War and the Politics of War: LitAgra in Conversation with Nibir K. Ghosh on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five

 

War and the Politics of War: 

LitAgra in Conversation with Nibir K. Ghosh on 

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five

 Saurabh Agarwal

In this conversation, recorded at the LitAgra ‘Book of the Month Meet’ held at Agra on 29 April, 2023, Professor Nibir K. Ghosh, talks at length on a variety of subjects that include his internationally acclaimed book Calculus of Power, the complexities of reading works like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, glamorization as well as denunciation of War in literature and films, and  how the individual, caught in the vortex of the power game, strives to evolve strategies for survival in a hostile, regimented and fluctuating environment.

Saurabh Agarwal: On behalf of LitAgra, I consider it a privilege to welcome you to today’s meet. First of all, accept our heartiest congratulations on the completion of 25 years of publication of your book, Calculus of Power. It is also an exemplary feat that this book figured in the list of 100 best books in “Political, Social, Cultural Criticism on Imaginative Literature: 1990-2003” that includes names of authors/critics like Harold Bloom, Edward Said, Lionel Trilling, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison among others.

Nibir Ghosh: Thanks, Saurabh for the greetings and felicitations. I deem it a pleasure to be sharing this evening with the LitAgra members.

Saurabh Agarwal: How did you come to decide on the catchy title “Calculus of Power” for your book?

Nibir Ghosh: This work presents a systematic and analytical evaluation of the political issues crucial to the understanding of twentieth century America. As politics is the most explicit embodiment of power relations, the book not only highlights the dynamics of power central to these issues but also illuminates how the individual, caught in the vortex of the power game, strives to evolve strategies for survival in a hostile, regimented and fluctuating environment. In a figurative sense, I have used the mathematical symbol to understand power equations in the world’s most powerful nation.

Saurabh Agarwal: Calculus of Power is an attempt to understand the problems and the changes that have been taking place in America through the study of selected fictional works. The selection of 18 works that form the subject of your study must have been a daunting task for you. 

Nibir Ghosh: As you may be aware, Calculus of Power is subtitled Modern American Political Novel. Selecting 18 novels out of around 125, representing five different areas of American society and polity, was primarily a labour of love rather than a daunting task. It was a challenge in a way that each novel’s inclusion demanded a rationale in being truly representative. It was a work that took me six precious years to complete but the recognition it received makes up for the time involved. Also, it gave me a comprehensive idea of what America was, is and will be through an intensive reading of its history, literature, culture and politics. The grant of the Senior Fulbright Fellowship for a year of research at the University of Washington, Seattle was like an icing on the cake.

Saurabh Agarwal: We as the book club members and readers in general always face this debate on what to read. So, to the general readers what would you suggest should be the consideration before making a book selection.

Nibir Ghosh: In Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland Alice asks the Cheshire Cat: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don't much care where,” said Alice. “Then it doesn't matter which way you go,” said the Cat. The way we should approach a book is quite like that. It depends on our individual approach to life and what we want from life: pleasure, profit, entertainment, or some higher goal or purpose.

Saurabh Agarwal: One challenge that we face is whether to choose fiction or nonfiction.

Nibir Ghosh: Fiction obviously provides a more comprehensive imaginative vision of reality than other genres.

Saurabh Agarwal: What, in your view, is a reasonably good way of approaching a book?

Nibir Ghosh: As a student, I had read a statement by Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893), French thinker, critic and historian known for applying the scientific method to the study of the humanities, wherein he mentions three great conditioning facts pertaining to study of literature: “the man, the milieu and the moment” i.e. the writer’s personality, his social, political, and geographical background, and the historical situation in which he writes. Considering the importance women writing enjoys today, we could also easily use “the woman, the milieu and the moment.”

Saurabh Agarwal: Does it mean we should be familiar with the man, the milieu and the moment before we begin reading a book?

Nibir Ghosh: No. On the contrary we should delve straight into the book. If we get interested in the plot, theme, or character we should then go to see it against these concepts. I have always encouraged my students to read the best books, rather than read the best books about the best books.  

Saurabh Agarwal: Slaughterhouse Five occupies a significant position among novels about war and its dreadful consequences. What relevance can a reader in India find in this book after the period of 75 years from the time dealt by the novel? Or in other words why should we read Slaughterhouse Five?

Nibir Ghosh: You ask, why should we read Slaughterhouse Five? Why should we read any good book for that matter? Milton said that “A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to life beyond life.” You know, Saurabh, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in France, it is told that there were longer queues of people outside book shops in Paris to procure a copy of The Plague by Albert Camus than that of COVID-infected patients waiting outside hospitals for a bed. Doesn’t this augur well for those who value books?

In my view, Slaughterhouse Five is the precious lifeblood of Kurt Vonnegut that gives us a view into a dimension of humanity hitherto unexplored. Why else would Vonnegut have waited 23 years to come to the conclusion that “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” His is a daring stand to expose those powers that be that glamorize war.

