Book Banning & Burning Throughout History

Here's a timeline of book banning and burning.

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ook banning in America is rising at an alarming rate. In fact, an all-time high of nearly 1,500 bans were put in place during the first half of the 2022-2023 school year, affecting 874 unique titles.

Books are banned for a variety of ostensible claims. Their content may be labeled “offensive” on religious or political grounds, as well as justifications like explicit sexuality or “vulgar” language. Lately, LGBTQA+ themes, diversity and social concerns lead the list.

At different points in history, authors of banned books have been ostracized, jailed, exiled, or even threatened with death. These days, we’re seeing such tools levied at our librarians. Library professionals have become victims of harassment and public defamation. Several states have passed legislation threatening jail time for librarians, as well as school librarians and teachers, for lending “inappropriate” material. And libraries in Chicago were recently the targets of bomb threats.

Similarly, during certain historical periods, possessing a banned book was regarded as a heretical act or considered treasonous, and as such punishable by prison, torture, or in the most notorious regimes, capital punishment. Here’s a brief timeline of book bannings, burnings, and other censorship tactics:

259–210 BC: The Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti is said to have buried 460 Confucian scholars alive, in order to control how history was written in his time. In 212 B.C., he burned all the books in his kingdom, keeping a single copy of each for his Royal Library—and even those were destroyed before his death. Since all historical records had been eradicated, history could be said to begin with him.

8 CE: The Roman poet Ovid was banished from Rome for writing erotic poetry, Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), which undermined Emperor Augustus’ agenda of moral reform. He was exiled to Tomis, the ends of the Roman Empire, if not the world. Savonarola later burned all of Ovid’s works in Florence during 1497, and U.S. Customs banned an English translation of Ars Amatoria in 1928.

35: The Roman emperor Caligula banned the reading of Homer’s The Odyssey, written more than 300 years earlier. Caligula considered the epic poem dangerous because it expressed Greek ideas of freedom.

640: According to legend, the caliph Omar burned every volume in the library at Alexandria in Egypt, all 200,000 of them. He did so because: “If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Book of God they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed.” On the upside, burning all these books provided six months’ fuel to warm the city’s baths.

1497–98: Savonarola was a powerful Florentine religious fanatic with a large following. He was also one of the most notorious censors of all time. During these years, he incited great “bonfires of the vanities” which burned books and paintings by some of the most renowned artists in Florence. He persuaded the artists themselves to surrender their works to the bonfires. A number of poets became convinced that their lines were wicked and impure, so they decided to stop writing in verse. Popular songs were condemned, and turned into hymns with pious lyrics. The final bonfire was lit in 1498, only this time, it was under Savonarola as he hung from a cross. Ironically, all his sermons, essays, and other writings were burned with him.

1525: Six thousand copies of William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament, which had been printed in Germany and smuggled into England, were burned by the English church. Church authorities mandated that the Bible only be available in Latin.

1559: At this point, the Roman Catholic Church had been listing books prohibited to its members for hundreds of years, but in this year, Pope Paul IV established the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. And for more than 400 years this remained the definitive list of books Roman Catholics were prohibited from reading. It was clearly one of the most powerful censorship tools in the world.

1597: Shakespeare’s Richard II originally contained a scene in which the king was deposed from his throne. Queen Elizabeth I was so angry that she ordered it removed from all copies of the play. The scene didn’t appear in the printed version of Richard II until 1608, during the reign of James I.

1614: King James I, on the other hand, banned Sir Walter Raleigh’s book The History of the World. Raleigh wrote the book while imprisoned in London Tower by James I, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it was banned for “being too saucy in censuring princes.”

1624: The Pope had Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible burned, in Germany no less.

1633: The Catholic Church banned Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. This is the book that championed Copernicus’ model of the universe, which put the sun at the center of the universe rather than the earth. Charged with “vehement suspicion of heresy” and under threat of torture, Galileo was not only forced to renounce his belief in the Copernican model, he was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

1644:  Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan is considered the first book to be banned in the United States (to be technically accurate, what would become the US). Though Morton arrived in Massachusetts with the Pilgrims, he wasn’t on board with the strict, insular Puritan society they set out to build. Morton set up a dissenting colony, and seemingly went out of his way to be a perpetual thorn in the side of its Governor, William Bradford. New English Canaan is Morton’s harsh, satirical critique of Puritan social order in general, and the contemptible treatment the New World was receiving at the hands of these Pilgrims. The book was written from England where Morton was involved in a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Bay Company. Upon his return to Massachusetts in 1644, Morton was arrested for the publication of New English Canaan, and exiled to Maine where he died in 1647.

