Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography 9781472542571, 9781441130341

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Chapter 1 A Postmodern Iconography
Chapter 2 Misanthropic Humanism: Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan
Chapter 3 Anxiety and the Jargon of Authenticity: Mother Night
Chapter 4 The Dialectic of American Enlightenment: Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Chapter 5 Eternal Returns, or, Tralfamadorian Ethics: Slaughterhouse-Five
Chapter 6 Anti-Oedipus of the Heartland: Breakfast of Champions
Chapter 7 Imaginary Communities, or, the Ends of the Political: Slapstick and Jailbird
Chapter 8 Abstract Idealism: Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard
Chapter 9 Apocalypse in the Optative Mood: Galápagos
Chapter 10 Twilight of the Icons: Hocus Pocus and Timequake
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel

Continuum Literary Studies Series Also available in the series: Active Reading, Ben Knights and Chris Thurgar-Dawson Adapting Detective Fiction, Neil McCaw Beckett and Decay, Katherine White Beckett and Death edited by Steve Barfield, Matthew Feldman and Philip Tew Beckett and Phenomenology edited by Matthew Feldman and Ulrika Maude Beckett’s Books, Matthew Feldman Canonizing Hypertext, Astrid Ensslin Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction, Ian Gregson Coleridge and German Philosophy, Paul Hamilton Contemporary Fiction and Christianity, Andrew Tate Ecstasy and Understanding edited by Adrian Grafe English Fiction in the 1930s, Chris Hopkins Fictions of Globalization, James Annesley Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism, Stephen J. Burn Joyce and Company, David Pierce London Narratives, Lawrence Phillips Masculinity in Fiction and Film, Brian Baker Melville, Mapping and Globalization, Robert T. Tally, Jr Milton, Evil and Literary History, Claire Colebrook Modernism and the Post-colonial, Peter Childs Novels of the Contemporary Extreme edited by Alain-Phillipe Durand and Naomi Mandel Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Fiction, Hywel Dix Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon, Nick Turner Seeking Meaning for Goethe’s Faust, J. M. van der Laan Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, Jeremy Hawthorn Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Phillip Larkin, Richard Palmer The Imagination of Evil, Mary Evans The Measureless Past of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida, Ruben Borg The Palimpsest, Sarah Dillon Women’s Fiction 1945–2000, Deborah Philips

Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel A Postmodern Iconography

Robert T. Tally Jr.

Continuum Literary Studies

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Robert T. Tally Jr., 2011 Cover illustrantion by Kurt Vonnegut. © 2006 Kurt Vonnegut / Origami Express, LLC (www.vonnegut.com) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Robert T. Tally Jr. has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN: 978–1-441–13034–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India. Printed and bound in Great Britain

For my father, whose own copies of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels were stolen by his firstborn son long ago. So it goes.

Contents

Acknowledgments Preface: And so on . . . Chapter 1: A Postmodern Iconography Untimely Meditations The Machine Age Some Real Characters Read It and Weep Harmless Granfalloonery Chapter 2: Misanthropic Humanism: Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan The Thing about Utopia: An Introduction The Work of Man in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction The Fate of the Messenger Chapter 3: Anxiety and the Jargon of Authenticity: Mother Night Authentic Existence Introducing Uncertainty A Man Without a Country “We are what we pretend to be” Chapter 4: The Dialectic of American Enlightenment: Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Disaster Triumphant The Tragedy of the Commonplace Chapter 5: Eternal Returns, or, Tralfamadorian Ethics: Slaughterhouse-Five Nietzsche’s Tralfamadorian “Thought” Tralfamadorian Style Tralfamadorian Ethics

ix xii 1 3 7 10 12 15 18 18 21 29 37 39 42 46 49 53 54 61 70 71 75 83

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Chapter 6:

Chapter 7:

Chapter 8:

Chapter 9:

Contents Anti-Oedipus of the Heartland: Breakfast of Champions

85

Breakdowns in the Signifying Chain Adapting to Chaos Etc., or, the Sense of an Ending

87 91 94

Imaginary Communities, or, the Ends of the Political: Slapstick and Jailbird

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The Family Romance as Political Strategy The Joint-Stock Company as Political Strategy After the Political

100 107 111

Abstract Idealism: Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard

114

Neutrality Abstract Expressionism and the Real “Strange and Clever Little Animals”

115 121 128

Apocalypse in the Optative Mood: Galápagos

131

The Thing Was . . . Apocalypse Revisited Big Brains The Era of Hopeful Monsters

132 136 139 142

Chapter 10: Twilight of the Icons: Hocus Pocus and Timequake Epitaphs and Enumeration Waking the Dead And So On . . .

148 148 153 157

Notes Bibliography Index

160 176 183

Acknowledgments

In my view, the single most important concept that Kurt Vonnegut introduced to the world is that of the granfalloon. A granfalloon, as explained in Cat’s Cradle, is a Bokononist term for an artificial karass. Whereas a karass is a team of humans, established by God for a particular purpose which remains unknown (as does the makeup of one’s team) in this life, a granfalloon is formed by humans themselves in an attempt to create bonds among one another, bonds which are not random, mysterious, or ordained by God, but may seem so to its members. Vonnegut mentions “Hoosiers” (i.e., people from Indiana) as one example: “Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.” Many readers, picking up on the mildly derisive tone here, embrace the concept of the karass (as real) and dismiss the granfalloon (as false), and hence manage to make one of the most famous secular humanists in America into an apologist for “real” religion— even though the religion in question is based on foma or lies; Bokonon himself encourages us to give only ironic credence to the notion of karasses. I think that they have missed the point. The granfalloon is a marvelous concept because it is not real, precisely because it is an artificial, manmade grouping, with all the failings that things of such construction inevitably have. God may have established, once and forever, before time began, who we are and who is in our karass (or whatever non-Bokononists call it), but we humans create these artificial communities, for better or, quite often, for worse. As Vonnegut’s own critique, as well as his affirmation, of the concept suggests, the granfalloon is no less meaningful to its members for being manmade. (Just attend a Hoosiers’ basketball game, for instance, to see for yourself.) The acknowledgments section of a book seems a perfect spot for some harmless granfalloonery, for everyone—named or unnamed here—who has helped make this book possible is part of a special granfalloon of our own

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often inadvertent making. And, as with any granfalloon, some of the connections seem natural, some less so, but all are happily established through the human, all-too-human relations that make life so dreadfully messy and painful and wonderful and worthwhile all at once. I was privileged to take part a few years ago in the founding of the Kurt Vonnegut Society, surely the most ironic yet entirely appropriate granfalloon out there, and I have been pleased to serve as its vice president. In organizing the Society’s panels for the American Literature Association’s annual convention, I have been able to meet a host of scholars and critics of Kurt Vonnegut’s writings, and I am delighted to report that their ranks are growing daily, it seems. I have benefited enormously from working with a number of eminent Vonnegut scholars (including Rodney Allen, Kevin Boon, Lawrence Broer, Susan Farrell, Marc Leeds, Donald Morse, Loree Rackstraw, Charles Shields, and Dennis Williams), and I have also enjoyed meeting the many graduate students and emerging scholars who are enlivening the field of Vonnegut studies. I am grateful to Donald C. Farber for his unwavering support for the Society. I have also received support from my colleagues at Texas State University, among whom I mention only two here—Michael Hennessy and Ann Marie Ellis—whose indefatigable hard work makes my work easier, and whose consistent encouragement has helped me through any temporary spells of professional doubt. My students have also contributed mightily to my thinking and my own learning. I would like to thank my parents, who engendered a love of reading and thinking that brought me to Kurt Vonnegut’s work early on. My mother instilled in me a desire to know more and better, and encouraged me to read, especially when video games and baseball seemed preferable. My father also insisted on book learning, especially with respect to philosophy and to the classics; moreover, his collection of Vonnegut novels got me started down this road. I recall how the cover art depicting a little Howard W. Campbell, Jr. riding a Dachshund on my father’s paperback copy of Mother Night piqued an interest in Vonnegut’s work that continues even now. My brothers, Richey and Jay, are also big Vonnegut fans, in addition to being accomplished musicians, and their conversations with me have certainly affected my views over the years. The healthy recognition of the random absurdity of all things has been underscored on a daily basis by Dusty and Windy Britches. And, above all, I owe the most to my wife, Reiko, whose intelligence, engagement, and love make these attempts at understanding possible.

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I would like to give special, double-thanks to Colleen Coalter of Continuum, who has gracefully shepherded not one but now two of my books through the editorial process. Her editorial aid and encouragement have done much to improve my work. Any remaining errors, omissions, misunderstandings, awkward phrasings, or just plain foma are, of course, my responsibility alone, perhaps with partial blame assigned to divine Improvidence (as David Lodge has called it). Earlier versions of Chapter 3 and Chapter 9 have appeared in slightly different forms, respectively, as “ ‘We are what we pretend to be’: Existential Angst in Vonnegut’s Mother Night” in Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice 3, no. 1 (Spring 2009), 94–115, and “Apocalypse in the Optative Mood: Galápagos, or, Starting Over” in New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut, edited by David Simmons (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 113–31. Many of the ideas discussed in Chapter 1 and throughout this book are based on an earlier exploratory essay, “A Postmodern Iconography: Vonnegut and the Great American Novel” in Reading America: New Perspectives on the American Novel, edited by Elizabeth Boyle and Anne-Marie Evans (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 163–78. I gratefully acknowledge the publishers and editors of each of these essays.

Preface

And so on . . . Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy affair, fraught with immeasurable responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds without high spirits having a part in it. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

In this book, I argue that Kurt Vonnegut’s 14 novels represent literary experiments conducted in order to provide a comprehensive image of American experience in the postmodern condition of the late twentieth century. I propose that, contrary to the conclusion of some other critics, Vonnegut is not himself a postmodernist, but that his works create, describe, and mobilize various images or icons of American life and that the larger picture produced in his oeuvre as a whole forms a postmodern iconography. Vonnegut’s tone, sensibility, ethos, and even style are, I argue, more modernist than postmodernist, but the world he depicts in his novels is decidedly postmodern. Vonnegut’s famously heterodox narrative techniques—employing collage, temporal slippages, drawings, authorial interventions, and the mixture of fiction and nonfiction—represent the novelist’s formal explorations of the means useful for developing a comprehensive vision of “America” in a world and in an era in which that abstraction is increasingly difficult to represent satisfactorily. Like his predecessors in this endeavor, such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway, Vonnegut attempts to grasp the plenitude of America in the novel form, trying to register the nation’s shifting and evanescent identity, and discovers the “great American novel” to be an ungraspable phantom. In what follows, I revisit each of Vonnegut’s novels, examining specific iconic elements and drawing connections among them in order to re-present Vonnegut as an untimely figure, a modernist in a postmodern condition,

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who develops an iconography of American experience while ultimately resigning himself to the impossibility of the project. My approach is somewhat less psychological and biographical than many other studies of Vonnegut, although certain correlations between Vonnegut’s life and writings seem inevitable. Also, unlike many Vonnegut scholars, who have frequently eschewed such areas, my argument draws on works of literary and critical theory. While such theory informs my readings, this study is not meant to be merely a literary-theoretical approach to Vonnegut. Rather I hope to show that the formal analysis of Vonnegut’s novels, combined with a philosophical or theoretical examination of the modern and postmodern conditions, will disclose a more interesting image of Vonnegut’s project as well as a more useful vision of the role of the writer in grappling with the contradictions of his age. What follows will also necessarily involve some underlying considerations of the theory of the novel, although limited to the novels of Kurt Vonnegut and limited further by my focus on the novel as a means of imaginatively representing certain aspects of a social totality. This partially explains why I am looking at Vonnegut’s novels, and not at his many short stories, plays, nonfiction essays, or other works (such as his “autobiographical collages,” Palm Sunday and Fates Worse than Death). I am particularly interested in how Vonnegut uses the novel form to construct his postmodern iconography. Undoubtedly, many of his writings in other forms contribute to this overall project. I am thinking especially of those short stories collected in Bagombo Snuff Box and Welcome to the Monkey House (which incorporates all but one of the stories previously collected in Canary in a Cathouse). These tales offer great insights into Vonnegut’s imaginative social theory, particularly as applied to the quiet desperation of middle-class life in the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s. They also display a good deal less misanthropy in that misanthropic humanism I locate in his early novels, and thus constitute variations on the themes established in Vonnegut’s long-form fiction. Yet, the novel as a literary form aims for overview and comprehensiveness, and so these and other short stories register something more like punctual interventions into the critique of American society, rather than a critical survey of that society. Such interventions have great value, and certainly contribute to Vonnegut’s overall project in often fascinating ways, but they do not attempt the same experiments that his novels do. In the end, the fact that Vonnegut largely avoided magazine writing— due in no small part, I concede, to the drying up of that market—and chose instead to concentrate on novels and book-length works in the last half or two-thirds of his career, indicates that the novel was likely the genre that he

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felt was best suited for his project. Indeed, I would argue that the novel is the only real form available for the project Vonnegut attempts, and that his work must therefore be seen in the context of the aims and scope of the American novel in the twentieth century. Similarly, but for another reason also, I take little interest in the posthumous collections, Armageddon in Retrospect (2008), Look at the Birdie (2009), and the forthcoming (as I write) While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction (2011). As every biographical account—including the forthcoming biography by Charles J. Shields, which I have not seen as of this writing, but which I believe will immediately become the standard against which all other biographies of the author will be measured—points out, Vonnegut took his role as a professional writer quite seriously, and was rather savvy when it came to the business of writing, right down to contract law and marketing. In fact, Look at the Birdie unaccountably includes a letter from 1951 in which Vonnegut expressly states his preference for the type of writing he wishes to do: rather than forego “fat checks” in pursuit of a lofty reputation, Vonnegut writes, “I’ll stick with money.” (In a brief notice available on the Kurt Vonnegut Society’s website [www.vonnegutsociety.net], Shields explains that this letter is erroneously listed as a letter to Walter J. Miller, when it was in fact written to Vonnegut’s Cornell University friend S. Miller Harris—the “Dear Harris” greeting might have been a clue—and regrets that this misattribution by the editors of Look at the Birdie will undoubtedly “bedevil Vonnegut scholars for years to come.”) If, after a few years, much less 40 or 50 years, Vonnegut continued to leave notes, drafts, and even complete manuscripts unpublished, presumably they were not meant to be published. That does not, of course, mean that they do not have any value and cannot become resources for scholars, as well as becoming valuable additions to the personal bookshelves of Vonnegut’s many fans, entertaining and delighting them as they will. But it does mean that they are more likely to be anomalies in the Vonnegut canon. And, regardless of the intentions of the publishers, these posthumous collections inevitably have the whiff of the graverobber about them. As for my own study of Vonnegut and the American novel, the overarching argument about Vonnegut’s postmodern iconography addresses all 14 novels; however, I do not want to lose touch with any of them. As such, I have organized my study of the novels, with one exception, around the standard chronological order of publication—not very Tralfamadorian of me, I know—while also speaking of Vonnegut’s overall project more generally throughout. Each novel, as I see it, makes a similar attempt to map postmodern American culture, yet each novel also executes the project

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differently, with different goals and results as well as different characters and plots. Each novel tries to grasp the essence of American life at its moment, and, in the aggregate, Vonnegut’s novels depict the mobile elements or icons of such a comprehensive image in a variety of constellations. Each novel fails, by the way, but each fails in interesting ways. The 14 “failed” experiments yield a postmodern iconography that helps us better understand ourselves and the world today. A brief overview may be worthwhile. In Chapter 1, “A Postmodern Iconography,” I will discuss certain iconic images or concepts, circulating in the everyday spaces of twentieth-century American life, that Vonnegut establishes in his novels. These include those familiar to American Studies, such as the pastoral ideal and the question of technology, the individual subject’s relationship to a broad social totality, the demands and responsibilities of art, political and economic forces, and above all the promise of an “exceptional” nation in a multinational world system. I will then examine Vonnegut’s own role as an iconographer and iconoclast, and discuss why Vonnegut’s iconoclasm is not specifically a postmodern stance, but necessarily involves the critique of the postmodern condition in the “American Century.” This chapter also shows how Vonnegut’s own “great American novel” does not materialize, but Vonnegut’s novels nevertheless contribute greatly to such an unattainable project. In Chapter 2, I examine Vonnegut’s first two novels, Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, and argue that Vonnegut develops a theory that might be called, using a paradoxical and parodic phrase, “misanthropic humanism.” Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism can be seen throughout his entire oeuvre, but in these first novels, Vonnegut seems at his most frustrated and pessimistic in trying to make sense of the human condition in the postwar period. Player Piano (1952) conforms in many ways to the dystopian works of science fiction, and it is frequently compared to such works as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. One might also add a book like Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, inasmuch as Vonnegut’s critique of modern society is here completely bound up in his critique of corporate, middle-class culture—the age of managers and engineers, more than of capitalists and proletarians. Yet Vonnegut goes further than the critique of corporate or industrial society, extending his criticism to all forms of liberation as well. The revolution against the dehumanization of industrial civilization concludes with the postmodern Luddites delightedly rebuilding the very machines they had smashed. For Vonnegut, the revolution cannot save us, since the problem lies not with the political, social, or psychological oppression or repression

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of one’s humanity, but with humanity itself. This is what it means to be, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s elegant phrasing, human, all-too-human. Similarly, in The Sirens of Titan (1959), Vonnegut presents a failed revolution in what seems to be an all the more fantastic genre. The Sirens of Titan is perhaps Vonnegut’s most ostensibly science-fictional work, what with its futuristic setting, its chrono-synclastic infundibula, and its space travel to Mars, Venus, and the moon of Saturn indicated in the title. Yet Vonnegut always maintained his opposition to the label science fiction, arguing that it was misapplied to writers who took technology seriously and that it tended falsely to distance writers and literary works from the world of their readers. In fact, Vonnegut’s second novel uses such science-fictional motifs as space- and time-travel to shine the light directly on 1950s Americanism, with its critique of class hierarchy, work and play, war, and relations between the sexes. In this work Vonnegut undermines the very conventions he employs to broaden his critique of everyday life, and reveals his sympathy for the human, alltoo-human condition, which is also shown to be utterly absurd. Bookending that curious decade, Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan present the struggles of middle-class America in its attempt to deal with the profound changes that a postmodern society in formation is experiencing. Both novels deal with the failures of utopia, and the uncertainties of human communication; as such, both resonate with the hopes and the anxieties of a prosperous society in transition. These works conclude with a theme sounded in all of Vonnegut’s subsequent work, but here with a sort of bitterness associated with the failed promise of modernism, that the liberation of humanity is thwarted by humanity itself. Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism offers a model for understanding this condition, while also forcing the writer and the reader to look for other avenues leading to one’s sense of purpose in the world. In Chapter 3, “Anxiety and the Jargon of Authenticity: Mother Night,” I examine Vonnegut’s existentialism, which is offered not as a solution to the problem of misanthropic humanism, but as a framework for understanding it and the world it confronts. The moral of Vonnegut’s third novel, as he puts it in his introduction, is “We are what we pretend to be.” Vonnegut’s most overtly existentialist novel, Mother Night (1961) explores the related themes of alienation, identity, and authenticity in order to analyze carefully the illusions and self-delusions of a man (and, by extension, of others) who believes himself to be good while involved in the most hideous of crimes. Vonnegut’s critique of identity thus undergirds his exploration of morality. But, following Theodor Adorno’s critique of contemporary German philosophy at almost exactly the same time in the early 1960s, I argue that the “jargon of authenticity” in Mother Night is used to make Vonnegut’s more

