Relief

(The death of “Papa” Monzano)

“And then papa said ‘Now I will destroy the whole world.’ “

“What did he mean by that?”

“It’s what Bokonists always say when they are about to commit suicide.” ¹

Humanity lives by the foma² that war is avoidable, that some global utopia can be achieved. Vonnegut suggests that a consensus on the true definition of utopia is not viable because each individual has his or her own truth. In the mentioned excerpt “Papa” Monzano possibly predicts the future, but more likely refers to the destruction of his own world. No other individual would have the same opinions or world perception as his, which illustrates that human beings have endless “shapes”, so how can there ever be consensus? Also, peace cannot be defined without war the same as black is supplemented by white, and lies are born from truths. For this, war and conflict are inherent in human nature.

When the current Israeli conflict will resolve, a new conflict – cause for tension – is bound to arise, whether it is with the same or another “force”. I think that this foma³ about war is not as accepted in the Israeli reality (and other places of similar circumstances). The reality is that wars cannot be prevented; they can be delayed, reduced to a lower scale or even “replaced” by another temporary solution (such as negotiations). But this “solution” may only slightly relieve the tension, preserve the same level of tension, or, most likely, enhance the tension and thus the next collapse will be more intense. War is founded on disagreement between two or more opposing sides so true consensus cannot exist. Even when an agreement is made, it is based on compromise, which means that some of the tension is sustained.

¹ Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, page 238

² Harmless untruths, Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut, page vii

³ Harmless untruths, Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut, page vii

 *This post follows my previous one “Epidemic” and is inspired by Hannah Mooney’s comment on it.

**Thank you Kevin for reviewing my post.

O

“I did not look on my work as therapy, and I still don’t. Yet when I received Norman Bowker’s letter, it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories you objectify your experience. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that really happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain (152)”.

            What separates the character Norman Bowker from the writer O’Brien, is that Bowker’s life is trapped in a circle, while O’Brien escapes existential circling by transmuting his heart’s circles into writing.

O’Brien invents a literary world in which Bowker is trapped in an orbit around his pain, too disconnected from the peace around him to be pulled out of his purposeless hump. The hub of his endless wheel is the lake, which is analogous to the shit field, but which disallows Bowker to identify or confront the source of his emptiness. The lake elicits all of the terror and shame of the shit field, but it is of the peaceful world, and Bowker cannot redeem his wartime self through the peacetime device he is fundamentally divided from. He cannot discuss the war with any people of peace, because he does not know what to say to them: he cannot understand how to bridge the gap between his experience, and the chasm it rent in him, and people with peacetime sensibilities. There is no way for him to remove the pointless wandering from his soul.

As long as O’Brien writes Bowker circling, living in futility, he can progress through graduate school, and marry, and live with trajectory. Through his method described in the above quote, the careful finessing of happening and construction to express and thereby escape his feeling of loss, O’Brien avoided spiritual paralysis. He does not “look on [his] work as therapy,” possibly because he connotes the word negatively, but O’Brien surely frees himself from entrapping internal struggles by writing characters to shoulder some of the burden. 

Baggage

In response to my thesis: (Which essentially states that there is a clear emphasis on the physical and emotional baggage each character carries with them, and often times it is the things that weigh the least that tend to be the most burdensome).

After reading The Things They Carried what is the most striking is how O’Brien wants us to see his novel, not as a war story, but instead as a story about love. Although it is true that while in the war O’Brien carried around a number of things, what he left the war permanently carrying was not a helmet, or twenty pounds of ammunition, but rather the weight of each war story. Coming out of the war, O’Brien is a different person, all innocence lost. The way he sees the world has changed and all he is left to constantly think about is what happened in Vietnam. The baggage from the war is weightlessly suffocating.

“I never spoke much about the war, certainly not in detain, and yet ever since my return I had been talking about it virtually nonstop through my writing. Telling stories seemed a natural inevitable process, like clearing the throat” (O’Brien 151).

Similarly, in Cat’s Cradle once each one of Hoenikker children is in possession of ice-nine, they are suddenly burdened with not just the physical invention itself, but more importantly the emotional baggage that comes along with it. Having seen what ice-nine had the power to do to their father, it is fair to say that each child walks around daily feeling the emotional pressures that come along with carrying a piece of their frozen father; a permanent reminder of his death. Furthermore, knowing that they hold the fate of the world in their hands, adds another layer of emotional complexity to what each child has to carry around with them.

