Flaws in the Telegraphic Worldview

In the first few weeks of this class, when we were reading essays about postmodernism and trying to wrap our heads around what a postmodernist history would look like, I had a vague vision of the Postmodernist Historical Novel taken to its limit that I thought would be impossible to write. In this novel, the author tries to distance themself from all metanarrative. They stick to only verifiable facts about the past, garnered from primary sources. They can’t try to tell a story about a time period, because the act of telling stories shapes the past in a way that postmodernists were aware of and uncomfortable with. The “novel” ends up just being a series of descriptions of primary sources, completely unintelligible and completely unread. Even if it could be deciphered, it would be useless because people automatically construct stories when presented with series of events. 

Kurt Vonnegut’s character Billy Pilgrim and his fictional race of Tralfamadorians view the world like they’re in that imaginary novel. 

Tralfamadorian novels are described as “telegraphic” series of events that don’t add up to what Earthlings would think of as a story. Instead, they create a general, diffuse sense of life through a bunch of granular anecdotes. No morality is imparted. There is no cause and effect. Similarly, a truly, reductively postmodern book would be super-granular, as it would only describe tiny, verifiable events. It would have no morality because morality is a metanarrative, and it would attempt to purge all metanarratives from its pages. It would contain a minimum of cause and effect reasoning, because you can never know if one thing truly caused another. And because of that lack of cause-and-effect or morality, you couldn’t impart meaning to anything – not even death.

Can an anti-war novel truly do away with metanarratives? I don’t think so, because to be anti-war, you have to subscribe to the large “war is bad” metanarrative. I think Vonnegut is critical, not supportive, of the way Billy and the Tralfamadorians view death. Billy’s character is neutral towards war – too neutral. While Vonnegut forbids his children from fighting in wars, Billy’s son is a Green Beret. While Vonnegut is horrified by the death toll in Dresden, Billy’s only conscious emotional reaction is “so it goes.” Instead of endorsing Billy, perhaps Vonnegut sees him as problematic because he can’t/won’t do enough emotional labor to help the anti-war movement. After postmodernism has run its course and we are left with the realization that all morality is relative, it’s up to us to pick a set of guiding morals. Instead of endorsing a bizarrely amoral character and worldview, Vonnegut is criticizing them to make a statement about the necessity of metanarratives during war.