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Pines by the Sea

This is how I will begin everything. Simple and unadorned. I have no need for ornaments to tell this story. I mean for this to be standard.

There is an unknown shore on the Western coastline. Unknown because no footprints slowly dissolve in the weak surf. There is a boat, however, as unknown as the shore, tied to a rotting wood post, the remnants of a forgotten dock. The sky over the water is a pale grey and covered in a quilt of sea mist. The ocean is calm here because a sand bar two hundred yards out has created a lagoon. The water gently laps at the shore. It rolls timidly, a miniature model of roaring waves some distance to the north or south. Stiff bubbles form a yellow sea foam which lingers for a moment, leaving its skeleton as the water recedes only to be washed away and left again as the water languidly floats back. The sand where these foam skeletons are left is mud, tacky and drenched. As it retreats from the water’s edge, it dries and is coarse, like gravel, a dull yellow, peppered with brown and blue stones. The gentle but constant wind has created small, shallow waves across the surface. Wild grass sprouts up, sparsely at first, but as it thickens, it becomes lost in the density of the trees. The sand disappears into soft soil. These are Douglas firs, mostly. They are ancient. They form a band four or five miles deep, until they begin to roll on the hills like the waves of the sea. The trees fade back to wild grass on the hills. There are no paths here. There is no way to navigate. The modest hills stretch back from the trees for two miles dotted with distant and ancient oaks. The hills retreat into plain, like waves calming on the surface of the sea. The wild grass blends into poppies and eventually disappears.

Poppies and poppies and poppies.

Yes, and this is where Autumn Le lay on her back, her eyes wide, watching the sky. This is where I imagine her beginning.

Among flowers.

The flowers look rotoscoped, their vibrant colors animated in the sunlight. And Autumn Le also looks only partially real. She is in fact my character. My character I do not control nor wish to. I never have. No, I will wind Autumn Le up, and I will let her go. I will watch her march across the page with purpose and conviction.

“Are you watching?” Sam asks her.

“Hmm?”

“It’s almost four.”

“Oh,” Autumn sighs wistfully.

Sam lay among the flowers too. His head touches hers slightly, legs pointed in the opposite direction. They are the hand of a compass pointing east and west.

“Shall we then?” he asks her.

“I suppose we shall.”

Autumn rolls over on her stomach. The back of her summer dress has flower petals and a few leaves of grass stuck to it. They blend in almost unnoticeably with the pattern of the dress. Sam rolls too meeting Autumn’s eyes with his own. She smiles sideways at him and hoists herself to her feet. She reaches down to pick up her camera. She snaps a lazy picture of Sam.

“How many of those do you need?”

“As many as I want.”

“I guess you’ll have something to remember me someday.”

He smiles.

The two walk hand in hand back to his car parked alongside the highway.

* * *

June straightens the pok-a-dot ribbon in her golden hair. It is red and white silk. Her lipstick matches. Her face is smooth like a porcelain doll and has the complexion of one. She takes her light blue eye shadow and applies it carefully so as not to over do it. Just a light dusting. An airbrushing.

She looks like glass.

Her breasts small and barely perceptible; her clothes made for a child. She doesn’t notice. She smooths out her shirt, which is stark white. It is skintight across her chest and under her bosom, and then flows out like a small dress. It hides how thin she really is.

She walks to the bedroom where she finds shoes that match her lipstick and ribbon. The small television is playing Access Hollywood. Casey is in the living room and asks June to turn it down. His ratty, white v-neck is so thin his tattoos are nearly completely visible beneath it. In the middle of his chest is a grenade. Above that, along his collarbone are these words:

Vita Palma Evanui, Ita Vadum Ego

Casey is half laying in the corner of the couch, one foot propped up on the formica coffee table. The table is covered with copies of Cosmo, Seventeen, Vogue, TV Guide and other such material. There are stacks of back issues piled all around the room and in the closets and in the kitchen and in the bathroom. He is flipping through a copy of Life magazine, studying each page very carefully. The cover of the magazine says this:

100 PLACES TO SEE IN YOUR LIFETIME

He is not reading the descriptions, only studying the large, full color photographs, as if looking for someone. He is looking at a picture of a lighthouse in Maine when June comes dancing into the room.

“Are we ready?” Casey says.

“Sure. Just a minute”

“It’s nearly six.”

“I know.”

“So?”

“Just one second.”

June picks up a copy of Cosmo and flips to one of the many dog eared pages where a large picture of a blonde actress winks back at her, red ribbon in her hair, red shoes on her feet. June runs back to the bathroom and holds the picture up to the mirror, trying to look at herself and herself at the same time.

Close, she thinks.

Casey is still on the couch in a trance. June hops over the back of it and lands on top of him.

“Dude, you’re boney,” he says to her, eyes still on the page.

“You bastard!” she shouts, playfully smacking him on the arm. He puts the magazine down and grabs her wrist, gently but with enough force to remind her. He smiles, and she leans in to kiss him.

“Come on,” he says. “Autumn and Sam will be waiting for us.”

“Let them wait,” June whispers.

“No,” Casey insists. “Let’s go.”

June moans slightly and rolls off the couch. The two of them step off the curb onto the street. Casey is wearing wooden clogs. They clop on the pavement.

“I wish you wouldn’t wear those,” June says to him.

“They’re the most comfortable shoes I own.”

* * *

The VFW Hall in Cambria has a small group of hipsters and scene kids standing outside. Sam and Autumn Le stand at the corner, apart from them, her camera around her neck. They are waiting for the doors to open. They, along with everyone else, smoke. Sam’s cigarettes are unfiltered Pall Mall’s, fashionable and dangerous. Autumn smokes Camel Lights. The VFW is veiled in a thin mist.

Casey and June approach from across the street. June waves frantically at Autumn like a ten year old girl who is seeing a friend again after a long summer vacation. Autumn Le waves back.

“Hey, June!” someone shouts from the crowd. “You make it to Hollywood yet? You get your big break?”

A few cackles issue from the group.

“Hey, Mick, why don’t you shut the fuck up, you fucking faggot,” Casey shouts back.

“Whatever, dude,” the faceless voice says.

Autumn and Sam look mournful.

June casts her eyes to the ground.

“C’mere Sweetheart,” Autumn says to June, moving her camera to the side and putting her arms around her. “Don’t listen to that asshole,” she whispers in June’s ear.

* * *

The VFW is a brick building one block over from Main Street, downtown Cambria. The interior looks like an elementary school cafeteria. The floor, waxed wood. The ceiling, perforated tile. A low stage with a blue, velvet curtain takes up the wall opposite the door. To the right, the ceiling is lowered to act as a sound dampener, preventing sound from the stage from echoing. Below this ceiling, along the wall are stacks of metal folding chairs and large, round and rectangular wooden tables.

One of the rectangular tables is set up at the entrance. Three dollars to get in.

“Who’s on the bill?” Sam asks the high school girl behind the table.

“Um, Horse Head in Jackie’s Bed, Turd Fergeson, and, uh, Sweet Thang?”

“Okay,” June says sarcastically.

The four of them lean against the back wall, arms crossed, looking very serious and very over the whole scene. But they come to every show anyway.

Autumn Le scans the room. She takes a few pictures. No one will question her. Small clusters of scenesters stand around, trying to block everyone else from their self-important world. When the bands play, these groups get pushed to the edge of the room and a large circle forms in the middle where other kids flail their arms and legs and run around until their faces are red and they are drenched in sweat. Tomorrow they will all mow the lawn, they will work the cash register, they will walk the streets, they will run through the woods, they will dive in the sea, they will dream.

Autumn Le is not one of these. She believes her small world is not a part either. They meet here, late on a Saturday, because they know already. Her universe knows. She knows all that life has got in store. They don’t need to be one of those circles. There is nothing that a circle in the middle of the VFW can offer them.

* * *

It is very late now on a Saturday. Autumn Le sits on the couch in Sam’s apartment. His head is in her lap, and he snores quietly. They are watching movies made about outer space. Autumn runs her fingers through Sam’s hair. She watches the spaceship travel into the void. Toward the stars.

We’re going to the stars, she thinks to herself.

They are always traveling closer and closer. The cold, bright light wrapping them up. Autumn Le cannot imagine the possibility of anything else occurring. I must confess that I too am having that same difficulty. As I always have. Autumn Le is boarding her rocket ship, and she knows that she will take her universe with her. It cannot be any other way.

* * *

Casey is rubbing his finger along June’s arm. It is remarkable to him how smooth she is. Like glass, he thinks. She looks at him and winks. He has his head in her lap, her arm around his neck while she sits on the couch and watches Extra!.

“If I go to Hollywood, will you come with me?” she asks suddenly.

“And watch all the guys there put their hands on you? No thanks.”

“No, but seriously.” She begins to choke up. “I just. I really want to. I really want that.”

“Want what?”

“I want to go to the stars. I’m going to be someone. Don’t you want to come with me? Don’t you want me to go? Don’t you see what I do?”

“Let’s just stay here,” Casey says.

June pushes his head off of her lap.

“I’m going,” she says, “with or without you.”

* * *

Autumn Le wakes up on Sam’s couch. Sam is on the floor. It is early on a Sunday now. She shivers in the morning mist. They left the window open, and the dew from the sea has crept in, wetting everything.

“Sammy,” Autumn groans.

“Hmph,” Sam replies, face in the shag carpet.

“The window.”

“Errrrrrrmmmmm.”

“Let’s go swimming today.”

“Kayfffff.”

Autumn sits up on the couch, yawns, and stretches, and throws one of the cushions onto Sam’s back.

“Call Casey,” she says.

* * *

June is at the mirror again.

“It’s just gonna come off as soon as you get in,” Casey shouts from the living room.

“So?”

“So, why are we wasting time worrying about that, when we could be there already?” he asks, standing now in the bathroom door.

“Because maybe I don’t want to go in. Maybe I just want to sit on the side and watch. I like just watching.”

“You and your watching.”

“You’re not going to wear those stupid wood shoes there, are you?”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re going to make your feet all musty and gross. And they’ll probably rot if they get too wet.”

Casey looks at his clogs, sitting by the front door. They are a pale, grayish brown, smooth with thin, straight cracks running through the tops. He doesn’t know where they came from originally. He found them on the beach.

June emerges from the bathroom, tying her hair in a messy ponytail. She wears a two-piece bathing suit with a wrap around her waist. She is pale, but in a stunning way that leaves no desire in Casey for her body to be any darker. It would ruin her, Casey thinks.

