Posture in Slaughterhouse-Five
When Jordan Peterson wrote 12 Rules for Life, his first rule was, “Stand up straight with your shoulders back.... Attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around.... Walk tall.”
Ten or fifteen years ago, I met someone who was a teacher of the Alexander Technique, which is about managing your posture and your body. She gave me two pieces of advice on walking:
- Think up
- Focus on your head, not your feet
I found that I could put these two teachings into practice; they had a big impact on my posture, my walking, etc. They actually made walking more enjoyable. I can’t recall another time in my life when so few words had such a lasting impact. While Zen affects every breath you take, the Alexander Technique affects every step you take; this is philosophy at its most practical.
Developed in the 1890s by an Australian named Frederick Alexander, the Alexander Technique struck a chord with leading intellectuals like Aldous Huxley, John Dewey, and Niko Tinbergen. Below is a picture of Alexander, demonstrating erect posture.
I recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. It has much to offer: it’s readable and entertaining, it presents interesting ideas and experiences, it’s popular with critics and with the public. Vonnegut describes the German prison where he himself was confined in the last months of World War II. At one point, he was kept in the fifth building in an abandoned slaughterhouse, hence the name Slaughterhouse-Five.
At another time, he was kept in a large prison that had English and Russian prisoners, as well as Americans. The English had been in prison since early in the war — about five years. Their food supplies were sufficient, perhaps because they received packages from home. They were on friendly terms with their German captors. They organized various games and performances. (In an earlier issue, I discussed prisoners who organized a university and a vegetable garden.) Vonnegut describes how the Germans looked down on the Russian prisoners and starved them. He also says that American prisoners couldn’t develop esprit de corps, couldn’t cooperate as the English did.
The Germans decided to move the American prisoners to Dresden, probably because they needed factory labor in Dresden. Before the Americans left the prison, an Englishman addressed them:
|
“If you stop taking pride in your appearance, you will very soon die.” He said that he had seen several men die in the following way: “They ceased to stand up straight, then ceased to shave or wash, then ceased to get out of bed, then ceased to talk, then died.”
The Englishman said that he, when captured, had made and kept the following vows to himself: To brush his teeth twice a day, to shave once a day... to polish his shoes once a day, to exercise for at least half an hour each morning... and to look into a mirror frequently, frankly evaluating his appearance, particularly with respect to posture. “If I may inject a personal note [the Englishman said]: It has been five years now since I have seen a tree or flower or woman or child — or a dog or a cat or a place of entertainment, or a human being doing useful work of any kind.”1 |
The Englishman was in a trying situation, and he felt that posture was important — a matter of life and death. He would understand why it’s Jordan Peterson’s first rule.
I recently joined a Facebook group called “Ancient Stone Mysteries of New England.” The group is for people (like myself) who are interested in NativeAmerican stone structures. I posted the picture below.
This is from a stone row at Lincoln Woods State Park (Lincoln RI). I think it exemplifies a theme of NativeAmerican stone rows: verticality. Vertical stones give stone rows a different look than the walls made by white farmers. (The term “stone row” is used for native structures, while the term “stone wall” is used for structures made by white farmers.)
Is there an idea or motive behind all NativeAmerican stone structures? Perhaps the motive is to champion life against death. When we die (or when a tree dies), we sink into the earth; life means being upright, being in the air. By propping boulders, and erecting “standing stones,” perhaps Native Americans were giving life to these stones, or creating symbols of life.
I like to compare NativeAmerican stone structures to ballet. Ballet is about defying gravity, being in the air. If stone structures champion life against death, perhaps the same is true of ballet. Many NativeAmerican stones point upward, that is, they have a “manitou shape.” Does this shape symbolize being in the air, being upright? Or does it symbolize the human frame, erect posture, human dignity? Does it symbolize “think up”?
Let’s look again at the stone row. The vertical stone is held in place by several stones, one of which might be called a manitou stone, i.e., an upward-pointing stone. On the other side of the vertical stone is another manitou stone. In the picture below, I marked these two stones with red, to illustrate their manitou shape. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the manitou shape in native stone-work.
Below is a standing stone that I came across in Smithfield, Rhode Island.
Note that the above stone has a manitou shape, an upward-pointing shape. Does a standing stone with a manitou shape represent the human figure, standing tall, standing erect? For the Englishman who addressed Vonnegut and his comrades, standing erect was a matter of life and death. Did the Native Americans respect posture? Did they regard posture as a matter of life and death?
