The Vonnegut Review

The first paragraph from our recent review of Robert Tally's Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography, originally posted at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

KURT VONNEGUT first exploded into the nation’s consciousness in 1969 with the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. The novel’s distinctive and ethical voice resonated with young Americans, and his appeal to countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s made him a reluctant literary celebrity. Absurdist novels such as Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions offered new ways of thinking about the self, the nation, and the world, and Vonnegut’s avuncular wisdom and anti-war sentiment appealed to the skeptical idealism of late-century America. Even as his celebrity waned, he continued to write poignant, experimental novels of the American experience, and his influence and appeal remained potent.

Click here to read the full review at The Los Angeles Review of Books.

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A Brief Reflection on #VonnegutSummer

2013-10-07T10:00:00.000-04:00

Dear Readers,

By now, attuned readers will note that The Vonnegut Review has long-since reviewed Vonnegut's final novel, Timequake, and, after fourteen novels and eighteen essays, the road ahead may seem unclear. Indeed, we have completed the fundamental goal of our project, and greatly appreciate all of the support and enthusiasm you have shared. Participating in a vibrant community of Vonnegut readers has been a wonderful experience for both of us. "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

However, we have not yet resigned to hanging our hats. We have found Vonnegut an invaluable companion to our own American lives, and do not rush to re-shelve his voice. We are working to expand significantly the scope of the project, and we look forward to sharing such journeys with you all. We also will be working on some capstone essays, intended to function as retrospectives, encapsulations, and, most importantly, continued explorations of the contours of Vonnegut's literary visions of the human in the world.

Please stay tuned, Vonnegut readers. The Vonnegut Review is not finished. Excitement lies just beyond the horizon.

Until then, please follow us on Twitter and Tumblr, where we will be posting more regularly. And be sure to explore our archives, which you will find on the right sidebar of this page. Most importantly, we urge you to read, and to read Vonnegut.

Sincerely,

Wilson Taylor and Matthew Gannon

Fictional Humans and Humanist Fictions

2013-09-06T22:15:00.000-04:00

by Wilson Taylor

“I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake, 1997

“Being alive is a crock of shit.”

- Kilgore Trout in Timequake

Vonnegut’s Old Man and the Sea

In an extended analogy to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Kurt Vonnegut identifies Timequake, his fourteenth and final novel, as a “stew.” Vonnegut “fillets the fish” of a failed novel (which he compares to Santiago’s destroyed marlin in Hemingway’s novella) with ostensible “thoughts and experiences” from his life. The novel as a “stew” resonates with Vonnegut’s “telegraphic schizophrenic” literary mode, which, in its fragmentation, sharpens a critical edge and cultivates redemptive narratives. The resulting gallimaufry is Vonnegut’s final attempt to deconstruct the novel as aesthetic and literary form, and simultaneously reconstruct the human and inaugurate new histories.

Timequake oscillates between Vonnegut’s literary meditations and a messianic narrative of Kilgore Trout. This narrative, the central plot line of the discarded Timequake One, considers a “sudden glitch in the space-time continuum,” or what Trout refers to as a “cosmic charley horse in the sinews of Destiny.” The Universe, Vonnegut explains, “suffered a crisis in self confidence” and “suddenly shrunk ten years.” This event, what Vonnegut refers to as a timequake, “zaps everybody and everything in an instant” from 2001 to 1991. “Then we all to go back to 2001 the hard way, minute by minute, hour by hour, year by year, betting on the wrong horse again, marrying the wrong person again, getting the clap again.”

This tedious accumulation of previously recorded time impels for Vonnegut a deep existential crisis. This realization of the eternal return distills the absurd tragedy of history in which the human is reduced to a “robot of the past.” While many of Vonnegut’s novels experiment with ontologies of time, Timequake offers his bleakest vision of human bondage to the inscrutable mechanics of temporality. To dramatize the crippling malaise of this timequake, Vonnegut refers to Thoreau’s Walden — “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” — and Shakespeare’s As You Like It — “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

In response to these desperate theatrics of an inhuman history, Vonnegut attempts to sow redemption. Vonnegut rejects the nihilism of Macbeth, who claims, in another meta-theatrical mediation, that life is “a tale / told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / signifying nothing.” Vonnegut refuses these resignations to tedious and meaninglessness performance. Vonnegut instead re-ignites the flame of being, illuminating an undiscovered history and redeemed humanity. If the eternal return posits the death of narrative, and postmodernism its irrevocable fragmentation, Vonnegut invests his humanism in the redemptive power of narrative and literature in re-imagining the self and the world. Imagination and art, he claims in Timequake, are essential for the cultivation of meaning.

Timequake and the American Automaton

Vonnegut’s timequake, a premise conceived by Kilgore Trout (whom Vonnegut identifies as his “alter-ego”), is a dramatization of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence. “What is time?” asks Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions as he sketches an Ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail. The characters of Timequake are thus condemned to a decade of recurrence, bearing what Nietzsche identifies as “the greatest weight.” Nietzsche, speculating on eternal recurrence as a philosophic and existential question in The Gay Science, imagines a demon condemning the human to living life “once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.” He responds — “Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?”

Vonnegut’s timequake reduces his characters to the dull repetition of a decade’s minutia. Eternal recurrence renders life absurd, and this strict determinism reduces the human, as Nietzsche describes, to a “speck of dust.” Vonnegut’s automatons sleepwalk through their lives as “tedious theater,” to quote Tony Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. Their lives are emptied through repetition of unimaginative rituals, pursued by Emerson’s “hobgoblins” of meaningless repetition. These selves flounder in what Walter Benjamin refers to as “homogeneous and empty time” of a history stripped of narrative meaning. Vonnegut considers the absurdity of this fate in the terrible abyss between thought and action, where actions are bonded to the intricacies of recurrence but devoid of imaginative or ontological investment. They have been violently submerged into the inescapable Other of historical time — these alienated selves embody Heidegger’s notion of “fallen-ness.” The divided self cannot cultivate inwardness, nor live with deliberation or meaning. This self-alienation, where the existential scream of the tortured self is silenced by its bondage to inhuman time, represents the apex of absurdity. “Being alive,” laments Kilgore Trout, “is a crock of shit.”

The absurdity and alienation engendered through the timequake satirizes the cultural logic of late capitalism. Vonnegut repeatedly critiques the pervasive loneliness and banality of American culture and society. The victims of the timequake, aimlessly wandering through the wastelands of the profane present, represent the alienated victims of late capitalism itself. Much of Timequake contains Vonnegut’s irreverent critiques of a commodified and corporatized American culture, rendered homogeneous and rootless through the inhuman machinations of late capitalism — the true subject of Trout’s timequake is Vonnegut’s American present. Neither context preserves imagination; neither phenomenon cultivates the self. Trout’s timequake forces an eternal return. Vonnegut’s concern is that fractured communities and culture industry of contemporary America will enforce an eternal present, with the human resigned to alienation, apathy, and absurdity. The human, Trout suggests, “feels like something the cat drug in.” Vonnegut employs the absurd science-fiction of a timequake to distill his satire of contemporary America. Selves, suggest Vonnegut, sacrifice agency and imagination for the anesthetizing pleasures of political complacency and the culture industry. The nihilism of the timequake parallels the nihilism Vonnegut reads in contemporary culture. Through the fantastic mechanics of a timequake, Vonnegut presents a tragic reduction of the human to an absurd automaton and a tedious Sisyphus.

As Vonnegut laments in Breakfast of Champions, “I cannot live without a culture anymore.” His heartbroken paeans repeat throughout Timequake, but Vonnegut is less hopeful for transformation. Instead, Vonnegut imagines himself beating against a cultural current of fragmentation and complacency, a lone voice in the darkness of despair. “If I hadn’t learned how to live without a culture and a society,” he suggests in Timequake, “acculturation would have broken my heart a thousand times.” Timequake, and the redeemed humanity it dares to imagine, presents both the broken-heartedness of wasteland of the contemporary, but also an earnest attempt to weave a new culture and new society out of the ruins.

“You Were Sick, but Now You’re Well, and There’s Work to Do”

Vonnegut’s timequake lasts for ten years, after which the wills of its victims are suddenly restored. Vonnegut’s paradoxical humanism rests upon this two-fold movement — a deconstruction before a reconstruction. But when the timequake ends in 2001, at the dawn of a new millennium, Vonnegut’s automata are crippled by malaise and a deep ennui. Termed “Post-Timequake Apathy,” the subjects of Timequake struggle to regain deliberate control over themselves. After a decade of tragic resignation to fate, Vonnegut’s fictional humans lack selves and lack will. This sudden restoration of will results in disasters spreading throughout New York City — planes fall to earth, vehicles collide, fires consume flesh and scorch stone. Only Kilgore Trout — who appears in Timequake as an absurd messiah adorned in a babushka with a teddy bear print — is able to awaken from the timequake and restore himself. And he begins to rebuild the world.

Trout, awake in a burning city, heals through incanting “Kilgore’s Creed” — “You were sick, but now you’re well, and there’s work to do.” Trout’s transformative vision spreads to a growing community of disciples who resurrect the apathetic automata of American complacency. Vonnegut explicitly frames Trout as a Christ figure attempting to build the Kingdom of God on Earth. Trout’s jostling complacent humans into a new consciousness mirrors Vonnegut’s own literary ambitions, as he hopes to impel the reader into a new relationship with the self and the world. Kilgore’s Creed, Vonnegut suggests, could inaugurate a new human history of justice and prosperity (which Vonnegut mourns as forgotten political ideals). Vonnegut’s invitation to heal the self, the community, and the planet underscores the moral obligation to do so. Reformulating the nightmare of history as a disease, from which humanity can recover, presents a messianic arc of history through the awakening of a sublime humanism. Humanity must realize itself as a healer and redeemer in order to inaugurate a sacred counter-history, a new history that has yet to be realized or written. And a writer of fiction shall lead them.

Though the timequake had silenced the interior self, Trout (and Vonnegut) attempts to cultivate the transformative and creative potential of imagination. In another passage that echoes Breakfast of Champions (Timequake often recalls Vonnegut’s 1973 gem), Trout expounds on the radical presence of “awareness,” which he unequivocally renames “soul.” The timequake, in both the crude determinism it represents and the cultural complacency it suggests, is a factor of “only energy and matter and time.” Trout presents the “soul,” then, as “something very new and beautiful,” a presence which escapes the reductivism of the contemporary and which can re-create the world. The inauguration of new histories depends on this capacity to imagine. Against the profanity of a diseased and fallen world, ruptured through poverty, oppression, and war, Vonnegut posits the transcendent soul as a sacred redeemer. Vonnegut “fillets the fish” of a fallen humanity in order to resurrect it as something “very new and beautiful.” And this soul, Vonnegut suggests, must be nourished through imaginative literature.

Counter-Histories and Counter-Hegemonies in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Novel

A central component of the inauguration of counter-histories is the weaving of new narratives to sustain them. Literature, Vonnegut suggests, must realize itself as a counter-hegemonic current of redemption in order to redeem the human. Anesthetizing pleasures, such as television, recapitulates the banality of capitalism into the consciousness of its viewers. Aesthetic pleasures, such as literature, instead cultivate the interiority of the human as a counter-hegemonic and redeeming force. If imagination and awareness is the most intrinsic component of the human, aesthetics can endeavor to re-imagine the human and the world. The counter-hegemonic potential of literature exists in its cultivation of new narratives and new consciousnesses. Through his fictional narratives, Vonnegut weaves eschatologies and ontologies of freedom.

Literature must realize itself as a transgressive and subversive force of imagination. Vonnegut has always battled political conservatism and censorship, as his transformative vision for the American self and society offer radical revisions of the status quo. Vonnegut is an author continually banned in schools, and he critiques this unimaginative and reactionary posture in Timequake. “In the slavering search for subversive literature on the shelves of our public schools...the two most subversive tales of all remain untouched, wholly unsuspected,” he writes with passion. “One is the story of Robin Hood... And another as disrespectful of established authority as the story of Robin Hood...is the life of Jesus Christ as described in the New Testament.” Vonnegut celebrates the historical and counter-hegemonic Christ in Timequake, and the radically transformative dream of the Gospels inspire Vonnegut’s own fictions. Vonnegut’s messianic narratives are potent enough to blast out of Benjamin’s continuum of “homogenous and empty time” and inaugurate a new history and a new humanity. History is first absurd, but also offers, again to quote Benjamin, “gates through which the Messiah might enter.” And Vonnegut’s telegraphic schizophrenic literary mode, replete with fissures and cracks, offers innumerable messianic gates.

Timequake’s narrative fragmentation reflects Vonnegut’s hermeneutics of suspicion — his weary skepticism toward the accepted and anesthetizing narratives of contemporary quietism, toward tired myths of progress or false myths of prosperity, toward the voracity of consumerism, toward the banality of American culture and consciousness. Vonnegut marries his postmodern critique with a transcendent humanism, and his suspicion gives way to sacrality. Vonnegut deconstructs the world in order to construct the human anew. Timequake is both anti-novel and self-conscious memoir — Vonnegut stitches meditative scraps and aborted stories into a bizarre collage redolent of the contemporary American consciousness and culture. Only through these fragments is it possible to present a truly critical vision of unrealized future, which, as Marx suggests through Hegel, can only be imagined as a “negation of a negation.” Vonnegut’s shattered fictions represent a shattered world, and, more importantly, suggests that the world can again be made whole through imaginative and ontological engagement. In this way, Vonnegut’s “telegraphic schizophrenic” literary mode is actually a mysticism of sorts, yearning for unity after fracture, for redemption after the fall.

Through Trout, Vonnegut articulates a defense of his "telegraphic schizophrenic" literary mode as a grounds for transformation. Trout rejects the assumption that an artist must act as a mirror, and that literary realism is the most sophisticated form of literature. The only "character" Trout has created, he argues, is his living son. "If I'd wasted my time creating characters, I would have never gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that make heroes and heroines alike feel like something the cat drug in." Literature, Vonnegut argues, must realize itself as a subversive force, deconstructing systems of oppression. The highest ideal of literature is for the reader to "realize life" and achieve a higher consciousness. Literature not only makes people appreciate being alive, as Vonnegut writes, but also helps explain what that means. "Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?" The deliberation and true realization of humanity is both the process and ideal of literature. And Vonnegut's fragmented narratives serve to defamiliarize the world, in a Brechtian sense, in order to jostle readers into a higher consciousness.

Part of the cultivation of counter-hegemonic narratives lies in the forging of communal bonds and is itself transformative. Vonnegut understood loneliness to be the most crippling disease of contemporary America, and the construction of a true community, of what Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to as a “beloved community,” is subversive. Again, imaginative literature can help cultivate these counter-hegemonic bonds. Literature, Vonnegut suggests, is the most intimate and engaging aesthetic form, one that can transform the world from the inside out. In his celebration of literature, Vonnegut writes, “Many people desperately need to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.’” This elevation of fiction as a bulwark against loneliness and absurdity, and as a fertile ground for the cultivation of new selves and new histories, echoes a celebration of fiction by David Foster Wallace. The two authors, despite writing in a postmodern style, sustain and center their narratives on a transcendent love for the human being. Wallace writes that “Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved...where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”

Aesthetics can heal the wounds of the alienated soul and help the world be pieced together again. Timequake, however, attests to Vonnegut’s recurring anxiety that even literature, to quote Eliot Rosewater in Slaughterhouse-Five, “isn’t enough anymore,” that imaginative literature is too abstract for the very real wounds of the world, that literature is too transgressive, difficult, or strange to garner sufficient attention, that literature has lost its place in an increasingly banal culture and consciousness. Yet despite this narrative frustration, the transcendent humanism that sustains Vonnegut’s literary voice beckons — “You were sick, but now you’re well, and there’s work to do.” Literature may be the most potent weapon in the struggle against absurdity. Vonnegut imagines redemption yet in the undiscovered futures of the fallen human.

Read Wilson Taylor's opening essay, "Irony and Authenticity in the American Imagination"

Read Wilson Taylor's previous reviews:

The Kings of Infinite Space and The Sirens of Titan
San Lorenzo Mon Amour
Oscillating to Eternity: Apocalypse and Eden in Vonnegut's Telegraphic Schizophrenic Novel
Of Man's Rude Slapstick, Yes, And God's
Speechless in Simulation: A Missive for Midland City
American Lazarus and the Renaissance of Rabo Karabekian

Vonnegut's Labor of Literature

2013-09-02T20:41:00.003-04:00

By Matthew Gannon and Wilson Taylor

The Vonnegut Review is pleased to announce a collaboration with Jacobin Magazine for a special essay for Labor Day. We have written a piece about the untold history of Labor Day as well as literature's role in re-imagining history and politics. We ask: can literature be a force in the fight for economic justice? What is Vonnegut's role in the history of America's storied labor movement? Here is the first paragraph of our essay:

There can be no doubt that Labor Day is a lapsed holiday in America. It was a once proud tradition celebrating, as the US Department of Labor website puts it, “the social and economic achievements of American workers,” and a “national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.” From its roots in the 19th century, it has, by the 21st century, become an opportunity for barbecues, a much-needed three-day weekend, and a convenient capstone to the summer season.

Click here to read the full essay at Jacobin Magazine's website.

Kurt Vonnegut as Ragpicker and Poet

2013-08-30T17:24:00.000-04:00

By Matthew Gannon

“These fragments I have shored against my ruin.”

- T.S. Eliot

The Complicated Futility of Ignorance

Hocus Pocus, like so many Vonnegut novels, is a first-person, non-linear narrative told episodically as an autobiography written by a prisoner awaiting trial. The protagonist in this case is disgraced professor Eugene Debs Hartke, who, like many Vonnegut characters, is not guilty of the charges leveled against him but is certainly guilty of other crimes – crimes against his conscience being chief among them. This epistolary novel is something of a confession to the readers. Eugene admits that though he is an atheist, there might just be somebody up there watching, and by writing he is trying to confess his crimes – though he can never clear his conscience. He awaits trial in the former library of Tarkington College, a school for the dyslexic or otherwise learning-impaired for the super-rich in Upstate New York in a town called Scipio “at the pinched waist of Lake Mohiga, the deepest and coldest and westernmost of the long and narrow Finger Lakes.” Eugene was a professor of physics there where is favorite pastime was encouraging his students to consider the inevitability of failure. He finds a set of failed experiments to produce a perpetual-motion machine and puts them on display with a large plaque reading, “THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.” His reasoning is that “even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm. It is unfair to youngsters particularly to leave them wholly unprepared for monster screw-ups.” Eugene is particularly keen on expressing the many faults he sees in the rich, or what he calls the “Ruling Class.” This casual Marxist critique and class-consciousness is taken from his namesake, Eugene Victor Debs, a real historical figure. Vonnegut’s character Eugene explains that his grandfather was “a Socialist and an Atheist,” and deeply admired the historical Debs, who was the Socialist third-party candidate for president many times during the first quarter of the 20^th century.

The protagonist Eugene isn’t nearly as political as the actual Eugene Debs, but his skepticism of the wealthy and powerful – as evidenced by his resignation towards collective failure – eventually gets him fired from his post as a professor. He should have stuck to physics, not social commentary, the board of trustees tells him. The ultra-rich donors and parents responsible for financing Tarkington College could not stand his un-American patriotism, even if Eugene was a prominent Lieutenant Colonel in the Vietnam War. Not only did Eugene serve in Vietnam, he was the last American in Saigon, throwing Vietnamese out of helicopters and shooting at them to prevent their escaping with the Americans as they fled the embassy. After his experiences in Vietnam, Eugene is not partial to war, calling army training the ability to be “turned into a suicidal, homicidal imbecile in 13 weeks.” A charismatic conservative television personality and father of one Tarkington student has Eugene secretly recorded making comments such as “Down with the Ruling Class!” and “Hitler was a Christian.”

The penalty for telling unpleasant truths is being labeled an “unteacher” by the trustees and fired from his post. After a chance drunken and despondent encounter at a local bar Eugene discovers that the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution in Athena, New York – across Lake Mohiga from Scipio and Tarkington College – is hiring teachers to improve literacy and occupy the prisoners time. Before long he finds himself teaching prisoners, and is lucky to be doing so because not long afterwards an explosion at the prison gate gives prisoners the chance to escape. Crossing the moonlit and frozen Lake Mohiga by night, the prisoners invade Scipio, take over Tarkington College – made easier by the students being on winter break – rape and pillage the town, and hold the board of trustees hostage. Eugene would have never survived such an onslaught, so being on the prison side of the lake saved his life. But after the insurrection is put down, the prisoners sent back to their cells, and the trustees delivered safely to waiting rescue squads and television crews, Eugene is arrested and charged with being the mastermind of the escape plot for no reason other than the fact that he is white and most prisoners were black. “It was a racist conclusion, based on the belief that Black people couldn’t mastermind anything. I will say so in court.” So Eugene is quarantined in the Tarkington College library, a makeshift prison while the prison is rebuilt. He may be innocent of the crime he is charged with, but he is haunted by his role in Vietnam, his estranged family, and general lack of humanity. In the confines of the library Eugene writes his autobiography and in it Vonnegut puts his trademark musings on life, death, conscience, sex, politics, justice, and humanity.

Notes from the Wasteland

As in many of Vonnegut’s epistolary novels, Hocus Pocus begins with an editor’s note – a piece of fiction written as non-fiction by Vonnegut pretending that the book before us, Hocus Pocus, is a genuine autobiographical work. Vonnegut explains that the purported autobiography was written in unorthodox fashion. The author “did not have access to writing paper of uniform size and quality.” He was, however, imprisoned in a college library littered with scraps of paper of every imaginable size and shape. And instead of tearing out pages from disused books, Eugene wrote the book “in pencil on everything from brown wrapping paper to the backs of business cards.” These curious writing materials were coupled with an equally strange method. The author wrote, “scribbling words on a scrap,” whatever might happen to be at hand at the moment, and filled it to its entirety “as though each were a bottle for him to fill.” Once completed with that scrap he paused that particular thought, as if the scrap itself had indicated that he had written all there is to be written about it. This is something of a practical experiment in aesthetic materialism. Each scrap was meticulously numbered so as to keep strict chronological order (though the story itself is told out of order). Each passage in Hocus Pocus represents a scrap and is demarcated by an unbroken horizontal line across the page separating one passage from another.

This fragmentary, meta-fictional, and idiosyncratic way of writing is not the only unconventional stylistic choice in the novel. Eugene almost never writes out a number with letters, feeling that “numbers lost much of their potency when diluted by an alphabet.” Vonnegut also capitalizes certain words, sometimes seemingly at random, as if to hint at their level of import. The most obvious case is his references to the Ruling Class, as if capitalization can serve as a warning to readers. In the editor’s note Vonnegut suggests that this may because the author, waiting to be tried in court, may be feigning insanity and hoping his strange scrapbook autobiography may serve as evidence to that. Another interpretation, one easily made by the reader, is that Hocus Pocus is so fragmentary in order to evoke the fractured cultural landscape of the postmodern wasteland in which Vonnegut (through Eugene) is writing. He writes at the cusp of ecological, economic, and political collapse – conditions which have been exacerbated today, not resolved. In the face of crisis, culture – politics, industry, the arts, journalism, education – has retreated, buried its head in the ground, and resigned itself to anesthetizing banality. Eugene Debs Hartke writes his autobiography, a confession of sorts, on the fragments of a once great institution, a library, which has been converted into a perverse place of inscrutability and injustice. Eugene is writing in the ruined wasteland of so-called civilization, and he is writing in the ruins, on the ruins, of the ruins.

This writing from the ruins is not far from T.S. Eliot’s poetic proclamation in the epigraph to this essay. In his writing Vonnegut will show us fear in a handful of dust. Vonnegut’s disjointed and fragmentary counter-narrative reflects the cracked and fissured landscape, thirsty for succor. There is not even the sound of water here. It the dead land, a wasteland, with nothing more than a heap of broken images at the disposal of the author. Vonnegut even uses this to his advantage, often inserting quotes from eminent historical authors, such as Shakespeare and Sartre. But he does not claim to have mastery of these. They are more broken images, more fragments, the he explicitly cites from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. “If more people would acknowledge that they got their pearls of wisdom from that book instead of the original, it might clear the air.” But the reader knows that Vonnegut does this not just for honesty, but to show how fragmented and meaningless literature has become, liquidated into its most familiar quotations for a chance to show off an unearned knowledge.

Hocus Pocus is set in the near future from Vonnegut’s writing, though that is now our past. The year is 2001, and the political situation is similar to the present in the United States. The country is deep in debt, it has sold off most of its assets for foreign interests, the poor can no longer find even menial labor, and the rich have retreated from industry to immaterial finance. This is the age of computer-logic, digitized consciousness, instant gratification (with little satisfaction), and ethereal immateriality that supplants both the flesh-and-blood as well as the conscience of humanity. Artists are despondent and impotent, mocked by society and filled with self-doubt. A colleague of Eugene’s at Tarkington puts on an art display that is accidentally destroyed by a rogue gust of wind. These fragile artworks are mocked by society who finds them pointless and mocking towards those who cannot understand them. The rich revel in their ignorance, though must feign wisdom to retain their moral superiority. The solution to crime is long-term incarceration with no attempt at education or rehabilitation. Prisons, like most institutions, are run for-profit by foreign interests and, due to exorbitant debts, the yen is more widely accepted than the dollar. Mindless entertainment is the panacea for all ills, from prisoners to educators.

Speaking to the already pessimistic Eugene, the Japanese prison Warden expresses his astonishment over the fall from grace American has experienced:

First the atomic bomb. Now this. They looted your public and corporate treasuries, and turned your industries over to nincompoops. Then they had your Government borrow so heavily from us that we had no choice but to send over an Army of Occupation in business suits. Never before has the Ruling Class of a country found a way to stick other countries with all the responsibilities their wealth might imply, and still remain rich beyond the dreams of avarice! No wonder they thought the comatose Ronald Reagan was a great President!

Most of the wealthy characters in this dystopia of the present end up losing their family fortunes through ill-advised investments in a shadowy enterprise called Microsecond Arbitrage. The title and its function as an investment firm illustrate Vonnegut’s longstanding belief that mechanical, linear time is itself in the employ of capitalism. Time reflects being, and mechanized times produce mechanized beings enslaved by capital and indifferent to humanity itself. The heightened interest in finance rather than industry characteristic of the late 20^th century indicates that the rich and powerful are quickly retreating from the material. The flattened cyberscape of the internet awaits, only exacerbating the problem and feeding humanity’s urge to retreat from itself. ''Poor and powerless people, no matter how docile, were no longer of use to canny investors,” writes Vonnegut. Finance, the digital, and the atomic bomb complement each other as a critical intersection of sterile inhumanity. Or perhaps rather than the atom bomb it should be the neutron bomb, a topic of Vonnegut’s previous novel Deadeye Dick, because it kills humans and preserves property. But by the age of digitized capitalism even material and physical property is an unnecessary reminder of the inherent messiness of humans, their laboring and biological bodies an affront to the seamless corporatized world of finance and class ideology. Liquefied wealth and liquefied humans are far more convenient. Eugene comes across a short story in a pornographic magazine called The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore in which the author (who is not named but is obviously the same Kilgore Trout from many other Vonnegut novels) explains that everyone on Tralfamadore knows "that germs, not people, were the darlings of the Universe." Humans are, at best, incubators for microbes who might themselves have some hopes of achieving what humans cannot, such as space travel, or planetary peace

Though these crises are very real and material, Vonnegut also fears for the cultural crisis, in which art is no longer taken seriously and cheap entertainment reigns. The prison Warden is in a particularly privileged place to comment on the tragedy and farce that is America because he lived through the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. He was a 5-year-old boy playing soccer. When he went down into a ditch to pick up the ball he looked up and the city no longer existed, nor did any of his friends or family. “There was a flash and wind. When he straightened up, his city was gone. He was alone on a desert, with little spirals of dust dancing here and there.” Vonnegut is distraught not only about the actual atomic bomb, but also the metaphorical blasted wasteland that the atomic and capitalist era has instilled in humanity. The atom bomb and the wasteland it created in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are symbolic of the equivalent cultural wasteland of postmodern America. This is why Vonnegut has is protagonist imprisoned in a library, huddled in the space of his own mind, critiquing society and imagining a better future. In the wasteland, where there are few traces of humanity, Eugene Debs Hartke wanders in search of redemption. Amid a desert of banal pointlessness, Vonnegut’s writing fills all the landscape with inviolable voice.

Scribbling on fragments in the disused library evokes the style of poetry by the classic modernist writer Charles Baudelaire. In a letter Baudelaire posited ragpickers, who he saw often throughout the dirty streets of Paris, as key figures in stimulating his poetic imagination:

Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.

Upon reading this passage decades later, the philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin wrote. “This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse.” Vonnegut too is concerned with refuse. Though more than a century has passed since Baudelaire penned those words, his concerns are still our concerns. Through his writing, Vonnegut searches for something more tangible than abstraction to hold on to As Eliot wrote, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” Even from such desolate nothingness can come brilliant being. Vonnegut’s fiction toils amidst “the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”

The Culture Industry Will Be Televised

Hocus Pocus is anxiously concerned with the role of television in society. There are dozens of mentions of “television” and “TV” and numerous references to movies, movie stars, tapes, and broadcasting in general. It is tape that also spells the downfall of Eugene, as he is recorded by a seemingly innocent student working undercover for her father, who happens to be a vitriolic conservative TV presenter whose anti-communist and pseudo-patriotic allegiance evokes Joseph McCarthy, or Glenn Beck today.

The argument Vonnegut is making is not that there is not enough culture or that culture has become diluted. The argument is that there is no culture, but only a culture industry. Culture itself is a false category, a lie perpetrated by capital to reap more profit and further thwart class-consciousness. This even more specifically applies to art and artists. What now passes as art and culture is reality television, news/entertainment hybrids about vapid people and pointless events. Once the hostages are released from Tarkington College after the prison-break, they are whisked away to be immediately interviewed by pseudo-journalists. They are no longer just hostage survivors, but television celebrities who can provide sound bites and clips for viewers so that they too can vicariously experience the excitement of imprisonment, abuse, and then liberation. This process of vicarious experience, technologically mediated alienation is allegorical of the process of media indoctrination itself, where media becomes realer than reality itself. The vacarious experience of liberation of the hostages is analogous to the vicarious and alienated experience of political and existential liberation. The culture industry presents liberation at a cheap price via the media while consumers greedily devour it and thereby further alienate themselves and bind themselves with the shackles of false-consciousness.

“We have so much to learn about TV!” exclaims Eugene while pondering such mysteries.

Media is not only a source of indoctrination for ideologies of power, but also a pacifying force. In the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution across the lake from Tarkington College they endlessly play tape recordings of previous broadcasts, mostly inane chat shows or historical documentaries. Nothing relevant or thought provoking appears, for fear that it might upset or influence the prisoners in some way. “They could feast their eyes on whatever they liked, just so long as it wasn’t relevant.” Moreover, the Japanese owned and operated prison is filled with Japanese TV sets playing decades-old tapes. Vonnegut likens the myriad television, which appear almost anywhere one looks, to “portholes on an ocean liner” in which “the passengers were in a state of suspended animation.” The prison itself is stagnant, with only a dull patch of blue-gray sky available for viewing (even a hint of landscape might insight the prisoners), but they can mindlessly stare into the maw of a droning television at anytime they look. Life itself, Vonnegut writes, “was like an ocean liner to a lot of people who weren’t in prison.” All you have to do is look into your television set and “ see all the world was doing with no help from them.” Television is an excuse for inaction, an anesthetic and inoculation against taking charge of life itself. It is not only an anesthetic, it is an an-aesthetic – an anti-aesthetic, violating the very precepts of truth and beauty.

Vonnegut imagines viewers looking at what world accomplishes without their help or participation. “Look at it go!” he comments wryly. Thanks to these wonderful television sets, the centerpiece of many a home and prison, half the population can’t even “find their own country on a map of the world. Three-quarters of them couldn’t put the cap back on a bottle of whiskey without crossing the threads.” Media traffics in sheer anestheticizing entertainment, and if the program doesn’t fit that standard it is dispensed with. Furthermore, everything must be filtered through this crude lens. Over a decade later Vonnegut wrote in the magazine In These Times: “One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.” In his quasi-memoir A Man Without a Country he takes this a step further when writing that “war is now a form of TV entertainment.” And insists that we can no longer trust our television sets (and our newspapers for that matter). Television is “so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what's really going on.” After Eugene takes it upon himself to teach reading to the prisoners he finds, to his disappointment, that they use their newfound skills to enhance their masturbation or else being entranced by the anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 'The lesson I myself learned over and over again,” Eugene complains, “was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment.''

The misinformation spread by media such as television is secondary to a greater threat: human experience itself is being filtered, categorized, and dictated by this media consumption. Eugene, haunted by his time in Vietnam, compares it to a movie. This is the only way he can understand himself and his experiences. He finds the most troubling aspect of his Vietnam experience is that he doesn’t find it troubling at all, merely “interesting.” And while Eugene writes often of his time in the war, “It is like an old movie,” he claims. “Does that mean that something is wrong with me?” He admits to being heavily influenced by Vietnam War movies, claiming that the fiction is often superior to the real. “The actors always turned out to be a lot more believable on the little screen than we were. Real people in real trouble don’t come across, somehow.” And when the prison break occurs and the prisoners raid Scipio and take over Tarkington College, he imagines that the invading prisoners were shooting civilians, astounding by how lifelike their deaths are: “Bang. Somebody else would jerk backward and downward, like a professional actor on a TV show.”

What are we to make of a world in which fiction is realer than reality and actors play parts better than genuine human experience? This is the concern of Baudrillard’s classic study of postmodern society Simulacra in Simulation. In that text he cites media indoctrination as not just replacing reality, but creating a false reality behind which lies nothing but a void, “the desert of the real,” as he calls it. This is a world of simulacra, which Baudrilard argues is “never wat hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.” In the simulated world, all referentials are “liquidated,” even those that refer to humans and human experience. They then experience an “artificial resurrection” and give rise to a system of signs that is “more malleable than meaning.” It is for this reason that the prisoners are so absorbed by the television and Eugene can only experience Vietnam in retrospect like a movie. Memory and experience are liquidated, made more malleable, and re-experienced as alienation. Simulation “threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’” writes Baudrillard, creating what he terms a “hyperreality.” And hidden behind this reality is not truth concealed, but a void that is filled with, according to Baudrillard, “the éminence grise of politics,” which are the dominant ideologies of exploitation and power. Through capital, ideology liquidates referentials, repackages experience and consciousness, indoctrinates through media through anaesthetizing misinformation, and lulls viewers into complacency. When the prisoners do escape – which only occurs because of an explosion that breaks down the gates to the prison – they are thrust in a world they comprehend through the hyperreal. Vonnegut likens their last stand at Tarkington College to the Alamo, mostly because he has seen the Walt Disney movie-version of that historical event. Humanity no longer experiences its own pleasure, but must seek out mediated and verified modes of experiencing and behaving.

The Soul Merchants

What, then, is to be done, when culture and politics have imploded and all that is left is an inhuman wasteland of germ-incubating humanoids? Vonnegut’s answer is, unsurprisingly, art. “Would I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist,” admits Eugene at the beginning of the novel. Instead of being a career soldier dedicated to “the ammunition business,” as he calls war, he would have preferred a life of jazz, and “I mean jazz,” insists Vonnegut, could have laid before him. Before West Point and then Vietnam, Eugene was in a band called The Soul Merchants who occasionally played “the never-the-same-way-twice music the American black people gave the world.” They were mostly commissioned to play standard white-American rock tunes. The racism at the time forbade them from admitting their surreptitious desire to break into jazz. But in the middle of a set they would sometimes “cut loose with jazz anyway.” Nobody even noticed; they all enjoyed the music so much. And when they played that jazz, oh “we were in ecstasy.”

This desire for the aesthetic life rather than one of capital or militarism is the redemptive thread that impels Vonnegut’s counter-narrative. Eugene has the opportunity to renew his love of music when first offered the physics position at Tarkington College. When being wooed by the president of the college, Eugene’s commanding officer in Vietnam, he finds out, by a strike of luck that they were in need of someone to play the Lutz Carillon, “the great family of bells at the top of the tower of the college library.” The bells were played just like a piano, with a keyboard, and when accepting the teaching position Eugene extended his hand and said, “Shake hands with your new carillonneur.” This opportunity was “like manna from heaven,” writes Eugene. “The happiest moments in my life, without question, were when I played the Lutz Carillon.”

The arts have the capacity to rival the capitalistic and the militaristic. Unlike the militaristic they serve the cause of peace and beauty, rather than violence and ugliness. And as opposed to capitalism, they are not concerned with profit. Eugene recounts the story of the original bells for the Lutz Carillon, crafted in the 19^th century by a blacksmith dying from emphysema due to inhaling fumes from molten metals. This blacksmith, literally dying for his craft, made the expensive bells through difficult toil at a great financial and physical cost to himself. The bells were his greatest project, “the most wonderful consequence of his having been alive for a little while.” Though he, like those failed perpetual-motion machines, was doomed to run down and die, those bells were his “dreams of immortality.” Part of the wonder of them is that anybody took it upon themselves to make something as “impractical and beautiful” as those bells.

Though we lead flawed and mortal lives, it is through art, through the aesthetic that a sort of transcendence is possible. Art reflects the greater part of humanity, that which is not dedicated to profit, violence, advantage, power, exploitation, or any of those other ugly human traits. Living through our art is our one opportunity to allow the beauty of humanity’s being to shine through. The aesthetic and the sublime are the secular routes to transcendence. Art alone is insufficient though, which is why Eugene’s artistic impulses are bound to his political outlook and social criticism. Vonnegut dedicates Hocus Pocus to Eugene V. Debs, the historical figure, because he believes not only in the beauty of art, but the need for justice and the power of political critique. The novel begins with a quote from Debs: ““While there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal element I am of it. While there is a soul in prison I am not free.” The novel ends similarly, with a quote of Vonnegut’s making: “Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.” Vonnegut’s politics are expressed through his art though. Rather than the tools of destruction, Vonnegut employs the tools of transcendence. In his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin cautioned against the pure aesthetic, disconnected from the political. An apolitical art, he argues, results in fascism. What is needed is a politicized art that speaks to the needs of its historical era. By grappling with the wasteland of postmodern, corporatized capitalism this is precisely what Vonnegut does. Such art is truly redemptive for a humanity that, through its ugliness and despicable acts, desperately needs it. Aesthetic beauty and creativity coupled to compassionate politics aimed at justice is the art form par excellence. As T.S. Eliot wrote upon accepting his Nobel Prize, “We must remember, that while language constitutes a barrier, poetry itself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier.” Vonnegut’s fictions challenge his readers while giving them the tools to overcoming the barriers between humans, and perhaps even for humans to overcome themselves. It is his job to gather the day’s refuse, collect everything humanity has thrown away and scorned. He catalogues and collects the waste like a miser guarding a treasure from the goddess of Industry. He is ragpicker and poet. He is the soul merchant, collecting refuse in the wasteland, trafficking in politicized art, and proffering humanist transcendence.

American Lazarus and the Renaissance of Rabo Karabekian

2013-08-23T16:46:00.000-04:00

by Wilson Taylor

“But like every movement, abstraction must have a direction, and it is on this that everything depends.”

- György Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” 1938

“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 1981

A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man

Vonnegut presents Bluebeard as “a novel and a hoax autobiography” of “erstwhile American painter Rabo Karabekian.” Karabekian, who also appears in Breakfast of Champions and Deadeye Dick, is a renown Abstract Expressionist, famous for works of abstract minimalism such as The Temptation of Saint Anthony and Windsor Blue Number Seventeen. Bluebeard offers Vonnegut a more direct voice to interrogate the role of art in representing and transforming the human world. While many of Vonnegut’s novels celebrate the transformative potential of art, Bluebeard represents Vonnegut’s most sustained discussion of aesthetics. The contours of Karabekian’s career, oscillating between realism and abstract expressionism, allow Vonnegut renewed perspective on art, the human, and the catastrophe of history. Bluebeard is a catalogue of the tension between these two modes of representation and the modes of being they engender.

Karabekian, an Armenian immigrant and descendent of survivors of the Armenian genocide, passes through three general aesthetic phases catalogued in his autobiography. First is his valuation of mimesis, or pure representation, a phase which is realized in his apprenticeship under Armenian-American realist Dan Gregory. Karabekian leaves Gregory after a dispute over the merits of modern art, and befriends a group of Abstract Expressionist painters, an auspicious circle which includes de Kooning, Rothko, and Pollock. In this second phase of Karabekian’s career, he realizes himself as a modern artist in search of pure aesthetic abstraction. This aesthetic phase is also Karabekian’s most fruitful, and Karabekian becomes famous for his pieces of abstract minimalism. He hones a style of painting large canvases with a single color of commercial paint, Sateen Dura-Luxe, before placing one or more strips of neon tape representing the soul. The third phase of Karabekian’s career is a return toward representational art. However, whereas the first stage of his aesthetic development was mimetic realism, the final stage is realized in a transformational or dialectical realism. After moving through the mimetic and the aesthetic, Karabekian, in his old age, finally becomes a revolutionary.

Ultimately, Vonnegut locates a transformative and redemptive potential in realism. Karabekian, identifying with Lazarus, stages his own renaissance through a realism not of representation, but of transformation. Karabekian’s final redemption of the signified, through his celebration of the transformative power of realist representation, attempts to cultivate new modes of seeing and being in the viewer. His final painting, Now It’s the Women’s Turn — throughout most of the novel only alluded to only as a void, a mystery veiled in a potato barn — inaugurates a transcendent and humanistic counter-history through aesthetic transformation. Karabekian’s aesthetics of transformation resonates with Vonnegut’s own “telegraphic schizophrenic” literary mode, which, while deeply surreal, absurd, and existential, revolves around his transcendent humanism, which centers and sustains his narrative voice.

Through a Glass, Darkly: On the Mimetic Regime

Karabekian explores the mimetic or representational artistic phase under the tutelage of Dan Gregory, a painter famous for his uncanny photorealism. Gregory’s realism resonates with Jacques Rancière’s analysis of the mimetic regime of the arts. The mimetic or representative regime of the arts, writes Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics, is distinguished by the imperative of art to “make copies resembling [its] models.” Rancière describes this imitative view of aesthetics as organizing “ways of doing, making, seeing, and judging... bringing the arts under the yoke of resemblance.” He continues: “it is not an artistic process but a regime of visibility regarding the arts.” Gregory attempts to instill in Karabekian a certain mode of seeing in accordance with this regime of visibility. “Draw everything the way it really is,” instructs Gregory, underscoring his celebration of objective and mimetic representation as the purpose and end of aesthetics. Tellingly, Gregory holds Picasso, whom Vonnegut revered, to be “Satan.”

In a perfect analogue to his aesthetic approach, Gregory recounts his own training as a realist, in which he was instructed to paint a perfect replica of a ruble. The value of art, suggests Gregory, is equivalent to its “negotiability” in the marketplace. Gregory’s flattening of art is made literal as his art capitulates to and replicates the empty mechanics of capitalism; his works are sold as advertisements. In turn, Gregory poses to Karabekian similar tasks of bland representation, demanding Karabekian recreate certain scenes, such as the reflection of a room in dusty mirror, on canvas. Karabekian develops a fine photorealistic touch, but, as he is repeatedly criticized, his paintings lack any “soul.” In their perfect presentation of an objective image of the world, they fail to infuse any humanity. Gregory’s mimetic vision leaves no room for the human.

