Scrutinizing meaning systems more closely will help us to distinguish the good from the bad in the systems we develop as we seek to live in God’s world in a manner pleasing to him.
From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith
In the quotation above, Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin make a case for the benefits of reading meta-fiction, a newer genre that seems in its very philosophical premises to oppose Christianity.
The work work I teach that most explores the epistemological skepticism undergirding meta-fiction is Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. The novel purports to be the diary of an American Nazi name Howard Campbell who is writing from an Israeli jail cell pending a trial for war crimes. Vonnegut, the novel’s author, claims only to be the book’s editor. Campbell is himself a writer, a playwright more specifically, and Vonnegut-as-editor meditates on what that means for the diary’s veracity.
To say that he was a writer is to say that the demands of art alone were enough to make him lie, and to lie without seeing any harm in it. To say that he was a playwright is to offer an even harsher warning to the reader, for no one is a better liar than a man who has warped lives and passions onto something as grotesquely artificial as a stage.
From Mother Night
Campbell’s crime is propaganda, a deliberate distortion of the facts that masquerades as complete truth. Vonnegut-the-editor wants us to see that the impulse that led Campbell to be a playwright is not all that different from the one that led him to work for the Germany government. Just as any sane person should be able to tell that what’s going on in a theater is not “real life” so too just should any sane person be able to tell that propaganda (especially the kind propagated by the Nazis) is “grotesquely artificial.” Vonnegut’s point is that we have to somehow make sense of why so many people believed the propaganda, and he (implicitly) proposes that the best way to do this is not through history but through fiction–through the very form that propaganda took in the first place. If Vonnegut’s done his meta-fictional job, we won’t be able to leave the novel without thinking about the kinds of fictions that our own government uses in order to achieve its moral ends.
Vonnegut is not satisfied with that end, however. He tells us in the 1966 introduction to the book that the novel’s moral is “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” This would seem to eliminate the distinction between lie and truth. The lie is the truth if believe and live it. The book, after all, gets its title from a speech in Goethe’s Faust where we learn from Mephistopheles that Mother Night is the most ancient thing in the universe. Light only exists, Mephistopheles maintains, as an after-effect of the dark. It sticks to bodies that try to combat the night, but those bodies will eventually pass away leaving only darkness. Vonnegut hints that this is why he’s chosen fiction. It is only in something that is obviously not true but that passes itself of as true that we can begin to see the ways we are seduced by propaganda. It is a grim view of humanity and reality indeed.
Paying attention to the novel as meta-fiction gives Christian readers one way to see just how dark it is.