A Hunger Artist

At the end of Franz Kafka's story, "A Hunger Artist," a starving man decreases in size to the point that he vanishes into the straw bedding of the circus cage in which he has performed his otherwise uninterrupted act. This, in any case, is one way to read it. That is to say: the hunger artist does not die in the story, though the story tempts us to say as much. Thus, too, Kafka's breakthrough story, "The Judgment," which ends when the protagonist leaps off a bridge and

Precisely.


There is today a hunger artist on the steps of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington. Or at least there was on April 14th. Perhaps he's now dead, or if anything just infinitely small. As The Washington Post writes,

...he has no illusions that his lone protest will make a difference. "I'm here because my brothers and sisters are being killed. It's not my responsibility what others do. It's only my responsibility what I do. I can do nothing less in the face of this atrocity." He pauses to swallow his welling tears. "I wish I had thousands of lives to give. But I have mine and this is how I choose to spend it."

What Kafka understood is that the infinitely small embrace everything, and that the sized, the ambitious, consume themselves. A hunger artist is patience, and patience is raw compassion (Mitglied). A hunger artist says, "There is nothing here worth eating."

Bon appetit.

Exhumation

The Bunker Hill Monument, Charlestown, Massachusetts

In the spirit of disappearing documents and administrative amnesia, I celebrated Patriot’s Day by examining two texts that, conversely, illuminate history by reconsidering and revising official records and autobiography.

We now know that during his testimony on Thursday, Alberto Gonzales will attempt to ease our minds about a series of events that “certainly was not in any way an attempt to mislead the American people.” Thus repentant, he will clarify:

I also recall Mr. Sampson mentioning career prosecutor Deborah Rhodes for San Diego in the event of a vacancy. I do not recall my response or any other discussion. Nor do I recall the timing of when this was raised with me. Although these names were mentioned to me, I do not recall making any decision, either on or before December 7, 2006, about who should replace the U.S. Attorneys who were asked to resign that day.

Naturally. That so many statements like this one have been formulated with the expectation of eliciting anything less than indignation in its audience is a sad commentary on the amount of credit typically given to the American public. We could spend lifetimes attempting to catalogue official efforts to bury all but this country’s didactic history—the slogan, the idol, the anecdote—which Melville, true to form, succeeds in suggesting by dedicating Israel Potter to no less towering an emblem than "His Highness The Bunker-Hill Monument."

That novel, a fictionalized account of one Revolutionary War veteran's actual experiences, relays the hardships of its title character, an American soldier who is captured as a prisoner of war and spends five decades exiled in Britain. Eventually able to return home after so many years of extreme poverty, he meets no traces of family, friends, pension or remembrance.

William Carlos Williams also opted to resurrect real documents and rewrite segments of national history throughout In the American Grain. He finds the source of America's disengagement in lingering Puritanical "seeds" in our psyche, which have always caused individuals to shrink, terrified, before all things immense, whether the "New World" wilderness, religious edicts, or, for later Americans, the "giants" of our own mythology. Giving credence to his own method, he reproaches the tendency to treat history as something that will shatter at the human touch. He criticizes all efforts to “boast of our saving, stabilizing Constitution in dread, as of a glass heart, fiercely aligning ourselves in its defense as if it were something else than a mechanical shift.” Noting the accumulation of references to infinitesimal containment throughout his collection, one begins to believe that, for Williams, the image of the ostensibly liberated but helplessly “huddled masses” must have been the most accurate rendering of a national portrait.

Ever willing to sustain his unrequited love for the “red ribbons and spangles, like upspringing tongues, and sparkles of flame,” Melville's Israel repeatedly demonstrates Williams' concept of self-incarceration. Trapped in Britain, he continues to serve America unofficially, even after “all visions but those of eventual imprisonment or starvation vanished.”