Karabekian further identifies realism with a certain deluded arrogance. As Karabekian makes literal in his military role as a camouflage artist in World War II, representational art presents a false image of reality that obscures the subjective experience of the human. Gregory, for instance, is a fascist and devotee of Mussolini. Gregory’s regressive political tendencies mirror his representational aesthetic fixation, both of which neglect the existential experience of the human in favor of a strict discourse of representation. Gregory’s passion for Mussolini recalls Otto Waltz’ embarrassing passion for Hitler’s painting and politics in Deadeye Dick. As Walter Benjamin suggests in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, fascism relies on the “aestheticization of politics,” which parallels Gregory's own mimetic fixation. These fascist sympathies, Vonnegut suggests, stems from a corruption of Gregory’s “ontologico-aesthetic model,” to borrow a term from Rancière. Mimetic representation, Vonnegut suggests, cannot communicate or represent the human experience. Gregory sacrifices the ontological human for the aesthetics and ethics of mechanistic reproduction.

Karabekian criticizes Gregory’s failed “ontologico-aesthetic model” as reducing art to “counterfeits” and “taxidermy,” reifying the human in history while mummifying subjectivity. He suggests that Gregory’s paintings are “truthful about material things, but they lied about time,” which is to say that they also lied about being. His taxidermist aesthetics misrepresent subjectivity, reifying the existential struggle of the human into discrete moments in time. Karabekian continues, in a passage that echoes the temporal deconstructions and humanism of Vonnegut’s fictions, “He lacked the guts or the wisdom...to indicate that time was liquid, that one moment was no more important than any other, and that all moments quickly run away... Life, by definition, is never still.” There is no life in Gregory’s paintings. In their stillness beckons only death.

Karabekian, who writes his autobiography after breaking away from Gregory’s influence and aesthetic approach, peppers his memories with belittling ironies — “Nobody could counterfeit images in dusty mirrors like Dan Gregory.” The attempt to capture the appearance of the world is meaningless when experience is ignored. Gregory’s imperative to “draw everything the way it really is” reduces subjective reality to a mirrored plane, ignoring that reality, as Marx implores in his “Theses on Feuerbach,” must not only be interpreted, but transformed. Gregory can only see the human through a glass, darkly — his mimetic obsession obscures human experience and subjectivity, and representational art is distilled into painting counterfeit images in dusty mirrors. Karabekian yearns to see the human “face to face,” as it were.

Discourses from the Whirlwind: On Abstract Expressionism and the Aesthetic Regime

Karabekian rejects the representational realism of his tutor and seeks liberation in Abstract Expressionism. As opposed to the reifying impulse of Gregory’s mimetic phase, Karabekian suggests that Abstract Expressionism more fully comprehends and communicates the human experience because it, unlike representational realism, knows that “time is liquid.” In the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists, “birth and death are always there.” This constant oscillation is crucial to Vonnegut’s own aesthetic visions of the human, and he seems to find a visual analogue to his literature in the abstract minimalism of Rabo Karabekian. Karabekian’s leap into expressionism is at first a liberating move, as he rejects the limits of his tutor and of the mimetic regime, and finds a more honest and human aesthetic mode. His Oedipal rejection of Gregorian mimesis allows Karabekian to recreate his aesthetic visions of the human.

Karabekian achieves fame and prestige as an Abstract Expressionist as he develops a style of painting which captures the fluidity of time and attempts to communicate the sacrality of human existence. He pioneers an abstract minimalism in which he fills a canvas with a single color of industrial paint, Sateen Dura-Lux, before placing a single strip of neon tape. In Breakfast of Champions, Karabekian defends his famous painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony explaining, “Each strip of tape was the soul at the core of some sort of person or lower animal” in a uniform field of light and color. He presents a similar defense in Bluebeard. Karabekian’s expressionism allows him to disregard the crude materialism of Gregory’s mimesis and focus his aesthetics on the celebration of that which is “sacred” to the human. Whereas Gregory’s art reified the human frozen in time and space, Karabekian explodes these absurd determinants in order to sacralize the human bound within.

Abstract Expressionism offers Karabekian another framework to imagine and express the human outside the mimetic strictures of Gregory’s representation. However, his explosion of the mimetic regime is not entirely redemptive, and ultimately dissatisfying. In particular, Karabekian is concerned that his art lacks engagement with the human or the world. He repeatedly laments, echoing Derrida’s formulation of the postmodern, that his art “was about nothing but itself.” In order to dramatize and render absurd this self-enclosed episteme and the ephemerality of modern art, Karabekian’s paintings disintegrate. His industrial grade paint, Sateen Dura-Lux (promised to “outlive the smile on the Mona Lisa”), peels off of Karabekian’s canvases, which hang blankly from gallery walls.

Rancière designates the “aesthetic regime” as offering a new identification of the arts, an identification no longer connected to the mimetic regime’s processes of “doing and making.” Rather, the aesthetic regime is distinguished by “identifying art in the singular and [freeing] it from any specific rule... by destroying the mimetic barrier” and erecting art as an “autonomous form of life.” Rancière marries the aesthetic regime to the historical process of modernity (and post-modernity, which, according to Rancière and Fredric Jameson, is merely an intensification of the process of modernity and does not represent an epistemological or ontological break from the modern), suggested that the modern is distinguished by this new artistic autonomy, this rupture between art and the social world. Rancière locates in Schiller a central articulation of the self-enclosed episteme of modern art’s “pure instance of suspension” in its lack of social or existential engagement. As Karabekian laments, his paintings are only about themselves. Abstraction, if only for its own sake, forecloses against itself.

New Wine in New Wineskins: On Karabekian’s Subversive Renaissance

The dissolution of Karabekian’s paintings and identity forces him to explore new modes of being and creating. Referencing the French folktale “Bluebeard,” in which a nobleman’s forbidden chamber foments tremendous mystery, the secret of Karabekian’s new aesthetics are veiled in his potato barn. After the disintegration of Windsor Blue Number Seventeen, Karabekian strips its canvas to a tabula rasa and creates, in its absence, a new aesthetic vision of the human. Whereas the Bluebeard of French folklore wreaks terror in his chambers as he recreates a primordial and patriarchal violence against his multitude of wives, Karabekian’s barn is a womb for the cultivation of new life and new narratives of redemption. In his barn are born new histories. On his blank canvas and in the tatters of the postmodern, Karabekian engages in the mysterious work of creating the world anew.

His final revelation is a subversive masterpiece of realism, Now It’s the Women’s Turn. A vivid recreation of Karabekian’s experience “when the sun came up the day the Second World War ended in Europe,” his painting situates the viewer “on the rim of a beautiful green valley in the springtime.” Assembled in the valley are over five thousand former soldiers acclimating to the sunshine, the springtime, and the newness of peace. Each soldier, Karabekian explains, has a story, and the painter rediscovers and recreates the human. The painting explores a radically new aesthetic mode; Karabekian rejects both the lifeless mimesis of Gregory and the self-enclosed aesthetics of expressionism and discovers a dialectical and transformative realism. By slipping into the recent past, into the sublimity of peace and “pure human wonder,” Karabekian attempts to inaugurate a redemptive counter-history disconnected from the ravages of war and the terror of history. As Vonnegut writes in Player Piano, "A step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction." Now It’s the Women’s Turn explicitly inaugurates a new history of redemption as a rejection of the terror of history heretofore. His return to realism is a revolutionary move.

Karabekian’s painting, depicting the first daybreak of a new history, recalls Vonnegut’s invocation of the sacrality of Armistice Day. Writing in Breakfast of Champions, he suggests that, in the sublimity of Armistice in 1918, when violence receded from the earth and peace whispered in, soldiers heard in “the sudden silence... the voice of God.” Vonnegut insists that “we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.” God enters human history in the moment of peace. Similarly, Karabekian’s Now It’s the Women’s Turn explores this hierophany — the sudden breaking of the divine into the world. Karabekian’s masterpiece is a revelation and annunciation of the divine, of God in history and God in humankind. “Life itself can be sacramental,” Karabekian insists. As Renaissance artist Leon Battista Alberti suggests in his 1435 tract On Painting, “Painting contains a divine force,” and the realist painter can approximate the creative powers of God. Karabekian attempts to wield this creative force of the divine in his cultivation of redemptive counter-histories. Vonnegut’s sense of the sacred resonates with his transcendent humanism as he weaves new narratives of redemption. The rising sun is the sacred illumination of a new history; the sun rises to the new millennium of messianic time.

Part of this divine redemption of humankind is realized in Karabekian’s recovered unity of subject, a yearning echoing in Vonnegut’s fictions since Slapstick. Whereas Gregory’s mimesis promotes a crude materialism, and Karabekian’s expressionism an unabashed (and ephemeral) focus on the abstract, Karabekian’s redemption is realized through the dissolution of this false dualism and the restoration of subjective unity. After deploring the behavior of the corrupted “meat” of his body (in opposition to his sacred soul), for most of his autobiography, Karabekian revels in his radically human aesthetic vision. “I had my strongest vision yet of human souls unencumbered, unembarrassed by their unruly meat.” Karabekian, after painting his masterpiece, is able to conclude — “Oh, happy Meat. Oh, happy Soul. Oh, happy Rabo Karabekian.” Karabekian, breaking out of history and traditional aesthetics, stages his own renaissance through his redemptive aesthetic. He has become Lazarus. Moreover, Karabekian seeks to inaugurate this new history in order to alleviate the alienation of modernity, asserting the new primacy of what Marx identified as the restored “species-being” of a redeemed humanity.

Karabekian’s return to realism as an inauguration of a counter-modernity represents a true synthesis between representation and expressionism in an overcoming of Oedipal anxieties. Realism can offer a more existentially and politically potent ontologico-aesthetic models than expressionism. Realism, writes György Lukács in his 1938 essay “Realism in the Balance,” is distinctly capable of discovering and dismantling the “network of relationships” of oppression and suffering, and that discovery “creates a new immediacy.” Whereas expressionism is awash in its own signifiers, and its abstraction is itself a capitulation to the totalizing abstraction of capitalism; realism — in its immediacy, its exploration of gaps and contradictions, and its intense focus on the human — is a more dialectically charged aesthetic form. According to Fredric Jameson, “the final dialectical subversion of the now automized conventions of an aesthetics of perceptual revolution...[is] realism itself.” Realism, Lukács suggests, is alone capable of exploding what Walter Benjamin calls “continuum of history.” As Lukács insists, grasping at what Fredric Jameson refers to the “levers of creation,” aesthetics “must have a direction.” The aesthetic must be invested in the political and in the human. The dialectical antidote to fascism’s “aestheticization of politics,” insists Benjamin, lies in the “politicization of art,” which is realized in Karabekian’s redemptive return to realism. The cultivation of new “ontologico-aesthetic models” can help create new worlds and new beings. Art, he suggests, must liberate and must redeem.

In championing the subversive aspect of this return to realism, Vonnegut advances beyond his celebration of Abstract Expressionism in Breakfast of Champions or Deadeye Dick. In his invocation of transformational realism and in his zeal to inaugurate redemptive histories, Vonnegut continues to interrogate the limits of the postmodern. In this way, Karabekian is a nearly perfect analogue for Vonnegut himself, as both struggle to communicate a certain synthesis of skepticism and sincerity through a new aesthetics of the human. Karabekian’s return to realism mirrors Vonnegut’s own telegraphic schizophrenic literary mode in his exploration of new modes of representation with deep humanist sympathy. Vonnegut shares Karabekian’s dissatisfaction with the self-enclosed epistemes of modern art because of a lack of political or existential engagement. Any art that is not grounded in the human experience is narcissistic and ephemeral, Vonnegut suggests. Visual art, like literature, “should not disappear up its own asshole.”

Karabekian’s redemption suggests that the unstable category of the avant-garde is not a signifier of form, but of content and dialectic. The creation of new beings and new histories must be foregrounded in the exploration of new aesthetic forms, but the existential human must foreground any aesthetic imagination. Art cultivates a framework of human recreation, and this aesthetic-ethical capacity must be directed toward redemption. Rabo Karabekian’s masterpiece approaches what Fredric Jameson identifies as “the crux of history beyond which we have not yet passed.” And where we have yet not passed, Vonnegut dares to imagine.

A Second Noah's Ark

2013-08-16T17:10:00.001-04:00

by Matthew Gannon

“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."

- William Shakespeare, The Tempest

The Grand and the Absurd in Human Evolution

In his first edition of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin rightly anticipated the disgruntlement and discomfort of his readers with the concept of natural selection. He knew that for many it would dislodge deep-seated quasi-scientific dogmas and unsettle more than a few religious beliefs. In advance of this potential opposition he defended his theories of evolution, declaring, “There is grandeur in this view of life…from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Since his writing of that book in 1859 many have indeed found “grandeur in this view of life,” even against the superstitious opposition it still faces. Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel Galápagos, locates the absurd in this view of life, and rewrites the story of evolution not as one of the “preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life,” as Darwin called it, but instead as the history of recklessness and foolishness amongst dangerous animals chief of which are the big-brained humans, who invent atomic bombs and slavery among other contemptible hobbies. Vonnegut even writes in a new chapter of human evolution in which the vast majority of the human race is wiped out by an apocalyptic bacteria and the remaining human population evolves into a human-seal hybrid who give up their attempts at technological enslavement of the world and live lives as gentle fisher folk that prefer playing and swimming to annihilating one another.

In typical Vonnegut fashion this unconventional narrative is narrated unconventionally. It is told by an omniscient ghost following the exploits of passengers on a cruise ship called the Bahía de Darwin on a voyage ironically called “the Nature Cruise of the Century.” The ghostly narrator is none other than Leon Trout, the runaway son of Kilgore Trout, the pulp sci-fi writer and Vonnegut alter-ego that appears in many of Vonnegut’s novels. Leon, a Vietnam veteran who sought asylum in Sweden after participating in unspeakable atrocities of war, was accidentally decapitated while part of the construction crew for the Bahía de Darwin. After this untimely death Trout finds himself an immaterial and invisible ghost who can inhabit the minds of anyone he chooses. Throughout the novel his father, Kilgore, appears to Leon attempting to entice him to give up his status as a ghost and join him in the afterlife. The path to the afterlife presents itself to Leon as a blue tunnel with a magnetic power he must resist to stay as a ghost on earth. The yonic implications of the tunnel to the afterlife are not to be ignored. Vonnegut describes the tunnel’s beckoning quality, as it seeks to draw Leon on with a “restless state of peristalsis.” Tellingly, Leon peers within, searching for his mother, but is disappointed to find only his typically unkempt alcoholic father. The afterlife symbolizes a utopian paradise and an Oedipal return. The return of the mother is a return to Eden before the fall of man and carries with it the potential of redemption. Prelapsarian Eden and the Oedipal state both symbolize innocence and an ur-history for humanity and its collective psyche, both of which must thus be returned to and then worked through in order to successfully avoid the trauma of the fall from grace and the abandonment of the maternal figure. Leon, however, finds only his father at the end of this yonic temptation, and Kilgore continually insults Leon as he attempts to coerce him into abandoning the earth. Without his mother, though, Leon refuses the false promise of eternal paradise and decides to stick it out on earth with the beleaguered cruise to see what comes of humanity and find out if they can find their own heaven on earth and Oedipal reunion.”

Leon narrates these events in retrospect, as his present is actually a million years in the future, when humanity has evolved into a seal-like being and he expects the blue tunnel to the afterlife to reappear and he will finally give up the earth and find his own absolution, whatever it may be. Human evolution takes a strange twist in 20^th century, Trout explains, because an incurable bacterial infection gnaws its way into the ovaries of every human female on earth – excepting the few females aboard the auspicious Bahía de Darwin – and renders human reproduction impossible. The Bahía de Darwin is fated to make a one-way trip to the Galápagos islands where it will run aground, thereby stranding its nine passengers on the fictional island of Santa Rosalia and destine them to restart the human race away from civilization as well as the nasty ovary-consuming superbug.

Dialectic of Beethoven and Barbarism

Vonnegut writes of the near-extinction of the human race with an element of cheerfulness not found in most apocalyptic fiction. This is because his vision for a new humanity rising from the ashes – from the Galápagos islands to be precise – is one of a post-human optimism. Throughout the novel the ghostly narrator Leon Trout insists that humans from the 20^th century (a million years ago from his perspective) are fatally flawed from an evolutionary perspective - the main flaw being the human brain, of course. Human brains, Trout explains, have been sending humanity on a destructive course that points to collective suicide one way or another. Whether it comes from bombs or disease or environmental collapse, the human race is doomed and the only possible escape is an escape from humanity itself.

In Breakfast of Champions Vonnegut wrote, “I tend to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with chemical reactions seething inside.” Humans, as a collection of chemical reactions, have so many opportunities to malfunction because of an imbalance in their fragile chemical state. “So it is a big temptation to me,” he continues, “when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.”

Brains in particular go haywire, and in Galápagos this mental short-circuiting leads to some nasty conclusions, chief among them being pointless wars and financial crises, which are both manufactured catastrophes invented in their muddled recesses of the human brain. The financial crisis Vonnegut writes about is a slight fictionalization of the Latin American debt crisis that was the result of excess borrowing by Latin American countries in the 1980s, when Vonnegut was writing this novel. The debt crisis is largely symbolic of the many human failings and manufactured crises throughout history. It was, as Vonnegut writes, “the latest in a series of murderous twentieth century catastrophe which had originated entirely in human brains.” Brains are forever thwarted any human peace and happiness in Galápagos, leading many characters to decisions that range from the suicidal to the homicidal to the plainly humiliating. “To the credit of humanity,” Vonnegut admits, “more and more people were saying that their brains were irresponsible, unreliable, hideously dangerous, wholly unrealistic – were simply no damn good.”

Vonnegut’s take on the contradictions of the human brain is thoroughly dialectical, expressed through two complementary thoughts on, of all things, Ludwig van Beethoven. When writing about the financial crisis that had ruined much of Latin American and ensured that the popular “Nature Cruise of the Century” would be derailed and serve as an inadvertent genetic life raft for humanity, Vonnegut laments the artificial manufacturing of crises, something audiences in the post-recession era can particularly appreciate. In the wake of the debt crisis, a number of countries, including Ecuador, where this novel is set, experienced hyper-inflation in their local currency making it essentially worthless. Virtually overnight great sums of wealth had become no longer useful in any practical capacity. Vonnegut takes exception to the fact that people ever place value in paper money at all. “Wake up, you idiots!” he writes, “Whatever made you think paper was so valuable?” The abstract notion of value in worthless bits of paper is a phenomenon that plagues a number of Vonnegut novels, and its absurdity comes to a head in Galápagos when an entire country can no longer afford to buy food for itself because “people had simply changed their opinions of paper wealth.” Vonnegut remarks, “the people were beginning to starve to death” because “business was business,” and that’s the way the world works.

The truth was (and still is) that the massive famines around the world due to depreciations of currency have nothing to do with material reality. The world, Vonnegut points out, is still a lush and fertile place, at least for now, and could easily support the planet’s population if resources were sensibly distributed around the globe. Nevertheless, millions and millions of people starve to death due to poor distribution and irresponsible waste. The famine “was all in people’s heads” though, and it was “as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.”

By drawing a parallel with one of the great works of art in history, Vonnegut admits the dialectic of civilization, in which that which allows for great art also, by necessity, causes great suffering. He is in agreement with philosopher Walter Benjamin, who once commented, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Vonnegut’s dialectic of civilization is the very same that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer famously wrote about in their classic work of political philosophy Dialectic of Enlightenment. In that text they wrote that their principle concern was “nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.” This pithy aim is that of Vonnegut’s, not only in Galápagos, but also throughout his corpus. His skepticism of enlightenment as a self-cannibalizing historical process is in accord with Horkheimer and Adorno, who in that same text wrote perhaps the most stunning indictment of that period of history and culture: "Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always been aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant."

Vonnegut’s writing is nothing but a catalog of he triumphant disaster that the earth has radiated under periods known as “enlighten” or “civilization” or “modernization” or “progress.” Nuclear apocalypse, technological dependency, biological superbugs, mass exploitation, warfare, and artificially manufacture famines are but the tip of the iceberg of atrocities committed in the name of civilization and enlightenment. At the nexus of this historical dialectic – this contradiction of progress and destruction – is the human brain, which Vonnegut blames for sending history down a careening and doomed path. It is for this reason that he formulates his second thought on Beethoven. Leon Trout has a habit of saying a particular quote he picked up whenever anybody dies. It goes: “Oh well – he wasn’t going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anyway.” This superficially heartless quip is actually emblematic of Vonnegut’s deeply sympathetic and humane outlook on life. It is, paradoxically, a way of saying that at least the deceased also won’t cause any harm anymore either, and perhaps the world is a more peaceful place now. Toward the end of the novel, after he has explained that humans have evolved into seal-like creatures with smaller brains, Trout makes this same quip about the human race, which has, since it evolved, effectively died out. This time, however, Trout’s sentiment is laced with a more explicit redemptive hope: “Nobody, surely, is going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – or tell a lie, or start a Third World War.” The dialectic of enlightenment is finally at rest. There are no more documents of civilization and thus no more documents of barbarism either.

Lest he leave us entirely without hope, in a deeply absurdist move, Vonnegut delights in this hopeless situation of humanity by proclaiming, “Even in the darkest times, there really was still hope for humankind.” Vonnegut’s absurdism is dialectic to the core though. For as he paints a gloomy picture of the corner humanity is in, where every bit of progress is regression and every document of civilization is barbarism, there is always a resolution awaiting humanity. It is not that despite humanity’s failings there is still an opportunity to overcome them and restart history and fulfill the goals of enlightenment. It is that it is precisely because of humanity’s paradoxical relationship to civilization and barbarism that we have the capacity to dialectically overcome ourselves. “Man is something that shall be overcome,” Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “What have you done to overcome him?” Vonnegut’s overcoming is found on the Galápagos islands, where a new Eden awaits and humanity finds a new opportunity to rebuild from the ashes and forge a civilization devoid of violence, enmity, exploitation, and the other crimes committed by brains the world over. Only then will there be a Beethoven without barbarism.

'Tis a consummation / devoutly to be wished

In his endeavor to illustrate the sick and twisted realm of the human psyche, Vonnegut does not just stop at the material manifestations of the collective insanity (i.e. the myriad manufactured crises) but also seeks to uncover the underlying psychological conditions that foment them. As is common for Vonnegut, he delves into psychoanalytic theory to make accusations of the mental sickness of the modernized and technologized world. Midway through the novel, when Latin America’s financial crisis is at its peak, he writes of a fictional war that breaks out between Peru and Ecuador for little reason other than to distract the populace from noticing how hungry they truly are. Vonnegut writes of a Peruvian pilot by the name of Guillermo Reyes who finds that in firing rockets from his jet he has “at last found something which was more fun than sexual intercourse.” The “tremendous self-propelled weapon slung underneath” the airplane was “madly in love” with a radar dish atop an Ecuadorian airport. When Reyes releases the rocket his “feelings at the moment of release had to be transcendental” and felt completely “drained.”

This orgasm/explosion connection and the symbol connection between the rocket and the phallus relates to Freud’s potent theory of the death drive, which argues that, as Freud writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, "the aim of life is death." Freud postulates that because the civilized world is deeply repressed, sexually and emotionally, it must seek an outlet for its pent-up libido elsewhere. The expression of the libido in alternative means than sex, a process known as sublimation, so often finds its manifestation in violence, which symbolically recreates the act of sex, as Vonnegut so deftly writes in the scene with Colonel Reyes. It is for this reason that most people “think of explosions as show business, as highly theatrical forms of self-expression, and little more.” According to Vonnegut, “the launching of the missile, in fact, was virtually identical with the role of male animals in the reproductive process,” which of course is the most alluring form of entertainment and theatrics. Reyes in fact is quite typical in feelings that “what he had done was analogous to the performance of a male during sexual intercourse.”

In this analogy of violence and sex, Vonnegut essentially sexes civilization and the violence it sows. The technological-military complex that drives so-called civilization is unambiguously sexed male, as it recreates the male sex-act in increasingly violent measures with sexual imagery and gratification. The progressive march of history, the endless mastery over nature through technology, and the exploitation of working classes matches the typical psyche of the alpha male. Vonnegut uses the words of Shakespeare to make his case for the link between sex and violence: “‘tis a consummation / devoutly to be wished.” The statement applies to the destructive forces and the lust of humanity, which, according to Freud, are ultimately one and the same. Even in the original Shakespeare the dual connotation is not to be missed. This destructive behavior is detrimental to those who might face its consequences, which are often not the perpetrators of the violence. In an extended passage on psychological conditions in modern society, Vonnegut diagnoses history with a severe case of “pathological personality,” which he says “merely cause pain to those around them, and almost never to themselves.” This pathology is the distinctly male and masculine personality of atomic bombs and capitalist exploitation.

If all that is ignorant and violent in humanity is sexed (and gendered) as male in Vonnegut’s writing, then the reverse is also true. All that is redeeming is characterized as female. Of the characters in the novel, the women are largely intelligent, hard working, and compassionate while the men are exploitative, deceptive, and futile. It is for this reason that the human apocalypse is manifested as a an ovary-destroying superbug – it is the destruction of the female and feminine that spells the destruction of humanity – or all that is worthwhile about humanity. Thus when the Bahía de Darwin finally sets sail, as an emergency escape for only nine passengers, all but one of them are men – and the lone man is a hopeless, ignorant, racist whose only contribution is his semen which helps restart the human race. Vonnegut jokingly calls the story of the stranded passengers of the Bahía de Darwin “A Second Noah’s Ark.” This is a deeply subversive narrative strategy though, as in Vonnegut’s retelling of the destruction and rebuilding of life as we know it, the male and female do not counterbalance each other for the future success of the human race, but the female is prioritized. Not only is there only one male aboard the cruise ship, but the other sexed elements of society – namely, technology – are portrayed as foolish. This ship itself, the Bahía de Darwin is a sheepish floating scrap heap, having been reduced to almost nothing by looters in the famine-ravaged Ecuadorian port of Guayaquil. Also along for the ride is a neat little techno-gadget called Mandarax, invented by an ill-fated would-be passenger, a Japanese inventor who is shot before even making it onto the cruise ship. Mandarax serves as a comic foil representing the futility of technology in seriously improving the human condition from a psychological or existential position. Its main function is to serve as either a translator or as a generous provider of quotes from literature. Thus throughout the novel Vonnegut includes dozens of quotes from literature to shed light on the condition of the castaways as they are stranded on the fictional Galápagos island of Santa Rosalia. When the passengers are lost at sea and hope that perhaps Mandarax has an emergency locating beacon or broadcasting device with which they can radio for help they cry mayday into its speaker. Mandarax’s unhelpful response contains the following “utterly mystifying words”:

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering Judas
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers. . .
- T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Unsurprisingly, the hapless passengers throw Mandarax into the ocean in a fit of impotent rage not long after they arrive in the Galápagos wherein it is promptly eaten by a great white shark. Through the inanity of Mandarax, that supposed technological marvel that found itself in the belly of a shark, Vonnegut mocks the technological-progressivist ideology of capitalism in which all new technologies are by necessity good so long as they make money, no matter how they are used. On the island of Santa Rosalia, Mandarax isn’t helpful in the slightest, only serving to raise the anxieties of those who attempt to use it. When asked for advice it only provided pointless quotations, most of which were “clunkers,” leading to users “feeling mocked by its useless advice or inane wisdom or ponderous efforts to be humorous.”

Through the absurdity of Mandarax, Vonnegut implodes the myth that we will soon be a superhuman, semi-robotic race of geniuses. Vonnegut supports a trans-humanism along the lines of Donna Haraway in her seminal theoretical text A Cyborg Manifesto. However, his is not a cyborg trans-humanism but instead an animalistic one. We do not need to unite with machines to overcome human flaws, for the flaws are ultimately derived from our fetishization of deadly machinery in the first place. It is, after all, a short step from Mandarax to the explosive missile. His desire is that instead of being hyper-technologized, we take a step back and reacquaint humanity with the profundity of its organic and animalist side. Instead of moral virtue, which is rife with hypocrisy, Vonnegut aims for something simpler: eradication of apocalyptic desire. Humanity has spent enough time lusting after ultimate destructive power that sooner or later we will, accidentally or not, get it and the results will be depressingly predictable. Whether through atomic warfare, ecological disaster, or diseases that resist medical intervention, humanity’s quest for mechanical superiority and monopolistic power will deliver the destruction it promises. Vonnegut’s trans-humanism is thus an attempt to find some scrap of goodness inherent in humanity, rather than seeking salvation elsewhere, such as through technology. Only in this return to the existing animal within humanity will humanity depart from its current destructive path, also known as “history.” Vonnegut animalizes the human, because even the most vicious animals and bloodthirsty creatures don’t enact such madcap adventures as conquering continents, building death camps, enslaving races, or blowing up entire cities. The flaw is thus in the human brain, something no other animal is either blessed or cursed with. As he writes in his novel Jailbird, “It was thinkers, after all, who had set up the death camps. Setting up a death camp, with its railroad sidings and its around-the-clock crematoria, was not something a moron could do. Neither could a moron explain why a death camp was ultimately humane.” In Galápagos, Vonnegut asks, “Can it be doubted that three-kilogram brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race?” It cannot be doubted, so Vonnegut writes a new future, a new Noah’s Ark, in which humans dispense with big brains, becomes seal-like, and regain their innocence in the hopes of doing humanity right this time around.

The Era of Hopeful Monsters

Vonnegut’s view is that technology is not just exacerbating the problems of society, but in many ways contributing to it. That is, technology made by and for human brains is the root of the problem. He writes derisively of scientists “using their big brains and cunning instruments” for the purpose of annihilation or triviality. Leon Trout calls the era of a million years ago (i.e. the 1980s) the “era of big brains and fancy thinking.” This is not unlike when Vonnegut wrote in The Sirens of Titan that the present can be called the “Nightmare Ages” in which everyone is still foolishly looking around for the purpose of life rather than within themselves, where it is located. Leon Trout explains that he was a Vietnam War veteran and was made to commit unspeakable atrocities. Vonnegut too was a war veteran, and his well-documented experiences in Dresden during its firebombing led him to abhor misuse of technology, particularly for military applications, but also for the machinery of capitalism. In Galápagos he writes that in the future, after humans evolve to be seal-like, even if anyone ''found a grenade or a machine gun or a knife or whatever left over from olden times, how could they ever make use of it with just their flippers and their mouths?'' Later he adds that people are by necessity kinder and gentler to each other: ''It is hard to imagine anybody's torturing anybody nowadays. How could you even capture somebody you wanted to torture with just your flippers and your mouth?”

These sentiments echo those he made at Bennington College in 1970, when he delivered a profound speech summarizing his thoughts on technology, ideology, and aesthetics. He said:

“The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage—and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still—I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art.”

Vonnegut’s aesthetics are not limited to just the arts though, but to the whole range of human experience that provides beauty and joy rather than cruelty and destruction. In this sense then, the seal-human hybrids of the future are the most aesthetic creatures he has yet surmised, being totally dedicated as they are to playfulness and enjoying the grandeur of their world. They cannot write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, but their simple life is as good a start as any in the simple aesthetic appreciation of existence itself. Furthermore, this lifestyle cannot possible lead to the disastrous outcomes such as atomic bombs or foolish wars in Vietnam. They spend their life eating, sleeping, and playing. They are not far off from another animal Vonnegut writes about, which is the blue-footed booby, supposedly named as such because they were deemed unintelligent when they did not resist the violence inflicted upon them by explorers and colonists who killed them for food. Such naïve innocence, such a booby-like nature, is to be praised in Vonnegut’s view, seeing as the boobies are dedicated to lives of aesthetic bliss rather than intellectual and technological domination through instrumental-rationality and military science. Vonnegut speaks to the beauty of the booby mating ritual and even postulates that they have a belief in the divine and transcendence from the sheer sublimity of their unusual dancing. This also applies to the marine iguana, who Vonnegut describes as needing nothing and wanting nothing except a belly full of food, which it has no problem attaining. “It has no enemies,” he states admiringly, as if the marine iguana had achieved a state of near-nirvana in its apathy and dedication to peaceful existence.

It is clear, then, that Vonnegut, drawing upon the greatest trends of romanticism, finds transcendence in nature and the aesthetic, which are often bound together, as in the Blue-footed booby or the marine iguana, or even the Galápagos islands in general. This remote archipelago thus serves as a paradise, a utopian escape from the ravages of history, and a location where humanity can regain its lost sense of beauty and peace. The Galápagos islands symbolize a place apart from the continents of despair, suffering, and ugliness. Vonnegut describes Mary Hepburn, the matriarch of the new Galápagos community as “Mother Nature Personified,” giving her the ultimate title he could bestow. To be aligned with nature is to be aligned with beauty and goodness, and even humanity, at least that element of humanity that has not been crushed by the machine of so-called civilization. Before being stranded on the Galápagos, Mary was a biology teacher who was well acquainted with the blue-footed booby. When explaining the mating ritual of this divine creature to her students, a ritual many found more beautiful than even the human institutionalized ritual or marriage, she asked her students to ponder if they would “dare call it ‘religion’? Or, if we lack that sort of courage, might we at least call it ‘art’?”

We could call our era the “era of big brains and fancy thinking,” as Vonnegut does in Galápagos, or perhaps the “Nightmare Ages,” as he does in The Sirens of Titan. Perhaps we ought to take another title though, one stolen from a Kilgore Trout novel, which the narrator, Leon Trout, describes in Galápagos. Kilgore, Leon explains, wrote a novel titled The Era of Hopeful Monsters, about “a planet where the humanoids ignored their most serious survival problems until the last possible moment.” Leon determines that most people from a million years ago, our present day, were monsters at least in terms of personality and decides he will call this era the Era of Hopeful Monsters. Vonnegut’s aesthetic redemption has the potential to rescue us from our monstrous selves, so long as we locate the aesthetic within ourselves. To quote Emerson, “Ne te quaesiveris extra.” Humans cannot evolve by sheer will into creatures that are more peaceful and less destructive, but we can start by locating the aesthetic in the contemporary human, even if the human is monstrous. When Leon recounts his childhood, which was deeply troubled, he reminisces that he flunked every course but one: art. “Nobody flunked art “ he contends, “That was simply impossible.” This is because art is a fundamentally human endeavor which everyone has equal access too. The aesthetic and the human are one and the same, and art is the endeavor to achieve a certain harmony or unity with the aesthetic in a quest for existential authenticity. The human is beauty itself, a rough and difficult sort of beauty, but beauty nonetheless. We are hopeful monsters, so often treated as “garbage,” as Vonnegut said to that audience at Bennington College. It is the aesthetic – whether in human art or the natural world – that can “put man at the center of the universe” and redeem a monstrous, yet hopeful, humanity.

Vonnegut, via the impotent Mandarax, quotes Thoreau near the end of the novel: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” He does so to make the point that the few characters, stranded aboard the Bahía de Darwin and then the Galápagos, are not the only ones plagued by self-doubt and existential despair. It is, unfortunately, an all too common state of being. In Galápagos the humane Vonnegut seeks to reassure his desperate readers that in the open sea of human despair, an Ararat awaits this second Noah’s Ark. And in the depths of that deep despair, a sea change awaits, and a new humanity just might transform into something rich and strange. There may, as Vonnegut writes, have to be “certain modifications in the design of human beings.” The changes that the ghost of Leon Trout saw are just a start. “I’ve only been here for a million years,” he says, just before it is his time to enter the afterlife once and for all, “no time at all, really.”

Read Matthew Gannon's opening essay, "Kurt Vonnegut Has Come Unstuck In Time"

Read Matthew Gannon's previous reviews:
Player Piano, the One-Dimensional Society, and the Emergency Brake of History
Vonnegut in Jerusalem: A Report on the Absurdity of Language and Media
The Tragedy of Eliot Rosewater, Prince of Indiana
Vonnegut on Truth and Aesthetics in a Nonmoral Sense
Vonnegut's Sermon on the Mount

Speechless in Simulation: A Missive for Midland City

2013-08-09T16:55:00.000-04:00

by Wilson Taylor

“Man is a subject caught in and tortured by language.”

- Jacques Lacan

“Words, words, words.”

- Shakespeare, Hamlet, II.2.192

“Blah blah blah.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, Deadeye Dick, 1982

Consider the Subtleness of the Sea

“Deadeye Dick,” writes Vonnegut in the Preface to his tenth novel, “is a sort of lungfish of a nickname. It was born in the ocean, but it adapted to life ashore.” He elaborates — Deadeye Dick “is a nickname for a sailor. A deadeye is a rounded wooden block, usually bound with rope or iron, and pierced with holes. The holes receive a multiplicity of lines... But in the American Middle West of my youth, ‘Deadeye Dick’ was an honorific often accorded to a person who was a virtuoso with firearms.” The deadeye, then, functions as a subtle metaphor in the novel, which revolves around the peculiar experience of the man — Rudy Waltz, neither sailor nor virtuoso — absurdly bestowed with this “lungfish of a nickname” and irrevocably marked by fate. The nautical origins of the deadeye suggest that the nickname function as a sort of lens into the American subject and psyche, with Deadeye Dick, to paraphrase Whitman, offering a filter of multiplicities through the self.

Using Waltz as such a lens, Vonnegut continues to interrogate the absurdity of the human and American subject in Deadeye Dick. In some ways, Waltz resembles other typical Vonnegut protagonists. He is “the victim of a series of accidents,” as Winston Niles Rumfoord from The Sirens of Titan might suggest, and these absurd crescendoes of coincidences plague Vonnegut’s unmoored protagonists. Rudy Waltz is a failed playwright and pharmacist, the son of a feckless painter, Otto, a one-time “bosom buddy” of Adolf Hitler. (The dictator and the dilettante met as struggling artists in 1920s Vienna.) In his adolescence, Rudy Waltz accidentally kills a pregnant woman with his father’s gun, firing a rifle nonchalantly from the window of his home. This event is a rupture in Waltz’ life. The accidents of his fate transform him into a murderer and bestow upon him the unshakeable epithet of “Deadeye Dick.” Another absurd event in the novel is the detonation of a neutron bomb over Midland City. Vonnegut implies that the “friendly bomb” was purposefully detonated by the United States Government, hoping to de-populate the decaying Rust Belt city. “That is my principal objection to life, I think,” suggests Waltz. “It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.”

But the senselessness of a deterministic fate is not the principal inquiry of Vonnegut’s Deadeye Dick. Beyond this tragic absurdity of contemporary life, Vonnegut is particularly interested in the problem of language. The threat of linguistic determinacy pervades the novel — Vonnegut is concerned that the omnipotence and omnipresence of language poisons and imprisons the self. Nietzsche refers to language as a “prison-house,” reaffirming the bondage of Deadeye Dick’s indeterminate self to the omnipotence of language. Language, Nietzsche argues, forms the structures and boundaries of thought and being. Heidegger further identifies language as the “house of being,” but, for Vonnegut, the relationship between language and being is much more troubled and troubling. As Slavoj Zizek writes in The Ticklish Subject, “Heidegger misses the properly traumatic impact if the very ‘passivity’ of being caught in language, the tension between the human animal and language: there is a ‘subject’ because the human animal does not ‘fit’ language; the Lacanian ‘subject’ is the tortured, mutilated subject.” Vonnegut’s subjects are much the same.

Whereas Rudy Waltz is plagued by guilt over his murder, he is also haunted by the resonance of the murder in the simulated world of language and society. This tragedy dissolves any space between identity and reputation, between subject and object; the ontological self of Rudy Waltz is collapsed into the neat alliteration of his inevitable epithet. He only exists as Deadeye Dick. Waltz wrestles with this profound ontological doubt, and, in this grappling, he is contending explicitly with his own linguistic determinacy. He is unable the exist as an unfettered subject due to the objectification he suffers in language. It is an existential problem which has metastasized under postmodernism. If the terror of Slaughterhouse-Five is that of the indeterminacy of the human in the incommensurate seas of time and fate, then Deadeye Dick is equally haunted by human indeterminacy in the vast oceans of language.

One may recall Pip, the enigmatic black sailor aboard the Pequod of Melville’s Moby Dick. (Vonnegut’s Deadeye Dick is, in many ways, a subtle homage to Moby Dick.) In Chapter 93, “The Castaway,” Pip is abandoned in the vastness of the sea by Stubb and the Pequod. After bobbing in the lonesome mystery of the ocean for an indeterminate length of time, he is at last retrieved, although he is reduced to an “idiot,” unable to speak. “The sea had leeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.” Pip’s speechlessness is indicative of his ontological indeterminacy amidst the determining construct of language (and, in the dark mysticism of the novel, a glimpse at the deus absconditus, the hidden God.) In Deadeye Dick, Rudy Waltz is analogous to Pip, his self drowned in the incommensurate oceans of language, unable to speak for himself. As language assumes more creative and signifying power, the self grows increasingly indeterminate.

Emerson hoped to realize himself anew as “a transparent eyeball,” but Vonnegut is skeptical of such a divine and pure mode of being. Deadeye Dick offers, instead, a broken lens into a broken world. And, in Deadeye Dick, this world is increasingly unredeemable. Vonnegut foregoes the transcendent humanism of earlier novels in the face of the irrelevance of the human qua human in the society of the spectacle and the omnipotence of the simulacrum. Vonnegut concludes Deadeye Dick with a powerful and fatalistic meditation on the never-ending Dark Ages of the contemporary world. The world of Deadeye Dick is a world drowned in referents, unsure that any substance lies beneath these calcified layers of signifiers. As Rudy Waltz dissolves into Deadeye Dick, he ceases to exist except as a linguistic construction; Vonnegut plays language-games with Wittgenstein.

Welcome to the The Desert of the Real

God, according to Genesis, speaks the world into existence ex nihilo, or "out of nothing." Rudy Waltz undergoes the inverted and unsettling process of his birth from nothing into an existence wholly created and mediated by language. “To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life,” he warns. “I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed.” Rudy Waltz’s birth, therefore, is also a fall. (Furthermore, the mysterious violence of this experience — as well as Vonnegut’s conception of the “peephole,” by which he refers to a limited, human perspective on life — parallels what Heidegger refers to as “fallen-ness,” the anxious immersion of the indeterminate self into the world.) To be free, suggests Waltz, is to be undifferentiated, to be undefined. And his descent into this linguistic realm — into Lacan’s Symbolic Order — is a birth into a world totally shaped by language. Later in the novel, Waltz compares this omnipresence and omnipotence of signifiers to “invisible insects buzzing around [his] head.” In Deadeye Dick, language assumes this threatening immanence and omnipotence.

In Simulacra and Simulations, Jean Baudrillard develops a Nietzschean reading of the interplay between signifiers and the signified. In his book, published one year before Deadeye Dick, Baudrillard discusses the concept of the “simulacrum,” by which he refers to the omnipotent system of representation and simulation that writes itself onto the “real” world, ultimately supplanting the “real” itself. He suggests that the world, what is considered to be real, is a media projection. “The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command modules.” In Baudrillard’s postmodern schema, supposed reality only exists inasmuch as it is sublimated into a series of signifiers. “The age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials — worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs... With it goes all of metaphysics.” He refers to this new era, where simulation renders reality obsolete, as the “hyperreal.” The hyperreal, the simulation, supplants reality. Reality no longer exists. All that remains is its image.