1720: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe was placed on the Index Librorum by the Spanish Catholic Church for heresy. Crusoe’s obsession with odds and likelihoods, as exhibited in his study of weather patterns and his ability to predict seasons of rain and drought, is seen as the art of conjuring.

1744: Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther was published in this year, and soon became popular throughout Europe. The book is a short novel about a young man’s sufferings from a failed love affair. And the final chapter of the book graphically depicts Werther’s suicide. The Lutheran church condemned it as immoral because several copycat suicides followed the publication of the book.  Governments in Italy, Denmark, and Germany followed suit and also banned the book. Two hundred years later, American sociologist David Phillips wrote about the triggering effect of publicized suicide, titling his book The Werther Effect.

1788: In deference to the insanity of the reigning monarch, King George III, Shakespeare’s King Lear was banned from the stage until 1820.

1807: Dr. Thomas Bowdler published a sanitized collection of Shakespeare’s plays. The preface of his first volume claimed that he had eliminated “everything that can raise a blush on the cheek of modesty.” This ultimately amounted to roughly 10 per cent of the playwright’s texts. The word “bowdlerize” has since became incorporated into the English language, meaning to modify passages considered vulgar or otherwise objectionable.

1843: The English Parliament updated an act requiring all plays performed in England to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for approval. Despite objections by renowned playwrights like George Bernard Shaw (in 1909), the Lord Chamberlain retained this power until 1968.

1853: Many historians point to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as the first book in the United States to be banned on a national scale. That “nation,” however, was the Southern Confederacy. Even so, the banning began years before the Confederate states seceded. From the instant it was published, Uncle Tom’s Cabin outraged people in the south, who labeled it “slanderous” to a criminal degree. This resulted in situations like a bookseller in Mobile, Alabama being run out of town for selling it. Stowe’s novel continues to come under fire, but these days it’s primarily because of the book’s racially charged language.

1859: Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, which introduced the theory of evolution, was published. In the same year, the book was banned from the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, the very school where Darwin had been a student. Origin of Species was also at the heart of the 1925 American legal case commonly referred to as the Scope’s Monkey Trial (formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes). The case challenged Tennessee’s Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach human evolution in state-funded schools.

1859: George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede was condemned as the “vile outpourings of a lewd woman’s mind,” and the book was removed from libraries in Britain.

1864–1959: Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables was placed on the Index Librorum because the Church was wary of political revolution, and remained on the Index until 1959. Not only did Victor Hugo support the French Revolution, in the nineteenth century, “liberty, fraternity and equality” were quite literally “fighting words.”

1881: Boston’s district attorney threatened to ban Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (published in 1833) unless the book was bowdlerized. There was so much public uproar that Whitman was able to buy a house with the proceeds from the additional book sales.

1885: A year after of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn was published, the library of Concord, Massachusetts decided to remove the book from its shelves. The decision-making committee said the book was “rough, coarse and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating,” further stating that “the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.” It is said that by 1907 Twain’s novel had been abolished from some library somewhere every year, mostly because its hero was seen as setting a bad example for impressionable young readers.

1927: A translation of The Arabian Nights by French scholar J. C. Mardrus was held up by U.S. Customs. Though a translation by Sir Richard Burton was deemed less objectionable and allowed into the country four years later, the ban on the Mardrus version was maintained.

1929: Jack London’s popular novel Call of the Wild was banned in Italy and Yugoslavia. However, it was not the harsh undertones and mistreatment of animals that brought about this ban. It was London’s Socialist politics, which ran afoul of fascist regimes who considered it “too radical.” The Nazi Party also burned several of London’s “socialist-friendly” books like The Iron Heel in 1933.

1929: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was banned in the Soviet Union because of its references to, and Doyle’s advocacy of, “occultism” and spiritualism.

1929–80: Novels by Ernest Hemingway were banned in various parts of the world, including Italy, and Germany, as well as the U.S. Banned by Mussolini himself,  A Farewell to Arms contains a glaringly-accurate account of the Italian retreat from Caporetto, which depicted the cowardice of the soldiers as well as the atrocities they committed. It was also challenged by the Vernon-Verona-Sherill, N.Y., School district in 1980 as a “sex novel.” All of Hemingway’s books were burned in the Nazi bonfires for “being a monument of modern decadence.” In 1941, the U.S. Post Office declared For whom the Bell Tolls unfit to mail because it was seen as pro-Communist. Hemingway’s books are frequently challenged for “vulgar” words, which he felt conveyed important truths about war and love. In 1962, a group called “Texans for America” went so far as to oppose any textbooks that refer students to books by the Nobel Prize-winning author.

