Vonnegut is a beloved author who has never been called a racist, sexist, elitist, or Social Darwinist. Imagine the reaction if he had stated his message in declarative sentences rather than in a satirical story. Every generation has its designated jokers, from Shakespearean fools to Lenny Bruce, who give voice to truths that are unmentionable in polite society. Today part-time humorists like Vonnegut, and full-time ones like Richard Pryor, Dave Barry, and the writers of The Onion, are continuing that tradition.
VONNEGUT’S DYSTOPIAN FANTASY was played out as a story-length farce, but the most famous of such fantasies was played out as a novel-length nightmare. George Orwell’s 1984 is a vivid depiction of what life would look like if the repressive strands of society and government were extrapolated into the future. In the half-century since the novel was published, many developments have been condemned because of their associations to Orwell’s world: government euphemism, national identity cards, surveillance cameras, personal data on the Internet, and even, in the first television commercial for the Macintosh computer, the IBM PC. No other work of fiction has had such an impact on people’s opinions of real-world issues.
Nineteen Eighty-four was unforgettable literature, not just a political screed, because of the way Orwell thought through the details of how his society would work. Every component of the nightmare interlocked with the others to form a rich and credible whole: the omnipresent government, the eternal war with shifting enemies, the totalitarian control of the media and private life, the Newspeak language, the constant threat of personal betrayal.
Less widely known is that the regime had a well-articulated philosophy. It is explained to Winston Smith in the harrowing sequence in which he is strapped to a table and alternately tortured and lectured by the government agent O’Brien. The philosophy of the regime is thoroughly postmodernist, O’Brien explains (without, of course, using the word). When Winston objects that the Party cannot realize its slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” O’Brien replies:
You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.4
O’Brien admits that for certain purposes, such as navigating the ocean, it is useful to assume that the Earth goes around the sun and that there are stars in distant galaxies. But, he continues, the Party could also use alternative astronomies in which the sun goes around the Earth and the stars are bits of fire a few kilometers away. And though O’Brien does not explain it in this scene, Newspeak is the ultimate “prisonhouse of language,” a “language that thinks man and his ‘world.’”
O’Brien’s lecture should give pause to the advocates of postmodernism. It is ironic that a philosophy that prides itself on deconstructing the accoutrements of power should embrace a relativism that makes challenges to power impossible, because it denies that there are objective benchmarks against which the deceptions of the powerful can be evaluated. For the same reason, the passages should give pause to radical scientists who insist that other scientists’ aspirations to theories with objective reality (including theories about human nature) are really weapons to preserve the interests of the dominant class, gender, and race.5 Without a notion of objective truth, intellectual life degenerates into a struggle of who can best exercise the raw force to “control the past.”
A second precept of the Party’s philosophy is the doctrine of the super-organism:
Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?6
The doctrine that a collectivity (a culture, a society, a class, a gender) is a living thing with its own interests and belief system lies behind Marxist political philosophies and the social science tradition begun by Durkheim. Orwell is showing its dark side: the dismissal of the individual—the only entity that literally feels pleasure and pain—as a mere component that exists to further the interests of the whole. The sedition of Winston and his lover Julia began in the pursuit of simple human pleasures—sugar and coffee, white writing paper, private conversation, affectionate lovemaking. O’Brien makes it clear that such individualism will not be tolerated: “There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother.”7
The Party also believes that emotional ties to family and friends are “habits” that get in the way of a smoothly functioning society:
Already we are breaking down the habits of thought that have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated…. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness.8
It is hard to read the passage and not think of the current enthusiasm for proposals in which enlightened mandarins would reengineer childrearing, the arts, and the relationship between the sexes in an effort to build a better society.
Dystopian novels, of course, work by grotesque exaggeration. Any idea can be made to look terrifying in caricature, even if it is reasonable in moderation. I do not mean to imply that a concern with the interests of society or in improving human relationships is a step toward totalitarianism. But satire can show how popular ideologies may have forgotten downsides—in this case, how the notion that language, thought, and emotions are social conventions creates an opening for social engineers to try to reform them. Once we become aware of the downsides, we no longer have to treat the ideologies as sacred cows to which factual discoveries must be subordinated.