Does Midland City really exist? The question, as the “Farmers of Southwestern Ohio for Nuclear Sanity” discover, is complicated. “They were fighting a losing battle in trying to make anybody...care what happened to someplace called ‘Midland City.’” Vonnegut’s heartbroken meditation on the omnipotence of the simulacrum anticipates Baudrillard’s famous 1991 assertion that “the Gulf War did not take place.” According to Baudrillard, the only experience (in the West) of the war was mediated through the simulacrum — through the advanced systems of signifiers of the media. It becomes impossible, he suggests, to filter the “real” war from the image of war, and the simulation therefore supplants the real. Does a place called “Midland City” exist, if no one cares that it has been destroyed? Does it matter? “Has the world lost anything it loved?”

Crime and Punishment

The rupture in the novel and in the life of Rudy Waltz — the event through which he is forever transformed into Deadeye Dick — is his accidental murder of a pregnant woman, when Waltz was only twelve years old. This tragedy allows Vonnegut to reflect on life, death, and the absurdity of human life. Moreover, Waltz kills this woman on Mother’s Day, the holiday in which Vonnegut’s own mother killed herself, as Vonnegut’s biography continues to inform his fictions. In a tragedy that echoes through the phenomenological, ontological, and epistemological, Waltz’s imagines the innocent firing of his father’s rifle as an act in affirmation of his manhood. “The bullet was a symbol, and nobody was ever hurt by a symbol. It was a farewell to my childhood and a confirmation of my manhood.” He also suggests that, through his ejaculatory jouissance of the phallic rifle, he “may have been trying to evolve into a superman,” a fraught meditation on the insufficiencies of the Nietzschean Übermensch.

If the accidental murder of the pregnant woman is, as Rudy Waltz suggests, to function symbolically, than it is necessary to peer beneath the event as mere phenomenon. As stated, this murder is a rupture — the event creates a fissure on Waltz’ biography and being. He is immediately incarcerated and abused by a vicious police apparatus. Officers smear his hands and face with ink and display him as a spectacle, and it is one of these officers who slaps the ignominious and eponymous nickname upon Waltz. Waltz further explains that, in his violence, he also killed himself. “I died,” a statement which refers to both the death of the ego (as the ego dissolves into language) and the sort of existential death that Waltz experiences (he later will identify himself as an asexual “neuter” and as “egregious,” which locates him “outside the herd”). This parallels the similarly existential death of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, who claims that, in his murder of the old woman, that he too “died,” in an abstract or existential way. Raskonlikov is able to find absolution through renunciation and faith. No such recourse is available for Vonnegut's tortured subjects.

In his attempt to assert himself through the violent symbol of the phallic rifle, Waltz attempts to claim a new mantle of masculinity, a putting an end to childish things. (Vonnegut is always skeptical of such performances of so-called masculinity.) In his self-assertion, Waltz kills a certain Oedipal constellation of mother and child, both, in some sense, existing within himself. However, despite this attempted explosion of the Oedipal or Symbolic apparatus, Waltz cannot find freedom. Instead, he becomes unmoored, awash in referents and lacking a self. He is forever incarcerated in Nietzsche’s “prison house” of language. His guilt and indeterminacy overwhelm any potential re-birth into freedom. Waltz cannot be reborn, but he is re-christened, baptized into new damnation as Deadeye Dick.

“Who is Celia? What is She? That All Her Swains Commend Her?”

The omnipotent creative force of language suffuses Deadeye Dick. In his tenth novel, Vonnegut re-considers the suicide of Celia Hoover, who first appeared in Breakfast of Champions. She commits suicide through consuming Drano. Celia is addicted to narcotics, a sign and symptom of both the late twentieth century’s “pharmaceutical bufoonery” and the inescapable loneliness of American life. She is a sympathetic character in Deadeye Dick, appearing, alternately, as Cinderella, Aphrodite, or Helen of Troy. Yet her ennui is typical of contemporary America. Suffering from, ironically, Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name,” Hoover is totally adrift in linguistic signifiers. She cannot speak; she is only spoken for, a mirror of Waltz’ own linguistic determinacy and existential uncertainty. Celia’s existential despair is primarily, if not entirely, linguistic. She laments to Rudy (who has composed a play, Katmandu, in which she starred), “All those wonderful words that came out of me — those were your words. I could never have thought up words that beautiful to say in a million years. I almost lived and died without ever saying anything worth listening to.”

Celia’s despair is that of a voiceless and indeterminate subject. Inasmuch as the process of being is tied to language (as “language is the house of being”), the voiceless subject is the subject without a self. Can a subject who cannot say anything "worth listening to" even exist in a meaningful way? Can such a subject dwell, in Heideggerian formulation, where the self asserts the self into the world? Celia, like Waltz, functions as a lens into the existential doubt of the contemporary American condition. In a world awash in referents, Celia’s depthlessness and inability to sustain a self is indicative of a deeper linguistic determinism and postmodern alienation.

Celia’s fatal consumption of Drano, then, must too be considered as a linguistic act. Celia, in consuming Drano, is hoping to clear the clogged pipes of being and thought, to free the stream of consciousness, as it were. Celia suffers from inability to speak for herself, and this corresponds to an insolvency of being. She seeks freedom through this symbolic act, but her attempt to clear these ontological pipes is fatal. She dies into silence; she dies into nothingness. If every birth is also a fall, then every death is also a damnation. Such is the cruel irony of Vonnegut’s increasingly fatalistic perspective on the human.

Celia’s funeral offers Vonnegut an opportunity to meditate on the nature of contemporary American life and on the individual. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche reduces the “individual” to a linguistic signifier, suggesting that the self is little more than a convenient fiction and grammatical construction. Vonnegut reaches similar conclusions, and finds some redemption in the dissolving of atomized individual into a social body. Daydreaming a theory “of what life was all about,” Waltz suggests that “there was no reason to take us seriously as individuals. Celia in her casket there, all shot through with Drano and amphetamine, might have been a dead cell sloughed off by a pancreas the size of the Milky Way. How comical that I, a single cell, should take my life so seriously!” Vonnegut finds wisdom, but uncertain absolution, in the dissolving of these constructions of individualism.

The Work of Art in the Society of the Spectacle

In the Preface, Vonnegut describes an “unappreciated, empty arts center in the shape of a sphere,” which symbolizes, he tells the reader, “my head as my sixtieth birthday beckons to me.” Deadeye Dick lacks Vonnegut’s typically optimistic view on human transcendence. This loss of faith is most clearly reflected in Vonnegut’s increasingly ambivalent approach to art and aesthetic redemption. Vonnegut’s diminishment of hope parallels his growing suspicion that language has supplanted reality, and that the human, like Pip, is reduced to incoherence and uncertainty amidst the omnipotence of signifiers. If the human doesn’t exist outside of language, how can the human be redeemed? The decay of the arts center, mirroring Vonnegut’s own literary and artistic anxieties, underscores the author’s own aesthetic uncertainties.

The most prominent artists in Deadeye Dick are Rudy’s delusional father, an unrealized and unskilled artist who fashions himself a bohemian, and Adolf Hitler. The relationship between the elder Waltz and Hitler begins in Vienna, when Waltz purchases a painting, “The Minorite Church of Vienna,” from a literally starving Hitler. Vonnegut highlights a possible relationship between art and death, as well as art and fascism. Encountering a painting of Hitler forces the viewer into the awkward position of literally seeing the world as he did, forcing the viewer into some sort of sympathetic relationship with the tyrant via the aesthetic gaze. The imaginative hegemony inflicted on the viewer through the realist painting (as Hitler and Waltz both were) implicates the art-object in a sort of imaginative fascism. As if to underscore this violent tyranny of creation, Vonnegut repeatedly refers to the artist’s easel and canvas as a “guillotine.”

Vonnegut’s skepticism surrounding the artistic process is not limited to the realist painting. Flowing from his own concerns of linguistic determinacy, Vonnegut extends this aesthetic anxiety to literature as well. Vonnegut even compares the writing of literature to Rudy’s incarceration, reinforcing the conception of language as a “prison house.” When Waltz is in prison and smeared with ink, he refers to himself as a an “ink-stained wretch,” which he also identifies as a “wonderful epithet for writers.”

Waltz, the “ink-stained wretch,” himself harbors something of a literary imagination. He won a contest for a play, Katmandu, which opened for one night in New York. The play was a failure, although it did open on two separate occasions in Midland City. The play itself deals with issues of redemption, and the protagonist, John Fortune, hopes to achieve transcendence or tranquillity in Katmandu. He is unable to do so — the imprisoned human of the postmodern has no recourse to the sublime, suggests Vonnegut. Before his grim death, Fortune suggests that “This is as much a Shangri-La as anywhere,” which is another way to say that there is no Paradise anywhere, that Eden remains obscured, that there is no exit from the ontological prison of the simulacrum.

In attempting to postulate a purpose of the arts, Kurt Vonnegut has suggested what he refers to as the “canary in the coal mine theory of the arts,” where artists are “useful to society because they are so sensitive.” However, in Deadeye Dick, Vonnegut is skeptical about any possible redemption for society or a transformative role of the arts. America, he suggests, is still in the grip of the Dark Ages. “You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages — they haven't ended yet.” Before reaching this tragic resignation, Waltz meditates on the dissolution of the American Dream. His ardor is especially poignant — Deadeye Dick was published in 1982, at the heights of the Cold War and the depths of the Reagan Administration. “The 1980s were not simply a decade of glitz and greed,” writes Cornel West. “More important, they ushered in a new era of American history — the triumphant conservatism of Reagan, Rambo and retrenchment.” Deadeye Dick is a meditation on this insidious triumvirate of contemporary America.

Near the conclusion of the novel, a United States neutron bomb destroys the population — but not the property — of Midland City. Vonnegut laments, “Does it matter to anyone or anything that all those peepholes were closed so suddenly? Since all the property is undamaged, has the world lost anything it loved?” The nation “was now ruled, evidently, by a small clique of power brokers who believed that most Americans were so boring and ungifted and small time that they could be slain by the tens of thousands without inspiring any long-term regrets on the part of anyone.” Vonnegut’s fictions have always been grounded by a strong current of humanistic sympathy, but Deadeye Dick offers arguably his bleakest vision for the human and the United States. “You can’t fight back against something that don’t have a name,” remarks a prescient local farmer. The power to name, as enshrined in Genesis, is the power to control.

“Guernica” and the Aesthetics of Resistance

Despite the bleak, anti-metaphysical mood of Deadeye Dick, Vonnegut does open a few spaces in his narrative to consider new modes of being. Echoing Breakfast of Champions, Rudy Waltz’ mother leads a successful boycott against abstract art, favoring a more nostalgic Realism to fill the empty walls of Midland City’s resplendent arts center, which Vonnegut imagines as a symbol for his own empty imagination. The simulacrum, however, poses a problem for strictly representational art (such as Hitler’s “The Minorite Church of Vienna” is an example prized by Otto Waltz). In a world subsumed into simulation and representation, a piece of art that participates in simulation becomes just another image, another piece of trash littering the desert of the real. The world has already been subsumed into representation and simulation — the task of the artist, then, is to create new modes of being.

Hope, Vonnegut insists, can be cultivated through non-representational and fragmented art. Vonnegut, through Rudy Waltz, elevates Picasso’s “Guernica” as an exemplar of such transformative art — “Some picture!” Vonnegut’s elevation of Picasso and celebration of abstraction recalls his eloquent defense of Rabo Karabekian’s “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” (which also appears in Deadeye Dick) in Breakfast of Champions. As Fredric Jameson suggests in his foreword to Peter Weiss' The Aesthetics of Resistance, Picasso’s “Guernica” “allows us to re-identify the utopian moment” of his work. Abstract art opens a new space outside of the strict boundaries of representation, thereby cultivating an imaginative space outside of the purview of the simulacrum. If language obscures and controls the lived world, abstract art can nurture a liberating counter-memory. Abstract art, in short, cultivates an aesthetics of resistance, to borrow a term from Peter Weiss. Creating these imaginative spaces is essential to the creation of new worlds. Abstract art, Vonnegut implies, has the power to shatter the simulacrum.

In addition to non-representational art, Rudy Waltz pursues other salves against the absurdity of simulation. Because the anxiety of Waltz is primarily linguistic, he seeks to cultivate extra-linguistic modes of expression. A particular pursuit of Waltz is scat singing, which he sings to “shoo the blues away.” Scat singing is essential to Waltz’ hopeful redemption. If language is a “prison house,” than he can tear down these ontological walls through dissolving language, through what Waltz refers to as “the brainless inward fusillades of ‘skeedee wahs’ and ‘bodey oh dohs.’” It is an abolition of language itself. Scat singing disrupts linguistic determinacy — Waltz can only assert himself through nonsense. He rejoices at this breakdown of language, for he is dismantling the walls of his ontological prison. Outside the boundaries of strict representation, he is free.

Another example of Vonnegut's repurposing of language can be read in his explanation of the Creole language of Haiti (from where Rudy Waltz narrates). The language has only a present tense. "Imagine a language with only a present tense." The emancipatory potential of this linguistic re-formulation lies in the freedom from guilt that haunts Waltz. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche discusses the connection between the linguistic construction of the individual with mechanisms of guilt. Therefore, changing language can seek to open counter-narratives for humanity, and allow the human to seek new modes of being. Vonnegut's Creole is another example of his toying with conceptions of time and being. His collapsing of the past, present, and future through a new linguistic understanding of being seeks the open new narratives of becoming.

Kierkegaard, celebrating Abraham as a Knight of Faith in Fear and Trembling, repeatedly emphasizes the incommunicability of Abraham's self. God speaks to him directly, but not in a universal language. Because language is a universal human space, the true relationship between God and the human pulls the human out of the Other of language and into a realm of individual incomprehensibility. Only in this realm, according to Kierkegaard, can the human seek transcendence. The eternal exists at odds with the universal. Vonnegut does not appeal to God or divinity in such a direct way, but he does celebrate the existential individual in similar ways as Kierkegaard. The human must ascend out of the simulacrum of representation in order to realize new modes of being.

This celebration of fragmentation, then, is realized in Vonnegut’s exploration of his “telegraphic schizophrenic” literary mode, through which Vonnegut cracks open narrative and language, attempting to elucidate and cultivate some eternal sense of transcendence hidden within. The human is sacred. The simulacrum is absurd.

Vonnegut’s Sermon on the Mount

2013-08-02T15:51:00.001-04:00

by Matthew Gannon

"Mr. Hapgood... why would a man from such a distinguished family and with such a fine education choose to live as you do?"

"Because of the Sermon on the Mount, sir."

Call Me Starbuck

Vonnegut’s ninth novel, Jailbird, resumes the author’s profound fascination with Christian theology, an intellectual phenomenon that is bound to confuse readers, given how often Vonnegut himself affirms his atheistic humanism. In his quasi-memoirs, A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut’s criticism of religious belief is pointed: “Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.” Nevertheless, Jailbird derives its moral authority from scripture itself, albeit in unconventional and decidedly progressive ways. It is perhaps telling that this novel revolves around a protagonist by the name of Walter F. Starbuck, an obvious, if elusive, allusion to Starbuck, the young chief mate of the Pequod in Herman Melville’s classical American novel Moby-Dick. Melville writes of Starbuck in his novel:

Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some organization seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance.

Vonnegut too harbors a sort of secularized superstition, a humanist theology that springs from intelligence rather than from ignorance. Vonnegut seeks to outstrip institutionalized Christianity itself in adhering to scripture, as he frequently makes use of the revolutionary fervor contained in such passages as the Sermon on the Mount. Vonnegut’s desire is to liberate the teachings of Jesus from their institutionalized shackles and thus free the words – rather, the Word – from those who misuse them. Vonnegut eschews what Cornel West has called the sanitized, deodorized, and sterilized treatment of the Gospel that minimizes its subversive power. He does so by making a direct link between the concerns of Jesus’s words and the political concerns of the contemporary. Rather than pulling scripture for abstract uses and diminishing the prophetic fire and inveterate justice of the Bible, as so many institutions do today, Vonnegut elucidates the revolutionary message of the bible itself. It is well known that Jesus was both a political and theological radical, but his political message has been obfuscated over time, his prophetic voice sanitized as scripture was used for the purposes of enslavement and exploitation, rather than joyous emancipation and human transcendence.

Walter F. Starbuck is the unlikely hero of this story, a secular evangelist retelling of the Bible in secular terms and taking the subversive message of the Messiah tot he mount once again to instruct the masses. Starbuck is, in typically Vonnegut tradition, a victim of a series of accidents. We meet this protagonist when he is sitting patiently in the confines of his prison cell, a post-modern and absurdist Saint Peter, awaiting liberation and destined for evangelism. Jailbird is yet another contribution to the prison-literature genre. Incarceration is a major theme in Vonnegut’s work, whether the circumstances are wrongful imprisonment, political imprisonment, incarceration in mental health facilities, prisoners of war, or, as is the case in Jailbird, imprisonment due to some combination of circumstance, apathy, and moral failings. Prison is a useful metaphor for the human condition under late capitalism, in which the self is a prisoner of (post-)modern subjectivity. There is, so to speak, no exit from this bleak scenario, at least not without some drastic radical political and theological action, which is precisely what Vonnegut calls for, although does not illustrate. The purposes of this carceral theme is not far from Shakespeare’s when, in Hamlet, he writes that the world “A goodly” prison, “in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons.” All writing, Vonnegut and Shakespeare seem to say, is of the prison genre, for as Hamlet says, he could count himself a “king of infinite space”and still be a prisoner and “be bounded in a nutshell” and be free were it not for something rotten in the state of his subjectivity.

Walter F. Starbuck’s tale is a tragic one, beginning with the optimism of his freedom from prison and concluding with his inevitable recidivism and renewed incarceration. Starbuck is something of a much less controversial Howard W. Campbell, Jr. from Vonnegut’s third novel, Mother Night. Like Campbell, Starbuck is imprisoned for his political apathy and willingness to allow himself to be used as a tool in some greater sinister plot. Starbuck, Vonnegut explains, was imprisoned for his “preposterous contributions to the American political scandals known collectively as ‘Watergate.’” His role consisted in allowing his office to be used for storage of an illegal stash of money, a small and unglamorous role, making him “the oldest and least celebrated of all the Watergate coconspirators.” In fact, throughout the novel he often expects other characters to remember him from the scandal, but almost no one does. Despite his small role in the scandal, Starbuck absurdly spends two years of his life as an old man behind bars. His exploits upon release, his interaction with the ghostly RAMJAC Corporation and its elusive majority stockholder Mrs. Jack Graham, Jr., his relationships with women, his rise to financial and professional success, and his anticlimactic and seemingly inevitable re-incarceration flesh our the rest of the story.

Blessed is the Slave Morality

The misuse of scripture by institutionalized religion is perhaps best exemplified by slave owners in the antebellum south who used to cherry pick quotes from the Old Testament instructing slaves to be obedient to their masters. Vonnegut inverts this abuse of the emancipatory capabilities of the Gospel and demolishes what he sees is clear a slave morality. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Vonnegut does not dispense with the Gospel, but rather liberates it in order to allow its revolutionary teachings shine through. Instead of using scripture to entrench slavery, Vonnegut uses it to free humanity itself. Nietzsche, of course, coined the term “slave morality” and spread his critique of Christianity liberally to all aspects of its usage. In texts such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche openly satirizes such moments of the New Testament as the Sermon on Mount, lampooning those who would wait for their reward in an afterlife by calling them “the preachers of death,” and joking that if they we like to be dead, “we should welcome their wish!” In Zarathustra Nietzsche also takes on such tenets as loving your neighbor and mortifying the flesh, accusing such thinkers of hating humanity and themselves and thus unworthy of the task of creating a transcendent humanity.

Nietzsche’s critiques of so-called virtues and moral teachings of Judeo-Christianity are well taken, though even his critique consists of a cherry-picking that obfuscates, rather than illuminates the prophetic fire and joyous aspiration of the Gospel. Though Vonnegut is an atheist, he is not ready to dispense with Gospel before he has deconstructed and then rebuilt his own version of Christian thought and liberation theology, an unconventional philosophy that takes Nietzsche’s criticism to heart while drawing upon a secular Biblical outlook that foils institutionalized sanitation. Thus, contrary to all his other Nietzschean leanings, Vonnegut picks up the Sermon on the Mount as the foundation of his redemptive eschatology.

The subject of Vonnegut’s revolutionary theology is primarily labor, as Vonnegut sees that as the key to furthering human emancipation in general. The tyranny of the free market effectively enslaves those who it even claims to support. It is, as Marx said, “that single, unconscionable freedom.” Vonnegut inverts the twisted logic of contemporary conservative rhetoric – which he would find even more appalling today – which audaciously claims that laborers, particularly menial workers, are moochers and a drain on an otherwise productive political-economic system. Adhering, rather, to a straightforward Marxian framework, Vonnegut recognizes that the true productive class is the proletariat, the workers themselves. The moocher class is instead the capitalist class, those managers, executives, and investors who do nothing but push money – bits of “worthless paper” as Vonnegut called it in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – around in get-rich-quick schemes that frequently collapse and, with bubbles burst, eviscerate any hope of job-security or class-consciousness attainable by the working class. At one point Vonnegut has a character, a labor organizer named Kenneth Whistler, recount a story about how he went to a factory where the conditions were harsh and job-security was non-existent. Whistler asks the hardworking laborers who are irreplaceable in their skills if they could run a factory as well as the managers and executives. "God, yes," they reply, "anyone here."

It is the laborers who have the real skill, know-how, and enthusiasm for productivity in Vonnegut’s politically charged worldview. Jailbird begins with the usual Vonnegut preface: a long autobiographical section that mixes fact and fiction. The core of this preface revolves around an influential lunch meeting Vonnegut had with Powers Hapgood, a labor activist upon whom a minor character in the novel, Kenneth Whistler, is based. Powers Hapgood, an important historical figure in his own right, was a labor organizer in the first half of the 20^th century. When he was 22 and just recently finished with his service in WWII, Vonnegut had the good luck of meeting Hapgood, who was, as Vonnegut writes of many characters in this novel (and with a fair amount of sarcastic disdain), a “Harvard man.” Hapgood, being a labor organizer, believed that “a true friend of the working people should be a worker himself,” and so went off to work in mines and fields and factories. As such, rather than being a high-society Harvard alumnus, Hapgood was “an ordinary-looking Middle Western Anglo-Saxon in a cheap business suit.” But from within this supremely ordinary-looking man emanated a wellspring of compassion, wisdom, and wit. Hapgood “was a talker,” Vonnegut reminisces, full of “far more wonderful stories” than anyone the young Vonnegut had ever met. He was such a good storyteller that he was delayed in meeting the young Vonnegut for lunch, as he had spent the morning in court testifying on behalf of a number of striking workers. The judge had apparently been so fascinated with his stories – along with the rest of the court – that he had actually encouraged him to go on with his tales of derring-do and fighting on behalf of the workers. The judge, however, was flummoxed by Hapgood’s desire to continue with difficult physical work and being an active member of labor unions. “Why,” the judge inquired, “would a man from such a distinguished family and with such a fine education choose to live as you do?” Hapgood, seemingly taken aback by such a forthright question, responded as plainly as he could: “Because of the Sermon on the Mount, sir.”

The Sermon on the Mount is thus a foundational text for Vonnegut’s humanistic morality and political radicalism, and that famous Biblical passage comes back a number of times in the text. References to the Beatitudes in particular – that segment of the Sermon on the Mount consisting of Jesus blessing the poor in spirit, the meek, and the persecuted – are explicitly and implicitly littered throughout Jailbird. Vonnegut constructs a political philosophy out of the New Testament in the vein of liberation theology and his Bible is a socialist text with the power to transform, rather than paralyze, society. Besides the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus insists that the meek will inherit the earth through righteous sociopolitical revolution, Vonnegut is obviously influenced by passages such as when Jesus instructs a wealthy man to eschew wealth, for it is destroyed by moth and rust, or when Jesus admonishes a young main for his riches and tells him: "if you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor." "And to this last assertion Jesus adds, "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God." Such revolutionary prophecy is not merely a plea for a simple redistribution of wealth, but rather very much a socialistic overhaul of existing social relations. Not only shall the poor be rewarded, but, like the proletariat, they shall "inherit the earth," and soon "the last will be first, and the first last." "You cannot serve both God and Money," Jesus warns, and Vonnegut takes this as his impetus for an unabashedly anti-capitalist reading of the New Testament.

Vonnegut, however, does not hesitate to outline his critique of organized religion, which has been sterilized so it can have no impact in the world of earthly human affairs. He explicitly connects organized religion to capitalism and its inevitable abuses of the common people. At the end of his long preface he recounts the story of the Cuyahoga Massacre, a fictional massacre about a labor protest gone horribly and fatally wrong. Vonnegut admits that the massacre is “an invention,” but he maintains that it is a “mosaic composed of bits taken from tales of many such riots in not such olden times.” Vonnegut, of course, could have been drawing upon a number of real-life riots such as the one he describes, in which mostly-peaceful striking workers are fired-upon by sharpshooters hired by the sinister Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron Company, and on Christmas morning of all days. “Fourteen people were killed outright by bullets,” Vonnegut laments about his fictional massacre, “twenty-three were seriously wounded,” and the rest of the hundreds fled immediately, as though ”freakish wind had blown across the plaza below,” the people “blowing away” like leaves. Alexander Hamilton McCone, the helpless and stuttering son of the owner of the Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron Company, recalls saying a prayer about the occasion, wishing that God would protect the workers from the infectious influence of labor organizers that he believed led to the fatal massacre. He is hopelessly ignorant of the fact that his family’s sharpshooters brought death that Christmas morning, not the protesters who demanded nothing more than livable wages.

Such is Vonnegut’s critique of the master-slave morality, and he does not hold back in his skeptical accusation. Remember that in in Slaughterhouse-five Vonnegut praises Lot’s wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt – punished by God for daring to look upon the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah: “But she did look back, and I love her for that because it was so human.” Vonnegut criticizes the bible again in Breakfast of Champions, in which he inverts the traditional narrative of the fall of man via the sinful consuming of the forbidden fruit by instead offering up the fruit himself (the Creator, and thus God, of his fiction), so that he may liberate his characters and thus humanity. Vonnegut despises a God that tempts humanity and then is so quick to punish indiscriminately. “Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe,” Vonnegut muses in that novel, reflecting on the unnecessary destruction wrought by the Judeo-Christian God.

In Jailbird he continues this skepticism of religious myth– a skepticism that is buoyed by an illuminating hope and an unmitigated desire for redemption. He thus pits institutionalized religion against liberated religion – the latter is that which can free itself from dogma as well as foolish notions such as an afterlife, an all-powerful God, and most forms of sin. Vonnegut, an atheist, calls for a renewal of Christianity. Paradoxically, it is through an unbeliever that we are lead to a return to scripture itself. Vonnegut, however, prioritizes particular aspects of biblical thought rather than glossing the text in its entirety with platitudinous abstraction and institutionalized dogma. In an important moment in Jailbird Vonnegut tensely describes his attitude toward Biblical dogma. Just before his release from prison, the generally non-religion Walter F. Starbuck encounters Emil Larkin, and old acquaintance who has made the startling transition from corrupt Nixon shill to a spirituals-singing, born-again proselytizer – otherwise known as a Presbyterian. Not only did Larkin dominate “the burglaries and the illegal wiretaps and the harassment of enemies,” but he also dominated “the prayer breakfasts” as well. Most Americans are familiar with the type. Larkin implores Starbuck to pray with him, assuring him that he is “trying to save [him] from hell.” When Starbuck, impatient with such superstition, does not comply, Larkin, Vonnegut writes, “then quoted the harrowing thing” that Jesus promised to say to nonbelievers on Judgment day: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” At this point Vonnegut’s writing is flamed with indignation, and seems to break the fourth wall: “these words appalled me then, and they appall me now. They are surely the inspiration for the notorious cruelty of Christians.” Vonnegut’s theological outlook is one that draws upon Jesus, but has no patience for such nonsenses as gnashing teeth and weeping sinner. Such talk, Starbuck says, “is so unlike most of what else He said that I have to conclude that He was slightly crazy that day.” Vonnegut’s is a joyous theology of redemption, not punishment, and he has enough space in his heart to accept all who seek it without insecurely cursing the rest. Vonnegut, as was Whitman, is large – he contains multitudes.

At this point, it is worthwhile to inquire into the etymological origins of the term Beatitude. The word ultimately derives from the Latin adjective beātitūdō, meaning happy, fortunate, or blissful. Someone such as Nietzsche could learn from Vonnegut, who, despite being an avowed atheistic and blistering critic against the madness of religion, can still see the beauty in the Bible’s underlying philosophy. Vonnegut’s is thus an unexpected defense of Christianity, even if it is also an attack on its worldly manifestations. Vonnegut recognizes the Beatitudes as an attempt at existential bliss and human transcendence. It was Nietzsche who quipped, “I would believe only in a god who could dance,” and derided somberness as he upheld laughter and revelry as the greatest good. Nietzsche, upon examining Vonnegut’s version of the New Testament, may have recanted his dismissal of it.

Woman is a Harp in Ruins

Starbuck admits that he believes, as many used to believe, that women are “more spiritual, more sacred than man.” Though this idea has fallen out of favor, replaced by a masquerade of egalitarian sympathies, Starbuck, as well as Vonnegut, retains this naïve believe in some bastion of innocence. “Is that, too, comical?” Starbuck wonders. But while Vonnegut praises women and elevates the feminine, he does not fetishize it nor fall for a one-dimensional and dehumanizing characterization or women. The women in his stories – and this story in particular – are often crude, ugly, broken, dirty, vulgar, or even suicidal (as Vonnegut’s own mother was). He describes Mary Kathleen O’Looney, his former lover and majority stockholder in the RAMJAC Corporation, as looking like a homeless woman and the proud owner of an overwhelming “smell of bad teeth” and a “bald spot about the size of a silver dollar.” And he speaks of his late wife Ruth as looking like an angel when he met her, but through the process of their marriage become morbidly obese – but he insists he never loved her less for that. Early in the novel Walter F. Starbuck recounts a poem he and his young friends would chant when they were college boys, “mocked by their own virginity,” and were positively “petrified of all the things that women of that time would expect of them,” both sexually and professionally. The punchline of this vulgar incantation is:

Sally in the garden,
Sifting cinders,
Lifted up her leg And farted like a man.
The bursting of her bloomers Broke sixteen winders.
The cheeks of her ass went –

Women, Vonnegut insists, are “more spiritual, more sacred than man,” not because of superficial qualities such as physical beauty or some pretension at demureness and etiquette, but rather because, of the women he has known all of them “seemed more virtuous, braver about life, and closer to the secrets of the universe than I could ever be.” Vonnegut, in the autobiographical preface, writes of his father that, after his mother’s suicide, became a man without a self and without direction or purpose in life. He was a man, even when Vonnegut was young, “in full retreat from life” and had “an air of defeat” about him. Vonnegut contrasts him with Powers Hapgood, the labor organizer, democratic activist, and master storyteller of derring-do. Vonnegut was “enchanted” with Hapgood, a man who was “still eager for information of what was really going on,” and “still full of ideas of how victory might yet be snatched from the jaws of defeat.” Vonnegut, in the preface, resolves to live like Hapgood, rather than his father, for his father had committed a form of suicide, like Vonnegut’s mother, even though he still went on living his lifeless existence.

Even Hapgood, though, has his flaws, and Vonnegut’s critique of masculinity applies to him as well. While very much an icon of justice, Hapgood displays some of those foolish traits of men that Vonnegut seeks to avoid. While it may be heroic that Hapgood, a “Harvard man,” resolves to work alongside the common man, the workers, in their hard labor, it is also foolish and naïve. To illustrate this point Vonnegut creates the fictional character Kenneth Whistler, who is explicitly modeled on Hapgood. Whistler, unlike the actual Hapgood, possess a number of flaws, such as being an alcoholic and abusive towards women. He is also nearly killed in a “routine mining accident,” which also deviates from Hapgood’s biography but illustrates the inherent folly in such typically masculine activities such as hard labor. The likes of Hapgood glorify the strength of men through labor, and while Vonnegut sympathizes enormously with labor, he weakness of the effeminate is far more valuable. After all, it is the meek who shall inherit this earth. It is for this reason that women are more spiritual and more sacred than men. It is also for this reason that Vonnegut demonstrates a greater sympathy for the effeminate men in his stories, such as the stammering Alexander Hamilton McCone, who was one of the two sons of Daniel McCone, the founder and owner of the Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron Company, and perpetrator of the fictitious Cuyahoga Massacre. Young Alexander, just recently finished with his college education, was often mocked for his unmanly and stammering demeanor. The workers “found him girl-like and stupid and too cowardly ever to come near the furnaces and forges.” Filled with an unalloyed level of cruelty, they would sometimes ”wave their handkerchiefs at him, as a salute to his futility as a man.” This, however, is what makes him a sympathetic character in Vonnegut’s writing, perhaps even more so than the workers, though they are to be exploited and demeaned and thus earn the reader’s sympathy as well. But his inherent “futility as a man,” is a blessing for young Alexander, for unlike his cruel and steely father and brother, he will not have the manly desire to conquer other men, and make his will be felt by those he can subjugate. In the master-slave dialectic, Vonnegut sides with the slave, for the slave shall inherit the earth. And no group of people, Vonnegut implicitly argues, is more enslaved than women and effeminate men. This is why Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-five is often described as weak and unmanly and it is also why in Breakfast of Champions the three most sympathetic characters are an abused woman, a homosexual man named “Bunny,” and a cross-dressing man.

Women, Vonnegut seems to suggest, have at their core something more deeply human and good than most men. Their connection to that inalterably perfect sense of humanness is not as tarnished as the male gender, who pollute their being with lusts for power and abuse of their fellow man. It through women that we find the purest synthesis of the sublime and the tragic in what is human. It is impossible not to think back to Vonnegut’s character Rabo Karebekian from Breakfast of Champions and his painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony. That painting, which is a solid green field and a single strip of orange tape, Vonnegut explains, is a representation of “the immaterial core of every animal – the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent.” The “vertical, unwavering band of light” signifies the fact that “our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.” Though humans are “complex, tragic, and laughable,” there is an irrevocably “sacred part” of our humanity, that “awareness” represented in the painting by “an unwavering band of light” which symbolizes our potential for transcendent redemption not from the dead machinery of our bodies, but within them.

Jailbird has its own aesthetic defense of the human, though in this novel Vonnegut feminizes it and makes his case for the gendering of the human. This aesthetic argument comes after Starbuck has a chance encounter with Mary Kathleen O’Looney, his former lover who appears dirty and thoroughly homeless but is actually the majority stockholder in the RAMJAC Corporation, a corporation that owns 19 percent of the USA and is twice as large as the second largest American corporation. Mary takes Starbuck on a caper from the streets of Manhattan, to the depths of the Grand Central Station basement (where she lives in secrecy), to the very top of the Chrysler Building (which she anonymously owns through the RAMJAC Corporation), which is where Vonnegut places the showroom of the fictional American Harp Company. In this journey they traverse from the depths of the subterranean, yonic, and secure to the pinnacle of the phallocentric icon of capitalist exploitation, imperial might, and masculine folly. Yet at the climax of this phallic journey, there lies a serene Edenic paradise, a showroom for harps filled with sublime architectural splendor, a menagerie of “myriads of bright yellow little birds,” flowing fountains, sumptuous carpets mimicking lawns, benches and statues, and, of course, the magnificent harps themselves.

Harps, Vonnegut writes, are “very strange –looking instruments.” Rather than technological terrors like the sleek machines of industrialism, they are “impossible marriages between Greek columns and Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machines.” They are poetic contraptions of the human imagination that communicate the desire for transcendence through aesthetic sublimity. They are, as Vonnegut says, “machinery for making clumsy counterfeits of airborne souls.” Harps are thus an uncanny mannequin, a serene counterpart made to mimic the impossible splendor of humanity itself. “Harps,” Vonnegut explains, “are self-destructive incidentally.” The reader has this on good authority, as Walter F. Starbuck eventually finds himself, through the influence of his friend Mary Kathleen O’Looney, running the American Harp Company. Harps suffer from intense amounts of tension that is “so tremendous and unrelenting” that they quickly exhaust themselves and become unplayable. But even the unplayable harp contains within it that “unwavering band of light” of its capacity for awareness and thus transcendence. Vonnegut describes Mary herself in similar terms as the harp: “It was most touching. Only her body was decrepit. Her voice and the soul it implied might well have belonged still to what she used to be, and angrily optimistic eighteen-year-old.” In Emerson’s great essay Nature he poetically wrote, "A man is a god in ruins." Vonnegut unknowingly replies: A woman is a harp in ruins. To compare women to an object such as a harp may, at first blush, sound patronizing and rather anti-feminist, but Vonnegut upholds aesthetic bliss as higher than almost anything, and he has no real use for gods anyway. Being a harp in ruins is the most human aspiration we could strive for. Both Emerson and Vonnegut, appreciate the aesthetic in unconventional and pointedly political ways, and thus both fit into a grand tradition of American radicalism and imaginative compassion. Humans are thus the paradoxical manifestation of the sublime and the ruined, with both elements firmly bound together, Janus-like, aching for redemption and, ultimately, transcendence through an absurd dialectic of politico-aesthetic existence.

“For the love of God, Father, won’t you please grow up!”

Much of Vonnegut’s writing is the attempt to overcome the bitter loss of women in his life. His was a troubled childhood at times, and possessed something of a Poe-like quality. His mother committed suicide when he was serving in WWII and he found out, of all days, on Mother’s Day. His sister Alice, with whom he was inordinately close and who was something of a creative muse for him, died of cancer before Vonnegut’s career took off – an event that he documents extensively, if imaginatively, in his previous novel, Slapstick. Furthermore, Vonnegut publicly divorced, remarried, and his philandering with young women, sometimes his students, is now well known. In this biographical light, it is more obvious why Vonnegut should seek to rectify society’s relationship with women, as he was continually working on this in his personal and private life.

The loss of a mother weighs particularly heavy on Vonnegut’s writing, and suicidal women feature in a number of his works. In Jailbird Starbuck’s wife dies young, causing Starbuck’s son to break ties with his father, disillusioned by his incompetent paternal figure. Starbuck himself looses his will to live, explaining why he hardly resisted the ludicrous Watergate charges leveled against him. While the absence, abuse, and ultimate redemption of women features prominently in Jailbird, the machinations of patriarchy – both political and personal – round out the gendering of Vonnegut’s writing. In the autobiographical preface Vonnegut admits that what is now Jailbird was at first an attempt to reconcile himself with his father, who, as mentioned above, Vonnegut respected very little, owing to his giving up on life so soon. In this story which was never written, the reconciliation would have to happen in heaven, and posed some problems for Vonnegut, so the “story turned out to be perverse.” In heaven, Vonnegut (an atheist) speculates, “people could be any age they liked.” When the semi-biographical Vonnegut arrives in heaven he is dismayed to discover that his father chose to be only nine years old. As such, the adolescent Vonnegut, Sr. was an embarrassment. Bullies hassled him and the senior Vonnegut “would come running” to the junior Vonnegut “purple with rage.” The junior Vonnegut, who chose to be a sophisticated forty-four, “respectable, but still quite sexy too.” As this forty-four year old Vonnegut sought to impress his friends with his urbanity and wit, his nine year old father would run up to him and embarrass him by “bawling bloody murder and with his little pecker waving in the breeze.” Vonnegut’s mother chose to be sixteen, and wouldn’t have anything to do with Vonnegut, Sr., so Vonnegut is stuck with his father, imploring him, “For the love of God, Father, won’t you please grow up!” As you could imagine, the story “insisted on being a very unfriendly” one and Vonnegut gave it up in favor of Jailbird.

Though Vonnegut gave this story up, the shadow of paternal estrangement and Oedipal frustration hangs over the entirety of Jailbird. Vonnegut eternally seeks to overcome the parental difficulties he faced and wishes to come to grips with his parents’ failures so he can move forward and forge his own subjectivity. Since his mother committed suicide before Vonnegut could fully come into his adulthood and his father lived his life out in blissful adolescence, Vonnegut never had the chance to confront his elder generation, repress his Oedipal anxieties, and healthily sublimate his neuroses. The twin figures of the yonic Grand Central Station and the phallic Chrysler Center stand in for his twin anxieties and his desire to overcome the tyranny of the patriarchal. This is no reductionist biographical psychoanalysis, however, but a serious political desire for Vonnegut. Vonnegut has, to a degree, sublimated his anxieties in the literary and the political, and by working through his Oedipal phase in public before readers he seeks to extend the personal to the public by yoking psychological emancipation to the political. Vonnegut’s project is thus very much in line with the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who in his seminal work Eros and Civilization writes of “non-repressive sublimation,” which he describes in the following way:

The sexual impulses, without losing their erotic energy, transcend their immediate object and eroticize normally non- and anti-erotic relationships between the individuals, and between them and their environment.

By yoking individuals to their environment in such a way, Marcuse argues, the liberation of the individual psyche from his or her neuroses (or, in worse cases, psychoses), becomes “a political matter,” and thus overcomes the bourgeois and individualistic limitations of traditional aesthetic, psychoanalytic, and political traditions. Furthermore, by tying the aesthetic, the psychological, and the political to the Biblical, Vonnegut reaches into the ur-history of all those phenomena, and seeks to restart history again, this time a history without its rottenness and intermittent madness. "I still believe in the revolution, Walter," says Mary Kathleen O’Looney, even as she is obviously not far from death, a beautiful woman trapped in a ruined body. Her name, Mary, is not irrelevant, as Mary is the ur-mother or redemptive eschatology and, in an Oedipal scheme, the most important woman in history (perhaps after Eve, who Vonnegut often mentions in other novels, most notably Slaughterhouse-five). “We will remake this country and then the world,” she boasts. “God must have sent you,” she tells him, affirming his role as the unlikely evangelist. And it is through Mary, that Oedipal ur-mother, Vonnegut argues, that the world can be remade in the vision of a redeemed and secularized Christianity. In an inversion of Hegel’s prediction of the end of history, Vonnegut, siding with a redemptive Marxian tradition, insists that we must instead begin history again if we are to repair the wreckage of history. Such repairs begin, as always, with the mother, the first woman. In Breakfast of Champions Vonnegut subverted the myth of the fall from grace. In Jailbird his Oedipal impulse draws him back even further in mythology, to the moment of creation itself, and he subverts the Bible's own mortal sin, beginning with a first man. Biologically, theologically, and psychologically the first human is a woman. Before the Messiah comes the mother, and Vonnegut subverts the creation myth to set things right again in attempt to reroute history down the path of redemption rather than destruction. He regains the mother and redeems her in order to redeem humanity itself. Only through this can Paradise be regained and, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, what is smashed be made whole again.

