson associates with postmodern writing (e.g., pastiche, non-linear plot, wide variety of unusual techniques, discussion between history and nostalgia and their roles, etc.) to simultaneously engage and distance the reader from the stories surrounding Howard W. Campbell, Jr.. Kurt Vonnegut reintroduces Campbell in his 1969 breakthrough novel Slaughterhouse Five where Vonnegut also uses Kilgore Trout as a character; Kilgore Trout is also a NomDePlume of Vonneguts.
Here’s the rub, Vonnegut has repeatedly publicly stated that the war events in Slaughterhouse Five happened to him as depicted through the novel’s protagonist Billy Pilgrim, that the events that take place stateside are autobiographical events, yet Vonnegut constantly reminds his readers that Billy Pilgrim isn’t Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut is telling us that his words are not history; Vonnegut is heavy handedly demonstrating illusions in his history. Techniques often associated with postmodern writing are being used to help illustrate Marx’s “whole trick of proving the hegemony of the spirit in history” by driving a wedge between history reported and known reality.
Vonnegut demands you NOT take his history too seriously. First, through a phantasmagorical usage of time-travel. Second, the Howard Campbell stories in Slaughterhouse Five and Mother Night contradict each other. Third, time travel is just plain hard to reconcile in objective historical representation.
Kurt Vonnegut is letting himself off the hook for any real deaths he may have caused in the physical war, but holds himself in contempt for crimes against humanity as a publicist, an “active, conceptive ideologists” whose livelihood was perfecting of the ruling class illusion.
The techniques common to postmodernism isn’t what makes Vonnegut’s work postmodern. Jameson suggests a postmodern artist is candidly stating where she sees society. But an exact definition of postmodern art or of a postmodern analysis won’t be agreed upon.
“Impossible now to pose the famous question: ‘From what position do you speak?’”
--Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of SimulcraSince I can’t fit Vonnegut’s text of his character into a postmodern definition, or extract meaning by inferring an exact perspective, I’d like to draw on a layman’s analysis I found at Amazon.com:
“…what Vonnegut accomplishes in Mother Night is to rescue post-modernism from its more nihilistic tendencies, and makes it clear that our unreal selves can sometimes have real consequences…to make it clear that while the ‘self’ is amorphous and changing, our actual actions have a clear impact on others and cannot be fortified from morality.”
-- D.C. Ober, Amazon.com; July 30, 2006
Mother Night; Post-Modern Morality Tale?Perhaps. However, while D.C. labels Mother Night as postmodern, she generalizes Vonnegut’s “a moral” to a class of morality, as if morality is empirical. Yes, Vonnegut discusses “good” and “evil”, but these words are not capitalized and are such not a pattern integrity either in a specific set of ideas nor the form of an energy such as a spirit.
An empirical morality challenges the Marxist perspective I understand. Marx appears not to suggest that one idea or another is right or wrong, but that a new ruling idea may emerge that presents itself as being in the interest of all members of society:
“…For each new class that puts itself into the place of the one ruling before it is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to present its interests as the common interest of all members of society…”
--Karl Marx, Ruling Class and Ruling IdeasUht-oh. Where’s the god? God is what holds order in place and creates an empirical morality. D.C. jumps from Vonnegut suggesting a moral or two can be gleamed from his story to a morality. Morality is a reflection of the righteousness of my cosmography.
If a definitive right and wrong exists, then art might as well be binary and linear. Life doesn’t fit inside of words constructing immutable mental boxes. A postmodern perspective is a way for me to embrace what doesn’t make sense to me in culture.
Vonnegut employs the phrase, “so it goes” to help blow off steam and simply move on. So long as folks are forcing their delusional mutually-exclusive-completely-exhaustive set of Earthly rules to me, I need help blowing off steam.
Between the original publication of Mother Night and its re-publication in 1966, an alarmist book was published that swept the nation’s conversation. Here’s the text from the front cover:
“The carefully documented story of America’s retreat from victory…/
”None Dare Call It Treason/
“1964 is a year of crisis and decision. Will America continue to aid the communist enemy, to disarm in the face of danger, to bow before communist dictators in every corner of the earth? The decision is yours!”