And finally we get to the core of the Party’s philosophy. O’Brien has refuted every one of Winston’s arguments, dashed every one of his hopes. He has informed him, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Toward the end of this dialogue, O’Brien reveals the proposition that makes the whole nightmare possible (and whose falsehood, we may surmise, will make it impossible).
As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O’Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O’Brien had said, he returned to the attack.
“I don’t know—I don’t care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.”
“We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.”9
THE THREE WORKS I have discussed are didactic and unanchored in any existing time and place. The remaining two are different. Both are rooted in a culture, a locale, and an era. Both savor their characters’ language, milieu, and philosophies of life. And both authors warned their readers not to generalize from the stories. Yet both authors are famous for their insight into human nature, and I believe I am doing them no injustice by presenting episodes from their works in that light.
Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an especially perilous source for lessons because it begins with the following order of the author: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” That has not deterred a century of cri
tics from noting its dual power. Huckleberry Finn shows us both the foibles of the antebellum South and the foibles of human nature, as seen through the eyes of two noble savages who sample them as they float down the Mississippi River.
Huckleberry Finn revels in many human imperfections, but perhaps the most tragicomic is the origin of violence in a culture of honor. The culture of honor is really a psychology of honor: a package of emotions that includes a loyalty to kin, a hunger for revenge, and a drive to maintain a reputation for toughness and valor. When sparked by other human sins—envy, lust, self-deception—they can fuel a vicious cycle of violence, as each side finds itself unable to abjure revenge against the other. The cycle can become amplified in certain places, among them the American South.
Huck met up with the culture of honor on two occasions in quick succession. The first was when he stowed away on a barge manned by a “rough-looking lot” of hard-drinking men. After one of them was about to belt out the fifteenth verse of a raunchy song, an altercation of relatively trivial origin broke out, and two men squared off to fight.
[Bob, the biggest man on the boat] jumped up in the air and cracked his heels together again and shouted out: “Whoo-oop! I’m the original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw! Look at me! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the smallpox on the mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whisky for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing. I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood’s my natural drink and the wails of the dying is music to my ear. Cast your eye on me, gentlemen! and lay low and hold your breath, for I’m ‘bout to turn myself loose!”…
Then the man that had started the row… jumped up and cracked his heels together three times before he lit again…, and he began to shout like this: “Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the kingdom of sorrow’s a coming! Hold me down to the earth, for I feel my powers a-working!… I put my hand on the sun’s face and make it night in the earth; I bite a piece out of the moon and hurry the seasons; I shake myself and crumble the mountains! Contemplate me through leather— dont use the naked eye! I’m the man with a petrified heart and biler-iron bowels! The massacre of isolated communities is the pastime of my idle moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of my life! The boundless vastness of the great American desert is my inclosed property, and I bury the dead on my own premises!… Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the Pet Child of Calamity’s a’coming!”10
They circled and flailed at each other and knocked each other’s hats off, until Bob said, as Huck describes it,
… never mind, this warn’t going to be the last of this thing, because he was a man that never forgot and never forgive, and so The Child better look out for there was a time a-coming, just as sure as he was a living man, that he would have to answer to him with the best blood in his body. The Child said no man was willinger than he for that time to come, and he would give Bob fair warning, now, never to cross his path again, for he could never rest till he had waded in his blood, for such was his nature, though he was sparing him now on account of his family, if he had one.11
And then a “little black-whiskered chap” sent them both sprawling. With black eyes and red noses, they shook hands, said they had always respected each other, and agreed to let bygones be bygones.
Later in the chapter Huck swims ashore and stumbles onto the cabin of a family called the Grangerfords. Huck is frozen in his tracks by menacing dogs, until a voice from the window beckons him to enter the cabin slowly. He opens the door and finds himself staring down the barrels of three shotguns. When the Grangerfords see that Huck is not a Shepherdson, the family with whom they are feuding, they welcome him to live with them. Huck is captivated by their genteel life: their lovely furnishings, their elegant dress, and their refined manners, especially the patriarch, Col. Grangerford. “He was a gentleman all over, and so was his family. He was well born, as the saying is, and that’s worth as much in a man as it is in a horse.”
