When Poetry Mattered: Notes on Andrei Voznesensky

Although it's been over a year since the death of Andrei Voznesensky, I've only just heard the news.  Voznesensky was one of the best-loved Russian poets of a generation called "the children of the 60s."  These were poets who came of age in the late 50s and early 1960s, the most famous of whom was Yevgeny Yevtushenko.  Both Voznesenksy and Yevtushenko were born in 1933, a good year for a Russian poet to be born.  Not only were they too young to be sent to the horrible slaughter that was the Second World War in Russia, they began to come into their own as poets just in time for the Khrushchev Thaw, a relaxing of repression following the death of Stalin and the removal of much of the apparatus of the Stalinist police state.  The period is also known as the False Spring, since it came to an abrupt end in 1963 and 1964, as Krushchev was replaced by that icon of dreary stagnation, Leonid Brezhnev.


During the brief thaw, though, it was good to be a poet in Russia, at least if you were the kind of poet who wanted attention.  Readings in stadiums were commonplace, in a way they never have been in the United States.  T.S. Eliot may once have delivered a lecture in a mid-sized university basketball arena, but these were actual poetry readings, in for-real stadiums: by 1962 Voznesensky was drawing crowds of 14,000 or more, and more than half a million people signed up to buy copies of his collection An Achilles Heart before it was published.  Other poets saw high levels of interest, too, and Yevtushenko was even more popular than Voznesensky.


What accounted for this enormous interest, even mania, for poetry?  I'm reminded of one of my critical touchstones, a passage from Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland where he speaks of the relative popularity of poetry in conditions of colonization and repression: when the national institutions don't represent the broadly-held values of a people, the people often turn to poetry as a vehicle for the articulation of those values. One can see why: if the theaters and newspapers and educational institutions are in the grip of oppressors, one can still take up a pen and write poems that say things unpalatable to the powers that be. And for a brief time in the Krushchev Thaw, poetry and other arts were liberated from the kinds of restrictions that still bound cultural institutions like museums and universities.  You could go to a poetry reading—as so many did—and hear a version of things that rang truer than the official accounts.  As my father, who studied Russian literature before becoming an artist, put it, "those readings in stadiums were the only place a Russian could go and not feel he was being bullshitted."


And what was it that Voznesensky had to say that didn't sound like bullshit to those crowds?  Well, a lot of it was an affirmation of the individual conscience.  In the 1959 poem "Who Are We?" for example, Voznesensky answers the title question by saying :


Under the cold stars, I wander alive
With you Vera, Vega, I am myself
Among the avalanches, like the Abominable
Snowman, absolutely elusive.


Against all the big, overwhelming forces, the little self remains, free and authentic to itself: there's a kind of individualistic sublime at work here.  The poem wouldn't be a Big Statement in the United States of the 1950s, even though Senator McCarthy's reign of terror over the intellectuals had come to an end only two years earlier: the level of repression just wasn't comparable to what Russians had seen, and Cold War America always defined itself against Russia by emphasizing the ideology of individualism.  But in Russia, where collectivism was an official ideology and individualism had been actively, and violently, discouraged, people heard in words like these a message of liberation.  


It's no wonder that Voznesensky wrote the kind of individualistic poems for which people were thirsting: as a young man he was a disciple of Pasternak, having moved out to Peredelkino to be near the grand old man in his last days.  Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, the great testament of the individual conscience against Czar and Commissar, was a kind of sacred text for Voznesensky. 


I sometimes wonder whether Voznesensky's individualism was made more palatable to the authorities by virtue of its being tempered with doses of nationalism.  Voznesensky's most famous poem, "I am Goya," with which he used to begin all of his readings, is many things: a harrowing picture of Russia during the Nazi invasion, a great piece of anaphoristic verse, a veiled remembrance of his father going off to war with a book of Goya reproductions in his backpack, an ekphrastic poem dealing with Goya's paintings of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, and a testament to the achievement of the Russian people in throwing back the better-armed, better-fed, better-organized forces of Hitler's Germany.  It ends like this:


I am the gullet
of a woman hanged whose body like a bell
tolled over a blank square
I am Goya


O grapes of wrath!
I have hurled westward
          the ashes of the uninvited guest!
and hammered stars into the unforgetting sky—like nails
I am Goya


That last bit, about sending the Germans packing, or scattering their dead ashes on a wind that will take them back to whence they came: that's some hard-core Russian patriotism that no General or Commissar could condemn, and no Russian of the war years could hear without a deep, heart-felt response.  And the victory is portrayed as being as great, and as unlikely, as the hammering of stars into the sky.  Great stuff!