Read Matthew Gannon's opening essay, "Kurt Vonnegut Has Come Unstuck in Time"

Read Matthew Gannon's previous reviews:

Player Piano, the One-Dimensional Society, and the Emergency Brake of History
Vonnegut in Jerusalem: A Report on the Absurdity of Language and Media
The Tragedy of Eliot Rosewater, Prince of Indiana
Vonnegut on Truth and Aesthetics in a Nonmoral Sense

Of Man’s Rude Slapstick, Yes, And God’s

2013-07-26T11:45:00.000-04:00

by Wilson Taylor

“And how did we then face the odds,

of man’s rude slapstick, yes, and God’s?

Quite at home and unafraid,

Thank-you,

in a game our dreams re-made.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick, 1976

American Pastoral

Kurt Vonnegut identifies his eighth novel, Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!, as “the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography.” Indeed, Slapstick is a highly personal novel, one that, like his others, confronts the ultimate absurdity of the human condition and responds with a subversive love. It is also presented as the autobiography of Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain (born as Wilbur Rockefeller Swain), the former President of the United States and current King of Manhattan. The novel is ostensibly “about desolated cities and spiritual cannibalism and incest and loneliness and lovelessness and death, and so on. It depicts myself and my beautiful sisters as monsters, and so on.” And this is true — the core of the novel is a meditation on alienation and loneliness. But the beating heart of Slapstick is Vonnegut’s honest and painful appraisal of his relationship with his sister and himself, and, with characteristic hope and humanism, the transformative power of love and art.

In the “Prologue,” Vonnegut reflects on his difficulty in dealing with his sister’s death, and his desire to keep her alive in memory. He even suggests that his sister “was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved.” Vonnegut’s discussion of “unity” is highly significant, for the novel is an attempt to overcome alienation and achieve some singularity of identity. Furthermore, Vonnegut’s worries that memories of his sister have “begun to fade away,” rendering Slapstick in part a lamentation for Vonnegut’s loss of creative and stylistic unity. Vonnegut’s eighth novel is very much a meditation on the importance of art and the artistic process. However, Vonnegut, imagining himself as a semi-literate “monster,” worries that, perhaps, pain has subsumed his imagination, that schism has torn his identity. Swain quotes Dostoevsky — “One sacred memory from childhood is perhaps the best education.” One is reminded of Eliot Rosewater in Slaughterhouse Five, wondering if that is “enough anymore.” Nevertheless, Slapstick is an attempt, through art, to transmute the sacred memory of childhood in order to still the heartsick cry of lonely and lost adults.

Hauntingly, Vonnegut’s discussion of his sister’s death achieves catastrophic implications in the novel. Her death and the destruction of the world coincide — Vonnegut’s emotions destabilize the world. Despite this bleak apocalypticism, Slapstick mounts a defense of love and fantasy as the only bulwark against absurdity. As alluded to in the title, Slapstick is fundamentally an absurdist discussion of contemporary America. Slapstick, published at the nation’s bicentennial, mounts a few prescient critiques of contemporary America. Vonnegut presents a disintegrating America after the squandering of natural resources and paranoia over an increasingly powerful China, and he presents an absurdist scheme to forge social bonds in an increasingly lonely nation. Despite this absurdity, however, Vonnegut mounts trenchant critiques against the increasingly unstable foundations of the modern self and modern world. Slapstick’s subtitle is “Lonesome No More!” and Vonnegut’s chief concern in the novel is the alleviation of lonesomeness, which he identifies as the greatest disease of modernity.

In Slapstick, Vonnegut explores through allegory two forms of alienation that lead to lonesomeness, which Vonnegut sees as a distinctive quality of modern America. Vonnegut suffers both from the rootlessness of late capitalism and separation from his sister. In Vonnegut’s novelistic conceit, moreover, his separation from his sister results in a schizophrenia of self — the two together create a complete whole. The schism in Vonnegut’s family and self adopts cosmic importance. Both of these forms of alienation suggest deep anxieties of modernity, which Vonnegut attempts to alleviate through the transformative power of art and through a subversive love. At the heart of the novel, Vonnegut seems to consider the question that haunts T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland — “Where are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / out of this stony rubbish?”

Epistemology of the Closet

Slapstick presents itself as the autobiography of Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, who writes his memoir as a meditation on apocalypse. He writes as the last President of the United States, elected before the nation crumbled due to peak oil, plague, and variable gravity. The novel oscillates between Swain’s discussion of his life on a dystopian Manhattan (called “The Island of Death,” or even “Skyscraper National Park”) and his memory of his prior life, mainly focused on his childhood with Eliza. Wilbur and Eliza are “dizygotic twins,” described as “neanderthaloids” and “monsters.” Due to the shame of their aristocratic parents, Wilbur and Eliza are quarantined in an old mansion in Galen, Vermont. Their lives in this mansion are schizophrenic — they perform the role of the idiots they are expected to be, but privately pursue a creative life of the mind. While both Wilbur and Eliza are severely handicapped when alone, when they combine their intelligences they achieve an intellectual acuity on par with Einstein. Together, the two can speak several languages, synthesize complex scientific theories (such as that of variable gravity, which allowed the Egyptians to build the pyramids and which is later controlled by the Chinese), and conceive utopian schemes. One such scheme, “Lonesome No More,” offers each American a new middle name, insinuating each individual into sprawling, artificial families. “Lonesome No More” assumes major importance in the imagination of the novel.

Vonnegut continues to explore his own Edenic imagination in Slapstick. Wilbur’s relationship with Eliza — which parallels Vonnegut’s own relationship with his sister — is explicitly framed as a pre-lapsarian love. Their mansion is continually referred to as a “Paradise,” their fall from which is to be a major defining trauma of their lives. In the mansion, the two can slip into an “alternate universe,” a clandestine network of passageways and chambers hidden within the mansion. The siblings pursue a bicameral existence, split between inwardness and outwardness, in a microcosm of the schizophrenia of the American consciousness and experience. (Indeed, the mansion is partially a metaphor for identity — Vonnegut celebrates interiority, but is concerned about the homogenizing effects of societal expectation.) Inside these interior spaces, the two pursue true collaborate scholarship and achieve un-alienated and unmediated love. Tellingly, they access this interiority, this “alternate universe,” through slipping through a secret passageway hidden inside a grandfather clock. Again, Vonnegut’s revolutionary use of time opens new modes of being for the protagonists. Wilbur and Eliza subvert historical time by dwelling outside of it. They retreat, slipping through gaps in time, into an a-temporal Eden. They cultivate a sublime happiness — “they were innocent great apes, with limited means for doing mischief, which...is all that human beings were ever meant to be.”

Wilbur and Eliza’s traumatic fall from Paradise impels an existential crisis for both siblings. They are separated from each other, thereby reduced to “idiocy.” Upon their expulsion from Eden, the two adopt alternate identities to communicate their fallen-ness — Bobby and Betty Brown. Because he can read and write, Wilbur is thrust into a position of privilege, while Eliza is hidden in remedial programs. Wilbur more or less forgets about Eliza, drowning himself in narcotics and practicing medicine before running for President. As she reminds him periodically, the Platonic love the two shareis integral to their identities, and their infrequent reunions result in “orgies” of unrestrained creativity. In one poignant discourse, Eliza — described, in her helicopter, as a “terrible mechanical angel” — quotes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 39, speaking “from Heaven of separation and love.” Crucially, the separation of the twins strikes Vonnegut as creating a schism in subjectivity. Wilbur, without Eliza, is not complete. His existence is alienated, and his desire to restore his love with his sister is also a desire to heal himself.

In imagining of the singular mind of these dizygotic twins, Vonnegut draws on classical conceptions of love and alienation first voiced by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. In theorizing on the creation of humankind, Aristophanes posits that humans were first created as “round wholes.” These complete beings led a war against heaven, and Zeus, in his wrath, split the whole into two beings who could incompletely overcome their punitive alienation through human love. The individual, he suggests, is fundamentally alienated, and seeks wholeness in community. Jacques Lacan also read the Garden of Eden and the subsequent Fall as a narrative of wholeness and alienation, a narrative which is mapped onto childhood and which Vonnegut employs in Slapstick. Crucially, the Edenic relationship between Wilbur and Eliza cultivates both love and creativity — two of Vonnegut’s essential components for a meaningful life.

Eliza’s death in a Martian landslide inspires a beautiful passage of destruction, as Vonnegut describes the overlap between the melancholy of Wilbur and the weight of the world falling upon him. “An extraordinary feeling came over me, which I first thought to be psychological in origin, the first rush of grief... I could not pick up my feet.” Vonnegut continues to narrate apocalypse, as a sudden increase in gravity brought down church bells, airplanes, bridges, and so on. “It was terrible.” These variations of gravity — wrought by the Chinese — dissolve Western Civilization. The United States is carved into fiefdoms (but Vonnegut does clarify that, despite the occasional wars between — for instance, the King of Michigan, the Hoosiers of Indiana, or the Sooners of Oklahoma — these wars are “no massacres,” and that the familial connections between groups has tempered violence.)

After Eliza’s death, Wilbur attempts to sublimate his grief into an elaborate and absurd scheme to overcome lonesomeness. He runs for President on the successful platform, “Lonesome No More,” intending to establish artificial families for all Americans. Instead of a nation of disconnected and alienated individuals, Vonnegut conceives of a true community, connected by complex familial bonds, where everyone “belongs.” In a 1973 interview with Playboy, Vonnegut claims, “human beings will be happier — not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie — but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.” Indeed, Wilbur’s proposal does alleviate loneliness. The nation, even as it crumbles due to lack of resources and variable gravity, finally finds happiness and community. Swain is able to create a home in the lobby in the ruins of the Empire State Building. After empire, all that remains is the individual, yearning for completeness. He surrounds himself with candlesticks and dreams of his lost love.

This American Life

Slapstick articulates Vonnegut’s desire firmly to root the human. If the modern self suffers from rootlessness and meaninglessness, Vonnegut attempts to alleviate this anxiety through planting the human in history, place, and, most importantly, imagination. The human must belong, and the schizophrenia of postwar America primarily results from this lack of belonging. He laments in the “Prologue” of the de-centering effect of anti-German sentiment in World War I inflicted upon his family. Vonnegut’s had been a leading German family in Indianapolis, but, he remarks, “my brother and sister and I were raised as though Germany were as foreign to us as Portugal... We lost thousands of years in a very short time.” History, a shared narrative, is necessary to alleviate the Cartesian terror of modern selfhood. When the Vonneguts lost their ontological anchor in historical narrative, they “became a lot less interesting, especially to itself.” As a result, Vonnegut remarks bitterly, “we were interchangeable parts in the American machine.”

This radical uprootedness and existential alienation is an essential component of capitalism. As Marx suggests beautifully in The Communist Manifesto, in a passage that resonates with Vonnegut’s discussion of modern alienation in Slapstick, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is made profane, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life.” This dissolving of human bonds radically unmoors the self, and the sublimation of identity into the “American machine” portends a deep existential dread for Vonnegut. “Where are the roots that clutch?”

Hannah Arendt famously identifies the “atomization” of communities as a distinctively violent characteristic of modernity. This atomizing process tears asudnder the social world, destroying communities and families and establishing a cult of the individual. The atomized individual is reduced to the self alone, and the self is both the foundation and ideal of modern capitalism. Vonnegut digs underneath this Thatcher-ian construct and uncovers a deeper existential crisis. He lampoons this dangerous ideal through the insufferable Dr. Cordiner, who separates Wilbur and Eliza, demanding they each learn to “paddle [their] own canoe.” She explains, in a rant suffused with irony, “this is the United States of America, where nobody has the right to rely on anybody else — where everybody learns to make his or her own way.”

The consequences, however, of paddling one’s own canoe, as it were, radically de-stabilize Vonnegut’s protagonists. Indeed, the conception of artificial families should be read as an allegory for Wilbur’s impossible desire to re-commune with his sister and achieve an un-alienated existence. Vonnegut does open this possibility of reunion after death (although Vonnegut repeatedly mentions the monotony of the afterlife), and Wilbur and Eliza seek to overcome their alienation and find a lost wholeness in the afterlife, referred to as the Turkey Farm. American life is one of radical loneliness and alienation, both from others and within the existential self. American life is also one of total disenchantment. Vonnegut yearns to re-enchant the world and to make himself whole again.

Indeed, the successes and virtues of Swain’s plan restore to the legions of interchangeable selves a firm sense of identity and place. “We need all the relatives we can get in a country as big and clumsy as ours,” Swain suggests, and it is easy to read both Vonnegut’s existential anxieties and disdain for modern capitalism through such statements. Today, when the nebulous cult of “family values” consists mainly of reactionary capitulations of patriarchy and late capitalism, Vonnegut’s construction of these families cultivates truly subversive communities. These flourishing sites of imagination and meaning connect disaffected Americans throughout the nation, paying no heed to race, gender, class, and so on. In so doing, Vonnegut imagines a truly benevolent and beloved community, a de-centralized utopia of familial bonds of love and fellowship. “Life was but a dream,” he sings.

Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!

At the heart of Slapstick is a meditation on the absurdity of human life, and the overwhelming imperative to make life meaningful. The name of the novel actually derives from Vonnegut’s sister — “slapstick” was among her dying words. In the recognition of the ultimate meaninglessness of life, Vonnegut wants merely to “bargain in good faith with [his] destiny.” Life is meaningless, but it is for that reason that the human must be celebrated. To become merely an “interchangeable part in the American machine” is to dissolve the human into the vast mediating structures of the state and economy, leaving little room for celebration. In response, Vonnegut yearns for unmediated human communion, but doubts if such recourse is possible. He wants to restore his Edenic love with this sister, and through that love restore himself. As Frank O’Hara laments in “Meditations in an Emergency,” “I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.”

Swain dies, “proud of what he and his sister had done to reform their society.” Indeed, Swain’s autobiography is a celebration of his relationship with his sister, and it functions in the same way for Vonnegut. In addition to his autobiography, Swain leaves a small poem, intended as an epitaph:

“And how did we then face the odds,

of man’s rude slapstick, yes, and God’s?

Quite at home and unafraid,

Thank-you,

in a game our dreams re-made.”

Swain’s intended epitaph reinforces Vonnegut’s themes of forging meaning through art, imagination, and community. Life is meaningless, but through imagination the human can and must re-make the world.

At the conclusion of Swain’s biography, he describes his birthday party. Friends had brought him candles for his innumerable candlesticks (he is known as the King of Candlesticks), and they lit them all. “Standing among all those tiny, wavering lights, I felt as though I were God, up to my knees in the Milky Way.” This sacralizing move is essential for Vonnegut. Despite the absurdity of the human condition, art must insist on the sacredness of the human. Swain, imagining himself divine, meditates on the cosmic centrality of the human, despite overwhelming meaninglessness. Slapstick is superseded by the sacred.

Read Wilson Taylor's opening essay, "Irony and Authenticity in the American Imagination"

Read Wilson Taylor's previous reviews:
"San Lorenzo Mon Amour"
"The Kings of Infinite Space and The Sirens of Titan"
"Oscillating to Eternity: Apocalypse and Eden in Vonnegut's Telegraphic Schizophrenic Novel"

Vonnegut on Truth and Aesthetics in a Nonmoral Sense

2013-07-20T12:58:00.000-04:00

by Matthew Gannon
(with drawings by Kurt Vonnegut)

“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions – they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense,” 1873

“Trout sat back and thought about the conversation. He shaped it into a story, which he never got around to writing until he was an old, old man. It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cared what the meanings of words were anymore.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions, 1973

The Voice of God

At the start of Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut’s seventh novel, coming on the heels of the peerless Slaughterhouse-five – the author makes a careful and prudent announcement to clear himself of any legal charges that might be leveled at him from taking the slogan of a cereal brand as the title of his book:

“The expression ‘Breakfast of Champions’ is a registered trademark of General Mills, Inc., for use on a breakfast cereal product. The use of the identical expression as the title for this book is not intended to indicate an association with or sponsorship by General Mills, nor is it intended to disparage their fine products.”

That expression “intended to disparage their fine products,” could not possibly be laced with any more irony and intentional mockery. Vonnegut has every intention of disparaging products. Somewhat paradoxically, Vonnegut couldn’t care less about General Mills, or any other particular brands or corporations. Vonnegut does not set out to demean any particular product but rather his goal is to deconstruct the very notion of “products” and lampoon the role of commercials and commodities in society. General Mills is not the only brand name that finds its ways between the covers of Vonnegut’s novel. Dozens of brand names – many of which are fictional – appear as the butt-end of Vonnegut’s bleak satire that illustrates the inanity of warping language for the sole purpose of selling products.

At the outset, the plot of Breakfast of Champions is remarkably simple. Vonnegut himself states the plot in the first sentence of the first chapter: “This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” The first man is Dwayne Hoover, resident of Midland City – an all-American suburban wasteland – and successful local businessman whose main trade is selling Pontiacs. The second man is Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut’s alter ego who has appeared in a number of previous Vonnegut novels. Trout’s main business is writing hundreds of pulp science fiction stories and novels, installing storm windows, and predicting the impending apocalypse to his parakeet Bill. Dwayne Hoover represents all that is respectable and business-like in modern America, but he secretly harbors “bad chemicals” that are about to drive him to insanity – particularly after reading Trout’s writings. Trout represents everything that is unrespectable and despised in America: creative drive, poverty, ugliness, and a healthy skepticism of the powerful elite that boast of progress. Kilgore Trout is heading to Midland City where is to be the keynote speaker at the Midland City Festival of the Arts Festival. By the time he gets there, Dwayne Hoover, whose Pontiac dealership is in Midland City, will be ripe for his complete meltdown, which comes when he reads the outrageous things in Kiglore Trout’s pulp fiction.

Dwayne Hoover is a respectable businessman, but secretly insane. Kilgore Trout is a raving doomsayer whose only friend is a parakeet, but he is actually completely sane. This reversal of sanity and respectability can be found in a number of Vonnegut’s works – particularly God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – but it is in this novel that Vonnegut explicates the curious linguistic basis of contemporary world-historical insanity. At the heart of Vonnegut’s linguistic analysis of culture and madness is his criticism of advertising, hence the sloganistic title of the novel.

At its most basic level, the novel constitutes an ironic appropriation of corporate ideology in order to explode the fetid waters of capitalist stultification. It constitutes an emptying-out of the containers of ideology – including an emptying-out of Vonnegut’s own literary imagination – in order to cast aside that which has been profaned so as to cling to that which is sacred. Vonnegut laments in the preface to the book that Armistice Day, one of his favorite holidays has been abolished to make room for Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was a day of remembrance for when the end of World War I, when “millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.” Vonnegut says that he talked to veterans who lived through that moment in World War I. They told him, “in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God.” Because of this, Vonnegut insists, “Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.”

Kurt Vonnegut was an avowed secular humanist and had no patience for the dull ideologies of religion. Nevertheless, he believe in a sacred kind of humanism, and still respects the Voice of God, even if it is just the sound of peace settling in the corners of the earth. Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut’s effort to throw away all that is not sacred and to keep all that he. “So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.” This assertion comes at the end of the preface. The rest of the novel consists in Vonnegut attempting to throw away all that is not sacred. “This book,” writes Vonnegut, “is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders.” Conversely, this book is also quite obviously an attempt to redeem that which is in need of it, that which has been written out of history or obscured by those who desire the unsacred. In Vonnegut’s paradoxical, humanist, and re-sacralizing eschatology two things stand out as particularly in need of redemption: language and humanity.

Value’s Last Tango

Vonnegut’s novel traffics in the jargon of corporatism – the title of the novel is itself a corporate slogan and the brand names and logos come in spades. Vonnegut deals in slogans, logos, clichés, and other pithy trappings of profiteers. The goal of this co-opting is, through ironic humor, to illustrate the utter sacrilege such use of phrases and logos commits on the sacredness of language and the innocence of the human imagination. As communicative beings, language becomes a sacred bond between humans, and slogans and other corporatized media-speech threatens the trustworthiness of language. At on point in Breakfast of Champions Vonnegut expounds a just-so story about the origins of ideas. Ideas, he explains, were never very important to humans because they were so hard to make a reality. As such, it used to be easy to agree with someone just because you were friends with them. Camaraderie came cheaply, and ideas became “badges of friendship or enmity.” But then something changed: “Earthlings discovered tools.” With the capabilities of an industrialized society, “agreeing with friends could be a form of suicide or worse.” But did that stop the cheap – and even crazy – ideas from flowing or from people quickly adopting their friends ideas for friendship’s sake? Not at all. “Earthlings when on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.” Thus ideas because lethal forces, resulting in the madness of genocides, wars, holocausts, slavery, and exploitation. Trafficking in lunatic ideas, humanity paid its price in blood. And to make matters worse, there was nothing humanity could do: “There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth.”

The cuckoo ideas Vonnegut speaks of aren’t always apocalyptic though. Sometimes they are plainly ridiculously and highly amenable to his satiric appropriation. The most notable silly misuse of language comes from advertising, which will warp language so out of shape just to sell a product. Advertising bookends the novel, which Vonnegut dedicating the book to a woman he knew during the Great Depression who wrote ads for a department story. Vonnegut wrote copy for her as a teenager, and, according to Vonnegut, she taught him a thing or two about how to write and think critically. Those familiar with Vonnegut’s biography will know that this wasn’t his last foray into the marketing world. After he returned from World War II he worked in public relations for General Electric in Schenectady, New York – which explains his abiding interest in science and robotics, as well as setting stories in upstate New York. General Electric forms the concluding bookend of the novel’s sloganeering. Vonnegut rips a line from GE itself – “Progress is our most important product” – and ironically puts it on a sign in a run-down and corrupt section of Breakfast of Champions’ urban setting. Vonnegut didn’t write that particular piece of copy, but he could have, had he been assigned to, and his ironic appropriation of it makes clear his desire to discard his public relations past for being insufficiently sacred.

Vonnegut's drawing of the PYRAMID truck

Littering Breakfast of Champions’ landscape are similar appropriations of brand names and ironic slogans - many of which he actually drew himself, albeit childishly, with a felt-tipped pen. Kilgore Trout, when hitchhiking across the country to attend the Midland City Festival of the Arts, finds himself in a tractor-trailer with the company name “PYRAMID” emblazoned in enormous letters across the vehicle. He asks the driver why a technological marvel of a truck, barreling across the country, would be named after something that has sat motionless for thousands of years. “I never saw anything that was less like a pyramid than this truck," he explains to the driver. In response, the driver is irked that Trout would have the audacity to ask why someone chose a particular word for their company’s name: “The driver's answer was prompt. It was peevish, too, as though he thought Trout was stupid to have to ask a question like that. ‘He liked the sound of it,’ he said. ‘Don't you like the sound of it?’” It is at this point that Trout concocts the story in the epigraph to this essay, about a planet where all the words keep falling apart into various pleasant-sounding music.

A sacred miracle is a tourist trap

This instability of language and truth is exacerbated by the commodification of language. Words themselves no longer function to communicate something so quaint as truths. Truth, Vonnegut writes via Rabo Karebekian, is “some crazy thing my neighbor believes.” Language nowadays almost exclusive serves to deceive, particularly in the service of selling some product. Language has become an advertising media-speech and a marketing ploy. This is how a pyramid can be a truck, or, to draw on other examples from Breakfast of Champions, a sacred miracle is a cheap tourist attraction, a galaxy is a car, Excelsior is a fire extinguisher, and so on. The potential of truth has been positively stripped away from any of these words, never mind the myriad products that offer “happiness” or “comfort” or “ease” or “satisfaction” or “fulfillment.” None of these words mean anything anymore, at least not what they used to mean. They now only mean what they could be meant to be selling. They are bound to their commodity and cannot mean anything outside of that. Progress is a product, according to GE, and nothing more. In some strange admixture of Marxism and post-structuralism, it is not unreasonable to say that there is no longer anything outside the text of the commodity.

Though Nietzsche wrote a century before Vonnegut, his concerns for language, truth, and human understanding were remarkably similar, as his quote in the epigraph to this essay demonstrates. In his essay “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense,” Nietzsche thought that language evolved simply as a way of convenience in communicating, as a tool, and that words are more like metaphors attempting to communicate rather than proclamations of absolute truth. Nietzsche’s main concern was not in advertising or capitalism ideology, but rather people mistaking metaphors for dogmatic truths, such as those expounded by science, religion, or social convention. His concern can be adapted to the actions of sloganeers though, whose goal is to essentially take advantage of this metaphoric condition of language to their advantage. General Electric faces no repercussions for claim that progress is a product that must be acquired through their corporation because the concept of “progress” has no genuine meaning beyond itself. This, not coincidentally, is why Nietzsche has such appeal to post-structuralist thinking. Vonnegut, however, does not accept this state of language, and resist the idea that nothing is truly sacred. As a fundamentally existentialist and humanist thinker, Vonnegut continually insists that meaning can be constructed from the void, and that this itself is the meaning outside the text. Vonnegut rejects the dogmatic values of social convention and religious tradition, but he does not forsake values altogether, and through his ironic appropriation of slogans, mottos, and logos, he laments the de-sacralizing of language and the puncturing of value wreaked by marketers and publicists.

Advertising seeks to take advantage of this slipperiness and convention-driven notion of truth. Their goal is to misuse language as much as possible in the effort to promote their product while minimizing the risk of what Nietzsche calls the “unpleasant, hated consequences” that could result in their lying. In a bureaucratized world, this means making as many outrageous claims and drawing upon the most improbable imagery to sell a product while attempting to ward off the potential lawsuits from violating peoples’ expectations. According to Nietzsche, humanity exchanges “truths for illusions,” and words are simply “the boldest metaphors.” When applied to marketing strategies, the results are a totally deceptive language with little connection to that which is genuinely human. A truck is a pyramid, a sacred miracle is a tourist attraction, and so on and so forth.

The concern for misused language, and the reason that Vonnegut insists that we no longer live in a “sacred” world where people can “hear the Voice of God,” comes from his genuine apprehension that language has become entirely dehumanizing and put to the uses of exploitation rather than expanding the understandings of human experience. In his seminal text Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard explores many of the same themes as Nietzsche with regard to language and truth. Due to what Baudrillard – as well as most post-structuralists – saw as the preeminence of text, he developed his theory of simulations, which he likens to the process of drawing a map. The map not only informs the user about the territory, but in a strange sense, creates the territory – or at least the viable ways in which the user can make sense of the territory. In the current era, says Baudrillard, “it is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory.” The map not only guides the user, but stakes out all possible interpretations of the territory such that what is real is limited to what the map claims is real and comprehensible. “It is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.” When this logic is extended further, the result is a compounding of what Nietzsche recognized over a century ago: namely, that language no longer refers to anything in actuality, but rather is a metaphor, or to use Baudrillard’s term, a simulation, of reality.” It is no longer anything but operational,” Baudrillard argues, and no longer relates to reality as such. “It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.”

The contemporary era is thus the “era of simulation,” which entails not an abnegation of the real, but rather a “hyperreal,” which masks “any distinction between the real and the imaginary.” It is hard to imagine a linguistic state less amenable to the twisted lies of advertising and capitalist ideology. “Simulation,” says Baudrillard, “threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary.’” As such, it is impossible to “unmask” the simulation, because it merely masks the fact that underneath it there is nothing to begin with. There is no truth behind the simulation, because “it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.” With the void of reality, there can only be power and exploitation. “Behind the baroqueness of images hides the éminence grise of politics,” and this is the point at which political ideology masks the genuine suffering with its onslaught of information and denigration of meaning.

By desiring a sacred – or re-sacralized – language, Vonnegut does not imagine a pristine language that is buffered against actual human usage. It is quite the opposite, as Vonnegut praises impoliteness and consistently pokes fun at manners and the stuffy formality of corporate culture. Sacredness for Vonnegut constitutes a re-humanizing of language and a decommodification of linguistic culture. By culling together corporate cultural mores into this novel, he locates the absurdity of capitalized language and profit-driven semiotics. Vonnegut’s semiotic parody is simultaneously a search for what lies behind the text and behind the fetishization of commodity.

Mauvaise Foi

Vonnegut’s previous novel, Slaughterhouse-five, represents his greatest turn away from narrative as a paradigm for fiction writing. Nevertheless, in Breakfast of Champions Vonnegut makes his aversion to narrative explicit in an unprecedented way. He opens the book with a meditation on his own role as an author, claiming that he feels “programmed to write,” in an attempt to minimize the authority of the writer and the notion of artistic genius – two mainstays of modernist though. In Slaughterhouse-five Vonnegut demeans his own work as “this lousy little book” and described his authorial role as “an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls.” In Breakfast of Champions his furthers this skepticism by suggestively asking, “What do I myself think of this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but I always feel lousy about my books.” Vonnegut endeavors to set himself up as the anti-prophet, explicitly remarking that the guidance of the muses or any other modernist versions thereof do not run through him. He is programmed to write, so his writes, nothing more and nothing less.

Fiction, Vonnegut speculates, is an inherently solipsistic activity, and it is a wonder that readers can get something out of a writers work at all. Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut thinks, is an attempt “to clear my head of all the junk in there.” This explains the numerous childish drawings dispersed throughout the text. All the flags, the assholes, the slogans, logos, animals, and so on are nothing more than clutter, weighing Vonnegut down, waiting to be cathartically expelled. He describes the book as a project of “cleansing and renewing.” This extends not only to symbols, but characters too. Characters such as Eliot Rosewater and Kilgore Trout have been cropping up in Vonnegut’s previous novels and it is now time for him to set them free. At the end of Breakfast of Champions Vonnegut really does set Kilgore Trout free. Engaging in high-level meta-fiction, Vonnegut writes about himself, the author, approaching Trout on a back road in Midland City and telling him, much to Trout’s chagrin, and telling him, “you are free, you are free.”

Though Vonnegut often maintains that his reasons for liberating his characters, jettisoning oft-used symbols, and eschewing narrative is a personal endeavor for the sole benefit of lifting psychological burdens from the author himself, he also, somewhat contradictorily, infuses his efforts with world historical importance. For example, when, at the end of the novel, he inserts himself into the narrative in order to approach Kilgore Trout and inform him of his freedom, he likens himself to Tolstoy, who freed his serfs, and Jefferson, who freed his slaves. He quite ironically compares himself to these Great Men Of History (my term) to demonstrate the importance of his project to “set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my career.”

Of course, it is inherently ironic to juxtapose literary characters with actually living slaves and serfs – something the highly historically and socially conscious Vonnegut is well aware of. Nevertheless, Vonnegut’s depiction of fiction elevates it beyond lousy little books or authors that are old farts with their memories and Pall Malls. Vonnegut genuinely believes fiction – particularly narrative fiction – to be a world-historical force, capable of shaping ideology and historical events alike. Narrative, Vonnegut suggests, accounts for the way people lead their lives: “they were doing their best to live like people invented in story books.” Narrative surely tells people mundane and harmless ways to lead their life, but it also has disastrous effects. Vonnegut supposes that so many Americans find it acceptable to shoot each other because “it was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.” So many people find it acceptable that the government treats them “as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues,” because that is how authors treat “bit-part players in their made-up tales.” It is a miserable idea that people can imagine themselves as bit-part players in their own made-up world.

Vonnegut solution to this depressing scenario is the rejecting narrative altogether, something he makes explicit in Breakfast of Champions but tacitly demonstrates in many of his novels. “Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling.” Vonnegut departs from those who wish to draw simplistically on conventional narratives depicting humans as sane and society as reasonable. The world has gone mad – mad with nuclear ambition, imperialistic urges, violent tendencies, glorifications of inequality and material excess – and Vonnegut endeavors to depict it as such. “Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order.”

Part of this enterprise is Vonnegut’s curious way of treating human beings, which he insists cannot be reduced to mere characters. Humans are complex beings, part crude machines lumbering around and interacting with each other and part transcendent beings striving to make sense of their world. Vonnegut treats derisively those who embody the role of a character for the sake of ease or simplicity. In a deeply Sartrean move, Vonnegut describes his own character Bonnie MacMahon, a waitress in Midland City. Bonnie, Vonnegut writes, adapts to the chaos of the world by dressing in a thoroughly predictable way, saying predictable things, and generally adopting a predictable attitude that people will find endlessly inoffensive. She dresses with a glittery uniform with just enough sex-appeal and delivers drinks to patrons with the exact same unfunny quip: “Breakfast of Champions.” Vonnegut is not unsympathetic, explaining that Bonnie acts this was as to please customers and thereby accrue as much in tips as possible. She’s had a hard life and needs as much financial security as possible. Nevertheless, Vonnegut awards more humanity to Rabo Karabekian, a minimalist painter attending the bar where Bonnie works. “Doesn’t that get tiresome?” Karabekian asks Bonnie after witnessing her elaborate act.

Vonnegut roundly criticizes people who act as if they are characters as well as authors who portray humanity as a collection of characters. This is precisely the notion of mauvaise foi [bad faith] that Sartre outlines in his text Being and Nothingness. Sartre too uses a waiter to illustrate his point that someone occupying or playing a role is avoiding their genuine humanity. Those who play the role of a character established by social convention or mores is thus rejecting their own humanity. As Sartre explains in Being and Nothingness, the waiter in café’s movement is “a little too precise” for the role of a waiter. “All his behavior seems to us a game… He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.” Vonnegut thus criticizes Bonnie MacMahon in similar terms, describing her behavior has too waitress-line. She has imagined a stock character “waitress” from the annals of social convention and seeks to be that when, in good faith she can be nothing of the sort since she can only ever be a human.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony

Rabo Karabekian, The Temptation of Saint Anthony

If Vonnegut does not think that humans are reducible to characters, social roles, or any other archetypes, his description of humanity is also not in purely negative terms. He posits a vision of humanity through the artwork of Rabo Karabekian, the aforementioned minimalist artist. Karabekian, who will take a leading role in Bluebeard, an upcoming Vonnegut novel, arrives at Midland City Festival of the Arts having recently sold the Festival on of his paintings, entitled The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Rather than the intricate, baroque Renaissance piece it sounds like, the painting is, in actuality, a minimalist artwork consisting of a twenty by sixteen foot canvas painted solidly commercial-brand green with a simple wall paint. Affixed to the canvass near the its left edge is a single vertical stripe of dayglo orange reflecting tape. “It was a scandal what the painting cost,” remarks Vonnegut. In order to rehabilitate the arts in the otherwise culturally barrenness American Middle West, the founders of the festive had paid fifty thousand dollars for the painting.

Vonnegut has little sympathy for so much money being spent on something which took such little effort to make. Karabekian, he writes, “knew he was surrounded by people who hated him for getting so much money for so little work.” He remarks bluntly: “Midland City was outraged. So was I.” After Karabekian patronizingly criticizes Bonnie MacMahon for being a too-perfect waitressing machine (though Vonnegut thinks she deserves it), Bonnie finally snaps. She “blew up,” making the stinging accusation that she’s “seen better pictures done by a five-year old.” At this point Vonnegut’s aesthetic allegiances become clear – he doesn’t support art being sold for such outrageous sums of money, but besides its hideous commodification, art serves as a truly redemptive and positive social force. Vonnegut, engaging in meta-fiction, muses about his innate nihilistic tendencies and generally hopeless outlook on life. “I did not expect Rabo Karabekian to rescue me,” but when Karabekian stood to respond to Bonnie, “he was majestic up there.”

When forced to explain the importance of his minimalist painting, consisting of a solid green field and a single strip of orange tape, Vonnegut – via Karabekian – delivers an astounding defense of modern and contemporary art. He claims the painting “shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out.” The single band of fluorescent tape represents “the immaterial core of every animal – the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent.” It is integral to every human, every animal, anything that lives with an awareness. This “vertical, unwavering band of light” signifies the fact that “our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.” In Vonnegut’s conception of humanity, everyone is just as equal as anyone else, because if you strip away all the layers of sociality, history, circumstances, and so on, you are left with a perfect and transcendent band of luminous awareness standing out from the chaos of the world. Thus Vonnegut reverses his earlier claim of bringing chaos to the world. He brings chaos to his literature, because the world is chaotic, but his destructive technique serves the transcendent end of illuminating the incontrovertible (secular) sanctity of being. All humans live in a world that Vonnegut describes as “complex, tragic, and laughable.” But through it all the “sacred part” of our humanity, our “awareness,” remains “an unwavering band of light.”

Pastiche, or, The Narrative of the End of Narratives

It is easy to label Vonnegut’s rejection of narrative-form as deeply postmodern. After all, Jean-François Lyotard’s proclamation of postmodernism as the rejection towards meta-narratives (or grand narratives) is practically the standard definition of postmodern. Even when not explicitly discussing the evils of narrative, Vonnegut’s anti-narrative style itself speaks to his undeniably postmodern themes. Slaughterhouse-five’s reformulation of the experience of time (Billy Pilgrim’s being “unstuck in time”) very closely matches concepts of montage – particular the theoretical application of montage by the likes of Vertov, Eisenstein, or even Godard. There are times, however, when Vonnegut’s technique seems almost closer to pastiche than montage, such as his ironic appropriation of slogans and logos and other trappings of corporate media-speech found in Breakfast of Champions.

The potential use of pastiche is problematic, because it ultimately undermines Vonnegut’s political project, which is to represent the interest of those who have been deemed unworthy or unrespectable in society. Pastiche, as formulated by the Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson, represents an ironic appropriate lacking in the satiric force needed to provoke real sociopolitical change. Pastiche, Jameson argues, is “free-floating and impersonal.” It is similar to parody, in that it ironically wears the linguistic mask of power, but it a “neutral practice” rather than a political practice. It is ultimately ”devoid of laughter and of any conviction.” These characteristics seem thoroughly unlike Vonnegut’s writing, which is steeped in conviction and filled with laughter. Nevertheless, Vonnegut’s appropriation of the linguistic dialects of late capitalism threaten to undermine conviction itself, particularly as Vonnegut’s project involves the herculean creative effort of re-sacralizing the world and redeeming humanity in the face of senseless commodification.

As Vonnegut’s most postmodern novel, Breakfast of Champions runs up against the limits of postmodernism, in which the deconstructive and pastiche tendencies of this paradigm inevitably fall into resigned disrepair once their ironic goal has been accomplished. Vonnegut himself was well aware of this novel’s pitfalls. In his 1981 books Palm Sunday, Vonnegut assesed his own novels by giving them a grade. Breakfast of Champions earns a meager C in this assessment, in stark contrast to his previous novel, Slaughterhouse-five, which earns him an A+ and is generally regarded as one of the greatest American novels ever written. Vonnegut’s pressing up against the limits of postmodernism is a lesson in the inexorable failure of postmodernism as an analytical framework, demonstrating its irrevocably collapsing in on itself. Ultimately postmodernism reveals itself to be nothing new, but just an expression of the existing contradictions inherent in society itself. As such, postmodernism is, at best, nothing but the self-aware manifestation of contradictory mainstream liberal though. At worst, postmodernism reveals itself to be a cloak for thoroughly conservative thinking, owing to the fact that the concept of genuine sociopolitical and cultural change is anathema to the postmodern movement. The resignation of postmodern and deconstructivist techniques too often lapses into a genuine support of the status quo over imaginative transformation of society. This resignation is surely what Vonnegut himself finds so flawed in Breakfast of Champions.

Despite the pressing the limits of postmodernism, Vonnegut is frankly aloof towards many of the main tenets of that theoretical paradigm. As I detailed above, Vonnegut rejects the resigned assumption that we are irrevocably bound to a text-based and inherently meaningless world. Vonnegut searches for meaning behind the text itself, which, to be sure, does not mean that he uncritically accepts traditional grand narratives. Furthermore, despite his pastiche tendencies and desire to discard all the unsacred ephemera trapped in his literary imagination, Breakfast of Champion is still a narrative, even if Vonnegut resists narrative. In fact, since Vonnegut is so explicit about his mistrust of narrative in this novel (whereas in previous novels he demonstrates, rather than explains his mistrust in narrative), it is possible to deem Breakfast of Champions, in the words of Fredric Jameson, a “narrative of the end of narratives.” Jameson describes many of quasi-postmodernist tendencies as deeply hypocritical, in that they employ narrative when attacking narrative. In Vonnegut’s case, however, this isn’t so much hypocritical as much as it is a brilliantly subtle defense of the concerns of modernism itself. That Vonnegut employs narrative, but still remains skeptical of it, is precisely why Vonnegut’s allegiances are ultimately not to postmodernism but to the extra-textual concerns of modernism and existential humanism. He certainly traffics in certain postmodern devices, but his desire is not the end of grand narratives, as Lyotard suggested, but rather the desire for a redemptive narrative.

Vonnegut postmodern tendencies can be seen as almost Brechtian then, and thus not truly postmodern in the way that many other authors so clearly are. Brecth, argues literary theorist Walter Benjamin, is a proponent of a “didactic” drama, in which the author rejects simplistic narratives and traditional emotional catharses in order to displace the reader/viewer and maker her complicit in her own self-education – specifically political education for Brecht and Vonnegut, as well as linguistic. In such a literary device, the task is, according to Benjamin “not so much the development of actions as the representation of conditions.” The idea is to uncover the underlying conditions of human existence. This can occur through “the interruption of happenings,” which serves to draw attention to the conditions, rather than the characters or the plot. The didactic play, Benjamin argues, creates a space in which the audience is not instructed or coerced into drawing conclusions or feelings dictated emotions, but instead one in which “every spectator is enabled to become a participant.” And what the participation entails is playing the role of a “teacher.” The author of the text does not authoritatively demand the audience learn, but rather create the conditions for the audience to teach themselves. In this sense didactic fiction is inherently autodidactic as well. By refraining from such things as traditional narrative device, coercive emotions, blunt characterization, and so on, Vonnegut (and Brecht) create the opportunity for readers to formulate their own particular compassionate understandings of the world itself. Such techniques share much in common with postmodernism, but have a fundamental distinction which must not get lost in the effort to classify a writer as so unclassifiable as Vonnegut.

In the beginning…

Perhaps the most striking moment of distinction between postmodernism’s skepticism of narrative and post-structuralism’s distrust of extra-textual meaning comes near the very end of Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut, after lampooning corporate slogans and logos and drawing maps of evil countries, decides it is time to redeem semiotics and employ them for humanistic and emancipatory purposes. In the last scene of the book Vonnegut writes himself into the plot, so that he can approach Kilgore Trout and notify him that he has been liberated from fiction, and is free to live his life as he pleases. In this act of profound compassion and anti-authoritarianism, Vonnegut speaks of the need for a symbol that can communicate all these joyous concepts to Trout all at once. Vonnegut wants to make Trout feel “a wholeness and inner harmony” because as a benevolent creator, Vonnegut loves his characters – as well as his readers. Vonnegut seeks to distinguish him from that other creator – The Creator – who saw fit to rain destruction on Sodom and Gomorrah, and populate his moral teachings with the constant threat of destruction. Trout is the modern Job, and Vonnegut could not help but break him down and take from him all potential happiness and success. But the time for redemption of humanity is nigh, so Vonnegut writes himself reaching out to Trout with a symbol in his hand, because the time for redemption of language and symbols is night as well. He creates a symbol that has “not been poisoned by great sins our nation has committed, such as slavery and genocide and criminal neglect, or by tinhorn commercial greed and cunning.” And what does Vonnegut hold out in his hand to demonstrate his inauguration of a redemptive era in human history? Trout looks up, and “he saw that I held an apple in my hand.” An apple, the modern incarnation of that infamous forbidden fruit which set humanity careening on a course of non-redemptive history. Vonnegut questions what type of a creator would so badly tempt Adam and Eve, so he now reaches out with compassion, and bestows the fruit willingly. “Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe,” Vonnegut muses earlier in the text after considering how much suffering and meaningless he seems to let enter into the world he has created. Vonnegut this constructs an alternative eschatology based on a redemptive history, rather than a history of the fall of humanity. He works through the fall therapeutically, and this time he prevents a fall from grace and allows humanity to retain its prelapsarian innocence for all time. Vonnegut has started history over again, and redeemed those symbols that previously represented sin. He is aware of humanity’s great sins, but he does not condemn humanity but instead he it. Go, Vonnegut seems to be saying, and from henceforth sin no more.