1931: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was banned by the governor of Hunan province in China. The reason for the banning is that animals shouldn’t use human language, and that it is disastrous to put animals and humans on the same level.

1932: In a letter to an American publisher, James Joyce indicated that “some very kind person” bought out the entire first edition of his novel Dubliners and had it burned. The New York Society for the suppression of Vice argued to have Joyce’s novel Ulysses labeled obscene, and it was banned in the U.S. until 1933.

1933: A series of massive bonfires took place in Nazi Germany, which burned thousands of books written by Jewish authors, communists, and others. In addition to those already mentioned, this included works of John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, Lenin, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, Upton Sinclair, Stalin, and Leon Trotsky.

1953: The Irish government banned a number of books for immorality, including Anatole France’s A Mummer’s Tale, all the works of Emile Zola, most novels by William Faulkner, as well all of John Steinbeck’s books, which were banned for subversion and immorality.

1954: Mickey Mouse comics were banned in East Berlin because the cartoon character was said to be an “anti-Red rebel.”

1959: After protests by the White Citizens’ Council, Garth Williams’ picture book for children The Rabbits’ Wedding was restricted to the reserved shelf in Alabama public libraries because it was seen as promoting racial integration.

1960: The year after England passed a new Obscene Publications Act, D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the subject of a trial, in which Penguin Books was prosecuted for publishing an obscene book. During the proceedings, the prosecutor asked whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover is “a book you would wish your wife or servant to read?” Ultimately, Penguin won the case, and the book was allowed to be sold in England.

1973: School officials in Drake, North Dakota voted to withdraw Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five from the curriculum, citing “obscene language,” and “explicit sex scenes.” Most students, however, didn’t want to give up their copy of the novel. So, lockers were searched, books confiscated, and all 32 copies were ultimately burned in the school’s furnace.

1977: Maurice Sendak’s picture book In the Night Kitchen, was removed from the school library in Norridge, Illinois because of “nudity to no purpose.” The book features a boy who dreams he falls out of his pajamas and into a bowl of cake batter, and was ranked #25 on the American Library Association’s list of 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.

1980s: During an evaluation of school materials, the London County Council banned the use of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny from all London schools. These classic tales were prohibited because the stories only portrayed “middle-class rabbits.”

1983: Members of the Alabama State Textbook Committee called for the exclusion of The Diary of Anne Frank because it was “a real downer.”

1987: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou was eliminated from the required reading list for Wake County, North Carolina high school students because of a scene in which Angelou, at the age of seven and a half, is raped.

1998: The Kenyan government banned 30 different books and publications for “sedition and immorality,” among them The Quotations of Chairman Mao, and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

2001: A pastor in New Mexico lead his congregation in a bonfire fueled by Stephen King novels, AC/DC records, and a number of other books, because they were “the work of the devil.” Church members sang Amazing Grace as they threw the books and records into the fire.

2006: Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale was deleted from an advanced placement English curriculum in the Judson, Texas school district. Overruling a committee of teachers, students, and parents, the superintendent banned the book after another parent complained about its sexual nature, and stated that it was offensive to Christians.

2010: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon was removed from the summer reading program in Lake Fenton, Michigan after parents objected to the novel’s “profane” language. Some parents have also insisted the book be eliminated from school reading lists because they feel it promotes atheism.

2016: The American Library Association’s report for this year included an anecdote by Daily Show writer Daniel Radosh regarding the irony of his son’s school requiring a signed permission slip in order to read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The irony lies in the fact that Bradbury’s novel is a cautionary tale about the dangers of banning books. In true satirical Daily Show fashion, “Radosh wrote a thank-you note to the teacher, saying the permission slip was ‘a wonderful way to introduce students to the theme of Fahrenheit 451.”

2019: St. Edward Catholic School in Nashville removed J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series from its library for reasons involving witchcraft. The pastor was worried that readers actually risk “conjuring evil spirits.”

2022: Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill has several Florida schools removing significant numbers of books from their libraries. There’s also the Sunshine State’s “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” (officially the Individual Freedom Act), which PEN America describes as an “educational gag order.” This law has Florida teachers removing or covering all the books in their classroom libraries until they have been “vetted” by the proper authorities. Dozens of books were ultimately removed after they were objected to by a single person.

In the 2021-2022 school year 565 books have been banned in Florida schools. Some were banned permanently, though other bans were temporary pending investigation. Either way, the result is the same: Students have lost access to books.

The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) has put together annual bibliographies of books that have been challenged, restricted, or banned since 1990. These lists are based on information gathered from media stories, and challenge reports submitted to the OIF from communities throughout the U.S.