Even his patriotism couldn't really save Voznesensky when the False Spring came to an end.  He was subjected to the fate of so many Russian liberals, from the Decemberists on, and sent into a kind of internal exile, wandering in the remoter provinces of the Soviet Union.  His poems from this era take on a slightly different tone, emphasizing hope in the form of a kind of small, saving remnant of Russian society.  Here's one I particularly like, "To B. Akhmadulina."  It gives us a small group, on the move:


We are many.  Four, perhaps, altogether,
spinning along in our car devil-may-care.
The girl at the wheel flaunts her orange hair,
the sleeves of her jacket yanked up to the elbow.


Ah, Bela, though your driving leaves me limp,
you look angelic, out of this world;
your marvelous porcelain profile
glows like a white lamp...


In hell they bang their frying pans
and send scouts up to the gate to watch,
when you, as the speedometer runs wild,
lift both hands off the wheel to strike a match.


How I love it, when stepping on the gas
in your transparent tones you say,
"What a mess!
they've taken my license away...


"I swear they've got me wrong!
     You'd think I was a reckless driver!
            Why! I was just poking along..."


Forget it, Bela.  To argue with a cop,
you know, is a losing proposition.
He can't appreciate your lyric speed—
it's past the power of his transmission.


A poet owes it to himself
not to be trapped in miles-per-hour;
let him resound at the speed of light
like angels choiring in the stratosphere.


No matter, taking light-years as our measure,
if we should vanish like a radiant star,
with not a creature left behind to earn the prize.
We were the first to crack the sound-barrier.


Step on it, Bela, heavenly friend!
Who cares if we're smashed to bits in the end?
Long live the speed of poetry,
the most lethal of all speeds!


What if the maps ahead are enigmatical?
We are only a few.  Four, perhaps, altogether;
hurtling along—and you are a Goddess!
That makes a majority, after all.


We've got the exile's self-affirmation (no one will ever give us any recognition for breaking the sound barrier, but we recognize ourselves), and we've got a nice turn on the old trope of describing a woman as a goddess: here, her divinity makes the small group more than equal to any forces that oppose it.  This would be mere sentimentality if it weren't balanced against the earlier assertion that there's no use arguing with a cop.  Voznesensky is well aware that, in the realm of real power, he and his friends are no match for the authorities.  But in the realm of art, they maintain a kind of freedom, where the police can't match their speed.


There are a lot of things to admire in Voznesensky, including his revival of the Mayakovsky era breeziness and confidence that fell out of Russian poetry in the 30s and 40s.  One of my favorite moments of this kind comes at the end of "Fire in the Architectural Institute."  The poem is based on one of Voznesensky's experiences: he'd been an architecture student, and just before he was to defend his thesis the institute burned down, destroying all of his work.  But like Mayakovsky, he's got a seemingly unlimited, irrepressible buoyancy: "Everything's gone up in smoke/and there's no end of people sighing," he writes, "It's the end?/It's only the beginning./Let's go to the movies!"


But whatever his fine qualities as a poet may be, the reason Voznesensky mattered to most of his readers was that he spoke back to them their own values when those values weren't affirmed anywhere else.  I think about this when I hear people say, of one or another contemporary American poet, "he deserves more readers," or "she deserves an audience."  I think about it, too, when I hear suggestions about how to get more people interested in poetry (by adding music to readings, by putting little placards with stanzas on them in the subway, etc.)  These are supply-side solutions to a demand-side problem.  They try to make something available, in hopes that this availability will create demand.  But if we really want giant audiences, stadium-filling audiences, we'd need social conditions that drive people to need what is on offer in poetry, and conditions that prevent it from being offered in other venues.  History has been a bit too kind to us for that.

An Impossible Position

So there's this, an account in the Chicago Tribune of how people feel about what's been going on at the Poetry Foundation.  If you click through to the third page, you'll find that the last of the people is me.

Robert Kroetsch, R.I.P.

