by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Blog
Kurt Vonnegut’s novels read smoothly. Depleted people are thrown this way and that without regard, without seriousness. Although, Vonnegut’s novels are very serious, all about war and politics and loneliness and angst. What else? Mental illness, suicide, loss, and death. If you feel like laughing at these things, and you do because he makes you, then you are like many of his characters: they are always complicit in the maddening thread of humanity’s self-absorption, ignorance, and meaningless self-destruction.
He started his career with a fairly straightforward narrative called Player Piano and slowly disintegrated his narrative technique until the convolution became part of the point. His narratives start to be read with irony and a knowing joke about it all. He often casually tells us what will happen, or jumps ahead to explain a later “pivotal” point in the narrative, as if a tour guide was more interested in telling jokes and anecdotes than the points of interest – this he does from time to time as a perfunctory task. There is still sensation only no forced tension. Things happen, strangely and sometimes with unbelievable coincidences but it doesn’t matter because it was all bound to happen.
Now things seem increasingly futile, out of our hands. The Sirens of Titan explains the human situation thus: the reason human civilisation flourished, its increasing ingenuity, was so that they would one day create a chip needed to fix a spacecraft of a Tralfamadorian who has broken down in their solar system. What fun.
We watch someone degraded, try as they might to turn fate – no such luck. Vonnegut is a satirist and follows the satirist’s strange but undoubtable logic that all this misery is funny for a reason – not funny in itself, but so terrible that laughter comes as a corrective – no other method, moral or other, seems to be working. If only people would listen and realise how presumptuous all their plans are, how vain and irresponsive their desires to control. Their big brains are the problem – however, their big brains don’t even know what they are working toward. Despite all this, the writing comes off as strangely comforting. He’s having serious fun. He’s not telling us anything new, only trying to remind us of common decency by wrapping it up in vaudeville. Look at the lengths he has to go through to remind us. What an entertainer.
What’s frenetic about Vonnegut? Why does he feel the need to tack on little remembrances and anecdotes, and stories in the rough, here and there, sometimes related, sometimes not? The attention span is allowed free range. Is there a story to tell? Yes, here it is. No life is a story unless in the vaguest sense that anything can be a story. They say it’s important to think about life like a narrative. That might be true, but it isn’t obvious what to think about in your life that should be in the narrative, or what the essential points are, if any. That’s why life is embarrassing, because it is forced. Things drive you places and there is a lot of noise along the way. Everyone is probably aware of this now. Life doesn’t seem to make any more sense the longer you live it. ‘Extenuating circumstances to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place’.
Are we informed enough to say: “now, that is good news!”. I have been offered a job doing so and so, and I really did want it. Now on my way work I am in some unforeseen accident and lose the use of my limbs. This is very taxing for my partner, financially and psychologically. The loss of intimacy reveals a new kind of intimacy, one of care. However, after a trying time, she leaves me for somebody else, realising through this, or entirely unrelated, that she is actually a lesbian. Now her new partner, who is a good doctor, is on a research team and treat me as a guinea pig for a new medicine which may cure my botched limbs or who knows what. It works, a miracle. I now have to go back to work, only I have been out of it for so long that I don’t know what I can do, and my lack of experience proves unpopular with those in charge of hiring, my self-esteem is taking a real hit… and so on and so on.
If you wanted to you can trail a few people around: now what happened to my partner in the end. how profound, she came out of the closet, or realised she was in one. Was it for the good? Who knows. And countless lives encounter and are changed by them – some people like the image of billiard balls being hit, and so on. Readers who have gone through their fair share of Vonnegut know that a main point that crops up again and again is how we don’t really know how to value the events of our lives and we should use our awareness to notice when things are pleasant for us, at least. Asides, from these isolated moments of being, Vonnegut is always thinking fatally, long-term. That is why he can’t declare: this is the good news and this the bad.
Things don’t need to be representative to make a point. That is an artistic point of his. Again:
I have been offered a job of doing so and so, etc., I am sure I wanted it – nothing happens on the way to and from work, ever. The management can stomach seeing me everyday and accept my work as something that was needed. So far, so good. Nothing has happened. I can afford to live. I could still lose my partner to my infidelity to a woman I met at work. I have no outlet, so I might tell myself; I am bored and am not seen as important, and need the rush. She is also in a relationship. Oh no, it’s come out. Our respective partners leave us, and we find out we don’t really like each other that much, but then! etc. and so on.