* * *

Santa Rosa Creek divides Cambria in two, though not in the way the Thames, Arno, or Danube divide medieval cities of Europe. The town proper lay to the south, and to north of the creek is Cambria Pines, a community of tourists and recluses, much smaller, but far wealthier than Cambria. Arthur Harold Beal also known as Der Tinkerpaw and Captain Nitt Witt, most likely the most famous person to live there, bought property at 881 Hillcrest Drive in 1928. Being one of the recluses and not one of the tourists, he built his house and began carving the hillside it sat atop, creating terraces like the old medieval citadels. He wanted his own. He did it completely by himself over the next fifty years. With a pick axe and a shovel. He named his citadel Nitt Witt Ridge.

And so it is to this day.

The plaque that designates Arthur Harold Beal’s citadel a historic landmark reads thus:

Nitt Witt Ridge, one of California's remarkable twentieth-century folk-art environments, is the creation of Arthur Harold Beal (Der Tinkerpaw, or Capt. Nitt Witt), a Cambria Pines pioneer who sculpted the land using hand tools and indigenous materials, inventiveness and self-taught skills. A blend of native materials and contemporary elements, impressive in its sheer mass and meticulous placement, it is a revealing memorial to Art's cosmic humor and zest for life. California Registered Historical Landmark No. 939. Plaque placed by the State Department of Parks and Recreation in cooperation for saving and preserving arts and cultural environments with the Art Beal Foundation, non-profit and educational corporation. June 26, 1986.

But Captain Nitt Witt had no interest in being a pioneer or a sculptor or the creator of a folk-art environment. He was crazy as a loon and hated people almost more than he hated himself. He built his house out of whatever he could find: aluminum cans, iron stoves, abalone shells, pieces of Hearst’s Castle that he stole while he worked there. Yes, Hearst’s Castle. Now there was a true American citadel. If there were any claim to fame Captain Nitt Witt sought, it was to create a citadel to rival that of Hearst, Winchester, and other Californian recluses and sociopaths. He wished to be the greatest sociopathic architect of the 20th century.

From Nitt Witt Ridge, Der Tinkerpaw could see Santa Rosa Creek, though it is many miles to the south, which is one of the reasons he chose the location he did. The trees on its banks are yellow, if they survived the bitter frost of winter, or bare if they did not. But the trees further away, the pines, those are green and vibrant and tall. There are redwoods and sequoias, living giants, timeless. They reach ever upward. Everyone’s gaze seems to be drawn toward the sky.

* * *

It is bright now on a Sunday. The filtered light makes its way through the towering branches to the soft bed of dead needles below, making warm white spots on the ground amidst the cool shade. There is no trail to Santa Rosa Creek from the road where Sam has parked his car. But they know the way. They grew up learning the path.

The four of them run to a part of the creek where rocks have created a natural dam that has caused a bend in the creek to form a deep pool. Short cliffs rise up around it. The tops of the cliffs look bare from the shore. There are trees, but only after yards of rock and sporadic grass. The creek is calm here and is unknown to the tourists of Cambria Pines. One of the last sacred places in California. They call this place The Garden of Eden.

Casey hops across the rock dam, slips on one in the middle, and falls backward into the pool. Sam runs in after him. Autumn Le and June spread their towels out on one of the large shore boulders in the sun. Autumn Le has left her camera behind today. The boulders are smooth, sandy, and warm. The girls lay on their stomachs watching the boys dunk each other in the middle of the pool. They are the only ones here.

“Come on!” Casey shouts at the girls.

They both shake their heads.

“I thought you wanted to swim,” Sam shouts at Autumn.

“In a bit.”

Casey and Sam look at each other and swim to the shore. The sand is hot on their feet. They run to the rocks.

“Don’t!” June warns. “I don’t want my towel to get all wet.”

“C’mon, June,” Autumn says. “So they don’t drag us in.”

“I will when I’m ready.”

Autumn steps cautiously into the pool as Sam and Casey run back in. They immediately turn around and send waves of cold water her way. She shrieks and runs in after them, swimming onto Casey’s shoulders to dunk him under for a minute before turning to swim in Sam’s direction, but he is on one of the cliff faces, fifteen feet above the water. He does a cannonball right next to Autumn, splashing water up her nose. She coughs, but laughs at the same time, and continues to swim after him. The three of them climb on the dam, jump into the pool, slide down the rocks to a shallower, wider bend in the creek. They forget the time.

* * *

“Where’d June go?” Autumn asks, looking back to the rocks.

“I’m up here!”

Autumn, Casey, and Sam look for the source of her voice. They spot her on the cliff. At the top, at the edge, not on a ledge in the middle of it like Sam was.

“June, what the hell are you doing?” Casey yells.

“I’m coming in!” she sings.

“Has she ever done this before?” Sam asks Casey.

“No—Hey, June. Come down. Don’t jump from that high.”

“I think I can see Nitt Witt Ridge from up here!”

“June, just come down. I really—“

“I’m not going to jump, idiot,” June says. “I just wanted to see what things looked like from up here. Seriously, I can see Nitt Witt Ridge, right over there.”

The August wind picks up. It comes from the sea through the forest. It is salty and cool.

“June!” Casey screams.

The wind is blowing harder now, but not with the gale force one would expect to accompany certain tragedy. But it is enough to lift June off her feet. No one knew how light she had become. She floats.

She laughs.

“I’m flying! Do you see, Casey? Do you see?”

The wind slows to a breeze, and then stills, as sea breezes sweeping across the pines often do.

June falls.

She is silent, and so are Sam, Casey, and Autumn. They watch her. She does not fall with a speed that one would expect from a body falling through space, but it is fast enough. It is not soft. When she lands on the warm boulder below, more than half buried in sand, her body shatters.

Like glass.

The pieces sparkle in the sun and fade into languor.

Casey pushes Autumn and Sam out of the way, sprints and stumbles to the boulder. He begins collecting the pieces, cutting his feet on June.

“Casey,” Autumn whispers, now behind him. “You can’t.”

“Don’t tell me,” he whispers. “Don’t you fucking tell me.”

Sam, still silent, begins to help Casey.

“Sam,” Autumn whispers again.

“We have to,” he mumbles.

Casey has collected an armful now, and each piece he adds forces another out. These disappear into the sand, are swallowed. June is cutting Casey’s chest. He sees these pieces disappear and frantically tries to dig them back out with his feet. He stumbles again and drops all he is holding into the sand. Those pieces of June disappear. Sam watches this happen. He drops his pieces into the sand.

“No,” Casey screams, hoarse and bleeding.

Autumn Le watches this too. She takes her towel and June’s, both embedded with pieces of glass, and shakes them out onto the sand. She uses them to sweep the remaining pieces onto the sand. Casey makes a motion to stop her at first, he moves forward, arms out, but simply falls backward to sit in the sand. He sighs deeply. Again. Again. The water continues to bubble over the rocks. Autumn is afraid to speak. She wants to. She wants to say something perfect to Casey. But she cannot. The words simply don’t come. She wishes Sam would. But Sam sits on the boulder in the same upright fetal position that Casey is in.

“We’ll never come back here again,” Casey says.

* * *

Thunderstorms are rare on the coast. But they do occur. They also typically carry very little precipitation, so fires from lightning strikes are frequent during these storms. The cool maritime air from the sea meets the warm coming over the hills from the Mojave Desert. When they converge, they create an updraft, which pushes the clouds higher and higher, creating monstrous, black formations with white heads. The low humidity allows for a higher level of static electricity. More lightning.

It is getting late on a Monday.

Casey is listening to the thunder pound the air outside. He is slowly burning magazines, page by page. There is a pile of ashes around the table. It is climbing onto the couch. He is sitting in it. All of what made June is now ash. He tries to burn the ash, but it merely blows around and away from the heat of the flame. He wants more to burn. Her clothes are gone. Her shoes. Those took a while. There is one thing he has not burned yet. He is not exactly sure why. It should have been first. It should have been first and all at once, one motion, lighter to thin paper, stomped out, obliterated, decimated, turned to less than ash, vanished. Erased wholly and completely from memory. He comes to the copy of Life magazine. He flips through slowly, not really contemplating each page, just looking. He stops at the lighthouse in Maine. He begins by burning that page.

He didn’t see, he didn’t see.

I didn’t see it, June.

He’s burned everything but the apartment and its furniture now. He stands up, smeared in grey soot, and walks to the kitchen. He takes two forks and puts them in his pocket. Before he leaves for the last time, he smashes both TVs. Not in a sensational way. He simply pushes them off the stands onto their faces. As he walks out the door, it begins to rain. It never rains during thunderstorms here, but now it is raining harder than he has ever remembered. It makes him furious because it adds too much drama. But there is nothing he can do. He can’t tell it to stop. He walks to the carport that he and June never used. But there is a gas can. It is three gallons and a rusting red. He carries it to the station on Main Street, pays the attendant cash, and fills up the can. He is walking in his clogs. The rain forms puddles at his toes. His feet squeak on the wet wood and occasionally slip out.

* * *

He continues to walk down Main Street, which, aside from the Pacific Coast Highway, connects Cambria and Cambria Pines. He turns onto Santa Rosa Creek Road and walks northeast. He walks until he comes to an open field.

He moves through the tall grass until he is away from any of the stray oaks. He is on top of a short hill. Casey opens the gas can and pours the contents onto his head. He opens his mouth and lets some of the gasoline slip down his throat. It burns, and he chokes. When the last drops have left the can, he takes the forks out of his pocket and holds them apart at arms length.

* * *

Autumn Le mourns. But she is not surprised. She mourns for Sam because he wouldn’t understand. They worry about Casey. They should see him. They should be with him at all times until this passes.

* * *

As static builds over a low hill off of Santa Rosa Creek Road, the air warms slightly. It is suddenly so dry, despite the pouring rain. Casey feels his skin tickle slightly as it dries for a second.

The discharge produced is immense. It begins in Casey’s feet, in his clogs. It travels to his arms and out the forks he holds in his hands and dissipates in the clouds above. He is not holding the forks for more than a thousandth of a second. His body is reduced to dust and returns to the earth.

* * *

Autumn Le is home now. Her studio apartment on Tully Place is a modest five hundred square feet. She has a couch, which is also her bed with a small table in front of it. That is her only furniture. She has no television. She has no dining table or chairs. Her closet has only a few pairs of clothing. The rest of the space is taken up by camera equipment. Screens and tripods and boxes of film and developing tanks and Ilfosol S-developer and Rapid Fixer and wetting agent and steel film clips and mix-up cups and this and that. Her apartment is also her darkroom.