The Difference in Death

           During their lives, Bokononists create individualized realities with the help of their religion, Bokononism. The building blocks of these constructed realities are the foma, or harmless untruths, that Bokononism introduces. The citizens of San Lorenzo, by allowing themselves to believe these untruths, can create a false happiness in their lives, despite the poverty and devastation that surrounds them. When a Bokononist dies, however, his individual reality dies with him. Others’ realities are left essentially untouched. This is why, when a Bokononist commits suicide he or she says “Now I will destroy the whole world” (Vonnegut, 238). Obviously, the individual is not actually referring to the entire world, but his or her own “world.” After a Bokononist dies, his or her reality is no longer relevant. In order words, in the end, a Bokononist would not die with “the right symbol” (Vonnegut, 285) in his or her hands. In fact, in the end, all of the meaning that has been imposed on a Bokononist’s life is meaningless. When someone dies in The Things They Carried, however, the necessity of lies is only amplified. Tim O’Brien and all others involved in the war, use stories and lies to reanimate the dead. If the soldiers create a reality for someone who has already died, they avoid dealing with the death of that person, making war easier on themselves. For example, when the men are confronted with the corpse of an old man they proceed to “propose toasts. The [lift] up their canteens and [drink] to the old man’s family and ancestors, his many grandchildren, his newfound life after death” (O’Brien, 215) rather than deal the blatant truth. 

Why Do You Lie to Me?

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, there exist a significant amount of lies, whether it be in the form of a foma, or an exaggerated or fabricated story.  Both books present a base depressing and cynical perspective on the world, intermixed by a fabric of mistruth.  However, it is through these mistruths that the characters understand and mold the worlds they live in, and subsequently how the reader does as well.

The Things They Carried speaks a lot concerning the nature of stories, specifically in the chapter “Good Form”.  This is also where the “anvil” of the fact that these stories are made up is dropped.  In contrast, Cat’s Cradle admits from the very start.

            Why would someone knowingly deceive themselves and their readers? O’Brien argues that, “What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.”  (172) O’Brien wants to relate the experience of war, loss, and other sentiments to the reader in a natural way.  For him, this is simply by the act of storytelling.  In a construct he specifically designs, he can “look at things he never looked at…attach faces to grief and love and pity and God…be brave…make myself feel again.” (172) Thus, this is how his characters interact with the world he creates them in.  In this world he makes, easily confusable with the real one, he can use metaphors and attention to detail to come across these emotions he feels he needs to communicate.  Similarly, Cat’s Cradle relies on admitting its falsehoods to better emphasize the ideas that are prevalent in the narrative, and not a “happening-truth”.

Under the Ice (9)

In Cat’s Cradle, Jonah summarizes one of the tenets of Bokononism. He describes “the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it” (Cat’s Cradle, p. 284). While one cannot completely escape reality, there are certain necessary foma that must be told in order for the San Lorenzans, and Jonah, to function from day to day.

Tim O’Brien has the same problem as the people of San Lorenzo. Tim can write “true war stories” over and over, each time circling the truth, each time getting closer and closer to what he wants to say, but he’ll never be free of his memories of Vietnam. He can never lie to himself about what he saw there. Tim can call a war story a love story, he can call a gunshot wound a “star-shaped hole” (The Things They Carried, 24), but he’s still haunted by what he saw in Vietnam. He still “wake[s] up his wife and start[s] telling the story to her” (Things They Carried, 82) in the middle of the night. He writes stories as catharsis, but they can’t cover up the memories of the truth.

Tim exaggerates his relationship with Linda at the end of the novel to further muddle the truth. Tim says that they were extremely close and spent a lot of time together, when in reality he barely got to know her. He says, “I loved her and then she died” (Things They Carried, 245). But he takes the lie one level deeper when he says, “I can still see her as if through ice… where there are no bodies at all” (245). Tim uses these mythical “memories” of Linda to escape to a time before he went to Vietnam. By disguising the truth and then lying about it, Tim is attempting to escape the “impossibility of lying” about reality.

Feeling the Lies and/or Questioning the Lies to Understand the Truth

In response to my thesis—essentially stating that readers must be able to “feel” the lies or/or question the relevance of the of the lies to fully understand the truth that is being conveyed.

