Agents & Instruments

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6811719312494990925.post-25384147485375448472007-04-13T14:18:00.000-07:002007-04-13T22:41:11.665-07:00Agents & Instruments <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_v2rVAzSjdUE/RiADE3cEkQI/AAAAAAAAAAU/lOFh6qxdVYs/s1600-h/bodies+iraq.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_v2rVAzSjdUE/RiADE3cEkQI/AAAAAAAAAAU/lOFh6qxdVYs/s400/bodies+iraq.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5053042164045746434" border="0" /></a> <div style="text-align: center;">Bodies falling into the state -- Karbala, Iraq: October, 2006 </div><blockquote>It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth.</blockquote><div style="text-align: center;">- Emerson </div><blockquote style="font-style: italic;">In went water and loaves of black-bread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language. </blockquote><div style="text-align: center;">- Vonnegut </div> 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:<blockquote>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.</blockquote>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:<blockquote>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.</blockquote>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:<blockquote>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.</blockquote>And a few more lines on, the Vonnegutian reduction of life to digestion is complete:<blockquote>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:<blockquote>"Sing a song 'a vic'try, A pocketful 'a bullets, Five an' twenty dead men Baked in a -- pie.'</blockquote></blockquote>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:<blockquote>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.</blockquote>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":<blockquote>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.</blockquote>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:<blockquote>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.</blockquote>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:<blockquote>The youth joined this crowd and marched along with it. The torn bodies expressed the awful machinery in which the men had been entangled. </blockquote>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:<blockquote>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. </blockquote>JLBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10987058554014193721noreply@blogger.com