Robert Kroetsch—one of the most important Canadian writers of his generation—has died in a car accident at the age of 84.  I had the privilege of knowing him a little when I was an undergraduate.  Though I never took a course with him, he was a presence on the campus and on the local literary scene, and a few times I found myself having a drink with him after Dennis Cooley’s evening seminars on contemporary literature let out.

He was a novelist, and something of a critic, and one of the founders of the journal boundary 2, but for me he’ll always be two things: a poet, and a benign godfather of a movement in Canadian literature that suffers the fate of all movements in Canadian literature: utter invisibility in the non-Canadian world.  But it was a real movement, with its own journals and presses and contretemps and aspirations, and it made a difference where it wanted to make a difference, in the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.  One might think of it as a prairie school, and of Kroetsch as its éminence grise.

As a poet, Kroetsch was many things.  Sometimes he was a proceduralist, foregrounding the artificiality of writing, and the agility of the poet, by adopting an arbitrary restriction, Oulipo-style, and forcing himself to work within its constraints.  In The Sad Phoenician, for example, Kroetsch writes a long meditation in which new lines of poetry begin, alternately, with “and” and “but,” making for an ode-like snaking-through of strophe and antistrophe.  At other times Kroetsch was a master of found texts, writing through his family’s account books in The Ledger and through a ubiquitous document of the Canadian prairies in Seed Catalog.  In both cases, he was concerned with the way written documents were the binding agents of a collective, of family and of region.  The best way I can describe the effects of reading these poems is to say that it’s like encountering a secularized version of scribal commentary on religious texts.  What a poet like Norman Finkelstein does with the Jewish textual tradition in a book like Scribe, Kroetsch did with the ordinary found texts that bound together his family and the rural communities of the Canadian prairies.

Kroetsch was also a serialist poet, who kept a long project called Field Notes simmering for years, adding and inserting sections in the manner of Olson’s Maximus Poems or Duncan’s Passages.  There was none of the history and grandeur of Olson, and none of the mysticism of Duncan, though.  Instead, there was a kind of constant, amused intellectual probing of the everyday.  And Kroetsch was always ready to surprise his long-time readers.  After developing a theory of the ever-incomplete, constantly-ongoing poem, and inspiring a host of other Canadian poets to begin ambitious serial projects, he suddenly called his poem to a halt, issuing his Completed Field Notes in 1989.  I remember the arguments in the student pub about whether that word, “completed,” represented a transcendence or a betrayal of Kroetsch’s project: I left in a huff, consoled by a young woman who wore even more eyeliner than I did back then.  She gave me a peck on the cheek and one of her earrings before ditching me over cappuccino.

Kroetsch was also a postmodernist.  For me, he’ll always belong to that generation of poet-professors whose natural habitat was the brutalist concrete campus office lined with books by Robert Scholes and Jonathan Culler.  I picture him now as he appeared on the cover of a 1987 issue of Border Crossings magazine: tweed jacket, beard, Remington typewriter on the desk in front of him, ready for a fresh sheet of paper and a new page of poetry composed by field in the manner of the Olsonite wing of Black Mountain.

One reason to think of Kroetsch as a postmodernist was what I can only call his loving suspicion of language and of the apparent coherence of narrative truth.  Jean-François Lyotard’s distinction between the grand récit and the petit récit, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, gets at the kind of thinking that informed Kroetch’s writing.  For Lyotard, the grand récit was a kind of authoritative story that purported to offer a comprehensive explanation of the world.  When, for example, a certain right-wing imbecile who happens to be a Cardinal of the Catholic Church maintained “the Church is neither left nor right, the Church is true,” he was offering the story of Catholicism as a (or, to his mind, the) grand récit, just as certain hard-core vulgar Marxists might see Marxism as a grand récit, or how the overconfident Victorian bourgeoisie took “progress” as their grand récit.  In postmodern conditions, Lyotard claims, such comprehensive stories become unsustainable, and instead we have a proliferation of smaller, more fragmentary, more localized, more tentative explanatory stories.  In postmodernism, one lets a thousand petit récits bloom.

Kroetsch was very much a man of the petit récit.  He would write paratactic, self-reflective works like those collected in his Field Notes, bend the conventions of narrative in his fiction, or hesitate at the brink of narrative, as in his first book of poetry, The Stone Hammer Poems.  Here, he begins with an artifact, a stone hammer found on the prairies.  The poem starts this way:

This stone

becomes a hammer

of stone

….