But she is not developing pictures today. She does not want to develop the roll that is in her camera right now. Instead, she looks at her walls. Her walls are covered with framed pictures. Of Casey and June and Sam. Of them at the VFW hall. Of them at the beach. Of them at Nitt Witt Ridge of them at The Garden of Eden of them visitng Los Angeles of them of them of them. She half expects June to be gone from the pictures, faded from history like in Back to the Future. But she is still there.

* * *

Autumn looks at a picture she took of Casey’s collarbone. He is stretching back the collar of one of his v-neck shirts to reveal his tattoo only a month or so old. The redness and the scabs had just healed. The light in the photograph is bluish, cold, the background, some bushes along the sidewalk, completely out of focus, the leaves becoming hundreds of orbs various shades of green.

“Vita palma evanui,” Autumn reads aloud.

We knew she wouldn’t read the rest.

* * *

“Casey is gone,” Sam tells Autumn.

It is early on a Tuesday.

“Where?”

“Gone.”

Sam can barely get the word out. He sits on Autumn’s couch, head down slightly, hands folded between his legs.

“Their apartment was full of ash,” Sam says. “The TVs smashed. Only the furniture.” He stops. He can’t say anymore.

“How?”

“We’ll never know. But he’s gone. Gone, gone.”

“You don’t—”

“He’s gone, Autumn.”

Sam turns his soaked face to her. She knows what he wants to say. But she can’t explain. She feels apart. She is no longer in this universe.

* * *

Sam stands up from the couch. He turns to Autumn but doesn’t speak.

“Don’t, Sam,” she whispers.

He runs.

For a brief moment, Autumn is frozen. She doesn’t want to believe that she won’t be able to catch him.

* * *

Autumn Le can see Sam ahead of her. They are running at equal speed. They reach the northwestern edge of town, the Pacific Coast Highway. Here is where the flowers begin.

* * *

They run through the flowers. Wild grass and foxtails begins to sprout. The hills start to roll like waves. They are full of motion. Ancient oaks appear sporadically like distant buoys on the surf. The cloud of dust and flower petals and grass Sam and Autumn Le are leaving behind is immense.

* * *

The hills subside again as oaks become pines and thicken into a forest. This forest is unknown to both of them. But they keep running, dodging trees, jumping over rocks. They know it is not endless. The ever increasing mist tells them it must end soon.

* * *

The density of the trees is traded briefly for the density of more wild grass. But this is different from the foxtails of the hills miles behind them. This is sea grass.

* * *

Their pace slows tremendously as they reach the coast. Their feet dig into the sand disrupting its ripples. This beach is no longer unknown.

* * *

And as Sam reaches the mud, tacky, drenched, the foam skeletons of the break sticking to it, Autumn stops. She wants to call out. “Where will you go?” she wants to ask. She walks now.

* * *

Sam is swimming. He saw the boat from shore. He saw the stars. He is getting on his rocket ship.

* * *

And Autumn Le watches him board. He disappears into the mist almost immediately. Two strokes, and he is gone.

* * *

Autumn Le stands still for a moment longer before she begins moving in reverse. She starts slowly at first, one step and then another. She is still facing the sea as her legs take her back. Back through the sand and sea grass and trees. Her movements are choppy. She is taking giant leaps back. But she is not going backward. The mist dissipates, and the sunlight is scattered again through the needles. She exits the forest, is moving over the hills. She watches the pines disappear from sight. The grass gets thinner, the hills flatten and turn back to poppies.

Poppies and poppies and poppies.

Autumn Le lifts off the ground.

She is leaving here. It is possible that she never actually belonged. She thinks that to herself. She can see now out over the forest, over the mist to the horizon. She thinks that Sam is—no, he can’t be. It isn’t possible. The flowers shrink and become one color, pink and red and white and yellow and orange and green all at the same time. She waves and wishes she had her camera.

"Battle Not With Monsters": Technology and the Necessity for Paranoia in Alan Moore's Watchmen

Technology has usually maintained an important presence in both science fiction and graphic novels, calling the reader to question whether or not the advancements in technology depicted are really worth their price but at times also acting as the savoir for humanity. Alan Moore’s Watchmen follows in this tradition on the surface; however, a deeper examination of the text will reveal that the technological advancements called into question take on a much more ambiguous role, that is they evade this type of signification.

Technology representing evil in science fiction tends to have a cause—some type of evil force behind it—and is thus signified by this cause. In Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, the spectacular human development that occurs and ultimately destroys humankind is set into motion by a singular, evil force, the Overmind. In the case of Clarke’s story, humans become aware of this cause but are powerless to stop the effects. The evil of the advancement that takes place in Childhood’s End is signified by the Overmind, a galactic entity far beyond human comprehension, but still existent as a being somewhere in the universe. Science fiction in general seems to follow this basic formula—only the ending varies in terms of whether or not the hero or heroes are able to prevent disaster from occurring. When the heroes are able to prevent malevolent technology from destroying the world, they may use that technology against the force behind; however, it usually comes at the price of destroying the technology itself as in Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report” or Asimov’s I, Robot.

Watchmen, however, seems to defy these terms. Technology exists as a threat; however, it is difficult to pin down any real source for the perceived threat. Rather than conceiving of the events in Watchmen as incited and then directed by one malevolent force that comes to signify the technology it uses to achieve a specific end, we can conceive of technology as a trace that evades signification—that is we can read no malevolent force that exists behind technology to bring it signification and thus the characters in the story act against an intangible, an empty signifier. The signification the reader expects is continually deferred; technology exists as a moment of différance. Whenever the evil of a technology threatens to manifest itself completely, it becomes displaced by another, refreshing the feeling of paranoia that the society of the novel feels. It is this necessity for paranoia on a societal scale that seems to drive the major events of the novel forward rather than the desire of the heroes to stop a singular entity from committing wrong and using technology as a vehicle to do so.

Technological threats exist in three primary ways within the text: Dr. Manhattan, nuclear war, and the plot by Adrian Veidt to prevent nuclear war and thus, end the Cold War. The novel comes across as particularly ironic, possibly even troubling or problematic because the heroes are not able to prevent Veidt, the “villain,” from executing his master plan, which requires the death of hundreds of thousands, and they decide to protect him rather than turn him in. I use the term villain very lightly with regard to Veidt because he is not a typical villain per se and not for the reasons one would normally classify a villain as atypical, i.e. a Byronic hero, etc. However, a reading of the somewhat problematic ending can be best advanced by reconceptualizing the catalyst for the events in the novel. What we can see developing within the novel is a technology that exists simply to further nothing but a societal desire to remain paranoid about the looming threat of technology in general.

Dr. Manhattan represents two sides of a traditional sci-fi conception of technology. He is both savior and threat. The extent of his capabilities are not just unknown—they are unknowable. The reader learns that he is able to not just manipulate all matter, but he also sees the atoms that comprise it. He comprehends not the totality of the universe, but its infinitude. He is outside of human existence both temporally and spatially, and because of that, eventually becomes unable to see the value of humanity. He sits on Mars, contemplating his past, present, and future simultaneously. As he recounts the events, he says “Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been here all the time. I’m there now, in 1960, saying those words watching that T.V. set” (IV, 13). Dr. Manhattan is not confined to presence. He is omnipresent.

While his presence overshadows the Cold War, the Russians are kept at bay. Dr. Manhattan has helped the U.S. win the Vietnam War. With him, the U.S. is invulnerable. However, his presence does not necessarily put the American public at ease. The magazine vendor, who represents American public sentiment, declares: “We oughtta nuke Russia and let God sort it out. I mean, I see the signs, read the headlines, look things inna face, y’know? I’m a newsvendor, goddamnit! I’m informed on the situation! We oughtta nuke ‘em till they glow!” (III, 1). Even with Dr. Manhattan’s presence, there remains a sense of paranoia. This vendor, as well as the media, knows that Dr. Manhattan exists. They know he is in the United States, working with the government. They know what he did in Vietnam. The vendor has no reason to fear the Russians and no reason to want them destroyed by nuclear weapons because of Dr. Manhattan.

It seems that Dr. Manhattan’s value, his presence, has been forgotten; however this is not necessarily the core of the problem. More accurately, Dr. Manhattan’s presence fails to provide the narrative the American people are looking for for salvation from evil primarily because labels such as good and evil cannot be placed directly onto him. This type of signification is continually deferred. The public not only does not understand even a fraction of his capabilities, but they desire a certainty that he does not embody. He is not a traditional superhero. He is all superheroes combined. However, in this, he seems to embody characteristics that could be classified as villainous insofar as he has no empathy. The American public never looks to him as a savior until after he is already gone. Dr. Manhattan is accused on national television of causing cancer in the people he had been close to over the years. This creates a brief moment of hysteria for the press, and in that moment, the final barrier from the possibility of Russian attack is removed. Dr. Manhattan travels to Mars.

As one government official puts it immediately following these events, Dr. Manhattan was “the lynch-pin of America’s strategic superiority” (III, 23). With Dr. Manhattan gone, Veidt just has to wait and watch as America grows more and more restless, more and more paranoid. Dr. Manhattan was never the threat he is accused of being; he actually did have the ability to be a protector. The threat of Dr. Manhattan’s “technology” so to speak has no force behind it. As soon as this threat is signified, its meaning is immediately deferred. The Russians seem to become the true threat and remain in this position until near the end of the novel.

The Russians occupy a different space in the novel because the reader is only given their actions through the perspective of the media. This perspective is contained to the background noise of the majority of the novel: Newspaper headlines and television news reports that appear between the dialogue of characters. One of the first news reports following the departure of Dr. Manhattan states:

In Afghanistan the fighting spreads… As the conflict moves closer to its borders, Pakistan today called on the U.S. to intervene…Thus while Russia claims to be merely securing her borders, western experts see only opportunistic hostility in the wake of Dr. Manhattan’s departure. Meanwhile, America’s European military installations have been place on full alert [. . .] And throughout the world there is tension with no sign of a breakthrough (VII, 12-3).

The lack of hope in these news reports can be read as an attempt to resignify technological threat. There is comfort in at least knowing the threat the country faces. However, that lack of hope, the paranoia regarding the escalation of the conflict must remain. And, in fact, the escalation of the conflict is never allowed to come to fruition. As soon as it seems as though the Russians will finally launch an offensive on the United States, Veidt unleashes his plan, and signification is deferred again.