Sources:

ABC News
American Library Association – ala.org
American Libraries Magazine
Associated Press
BBC News
Catholic Lane – catholiclane.com
Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic by Jesse Molesworth.
Chicago Sun Times.
Christian Science Monitor – csmonitor.com
Freedom to Read Week – freedomtoread.ca
History Answers – historyanswers.co.uk
History – history.com
Literary Hub – lithub.com
PEN America – pen.org
Politics and Prose Bookstore – politics-prose.com
Royal Collection Trust – rct.uk
San  Diego Free Press. https://sandiegofreepress.org/2014/09/americas-first-banned-book-and-the-battle-for-the-soul-of-the-country/#.YbuTIX3MIb0
Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World by Charles H. Firth.
Smithsonian Magazine – smithsonianmag.com
SocialBooksheves.com
“The Cause of Ovid’s Exile” by G. P. Goold in Illinois Classical Studies.
“The Censorship of the Deposition Scene in Richard II” by Janet Clare in The Review of English Studies.
The New York Times
The Nobel Prize Website – nobelprize.org
The Online books Page – onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu
The Washington Post – washingtonpost.com
World.edu Global education network — world.edu
World History Encyclopedia —  https://www.worldhistory.org/New_English_Canaan/




Slaughterhouse-Five: Jumbled, Jangled… and Burned.

This Book is Banned - Slaughterhouse-Five

This Book is Banned-Scarlet Slaughterhouse-Five revolves around Billy Pilgrim, who like Vonnegut, was a POW in Dresden when it was decimated by Allied firebombing during World War Two.[1] Billy has “come unstuck in time.”[2] And to complicate matters further, he is abducted by aliens, two-foot-tall creatures, who are shaped like toilet plungers, from the planet Tralfamadore.[3]

Why was Slaughterhouse-Five banned? Kurt Vonnegut’s searingly sarcastic, darkly funny, science fiction-infused war story is considered one of the greatest anti-war novels of all time. Needless to say, it includes a good dose of rough language, the kind soldiers have been known to use. Bearing both of these things in mind, it’s no surprise that Vonnegut’s novel has been challenged at least eighteen times, with “obscene language,” and “anti-American” sentiment or “lack of patriotism,” consistently among the objections.[4] But as always, some challenges were more successful than others.

A petition to remove Slaughterhouse-Five (among other books) from the junior high and high school libraries of Island Trees Union Free Public School District, made it to the US Supreme Court. Fortunately, citing the First Amendment, the court found that these books could not be removed from the school district’s libraries.[5]

On the other hand, there’s Drake, North Dakota, a banning that got Vonnegut’s personal attention. In 1973, school officials voted to withdraw Slaughterhouse-Five from the curriculum. Most students, however, didn’t want to give up their copy of the novel. So, lockers were searched, books confiscated, and all 32 copies were ultimately burned in the school’s furnace.[6]

The event made national headlines. And Vonnegut sent a biting letter to the chairman of the Drake School Board, who apparently couldn’t fathom what all the fuss was about. In his typical no-holds-barred style, Vonnegut stated what to many of us is obvious:

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that.[7]

Vonnegut concluded his letter by summing up the stand against censorship book burning like only he can:

Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them… it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books—books you haven’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and survive.[8]

To Vonnegut’s point, this book is definitely more than just a stockpile of salty language. But, why is Slaughterhouse-Five important? Like all literature, it’s a snapshot of the culture that produced it. As noted in an earlier post, authors and their works present, analyze, and shed light on the social maladies of their day. When readers look beyond Slaughterhouse Five’s rough language, it’s obvious that this book addresses the devastating aftereffects of war. And the novel’s time-traveling, non-linear structure mimics a debilitating psychological condition, one our soldiers struggle with all too often as a result of their war experience.
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This Book is Banned Slaughterhouse Five John Wayne in The Longest Day trailer

No parts for
Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.

