The War Was Meaningful; Life Is Absurd

The Novel’s Ghosts

In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1985 novel Galápagos, a mysterious disease wipes out human fertility, bringing about a silver-haired apocalypse. The parallel to our real-world situation should be obvious, and this is one of the reasons I’ve wanted to return to this novel.

The few survivors, stranded on the Galápagos Islands, embark on a strange journey as they slowly transform into seal-like creatures over the course of a million years. The devolution begins when the pregnant granddaughter of a Hiroshima survivor gives birth to a furry, webbed child whose traits quickly dominate the inbred island community, who turn to the war waters to survive as fishers. With each generation, the children become more seal-like and less human. As they dive, their skulls shrink, and they lose any capacity for higher thought. All of this is observed by a ghost, Leon Trout, a Vietnam veteran who went AWOL. He watches the last intelligent humans have less intelligent children and is overjoyed. Traumatized by the war, he ponders whether seal life is superior to industrial modernity. Hidden somewhere on the archipelago is the last remnant of human knowledge, the small computer Mandarax, which is deliberately smashed and thrown into the sea. The act is treated as no more consequential than catching a fish.

In Galápagos, though the world suffered a fertility crisis, leading to a desolate, posthuman earth inhabited by incestuous seals, Vonnegut is happy. His story is that of a happy ghost watching decline. There is no space between Vonnegut and Leaon, the ghost of the Galápagos. Though Leon’s experiences are Vietnam-era, the voice is saturated with Vonnegut’s own experience of the Dresden firebombing; the ghost becomes the author’s ectoplasmic stand-in. Vonnegut’s ghost is a portal through which he fantasizes about changing the world into a posthuman one. Vonnegut wrote, and earnestly meant, “the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain.” For Vonnegut, our capacity to settle for hot rocks and blue water was a form of redemption. It is easy to consider Galápagos as merely a satirical work, but it’s not: buried beneath the laughter is an all-too serious edge, halfway between wish-fulfillment and coping mechanism. Galápagos stands out as a defining work of postwar American literature.

The Postwar Inversion

For Vonnegut, his experience of the war was quite strange. He was a thoughtful, considerate man, and he never bought the anti-Japanese and anti-Teutonic racism that, for so many American soldiers, animated their willingness to fight and to die. Vonnegut was not even really motivated by anti-Nazism, as the holocaust was not yet infamous during the war. It did not figure greatly in his imagination. So what did Vonnegut fight for?

In another Vonnegut novel, Slaughterhouse Five, he encounters an American defector to the Nazi regime, decorated with ribbons and awards. He sees in this carnivalesque creature something of himself, a fellow American, separated only by the pageantry of fascism, which he hated. He reeled at the thought that he was similar to the ribboned and pinned doll before him, and yet, the United States’ firebombing of Dresden seemed to prove to him that he was.

Vonnegut fought for democratic civilization. And then he was captured, and forced into a slaughterhouse, and watched the Americans firebomb Dresden and slaughter civilians, and another American parade around an industrial death machine and speak about Abraham Lincoln. And he was left with nothing. A bucket of water was dumped on his fire. He lost the motivation to fight because he thought it was unconscionable that a democracy would kill civilians. And yet, he hated fascism, so the war must be meaningful. This terrible conflict of ideals was the first of two struggles that pushed Vonnegut, who was a true, genuine liberal, towards a cynical view of civilization, which would later culminate in Galápagos.

The second was the terrible reality of America’s involvement in WWII: the Huns were a bigger deal than the Jews, big-D Democracy wasn’t as important as owning the Pacific, and most soldiers were racist. The war fought for colonies was just as much a part of WWI, and though the war was against fascism, it was also for communism. All of these complicated realities were sublimated into a Manichean origin story for postwar America. The resultant gap between the warriors’ culture and the noble cause narrative of the war created an impossible problem. Men like Vonnegut knew the noble war was fought by ignoble men with ignoble means. The world after the war was a world of decolonization and antiracism, born of men who fought for colonies and for race. So something tremendously important happened. Rather than developing a postwar literature that questioned the war, as the Lost Generation did, he put his energy into one that questioned life. Unlike the dejected writers of WWI, who correctly noted the war’s pointlessness, many of the writers who sprang up after WWII incorrectly noted the pointlessness of life. Vonnegut is a typical example.

