In the excerpt, Hutcheon refers to Lyotard’s main concerns with postmodernism, which he defines as an “incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard 1). Metanarratives provide a framework to understand historical and cultural events but also distort our perception of historical events by providing only one interpretation, a sole, absolute ontological Truth. Lyotard posits that there are instead “multiple truths”, which “deprive the modern of its idea of a single anchoring centre” (Hutcheon 119). Indeed, this scepticism of metanarratives is the core of postmodernism. The postmodernist movement seeks to delegitimise the idea of a totalising Truth by replacing it with countless petits récits or “little narratives” which aim to undermine the metanarratives which dominate our world. As the postmodern seeks to question and interrogate the “grand narratives of repressive power” (Hutcheon 120), the novel becomes a natural stage for this discourse, where “a variety of writing, none of them original, blend and clash drawn from innumerable centres of culture” (Barthes, 1468). The postmodern novel hence becomes a stage for heteroglossia, for “multiple truths” and “little narratives” to interact in the absence of an ontological Truth.
Kurt Vonnegut’s postmodern novel Slaughterhouse Five similarly questions the legitimacy of the metanarratives through the events of World War II through heteroglossia. Slaughterhouse Five functions as a meeting ground for various ideological viewpoints and discourses present in society through the inclusion of not only the author’s personal experience in the war but also real-life quotations from Truman, literary works and “echoes of popular self-help guides and psychobabble” (Rigney 13). According to Barthes, this fulfils the function of the writer: to blend various texts thus creating an intertextual conversation between different discourses (Barthes 1468). This mixture of different writings combined in one medium represent Lyotard’s idea of “multiple truths”, challenging the idea of the absolute Truth that comes with metanarratives. Vonnegut further complicates the issue by adding metafictional elements into the mix, promising that “All this happened, more or less” (Vonnegut 2). In the first three words, the author promises a complete mimetic retelling of the bombing of Dresden, then immediately backtracks on the statement by questioning his veracity. By combining metafiction with mimesis, Vonnegut creates a “Janus-headed outlook” (Jensen 3), encouraging readers to question the veracity of historical metanarratives. Hence, in this essay I will argue that Vonnegut uses heteroglossia in Slaughterhouse Five, combining mimesis and metafiction in his portrayal of the Dresden bombing to emphasise the postmodernist idea of the lack of one single ontological Truth.
Vonnegut challenges the authority of metanarratives by using heteroglossia in Slaughterhouse Five, representing many different perspectives instead of just one interpretation of the bombing of Dresden. This inclusion of various intertextual elements allows Vonnegut to give a picture of the bombing of Dresden without the burden of creating an objective state of events. The heteroglossic nature of Slaughterhouse Five allows for not only the metanarratives propagated by state powers but also Vonnegut’s subjective autobiographical experience and metafictional elements to be considered.
Note how Vonnegut depicts Nazi soldiers forming a metanarrative in Chapter 3, taking photographs of Billy Pilgrim’s feet as “heartening evidence of how miserably equipped the American Army often was” for a newspaper and the guards acting out a capture (Vonnegut 46). This is just one example of a metanarrative created by the Nazis to boost morale. Interestingly, we see the same phenomenon on the Allied side when Mary O’Hare accuses the homodiegetic narrator of writing a propaganda book glorifying war where he’d be “played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful” (Vonnegut 13). Mary refers to the jingoistic propaganda war films put out by Hollywood in the 1940s which cemented John Wayne as a symbol of American power. Liksxadsadsae the Nazis, the Americans also seek to create a “grand explanatory scheme” to forge a new understanding and portrayal of World War II. By bringing these examples into sharp focus, Vonnegut expresses his scepticism of metanarratives and exposes the fictive element of history. History cannot be claimed to be objective due to the fictive elements which often govern its creation “exposing contradictions”. In this sense, Vonnegut fulfils the postmodern goal of “exposing contradictions” (Hutcheon 116) in historical metanarratives glorifying and sugar-coating war.
Vonnegut portrays war-glorifying metanarratives using real-world historical documents seeking to justify enemy civilian casualties. In the foreword of The Destruction of Dresden which appears in the text, Allied forces criticise “weep about enemy civilians who were killed”, justifying their actions as “a necessary effort to completely defeat and utterly destroy Nazism” (Vonnegut 143). This narrative aims to justify the murder of innocents in the metanarrative of the Allied forces. However, Vonnegut also provides a different viewpoint: a fictionalised account of the bombing of Dresden. While his experiences are necessarily subjective due to their semi-autobiographical nature, they create a counterpoint to the metanarrative of justified civilian casualties.