The once forbidden fruit has now become redemptive

Read Matthew Gannon's opening essay, "Kurt Vonnegut Has Come Unstuck in Time"

Read Matthew Gannon's previous reviews:

Oscillating to Eternity: Apocalypse and Eden in Vonnegut's Telegraphic Schizophrenic Novel

2013-07-12T16:19:00.000-04:00

by Wilson Taylor

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”

- Thoreau, Walden, 1854

All This Happened, More or Less

“Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only with the electric clocks, but the wind-up kind, too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.” So remarks the first-person narrator in the meta-fictional opening chapter to Vonnegut’s sublime masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five. Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel suffused with historical and temporal anxiety, which alludes to the far deeper existential uncertainty, guilt, and paranoia that haunts both Kurt Vonnegut and the postwar American consciousness. The terror of Slaughterhouse-Five is the terror of human indeterminacy amidst the incommensurate seas of history, time, fate, and circumstance. The crisis of Slaughterhouse-Five is the crisis of unmoored subjectivity in postwar America.

Vonnegut’s final unburdening of his Dresden story — in this supposed “failure” of a novel, in a narrative “so short and jumbled and jangled” — is a courageous rejection of the accidents of history and fate and a resolute defense of the human. Slaughterhouse-Five is itself a witness to the difficulties of finding meaning in the incomprehensible, and the fundamental uncertainty of the novel is further intended as a critique of the catastrophic twentieth century. The ambivalence pervading Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut refers to it as “this lousy little book”) underscores Vonnegut’s own struggles with memory and identity. He compares himself to Lot’s wife, destroyed in her attempt to search the past for meaning. “There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” (Vonnegut's ambivalence further extends to the act of writing itself — he suggests that the "anti-war" novel is a failure in itself; one might as well write an "anti-glacier book.") Vonnegut yearns to move beyond history, but is ceaselessly pulled into the past. The firebombing of Dresden is the consuming no-thing of Vonnegut’s literary consciousness, and he struggles to address it directly without resigning to fatalism and while simultaneously maintaining his transcendent humanism. In order to do so, Vonnegut deftly weaves together four concurrent narratives in a novel “somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore.” Whereas Billy Pilgrim is unable to find redemption, Vonnegut attempts to erect literature as a narrative of redemption and as a rejection of fate. History is absurd; literature and art, suggests Vonnegut, may offer transcendence and meaning.

Against the meaninglessness of history and the absurdity of war, Vonnegut tears the tapestry of fate, weaving, instead, a resolute defense of the human. The human threatens to be washed away in the rapids of time; Vonnegut attempts to distill an eternal humanism as a bulwark against meaninglessness. In chapter one, Vonnegut’s narrator reads a book on Celine, whose macabre Journey to the End of Night influences Slaughterhouse-Five. “Time obsessed him,” Vonnegut remarks, sharing a scene in which “Celine wants to stop the bustling of a street crowd. He screams on paper, Make them stop... So that they won’t disappear anymore!” Celine’s desire to still the terror of history and resurrect the human therein is also Vonnegut’s. Slaughterhouse-Five is an attempt to find redemption or salvation through literature, to seek transcendence amidst chaos.

Slaughterhouse-Five is an index of Vonnegut’s anxieties. The jumbled structure of the novel reveals Vonnegut’s inability to and antipathy toward the comprehensible rendering of the meaninglessness of Dresden. But, his desire to weave this literary narrative speaks to a higher impulse toward transcendence for which Vonnegut yearns. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut deconstructs the novel in order to represent a disjointed world. More importantly, the deconstruction of the novel portends a reconstruction of the self. Literature, he suggests, can help break the self free from the bondage of history and offer the re-invention of being and time.

Billy Pilgrim Has Come Unstuck in Time

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” announces Vonnegut on his hero’s temporal rootlessness. To be unstuck in time is Vonnegut’s narrative strategy for conveying the trauma of Dresden and the crisis of postmodern subjectivity. While he intended to write a “masterpiece” of linear narrative, Vonnegut struggled to communicate through the void of disaster. Such a narrative is untenable. Like Vonnegut himself, Pilgrim finds his memory constantly gravitating back to the incomprehensibility of Dresden. Pilgrim is “spastic” in time, continually performing various roles in a fragmented life. He is randomly frisked between Dresden, a life of postwar prosperity (with Vonnegut’s ironic portrayal of the American Dream), and a life of quiet exile in a Tralfamadorian zoo.

Vonnegut weaves this tripartite narrative of Pilgrim in order to emphasize what he sees as the “schizophrenia” of contemporary American consciousness. Vonnegut’s narrative presents a distressing portrait of Pilgrim, where overwhelming violence bleeds into suburban domesticity, and satisfaction is dependent upon repressing the trauma of history. But Pilgrim is unable to forget, and his uneasy pact with postwar peace is shattered when the exigencies of memory whisk him between war and peace. Catastrophe has violently wrested Pilgrim from historical time, destroying his ability to make sense of the world or himself. The result is a radical instability of self. Pilgrim’s consciousness has been ruptured by war. In this way, Pilgrim stands as a synecdoche for postwar America, itself struggling to reconcile with the trauma of its past and present. “The time is out of joint,” remarks Hamlet, attempting to convey the existential anxiety of modern subjectivity. Vonnegut’s Pilgrim is similarly disjointed. As Heidegger suggests, temporality must anchor ontology — Pilgrim’s temporal spasticity impels an ontological crisis.

Vonnegut’s phenomenology of being “unstuck in time” is a surreal exploration of the painfulness of memory. Pilgrim had more or less succeeded in forgetting his past, and on the precarious foundations of postwar American prosperity he had constructed a life of opulence. The American consciousness is unabashedly futurist, attempting to repress the painfulness of historical memory in order to construct a City on a Hill. Vonnegut, like Hemingway, insists on the precarious impossibility of such repression and on the imaginative voracity of war. Any City, then, would be built on uncertain foundations. Like Jake Barnes or Nick Adams, Pilgrim carries unseen and unacknowledged wounds, ontological ruptures that infect his consciousness. Pilgrim’s repressed past rushes back to him as a nightmare. Singing friends at a birthday celebration mimic the orgiastic grotesqueries of apocalypse, and Billy’s memory of the past overwhelms his perception of the present — the two are married in a macabre braiding of perception and being. Pilgrim’s constructed postwar identity fragments under the burden of history. Vonnegut employs a strategy of Brechtian alienation throughout the novel, defamiliarizing the reader with the assumed history of World War II and postwar American prosperity. This strategy — what Brecht refers to as the “estrangement effect” — challenges the reader, forcing a re-evaluation of the self and of the world. For instance, the subtitle of Slaughterhouse-Five is, as he promises Mary O’Hare, is The Children’s Crusade, in reference to the absurdity of war and terror of history. He refuses to weave a romantic or heroic tale out of history. The comforting tapestry of the American Dream has, woven deeply into its narrative fabric, nightmare and apocalypse. As Pilgrim knows, the two are inseparable. The slaughterhouse is integral to society.

As dramatized in The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut yearns for an escape from history. Boaz and Constant both become heroes in their transcendent resignation and their denial of absurdity through a Thoreauvian deliberation. This Edenic impulse beats powerfully through Vonnegut’s imagination, but the narrative structure of Slaughterhouse-Five forecloses on such transcendence. Vonnegut’s eerie appeal to a Tralfamadorian Eden speaks to the falsity of a paradise regained. Pilgrim achieves an illusion of postwar bliss with Montana Wildhack, the adult film star and Eve surrogate, in a Tralfamadorian zoo. Yet this mode of being strikes Vonnegut as naive and escapist, and Pilgrim is unable to sustain any satisfaction. Even after recovering this constructed paradise, Pilgrim’s temporal spasticity slings him back to war. History cannot be ignored.

The Tralfamadorians teach Pilgrim that “it is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.” Pilgrim, in order to cope with trauma, finds uncertain solace in floating above these beads, in observing history from an uncertain and detached perspective. However, Pilgrim’s life is devoid of will. He lacks imaginative agency and is alienated from his own experience. He is unable to make sense of his life, like the “many Americans...trying to construct a life of things...found in gift shops.” Whereas the Tralfamadorians posit memory as a salve against absurdity, where suffering can be alleviated through the selective focus on “pleasant moments,” Pilgrim is unable to suppress or surpass his own trauma. Seemingly every facet of his postwar life whisks him back to Dresden. Sleeping next to his wife reminds Pilgrim of his confinement in a train of prisoners, which in turn reminds him of his daughter’s wedding. Though supposedly freed from the deterministic contours of history through Tralfamadorian ideology, Pilgrim’s being lies in total bondage to the contours of history.

My Name is Yon Yonson

Pilgrim, through supposedly unstuck in time, is also described as a “bug trapped in amber,” a more appropriate metaphor for his crisis. Therein lies the paradox of Pilgrim — he is resolutely bound to innumerable discrete moments in the fragments of time. The Tralfamadorians suggest that this atemporality offers freedom in that the anxieties of will and fate are mollified. “The moment is structured that way,” they resolve, mitigating their own culpability in the destruction of the universe. But, for Pilgrim, the dissolution of his agency and identity ferments a heightened degree of existential anxiety. “He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.” The absurdity of the human condition is embodied in Pilgrim as he flits meaninglessly throughout the fabric of time. Like Winston Niles Rumfoord of The Sirens of Titan, Pilgrim lives everywhere but dwells nowhere, and is totally overwhelmed by the trauma of history and the incomprehensibility of fate.

Heidegger employs the verb “to dwell” to denote the quality of Being (what Heidegger refers to as Dasein) as an unfolding process through which the self asserts the self into the world. The entirety of Pilgrim’s life is stirred into a senseless gallimaufry of circumstance, his identity is dissolved into the structures of history and the world — what Heidegger identifies as “fallen-ness.” In such a Heideggerian formulation, Pilgrim is unable to assert any authentic mode of being, any true Dasein, because he, as a “bug trapped in amber,” is irreparably bound to history. He is submerged into the Other of historical time — there is no self to Billy Pilgrim. Vonnegut repeatedly articulates a desire for the self to break free of the deterministic bonds of history, time, and space, which resonates with this Heideggerian impulse to assert an authentic mode of being over and against the fallen-ness of the world. Vonnegut, however, struggles with precisely how to sublimate this desire into his literature. One one hand, Vonnegut refuses to traffic in naive escapism, or in Heidegger’s own nostalgic (and fascistic) utopian eschatologies. But Vonnegut, in his existential sympathies, cannot allow the individual to dissolve into the crushing dialectic of historical time. Slaughterhouse-Five is an index of this tension.

Throughout the novel, Pilgrim is haunted by eternal recurrence — the endless repetition of history celebrated by the Tralfamadorians. Pilgrim is condemned to the perpetual reliving of his trauma, what Nietzsche in The Gay Science identifies as “the greatest weight.” Milan Kundera, who toys with eternal recurrence in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, posits, “If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect.” Vonnegut agrees — “If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed.” In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut presents Pilgrim as similarly “nailed to eternity.”

Repeatedly, Pilgrim theorizes on the lightness and weight (to borrow a dichotomy from Kundera) of his being. At one point in the novel, Pilgrim imagines himself “[turning] to steam and [floating] up among the treetops.” He repeatedly imagines himself as a fluid (and, in on poignant revision of Twain, Vonnegut describes the "Mississippi of humiliated Americans" flowing through German valleys), contrasting his fluidity with the "stone" of a dead American. Pilgrim yearns to float above the continuum of history, to transcend and escape the burden of accident and fate. But he tragically remains a “bug trapped in amber,” inevitably and inescapably weighed down by history. The uncertain absolution offered to Pilgrim, that his will and identity will be dissolved into the ceaseless recurrence of historical time, offers meager recompense to Vonnegut.

Pilgrim and Vonnegut are both overwhelmed by the traumatic absurdity of history, and unable to cultivate what Nietzsche refers to as the amor fati, or “love of fate,” necessary to shoulder the enormous burden of eternal recurrence. “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful,” Nietzsche suggests. The Tralfamadorians adopt this amor fati, eager to deny the terror of history and focus on moments of joy. Vonnegut, while admitting a certain degree of recompense in amor fati, is unable to stomach the overwhelming fatalism of eternal recurrence. Vonnegut cannot sustain the contented solipsism of the Tralfamadorians, who suggest, on war, that “there isn’t anything we can do about them, so we simply don’t look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments.”

While this new concept of temporality does allow the individual to conquer death in some sense (“the most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die”), simple resignation to fate offers facile recompense for the terror of history. The dissolution of will does not satisfy Vonnegut, and he rejects the quietist fatalism that many attribute to him. The Tralfamadorian amor fati represents a resignation to history, including suffering and war, that Vonnegut finds deeply unsettling. For Vonnegut as for Pilgrim, the present is interwoven with violence and trauma, and the necessity of the artist is to transcend the absurdity of history. Vonnegut presents Slaughterhouse-Five as “A Duty-Dance with Death,” and, for Vonnegut, the task of the artist is to reckon directly with death and absurdity. He paraphrases Celine — “no art is possible without a dance with death.”

Dostoevsky, Vonnegut, and the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Novel; or There Was a Young Man from Stamboul

While Pilgrim does not directly offer a model for Vonnegut’s own redemption, Pilgrim’s situation embodies Vonnegut’s fear that he will be unable to truly recover from the firebombing of Dresden. The consistent irony and detached narration of Slaughterhouse-Five allows Vonnegut to interrogate Dresden and his own fate without succumbing to despair — Vonnegut can only approach Dresden through a defensive and distancing irony. Moreover, observing Dresden through Pilgrim’s perspective allows Vonnegut to toy with ideas such as eternal recurrence and fatalism, while, ultimately, presenting Slaughterhouse-Five as an aesthetic reflection on eternity. Due the sublime, multi-tiered narrative structure of the novel, Vonnegut is able to mitigate the horror of Dresden, to sublimate his suffering into art. As John Updike suggests in an essay in The New Yorker, Vonnegut, “through the transpositions of science fiction, [had] found a way, instead of turning pain aside, to vaporize it, to scatter it on the plane of the cosmic and the comic.” He identifies the novel’s refrain, “so it goes,” as a “new way of stacking pain.”

Part of Vonnegut’s struggle in communicating the trauma of Dresden lies in the catastrophe’s opacity to literary narrative. Dresden eludes disclosure because it repels comprehension. Vonnegut shares that, upon returning from Dresden, he “thought it would be easy to write about... that it would be a masterpiece.” He even constructs a meticulous timeline, “the best outline I ever made, or anyway the prettiest one...on the back of a roll of wallpaper. I used my daughter’s crayons.” Despite his naive optimism, Vonnegut struggles; Dresden eludes him. “Not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown.”

Vonnegut’s meta-fictional self-consciousness in his opening chapter suggests that, beyond the ostensible narrative of Slaughterhouse-Five, something much different is going on in Vonnegut’s imagination. He disrupts the construct of the novel as a stable aesthetic object and literary form, choosing instead continually to undercut his own authority. He de-mystifies and de-fetishizes the novel as a cultural product (even identifying it as “this lousy little book”), allowing it greater potency as polemic and platform for a radical re-envisioning of selfhood, culture, and history. Slaughterhouse-Five, then, must be conceptualized as a transgressive de-construction of the novel, meant to reflect the fragmentation of the world. In its place, Vonnegut hopes to cultivate an aesthetic and imaginative space in which the reader can critique the self and the world, and, ideally, strive for transformation. Vonnegut offers this “telegraphic schizophrenic” novel as an aesthetic and cultural experience that aims to de-familiarize the world in order to mystify it anew.

At the root of Vonnegut’s struggle with narrative is his wrestling with absurdity. At the foundation of Vonnegut’s consciousness is that war is meaningless and history absurd. To narrate a typical war-novel of literary realism — in the vein of Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, which “poor old Edgar Derby” reads to Pilgrim in a German hospital — risks rationalizing, minimizing, or romanticizing his trauma. A facile linearity risks smoothing these jagged edges and offering false appeasement to Vonnegut’s existential dread. Dresden is not a plot device but a rupture, an epistemic and existential tear in the fabric of experience. The realist novel is insufficient to communicating the experience of war because the realist novel offers a narrative structure that necessarily forges meaning. History is chaos, suggests Vonnegut, and a clean and linear narrative misrepresents this chaos by subjecting it to an ordering structure. To forge a linear narrative through Dresden would minimize suffering and justify war. Instead, he must construct a narrative that refuses this facile structure and adequately reflects the entropic anxiety of history. As Bertolt Brecht demands, a subversive or radical art must find new representative modes in order to reflect and change the world. “Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change.”

Walter Benjamin similarly critiques this conception of the linear inevitability of historical time. In his 1940 “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin calls for a re-imagining of history, uniting the past with the present in order to cultivate a new future and a new human. “A historian...stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellations which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a concept of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.” Investigating the past, resurrecting it as something living, assumes for Benjamin a revolutionary and messianic potential. Whereas the Tralfamadorians seek solace in the denial of history, Vonnegut wishes to resurrect the past in order, as Benjamin suggests, to “explode the continuum of history.” For Vonnegut, all moments — past, present, and future — exist in the simultaneity of human consciousness. Vonnegut’s collapsing of historical time leads to a consequent expansion in human Being.

As the Tralfamadorians teach Pilgrim, “it is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.” The problem with this linearity is that the past remains in the past. But, for Vonnegut, the terror of the past is written onto the present and future — the nightmares of Pilgrim’s past infect his futures, in Vonnegut’s Faulknerian riff on history (“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” suggests Faulkner). Again, the slaughterhouse is written onto society. Vonnegut’s narrative strategy, then, is to shatter these rosary beads of historical time. Doing so allows him not only to re-write history, but also to re-invent the human. Opening a more honest conversation between the past and present allows Vonnegut to inaugurate new modes of being. The present is fractured, suggests Vonnegut, with nightmares of the past rushing through fissures in society and identity. This conversation, then, must inaugurate new imaginative frameworks to re-consider the self. While it may not be possible, or advisable, to realize an a-historical mode of being, Vonnegut yearns for an elusive eternity outside of history. In a world unstuck and otherwise haunted by time, Vonnegut’s utopianism strives for the timeless.

Vonnegut dedicates Slaughterhouse-Five to Mary O’Hare, who inspires Vonnegut to re-consider his “famous book on Dresden.” Furious, O’Hare accuses Vonnegut of attempting to romanticize war. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful.” A new narrative form, then, is necessary to communicate or comprehend the absurdity of war. Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade, presents a radically new literary form, one that rejects the urge to render facile or romantic meaning from the absurd, and one that equally rejects the solipsistic fatalism of ignoring or acquiescing to history. Unlike the Tralfamadorians, Vonnegut (and O’Hare) cannot condone the narrative justification or imaginative mitigation of suffering or evil. Literature instead must inspire a transformation in consciousness, while diving into the chilling waters of the absurd.

Vonnegut shares the key to Slaughterhouse-Five in a poignant conversation between Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater, the hero of Vonnegut’s previous novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Billy Pilgrim has been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown after the nightmarish return of his repressed past. Rosewater and Pilgrim are both victims of World War II, and, because of their experience, “they had both found life meaningless.” Rosewater, however, seeks solace in literature, “in particular the writings of Kilgore Trout.” This obscure author of science-fiction surfaces in a few of Vonnegut’s novels, and Trout represents a certain sci-fi sensibility of Vonnegut. Appealing to Trout’s novels, Rosewater articulates a defense of the role of literature and the transformation of the human. Literature, Rosewater suggests, will help the two victims “re-invent themselves and their universe.” Rosewater continues, suggesting that “everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. ‘But that isn’t enough any more.’” Vonnegut’s literary ambition in Slaughterhouse-Five is nothing less than the creation of a new narrative form that can re-invent the human and universe through addressing the distinctive anxieties of postwar America.

Vonnegut realizes this new literary form, this new imaginative space in which humans can “re-invent themselves and their universe,” in the telegraphic schizophrenic literary mode adopted from the Tralfamadorians. Because the Tralfamadorians perceive time all at once, looking at “all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains,” linear narratives cannot sustain them. A Tralfamadorian novel, which informs the sublime construction of Slaughterhouse-Five, “produces an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep” because of its disjointed narrative structure. “What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.” Vonnegut’s goal, then, is to inspire this sublime sense of transcendence in his readers. He shatters the teleology of narrative in order to emphasize the epistemic, ontological, and temporal rupture of warfare, simultaneously re-inventing narrative in order to re-invent the human. Vonnegut seeks to break temporal and ontological shackles, ushering the human, through a new relationship with the self and the world, into a heightened awareness of Being. He strips away the determinism of history and circumstance, attempting to carve underneath the calcifications of fate and uncover the eternal. This desire to crack open the continuum of history and redeem the human therein surfaces throughout Vonnegut’s novels, and is given its most distilled and anguished articulation in Slaughterhouse-Five.

Billy Pilgrim Was Cinderella and The Gospel from Outer Space

The narrative structure and pervasive irony of Slaughterhouse-Five render it an elusive work, but a few moments can be identified as offering the re-invention of being that Rosewater cites as the chief goal of literature. An unrealized hero of the novel arises in Edgar Derby, the middle-aged schoolteacher who volunteers for the war. While Pilgrim and Derby are imprisoned by the Germans, Howard W. Campbell, American Nazi and protagonist of Mother Night, visits Slaughterhouse-Five. Campbell tries to persuade the American soldiers to defect and join the Nazis in the struggle against the Russians. In response, Derby delivers a vehement defense of American values, which resonates with Vonnegut’s own statement that he himself still believes in junior civics. Derby’s patriotism is not intended to be ironic. In his defense of “freedom and justice and opportunities and fair pay for all,” Derby achieves a heightened degree of imaginative intentionality, a focused sense of Being that Pilgrim lacks. Derby became a “character.”

The only response to Derby’s articulate defense of justice is the “mournful howl” of an air-raid siren. Vonnegut is haunted by doubt that Derby’s idealism has any role in the postwar world. Derby’s tragic and ironic death — executed for stealing a teapot — concludes the novel, and, beyond Vonnegut’s ubiquitous deployment of “so it goes,” the only response the novel provides is the bird’s bemused “poo-tee-weet?” Derby’s idealism is undercut by the novel’s structural irony. Like Samuel Beckett, Vonnegut reveals a postmodern anxiety about the role of the hero in the contemporary world. Vonnegut’s protagonist is an emblem of uncertainty and instability. Vonnegut is still waiting for Godot. But although Pilgrim’s story in itself offers only uncertain glimmers of hope, the frame narrative of Slaughterhouse-Five offers Vonnegut a more direct voice to discuss the relationship between literature, consciousness, and war.

Vonnegut’s frequent invocations of Eden speak to his desire to transcend the deterministic contours of history. In addition to Pilgrim’s porous Eden on Tralfamadore, Pilgrim, encountering German soldiers in World War II, reports staring “into the patina of the corporal’s boots, [seeing] Adam and Eve in the golden depths. They were naked. They were so innocent, so vulnerable, so eager to behave decently. Billy Pilgrim loved them.” Perhaps more dramatically, Pilgrim than describes a young boy as a “blond angel,” a “heavenly androgyne,” one “as beautiful as Eve.” American literature is replete with yearning for a recovered Eden, and Vonnegut’s novels, despite their postmodern form and technique, similarly traffic in this utopian imagination. Vonnegut’s awareness of these utopian eschatologies pervading the modern consciousness underscores both the centrality of the Eden myth in his fictions and in his desire to reconsider the form of this myth. For Vonnegut, Eden is less an imagined or imaginative space — such as Pilgrim’s Tralfamadorian zoo or the Tralfamadorian amor fati — as much as an awareness of messianic threads woven alongside those of apocalypse. Pilgrim can consider a German boy as “beautiful as Eve” through Vonnegut’s transcendent imagination — Vonnegut’s yearning to imagine the transformation of consciousness and humanity through literature and his impulse to locate threads of redemption amidst suffering. The dehumanized world of the present still bears within it these glimmers of new worlds and new modes of being. This messianic urge of Vonnegut’s fictions underscores his desire to transform and redeem the human.

In a haunting and beautiful scene in Slaughterhouse-Five, Pilgrim, unstuck in time, watches a World War II film in reverse. Vonnegut's film transforms history into a sublime montage of redemption. He describes German and American planes resurrecting corpses, healing the landscape, and gathering bombs back into themselves. These bombs are deconstructed, their minerals buried in the earth “so they would never hurt anybody ever again.” Pilgrim continues to narrate history in reverse outside of the film, imagining that “all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve.” He constructs a utopian eschatology, which, however unreal, allows the reader to re-consider the world, history, and the self. The imaginative Eden is more potent than a falsely realized Eden; Vonnegut implores the reader to re-sacralize the world and the human. Eschatologies of Eden flow alongside narratives of apocalypse, and imagination must tap into the fertile potential for transformation therein. Vonnegut’s subversive imagination has the power to still the entropy of history and redeem the human. Furthermore, his literature purposely de-familiarizes the reader with the world — narrating war in reverse serves to render war absurd. Art has the power to compel such subversive re-imaginings, and Vonnegut’s teleology of redemption, however fragmented, shines through Slaughterhouse-Five.

In Man With a Movie Camera, avant-garde Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov constructs a similarly sacred teleology of redemption. “Kino-eye moves time backward,” Vertov proclaims, before engaging in a similar cinematic reversal of history. Vertov interrogates a slab of meat before reverse-narrating its processing through transgressive montage. The packaged commodity returns to the slaughterhouse, itself not unlike Vonnegut’s own “Schlachthof-fünf,” his eponymous prison in Dresden. Vertov imagines the slaughtered bull re-assembled with his organs, re-dressed in his original skin, and finally returning to life. Vertov’s resurrection of the bull forces the viewer to reconsider the totalizing machinations of capitalism, consumerism, and carnivorism, de-familiarizing the everyday in order to jostle the viewer into a new consciousness and new ethical imagination. As Vertov and Vonnegut both realize, the slaughterhouse (as both structure and symbol) is an integral — if unseen and unacknowledged — component of modernity. Vertov’s filmmaking impels the viewer to imagine the resurrected bull as sacred. Vonnegut’s literature attempts the same with the human.

Shortly after arriving at a German prison, a group of interned British soldiers perform a version of Cinderella for the Americans. Vonnegut describes Cinderella as the “most popular story ever told,” and its repetition in Slaughterhouse-Five underscores Vonnegut’s desire to uncover such archetypal narratives of redemption. Cinderella is, at heart, a narrative of redemption and transcendence, as Cinderella is able to exit the cyclical tragedy of history through what Benjamin refers to as “messianic time.” And, as the British adaptation underscores, Cinderella’s curse, like Pilgrim’s, is that of being “unstuck in time.” At midnight, Cinderella’s magical evening dissolves, and she is whisked back into the tragic inevitability of cyclical time. However, Cinderella is able to find eventual transcendence that Pilgrim cannot — her enchanted teleology of redemption carries her out of history and into the sublime. Pilgrim’s impossible desire to do the same is reinforced when he chooses to don the silver-painted combat boots that signify Cinderella’s glass slippers. “Billy Pilgrim was Cinderella, and Cinderella was Billy Pilgrim.” Pilgrim marches in these messianic slippers, but is tragically denied redemption.

This same desire for transcendence is further reinforced in the novel’s continual trafficking in Christian eschatology. Despite Vonnegut’s purported atheism, a thoroughly religious desire for transcendence and the sacred pervades his imagination. Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout even revises the Gospels in his own The Gospel from Outerspace, which emphasizes both the humanity of Christ and the sacredness of the human. And in Slaughterhouse-Five, the Christ narrative serves to underscore this sacrality and the desire to transcend historical time. The Christ narrative, like Cinderella’s, presents the redemptive and messianic exit from historical time, and this sublime desire for transcendence glimmers throughout Vonnegut’s fictions. Kundera remarks that, in eternal recurrence, the individual is nailed like Christ to the cross of eternity. What is unacknowledged in Kundera’s construction, however, is the subsequent exit from history that this narrative dares to imagine. Vonnegut is searching for a similar transcendence. Underscoring Vonnegut’s messianic urge, the epigraph for Slaughterhouse-Five is a carol celebrating the birth of Christ.

Peace.

This messianic hope is the foundation of Vonnegut’s fictions. Through the temporal spasticity of Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut attempts to dig beneath the ontological and historical ossifications of the contemporary world in order to reveal a glimmer of eternity. Vonnegut yearns to uncover the essential and eternal human — the Adam and Eve who dwell beneath the rivers of historical time. In the opening chapter, Vonnegut, contemplating a river, asks himself “about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” Like Thoreau, Vonnegut wishes to sift through the sands of time to find a glimmering diamond of transcendence and sublimity. He cannot learn to love his fate uncritically, but he can learn a subversive love for the human. Vonnegut must stare directly into the traumatic absurdity of history — his “duty-dance with death” — in order to insist, paradoxically, on the sacrality of the human. Imagination, not history or fate, must provide the foundation of the re-invented self and universe. Vonnegut’s fictions, then, are attempts at cultivating this transgressive and humanistic love.

In the end, Slaughterhouse-Five is an attempt to transmute, through literature, the suffering and absurdity of history. Vonnegut’s anxieties are embodied in the haunted Billy Pilgrim, but Vonnegut’s fate is not that of Pilgrim’s. Vonnegut hopes to shatter Pilgrim’s beads of historical recollection in order to imagine a new history and a new literature for the purpose of inaugurating a new mode of human being. Pilgrim is irreparably “trapped in the amber” of history; Vonnegut yearns to crack open the amber and redeem the human trapped within. His “duty-dance with death” succeeds because Vonnegut does not allow himself to be conquered by death or to succumb to nihilism or despair. Indeed, Vonnegut’s “dance” impels a transcendent humanism that denies the determinism of historical fate in favor of the beautiful cultivation of the human sublime. He had found a way to mitigate the suffering of history not through amor fati, but through something far more profound and more redemptive.

His fictions help impel a critical and ethical imagination in his readers, and his fictions are always grounded in the experience of the human. Human life is beautiful and sacred, Vonnegut continually insists, and his literatures help re-invigorate that sacrality. Through literature, Vonnegut seeks to sacralize the human and humanize the sacred.

In his seminal Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard writes of the “knights of faith.” These figures insist in redemption “by virtue of the absurd,” by which Kierkegaard refers to the overwhelming paradox of such faith in a world that denies its possibility. Vonnegut insists on this same faith in the human by virtue of the absurd. Although Pilgrim is unable to find transcendence, and although he is perpetually haunted by fate, Vonnegut continually imagines threads of redemption glistening alongside the catastrophe of history. Kierkegaard compares these knights to “ballet dancers” who, in their insistence on redemption, are able to make “the movement of infinity... to express the sublime in the pedestrian.” Such a knight is Abraham, who, even when drawing the knife against Isaac in Genesis 22, knows, by virtue of the absurd, that his son will be restored to him. This is the sublime paradox of Vonnegut, who, only after insisting on the meaninglessness of life, is able to resurrect the human as sacred. The metaphoric dancing of these knights suggests their confidence in redemption by virtue of the absurd. They are not weighed down by the burdens of history or fate, but buoyed by the desire for transcendence and their confidence therein.

Such is Vonnegut’s “duty-dance with death.” In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard laments that he “cannot make the movement of faith,” that he “cannot shut [his] eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd.” This plunge for Kierkegaard results in overwhelming anxiety; he doubts that he is able to transcend the paradox of the absurd. This is the plunge of Kurt Vonnegut, who continually insists on the sacredness of the human in the midst of the ruins of modernity. The world is meaningless, insists Vonnegut, but the human is sacred by virtue of the absurd. This is the plunge — and this is the faith — of Slaughterhouse-Five.

The Tragedy of Eliot Rosewater, Prince of Indiana

2013-07-05T18:34:00.000-04:00

by Matthew Gannon

"What a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”

- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, quoted by Senator Lister Ames Rosewater

Act I: Shithouses, Shacks, Alcoholism, Ignorance, Idiocy and Perversion

After his long time away from earth touring the solar system throughout his first four novels, Kurt Vonnegut has come back to earth for his fifth novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. His postmodern odysseys have taken him to a dystopian future, the far reaches of the solar system, a Jerusalem prison cell, and an absurdist Caribbean island to witness the end of the world. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Vonnegut comes back to practically his own childhood doorstep, seeing as he grew up in Indiana, the setting of the bulk of this novel about social nihilism, soul rot, and economic inequality. While Vonnegut’s wild and whirling travels through space and time are illustrative of his thoughts on the nature of society, politics, the worth of humans, and all other modern anxieties of advanced industrial society, he has yet to confront the gritty reality of post-WWII America. His escape from orbit is in many ways a desire to leave this world behind, an attempt to find a better world where the atom bomb isn’t the ultimate problem-solver and a machine can’t outrank a human in worth. He has grappled with the apocalyptic and the fear of Cold War-era American, but he hadn’t yet confronted the soul crushing meaningless of everyday life people experience while waiting for the bomb to go off. If his previous novels have largely seen Vonnegut searching out a new, more human and humane world, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a return to earth to confront that earthly sickness from which he is so desperately trying to escape. His previous works are largely symbolic, using a fictive Martian army to express the conformity in post-WWII American or a player piano to investigate anxieties over human superfluity. God Bless Your, Mr. Rosewater is a return to the literal – it is a realist respite for a very surrealist author.

And what, after his long odyssey, does Vonnegut find happening in post-WWII America? Nothing but “shithouses, shacks, alcoholism, ignorance, idiocy and perversion.” This is, at least, what the scene is in Rosewater, Indiana – a fictional middle-America small town overcome with industrial malaise and social nihilism. Rosewater is home to the Rosewaters, a glaring example of American royalty: a collection of politicians, industrialists, and capitalists with the ability to suck the marrow from the dry bones of the American public just long enough to hightail it to their east coast yachts and beachside properties. That is, all but Eliot Rosewater, the family black sheep, known for his perverse compassion for the common man and his disdain for worldly trappings such as wealth, power, and reputation. Eliot, after all his years in east coast boarding schools and Ivy League colleges, has decided to return to his family’s hometown to revive the Rosewater Foundation, a supposedly philanthropic organization that was really devised by family lawyers looking to avoid paying taxes on the nauseating immensity of their wealth.

Back in Indiana Eliot is estranged from his father as well as his east coast relatives, the “Rhode Island Rosewaters” who feel they are being swindled out of their fair share of the family wealth. He returns to this rotten core of industrialized America to put his family funds towards the endeavor to award humans unconditional and uncritical love – and a little money besides. Setting up shop in a disheveled apartment nearby the local fire station. Firefighters, he claims are some of the most compassionate people alive, being willing to save people with such valor. Living in a bachelor pad for the ages, a slowly decaying wreck compared to the abandoned mansion his family owns nearby, he takes calls from concerned citizens, offering advice on everything from why they shouldn’t commit suicide ("Don't kill yourself, call the Rosewater Foundation") to how to properly notarize an official document. His one ultimate maxim is: “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” It is here, at the rotten heart of America, that Eliot decides to confront the overwhelming madness of the world – though there are plenty who claim that Eliot is himself mad in his attempt to do this. The sniveling family lawyer Norman Mushari wants to part Eliot Rosewater’s from his millions, ostensibly for the purpose of fairly distributing it to the Rhode Island Rosewaters. All he has to do is legally prove that Rosewater is insane, making him illegible to inherit his wealth. To make his case he relies upon the “common gossip in the office” that Eliot Rosewater is a “lunatic.” Such a characterization is a playful one, Vonnegut insists, but “playfulness was impossible to explain in a court of law.” In a thoroughly bureaucratic world, the insane are made to look sane and the sane insane. Being a lunatic is a perfectly normal reaction to the horrors of industrial modernity, but the bureaucratic morasses of modern life cannot adopt a sympathetic humanist gaze to comprehend that. This is the reason the Herbert Marcuse, in his study on one-dimensional society, wrote that “the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization” is the “rational character of its irrationality.” Eliot Rosewater may be thoroughly irrational – a lunatic really – but in this rationally irrational society, his attitude is, ultimately, the rational attitude. Mushari “never saw anything funny in anything, so deeply immured was he by the utterly unplayful spirit of the law.” Vonnegut humor serves to cut through the inhuman logic of mechanized society to reinvigorate human experience and understanding.

Act II: Something is Rotten in the State of Indiana

Before he settles back in Indiana Eliot decides to take a tour of the country visiting various small towns, reacquainting himself with the American proletariat, and donating money to his much beloved fire stations. While away he happens upon a town called Elsinore, which clearly strikes a Shakespearean chord in him. Penning a letter to his estranged wife, he refers to her as Ophelia and signs his name as Hamlet. Eliot, like Hamlet, is “too much in the sun.” And his relationship to his relatives, particularly his father, is “a little more than kin, and less than kind.” Eliot’s concern for the common people is disconcerting to his capitalist relatives, who which he would, in the words of the Bard, “throw to earth / this unprevailing woe.” Concern for the wretched of the earth is unnatural to them. As Claudius reprimands Hamlet:

“It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,

A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,

An understanding simple and unschooled.

For what we know must be and is as common

As any the most vulgar thing to sense,

Why should we in our peevish opposition

Take it to heart?”

Eliot Rosewater’s will is very much indeed set against heaven if heaven’s desire is for a rigid social system, which Vonnegut calls the “savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system.” Eliot, like Hamlet, must defend himself against accusations of insanity in order to set to rights the madness of his world. Like Hamlet, he is the son of royalty, albeit American royalty. His father, besides being fabulously wealthy, is a US Senator for the state of Indiana. Thus God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater consists of Vonnegut illustrating Eliot’s compassionate insanity and everyone else’s inhumane, calculating, and all-too-rational logic.

Eliot, the prince of Indiana, fits uncomfortably in this irrationally rational society. Like Hamlet, he’s been given everything he supposedly could need in life: military honors, splendid education, millions of dollars, a beautiful wife, a sturdy body, hundreds of friends. And yet, laments his father, the Senator, “what is his reply when life says nothing but, ‘Yes, yes, yes’? ‘No, no, no.” Eliot Rosewater is a rebel, engaging in a great refusal to complacently accept the world – a world bereft of love and human compassion – as it is given to him. Eliot’s world, however, takes his refusal as madness. QuotingHamlet, Senator Rosewater laments, “What a noble mind is here o’erthrown!” Eliot is Hamlet, but an inversion version of the character. While Hamlet grieved his father’s death, Eliot’s father grieves for his son’s life. Hamlet lost a father, and Eliot’s father (believes he) lost his son. Hamlet believes he has lost everything that mattered to him while Eliot Rosewater, to the chagrin of his father, desires to lose everything that society says should matter.

What ultimately binds Hamlet to Eliot Rosewater is their lonely awareness of the rottenness of their world. For both, the world is “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely.” Hamlet alone knows the depths to which his Denmark has plunged and the utter corruption that eats away at its and his heart. Likewise, Vonnegut portrays Eliot as being one of the few humans that not only experiences the rottenness of the world but seems to know why it is so rotten: capitalism. It is the class system that is most foul, strange, and unnatural while “the funeral baked meats” of the dispossessed “did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables,” of the bourgeoisie. In Hamlet, the root of this sickness is a corrupt monarch, guilty of fratricide, regicide, and light incest – as well as the hyper-militarization of society and vague troubles in international politics. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater the root of the sickness is money. Money, Vonnegut writes in the very first lines of the novel, is “a leading character in this tale.” The lengths that people will go to acquire bits of “worthless paper” is immense – and the result of this lust for wealth has induced a fatal sickness in society.

While it may be true that, in a strictly psychological sense, Eliot Rosewater may be mad, his mind is still the sturdiest indicator of humanity and humaneness in this condition of world-historical sickness. One character exclaims that Eliot is, “the only American who has so far noticed the Second World War” – mainly because it largely drove him insane. Hamlet too was one of the few who knew the degree to which is world was corrupted. This is clearly how Vonnegut sees himself – the only American that has noticed war, along with all the other abominations of human ego and industrialism. To be so affected by things like war may lead to clinic insanity, but socially and historically, it is the sanest reaction of all.

Vonnegut paints an unblemished picture of Eliot Rosewater’s madness. He admits that Eliot is a “drunkard, a Utopian dreamer, a tinhorn saint, an aimless fool.” Eliot and his wife are described as “two such sick and loving people” that are constantly in psychoanalysis, undergoing electroshock and chemotherapy, and are thoroughly unable to lead anything resembling an ordinary and stable life. But accusation of insanity are not meant as censures – it is in fact the thoroughly sane for whom Vonnegut reserves his disdain. Who could blame Hamlet for his insanity? Perhaps the actions undertaken during his insanity are reprehensible, but the insanity itself is a perfectly reasonable reaction to an insane world. After all, it isn’t really Eliot or Hamlet that are insane, but the world itself. Their only fault lies in their expecting the world to be a decent and honorable place, a naivety that Vonnegut prizes above all else. Eliot’s goal is – against all odds – to “love everybody, no matter what they are, no matter what they do.” This is what truly earns him the label of insanity. Even the wretched figures he cares for in his Indianan hometown recognize this: “people are going to think you’re crazy for paying so much attention to people like us.” Vonnegut doesn’t dispute such an accusation, for it truly is crazy to have so much concern about the dispossessed and downtrodden – but it is such craziness that we so desperately need more of. This is what largely separates Eliot’s madness from Hamlet’s. Instead of the solipsistic moaning of the pathetic Hamlet, Eliot, as one character lauds him, “gave up everything a man is supposed to want, just to help the little people.” For this, she praises him: “God bless you, Mr. Rosewater.” From this it must be concluded: God bless insanity.

The world of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a surprisingly realistic take on modern America. Gone are the aliens and time travel that Vonnegut so comfortably works into his social and political analyses. We are left with the gritty and disappointing soul-rot of Cold War-era America. This is a world where, as Vonnegut writes, lives are “nearly all paltry, lacking in subtlety, wisdom, wit or invention,” and thoroughly “pointless and unhappy.” The whole of advanced industrial America is rotten to the core with a fatal sickness of the spirit, a bleak social nihilism from which we may never recover. People are constantly being “rejected as being mentally, morally, and physically undesirable.” That anyone could make a fortune on stocks and bonds – “small experiments with worthless paper” – while laborers starve on the streets indicates that something is very rotten indeed.