Three of the six Grangerford sons had been killed in the feud, and the youngest survivor, Buck, has befriended Huck. When the two boys go for a walk and Buck shoots at a Shepherdson boy, Huck asks why he wants to kill someone who has done nothing to hurt him. Buck explains the concept of a feud:
“Well,” says Buck, “a feud is this way: A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man’s brother kills him; then the other brothers on both sides goes for one another; then the cousins chip in—and by and by everybody’s killed off and there ain’t no more feud. But it’s kind of slow and takes a long time.”
“Has this one been going on long, Buck?”
“Well, I should reckon! It started thirty years ago, or som’ers along there. There was trouble ‘bout something and then a lawsuit to settle it, and the suit went agin one of the men and so he up and shot the man that won the suit—which he would naturally do, of course. Anybody would.”
“What was the trouble about, Buck?—land?”
“I reckon maybe—I don’t know.”
“Well, who done the shooting? Was it a Grangerford or a Shepherd-son?”
“Laws, how do I know? It was so long ago.”
“Don’t anybody know?”
“Oh, yes, pa knows, I reckon, and some of the other old people; but they don’t know now what the row was about in the first place.”12
Buck adds that the feud is carried along by the two families’ sense of honor: “There ain’t a coward amongst them Shepherdsons—not a one. And there ain’t no cowards amongst the Grangerfords either.”13 The reader anticipates trouble, and it comes soon enough. A Grangerford girl runs off with a Shepherdson boy, the Grangerfords head off in hot pursuit, and all the Grangerford males are killed in an ambush. “I ain’t a’going to tell all that happened,” says Huck; “it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn’t ever come ashore that night to see such things.”14
In the course of the chapter Huck has met up with two instances of the Southern culture of honor. Among the low-lifes it amounted to hollow bluster and was played for laughs; among the aristocrats it led to the devastation of two families and played out as tragedy. I think Twain was commenting on the twisted logic of violence and how it cuts across our stereotypes of refined and coarse classes of people. Indeed, the moral reckoning does not just cut across the classes but inverts them: the riffraff resolve their pointless dispute with face-saving verbiage; the gentlemen pursue their equally pointless one to a dreadful conclusion.
Though thoroughly Southern, the perverse psychology of the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud is familiar from the history and ethnography of just about any region of the world. (In particular, Huck’s introduction to the Grangerfords was hilariously replayed in Napoleon Chagnon’s famous account of his baptism into anthropological fieldwork, in which he stumbled into a feuding Yanomamö village and found himself trapped by dogs and staring down the shafts of poison arrows.) And it is familiar in the cycles of violence that continue to be played out by gangs, militias, ethnic groups, and respectable nation-states. Twain’s depiction of the origins of endemic violence in an entrapping psychology of honor has a timelessness that will, I predict, make it outlast fashionable theories of the causes and cures of violence.
THE FINAL THEME I wish to reprise is that the human tragedy lies in the partial conflicts of interest that are inherent to all human relationships. I suppose I could illustrate it with just about any great work of fiction. An immortal literary text expresses “all the principal constants of conflict in the condition of man,” wrote George Steiner about Antigone; “ Ordinary people experiencing friction on the page is what warms our hands and hearts as we write,” observe
d John Updike. But one novel caught my eye by flaunting the idea in its title: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story.15
Singer, like Twain, protests too much against the possibility that his readers might draw morals from the slice of life he presents. “Although I did not have the privilege of going through the Hitler holocaust, I have lived for years in New York with refugees from this ordeal. I therefore hasten to say that this novel is by no means the story of the typical refugee, his life, and struggle….The characters are not only Nazi victims but victims of their own personalities and fates.” In literature the exception is the rule, Singer writes, but only after noting that the exception is rooted in the rule. Singer has been praised as a keen observer of human nature, not least because he imagines what happens when fate puts ordinary characters in extraordinary dilemmas. This is the conceit behind his book and the superb 1989 film adaptation, directed by Paul Mazursky and featuring Anjelica Huston and Ron Silver.
Herman Broder lives in Brooklyn in 1949 with his second wife, Yadwiga, a peasant girl who worked for his parents as a servant when they lived in Poland. A decade earlier his first wife, Tamara, had taken their two children to visit her parents, and while they were separated the Nazis invaded Poland. Tamara and the children were shot; Herman survived because Yadwiga hid him in her family’s hayloft. At the end of the war he learned of his family’s fate and married Yadwiga, and they found their way to New York.