This escalating conflict, however, runs behind what appears to be the main plot, the driving action of the novel. The protagonists are in search of the entity that seems to be behind a conspiracy to rid the U.S. of superheroes, possibly to prevent them from intervening in the Russia conflict as they did in Vietnam. The Comedian is killed at the opening of the novel; Dr. Manhattan is forced to leave Earth; Rorschach is set up and arrested by the police. Even Veidt is shot at. Nite Owl and The Silk Specter, both thought to have been retired, rescue Rorschach and convince Dr. Manhattan to return, but their pursuit is ultimately futile—not because they are unable to physically prevent Veidt from unleashing his plot, but because Veidt actually does not bring signification to technology.

Veidt’s plot requires that signfication be deferred again. Once it is executed, the Russian threat, specifically their nuclear weapons, is neutralized. Veidt’s plot is essentially to create a mock alien invasion that will kill hundreds of thousands in New York so that the world will unite against this new threat. In describing his master stroke to Night Owl and Rorschach, he says that he “saw East and West locked into an escalating arms spiral, their mutual terror and suspicion mounting with the missiles [. . .] Both sides realized the suicidal implications of nuclear conflict, yet couldn’t stop racing towards it lest their opponents should overtake them. Afraid of their weapons, afraid of losing them, afraid to blink or turn their backs” (XI, 21). Veidt continues to lay out his entire thought process. He sees continuing environmental ruin at the hands the of the atomic age, and says that “[Dr. Manhattan’s] presence accelerarted this [. . .] Nevertheless, he somehow symbolized mankind’s problems (XI, 22). In this moment, Veidt too attempts attribute some kind of signification to technology. He understands Dr. Manhattan’s presence better than anyone. This presence may signify incredible advancement in technology; however, Veidt’s assertion that Dr. Manhattan symbolizes mankind’s problems is not entirely accurate, especially given what he has already done.

His plan involves using the technology that Dr. Manhattan’s existence brings to the world. With Dr. Manhattan’s help, Veidt makes extensive leaps in the fields of teleportation and genetics. On an island he had purchased fifteen years before, a team of artists and scientists develop a massive creature—an alien. Veidt teleports the alien to New York City, which causes an explosion—an unexplained side effect of teleportation that seemed to render it useless during Veidt’s and Dr. Manhattan’s research. Veidt also uses his enormous wealth to prevent Dr. Manhattan from seeing the unleasing of this plan in the future: he creates tachyon interference so that Dr. Manhattan cannot see his future and know what Veidt is doing. Veidt uses this technology to unleash his plan—yet the technology remains an empty signifier because only Veidt and the protagonists know that that was the reason behind it. And they choose to remain silent. The alien invasion does resignify technological threat, but in a way where from this point on it will always remain a threat, never to manifest itself again. The world will be locked in a state of perpetual paranoia where the technological threat—alien teleportation will never appear again because it was not real.

This ending becomes problematic because the reader is not one of ignorant citizens of the world—the reader knows the truth. Yet even Veidt’s actions themselves evade being signified as evil. He is not the same malevolent force behind destruction that many villains are in science fiction. When his plan is revealed to have worked, he asks the protagonists, “Will you expose me, undoing the peace millions die for? Kill me, risking subsequent investigation? Morally, you’re in checkmate” (XII, 20). The novel puts the reader in moral checkmate as well; however, it may be more accurate to say that what the reader experiences is the inability to create a master narrative that comfortably explains the events of the novel. The terms good and evil cannot be effectively centered as signifieds for the characters. No matter which character the reader tries to attach to regarding these terms, he finds that the character will slip away. Rorschach wants to expose Veidt’s plot, which the reader sees as possibly redeemable. At the same time, however, the reader knows what this exposure would do: plunge the world back into war, causing greater devastation and death. The reader cannot fully relate to Rorschach’s position, especially when he tells the others, “Even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise” ( XII, 20). The reader paradoxically finds himself aligned with Veidt and now the other protagonists who agree to keep quiet, in a state of continually deferred, decentered meaning. Or as Nite Owl puts it, “How can humans make decisions like this? We’re damned if we stay quiet; Earth is damned if we don’t” (XII, 20).

Works Cited

Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. 1986-7. New York: DC Comics, 1995.

Inside the Sacred Machine: The Reconciliation of the Sacred and the Mechanical in Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions

“If I watch two people talking on a street corner, I see not only their flesh and clothes, but narrow, vertical bands of color inside them—not so much like tape, actually, but more like low-intensity neon tubes.” —Rabo Karabekian, Bluebeard

Kurt Vonnegut criticism seems to be split primarily between two competing ways of reading. Early Vonnegut criticism labels Vonnegut a nihilist, an author who sees the universe as one big joke being played on humanity. More recent criticism has argued that Vonnegut’s work sews together two disparate worlds, postmodernism and morality, and that what Vonnegut establishes is moral relativism. Vonnegut, however, is difficult to pin down using either of these modes of reading—he contains elements of both, but at times also seems to defy these categorizations, daring the reader to try and label him. Breakfast of Champions is particularly characteristic of this because Vonnegut utilizes a narrator many mistake for his historical self. It seems nearly impossible to decide when Philboyd Studge, the name the Vonnegut persona gives himself in the preface, is reliable and when he is using satire. Does he take anything seriously? A perfect illustration of such an instance occurs at the end of the preface, where Studge remarks, “Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is” (Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 6). This notion of sacredness is an interesting detail, which is important not only in this brief section but throughout the novel. It is not necessary to read it as a belief in a Judeo-Christian sacredness per se, but in some form of non-rational transcendence. His use of the word could possibly imply something more than mere importance.

At this point, however, before the novel has even begun, we are not yet ready to declare the narrator reliable about anything he has said. Not when we’re already familiar with the way Vonnegut continually eludes the reader in this respect. If we look closely at this statement, we can see a bifurcation—a moment of dfférance. The narrator’s tone in the first half is somewhat indefinable. He is matter-of-fact. But he is also discussing a day that honors the millions who died during World War One. The predicate “was sacred” has power here for Studge. The reader has no reason to believe that Studge does not mean what he says when he labels Armistice Day as sacred or when he says that he does not wish to throw away that which is sacred. However, when he poses and then answers the question “What else is sacred?” we can sense a slight shift in tone particularly with his conversational use of the interjection “Oh,” as if he just remembered what else holds such high esteem—the connation of sacred is deferred. Suddenly, the narrator is casual about what is sacred. Suddenly, the word sacred has lost the power that it had before. Studge implies that he can label anything sacred. There is something arbitrary about using the word as a predicate in these instances. He hastily throws in Romeo and Juliet and “all music” with Armistice Day, which he seems to have great reverence for. The end of the preface does read as an afterthought, and this minutiae would not be important if this kind of deferral of meaning ended here. Yet it is continued throughout the rest of the novel and grows into something much larger than mere satire. Ultimately, Philboyd Studge’s use of the word sacred develops into a discursive practice which alters the way the novel views the world and helps the narrator reconcile the disparity between the importance he wants to place on living things, particularly humans, and his worldview that human beings are absurd machines, destined to fail to control the world around them; this new mode of representation subverts and displaces the discursive practice he was engaged in to begin the novel. In order to understand and pinpoint exactly how the word is used in the novel and how that usage develops, we must recognize that the narrator uses a variety of discursive practices in developing the narrative itself. He begins the first few chapters with what appears to be postmodern*1 or post-structuralist discourse, but transitions into something entirely different by the end of the novel.

*1 I use the terms “postmodern” and “post-structural” in a very specific sense here. Because I recognize postmodernism can be many different things to different people, I would like to avoid a complete oversimplification of it and classify it purely by how I see Vonnegut’s text following a particular current of postmodern thought. When I discuss the various discursive practices implemented in the novel, I am bearing postmodernism in mind as a practice that subverts meta-narrative and meta-discourse and more specifically a practice which subverts the meta-discourses associated with transcendence, e.g. deconstruction. However, the aim of this project is to illuminate the ways in which the text also breaks free from these practices, not merely to say that they are implemented.

This brief moment at the end of the preface outlines a larger problem that exists in Vonnegut’s texts: the distinction between satire and sincerity particularly when it comes to the status of human beings in the universe. There is a precedent set in Vonnegut’s work by his characters—many of them engage in a discussion of the transcendent “part” of human beings, and many of these passages have been taken as either satire or serious commentary on the human condition. Vonnegut’s earliest work, particularly Sirens of Titan and Mother Night, does not confront the value of humanity in the same way that the later novels do. Rather, it emphasizes the futility of human life and man’s inability to establish both selfhood and meaning. In Sirens of Titan, Malachi Constant discovers that the totality of human history—every war, every tragedy, every triumph, every failing—has all been to send directions to an alien race so it may deliver a spare spacecraft part to a vessel stranded on Titan, a moon of Jupiter. Howard J. Campbell, the narrator of Mother Night, believes that he is an American spy posing as a Nazi only to discover that he has helped the Nazi cause almost more than anyone else. He is unable to reconcile this, to establish a self or meaning, and he decides to commit suicide for “crimes against himself” (Mother Night 268). In Vonnegut’s fifth novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the narrator relates a tale written by Kilgore Trout (in his first appearance as a character in Vonnegut’s work) where a character tells his wife as he is dying that when he meets God, he wants to ask him one question: “ ‘What in hell are people for?’” (22). The rest of Vonnegut’s work seeks to answer this question while bearing in mind the absurd and tragic nature of the human race.

Vonnegut’s characters are constantly struggling to make sense of man’s inhumanity toward man and the inhumanity of the universe. In Vonnegut’s later work, the characters believe in man’s ability to create meaning through his awareness. But it is also in these later novels, beginning with Breakfast of Champions, that the notion of that ability being somehow transcendent is raised. In Galápagos, Roy Hepburn says to his wife as he is dying, “ ‘I’ll tell you what the human soul is, Mary. [. . .] It’s the part of you that knows when your brain isn’t working right. I always knew, Mary. There wasn’t anything I could do about it, but I always knew’” (45). Here we have a character asserting a transcendent quality in human beings related to awareness, but awareness as it is described here is in many ways tragic. Hepburn admits that he could not do anything about his malfunctioning brain, only that he knew it was malfunctioning. If he cannot use that awareness to fix himself, then the implication is awareness can be potentially worthless. Studge struggles with this problem directly in Breakfast.

