Structuralism and Space Aliens

At a glance, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five appears to be something like a normal novel cut to pieces and reassembled at random. Of course, first impressions aren’t always accurate, and anyone who has *read* the novel can tell you that it is in reality a meticulously assembled work that is made to appear random as part of a comment on narrative structure. In the novel, Vonnegut also uses a bizarre race of aliens called the Tralfamadorians to further comment on the structure of novels, particularly the novel they appear in.

The Tralfamadorians, little creatures in flying saucers that look like toilet plungers with hands on top of them, perceive time as happening all at once, without beginning or end. As a result of their peculiar perception of chronology, they view time one moment as being no more important than another, each just another facet in time’s crystalline structure. Beginnings and endings have no importance in the grand scheme of things, and life and death are barely made distinct from one another.

Vonnegut constructs his novel to reflect the way Tralfamadorians perceive time, and in doing so subverts traditional narrative structure. This is evident in the first chapter of the novel, in which Vonnegut (the narrator) tells us exactly how Vonnegut (the author) will begin and end the story of protagonist Billy Pilgrim, and in doing so strips both moments of their significance in a traditional narrative. If the reader already knows how the story will begin and end, then everything in the middle becomes of equal or greater importance.

Of course, simply telling readers how a story begins and ends isn’t enough to be taken as a comment on narrative structure, so Vonnegut also structures in the middle in a wholly non-linear fashion, alternating between moments in Billy Pilgrim’s strange existence with such fluidity that they seem to be happening all at once. The novel has a faint hint of a traditional narrative structure with moments of rising and falling action and a fairly distinct climax, but they are created through the juxtaposition of unrelated events and not one moment leading to the next in chronological order.

Vonnegut takes the comparison between the Tralfamadorians and the structure of Slaughterhouse Five a step further when he introduces the Tralfamadorian novel during Billy Pilgrim’s flying saucer voyage back to the aliens’ home planet as “brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. . .there isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.”

This is Vonnegut’s ultimate comment on the nature of stories: it need not matter what order the pieces are in, as long as they are part of a meaningful whole.

Race and Gender in Their Eyes Were Watching God

In last Friday's class we discussed some critical responses from three black scholars to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God that focused on the book's status as a great work of African-American literature. Two of those responses, written by Richard Wright and Alain Locke, both contemporaries of Hurston, criticize the book for what they perceive to be its failure to live up to their expectations of what a great black novel should be. I would argue that in doing so they have misread the intentions of the novelist: Their Eyes Were Watching God is primarily concerned with issues of gender, not with issues of race.

In having Janie's grandmother refer to the black woman as "de mule uh duh world," Hurston sets up a tale not about the struggle of the black American living in a prejudiced society, but the struggle of a woman to find independence and self-worth in a rural black community. June Jordan is correct when she argues that "whites do not figure in [the novel] . . . white anything or anybody is not important". The only white characters to appear in the novel do so during flashbacks, specifically to times before Janie's grandmother purchased her own property. The rest of the novel is focused purely on Eatonville and the other all-black communities that Janie finds herself in. By choosing her settings in this way, Hurston de-emphasizes racial themes and puts the focus on Janie's quest for self-affirmation as a woman.

Other evidence for this reading of the novel comes from the fact that the hardships Janie faces in the novel come to her not because of her race, but because of her gender. As a woman, Janie is forced to marry the first man her grandmother deems correct for her, then spends the majority of her life being ignored and abused by the men society says she has to rely on. Only through finding her own self-worth does Janie realize that she deserves to live life the way she believes she should live it, and though she chooses to rely on Tea Cake even after inheriting money from Jody, it is made clear in the novel that she is making a conscious choice to do so.

Locke in particular is incorrect in his assertion that Hurston's novel is not one of social document fiction. With Janie's story Hurston presents the ongoing efforts of a woman trying to make her own place in the world and does so in a way that equates it with those of other oppressed groups struggling to claim an equal standing in the society in which they live.