Science-fiction tropes may carry Slaughterhouse-Five’s narrative, but Vonnegut’s novel tells the very real tale of a verifiable historical event. In the book’s opening chapter, however, Vonnegut makes it clear that he wrote about the firebombing of Dresden because of its historical significance, rather than simply because it made for an exciting personal war story.[9]

But, Vonnegut doesn’t write from the romanticized, gung-ho perspective prevalent in post-World War Two culture. As he tells us in the novel’s autobiographical first chapter, after an uncomfortable conversation with his war-buddy’s wife (Mary O’Hare, to whom Slaughterhouse-Five is dedicated), he realized that the book he was about to write would add to the cultural mythology that perpetuates war and glamorizes young men’s participation in them.[10] So, Vonnegut made her a promise, vowing that if he ever finished his book and it was made into a movie, there would be no parts for actors like Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. There would be no roles for “glamorous, war loving, dirty old men,” who “make war look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them.”[11]

Consequently, Vonnegut’s novel doesn’t praise the British bombers who carried out the raid, justify American involvement, or support World War Two generally for that matter. Instead, he wrote about hungry and sick prisoners of war. He tells us about a good man who survives the bombing but is executed for picking a teapot out of the rubble.[12] And as Vonnegut points out in the novel, “there are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations.”[13] He wrote it this way because “one of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters,” by which he means being seen as human beings.[14]
_____

Why is Slaughterhouse-Five’s
1969 publication date significant?

As also mentioned in a previous post, the period a book was written in can tell us a lot. And Slaughterhouse-Five’s 1969 publication date, nearly twenty-five years after Vonnegut’s release from a repatriation camp in France, is definitely noteworthy.[15] It’s significant for a couple of reasons. First, because dissent toward the Vietnam war finally freed writers to report on World War Two events that “made war look so ugly.”[16] The time frame is also pertinent because it is during this period that Mental Health professionals began defining the symptoms of PTSD, and advocating for an official diagnosis for this debilitating effect of war.[17] This tidbit of medical history is relevant because Billy Pilgrim, Slaughterhouse-Five’s haunted protagonist, appears to be “a text-book sufferer of PTSD.”[18]

Some significant insight into PTSD is that it’s caused by more than the trauma itself. The “psychosocial atmosphere” of the society soldiers are returning to can, and often does, hinder the process of coping with traumatizing events.[19] And this situation can be observed in Slaughterhouse-Five. When Billy comes home after the war, the environment in America isn’t conducive to working through the trauma he experienced as a soldier.

Shortly after he returns from the war, Billy resumes optometry school. By the middle of his final year, he has himself committed to a veterans’ hospital for non-violent mental patients. And though the doctors agree that Billy was indeed “going crazy” (as Vonnegut describes it), “they didn’t think it had anything to do with the war.”[20] Billy’s doctors were certain his issues could only have stemmed from childhood experiences.

This scene reflects the medical history noted above. PTSD wasn’t even on the medical community’s radar until the the Vietnam war. And it wasn’t recognized as a diagnosable psychological disorder until 1980.[21]

As Vonnegut’s remarks about Hollywood films suggest, prior to the emergence of the social movement that opposed the Vietnam war, American culture considered battle experience to have a positive, maturing effect on young men.[22] Billy’s son, Robert, embodies this notion. He was a sixteen-year-old alcoholic who flunked out of high school. But after a couple tours in Vietnam, “he was all straightened out now.”[23] It’s no coincidence that Robert is a Green Beret in the Marine Corps. A very famous film titled The Green Berets had been released just the year before Slaughterhouse-Five was published.  And it starred the selfsame John Wayne that Mary O’Hare called out as bearing responsibility for glamorizing war.

There’s also the gung-ho, political American mindset that kept information about Dresden quiet for so many years. Vonnegut put this attitude in the mouth of Professor Rumfoord, Billy’s hospital roommate following the airplane crash that killed everyone but Billy. When asked why Dresden would be kept a secret for so many years, Rumfoord answered, “For fear that a lot of bleeding hearts… might not think it was such a wonderful thing to do.”[24]

The culture that emerges from these commonly held perspectives prevented the negative effects of wartime experience and resultant PTSD from being taken seriously.[25] But as Rumfoord was finally forced to acknowledge that Billy had indeed been in Dresden during the Allied firebombing, PTSD was finally recognized as a trauma-related condition.
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This Book is Banned Slaughterhouse Five unstuck in time

Billy Pilgrim, “unstuck in time”,
a text-book case of PTSD.

Vonnegut himself describes Slaughterhouse-Five as being “jumbled and jangled.”[26] And his non-linear structure resembles the most common symptom of PTSD, “re-experiencing… when a person involuntarily and vividly relives the traumatic event.” [27] This can occur through nightmares, repetitive images and sensations, or it can take the form of flashbacks.[28]

One form of re-experiencing is reflected in Vonnegut’s repetition of particular phrases. These phrases function as both a psychological and narrative linking device, repeatedly returning both Billy and the reader to the war. One example is the oft-repeated image of “blue and ivory feet,” which Billy first saw on corpses while being marched to a POW camp.[29] There’s also the frequently referenced “smell of roses and mustard gas,” whose first chronological encounter occurred in the corpse mines of Dresden.[30]

And then, there’s Vonnegut’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, who he describes as having “come unstuck in time.”[31] Billy time travels, spontaneously and frequently. And the fact that Billy has no control over what part of his life he’ll find himself in, echoes the flashbacks experienced by many who suffer from PTSD.