The most explicit ramification of such loyalty occurs during his time as a covert courier between American sympathizers in Britain and an alliance in Paris. Having successfully returned to Britain, messages intact, he is led into temporary hiding in a secluded closet of his host’s mansion. Several days in this solitary confinement pass without word or additional supplies from his caretaker (who, we later learn, has died, along with all living knowledge of Israel’s location), during which “the sense of being masoned up in the wall, grew, and grew, and grew upon him.” With such masonry, Melville sacrifices Israel not merely to the physical terrors of space, but into the historical “origin of the cell” itself. We learn that, upon Israel’s arrival, the host had explained the chamber's prior use by the Templars as a holding cell for dissidents:

A small hole, of the girth of one’s wrist, sunk like a telescope three feet through the masonry into the cell, served at once for ventilation, and to push through food to the prisoner. This hole opening into the chapel also enabled the poor solitaire, as intended, to overhear the religious services at the altar; and, without being present, take part in the same. It was deemed a good sign of the state of the sufferer’s soul, if from the gloomy recesses of the wall was heard the agonized groan of his dismal response.

It was “with this history ringing in his brain” that the unsung and exiled Bunker Hill veteran, as invisible as those heretical predecessors but without the safety of screaming out in remorse or retraction, “lifted himself convulsively from the floor, as if vast blocks of stone had been laid on him; as if he had been digging a deep well, and the stonework with all the excavated earth had caved in upon him.”

Williams would surely agree that Israel exemplifies the unpalatable leftovers of what America, “in its hour of excitement…had promised, its declarations, its pronouncements, its Patrick Henry speeches.” He often asks us to consider whether these gift-wrapped premises of patriotism were “just expedients of war to spur to battle or was it serious?” That question, posed today, is of obvious relevance and Williams places substantial culpability on the American public for almost aspiring to historical ignorance. He sees it as no less than

an extraordinary phenomenon that Americans have lost the sense, being made up as we are, that what we are has its origin in what the nation in the past has been; that there is a source in AMERICA for everything we think or do; that morals affect the food and food the bone, and that, in fine, we have no conception at all of what is meant by moral

And the problem, “made up as we are,” is, once again, Puritanical smallness. Those original, ceaselessly compacting individual "seeds" continue to shrivel in response to the terrifying "greatness" of our own mythology. Williams is certain that the Israel Potters will, of habit, be stifled by the Ben Franklins, the John Paul Joneses and Ethan Allens of America—all figures that one or both authors treated in the works discussed here. As he sees it, Americans, like the earliest Puritans, have not demonstrated a willingness to truly “penetrate there to see what was contained,” during those first embellished days in the “New World” and thereafter. With the exception of periodic Melvilles, Williams is convinced that, collectively, we are content to look forward, to find faith in the dream of American progress

and that this rudeness rests all upon the unstudied character of our beginnings; and that if we will not pay heed to our own affairs, we are nothing but an unconscious porkyard and oilhole for those, more able, who will fasten themselves upon us...

Just as we are often unaware of causes, each time one of America’s historical badges—person, place, thing, tragedy, etc.—is referenced in support of some new idea,

This is fixed in us without realization of the EFFECT that such a story, such a tradition, entirely the product of the state of mind that it records, has had upon us and our feeling toward the country. We scarcely know that there can be EFFECTS

Rhetorical bullying aside, Williams nonetheless helps us here by sharing Melville’s concern for the “EFFECTS” of erroneous, dead history and selective memory on individuals buried--as discussed in the two preceding posts--by the State. Both writers suggest the ease with which we seem to allow ourselves to be edited out of reality, much like the utterly forgotten Israel finally succumbs to his exile and is hired to create bricks similar to those that once threatened him with entombment. His physical escape from that earlier incident is ultimately not a triumphant one, as Melville assures us that “men and bricks were equally of clay.” Settled in this new task, Israel's poverty, failure and abandonment have conditioned him to fall in rhythm with the work and

this continual, violent, helter-skelter slapping of the dough into the moulds, begat a corresponding disposition in the moulder, who, by heedlessly slapping that sad dough, as stuff of little worth, was thereby taught, in his meditations, to slap, with similar heedlessness, his own sadder fortunes, as of still less vital consideration.

Williams likewise returns to his image of the blissfully microscopic man encapsulated by “austere and limpid history,” which operates “blind to every contingency, mashing Indian, child and matron into one safe mold.” Melville offers a small window of opportunity to all “reckless” individuals convinced of their historical inferiority, assuring them that “their vice was like that weed which but grows on barren ground; enrich the soil, and it disappears.”

