A Country at War (Part 1a) - The Art of Slaughterhouse 5 (Complete)

 

Above are a few examples of the numerous editions of Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five (or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death), compiled by Emily Temple (2019) and found in the Literary Hub article, The 50 Best Slaughterhouse Five Covers from Around Around the World.

From upper left to lower right (publisher, language, date): Vintage Classics (USA) 2024, Points (French), 2016, Knygos (Lithuanian), 2017, Mondadori (Italian), 1988.

The Rosy Spade meme has taken me to some pretty strange places since the first day I envisioned it, on February 13th of this year. And, it's been a long and winding road. There is no real way of rationalizing this journey. I seem to be unconsciously following some intuited breadcrumb trail with no consciously known goal. And, weirdly enough, those dates, February 13 and 14, seem to  keep popping up throughout my research like little red flags, although not necessarily in a Friday the 13th nor a Valentine's Day aspect..  

Recently, the name Kurt Vonnegut came to me... as I compulsively grappled with how best to describe the present (absurd) state of American affairs (an unfortunate factor that can't be dismissed). It's as if someone whispered it in my ear. Eureka!, I thought, Kurt Vonnegut, exactly. The second thought that came to my mind was Slaughterhouse Five, a novel I once read in my rebellious, energetic youth... a time when many of us still believed everything could, should, and would eventually make sense. Vonnegut warned us about that delusion. But, like most children, we didn't listen.

Inset left is a photo of Vonnegut with his signature unfiltered Pall Mall which he unapologetically chain-smoked until his (unrelated) death at the age of 84.

As it happened, in keeping with the Rosy Spade's "birthday,"  February 13 & 14 would put in an appearance once again... in the darkest of ways. Read on.

Kurt Vonnegut believed in the power of art. If he hadn't he would never have had the courage, stamina or creative fire to complete his 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse Five, based upon his horrifying experiences during the bombing of Dresden (which began on the night of February 13, and continued throughout February 14, till the 15th, 1945) near the end of World War II; an undertaking which took him over 20 years to accomplish.

 It is now considered the pre-eminent anti-war novel of its time... possibly, of all time. And it's numerous, international incarnations over the past 57 years give testament to the novel's lasting power and relevance. But, it came at a great cost. The memory of the harrowing experience which compelled Vonnegut to write the novel never entirely left him.

Inset right is the cover of the Mladá fronta (Czech) edition from 1973. It has a great graphic treatment which seems to add it's own dimension to the story. And, you might say, this is true across the board. Art interprets art. Does language play any part in this process? Take, for instance, the most painterly and elegant of the editions, the French edition, with the less harsh-sounding title of "Abattoir 5."

Abattoir, Abatorul, Bitúnok, Jatka, Lò mổ, Matadouro, Mattatoio, Mezbaha, Rzeźnia Schlachthof, Slakthus, Skerdykla, Slachthuis, Slagtehal, Teurastamo... Who knew there were so many diverse ways to say the word "slaughterhouse"?

Inset left is a German edition published by  HoCa-Belletristik in 2016. Note it's sophisticat design but somewhat grim image ... and then compare it to the Lithuanian edition with the huge, cartoonish bird, or the Italian edition with the comic book action graphic. While each is powerful in its own way, they might be covers from different novels altogether.

Importantly, Slaughterhouse Five is a difficult novel to portray in a single graphic image. It is not your standard novel. Below is its (lengthy) title page, fashioned like a prose poem and not as straightforward as we might wish. It almost stands as a reminder: what you are about to read is not an ordinary novel; it is intended to represent a new literary (schizoid) art form.*

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Slaughterhouse-Five

OR THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE:

A DUTY DANCE WITH DEATH BY

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

A FOURTH-GENERATION GERMAN-AMERICAN

NOW LIVING IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES

ON CAPE COD (AND SMOKING TOO MUCH),

WHO AS AN AMERICAN INFANTRY SCOUT

HORS DE COMBAT,

AS A PRISONER OF WAR,

WITNESSED THE FIRE-BOMBING

OF DRESDEN, GERMANY,

“THE FLORENCE OF THE ELBE,”

A LONG TIME AGO,

AND SURVIVED TO TELL THE TALE.