--John Stormer, cover of None Dare Call It TREASONWhat a fabulously engaging drama. Quick question: what corners of the earth? Do these folks still see the world as flat and therefore possibly having corners? It is just tough for me to take this pulp seriously. And this is minor. How can I reconcile transubstantiation with what my eyes tell me. Or, when the pope sits on his throne of Truth where everything he says is deemed absolutely true? And, who took the unicorns out of the King James Bible? That was my favorite part. All this occurs to me as absurd and yet I see folks organizing themselves around these ideas I have trouble taking seriously. Good morning Troy, New York. FUBAR, fucked-up-beyond-all-recognition. Now what? We speak what truth we can, and wade through our own personal ambiguity:
“I loved my motorcycle more than I loved my wife…this is one of those moments when somebody speaks the truth, one of those rare moments. People hardly ever speak the truth, but now I am speaking the truth. If you are the friend I think you are, you’ll do me the honor of believing the friend I think I am when I speak the truth.”
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Mother NightDoes it get an clearer than that?
Why do I care about postmodern art? What’s in it for me? The techniques of postmodern art creation can validate my disjointed feeling of living in an engineered world, where those that don’t see the cosmographic seams of the human construction must be suffering from agnosia. And, yet, there are so many of them and all we have are bright and creative people on our side.
Artists don’t always have full choices. Speaking too plainly can be hazardous. Many works of art don’t speak plainly about the subject of their analysis, as in Citizen Kane where Orson Wells pretended he wasn’t discussing William Randolph Hurst, or 1984 where George Orwell pretends he’s not discussing 1948.
Similarly, Vonnegut doesn’t talk directly about Karl Marx and yet he speaks as plainly as he can through the gatekeepers and censors of our time. Vonnegut never overtly states his support of Marxist ideas. Stating a support of Marx would have been a death nail to the popular success of his novel. While it is easy to find Marxist values in the text of Howard Campbell, the name Marx is kept separate from the ideas of Campbell. Sure, Howard Campbell has a Jewish guard named Arnold Marx, but that has nothing to do with Karl Marx. Right?
Is there a line between lying for survival and lying for a living? Vonnegut communicates the arbitrary elements of our beliefs by stating that had he been born in Germany, he would have been a Nazi. This casual ambiguity helps commingle the ideas of our victorious culture with the ideas of Nazi Germany. This commingling separates, or at least questions, the empirical reasons we associate with our ideas, setting the groundwork for a society based on the illusions of belief and these inherent dangers. The 1966 Mother Night begins with the introduction I cited above. However, here’s the rest of that sentence:
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Mother Night; 1966The prudence of “we must be careful about what we pretend to be” comes from something unpleasant. Why revise the introduction? Speculatively, this revised introduction was a response to the 1964 manufactured interest around the book None Dare Call It Treason by John A. Stormer which conservative pundits used to sustain the Communism scare 10 years after McCarthy was deemed a wacko.
Perhaps I’m biting off more than I can chew by referencing outside of my specific text for analysis. However, when written words lose their explicit meaning, then the division between text and reality also blurs. In sharing a draft of this essay with my friend Dr. Fink, he asked how I could be certain that Vonnegut was aware of Stormer’s book None Dare Call It Treason. I can’t. However, Stormer’s book sold over 10,000,000 copies in 1964 while Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code sold less than 8,000,000 its first year in the U.S., with more than twice as many adult American book buyers, and way fewer books per-capita being sold back then. In other words, to suggest that a writer striving for popularity not be aware of Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason appears to me as tragically unaware of 1964 contemporary media and the root of the Zeitgeist of the time. I would prefer to speculate how many Vietnamese the American public would have championed slaughtering without None Dare Call It Treason. I’d wager on fewer if we had a way of calling the bet. But to suggest that Vonnegut was not aware of None Dare Call It Treason is like asking if somebody in 1986 knew we lost Space Shuttle Challenger. You couldn’t be an active citizen, engaged in popular media, and not know we lost the Space Shuttle.