In an earlier blog post in regards to Cat’s Cradle, I state “I think Cat’s Cradle is a clever way of blurring the line between true and false because in the end, isn’t “our world” a lot closer to the world in Cat’s Cradle where seemingly “nothing in [it] is true.” It is once we question the relevance to our own lives and validity of these lies and fomas that the reader understands Vonnegut’s goal in his satire, and comes to the jarring conclusion that the fictional world in Cat’s Cradle is eerily similar to our own.

Similarly, O’Brien manipulates the reader to really feel the lies that are being told, though we are consciously aware of the fictional nature. By the reader having a visceral and “real” reaction, we are no longer tied down by figuring out if something is true or not, because we have already felt the meaning that O’Brien is elucidating.  

It is the manipulated “real” reaction that the authors extract from their “fake” works that create meaning for a reader, and arguably a more authentic meaning than a non-fictional counterpart.

We Kept The Dead Alive With Stories?

Although Tim states within The Things They Carried that he’s “trying to save Timmy’s life with a story”, throughout the novel he suggests this is impossible. As he talks about the meaning of war he says things like, “you can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead” (O’Brien 39). The idea that the dead can’t be saved or brought back to life also arises on his date with Linda as he says about the body in The Man Who Never Was, “even then I kept seeing the soldier’s body tumbling toward the water, splashing down hard, how inert and heavy it was, how completely dead” (O’Brien 220). Even as Tim strives to bring back the dead, he’s aware that it’s impossible. Perhaps here The Man Who Never Was becomes even more important. The movie, like the beginning of the novel, centers around that which the soldier carries and the conclusions drawn from it, but perhaps even more importantly- all of the conclusions drawn from the body are false. As the Nazi soldiers try and derive meaning from the dead man and discover who he was, effectively trying to bring him back to life in the same way Tim tries to bring the soldiers, Linda, and even his younger self back to life, they can’t do it. They’re wrong about who the soldier was. Perhaps this can also be applied to Tim and his own conceptions of his younger self as well as his friends. Although he says about Linda, “in a story I can steal her soul. I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging. In a story miracles can happen” (O’Brien 224), he is never able to bring Linda back, his imagined relationship with her is never what it was when she was alive, her existence dependent on his imperfect perception and memory, memory which is transformed and revised as time passes, changing  in the same way as Rat Kiley’s stories. Although Tim may strive to bring Timmy back to life through writing, he can’t… and he’s aware he can’t. The truth he tells is imperfect, or perhaps even false, as are his memories of that which is gone.  As he writes and rewrites his history he’s chasing something he can never catch.

(I wrote about the fallibility of memory and perception within Cat’s Cradle in my first blog post)

The Function of Lies

In response to my thesis (which is about the function that lies serve):

I think that what both Vonnegut and O'Brien were trying to get at in their novels is this idea that lies and stories possess a certain functionality. They can be cathartic or communicative, they can make sense of the things that don't make sense, they can transfer raw emotions and give us access to a new vantage point through which to process the world. I believe that this last one is the most important—or at least I believe that that is what Vonnegut and O'Brien have made case for. The world is an invariably intimidating and enigmatic place and often the truth (like that there is no meaning of life, as Jonah finds out or that there is no way to recover one's innocence once it has been lost, as O'Brien finds out) is not something particularly easy to understand or to accept. It seems to me that the truth is that star-shaped hole, that glistening lake that you can circle around but can never find the words to describe or the emotions to process. What lies do, however, is give a person a lifeline, a rope just long enough to make the truth not seem so immediate or so final. From this new vantage point, one is able to face the truth, that incomprehensible thing, and either find a way to accept it or to create a new “truth” to replace it. In The Things They Carried, Tim makes the case for acceptance: he finds that telling stories can double as a coping mechanism for keeping him above the truth that he is unable to fully reconcile his past and his present. On the contrary, Jonah's adherence to Bokononism even after Bokonon admits that the religion is just a mark of “human stupidity” shows that Cat's Cradle is more about inventing the truth than it is about accepting it (Vonnegut 287). 

Why Write

         Tim O’Brien’s guilt for Kiowa’s death in The Things They Carried and the Bokononist’s fear of living in a cruel world in Cat’s Cradle both demonstrate how manipulative lies are used as a defense mechanism to help individuals cope with constant destructive feelings.

