THE WEARY ROAD REDEFINED: A STUDY OF MYTHS AND ARCHETYPES IN KURT VONNEGUT’S SELECT FICTION

Abstract

Ever since humans came into being, stories have been our constant companions. Be it the orally transmitted tales of our early ancestors or the physically enacted, handwritten, printed, and now digitalised modes of storytelling, if there are some things that haven’t changed over the course of human history, one is our enchantment with stories. As cognition grew in humans and led to the birth of civilisations, stray stories assumed the form of myths—often rooted in folklore and religion—and continue to offer meaning, purpose, guidance and solace to peoples from different cultures around the world. It is undeniable that nothing is created in vacuum. Whether the most seminal literary works or our beloved tales carried through the oral tradition, many stories hark back to recurring tropes and motifs, sometimes without knowing it. Regardless of the temporal, geographical and ethnic diversity in the stories created by humans, recurring tropes and motifs abound and are often summed under the term “archetype”. The term comes from the Greek terms “arche” meaning “original,” and “typos” meaning “form”. Drawing from areas such as theology, anthropology, psychology and literature, the concept of archetypes is timeless, universal and has remained ingrained in human consciousness since archaic times. An archetype can be: a recurring trope or motif in mythology, literature or art, as studied by the mythologist Sir James George Frazer; a universally present thought, idea or image residing in the collective unconscious of individuals, as proposed by the analytical psychologist Carl Jung; a Platonic idea referring to pure fundamental forms which every other art form tends to imitate; or, simply put, a prototype that serves as the original model for objects to copy. Archetypal and myth criticism, though uttered often in the same breath and treated as a single branch of literary criticism, is composed of two areas generally regarded as one, and understandably so, for myths and archetypes inform each other to a great extent. Archetypal literary criticism as a form of critical theory has its roots in social anthropology and psychoanalysis, and has been enriched over time by the works of pioneers such as Plato, Sir James George Frazer, Carl Jung, Northrop Frye, Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Hillman, and feminist archetypal critics such as Annis Pratt, Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht. Archetypal criticism argues that the form and function of literary works are determined by archetypes, and cultural and psychological myths shape a text’s meaning. The timeline of myth criticism begins with the works of Sir James George Frazer and Northrop Frye, and has steered to align with comparative anthropology and philosophy, continuing with the works of Joseph Campbell, Jessie Weston, Leslie Fiedler, Ernst Cassirer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Richard Chase, Philip Wheelwright, C.L. Barber, René Girard, and Francis Fergusson. Myth criticism regards myth-making (as in folktales, rituals etc.) as integral to human thought and as a culture’s attempt to establish meaning and a moral compass essential to human existence. Literature, which emerges from myth, is considered to be based on recurring patterns. Myth criticism generally identifies manifestations of mythology in works of literature—whether it is an original myth, an appropriation of a traditional myth, or mere allusions—and uses these elements to reinterpret the work. The present research studies select works of fiction by the late American author Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), best remembered as a postmodern iconoclast and America’s poster boy for humanism. An adept practitioner of metafiction, science-fiction, satire, gallows humour, non-linear narratives and such markers of postmodernist writing, Vonnegut yoked prevalent postmodern practices with tropes of yore, while adding his distinctive touch of a humanist rebel. A war veteran himself, Vonnegut’s writings have the imprint of his humanist ideology, inculcated in part from his family, his training as an anthropologist, and his miraculous survival in World War II from the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany. The troubles of Vonnegut’s protagonists, though triggered often by external agency, are as psychological as they are worldly. The Vonnegutian hero, a deeply compassionate individual, senses that contemporary quests—war, religious fanaticism, unethical scientific pursuits, political corruption etc—are false and futile, takes a rather different route trying to mend the previous wrongs either or not committed by him, often descends into insanity, and ends up a changed person. The second chapter of the thesis attempts a close reading of Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse-Five using a theoretical