Ever since Adorno said that "after Auschwitz, writing poetry is barbaric", many people who do not know what literature is all about have picked up their wisdom and relished, thinking that Adorno meant that Auschwitz's existence made writing poetry incompetent, and then they questioned the ability of literature as a whole to face the cruel history. In fact, Adorno is essentially saying that the Nazi extermination Holocaust has made the meaning of all civilizations nothing, and even the quintessence of civilization is barbaric and even accomplice. But why do people write poetry? Are poetry and art the only relics left by Auschwitz that could negate barbarism?
"The Fifth Slaughterhouse", by Kurt Vonnegut, translated by Yu Jianhua, edition: Reader Culture Henan Literature and Art Publishing House, July 2022
Survivors of bombing disasters
The poet Paul Celan, a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, wrote Death Fugue to refute the historical nihilism that "after Auschwitz, there was no poetry." And Adorno, after reading the poem and the works written by more Jewish survivors such as Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs (winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature), publicly stated that he had misjudged.
If we admit that after Auschwitz, poetry died with the physical demise of the poet, then we truly surrendered to the Holocaust. However, the human soul is always getting stronger and stronger, and perhaps human beings as organic creatures have no soul to speak of, but through the exercise of nothingness, we dare to win the soul and make it harder. Such a belief has driven historical witnesses in different positions to write about the desperate situation of humanity, both direct victims like Celan, German-Austrian writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann who are the descendants of perpetrators, and those with traumatic sequelae in the Allied forces, such as Kurt Vonnegut, who will be discussed in this article.
Vonnegut faced the same question: "After Dresden, writing fiction is barbaric? "The bombing of Dresden was the worst bombing of the European theater of World War II, with 135,000 deaths, more than the bombing of Tokyo. The point is that Dresden is an undefended cultural city of no strategic significance, so the vast majority of those killed in the bombing were civilians, a stain that the Allies were trying to downplay. And the novelist Vonnegut happened to be in Dresden as a prisoner, a survivor of the bombing disaster. He witnessed the tragic situation, so he was obsessed, and then spent twenty-four years dealing with the trauma in his heart, and finally wrote a famous book "Slaughterhouse No. 5".
Dresden after the bombing in 1945.
"Loss of courtesy"
"Slaughterhouse Five" was a concentration camp for American prisoners in Dresden at the time, but its basement was strong enough to protect these prisoners of war (including the novel's protagonist Billy and the narrator/Vonnegut) and the four German soldiers who guarded them. The irony that the slaughterhouse was set up to kill, but created a miracle of survival, is laughable.
Perhaps it is this irony that revelates Vonnegut's view of life and death and the structure of the novel, in which he introduces an alien advanced civilization "Trafamado" to counter the stupid belligerence of "Earth Boy". In the perception of many people in Trafama, death does not mean the end, people are immortalized in all stages of time, and time is not a river but a three-dimensional network that can travel. Therefore, the novel's protagonist, Billy, as a person with the ability to travel in time, simultaneously travels through the European battlefields of 1944 and 1945, the post-war recovery of the United States, and the planet Trafamado, creating the parallel universe structure in the novel. Vonnegut's sharp and smooth penmanship and strong visual sense of the story make it clear to the reader as Billy shifts narrative horizons like a fish, and it can be said that Trafamadou's eternal life becomes the immortality of the art of fiction.
Of course, from the perspective of realistic war trauma novels, the belief of World War II survivor Billy in the civilization of Trafamador and his time travel are a kind of self-hypnosis for him to avoid PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) syndrome. He concocts a more perfect universe to counter this cruel and ruthless universe - a cynical universe that only mutters "this is how it is" after every absurd death. At least, Billy's children and doctors in the novel believe so.
Coupled with Vonnegut's particularly distinctive black humorous style, we often can't figure out which of Billy's narratives are memories, which are present, and which are fictions, and Vonnegut makes us think about it after a smile, because in the eyes of many people in Trafama, we humans are all pitiful creatures like Billy. And writing, only writing saved Billy, and of course Vonnegut, and even saved the history of Dresden from deliberate concealment.
What does Trafamado's writing look like? Billy sees it this way: "Each cluster of symbols is a concise, urgent message, describing a situation, a scene. We Trafalama multiple people read this information at the same time, not one after the other. There is no special correlation between all this information, but the writer carefully cuts them out so that, when you see all of them at the same time, they produce a beautiful, unexpected, esoteric image of life. The novel has no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral preaching, no cause, no consequences. We love our books because we can see the depths of many wonderful moments at the same time. ”
This is very similar to the alien text in a deep science fiction movie "Arrival" a few years ago, but Xuan Zhi Xuan heals and eliminates the conflict of all things. But if you think outside the mind of a novelist, isn't this the characteristic of modern poetry? Modern poetry, composed of strange images, juxtaposes emotion, information and will, and at the same time gives it to readers who are willing to accept it with humility, so that readers and poets can appreciate the beauty of this infinite moment of the universe at the same time.
Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was an influential American writer of black humor in the 20th century. Graham Green hailed him as "the most talented contemporary American writer."
To be able to write such a novel is not barbaric, but to help us "lose courtesy and seek the wilderness"—to replace the rigid logic of this old world that has long been ruined with a redefined logic of freedom and wild logic. The salvation of literature, so imaginative and so subtle, cannot directly reconstruct Dresden or anywhere else that has been bombed into the surface of the moon, but it may reconstruct our worldview that has fallen apart.
This good wish is like an experiment in the novel Billy, where he fantasizes about history being played backwards like a movie lens: "American pilots surrender their military uniforms and become high school kids." Hitler turned into a baby ... Everyone became a baby, and all human beings, without exception, were made up by biological determination to produce two perfect characters named Adam and Eve..." Then he saw Trafama's flying saucer land in his backyard.
Whether or not we believe in Billy depends on what we expect from the planet. In 1969, Vonnegut's fantasy of the Trafamador civilization and the construction of a new cosmology were also continued and deepened in the world of science fiction literature in the next half century, and today we should better understand the four-dimensional gaze that transcends human narrowness.
Written by/Liao Weitang
Editor/Zhang Jin
Proofreader/Xue Jingning