Native Americans often put stones in the air, they often propped large boulders on smaller rocks, they often balanced boulders so that the boulder barely touches the ground. I like to compare this to a ballet dancer who stands on one toe. Ballet dancers stand erect, as this picture shows:
The above picture shows that being erect is compatible with being relaxed. Ballet dancers stand erect, and defy gravity by leaping, being light on their feet, etc. Likewise, NativeAmerican stone-work aims to stand erect and defy gravity. Perhaps the underlying principle of culture in general is to champion life against death, to create symbols of life. Philosophy discusses The Good Life, art creates symbols of The Good Life.
Nietzsche said, “There is no such thing as pessimistic art — Art affirms.... Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life.”2 Nietzsche’s first book dealt with Greek tragic drama. He argued that tragedy is life-affirming: “Tragedians.... promote the life of the species, by promoting the faith in life. ‘Life is worth living,’ every one of them shouts.”3
Vonnegut’s remarks on hygiene and posture are some of the most positive remarks in a pessimistic book. Critics overlook these remarks, they prefer to discuss the novel’s structure, or its narrative voice.
I recently saw a very pessimistic tweet:
Vonnegut expresses a similar pessimism. His protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, covers his head with a blanket when his mother visits him in the hospital. “She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.”4
On the other hand, Vonnegut-the-parent seemed to enjoy having children around, enjoyed being part of a large family, and was depressed when the house was empty. In a recent issue, I wrote, “Vonnegut suffered from loneliness, and often fantasized about (and wrote about) large, extended families.” After Billy Pilgrim’s daughter is married, Billy can’t sleep, he “shuffled down his upstairs hallway.... The moonlight came into the hallway through doorways of the empty rooms of Billy’s two children, children no more. They were gone forever.”
This would seem to strengthen the argument that we have children for our own enjoyment, not because we regard life as a precious gift. In my view, life is neither inherently sweet nor inherently sour, we can view it positively or negatively. I admit, though, that there are “objective factors” that can tilt the balance one way or the other. Perhaps the most important of these objective factors is your parents, and how they treat you. Many parents probably think, “Life isn’t inherently sweet, but it will be sweet for my child, because I’m going to do all I can for my child.”
A reader might object: “You said that art is life-affirming, but then you said that Vonnegut’s novel is pessimistic. Isn’t this a contradiction? Doesn’t Slaughterhouse-Five prove that art isn’t life-affirming?”
My response: The Buddha’s first teaching was “Life is suffering.” By acknowledging that, we take the first step toward coping with suffering, and working through it. Likewise, tragic drama looks at painful aspects of existence, but is ultimately life-affirming. Nietzsche said, “All good things are powerful stimulants to life, even a good book written against life.”5
A reader of Slaughterhouse-Five soon realizes that it’s written in discrete chunks of text; one might call the style aphoristic. Time doesn’t move in a linear fashion, following the protagonist as he grows older. Rather, time jumps forward and backward. Time-travel is a common theme in science-fiction; Slaughterhouse-Five is, in part, a work of science-fiction.
But I wouldn’t view Vonnegut’s time-travel as zany fantasy. There’s reason to believe that we can sometimes anticipate the future, as if the future already exists. Vonnegut himself may have had a vision of the future when he was a soldier in Germany; this experience may have made him more receptive to the idea of time-travel. Mark Twain had a vision of the future, and this vision made him more receptive toward the occult. Time-travel is sometimes a matter of sober fact, not wild fantasy.
Just as there’s reason to believe that the future already exists, so too there’s reason to believe that the past still exists, if unconsciously, and can be reawakened by a memory-trigger, such as Proust’s madeleine. Vonnegut shows how the past and the future are intermingled with the present; he overturns the notion of linear time. So Vonnegut’s science-fiction has a certain philosophical or psychological truth; his science-fiction might appeal to readers who think they don’t like science-fiction. His view of time reminds me of Bergson’s view of time, which I discussed in a recent issue.
When Proust tastes his cookie or “madeleine,” his childhood comes back to him in a flood, and his happiness is so intense that he almost faints. But Billy Pilgrim’s “memory-trigger” doesn’t bring him happiness; when Billy hears a “barbershop quartet,” he’s reminded of the quartet of German guards, and of the horrors of Dresden. “His face became grotesque,” Vonnegut writes, “as though he really were being stretched on the torture engine called the rack. He looked so peculiar that several people commented on it solicitously when the song was done. They thought he might have been having a heart attack, and Billy seemed to confirm this by going to a chair and sitting down haggardly.”6
Proust is more optimistic than Vonnegut; though Proust lived through World War I, his worldview developed prior to World War I, during a relatively peaceful, prosperous, and optimistic period. Proust believed in music, in visual art, in civilization, in beauty and truth.