The rawhide loops

are gone, the

hand is gone, the buffalo’s skull

is gone;

the stone is

shaped like the skull

of a child.

We begin with the sense that the explanation of the artifact is a matter of framing: the stone, when literally framed with an apparatus of wood and rawhide, becomes a hammer.  It has since been many things, entering other narrative frames.  But the literal history of the stone, speculative and ultimately unknowable, isn’t the only frame.  As the last stanza above indicates, the stone can also enter a metaphorical frame: its shape and size allows it to become a metaphor for a child’s skull, for birth and for death.

The poem goes on, trying to locate the stone in a narrative, and failing to find much authoritative purchase on the truth of things.  A few sections later in the poem, for example, we find this:

Grey, two-headed

the pemmican maul

fell from the travois or

a boy playing    lost it in

the prairie wool or

a woman     left it in

the brain of a buffalo or

it is a million years older than

the hand that

chipped stone or

raised slough

water (or blood) or

The section ends there, with “or,” a gesture much like Olson’s opening of a parenthesis that never closes: it’s a sign of indetermination, of the impossibility of grand récit.  The poem goes on to trace the losing and finding of the stone in many histories, some imagined (Kroetsch imagines it moved in the last ice age by “the retreating ice,” then moved much later by “the retreating buffalo” and later still by “the retreating Indians”) some grounded in family stories of how this same stone was lost by his grandfather and found again by his father plowing in a field.

There’s another reason to think of Kroetsch as a postmodern poet, rather than a modern one, a reason having to do with tone.  While the generalization I’m about to make has the flaw of all generalizations (i.e., that it is full of holes and therefore untrue), I’m still making it: modernism is more serious and less funny than postmodernism.  I grant all your objections regarding specific texts, and yet I return to the generalization.  Wry as he can be, T.S. Eliot is more grave and less funny than Frank O’Hara.  While he’s not above jokes, Ezra Pound is more often dead serious than is John Ashbery.  And when Robert Kroetsch is meditating on the perspectival nature of truth, he’s less sublime, and funnier, than Wallace Stevens when he does something similar.  I’m sure the model for Kroetsch’s “Sketches of a Lemon” is Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but the tone is entirely different.  Here’s Stevens’ opening stanza:

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Is the eye of a blackbird.

This is straight-up Kantian sublimity: the little living eye comprehends the huge, rugged world that so exceeds it in scale and in grandeur that it renders the bird’s eye insignificant—except for the fact that the little eye comprehends the vastness.  Here, by contrast, is the opening of Kroetsch’s series of lemon sketches:

A lemon is almost round.

Some lemons are almost round.

A lemon is not round.

So much for that.

There’s a skepticism about our ability to intellectually frame the world here (it’s The Stone Hammer Poems again, or The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge), but there’s also a kind of philosophical pratfall.  The poem is full of this sort of thing: it's a self-deflating comic text that also has something serious to say about how intellectual frames fail, or about how narratives and descriptions end up mutating into something other than what they were initially meant to be.  Something like that happens in the following passage (“Smaro” is the name of the poet’s wife):

Sketches, I reminded myself,

not of a pear,

nor of an apple,

nor of a peach,

nor of a banana

(though the colour

raises questions)

nor of a nectarine,

nor, for that matter,

of a pomegranate,

nor of three cherries,

their stems joined,

nor of a plum,

nor of an apricot,

nor of the usual

bunch of grapes,

fresh from the vine,

just harvested,

glistening with dew—

Smaro, I called,

I’m hungry.

What began as a kind of attempt at negative definition (doomed to a seemingly infinite series of specifications) warps, suddenly, and we see that all along, without our knowledge, the list or catalog had been functioning in ways we hadn’t suspected, inciting the appetites rather than providing definition.  A hidden subordinate function becomes, suddenly, the dominant function of the list, and the sentence lurches jarringly in a new direction.  I like that: I remember reading this poem to the woman who would become my wife, and how she liked it too.  But it wasn’t her favorite section.  This was:

poem for a child who has just bit into

a halved lemon that has just been squeezed

see, what did I tell you, see,

what did I tell you, see, what

did I tell you, see, what did

I tell you, see, what did I

tell you, see, what did I tell

you, see, what did I tell you,

see, what did I tell you, see,

what did I tell you, see, what

did I tell you, see, what did

I tell you, see, what did I

tell you, see, what did I tell

you, see, what did I tell you

One could, of course, go on.