Another strong example of this conflict played out over the course of a novel is Bluebeard, which is written as the autobiography of Rabo Karabekian. Throughout the course of the novel, Karabekian learns to make his paintings communicative rather than autotelic by inserting his soul into them. Dan Gregory, Karabekian’s mentor, throws Karabekian’s first painting that Gregory has him do into the fire. When Karabekian asks what was wrong with it, Gregory says, “ ‘No soul’ ” (Bluebeard 163). Later in the novel, as Karabekian is driving with fellow artist Terry Kitchen, he tells Kitchen, “ ‘My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things. [. . .] I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does’ ” (273). Karabekian, narrating now, continues: “I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control” (273). This echoes the speech that the Karabekian of Breakfast gives regarding his painting. However, the Karabekian of Bluebeard adds on to the earlier sentiment. He tells Kitchen: “ ‘[W]hen people I like do something terrible [. . .] I just flense them and forgive them. [. . .] [Flensing is] what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board. [. . .] They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people—get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them’” (273). Here, we come closer to the heart of the matter, that is, to the effect of satirizing something that is also being taken seriously on some level. Karabekian tells the reader he is “half joking” about seeing the souls inside of people as neon tubes, but we need not read that to imply that he is joking about seeing souls or believing in a soul; rather that his representation of the soul is somewhat humorous. The weight of man’s inhumanity toward man is on Karabekian’s shoulders; therefore, it is this notion of forgiveness that is most important. Karabekian implies that the soul is what makes human beings important enough, special enough, to be forgiven despite the terrible things that they do. Vonnegut’s characters and narrators continually come to see that because human beings have freedom to create whatever meaning they choose, they sometimes perpetrate unimaginable horrors: the bombing of Dresden, the Holocaust, worldwide pollution, fulfillment of greedy desire no matter what the cost—the list can go on. Yet they also recognize, especially from Rosewater on, that there is something else inside humans, something transcendent, that forces those characters to still believe in the perseverance of humanity. Vonnegut handles the shear immensity of the horror committed by humanity through satire; however, he recognizes the inverse of that horror: In order for horror to be committed, in order for anyone to see an act as horrific, some sense of vast importance, even transcendence, must be placed on the victims of such horrors. Therein lies the paradox. How can something be sacred and profane at the same time?

Recent critics have responded to this problem in a way that attempts to reconcile the paradox and unpack it in a way that establishes a way that gestures towards satire as a trope found in Vonnegut’s work. Loree Rackstraw, in her essay “The Paradox of ‘Awareness’ and Language,” examines said paradox in existential terms,*2 writing that Vonnegut’s work presents the irony that “we are born to die and doomed by our human evolution to a painful awareness of that paradox” (57). She pinpoints a few of the chief concerns regarding Breakfast. In her discussion of the appearance of the sacred in Vonnegut’s texts, she argues that the sacred band of unwavering light, awareness, occurs again and again and parallels the firestorm of Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five and Eliot Rosewater’s hallucination of the firestorm of Indianapolis in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. She notes that there is yet a further “paradox” in these instances: “that column of light representing life’s consciousness was visible to Dresden survivors only because of fire and as a characteristic of it [. . .] Light—and the light that is aware of it—cannot occur separate from that process of oxidation” (57). Both the destructive, horrific power of fire, and the cleansing, sacredness of light are one in the same. They are inseparable. Rackstraw continues, “We are the profane and consuming fire, and at the same time, the sacred light” (57) echoing Rabo Karabekian’s speech in Breakfast: “Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery” (Vonnegut 226).

*2 Here Rackstraw, without acknowledging it, points to what Camus would call the absurd and Sartre anguish or despair. These thinkers are arguably most closely “aligned” with Vonnegut’s work, though I would not go so far as to say Vonnegut is purely an existentialist.

If we trust the narrator’s reliability, as Rackstraw does, Rackstraw’s discussion helps us to understand the conflict between satire and sincerity found in Vonnegut’s texts; however, with relation to Breakfast of Champions, it does not explain how Philboyd Studge can agree with Karabekian despite the mode of representation he has established for the novel, one that denies such a belief because it is based upon the metaphysics of presence. The narrator’s seemingly contradictory agreement with Karabekian is a fact that many critics seemingly take for granted in responding to the overall paradox of satire and sincerity in the narration. The narrator of Breakfast does not contend that the lives of human beings are merely meaningful or important because of human ability to recognize its own construction of meaning within an absurd and ultimately uncontrollable reality. He labels that awareness as sacred, seemingly abandoning his previous postmodern discursive practice.

The passage of transition from one discourse into the other occurs at what Studge claims is “the spiritual climax of the novel” (224). The reader is given a brief and direct summary of how Studge comes to develop his new discursive practice. Studge states, “[I]t is at this point that I, the author, am suddenly transformed by what I have done so far. This is why I had gone to Midland City: to be born again. And Chaos announced that it was about to give birth to a new me” (224). Chaos as the instigator in this event is important because it helps to further describe the confusion in reading these passages and the bifurcation between satire and sincerity that exists. In the two pages that describe this rebirth is where we find the largest point of bifurcation. Studge explains the belief behind the his narration up until this point:

As for myself: I had come to my own conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.
I did not expect Rabo Karabekian to rescue me. I had created him, and he was in my opinion a vain and weak and trashy man, no artist at all. But it is Rabo Karabekian who made me the serene Earthling which I am this day. (225)

The speech that Karabekian gives regarding his painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony is the primary turning point for Studge. Karabekian tells the people of Midland City:

‘I now give you my word of honor [. . .] that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal—the “I am” to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us—in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.’ (226)

Just as with the first mention of the word sacred in the preface, both this and the narrator’s speech seem to contain elements of satire and sincerity. The tone of sarcasm that the reader garners from Studge’s proclamation is with regard to his old discursive practice. Studge gives the impression that he now detests that position. However, he explicitly states that he detests the man who sparks his rebirth and transition from these previous discursive practices into his new one, which calls into question whether or not Studge truly believes even his own words about what is happening. Karabekian is sincere in this speech. As readers, we have no reason to doubt that. Yet we cannot help but laugh a little at his choice of animals he uses to illustrate his point: a mouse, deer, cockroach, cocktail waitress, and Saint Anthony. The juxtaposition of these animals calls into question the “seriousness” of the speech. As readers outside the story, are we supposed to take this seriously? If the answer is no, then we certainly cannot take the narrator seriously when he says this speech has transformed him. However, we need not make this an either/or situation, which, as I pointed out, it tends to become in Vonnegut criticism.*3 It is possible, as with the preface, to argue that the narrator comes to see sacredness both ways—necessary but somehow tragic and therefore, laughable.

*3 The critics I refer to are best represented by Bill Gholson, Todd F. Davis, and Loree Rackstraw. All three posit a moral relativism but in terms that seem to suggest postmodern discourse excludes morality completely and that Vonnegut is “a writer who bridges two disparate worlds” (Davis 150), i.e. morality and postmodernism. With respect, such criticism suggests we either read the “important” parts of Vonnegut seriously and without irony or else we are calling him a nihilist.

The existence of sacredness in the text, therefore, need not be contradictory. That being said, it is necessary to discover the possible ways of reading the word without dismissing the possibility of transcendence because that quality seems to be present in not only this text but others as well. There are multiple ways to read this word in the text, which dismiss transcendence. The first would be to simply label the narrator as inconsistent. This is a distinct possibility, and I shall explore the function of the narrator in great detail. The second is to again fall back on the most common of explanations for any inconsistencies in Vonnegut’s work: call it satire. This too is certainly viable; however, given the bifurcation established in the novel and in other Vonnegut texts, labeling Studge’s entire “spiritual experience” as satire seems too easy. Furthermore, such a reading must lead us to question how that satire functions in terms of what the text is doing.

In determining what the text is trying to do, it is important to look at the above options in full detail to see what best serves a complete reading of the text because the use of sacred is a large part of Breakfast, and it need not be inconsistent or problematic. The problem is in the contemporary conception of the modes of representation the narrator engages in, not in the idea of the transcendent. We must remember that a discourse such as deconstruction is not destructive. Rather, it is a reordering of priorities within a text. In this way, we can conceive of the narrative, that is, Studge’s discourse and the discursive practices he engages in, as an ordered chaos, so to speak. Studge is engaged in a deconstruction of American ideology, but by the middle of the novel, seems to deconstruct his own mode of narration that he begins the novel with.

The self-conscious narrator of Breakfast can be extremely difficult to pin down, and is usually defined in terms of reliability. These terms are useful as far as they go; however, the narration at the level this project discusses it seems to subvert the opposition between reliability and unreliability. A more useful way of conceiving of Studge is to discard this mode altogether; that, is to say he defies the terms reliable and unreliable as such. Vonnegut, in the preface to Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, asserts that he himself is “a work of fiction” and that “works of the imagination themselves have the power to create” (xix, xv). Furthermore, through creating a narrator who seems to be so closely aligned with his historical self yet is clearly not, Vonnegut explodes the notion of “authorship” altogether. We cannot access the narrative in terms of reliability and unreliability—it just is. When we enter into these terms we find that we are stumped as readers; we continually encounter areas of the text where not only is it impossible to answer the question of reliability, but it does not seem entirely useful either. The narrator becomes of parody of such terms. To see this more clearly, we must turn to Wayne C. Booth, who, in The Rhetoric of Fiction, provides a list of questions with which we are supposed to be able to describe a narrator as fully as possible:

1) What kind of first person?
2) How fully characterized?
3) How much aware of himself as narrator?
4) How reliable?
5) How much confined to realistic inference; how far privileged to go beyond realism?
6) At what points shall he speak truth and at what points utter no judgment or even utter falsehood? (165)

Studge, as a self-conscious narrator, makes reference to the “authoring” of the book by his hand, referring to himself as “the author” and “a novelist” (224, 299), making the reader completely aware of Studge’s self-consciousness. His imposing comments on the creation of the novel help to subvert the notion of authorship—it matters less who is speaking than how he speaks.

