Holder of Slaughterhouse - Five

So this week, while reading Holder of the World (and writing an 18 page research paper) I was also reading Slaughterhouse – Five for FYS. It struck me how very similar they were at times, especially on the issue of time. If you haven’t read Slaughterhouse – Five I suggest you do so because it’s super good. Really, it’s quite genius. I won’t give away too much of the plot because I think you should all go read it for yourself but the story is about a man named Billy Pilgrim who has “come unstuck in time.” Basically he time travels (seemingly both at will and at random) back and forward through different times of his life.
Billy’s time travelling was what first struck me in comparison to Holder of the World. Obviously, Venn is working on a time machine in the novel, and while Billy’s time traveling is not done with the aide of a machine the Tralfamadorians (aliens Billy is convinced he was abducted by) say that all things (plants, animals, people, etc) are machines because we have no free will. So in that sense they are both time traveling by means of machine—one a man made machine, the other a man machine. The other part of the time traveling that was similar in both books was the jumping between present and past (and in Slaughterhouse – Five’s case the future as well). Holder of the World jumps between Beigh’s story and Hannah Easton Fitch Legge’s (haha) story and they become interconnected. In slaughterhouse - Five there is a quasi base story of Billy going to fight in World War II, and then it jumps around all over the place from his birth to his death to his wedding night, etc. I see this jumping between times technique as a very post-modern style of writing. There is a story within a story within a story and there are back stories and side stories and seemingly random and jumbled up stories. This is very unlike books from before post-modernism in which there was a story and you followed it from start to finish.
The concept of time is also examined in both books (both with time travel and with out). In Holder of the World Venn says Hannah married Gabriel Legge because it was her time to get married—a very determinist way to look at life. If Hannah got married because it was her time then this displays a belief that everything is predetermined and things happen when they do because that is when they were supposed to happen (determinism). In Slaughterhouse – Five the Tralfamadorians teach Billy that we are all machines and have no free will or ability to make decisions. They also show Billy that time is kind of a concept of the human mind and all time exists at once. So it’s kind of like you die, but you are still living in every other moment of your life. This is also in its own way determinism. Just as Venn looks at Hannah getting married as her ‘time’, Billy is living ‘times’ of his life—his time to go to war, his time to get married, his time to die. This even affects the way the tralfamadorians (and Billy) look at death. Any time someone dies in the novel (be it thousands of people, a horse or a glass of Champaign) the description of the death always ends with ‘so it goes.’ It is as if they are saying ‘it was there time, nothing you could do about it.’ Hannah get’s married: so it goes, it was her time. Thousands die in the bombing of Dresden: so it goes, it was there time.
The books also examine agency in similar ways. In Holder of the World Gabriel Legge is described as having no equal in Salem. He get’s this agency from his experiences, from the places he has been, things he has done. These are places and things the rest of Salem has not seen or done. So Gabriel get’s higher agency. When I was reading Slaughterhouse – Five I was wondering why Billy was so quick to believe everything the tralfamadorians told him. And then I realized that they, like Gabriel, had agency from experience. They had been places and seen and done things Billy couldn’t even imagine. And so it follows that he assumed they had superior intelligence from their experiences. Experience = knowledge = agency.
Basically it worked out quite nicely that I ended up reading both of these books at the same time because they were both very good and they complemented each other well. I found it rather handy. Go read Slaughterhouse – Five if you have not and good luck on finals everyone!!

"What You Want"

So this evening I was in my car, racing back to campus to try (alas, in vain) to be on time for a floor meeting, and I had my IPod on shuffle (a tactic to keep my eyes on the road and off the IPod screen that has proven to be rather difficult for me because I tend to want to skip songs I’m not in the mood for. It’s frustrating because I can’t; I’m driving). The song “What You Want” from Legally Blonde the musical came up. As I was singing along (another car habit) I realized that it (both song and the musical itself) totally pertained to strategies and tactics. Eureka: a blog topic!

Wednesday morning we decided as a group that a goal is what you want to accomplish (duh), a strategy is a generally idea of how you want to go about accomplishing the goal and a tactic is an actual action that you act out in order to achieve the goal. So basically a tactic is a more specific, acted upon part of a strategy. For example we looked at the tea bagging protests that happened Wednesday. The goal was (if I am not mistaken) to lower taxes. The strategy was to rise up the people and inspire and spark protest. The tactic was, well, tea bagging. The twitter, facebook and TV promotions could also be called tactics.

But how does Legally Blonde fit in? Elle Woods, the stories protagonist, has a clear goal, a strategy and tactics that are shown within the play. For those of you who haven’t seen the musical, it basically follows the same plot of the 2001 movie version. If you haven’t seen the movie version, go shoot yourself in the foot. Everyone has seen that movie, get with it. But for now, here is a plot synopsis.

Elle’s goal is fairly simply. She’s been dumped by the man she believes to be ‘the one’ – Warner - because she’s not serious enough for the future Harvard Law student. Elle’s goal is to get Warner back and to make I'm realize that he still loves her. Her strategy is to prove she is serious. She has several tactics to accomplish this. One tactic is to get into Harvard law. This in itself is also another goal with its own strategy and tactics. Elle’s strategy to get in is “What [Harvard] Wants”. Her tactics to prove this are as follows. First Elle must get her parents to agree to pay for the expensive education (technically also a goal, but really this could go on all day so we won’t go there). After this she must get a good enough LSAT score (“of more than 174”) to be even considered by Harvard, which she accomplishes by studying rather than going to parties. To top it off she’ll “need a killer essay” to even be able to hope to get accepted. Rather than writing an essay (because after all “an essay’s so boring and so much does not fit”) Elle and the entire UCLA marching band descend upon the office of the Harvard acceptance committee and insists that she is exactly what they want.