Seventy years later, Williams would find this ground still unfertilized, mildly incubating those imploding Puritan seeds. Over eighty years after that--Gonzales:

I have taken these important steps to provide information for two critical reasons: (1) I have nothing to hide, and (2) I am committed to assuring the Congress and the American public that nothing improper occurred here. The sooner all the facts are known, the sooner we can all devote our exclusive attention to our important work--work that includes protecting the American people from the dangers of terrorism, violent crime, illegal drugs, and sexual predators.

More diversion and misdiagnoses, seeds quaking as long as habit permits.

Baggage

I am taking the discussion up again immediately where it last left off:

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

What happens after the speaker’s body is washed out of the turret? What happens, I mean to say, to those of our dead, the ones returning every day from our own country’s war machine? My attention was recently focused on just this subject by a segment I heard on NPR. This segment dealt with the precise details of bringing home the body of a soldier who was killed in Iraq. Should you want to hear it, go here:

http://www.here-now.org/shows/2007/04/20070410.asp

To summarize, John Holley’s son, Matthew, was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2005. In his attempts to prepare for Matthew’s body’s arrival, Holley discovered that it was to be transported in the cargo hold of a commercial jet and unloaded with a forklift by members of the airport ground crew. Holley found, also, that he would be "picking his son up" at a warehouse in a cargo area. Though it’s been quoted in every interview I have since read about the situation, I can’t help but repeat the words of an airline executive who told Holley that commercial jet liners were the "most expeditious way" to bring the dead back to America. Without ceremony, I would add, without an honor guard, without any real acknowledgment of loss.

As if a body were a piece of baggage.

Now a body, we all feel instinctively, is decidedly not a piece of baggage. The need to bury one’s dead, and not just to bury them but to have some kind of funeral rites, is something of a constant among otherwise disparate cultures. It was this need that brought Antigone to her eventual demise and that forced Priam to beg his son’s body of Achilles. The body is the ultimate confirmation of death; it is, in fact, an obligation to acceptance. Seeing is believing. And it was my instinctive feeling of recoil upon hearing this story that brought me back to the idea that war and the state turn agents into instruments. I would only add that instruments, once defunct, have now become baggage, something burdensome to those responsible for its transport, something to be disposed of expeditiously.

As it turns out, Holley is a veteran of the Vietnam War and was dismayed at the way in which his son’s remains were to be brought home. He contacted his representatives and fought to have an honor guard escort the body at the airport. Following his own son’s funeral he turned his attention to other returning soldiers and eventually congress passed a law requiring that remains be flown on a military contracted aircraft with an escort and an honor guard. Only now, years into the war is this coming to our attention.

Since I heard John Holley speaking on NPR, I have read that not all military remains were treated in this manner and that the story misrepresents the truth. The problem is this: it doesn’t matter how many individuals have been transported as baggage. This kind of response is irrelevant and inappropriate. What is there to say of a nation that brought home any of its fallen soldiers without ceremony, without honor. And I’m not talking here about honoring the dead in words because I think there has been plenty of that; there has been plenty of talk of heroism, there have been plenty of public statements about our losses, many public expressions of sorrow. I am talking here about dead bodies. The actual, physical, grotesque detail of their transport. When it came to the rites and acknowledgment bereaved families needed to make sense of their first confrontation with the truth of a dead body, where were they symbolic gestures then?

Ismene:
At least do not speak of this act to anyone else;
bury him in secret; I will be silent, too.
Antigone:
Oh, oh, no! Shout it out. I will hate you still worse
for silence– should you not proclaim it,
to everyone.

Agents & Instruments

Bodies falling into the state -- Karbala, Iraq: October, 2006

It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth.

- Emerson

In went water and loaves of black-bread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language.