framework of the hero quest, or monomyth, as professed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The chapter disentangles the novels to identify the inherent quest narrative in their non-linear plots and reinterprets the novels in terms of Campbell’s quest stages to reveal a resemblance with the archetypal hero’s journey. The journeys of Malachi Constant and Billy Pilgrim (the protagonists in the two novels) are scrutinised, appropriate equivalents are substituted for Campbell’s original quest stages, the chronology of the quest stages is shuffled or merged as required, and an understanding is arrived at as to what extent the investigation succeeds in identifying in the novels a standard monomyth framework. The nature of the Campbellian tropes in Billy’s and Malachi’s journeys, such as the call to adventure, refusal of the call, the whale, the goddess, the temptress, father atonement, apotheosis, and the relevance of their ultimate boons for their societies determine the implications of the two Vonnegutian heroes’ monomyth. The third chapter is divided into two parts and seeks to understand the motives and nature of the antagonistic characters in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels while refuting his claim of having never created villains in his novels. The first part examines the antagonists in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, Slapstick, Mother Night and Cat’s Cradle using a theoretical framework of the archetypal trickster figure as studied by Paul Radin, Carl Jung, Lewis Hyde, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, Winifred Morgan and Joseph Campbell among other scholars on the subject. The second part of the chapter is a revisionist study of Bluebeard and argues that Rabo Karabekian, the protagonist and self-proclaimed “Bluebeard” of the novel, is not, in fact, the villain he considers himself. Instead, Dan Gregory, Rabo’s mentor in the novel, is revealed as the true “Bluebeard” when the novel is studied comparatively with the inspiration behind its title—the French fairy tale Bluebeard translated by Charles Perrault. The chapter concludes by locating the antagonists in Vonnegut’s novels—the tricksters and the real Bluebeard—into a morally questionable domain and in doing so propounds an alternate understanding of Vonnegut’s assertion of having never created villains in his writings. The fourth chapter examines the characters in Vonnegut’s Bluebeard with a psychoanalytic framework structured along the studies on archetypes and complexes by Carl Jung, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, and Joseph Campbell. The chapter uses the psychoanalytic findings along with existing feminist critiques of Jung to assert that Bluebeard refutes Jung’s essentialist anima-animus model with its anti-sexist depiction of characters. In addition, by dissecting the male protagonist’s immature masculinity in Bluebeard, probing the feminine hand in his development from an elitist impulsive man-child to an empathetic old artist, and by assessing Vonnegut’s opinions on (and representations of) women and gender issues, the chapter concludes that Bluebeard replaces the male-biased Jungian schema with a more balanced structure in the post-Jungian feminist vein by being a rare mother quest narrative in the otherwise father-centric American fiction. The fifth chapter, like the third chapter, is divided into two parts. The first part begins by introducing the humanist and anthropocentric thought originating in the Western theological and intellectual canon, and then looks at the many strands of posthumanism that seek to decentre the human and promote inter-species equality and justice. Next, it scrutinises Vonnegut’s flawed posthumanism in Galápagos and his incorrigible humanist bent in the novel. The second part of the chapter undertakes a close reading of the novel, studying it against a theoretical framework of the cosmogonic cycle as depicted in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and finds that Vonnegut’s evolutionary plotline mimics the archetypal trope of the creation myth—a humanist construct. The chapter, thus, concludes that Galápagos, despite depicting the post-human in the form of an evolved post-Homo sapiens species without human vices, suffers from Vonnegut’s ever shifting humanist and posthumanist bents and thus manages to remain a humanist–posthumanist concoction at best. The research concludes with the last chapter reassessing the studies in the prior chapters and by noting how the thesis adds a novel contribution to Vonnegut scholarship by employing an interdisciplinary theoretical framework of comparative mythology, anthropology and psychoanalysis to scrutinise Vonnegut’s works and to reveal how the humanist author’s writings hark back to myths and archetypes to find cures to humanity’s problems (war, trauma, racism, gender discrimination, socio-economic disparity, ecological sabotage etc.) in contemporary times.