Flashbacks occur in cases of PTSD because the process of memory consolidation is short-circuited. Familiar, non-stressful events are automatically assimilated and the information in our brain’s “active memory storage” is rapidly eliminated. But that’s not the case with traumatic events.[32] As amazing as our brains are, they have a limited capacity for processing. And information associated with extraordinary, stressful events can’t be processed rapidly, so it remains in active memory storage and continues to run in the background, if you will. When a traumatic memory is triggered, it inserts itself into active consciousness, like pop-ups on websites if you don’t have an ad-blocker.[33]

Specific triggers, things that remind Billy of the war, prompt his time travel/flashbacks. For example, the siren announcing high noon on the firehouse across the street “scared the hell out of him,” and catapults him back in time: “Billy closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was back in World War Two again.”[34] Another triggering instance occurs when Billy was in the mental ward, and his room-mate is reading a book:

Billy fell asleep under his blanket. When he woke up again, he was tied to the bed in the hospital back in prison. He opened one eye, saw poor old Edgar Derby reading The Red Badge of Courage by candlelight.[35]

Like the repeated phrases mentioned above, Billy’s time travel/flashbacks also function as a linking device, repeatedly returning both Billy and the reader to the war.

This Book is Banned Slaughterhouse Five PTSD

A great big secret somewhere inside.

The barbershop quartet at Billy’s anniversary party also triggers a war-related memory. But this time, his response is very different. Rather than having a flashback/time traveling:

His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as though he really were being stretched on the torture engine called the rack. He looked so peculiar that several people commented on it solicitously when the song was done. They thought he might have been having a heart attack… [36]

While coming unstuck in time is the result of a memory that has been partially processed, the barbershop quartet triggers Billy’s response to a memory that had been suppressed. So, even Billy himself didn’t understand why the song evoked such anguish. He finally realizes that the barbershop quartet reminded him of the expressions on the faces of four gobsmacked German guards as they take in the sight of the freshly devastated Dresden.[37] When everyone, guards and prisoners alike, emerged from the meat locker they were sheltering in:

… the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.[38]

The bombing of Dresden is the epicenter of Billy’s trauma. As such, it was not just too frightening to relive, but too painful to even remember. So he suppressed the memory altogether, that is until it was triggered by the barbershop quartet.[39]
_____

What’s with the Tralfamadorians?

Billy’s roommate in the mental hospital, Eliot Rosewater, introduced Billy to the science fiction books of Kilgore Trout. Rosewater had been an infantry captain in the war, and he and Billy were both feeling the “sense of dislocation and absurdity” frequently experienced by survivors of atrocity, a sensibility that destroys their previous assumption of a rational universe.[40]  So, as Vonnegut specifically tells us, Billy and Rosewater use science fiction to “re-invent themselves and their universe.”[41]

One of the books Billy read while he was in the mental hospital was titled Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension. It helped Billy understand why his doctors couldn’t fix what was wrong with him. According to Trout’s book, “mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension.”[42] So, Billy’s three-dimensional Earthling doctors weren’t actually incompetent. They couldn’t identify the cause of his problems, because they were unable to see them. Rather like the way the psychosocial atmosphere in America hindered Mental Health professionals from identifying PTSD prior to the Vietnam era.

The Tralfamadorian concept of time offers Billy an explanation for his flashbacks. According to the Tralfamadorians, the notion that moments occur one after another, and are gone forever once they have past, is merely an illusion we have here on Earth. Tralfamadorians can:

…look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.[43]

This is an apt description what happens in a flashback. All moments are active. As mentioned earlier, the brain hasn’t finished processing traumatic memories and removed them from active memory storage. And when a particular moment is triggered, indicating interest in that moment, the subject (re-)experiences it.

As a result of their understanding of time, when Tralfamadorians see a corpse they merely think the dead person is in a bad state at that precise moment. That same person is in fine shape in plenty of other moments. A passage within Slaughterhouse-Five that overlaps the moment when Billy’s entire company was killed with a moment of camaraderie during boot camp, indicates the psychological benefits of seeing time in this way.