If straight-up sublimity lies a bit beyond Kroetsch’s range, something like this lies a bit beyond Wallace Stevens, and I think the difference is generational, modern vs. postmodern.

It’s poems like “Sketches of a Lemon” that first attracted me to Kroetsch’s work, but I knew of him in his capacity as the godfather of a literary movement before I’d read him.  He was a kind of benevolent, presiding presence for whole generations of aspiring writers in the Canadian west, and a great intellectual sponsor for a regionalist/postmodernist movement in the poetry produced on the Canadian prairies.  The point of the movement, I think, was a kind of mild intellectual and literary decolonization.  The western provinces have, in the minds of many of their inhabitants and more of their intellectuals, always been the resentful pseudo-colonies of the bankers and politicians of Toronto and Ottawa.  Ignored by a Canadian cultural establishment that was itself marginal and barely visible in the wider world, many of the writers of the west needed a good, strong dose of William Carlos Williams-style local pride, and Kroetsch, by writing out of western experience, provided exactly that.  And he was one of a group of writers and academics who built a regional literary infrastructure where none had been.  The journal Prairie Fire, Turnstone Press, Grain, Open Letter, a number of critical books, a bunch of reading venues: Kroetsch was one of the leaders in building something outside of the established literary networks.  I remember, in particular, one moment of Kroetschian direct action in the establishing of local literary institutions: a group of student poets were trying to launch a magazine called Ca(n)non (it was the eighties, and journal titles were filled with parentheses, backslashes, and other signs that the language was plural and unstable and self-deconstructing, etc.).  They approached Kroetsch as he was heading for the elevator outside his office, and asked if he could help them out.  He opened his wallet, hauled out a wad of bills, including a couple of the old red Canadian fifties with their Mounties on horseback, and handed it over.  “Wait,” he said, taking back a ten, “I need this for lunch.”  Not a lot of professors would have been so unhesitating with a crowd of scruffy and callow young poets.  It’s an image that’s stayed with me, and the image with which I’d like to end on the sad occasion of Kroetsch’s passing.

Kurt Vonnegut, Absurdity, and All Those Young Men in Chuck Taylors

The other day I found myself down in a particularly dark and foreboding part of my unfinished basement, groping around in my auxiliary bookshelves (yes, it has come to this, backup bookshelves in the basement), looking for a collection of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ letters that I thought might be of use for the book I’m writing. I never got to the Hopkins, though, because I was waylaid by a pile of crumbling old paperbacks I hadn’t looked at in at least fifteen years: the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, with which I then spent the afternoon. Like a lot of people, I read Vonnegut obsessively in my late teens: he was my transition from Heinlein and Asimov to Dostoevsky and Camus — and appropriately so, since Vonnegut is one part science fiction and one part existentialism, along with one part Mysterious Stranger-era Mark Twain, stirred and served chilled in a Mason jar found under the back porch of an Indiana farm house.


It’s a fairly common observation that a large portion of Vonnegut’s readership has always been young: you find his affinity with the young noted everywhere from the socialist website Solidarity to the pop culture shit-funnel Entertainment Weekly. The observation certainly rings true with my own experience, not only as a reader, but as a clerk in a used bookstore on Chicago’s Clark Street back in the 1990s.


Those of us who worked at the old Aspidistra Bookshop amused ourselves in all manner of ways, but one of them was in predicting what kind of book a customer would end up buying. Whole demographic categories were easy: the street people would go for self-help books or anything conspiracy oriented; the people from the nearby fetish store called House of Whacks would buy books on leatherworking, the sleek professional Lincoln Park ladies would buy Jane Austen, Jane Austen fan-fiction (there’s a ton of this stuff), and exotic cookbooks; the leftover Black Panther types always wanted Machiavelli and Soul on Ice; old white guys wanted biographies of dead presidents and books with pictures of World War II airplanes, etc. But the easiest of all were the teenage guys from the suburbs, the indie-rock looking ones in Chuck Taylor sneakers: they wanted Vonnegut. Once in a while they wanted the poems of Charles Bukowski, and after 1996 they sometimes sought out used copies of Fight Club. But it seemed like half of all the fiction we sold to these guys had been written by Vonnegut. We knew the type: we were the type, although now we’d moved on to more arcane snobberies, and looked down on the Vonnegut readers as only ex-Vonnegut readers could. “Vonnegut’s not a writer,” we’d say to one another, as another kid from New Trier High School trooped out with copies of Mother Night and Slapstick tucked into his courier bag, “he’s a phase.” We would then clink our bottles of Guinness — the Aspidistra beverage of choice — together, and get back to reading the free weekly papers and sneering at the movie reviews.