Vonnegut’s class analysis shines through in this tale of gruesome realism: “the least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies. Life is hard enough, without people having to worry themselves sick about money, too. There’s plenty for everybody in this country, if we’ll only share more.” Vonnegut spoke openly about his admiration for the American socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. His words resonate strongly with Debs, who once stated his opposition to capitalism as such: “I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

The real sickness at hand is the mere fault of being human in an era in which humans have become superfluous – insufficient at completing the mechanized and mindless tasks of industrial society. “Can I help being human?” Eliot’s wife asks him. “Not that I know of,” he replies. People have been reduced to unthinking and unfeeling machines – “they have lost all semblance of human beings except that they stand on two feet and talk – like parrots.” Money, one character perversely exclaims, has become the “most important single determinant of what you think of yourself and what others thing of you.” The time when men worked with their hands and backs is all over, “they are not needed,” laments Vonnegut. Obedience is crucial – obedience to religion, to rigid social norms, to the cult of the self-made man in a world in which to be human is a debased thing. Even something so basically human as sexuality can only be experienced through the most degrading smut. One character is shown to be admiring a photograph of “two fat, simpering, naked whores, one of whom was attempting to have impossible sexual congress with a dignified, decent, unsmiling Shetland pony” – a favorite example of Vonnegut’s that appears in other novels. Surely there is something sick about this – but it really the world that is sick at heart, not the few deranged individuals looking for escape. It is a world in which, as Marx described, “man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions… and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.” Vonnegut, via Eliot Rosewater, is attempting to overcome the vicious separation of man from animal that the dehumanizing system of capitalism necessitates.

Act III: The Sickness Unto Death

Kierkegaard, in his text The Sickness Unto Death, describes humanity as balancing between polarities such as the "finite and infinite" and the "possible and the necessary." The tension between these opposing forms a dialectic against which the self can be defined. Similarly, Vonnegut exposes the dialectical progression of history – including its crushing contradictions and especially its dispossessed. For Kierkegaard the sickness unto death is the inability of the self to reconcile with the dialectic of finite and infinite and the despair that it elicits. Vonnegut sees the social sickness unto death as the inability of the historical subject – the historical self – to grapple with the dialectic of history and align that self towards existential, rather than deterministic and utterly grim ends. When the self is unable to pry itself from despair over the dialectic, when Sisyphus is not happy, determinism is overwhelming and nihilism (social, metaphysical, and political) sets in.

Kierkegaard posits faith as the opposite of despair. His, of course, is a deeply Christian faith, which he describes as "In relating itself to itself, and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it." That power is, in Kierkegaard’s estimation, God. In a secular version of this, which suits Vonnegut, a secular absurdist himself, this could be restated in the following way: "In relating itself to itself, and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it, which is itself the self." This is the self overcoming – or breaking free from – history and all the perceived determining forces that act on a self, such as social convention or dogmatic ideology.

Eliot is himself not sick, but he lives in the age of sickness, a time when history has been thoroughly overcome with the nausea of control and inevitability. When Eliot enters psychoanalysis he can’t speak of his own neuroses, but instead, according to his analyst, talks exclusively about American history. When asked to explain his dreams for analysis, he tells his analyst “Samuel Gompers, Mark Twain, and Alexander Hamilton.” He insists on reciting “well-known facts from history, almost all of them related to the oppression of oddballs or the poor.” The doctor, fed up with Rosewater, insists that there is no cure. Rosewater counters, “It’s a cure he doesn’t understand, so he recuses to admit it’s a cure.” The cure is for a historical sickness – it is a cure for the sickness that is history itself – which is why his analyst is helpless.

If psychoanalysis won’t help, then what is the way to overcome this world-historical sickness? It must consist in overcoming world history itself. History itself is rotten through. Vonnegut describes a relative of Eliot – Fred Rosewater – who despairs in his seeming insignificance in the state of world history. Fred, to his delight, comes across a manuscript detailing his family history. Enthralled by the adventurous exploits of his ancestors he is distraught to find that, besides the first few pages, this history of his family is literally rotten, eaten away by worms. Once again, Fred finds himself without a sense of purpose, unable to be comforted by the idea of continuing a genealogy of which he could be proud. The literal rottenness of history evokes the metaphoric rottenness that Fred is blind to. Fred wants to willingly subject himself to a determinism where he can play a part in something someone else has written. He would rather act than live, rather mimic than create, and rather accept a history as an inexorable progression than write his own history and leave the rotten history to the worms where it belongs.

Fred should have taken his cue from the original Rosewater, one of the only ancestors he could read about before finding that the manuscript was rotten. This first Rosewater, originally John Graham, moves to an island off the coast of England, and becomes a poet and a farmer “far from the centers of wealth and power.” Why he changed his name to Rosewater is not entirely clear, but Vonnegut speculates that perhaps he was “sickened by all the bloody things he saw” in the world. By this Vonnegut means John Graham wished to escape the dreadful dialectic of history, the succession of bloodied kings and violence, and make it on his own by living a purposeful and aesthetic life. This Thoreauvian aspiration drives much of Vonnegut’s post-historical imagination and speaks to the need to create an alternative history that can shed the atrocities of the past and open forth to a liberated future.

While Fred Rosewater could not willingly relinquish the history he so wished to rely upon, Eliot Rosewater had no such qualms. Eliot recognizes that absence of history is an opportunity, a chance, like his great forefather John Graham, to restart his own history and to be free from the bloody determinism of history by creating the self and its new legacy. Disregarding the past is an emancipatory strategy and a decision to not be beholden to expectations of inevitable progression. Eliot finds himself in such an amnesiac position at the end of the novel. Due to his fragile psychological state he forgets almost his whole life’s history. His insanity getting the better of him, he hallucinates vividly of the destruction of the world before forgetting years of his life. He is not worse for it though. When he awakes from his soporific forgetting he may have forgotten the details of people’s lives – even his own – but he has retained the humanist acuity necessary to lead a good life and treat people decently, something seemingly bred out of most humans. He has forgotten history but remember humanity.

At the end of the novel he finds himself in the company of Kilgore Trout, a science fiction novelist that appears in a number of Vonnegut’s works to serve as something of an alter ego for Vonnegut. Trout explains that Eliot has led a grand social experiment trying to find out how it is possible to love people who have no use. After all, “if we can’t find reasons and methods for treasuring human beings because they are human beings, then we might as well, as so often been suggested, rub them out.” Eliot thus finds himself in the position of needed a new history – a humanist tradition which posits the human at the most important figure, rather than abstract constructs such as progress or profit. Eliot comes to find that due to his great wealth and seeming generosity, fifty-six women in his hometown had made paternity suits on him in a fairly shameless attempt to extract some money out of him. Though there was absolutely no validity to this claim – after all, Eliot is as sexless as a mannequin – he gladly accepts paternity for these poor souls, and writes them all a check accordingly. Thus not only does Eliot redistribute the wealth for which he rightfully feels ashamed to have inherited, he also recreates a genealogy based on this false paternity. Though the biological paternity is not valid, he has reformulated a new genealogy by sacrificing his own wealth and power and willing it to his new “descendants,” which will surely be as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. He rejects the covenant of capital and history and creates a new covenant in which he is the patriarch of a new, humanist tradition. Eliot desires to begin the world over again, but this time he will found a new genealogy with a history of redemption, rather than exploitation and dehumanization.

Act IV: Location: A firehouse. Elisinore, California. Enter Hamlet, William Shakespeare, Terry Eagleton, Eliot Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut.

The connections between Hamlet and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater are more profound than Eliot Rosewater visiting the an American town of Elsinore (the team was so bad they were called The Melancholy Danes) or that he wrote a letter to his fiancé as one from Hamlet to Ophelia. It goes beyond Vonnegut mentioning that one of Eliot’s favorite Kilgore Trout novels is titled 2BRO2B, a supposed take on “the famous question posed by Hamlet.” The connection is that Eliot Rosewater sees himself as a Hamlet in his own story. He, along with Vonnegut, is sick to death, not because of any internal illness, but because of the sickness of the world around him. Instead of pouring his emotional energies into the loss of his father figure, as Hamlet did, Eliot pours his love out equally to all humans. This futile attempt to confront the sickness of the world is what ultimately draws Hamlet, Eliot Rosewater, Shakespeare, and Vonnegut together.

Hamlet, according to literary theorist Terry Eagleton, is an exceptional literary figure because he is trapped between two epochs – eternally torn between past and future and wracked by its resultant historical and personal tensions. Though the plot points towards drama and tragedy, of even greater interest is how Hamlet sees himself in relation to the madness of his sickly world. He has, Eagleton argues, to possibilities for conceiving of himself. That is, he is a character trapped between two competing subjectivities, both informed by their historical circumstance. On the one had Hamlet experiences his subjectivity through the historical lens of monarchy and feudalism, with its concomitant traditionalism, patriarchy, rigid religious dogmas, and fixed state of being. On the other hand Hamlet senses the approaching wave of bourgeois individualism – what Eagleton calls the “private enterprise of the self” – which was only just beginning during Shakespeare’s time. His subjectivity is thus trapped, a condition only exaggerated by the dramatic plot unfolding around him in the royal court of Denmark. Hamlet is a transitional figure, marking historical change by being “strung out between a traditional social order” and “a future epoch of achieved bourgeois individualism which will surpass it.” Because of this, Hamlet often feels like a very modernist character, balancing tradition and the highly anticipated future. Furthermore, because Hamlet leaned towards that epoch of bourgeois individualism, a period that may itself be drawing to a close, he speaks to our times. We too are torn between paradigms of traditionalism and the uncharted waters of the future. While bourgeois subjectivity was novel for Hamlet – and highly progressive – it has become regressive in our times, and thus we find ourselves reenacting Hamlet’s struggle, seeking out new forms of subjectivity to match our aspirations and to break free from the stultifying past. We, as Eagleton writes, “gropingly feel our way” towards new subjectivities just as Hamlet did, although we do it to break free from that bourgeois individualism which represented social progressiveness in his time.

Eagleton proposes that the conflicts of body and ideology in Shakespeare’s writing serve as allegories for class struggle and reflected anxieties about the rapidly changing political and economic structures of his times. Shakespeare bared “the burden of a class society in crisis.” Because of that, Eagleton sees a deep connection between Shakespeare’s period and our own, particularly as represented ideologically by Hamlet’s tensions of subjectivity. However, while Shakespeare’s period was not ripe for a truly revolutionary class struggle our time may be, in that “the exploited and dispossessed have now become an historical force to be reckoned with.” Eagleton’s writing on Shakespeare (and Hamlet in particular) reveals his deeply modernist reading of the Swan of Avon as well as his desire to reinvigorate Shakespeare’s ideologically and politically tense characters to reflect the concerns of today. Hamlet is a progressive character – for his time – and it is necessary to reformulate such progressiveness for the end of bourgeois hegemony and to spell out the possibility of a liberate humanity. Eliot Rosewater, the protagonist of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, is such a character. Terry Eagleton describes Hamlet as a loiterer, who is “unable and unwilling to take up determinate position within” society and “spends most of his time eluding whatever social and sexual positions society offers him.” This loitering behavior applies to Eliot Rosewater as well, who becomes estranged from his wife, childish and desultory in his naivety, and thoroughly genderless and sexless.

Eliot Rosewater too straddles historical epochs: that of bourgeois individualism and self-interest and an as yet not existing form of subjectivity. He, like Hamlet, is “never identical with himself,” as Eagleton describes Hamlet. Eliot recognizes that individualism – the enterprise of the self – is far too solipsistic in times in which sociopolitical nihilism has become the norm. In an era in which the press of a button can set off a nuclear holocaust it is far too risky to raise oneself above all others in import and prestige. Paradoxically though, this rejection of solipsism necessitates a return to the self and involves self-work. Part of rejecting the self-absorption of bourgeois individualism is the ability to recognize the responsibility of the self in society. “This psychological regression,” Eagleton claims for Hamlet, “is also, paradoxically, a kind of social progressiveness.” Eliot too rejects the traditional patriarchal trappings and renounces his claim to the throne in order to serve what he perceives as a greater purpose. Eliot Rosewater too renounces his claims by donating money to his estranged relative and giving money to all those who have made paternity claims on him. The loss of a mother figures into both Eliot and Hamlet’s imagination. The self must be reconfigured as a social self, one that constantly enters into social relationships and affects other selves in a deeply phenomenological sense. This return to the self is, contradictorily, a rejection of individualism. The self, in short, is a social self, something Hamlet failed to recognize – much to the detriment of those around him who faced the consequence of his destructive conception of the individual self.

Act V: The Bard of Indiana

If Eliot Rosewater is the modern Hamlet, then Kurt Vonnegut is the modern Shakespeare. This analogy is surely hyperbolic, but it has an undeniable ring of truth. Both Shakespeare and Vonnegut convey complex philosophical and political concepts in fairly simple and popular terms (contrary to his rigidly highbrow status now, Shakespeare’s plays were very much popular among working class populations during his time, although his English sounds oddly formal today). Both writers were concerned with the role of art in society and struggled with the desire to change the world versus the inability to truly impact the course of historical events. Hamlet feels the paralyzing anxiety of inaction as he contemplates whether human existence is worthwhile at all. Eliot Rosewater similarly experiences something Vonnegut calls “Samaritrophia,”that is, a “hysterical indifference to the troubles of those less fortunate than oneself.” Eliot’s wife in particular experiences an acute form of this psychological disorder, which arises not because she truly doesn’t care for anyone, but because she is driven to madness by her paradoxical desire to make the world better and the inability to make any positive changes in this sickly world. In response, she completely gave up trying to help people at all and showed a sociopathic indifference to humanity. To cure her, her doctor engages in some combination of “chemotherapy and eclectic shocks” to change her personality. Her new medically prescribed personality was one of superficiality. The goal was to make her, like most people, care only slightly about humanity and not be perturbed by the ineffectiveness of most attempts to change the world for the better. In this technocratic world, it is up to the doctor to determine how much guilt and pity she ought to feel. The doctor in this case is slightly horrified, for he had “calmed a deep woman by making her shallow.” He exclaims: “Some doctor! Some cure!”

The paralyzing of the self strikes at the heart of both Hamlet and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The melancholic indifference of Hamlet would fit in well in the slums of Rosewater, Indiana. Terry Eagleton describes Hamlet’s melancholia as that which “drains the world of value and dissolves it into nauseating nothingness.” This is not far from Vonnegut’s Samaritrophia – though the later has important social and political connotations that Hamlet’s solipsism does not. Nevertheless, Hamlet, as Eagleton conceives him, “falls apart in the space between himself and his actions.” This derives from an incommensurability between the self and the idea of the self as well as between the world and the idea of the world. Theory and practice are misaligned, shattering a complete understanding of self. Hamlet and Eliot Rosewater alike lament, “The time is out of joint. Oh, cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right.”

Shakespeare often meditates on the role of artists in society and puts forth competing ideas on how the aesthetic can mix with the political, the social, and the historical. Vonnegut too is preoccupied with this issue, and frequently illustrates his vision of an aestheticized humanity. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater he ironically pronounces some casual advice: “You can safely ignore the arts and sciences. They never helped anybody.” At the same time, his praise of the arts is strewn across this novel. One character admonishes an insurance salesman: “Why be an insurance bastard? Do something beautiful.”

Perhaps the greatest defense of the arts comes in Eliot Rosewater’s madman rant at a science fiction conference. Engaging in some blatant meta-fiction, Vonnegut, via Eliot gives an impromptu speech praising science fiction writers, saying he only reads that genre because they are “the only ones who’ll talk about the really terrific changes going on.” They are the only ones with “guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us.” Science fiction writers are the diagnosticians of modern life. They are “the only ones zany enough to agonize over” the mysteries of the present and the sickness of society. This is meta-fiction, because Vonnegut is himself a science fiction writer, although God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater isn’t itself science fiction. Eliot later admits that “science-fiction writers couldn’t write for sour apples, but he declared that didn’t matter. He said they were poets just the same.” For Eliot, just as with Vonnegut, what matters is that they are “more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well.”

Though this is not a work of science fiction itself, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater reveals itself to be a tender paean to the science fiction sensibility. It is a call to imagine, among other things, news ways to circulate money. More broadly, Vonnegut wants to reimagine history and historical possibility. This is why, when in analysis, Eliot Rosewater only speaks of American history. We live in a sick and troubled world the cause of which is a faulty history. The mass neuroses and psychoses in the world are not, at root, psychological. There is a political an historical (and perhaps even metaphysical) sickness in society Vonnegut seeks to treat with his potent imagination. Science fiction writers, he argues, are best suited for this treatment. Their imagination is a curative one. This is a tongue-in-cheek naive belief, but this novel is nothing if not in praise of the naive and innocent foolhardy dreamers of a world with more sense and less pain. There are more things on heaven and earth, after all, than are dreamt of in unimaginative philosophies. Hamlet opined that he "could be bounded in a nut shell and count / myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I / have bad dreams." Vonnegut's appeal is for new dreams for an emancipated humanity.

Something Eliot greatly admires about Kilgore Trout, the author of pulp science fiction novels, his tendency to “describe a perfectly hideous society, not unlike his own, and then, toward the end, to suggest ways in which it could be improved.” He is a diagnostician for the sickness in the world, not unlike Vonnegut himself and, in many ways, Shakespeare. Vonnegut and Shakespeare alike create characters struggling with the tension of the self and attempting to survive the dialectic of history. Shakespeare straddled pre-modern and modern epochs while Vonnegut straddled the modern and post-modern. Both writers diagnosed the sicknesses of their times and offered up their aesthetic cure for willing readers. While Shakespeare wrote centuries ago, we are, as Terry Eagleton once wrote, still catching up to him – the same is must be said for Vonnegut, as we imagine new histories, new politics, and new ways of being human.

Exuent

Read Matthew Gannon's opening essay, "Kurt Vonnegut Has Come Unstuck in Time"

Read Matthew Gannon's previous reviews:
Player Piano, the One-Dimensional Society, and the Emergency Brake of History
Vonnegut in Jerusalem: A Report on the Absurdity of Language and Media

San Lorenzo Mon Amour

2013-06-28T11:56:00.000-04:00

by Wilson Taylor

"By painful experience we have learnt that rational thinking does not suffice to solve the problems of our social life. Penetrating research and keen scientific work have often had tragic implications for mankind, producing, on the one hand, inventions which liberated man from exhausting physical labor, making his life easier and richer; but on the other hand, introducing a grave restlessness into his life, making him a slave to his technological environments, and — most catastrophic of all — creating the means for his own mass destruction.”

- Albert Einstein, “A Message to Intellectuals,” 1948

“We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima

Into the ceaseless catastrophe of the twentieth century steps Kurt Vonnegut. Cat’s Cradle is a narrative of disaster. Hiroshima is an absence that infects the entirety of the novel, the threat of annihilation that invades the modern consciousness. Jonah, in the liminal space between apocalypse and death, narrates Cat’s Cradle as a Bokononist meditation on living through the end of time. The omnipresence of cataclysm pervades the narrative, which is woven together through the parallel and competing discursive threads of science and religion. Vonnegut’s primary concern in his fourth novel is the unstable relationship between discourse, disaster, and the human. In Cat’s Cradle, the author interrogates the existential and imminent threats against the human, and, as in The Sirens of Titan, imagines an alternate mode of being outside of history. The deep narrative tension of Cat’s Cradle — the uncertain relationship between truth and fiction, life and death, love and disaster, creation and destruction — results from the tragic absurdity of the human condition. After apocalypse, Vonnegut subversively re-imagines and re-enchants the human through the creation of a counter-hegemonic mode of being via a discourse of sacrality, while de-mystifying and de-legitimizing rationalism as a discourse of meaning and mode of being.

The narrative thrust of Cat’s Cradle careens towards apocalypse. While the novel concludes with the destruction of the world, it begins there as well. Jonah’s original goal is to write a “factual” and “Christian” account of the atomic bomb. In The Day the World Ended, Jonah hopes to “emphasize the human rather than the technical side of the bomb.” This oppositional relationship between human ontology and machine epistemology courses through Cat’s Cradle. All of Vonnegut’s novels interrogate the absurd — Cat’s Cradle attempts to formulate this interrogation in the specific context of apocalypse, and seeks to posit a meaningful mode of existence in the wasteland. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” laments T.S. Eliot. Vonnegut dares to sow redemption therein.

In Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut directly interrogates the devastating paradox of progress and apocalypse. In her Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir attempts to resolve what she identifies as the fundamental uncertainty of the existential individual, who sees the self as both subject and object in the world. “The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces. Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to destroy them.” Such is the schizophrenia of the twentieth century. In response to this irony, so piquantly felt by Vonnegut, de Beauvoir suggests that the human must create one’s own system of values. Where scientific truth destroy the world, Vonnegut supplies literary fiction to re-create it.

Vonnegut constructs a narrative as a response to this ambiguity. He creates Bokononism as a thread of redemption after the fall, of love amidst the ruins. As a counter-narrative to the discourse of modernity, Vonnegut constructs Bokononism as an alternate mode of being. Vonnegut seeks to re-enchant the world by placing the human in conversation with the sublime. In a Kantian schema, the realm of the sublime transcends reason and the individual. Similarly, Vonnegut strives for something eternal and timeless in his alternative community of Bokononism. Vonnegut asserts the centrality of the human in the age of the atom bomb. His deftly woven narrative is a testament to the necessary power of fiction and imagination in forging meaning through absurdity. Vonnegut seeks to absolve the sexual, environmental, geo-political, and, above all, apocalyptic anxieties of postwar America through a religious-aesthetic discourse. Vonnegut, in short, is Bokonon.

Après Nous, le Déluge

Dr. Felix Hoenikker is the absent and omnipresent patriarch in Cat’s Cradle. “Father” of both the atomic bomb and the weaponized particle ice-nine, Hoenikker engineers apocalypse. In Hoenikker is embodied the tragic paradox of the twentieth century, the utopian dream and apocalyptic nightmare of technology. He embodies the impulse to subject the earth to human dominion, but Hoenikker’s final creation, ice-nine, freezes the planet and ushers in nuclear winter. Cat’s Cradle’s dialectic of disaster reveals the damning teleology of enlightenment and technology. Vonnegut does not dismiss science, but he does warn gravely against the mystical faith that Hoenikker attributes to science. Vonnegut’s existential critique of scientism — the belief that scientific discourse reserves exclusive right to meaning — lies in a lack of self-awareness and the blind faith in “progress” and “truth” evinced by figures such as Hoenikker and his associate, Dr. Breed.

Hoenikker understands science as a new religious discourse, exhibiting a dogmatic faith in his own rationality and to quote Adorno and Horkheimer, placing “too much trust in contemporary consciousness.” Too many, he claims, “were still superstitious instead of scientific,” blind to the superstitious faith he himself places in science. Hoenikker believed that “science was going to discover the basic secret of life someday.” Science and technology, according to Hoenikker, leads to a superior state of being and to a re-created world. Dr. Breed even describes Hoenikker as a “modern holy man.” The irony is clear — the technology that Hoenikker creates directly leads to the destruction of the world. And the “basic secret of life” that Hoenikker hoped to discover turns out to be, absurdly, “something to do with protein.”

Hoenikker’s religious zeal for scientism echoes Adorno and Horkheimer’s powerful postwar critique of rationalism contained in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Their foundational question anticipates Vonnegut’s ironic portrayal of the enlightened scientist. “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of though, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and establishing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.” They speculate that rationalism has itself “reverted to myth,” marching through the human consciousness with a “false clarity” that resembles dogmatic religion. This apotheosis of rationalism — which claims precedent over alternate discourses or modes of being — constructs a teleology of progress and power. And, for Vonnegut, like Adorno and Horkheimer (and Walter Benjamin), apocalypse is the logical end of this faith in progress. To the credit of the Bokononists of San Lorenzo, the only “aspect of progress that really excites them” is the electric guitar.

Dr. Breed claims, in a statement that would make a Bokononist “howl,” that “new knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” Adorno and Horkheimer critique this instrumental attitude, where intellect “is solidified into a cultural asset and handed out for consumption” and “thought is being turned inescapably into a commodity.” The rationalist discourse of enlightenment, instead of providing meaning and purpose to human life, constructs a teleology of cataclysm that negates the human and destroys the world. Among the myriad problems with this discourse, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is its lack of “self-awareness,” leading to the “self-destruction of enlightenment.” Rationalism cannibalizes itself. Humanity births the bomb, destroys the planet, and “sinks into a new state of barbarism.” J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita after testing the atomic bomb — “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

This lack of self-awareness of enlightenment extends to Felix Hoenikker. He attributes his technical success to his continuous “wonder” at the world — “I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year old on a spring morning. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder.” Because of this detached perspective, Hoenikker’s son, Newt, describes his father as “innocent,” as a scientist in pursuit of pure knowledge. He recounts to Jonah a story of Hoenikker’s pre-lapsarian innocence in a story that deliberately echoes Oppenheimer. After testing the atomic bomb at Alamogordo, “a scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said, ‘What is sin?’” This remarkably indifferent attitude of Hoenikker demonstrates the dangers of an epistemology that neglects the human. “People weren’t his specialty,” suggest Newt Hoenikker of his father. For Vonnegut, the human must always center and sustain any discourse or mode of being, and any ontological or epistemic framework that ignores or neglects the human is dangerous. Newt Hoenikker recounts his father’s startling lack of self-awareness in his memory of his father on August 6, 1945, when the atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima. Felix Hoenikker was playing games, manipulating the eponymous “cat’s cradle” with a loop of string. Newt, despite his apologetics for his “innocent” father, remembers a monster. “Cigar smoke made him smell like the mouth of Hell.”

As Newt later describes, his rage against his father, partially lies in this bizarre game of the cat’s cradle. “No damn cat, and no damn cradle,” Newt would later decry. Therein lies the damning paradox of Hoenikker’s scientism. In his technical creation, he lost sight of the human. He weaves a system without any role for the “cat,” for the lived experience of the human and the world. Oppenheimer, reflecting on the creation of the bomb, would suggest that the process was in pursuit of “technical sweetness,” that the bomb was created as a result of an unreflective and uncritical process of disconnected rationality. Bokononist Jonah adroitly penetrates this uncritical posture — “the creators of the atomic bomb had been criminal accessories to murder most foul,” he implies. Or, as Vonnegut suggests in his 1970 “Address to Graduating Class at Bennington College,” “Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened...was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima. We killed everybody there.”

In Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut attempts to dramatize the absurdity of this disconnected scientific worldview, an epistemology that disenchants and negates the human. The destruction of the earth functions in the novel as a Bokononist “wrang-wrang,” an event that “reduces...a line of speculation...to an absurdity.” At one point in the novel, Jonah offers Sherman Krebbs his New York City apartment for a brief stay. Krebbs is a nihilist poet and “National Chairman of Poets and Painters for Immediate Nuclear War.” When Jonah returns, his cat had been killed and his apartment “wrecked by a nihilistic debauch.” This experience functions for Jonah as a “wrang-wrang,” teaching that “nihilism was not for me.” Vonnegut imagines his apocalypse similarly. He distills the catastrophic teleology of technology to its most absurd, and terrifyingly imaginable, conclusion.

After reducing the dialectic of enlightenment to an absurdity, Vonnegut constructs the elaborate humanistic theology of Bokononism in order to reinforce his true novelistic aims. Whereas Hoenikker represented a “modern holy man” of apocalypse, Vonnegut’s Bokonon is a prophet of the human. Whereas “enlightenment” disenchants, Bokonon offers to re-sacralize the human and the world. He dismisses machine epistemology and weaves a human ontology. Dangerous scientific truths beget the redemptive lies of Bokonon. Bokonon reinforces Vonnegut’s Epicurean humanism, embodying the impulse to exit the dialectic of history and cultivate a transgressive love.

La Petite Mort

Apocalypse carries sexual implications. Again, Felix Hoenikker is the absent and omnipresent Father in Cat’s Cradle — as both the embodiment of the patriarchal discourse of enlightenment and the literal creator of both the atomic bomb and ice-nine. His apocalyptic technology partially results from his sexual anxiety. Vonnegut reveals that Hoenikker was cuckolded; his alleged offspring are the product of an adulterous liaison between Hoenikker’s wife and Dr. Breed. The atomic bomb and ice-nine, therefore, are twin products of his resultant insecurity. Vonnegut expands Hoenikker’s sexual and reproductive anxiety to encompass the schizophrenia and paranoia of the contemporary world. In the creation of the counter-hegemonic community of Bokononism, Vonnegut creates a new form of sexual relation. It is not coincidental that Vonnegut’s new religion, Bokononism, is grounded in the new sexual communion of boko-maru. The creation of a new world, suggests Vonnegut, depends on rejecting the Freudian anxieties of modernity and finding new modes of unmediated human communion.

As Thomas Pynchon played with elaborately in Gravity’s Rainbow, the phallic symbolism of the atomic bomb reinforces the Oedipal anxieties of modernity. Ice-nine is further described as a “seed” particle, one which will reproduces its likeness by freezing all particles on earth. Vonnegut reinforces the orgasmic implications of apocalypse through a fictional narrative of destruction, 2000 A.D. “It told how mad scientists made a terrific bomb that wiped out the whole world. There was a big sex orgy when everybody knew that the world was going to end.” Hoenikker’s patriarchal violence against the world resonates with Derrida’s conception of the “phallogocentrism” of modernity. Phallogocentrism refers to the twin centrality of reason and the phallus in the Western consciousness. Hoenikker’s monomaniacal pursuit of detached scientism is explicitly gendered, and reinforces patterns of patriarchy and domination. This phallogocentrist hegemony is explicitly elided in the image of the atomic bomb. Vonnegut desires to transcend the Oedipal constraints of modernity. In order to do so, he must, in a Freudian vein, kill the phallogocentric Father of Apocalypse, Felix Hoenikker. Hoenikker actually kills himself, in keeping with the self-destructive impulse of enlightenment. In an urge to move beyond a phallic and patriarchal binary of domination, Vonnegut creates a non-phallic form of sexual and human communion. He urges what Deleuze and Guatarri refer to as the “deterritorialization” of the human consciousness in order to create new modes of being.

The Bokononist act of boko-maru comprises the ritualistic contact of the soles of the feet between two humans. Jonah’s love for the “sublime” Mona reinforces Vonnegut’s desire to transcend and to find a new mode of human being. Jonah and Mona engage in both boko-maru and penetrative sex, the latter discounted by Jonah as “sordid” and “repulsive” and by Mona as “sad.” Boko-maru offers instead an unmediated communion of souls. Vonnegut imagines this subversive sex to be revolutionary, capable of transforming human consciousness and ushering in a new world. Boko-maru carries an added environmental component, meant to unite love of human with love of “Mother Earth” in a constellation of desire, and in direct opposition to the patriarchal domination of Hoenikker’s phallic rationalism. Vonnegut reinforces the revolutionary love of boko-maru and Bokononism as a rejection of the “sex orgy” of2000 A.D. After apocalypse, Jonah finds a valley filled with the frozen corpses of Bokononists engaged in boko-maru, searching for love amidst the ruins. Whereas apocalypse is the teleological end of patriarchy, Vonnegut desires to create a new world of fluid love and communion through humanistic and environmental love.

Vonnegut’s urge to transcend the Oedipal restraints of modernity and situate the human in the sublime echoes Jacques Lacan’s conception of the Symbolic and the Real. In Lacan’s post-Freudian psychoanalysis, the individual is mediated, through the Oedipus complex, into the Symbolic order of language, desire, and thought. This alienated individual seeks recourse to the Real, the sublime realm of unmediated human being. Vonnegut’s community of Bokononism attempts to situate the human into the Real by positing a holistic realm of imagination that leads to human flourishing. The individual can dissolve into a higher realm of being. Whereas the Symbolic is fragmented — by, for instance, the infectious negation of apocalypse — the Real offers true transcendence.

The Work of Art in the Age of Apocalypse

Vonnegut weaves Bokononism as a holistic humanist theology in order to oppose enlightenment’s patriarchal negation of the human and the world. Cat’s Cradle sings with the dynamic tension between Hoenikker’s scientism and Bokonon’s humanism. Whereas the truths of Hoenikker’s scientism lead to apocalypse, Vonnegut hopes to sow foma, or harmless untruths, in order to reap redemption. To return to his 1970 “Address to Graduating Class at Bennington College,” Vonnegut claims, “The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage... Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still — I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art.” Vonnegut's valuation of aesthetics overlaps Bokonon's religious discourse.

All that is sacred to Bokonon is the human. “Not even God” is sacred. “Just man.” Vonnegut’s highest ethic is to cultivate a subversive humanism, which, in Cat’s Cradle, adopts the form of the counter-hegemonic community of San Lorenzo. Bokononism is counter-hegemonic (a term coined by Gramsci) in its rejection of the apocalyptic anti-human discourses of the catastrophic twentieth century. Bokononism further seeks a place of existence outside of the dialectic of history. “History,” laments Bokonon: “read it and weep!” Like Epicurus, Bokonon preaches an anti-eschatological cosmology, denying the importance of the gods or the presence of an afterlife. Within this radically dis-enchanted world, Bokonon seeks to re-sacralize the human.

As a rejection to the suffering absurdity of humankind, Bokonon’s religion hopes to offer transcendence through the creation of what Martin Luther King refers to as a “beloved community.” The people of San Lorenzo, despite their poverty, find happiness and meaning through Bokonon’s sacralizing discourse. In The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut proposes aesthetic engagement with the world as a salve against absurdity. He re-invokes this impulse toward transcendence through Bokononism, which aims to alleviate the Hobbesian despair and Sisyphean absurdity of the human condition. “The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever,” says Julian Castle, a follower of Bokonon. Nevertheless, through the utopian imagination of Bokonon, “people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth... The happiness of the people grew.” The satisfaction offered through Bokononism, in addition to the unmediated communion of souls through boko-maru, lies in the aestheticization of life. Believers perform the rituals of Bokononism in order to surpass the absurd. The vast impenetrability and incomprehensibility of the world — alluded to in the Bokononist mantra, “busy, busy, busy” — is made human through the Bokononist imagination. “They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood.” Through recourse with the sublime, being is re-imagined and imbued with meaning. Through Bokononism, “life became a work of art,” marvels Jonah.

Bokonon’s transformation of life through aestheticizing the absurd directly echoes Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, in which he theorizes the necessity of aesthetics in imbuing an absurd life with meaning. “Man,” he writes, “has become a work of art; man himself now moves with the same ecstasy and sublimity with which, in dream, he once saw the gods walk.” Transcendence, suggests Nietzsche, is possible only through the transformation of consciousness through art. “Only as aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.” The allure of Bokononism, then, lies in this sublimation of absurdity into something far more profound. Vonnegut suggest that Hobbes is correct in that life is “nasty, brutish, and short,” or, like Macbeth, that life “[signifies] nothing.” To quote Adorno and Horkheimer’s discussion of Schelling in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “art begins where knowledge leaves humans in the lurch.” Vonnegut’s religious discourse helps re-sacralize the human in the wake of apocalypse. Whereas the false discursive cradle of modernity kills the “cat,” Vonnegut weaves a counter-narrative of the sacred centered on the human. Art must resurrect and redeem the devastated world.

Bokonon, the strict antipode to the “modern holy man” of Hoenikker, weaves his religious discourse as a self-conscious fabrication. The first sentence of The Books of Bokonon reads, “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.” Vonnegut reveals the dichotomy between the apocalyptic “truths” offered by scientism and the humanistic “lies” of Bokonon. Jonah warns the reader early in Cat’s Cradle, “Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book.” Vonnegut weaves elaborate tales to approach the simple yet elusive dream of becoming fully human, to achieve what Marx refers to as the “species-being” of un-alienated fulfillment. Throughout Cat’s Cradle, the prophet Bokonon weaves his diverse cradle of humanism out of fictions and dreams in order to emphasize the human sacrality that must provide a bulwark against absurdity and apocalypse. Bokonon rejects the determinism of history and fate, and attempts both to turn inward and outward, the commune directly with himself and with others.

Bokononism emphasizes the human, attempting to construct a narrative of meaning amidst absurdity. Vonnegut’s humanist fictions attempt the same. The epigraph of Cat’s Cradle claims that “Nothing in this book is true.” Nonetheless, his self-aware fictions aim to grasp at a far deeper and more human truth than can be otherwise reached. Literature and art has an essential role in mitigating the Sisyphean absurdity of human life. Castle suggests that without art and literature, people would “die like mad dogs...snarling and snapping at each other,” or of “putrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system.”

Through Bokononism, Vonnegut seeks to negate the negation of enlightenment — to make sacred the human and humanize the sacred. As Marx writes in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, a true “society is the consummated oneness in substance of man and nature — the true resurrection of nature — the naturalism of man and the humanism of nature both brought to fulfillment.” Vonnegut posits the Bokononist Republic of San Lorenzo as such a humanistic and environmental consummation. Only through this cultivation of a counter-hegemonic consciousness can apocalypse be thwarted. Bokonon’s hopes to transform the human and inspire transcendence — what Nabokov refers to as “aesthetic bliss — resonate with Vonnegut’s goals as a novelist. Vonnegut attempts to emphasize the absurdity of the world in order to mystify it anew. Vonnegut is Bokonon. He insists, by virtue of the absurd, that life is beautiful and sacred and divine, that life is transcendent.

"God made mud.

God got lonesome.

So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!”

“See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.”

And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.

Lucky me, lucky mud.

I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.

Nice going, God.

Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have.

I feel very unimportant compared to You.

The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.

I got so much, and most mud got so little.

Thank you for the honor!

Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.

What memories for mud to have!

What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!

I loved everything I saw!"

- Last Rites of Bokononism, Cat's Cradle, 1963

Read Wilson Taylor's opening essay, "Irony and Authenticity in the American Imagination"

Read Wilson Taylor's previous review, "The Kings of Infinite Space and The Sirens of Titan"

Vonnegut in Jerusalem: A Report on the Absurdity of Language and Media

2013-06-21T16:20:00.002-04:00

by Matthew Gannon

“No matter through what accidents of exterior or interior circumstances you were pushed onto the road of becoming a criminal, there is an abyss between the actuality of what you did and the potentiality of what others might have done. We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your inner life and of your motives or with the criminal potentialities of those around you.”

- Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963

“This book is rededicated to Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a man who served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his times.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night, 1961

In her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt presented her collected reports on Adolf Eichmann’s Jerusalem trial for crimes against humanity and the Jewish people. Eichmann, a former member of the Nazi SS largely responsible instituting the logistics of the mass incarceration and extermination of millions of Jews, was captured in Argentina by Israeli foreign intelligence agents and brought to Israel to answer for his crimes. Just two years before Arendt’s book, Vonnegut published, Mother Night, which dealt with remarkably similar themes as Arendt’s. Mother Nightfollows the exploits of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a high profile Nazi propagandist who is brought back to Jerusalem years after World War II in order to be tried for his crimes against the Jewish people, against humanity, and, as Campbell puts it, against his own conscience.

Mother Night’s Howard W. Campbell, Jr. bears a remarkable similarity to Adolf Eichmann, at least superficially. Both were former SS members, both fled Nazi Germany to escape from judgment (particularly the Nuremberg Trials) after the victory of Allied forces, and both were brought back to Israel for trial. Vonnegut was clearly inspired by Eichmann, and even possibly Arendt. Though Arendt’s book appeared years after Vonnegut’s, she wrote about the Eichmann trial, which occurred in 1961, the same year Mother Night was released, serially for The New Yorker. Hannah Arendt famously attracted as much attention as much for her coverage of a sensational figure – the notorious Eichmann – as for her seemingly sympathetic consideration of him. Arendt considered Eichmann to be clownish rather than malevolent and found his actions understandable within the context of ideological bureaucracy. She famously described Eichmann’s form of evil as banal, rather than truly willful. This is not to say she easily forgave Eichmann his sins. In fact, readers of the book will find that as sympathetic as she is, her indictment of this banal evil and her accusation of Eichmann’s clownishness are more poignant than those accusing him of active evil.

Vonnegut too is deeply concerned with the latent evils of bureaucracy in an industrialized and militarized world and indifference to human suffering. Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the protagonist of Mother Night, can even be read as a fictionalization of Eichmann for Vonnegut’s distinct literary purposes. Besides their biographical similarities, both characters make the claim that their role in what Vonnegut calls “the machines of history” was due to sheer chance, not intent.

The similarities between Eichmann and Campbell stop there. Campbell, as a literary figure, is much more lucid and cannot help but posses Vonnegut’s unique moral and political acuity. Vonnegut cannot write a major character that fully evades their evil of their actions as thoroughly as Eichmann did. Campbell even admits as such after having an (fictional) encounter with Eichmann in their Jerusalem prison. Eichmann, Vonnegut (via Campbell) writes, had no ability to distinguish between good and evil and between sanity and insanity. Such was the spirit of history in the twentieth century. Campbell, on the other hand, admitted his own moral awareness and guilt, making his meditations on his life all the more tragic.

The concept of guilt lies at the heart of both Arendt and Vonnegut’s writings. Though Campbell did not directly order Jews to their deaths as Eichmann did, his moral awareness makes him even more susceptible to guilt. If he is guilty though, it is necessary to ask of what. Campbell must be found guilty for the misuse of his words, as he served as a major propagandist in his capacities as a Nazi radio show host. He states that Israel sought to show that “a propagandist of my sort was as much a murderer as Heydrich, Eichmann, Himmler, or any of the gruesome rest.”

Language, then, is at the crux of Campbell’s guilt and it is the focus of Vonnegut’s moral and political interrogations. Language can be used for good or ill. Language can be warped – through mediation and editing – and made to effect different results than the speaker/writer intended. It is the paradoxes and absurdities of language that Vonnegut seeks to explore in Mother Night.

Mother Night is primarily a meditation on media – on mediating writing and rhetoric – and its relation to existential ethics. Vonnegut’s principal methodology in this endeavor is to acknowledge his own mediation, which he accomplished through via meta-fiction, a technique that abounds in Mother Night. The text begins with an introduction that appears to be purely non-fiction (though what non-fiction means is certainly blurred in this and other Vonnegut novels). The introduction is followed by an editor’s note, which is fictional, which gives the illusion of being non-fiction with Vonnegut serving merely as its editor. After this editor’s note comes the bulk of the novel, which has the title “The Confessions of Howard W. Campbell, Jr.”

The purpose of the meta-fictional song and dance is straightforward: Vonnegut seeks to undermine the reader’s trust in his authority as an author in order to provoke the reader into drawing his or her own conclusions. Vonnegut employs various devices to achieve this effect in many of his other novels – perhaps most notably in Breakfast of Champions. Of his early novels, Mother Night may be boldest in its use of meta-fiction and subversive writing to this effect. Vonnegut’s meta-fiction creates an ironic distance, giving readers the space to formulate their own opinions and not be bullied by the author. Vonnegut seeks to problematize his authorial voice for the reader by toying with the narrative point of view. He thus disorients readers, creating ironies and paradoxes. For example: at the beginning of the novel Vonnegut lays out a few morals of the story. These include such platitudes as “When you’re dead you’re dead,” and “Make love when you can. It’s good for you.” What do these stock phrases have to do with the story at hand? Nothing really, making the reader immediately mistrustful of a narrator that seems inclined to spout out odd bits of folk wisdom at random. Furthermore, by partitioning his own identity as a writer and he prompts readers into more imaginative and, ultimately, more empathetic modes of being. Kafka famously stated that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Vonnegut’s narrative devices, alter egos, double-identities, and unreliable narration chip away at that frozen sea.