It is no coincidence that he broke into true critical acclaim with Slaughterhouse Five, which was strongly, deeply anti-war, and yet... in favor of World War II. In Vonnegut’s work, we can see most clearly the fundamentally disordered thinking of postwar American liberalism: rather than seeing the war as absurd and life as meaningful, they saw the war as meaningful and life as absurd.

This is an important literary invention and an inversion of the moral order of the world before the war. In Galápagos, Vonnegut resolves this problem by envisioning apocalyptic devolution as redemption, restoring humanity’s natural order and cleansing the scourge of the life of the mind. As seals, dissonance and absurdity are blasted away by posthuman devolution. None of this matters to seals. And though they still commit acts of violence, though they kill fish and turtles and occasionally each other, this is simple, primal, and disorganized violence. They live their soft lives in the violent trance of perfect nature. Their murders are innocent, in the sense that they could be no other way. There are no great and terrible acts of violence because there is nothing great to be made. The firebombing of Dresden is impossible, because Dresden is impossible.

This feeling is reflected in many contemporary pop culture memes about liberalism, from the joke that all we are is monkeys on a rock to the idea of humanity as a plague common in environmentalist circles. In all these little ideas, you can hear Vonnegut’s insistent formula: “The war was meaningful; life is absurd!”

We could, in another age, call this a Hegelian contradiction of the spirit. Unlike philosophical contradictions, which are abstract and often matter very little, this is a very practical, historical contradiction between a political regime’s founding myth, which it constantly attempts to embody perfectly, and the reality of its rule. This regime attempts to deconstruct meaning on a hill of meaning, to condemn some behaviors on the grounds that all we are is animals, while condemning others because they are beneath human dignity, and violent human rights.

Liberalism is incapable of earnestly reckoning with the state violence essential to a well-ordered society or necessary democratic survival, because liberalism’s demands of human beings are incompatible with democratic survival. One could make this formulaic.

• If human beings must not commit acts of violence against other humans or deny others their human rights,

• and human beings must commit acts of violence against other humans and deny others their human rights to persist,

• then the only way to avoid acts of violence against other humans and denying others their human rights is for humanity to no longer exist.

This formula is essential to understanding postwar liberalism. Vonnegut’s cynicism in Galápagos gives us an understanding of why: if what awaits us in modernity is atom bombs, rather than the end of war, then modernity must end. 

This manifests directly in the struggles of blue cities to lower crime, build infrastructure, or maintain investments from large corporations. To maintain an advanced industrial society, the state must deploy police forces, which inevitably are brought into conflict with minority populations in inner cities. Because this would deny some their rights, and deploy violence against them, the state retreats, thus the advanced infrastructure that makes civilization possible flees, and quite literally, human beings are brought lower, closer to seal-life. They then become easier to rule, and it becomes unattractive for politicians to raise their condition, which would require the use of force to constrain inchoate violence and disorder. To reduce the human being is to increase the possibility of paradise.

Vonnegut has thrived as a writer within this political paradigm because he offers a resolute defense of seal life as the good life; what appears to be satire is, in fact, a work of political philosophy. Thus, in Galápagos, we can find an authentic expression of the attitude that has come to dominate postwar liberal governance.

Unfortunately for us, though lucky for the zoo’s masters, seals are fat and slow on land. They are naïve and trusting. That is why they are so easy to club, kidnap, and train.

Barking Seals and Silent Birds

One can imagine that, though most people were happy to become seals, a few rebels stared at crumbling ruins and wondered who had built them. There is a call to action by Albert Camus that I think of as a joke: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