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profound point that authentic existence is largely impossible, and the desire for such amounts to a delusional, even dangerous, condition. In setting himself up as the genuine article in a world of caricatures and phonies, Howard W. Campbell, Jr. assumes the role of the false martyr, and betrays his own hollow sense of being. By undermining and reevaluating the concept of authenticity, Vonnegut’s existentialism unfolds into a critique of modernity itself. Vonnegut’s critical assessment of everyday life in contemporary American society moves subtly from a devastating exposure of middle-class morality and personal self-regard to a broader critique of the modern and postmodern condition itself. In Chapter 4, “The Dialectic of American Enlightenment: Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” I take up Vonnegut’s own version of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s famous critique, in which they note that—contrary to one’s expectations or to its promise— while “the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty,” yet “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.” Drawing on anthropological and sociological observation, Vonnegut’s farcical critique of science and religion in Cat’s Cradle (1963) presents a sort of dueling dialectics, with various figures in motion to point out the absurdity, but also necessity, of the human condition at the end of the world. This end-of-the-world masterpiece is supplemented by what might be termed “the tragedy of the commonplace” in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965). Eliot Rosewater dramatizes the utopian impulse of American society, while also serving as an ambiguous avatar of Americanism. Partially under the influence of Kilgore Trout, who makes his first appearance in this novel, Rosewater attempts to transform a commonplace, seemingly realistic, or even banal life, into one of extraordinary import. Vonnegut here shows his own development since Player Piano, as the tragedy and comedy merge seamlessly into a fastidiously real world of science, religion, money, and power. The ambiguities of Cat’s Cradle’s dialectic of Enlightenment and Rosewater’s “pearls before swine” open up the terrain of the fundamentally ethical philosophy unveiled in Vonnegut’s most celebrated work. Chapter 5, “Eternal Returns, or, Tralfamadorian Ethics: SlaughterhouseFive,” examines that novel’s conception of a spatial history, which enables the text to function as a “time-travel” narrative while not actually involving time at all. In establishing both the narrative form and the Tralfamadorian content, that is, by presenting the novel as a mode of alien storytelling, Vonnegut lays the groundwork for a moral project, gaining its force from something much like Nietzsche’s theory of the eternal return. As Nietzsche

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notes, the idea of the eternal return derives from a cosmological principle of pre-Socratic atomism, but it functions as basis for ethical action. And, as Gilles Deleuze has elaborated it, what returns is difference itself, as the infinite variation and proliferation of difference makes possible Vonnegut’s weirdly comprehensive vision of postmodern American life. Indeed, by virtue of its Tralfamadorian narrative structure, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), the book that might appear to be Vonnegut’s most postmodern novel to that date, actually comes closest to fulfilling the modernist project of representing and reintegrating the fragmentary, perhaps chaotic, pieces of a culture than no longer appear to fit together in any natural pattern. The schizoid nature of this experience is reintegrated into a meaningful image by virtue of the Tralfamadorian point of view and an ethical program rooted in the absolute affirmation of life. Following the successful integration of time and space in SlaughterhouseFive, Vonnegut’s seventh novel, Breakfast of Champions (1973), shatters the tenuous and ephemeral Tralfamadorian unity by extrapolating a thoroughly schizophrenic narrative. In Chapter 6, “Anti-Oedipus of the Heartland,” I analyze this marvelous and eccentric novel in connection to Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizoanalysis” in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. The protagonist of Vonnegut’s novel, Dwayne Hoover, cuts the perfect figure of the “schizo out for a stroll,” and the multiple cast members—among them such recurrent or iterated characters as Francine Pefko, Rabo Karabekian, Kazak (the dog), Kilgore Trout, and the author (“The Creator of the Universe”) himself—form a mobile army of perplexed “schizoanalysts.” Breakfast of Champions marks the turning point in Vonnegut’s career, with his own admission that the novel is an attempt “to clear my head of all the junk in there—the assholes, the flags, the underpants.” The novel also represents Vonnegut’s most powerful engagement with madness, with schizophrenia in a psychological and cultural sense. In his schizoanalysis, Vonnegut mobilizes nearly his entire iconography and leaves the text with an open-ended cri de coeur, and an unambiguously salient “ETC.” In its ultimate refusal to incorporate the profusion of fragmentary icons into an imaginary whole, Breakfast of Champions goes furthest down the road toward the typically postmodern novel, yet in its persistently elegiac tone, the novel attempts to establish an almost premodern or Renaissance unity, figured forth in a new humanism that places the author’s own biography and politics front and center. In the scholarship on Vonnegut’s career, a line is often drawn between early and late, with either Slaughterhouse-Five or Breakfast of Champions as the definitive turning point. Vonnegut himself acknowledges that his work, or

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he himself, became more optimistic, though his optimism is often odd, and only achieves its apotheosis later in Galápagos. With the aftermath of his fame and the success of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut became—like it or not—a public spokesman, and his post–Breakfast of Champions works are much more explicitly political. Yet, as with his critique of religion, Vonnegut’s critique of politics employs a bittersweet recognition of the need for, but inevitable failures of, a sense of purpose and of community. Chapter 7, “Imaginary Communities, or, the Ends of the Political,” examines Vonnegut’s Slapstick and Jailbird. In Slapstick (1976), Vonnegut posits the value of what he had in Cat’s Cradle called a “granfalloon,” an arbitrary organization that provides a false sense of collectivity or belonging. The novel depicts the familial breakdown, symbolized in the splitting of the hermaphroditic unity of the “single mind” of Wilbur and Eliza Swain, alongside a national breakdown as Wilbur serves as the very last President of the United States in an apocalyptic postnational condition. But envisioning “imaginary communities,” Benedict Anderson’s evocative term used to describe the conceptual basis of nationalism, Vonnegut re-imagines the roles of both families and nations in American life. The “family romance” as a political strategy is, of course, problematic, and Wilbur’s utopia does not really fare better than Vonnegut’s earlier utopian schemes. Indeed, in his post-Watergate exploration of the political in Jailbird (1979), Vonnegut offers a bleak assessment of the postmodern American scene, specifically introducing the correlations between geopolitical forces and multinational capitalism. Jailbird is Vonnegut’s most overtly political novel, with a refugee of the Nixon White House as a narrator and the labor history of the United States for its ancillary subject matter. However, the political vision of the postmodern condition—and Vonnegut’s epigonic modernist response—is revealed in Walter Starbuck’s grumbling quiescence. Here what had seemed a somewhat hopeful embrace of political granfalloonery in Slapstick becomes a wholesale dismissal of politics as a transformative force. Chapter 8, “Abstract Idealism: Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard,” explores Vonnegut’s aesthetic turn in two surprisingly powerful novels from the 1980s, Deadeye Dick (1982) and Bluebeard (1987). Each deals specifically with the roles of art and of the artist in the context of modern or postmodern American civilization, which is why I have chosen to make a temporary break from the chronological examination, allowing Bluebeard to leapfrog Galápagos (1985) for the moment. Possibly Vonnegut’s most underrated work, Deadeye Dick attempts a kind of phenomenology of spirit, complete with a philosophy of history, the dramatization of historical forces, and a meditation on the dialectic. The central theme of the neutral (from the

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Latin, ne-uter, “neither one nor the other”), plays out in Rudy Waltz’s selfimposed neutering, as well as in the neutron bombing of his home town. In a sense, this commitment to the neutral offers its own kind of utopian vision, even as it paints a picture of a world still in formation and in need of better illumination. In Deadeye Dick, Vonnegut most fully realizes his own vision of history—both the substance of history and the formal aspects of storytelling—concluding, as in Cat’s Cradle’s “read it and weep” punch line, that the Dark Ages continue. Yet, in Bluebeard, Vonnegut’s long-time interest in abstract expressionist art forms a backdrop to the story of Rabo Karabekian, a character who made his debut in Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut is interested in the struggles of an artist in a world where art no longer seems to matter. The cosmic irony in Karabekian’s career, that his most famous paintings disintegrate thanks to the Sateen Dura-Luxe paint of inferior quality, presents an iconic vision of the conflicts between art and life, between abstract idealism or expressionism and the real. Vonnegut’s meditation on abstract art leads him to cautiously embrace a representational or highly mimetic art that glories in a kind of idealism grounded in realism, a utopian image of art and the artist. Bluebeard has Vonnegut’s happiest ending yet, with an almost Bokononist hymn to Vonnegut’s humanism. Yet it also reveals the degree to which, in order to find this harmony, Vonnegut first needed to retreat into the neutralized and ideal space of the aesthetic, in order to emerge in the salubrious ambiance of the human, all-too-human. In Chapter 9, “Apocalypse in the Optative Mood,” I examine what I take to be Vonnegut’s most optimistic novel, Galápagos. The epigraph to Galápagos also reveals the novel’s overall theme: “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” That the line comes from Anne Frank’s diary makes it all the more powerful, since we know exactly to what the “everything” refers. Galápagos shares with Vonnegut’s other works a poignant critique of the follies of man, a sense of the absurdity of life, but emphasizes an element previously much more understated: hope. Here Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism resolves itself by removing the anthropos, and his apocalypse finds salvation in a not-quite-Deleuzian “becominganimal,” whereby humanity sheds its all-too-human nature and, in so doing, becomes vastly more humane. By inaugurating an “era of hopeful monsters,” Vonnegut completes his modernist, utopian vision for a happily resolved post-postmodernity. One almost wishes that Galápagos and Bluebeard had been Vonnegut’s final novels, ending as they do with such hopeful and forgiving images of posthuman humanity and post-abstract-expressionist affirmation of an embodied realism. In Chapter 10, “Twilight of the Icons,” I look at Vonnegut’s final

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two “novels,” Hocus Pocus and Timequake; I place the word in “scare quotes” because the latter is not quite a novel at all, and arguably represents a petering out of, rather than a conclusion to, Vonnegut’s postmodern iconography. Hocus Pocus (1990), whose very title betrays its philosophical argument, offers a Mother Night–like confession, with an ostensible Vonnegut-as-editor collecting fragments of Eugene Debs Hartke’s reflections. These fragments provide a formal counterpart to the fragmentarity of postmodern America, also serving as a jeremiad without hope. In the blink of an eye—hocus pocus!—all that functioned as the image-repertoire of America becomes a nightmare of fractured archetypes. This is an aesthetic of disintegration whereby the modernist celebration of loss (à la William Butler Yeats’s “things fall apart, the center cannot hold”) reaches its height in Vonnegut’s project. In the “twilight of the icons,” Vonnegut’s ambiguous Timequake, not quite a novel and not quite a memoir and not quite a collection of curmudgeonly aphorisms, marks a suitably incomplete final intervention in a lifelong project to understand “America” by means of iconography. Kilgore Trout, scribbling “novels” on scraps of paper, which are immediately tossed in the garbage, finds himself soothing a confused and terrified humanity, and is once again confronted by the “creator of the universe,” to whom he delivers a final sermon, with its unifying theme of a heavenly soul. The “postmodern harlequin” (as Todd Davis names him) turns out to be a late-twentieth-century Descartes. Timequake indeed! Vonnegut is an untimely figure, this poetic modernist in a most prosaic postmodernity, a misanthropic humanist, secular and even atheistic religious nut, a technophilic Luddite and technophobic technologist. Vonnegut’s postmodern iconography, developed through and on display in his novels, represents a bizarre, almost quixotic, attempt at the sort of comprehensiveness and unity assayed by the most wide-eyed utopians of the early modernist period, yet Vonnegut’s world remains more fragmentary and unfixed than the elegiac modernists imagined. Hence, Vonnegut makes a botch of things, but, as Herman Melville had once put it while writing Moby-Dick and referring to his own failed attempts at meaningful representation, “all my books are botches.” The “America” Vonnegut depicts cannot be easily pinned down. Vonnegut’s failure to achieve his iconography is largely based on the ungraspable ideality of the thing itself, the “America” he hoped to comprehend. The iconography cannot really represent it, and its very unrepresentability points to a different project for the post-American century: no longer relying on icons, iconography, and iconoclasts, but perhaps projecting a provisional, mobile constellation better suited to making sense of the human condition of the twenty-first century. And so on.

Chapter 1

A Postmodern Iconography

“Call me Jonah.” The opening line of Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut’s endof-the-world masterpiece, unmistakably echoes that of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s end-of-the-world masterpiece. Indeed, such echoes are audible elsewhere in Cat’s Cradle, from the “cetacean” Mount McCabe, which looks like a whale with a snapped harpoon protruding from it, to the great Ahablike quarrel with God, humorously figured in Bokonon’s thumb-nosing gesture at the novel’s end. In pointing to Moby-Dick, as likely a candidate as ever was for the “great American novel,” Vonnegut registers his own entry into the contest, but here it is also bound up in the laughable impossibility of the project. The novels of Kurt Vonnegut are not generally the first to come to mind when one thinks of the great American novel. Indeed, this elusive object— impossible and, perhaps, not even desirable—has long been a bit of a joke, the sort of thing an aspiring writer claims to be working on, or (even more likely) something a writer’s parents, friends, and others say he or she is working on. The great American novel is always a dream deferred; it cannot really exist, it seems, for that very reality would probably undermine any novel’s greatness. The notion of the “great American novel” really belongs to the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. It existed there as a dream of writers and critics, desperate to carve a distinct national culture from the variously influential European traditions. By midcentury, many writers claimed that the great American literary tradition, one that would surpass its European forebears, was already beginning to emerge. Melville himself wrote, in 1850, that “men not very much inferior to Shakespeare, are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio.”1 The closing years of that century are filled with lamentations that the messianic promise of an earlier generation had not come to pass.2 The ideal great American novel would express an “American spirit,” which is not the same as expressing a particular patriotic or nationalistic theme. It did not need to be set in America or even to feature Americans as its principal characters. It had, in a sense, to

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capture the essence of “America” in its totality. In the language of the narrator of Moby-Dick, the range must include “the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the universe, not excluding its suburbs.”3 Few writers have attempted the task as set forth in Moby-Dick, but many writers have tried to evoke its intent in partial renderings. Although the “great American novel” is by now a joke, the underlying project seems to animate the works of many twentieth-century writers, from John Dos Passos to Thomas Pynchon to Don DeLillo and so on. Each age writes its own histories, of course. In the postmodern era, an epoch defined in large part by the perceived impossibility of comprehensive representation, a fragmented version of that vision seems the only feasible way to go. Vonnegut’s entire career might be characterized as an attempt to produce something like “the great American novel,” but of its own time. Rather than depicting a representative American symbolic narrative, comprehensively bound in a single, emblematically American work, Vonnegut’s novels as a whole offer a postmodern iconography, a sustained though fractured narrative of characters and themes that underlie that older project. Like Moby-Dick, Vonnegut’s novels present a sprawling image of the complexity of American life, expressing the human, all-too-human, condition of its varied inhabitants. Perhaps recognizing, as did Melville, that comprehensiveness is not really possible, Vonnegut presents a collage of figures, icons whose meanings are gently elicited by the plots rather than being clearly drawn on their faces. Vonnegut’s collage is also indicative of the characteristically postmodern pastiche, in which the various styles of older art forms reappear in surprising places. Such pastiche extends also to Vonnegut’s use of genres. Although his existential themes and heartbreakingly poignant sense of everyday life have won him critical praise, Vonnegut has often couched his observations in literature that seems marginal, featuring such B-list genres as science fiction, dime-store magazine writing, slapstick comedy, and even soft-core pornography (or, in the case of Breakfast of Champions, all of the above). Vonnegut employs these genres, but his work cannot be contained by any of them. That is, it is not really viable to describe Vonnegut as a “science fiction” or “comic” author. Indeed, Vonnegut is not a typical novelist, and there is no type of novel that fits neatly with his sensibilities. Hence, Vonnegut’s career may be seen as generically uncategorizable; it too seems like a collage, with bits of science fiction, pop psychology, personal memoir, and so on, all pasted together in artful ways to present an overall image.

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This uncategorizable oeuvre thus functions as a postmodern iconography, a scattered and critical portrait of American life at the very moment of its seeming transcendence, the postwar period which began America’s reign as a leading world power, with all the absurdity and horror that accompanies such a position. Throughout his career, Vonnegut’s iconography advances a literary project—far too highfalutin a term, perhaps—to produce what Melville and others imagined the American novel could accomplish: an expression of the multitude and diversity of American life in its time. This is the goal of the ever-elusive great American novel, and although Vonnegut has not captured this legendary creature, he has reasserted the value of attempting such a project in the postmodern world.

Untimely Meditations Vonnegut’s work is frequently labeled postmodern, and the postwar America that provides the content for all of his novels is a primary social and cultural terrain of postmodernity. It is far from certain that Vonnegut would characterize his own work as postmodern, although legions of sympathetic critics, from Jerome Klinkowitz to Todd Davis, have been happy to embrace the adjective in characterizing his writings. Certainly Vonnegut’s oeuvre does manifest many elements that are associated with postmodern fiction, such as metafictional techniques, use of collage or pastiche, disruptions in the narrative timeline, genre-blending, and so on; however, Vonnegut has eschewed certain aspects of the postmodern and embraced many others that we tend to view as modern or modernist. David Cowart has suggested that Vonnegut’s work be viewed as a bridge between modernism and postmodernism.4 This seems to me much more plausible, inasmuch as Vonnegut’s apparently formal postmodernity is thoroughly infused with a modernist content. Nevertheless, it is also clear that Vonnegut’s work embodies a kind of postmodern sensibility, a feeling for its place and time, that marks it as postmodern in a recognizable way. Understood historically, Vonnegut’s work cannot function in the same way as that of the modernists. Of course, historical understanding may already be a modernist concept. In my view, Vonnegut’s novels are not exactly modernist or postmodernist. They do not so much represent a bridge between the two aesthetic or cultural forms as they do an unresolved tension between them. Assiduously of his time, Vonnegut cannot escape his own postmodernity, with its pervasive fragmentarity and stubborn resistance to comprehensive meaning, but he remains a modernist who desires a form of completeness and semic

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stability that remains elusive. Indeed, Vonnegut is untimely insofar as he insists on a modernist aesthetic while trying (perhaps often failing) to make sense of a postmodern condition in which all of his work is situated. His postmodern iconography is therefore a powerfully modernist project. The term “postmodern” has a notoriously slippery meaning, owing in part to the variety of uses to which it is put and the contexts in which it is asserted. In literature, the term began to be used by critics to identify post– World War II writers who were quite distinct from the modernists of a previous generation, modernists whose work was beginning to dominate academic literary criticism. Thus could the Beats, for instance, be distinguished from James Joyce and William Faulkner. In France, especially following Jean-François Lyotard but drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, among others, postmodernism became a label with which to describe the cultural and philosophical condition of a world in which “le grand récits” of modern societies (here understood in terms of those ideological and rational theories from the Enlightenment) no longer held true. And, perhaps most famously, in architecture the term carried a polemical meaning, also hinted at in these other usages, directly attacking the conventions and pretensions of modernism.5 In all cases, the label was meant to register a break with the modern, not merely to indicate posteriority. The point was not merely that these postmodernist ways of thinking, writing, building, or what have you, appear after the modernist ways of doing things, but also that they are somehow selfconsciously aware of their differentiation from modernism. With its comprehensive attempt at a synthetic and synoptic overview of the various phenomena gathered together under the rubric of the postmodern, Fredric Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism as the “cultural dominant” of the era of late capitalism offers one of the most useful theories of the postmodern. By grounding the aesthetic and cultural dimensions in the socioeconomic bases of modes of production and distribution, Jameson does a better job than most of historicizing postmodernism while also disclosing its connections to globalization. Jameson specifically understands postmodern art as being fully integrated into commodity production. Whereas the modernists struggled with the problem of the work of art in the machine age, inventing forms that, in some cases, were meant to fully resist commodification, the postmodern condition is one in which the artistic and the commercial have become inextricably intertwined. (Here one almost inevitably thinks of Andy Warhol and Campbell’s soup.) Architecture, of course, lends itself most effectively to this condition, since architecture always requires a mixture of aesthetics

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and economics; the great postmodern buildings are monuments—in more ways than one—to the economic system in which they are produced. It is no wonder that finance capital and bank buildings come together in such gaudy skyscrapers, or that the flow of global capital can be articulated so forcefully in lavish hotels designed for the collective wish-fulfillment of international travelers. In addition to labeling a historical period, postmodernism has several aspects that distinguish it from its predecessors, in literature and other mimetic arts, modernism and realism especially. Any enumeration of such aspects is doomed to remain incomplete, since the very nature of the postmodern involves seemingly endless proliferations, like the monotonous lists found in DeLillo’s novels or the almost numberless brands of colas found in supermarkets. However, a few salient features are worth observing here. For one thing, as Jameson notes frequently, postmodernity is characterized by a certain lack of historical sense. As Jameson says of his own analysis, “It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.”6 The domination of the “now” and the inability to think historically have a haunting, almost elegiac sense, at least from the modernist perspective; there is a disconnection with the past, a loss of shared history, that inevitably involves a break with a perceived community. Vonnegut touches upon this aspect of the postmodern condition again and again.7 This lack of historicity leads to a second characteristic of postmodernism: the subversion of time by space. Postmodernism is often characterized by a profound sense of spatiality. Whereas modernism is the era of time, of temporal flux, memory, and historical possibility, the postmodern is all about space, juxtaposition, extension, and positions, as Foucault famously described it.8 In the postmodern, space has usurped time’s constitutive role in human experience; one must then figure out one’s place in an evermore-complex network of interrelations.9 In Vonnegut’s novels, one discerns a profound sense of homelessness, of being out of place. Much of the bewilderment encountered by characters in the novels has to do with their sense of being lost, of not knowing where to go. To be sure, that homelessness existed before; it can be seen in Don Quixote and in the novels of Thomas Wolfe. But in the postmodern, there is an even more alarming realization: there may not be any underlying referent. That is, not only can you not go home again, but there was never a home to begin with. Hence, a possibly crucial distinction between the modernist and postmodernist sensibilities: whereas the modernist eulogizes a lost home,