            In both of these texts, the authors started off by stating that the content with in the books is not true. The fact that they stated this made us conscious of the fact that the authors were trying to manipulate us, but yet it was very easy for the readers to fall for the lies. The mechanism behind the lies was different in each text, but the purpose was quite similar. Both authors used lies to help them cope with their feelings. O’Brien writes his lies because he has no other way of explaining his emotions and feelings from the war. The Bokononists believe in a web of lies that allows them to cope with the fact that they are living in an unstable and depressing economy. By writing novels and memoires, O’Brien is able to relieve some of the guilt he feels from “killing” Kiowa. By believing in Bokonism, the people of San Lorenzo were able to feel happy and imagine that they lived in a world full of bliss.

Cat’s Cradle- pg. 127 quote from Calypsos

            “I wanted all things

            To seem to make some sense,

            So we all could be happy, yes,

            Instead of tense.

            And I made up lies

            So that they all fit nice,

            And I made this sad world

            A par-a-dise.

This quote is evidence that the Bokononists believe in lies so they can feel better about themselves and about the lives they live in.

The Things They Carried- pg. 178

            “In a way, maybe, I’d gone under with Kiowa, and now after two decades I’d mostly worked my way out.”

Two decades later, Tim O’Brien has written multiple books about the Vietnam war, which arguably are not about the war at all. However, all of these books are written as O’Brien’s coping mechanism to help him get over his grief and his guilt about Kiowa’s death. 

A Second Read

To put it lightly, reading The Things They Carried for the second time has blown my mind. The first time through, O’Brien’s flowery language and constant intermissions annoyed me to be quite honest. But having read it more critically along with our class discussions, I have realized that both are absolutely crucial to the narrative. As O’Brien himself states, it is impossible to tell a war story with a moral, and it is impossible to tell a war story that is absolutely true. Chapters like “Good Form” break the narrative and make the reader doubt all that he has read. O’Brien outright says that “almost everything else is invented” (171). Yet, in the very next paragraph he states that what he said was at least partially true, before going on to debunk himself again. As he so eloquently puts it, the “story truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (171).

In fact, I believe that the purpose of O’Brien inserting himself as the narrator of a fictional story is to further this doubt. Had the narrator been a fictional character with a made up name and completely made up experiences, the entire novel would lose credibility. Having to separate between the author himself and his recreation of himself in the book allows the reader to trust the author’s credibility as a Vietnam veteran, while at the same time not believing a word that the narrator says. As O’Brien says, his purpose is to “invent myself” (171). In inventing himself, he creates a more believable story than if had written the absolute truth.

Making Things Present

After reading both novels, I found profound similarity between the two conclusions.  Both embody the idea that stories have the power to “make things present.”

Vonnegut lists things he “would” have done “If [he] were a younger man.”  Although the immediate effect and perception I have is one of regret, all of the actions he lists are ones that his characters or he himself have done.  For example, he writes, “I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe,” which Jonah, the narrator, did.  He says, “I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statutes of men; and I would make a statue of myself.”  Just a few pages earlier, Jonah came across Bokonon who did just that.  At the beginning of the paragraph Vonnegut writes, “I would write a history of human stupidity,” which he (Vonnegut and Jonah) did.  Because of this statement, the “I” becomes more ambiguous.  Did Vonnegut write Jonah to be himself?  Furthermore, Vonnegut made up Bokononism.  Vonnegut is technically the author of the Books of Bokonon, thus also equivocating himself with Bokonon.  Bokonon made a statue of himself from blue powder, and Jonah said he would have made one of himself.  Now all three of them are connected.  By making readers identify him with his characters, Vonnegut essentially puts himself in the book, which is impossible because in the book the world ended; yet here we all are, in the present.

O’Brien’s conclusion is more obvious in its connection to the present: it is written in the present tense.  He says, “I’m young and happy,” describing his current state.  Also, like Vonnegut, O’Brien draws himself closer to his character O’Brien when he says “Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.”  This statement describes what O’Brien the author is currently trying to do, in part, with the novel, and his other writings in general.  Through his writing, O’Brien brings people to life in words, telling a story that makes himself and readers feel deeply, so much that those they read about come alive and feel present.  Through his ability to make himself believe certain “foma” through stories, O’Brien demonstrates the power stories have to redefine what it means to be present.  It doesn’t only apply to what is physically visible.  Being present can mean being in someone’s thoughts, or even evoking emotion from words on a page.

*All Vonnegut quotes are from page 287; all O’Brien quotes are from page 233.

*Thanks Professor Schwartz for helping synthesize my idea.