Vonnegut underhandedly explains his intent in the editor’s note at the beginning of the text. He – in his role as Campbell’s editor and, in some ways apologist – insists that Campbell’s writings are “more than mere information or deceiving.” That is, his writings are somewhat beyond truth and lies – perhaps even beyond good and evil – in that they contain lies that “can be, in a higher sense, the most beguiling forms of truth.” Vonnegut generalizes this wisdom, as he says it not only applies to Campbell’s (fictional) confessions but also to all instances of “lies told for the sake of artistic effect.” Thus the lies of fiction are, in a sense, a higher form of truth. And since all fiction is, in a sense, a lie, all fiction aims at higher truths. Thus the distinction between non-fiction (truth) and fiction (higher truth) is muddled, providing more ironic distance and authorial subversion.

Though Vonnegut praises lies and fiction at the beginning of the novel (at least those that aim at higher truths), the rest of the novel spells out his skepticism towards writing – and other forms of rhetoric – and its potential to elicit unambiguous truth. Vonnegut is deeply ambivalent on this matter. Lies may elicit higher truths, but that does not negate their mendacity. In the case of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., as well as other characters – such as George Kraft, aka Iona Potapov, and Resi Noth, operating under her sister Helga’s name – he is able to concentrate truth and lies, good and evil, into a singular character.

Media serves as an apt metaphor in Mother Night because it reflects the moral and political ambiguity of humanity itself. Media can be used for myriad purposes and has the capacity to transmit both good and evil. Humans, as thoroughly mediated beings, are always subject to this ambiguity and can thus never attain a purity of communication or understanding. Vonnegut has no suggestions as to how to overcome this ambiguity. He instead beseeches readers to embrace the ambiguity of the mediated world and the alienated self. Howard Campbell evades ambiguity and flees from the absurd by suppressing his authentic self and playing out a fictional role of a Nazi propagandist. It’s not so much the Nazi aspect of Campbell that Vonnegut vilifies – although that certainly plays its own part in Campbell’s character – but more that Campbell is so thoroughly inauthentic and unwilling to confront the absurd. Campbell chooses to not choose, denying his own human freedom and willingly subjecting himself to deterministic forces. Campbell thus dehumanizes himself and is worthy of scorn and, as always in Vonnegut’s novels, pity. The world is both peaceful and violent, both good and evil, both moral and not, both just and unjust, and every other paradox imaginable all at the same time, and often within the same contradictory human beings.

Media crops up all over the place in Mother Night, from loudspeakers to radios to record players to newspapers. Campbell’s broadcasts carried information out of Germany. He, like his microphone and radio, contained coded information to listeners abroad. He was as much a medium as his microphone and radio. The editor of the White Christian Minutemen, praises Campbell for being “a beacon,” illuminating his role as a medium for dubious purposes. Campbell describes himself as an “idol of the international airwaves” in his duty as a Nazi propagandist.

As a tonic against this unremitting mediation, Campbell constantly desired unmediated contact, even if it could be with just one other person: his wife Helga. When describing his late wife he says, “We didn’t listen to each other’s words. We heard only the melodies in our voices.” Vonnegut postulates that sex is perhaps the only unmediated interaction possible between humans. Campbell remarks that during sex, his lover (and his late wife’s sister) Resi North was “not even able to speak a word of my language.” And yet, “how eloquent she was.” Bodily experience is at least the least mediated, and provides honest, albeit all too brief, encounters between selves. Even in New York, where Campbell has managed to make a home in a ratty SoHo apartment in hiding from the authorities, he eschews language, with its uncomfortable ambivalence, its schizophrenic character. He listens to Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” endlessly, a vapid escapism if there ever was one. Tellingly, he refuses to write during this period. In this little respite he feels no pain, narcotized against emotion via escaping the complexity of humanity and the self. His friend is a painter, another escapee – a Soviet spy lamenting his solitude – working in a wordless medium: painting. His neighbor, alias George Kraft, claims art as his only relative in the world. Even another human relation would make life too complex. And when Campbell makes the curious mistake of wandering over to Kraft’s apartment the walls of Cambell’s nation of one crumble, as does his tenuous New York life.

What, readers might wonder, is the inherent problem with media? Firstly, all human contact is mediated, even that relation of the self to the self. At a basic level, media dominates much of society’s communication: radios, television, books, and writing. Language itself is a medium, the most primordial of media. Any direct human contact must be mediated through language either in spoken word or in writing. True, music, painting, pictures, and wordless expressions are mostly devoid of language and are thus less mediated in a sense, but to fully comprehend anything as a human is to filter experience through language in an attempt to achieve clarity. These attempts at clarity are foiled by the unpredictability and ambiguity of language. Language and words are slippery – they can represent good just as easily as evil (and banality). Furthermore, because all comprehension is linguistic, comprehension of the self must too be linguistic, which serves to reveal the complexity and ambiguity inherent in the self. The self is thus mediated from the self by language. In response to this alienation from the self and others, the self can choose to embrace this ambiguity or reject it. Vonnegut describes this ambiguity as “schizophrenia” – the capacity for both good and evil contained within humanity as well as all language and media.

Plato mediated on the problematic nature of media as well, particularly that of writing, which was not common in the Hellenic world at that time. In his Phaedrus, Socrates remarks that writing “will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves by their own unaided powers, but under the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves.” Wisdom will vanish in favor of simple reminders that are based in these external marks. They will create “the delusion” that readers “have wide knowledge, while they are, in fact, for the most part incapable of real judgment.” Socrates warns: “Once a thing is put in writing, it rolls about all over the place, falling into the hands of those who have no concern with it just as easily as under the notice of those who comprehend; it has no notion of whom to address or whom to avoid. And when it is ill-treated or abused as illegitimate, it always needs its father to help it, being quite unable to protect or help itself.”

Vonnegut, like Plato/Socrates, is suspicious of mediated knowledge. Vonnegut’s concerns are not just for wisdom, but for morality and political knowledge. Media deceive by giving illusions of truth while containing deeper lies. Just as lies in fiction may contain beguiling truths, some truths expressed through media contain deeper lies. As William Blake once said, “A truth that's told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent.” Contemporary viewers of the 24-hour news cycle and talking heads news programs may be acutely aware of this without having to resort to Plato, Blake, or Vonnegut. Nevertheless, Vonnegut, aware of the pitfalls of media and its dubious relation to truth, seeks to circumvent this inherent untrustworthiness with the aforementioned meta-fiction. Reader’s shouldn’t rely simply on the “external marks” that are “alien to themselves.” They ought to rely on their own mental acuity and moral workings. By eschewing traditional authorial authority Vonnegut coerces readers into taking responsibility for their own consciousness on matters of politics and ethics. It is not for Vonnegut to layout truth unequivocally but to be suggestive, to play with meta-fiction and postmodern authorial tactics to liberate the reader from oppression by the writer. Don’t blindly trust words, media, or even Vonnegut himself. Place more trust in your own critical examination. This is a deconstructive strategy to be sure, but one that initiates the rebuilding of human consciousness and empathy on stronger, more sustainable ground.

While in prison, an Israeli guard tells Campbell the conditions of the concentration camp he was once prisoner of: “There were loudspeakers all over the [concentration] camp.” They played music all day long and occasionally barked instructions to the prisoners or their guards. “Very modern,” replies Campbell. The affect of these speakers somehow convinced many prisoners that it was desirable to become a “corpse-carrier,” a particularly vile activity in which prisoners would carry away corpses for incineration before they would themselves face the same fate. These figures were what one character described as “briquets.” That is, they were inhuman molded blocks of coal dust, designed specifically for combustion. Media turns words around on themselves and can make even the inhuman seem humane. On the other hand, it can serve the opposite function of making the human seem inhuman. Vonnegut takes particular exception to Nazis being dehumanized. Vonnegut was himself a prisoner of war of the Nazis during World War II. His experiences –later illustrated in more depth by Slaughterhouse-Five – revealed the humanity of Nazis. Because of this, Campbell’s defense of Nazis’ humanity is even more poignant. He knows of the atrocities they committed, but he “knew them too well as people” to think of them as anything but humans, albeit deeply flawed ones. “Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind,” he admits – revealing that narrative and language conceals their humanity even as it reveals their inhuman actions.

Media – particularly language – is so important in Mother Night because Howard W. Campbell, Jr. is himself a medium, an instrument to be used by the Nazis and the Allies. Vonnegut’s severest criticism of Campbell isn’t that he was affiliated with the Nazis but that he allowed himself to be used as a mere tool rather than acknowledging his humanity and his human imperative to be a conscious actor in life. Campbell essentially denies his own humanity by denying the self that is at the core of his being. This is why Campbell ultimately admits to committing “crimes against my own conscience,” which are, in many ways, the ultimate crime. In bad faith, Campbell does not embrace his relation to the absurdity of existence and the ambiguities of language and chooses to not choose. When Frank Wirtanen, the American intelligence officer that assigns him his spy duties, first presents Campbell with the option of being a spy, he insists that Campbell’s choice won’t come through a yes or no answer, but in how he ultimately chooses to act. Despite that Campbell does end up serving as a spy, he does so in a existentially inauthentic way. Wirtanen, after the war is over, marvels with an unmistakable horror at how well Campbell infiltrated the Nazis. When Campbell asks why Wirtanen cannot trust him even after he has been such an excellent spy, Wirtanen responds, “How could I ever trust a man who’s been as good a spy as you have?”

In order to fully convert himself into an instrument to be used rather than a human that can choose Campbell must suppress his conscience and even his true consciousness. He abdicates the self in an order to allow his encoded messages to pass right through him. When, after the war, someone suggests he should work in public relations he says, “I certainly don’t have any powerful convictions to get in the way of a client’s message.” As a communicative tool, Campbell is an empty out as the wiring of a radio, waiting for the proper impulses to automatically produce whatever message he is designed to broadcast. At one point he admits: “I confess to a ghastly lack in myself.” Campbell’s greatest sin is a sin against conscience, the sin of allowing himself to be used as an inhuman instrument for inhuman ends.

In order to hollow himself out to become an unconscionable medium, Campbell destroys his conscience and, ultimately, his own self. He is a tool, not a human, and a tool has no use for a self. He serves the purposes of means-ends rationality, and he does not exist in himself and for himself as a human being. He buried his authentic self deep inside and fractured it beyond repair. When he is told that he unwittingly broadcasted the information that his wife had died he becomes despondent with the thought that there was a “wider separation” of his “several selves” than he had previously imagined. By retreating into himself and allowing himself to be turned over for use as an instrument of mediation, he fractured himself. “One part of me told the world of the tragedy in code. The rest of me did not even know that the announcement was being made.”

After the war is over and he finally returns to America, where he had only ever lived as a child, he begins to long for a self again, though his is irrevocably damaged. He has regretfully inured himself against all possible pain and narcotized himself against any sense of justice or morality. Campbell desires the sanctuary of the self, but his own self is damaged. Campbell longs to hear the cry of “Olly-olly-oxen-free” that can beckon him back to “that little Eden,” that sanctuary of the self. He admits that while “hiding from many people who might want to hurt or kill” him, he “often longed for someone to give that cry” for him, to end his “endless game of hide-and-seek.” But the true hide-and-seek has been with himself and his conscience. Unfortunately, Campbell’s prelapsarian sanctuary has been demolished and there is no Eden to which he can return, though there may be an Elysium for him yet. When Campbell finally turns himself over to Israeli authorities and is trapped within his actual Jerusalem prison, Campbell has the chance to confront the prison of the self and reckon with his crimes against his conscience.

Howard W. Campbell, Jr. was a man who embodied the schizophrenia of modern industrial society and the absurdity of the world, but he was not a man who could confront this schizophrenia. He coped by rejecting the self, rather than grasping it. He could, as Vonnegut writes of Campbell’s friend Kraft, “be many things at once – all sincerely.” This falsity, which Vonnegut likens to a sort of plagiarism, is the easy way out. He writes of plagiarism as “the silliest of misdemeanors.” What is really criminal is “real originality,” because in this schizophrenic and ambiguous world, to forge your own identity as faithfully to the self as possible is the truly difficult task. Campbell, a playwright, poet, and propagandist, could only summon his creative power to construct an identity with the utmost disingenuousness and one-dimensionality.

Jean-Paul Sartre once said that humans “decide our being” and “there is a plurality of possibilities” from which can shape ourselves. He insisted that we are free to choose, “that is to say, invent” our being and are not subject to vulgar determinism because “man is free, man is freedom.” In the introduction to Mother Night, Vonnegut reformulates this Sartrean philosophy on choice and being: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." How can such a solipsistic attitude impact society at large though? Why does it matter who we pretend to be on a social level? “What can one any one person do?” one character inquires of Howard Campbell. “Each person does a little something,” he replies, and eventually, “it all adds up.”

Campbell is fully aware of his failure in this regard, which is why he distinguishes himself from Eichmann, whom he encounters in Jerusalem. When he meets Eichmann he decides to try out some “intramural satire.” He asks Eichmann if he will use as his excuse for the murder of six million Jews, “You were simply a soldier…taking orders from higher-ups.” Eichmann responds with astonishment, because Campbell had precisely guessed what Eichmann was using as his defense. Campbell knows better than to make such a claim, because he, unlike Eichmann can actually understand the sins of his actions. And even more than that, he can see that claiming to be simply an instrument of the great machine of history – that is, obviating your own human will – is an even great crime to admit to. As Hannah Arendt insisted in her conclusion to Eichmann in Jerusalem:

“Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefor actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.”

Later in her conclusion, Arendt writes that Eichmann had determined he could not share the earth with the Jews and thus nobody should be expected to want to share the earth with such a man with those opinions. It is for this reason he had to die. Campbell could not bear to live in a world with his human self, with all its complexity, absurdity, and self-determinative capability, and this is why he had to die.

Read Matthew Gannon's opening essay, "Kurt Vonnegut Has Come Unstuck in Time"

Read Matthew Gannon's previous review, Player Piano, the One-Dimensional Society, and the Emergency Brake of History

The Kings of Infinite Space and The Sirens of Titan

2013-06-14T13:55:00.000-04:00

by Wilson Taylor

“You will come first of all to the Sirens, who are enchanters

of all mankind and whoever comes their way; and that man

who unsuspecting approaches them, and listens to the Sirens

singing, has no prospect of coming home and delighting

his wife and little children as they stand about him in greeting,

but the Sirens by the melody of their singing enchant him.”

- Homer, The Odyssey, XII.39-44

John, I’m Only Dancing

When confronted with the absurdity of the human condition, Harrison Bergeron chooses to dance. Refusing any longer to bear the pain of existence, the weight of history, or Hamlet’s “whips and scorns of time,” Bergeron casts off his burdens and dances with revolutionary grace. Through art, Bergeron transcends life itself. As Nietzsche suggests in The Birth of Tragedy, “our highest dignity lies in our significance as works of art — for only as aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.” Bergeron invests life with meaning through his actualized desire to “become a work of art.” Bergeron’s dance is a dance against history and against time. Bergeron’s dance is Sisyphus’ scorn — to quote Camus, all of his “silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him.” In his rejection of absurdity, Bergeron discovers his soul.

Harrison Bergeron revolts against a totalitarian regime that demands, in the name of equity, all subjects to bear weighted handicaps and an implanted radio, the latter for the purpose of disrupting thought. “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.” Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” resounds with echoes of ideas first explored in 1959 through Vonnegut’s second novel, The Sirens of Titan. Bergeron’s revolt into a transcendent, aesthetic realm transforms an absurd life and imbues it with sublimity. As Bergeron’s revolt suggests, meaning can only be sought within the existential self, and that meaning can only be realized through aesthetic engagement with the world. Bergeron, dancing with revolutionary grace, dies into freedom. Through art, Bergeron becomes timeless. Bergeron exits the cycle of history and his moment of transcendence is eternal.

The Sirens of Titan is Vonnegut’s novelistic meditation on history and happiness. Like Malachi Constant, all are victims of fate; all are hostages on inevitable and inscrutable odysseys. True meaning can only be found through exiting the terror of history to find the eternal — to dance, like Bergeron, against the accidents of fate. In order to avoid Charybdis and Scylla, Hamlet’s “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” it is best to exit history and sing with the Sirens.

Space Oddity

The Sirens of Titan opens with Vonnegut’s exposition on the narrative, in which he introduces this “true story from the Nightmare Ages” of postwar America. In the Nightmare Ages, no one “knew how to find the meaning of life within themselves.” To assuage this existential doubt, humankind “looked outward” in search of meaning, flinging themselves “like stones” through space. “These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance here on Earth — a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.” Meanwhile, “grimcrack religions were big business.”

At the nightmarish intersection of the “empty heroics” of space travel and the “big business” of grimcrack religion grins Winston Niles Rumfoord like a Cheshire Cat. Winston Niles Rumfoord “had run his ship right into the heart of an uncharted chrono-synclastic infundibulum,” which has radically transformed his being. Rumfoord now exists as a “wave phenomenon” — he no longer exists at discrete moments in time and space, but at all moments in all times and all spaces. Rumfoord is unmoored. Whereas Malachi Constant, American playboy and eventual hero of Sirens, exists “punctually,” Rumfoord “pulses in a distorted spiral with its origin in the Sun and its terminal in Betelgeuse.” Rumfoord “materializes” whenever an incidental planet intercepts the inevitablity of his cosmic being.

The irony of Rumfoord’s character is that, though he is unconstrained by space or time, he is still subject to the cruel accidents of fate. Rumfoord flits everywhere but dwells nowhere, in mechanistic harmony with the determined intricacies of space-time, but devoid of any transcendent meaning. Rumfoord lacks any inwardness. And, whereas Vonnegut’s citation from A Child’s Cyclopedia of Wonders promises that traversing a “chrono-synclastic infundibulum” will allow one to “see all the different ways to be absolutely right” and offer new perspective on the cosmos, Rumfoord remains blind. Despite Rumfoord’s wisdom that “everything that ever was always will be, and everything that ever will be ever was,” he lacks insight or perception. As a “wave phenomenon,” Rumfoord offers a window into the meaningless exploration of space, the vagaries of time, and the arbitrariness of fate. Rumfoord embodies the paradox of the Nightmare Age — someone who, in a quest for meaning, discovers the “meaninglessness without end” of contemporary existence.

Rumfoord’s absurd exploration of space and time inhibits his interrogation of his own being. Again, Vonnegut insists that “goodness and wisdom” can only be found in the “terra incognita” of the “human soul,” not in the meaningless expanses of the cosmos. If truth exists, it exists within. Rumfoord is too haphazardly implicated in the fabric of space and time to examine and cultivate his own being. He is too tired to dance. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut wonders about the relationship between being and time. “I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, and how much was mine to keep.” Rumfoord, spread so thin as often to appear translucent, has very little time to keep. He is, instead, rushed through the rapids of time and “the monotonous clockwork of the Solar System,” unable to draw a breath.

As Vonnegut hints, Rumfoord is unable to find the meaning of life within himself, so he searches for it externally. In his inability to discover meaning, Rumfoord fabricates it, inaugurating and evangelizing a new “grimcrack religion” and commercial enterprise, The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Rumfoord’s church calls for the “Brotherhood of Man” through the systematic handicapping of believers and proselytizing for an apathetic demiurge. “I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all,” evangelizes Winston Niles Rumfoord. Despite this apparent insight, Rumfoord’s church is a manifestation of his hubristic and inflated sense of self. He cultivates grand visions of his own cosmic-historical import, but is unhinged when reminded of his own insignificance. Rumfoord exploits the lives of thousands in order to extort belief from a planet of skeptics, most notably manipulating the destiny of Malachi Constant so the beleaguered space wanderer can serve as a mouthpiece and scapegoat for his religion. More broadly, Rumfoord establishes a ramshackle colony on Mars from which to mount a doomed and bloody invasion of Earth. Only after the failed invasion can he believably spread his gospel of brotherhood. Ultimately, through bloodshed and brainwashing, Rumfoord manufactures an opiate for the masses of Earth. He sells The Meaning of Life alongside baubles and dolls, neglecting that, for him and for all, the meaning of life can only be found within. Only when the individual self searches for meaning within can that individual transcend the self and transcend time. Winston Niles Rumfoord is too deeply implicated in the accidental machinery of time to move beyond. He is inescapably bound to the absurd.

Life on Mars?

Malachi Constant, following “an opportunity to think about [his] native planet from a fresh and beautifully detached viewpoint,” follows two Martian recruiters to Mars. Winston Niles Rumfoord has established a “rented” and ramshackle colony on Mars from which to mount an invasion of Earth. Rumfoord designs the invasion of Earth to fail, but plans to exploit that failure to introduce the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Only after a failed invasion of Earth, he believes, can he impel Earthlings to embrace the brotherhood of humankind.

Constant is absorbed into the Martian war-machine. He, like thousands of other recruits, has his memory erased and a radio antenna implanted in his brain. The removal of memory, likened to “cleaning out a pumpkin,” and the antenna installation allow Rumfoord more completely to control the thoughts and actions of his subjects. Mars is totalitarian and “military-industrial” dystopia, an Orwellian nightmare. In the frightening opening scene to Vonnegut’s Martian narrative, Constant, who has since been renamed “Unk,” is forced, via mind control, to strangle brutally his best friend and mentor, Stony Stevenson. As Constant learns, he is “not only a victim of outrageous fortune, but one of outrageous fortune’s cruelest agents as well.”

Unk’s sojourn into the military-industrial dystopia of Mars potentially opens an unsettling allegorical discussion of post-war American society. At one point, “Unk had the eerie feeling that he and Boaz were the only real people... that the rest were glass-eyed robots,” marching and thinking (and, eventually, murdering) according to a radio transmission in their heads. The automata of Mars have no imagination and no inwardness. These “glass-eyed robots” embody Vonnegut’s conception of the meaninglessness of the individual against the accidents of fate and the terror of history. Upon arriving to Mars, Unk is forced into Martian society, which has been brainwashed and filled with false hope, absorbed into a misleading narrative of progress and perpetual war. While Vonnegut’s Martian narrative is directly critical of the militarization of human bodies and beings, he is also mounting a more nuanced critique of American society.

Much of Vonnegut’s fiction attempts to communicate the schizophrenia of the American experience, with World War II functioning as a point of rupture in his imagination. Like Constant, Vonnegut attempts to comprehend his disruptive experience of war. And like the eventual heroes of Sirens, Vonnegut attempts to escape the terror of history through art. The Sirens of Titan, like most of his narratives, is an aesthetic struggle of Vonnegut’s human soul to transcend the accidents of his own fate and his terror of history.

In 1961, President Eisenhower would warn against the encroachments of the “military-industrial complex,” the absorption of all facets of American society into an insatiable war machine. Vonnegut’s critique, from the iron wastelands of Mars, carries more ironic nuance. The war-machine is supported by a city, the industrial wasteland of Phoebe, inhabited by more “glass-eyed robots.” Constant, in order to assert and celebrate his humanity, deserts. He exits the dialectic of history in order to pursue the eternal.

Like the American President in Sirens, who moronically trumpets the supposed need for “progerse,” Vonnegut suggests that the false idea of “progress” — scientific, militaristic, historical, et cetera — is itself another “grimcrack religion.” To leap, unseen, into a supposed river of progress is to abandon oneself to “flinging stones” at meaning and purpose. Vonnegut conceives of the dialectic of history in accordance with Walter Benjamin’s “storm,” the catastrophe of history commonly referred to as “progress.” In the epigraph of Sirens, Vonnegut absurdly defines progress as the “forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules” the Solar System travels each year. This farcical epigraph, provided by the fictional “Ransom K. Fern,” is among several “official” voices from which Vonnegut ironically pulls to stitch together the postmodern odyssey of Sirens.Vonnegut assumes such a great variety of voices — scientific, political, religious, militaristic — in order to emphasize the overarching theme of the novel: that truth can only be found within the self and outside the bounds of history. Whereas history, in all of its absurd grandeur, continues to march with incidental inevitability, true redemption can only be found within the human self and outside the flow of historical time. In order to still the nightmare of history, the human must turn inward for meaning. History is a farce. Vonnegut’s hero is the deserter. Vonnegut’s hero is the transcendentalist.

Oh! You Pretty Things (The Sirens of Titan)

History is absurd, Vonnegut suggests, and any attempt to mold transcendent meaning out of its heap of accidents is equally absurd. The conclusion of the novel is set on Siren, Saturn’s largest moon. It is here, not on Mars, where Constant is finally afforded the “beautifully detached” perspective on Earth, on humanity, and, ultimately, on himself. Rumfoord has been materializing on Siren periodically, where he has befriended a shipwrecked Tralfamadorian transversing the Universe. Salo has been stranded for over two hundred thousand years, awaiting repair for his vessel. In the long millennia of his layover, Salo has sculpted beautiful statues of Earthlings. Salo’s sculptures — which capture Earthlings in moments both pedestrian and sublime — evince a recurring desire in Vonnegut’s imagination to stop time, to exit history, and to capture the eternal in a moment. Salo sculpts where Bergeron dances. Among his statues are the eponymous and infamous Sirens of Titan, whose beauty had intensely drawn Constant.

The necessary mechanical piece for Salo’s ship, in a beautiful frisson of absurdist fiction, is a metal shard carried in the pocket of Constant’s son, Chrono. This piece is the “culmination of all Earthling history.” Those searching for meaning in the hopeless abstractions of progress and history are thus both satisfied and chagrined — meaning exists, but the entire history of Earth has been for the intended benefit of a shipwrecked Tralfamadorian. The pain of this cosmic truth shatters Rumfoord. The purpose of human history is absurd — the eventual heroes of the novel must find a way to exist meaningfully outside of its meaningless telos.

While on Mars, Unk uncovers a self-written letter in which he has written himself as the hero of his own postmodern odyssey. The letter contains 151 disparate pieces of wisdom he has been able to gather, despite the repeated erasure of his memory. Discovering this letter changes Unk’s conception of himself, transforming him from a “victim of a series of accidents” to a “secretly free” hero. Point 72 reads, “The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of the pain now, Unk, but you won’t learn anything if you don’t invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.” Because of Constant’s nuanced appreciation of the painfulness of truth, he, unlike Rumfoord, is not shattered by the revelation of the absurdity of human history. Rather, Constant is one of several characters who achieve a higher form of wisdom through exiting the dialectic of history and seeking transcendence from within. Like Bergeron, and like Vonnegut himself, these characters all explore their beings through aesthetic engagement with the world. These eventual heroes of The Sirens of Titan embody Vonnegut’s sentiment of the highest good.

Unk’s companion Boaz assumes the mantle of Vonnegut’s first hero in Sirens. In Unk’s attempt to desert the Martian military and flee the planet, the two of them are whisked to Mercury for an indefinite sojourn on the first planet. Apart from the two wearied travelers, the only inhabitants of the planet are harmoniums, who live a life of aesthetic beauty and bliss in the subterranean caverns of Mercury. The creatures, which resemble kites, feed on planetary vibrations, and often “arrange themselves in striking patterns on the phosphorescent walls.” Because they feed on vibrations, the harmoniums are appreciators of music. The harmoniums inspire Boaz through their “love for music and their willingness to deploy themselves in the service of beauty.” And Boaz obliges them, devoting countless hours to aesthetic revelry with his multitudinous recordings. The first score he plays for them is Le Sacre du Printemps, or The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky’s own meditation on the overpowering force of art. As the harmoniums thrive on the power of art, Boaz’ soul is sustained as well. He creates new meaning in Mercury — he finds redemption and transcendence when allowed to explore the “terra incognita” of his own being. Boaz refuses to leave Mercury, content to exit history and live a life of deliberation and aesthetic engagement. “I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm,” explains Boaz with a wisdom that informs the conclusion of Sirens, “and they love me... I found me a home.”

Other heroes of Vonnegut’s odyssey experience similar epiphanies in the Elysian fields of Titan. Beatrice, Chrono, and Constant all emerge as unlikely heroes. They have explored space and time and found it lacking — “only inwardness remained to be explored.” Like Boaz, this small family retreats to the unexplored solitude of Titan in order to exit the continuum of history and seek the eternal. On Titan, they exit the terror of history and find redemption. On Titan they achieve transcendence. And, for Bergeron, Boaz, Salo, and Vonnegut himself, this transcendence is realized through aesthetic engagement with the world. Through art, these characters create meaning in their world. They live with deliberately, and with revolutionary grace.

Whereas Rumfoord existed cosmically, at once everywhere and every time, Chrono, Beatrice and Constant characters exist punctually, at one place and in a limited time. In so doing, they actually achieve timelessness — they find eternity. While these characters were brought to Titan by another “series of accidents,” they find a way to subvert the inevitability of fate through a deliberate and intentional life outside of historical time. They live deeply, and in so living, achieve transcendence and purpose.

Henry David Thoreau, articulating a dream that courses through the American imagination, describes his life in Walden that captures these wanderers purpose on Titan:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

Constant, Beatrice, and Chrono on Titan, like Boaz on Mercury, all pursue this dream of transcendence through simplicity and deliberation. They reduce life to its lowest terms in an attempt to determine what life is and what it means. And they all find purpose through aesthetic engagement with the world. Like Bergeron, they explore and justify their beings through “becoming a work of art.”

Chrono, whose name means “time,” has fulfilled the mechanical and historical destiny of his life in helping to repair Salo’s ship. His life has fulfilled the purpose of humanity. In response, Chrono abdicates humanity, dropping out of human history to which he had been so instrumental. Chrono finds true harmony between himself and the world through becoming, in some sense, a Titanic bluebird. Of these heroes, Chrono’s transformation is the most total and the most radical. Whereas he had been a sullen and cynical boy, Chrono transcends himself by re-creating his being. “It was all so sad. But it was all so beautiful, too.” Chrono still “rages” against civilization, but lives a life of simple purpose and revolutionary grace. In a practice that strikes Constant as deeply beautiful, Chrono creates small religious shrines to Saturn, composing small models of the planetary system, in its rings and moons. Whereas Chrono had been the embodiment of human teleological time, now he is in harmony with a cosmic and mythical time, and creates a life far deeper and more profound.

Of the three, Beatrice is the most resigned. She dwells inside of Rumfoord’s Titanic estate, modeled after the Taj Mahal. She devotes her time to writing a book, The True Purpose of Life in the Solar System. “It was a refutation of Rumfoord’s notion that the purpose of human life in the Solar System was to get a grounded message from Tralfamadore on his way again.” Beatrice reaffirms the importance of individual intention, of the deliberate cultivation of being and happiness and meaning, in living a purposeful life. Beatrice finds purpose through writing about purpose, through rendering it as a form of art. According to Beatrice, human life can have great meaning, even if the life is unintentionally serving Tralfamadore, if that life is lived in a “highly personalized way.” Beatrice subverts the apparent meaningless of life by investing it with paradoxical meaning. To live meaningfully is to live deliberately, to find the meaning of life within and cultivate it, far from the “whips and scorns” of time.

Malachi Constant is an unlikely hero. Whereas Odysseus travelled across the sea for ten years, hoping to return home to Ithaca, Constant, in his own, postmodern odyssey, is whisked around the Solar System by the inevitability of fate. What he finds, like Boaz, is that home is a state of being and a state of love, not of place. He finally falls in love with Beatrice. Constant reaffirms the purpose of human life, “to love whoever is around to be loved.” In his dwelling on Titan, Constant lives a life of Thoreauvian harmony through solitude. He “lives sturdily and Spartan-like,” devoting his hours to reconstructing Salo, the Tralfamadorian, and harvesting berries, daisy-milk, other natural bounties of Titan. Constant closely resembles this Thoreauvian ideal, or perhaps Thoreau’s “Homeric or Paphlagonian man,” the Canadian lumberjack who wanders through Walden. Constant is drawn to Titan by the presence of three beautiful women, the Sirens of Titan, that Rumfoord describes to him. And although these Sirens are only three of Salo’s statues, Constant still finds a live of harmony and beauty on Saturn's largest moon.

In Homer’s The Odyssey, Circe warns Odysseus about the Sirens, suggesting that if he yield to the aesthetic enchantment of the Sirens’ song he will never return home. “They sit in their meadow, but the beach before it is piled with bone heaps of men now rotted away.” Odysseus must plug his oarsmen’s ears with wax and bind himself to the mast of his ship so he can safely pass by the Sirens while enjoying their art. He cannot be distracted from his historical purpose. The Sirens of Titan is, in some ways, Vonnegut’s revision of the Homeric legend. Constant indulges his desire to commune with the Sirens, and in so doing, discovers a life of aesthetic enchantment and harmony. The men whose bones litter the Siren’s beach should not be pitied, suggests Vonnegut, for they lived and died awash in aesthetic beauty. There is no “home” to which Constant can return — he, like Boaz, creates a home as a state of being and a state of love. The teleology of history has been shattered.

When Odysseus sails past the Sirens, they call to him. “Over all the generous earth we know everything that happens.” According to Adorno and Horkheimer, whose Dialectic of Enlightenment traces the Odysseus myth as a foundation of human history and the human ego, the Sirens enchantment is the promise of “losing oneself in the past.” The progress of human history depends on the refusal of aesthetic beauty and the temptation of the past. The Sirens represent a “primeval myth,” their promise of transcending history through abdication. This promise of joy is a threat against the “patriarchal order,” against civilization, and against history itself. The Sirens represent a primeval thread of myth and eternity running parallel to historical time. Their offer is to exit history and rejoice in aesthetic abandon. Odysseus rejects the lure of myth and eternity, instead choosing to continue existing as a historically bound being.

Vonnegut suggests otherwise. Like Odysseus (and like Vonnegut himself), Constant reckons with the trauma of warfare. But his choice is not Odysseus’ choice. Constant chooses to leave the tyrannical continuum of historical time in hopes of finding something eternal within himself. Indeed, he does. Constant, like Bergeron, Boaz, Beatrice, Chrono, and Thoreau, exits history in search of eternal transcendence. He dies, awash in aesthetic enchantment and beauty, in harmony with the world and seduced by the promise of the Sirens. History and progress are meaningless constructions, and amount to the absurdity of trivialities. The Sirens threat is that of never returning home. Vonnegut's counter is that home is with the Sirens, in a state of harmony, beauty, and love. The human, Vonnegut suggests, must find meaning outside from history and inside the existential self.

Hamlet, raging against the cruelties of fate and the “whips and scorns of time,” seeks a similar retreat into himself for freedom’s sake. In Act II, he laments — “O God — I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” Hamlet’s nightmares are Vonnegut’s nightmares — the terror of history, the absurdity of existence, the arbitrariness of fate. Hamlet is unable to turn fully inward, he is unable to exit the dialectic of history. But Hamlet's desire — to shrink life down to its elemental determinants, to exit history and turn inward, and, paradoxically, to count himself “a king of infinite space” — is Constant’s desire and Vonnegut’s hope. For, in Vonnegut’s imagination, to live simply is to transcend, to live truly is to love, to seek aesthetic enchantment is to transform the self, and to remove oneself from history is to seek eternal life.

Read Wilson Taylor's opening essay, "Irony and Authenticity in the American Imagination"

Player Piano, the One-Dimensional Society, and the Emergency Brake of History

2013-06-07T16:04:00.000-04:00

by Matthew Gannon

“What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened”

- T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” 1936

“A step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano, 1952

One-Dimensional Society

In his seminal book on advanced industrial society, One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse makes the case that even many ostensibly democratic nations are, at heart, totalitarian. Totalitarianism, he argues, need not manifest as dystopian wastelands with labor camps, dictatorship, secret police, and all those other Orwellian characteristics: “For ‘totalitarian’ is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.”

Player Piano, which purports to be “not a book about what is, but a book about what could be,” is such a totalitarian society – not one organized by terrorism but by economic-technical coordination of vested interests. Its society is one that appears, as its main character Paul Proteus notes, as a “clean, straight rafter,” that, once the surface is scraped away, is rotten to the core.

Paul doesn’t just grapple with his technocratic totalitarian society in Player Piano, but also with the meaning of his life (as well as life in general), the paradox of progress, and the potential for human freedom at odds with the straightjackets of circumstance and history. The society of Player Piano is neatly organized, with its National Manufacturing Council – of which Paul’s father was its leader and Paul is expected to take over one day – and its other corporatized, streamlined, and highly industrial services. Led by a few elite individuals all disconnected from the government as such, Player Piano envisions a future so run amok by corporatized capitalism and automated technology that it has nearly reached the point of human superfluity. Humans are the messy, inefficient, and irrational distractions for the machines, which could almost go on running themselves for perpetuity.

This ability for machines to run themselves throughout time without the need for human ingenuity and human bodies to accompany it is the bleak dystopian core of Player Piano. Much like Brave New World, a novel Vonnegut was happy to admit he all but copied from, the rotten core of this industrialized society is not its denigration of human bodies and the call for militarized obedience (like in1984). The rotten core buried under a façade of shining machines is that this society has made humanity superfluous, sucked all meaning out of the world, and replaced humanist values with a machine ethic predicated upon a new holy trinity: “Efficiency, Economy, and Quality.”

Player Piano contains a society going through its own peculiar Industrial Revolution that evokes Marx, who, when faced with the first Industrial Revolution, saw the inexorable contradictions that lay ahead. A society cannot go on making life easier with amenities and concentrating wealth while simultaneously generating an enormous discontented population. Both Marx and Vonnegut understood that the dissatisfied population will boom and, when it becomes conscious of itself, find it has nothing to lose but its chains.

In many ways Player Piano reads like an exposition on Marxian political and sociological theory. There is a good old-fashioned proletarian revolution mounting throughout the novel. But Vonnegut, having seen the horrific results of industrialism that not even Marx could have imagined (industrial warfare, mass-production on an unprecedented scale, the sloth induced by mass media), has a different outlook on history. Whereas Marx saw history culminating in the concentration of technology for the benefit of the masses (wherein the coming revolution would use those technologies to liberate humanity), Vonnegut rejects the onslaught of history and cries for a halt to progress itself. Humanity’s liberation will not come through pure technological means but instead through a critical reformulation of its relationship to technology on ontological and epistemological grounds. Machines are slaves, one character notes, and “anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave.”

Player Piano is thus a novel about the noble quest to regain humanity in the wake of dehumanizing conditions. Above all, this means a revolutionary reconstruction of humanity’s conception of progress and time. Walter Benjamin once wrote:

“Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake.”

Vonnegut is clearly grabbing for that emergency brake. The captains of industry in Player Piano often refer to history as an inevitable, even mechanical march forward in “the procession of civilization, opening new, undreamed-of doors to better things, for better living, for more people, at less cost.” This is a philosophy of history befitting a commercial rather than a serious thinker. But history has lost all meaning in this society, and, as one character notes, everything is promotion. Why have history when you could have advertising?

This view of history is essentially a clockwork history. Player Piano contains an automated society, so it makes sense that its history is totally automated as well. Its history is predetermined by the needs of industrialism, not the choices of actual human beings. Free will has been stripped away. Machines have no need for will. Machines don’t even have much need for humanity. Vonnegut attempts to re-inject humanity, that great incomprehensible variable, into the equation of history. The Ghost Shirt Society, that group of radicals formed to counter the status quo, advocates that “men and women be returned to work as controllers of machines, and that the control of people by machines be curtailed.” They understand that the “freedom” provided by machines is a simulated freedom that produces only false-needs. A government-provided refrigerator, microwave, television, and washing machine are not the equivalent to human freedom. As Marcuse wrote, “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.”

The majority of the U.S. population has had “the spiritual stuffing knocked out of them.” They are desperate for meaning and for dignity. They need to have a place in this world but none is provided for them. “Now that the machines have taken over, it’s quite somebody who has anything to offer. All most people can do is hope to be given something.” The machines brought to society material abundance, a veritable Eden, but people quickly discovered that everything worth enjoying with material abundance, “pride, dignity, self-respect, work worth doing, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption.” The material abundance of this futuristic society thus had the opposite effect it was intended. Instead of spreading peace and contentedness, bile and discontent flourished in their place.

What, then, is to be done about a society that denigrates humanity in the name of efficiency? It is a difficult predicament, because to oppose such an efficient industrial society seems to support inefficiency, which would be irrational. Marcuse, in One-Dimensional Man, says that “the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization” is the “rational character of its irrationality.”

In order to counter this rational irrationality it is necessary to adopt a position of irrational rationality. This is precisely what the Ghost Shirt Society sets out to do: “we’ve got to be a little childish,” they insist, “and fighting is necessarily undignified and immature.” Humanity itself, the Ghost Shirt Society writes in its manifesto, is imperfect, frail, inefficient, alternately brilliant and stupid. Machines are perfect in their own one-dimensional ways, but as multi-dimensional beings, there is virtue in human imperfection, more virtue than any machine could hope to hold – namely the potential of human will and humanity’s freedom to choose what kind of beings they would like to be, rather than have that predetermined, or programmed like a machine. Vonnegut thus grasps for the emergency brake of history in Player Piano by calling for a halt to the continued enslavement of humanity and advocating a new ontological basis for the relationship between humanity and machines predicated upon a new conception of progress.

A Battlefield at Peace

While Player Piano seems very much like a tirade against modern technology it is much more a critique of progress, specifically technological progress unaccompanied by social and political progress. In his 2005 memoir A Man Without A Country, Vonnegut admits that many have accused of him being a Luddite. Surely Player Piano is the primary evidence for such accusers. In some ways Vonnegut certainly is a Luddite, though in many important ways he is not. He is a Luddite in the sense that he shares the Luddite’s rejection of dehumanizing technologies. He is not a Luddite in the sense that he does not totally rejects technology as such, but rather rejects society’s unhealthy relationship to technology. This is a subtle distinction to be sure, but still an important one to make.

Technology and the concept of progress are inextricably bound together. Vonnegut’s critique of progress stems not from his desire to stymie technological developments, but his quest for social and political progress, which all too often lag behind that of technological progress. Furthermore, technological progress so often overshadows social and political progress that it precludes them, or stands in as a replacement for them. In his essay “On the Concept of History,” philosopher Walter Benjamin writes that Nazi Germany became the technocratic nightmare we know it to be because “it regarded technological development as the driving force of stream with which it thought it was moving,” and created “the illusion that factory work ostensibly further technological progress constituted a political achievement.” As a result, he writes, “one reason fascism has a chance is that, in the name of progress, its opponents treat it as a historical norm.”

The society of Player Piano is precisely one in which the populace believes technological progress to be interchangeable with political achievement, while in reality the elision of the two only produces the elimination of the latter. Vonnegut thus really only criticizes the “intemperate faith in lawless technological progress” rather than technology as such. A society that makes technological advances without social progress has not made true progress at all. In fact, it has regressed, because the new technologies only serve to enslave humanity further, yoking them to newer and crueler forms of exploitation. This is why Paul Proteus’s testimony that “a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction,” is so undeniably true.

To illustrate this point, Vonnegut describes a scene at the beginning of the novel where Paul Proteus looks out his office window in upstate New York and sees what he describes as a battlefield at peace: “Here in the basin of the river bend, the Mohawks had overpowered the Algonquins, the Dutch the Mohawks, the British the Dutch, the American the British.” These horrid scenes “where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well” were now nothing but “bones and rotten palings and cannon balls and arrowheads.” As if to rub salt in the wounds, the product of such centuries is merely “baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles.” These are, as Vonnegut says, the “the fruits of peace.” This is the so-called progress of which Vonnegut is rightly derisive.