Toward the end of the novel, Studge enters his own story and demonstrates his power as creator. Even though he claims to be able to do whatever he wants to his characters, Studge actually does not have complete control over them. He admits, “I could only guide their movements approximately, since they were such big animals. There was inertia to overcome. It wasn’t as though I was connected to them by steel wires. It was more as though I was connected to them by stale rubberbands” (207). His claim of complete control is contradicted, further subverting the idea of authorship, since we normally conceive of the historical author as one who controls the physical production of the text, revising and editing until he or she is satisfied with it. His claim of control is contradicted again through action paradoxically independent of Studge’s doing when he describes a fight that takes place in the cocktail lounge involving Dwayne Hoover:

As for myself: I kept a respectful distance between myself and all the violence—even though I had created Dwayne and his violence and the city, and the sky above and the Earth below. Even so, I came out of the riot with a broken watch crystal and what turned out later to be a broken toe. Somebody jumped backwards to get out of Dwayne’s way. He broke my watch crystal, even though I had created him, and he broke my toe. (282)

This lack of control goes beyond mere reliability or unreliability. The “author” of the text is being harmed by his own creation and recognizes it. Studge is, therefore, a narrator who is not confined to realistic inference because he claims to be the creator of all the other characters, yet there is more to him than that. At times, he offers the reader what seem like objective descriptions and windows into the minds of certain characters; however, his lack of control does not necessarily question his reliability because in many of these instances, he provides the reader with no means to access the answer to that question in a way that would be productive to a reading of the text. Rather, it parodies the idea of an author who is “in control” of his own text. The standard notions of author and narrator as Booth classifies them are destabilized. Rather than attempt to decide whether or not Studge is reliable, we can ask whether or not his choice in discursive practice has any value in relation to the other events in the novel.

Studge’s primary mode of representation is an engagement in a critique and satirization of meta-narratives and language games. This leads him to believe that human beings are mechanized objects, as he states just before the description the climax.*4 Studge begins the novel with a discussion of America’s discovery narrative, the narrative of founding a sovereign nation, and the narrative of freedom, liberty, and justice—the three together comprising the American meta-narrative. The primary way in which this critique is achieved is through defamiliarization. Viktor Shklovsky, who coined the term, points out that, “As perception [of an object or concept] becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. [. . .] [A]ll of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic. [. . .] In this process [. . .] things are replaced by symbols” (Shklovsky 17). So it is with these symbols. Icons such as the flag and the Statue of Liberty have become unconsciously automatic—their signified meaning, in the mind of the average American, is not questioned. Shklovsky continues: “By this ‘algebraic’ method of thought [referring to the unconsciously automatic transforming objects into symbols] we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics” (18). With regard to American symbols, they act as foundations—as the center—for American ideology. The problem, as Studge points out, is that they are merely objects—signifiers whose signifieds have been made seemingly concrete, when, in fact, they are not.

*4 It is not that the post-structuralist discursive practices themselves contain an inherent connection to the mechanization of human beings but that Studge makes this connection himself within the text.

To understand more specifically how Studge destabilizes the American meta-narrative, it is useful to turn briefly to deconstructive discourse, which will help us define the terms of Studge’s narrative more precisely. In “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida discusses the notion of center and what that has meant to Western metaphysics and more importantly, the implications it has for meta-discourses. He writes: “[I]t has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it” (278). In other words, “the center,” in Western metaphysics, must transcend the structure that it supports. It is given a special, “untouchable” position. This conception of center is based on the metaphysics of presence. Centers such as “essence, existence, [. . .] transcendentality, consciousness, God, man” all demand presence (280). Derrida points out, however, that a signified that demands presence limits the play of the signifier; that is, if there were the possibility of an absolute, the play of the signifier would be finite. Therefore, to rely on these portions of American history as absolute would be to say that they are centers which transcend their own structurality.

Studge begins with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” calling it “pure balderdash,” and “gibberish sprinkled with question marks” (Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 8). He continues on to the Flag and then to the Eye of Providence, which appears on the back of one dollar bills, stating, “Not even the President of the United States knew what that was all about. It was as though the country were saying to its citizens, “In nonsense is strength” (9). Vonnegut of course is writing in a post-Watergate, post-Vietnam world, and his narrator is ridding his ideology of the symbols he sees as useless. He is continuing what he did at the end of the preface—discarding that which is not sacred, that which holds no meaning. Studge is pointing out that America only puts value into these symbols because based on experience as Americans they have value. Studge can just as easily say that the American flag is merely a piece of cloth with stars and stripes. This unmasking of American symbols as not only empty signifiers but signifiers which are destructive also demonstrates that the American meta-narrative is not an absolute nor should it be.

Symbols of the discovery narrative, such as the date 1492, are described as “evil, since [they] concealed great crimes” (Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 10). Studge includes a visual representation of how the date would be written on the board, first to remind the reader that “teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy” (10), but also to remind the reader that those numbers in that order are just that: numbers. They are given a value because they represent a year. That year signifies something important to America. But the signifier/signified relationship also allows Studge to assign the meaning that he wants. He wants to discard this symbol because he sees it as evil. The reader is given a short history lesson that is very different from what was being taught in history classes across the country. The narrator reminds the reader: “The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492” (10). This is a fact that all Americans are already familiar with, yet most do not realize the implications. The notion that Europeans discovered this land and rightfully settled it should seem contradictory. Yet it isn’t. It is far from contradictory to the majority of Americans. To the Western world, and particularly America, 1492 signifies a major turning point, the biggest turning point in human history. Studge then lets the reader know that it “was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill” (10). As bluntly as possible, the narrator dismisses the transcendent, signified meaning of 1492.

Similarly, he calls the torch held by The Statue of Liberty, which is supposed to be “a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere,” a “sort of ice-cream cone on fire” (10). He again includes his own visual representation of this image. The drawing itself does not have any meaning attributed to it. It is separated from the statue and reduced to the status of a fiery ice-cream cone, again to allow the reader to rethink the overly familiar. The irony of this beacon of freedom juxtaposed with the truth that “the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery” (11) makes it impossible for the destabilization of America’s meta-narrative to be ignored.

Most importantly, Studge has no hope that anything will change, which explains his sarcastic tone throughout this section. In the preface, he discusses Phoebe Hurty, the person he dedicates the novel to. He writes, “I think now that grace was easier for her than it is for me because of the mood of the Great Depression. She believed what so many Americans believed then: that the nation would be happy and just and rational when prosperity came” (2). Studge sees now that this has not been the case. The same greed, the same lies which Phoebe Hurty and other Americans thought would disappear, still persist. Studge is at a loss until Karabekian’s speech.

Studge’s demonstration of this type of narrative formation is usually accompanied by a lengthy discussion of signs and how they operate as signifier and signified. He implies that in an attempt to form new narratives, people engage in language games. Studge’s incorporation of hand-drawn illustrations is important to note because the images demonstrate that an attempt to force a signified onto a signifier, even through visual demonstration, is futile. A clear illustration of this can be seen in surrealist painting of the early twentieth century. René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images helps us understand what Studge is attempting to achieve:

*

The two images above are both of pipes but with different captions. The image on the left, from a dictionary, has the caption “a pipe” while Magritte’s painting, an image that one could imagine in a dictionary, a catalogue, or advertisement, has the opposite statement: “This is not a pipe.” In terms of the free play of the signifier, Magritte’s caption is correct in two ways. First, we are looking at the image of a pipe, not an actual pipe. We call the image “a pipe” out of necessity for demonstration purposes. It would be impossible for a dictionary to include a physical object for every word defined that requires a picture. Such a notion is ludicrous. But this painting draws the viewer’s attention to the possibility that claiming the image is the physical object could also be ludicrous. Secondly, it demonstrates that the signifier-signified relationship is inseparable in constituting the sign. The image of the pipe cannot exist by itself without bringing forth the word “pipe” to mind and visa versa. The two are like the opposite sides of a sheet of paper. The statement is especially paradoxical in terms of the sign because it attempts to remove signification from the image. If the image is not meant to signify “pipe,” then what is it meant to signify? If it is not a pipe, then what is it? The signified is absent, described in negative terms, suggesting that it may be possible to attach any signified but the standard one to the image in order to make the sign complete. Studge’s drawings have a similar, but in some ways more pronounced, effect because they are very crude felt pen drawings. What looks like an asterisk the reader is told is actually a “picture of an asshole” (Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 5). Because the reader is told what the signified is, the signifier automatically becomes that object.

Studge moves from the American meta-narrative and its signifiers to simple, generic words, which more acutely represent the free play of the signifier in language that is not necessarily attached to a meta-narrative but is used in narrative formation. Lyotard notes that these types of language games are very common, writing, “Consider the form of popular sayings, proverbs and maxims: they are like little splinters of potential narratives, or molds of old ones, which have continued to circulate on certain levels of contemporary social edifice” (22). With Studge’s examples, the words take on whatever meaning a character chooses—based on anything, even something as arbitrary as the way a word sounds. These examples are used to satirize the way in which human beings purport to have control over language within the language game.

Wittgenstein, who coined the term “language game” in the way I use it, gives the following concrete example of the game being played:

If we study the grammar, say, of the words “wishing,” “thinking,” “understanding,” “meaning,” we shall not be dissatisfied when we have described various cases of wishing, thinking, etc. If someone said, “surely this is not all that one calls ‘wishing,’” we should answer, “certainly not, but you can build up more complicated cases if you like.” And after all, there is not one definite class of features which characterize all cases of wishing [. . .] If on the other hand you wish to give a definition of wishing, i.e., to draw a sharp boundary, then you are free to draw it as you like; and this boundary will never entirely coincide with the actual usage, as this usage has no sharp boundary. (19)

Wittgenstein argues that it is impossible for us to say definitively that the current usage of a word is complete, that there can be no additional usages, even if we are satisfied with a definition. Lyotard points out that in Wittgenstein’s theory of language games, there are three things upon which the games are contingent: “The first is that their rules do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit, or not between players” (10). What one tries to “do” with language is governed by what the given society will deem as acceptable. A move in the language game cannot be self-legitimizing. “The second is that if there are no rules, there is no game” (10). Not every “move” will be considered valid when compared with the contract between players. One cannot begin to call all dogs “trees” and simply expect to be understood. Finally, Lyotard continues, “To speak is to fight, in the sense of playing and speech acts. [. . .] A move can be made for the sheer pleasure of its invention. [. . .] But undoubtedly even this pleasure depends on a feeling of success won at the expense of an adversary—at least one adversary, and a formidable one: the accepted language or connotation” (10). Lyotard acknowledges that the free play of the signifier is unrestricted. If one were to somehow establish “dog” as “tree,” then that would become the new meaning. This happens constantly between languages: The appropriation of a foreign word into a language that produces a new signified. In Southern California, the Arroyo Seco signifies a specific highway; however, arroyo seco in Spanish signifies a dry river, any dry river—it has no specific signified. Yet it is important to note the distinction between “play” and “game.” A game implies a set of rules, as Lyotard has outlined. Play is free from rules. While Wittgenstein points out that we cannot exhaust the definition of a word, the use of a word within the social contract is limited. The free play of the signifier is infinite, but only outside of social interaction.