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community, or prelapsarian stasis, bemoaning the fragmentation of what was once whole, the postmodernist recognizes—in some cases, celebrates— fragmentarity as the state of being, denying the existence of a prior, Edenic, pure, and wholly circumscribed state in the first place. If both modernists and postmodernists highlight the disintegration of contemporary social life, then the difference lies primarily in one’s attitude toward this condition. In most modernisms, the integrated whole is a thing of the past, an idealized community, that has been torn asunder by the forces of modernization, such that the world is now no longer whole, no longer intrinsically meaningful, and is—in Georg Lukács’s wonderful phrase—a “world abandoned by God.”10 For the postmodernist, whether engaging in a celebration of the fragmentary or a condemnation of it, the “lost” wholeness is a chimera. Vonnegut, in some ways, seems to straddle the two. In his persistent longing for a perceived, former unity, in “forever pursuing Eden” (which Leonard Mustazza has somewhat convincingly argued characterizes Vonnegut’s entire corpus),11 Vonnegut betrays his thoroughgoing, elegiac modernism; however, his formal techniques and his more philosophical content suggest an insinuation of the more postmodern vision in Vonnegut, where the author seems to admit that such comforting ideas of past glory are nothing but what Bokonon dubbed foma, useful lies. A third characteristic of the postmodern condition, what might be thought of as the psychology of the age, is visible in the seeming fragmentation of the individual subject. The age of realism might be characterized by the process of individuation, by the birth of the modern, bourgeois individual. The modernist era is marked by the intensification of that individuality, most visible in the form of interiority—expressed through such formal literary techniques as stream-of-consciousness—which, at its extreme, is associated with a kind of madness. If neurosis, or paranoia, is emblematic of the modernist condition, then schizophrenia is surely the model of postmodernism. The idea, most fully developed and even celebrated in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, but also articulated in any number of postmodernist literary productions (e.g., those of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Vonnegut himself), seems most fitting in the present era, an era characterized in part by its being so very “in the present.” Without history and without home, the subject breaks up into so many little fragments, lacking coherence. A final point about the postmodern condition, one perhaps with special relevance to Vonnegut, has to do with the notion of pastiche. Pastiche, or the imitation of past styles or genres, has come to characterize the postmodern (especially in architecture, but by extension, the other arts as well); in

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postmodernism, older concepts like originality and authenticity are suspect, if not discarded outright. It would seem that, as an artistic practice, pastiche might exert some critical energy, attacking and reforming older styles while forming entirely new ones through a kind of collage. But, as Jameson notes in contrasting pastiche with parody, the critical capacity of postmodern art seems extinguished by the fact that it lacks the ground upon which to base its critique. As Jameson puts it, “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a particular or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of its satirical impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus a blank parody, a statue without eyeballs.”12 Of course, it makes sense that without a real sense of history, the uses of the past amount to mere “pasteboard masks” as Melville’s Ahab would put it. Vonnegut remains a master parodist, but his use of pastiche— especially with respect to genres and literary conventions—marks an aspect of his own postmodernity, while his commitment to “some unknown, but still reasoning thing” that lies behind the mask exhibits his ultimately modernist attitude. The postmodern condition shines through in Vonnegut’s novels, even where Vonnegut himself would most likely cling to a more properly modernist aesthetic, one in which social problems are still identifiable, narrative maintains its representational power, and the solutions are worth pursuing. In dealing with the present condition, Vonnegut revisits themes of the modernist tradition—the effects of industrialization and technology, the breakup of traditional (so-called organic) communities, the relations between historical and psychological structures, between social totality and personal experience—but he must do so within a postmodern framework, as his iconography of American life in the late twentieth century requires him to struggle with the postmodern condition. It is almost as though Vonnegut is a reluctant postmodernist. Or, perhaps, like the rest of us, he has had postmodernity thrust upon him.

The Machine Age Vonnegut’s first novel provides a nice point of entry into the discussion of his postmodern iconography. Often overlooked, or viewed as an outlier in his career, since it was written so early and before Vonnegut’s career as a

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novelist was established, Player Piano outlines a number of themes that animate Vonnegut’s later work. In some respects, Player Piano seems to be another entry in that now clichéd category of 1950s middle-class representations of bourgeois ennui or social doldrums. There’s the predictable wifesleeps-with-coworker affair, the usual button-down boring lifestyle of middle management, the unfulfilling mission of keeping up with the Joneses. However, this is not another Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (and, of course, it appeared three years before that novel). Player Piano not only delves more deeply into the heart of the malaise of the fifties, but it also registers a distinctive political attitude that affects Vonnegut’s later writings.13 Because of the emphasis on technology, specifically on the ability of manmade machines to outperform men in various workplaces, Player Piano is often characterized as science fiction, a view with which Vonnegut expressly disagreed.14 The actual technology is not all that different from what would have been available at the time, and is laughably obsolete by the standards of even the late 1960s. Nevertheless, the issue at the heart of the novel is the pointlessness of a life without purpose. Having become obsolete, the vast and growing majority of Americans are out of meaningful work. They can get menial jobs, joining the “reeks and wrecks,” working on road crews or serving as waiters at large, corporate functions. Because of the efficiency of the machinery, there is no physical want; the spiritual longing is for purposive work. The protagonist, Paul Proteus, is one of the few with a meaningful job; he is a manager at a large, multifunctional factory. Yet Proteus feels pressure, from his wife, his coworkers, and even from the memory of his father (a luminous figure from the industrial past), to climb the corporate ladder. His dissatisfaction with his own lot is compounded by his sense that the overall progressive project is itself not worthwhile. He feels guilty that the machine age that he and other technologically-minded engineers made possible is making life meaningless for others, and—in what seems a rather pathetic attempt at a kind of Romantic anti-modernism—he longs to return to the soil himself, buying an abandoned farm outside of town. Eventually he becomes involved with a revolutionary organization, a group of anarchist Luddites whose goal is to destroy the machines and return to the dignity of manual labor. Making Vonnegut’s allegory complete, the revolution does happen, at least in the fictional Ilium, New York. The revolutionaries shut down and destroy the machines, and temporarily take over the town in the name of human dignity. True to a form that Vonnegut would become well known for, however, the revolution winds up being destroyed by human nature itself. Here, the natural curiosity and ingenuity of the common man leads

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some of the working class revolutionaries to start fixing the machines they had so recently broken. At first, repairing the machines is a puzzle, a task to be accomplished just to see if it could be done. The sense of accomplishment that comes with fixing a machine leads people to fix others, to design better ones, to build machines that could themselves design and build others. Thus, the revolutionaries restore almost immediately the very things they had struggled against. And they do it with pride. The story is emblematic of the politics of Vonnegut’s novels in general. It is no surprise that the utopian impulse leads to dystopian ends. Indeed, by the mid-twentieth century, that is itself a cliché.15 But for Vonnegut, the issue is always that humans are themselves so “naturally” unable to do the right thing. Or rather, it is entirely within their nature to do the thing that will eventually cause them harm. It is as if humans are machines programmed to self-destruct. Vonnegut will return throughout his career to the notion that humans may or may not be machines, programmed by God, by chemical reactions, or whatever. In The Sirens of Titan, a machine (Salo from Tralfamadore) tries to embrace humanity, but the psychotic fiction of Breakfast of Champions—that all humans (but one) are merely robots—is the more prevalent view. If humans perform acts of cruelty, stupidity, or even kindness, what matter? It is not their fault, Vonnegut seems to say. It is the way they were made. Hence, Vonnegut’s peculiar politics: whereas he has characterized himself as a socialist, clearly tends to the political left, was revered by college students in the 1960s and 1970s for his radicalism, and became even more openly political in his old age (see his many pointed comments in A Man Without a Country, for instance), Vonnegut never really allowed for the possibility of a political solution to anything. Even at his most utopian, in such works as God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater or Slapstick, Vonnegut ultimately views all political paths to be dead ends, which has led some to dismiss his effectiveness as a social critic. Vonnegut’s antipolitics is not really a quietism or an escapism, however. In some measure his political views could simply be written off as a form of pessimism, since Vonnegut appears to long for a political solution that he does not believe can actually happen. But it is both more profound and more dangerous than this: Vonnegut does not just doubt that the polity will do the right thing; rather, he believes that the wrong thing will inevitably happen, that it cannot be otherwise. This is a profoundly anti-utopian position, not one grounded in either pragmatism or realism.16 Manmade solutions, including all political ones, are not possible precisely because they are manmade. This attitude largely constitutes what I consider Vonnegut’s paradoxical ethos of misanthropic humanism.

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Perhaps this is another way in which Vonnegut’s precarious position between modernism and postmodernism discloses itself. For better, or more often for worse, modernism is characterized by a belief in political solutions, from the noble (and somewhat misguided) Progressives, to the good intentions that paved roads to Hell which typify various visions of communism, to the reactionary Romanticism of Fascists and Nazis, and on and on. As so many have commented, the politics of postmodernism—by denying both an Edenic past to return to and a utopian future just over the horizon—often appears doomed to fall back into an apolitical position. Vonnegut’s odd politics might also be a peculiarly postmodern feature of his work, where his political forces have been driven deeply into an unconscious. A writer who desperately wants to support causes championed by a populist left, Vonnegut cannot help his general despondency over the impossibility of a genuinely political movement achieving success. As noted, this leads to another curiosity of Vonnegut’s political philosophy, or rather his overall philosophy, which might be called again, in a suitably paradoxical expression, misanthropic humanism. The fundamental problem with people is people.

Some Real Characters This misanthropic humanism is characterized by a fundamental sense that human, all-too-human behavior inevitably leads to ruin. If basic humanity is the problem, then perhaps it is in the quirky, oddball humans who deviate from the norm that the best hope lies.17 This view is illustrated in his novels by an abundance of characters, in multiple senses of the word. Their representativeness, combined with their eccentricity, allow Vonnegut to survey postmodern American society while also expressing his strong nostalgia for a preferable “modern” condition and his feebler hope for a more humane condition to come. Vonnegut’s novels are populated by odd and memorable characters. Some make only fleeting appearances, like Lyman Enders Knowles (the elevator operator who appears briefly in one chapter of Cat’s Cradle), fading away without much development. Others are more fully developed, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five or Walter J. Starbuck of Jailbird, whose personalities unfold throughout the pages of an entire book. Vonnegut is perhaps most famous for recurring characters, who not so much recur as disappear and reappear, often in unlikely places, in more than one novel. The most famous of these is Kilgore Trout, often viewed as Vonnegut’s own

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alter ego, who appears in no fewer than six different novels, but who might be said to “star” in only one or two (Breakfast of Champions, and perhaps also Timequake). Similarly, Eliot Rosewater, Howard W. Campbell, Rabo Karabekian, dogs named Kazak (or Kazakh), women named Francine Pefko or Diana Moon Glampers, men named Khashdrahr Miasma, and more than one Tralfamadorian alien get face time in multiple works. Often Vonnegut reintroduces characters who may or may not be the same person we have seen before. For example, in The Sirens of Titan, Winston Niles Rumfoord’s space-traveling companion and beloved pet is a dog named Kazak. Kazak is also the name of a ferocious Doberman guard dog who makes a brief but memorable appearance in Breakfast of Champions; a seeing-eye dog named Kazakh shows up in Galápagos as well. The Rumfoord family figures prominently in Vonnegut’s work. Surely Professor Bernard Copeland Rumfoord, of Slaughterhouse-Five, is a relative of the space-traveler. Bokonon himself, when he was still called Lionel Boyd Johnson, had worked as a gardener on the Rumfoord estate (Cat’s Cradle 76). Khashdrahr Miasma is the name given to a young doctor from Bangladesh in Breakfast of Champions and to the interpreter for (and nephew of) the Shah of the fictional land of Bratphur in Player Piano. Minor characters from some books later get starring roles in other ones, as when Rabo Karabekian appears in Breakfast of Champions and stars in Bluebeard. Starring characters in some books have cameos in later ones, as when Mother Night’s narrator and protagonist, Howard W. Campbell, gives a memorable speech in Slaughterhouse-Five, or when Eliot Rosewater, of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, also appears in Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. And so on. This practice of reintroducing characters has the salutary effect of re warding Vonnegut’s longtime fans. It does not, however, presuppose that Vonnegut is creating a semi-closed world in which his own literary creations lead independent lives that occasionally intersect. (One might think of J.R.R. Tolkien as the ultimate example of this, where whole families and races go about their lives and occasionally reconnect. Indeed the genres of fantasy and science fiction seem most apt for this creation of an entirely enclosed and self-sufficient “world.”) There are enough “mistakes” in these recurrences to make one wonder whether it is the person who is appearing again or merely the name (as with Kazak and Khashdrahr Miasma above). The Tralfamadorian pilot, the robot Salo, in The Sirens of Titan bears no resemblance at all to the Tralfamadorians of Slaughterhouse-Five; one wonders if they are the same Tralfamadorians, or if the planet Tralfamoradore contains wildly different sentient species. To take another example, when Campbell reappears in Slaughterhouse-Five, we learn that he was married to

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“a famous German actress named Resi North.”18 Careful readers of Mother Night, however, remember that Campbell was married to Helga Noth (no “r”) and that Resi was Helga’s nihilist little sister. A minor figure deemed “too dumb to live” in Rosewater, Diana Moon Glampers is the vicious executioner of Harrison Bergeron in the short story named for him. Interesting as it is to note such minor inconsistencies, and nice work for a continuity editor in the world of filmmaking, it is not really worth belaboring, since Vonnegut never promised his readers a continuous tale carried out over a dozen or so novels. Indeed, consistency is probably far from the point. If Vonnegut’s characters get strewn throughout his works, they do not do so according to iron-clad laws, but through the vagaries of history. It is Vonnegut’s philosophy of history that allows for his oddballs to bounce around, to find themselves in different places at different times, often without warning or with no particular reason. As theories of history go, this may be as convincing as any.

Read It and Weep Vonnegut’s much ballyhooed narrative trickery relates somewhat to his views of history as well. Rather than proceeding in a straight line, or, to use a fluvial metaphor, in a calmly flowing river winding its way from Genesis to Armageddon, History (with a capital “H”) is more likely to be experienced in fits and starts, with unforeseen reversals and needless repetitions. Responding to the oft-quoted and rather smug expression made famous by George Santayana, that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, Vonnegut’s vivacious Circe Berman in Bluebeard points out that “we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.” And, having just heard a lunatic portentously intone the same old paraphrased quotation, Slapstick’s Wilbur Swain remarks “History is merely a list of surprises. . . . It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”19 Vonnegut’s narrative technique, especially with his skipping around in time and space, relates to this sense of history as both repeatable and full of surprises, and might be associated with the Tralfamadorian view of time in Slaughterhouse-Five. On the distant planet of Tralfamadore, we are told, time is viewed not as a river, but as a mountain range. This apt spatial metaphor identifies time with space, showing that all moments are essentially present at once. As Vonnegut has Billy Pilgrim describe it in Slaughterhouse-Five, “All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we

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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.”20 This view of history does not merely add an interesting, science fiction element to the plot; in Slaughterhouse-Five, it actually determines the emplotment of the narrative. The novel’s first line—after the autobiographical first chapter, that is—reads: “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”21 That sounds the clarion, letting the reader know how the story will be told precisely as it is being told. That is, the “story” of Slaughterhouse-Five will be about Billy Pilgrim’s time-tripping, but the story will also itself be a matter of time-tripping, jumping here and there between Billy’s wartime experiences, his childhood, his life in a Tralfamadorian zoo, his marriage, his optometry practice, and so on. Slaughterhouse-Five makes the most and best use of this technique, which is actually consistent with Vonnegut’s view of history, and more so memory, in general. Actually, the view of history as an everlasting present tense, or as a spatial formation in which all tenses may be present at once, is somewhat similar to Henri Bergson’s theory of memory. In memory, all moments coexist in more or less concentrated forms. Thus, memories closer to the present consciousness seem more concrete, concentrated into easily recognizable images; more distant memories are more disparate, fuzzier we might say. As the very expression “distant memory” suggests, space and time commingle in this theory. All memories are in fact present at once; they are just dispersed over a landscape that spreads out before the consciousness.22 Time is essentially space. As noted above, the inhabitants of Tralfamadore were introduced in The Sirens of Titan, in which one Tralfamadorian, Salo, makes possible the plot by supplying Winston Niles Rumfoord the technology to carry out his plan. The Sirens of Titan helped establish this view of time and space by inventing the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, literally a funnel in which time curves inward. Rumfoord and his dog, Kazak, inadvertently run into the infundibulum while piloting a private spaceship to Mars. Now man and dog live on, forever, as wave phenomena, pulsing between the sun and Betelgeuse. They appear on Earth (and other planets) when the planet’s path intersects with the infundibulum. Because Mars’s orbit seems to coincide perfectly with the great time-funnel, Rumfoord and his cosmic hound can “live” there all the time, even while appearing elsewhere. The being-everywhere-at-once sensibility plays on the feeling, however unjustified, that time is literally standing still. This vision, dramatized in the

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plight of Rumfoord and of Billy Pilgrim, leads to the psychological state that such a historical condition would imply. Billy has become unstuck. He is multiple places in time at once. The feeling that this is a somewhat schizophrenic condition is not accidental. In Jacques Lacan’s famous definition, schizophrenia involves a breakdown in the signifying chain.23 That is, the once predictable meanings, or the correspondences being signifiers and signifieds, no longer hold. In Slaughterhouse-Five, the time-tripping narrative lends itself to a notion of schizophrenic narration, the breaking down of the expected signifying chain. Modernism gave us the stream-of-consciousness narrative, with its insistently personal, even neurotically inward, unfolding of an individual ego through the visible machinations of the individual’s mind. With the postmodernist narration, time does not ebb and flow, a river winding its way through the valley, but rather jerks and twists and lurches backward and forward, up and down. In Slaughterhouse-Five this lurching is accomplished through quick breaks, jumping from place to place. But the novel also maintains a modernist sensibility, as the various pieces of the puzzle fit into place, making the picture whole by the end of the novel. Vonnegut’s sequel would be more schizophrenic still. Breakfast of Champions is, among other things, about schizophrenia. The tale’s protagonist, Dwayne Hoover, is in the midst of a schizophrenic episode, a mental breakdown that will, by the novel’s end, manifest itself in a horrifically violent rampage. But Breakfast of Champions is not really about Hoover in the way Slaughterhouse-Five is about Billy Pilgrim. Breakfast of Champions is a collage in other senses, fitting together completely disparate images in a chaotic ensemble. Many of Vonnegut’s recurring characters appear in this novel, most notably Kilgore Trout, but also Eliot Rosewater (now sober), a dog named Kazak, Rabo Karabekian, and even a Francine Pefko, who appeared as a bewildered secretary unable to tell the difference between science and magic in Cat’s Cradle. (Many of these Midland City townsfolk will reappear in Deadeye Dick as well, where the arts center that the ensemble had gathered to dedicate in Breakfast of Champions is run-down and empty, a metaphor, Vonnegut says in the preface, for his own mind.) Most notable of all is the insertion of Vonnegut himself in the Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut had appeared in Slaughterhouse-Five as well, but he had played no active role in the events unfolding in Billy Pilgrim’s life; he merely mentions that he had been in Dresden with Billy during the war. Here Vonnegut the Writer joins the action, watching (and making) his characters interact, and speaking directly to his creation, Kilgore Trout.