But here’s the funny thing: I can think of only one time I or any of my peers at Aspidistra ever sold a copy of a Vonnegut novel to a woman: a much tattooed, nose-pierced student from DePaul. My pal Colin tried chatting her up (he did this with any girl who looked like she was crazy enough to take him seriously), and found out that she was reading it for class. This means we never sold a Vonnegut book to a woman who wanted to read it of her own volition. I don’t mean to say no women read Vonnegut, only that he seems to be one of those writers — like Austen, like Hemingway, like Helen Fielding, like Pahlaniuk — whose readership seems fairly heavily skewed on the basis of gender.


If we can admit these admittedly unscientific notions about Vonnegut’s readership — that it skews young, and skews male — then the question arises: why? I don’t have anything like an answer supported by evidence, but I have a hypothesis, which is this: I think the youngness and maleness of Vonnegut’s readership may have something to do with the existential absurdity of his work.


My favorite explanation of existential absurdity comes from Sartre’s 1943 essay on Camus’ L’Étranger. In that essay Sartre goes back to a passage from Camus’ Le Mythe de Sisyphe to give us Camus’ image of a man seen talking animatedly in an old-style, glass box telephone booth as an image of absurdity: of life as a series of meaningless, possibly ridiculous, gestures. “A man is talking on the telephone,” goes the Camus passage, “We cannot hear him beyond the glass partition, but we can see his senseless mimicry. We wonder why he is alive.”


Here’s Sartre’s commentary on the passage:


"The gesturing of a man who is telephoning and whom we cannot hear is only relatively absurd, because it is part of an incomplete circuit. Listen in on an extension, however, and the circuit is completed; human activity recovers its meaning. Therefore, one would have, in all honesty, to admit that there are only relative absurdities…"


So there’s a bit of a difference between Camus (in this instance, if not in others) and Sartre on the question of absurdity. For the Camus of this particular passage, life is a series of pointless gestures, an absurdity without meaning; for Sartre life may seem absurd, but there is a possibility that it is not, that the apparently empty gestures do actually connect to some larger significance beyond absurdity.


Kurt Vonnegut was a humane man, who seems to have meant it when, in God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, he wrote “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter…. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—‘God damn it, you've got to be kind.’” But his overall vision—and he was certainly a writer with an overall vision—was of a universe without transcendent meaning, without overarching significance. He was, in his way, as much of an absurdist as was Beckett, or Kafka — as much of an absurdist as the Camus who wrote the passage quoted by Sartre.


Vonnegut came by his absurdism honestly. The experiences upon which he based his greatest work, Slaugherhouse Five, were dire enough to drive anyone to the conclusion that the quest for meaning or significance was bound to falter and fail. Like the protagonist of Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut was a prisoner of war during the Allied firebombing of Dresden, and like that protagonist he was one of the very few survivors of that cataclysm, having been locked in an underground slaughterhouse when the city burned. The firebombing of Dresden—a beautiful city of absolutely no military significance—was a gratuitous act, coming at a time when the Allies had all-but-won the war, and gaining them nothing of strategic worth. It was, for the most part, a slaughter of innocents and a desecration of cultural heritage. It was, in short, an absurd action par excellence. When Vonnegut emerged from his bunker, his German captors set him to work on the hopeless task of cleaning things up, which involved, among other things, moving the charred remnants of untold numbers of people from the destroyed streets. The young Vonnegut was forced to see, and touch, the aftermath of an action of such excessive destruction and stupidity that it could not be explained as the result of a rational civilization, even of a rational civilization at war. Dresden put the lie to the idea of a simple right and wrong in war. It put the lie to the idea of technology as progress, as it put the lie to the idea of a benevolent democratic nation. One could not look on Dresden and believe in the old nineteenth century ideal of progress, nor could one believe in the even older Enlightenment faith in reason. It would take a Job-like level of faith to believe that a benevolent deity would have allowed something like this to happen, and Vonnegut was no Job. His world went dark that day and never really lightened: all the laughter in his novels comes from a dark place, and even when he writes of love, it comes not from joy, but from a sense of the pathos of humanity in a universe without meaning, a universe that renders our noblest hopes and gestures absurd.