- Vonnegut

I'm convinced there's a dark and ironic parallel between these quotes, but I will leave it to the logicians to sort out the syllogism. Today in our class on Slaughterhouse-Five, we spent some time dwelling and discoursing upon the relations, as we can observe them in Vonnegut and Melville, between language and excrement, metaphysics and physics, all our grand ideas and exotic intentions and the bare and brutal facts that all of these reside in nothing more than a delicate assemblage of what Vonnegut calls "wires" and "tubes," blood and guts and shit. At one point in Slaughterhouse-Five, two American scouts pause to contemplate the problem this way:

One scout hung his head, led spit fall from his lips. The other did the same. They studied the infinitesimal effects of spit on snow and history.

Captain Ahab illustrates the futility of both spit and speech by conflating them at the end of Moby-Dick: "For hate's sake," he says to the (presumably) uncomprehending whale, "I spit my last breath at thee."

I wrote extensively about these two texts yesterday, so for today I'll depart only slightly to another one with strong intertextual associations to Vonnegut. Many books appear in Slaughterhouse-Five, some real, some imagined. The one I'd like to look at is a real one: Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage -- a novel Crane thought of as an extended psychological portrayal of fear.

This seems like a fairly apt description, but what interests me at present is the insistence on the image of the machine, which places Crane's book in direct association with the passages from Thoreau and Vonnegut we looked at yesterday. Coming back upon the battle from which he recently tried to run, Crane's Henry is suddenly drawn, as if by a kind of magnetism, to the operation of the massacre machine:

The battle was like the grinding of an immense and terrible machine to him. Its complexities and powers, its grim processes, fascinated him. He must go and see it produce corpses.

That final line might as well have been written by Vonnegut. A few moments on, the machine is imbued with language, which rises in competition with the agonized voices of its human fuel:

With the courageous words of the artillery and the spiteful sentences of the musketry mingled red cheers. And from this region of noises came the steady current of the maimed.

And a few more lines on, the Vonnegutian reduction of life to digestion is complete:

One was marching with an air imitative of some sublime drum major. Upon his features was an unholy mixture of merriment and agony. As he marched he sang a bit of doggerel in a high and quavering voice:

"Sing a song 'a vic'try,
A pocketful 'a bullets,
Five an' twenty dead men
Baked in a -- pie.'

Vonnegut wrote his way through all the wars that followed the one that tried to bake him in a pie. In concluding Slaughterhouse-Five, he returns to the frame story of the present:

Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.

And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.

He had similar things to say about the current experiments taking place in the field of "military science." The production of corpses, from the time of Henry Fleming, through the irregular time of Billy Pilgrim, to the outright moral grotesquerie of recent "policy," has continued apace, with no signs of slowing up for anybody. As Vonnegut would say, it's simply the continuation of the long and illustrious history of the human experience. In all of these examples "man" appears as a kind of digesting machine, made specially to digest himself, reducing himself to pure matter, to be either washed from the ball-turret, or blowtorched where he lies. Vonnegut reported on this particular style of expedient "mopping up" in the conclusion to his novel. He calls the retrieval of the dead in Dresden, carried out by the prisoners of war, of which he was one, the process of "corpse mining":

There were hundreds of corpse mines operating by and by. They didn't smell bad at first, were wax museums. But then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas.

So it goes.

The idea of digestion is not just some whim of mine: the description of this stink, the smell of "roses and mustard gas," is Vonnegut's preferred formulation for the smell on the breath of a drunken man. It sickens the women the drunk men try to kiss, as it does his Maori co-worker in the corpse mine, tearing him to pieces from the inside:

The Maori Billy had worked with died of the dry heaves, after having been ordered to go down in that stink and work. He tore himself to pieces, throwing up and throwing up.

So it goes.

So a new technique was devised. Bodies weren't brought up any more. They were cremated by soldiers with flamethrowers right where they were. The soldiers stood outside the shelters, simply sent the fire in.

Somewhere in there the poor old high school teacher, Edgar Derby, was caught with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs. He was arrested for plundering. He was tried and shot.

So it goes.

I include the final lines because they wrap up his narration as I'd like to wrap up the post. Edgar Derby, the poor old English teacher, is the one who, while Billy lay insane in his bed in the prison camp, sat by his bedside, reading The Red Badge of Courage. Edgar, like so many others, has his body torn to pieces. Here's how Henry, the witness to the destruction, sees the procession of such bodies, a procession, like the one described in Thoreau, which he joins:

The youth joined this crowd and marched along with it. The torn bodies expressed the awful machinery in which the men had been entangled.