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Breakfast of Champions takes Vonnegut’s use of collage, with pastiche as an underlying effect, to another level. Multiple story lines, leading to a particular, climactic point, is an old technique, just as multiple characters who find that their lives are more closely connected than previously thought is old hat for Vonnegut. What is different is the insertion of the writer as an interactive character. It is not just metafiction—fiction that acknowledges itself as such on its pages—it is hyperfiction, or better patafiction, insofar as it highlights the absurdity of the techniques of fiction itself, much in the way that Alfred Jarry’s ‘pataphysics parodied the methods and scope of metaphysics. Given the relationship between the fictional and the absurd in Vonnegut, the term patafiction may not be all that outré. Famously, Breakfast of Champions also includes childish drawings by the author. These drawings are often silly in the extreme, such as his asterisklike illustration of “asshole” or his examples of what a “beaver” looks like. In the preface to the novel, Vonnegut concedes that the book is an attempt to clear out the junk that has been accumulating in his head.24 But unburdening himself of the cultural detritus clogging his mind, however therapeutic it might be, is going to read like a form of schizophrenia. There will be lots of breaks in the signifying chain. Perhaps the viewing of an * as an asshole is already a symptom of the break. Breakfast of Champions represents a postmodern iconography in itself, the breakdown of signification amid the breakdown of a character’s mind and the breakdown of American industrial society in general, represented by the collapse of a midwestern city’s economy into a fragmented, consumerist culture where roadside attractions and toxic chemical spills are more vibrant than any meaningful work in town. In Vonnegut’s oddly spatial history, the ever-presence of all people and events constitutes a fundamental sense of being, typified by absurdity. If human existence is essentially absurd, if all history is the history of incompetent and irrelevant human activity (the inevitable conclusion of a misanthropic humanist), one can say of “History,” in the joke used in Cat’s Cradle, “Read it and weep!”25 This is the collective experience of mankind, and hence the postmodern psychology on display in Vonnegut tends back toward the social, away from the individual.

Harmless Granfalloonery If Breakfast of Champions represents a type of apocalypse, it is different from Vonnegut’s other apocalypses, such as those in Deadeye Dick or Galápagos. The best example of the genre is Cat’s Cradle, which may also be Vonnegut’s best novel. Here the iconography is elaborated with all of the

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skill of a literary artist mixed with the methodological rigor of an anthropologist . . . well, sort of.26 It is the study of a new kind of community, one which has different social and spiritual rules. Cat’s Cradle’s connection to Moby-Dick has already been noted, but it is worth remembering that Melville’s Ishmael goes to sea, at least in part, to prevent his own suicide; at sea he finds a community made up of “isolatoes,” individuals without a home but with a common purpose that holds them together. Vonnegut’s “Jonah”-narrator, like Melville’s “Ishmael,” refuses to succumb to the temptations of nihilism, and ends up participating in a collective project with the aim of understanding the meaningless immensities of the world. It seems clear that Vonnegut intended the resonances to Moby-Dick to signify a quest for community, even as the quest involves the destruction of the world through the desire for knowledge of it. Bokononism, the religion that Vonnegut both invents and embraces in Cat’s Cradle, supplies a vocabulary that answers for the faults of other religions. A brief recitation is in order. A karass is a group of people who, unbeknownst to its members, are somehow working together to do God’s will. A wampeter is the thing around which the karass moves or comes together (in the novel, the wampeter is the mysterious and dangerous substance ice-nine; elsewhere, Vonnegut names the Holy Grail as an example).27 A granfalloon is a false karass, a group that has no purpose whatsoever but whose members believe is really significant; the first example in the book is Hoosiers (people from the state of Indiana), but Vonnegut adds: “Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.”28 Foma are lies, or rather “harmless untruths,” the foundation of Bokononism, or of any religion, incidentally. Such untruths become “necessary fictions” (as the eighteenthcentury philosopher David Hume would put it); they are necessary to our functioning as humans. Granfalloonery is itself one of the most powerful concepts in the Vonnegut universe, which is to say, our own. What Vonnegut recognizes clearly is the profound need for community, for a sense of purpose and of belonging. This is evident in all of his novels, from Player Piano to Timequake. In Cat’s Cradle, he seems to ridicule the idea, showing how silly such things as school spirit, club membership, and nationality are. “If you wish to study a granfalloon,” sings Bokonon, “Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.”29 In other words, the substance of a granfalloon is as insubstantial as thin air (or hot air). Later, Vonnegut seems to recognize how powerful, and even effective, such a need for community is. In Slapstick he expresses this elegantly in

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President Swain’s “Lonesome No More” campaign, through which every citizen will be assigned a collective name and a number, which will provide everyone with a family (those sharing a family name would be cousins, and those sharing a family name and number would be siblings). Cowart has suggested that Vonnegut’s entire career, especially his later career, is suffused with the hopeful idea of family as community.30 And here is where Vonnegut’s pessimism, as he once called it, runs out of gas. The positive side of the Bokononist theory is that there are real, purposive communities (karasses) that we do in fact belong to; what Vonnegut seems to realize also is that the granfalloons serve their purposes as well. Vonnegut’s overall corpus, therefore, does get at what Melville had in mind when he audaciously attempted to include the whole world in the representational scope of his great novel. Like Melville’s, Vonnegut’s world is undoubtedly American, but, also like Melville, Vonnegut sees not the Americanness, but the worldliness, as the most important aspect of the literary project. The goal is to show our world, and that it is for Vonnegut an American world is noteworthy, yes, but not essential, nationhood being no more than a mildly comforting, and sometimes rather discomforting, granfalloon after all. In order to present this image of the world, Vonnegut makes great use of collage, the form of art most suitable for his Tralfamadorian sense of history, as well as for his typically modernist rendering of the postmodern condition. In both the form and the content of his novels, Vonnegut produces his postmodern iconography by the piecing together of various and discrete images in order to form a new, unique overall image. In this sense, Vonnegut remains a modernist; he laments the fragmentation of our personal lives, of community, and he wishes to put it back together. This becomes his version of the “imaginary solution to real problems,” to paraphrase Louis Althusser’s redefinition of ideology. But Vonnegut’s novels remain postmodern also, not just because several of his books instance the reflexivity of language or some other defining postmodernist characteristic, but because his work is so assiduously of the postmodern culture it presents. Returning to my initial point, let me conclude by saying that Vonnegut does not provide a “great American novel” in that nineteenth-century sense. Even taken as a whole, Vonnegut’s 14 novels do not really achieve such lofty, if now dubious, goals. What he has done, over the course of a number of discontinuous, uncategorizable books, is project an image of what society looks like in the United States in the postmodern age. This postmodern iconography is Vonnegut’s contribution to the American novel, and perhaps it exemplifies his “greatness” after all.

Chapter 2

Misanthropic Humanism: Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan

“If only it weren’t for the people, the goddamned people . . . always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren’t for them, earth would be an engineer’s paradise.” “Let’s drink to that.” 1

The Thing about Utopia: An Introduction If Kurt Vonnegut can be viewed as a representative American novelist, as so many readers in the United States and elsewhere have seen him, perhaps it is not surprising that his earliest novel is an exercise in creating a utopia.2 American literature might be said to be utopian in its essence, as visions of the New World have always elicited dreams of an ideal society. Indeed, we recall that Thomas More’s island of Utopia, as described by his character Raphael Hythlodaeus, was supposedly discovered on one of Amerigo Vespucci’s voyages across the Atlantic Ocean. From the early letters of Columbus to the “New Jerusalem” of the Puritan settlers, from John Winthrop’s shining “city on the hill” to Abraham Lincoln’s image of a new nation dedicated to a principle, and so on, the conflation of America and an ideal society is part of the constitutive national tradition. In fact, as early as 1693, Cotton Mather said that “Such great Persons . . . who mistook Sir Thomas Moor’s Utopia, for a Country really existent, and stirr’d up some Divines charitably to undertake a Voyage thither, might now have certainly found a Truth in their Mistake; New England was a true Utopia.”3 It seems that the utopian impulse has always been part of the American national self-image. This also holds for the tradition of the American novel, in which the narrative acts of describing and fabulating this national image help to present

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a utopian vision as part of the real world of everyday life in the United States. If the American novel was frequently thought of as romantic—indeed, the old view is that the British developed the Novel while the Americans remained committed to the Romance—it is probably based on the fundamentally utopian impulse underlying early American literature: to project an imaginary world that nevertheless can really represent the world in which we live. Maybe, as Nathaniel Hawthorne bemoaned in the preface to the Blithedale Romance, American literature seemed to lack what European fiction had close to hand, a “Faery Land, so like the real world, that, in a suitable remoteness, one cannot well tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own.”4 Lacking such enchanted places, American literature helps to create a kind of national utopian space. With its fundamental ideological starting point located in the utopian impulse, of course, any shortcomings with respect to an impossible Ideal necessarily plunge one into the depths of dystopia. The sense that the utopian “America” has lost its way, has fallen into some type of “dystopian” nightmare, whether into sin or into tyranny, underlies an ideology almost as strong as the nationalism it seeks to promote, in Sacvan Bercovitch’s elegant term, the American jeremiad: the loss of utopia’s high ideals.5 The American jeremiad that mourns the loss of the utopian ideal begins almost at the same time as those ideals are articulated and felt, as the earliest settlers of New England bemoaned the fall of their “New Jerusalem” within a few years of establishing it; the same jeremiad undergirds the revolutionary fervor of the Founding Fathers, and then again of the Abolitionists (and of the anti-Abolitionists) in the nineteenth century. Indeed, in the very lines which follow those quoted above, Cotton Mather decries the fall of the utopia that was New England, as new settlers and “some, especially of the young ones . . . have become extravagantly and abominably Vicious,” as the old morality and “Restraints” cease to hold sway over them.6 The American jeremiad later finds its voice in the suffrage movement, in labor unionism, in the Progressives, as well as in those opposed to these factions. It reappears in the pro-war and antiwar movements in the twentieth century, and can be heard by civil rights activists and neo-“Tea Party” conservatives in the twenty-first. So entwined are the utopian and dystopian elements of American national culture, as Bercovitch has pointed out, that the myth of a lost Eden or Paradise in the beyond animates the most ardent critics, regardless of political stripe. Referring to the upheavals of the 1960s, during which Vonnegut found his own voice and a rabid following once the

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jeremiad Slaughterhouse-Five was published, the Canadian Bercovitch came to the United States and was astonished by the spectacle: When I first encountered the ritual of American consensus, in the mid1960s, it took the form of protest and despair: the Jewish anarchist Paul Goodman berating the country for abandoning its promise; the descendent of American slaves, Martin Luther King, Jr., denouncing injustice as a violation of the American Way; an interminable debate about national destiny, full of rage and faith, conservatives scavenging for un-Americans, New Left historians recalling the country to its sacred mission. The complaints on all sides amounted to an old refrain adapted to a New World prophecy: “When is our errand to be fulfilled? How long, O Lord, how long?” And on all sides the solutions joined celebration and lament in reaffirming the American Dream. I felt like Sancho Panza in a land of Don Quixotes. It was not just that the dream was a patent fiction. It was that the fiction involved an entire hermeneutic system. Mexico may have meant the land of gold, and Canada might be the Dominion of the North, but America was a venture in exegesis. You were supposed to discover it as a believer unveils scripture. America’s meaning was implicit in its destiny, and its destiny was manifest to all who had the grace to discover its meaning. To a Canadian skeptic, a gentile in God’s Country, it made for a breathtaking scene: a poly-ethnic, multi-racial, openly materialistic, self-consciously individualistic people knit together in bonds of myth, voluntarily, with a force of belief unsurpassed by any other modern society.7 Utopia, especially in its American national context, inevitably evokes the dystopia lurking underneath or just around the corner or even right before our very eyes. Vonnegut’s novels partake of this utopian mythmaking, which is really quite the same thing as—or the flipside of—a dystopian jeremiad. Insofar as Vonnegut’s postmodern iconography highlights the failed promise of an American Way that Vonnegut himself knows to be mythic at best, he nevertheless insists upon a utopian critique of the present with recourse to a somehow purer past, or—again the flipside—a dystopian near future that warns of the logical and negative consequences of our decision not to turn back before it is too late. This amounts to what Fredric Jameson has characterized as a “nostalgia for the present,”8 inasmuch the postmodern representation of a supposedly more coherent modern (or even premodern)

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condition is motivated by a sensibility that no one, and surely not those imaginary Adams and Eves living in the fictional gardens, ever felt. The nostalgic longing for the imagined past is thus part and parcel of the projection of an imagined future in utopian literature or science fiction. In both cases, the object of representation and of the critique is the present condition, always envisioned as dystopian in one way or another. And that’s the thing about utopia. Often utopia functions less as a means for imagining or organizing ideal social formations, and more as an imaginary way of understanding ourselves and our place in the “real” world. With Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut establishes his utopian/dystopian credentials through what seems to be science fiction, with their depictions of automated machinery and space-time travel, but which also steadfastly cleave to a single subject, the classic raw material of modernist thought and literature: the soul of man in the present age.

The Work of Man in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction That Vonnegut’s first foray into the American novel is a utopian or dystopian narrative is therefore neither surprising nor atypical. For obvious reasons, Player Piano has been placed alongside Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, although it supplements these dystopian critiques with another that seems much more appropriate to the American 1950s in particular: that of the anxieties of the middle class in an increasingly corporate and suburban society. Hence, it is not only the terrors of a world in which we all love Big Brother, but the more mundane (but perhaps equally horrifying) troubles in the life of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. At issue in Player Piano, as Vonnegut makes clear throughout the novel, is what happens to the soul of man in the world of machines. But Vonnegut frequently blurs the lines between man and machine, showing not just how humans are being replaced by machines or how machines have dehumanized American society (the ostensible themes of Player Piano), but that humans are themselves machines. As Peter Reed notes, Vonnegut’s fiction returns again and again to “the notion that human beings are robot-like in lacking free will, because of body chemistry, fate, or events beyond their control.”9 Like those profoundly modernist works of an earlier generation—Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) is perhaps the emblematic representative—Vonnegut’s postmodern iconography targets the interrelations between man and machine.

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At the risk of proceeding in an all-too-Tralfamadorian manner, it may be worthwhile to begin the discussion of Player Piano by looking at its ending. In the final hours, on the morning after the Ghost Shirt Society’s revolution, the architects of the neo-Luddite uprising, including protagonist Paul Proteus, survey the scene in triumph, “touring the strongpoints of the frontier of their Utopia.” The zealous rebels have smashed or shot up all the tyrannical machinery, the bits of which are spelled out in alphabetical detail, with the combination of randomness and rational order, from “air conditioners” to “zymometers.” Although they realize their victory is small and temporary, Proteus and the other leaders are convinced that a greater experiment was about to unfold; they would prove that humans can live, and live well, without the aid of machines, and thereby build a paradise by rediscovering “the two greatest wonders in the world, the human mind and hand.”10 They pause in their tour when they overhear a group of revolutionaries gathered around an automated “Orange-O” vending machine. (“Orange-O,” we are told, designates a disgusting soft drink consisting of “blended wood pulp, dye, water, and orange-type flavoring,” which was enjoyed by almost no one.) Like all other machines, this one had been smashed, but for some reason it drew a large audience, as “people were crowding one another excitedly, as though a great wonder was in their midst.” The solution to the mystery is revealed in dramatic fashion: “O.K., now let’s try anotha’ nickel in her an’ see how she does,” said a familiar voice from behind the machine—the voice of Bud Calhoun. “Clunkle” went the coin, and then a whir, and a gurgle. The crowd was overjoyed. “Filled the cup almost to the top that time; and she’s nice and cold now, too,” called the man by the machine’s spout. “But the light behind the Orange-O sign didn’t light up,” said a woman. “Supposed to.” “We’ll fix that, won’t we, Bud?” said another voice from behind the machine. “You people get me about three feet of that red wire hanging out of the shoeshine machine, and somebody let me borrow their penknife for a second.” The speaker stood up and stretched, and smiled contentedly, and Paul recognized him: the tall, middle-aged, ruddy-faced man who’d fixed Paul’s car with the sweatband of his hat long ago. The man had been desperately unhappy then. Now he was proud and smiling because his hands were busy doing what they liked to do best, Paul supposed—replacing men like himself with machines. He hooked up the lamp behind the Orange-O sign. “There we are.”

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Bud Calhoun bolted the back. “Now try her.” The people applauded and lined up, eager for their Orange-O. The first man emptied his cup, and went immediately to the end of the line for seconds. “Now, le’s have a look at this li’l ol’ ticket seller,” said Bud. “Oh, oh. Got it right through the microphone.” “I knew we’d be able to use the telephone out in the street for something,” said the ruddy man. “I’ll go get it.” The crowd, filled with Orange-O, was drifting over to encourage them in their new enterprise.11 Vonnegut’s message is clear: Hours after storming the Bastille, the triumphant revolutionaries are already eager to rebuild and even improve upon the prison’s design as they lock themselves up in it. This scene, which Vonnegut does not so much describe as allow to unfold before Paul Proteus’s eyes, marks the end of both the revolution and the dream for a utopia in which one could see just “how well and happily men could live without machines.”12 Already delivering a satirical masterstroke in his first novel, Vonnegut makes a point of showing that the machine being fixed provides for neither a human need nor even a human desire! Nobody even likes “Orange-O.” But the crowd is eager to see the beverage dispensed from a now operable machine (never mind that some in the same crowd may have been the ones who had just as gleefully broken it the day before). In the final pages of Player Piano, Vonnegut impresses upon the reader that the revolution that was to liberate man from machine fails, not because of a repressive State apparatus—the army and the police—working on behalf of the machines, but precisely because of the inner failings of human, all-too-human nature. Sounding a theme Vonnegut will revisit in all of his novels, Player Piano shows how human beings themselves are the greatest, indeed perhaps the only, impediment to human freedom and happiness. In an odd but interesting way, Player Piano investigates the human condition in the machine age, a quintessentially modern question—Faust and Frankenstein bear witness—exacerbated by the great technological advances made possible by and through the two world wars. Indeed, although the question of man’s relationship to the machine goes back long before the industrial revolution, becomes directly political in the era of the Luddites, and has broad cultural and national implications in the United States (as explored in Leo Marx’s classic and still-important study, The Machine in the Garden),13 Vonnegut emphasizes just how much Player Piano owes to the

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then-present of 1952 in the opening pages, and much of the pathos of the book derives from the nagging suspicion that, were it not for the machines and the machine-based society that now appears to render most human activity utterly meaningless, the “free world” would have lost the war, and would have possibly become enslaved to a far more tyrannical and unpleasant form of social order. (The presence of the Shah of Bratphur, a nonindustrialized “Third World” country, seems meant to provide an unattractive alternative to the American Way of Life in the era of EPICAC, as well as presenting an external observer to the proceedings.) In a brief foreword, Vonnegut indicates that the novel is set in the near-future, with characters “modeled after persons as yet unborn, or, perhaps, at this writing, infants,” yet on the first page of the narrative, the date in which Player Piano is set is established as “Ten years after the war,”14 or 1955—a very near future indeed. As we learn, this is an era of “peace and prosperity,” and the only real social problems involve a deeply interior sensibility. That is, now that war and famine and general welfare are no longer explicit threats to human happiness, where does one find that anxiety that so typifies modern existence? The answer, of course, is within. In the general mood of Player Piano, it becomes apparent that the problem with this well-nigh utopian America, in which all needs and most desires are satisfied by the “know-how” of engineers and managers and the technologies they have put into motion, returns to that oldest of philosophical questions: the meaning of life. Or, to put it in the words of a character from a Kilgore Trout novel (2BR02B, as described in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater), “What in hell are people for?”15 The vast majority of the population, the “Reeks and Wrecks” of the novel, are left with no meaningful work to do, but also with no dire problems to face; as such, they have themselves become outdated machines, no longer of much value to anyone, but who persist in existing anyhow. Replaced by machines that can do their jobs at least as well as their human predecessors, but much faster, much more consistently, and without rest, the human characters have lost their authenticity. They are no longer, in this sense, “real.” The crisis of authenticity, which I will address in more depth in my discussion of Mother Night in the next chapter, is another theme in Vonnegut’s postmodern iconography, and again reveals his commitment to a modernist aesthetic. Vonnegut’s message is analogous to, but with thoroughly different conclusions from, Walter Benjamin’s famous discussion of the aura in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”16 The gist of Benjamin’s analysis is that mechanical reproduction—more accurately, mechanical reproducibility—fundamentally alters the way we view art. In the old days,

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an original work of art was imbued with the spirit of the artist, who was actually united in the artwork’s presence in time and space. Indeed, the entire idea of an original, as opposed to a copy or a forgery, was crucial to the work of art. “The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.”17 With mechanical reproduction, the question of authenticity is evacuated entirely. “From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.”18 What’s more, the mechanical reproducibility allows for an expansion of what the work of art could do in its original, authentic existence. Benjamin notes that photography, through close-ups or enlargements, allows us to see things not visible in the original scene; film can employ slow motion or accelerated speed to alter our perceptions of the events filmed; a phonograph recording of the chorale transports the singers from a concert hall or cathedral into one’s own living room.19 What gets lost in all this is what Benjamin calls a work’s “aura.” Benjamin’s argument is elegant and nuanced, and it does not simply mourn the loss of some sort of authentic aura in reproduced artworks. In fact, although he acknowledges the loss, Benjamin is not Heidegger, and his argument is that the loss of aura has the productive and positive effects of liberating the work of art from a somewhat repressive tradition and quasi-mystical ritual and making possible new forms of art in the realm of the political. As the aura of individual artistry, authenticity, and originality gives way to an art that is designed with mechanical reproducibility in mind, new forms of art expression become possible: “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.”20 Vonnegut’s view of this process is not quite so celebratory, but neither does he simply accept the older notion of a pure authenticity uncritically. Throughout Player Piano, the reader is invited to identify with Paul Proteus, to share his thoughts, and to support his dreams for a pastoral life away from his engineering and corporate culture. However, as with Malachi Constant (in The Sirens of Titan), and especially with Howard W. Campbell, Jr. (who actually narrates Mother Night), Vonnegut’s invitation to empathize with the protagonist turns out to be a ruse in itself. Proteus is no more “right” than is the dangerous mountebank Lasher or the cynical Finnerty or the affable fix-it man Calhoun. As noted above, the human-versus-machine antagonism proves to be a false alternative, both in the novel’s conclusion of failed revolution but also in the pervasive sense that humans and machines have a lot more in common than Proteus (but not Vonnegut) thinks.