Young people tend to connect with absurdism. But their absurdism is often more like the relative absurdism described by Sartre. That is, much of the absurdism of teenagers is predicated less on a deeply-felt sense of the metaphysical emptiness of the universe than it is based on lack of empathy and lack of experience (I’m sure there are exceptions, probably among the traumatized—but I’m thinking of all those boys from Winnetka who traipsed through Aspidistra on their way to buy Pavement CDs at Wax Trax back in the mid-1990s: a segment of the population statistically high in skinny-legged jeans, privilege, and Ivy League ambitions, and statistically low in deep trauma).


The notion that teenagers lack empathy is more than just a folk belief among frazzled parents: it’s got some pretty persuasive neuroscience behind it, based on studies of how the brain functions differently for people of different ages. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience is, in my layman’s opinion, the best explainer of these matters. “We think that a teenager's judgment of what they would do in a given situation is driven by the simple question: ‘What would I do?’” says Blakemore. In contrast, she tells us, adults ask “What would I do, given how I would feel and given how the people around me would feel as a result of my actions?””


Other neurological studies,notably those of Donald Pfaff, indicate that women are likely to feel empathy in a broader range of circumstances than are men. Long story short, it seems that women are more likely than men to extend empathy to those they consider opponents and rule-breakers than men are. The guys take their cue from Conan the Barbarian, wanting to see their enemies driven before them, their villages in flames. The women, not so much.


What does any of this have to do with absurdity? Well, consider Sartre’s comments on Camus’ image of the man in the phone booth. If we watch him without empathy, he does indeed appear absurd: his gestures are ridiculous, pointless things. We might, if we’re teenagers, and even more so if we’re teenage guys, nudge the kid next to us, point at the guy with the cigarette we’re unduly proud of smoking, and say something like “check out that douchebag,” which is a demotic way of saying “that guy and his actions are absurd.” But if we have empathy—if we can imagine ourselves, perhaps, in his situation, we might think “that guy’s really agitated: maybe he’s pleading with a hospital administrator not to kick his daughter out of the treatment ward even though his insurance has run out and he can’t make the payments unless he somehow manages to move some real estate down at the office.” If we can imagine listening in on an extension, in the way Sartre describes, then perhaps “human activity recovers its meaning.”


In addition to cognitive difficulties with empathy, young people generally lack experience, which means that many of the actions they observe in the world seem pointless or meaningless, even when that may not be the case. If you don’t know anything about how a bureaucracy works, all bureaucracies look like they come straight off the pages of Kafka’s The Castle. I’m not saying there are no absurd bureaucracies—I’ve been in academe too long for that—only that youth correlates with inexperience, and the more inexperienced one is, the less one is likely to see actions as meaningful. It’s no accident, I think, that the gentle absurdism of Monty Python's Flying Circus was the creation of young men, and that it’s still young men one overhears doing those ridiculous pepperpot women voices and reciting skits like “Hello Mrs. Gorilla” or “Spam Spam Spam Spam.” This is relative absurdism, the view from outside the phone booth, where the gestures are visible but the words that give them meaning are inaudible. Absurdists of this type will feel an affinity for the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, but unless they are traumatized or otherwise driven into a different, more profound type of absurdity—a Dresden absurdity—their Vonnegut novels are likely to end up in the basements of their suburban houses.

Because You Wanted Your Martiniquais Surrealist Négritude Poetry Online

Since you asked: yes, two poems by Lucie Thésée, the Surrealist/Négritude poet from Martinique I've been translating, are now not only in the latest issue of Poetry, but also available on the Poetry Foundation's website. They're called "Sarabande" and "Poem," and they're accompanied by a few notes I wrote about this remarkable, little-known poet.