In relation to Breakfast, the game is constantly being played. Studge explains that Kilgore Trout can only publish his writing in porno magazines. He tells the reader that Trout’s name and the title of his “most widely-distributed book” has been “obliterated” by a “lurid banner which made this promise: Wide-open Beavers Inside!” (Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 22). The crude banner is written out in felt-tip pen, and the word “Beavers” is underlined twice. Studge systematically explains how the free play of the signifier is operating with regard to the signifier “beaver.” He describes the magazine banner thus: “A wide-open beaver was a photograph of a woman not wearing underpants, and with her legs far apart, so that the mouth of her vagina could be seen” (22). He then explains how that particular use of the word developed. Yet, he does not use complex, sociological concepts or terminology to explain it; he simply tells how news photographers “needed a code word to yell to other newsmen and friendly policemen and firemen and so on, to let them know what could be seen, in case they wanted to see it. And the word was this: ‘Beaver!’” (22). This is a re-signification of the signifier “beaver”—a move in the language game is made. Studge explains to the reader the different uses for “beaver.” This exposition is followed immediately by a description of the animal that “beaver” can signify. Then a drawing of the animal. Just to be clear, the narrator finally draws a crude representation of a vagina, saying before it “The sort of beaver which excited news photographers so much looked like this:” and after it, “This was where babies came from” (23). The narrator’s drawings function much in the same way that Magritte’s painting does: signification cannot be forced onto the signifier, even through visual image. The narrator also demonstrates how the connotation of a word is tied into the signified. Studge leads the reader through a journey from beavers to babies. The reader is forced to consider the various meanings of this one word and all the possible objects it can refer to. If the drawing of the vagina signifies “beaver,” then the signified connotation is vulgar; if it signifies “the place where babies come from” then it is not. Similarly, if “beaver” signifies vagina, its signified connotation is vulgar, and so on. Once confronted with these simplified connections, the reader at once sees the impermanence of the signifier and the vast “distance” the signifier can travel in the linear system of language.

The number of examples of these demonstrations is large, but they serve an important purpose in ultimately discussing sacredness as used in the novel. We can read these discussions as belonging to the way the novel views the world. Drawing on post-structural discourse, the narrator forms his own mode of representation which is closely aligned with these other discourses; however, focusing the narrative in this manner has lead him to say that human beings are machines. In the preface, the narrator addresses this concern directly:

As for the suspicion I express in this book, that human beings are robots, are machines: It should be noted that people, mostly men, suffering from the last stages of syphilis, from locomotor ataxia, were common spectacles in downtown Indianapolis and in circus crowds when I was a boy. Those people were infested with carnivorous little corkscrews [. . .] The victims’ vertebrae were welded together after the corkscrews got through with the meat between. The syphilitics seemed tremendously dignified—erect, eyes straight ahead. (3)

In suspecting that human beings are machines, Studge points out the ways in which human beings cannot control themselves. He continues:

I saw one stand on a curb [. . .] This syphilitic man was thinking hard there [. . .] about how to get his legs to step off the curb and carry him across Washington Street. He shuddered gently, as though he had a small motor which was idling inside. Here was his problem: his brains, where the instructions to his legs originated, were being eaten alive by corkscrews. The wires which had to carry the instructions weren’t insulated anymore, or were even eaten clear through. Switches along the way were welded open or shut. (3)

The idea of human beings as machines is connected to language games and the deconstruction of meta-narratives only insofar as Studge makes that connection, which appears with regard to his fascination with meta-narratives and language games as a part of the narrative. It seems to be summed up best as a fascination with the ways in which human beings feign control over their surroundings. Through defamiliarization, Studge mocks the human desire to control. Humans attempt to establish meta-narratives, which Studge sees as impermanent and easily subverted simply by resignifying the symbols associated with them. He sees this lack of control not only in his characters’ surroundings, but within their bodies as well. We can see then why Studge admits to the reader that up until the spiritual climax, he believed human beings were machines, not sacred, containing nothing transcendent.

The question becomes both how and why the narrator changes his mind within two pages of the narrative, as I pointed out at the beginning of my argument. More recent critics, Bill Gholson and Todd F. Davis, specifically, have posited a moral relativism*5—that is, Vonnegut brings a contingent morality to a postmodern worldview. However, not only does the word sacred imply so much more than morality, but to describe morality and postmodernism as “two disparate worlds” (Davis 150) seems erroneous. Postmodernism is not an amoral worldview; however, postmodern and, more accurately, post-structural discursive practices deny the existence of the transcendent, which is why the sacred is so important to a reading of this text.

*5 The debate over moral relativism has been ongoing for quite sometime but experienced resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s primarily with the rise of Neopragmatism and thanks mostly to the work of Davidson, Rorty, Harman, and Wong. While neither Vonnegut’s work nor his critics directly address any debate between an empirical or metaethical conception of moral relativity, the general concept itself is present. See Donald Davidson, “The Objectivity of Values”; Gilbert Harman, “Moral Relativism”; Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth; D.B. Wong, Moral Relativity.

To answer these questions of why and how, we must begin at the point that Studge enters the novel himself because it is at this point that his discursive practice begins to change. We must also bear in mind the deferral of meaning that occurs with reference to the sacred in the text because at this point, there is now a connection between the nature of the sign and Studge’s use of sacred. In using the word, Studge relies on the play of the signifier sacred. His first statement regarding what is sacred at the end of the preface can be read as a moment of play. The meaning of the word slips from something transcendentally important to the status of satiric contrivance. The word holds the latter place prior to the narrator’s entrance. Dwayne’s stepbrothers, Lyle and Kyle, run a tourist attraction called Sacred Miracle Cave. It becomes overrun with industrial waste, and the two come to Dwayne for help. The narrator describes all the elements of the attraction, most named in a religious fashion:

The organ was the Pipe Organ of the Gods, a thicket of stalactites and stalagmites which had grown together in one corner of the Cathedral. There was a loudspeaker in back of it, through which music for weddings and funerals was played. It was illuminated by electric lights, which changed colors all the time.
The Sacred Miracle was a cross on the ceiling of the Cathedral. It was formed by the intersection of two cracks. ‘It never was real easy to see,’ said Lyle, speaking of the cross. ‘I ain’t even sure it’s there anymore.’ (Vonnegut, Breakfast 120)

Studge relates this episode as a means of satirizing human attempts to draw meaning out of occurrences in nature that are meaningless. Applying the words “sacred miracle” does not make the cracks in the ceiling of a cave sacred. But the same cannot be definitively said about Studge’s application of “sacred” to human awareness. There is again a difference in tone when compared to his second epiphany. The signifier slips back when the narrator has experienced this.

In using such a potentially loaded word, Studge is recognizing the inseparability of the profane and the sacred within humanity, which Rabo Karabekian describes to Studge and the rest of Midland City. Human awareness is inextricably linked to the dead machinery of the human body as well as the unfathomable horror that body can produce. For Studge, he sees now that horrors committed by the sea pirates, which represent for him colonialism worldwide, not just the colonization of America, could not seem horrific if it were not for the sacredness of humanity. He had focused his attention solely on one side of this relationship, which he admits as soon as he enters his own text. He writes: “This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believe” (198-9). Studge makes this statement in reference to possibly having schizophrenia. He implies that focusing on the fragmentation of knowledge, the futile attempts of man to create meta-narratives is making him schizophrenic. He can no longer dwell on the language games that people play or the ways in which they cling to the trace of a meta-narrative—he must focus on what is truly important to people, but he does not know what that is until Rabo Karabekian’s speech, and in deciding that human awareness is sacred within the discourse he has been operating this entire time, he destabilizes that mode of representation.

What Studge sensed was not schizophrenia but rather the beginnings of a developing discursive practice, one that recognizes human beings as both sacred and profane, or in terms of the sign, sacred and profane are signifieds under which the phrase human beings will travel, yet for Studge, neither one can be removed from the signifier. They are there together. He tells the reader: “Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. [. . .] It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done” (215). Studge has not experienced either of his epiphanies yet. When he tells the reader this, he believes he is referring to his unmasking of the American meta-narrative and language games. However, in developing a discourse that combines the post-structural mode of representation he was engaged in with transcendence, he seems to reverse what he thought he was doing at the outset. He first orders post-structural discursive practice by attempting to systematize the ways meta-narratives are deconstructed and language games are played and then brings chaos into that “system” because Studge realizes at this point that he too has attempted to provide a totalizing narrative for human existence. He gives the reader a clear example of how his new discourse will now inform the narrative just two pages after Karabekian’s speech, describing Kilgore Trout’s attempt to cross Sugar Creek:

His situation, insofar as he was a machine, was complex, tragic, and laughable. But the sacred part of him, his awareness, remained an unwavering band of light.
And this book is being written by a meat machine in cooperation with a machine made of metal and plastic. The plastic, incidentally, is a close relative of the gunk in Sugar Creek. And at the core of the writing meat machine is something sacred, which is an unwavering band of light.
At the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light.
My doorbell has just rung in my New York apartment. And I know what I will find when I open my front door: an unwavering band of light.
God bless Rabo Karabekian! (231)

The reader is given directly the deferral of meaning that was implied at the beginning of the novel. He sees the profane and the sacred existing together. Studge also blesses Karabekian even though he despises him as an artist. He believes that within Karabekian is an unwavering band of light no matter how much of a hack Karabekian may be as an artist. The slippage of meaning occurred previously because Studge did not recognize the sacred “part” of human beings—awareness—as separate from the body. The previous mode of representation, which was rooted in post-structuralist discourse, assumed that human beings were unaware, and, most importantly, that they did not have the ability to become aware. But now Studge sees that ability; it is a gift. He wants to believe it is sacred because recognizing awareness has saved him from becoming fractured and schizophrenic.