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In a pointed example of a kind of “aura” from early in Player Piano, Proteus muses about those craftsmen and machinists who had served as the model for the automated technology now in place some thirteen years later. Specifically, Proteus remembers one Rudy Hertz, a “master machinist” whose every movement was recorded on tape, which in turn served as the “mind” behind the automated (player piano-like) machines that could now operate without human labor at all. In what Vonnegut clearly intends as an ironic moment, we see that the technologically ignorant but skilled worker took immense pride in the fact that his movements had been selected for recording, blissfully unaware perhaps that such recordings would put skilled craftsmen like himself out of work. “Rudy hadn’t understood quite what the recording instruments were all about, but what he had understood, he’d liked: that he, out of thousands of machinists, had been chosen to have his motions immortalized on tape.” Taking a more metaphysical turn, the narrator continues: And here, now, this little loop in the box before Paul, here was Rudy, as Rudy had been to his machine that afternoon—Rudy, the turner-on of power, the setter of speeds, the controller of the cutting tool. This was the essence of Rudy as far as the machine was concerned, as far as the economy was concerned, as far as the war effort had been concerned. This was the essence distilled from the small, polite man with the big hands and black fingernails; from the man who thought the world could be saved if everyone read a verse from the Bible every night; from the man who adored a collie for want of children; from the man who . . . what else had Rudy said that afternoon? Paul supposed the old man was dead now—or in his second childhood in Homestead.21 As if to heighten the irony of a “dead” man’s essence now directing the production and reproduction of his labor, Vonnegut adds this brief follow-up paragraph: “Now, by switching in lathes on a master panel and feeding them signals from the tape, Paul could make the essence of Rudy Hertz produce one, ten, a hundred or a thousand of the shafts.”22 Rudy Hertz, or his ghost, is thus the spectral “player” of the player piano, a point made rather unsubtly as the reader and Proteus discover that Hertz is not dead after all. Proteus meets him again in a Homestead tavern, and the now aging and decrepit machinist celebrates their reunion by introducing the literal example of the novel’s entire guiding (and titular) metaphor. “Music,” said Rudy grandly. “Let’s have music!” He reached over Paul’s shoulder and popped a nickel into the player piano. . . . Rudy acted as

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though the antique instrument were the newest of all wonders, and he excitedly pointed out identifiable musical patterns in the bobbing keys— trills, spectacular runs up the keyboard, and the slow, methodical rise and fall of the keys in the bass. “See—see them two go up and down, Doctor! Just the way the feller hit ‘em. Look at ‘em go!” The music stopped abruptly, with the air of having delivered exactly five cents worth of joy. Rudy still shouted. “Makes you feel kind of creepy, don’t it, Doctor, watching them keys go up and down? You can almost see a ghost sitting there playing his heart out.”23 One of the jokes that runs throughout Player Piano involves the old “ghost in the machine” trope. The living laborers in Homestead have themselves become ghosts, spectral players of the pianos whose tunes are prerecorded, just like Rudy Hertz’s movements. The ghostly theme is dramatized by Lasher’s revolutionary Ghost Shirt Society, named for Indian martyrs who—we are unsubtly reminded—are the precursors to the “white men” of Ilium in the present. (Using the exact same wording he uses later, but with the word “machines” substituted for “white men,” Lasher explains: “The only thing they could do in the changed world was to become second-rate white men or the wards of the white men.”24 The absent presence of workers who no longer do the work, but whose mechanically reproduced efforts have made the humans themselves obsolete is, ironically, analogous to Proteus’s pipe dream of returning to a rustic farm, a farm that does not need a farmer, a kind of life that could only be desired by someone so well off that it would amount to an insulting form of slumming. As Leonard Mustazza has argued persuasively, Vonnegut’s novels seem to yearn for a return to the Garden of Eden. Proteus’s rustic fantasy leaves no place for anyone else, including the farm workers—who, in the case of Mr. Haycox (another version of Rudy Hertz), would be made obsolete by Proteus’s almost mechanical plans—except perhaps for his wife, a “nation of two” as it will be called in Mother Night. But in this, as Vonnegut reveals, the machine world continues. Humans in Player Piano are not merely replaced by machines, like so many of the workers languishing among the “Reeks and Wrecks.” They have also assimilated themselves into the machine world. Proteus’s wife, Anita, is fully aware of the mechanics of human interaction, and the machinelike behavior of the human beings is what keeps the overall social machinery operating. This is even, or perhaps especially, the case with the most intimate and personal of relationships, like marriage. “Anita had the mechanics of marriage down pat, even to the subtlest conventions. If her approach

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was disturbingly rational, systematic, she was thorough enough to turn out a creditable counterfeit of warmth.”25 But for all the satire implied here, it is Proteus who fantasizes about a world without machines, only to embody the tired old nostalgias for a past that never existed. Proteus is, in fact, living a machine-life as well, and—in a manner much more machine-like than that of his wife—he is not conscious of being a machine. Later, Anita actually puts the fine point on it, exclaiming that she is “sick of being treated like a machine,” accusing Proteus of really wanting what Ira Levin would satirically fashion as a “Stepford Wife,” “something stainless steel, shaped like a woman, covered in sponge rubber, and heated to body temperature.”26 As a kind of parting shot, Anita gives Proteus “a stunning kiss,” which suggests an act of pure humanity, an unpredictable, illogical act (“Paul realized that she had had absolutely nothing to gain by the kiss”); the kiss is a demonstration of Paul’s own machinelike inhumanity, as he still hopes to make her a cog in his almost-engineered fake Eden. It becomes apparent that Anita, not Paul, was correct in thinking that Paul’s plan for a world apart from the machines was like another machine for him, where he hopes to engineer his own mechanical utopia. In his hope to escape from history, Proteus is motivated by that same utopian impulse that inspired a tradition in American civilization, but in his desire to escape alone (or with his wife, a stage-prop Eve to his theatrical Adam), Vonnegut shows his dream to be one of individualistic, even solipsistic, withdrawal. Indeed, Proteus’s failed Eden merely prefigures the Ghost Shirt Society’s failed revolution. Again, the human, all-too-human element— here envisioned as the desire for mechanical mastery—is the tragic flaw. If the nineteenth century saw the grand return of earnestly utopian schemes and narratives—from the Fourierists and Brook Farm communists to the social criticism of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and so on—the twentieth century, with its world wars, turned the tables, to the point where utopian fiction almost always and only brought to mind dystopia. Player Piano is generally thought to be consistent with this later version, as it depicts a technologically advanced future in which human life, particularly for the protagonist, is made much worse. However, as Mustazza and others have noted, those other dystopian visions tend to pit the individual human against the dehumanizing system or the machine, such that the individual’s humanity—even, or especially, in its “tragic” defeat—shines through as a force of resistance. Vonnegut, notably, does not allow for this, as he maintains that the basic impediments to human liberation and fulfillment are not the dehumanizing powers of capitalism, technology, or the totalitarian state, but humanity itself. Thus, as

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Mustazza has concluded, “technology and political oppression that can result from its inhumane application are not the point of Player Piano except in a highly superficial sense.” Rather, this novel is an explanation of the human urge to envision and create utopias— whether through technology or in dreams based upon mythic models— and a scrutiny of the human condition and its susceptibility to what Mary Sue Schreiber calls “the reality of tedium vitae.” Machines have not imprisoned the people of Ilium; their own humanity has, and even if they had managed to dismantle completely the current technocracy, Vonnegut suggests they would only be making way for another group of engineers with their own technologies and utopian schemes to work out. In short, the author’s point—a subtle and sophisticated, if pessimistic, point—is that human dynamics create discontent by their very nature.27 This is the essence, and the effect, of what I refer to as Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism. The human need for utopia is matched by the human, all-too-human nature that prevents utopia’s realization.

The Fate of the Messenger Mobilizing its principal ideas in a rather different manner, The Sirens of Titan nevertheless also engages with the same utopian questions by looking at the relations between man and machine. On its first page, it expressly acknowledges that the utopian impulse, the same one that motivated voyages of discovery in the sixteenth century, has turned inward. The narrator speaks from a future present roughly a hundred years after “the Nightmare Ages, falling roughly, give or take a few years, between the Second World War and the Third Great Depression”; that is, like Player Piano and despite its science fiction trapping, this novel is set in the near-present. The narrator explains that “Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself,” but in the benighted era in which the narrative takes place, “Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward—pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.” With it understood that the search for utopia in the outer reaches of space is futile, the explorations turn back. “Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions. Only inwardness remained to be explored. Only the human soul remained terra incognita.”28 The geographic

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or cartographic term underscores the reversal of the utopian project, as Vonnegut allows us briefly to succumb to Paul Proteus’s own fantasy of an idyllic realm to be populated by his own personal dreams and ideals: the “nation of two” is really a “utopia of one’s self.” Of course, in The Sirens of Titan another great joke is played on the would-be explorer of the universe, whether that universe be within one’s own soul or to the outer rim of the galaxy. In the novel’s concluding pages, we learn that everything that has every happened throughout the entirety of human history has been part of a single messenger and delivery service, at once grand and pedestrian. It turns out that the Tralfamadorian being, Salo—who, quite unlike the Tralfamadorians encountered elsewhere in Vonnegut’s oeuvre—is a machine (or robot), an intergalactic messenger sent by his people to deliver a single message to the farthest reaches of the universe. After Salo embarks on this mission in the Earth year 483,441 B.C., mechanical difficulties in his ship’s engine (a small part, “about the size of an Earthling beer-can opener,” has burned out) force him to delay his mission, and he settles on Titan in the year 203,117 B.C. to await further instructions. Those instructions come in the form of messages spelled out on the surface of the Earth, which Salo can read from his ship’s monitor. The punch line to this cosmic joke comes with the recitation of those messages, which each establish a parallel between some monumental human achievement and the most quotidian of communiqués. So, in the Tralfamadorian language the line, “Replacement part being rushed with all possible speed,” was “written on Earth in huge stones on a plain in what is now England. The ruins of the reply still stand, and are known as Stonehenge.” Similarly banal, reassuring communications are visible in the Great Wall of China, the Golden House of the Roman Emperor Nero, and the Kremlin. “The meaning of the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, is: ‘Pack up your things and be ready to leave on short notice.’ ”29 Adding further insult to this injurious blow to humanity’s sense of purpose, Vonnegut reveals that these efforts were the successful ones, as opposed to all of the failed attempts that so many humans must have struggled, suffered, and died for. “Old Salo had watched many communication failures on Earth. Civilizations would start to bloom on Earth, and the participants would start to build tremendous structures that were obviously to be messages in Tralfamadorian—and then the civilizations would poop out without having finished the messages. Old Salo had seen this happen hundreds of times.”30 And, of course, in the novel’s coup de grâce, it makes sense that everything that has happened in The Sirens of Titan—the misfortunes of Malachi Constant, the time-space travel of Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog, the

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sorrows of Beatrice, the horrors of the Martian invasion and massacre— everything had led up to the delivery of the replacement part, which turns out to be a small piece of metal that Chrono (Beatrice and Malachi’s son) wears around his neck as a “good luck piece.” Not only is Salo the messenger, but the entire human endeavor, dramatized in the trajectories of certain characters in the novel, leads ultimately to mechanical communications, to “being used” as machines, or like the small bits of metal involved in an elaborate telegraph system. Thus, whereas “mankind hoped to learn . . . who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about,” the answers to these questions are depressingly mundane: with respect to Earthling humans at least, the Tralfamadorian messengers are in charge of all creation, and what creation was all about was to deliver a message to a messenger so that he could in turn get back to delivering his own message to its intended recipients in a galaxy many millions of light years away from those Earthlings who had hoped for answers to the questions of life, the universe, and everything.31 Vonnegut’s vision of the absurdity of existence hereby finds tragicomic expression in a “meaning of life” so banal as to be another form of meaninglessness. You wanted to know the purpose of man’s existence? Here you go: to help deliver messages to a single stranded delivery boy to help him move on with his errand, as he would have done if—but for the misfortune of a bit of engine trouble—your entire species had never existed. Indeed, Vonnegut shows that the ultimate message is itself so inconsequential, of such little import, that one can only laugh. Salo, upon reaching his destination after a voyage of who knows how many millions of years, is to translate a Tralfamadorian word, a single “dot” no less, to his audience: the message is “Greetings.” The Sirens of Titan thus stages, seemingly on the much larger scale of the solar system or the universe, the drama of Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism in the machine age that had unfolded in Ilium, New York, in Player Piano. There human life was rendered meaningless or purposeless by an age of mechanical reproduction that rendered most human activity obsolete. In the guiding metaphor, the ghost that plays the player piano is the lost humanity that is no longer valued in the present social formation. In Lasher’s phrase, “People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.”32 In the earlier novel, this situation was set up as the problem, one that might be overcome by a boldly Romantic gesture, the Ghost Shirt Society’s neo-Luddite revolution, which seems as quixotic as tilting at windmills (another misguided attack on a machine). In The Sirens of Titan, however, the individual and the human

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race as a whole are understood to be in a vast mechanical ensemble, and in the end this is not so much a problem to be overcome or a “fallen” state to be mourned, but a sober reflection on la condition humaine or man’s fate (in the patois of the era of André Malraux and others). Humanity is no longer opposed to the machine, but may be understood as being by nature, as it were, part of a machine. The narrative movements of one Malachi Constant indicate the degree to which an individual is caught up in some supra-individual or suprahuman mechanical scheme of things. As perhaps the luckiest man on Earth, Constant is already nestled in a web of mysterious relations that are as inscrutable as the will of God. The inexplicability of his good fortune—“I guess somebody up there likes me”—is entirely consistent with the apparent randomness of bad luck.33 Whether part of a divine plan (as in the saying, “The Lord moves in mysterious ways”) or part of no plan (with a “God the Utterly Indifferent”), the individual is still subject to forces well beyond his control, such that free will is either entirely illusory (e.g., the ghost playing the player piano) or conforms to a plan to which the “free-willers” are not aware (such as the builders of Stonehenge). Malachi’s good luck is one such overarching machine in The Sirens of Titan. Another is, of course, Winston Niles Rumfoord’s own machinations, whereby the eccentric billionaire—scattered throughout time and space in the chrono-synclastic infundibulum—sets the wheels in motion for Malachi’s humbling journeys, a new religion, a war of the worlds, and so on. Discovering that he, and many others as well, has merely been a tool in Rumfoord’s larger plan only paves the way for the grander revelation of the Tralfamadorian replacement-part delivery to come. In all of these matters, the individual human is merely a piece of machinery. In the case of Malachi Constant, the purpose of life is clear: to be used in this machine in the most suitable way. The protagonist of The Sirens of Titan is, after all, named Malachi Constant, which means (as he himself explains) “faithful messenger.” In his moments of doubt or depression, we are told, “Constant pined for just one thing—a single message that was sufficiently dignified and important to merit his carrying it humbly between two points.” Although it is a fatuous act of mimicking a worn-out tradition of nobility, Constant has designed a coatof-arms, complete with the motto, “The Messenger Awaits. What Constant had in mind, presumably, was a first-class message from God to someone equally distinguished.”34 This sense of purpose, tied to the mode of communication, is a profoundly utopian dream, albeit another individualistic or even solipsistic one. The pure purpose of being a messenger of God is the role of the angel, or in the iconic language of Michel Serres, Hermes, messenger of the

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gods, the go-between. “Intermediary. Angel. Messenger. Hyphen. Forever outside any community, but a little and just barely in all of them.”35 Although it does not happen in the way he had imagined, perhaps, Constant does become that faithful messenger, an angel or even Messiah, delivering the message (and the replacement part) to Salo in the novel, but also delivering Vonnegut’s message through the novel. One is tempted to contrast Malachi Constant’s name, meaning “faithful messenger,” with that of Paul Proteus. After all, the name Paul refers to a messenger, an apostle and evangelist, just as Malachi refers to a messenger from God, an angel who can serve as a go-between in the interval that separates the divine from the mundane. But the protean seems quite the opposite of constancy; shape-shifting, changing, perhaps even unstable, Proteus in myth is believed to use his mutability to avoid capture, and to avoid delivering his message—reportedly his ability to tell the future. Both Paul Proteus and Malachi Constant are enlisted as “Messiahs,” another type of messenger. Paul Proteus preaches a Gospel of change, but does not really buy into it himself; in the end, as noted above, Proteus just wants to escape. Whereas Proteus wished to remove himself from a machine-world, where he can be used as a part of a larger machine, Malachi ends up embracing his role as a cog in a vast, cosmic machine. As a symbol for the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, Malachi himself, like all of humanity in the enormous delivery machine of the Tralfamadorians, finds the meaning of life not only in being useful (a key point of the moral of Player Piano), but also in being used. As Beatrice notes, in such a conclusive way that it might be taken as Vonnegut’s moral to the story, “The worst thing that can possible happen to anybody . . . would be to not be used for anything by anybody.”36 And here again we return to the man-and-machine question. Paul Proteus, like his wife, detests being a machine, whether as part of a corporate machine or participating in the processes of dehumanization symbolized by Rudy Hertz and the player piano. Yet Beatrice, in Sirens, discovers that “being used” by someone else, being made into a useful machine, is in fact the closest thing to a transcendental meaning or purpose as one can hope for in a universe abandoned by God (or overseen by an utterly indifferent God). Constant also, in dreaming of a purpose, the delivery of a message, longs to be a machine, part of a larger system in which his role is that of a relay between points. He, like Salo (who is a machine after all), longs to be a good machine “dependable, efficient, predictable, and durable.”37 Constant’s sappy conclusion, reiterated in various forms throughout Vonnegut’s career, that “a purpose in human life, no matter who’s controlling it, is to love whoever is

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around to be loved,”38 has its own machinelike simplicity, complete with a profoundly mechanical notion of the formerly romantic concept of “love.” For all of its apparent sentimentalism, it offers a fairly drab, “insert tab A into slot B”-styled formula, evacuating any content from the human activity that might suggest transcendence or resolution. Indeed, when Salo—who is again a machine programmed to perform a certain task in a certain way— explains his “decision” to continue on with his message delivery mission, he says, “Anybody who has traveled this far on a fool’s errand . . . has no choice but to uphold the honor of fools by completing the errand.”39 The line between human and machine has now become entirely blurred, and Vonnegut suggests that following unconsciously the mechanical clockwork determining one’s actions is the best, most purposive, and meaningful form of human activity there is. In what remains an important essay on Vonnegut’s early writings from Player Piano to Slaughterhouse-Five, Tony Tanner argues that the entirety of Vonnegut’s artistic project lies in the author’s role as an “uncertain messenger.”40 The messenger must be uncertain, for there really is no transcendent figure to assure its ultimate truth, and the message itself may be of little value—“Greetings!”, for instance. Tanner points out that a key aspect of Sirens is Vonnegut’s view that, even though humans can never be certain of what the final meaning of their work will be, they continue to form “patterns” that both shape reality and become texts for interpretation. “Vonnegut depicts man as an inveterate pattern-maker,” writes Tanner, and from the patterns formed by Beatrice in her writing, Chrono in building shrines on Titan, the Martian army’s precise military formations, or the lovely harmoniums forming elaborate mosaics on Mercury’s cave walls, One takes the point: some orderings are dedicated to death, some are productive of beauty and harmony—conflicting patterns are open to man who is himself such a compulsive perceiver and maker of patterns. The plurality of patterns and messages in this book undermines the notion of any final truth: at the same time it suggests that Salo (whose mission is only to “say hello” to the other side of the universe), when he stares down at Stonehenge and reads it as a message addressed to him, may be as solipsistic and bemused a messenger as any in the whole galaxy.41 Leaning toward the existentialism much in vogue in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, Vonnegut recognizes that the fundamentally meaninglessness of human existence is not a conclusion, but a starting point for making life meaningful, if only provisionally, for now.