THIS IS A NOVEL SOMEWHAT IN THE

TELEGRAPHIC SCHIZOPHRENIC MANNER

OF TALES OF THE PLANET TRALFAMADORE,

WHERE THE FLYING SAUCERS COME FROM.

PEACE.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

So, although at its heart it is an anti-war story, it is a also a historical novel based on fact. It is a semi-biographical novel.  It is also, very possibly, a thinly-veiled case-study of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. But, beyond that, it is an existentialist, absurdist commentary and a satire.

And, yet, what most of the Slaughterhouse 5 book jackets fail to convey, is that the novel is also, both in spirit and fact, a science-fiction tale. It has all the qualifying elements: time travel, an exoplanet and an alien abduction involving some very freaky extraterrestrials.

How freaky? Well, the Vintage Press edition introducing this post - the falling hand with the central eye - actually represents an alien intelligence.

Inset left is one book jacket which carries the science fiction theme further. In it's almost childlike illustration we're confronted by a destitute soldier crouching next to what appears to be a unusual plant-like creature with a body resembling a toilet bowel plunger topped by a hand-shaped head with a single green eye in the center. This entity is a Tralfamadorian who (pun intended?) helps Billy Pilgrim become "unstuck" in time. In other words, unless the creature is in disguise, it is clearly a metaphor.**

Tralfamadore is also discussed in this Post-Mac Blues cross-post: A Post-Birthday Greeting from Tralfamadore.

(Continued below the break...)

Qualifying Feminism: Empowerment and the Arts (Part II)

A poster in a London bus station featuring an image by the artist Egon Schiele.
The banner, however - strategically plastered over the figure's pubic area -

was not of the artist's device. See here or here.
(All images in this post can be clicked-on to enlarge.)

_______________________________________________

The C-Word: Censorship

“Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.”

- Egon Schiele, Austrian painter (June 12, 1890 - October 31, 1918).

"The purging wave seems to know no bounds. The poster of an Egon Schiele nude is censored; calls are made for the removal of a Balthus painting from a museum on grounds that it’s an apology for pedophilia; unable to distinguish between the man and his work, Cinémathèque Française is told not to hold a Roman Polanski retrospective and another for Jean-Claude Brisseau is blocked. A university judges the film Blow-Up, by Michelangelo Antonioni, to be "misogynist" and "unacceptable." In light of this revisionism, even John Ford (The Searchers) and Nicolas Poussin (The Abduction of the Sabine Women) are at risk."

- Via an English translation of one of the more coherent passages from the notorious "#MeToo" backlash letter published in Le Monde earlier this year, written and signed by 100 French women-of-note, up to and including Catherine Deneuve. The original document (in French) can be found here and, in English, here. Inset left is the  painting under scrutiny at that time, Thérèse Dreaming.

"As with previous awareness raising campaigns, it is not unlikely that the backlash will snowball and that the deeply entrenched patriarchal mechanisms that have maintained sexism for centuries will reassert themselves. That is after all how the system has survived to date. It is also all too likely that we will all — men and women — soon grow weary of allegations of sexual harassment as we have done in the past, making #MeToo a distant memory, a bud that did not blossom into long-lasting structural change. As Jessa Crispin writes in her manifesto about why she is not a feminist, popular social movements must, by their very nature, be “banal… non-threatening, and ineffective.” This underscores the problem with movements propelled by hashtags and celebrities."

- Excerpted from the Public Seminar article The Many Faces of the #MeToo Backlash, written by Maryam Omidi.

"In an angry riposte, French feminists described the letter’s signatories as “apologists for rape” and “defenders of paedophiles”, a reference to Deneuve’s vigorous support of the French-Polish film director Roman Polanski, convicted of raping a 13-year-old girl.

'There’s nothing really new in the arguments they use; they’re like the embarrassing colleague or tired uncle who doesn’t understand what’s happening,' a group of feminists wrote in an open letter of their own to French radio."

- Regarding a backlash against the former backlash via this article. Inset left is a still from Repulsion, a Roman Polanski film starring Catherine Deneuve (pictured) as a woman who kills two men, one of whom sexually assaulted her. As one might expect, Deneuve's character is portrayed as psychologically deranged (i.e., violence of men is expected and often applauded in a patriarchal society, violence in women - even when justified - is pathological.)

