ABSTRACT
Vonnegut’s most psychologically complex novel, Mother Night (1962), utilises ecological themes in questions of purity and authenticity. Referring to the surprising history of Nazi ecology and naturalist ideology while examining the meta-historiography of Mother Night, this chapter draws attention to the content of Howard W. Campbell’s plays and poetry. While Campbell believes, and is invested in, the idea that a real and impermeable barrier exists between his inner artistic and outer propagandistic personas, these multiple selves are nowhere near as inseparable as he hopes or thinks. Campbell recapitulates fascist attitudes even as he consciously repudiates their gross consequences, condemns nationalism while living according to a metaphor couched in its terms, and disavows material history and even his own body in favour of the transcendental and authentic power of aesthetics. Whether the desire is to suppress (or rhetorically appropriate) materialism in favour of idealistic purity or to suppress human subjectivity in favour of natural purity, the ultimate contradiction – the contradiction that causes Campbell’s final undoing – is to try to ontologically separate interdependent elements.