Nothing But a Cat on the Fence

Proteus himself doubts this concept of progress, and sees the increasing technification of humanity as a dangerous process with a bleak endgame. He can beat Charlie Checker for now, but how much longer will the human mind surpass the robotic mind? As it is, the robotic body has surpassed the human body. The novel even hints at the eroticization of robotics. In the warehouse Proteus admires the bodily aesthetics of the machines with an almost erotic longing. “Machines themselves were entertaining and delightful.” They are “a thousand little dancers” who never miss a step or fail to delight: “practiced precision calisthenics – bobbing, spinning, leaping, thrusting, waving…” “. They sing too, with their “Furrazz-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ak” and “Vaaaaaaa-zuzip!” and “Aw-grumph! tonka-tonka.”

This fascistic adoration of the metallized body matches the aesthetic ideal of Filippo Tommasso Marinetti, the 20^th-century futurist poet who, when praising fascist art, glorified the “dreamed-of metallization of the human body.” In his manifesto for futurism and fascism, Marinetti wrote: “we want to glorify war — the only cure for the world.” This is the logical endgame for the metallized body that even Paul Proteus cannot help secretly desiring. Such lust is a lust for war though, or at the very least, the longing for the obsolescence of humanity itself. Paul Proteus must thus unlearn his desiring for the metallized body, and, by the end of the novel, his reeducation is complete.

It is this perverse denigration of all things human that Vonnegut finds so utterly offensive. The idea that, as Paul articulates on trial, “we’re no good because we’re human.” Humans are contrasted with machines, something Vonnegut finds distasteful: “it’s a pretty unimpressive kind of man that comes out on top when compared to a machine.” Yet everything about humanity has been reduced to a machine status, and humans make second-rate machines at best. The society itself is a mechanical pantomime, a behavioral and gestural reproduction of mass ideology, not unlike the dreadful play the engineers were forced to sit through at the Meadows business conference. All the world’s a stage and they are being forced to act their roles upon it. All everybody talked about was how great things were: “who could deny that that was magnificent and gratifying? It was what everyone said when he had to make a talk.” This is the “corporate personality,” to which everyone adheres. This is the “time-consuming pomp and circumstance lovingly preserved by the rank-happy champions of efficiency.” When Paul speaks to Anita she critiques him, analyzes his responses, and finally edits and polishes them.

Human interaction is mechanized. Paul speaks of the “mechanics of marriage.” When his wife tells him she loves him he never fails to robotically reply: “I love you, Anita.” It’s not real love or emotion. It is, as Vonnegut says, “a creditable counterfeit of warmth.” Ed Finnerty even jokes about a human can easily be robotized itself: “Stainless steel, covered with sponge rubber, and heated electrically to 98.6 degrees.” Yet this is precisely what has happened. Their industry relies on “production with almost no man power.” It is a society that “learned to get along without their men and women.” This is a society sanitized of humanity. Humans are too inefficient, “unmachine-like,” as Vonnegut says. Humans are placed in quarantine across the river. Susan Buck-Morss once said that Western countries have no need for the gulag, they have the ghetto. Homestead is the ghetto/gulag, it is a prison without bars because the bars are political and infinitely more effective than those in a real prison. The flesh and bone of the human body becomes its own kind of prison. Consider the cat in the machine room at the beginning of the novel. Startled by the robotics it is ultimately electrocuted on the fence. “Nothing but a cat on the fence.” As the cat goes, so goes humanity.

The advanced technology in Player Piano hasn’t liberated humanity, only furthered their exploitation. Their lives are easier, but not more meaningful. The technology they have has not been harnessed to revolutionizing human meaning-making. The technology isn’t used to bring out the best in humanity. It doesn’t supplement humanity – it merely replaces it. The replaced humanity is ghost-like, a trace of what it once was. Humanity is player of the player piano, a recording on a tape, like the poor Rudy Hertz, onetime skilled mechanic.

It is for these reasons that technology and progress are rejected. Vonnegut reaches for the emergency brake, looking for, as Eliot puts it in the epigraph, the passage which we did not take and the door we never opened. Vonnegut demands that humanity return to a prior state of technological progress and begin again, this time ensuring social progress along with technological progress. The reader ought to align with Finnerty, an arch-human in this novel, when he says “my sympathy’s with any man up against a machine,” particularly when it is the machine of history itself. “Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.” If this mechanized history, an automated and unquestionable history, is allowed to continue unfettered then ultimately all of humanity will end up enslaved, victims of their own creation, or else threatened with extinction due to environmental degradation or perpetual warfare. The only way to halt history, as Benjamin intimated, is to halt time itself. Benjamin posited that, “The concept of mankind’s historical progress cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time.” In Player Piano Vonnegut describes this fully automated society as “an altogether pleasant and convenient place in which to sweat out Judgment Day.” This is the empty, homogenous time that must be blasted out of historical continuity in order for new historical and sociopolitical potentials to arise and, ultimately, to allow transcendent humanity to inherit the earth.

Against Time

There is an important moment in Player Piano that, if the reader isn’t paying close enough attention to, slips by unnoticed. Nevertheless, it pinpoints Vonnegut’s the uniquely temporal critique of progress. This moment occurs about halfway through the novel, when Paul Proteus is at an old-fashioned farmhouse on the outskirts of the technified and automated industrial hub of Ilium. Paul is at this farmhouse, a veritable fossil in a futuristic landscape, to buy it. Against all aesthetic, social, and political convention Proteus is looking back in time, longing for a simpler era rather than the convoluted nightmare of his automated present. He describes the house as “cut off from the boiling rapids of history, society, and the economy. Timeless.”

While inside the farmhouse he notices a grandfather clock, which is such an antique that its inner works are made of wood. Proteus’s attention is immediately drawn to the clock, and he quickly compares it to his own watch, a “shock-proof, waterproof, anti-magnetic, glow-in-the-dark, self-winding chronometer.” Noticing that the grandfather clock is off by about twelve minutes, he indulges in “an atavistic whim” by winding his own hi-tech watch to match the time espoused by the grandfather clock.

By slipping out of standard, mechanical time by just twelve minutes, Paul Proteus slips into a new time line, an alternative time running parallel to the present. Proteus, in a very small way, has traveled in time. Player Piano thus inaugurates time travel as a potent literary device, something Vonnegut would use to great effect in later novels, particularly Slaughterhouse-Five. By planting the seeds of doubt in the traditional progression of time Vonnegut creates the potential for a revolutionary rupture in history that would become an integral part of his entire oeuvre.

By juxtaposing the farmhouse and the clock against the totally automated and futuristic society of Ilium, Vonnegut establishes anachronism as a novel form of time travel. Anachronism is so often understood as an error, a flaw in the plot in which characters use or refer to concepts, inventions, historical figures, etc. that are out of place in time and history, that its use as a subversive force often goes unrecognized. Not all writers use anachronism by mistake though, and Vonnegut employs it masterfully in Player Piano. Vonnegut isn’t the only writer to take advantage of anachronism, but he is undoubtedly one of its finest practitioners. The word anachronism literally means, from the Greek, against time. The key to using anachronism is the ability to make use that moment of crisis readers experience when forced to read against time. Using this device intentionally serves to, in the words of the 20^th-century literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, “brush history against the grain.” As a literary device, anachronism is nothing less than revolutionary in its capacity to indict the present and summon new realities.

Theodor Adorno once wrote that only that which does not fit in can be true. This is the basic principle of anachronism. By setting himself off from his present by twelve minutes Paul Proteus rejects his present and calls for an awakening of a new time and, along with it, a new consciousness. By disrupting readers and making them read against time, their normal perception of the progression of time is disrupted and their understandings of the temporal basis of progress is thrown into question. It shakes the foundations of “intemperate faith in lawless technological progress,” that Vonnegut so ruthlessly criticizes in Player Piano. Like tapping into a subterranean vein, Vonnegut delves into his readers collective psyche via schisms in time in order to unearth new modes of consciousness and being that can transcend the dehumanizing present. After all, it is the notion of progress that Vonnegut seeks to interrogate in this novel, and by placing Paul Proteus out of time, even by just twelveminutes, he gives himself the space to initiate his critique.

The Most Beautiful Peonies I Ever Saw…

As readers find at the end of the novel, Paul makes his choice and decides to break free from the chains of circumstance and history. “Finnerty could be anything he wanted to be,” Paul laments, while he “could have been only what he was.” Nevertheless, he desires to assert his humanity against the ghost at the player piano. Paul is appalled at the notion that he is “so well-integrated into the machinery of society and history as to be able to move in only one plane.” He is trapped in a truly one-dimensional society. Paul’s existential and professional crisis symbolizes the broader historical crisis of an automated history and society. That is, a society that not only is industrialized, but its history and social norms are as rigid as automated processes. Paul desires to opt out of this “procession of history,” as Vonnegut puts it. In the mechanized history, “somebody always wins, and somebody always loses.” The problem with a machine is that “it can’t make a mistake.”

Paul wishes to exit the dialectic of history, “to stop being the instrument of any set of beliefs or any whim of history.” Hegel’s world-spirit doesn’t run through him, he insists, he just wants to live in a house by the side of a road. He doesn’t want to deal with society, “but only with earth as God had given it to man.” He desires a life like Thoreau, to live purposefully, “heartily and blamelessly,naturally, by hands and wits.” His history, all of history, has been entirely hemmed in though, all the crossroads are extinct and there’s nothing but one-way streets. The only option is revolt. Paul becomes The Rebel.

To go about reaffirm humanity, Vonnegut claims, is not to claim human superiority over machines, but to claim humanity’s innate qualities are in and of themselves values that cannot be mechanically reproduced. Humanity must overcome mechanization not through sheer struggle, but by default. This sounds like a cop-out but it really isn’t. “The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings… not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.” This existential cry is made in full acknowledgement of the imperfections of humanity. These inherent imperfections, these flaws, are the very things that make human life so valuable. The un-perfectible forecloses all potential for change, but the imperfect human has limitless potential. “The most beautiful peonies I ever saw… were grown in almost pure cat excrement,” says Paul. Each imperfection provides a chance for choice and human will. That, in and of itself, is the only value humanity ever needs.

Paul Proteus, at more than one moment, imagines, with no small amount of self-aggrandizement, that he is the end of a race. He represents that last vestige of humanity that desires to remake the world in the image of humanity, not machinery. After he is gone all roadblocks will be lifted and the clockwork history can proceed unfettered until all humans have become irrelevant. Après nous, les machines. Still, at the very end of the novel Vonnegut teases readers with a glimmer of unblemished redemptive possibility: “This isn’t the end, you know… Nothing ever is, nothing ever will be – not even Judgment Day.” After all, there’s always a step backward, and a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

Read Matthew Gannon's opening essay, "Kurt Vonnegut Has Come Unstuck in Time"

Irony and Authenticity in the American Imagination

2013-05-31T19:02:00.001-04:00

by Wilson Taylor

“In some remote corner of the universe, flickering in the light of the countless solar systems into which it had been poured, there was once a planet on which clever animals invented cognition. It was the most arrogant and most mendacious minute in the ‘history of the world,’ but a minute was all it was. After nature had drawn a few more breaths, the planet froze and the clever animals had to die.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” 1873

“What memories for mud to have!”

- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 1963

Recurring throughout Vonnegut’s imagination and fiction is an impulse of ironic distancing and deflection. Vonnegut’s fiction is motivated by an awareness of the tragic and existential absurdity that underlies the human experience, and this awareness functions as an elliptical center of his narratives. Irony functions in Vonnegut’s novels as a defensive posture, establishing a critical distance allowing Vonnegut to apprehend the absurdity of the human condition. For instance, the firebombing of Dresden, the ostensible subject of his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five, is a void through which he is unable to communicate directly. Dresden functions as a synecdoche of cyclical suffering, of violence and death and war, and of the ultimate absurdity of existence, which he attempts to communicate via the recurring and critical deployment of what has become his most identifiable ironic reflex, “So it goes.” He identifies this novel as a failure, as it was written by a “pillar of salt” — one, as Lot’s wife, who was cursed for attempting to look into the past and is therefore denied narrative comprehension and disclosure. Vonnegut suggests that the existential absurdity of the human condition deflects narrative and defies comprehension and communication. “There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre,” so Vonnegut must employ an idiomatic language of irony. And that is true not only for the massacre of Dresden, but also the distinctly human terror of history. Irony is the only approach available to Vonnegut. “So it goes” repeats so many times throughout the novel because Vonnegut can only approach such absurdity through a distancing and defensive irony, allowing Vonnegut to critique the absurdity of human existence without yielding to despair. Furthermore, irony functions in Vonnegut’s imagination in order to create critical distance between the reader and the narrative. Vonnegut’s shattering of linear narrative and the recurrent phrasing of his irony both function to decenter and discomfort the reader. Ultimately, this irony serves a reflexive function for the reader, forcing the reader to reconsider the human condition and approach it more critically.

Irony offers two aesthetic and ethical options, both grounded in a radical deconstruction of the human experience. One option concedes that life has no transcendent meaning and is thus arbitrary and purposeless, that life signifies nothing. This direction portends a capitulation to nihilism that some mistakenly identify in Vonnegut’s writing. Ostensibly, Vonnegut’s comparison of humans to mud clods or to unfortunate and tragic animals seems deeply misanthropic and cynical. The second option, and the ethic pursued by Vonnegut, is to accept this radical meaningless of life, the ultimate absurdity of the human condition, and use it to motivate a paradoxical humanist ethic. Indeed, Vonnegut’s first assumption is the lack of transcendent meaning to life, but in that dearth of purpose Vonnegut finds love and liberation. Vonnegut accepts that life ultimately signifies nothing, and uses that as an impetus for a profound ethical engagement with the world. After conventional narratives of meaning are stripped, all that remains is humankind, lonely and lost and searching for purpose. This stripping away of narratives of meaning — exemplified in Slaughterhouse-Five when the weighty teleology of World War II is deconstructed, and the grand march of history and freedom is reduced to sad animals, or baffled children, playing war-games in the snow — the suffering to which culture has inscribed so much meaning fails to remain transformative. Billy Pilgrim, the narrator of the novel, must destroy his meticulous and color-coded timeline while Vonnegut himself must shatter a coherent literary narrative. Without such a structuring narrative, the human individual is unmoored from conventional processes of meaning construction. Progress is untenable for Vonnegut’s postmodern pilgrims. All that remains is an obligation to cultivate happiness, which Vonnegut identifies as his ethical imperative — “God dammit, you’ve got to be kind.” Repeatedly, Vonnegut champions this humanistic ethic, this deep and profound love for human life and humankind. His reflexive irony, far from acting as a negative or cynical impulse, actually serves as the foundation for a transcendent ethic of human love. Because human life has been unmoored from conventional meaning, suffering and evil are reduced to meaningless postures. All that remains is the imperative of love. His irony cultivates his humanism.

Significantly, Billy Pilgrim learns his ironic stance from the Tralfamadorians. These aliens propose “so it goes” as the appropriate response to death, and their “telegraphic schizophrenic” narrative style informs the sly and sublime tone of Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut typically relies on this cosmic perspective, this insight from the Other, to relativize the human experience. This cosmic perspective allows Vonnegut to use irony as a scalpel, deconstructing postwar narratives of progress, satisfaction, consumerism and capitalism, American innocence, et cetera. Viewing these constructions through the critical eyes of the Other brings Vonnegut’s satiric urge to the forefront. He defamiliarizes the reader with the everyday in order to impel a critical stance. If human life is absurd, what possible meaning can arise from the slaughter of 135,000 people and the destruction of Dresden, the lovely “Florence of the Elbe?” If humans are made of “mud,” what possible purpose could violence or suffering adopt? Imagining our dehumanized and arbitrary worlds through the perspective of the Other allows Vonnegut to emphasize its absurdity. “So it goes” allows Vonnegut simultaneously to laugh and to weep at the absurdity of the world.

An aim of Vonnegut’s fiction is to cultivate this radical love of the human. To return again to Billy Pilgrim — who functions as a stand-in for the author in so many ways — the narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five is an optometrist: his hope is to help people to see the world more clearly. And, after his odyssey with the Tralfamadorians, he continually attempts to inspire people to see in four dimensions, to see the true nature of the cosmos. To see clearly, as Pilgrim hopes, is to look beyond our dehumanized present and cultivate a radical humanism. Vonnegut’s role as an author is much the same. He attempts to inaugurate new modes of seeing in his readership. To do so, Vonnegut invents a new American idiom at the intersection between irony and love and in a tone that is at once alienating and intimate. This irony allows Vonnegut to defamiliarize readers with the everyday while asserting the paradoxical beauty in meaninglessness. Life is absurd; life is beautiful. Like Kierkegaard's existential knights, Vonnegut must insist on making meaning in the world by virtue of the absurd. Vonnegut jostles readers into radical new consciousnesses.

Vonnegut’s vocation is to help people to see the world, including imagined worlds, more truly and more generously. Adopting the Tralfamadorian perspective, Pilgrim suggests that humans, due to improper vision, derive unsatisfying purpose through a misinterpretation of history. "It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever." Vonnegut's narrative strategy is to break this string and scatter these beads. Only then can the individual forge new connections and derive more authentic meanings — the individual must bead one's own ontological string. Imagination, not history or happenstance, is the fertile soil of the self. "We are what we pretend to be," Vonnegut would famously assert. Vonnegut uses irony to deconstruct the world in order to rebuild it on a human scale. Vonnegut's fictions dare to imagine new histories, new times, and new modes of being. Through irony, Vonnegut polishes our imaginative lenses so that we may see the human more clearly.

Ultimately, the relativizing direction of his imagination allows Vonnegut to deconstruct the present and to reassert the centrality of the human. If human life is absurd and humans molded only from mud, it is our collective imperative to love the human. Despite his recursive irony, an Edenic impulse beats distinctly in Vonnegut’s imagination. His latent cynicism allows Vonnegut to distill something innately beautiful and authentic amidst the tragedy of the human condition. In a memorable scene in Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim recognizes Adam and Eve reflected in a leather boot. Vonnegut implores us, like Billy Pilgrim, to imagine transcendent modes of being that flow alongside or underneath or inside our dehumanized worlds and consciousnesses. It is precisely the dehumanization of (post-)modernity to which Vonnegut so slyly objects, and he seeks to re-invigorate our ethical imagination. In an utterly sublime passage of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut describes watching a World War II film in reverse — American planes "suck bullets and shell fragments" from soldiers while bombers gather bombs back into themselves. These bombs are returned to the United States to be deconstructed and their materials buried so as to prevent future war. Narrating history in reverse situates Vonnegut to re-tell history as a narrative of redemption instead of catastrophe and tragedy. History, suggests Vonnegut, is flowing in the wrong direction.

Vonnegut views the purpose of art through an optimistic and humanistic lens. While military science treats humankind as “garbage,” (and, he concedes that “military science is probably right about the contemptibility of [humankind] in the vastness of the universe”), the revolutionary virtue of art is that it places the human experience at the “center of the universe.” In the rocky soils of hopelessness, Vonnegut sows tremendous love. This is the quintessential movement of Vonnegut’s worldview — Vonnegut works through a bitterly ironic deconstruction of the world in order to erect something far more lovely and sublime. He must pass through a postmodern skepticism in order to assert something beautiful. Vonnegut demystifies the world so as to mystify anew.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus presents the eponymous figure as an absurd hero. His absurdity arises from the tragedy of his fate; the gods have sentenced him, for attempting to elude Death, to exerting himself forever to push a fated stone up the mountain of history. Sisyphus is an absurd hero who — like Pilgrim, like Vonnegut — insists on significance by virtue of the absurd. Sisyphus' heroism arises from his awareness of absurdity and in his paradoxical insistence on meaning. Like Vonnegut, Sisyphus chooses meaning over despair. The moment of Sisyphus' tragic awareness is in his return down the mountain, chasing his stone. This moment is his "hour of consciousness," and in that moment Sisyphus is superior to his fate and superior to the gods because he has claimed his fate and chosen to make it meaningful. In this awareness of absurdity, Camus locates tremendous pathos and sublime heroism. Sisyphus cultivates a new awareness of himself and the world, and, in that superior ontological and epistemological framework, he chooses to imagine happiness and beauty. Camus concludes that "one must imagine Sisyphus happy." So too must one imagine Billy Pilgrim.

David Foster Wallace, in “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” his seminal discussion of the cultural and aesthetic logic of postmodernism, critiques what he sees as a pervasive and crippling ironic reflex of contemporary culture. Wallace interprets irony as an increasingly negative and self-contained force, as an attitude and approach to life that is unremittingly cynical and destructive. Irony serves a vital function, he argues, in deconstructing the particularly noxious mythology that cripples the American consciousness, such as American innocence and exceptionalism, postwar prosperity, the American Dream, et cetera. However, when irony becomes institutionalized as an end-in-itself, and when postmodern cynicism is absorbed into a totalizing aesthetic of cool, irony itself becomes poisonous and imprisoning. Postmodern posturing can mask a hollow and heartless core. In order to move beyond this negative irony, Wallace calls for the inauguration of a new American idiom. The new transgressive aesthetic and the new subversive artist, Wallace suggests, will be one who is unabashedly sincere and unapologetically sentimental. “The next literary rebels,” he argues, “might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels... who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.” Such an artist may be rejected as naive or foolish, but would be creating on a higher and more urgent ethical plane. Such an artist may cloak their work in apparent cynicism, but use that in order to inform a sublime humanism. Such an artist who, perhaps, as Vonnegut confesses of himself, still believes in junior civics.

Vonnegut is still such a timely and necessary writer because of his fluidity in bridging this gap between irony and authenticity, between cynicism and sincerity. Vonnegut’s irony is never self-enclosed or hollow, but rather directed towards cultivating human flourishing. Simply put, Vonnegut is a subversive writer, and must be recognized as such. He always approaches humankind with the utmost reverence and with a radical love. "Literature," he piquantly quips, "should not disappear up its own asshole." A note of harmony between Vonnegut and Wallace is their deep respect for the human individual in response to the ravages of an increasingly dehumanized world. Both authors drew inspiration from the Serenity Prayer, referenced repeatedly in both Slaughterhouse-Five and Infinite Jest. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can change, and wisdom to know the difference." This prayer functions in Vonnegut’s imagination as a mantra that impels his empathizing perspective. Emerson defines the human as a "god in ruins," and Vonnegut recognizes this same sense of tragic sublimity in the characters that populate his dreamworlds. Among Vonnegut's virtues is his earnest and paradoxical insistence on embracing the timeless beauty amidst the absurdity of human existence. In a manner truly befitting an artist so intrigued by the experience of becoming “unstuck in time,” Vonnegut is still today’s most ardent humanist writer. As the world continues its pointless march toward abstraction and dehumanization, Vonnegut, broken-hearted, implores us to reconsider our priorities and reconsider our humanity. Vonnegut’s love, cloaked in irony, remains a potent aesthetic and ethical tool for re-imagining our worlds and re-creating our beings. Hi-ho.

"God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!”
“See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.”
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!"

- Last Rites of Bokononism, Cat's Cradle, 1963

Read Matthew Gannon's opening essay, "Kurt Vonnegut Has Come Unstuck in Time"

Kurt Vonnegut Has Come Unstuck In Time

2013-05-31T18:58:00.001-04:00

by Matthew Gannon

"Materialist historiography… is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly comes to a stop in a constellation saturated with tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by which thinking is crystallized as a monad. The historical materialist approaches a historical object only where it confronts him as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of… a revolutionary chance in a fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history."

- Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 1940

All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969

. . .

Kurt Vonnegut Is Not A Fish

Kurt Vonnegut, the acclaimed author of literary masterpieces such as Slaughterhouse-Five, trenchant cultural criticism such as A Man Without a Country, and imaginative short stories collected in such volumes as Welcome to the Monkey House, was born on Armistice Day, November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. He was 29 years old. He published his last novel, Timequake, in 1997. He was 74 years old. Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007 in New York, after falling down a flight of stairs in his home. He was 84 years and 5 months old. Vonnegut was born, wrote some books, and then died. So it goes. Vonnegut, as William Faulkner might have astutely put it, became not-Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut is a fish.

Except not quite, because Kurt Vonnegut has come unstuck in time. Truthfully, he was really never stuck in time in the first place. The first piece of evidence for this is that his literary legacy, like so many famous authors, has outlived him. Between his death in 2007 and 2013, six books have been released in as many years under the deceased author’s name. It turns out that the deceased author is more prolific that the living. What a feat.

And Still Some Misfits Insist There Is No Progress…

Vonnegut’s unconventional relationship to time is by no means confined to posthumous publications. He, like Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five, has always been unstuck in time. Humans have the nasty habit of perceiving time as a chain of events, linked together progressively and linearly, one after the other. In such a perception of time, history is a very long, inalterable, and unquestionable chain. All that remains to be done for historians is to examine each link in the chain, describe it, and let it be.

Vonnegut refuted this progressivist view of history, eschewing the linear model of time for a flexible, expansive concept of time. Time is not a progression from one moment to another but a collection of constellations, individual moments bound together by unperceived links. In Vonnegut’s estimation, progressivist history is a machine history, a technocratic nightmare. It is an automated history that benefits the few, not the many. It is because of its deeply unjust and unimaginative condition that Vonnegut must do away with it.

Many of Vonnegut’s novels deal with time travel in one way or another, even if such time travel is unconventional, a Proustian inflection in the science fiction canon. Sometimes his characters don’t travel through time, but instead perceive and experience time in a radically different manner than the average human. His second novel, The Sirens of Titan, includes a character that perceives time all at once. To reiterate the Walter Benjamin from the epigraph to this essay, such characters experience time as a crystallized monad. The past and future intermingle in a curious cosmic mélange, operating telegraphically, schizophrenically, like a montage that changes depending on how you look at it. “Everything that ever was will be, and everything that ever will be always was,” writes Vonnegut. The past, present, and future are unbound, freed from the tyrannical constraints placed upon them by human limitations.

Vonnegut’s characters are so often free from the constraints of progressivist history – and he even invented an alien race that always perceives time non-linearly – because progressivist history, that is the normal history we tell ourselves in which one moment inexorably leads to the next into infinitude, is nothing less than oppressive. History is, as Walter Benjamin once said, “the triumphal procession in which current rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.” In fact, Vonnegut’s position of time and progress is often closely aligned with Benjamin, whose 20^th-century writings mirror Vonnegut’s distaste for a historicism that valorized the exploiting ruling class and devalued the exploited. The intelligent reader, the sympathetic reader, Benjamin argues, views history and culture “with cautious detachment.” After all, “there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Writers must “brush history against the grain” to avoid becoming complicit in this transmission of oppressive history. Vonnegut’s is then a project of writing novels against the grain of history.

In his debut novel, Player Piano, Vonnegut describes a character in upstate New York looking out at a battlefield at peace. The locale was not the scene of one battle, but many: “Here in the basin of the river bend, the Mohawks had overpowered the Algonquins, the Dutch the Mohawks, the British the Dutch, the American the British.” These horrid scenes “where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well” were now nothing but “bones and rotten palings and cannon balls and arrowheads.” On top of these depressing strata lays the present, just barely covering the past such that it is easily forgotten, easily repeated. And what is the product of such centuries of suffering? What was it all for? “Baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles.” Such are, says Vonnegut, the “the fruits of peace.” All that bloodshed for a few modern amenities. What a deal. Benjamin echoes: “There is no document of culture which is not a document of barbarism.”

History and memory thus function as twin poles of a particularly nefarious form of cultural remembrance. Characters remember the past but seem helpless to repeat it, just as historians inform us of the bloodshed but cannot forestall its inevitable recurrence. In his 1987 novel Bluebeard Vonnegut directly responds to George Santayana’s claim that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it: “I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.” History, in Vonnegut’s estimation, is a battlefield temporarily at peace, littered with bones, waiting for the next and all-too inevitable battle to take place with the same arbitrary bloody reshuffling of culture and class. Only one thing remains constant: one group of people is trod underfoot to make way for the next, who, in their own time, will face the same fate.

Walter Benjamin once said, “The concept of mankind’s historical progress cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must underlie any criticism of the concept of progress itself.” Vonnegut too criticizes progress, or so-called progress, heavily. While society marvels in the technological splendor of the present, Vonnegut understands that even technology itself can mask the age-old and deeply corrosive social inequalities that have persisted for centuries. There is a persistent notion that humanity is better off now than it used to be. This present-bias has elements of truth (in terms of standards of living, life-span, etc.) and an element of untruth. The point is not to debate about how much better off humanity is now than in the past, but to refuse to allow the gains that have been made to serve as an excuse for political complacency. The fetid waters of the status quo cannot be allowed to carry us helplessly along the endless river of time. As futuristic works like Player Piano argue, as technological innovation increases the exploitation and pain inflicted on the working classes will become that much easier, and enacted at a distance so as to optimize moral sanitation. Vonnegut, filled with gallows humor and depressive Panglossian aphorisms, appears hopelessly pessimistic. We are doomed to repeat our sordid history of holocaust, slavery, war, bloodshed, exploitation, and more.

However, just before readers prepare for the final descent into a dystopian abyss of pessimism and rejection of the future Vonnegut reminds us that humanity is perhaps worth saving after all, even in its attempt to collectively eat itself, starve itself, drug itself, drink itself, pollute itself, or fight itself to death in a tragic case of collective suicide. His 1985 novel Galapagos begins with an epigraph from Anne Frank: “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” It’s possible to read this epigraph as deeply ironic. Vonnegut’s writing is steeped in irony (his very first novel begins with an epigraph from the New Testament when Vonnegut was an avowed atheist). Vonnegut’s secular faith in humanity remained strong. His more popular quotations include such gems as “God damn it, you've got to be kind” and “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

By recounting the atrocities of the past and their seemingly inevitably recurrences in the future he brings readers to the brink. It is at this moment of existential, moral, and historical crisis that Vonnegut’s perception of time becomes most profound. Vonnegut believed in the inherent goodness in humanity and society, even if he did not believe in the goodness of history and was skeptical of so-called progress. Vonnegut thus brilliantly takes the human subject out of history, out of linear time itself. He didn’t believe that history would get better, or that things would just automatically improve with time as if social progress necessarily, mechanically even, increased as time did. Vonnegut knew history would repeat itself (and indeed it did on many fronts even within his lifetime) but he believed that through the seer effort of imagination humanity could collectively opt out of history and jump into an uncharted history, something Walter Benjamin described as the “leap in the open air of history.” Such a leap would place humanity in a new history and timeline in which violence and exploitation weren’t the bedrock of society and future actions weren’t all but predetermined by past sins.

Being and Time

Karl Marx once wrote: “the world has long been dreaming of something that it can acquire if only it becomes conscious of it… It is not a matter of drawing a great dividing line between past and future, but of carrying out the thoughts of the past.” Vonnegut, by rupturing time itself, is out to reform consciousness. He performs a ruthless critique of everything existing. The liberated future has already arrived, we only need awaken and realize it to make it our own.

This relationship between time and consciousness can be reformulated, in the spirit of Martin Heidegger, as that between being and time. It is deeply ironic to draw upon Heidegger to analyze Vonnegut, considering Heidegger’s unabashed fascism and Vonnegut’s unremitting opposition to everything fascism stood for. Nevertheless, both writers were humanists in their own way, and both employed an existential analytic predicated upon time that cannot be dismissed. Heidegger, in his monumental 1927 inquiry into ontology Being and Time, argues that being itself is time: “The central problematic of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time.” To be human is to occupy not only a particular body in a particular space but also to occupy a certain amount of time in a certain way. Humanity’s experience of time is inexorably bound to its experience of being.

Heidegger writes of “modes of temporality.” These modes of temporality correlate to modes of being. “Time,” he argues, “must be brought to light – and genuinely conceived of – as the horizon for all understanding of Being and for any way of interpreting it.” He is preoccupied with he calls the “Temporality of Being,” by which he means “the way in which Being and its modes and characteristics have their meaning determined primordially in terms of time.”

In Vonnegut’s work, different modes of time also correlate to different mode of being. Being placed out of time, even just infinitesimally, decenters the subject, the reader. The decentered, discomfited subject is a being amenable to change, amenable to being anew, being made anew. The whole world is susceptible to this process, making it possible to, as Thomas Paine once advocated, “begin the world over again.”

Heidegger, like Vonnegut, was dissatisfied with traditional narratives of time, which he said had been wrongly promoted since Aristotle and all philosophers thereafter. He argued that the temporality that matters is not the strict progression of one moment after another, but instead it is the present that matters, and a human’s choice to live in its present time and reckon with its inevitable death as it affirms its existence in the present." Heidegger rejected chronos, the passage of empty, mechanical time, in favor of kairos, the Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment. Walter Benjamin called this kairos “now-time,” the moment in which the past is inconsequential, the future is in no way inevitable, and it is possible to “make the continuum of history explode.”

In Vonnegut’s work this concept is made illustrated literarily through the use of time travel. Beings that perceive and experience time differently are simply different types of beings entirely. In The Sirens of Titan a character that experiences time all at once, as a monad rather than linearly, even becomes estranged from his wife and friends because he is simply a different being – albeit one they happen to find intolerable. Vonnegut must take his readers out of their comfortable confines of space and time because he knows his readers want to remain bound to their comfortable assumptions, ideologies, and behaviors. The problem is, these comfort zones are ones of death and destruction and thus not worth staying in in the first place. So Vonnegut makes his characters – and his readers along with them – travel through time and space to escape their rigid ideologies and achieve a transcendent form of being, a transcendent humanity. They perceive time differently and thus quite literally become different.

We Are What We Pretend to Be

By pushing the limits of human consciousness and being by rupturing the flow of homogenous time, Vonnegut challenges the moral complacency of society and promotes an urgent humanistic ethic based on deeply existentialist principles. During his lifetime Vonnegut spoke openly about his humanist ideals, which ran in his family for generations. Later in his life he even succeed Isaac Asimov as the honorary president of the American Humanist Association. This humanism and existentialism can be located in the realm of free will, which is the ultimate purpose of Vonnegut’s nonlinear, imaginative writing.

At times, it is tempting to view Vonnegut’s perception of time as rigid and entirely deterministic. After all, if all of time is fixed in place, like the Rocky Mountains, aren’t all human decisions and actions as firmly fixed as mountains? There appears to be little room for human ingenuity and will in the statement, “Everything that ever was will be, and everything that ever will be always was.” This would seem to contradict the notion that Vonnegut was a literary liberator in dislodging readers from the flow of empty time. However, it is only the illusion of cause to effect that would incite a reader to assume that one moment must inevitably lead to another in the first place. Since time is not beads on a string, there is no reason that anything must result from something that preceded it. Time may be fixed, but not fixed in an unalterable procession. All moments in time exist in and for themselves and are thus susceptible to human will. Humans may not have the capacity to choose the conditions of their choices, but the choices and actions they make are solely their own. It is only in retrospect, which the fictive narrative of linear time is mapped onto human will, that the illusion of determinism is feasible. As such Vonnegut’s writing against the grain can be seen as an emancipation from determinism. Whereas on the one hand he acknowledges the determinism of circumstance hemming in society, he seeks to unravel that determinism and allow will to flourish in a transcendent humanity.

Only an ideology in which time moves fixedly from past, to present, to future is such a thing as determinism even possible. Even while he witnessed firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, Kurt Vonnegut – as his Slaughterhouse-Five alter ego Billy Pilgrim – could slip away through the cracks in time, freed from his momentary limitations, and reintegrate and reidentify with his humanity. Such is not the reality of human experience, but an ideal, a hope. Vonnegut is nothing if not filled with fervent hope – hope for new times, new histories, new modes of being and understanding, new realities. Sartre, perhaps the most notable of humanist and existentialists, eloquently walks that fine line between determinism and free will. In a 1946 lecture he stated, “there is a plurality of possibilities, and in choosing one of these, [we] realize that it has value only because it is chosen.” We make choices first and then rationalize them later by placing them into cause/effect relationships. It is only afterwards that we naively yoke human experience as yet another link in the chain of determinist history.

Sartre insists, "there is no determinism – man is free, man is freedom.” He does not mean this naively, as if to say that environment and historical circumstance does not play a role in shaping human lives. Sartre, like Vonnegut, was a WWII prisoner of war and knew firsthand that humans can be shackled and compelled and degraded. This, though, is not the natural condition of humanity. It is the aspiration for freedom that defines humanity, the “species-being” to which the likes of Marx aspired. Such liberty is what Sartre and Vonnegut seek, not despite their experience with bondage, but in many ways precisely because of it.

Such an idealized vision of emancipation is an imaginative position to take, one very much informed by literary imagination and talent, something Vonnegut was not lacking in. Vonnegut bound together his potent literary, political, social, and philosophical imagination for the betterment of mankind. In this way he was very similar to Sartre. In speaking of will Sartre argues, “You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent.” “We ourselves,” he adds, “decide our being.” Vonnegut expressed a similar sentiment on the inventiveness of will and being: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Humanity, on the individual and collective level, is being perpetually made and remade. Because of this there is a certain level of artificiality to humanity, as it is constructed actively rather than accepted complacently. But this artificiality doesn't make it wrong. As Vonnegut declares in Player Piano, "what distinguishes man from the rest of the animals is his ability to do artificial things." Existentialism holds that it is action and choice that define people. Man, says Sartre, is “nothing else but the sum of his actions.” The humanist Vonnegut insists that for the benefit of one and all, those choices ought to be based on compassion and liberty above all else. “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

In order to spur readers in the direction of compassion and liberty, Vonnegut leads readers away from their habitually complacent subjectivity and consciousness. This decentering is a form of transcendence, something Sartre insisted is integral to humanity as such: “Man is all the time outside of himself: it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he makes man to exist; and, on the other hand, it is by pursuing transcendent aims that he himself is able to exist.” This transcendence does not aim for the supernal, but for the material and the human. This is a process of self-surpassing in which man “is himself the heart and center of his transcendence.” By traveling through space and time and critically displacing readers, Vonnegut aims at such Sartrean transcendence, not for eternal salvation in the next life but for secular redemption on earth.

Doomed To Repeat The Past

Vonnegut dislodged his characters, and his readers, from the machinery of time in order to allow them to flourish in a present that is freed from the baggage of the past and the enslaving certainty of the future. Such a project was deeply existential, phenomenological, and humanistic. In this effort Vonnegut drew upon all of his resources politically, historically, morally, politically, and, above all, literarily. As such, Vonnegut himself was man out of time: a socialist during the Cold War, an atheist in a zealously religion nation, and a humanist in a profoundly dehumanizing time.

It is Vonnegut’s perseverance – his literary, moral, and political perseverance – that is so desperately needed today. Hypocrisy lay at the heart of Vonnegut’s time on earth just as it does ours. The paradoxes of Cold War that he lived through carry over into today, making Vonnegut’s concerns our concerns. America, then and now, promoted freedom of religion while discriminating against non-Christians. America, then and now, spied on its citizens, infiltrated protest organizations, jailed dissenters, and wielded excessive executive authority, particularly in matters of war and surveillance. During Vonnegut’s life there was the House Un-American Activities Committee, now there is the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act. Vonnegut witnessed firebombs, atomic bombs, and napalm while today there are drones and biological weapons. The U.S. used to practice containment policy, now it polices the Arab world. The U.S. invaded countries dominated by communists, now it invades countries dominated by Muslims. This repetition of the past occurs despite a president that promised hope and change and is well known for his intellect. Why hasn’t Barack Obama remembered history and learned from its mistakes? I've got news for Mr. Obama: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. Walter Benjamin once said, “To grasp the eternity of historical events is really to appreciate the eternity of their transience.” Everything always changes but there’s never any progress.

Vonnegut did not have practical means for liberating humanity from the procession through a blood-soaked history. He did, however, have a potent literary means of educating readers, pushing them, and challenging them to envision new worlds, new times, new histories. This could only be accomplished through Vonnegut’s deeply violent writing, which serves to blast his readers out of the continuum of empty, homogeneous time. Time travel, so often seen as a sci-fi ploy for cheap plot, is, at least in Vonnegut’s case, a deeply existential device that serves to elucidate his deeply humanist roots and ontological interrogations. Time travel serves as social criticism, novel historicism, and political resistance.

Vonnegut himself, or at least his writing and his legacy are thus blasted out of history, unstuck in time. He is pulsating, fluctuating, and flying around space-time with wild abandon. He is in Indianapolis, Dresden, Cape Cod, New York. He is in 1922, 1945, 1969, 2007, 2013, and beyond. He is, he was, he always will have been. Time is not a series of beads on a string. One moment does not follow another.

. . .

"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

- Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," 1940

"Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress."

- Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan, 1959

Read Wilson Taylor's opening essay, "Irony and Authenticity in the American Imagination"

Memorial Day - How Should We Remember?

2013-05-27T20:19:00.000-04:00

by Matthew Gannon

On this Memorial Day 2013 let's not forget that Kurt Vonnegut himself was a veteran. How could we? His masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, is famously based on his experiences as a prisoner of war during World War II. That novel, a vital contribution to American literature, was a powerful counter-narrative to the glorification of war and the uncritical memory of the American public. While many wars since World War II have been highly controversial, World War II is still often upheld as a righteous war fought by brave men against a seemingly insurmountable foe. Slaughterhouse-Five proved that even the enshrined World War II should be critically reexamined.

In his reexamination Vonnegut didn't seek to diminish what the Allies accomplished or perversely argue that the Nazis weren't worth overthrowing. He did seek to reevaluate the way we remember and memorialize war. So what could be a better way to celebrate Memorial Day than to consider Vonnegut's words. Memorial Day officially pays its dues to those who perished in the service of their country. Vonnegut has lamented, "if only I’d managed to get myself killed in the war," because it is seen as the most honorable way to die. Fortunately, if improbably, Vonnegut lived through his combat and POW experience, even witnessing the firebombing of Dresden by Allied forces, an operation that killed one hundred and thirty-five thousand people in a matter of hours, destroyed over ninety percent of the city center, and was performed for questionable strategic reasons.

The world is a better since it had the luck of Vonnegut living in it. So even though Vonnegut is technically not one of those who are honored on this day of memory, his words carry more weight for having witnessed the horrors of war that most will never see. Even if most could see such horror, few could so successfully articulate their impressions as Vonnegut did in Slaughterhouse-Five. With that said, here is a passage from the autobiographical introduction to that novel in which Vonnegut grapples with the difficulty of talking sensibly about such atrocity:

Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. "You were just babies then!" she said.

"What?" I said.

"You were just babies in the war - like the ones upstairs!"

I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.

"But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.

"I - I don't know," I said.

"Well, I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs."

So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encourage by books and movies.

. . .

So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.

"I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it 'The Children's Crusade.'"

She was my friend after that.

Vonnegut's unconventional narrative style and tendency to brush history against the grain infuses traditional war rhetoric with a fresh perspective. Only a carefully cultivated counter-memory can forestall the inevitability of future wars. Because of this, Vonnegut's memory is worth savoring and sharing on this Memorial Day 2013.


A pile of bodies gathered for cremation after the bombing of Dresden.

Dresden in ruins after the bombing raid.

A young Private Kurt Vonnegut in uniform.