How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
When Arpad came on duty at six last night, he demanded to see what I'd written so far. I gave him the very few pages, and Arpad walked up and down the corridor, waving and praising the pages extravagantly.
He didn't read them. He praised them for what he imagined to be in them. (3.2-3)
If you've ever talked about literature at a party—come on, we know you have—you know that people are pretty inclined to both praise and diss works of literature they haven't actually read. There are different reasons for that, but when your own opinions are so ingrained in your brain, sometimes it's hard to hear new things. That sounds like a dangerous way to go through life—not to mention a disservice to whatever it is you're supposed to be reading.
Quote #2
Hoess heard that I was a writer, and he got me to one side at the party, and he said he wished he could write.
'How I envy you creative people—' he said to me. 'Creativity is a gift from the gods.'
Hoess said he had some marvelous stories to tell. He said they were all true, but that people wouldn't be able to believe them. (5.2-4)
Calling a skill a gift kind of obscures the hard work that goes into it. We don't think that's actually what Hoess is getting at here; it's more like he's trying to understand why writing isn't a go for him. What we really want to pause on here, though, is the notion of unbelievable stories. This is a happy little meta moment, since Campbell is actually telling us a story we can't believe. And yet it's true.
Quote #3
'I saw the play you've got running now, and I've read the one you're going to open.'
'Oh?' I said. 'And what did you learn from those?'
He smiled. 'That you admire pure hearts and heroes,' he said. 'That you love good and hate evil' he said, 'and that you believe in romance.' (9.64-66)
According to Wirtanen, Campbell's easy to read. In fact, he's a hopeless romantic who's a sucker for a good story—Campbell's own stories told him so. Everyone's a literary critic.
Quote #4
His examination papers were quite probably the longest such papers ever written in the history of dental education, and probably the most irrelevant as well. They began, sanely enough, with whatever subject the examination required Jones to discuss. But, regardless of that subject, Jones managed to go from it to a theory that was all his own—that the teeth of Jews and Negroes proved beyond question that both groups were degenerate. (13.5)
Here's another instance when writing reveals too much of the inner soul of the writer. In this case, it's not a reader or viewer doing the interpretation; rather, it's the act of writing itself that drags the truth out of Jones. He's so filled with paranoid, obsessive hate, that he can't even hide it to save his degree. The more he writes, the more his gnarled beliefs come to life for him.
Quote #5
'Will you write a play for me some time?'
'I don't know if I can write any more,' I said.
'Didn't Helga inspire you to write?' she said.
'Not to write, but to write the way I wrote,' I said.
'You wrote a special way—so she could play the part,' she said. 'That's right,' I said. 'I wrote parts for Helga that let her be the quintessence of Helga onstage.'
'I want you to do that for me some time,' she said. (24.51-57)
Besides wanting everything Helga had, Resi recognizes the power of writing to make things real. Yes, real things are already real, but in this view, writing about real things makes them more real. That's what Resi wants Campbell to do for her. Why? Because his being able to do so would mean that he "gets" her—he really understands what makes her tick.
Quote #6
'When you get out of this country with your girl, get yourself new surroundings, a new identity, you'll start writing again,' he said, 'and you'll write ten times better than you ever did before. Think of the maturity you'll be bringing to your writing!' (28.22)
Writing, for Kraft, is apparently like a fine wine. Now that Campbell has aged, lived a full life, and is about to be free, he can really get going on his writing career. That's what Campbell is doing: writing to us about all he's learned from his jail cell.
Quote #7
Eichmann was writing the story of his life, just as I am now writing the story of my life. That chinless old plucked buzzard, with six million murders to explain away, gave me a saintly smile. He was sweetly interested in his work, in me, in the guards in the prison, in everybody. (29.27)
Eichmann shows up in this novel as a clueless, self-absorbed figure, and at this stage in his life, he's just playing the part of careful writer. He observes all those around him—probably because he's heard writing advice like "write what you know."
Yeah, when you're Adolf Eichmann, "what you know" is kind of vomit-inducing. But whatever.
The kicker? No amount of observation will turn Eichmann's writing into a self-reflexive act: he's not going to write until he suddenly sees what he's done and registers the weight of the deaths on his hands. It's just never gonna happen, because he's not capable of that kind of interiority. For Eichmann, writing is just another form of propaganda.
Quote #8
'You still write?' Eichmann asked me, there in Tel Aviv.
'One last project—' I said, 'a command performance for the archives.' (29.54-55)
Just as Campbell's radio broadcasts were a big phony show, his very important, heartfelt confessional is—wait. How can this also be a joke? Say it ain't so, Campbell, say it ain't so. Sigh. Well, this complicates things. It's getting to be that you can't take a dark, postmodern comedy completely sincerely anymore—oh, yeah. That. Teehee. Okay, so all writing is complicated, and this novel is no less so. We'll just leave it at that.
Quote #9
'We thought you'd kill yourself before the sun came up again.'
'I should have,' I said.
'I'm damn glad you didn't,' he said.
'I'm damn sorry I didn't,' I said. 'You would think that a man who's spent as much time in the theater as I have would know when the proper time came for the hero to die—if he was to be a hero.' I snapped my fingers softly. 'There goes the whole play about Helga and me, "Nation of Two,'' I said, 'because I missed my cue for the great suicide scene.'
'I don't admire suicide,' said Wirtanen.
'I admire form,' I said. 'I admire things with a beginning, a middle, an end—and, whenever possible, a moral, too.'
'There's a chance she's still alive, I guess,' said Wirtanen. 'A loose end,' I said. 'An irrelevancy. The play is over.' (32.29-36)
This mini-manifesto on writing makes it sound as if Campbell is invoking some serious rules thrown down by Aristotle on form and content. What's with all this beginning, middle, and end stuff? Why do we need a moral?
Is Vonnegut himself adhering to these rules? It doesn't feel like it, since Campbell's narrative jumps around a lot, even if the twists are perfectly timed. Then again, Vonnegut does play fast and loose with his casually obvious foreshadowing.
What's the moral we're going to take from this? That in his anger, Campbell has reduced the value of his and Helga's lives to a matter of entrances and exits onstage. Womp womp.
Quote #10
'It's a mutilation!' I said. 'The pictures are bound to mutilate the words. Those words weren't meant to have pictures with them! With pictures, they aren't the same words!' (36.3)
Someone is ticked. And that someone is Campbell. He's totally miffed that someone added pics to his sex book about Helga. First off: fair. This is definitely a violation of privacy. No doubt about that. Secondly, it's super interesting to think about the interplay between image and text. Here, the images undo the value of words. They make what was kinda sorta porn into some real nasty Nazi porn (disguised as not porn, of course, because Nazis aren't supposed to be into porn). Yeah, it's complicated.