Billy’s fellow soldiers were merely “theoretically dead.”[44]  And these “theoretical corpses” were still able to laugh and eat “a hearty noontime meal.”[45] Recalling the incident some years later, “Billy was struck by what a Tralfamadorian adventure with death that had been, to be dead and to eat at the same time.”[46] In short, understanding time as the Tralfamadorians do provides Billy with the tools to get a handle on his condition. These tools also allow him to cope with the vast amount of death he witnessed in the war, which caused his condition in the first place.
_____

This Book is Banned Slaughterhouse Five Tralfamadorians

Why are aliens
intertwined with Billy’s PTSD?

Once again, Vonnegut’s use of aliens reflects what was going in American culture when he was writing his novel. At the time Slaughterhouse-Five was published, the Roswell incident had been in American culture for about twenty years. And reports of alien encounters were beginning to crop up. These alien abduction stories indicate that, during this period, science fiction has gone beyond merely being a genre of fiction to become a way of looking at the world.[47]

It’s interesting to note that the first widely publicized account came from someone who, like Billy Pilgrim, was a World War Two veteran. The fact that this abductee said the alien in charge reminded him of “an evil-faced German Nazi” officer is intriguing indeed.[48] This shared characteristic with Billy Pilgrim is especially compelling, given that he also noted a similarity between the “precision of movement” the alien crew exhibited when they moved as a group, and German soldiers.[49]

Studies of alien abduction accounts indicate that, along with other phobias and aversions, subjects commonly experience a confused temporality and gaps in time. These symptoms are frequently related to trauma, which as we have seen, often disrupts memory assimilation. In order for the subject to protect themselves from remembering the event that created their psychic wound, these gaps in time demand to be filled.[50] After the Roswell incident “proved” the existence of extraterrestrials, an alien abduction story is the perfect way to account for this missing time.
_____

In Conclusion.

Slaughterhouse-Five is clearly more than a jumbled bag of sarcastic anti-American rhetoric, sprinkled with a good dose of rough language. Like all literature, Vonnegut’s novel reflects what was going on in the culture that produced it. Even if, like PTSD prior to the Vietnam era, it doesn’t have a name yet. This book does more than just talk about the devastating after-effects of war, however. It gives engaged readers a very small taste of what it’s like to try and make sense of the world when suffering from this debilitating psychological condition.

The moral of Slaughterhouse-Five is simple, War is Hell. By showing us how damaging trauma is, especially on the scale endured as a result of World War Two, Vonnegut does indeed make the case for why people need to be kinder and more responsible than they often are.

That’s my take on Slaughterhouse Five – what’s yours?
Check out this discussion guide to get you started.

Page Capper copy

Endnotes:

[1] Powers, Kevin. “Forward.” Slaughterhouse-Five. (New York: Modern Library, 2019), xi.
[2] Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. (New York: Modern Library, 2019), 25.
[3] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 28.
[4] Morais, Betsy. “The Neverending Campaign to Ban “Slaughterhouse-Five.’” The Atlantic, August 12, 2011; Henriksen, Megan. “Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Slaughterhouse-Five.’” The Banned Books Project @Carnegie Mellon University. September 12, 2019.
[5] Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 et al., Petitioners, v. Steven A. PICO, by his next friend Frances Pico et al. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/457/853.
[6] Johnson, Hannah. “40 years later, the resentment still smolders.” The Bismarck Tribune. Nov. 10, 2013; Stevens, William K. “Dakota Town Dumfounded at Criticism of Book Burning by Order of the school Board.” The New York Times, Nov. 16, 1973.
[7] Vonnegut, Kurt. Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage. (New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, 2011), 4-5.
[8] Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 6.
[9] Laufert, Wayne. “From the Slaughter.” The Humanist.com (Feb. 19, 2019).
[10] Kunze, Peter C. “For the Boys: Masculinity, Gray Comedy, and the Vietnam War in ‘Slaughterhouse-Five.’” Studies in American Humor. New Series 3, No. 26, Special Issue: Kurt Vonnegut and Humor (2012), 45.
[11] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 17, 16.
[12] Laufert, “From the Slaughter.”
[13] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 168.
[14] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 168.
[15] Solly, Mellan. “Kurt Vonnegut’s Unpublished World War II Scrapbook Reveals Origins of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five.’” Smithsonianmag.com (Dec. 14, 2018).
[16] “‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ at 50.” 2003 Interview with Renee Montagne. NPR radio. (June 6, 2019).
[17] Scott, Wilbur J. “PTSD in DSM-III: A Case in the Politics of Diagnosis and Disease.” Social Problems, Vol 37, No. 3 (Aug., 1990).
[18] Kavanagh, Ciaran. “Diagnosing Kurt Vonnegut: A Response to Susanne Vees-Gulani on the Subject of Slaughterhouse-Five.” IJAS (Irish Journal of American Studies.) Online, No. 5 (2016), 14.
[19]  Kleber, Rolf J., Charles R. Figley, and Bertold P. R. Gersons. Beyond Trauma: Cultural and Societal Dynamics. The Plenum Series on Stress and Coping. (New York: Plenum, 1995), 2.
[20] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 103.
[21] Friedman, Matthew J. A Brief History of the PTSD Diagnosis. PTSD: National Center or PTSD.
[22] Bracken, Patrick J. “Post-modernity and post-traumatic stress disorder.” Social science & Medicine. Vol 53 (2001), 734.
[23] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 194.
[24] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 195.
[25] Bracken, Post-modernity and post-traumatic stress disorder, 735.
[26] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 21.
[27] Symptoms: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/symptoms/
[28] Symptoms: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
[29] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 68.
[30] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 219; Kavanagh, Ciaran. “Diagnosing Kurt Vonnegut: A Response to Susanne Vees-Gulani on the Subject of Slaughterhouse-Five.” IJAS (Irish Journal of American Studies.) Online, No. 5 (2016), 14.
[31] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 25.
[32] Horowitz, Mardi J. Stress Response Syndromes: PTSD, Grief, Adjustment, and Dissociative Disorders. (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc., 2011), 84.
[33] Horowitz, 84-85.
[34] Kavanaugh, 14; Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 60.
[35] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 108.
[36] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 177.
[37] Kavanaugh, 14-15.
[38] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 182.
[39] Kavanaugh, 14-15.
[40] Lifton, Robert J. “Beyond Atrocity.” Saturday Review. (March 27, 1971), 23.
[41] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 104.
[42] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 107.
[43] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 29.
[44] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 33.
[45] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 33.
[46] Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 34.
[47] Luckhurst, Roger. “The Science-Fictionalization of Trauma: Remarks on Narratives of Alien Abduction.” Science Fiction Studies. Vol. 21, No. 1 (March, 1998), 29.
[48] Friedman, Stanton T. and Kathleen Marden. Captured!: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. (Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2007), 136.
[49] Friedman, 108.
[50] Luckhurst, 37.

