英文文學與文化教學資料庫

''Death of the Author?''

Besides responding to the writing modes of black humorist and metafictional elements, Vonnegut's novels are also related to contemporary critical discourse. In critical theories, two influential essays, John Barth's ''The Literature of Exhaustion'' (1967) and ''The Death of the Author'' (1968) by Roland Barthes, comment on and respond to the ideas of the author in creative literary works. Though John Barth does not directly focus on the discussion of the author, he seems to claim the dead end of the author's creativity and originality since the traditional forms have been exhausted. Barth cites Borges's words that ''all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing archetypes¡Kfor one to attempt to add overtly to the sum of 'original' literature ¡K would be too presumptuous, too naive; literature has been done long since'' (qtd. in Bradbury 80). Barth explains ''exhaustion'' that ''the used-upness of certain forms or exhaustion of certain possibilities'' and ''by no means necessarily a cause for despair'' should be stressed (qtd. in Bradbury 70). The ''exhaustion'' of literature does not mean that novelists will cease to have creative power. Instead, novelists '' confront an intellectual dead end and employ it against itself to accomplish new human work'' . It is, in other words, a rebirth rather than a dead end that postwar novelists are engaged in. Barth concludes in ''The Literature of Replenishment'' that ''the effective 'exhaustion''' is ''not of language or of literature, but of the aesthetic of high modernism . . . '' (qtd. in Bradbury 76). Waugh also echoes this point in her Metafiction: ''There has been paranoia, on the part of both novelists and critics for whom the exhaustion and rejection of realism is synonymous with the exhaustion and rejection of the novel itself'' (7). Barth's idea of turning exhaustion into replenishment is exactly what I see in Vonnegut's novels and the major argument of this thesis.

Roland Barthes in his essay ''The Death of the Author,'' (1968) also directs his attention particularly to the concept of the author. The concept of ''death'' can be ''paradoxical'' as Waugh suggests in the practice of metafiction writing that the author is sometimes presented explicitly as the creator of the narrative and thus the authorial power is exaggerated rather than disappears (133). But the essay seems to make an announcement that we do not need the author anymore. By regarding the act of writing as intertexuality, which is'' a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash,'' and ''the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent.'' I think ''the abscence'' refers to the refusal to regard the author of the text as the source and origin of the meaning, since the essay is based on the linguistics concepts of deconstruction that meaning ''has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins'' (146). However, the absence of the author as an actual person and the inscription of the author as a sign, I think, actually corresponds to the formation of some metafictional strategies, which allows more possibilities to the act of writing in the social and political context of American culture.

Unlike Barthes' view of textuality, moreover, Vonnegut's fictional construction is never a system of endless language game which aims to expose the fictionality of the work only. Though technically, Vonnegut does share the writing modes of metafiction with his contemporaries, such as John Barth and Robert Coover, Vonnegut also locates his novels closely within the contexts of American social and cultural realities. Vonnegut's experimental spirits are not merely directed to forms and styles, or to play with '' various possibilities of self-reflection'' as Barth does in Lost in the Funhouse (Hilfer 130). Nor is Vonnegut like what Hilfer suggests of Robert Coover: '' . . . a writer sometimes exemplifies . . . occupational hazard of writing that is more interesting in its narrative concepts than in its stylistic execution of them . . . where the criticism of the book is somewhat more interesting than the book itself'' (145). In SF, Vonnegut deals with the historical experience of the Dresden bombing and its relationship with writing. As in BC, Vonnegut confronts the social and cultural decadence of American society with the predicament of the author surrogate. Vonnegut's flaunting of his work as an artifact often has a strong parallel and connection to the presentation of his thematic concerns on the predicament and disasters of human beings.

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Of Theme and Form

Consequently, in my thesis, I will argue that Vonnegut collaborates his narrative forms or writing strategies with his thematic concerns, and that none of these two aspects can be discussed separately. I do not follow the prevailing literary trend that ''[l]iterature was being considered less in thematic, more in formal terms,'' (Hilfer 127) which is usually found in some of the writings of Vonnegut's contemporaries, I think, is the last thing we can find in Vonnegut's works of fiction. I agree with William Rodney Allen that:

[Slaughterhouse-Five] captured the imaginations of enough readers¡Xespecially young ones¡Xto make Vonnegut for a time the most popular writer in the country. Perhaps not since Uncle Tom's Cabin had a work of fiction so deeply affected the public's perception of an ongoing American war. If, as Lincoln famously remarked, Harriet Beecher Stowes's novel helped start the Civil War, then Slaughterhouse-Five¡Xalong with non-fictional events like the Tet Offensive and Kent State¡Xhelped get the United States out of Vietnam. (ix)Though my thesis is not focused on the social influence of Vonnegut's novels, I should stress that while Vonnegut's novels correspond theoretically to the metafictional writing techniques, they also show Vonnegut's deep attachment and concerns with the social and historical environment of the time.

