190
PARTISAN REVIEW
burlesque, making up Borgesian religions, cultures, whole literary
oeuvres,
and writing down their texts. But faced with the ftrebomb–
ing of Dresden, where he himself had been a helpless bystander, a
stunned survivor, he lets the intensity of his feelings overshadow the
fable that tries to express them. The brilliant ftrst chapter, which tells
the story straight, overwhelms the ftctional version which follows.
Compared
w
the moving personal presence of the author in the
opening chapter, there's a thinness and insubstantiality, a puppetlike
quality, to Billy Pilgrim and his fellow "characters" as they jerk
through the time warps laid down for them by the author. The other
side of the inventiveness of sixties ftction is the high degree of manip–
ulation 'and authorial presence we encounter, which entails a deple–
tion of life in the thing made, the story told, the character caricatured.
A writer like Barth pays for his Brechtian honesty about what he's
making up by a loss of vitality, until the "story" is pared down to his
own witty and self-conscious voice soliloquizing about the act of
creation. This imbalance between creator and artifact is an ambiguous
development. Where ftctional characters in the ftfties can still subject
life to a degree of personal control , can grow and change within the
limits of their personality, the zany, two-dimensional characters in
Vonnegut, Barth, Pynchon, and Heller declare not simply their
authors' departure from realism but their brooding sense that life is
increasingly controlled by impersonal forces. For the realist of the
ftfties, character is destiny; for the comic-apocalyptic writer, destiny
turns character into a joke. For the ftfties writer, history is remote and
irrelevant compared to what Updike calls "private people and their
minute concerns"; for the sixties writer, history is absurd but it can
kill you. Books like
Slaughterhouse-Five
and
Catch-22
do not slowly
gravitate towards death like straightforward novels with unhappy
endings. Because of their peculiar structure-in which everything is
foreshadowed, everything happens at once-they are drenched in
death on all sides, like an epidemic that breaks out everywhere at the
same time. Thanks to the time-scheme of Heller's book characters
seem perpetually a-dying and reappearing-quite a joke-so that
we're shocked when they ftnally do disappear, one by one, each with
his own mock individuality, each to his utterly depersonalizing fate.
And the Army stands for fate or necessity itself; it's a machine not for
ftghting or killing but solely for devouring its own.