Vonnegut writes a lot of parables. And make of them what you will but his “odd” narratives only appear odd because of a false standard of narrative, if you’re expecting a standard of narrative. This sense of a reliable narrative had already been deconstructed plenty before Vonnegut. His take on the narrative was based on the problem of how to evaluate experience. The confusion around this point doesn’t lead to enlightened masters of experience, it leads to shame, embarrassment, and apathy. It doesn’t matter how you consider meaning, the feeling of being alive always remains, and there certainly is something called well-being.
‘if a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is an epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is’. Some people cannot stand feeling like their story is through, having honestly confused the two, life and your story of life. Things don’t end when you want them to, or need them to. Although it may be obscurely true that they end when you actually need them to. That’s why he’s telling you what will happen to this or that character, or what pivotal point will occur in the plot later, or a history in the rough, or a history that can’t be finished. The real story would be ‘and then, and then, and then’ – unlikely to hold attention. Shapeliness to Vonnegut is a lie. Only become aware. Awareness doesn’t make life make any more sense but it becomes more sensuous and less bound to lies.
In his novel Galapagos, there is a box called the Mandarax, a translation device which also has a store of quotations from both fiction and non-fiction. It becomes a vestige of civilisation as we know it, while humanity undergoes its next stage in evolution, I.e. the shrinking of the brain and the turning into seal-like creatures. Even before this, however, the Mandarax provided the characters with little help in understanding. It is comically out of context. So little does the store of human culture seem to represent the situation.
Anyone familiar with the work of Kurt Vonnegut knows that he uses Kilgore Trout as an alter-ego. A prolific short story writer whose work is neglected and acts as a filler in pornographic magazines. The life of Kilgore Trout isn’t coherent from novel to novel. Many of his other recurring characters seem to be. Trout allows Vonnegut to place synopses of Trout’s short stories throughout his novels (Slaughterhouse-Five, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Breakfast of Champions, Timequake). They are miniature allegories in the guise of Sci-Fi, Sci-Fi being easily able to translate “big ideas” into a concrete narrative, a genre he let Trout take over from himself. These sometimes act as little representations of ideas Vonnegut is trying to tell the reader, sometimes they seem more like an aside, and they are almost always detailing those characteristic themes of Vonnegut: humanity, in all their ignorance, are up to their old tricks of stupidity again, here comes fate. Vonnegut made Trout a kind of gaily despairing character: “life is a crock of shit”. Trout also has, it seems, endless self-esteem. He is nobody’s fool. He isn’t shocked by what happens. He is only horribly lonely and too wayward for connection, a fantasy of someone who sees toomuch.
In Timequake, Vonnegut quotes Nietzsche: “Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of religious skepticism”. I said that Vonnegut often appeals to undergrads and the like for the whimsical pleasure he takes in deconstructing culture and humanity, his constant skeptical satire. But to write like him takes some courage, and to think like him, too, takes some faith. To be painfully aware of the world. For all the ingenious convolution of his stories, Vonnegut had a simple message: be decent. Notice a good moment when it’s happening, or if you feel happy: “if this isn’t good, I don’t know what is”. Go out of your way to dick around. Make time to have sex. Dance. Remember music, remember music. Timequake was Vonnegut’s last novel, and it is in Timequake thatfinally gives Kilgore Trout his sob of deep feeling, and his extended family, ending his days of being a lone wandering bum. Trout and the person Kurt Vonnegut come together for a clambake, telling jokes and various anecdotes. They seem happy. Trout’s never been such a conversationalist. The food is great, and they all have their free will back after a ten-year re-run of their lives. He has one last thing to say: ‘”Your awareness”, he said, “that is a new quality in the universe, which exists only because there are human beings”’.
Q & A:
Why does Vonnegut appeal to late adolescence and undergrads?
Answer: because he’s writing in a non-traditionally serious way and so seems un-serious. He is also unabashed to humiliate humanity by showing how stupid, selfish, and cruel they are. Everyone growing with rules they don’t understand feels this.
Should you still read him when you’ve have grown older?
Answer: why not? Have you outlived your youth? Have you become deadly serious? Would it be hateful to you if you were to find out, in general terms, how experience has spoiled you? or how you have spoiled experience?
Are Mr. Vonnegut’s novels simple? Is their message simple?
Answer: yes and no. You can read through them as mindlessly as watching TV. Only you slowly become aware that you are watching TV, mindlessly flicking through channels, and that you have to be alive to do so. What’s next?
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This Carl Kruse Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.org
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
other articles by Fraser include: How I stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb and Spring Again.
The blog’s last article was on the DART Mission.
Also find Carl Kruse at the Kruse @ Denis homepage and Kruse on Pinterest.