Vonnegut also “consider equally both sides of binary opposition” (Hutcheon 116). He portrays German civilians and soldiers in a sympathetic light. The POW guards are “boys and men past middle age” (Vonnegut 114), the war is “fought by babies” (Vonnegut 13). These characters were not evil or deserving of death, yet they “were all being killed” (Vonnegut 136) in the bombing of the city. These “little narratives”, seen through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, provide a different viewpoint by portraying the civilians as living humans whose murder cannot be justified. They represent another “truth” in the overall depiction of the bombing of Dresden by refusing to justify the killing of civilians, hence embodying a strong anti-war sentiment. Hence, we see that Vonnegut uses heteroglossia in Slaughterhouse Five, contrasting metanarrative interpretations of the bombing of Dresden with the semi-fictional petit récit of Billy Pilgrim’s experience at Dresden. This contrasting of viewpoints regarding the same event challenges the veracity of the metanarrative and proves that there cannot be a “single Truth”. Instead, there are multiple narratives and hence multiple viewpoints.
Simultaneously, Vonnegut further destabilises the metanarrative by introducing both metafictional and mimetic patterns in Slaughterhouse Five. Slaughterhouse Five can hence be considered as “historiographic metafiction”, i.e. works of fiction which is “both intensely self-reflexive and paradoxically lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon, Poetics 11). Indeed, the first chapter of Slaughterhouse Five is metafictional by way of its homodiegetic narrator, told from the perspective of the author himself. The first sentence of the novel states: “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” Vonnegut promises a mimetic narration of his version of events then immediately backtracks on this statement with the phrases “more or less” and “pretty much true” which show that he cannot confirm their accuracy. Later on, Vonnegut writes of “authentic backgrounds” which he will use for “made-up stories” (Vonnegut 17). Speaking on his memories of Dresden, Vonnegut also claims that “neither of us could remember anything good” (Vonnegut 12). Vonnegut uses metafiction to deliberately call to the reader’s attention the veracity of his words. He uses an unreliable, homodiegetic narrator who cannot confirm the truth of his own words. The reader is immediately made aware of the fictive element in the novel which, as Vonnegut states, is constructed from “made-up stories”. This “Janus-headed approach” is caused by the author’s intention to depict real historical events while “thematizing the issues related to creating representations of such events” (Jensen 2). Vonnegut’s metafictional approach shows that his version of Truth is subjective due to his intentions of ideologising his work with anti-war sentiment. As Hutcheon writes:
“both history and fiction are equally ‘discourses’, that is, ways of speaking about (and thus seeing) the world that are constructed by human beings; both are systems of meaning by which we make sense of the past – and the present. The meaning of history is not in the events but in the narrative” (Hutcheon 122)
While Slaughterhouse Five is a work of fiction, its claims of truth, at least “the war parts” give it a place in historical discourse, or the ongoing discussion of historical events, in this case, the bombing of the city Dresden. Vonnegut encourages the reader to question all narratives, not just fictive elements like the Tralfamadorians. By combining mimesis with metafiction, Vonnegut creates a historiographic metafiction, forcing the reader to question the veracity of not only the historical events depicted in the novel but also those of “grand narratives”.
In conclusion, Slaughterhouse Five embodies the scepticism of postmodernism in its questioning of historical metanarratives. Vonnegut reflects Lyotard’s idea of “multiple truths” rather than a “single truth” through his use of countless petits récits. Vonnegut turns the novel into a stage for various discourses and viewpoints through his use of heteroglossia, challenging metanarratives. Furthermore, Vonnegut blends mimesis with metafiction to encourage readers to question the veracity of historical metanarratives, showing that history is a subjective discourse (Hutcheon 122). Hence, Vonnegut uses heteroglossia in Slaughterhouse Five, combining mimesis and metafiction in his portrayal of the Dresden bombing to emphasise the postmodernist idea of the lack of one single ontological Truth.
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Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author”, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, general ed. Vincent B. Leitch, W.W. Norton & Company: New York & London, pp.1466-1470
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “Defining the Postmodern”, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, general ed. Vincent B. Leitch, W.W. Norton & Company: New York & London, pp. 1612-1615
Hutcheon, Linda. “Postmodernism”, The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Simon Malpas and Paul Wake, Routledge: London and New York, pp. 115-126
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Print.
Rigney, Ann. “All This Happened, More or Less: What a Novelist Made of the Bombing of Dresden.” History and Theory,Vol. 48, No. 2, Theme Issue 47 (May, 2009): 5-24.JSTOR. PDF File.
Jensen, Mikkel. “Janus-Headed Postmodernism: The Opening Lines of SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE.” The Explicator, 74(1), pp. 8–11
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-five or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, 2009. Print.