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Why I chose them

I chose SF and BC as the focus of my thesis in discussing authorial strategies because these two novels have several common features. Definitely, these two novels are different in their subject matter: one focuses on the experience of the Second World War, while the other mainly presents fragments of American culture. One provides the fantasy of the outer planet Tralfamadore, while the other tells the meeting of two Americans on earth. One presents Kilgore Trout as a failed science fiction writer without ''doodly-squat;'' the other announces him as a winner of Nobel Prize for medicine at the end. Obviously, SF has become the most renowned work of fiction in Vonnegut's writing career. It is often regarded as Vonnegut's climax, as Tony Tanner describes the novel as ''the masterly'' (3). Even Vonnegut himself grades the book with an A+. On the contrary, BC seems to receive a completely opposite review by some critics, such as Prescott, who uses ''hate'' (40) to describe his discontent on the book. Vonnegut gives the self-comments on both books in an interview: ''Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions used to be one book. But they just separated completely. It was like a pousse-cafe, like oil and water¡Xthey simply were not mixable. So I was able to decant Slaughterhouse-Five and what was left was Breakfast of Champions'' (qtd. in Allen 108). It seems that the production of BC suggests the fact that Vonnegut is ''crossing the spine of a roof¡Xhaving ascended one slope'' (4) since he has created what the critics called a masterpiece of his writing career.

What I have found, however, is that the two works share some characteristics which serve as excellent examples for the discussions of the authorial control. The close publishing time of SF (1969) and BC (1973) is not the only reason I chose them for detailed discussions on the problems of the authorial power in this thesis. More importantly, as I focus my discussions on the power or powerlessness of the author, Kilgore Trout, who is usually seen as an alter-ego of Vonnegut by the critics, will be the most conspicuous character to start with in my discussion. It is without coincidence that Kilgore Trout does appear in both novels as a mindless and unprofessional science fictional writer and his stories have been summarized and become parts of the two novels. Moreover, in both novels, Vonnegut merges the position of the biographical Vonnegut persona with the omniscient narrator, which the realistic and modernistic narratives do not allow. For the most prominent strategic features, both novels adopt elements of metafictional writing and the inherent spirit of black humor as I have pointed out previously. My thesis, therefore, chooses these two novels to analyze how Vonnegut's writing strategies have changed the traditional authorial power and allowed new kinds of power to the author in the postmodern time.

Wanna Read More?

This thesis, therefore, will be a textual study in order to examine the authorial power and powerlessness of the two novels of Vonnegut. In chapter one, I will offer a definition of what I mean to be the power of the author in realist and modernist traditions as the ground for the discussion on the loss of the authorial power in the two chosen novels of Vonnegut. In the following two chapters, I will discuss respectively why Vonnegut chooses to abandon the authorial power and what power he has gained through the very renunciation in SF and BC. In these two chapters, I want to argue that though Vonnegut's fictional treatments of the authorial control appear to be negative and destructive, it is by this very means that the author can produce a fictional work which connects form with the subjects of nihilism and lack of free will and brings power again to the author.

To conclude, this thesis wants to argue that the author has to abandon the traditional authorial power in order to acquire his power as a metafictional writer. The metafictional authorial power is quite paradoxical because the author has to be powerless first as he abandons certain traditional authorial control over text. However, the renunciation of the authorial control is for the successful presentation of the author's thematic concerns because the realistic and modernistic authorial mode is hardly adequate. Therefore, through the presentation of the author as a powerful/less one, Vonnegut is able to bring forth his message to readers in the face of chaotic and disastrous human experiences.
　

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¹ Hilfer does point out the difference between black humor and metafiction. ¡"''Black humor remained predominantly realistic in technique, though a calculatedly flattened form of realism¡Kmetafiction in contrast, specialized in one direction of modernism, taking it as far as it could go, more completely disputing the basis of any 'reality'¡KMetafiction reduces all to discourse while doubting the validity of that discourse" (128). However, I do not intend to distinguish these two literary terms in my thesis, since Vonnegut's work, to borrow Hilfer's words again, is a kind of metafiction which ''overlaps with as well as incorporates black humor" (127).

² For more thorough and detailed historical background of the American history in the sixties, see David Farber's The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s ( New York: Hill and Wang, 1994).

³ The metafictional and the other powerlessness of the author will be discussed in much more detail in Chapter One.