Annotation #15

Vonnegut, Kurt. Mother Night. New York: Dell, 1999, c1961.

Vonnegut knows gallows humor, something I find rare in writers. (Sherman Alexie has a grasp of it when he's not too politically charged, along with probably anyone else who lives on a reservation, or in a prison, a mental hospital, or who went to war.) Too often writers reach the gallows, so to speak, but refuse to laugh about it. Not Vonnegut. Mother Night probably exemplifies more than any of his other work his use of black humor as a tool to weed out the blowhards in life. You know them, someone seemingly capable of reason who is unfortunately clinging to some godawful idea, opinion, or belief. The astronaut who believes the moon landings were faked, the Black Panther who denounces racism but goes on to criticize Jews. The narrator of Mother Night, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., describes the mentality in this way:

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell (223-224).

Campbell should know, as he is the narrator of the novel, setting it down on a typewriter in jail awaiting trial for war crimes in Israel. Campbell, an American by birth who also grew up in Germany, was recruited by the U.S. to spy on the Nazis, to write propaganda broadcasts and to pass on secret information by way of a code of coughs, sneezes, and pauses. However, when the war is over no one knows of his being a spy, only of his atrocious bigotry nightly on the radio, his Nazi snobbery. Campbell is a character very clearly facing the gallows, and tells his story in typical Vonnegut fashion, jumping from time to time and ending most chapters with a punch line. But what fascinates me most about this work are the questions of morality.

Some will say this work only raises questions, does not provide any answers. I beg to differ. There is one answer provided here: Don't Rationalize, Do Something. Campbell was able all along to see through the madness of the world, but he refused to do anything about it, thinking it futile, and instead went along with madness. As he explains later, however, he is more guilty than anyone:

    My case is different. I always know when I tell a lie, am capable of imagining the cruel consequences of anybody's believing my lies, know cruelty is wrong. I could no more lie without noticing it than I could unknowingly pass a kidney stone.
     If there is another life after this one, I would like very much, in the next one, to be the sort of person of whom it could truly be said, "Forgive him--he knows not what he does."
     This cannot be said of me now (166).

He saw the madness coming, but refused to defy it. He could have moved, could have pursued some other work, but instead he went along with the Nazi machine, only to seek solace in bed with his wife, Helga, with whom he shared a kind of blissful oblivion, his "Nation of Two." Until she died unexpectedly, anyway. Campbell went through the war as a kind of crap artist, making up unbelievably stupid propaganda and yet having millions swear by it. (And of course, after the war, most of them would deny having anything to do with it.) He relates a kind of loneliness, not only of missing his Helga, but of seeming drowned by the world's lack of reasoning:

That may be so. I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile (160).

This has been the common denominator in all of my readings, a plea for sanity and reason, a search for it in the face of a seemingly uncaring world. Campbell is that one lemming sticking up his head above the crowd and wondering, why are we running? What's up ahead? If I stop, will I be left all alone, with no friends? Unfortunately for Campbell, he willfully put his head back down and kept running with the crowd.

Vonnegut states at the beginning of the novel that had he grown up in Germany, he too may have gone along with the madness. So it's interesting (even brave) that his novel doesn't try to go back and correct things, to portray someone fighting from the start, but instead someone who went along with the evil and lived to regret it. This is the world's best advice, that which comes from people who've made grave mistakes, and yet too often people choose to ignore it, or denounce the advisor as a hypocrit. Campbell has learned the real definition of evil, however:

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive" (251).

This novel generally doesn't seem to deal in polarized issues, but on this one, the only one worth speaking of, the message is clear. Reason Good, Ignorance Bad. Especially purposeful ignorance.

Purposeful ignorance is what I began my study to escape from. There's a fallacious belief that avoiding understanding and responsibility will make life easier, or happier, or at least less painful, but it's been my experience that life only becomes worse. Campbell shared that illusion of an escape, or at least a resignation, as he speaks with Helga's younger sister, Resi:

    "You don't write any more?" she said.
     "There hasn't been anything I've wanted to say," I said.
     "After all you've seen, all you've been through, darling?" she said.
     "It's all I've seen, all I've been through," I said, "that makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I've lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind" (123-124).

A life of reason is no guarantee of happiness, but a life of ducking and hiding certainly is a recipe for depression, as Campbell finds out. With the help of his spy contact, he is resettled in New York, and lives off an inheritance in an attic apartment, hiding away from himself and the world for fifteen years, until coincidence brings him into contact with more lunacy, in the form of fringe people who worship Nazi ideals and consider him their hero. This includes a Russian spy who knows Campbell's identity and sets things in motion, a defrocked priest, the self-proclaimed Black Fuehrer of Harlem, and a racist dentist and publisher of The White Christian Minuteman. All of these characters seem humorous, but in fact their flawed reasoning is not far different from Nazism and Campbell gives an example of the Black Fuehrer's and the dentist Jones' insanity:

"Now, now," said Jones soothingly. "What useful purpose does it serve for us to squabble among ourselves? The thing to do is to pull together."
"I just want to tell them what I tell you," said Robert. "I tell this Reverend gentleman here the same thing every morning, the same thing I tell you now. I give him his hot cereal for breakfast, and then I tell them: 'The colored people are gonna rise up in righteous wrath, and they're gonna take over the world. White folks gonna finally lose!'" (89-90).

And he goes even further into a rant about Japanese being colored people and Chinese not, and colored people getting the atomic bomb to use on their enemies. The difference between these characters and those of Campbell's life in wartime Germany, however, is that these people are on the fringe and have no real power, whereas in Germany this madness was in leadership, and Campbell went along with it.

There is no real villain or standard plot in this novel, and that's fine. What we have is a lamentation, a gallows confession, from someone who understands exactly where he went wrong and, though he doesn't dare to voice his hope, wants people to avoid his mistakes; through those mistakes he has become more lonely than he ever thought possible.

All contents, except where otherwise noted, are copyright Andrew Lee Hunn.

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