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The opening warning of Sirens must be borne in mind as well. Vonnegut’s view of the possibility of a provisional utopia, of making do with what people or things at hand that can be used, remains a startlingly egoistic (or, again, solipsistic) enterprise. Given the narrator’s opening remarks, the reader is led to believe that the entire novel—the good luck, the chronosynclastic infundibulum, the vicious ill-treatment, the alien machine and his damaged spaceship, the awkward love story, and so on—are merely part of an inward odyssey, perhaps within the soul of Malachi Constant, perhaps within the terra incognita of the “soul” of the narrator. Here again, the utopia or dystopia lies not in a dehumanizing society, or even an unfeeling universe, but within that human, all-too-human self. Misanthropic humanism, although seemingly less visceral in Sirens than in Player Piano, continues to animate Vonnegut’s project. Whereas the early humanists of the Renaissance (including, of course, Thomas More) could imagine a utopian liberation from fear and want made possible by the prudent and collective use of human faculties (human Reason, above all), Vonnegut finds the impossibility of any utopia to be grounded in the fundamentally irrational nature of human beings. From the dreams of a collective utopia or ideal society, Vonnegut’s protagonists withdraw into interior, psychological fantasies or no-places, in which they can find ways to cope with, while also evading, their world. The quintessentially American utopianism, embedded in the rhetoric of the Puritan “errand into the wilderness,” the political discourses of freedom and equality, and the novelistic aims of creating a world apart, is here—in a rather modernist approach to the postmodern fragmentation of personal as well as social experience—turned inward, made personal or individualistic (another quintessentially American characteristic, perhaps) rather than social and collective. As the narrator of Sirens suggests, the quest for utopia now lies in soul-searching, thus the question of authenticity, which I will look at in the following chapter, becomes paramount. The ambiguous ending of Player Piano and Constant’s hypnotic slipping into death at the end of Sirens offer alternatives. In Sirens, as in life, death offers the ultimate escape from the “real” world, and Paradise offers the utopia to end all utopias, combining the pastoral ideal of the Garden of Eden with the celestial Kingdom of Heaven itself. Meanwhile Salo, presumably, continues on his preprogrammed way, off to complete his meaningful/meaningless fool’s errand. Player Piano, with its more traditional utopian or dystopian plot, presents a less clear and reassuring ending. Paul Proteus, along with Finnerty, Lasher, and von Neumann, are also messengers, delivering the “record” of their experiments to the people and to history. As

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Mustazza notes, the dystopian aspects of Player Piano are much more muddled and unclear than in such near-contemporary versions as Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World. “Although Orwell’s and Huxley’s respective endings to their dystopian nightmares are harsher than Vonnegut’s, theirs are also clearer and easier to understand. The individual there contends with a large political system and loses. Here, however, the force contended with is the tangled web of the self, capable of misrepresentation, of asserting humanitarian motives for strictly personal ends, of deception and inconsistency. And so, the refrain, ‘to the record’ is quite appropriate here for that is what Vonnegut wants to capture and document in the novel—the record of human action.”42 This final toast, “to the record,” sums up the misanthropic humanism animating much of Vonnegut’s work, and certainly these early novels. Vonnegut cannot grant that humans will, or even can, do the right thing, and hence his view remains rather misanthropic (in the spirit of Heraclitus’s thesis: “most men are bad”). However, ironically perhaps, from the God’s-eye-view of the author, Vonnegut can gaze down upon his creation with pity, understanding that while humans must always fail, they remain the only game in town. God, not even the deific stand-in known as the Author, will not make things right, so Vonnegut cleaves to a thoroughgoing humanism, even—or especially—where he knows that his humans will always disappoint. “If only it weren’t for the people, the goddamned people. . . . ” That is what “the record” inevitably shows. In Mother Night, Vonnegut alters both the narrative form and the philosophical thrust of his project, while still asking many of the same questions and maintaining his misanthropic humanism. From a rather omniscient third-person narrative in Player Piano and the tricky, hallucinatory narration of The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut casts Howard W. Campbell, Jr. himself as the author and narrator of Mother Night, while also (as I will discuss in the next chapter) calling that narration into question in the “Editor’s Preface” and with other hints in the text. To the extent that Paul Proteus wished to discover a utopian, authentic existence apart from the artificial world of machines, and that Constant longed for a real purpose, namely to deliver an important message, the memoir of Campbell serves to dispel the nobility or even the value of these ambitions further. Exploring more deeply for that utopian terra incognita of one’s “true” self, Vonnegut offers a lesson in the jargon of authenticity.

Chapter 3

Anxiety and the Jargon of Authenticity: Mother Night

The misanthropic humanism mobilized and animated in Vonnegut’s early novels projects an image of a human condition in which the lack of some transcendent plan for or essential meaning of life leads to forms of anxiety, despair, or resignation. In the science fiction worlds of Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut elaborates this theme in expansive ways, drawing on a discernible (but still unreal) future in which machines determine one’s existence, or where all human activity over hundreds of thousands of years can be reduced to a cryptic telegraph service for the benefit of one stranded Tralfamadorian robot. The disillusionment of Paul Proteus, and his eventual release from self-delusion, lies in his recognition that the Edenic or “pure” condition he had longed for was as fraught with manmade difficulties as any machine-driven world of Ilium. And Malachi Constant’s realization that his own life, from playboy to victim to Messiah to Indianaretiree, was an elaborately staged melodrama scripted by a heartless demigod, himself standing in for a Creator utterly indifferent to the plight of those in the world below—all of which was itself placed in the service of an intergalactic, one-way radio communication for the benefit of a single automaton—only reveals (and revels in) the absurdity of existence. These works allow us peer into the existential anxiety experienced by these characters, who are not themselves always cognizant of their own anxiousness and crises of authenticity. After these two novels, and after years of writing tales of middle-class angst for the glossy magazines of the 1950s, Vonnegut turns to a new style and genre—the confessional memoir—to explore these anxieties from within, while also providing a critique of self-reflection in the process. Mother Night becomes Vonnegut’s most sustained meditation on the experience of existence, and it is itself an example of existentialist fiction. Existentialism, a label that at once suggests both a philosophical and literary

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or aesthetic movement, was remarkably influential on postwar American literature, and it was perhaps at its most dominant in the late 1950s and early 1960s as Jean-Paul Sartre, among others, became a household name on both sides of the Atlantic. (Albert Camus, for instance, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957; Sartre was awarded, and turned down, the same prize in 1964.) Yet, despite, or perhaps because of, its pervasiveness in setting the mood for the era, existentialism resists definition. In discussing the theory it is sometimes hard to find the right balance between dense German or French philosophy on the one hand, and glib slogans and overgeneralizations (e.g., “the meaninglessness of life”) on the other. As some have noted of Sartre, frequently the fictional explorations of the subject yield better results than the strictly philosophical ones.1 Grappling with concrete examples from a single text offers an entrée into existentialist thought, and Vonnegut’s work often explores themes central to existentialism, although he is not necessarily labeled an “existentialist.” Vonnegut’s novels wrestle with such questions as the attempt to understand one’s self, the relationship of one’s self to one’s society, the pervasive anxiety that accompanies an unenviable human freedom, and, above all, the utter absurdity of existence. Throughout his career, Vonnegut revisits these themes over and over, sometimes extending their arguments to ridiculous lengths, but always—amid the laughter and confusion—leaving room for sober reflection on the human, all-too-human condition. The darkness of the American condition becomes all the more visible in the false light of the optimistic rhetoric of Americanism, and Vonnegut’s work holds up a dusky mirror to this complex reality. In his postmodern iconography, Vonnegut establishes existential angst, the pervasive mood of anxiety that accompanies human freedom, as a key feature. This anxiety is tied to the crisis of authenticity, of being and acting true to oneself, that plagues the characters in his novels. The sense of wonder, the creative impulse, and the abject dread of nothingness come together in the minds of Vonnegut’s protagonists, and unraveling the threads of this existential skein of emotions and ideas is often the real action in the novels. Although these themes can be found throughout Vonnegut’s oeuvre, no novel exemplifies Vonnegut’s existentialism more than Mother Night, the purported confessions of a Nazi war criminal who is also an American war hero. Mother Night operates as an existentialist text by elaborating a number of themes generally associated with the philosophy, and by telling a tale that simultaneously highlights the absurdity of human existence and the deep sense of pathos with respect to it. The narrative is established as the confessions of an American-born Nazi war criminal, a Third Reich propagandist

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whose radio broadcasts fanned the flames of hate throughout Europe, but also possibly contained hidden information valuable to the American and Allied forces. Howard W. Campbell, Jr., surely one of Vonnegut’s most original characters, represents the ultimate figure of divided selfhood. He is a writer, a playwright who is recruited to serve as an anonymous double-agent during the war, secretly broadcasting useful information to the Allies while openly serving the Nazis. In what are supposed to be his own words, he acknowledges that “he served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his time.”2 The chief aspect of Campbell’s malaise, and of Vonnegut’s exploration of existential angst in Mother Night, is the crisis of authenticity, occasioned by wearing so many masks so often. The absurdity of existence is highlighted in Campbell’s meticulous analysis of his own self and its relation to his world. Campbell, a playwright secretly recruited to work for the Americans as a spy during World War II, gained his fame and infamy by working as a Nazi propagandist, spewing the vilest lies and fomenting violent hatred over the airways. His horrific diatribes carried secret messages, unknown even to him, that gave the Allies information during the war, but no one other than Campbell and his “Blue Fairy Godmother,” the U.S. agent who recruited him, actually knew what was going on. Campbell made an excellent Nazi, and his fame and high regard within the upper echelons of Nazi leadership helped to seal his fate. He knew that he could never be forgiven his crimes, since they were real, even if they were in the service of another—perhaps greater—good. His time in New York City, living like a ghost, merely accentuates the absurdity of his already absurd condition. The events related in Mother Night, involving his final months before committing suicide, highlight the existential angst and crisis of authenticity in this original character.

Authentic Existence Before examining Campbell’s case more closely, it might be useful to define the terms of the existentialism Vonnegut explores in Mother Night. Existentialism, famously, is not a school of thought; it has no list of agreed-upon principles or precepts. However, for the term to have any meaning, several features must be acknowledged. One is the founding Sartrean principle that “existence precedes essence.” Actually, Sartre’s slogan derives from a line in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time: “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence.”3 What Heidegger means is that the fundamental or essential

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aspect of being-in-the-world, of actually existing people, is that they exist. Nothing more. Hence, what makes us who we are—our “human nature,” to use an antique notion—is that we are, and also that we question who we are. For Sartre, it follows that, with no inherent human nature, no eternal or transcendent meaning to our existence, we must create our own meaning. There is no intrinsic meaning to one’s existence, no essential being other than the existing being, so one cannot look outside of actually existing reality for answers to the question of the meaning of life, and so on. Moreover, man is situated in the world and cannot stand outside of it. Hence all actions take place in relation to an actually existing world, without reference to an otherworldly ideal. A basic consequence of this worldview is that the human individual, who embodies no essential human nature and whose life has no essential meaning, must have the freedom to create his own meaning. Such freedom is not necessarily a blessing, and it is primarily experienced as a generalized mood of anxiety. Sartre dramatized this anxiety as nausea, in his novel of that name. The anxiety one feels comes from not knowing whether one’s actions are correct, thereby acknowledging—albeit negatively—that one must have the freedom to choose the right or wrong path. By feeling anxious about making a mistake, therefore, we acknowledge that we are free. This also causes a profound sense of alienation, or, in Heidegger’s resonant phrasing, Unheimlichkeit (usually translated as “uncanniness,” but which might be aptly, if inelegantly, translated as “not-being-at-home-ness”). “In anxiety one feels ‘uncanny’ [unheimlich]. . . . But here ‘uncanniness’ also means ‘notbeing-at-home’ [das Nicht-zuhause-sein].”4 Because the world in which we are always situated is not of our own making, and because—presumably unlike the cosmos of Ancient Greek philosophy—we have no essential place in that world, we are estranged from the world and from ourselves. There is a form of homelessness, of not feeling “at home” in the world, that constitutes our relationship to the world, and this causes a pervasive feeling of alienation, as well as angst, a fundamental condition of our existence. Georg Lukács, writing from a Hegelian tradition in The Theory of the Novel, argues that “transcendental homelessness” is the fundamental characteristic of life in the modern world.5 This alienation or estrangement is further registered through the existence of others, other selves that can view me and make me an object. My first-person perspective on myself and the world is disrupted by another’s, making me aware of a third-person version of myself and the world. Famously, Sartre pronounced in No Exit that “l’Enfer, c’est les autres” (“Hell is other people”), as the alienation experienced in seeing myself from a

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third-person point of view makes me recognize the extent to which I am an object. My objective being no longer directly coincides with my subjective being, as I must own that who I am or what I do is fundamentally conditioned by who one is or what one does. My self is thus reflected back at me in a strange form, as when Sartre’s Garcin, viewing the distorted reflections of Inez and Estelle’s gaze (le regard) in the bronze ornament, declares that Hell is other people.6 From the maxim “existence precedes essence” we understand the absurdity or fundamental meaninglessness of life, and we also understand that, with no inherent meaning, we must create our own meaning via our own projects. This freedom to create meaning brings with it anxiety over whether we are acting appropriately. Compounding this angst is the overall sense of alienation from the world, from ourselves, and from the other selves we encounter. From these concepts follows the crisis of authenticity. In the existentialist lexicon, authenticity names the attitude in which one acts in accordance with one’s own self, rather than in accordance with what others similarly situated might do. The German term, Eigentlichkeit, highlights the degree to which one is true to one’s own (eigen) self. In other words, am I acting as I would act, or am I just acting as someone in general might act? For the existentialist, there is no essence that could serve as a standard of action; there is no transcendent purpose against which to measure our own actions, no Platonic ideal to compare our simulacra to. But through my interactions with the world, I can distinguish how I would act as myself from how I would act as merely anyone. Authentic behavior, then, would refer to acts done strictly as myself, observing Polonius’s advice to Laertes: “To thine own self be true.”7 Authenticity in this sense does not refer directly to what we do, but the attitude in which we choose to do it. By acting authentically, I affirm my self, taking ownership of the act and incorporating that act into my very being. The same act may very well be accomplished inauthentically, if I were to perform the act simply because it is what one does, or because I am fulfilling the role assigned to me. The resolute choice to act is what Sartre refers to as commitment, and an inauthentic person irresolutely occupies a role established by others, rather than committing himself to being in that role. Typical of inauthentic behavior are actions done in “bad faith.” Bad faith, for Sartre, means the denial of our angst-ridden freedom. Acting in bad faith, we assume that we have to behave a certain way, rather than commit to incorporating our actions into our own being. By choosing to act in bad faith, we are still expressing our freedom, but paradoxically doing so in order to deny our freedom as well. For instance, if I say I had

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to behave this way because it was expected of me, I am making an excuse for my freely chosen actions by suggesting that I was not free. Sartre does not accept the Nazi excuse, “I was only following orders,” for this reason. It is inauthenticity or bad faith, par excellence. Authenticity, Eigentlichkeit or “own-ish-ness,” is the condition of being our own selves, rather than the anonymous oneself. This “jargon of authenticity,” as Theodor Adorno has called it in his scathing critique of (then) contemporary German philosophy, has a more sinister side. In demonizing the inauthentic or fake, and in fetishizing a largely imaginary “real” or authentic experience, such thinkers inevitably—and, in Heidegger’s case, wholeheartedly—embraced a logic of exclusion that underwrites some rather appalling behaviors. In Germany, as in the United States and elsewhere, authentic experience became tied to the rustic, the rural, the soil, the homeland; it was opposed to both the “foreign,” which by definition must appear inauthentic, and the “modern,” which by some definitions subverts the traditional (and, hence, more authentic) order. The jargon of authenticity, with its romanticizing of the “homeland,” carried with it the discernible stench of fascism. Adorno knew that one cannot “go home again,” that one should not even want to, and that the “spirit” longing for this mythic homeland “hires itself out as the lackey of what is evil.”8 As Adorno reads it, the imperative to behave authentically winds up supporting the massive infringement of the very freedom Sartre understood to be the human condition. This is a Hegelian dialectical reversal of some magnitude, where the freedom to act in a manner true to one’s own self becomes the obliteration of self and freedom in a purportedly “authentic” state of being. In the figure of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., Mother Night enables one to see the problem of authenticity play out at the level of the individual.