Saurabh Agarwal: Could you please cite a few examples of works that show glamorization of war?

Nibir Ghosh: I remember when I once visited Bangalore (now Bengaluru) as a student, I had gone to see Patton, the multiple Oscar-winning 1970 film in a posh theatre. The movie opened with the American flag sprawled over the large screen. Then walked in General George S. Patton, famous tank commander of World War II, played by George C. Scott. As General Patton uttered the following opening words on the screen: “Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country,” everyone present in the hall gave the speech a standing ovation. This is how War and such propagandist articulations thrills audiences all the world over. In Slaughterhouse Five Vonnegut cites words used by President Harry S. Truman’s announcement justifying the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima: “With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces…We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.” This is how military supremacy is established without counting the cost in human terms.

Saurabh Agarwal: Can we call Slaughterhouse Five an anti-war novel?

Nibir Ghosh: I see it primarily as a novel that condemns war as well as violence in whatever form they appear. It is a novel about death. If you have noticed, the expression, “So it goes,” figures 106 times in the novel. It is not a way of accepting life but, rather, of facing death. It occurs in the text almost every single time someone dies, and only when death is evoked. It is used only and always as a comment on death. In the last section of the book, the frame of reference shifts from Dresden to America when Billy Pilgrim mentions the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., two events that had then rocked  the contemporary world.

Saurabh Agarwal: In Calculus of Power the chapter entitled “In the Theater of War” deals with four works including Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. All these works are canonical in their own right. The range and variety of this choice can be understood. Could you shed some light on the said chapter?

Nibir Ghosh: The first war novel in the chapter is Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) that deals with the Spanish Civil War which was considered a dress-rehearsal to World War II. Hemingway portrays the human ability to display exceptional courage when loyalty to a cause is at stake. It is followed by a discussion on Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller. Heller’s novel became an instant success with a sale exceeding six million copies, an unparalleled publishing phenomenon and a cult book all over the world. Emerging out of Heller’s experience as a wing bombardier in Second World War for the Twelfth Air Force stationed at Corsica, where he flew sixty missions, Catch-22 continues to be regarded as a scathing indictment of the big business of modern warfare.

Armies of the Night (1968) by Norman Mailer has for its subject the author’s diatribe against the Vietnam War that is founded on strongly logical lines. He takes almost all the important factors into consideration before denouncing the American intervention. According to him, no war is justified which tends to encourage the secret passion for hunting other humans even if it is nurtured on the illusory note of patriotism. His assertion is an indictment of American involvement in Vietnam: “pull out of Vietnam and completely leave Asia to The Asians.” Armies of the Night offers an elaborate expression of his first-hand experience of the anti-war march on the Pentagon on October 21, 1967. Subtitled History as a Novel, the Novel as History, the book won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Combining the historical and the novelistic viewpoints of the Pentagon March, Mailer explores, with a fairly high degree of passion, all the ingredients of the anti-Vietnam demonstration in order to offer a brilliant exposure of America itself.  

Saurabh Agarwal: How would you compare the novels of these three writers with Slaughterhouse Five?

Nibir Ghosh: In relation to the above three novels, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five showcases a uniquely different view of war by portraying the fire-bombing of Dresden by American bombers on February 1945 that destroyed the beautiful German city and killed 1,35,000 innocent people. Although war and catastrophe recur frequently in Slaughterhouse Five, combat centred action is cleverly avoided to focus attention on Billy Pilgrim’s conscious and subconscious interaction with the fire-bombing of Dresden. It is pertinent that the novel contains no scene of any battle. What remains at the centre always is the devastation of a beautiful undefended city. It is not surprising that the novel also mentions the catastrophe brought about by American intervention in the Vietnam War. The speaker at the Lions Club meeting voices America’s capacity for intent and capacity for destroying people. With a tinge of irony, Billy Pilgrim refers to the views of the said speaker justifying America’s role in Vietnam: “Americans had no choice but to keep fighting in Vietnam until they achieved victory or until Communists realized that they could not force their way of life on weak countries. … He was in favor of increased bombings, of bombing North Vietnam back into the Stone Age, if it refused to see reason.” Combining history with science-fiction, fantasy with documentation, reality with optical illusion, Vonnegut offers a comprehensive critique of war and the grim realities of war in a manner that justifies that “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” Also, Slaughterhouse Five seems to me to be significant because it shows “our” side, the supposed good guys, destroying a beautiful city.

Saurabh Agarwal: There is a whole gamut of books that have been written on World Wars and still the writers who have been born after WWII are writing books based on that.  Depiction of WW in literature and movies has been accepted as a method to deal with the pain. India too has undergone pain and suffering untold. Do you feel that writers in India have done justice in terms of tackling the subject of atrocities that this country has undergone?