Knowing and not knowing. Perhaps Baudrillard is right that we can’t ask from what position a person speaks. But what if position is not a fixed place but a tone? There are least two basic tones: righteousness and non-righteousness. Sure, we can get ourselves into intellectual paradoxes with a division so simple and how this type of analysis is binary and may appear to contradict ideas presented so far. I’m okay with that. I’m not obligated to explain myself to your content, just my own. I’m speaking from a position where I know you’re a voyeur. I know I’m speaking in typed words from an observed position. I know that tonally None Dare Call It Treason presents itself as Truth while Mother Night, refers to itself as a confession, reflecting the perspective of a wrongdoer. Moreover, None Dare Call It Treason discusses the “Truth of reality” while Mother Night goes out of its way to remind you not to take the words literally but teasing out the relationship between the book and its fiction, where Vonnegut not only appears as author, but as a fictitious editor who came across a manuscript by Howard W. Campbell and concludes his “Editor’s Note” with:
“…no single name to which I might aptly dedicate this book—unless it would be my own.
“This book is rededicated to Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a man who served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his times.”
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Mother Night; 1966If there is blame to be found, Vonnegut is examining his role and pointing to himself. Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason points the blame at our enemy, the Communists, who are “bad”. We are good. There is little cut-and-dry around Howard W. Campbell, Jr.. If there is bad to be found, Vonnegut first looks at himself in Mother Night, and condemns himself for the crime of a publicist. Nothing similar is found in None Dare Call It Treason—we’re good; they’re bad.
Tolerance for ambiguity is the backbone of Vonnegut’s postmodern text.
“All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” (Billy Pilgrim)
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse FiveWithout a promise for accuracy, Vonnegut describes his war experience and what lead him to writing these experiences down in a book. In the process of revisiting Howard Campbell, Vonnegut kills him, which is the same outcome as Campbell committing suicide since the character represented Vonnegut who now wrote the execution.
Vonnegut’s most recent book, A Man Without A Country is a memoir. Should this not be considered part of the text of Howard W. Campbell? Only to the extent the text is autobiographical because the character of Howard Campbell is not referenced.
Howard W. Campbell, Jr. is just one of at least four names Vonnegut calls himself in his own text. As Vonnegut gets older and continues to smoke, it appears he really did kill his Campbell. Perhaps he didn’t need him anymore.
“So I went to a friend’s house –Bernie O’Hare, who’d been my pal. And we were trying to remember funny stuff about our time as prisoners and the war in Dresdon, tough talk and all that, stuff that would make a nifty war movie. And his wife, Mary O’Hare, blew her stack. She said, ‘You were nothing but babies then.’/And this is true of soldiers. They are in fact babies. They are not movie stars. They are not Duke Wayne. And realizing that was the key, I was finally free to tell the truth...”
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., A Man Without A Country; 2005The truth Pilgrim speaks in Slaughterhouse Five is the redemption for Vonnegut, transitioning from an “active, conceptive ideologists” who made the depicting of the illusion his chief source of livelihood to presenting truth:
“…devoting his life to a calling much higher than mere business.
“He was doing nothing less now than prescribing corrective lenses for Earthbound souls.”
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse Five; 1969
finis
Notes
1Postmoderism: The Rough Guide by David Morley; Cultural Studies and Communications pg 51
†"While the British colonel set Lazzaro's broken arm and mixed plaster for
the cast, the German major translated out loud passages from Howard W.
Campbell, Jr.'s monograph. Campbell had been a fairly well-known
playwright at one time. His opening line was this one:
"'America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly
poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the
American humorist Kin Hubbard, "It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it
might as well be." It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even
though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk
traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and
therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales
are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their
betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who
is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this
cruel question: "If you're so smart, why ain’t you rich?" There will also
be an American flag no larger than a child's hand--glued to a lollipop
stick and flying from the cash register.
"The author of the monograph, a native of Schenectady, New York, was said
by some to have had the highest I.Q. of all the war criminals who were
made to face a death by hanging. So it goes.
"'Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are
obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth
is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not
acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those
who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame
has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less
for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class
since, say, Napoleonic times.
"'Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a
thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love
one another because they do not love themselves. Once this is understood,
the disagreeable behavior of American enlisted men in German prisons ceases to be a mystery.'”
- Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
“I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorian novels misrepresented life by leaving out sex."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., A Man Without A Country; 2005