This reading is illuminated further by the parallel between what happens to Studge and how Dwayne Hoover is transformed by Kilgore Trout’s novel, Now It Can Be Told. Dwayne comes to believe everyone on Earth is a machine but him, put there by the Creator to draw different reactions out of Dwayne. Both Dwayne and Studge are transformed by the words of characters in the story and at exactly the same time. During Karabekian’s speech, Studge notes: “Dwayne Hoover, incidentally, wasn’t taking any of this in. He was still hypnotized, turned inward. He was thinking about moving fingers writing and moving on, and so forth. He had bats in his bell tower. He was off his rocker. He wasn’t playing with a full deck of cards” (227). However, rather than read this as a signpost which points to Studge’s experience as parody, we can read this parallel as a contrast which helps explain the complexity of Studge’s epiphany. First, Studge recognizes that Dwayne Hoover is insane. A comparison between the two transformations to produce satire would only be completely effective if Studge did not recognize Dwayne as out of his mind and therefore easily shaped. The narrator admits to being possibly schizophrenic, but he is aware whereas Dwayne is not. These are marked differences which do not produce the same effect of satire that Studge’s unawareness would. The parallel puts further emphasis on the important role that awareness plays in the narrator’s newly developed discursive practice, which directly informs the narrative that ends the novel.

Studge wants to set Kilgore Trout, his creation, free from his control by giving Trout the gift of awareness—the ability to recognize that he lives in a constructed narrative but that through awareness, he can go on to construct his own narrative. Studge tells Trout, “I have broken your mind to pieces. I want to make it whole. I want you to feel a wholeness and inner harmony such as I have never allowed you to feel before” (300) because Studge has “written” Trout’s character to recognize the same fragmentation of knowledge that Studge focused on for the first two thirds of the novel. It is through the characters with which Trout comes into contact that Studge has described the majority of the language games played. Studge explains to Trout what the entire novel has been building toward:

“Mr. Trout—Kilgore—[. . .] I hold in my hand a symbol of wholeness and harmony and nourishment. It is Oriental in its simplicity, but we are Americans, Kilgore, and not Chinamen. We Americans require symbols which are richly colored and three-dimensional and juicy. Most of all, we hunger for symbols which have not been poisoned by great sins our nation has committed, such as slavery and genocide and criminal neglect, or by tinhorn commercial greed and cunning.” [. . .] He saw that I held an apple in my hand. (300-1)

Studge is essentially telling Kilgore Trout that through awareness, narratives are not absolute: he can construct his own narrative. The American meta-narrative can be altered based on a new symbol—the same way so many other characters in the novel have relied on language games for ultimately pointless reasons. America can abandon its history of “great sins” and look toward a future where its symbols represent something wholly good and are not tainted by a gruesome past. Studge now has a hope that resembles that of Phoebe Hurty in the preface, and he wants Trout to recognize that he has this same ability.

This seems like something Kilgore Trout should understand. Throughout the entire novel, the narrator has noted Trout’s questioning of language games for ultimately worthless ends. All of Trout’s novels and short stories treat the core problems of humanity with childlike simplicity. After this new American symbol is presented to Trout, the narrator says to him, “ ‘Arise, Mr. Trout, you are free, you are free’ ” (301). What Studge means is that Trout is now aware. If Trout can recognize this and act accordingly, then he will be free. Everyone else will continue on, passively allowing language to control them, believing that the meta-narratives they adhere to are totalizing.

As the narrator “somersault[s] lazily and pleasantly through the void” (301) back to his reality outside of his text, he hears his father’s voice issuing from Kilgore Trout’s mouth. Studge begins to cry, and draws a picture of his eye shedding a tear. Trout is shouting, “ ‘Make me young, make me young, make me young!’ ” (302). He missed the point. After being made aware of the nature of his existence, he chooses to ignore it. He could have asked anything of Studge. He knows the man he was just talking to is his creator, yet all he wants is to be made young again. Studge has admitted that he cannot control the precise movements and decisions his characters make, which is why he cannot force Trout to do what he wants. Trout’s condition is tragic, which is why Studge draws a picture of himself shedding a tear. Trout’s reply is a result of his mechanical body. He would rather have that body be remade into one younger and better because he cannot control that part of him. Not only is this particular event tragic for Studge, but he further emphasizes the tragedy on a larger scale by drawing the abbreviation “ETC.” (302) at the end of Trout’s demand. The narrator uses “etc.” throughout the entire novel; however, at first, he doesn’t use the abbreviation. He simply says “And so on” over and over. Once he enters the text, he begins drawing the letters, the abbreviated form of “et cetera,” which denotes “and so on” and is “occasionally used when the conclusion of a quotation, a current formula of politeness, or the like, is omitted as being well known to the reader” (OED). In the novel, the phrase is usually included after some instance of human suffering, or something that is overly familiar. When the drawing is first included, Studge prefaces it by saying, “The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it” (234). He, of course, ends his own story with the abbreviation, indicating that Trout’s vanity, his disappointing behavior, should be well known to the reader. It is innate in all of us.

Reading Studge’s speech and the ending as part of the development of his new mode of representation is most consistent with the rest of the novel. However, even though his epiphany is consistent with his development as narrator, it is in direct conflict with his previous discourse, making it seem inconsistent. How can the narrator so easily reconcile his new belief in the sacredness of human awareness with his previous mode of representation which denied such a meta-discourse?

First, we cannot simply accept sacred as a signifier for transcendent, especially because this signifier has experienced a slippage of meaning throughout the text. However, it has only slid between two signifieds: transcendent importance and satiric contrivance. At this point, Studge does not imply that a language game being played or a meta-narrative being adhered to erroneously. With other moments of play, such as his discussion of the word “beaver,” Studge provides extensive commentary on the word and the way it slides under various signifieds according to the rules of the game. He mocks these moments of play as being ultimately worthless. When Karabekian mentions human awareness as sacred, Studge does not do this; rather, he accepts it straightaway. Rudolf Otto’s definition of the sacred will be helpful in deciding how Studge is using the term in this instance. Otto describes the sacred as something “non-rational,” meaning when someone experiences it, he or she does not have the faculty to fully understand or explain it using language (2). The term does not necessarily have to connote transcendence; however, the “sacred human awareness” that Studge describes is interchangeable with Rabo Karabekian’s or Roy Hepburn’s discussion of “the soul” in Bluebeard and Galápagos. All three are referring to human awareness, and in the latter two, the implication is directly transcendent. The soul implies transcendence because it denotes some part of a human being that will continue on after death and transcend human existence. Defining sacred in this way clearly implies belief and adherence to a meta-narrative—why then does Studge choose not to destabilize it?

Even though Studge operates within post-structural discourse to comment on everything he does in the novel, he also uses this discourse against itself. When Studge admits to the reader that he could possibly be schizophrenic because he has focused on the fragmentation of knowledge, he realizes that there is no escape from meta-narratives. He has understood the way the novel previously viewed the world as being free from meta-discourse—as a tool to destroy meta-discourse. He wants to bring chaos to order and thinks that is what he has done by breaking down such discourses. We can read the narrator’s epiphany not only as the development of a new narrative mode but the development of one which destabilizes Studge’s prior conception of both post-structuralism and postmodernism and attempts to displace these. Derrida writes that he is not interested in the destruction of Western metaphysics, which is what he claims Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger attempt to do.*6 Derrida acknowledges that these discursive practices seek to establish a conception of truth that defies Western metaphysics and attempts to solve its central problems, questions of being, truth, and knowledge, by destroying its foundations—precisely what Studge attempts throughout the beginning of the novel. Derrida points out that, “all of these destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a kind of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relation between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics” (280). For Derrida, it is impossible to critique metaphysics by attempting to dismiss its terminology because we “have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” (280-1). It is impossible to escape the use of a discursive practice if one seeks to critique that same practice. One must use the same language.*7

*6 Since the introduction of Derrida to American academia, many, primarily literature departments, have attacked deconstruction for attempting to do exactly what Derrida accuses his predecessors of doing. We must not conflate deconstruction with destruction. For a discussion of deconstruction in American literature departments, see Jeffrey T. Nealon, “The Discipline of Deconstruction.”

*7 Here there is a circling back, so to speak. The narrator’s epiphany shows the futility of attempting to completely dismiss transcendence within his previous discursive practice, but in establishing a new discursive practice, the narrator must rely partially on this previous one as well. He does not destroy it, he subverts it and must incorporate it.

Derrida also confronts the notion of totalization, which is important because Studge’s conception of totalization changes along these lines. Nietzsche, as Derrida points out, defines totalization as “useless, and sometimes as impossible. This is no doubt due to the fact that there are two ways of conceiving the limit of totalization” (289). In Nietzsche’s view, totalization is impossible because he sees it as an attempt to master the unmasterable.*8 It is the use of finite language to try and contain the infinite. Studge satirizes this attempt at totalization in American culture. Derrida, however, writes, “[N]ontotalization can also be determined in another way: no longer from the standpoint of a concept of finitude as relegation to the empirical, but from the standpoint of the concept of play” (289). Rather than seeing language as a finite field which cannot cover the infinite, Derrida sees that the “nature of the field” itself “excludes totalization” (289). That is, it is not that the field is too large; rather there is “something missing from it” (289). The field of language is missing a center. The sign replaces the center, thus “One cannot determine the center and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the center [. . .] occurs as a surplus, as a supplement” (289). Language, for Derrida, does not function merely as a finite system of metaphors but as a system where the “center” is always missing. In terms of Breakfast, rather than reading post-structuralism and postmodernism as a raising up of the anti-transcendent, the atheistic, the secular above the transcendent, we can read it as a “leveling” of these terms.

*8 See Friedrich Nietzsche. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.”

Conceiving of the narrator’s new discourse as a move in the language game—as a moment of play—as we have previously is particularly useful because we can read it as a moment in which, for the narrator, sacred has now taken the place of “center.” In this moment of play, Studge recognizes that even though post-structuralist discourse has destabilized the metaphysics of presence, it can never fully prohibit anything, lest it too try to claim absolute presence. Does this suddenly reaffirm some form of transcendence? No, but it does affirm the position that Studge takes at the end, that he offers to Trout. He is going to choose a narrative, recognize that it cannot be absolute, but treat it as such anyway. This is his only recourse aside from driving himself to schizophrenia by analyzing the ways in which these various discursive practices wrestle and try to displace each other. Studge chooses a mode of representation that is centered on human awareness as sacred over a discourse he now sees is exclusionary yet required to include, suspicious yet unable to dismiss—both present and absent simultaneously—because he decides that is what must be most important to him in order to maintain his sanity.

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