Their bodies are caught in the machinery -- the machinery of the war, the state, the long history of carnage. This is the machinery Thoreau says must be broken with these bodies, lest it continues to break us, continues transforming men from, as Ahab would put it, agents to instruments -- instruments that when they wear out are burned into dust or, as Randall Jarrell famously put it, washed away with a hose. I'll leave off with Jarrell, in full -- a poem which, as I've said elsewhere, sums up the problem with the greatest precision:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Vonnegut: 1922-2007

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

-- Slaughterhouse-Five

So it goes. Surely eulogists the world over have thus prefaced their remarks, and I will demand zero points for originality. But how else to begin a remembrance of Kurt Vonnegut? It is surely what he would have said about his own death, a thing which, with all his irony, he knew was devoutly to be wished.

I met Kurt Vonnegut sometime in the late 70s -- or so my father tells me. Unlike the intensely fortunate Andrew Leonard -- who today recalled a "topsy-turvy" chess game he played, at the age of 12, with Vonnegut on the floor of a living room, surrounded by the New York literary illuminati, at a party at Thanksgiving in 1974 -- I do not remember the encounter. My father, who was a friend of Vonnegut's for decades, may very well have been at that party. On that day, I was four days old.

Leonard remembers the chess game as emblematic of Vonnegut's entire philosophy. Riffing on the metaphor that runs throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, otherwise known as "The Children's Crusade," Vonnegut reconfigured the chessboard, as an experiment in ironic historical representation, so as to place the bigshots on the front line, the pawns in rear guard. Leonard describes it like this:

On a whim, he suggested that we rearrange the board. Why did the pawns have to go in front, those sacrificial lambs about to be chewed up by the slaughterhouse of the front lines, those powerless vassals of the high and mighty? Let's force the feudal lords out of their foxholes and into the hurly-burly!

Let's put the pawns in the back row, he proposed. Let's put the knights and bishops and kings and queens in the front rank!

Oh, the thrill of chess sacrilege!

Of course I was game -- how could I not be!? As we explored the craziness inherent in this new lineup, I had only a shred of comprehension as to how this casual act of ad-libbed creativity was of a piece with everything that Vonnegut represented, as an artist, as a writer who willed strange new worlds that spoke directly to all-too-familiar human dilemmas. Mostly, I figured him as a really nice guy who enjoyed messing with the head of an extremely dweeby 12-year-old.

And, well, shaking up the board like that was kind of weird.

Vonnegut was a great shaker of boards. Indeed, decades before he entitled a novel Timequake, he had already experimented, with exquisite results, with the shaking up of linear experience itself. Billy Pilgrim, the unfortunate protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five becomes "unstuck in time," an experience that would doubtless have been entirely inexplicable and traumatic, if it hadn't been for the intervention of the little green people of Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians, God bless them, dispense with linearity, and thus with causality, and thus with the need to explain. This refiguration of time as static is obviously not an original Vonnegutian invention, but he uses it to great effect, allowing Billy Pilgrim to navigate through his life in an irregular order. This reaches its pinnacle when Pilgrim, knowing he has an hour or so to wait for the arrival of the Tralfamadorian flying saucer, watches a war movie backwards. Anyone with any doubts as to the brilliance and durability of Vonnegut's fiction at its best would do well to keep this passage in mind. Dinita Smith, writing in the New York Times, said this about Vonnegut: "To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness." The movie in reverse illustrates a fantastical sequence of human kindness, the irony of which is all-too-evident:

Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve...

Eyal Peretz, introducing his study of Moby-Dick, links literature with disaster. Peretz, following various recent and not-so-recent thinkers and theorists (Blanchot, Agamben, Felman, among others), identifies the writer of the disaster with the concept of the witness. The witness to the disaster, like Job's messengers, suffers the disaster but survives it. The witness survives the event, which at the same time overwhelms her; the act of witnessing and testifying to that which is witnessed is its own kind of traumatic event. The trauma here is constituted by an excess of experience, an overwhelming event that ruptures the language with which the witness might testify to it. As Peretz puts it:

The witness's language suffers, and thus signifies, a collapse in the vocabulary of knowledge, a collapse that has to do with a certain excess of the event witnessed beyond the witness's capacity to know the event. The event cannot be grasped and assimilated as knowledge because it overwhelms the witness.