Images:

Cover – 1st edition. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five.  (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969). Jacket design by Paul Bacon” is found on the left jacket flap. (For jurisdictions that define copyright term on the date of the author’s death: according to this article, Bacon died in 2015.) – AbeBooks (direct link to jpg)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80843456

No Parts for John Wayne or Frank Sinatra. “The Longest Day.” trailer screenshot (20th Century Fox), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Billy Pilgrim, a Text-book Case of PTSD. Photo by Ahmad Ossayli on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/laJW5pp-6Yw?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink

A Great Big Secret Somewhere Inside. Photo by Edge2Edge Media on Unsplash  https://unsplash.com/photos/x21KgBfOd_4?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink

Why are Aliens Intertwined with Billy’s PTSD? Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/sMPRCsoUM4A?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink




Show Me on the Doll Where This Book Hurt You

censorship and book banning

They finally started coming for the information

Just as they once went after music

Put a parental warning sticker over my mouth

and the mouth of every writer out there

To Kill a Mockingbird and Lady Chatterly’s Lover

are cast back in the fire

Howl and Tropic of Cancer

are back in court upon appeal

The busybodies are out for blood

out for ink

and out after all the silly misfits

.

Evil deeds have hidden behind

noble language so long

they are now transparent

But now it stands

with the possibility of every Missouri librarian

facing anything

from a $500 fine to a year behind bars

No one has that kinda money

or that kinda time

.

It all comes down to small people

wanting big power

Maybe the biggest of all

The power to control the mind

To limit what goes in

Because these parents already have

the lives of their children

mapped out

And know who they want

living in their neighborhoods

.

A perfect little life

all planned out

And there’s no room

in a perfect little life

for questioning

all the little plans

.

Author Bio:

This Book is Banned-contributing author,Daniel WrightDaniel W. Wright is an award-nominated poet and fiction writer. He most recently wrote the foreword for Sacred Decay: The Art of Lauren Marx (Dark Horse, 2021). He is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Love Letters from the Underground (Spartan Press, 2021), Rodeo of the Soul (Spartan Press, 2019), and Murder City Special (Bad Jacket, 2017). His work has appeared in print journals such as The Literary Parrot, BUK100, 365 Days, and Gasconade Review, as well as online journals such as Book of Matches. He currently resides in St. Louis, MO, where you can usually find him in a bar or a bookstore. 

#On Censorship      #Banned       #Guest Essayists Page Capper copy

Author photo by Gabrielle Blanton
Doll photo by Yousef Bagheri on Unsplash