One of my pet peeves when discussing books with other people both inside and outside English class is when people try to diagnose characters in the novel. Often I will hear people saying "oh, that character is suffering from depression" or something like that even though no mental condition is stated in the novel. I think this is a bad way to read books because it is not the way the author wrote it.
For example, in last year's 20th century literature class we read Mrs. Dalloway and the comment was often made that Septimus Smith was suffering from PTSD. I feel uncomfortable with that because the very idea of PTSD was not invented until later and when we introduce a concept like this it has all kinds of other meaning and baggage that come along with it that the author never intended. I feel comfortable saying that the war affected him in certain ways that affected his later insanity, but nothing so definite past that. Otherwise we just end up projecting our own ideas of PTSD and wartime trauma instead of reading what Woolf wrote about the character.
So I feel uncomfortable speculating about Billy's sanity/hallucinations/PTSD. I much prefer to read the events as having actually taken place. I think if we chalk the whole time travel and Tralfamdore thing up to hallucination, we run the risk of making the novel into something entirely different than what Vonnegut intended. It is very different to read this book as Billy's suppression of his feelings about the war than reading his "holy fool" attitude in the war as a result of his time travel. I feel like the former case is just trying to "normalize" Billy, which is opposite the effect Vonnegut tries to achieve by having the story be so outlandish. Another thing is that if we see this as all taking place in Billy's head, then we have to discount the death scene as never happening because that scene would be impossible without Billy being unstuck in time. While I thought the argument that this is all taking place in Billy's head and is a result of psychological damage from the war, I ultimately prefer to read the events as having actually taken place.
While I agree that if we try too hard to diagnosis characters we run the risk of trying to create aspects of them that aren't supported by the text I'm not sure that that's exactly what's happening when people say "Billy has PTSD". For instance I don't know anything about the technicalities of PTSD and as a result when I say, "Billy has PTSD" what I really mean is "Billy seems to be traumatized from the war, and PTSD is the modern way of saying that". They have called it shell shock as the diagnosis in those days, and there are certainly some specifics that differentiate the two from one another, but I think for the most part we're really just using these terms to make observations about how we understand Billy to be acting. I think you're right that we shouldn't be too rigid about trying to specifically figure out how we would classify Billy's mental condition, but I also think that PTSD is just our contemporary catch-all term for mentally unstable due to war experiences.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that when it comes to _Slaughterhouse-Five_, it diminishes the novel's strangeness--and the various ways that time travel and space travel serve as literary devices for Vonnegut to develop his themes--to simply "diagnose" him in this way. But I do think it makes sense to consider some ways that his experiences of time travel and space travel might reflect the fact that his brain has been severely damaged by his wartime experiences (and by that plane crash he survived, with a catastrophic head wound!). It's a matter of adding an additional aspect to ponder versus "nailing down" a diagnosis and feeling like our work here is done.
ReplyDeleteWith Septimus Smith, though, the issue is a little different. PTSD didn't exist as a psychiatric category at the time, but the same basic set of symptoms was just being labeled as an actual phenomenon (met with skepticism by many "stiff-upper-lip" military traditionalists): "shell shock." By integrating Smith into her novel, Woolf is engaging with the current and controversial issue of what to do about all the "walking wounded" the war had produced. Septimus's suicide is linked directly, at Clarissa's party, to talk of renewed efforts at legislation to provide care for veterans suffering from shell shock. So we aren't "diagnosing" Septimus in the same way--his shell shock is written into the book as such, and Woolf is coming out as someone who takes seriously this once-controversial idea about how damaged the "survivors" of war can be.
(Now, when it comes to "diagnosing" Meursault as autistic or whatever, I'm fully on board with your objections!)