Vonnegut, on the other hand, experienced the horrors of World War II at close range; his personal experience was harsher than Proust’s, and his generation was less optimistic than Proust’s generation. In Vonnegut’s day, Western civilization no longer believed in itself. Proust could work his way through suffering to an affirmation of life, but it’s harder for Vonnegut to affirm. Vonnegut’s challenge is still a challenge today: Can we develop an affirmation of life, given what we know about human history and human nature, given our loss of faith in religious consolations and political utopias?
Confronted by the horrors of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim retreats and withdraws. Vonnegut writes, “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.”7 A critic named Arnold Edelstein says that Vonnegut is “resigned and pessimistic.”8
Edelstein says that, like “so many other American novels,” Slaughterhouse-Five turns its back on “the responsibilities of adulthood,” and retreats into a kind of womb. Billy rides through the ruins of Dresden in a horse-drawn wagon, a kind of womb; one of the happiest moments of his life was his “sun-drenched snooze in the back of the wagon.”9 He’s finally roused by two “obstetricians.” Discussing Billy’s retreat into the womb, Edelstein says that the ostrich sticks his head in the sand, but Billy goes even further, he tries to crawl back into the egg.
Another womb-image, Edelstein says, is the cattle-car in which the American prisoners are transported. “Each cattle-car ‘became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators’.... The womb of the cattle-car is pleasant: ‘When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared.’”
Yet another womb-image, Edelstein says, is the zoo on the planet Tralfamadore. Billy is kept in this zoo as an object of curiosity; Billy lives in a transparent geodesic dome. Edelstein writes, “Billy is appropriately naked within his geodesic womb.”10 Vonnegut writes, “The Tralfamadorians were interested in his body — all of it. There were thousands of them outside.... There were no walls in the dome, no place for Billy to hide.... Billy got off his lounge chair now, went into the bathroom and took a leak. The crowd went wild.”11
The Tralfamadorians focus on moments, they don’t have a linear conception of time. There’s a Zennish wisdom in this attitude. A Zen writer named Jon Kabat-Zinn quotes an 85-year-old woman: “Oh, I’ve had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day.” This woman’s Zennish wisdom, the fruit of long experience, is similar to the attitude of Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians. Vonnegut’s sci-fi fantasies contain interesting ideas.
I spoke to a Chinese woman who had studied meditation in China. Her advice was to begin meditating by turning your mind to pleasant memories, perhaps childhood memories. Here again there’s a close resemblance to the Tralfamadorians. We should try to think positive thoughts, maintain a positive attitude.
Vonnegut has what all great writers have: a certain honesty, a certain candor, a seeking after truth, including the truth about himself. He explains the meaning of his novel’s epigraph and his novel’s dedication. He tells us about the difficulties of writing the novel:
| I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.
But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then — not enough of them to make a book, anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown.12 |
The epigraph of Slaughterhouse-Five is,
The cattle are lowing,
The Baby awakes.
But the little Lord Jesus
No crying He makes.
Vonnegut explains his epigraph: “Billy cried very little, though he often saw things worth crying about, and in that respect, at least, he resembled the Christ of the carol.... Later on, as a middle-aged optometrist, [Billy] would weep quietly and privately sometimes, but never make loud boohooing noises.” Billy’s weeping, like so much else about Billy, probably is based on Vonnegut himself. Edelstein writes, “Billy and Vonnegut, finally, in spite of narrative distance, are one.” Vonnegut writes, “He lay down on the outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears came instead. They seeped.”13
In an earlier issue, I said that a tendency toward tears can be found in Nietzsche, Dickens, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Perhaps we should ascribe these tears to two characteristics of genius: melancholy, and a weak ego. Aristotle said that all geniuses are melancholy; I made the same argument in my chapter on genius. I discussed the weak ego of genius in an earlier issue.
When I discussed G. B. Edwards, I noted that he was preoccupied with death. Vonnegut is even more preoccupied with death, and whenever he speaks of death, he says “So it goes.” Edelstein calls this “the leit-motif of the novel.”
Critics such as Charles Harris have noted mistakes in Vonnegut’s chronology, Vonnegut’s math.14 For example, Billy Pilgrim gets married in 1948, and celebrates his 18th wedding anniversary in 1964. “Similar discrepancies abound in the novel,” Harris writes. In an earlier issue, I mentioned math mistakes in Moby-Dick: “The doubloon (discussed in chapter 99 of Moby-Dick) is worth 16 dollars. Stubb says ‘At two cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars.’ But it’s actually 1600/2 or 800 cigars.”