In another tale, Sisyphus pauses from his task to listen to a song sung by Orpheus, which is so beautiful that he pauses, sits upon his rock, and listens. If he was already happy pushing his rock, why would he stop and listen to the music? Why would a song provide him respite? Sisyphus was, in truth, a noble rebel: he pushed the rock as a refusal to bow to the will of the gods, which had cursed the boulder to roll down whenever close to the top. To push the rock was to deny the gods their power and insist upon the potential of the human being; to pause and listen to the music was to place the beauty of a song above both the gods and humanity. This drama is destroyed, lost entirely, in Camus’s absurdist rendition. In absurdism, there is no room for beauty to be simply beautiful, for suffering to be awful, and for nobility to be noble; absurdism cannot account for the dynamism of the mythic Sisyphus. Sisyphus becomes one-dimensional, in Camus’ rendition, just as humanity is made one-dimensional once we are reduced to “monkeys on a rock” or, in Vonnegut’s interpretation, creatures cursed by “the villain of the human brain.” Sisyphus kept pushing because it mattered to him to defy the gods. The futility of this task is totally different from the futility of his task in the absurdist interpretation, in that Camus asked us to rejoice in the task itself, rather than to accept the awful struggle, and value nonetheless the cause. Sisyphus’ nobility cannot coexist with Sisyphus happiness: these are mutually exclusive. What is the value of happiness, after all, if it simply comes from pushing against a rock? Returning to the post-war inversion, “The war was meaningful; life is absurd!” is an existentialist statement, quite similar to “Sisyphus is happy, though the task is absurd!” Collapsing the drama of Sisyphus’s torture into an exercise in absurdism removes all of the pathos from the tale, undermining our capacity to understand why he kept pushing, despite the rock being cursed; just as collapsing the drama of war into an absurdist struggle removes the nobility, pathos, and cause. Camus’s Sisyphus and Vonnegut’s satire leave the human being estranged from a rich, meaningful life. In Camus’s rendition, Sisyphus is a seal. And like Vonnegut, Camus is considered a great writer of the second half of the twentieth century. The condition of the world today, and of literature, is still that of Vonnegut and Camus, because this is still the postwar world.

Both writers would agree: we are monkeys on a rock, who fought a meaningful war, though life is, of course, absurd.

There is a constant refrain in debates over democracy, revolution, and political stability: in reactionary circles, that “the people” are tired and incapable of the work of democracy, or, in the Marxist telling, “the people” passively await “critical consciousness” to be delivered from on high. But there is an alternative perspective: we can think of people not as fat seals or passive actors, but perhaps as puffins, taught to be seals.

Puffins are incapable creatures. They are confused by city lights. They once navigated from their nests, buried high on Icelandic cliffs, to the sea by moonlight. Now, when young puffins take off on their first flights, some are confused by light pollution and fly towards pubs rather than the sea. This terrible mistake is rectified by a new tradition: the locals of Iceland emerge from their homes at night, find the baby puffins, carry them to the cliffs, and throw them into the ocean. Though soft and fluffy and naïve and dumb, the little birds take flight and dive deep on instinct, into the dark waters of the black Atlantic. They will not find a wine-dark sea or turquoise shoals. There will be no warmth. There are no lemon trees for little puffins to rest under! They live harsh, confusing lives, of rock and salt and frigid cold. Some little birds are never found. They perish, confused, beneath industrial light,

There is the violent rake of air in their soft, small lungs as they first emerge from the water. They terribly beat their wings against the wind, the current, and the waves, back towards their cliff-homes. When they seek a mate, males dance, tapping their feet in silent pitter-patters, and if the rhythm is good, they find a lover. Their song is terrible to hear. They honk and do not sing. So puffins must be silent romantics, waltzing on the cliffside. When they sing, their song is ugly, but when they dive — well, can anything look bad diving, back arched, cutting into gleaming waves?

Puffins will never adapt to city life, to the strange scent of human hands and the touch of oily thumbs, or children’s laughter, as they are gingerly carried to the cliffs. Yet when they fall, beaten by the familiar weight of rough spray and trough wind, they somehow know how to survive. Without our kindness, some would die. They do not need us much: they only need us to throw them from the cliffs. We could ignore them.

People are seals if you train them to be. They will bark and roll and pat their bellies if you throw them fish. But if you throw them into the water, revealing their most vulnerable self to the black ocean, some might just dive, thrusting their golden beaks like swords against the waves.

Vonnegut and his generation gave literary confidence to a culture of seals and captured, in their work, a certain cynical view of the human being, which nicely captures liberal governance’s odd paradox of ever-heightening demands on human beings, paired with an ever-shrinking belief in human potential. People will remain seals if they are never shown that there is more than hot rocks, as taught, that any meaning is really meaningless, because life is absurd.

We can imagine another way of living, and of writing. In a seal culture, writers write stories about paradisal coves; in a puffin culture, writers write stories of deep dives and cliff-homes, of a hard-won catch, and of silent love beneath the moon. Both may focus on catching fish, but one is a tale of abundance, and the other of starvation and success. In the seal, I see Sisyphus happy. In the puffin, I see Sisyphus, rebelling.