Books after WW II often of focused on Vietnam. If you’re going to talk about wars and books it would be savvy to say something about Vietnam – more than what you say about Armies of the Night.

Nibir Ghosh: Yes, writers and film makers in India have dealt with atrocities connected with events like the Partition, Gujarat riots, the Sikh riots, the Kargil war etc. But in most cases they follow the traditional linear uncomplicated mode of narration and the experiences have a direct bearing on actual action.

Saurabh Agarwal: Many of our readers experience great difficulty in reading works by modern writers on account of the complexities of their narratives and their experimentation with techniques. Would you like to share your views on how a lay reader, especially in India, can negotiate through such hurdles pertaining to techniques and themes used in the Western world?

Nibir Ghosh: In order to come to terms with the complexities involved in understanding or enjoying fiction of this kind, please allow me to digress a little and take the learned audience to some of the factors that influenced writers in France, Germany, England, America among other nations in the 20^th century and after. With the publication of Principles of Psychology by William James in 1890, radical change was ushered in the domain of human thought. James' most famous psychological metaphor was the concept of “stream of consciousness” that changed forever our traditional manner of studying human behaviour. However, it may be useful to say that “stream of consciousness” made its entry into literature primarily through three exponents -- Virginia Woolf in England, Marcel Proust in France and James Joyce in Ireland (though unknown to one another) -- who were working simultaneously on the idea of using the stream of consciousness as a technique to unfold the working of the human mind in its various dimensions. Virginia Woolf pointed out emphatically that “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged. Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding the mind from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” Herein arose the need for a writer or reader to understand that the linear mode of the beginning, the middle and the end was no longer tenable to see reality in its totality.

Saurabh Agarwal: Did World War II and its aftermath effect the perception of life in any way? 

Nibir Ghosh: The post-World War II scene raised very significant issues pertaining to Europe and America in terms of philosophy of living and approach to literature, giving rise to ideas like existentialism, nihilism and the absurd that propagated that God was dead, the Novel was dead, the Hero was dead. The emergent existential crisis drew the attention of writers and philosophers alike. Nietzsche pronounced: “Not to be born is best for man; to die young was the second best.” In due course, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean Paul Sartre, Thomas Becket and many others opened up debates and discourses about finding ways and means to discover the purpose of living in an absurd universe where nothing seemed to be certain and constant.

Saurabh Agarwal: Most of the themes of the book are being taken up by the members. I would request you to express your views on the idea of Free Will which figures prominently in the novel. How has Kurt Vonnegut addressed this philosophical concern in his work?

Nibir Ghosh: First of all, let’s explore what “Free Will” implies. Shakespeare, in Julius Caesar writes, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/ But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Which means man is free to forge his own destiny. Contrarily, in King Lear we have the lines, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport,” meaning thereby that we are mere playthings in the hands of God. Free Will is, therefore, our ability to explore our choices and then take a stand and decide the course of action we need to follow. But once we decide, we are responsible directly for the consequences of our actions. In the Gita Lord Krishna explains to Arjuna everything he needs to know but in the 18^th chapter, he tells Arjuna that he is now free to decide what is best for him.

In Slaughterhouse Five Billy Pilgrim exemplifies that he is capable of exercising his Free Will despite his being “a plaything of forces” beyond his control when he reassures Mary O’Hare, his friend’s wife, who derides people for glorifying wars: “If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.” True to his promise, Vonnegut refrains from glorifying War in any form like the makers of the film Patton.

Saurabh Agarwal: What role can a novel like Slaughterhouse Five play in discouraging human interest in warfare?

Nibir Ghosh: Vonnegut condemns violence but does not see any great possibility of the individual effecting any change. Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) couldn’t dissuade demagogues like Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and others from initiating the systematic murder and genocide of millions of people from 1939 to 1945. In today’s parlance all the anti-war novels are of no consequence to fanatics like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump or the rest of them. Yet, it is important that novels like Slaughterhouse Five must continue to be written to sensitize feeling human beings to the catastrophe and the misery of what meaningless wars entail. No careful reader can miss the impact of Vonnegut’s firm resolve that appears very early in the novel: “I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.” It cannot be ruled out that the thousands of Russians who have left Russia and have turned away from war were influenced by books and movies and literature about war.

The goal that Vonnegut sets for the individual is to find a strategy for surviving in a conflict-ridden world by asserting his/her own choice of condemning violence in any form rather than side with offenders under the pretext of neutrality. Billy Pilgrim has acquired, through his own experiences as a prisoner of war, “the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.”

Saurabh Agarwal: Thank you Sir for this engaging conversation.

Nibir Ghosh: I must thank you, Mr. Mohit Mahajan and your enthusiastic team for organizing this meet with such success.

 

Video Link

 LIT - 29-04-2023 - 2of8.mp4