Just as critics argue that Melville’s mistakes are intentional, so too they argue that Vonnegut’s mistakes are intentional. Harris writes,
| [Vonnegut] does not merely deny the relevance of chronological order, as, say, Faulkner does through his temporal involutions in The Sound and the Fury; he denies its very existence. By making it impossible to link the novel’s various dates into a coherent chronological sequence, Vonnegut effectively denies the pastness of Billy’s past, the futureness of his future. Both past and future are now. |
So Vonnegut’s “mistakes” aren’t really mistakes, according to Harris; Vonnegut’s mistakes disrupt linear time, disrupt what Bergson called “clock time.” The soul has its own clock, which is quite different from mechanical clocks.
In an earlier issue, I discussed two approaches to the novel:
- Henry James’ approach, which emphasizes structure, form — what Schiller called Formtrieb (Form Drive)
- H. G. Wells’ approach, which values content — what Schiller called Stofftrieb (Content Drive)
Academics side with James, they admire complexity of structure over richness of content. I’ve argued that great writers admire simplicity, while critics admire complexity. Slaughterhouse-Five appeals to academic critics because it has a complex structure; Harris calls it, “a story within a memory within a novel within a novel.” I think Slaughterhouse-Five can be appreciated without grasping its complex structure, but Harris disagrees:
| By a skillful manipulation of formal devices Kurt Vonnegut has achieved in Slaughterhouse-Five a novel of complexity and power. Few critics have missed the power. Many, however, have overlooked the craft with which the novel is constructed. This is a significant oversight since, as I have tried to demonstrate, the meaning of Slaughterhouse-Five rests largely in its methods of presentation. |
This passage shows what academics value: skill, craft, form, complexity. What I value is candor, passion, wisdom — including Vonnegut’s remarks on posture, which critics ignore. I must admit that the complexity of Vonnegut’s novel is intentional, and serves a purpose; on the other hand, Harris must admit that Vonnegut’s remarks on posture are intentional, and serve a purpose. Perhaps in this debate, as in so many debates, both sides are partly right.
© L. James Hammond 2024
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| Footnotes | |
| 1. | Ch. 6. In a recent issue, I discussed the French novelist Stendhal, who was in Napoleon’s army. I said that, when the army retreated from Moscow, with the Russians harassing them, Stendhal made a point of shaving every day, of ‘taking pride in his appearance.’ back |
| 2. | The Will to Power, #821 and #853 back |
| 3. | The Gay Science, Book I, #1. The epic poet and the lyric poet also take an affirmative attitude toward life. When Werner Jaeger discussed Homer, he spoke of “that ideal world into which the epic raises everything it touches.... Homer transports everything — even ordinary objects and common events — to a higher plane.” Pindar does the same: “At Pindar’s magical touch everything in this dull ordinary world at once regains the fresh vigor of creation’s morning.” back |
| 4. | Slaughterhouse-Five, Ch. 5 back |
| 5. | Assorted Opinions and Maxims, #16
Nietzsche wrote,
“But this, as I have already shown, is a pessimistic standpoint; it is the ‘evil eye’: the artist himself must be appealed to. What is it that the soul of the tragic artist communicates to others? Is it not precisely his fearless attitude towards that which is terrible and questionable? This attitude is in itself a highly desirable one; he who has once experienced it honors it above everything else. He communicates it. He must communicate, provided he is an artist and a genius in the art of communication. A courageous and free spirit, in the presence of a mighty foe, in the presence of a sublime misfortune, and face to face with a problem that inspires horror — this is the triumphant attitude which the tragic artist selects and which he glorifies.”(Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes in a War with the Age,” #24) back |
| 6. | Slaughterhouse-Five, Ch. 8 back |
| 7. | Ch. 3 back |
| 8. | “Slaughterhouse-Five: Time out of Joint,” by Arnold Edelstein, College Literature, Spring, 1974, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 128-139, jstor.org/stable/25111023 back |
| 9. | Ch. 9 back |
| 10. | Edelstein, p. 135 back |
| 11. | Ch. 5 back |
| 12. | Ch. 1 back |
| 13. | Ch. 3 back |
| 14. | “Time, Uncertainty, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Reading Of Slaughterhouse-Five,” by Charles B. Harris, The Centennial Review, Summer 1976, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 228-243, jstor.org/stable/23738361
Harris says that Vonnegut and other contemporary novelists can be connected to the broader contemporary worldview. He recommends two writers on this topic: |