Moby-Dick may be the single most illustrative example of this phenomenon, at least in the American literary tradition. Vonnegut was a great lover of Melville, and Moby-Dick in particular -- and his writing, as much as it more obviously follows Twain, follows also in the footsteps of Melville. In Slaughterhouse-Five he surely stands as a witness to the disaster -- not just of the war itself, not just the hideous and criminal event that was the firebombing of Dresden, but the long and senseless history of human violence. Here is how Billy reports it to the Tralfamadorians:

"As you know, I am from a planet that has been engaged in senseless slaughter since the beginning of time. I myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time...And I have lit my way in a prison at night with candles from the fat of human beings who were butchered by the brothers and fathers of those schoolgirls who were boiled. Earthlings must be the terrors of the Universe!"

Billy, like Vonnegut, was not so worried about losing his own life; Billy was not even so concerned about the suicidal death of his own planet, which he assumed was inevitable; what he worried was that the corruption was so vast and severe that it might indeed contaminate the entire universe. But the grandeur of this fear was just as much a target of the satiric wit as everything else, since such grand notions are merely another kind of egotistical delusion. As the Tralfamadorians, with a bemused sort of pity, explain to Pilgrim: "We know how the Universe ends...and Earth has nothing to do with it..."

Vonnegut was a disciple of Melville and Twain. My father mentioned regretfully today that he had been meaning to call him these past few weeks, but, as it so often happens, he had put it off until it was too late. I told my father that it was too bad, because he could have passed along the entirely coincidental fact that just now, this week, in a class loosely focused on the theme of the attempted escape from the unescapable, I am teaching Slaughterhouse-Five, in a sequence in which it follows his two favorite forerunners: Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn.

One final antecedent I'd like to mention is Thoreau. For all of Vonnegut's riotous humor and dark vision, at the center of his work there always lay a clear-eyed morality and a furious sense of justice. Slaughterhouse-Five, along with many of his others, stands in unflinching defiance to a modern world insistent upon its own massacre, insistent upon turning its men and women into moving parts in what Vonnegut called the "massacre machine." In turning that chessboard topsy-turvy he was simply reiterating the core principle of his worldview. The modern war machine, which had tried so hard to turn him and so many others into so many more slabs in the slaughterhouse, has as its main purpose the transformation of human beings into things, into agents or victims of a rigorous process of disposal. This "automation" of man was vigorously opposed by Thoreau, who recognized that all too frequently a submission to the law, an adherence to "duty," is a serious affront to the demands of the higher principle of justice:

A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?

This was how Vonnegut saw war -- and not just the one he had to sit through. He saw the systematic degradation of "man," and "man" in the form of "children"; these children were the pawns in some inscrutable game, cogs in an immoral machine owned and operated by unscrupulous men in power, in which "A lot of people were being wounded or killed. So it goes."

Vonnegut, like Melville, Twain, and Thoreau, was testifying to a disaster in progress, bearing witness and carrying a warning. What is such testimony good for? It may, in the end, be impossible to say. But I might borrow an image from Melville to try to explain it. The documents left behind, the Moby-Dicks and Cat's Cradles of the world, are signs of faith, like Queequeg's little lantern, hung out there in the midst of the disaster, lit for no purpose other than to light it, but which nonetheless serves as a message both coherent and comprehensible, which gets through to its intended recipient. Drifting on the empty ocean, blinded by mists, with really no hope at all, they light the signal lantern anyway:

So, cutting the lashing of the water-proof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.

But surely this is all too much intertexutal melodrama. Vonnegut described human life much more succinctly:

In went water and loaves of black-bread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language.

So it goes. To dwell any further on his death would be, I think, to do a disservice to his life. So I will leave off here with the conventional Tralfamadorian wisdom concerning the dead:

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.'