And nothing hurt

HUM 2052: Civilization IISpring 2012Dr. Perdigao

April 18-20, 2012

Keep Listening

• Englishness/Americanness: Derby as “head American”; Campbell on Americans—as Nazi

• Bertrard Copeland Rumfoord, Harvard history professor, as roommate in hospital

• “Official accounts”

• Rumfoord writing a one-volume history of the United States Army Air Corps in World War II (184), as “readable condensation of the twenty-seven-volume Official History of the Army Air Force in World War II” (191) into one volume; Truman’s announcement that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima (1939—science and atomic energy [186]), read by Rumfoord’s wife Lily

• Lily brings Rumfoord David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden (1964)(186), accounts of attack, destruction, and casualties

Keep Listening

• Rumfoord’s plan to include the bombing of Dresden, as nothing has been included in the “official history”; it will now be told from the “official Air Force standpoint” (191)

• “‘I was there’” (191): Echolalia

• Epigraph (197): Christmas carol—Vonnegut references the epigraph

• Inability to cry over events

• Story of Christ, resurrection?

• Rumfoord: “‘It had to be done’” and “‘That’s war’” (197)

Keep Listening• The Big Board (201); Jesus, time machine (202)

• Magazine with “What really became of Montana Wildhack?” (204); pictures… grainy images (locket); photo with Shetland pony (205)

• Literary critics discussing if novel is dead… bury the novel (205-206)

• Montana Wildhack—blue movie, says one with Edgar Derby (207): what is reality and what is fiction?

• Assassinations of Robert Kennedy (1968), Martin Luther King Jr. (1968)

• Return to Darwin, over Christ for Tralfamadorians (210)

• 2 days after city destroyed, digging, Derby killed, then at end return to coffin-shaped wagon (215), war is over, horses

• Digging began, new technique, no more corpse mines (213-218)

Endings?• Ilium—as Troy—question of heroism, those that try to be

heroic are ridiculous. Cult of heroism as leading to war

• 60s—anti-authoritarian

• Past—smuggled back in, held up on wall, ruined cathedrals, smudged paintings

• Yearning and attack on past—ambivalence, mix of nostalgia and criticism

• Novel of exposure

• How can people remember? How can we write about it?