Introducing Uncertainty Mother Night purports to be the autobiographical confessions of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., written while awaiting trial as a Nazi war criminal in a Jerusalem prison in 1961. Vonnegut establishes this form not only by having the narrative be Campbell’s first-person history of his life and times but also by including an “Editor’s Note,” signed by “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.” himself, explaining some textual variances and other circumstances relating to the publication. Vonnegut added another “Introduction” to the novel in 1966, but in its original 1961 paperback edition, the book appeared as memoirs,

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with a lurid marketing label on the cover that reads: “An American Traitor’s Astonishing Confession.” As established by this presentation, Vonnegut pretends to be merely the editor of those memoirs, claiming emphatically that the words are Campbell’s own. This “Editor’s Note” serves both to enhance the reality of the fictive narrative by introducing the editor’s “objective” voice and to distance Vonnegut from the role as author. As “editor,” Vonnegut may step outside of his own writerly self, offering to clean up someone else’s manuscript—e.g., “I have corrected some spelling, removed some exclamation points, and all the italics are mine”—while taking no credit himself.9 The operation itself dramatizes what Mother Night calls the schizophrenia that Campbell and other spies must experience, the alienation of seeing oneself as other, of knowing that there are (at least) two persons in everyone. Vonnegut, the writer who has created Howard W. Campbell, Jr., is also the editor of “the American edition of the confessions of Howard W. Campbell, Jr.,” as if he has merely been assigned to edit an existing historical text, one that may or may not have already been released elsewhere, in other editions, with other editors. If Campbell himself was not what he seemed to be, neither is his creator. Indeed, the opening lines of the “Editor’s Note” are almost defensive, taking pains to show the reader how difficult the editorial task really was. In preparing this, the American edition of the confessions of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., I have had to deal with writings concerned with more than mere informing or deceiving, as the case may be. Campbell was a writer as well as a person accused of some extremely serious crimes, a one-time playwright of moderate reputation. To say that he was a writer is to say that the demands of art alone were enough to make him lie, and to lie without seeing any harm in it. To say that he was a playwright is to offer an even harsher warning to the reader, for no one is a better liar than a man who has warped lives and passions into something as grotesquely artificial as a stage.10 Rarely has an “author” been so clear in warning his readers that what follows may be unreliable. Rarely has an “author” suggested to his readers that what follows may very well be lies, and dangerous lies at that. As a writer, Vonnegut may be ironically self-critical in his view that writers are merely artistic liars, but, in his “editor” persona, he hastens to add that “lies told for the sake of artistic effect—in the theater, for instance, and in Campbell’s confessions, perhaps—can be, in a higher sense, the most beguiling forms of truth.” Although the notion that art, in using artifice and fiction, may

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also reveal higher truths is itself something of a cliché, Vonnegut’s assertion here serves to redeem, in advance, the lies we may or may not be about to read. It is a bold assertion, juxtaposed to the warning, and its bold presentation is allowed to stand for itself. If Vonnegut-the-writer wishes to claim for himself and for Campbell the prerogative of the truth-teller whose lies are to be not only forgiven but embraced, Vonnegut-the-editor quickly steps in: “I don’t care to argue the point. My duties as an editor are in no sense polemic. They are merely to pass on, in the most satisfactory way, the confessions of Campbell.”11 The remainder of the “Editor’s Note” is given to seemingly quotidian matters of textual variances. After conceding that he has corrected Campbell’s spelling and punctuation, and acknowledging that several names were changed or invented to protect the innocent, Vonnegutthe-editor discusses some poems, reproduced exactly in the English but requiring extensive reconstruction in Campbell’s original German, in the volume. This is, of course, a bizarre note. Vonnegut himself knows English well, with only a smattering of German; his character, Campbell, is fluent and even gifted in German, but cares little for his English writing. So the author and the character blend together and separate from one another in an odd, schizophrenic pas de deux as Vonnegut’s English and Campbell’s German run up against one another, adding uncertainty to the very thing that the “editor” is trying to make clear. Vonnegut-the-editor then mentions two omissions from the text, and, in mentioning them, almost un-omits them, making them much more noticeable in their absence than they might have otherwise been. First, he claims that his publisher’s lawyers have advised that he remove an unsubstantiated claim made by an insignificant character. “Witnesses agree that such a claim was made, but made without any apparent basis in fact.”12 Indeed. In an entirely fictional work, the fictional confessions of a fictional character, this fictional omission—for fictional legal reasons—is all the more bizarre. Lies told for the sake of artistic effect might offer beguiling forms of truth, but let us not expose ourselves to lawsuits over it. The second omission involves the pornographic content of the newly written “Chapter Six Hundred and Forty-three” of Campbell’s Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova, and which the editor has removed on the grounds that Campbell himself, “right in the body of the text,” authorized the bowdlerization. Campbell’s authorization—“I leave it for an editor of taste and delicacy to abridge with innocent polka dots whatever might offend”—retroactively establishes Vonnegut himself as “an editor of taste and delicacy.”13

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Two final points close the “Editor’s Note.” The first is that the title is Campbell’s own, and that it comes from a line in Goethe’s Faust. Although Vonnegut does not say so exactly, the phrase appears in another autobiographical moment, where another character of questionable morals and veracity explains who he is and where he comes from. Mephistopheles, in his first appearance before Faust, provides some insight into his own genealogy: I am part of the part that once was everything, Part of the darkness which gave birth to light, That haughty light which envies mother night Her ancient rank and place and would be king— Yet it does not succeed: however it contend, It sticks to bodies in the end. It streams from bodies, it lends bodies beauty, A body won’t let it progress; So it will not take long, I guess, And with the bodies it will perish, too.14 Movingly poetic, for Vonnegut or Campbell to name these “confessions” after Mephistopheles’ primal darkness, Mutter Nacht, and to evoke with disdain the usurper Light, is telling. For Campbell’s memoirs and Vonnegut’s existential anxiety relate to the sense of inevitable, diabolic darkness. Mother Night, the primordial and eventually victorious darkness, is set beside a final image in the “Editor’s Note,” the image of Mata Hari, less diabolical than Mephistopheles, though, perhaps, equally infamous. Vonnegutthe-editor tells us that the dedication of the memoirs, to Mata Hari, is Campbell’s own, although the editor has found a note (“in a chapter [Campbell] later discarded”) suggesting another figure. Campbell writes, “She whored in the interest of espionage, and so did I,” but that he now feels the book should be dedicated “to someone less exotic, less fantastic, more contemporary”—less a creature of silent film. “I would prefer to dedicate it to one familiar person, male or female, widely known to have done evil while saying to himself, ‘A very good me, the real me, a me made in heaven, is hidden deep inside.’ I can think of many examples. . . . But there is no single name to which I might aptly dedicate this book—unless it would be my own. Let me honor myself in that fashion, then: 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.”15 This note by Campbell is allowed to serve as the end of the “Editor’s Note” signed by “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.”

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A Man Without a Country Before Chapter 1 of Campbell’s confessions, one final preliminary appears, an epigraph,16 which, in the context of Mother Night, can only be a hollow joke. Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, “This is my own, my native land!” Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d As home his footsteps he hath turn’d From wandering on a foreign strand? —Sir Walter Scott The answer to Scott’s question is, of course, Yes. Campbell begins his confession by stating his name, and (like Mephistopheles) then offers a bit of background. “I am an American by birth, a Nazi by reputation, and a nationless person by inclination.”17 The nationlessness to which Campbell inclines remains with Vonnegut himself, whose final book published during his lifetime was A Man Without a Country.18 Campbell clearly has no heartfelt sense of homeland, either for the United State or Germany or elsewhere, and he feels a mild disgust for those who really do. To conclude an argument with his neighbor about the nature of patriotism, Campbell at one point draws a swastika, a hammer-and-sickle, and the stars-and-stripes in the dust on windowpanes. “I had given a hearty cheer for each symbol, demonstrating to Kraft the meaning of patriotism to, respectively, a Nazi, a Communist, and an American. ‘Hooray, hooray, hooray,’ I’d said.”19 The novel’s epigraph thus does not label its author or protagonist so much as alienate him. Of course, Campbell had one country he truly loved, to which he remained loyally patriotic to the point of obsession. It was his Reich der Zwei, his “Nation of Two,” that he founded with his beloved wife, Helga. In turning away from any notion of nationhood beyond the romantic and erotic love the two shared, Campbell tries to triumphantly alienate himself from his fellow man. The image is romantic, to be sure, but also somewhat pathetic inasmuch as it represents an almost total withdrawal into a sexualized solipsism, a merging of bodies that excludes the rest of the world entirely. The young playwright’s early work, The Goblet, which is described later in the memoirs, provides an example of what such a Reich der Zwei looks like. In the play, “a blindingly pure young maiden” guards the Holy Grail, and she will relinquish it only to a knight who is equally pure. Such a knight arrives, and the two fall in love with each other, but that love causes them to have impure (sexual) thoughts,

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involuntarily disqualifying either of them from keeping the Grail. Presumably because of their new impurity, the Grail disappears, and the two lovers consummate their damnation “with a tender night of love.” Confident that hell-fire awaits them in the afterlife, they vow to make this life worth it, at which point the Grail returns, “signifying that Heaven does not despise a love like theirs.” They live happily ever after.20 Such a romantic fairy tale reveals its flipside a few pages later when a real couple is juxtaposed to the idealized one. When Resi Noth realizes that her knight, Campbell himself, is not willing to live or die for principle, for pure love, she decides to show him how it is done, poisoning herself with cyanide.21 Thus falls, for at least the second time, the nation of two, Campbell’s only homeland. The opening chapters of Mother Night introduce the Israeli soldiers who are currently guarding Campbell in his Jerusalem prison. Thus his odyssey begins in medias res, or rather near the end of his long voyage, in 1961. Vonnegut uses these guards as avatars, each embodying an existential theme that will then carry on elsewhere in the novel. The first comes to stand for History with a capital “H,” that history which is thoroughly human in that it is manmade, but also inhuman in its merciless superseding of individual human lives. The war, ended 16 years earlier, is “ancient history,” yet the brand-new prison also has stones in it that were cut in the time of King Solomon.22 The first guard, an 18-year-old named Arnold Marx, is fascinated by history; he spends his leisure on archaeological expeditions to learn more about his nascent republic’s long past. Marx is astonished that Campbell had never heard of “Tilgath-pileser the Third,” an ancient Assyrian, but it turns out that the young amateur has never heard of Campbell’s old boss, Paul Joseph Goebbels. Another Marx, Karl Marx, famously said, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.”23 Campbell discovers a piece of doggerel he had written in the 1930s that also reflected on history, a poem titled “Reflections on Not Participating in Current Events:” I saw a huge steam roller, It blotted out the sun The people all lay down, lay down; They did not try to run. My love and I, we looked amazed Upon the gory mystery. “Lie down, lie down!” the people cried. “The great machine is history!” My love and I, we ran away, The engine did not find us.

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We ran upon the mountain top, Left history far behind us. Perhaps we should have stayed and died, But somehow we don’t think so. We went to see where history’d been, And my, the dead did stink so.24 For someone who spent the war being intimately involved in the history, including the steamrolling aspects of it, Campbell’s sentiments are absurdly ironic. On the one hand, the meaninglessness and horror of the events are evident, but so are the actions of “my love and I” as well as those of them who “lay down, lay down.” Campbell’s afternoon guard, Andor Gutman, had been in Auschwitz, where he nearly served in the Sonderkommando, the “special detail” of prisoners who shepherded others into the gas chambers and then removed the corpses before being executed themselves. He notes that many, including himself, volunteered for such grisly duty, though he cannot explain why. Upon reflection, he suspects the announcement for the Sonderkommando, which occasionally interrupted the beautiful music played over the camp’s loudspeakers, must have made the detail seem like a good job. “ ‘Leichenträger zu Wache,’ he crooned, his eyes still closed. Translation: ‘Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse.’ In an institution in which the purpose was to kill human beings by the millions, it was an understandably common cry.” The same phrase, uttered in singsong fashion, is crooned to Campbell by Mrs. Epstein, the Auschwitz survivor to whom he turns himself in, when he is taken away to stand trial in Israel.25 Campbell’s evening guard, Arpad Kovacs, is also a war survivor, but one with energy and levity. He takes pride in how he spent the war, pretending to be a Nazi while secretly spying on or sabotaging Nazi plans. He had used false papers to join the Hungarian SS, and he therefore has sympathy for Campbell. He hated, almost as much as the Nazis themselves, the passive Jews who did nothing to resist being killed. He called them briquets, since they allowed themselves to be burned. “Tell them the things a man does to stay alive! What’s so noble about being a briquet?” Kovacs himself was almost proud of what a fiercely anti-Semitic Aryan he had managed to become: “I was such a pure and terrifying Aryan.”26 He was put in charge of a special detachment whose job it was to find out who was leaking information (it was he himself all along, of course); he managed to get 14 SS men shot based on his recommendation. Here is an absurd hero of the war. Refusing to be a victim, Kovacs schemed to become a double-agent, and managed to

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fool the Nazis. He is, perhaps, an example of what Campbell could have been, had Campbell any definite principles. The final, overnight guard tells a tale of the absurd right out of Albert Camus’s interpretation of the Sisyphus myth. Bernard Mengel, a Polish Jew who managed to survive the war by playing dead so well that a German solder removed his gold teeth, also helped in the execution of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz. He tells of tightening the straps around Hoess’s ankles just prior to the hanging, but he says he felt no satisfaction in the deed. “I got so I couldn’t feel anything. . . . Every job was a job to do, and no job was any better or any worse than any other.” After hanging Hoess, he packed to go home, and he fastened a leather strap to close his suitcase. “Twice within an hour I did the very same job—once to Hoess and once to my suitcase. Both jobs felt about the same.”27 In his explication of the Sisyphus myth, Camus understands that the absurdity of meaningless toil without cease also carries with it an element of joyful wisdom. True, there is tragedy in knowing that all one’s efforts are ultimately futile, but the joy comes in owning the fact.28 If there is no ultimate purpose, then one can create one’s own fate. Satisfaction is a job well done; helping execute a Nazi war criminal or fastening one’s suitcase can be its own reward. Campbell’s opening encounters with his guards set the stage for his discussion of Purgatory, his long period of death-in-life between the end of the war and coming to Israel for trial. The rest of the book combines the story of a few months in New York City leading up to his arrest with flashbacks designed to flesh out the tale of his war crimes, which also were— secretly—heroic acts of espionage. The juxtaposition of Campbell’s own playacting, his schizophrenic division of his own self, and the authentic behavior of his four prison guards is striking. Each shows aspects of Campbell’s own existential angst, from his interest in, but flight from, History, to his voluntary embraces of a horrible duty, to his remarkable ability to pretend to be something else, and, finally, to his acceptance of the utter absurdity of his, and the human, condition. Campbell’s persona is prefigured in these opening chapters, and his biography, spread out over the rest of the work, merely dramatizes these characteristics.

“We are what we pretend to be” In 1966, in a new introduction written for the re-release of Mother Night, Vonnegut tells a bit about his own experiences in Germany during the war—the full story would later be told in Slaughterhouse-Five. In the opening

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lines of the “Introduction,” Vonnegut tells us the “moral” of Mother Night: “This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”29 This is a crucially significant moral, I think, for a novel that deals so directly with the nature of selfhood, with the anxiety over one’s actions, with the questions of authenticity, and with the consequences of being exactly who one pretends to be. Howard W. Campbell, Jr., as suggested above, is a rather unreliable narrator. Not only is he mendacious for the sake of art, but he deludes himself. In his alternative dedication, to himself, he sees himself as an evil-doer who was secretly a good person, beloved in Heaven’s eyes. But he also recognizes that his activity was not merely playacting. At one point he distinguishes his own venomously racist speeches and writings from those of the Reverend Lionel Jones, D.D.S., D.D. This benighted bigot, unlike Campbell, was “ignorant and insane.” “Those whose orders I carried out in Germany were as ignorant and insane as Dr. Jones. I knew it. God help me, I carried out their instructions anyway.”30 This admission is a momentary glimpse of Campbell’s bad conscience, where he knows that—whatever secret good he may have accomplished through his public evil—he was also truly reprehensible, more so perhaps than even the Nazis who so fervently believed his hateful rhetoric. In a meeting with his “Blue Fairy Godmother” at the end of the war, Campbell learns a bit more about what he was really doing during the conflict. He asks Frank Wirtanen, the U.S. agent who had recruited him before the war had even begun, how many people actually knew that he was really “good” during those times. Wirtanen answers only three: himself, a general, and President Roosevelt, on whom Campbell in his speeches had bestowed the more Jewish-sounding name “Rosenfeld”. “Three people in all the world knew me for what I was—” I said. “And all the rest—” I shrugged. “They knew you for what you were, too,” he said abruptly. “That wasn’t me,” I said, startled by his sharpness. “Whoever it was—” said Wirtanen, “he was one of the most vicious sons of bitches who ever lived.” I was amazed. Wirtanen was sincerely bitter. “You give me hell for that—knowing what you do?” I said. “How else could I have survived?”

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“That was your problem,” he said. “Very few men could have solved it as thoroughly as you did.” “You think I was a Nazi?” I said. “Certainly you were,” he said. “How else could a responsible historian classify you?”31 In other words, you are what you pretend to be. Campbell had earlier suggested that one of the main reasons he had agreed to serve as a secret agent for the United States was that he was a ham, that he loved the opportunity to playact. “As a spy of the sort he described, I would have the opportunity for some pretty grand acting. I would fool everyone with my brilliant interpretation of a Nazi, inside and out.”32 Campbell’s pretending was so good that it eventually fooled himself, and the schizophrenia he describes, the wide separation of his “several selves,” breaks down the distinction of authentic or inauthentic behavior. So what if Campbell-the-American-spy was actually good, at the same time that Campbell-the-Nazi-propagandist was evil? The line blurs. Wirtanen says to him later in the scene recounted above that spies rarely did what they did for either money or patriotism. Why did they do it? “Each person has to answer that question for himself—. . . . Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.”33 Vonnegut’s moral, we are what we pretend to be, is fitting for a work of existentialist inquiry. The terrible freedoms that accompany a world without inherent meaning, an existence whose essence lies precisely in existence, make the “authentic” acts we do as ourselves functions as pretending in any event. By saying “I am a Nazi,” Campbell did indeed affirm his own, authentic Nazism; even if that were simply a part he played, he played it authentically. His memoirs conclude with the newly found hope of freedom: a letter from the real person Campbell had known as Frank Wirtanen, his Blue Fairy Godmother, appears and confirms Campbell’s entire defense against the war crime charges. Campbell’s reaction to the news of his impending freedom evokes Sartre’s metaphor: “I find the prospect nauseating.” Rather than accept such freedom, Campbell opts for a final, free act—the one Camus philosophized about so eloquently—suicide. “I will hang Howard W. Campbell, Jr., for crimes against himself,”34 and, as we learn in Slaughterhouse-Five, Campbell did indeed hang himself. The end of Campbell comports with his lifelong sense of divided self. An American who was a German, he was also a patriotic man without a country, a monogamous polygamist, a high-minded romantic who produced outright pornography, and on and

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on. This anxious, apparently inauthentic playacting does not form a shield protecting one’s true or “authentic” self, as that jargon of authenticity had always been a rhetoric of escape and xenophobia. To the motto, esse quam videri (“Be, rather than seem to be”), he could have no answer, since his being was entirely caught up in his seeming. A motto for modern man, whose existence precedes and utterly conditions his essence: be careful what you pretend to be.

Chapter 4

The Dialectic of American Enlightenment: Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

The crisis of authenticity in Mother Night draws upon the fundamental character of a world in which “being” and “seeming” are not clearly distinguishable. So the existential angst of an individual who is what he pretends to be may be extended to a human condition in which not only those former certainties become doubtful, but the very systems or means for ascertaining things are called into question. In other words, if the individual subject—the Cartesian ego, or the very foundation for knowledge of the world—cannot be authentic, then the entire kit – and caboodle is susceptible to renewed scrutiny. In Cat’s Cradle, whose very title indicates the point while also making its joke (inasmuch as the complex design formed by the crisscrossing threads of a cat’s cradle reveals, as Newt Hoenikker will say, “No damn cat, and no damn cradle”), Vonnegut takes aim at those grand sense-making systems, particularly science and religion, and shows that even the most innocent or well-intentioned efforts to discover or impose meaning in the world are misguided, even dangerous. This is the first part of Vonnegut’s version of the dialectic of enlightenment, to use Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s famous formulation.1 The second part, quite appropriately, returns to the psychological and social aspects of life in an “enlightened” age. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Vonnegut only appears to step back from the grand narratives of the Enlightenment, but in fact takes the additional step of showing how the social and economic relations among Americans are deeply affected by the most flimsy of abstractions. With Rosewater, therefore, the critique of the Americanized version of the Enlightenment ideology is made complete, as Vonnegut can combine his parodic sketch of large-scale institutions with the ludic analysis of the street-level institutions of everyday life. The dialectic of American enlightenment, then, will involve both the great and inspired elements of the Age of Enlightenment, Kant’s Aufklärung,

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or mankind’s collective maturation—or rather, as Kant actually puts it, “mankind’s emergence from its self-imposed immaturity”2—and those aftereffects or side-effects of enlightenment that appear to be merely pedestrian (such as worries about life insurance or petty greed), but which of course condition, often in minute detail, the lives of human beings. Indeed, at stake in even Adorno and Horkheimer’s view of the dialectic of enlightenment is the overlapping between the grand narratives of modernity and the changes at the level of social relations that accompany the Enlightenment ideology; this is how they can make the astonishing claims that Odysseus in The Odyssey is “a prototype of the bourgeois individual” and that the “gymnastic orgies” of the Marquis de Sade’s novels replicate “the architectonic structure of the Kantian system,” in which nature is subjugated to the “autocratic subject” and even amorality finds its “moral rigor.”3 For Vonnegut’s postmodern iconography, Cat’s Cradle and Rosewater bring together the two aspects of the critique of Enlightenment, and, in its aftermath, push Vonnegut’s thinking further away from knowledge and understanding and toward ethics, which ultimately infuses all his work.