As for Roman Polanski, in 2018: "in light of the #MeToo and Time's Up movements, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted to expel Polanski from its membership." As for Polanski's relationship with his "victim," Samantha Geimer, apparently they have become friendly... see Samantha Geimer on Roman Polanski: 'We email a little bit'.

"The problem of comprehending Lolita begins with this moral discrepancy and her literary position as a rape victim. It causes us to unravel with Humbert. We question the book, ourselves, our culture, and in the space between our disgust and Humbert’s desire, we obsess over and recreate the story. Spawning two films, several musical adaptions, ballets, plays, a Russian opera spin-off, fashion subcultures, and endless memorabilia, Lolita is a transcendent literary icon. Her ghost lingers in Lana Del Rey, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus and many a pop icon seen cradling a teddy bear in skimpy lingerie. The hyper-sexualization of young women is Lolita’s legacy, a cast thrown sixty years into the future: a transition from rape victim to sex icon."

- From Emily Roese's 2016 (Huffington Post) article: The Problematic Idolization of Lolita. Inset right is a detail from a poster for Stanely Kubrick's 1962 film adaption Lolita.

"Violence against women is often against our voices and our stories. It is a refusal of our voices, and what a voice means: the right to self-determination, to participation, to consent or dissent, to live and participate, to interpret and narrate. A husband hits his wife to silence her; a date rapist or acquaintance rapist refuses to let the 'No' of his victim mean what it should, that she alone has jurisdiction over her body; rape culture asserts that a woman's testimony is worthless, untrustworthy... Having a voice is crucial. It's not all there is to human rights, but its central to them, and so you can consider the history of women's rights and lack of rights as a history of silence and breaking silence."

- From Rebecca Solnit's A Short History of Silence, an essay from her (highly recommended) collection: The Mother of All Questions, 2017, Haymarket Books.  Regarding the photo (inset left) - "STILL NOT ASKING FOR IT" - more info can be found here and here.

***

Apparently, the poster which introduces this section is one of several which appeared in London bus stations this year announcing an exhibit of artwork by Egon Schiele, a Viennese artist and painter, known for his oddly contorted human figures, both nude and otherwise (inset right and sourced here). I don't know that any feminists were involved in the censorship of his work - and, possibly, the exhibition of his nudes in a bus station wasn't the most brilliant of plans to begin with - but, in terms of censorship "100 years old and still too daring" makes a significant point. In terms of culture, are we as a species moving forwards, backwards, or remaining stationary? More importantly, will the censorship of art and/or the artist - either contemporary or from the distant past - solve anything? Lastly, is the sensual and/or sexual content of art - regardless of the variety explored or intimated - a feminist issue? And, if so, should art fall under the jurisdiction of any and/or all other political and societal movements as well?

While I can both sympathize with and applaud the #MeToo
(and subsequent Times Up) movements - which marked the historical moment when women finally broke their silence and dragged a few "rape culture" enthusiasts out from under their proverbial rocks (where they'd been congregating for a very long time) - the infamous backlash letter signed by 100 French female luminaries was correct in one respect: suppressing a work of art due to its sexual content or the sexual behavior of its makers - even when said content or behavior is presently considered taboo - is antithetical to the nature of art, human creativity and human expression. But, most importantly, for a feminist, fanning the flames of censorship can also backfire.

Then again, history tells us that in almost every case of censorship or prohibition - across the board - the eradication of the offending behavior was not achieved... neither in the short term and, most certainly, not in the long term. Case in point: Lolita, the 1955 novel written by Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). Basically, it's a feminist's nightmare - and a hebephile's wet dream - following the obsessional musings of a middle-aged man directed towards his manipulative, sexually precocious 12-year-old stepdaughter whom he eventually rapes. Banned in Great Britain and France for a period of two years, it was then banned in Australia from 1958 to 1965. Meanwhile, when it arrived in America, 100,000 copies were sold in its first three weeks. After all, nothing says "Must Read" like the word: "Banned"...