I suppose all of these tactics are also in their way minor tactics to reach the major goal: operation ‘get Warner back’. They are like tactics to accomplish a tactic. Once Elle’s first major tactic to get Warner back (get into Harvard) is accomplished, she must then succeed in getting his attention. For this she tries several friend suggested methods including “shaking her junk” and “getting a chip on her shoulder”. Eventually Elle realizes that she must actually get serious in order to prove to Warner that she is serious. Her tactic is to actually study. Do homework and try in her classes. Elle’s final tactic is to win an actual court case that no one believes she can win (which she does using a finely tuned ‘gay-dar’, the always handy ‘bend and snap’ and her knowledge of hair care). Her strategy, and the tactics that puts it into action, succeeds because in one of the last scenes of the show Warner proposes to Elle. Unfortunately for him Elle’s journey of strategies and tactics has led her to discover that she deserves better and she doesn’t need him and her answer is “Thank you, but no.” Denied.

But despite the fact that Elle’s original goal was not the same as what she realized at the end she wanted, her series of strategy and tactics clearly worked. Elle, along with a group of trusted friends, planned out (and admittedly fumbled through) a strategic plan of action (tactics) and in the end achieved their goal (Elle does in fact find love, though it’s not Warner). Like Klein and Juffer show, it is all good and fine to have a goal, but without effective strategy and tactic that goal goes nowhere.

Anging Backwards

“While, everyone else was aging, I was getting younger... all alone.”- Benjamin Button, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This weekend I went and saw Benjamin Button on campus. While there I ran into Amy, who jokingly told me to blog about the movie. But funny story by half way through the movie we both realized that blogging about it was actually a legitimate option this unit. I know. I know I’m blogging about another movie. So shoot me, they’re good examples. For anyone who does not know the movie is about a man who is born an old man and gets younger as he grows older. His body is getting progressively younger while his mind is growing as a normal mind would. This is a perfect example of time and space and how people’s circumstances and so on can drastically change the way they relate to and think about time and space. Throughout the movie there are many instances where this relationship is displayed and examined.

The movie opens with the story of a clockmaker who was commissioned to make a clock for the new train station. Before the clock is finished his son dies in the World War 1, devastating the clockmaker. On the day the new clock is unveiled we find out that he made it so that the hands move backwards. The clockmaker says that he did this on purpose, that his hope is that time will move backwards and bring his son, and all the other young men lost at war back home safely. This brings up the movies first interesting point. When we have suffered a loss we tend to dwell in the past, wishing we could go back and change things or not take people for granted. Rather than moving forward we. Like the clockmaker, will time to move backwards instead. We fight a losing battle against time because it will never do what we so wish at those times that it would. Sometimes we are like the clockmaker and let that battle consume us, becoming almost unable to function because of our anger, frustration and pain caused by time trudging forward no matter what happens to us, no matter how much we wish to stop it or make it go back.

Later in the movie we meet Benjamin, who was born shortly after the clock was unveiled. We are left to assume that his backward aging is somehow connected to the clock. As Benjamin grows up he has to start facing the truth that he is different, that time and space mean something different to him than they do to others and that his relationship with other people. When Benjamin is about 10 or 12 he meets a little girl about the same age named Daisy. They become close friends because despite what Benjamin looks like on the outside, they are both children. It is clear that Benjamin is able to relate more to her than to the older people he lives with and looks like. One night the two sneak downstairs when they should be sleeping and sit under the table and talk, like a fort. Daisy’s grandmother catches them and harshly scolds Benjamin for getting so close to a girl Daisy’s age. Benjamin’s mother comes to console him and explains that people don’t understand because he is a ‘man-child’. Benjamin’s outward appearance and the way time is moving for him (backwards) is affecting where he can go and what he can do. His space is limited and different from everyone else’s.

Benjamin’s relationship with Daisy is severely impacted by his growing younger. It is fairly easy to tell that they are in love for most of the movie. But a relationship at the beginning of the movie when they meet is not exactly socially acceptable because of the apparent (though false) age difference and at the end of the movie it becomes impractical as Benjamin becomes a teenager, then toddler, then baby. So in order to have the relationship they desire they must meet in the middle for the few years there ages are close both in appearance and actuality. There time together is limited. Unlike a normal couple they cannot grow old together, nor can they raise children together. When Daisy becomes pregnant Benjamin feels forced to leave because he wants his child to have a father, not a playmate and as he says, Daisy cannot raise both of them. Daisy eventually marries someone else and they agree it is for the best. Benjamin’s time with the woman he loves and with his child are both limited because of his reverse aging.

Time itself is a completely different thing for Benjamin than it is for us. Most of us don’t know when we are going to die and could live to be very very old. But Benjamin, being born in the body of a man in his 80’s has a limited time. He is almost like a ticking clock. He can only live until he becomes a baby, and in that way his entire life is limited to a certain possible time span. The quote I opened with makes a big point. He was going through all of this alone. Benjamin was the only one growing younger, the only person whose time and space is affected in that. This puts him in a different space than everyone else. He is alone. Kind of a bummer. But it shows how just one factor can totally change how someone relate to time and space. Like Juffer and Klein both point out, time and space are by no means constant or universal. They are different for everyone. And yet at the same time they never really change. Only our relationship to them changes. That being said, I’ll leave you with a quote from the trailer (you know, one of those things they show in the trailer but you realize later was never in the movie…):

“Life can only be understood looking backward. It must be lived forward.”