Disaster Triumphant The opening lines of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment indicate precisely the effects of that dialectic in the immediate postwar era: “In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”4 In their critique of modernity in the wake of the Second World War, these Frankfurt School critics famously turn conventional wisdom on its head, suggesting that the very forces of humanistic progress led to the atrocities lately observed. That is, they reasoned, it wasn’t that barbarism had briefly triumphed over civilization, but that civilization itself contained such elements of barbarism. This extends to the written word as well; as Walter Benjamin famously put it, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”5 For all of its tangible benefits and progress, one cannot look at modernity without horror. In other words, as Vonnegut has Bokonon say of History: “Read it and weep.”6 Although Vonnegut is not usually associated with the work of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, his novels frequently engage with similar concerns, sometimes with similar results. Throughout his career, in these various experiments, Vonnegut spent much of his time meditating on the dialectic

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of enlightenment, and Vonnegut’s conclusions are usually directly in line with Adorno’s: regardless of intent, the mastery of the world—in terms of knowledge or power, which after Francis Bacon’s New Organon we recognize as the same thing—inevitably destroys the world. (And Vonnegut seems to add, “Good riddance.”) Nowhere is Vonnegut’s cultural critique of this aspect of modernity more vivid than in Cat’s Cradle, a work that the University of Chicago later accepted as an anthropology thesis in belatedly awarding Vonnegut his Master’s degree. In Cat’s Cradle, the narrator seeks to understand the meaning of a world in which brilliance and creativity can lead to mass destruction in the form of the atomic bomb, and he discovers an even more tragic example of the dialectic of enlightenment in ice-nine. The narrator says that he is named John, but his opening words—“Call me Jonah”— initiate us into the world of another end-of-the-world narrative, Moby-Dick, with which Cat’s Cradle remains in an implicit intertextual conversation throughout the novel. Like Moby-Dick, Cat’s Cradle explores the apocalyptic ends to which science, madness, and even hearty fellow-feeling can lead. Here again one may see that “misanthropic humanism” that animates so much of Vonnegut’s work. Vonnegut sees most people as fundamentally flawed, petty, avaricious, and prone to acts of almost incredible cruelty. Yet, for all that, Vonnegut also cannot abandon humanity; he marvels at human absurdity, noting sadly or just curiously man’s absurd perseverance, as in Player Piano’s bittersweet image of the triumphant Luddites who proudly put back together the very machines they had broken so ecstatically just days before. In Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut presents the apotheosis of man’s ingenuity, the ability to destroy the world itself and everyone in it. But he also develops a religion appropriate to such a world, one based on foma or “harmless lies,” in which humanity is divided up into teams (karasses) that somehow perform the work of God without the members knowing what that work actually is. Bokononism is really a kind of re-enchantment of a post-Enlightenment world, a world “abandoned by God” (as Lukács famously puts it in The Theory of the Novel),7 but one in which we must soldier on, hoping against hope that there is some transcendent meaning. Vonnegut’s dialectic of enlightenment is then another version of his misanthropic humanism and his critique of authenticity, as he finds the human, all-too-human self responsible for the disastrous human condition. If all of Vonnegut’s works tend to show that we humans are the butts of one great cosmic joke, they also usually suggest that we ourselves are the jokers. Cat’s Cradle is perhaps Vonnegut’s best joke in this regard. As a matter of narrative technique, the book is meant to proceed as a series of jokes, as Vonnegut explained later in A Man Without a Country: “It’s damn hard to

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make jokes work. In Cat’s Cradle, for instance, there are these very short chapters . . . and each one is a joke.”8 It is not really important whether each, or any, of the 127 “jokes” are funny or work on their own, however. What matters is that Cat’s Cradle organizes reality itself into this joke-world, where the attempt at mastery of the natural world, for example, is really an attempt to “get” the joke; likewise, the attempt at humor is a kind of science in its own right, a way to “know” the world at a more visceral level. This is the theory of the novel as well. How does one organize and order the various elements of existence into an aesthetically coherent work that can most effectively be used to understand ourselves and our relations to this world? Vonnegut’s position, especially in these earlier novels, is that, in an utterly meaningless world, the most meaningful way to approach this task is through humor. That’s the joke built into the title of Vonnegut’s third novel, which is enunciated by Newt Hoenikker midway through the book. Holding his hands in the air with fingers splayed “as though a cat’s cradle were strung between them,” Newt reveals the meaning of all those “X’s between somebody’s hands”: “No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”9 The story of Cat’s Cradle is equally simple, and yet almost mystically perplexing and complex. The narrator plans to write a book, to be titled The Day the World Ended, about the events leading up to and of August 6, 1945. “The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.”10 Of course, in attempting to gather material for this book, “Jonah” is swallowed up in a larger tale that eventually leads him to a front-row seat to another “day the world ended.” As his newfound Bokononism assures him, the absurdity of these events is just as meaningful as anything else he could have hoped for. Somewhat like the biblical Jonah, who disobeys, then grudgingly accepts, then questions God’s orders, demanding that God justify his actions and explain his apparent inconsistencies, the “Jonah” of Cat’s Cradle seeks answers and “moral clarity” (as it is now rather ominously known), before succumbing to the wisdom of Bokonon harmless untruths or foma. Only after the action of the novel takes place, in the retrospective first-person of the Bokononist narrator, does the world make sense in its nonsense. Vonnegut, the anthropologist who had earlier invented the “Ghost Shirt Society” and created a new religion in honor of “God the Utterly Indifferent,” here explores again the need for the myth as a counterpart to scientific Enlightenment. Indeed, as Adorno and Horkheimer would say, “myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”11 With Bokononism, Vonnegut invents a self-consciously mythic system—a religion

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that acknowledges that it is based entirely on lies!—that assuages the suffering caused by enlightened civilization while also perpetuating that civilization’s most cherished foma. An early scene presents a typically Vonnegutian satirical critique of the divide between myth and science. During his tour of the General Forge and Foundry Company laboratories, the narrator (“Jonah”) meets a secretary named Francine Pefko—a name, if not a character, that reappears as Dwayne Hoover’s secretary and paramour in Breakfast of Champions. Here, Pefko is a dutiful if befuddled worker from the “girl pool” (i.e., the small army of typists). Nervous and insecure about her own ignorance, Pefko looks around at the technological marvels of the educational exhibits in the Laboratory, and she lets slip a single word, for which Dr. Breed, the director of the facility, mildly rebukes her: “Magic,” declared Miss Pefko. “I’m sorry to hear a member of the Laboratory family use that brackish, medieval word,” said Dr. Breed. “Every one of those exhibits explains itself. They’re designed so as not to be mystifying. They’re the very antithesis of magic.” “The very what of magic?” “The exact opposite of magic.” “You couldn’t prove it by me.” Dr. Breed looked just a little peeved. “Well,” he said, “we don’t want to mystify. At least give us credit for that.”12 The scene offers one of Vonnegut’s more delicate and subtle arguments related to the dialectic of enlightenment. The forces of science and the forces of magic are essentially the same, frequently involving the same results, notwithstanding the intentions—good, bad, or indifferent—of their practitioners. And, although Dr. Breed is positioned as the fatuous, selfsatisfied champion of science, he is undoubtedly correct in saying that scientists—any more than the engineers of Player Piano—do not wish to mystify. However, Pefko’s view is likely the more common one. The very science that was to have explained and demystified the world has, in fact, made things all the more mysterious. And dangerous. This scene introduces us to Dr. Felix Hoenikker’s laboratory, where he first conceived of the substance that would eventually destroy nearly all life on the planet. After Dr. Breed explains that “new knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth,” he notes that “a pure-research man” like Hoenikker was viewed by others “as a sort of magician who could make

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America invincible with a wave of his wand.”13 Magic and science are really two visions of the same thing, as J. R. R. Tolkien once noted, referring to the principle as “the Machine (or Magic). By the last I mean all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of developments of the inherent inner powers or talents. . . . The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognized.”14 A more recent fantasist has actually imagined a magician being hired by the military to do precisely what a Marine general had asked Hoenikker to do when he conceived of ice-nine. In Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Strange aids Lord Wellington and the British military in their war with Napoleon by, among other things, magically making smooth and firm roads, which would later revert to muddy, impassable ones.15 All this is to say that, for Vonnegut, science contains no greater truth-value than does magic or myth. In fact, the problem with both is that they seek to impose, whether through “innocent” discovery or Promethean (or Faustian or Frankensteinian) invention, “truth” upon us at all. Is it accidental that, at this very point in Cat’s Cradle, a person named Faust expresses doubt about the inherent value of truth? “Miss Faust was ripe for Bokononism.”16 Bokononism provides Vonnegut with some of his most beloved images, and these form the tools for his most incisive comments about postwar American life, although they will be called by different names in different novels. The most crucial, but implied, concept is that God does indeed have a plan for our lives. A Bokononist would not need to ask, as the distraught man asks in the Kilgore Trout novel, “What in hell are people for?” Or rather, people might continue to ask the question, since only after death will God reveal to anyone his or her purpose in life, but Bokononism assures everyone that there is such a game plan for human existence. This is one of the foundational foma or “lies” upon which the religion is based. The purpose of one’s life is always bound up with one’s karass. “We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon.” Just as one cannot know what one’s purpose in life is, one cannot really know who else belongs to one’s karass or what the karass’s purpose is. The karass is organized in relation to a wampeter, which is the “pivot” of a karass, the hub to its wheel. In Cat’s Cradle, the narrator surmises that he is in a karass with Felix Hoenikker’s children, and that ice-nine is their particular wampeter, but, of course, “Jonah” cannot really know that. In fact, one cannot know any of this until after death, as we see in the Bokononist “last rites” administered to “Papa” Manzano. During this ritual, a man— who is figured as mud that had been allowed to sit up for a while but now in

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death returns to plain mud again—looks forward to going to heaven: “I can hardly wait . . . To find out for certain what my wampeter was . . . And who was in my karass . . . And all the good things our karass did for you. Amen.”17 Other Bokononist expressions are scattered throughout Cat’s Cradle, including the kan-kan (the instrument that brings one into a karass), the vin-dit (“a sudden, very personal shove in the direction of Bokononism”), a wrang-wrang (“a person who steers people away from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the wrang-wrang’s own life, to an absurdity”), a duprass (“a karass composed of only two persons”), and bokomaru (a ritual “mingling of awarenesses” achieved by pressing the soles of one’s feet to another’s).18 Boko-maru, in fact, is a ritual that embodies Vonnegut’s somewhat mawkishly sentimental philosophy, but that also dramatizes his Edenic ideal, symbolizing what Leonard Mustazza has argued Vonnegut’s entire oeuvre aims to represent, the pursuit of Genesis.19 For boko-maru is both a form of pious attention, not unlike foot-washing or anointing in the biblical cultures of the Near East, and a rather intimate act between two persons. “We Bokononists believe that it is impossible to be sole-to-sole with another person without loving that person”; as if to emphasize the homophonic joke, “Jonah” waxes poetic about the experience, with the lines “My soles, my soles! / My soul, my soul, / Go there, / Sweet soul; / Be kissed.”20 The combination of humility and intimacy makes the pair engaged in boko-maru a temporary Adam-and-Eve, as it were, innocently loving each other if only for the fleeting moment. (In Cat’s Cradle, after participating in his first boko-maru with the beautiful Mona Aamons, “Jonah” tries to prevent Mona from engaging in boko-maru with anyone but him, essentially equating the practice with a sexual act and thus binding it to the institution of marriage and therefore adultery; he thereby almost loses his Mona, before she straightens him out, calling him a sin-wat, or “a man who wants all of somebody’s love.”)21 Boko-maru, the “mingling of awarenesses,” is a momentary realization of Vonnegut’s “nation of two,” which is to say, for him, utopia. In my view the most important Bokononist concept, for Vonnegut’s overall worldview and for his modernist project in his postmodern iconography, is that of the granfalloon. A granfalloon is a “false karass,” a “seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done.” Vonnegut pointedly indicates this meaninglessness by listing several entities that many Americans in 1963 might have thought important as illustrations of the concept. “Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.”22

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The tone of this, as well as that of the “calypso” in which Bokonon reveals the essence of a granfalloon as being nothingness (“If you wish to study a granfalloon, / Just remove the skin of a toy balloon”),23 has understandably convinced readers that granfalloons are fraudulent or worthless, forgetting for the moment that Bokononism is based entirely on foma and, hence, that the karass is itself meaningless as well. Indeed, given Vonnegut’s (and Bokonon’s) thoroughgoing, if somewhat misanthropic, humanism, it would be reasonable to argue that the granfalloon, by being an entirely human and not divine form of teamwork, is actually more critical to the work of coping with life in the twentieth century. This is not to say that “any nation, anytime, anywhere” or “Hoosiers” are meaningful in themselves, only that they represent the human and collective efforts to make sense of the world and of a person’s place in it. In Slapstick, Vonnegut will actually make a form of granfalloon-building the cornerstone of Dr. Wilbur Swain’s vision of an American utopia, however flawed in practice. In this sense, granfalloonery takes up the mission of literature, of myth or science, insofar as it becomes another sense-making (or meaning-making) practice. Indeed, the whole of Bokononism, including the theory of the karass or granfalloon, is part of Bokonon’s own mythic or enlightened attempt to restore—or rather, to create—an appearance of meaning for people whose lives and world are meaningless. As he sings, “I wanted all things / To seem to make some sense, / So we could be happy, yes, / Instead of tense. / And so I made up lies / So that they fit all nice, / And I made this sad world / A par-a-dise.”24 In Bokononism, we are told, only one thing is sacred: “Man. . . . That’s all. Just man.”25 This is, after all, the same “sacred” thing enshrined by the Age of Enlightenment as well, but Vonnegut emphasizes that, where a certain kind of enlightened subject may attempt to discover the meaning of life, the Bokononist—a still-misanthropic humanist—knows that the only meaning will be created by humans themselves, and will therefore also be ultimately meaningless, like a granfalloon. In Bokonon’s creation myth, for instance, the “sitting-up mud” that is man looks around at the world and asks God, “What is the purpose of all this?” God responds by questioning whether anything needs a purpose, and tells man, if so, “Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” and “He went away.”26 “Harmless granfalloonery here and there,” as Vonnegut calls it,27 is perhaps the best option. In the final image of Cat’s Cradle, “Jonah” encounters Bokonon himself, who delivers the draft of the final paragraph of The Books of Bokonon. “Jonah,” behaving much like Malachi Constant here at the end of the world, when ice-nine has apparently destroyed nearly all life, now wishes to

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make some grand, heroic gesture, delivering a final message from man to the cosmos, and decides that the entire point of his karass must have been to lead him up Mount McCabe to plant that symbol, “But what, for the love of God, is supposed to be in my hands?” Bokonon gives him the answer: “If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the bluewhite poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.”28 This is a humorous grotesque of the mission of the Enlightenment, in which man might understand and even replace God and myth by “daring to be wise”—Sapere aude!—as Kant put it.29 Armed with “the record” (of human stupidity), enlightened man may only thumb his nose at the very thing he so desperately sought to understand. This statue might be labeled “Disaster Triumphant,” and be a fitting symbol of the dialectic of enlightenment.

The Tragedy of the Commonplace The apocalyptic nose-thumbing by the would-be Messiah finds its curious counterpart in the absolutely ordinary tale of the wayward, drunken millionaire in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Cat’s Cradle, in evoking “big” questions of science and religion—“grand narratives” used to explain or give meaning to the entire universe—seems rather different from the simpler narrative of Eliot Rosewater’s queer behavior, of scheming lawyers, pathetic insurance salesmen, and the sort of person “who, by almost anybody’s standards, was too dumb to live.”30 Yet this is the necessary counterpart to Vonnegut’s dialectic of American enlightenment, since the effects of the grand scientific and religious schemes find their most poignant and absurd avatars in these everyday figures. In Rosewater, Vonnegut provides a streetlevel view of “the fully enlightened earth.” As most critics are quick to note, Rosewater is among Vonnegut’s most sociological works, dealing more directly with matters of economics than any other (except perhaps the later Jailbird), and the novel is at its most acutely critical when focusing on the negative effects of laissez-faire capitalism in American life. In the book’s opening line, the reader learns that “A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.”31 The facile equivalence between the relations of money to people and that of

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honey to bees (that is, their equal roles as an attractor, a product, and even as a raison d’être) introduces that other aspect of enlightenment—the Scottish Enlightenment of Adam Smith, perhaps—namely, that the world can be rationalized into meaningful or useful equivalents, symbolized and understood in financial or economic terms. The question of what a man is worth, in dollars and cents, now stands in for the metaphysical questions of the meaning of life or the nature of the universe. As Donald E. Morse points out, Rosewater addresses a foundational American problem that could be said to go back to the Mayflower, wherein religious Puritans hoping to establish the New Jerusalem in America had to rub elbows with “strangers” who came to America in search of riches. “The dreams of America held by each group—a land of peace with individual freedom of conscience and a land of plenty with individual accumulation of wealth—coexisted as uneasily on the Mayflower as they have throughout subsequent American history.”32 Morse adds that there have really been two “American Dreams,” one based on freedom and the other on wealth, and that Vonnegut’s fifth novel is a meditation upon “the collision of these conflicting dreams.”33 Perhaps it is not accidental that in More’s Utopia, like so many of the classical utopias, a key element of the perfect society is that it lacks, and has no need for, money. Eliot Rosewater himself, in a letter taken as evidence that he might be insane, notes that “the United States of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all” fails in its aim because the Founding Fathers “had not made it the law of Utopia that the wealth of each citizen should be limited.” As a result, “a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America,” and soon the utopian ideal itself is contested by the official spokespersons of such citizens.34 In the imagined words of his grandfather, Eliot sums up the new philosophy: “Anybody who thought that the United States of America was supposed to be a Utopia was a piggy, lazy, God-damned fool.” That Eliot then describes himself as “a drunkard, a Utopian dreamer, a tinhorn saint, an aimless fool,” places him squarely on the side of those who are un-American in the new vision.35 This also allows Vonnegut to reenact once more the tragic banality of modern American life, which—as with the Reeks and Wrecks of Player Piano, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in The Sirens of Titan, the fundamental uncertainties of knowing one’s own self in Mother Night, and the disastrous effects of enlightened “progress” in Cat’s Cradle—comes down to the inevitable unhappiness or uselessness of most people. The country that “was meant to be a Utopia” has not only become a dystopia for so many of its inhabitants, but it has done so directly by virtue of processes put into

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motion through the principles that were supposed to make America a Utopia in the first place, that is, freedom and opportunity. This inversion of the notion of utopia is what I mean by the tragedy of the commonplace in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The phrase is an intentional play on “the tragedy of the commons,” made famous in Garrett Hardin’s influential essay of that name.36 In the essay, Hardin notes that many of the world’s seemingly intractable problems cannot be solved by technical or technological means, but will require “change in human values or ideas of morality.”37 Hardin argues that, using rational (and not necessarily greedy) self-interest and seemingly prudent methods, individuals may cause a tragedy whose most baleful effects are experienced by all. Hardin’s famous example is of herders using the same pasturage (“the commons”): The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. . . . As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component [i.e., possible overgrazing, a “negative” shared by all herdsmen, and additional revenue, a “positive” benefit to the one individual]. . . . [T]he rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another. . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.38 This tension between freedom and opportunity, what some might consider a foundational tension at the heart of the American national narrative, plays itself out in Eliot’s own utopian philanthropy, as he himself recognizes that providing more money does not lead to more happiness. Eliot, like so many who have merely inherited fortunes and who recognize the historical crimes that lie behind them (again, as Benjamin reminds us, every document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism), responds initially by becoming a philanthropist, in the most common usage of that term. This means that, acting as the head of The Rosewater Foundation, Eliot has donated many millions of dollars to charitable causes

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or for research. This is, of course, the acceptable form of charity in the upper-class sensibilities of the American ultra-rich. Indeed, once Eliot shifts his gears, so to speak, and engages in the more saintly behavior that makes people like Diana Moon Glampers say “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” he is no longer giving large sums of money away, as noted by his plutocratic father. By the novel’s end, Eliot will find a way to disperse the foundation’s assets even more completely, by making every child who has even merely claimed to be a child of Eliot’s a direct heir to his fortune. In effect, at least dozens if not hundreds of children born in Rosewater County will become legatees, and then their children, and so on. Eliot’s saintliness, established in several places throughout the novel, is able to find fulfillment at last in his waving of “a magic wand.”39 Vonnegut cleverly presents the counterpoint to Eliot’s saintliness in the form of two lawyers, the execrable “boy shyster named Norman Mushari” (7) and The Rosewater Foundation’s own white-shoe lawyer, Reed McAllister (a relative perhaps, but apparently different from the Thurmond McAllister who was to have mentored Mushari and who represents Eliot later). Vonnegut once noted, citing an observation made by his father, that he had never written a story with a villain in it,40 but Mushari seems plenty villainous. A corrupt, mean-spirited, and ugly person—Vonnegut even goes so far as to suggest that his height (“five feet and three inches tall”) and the size of his backside (“an enormous ass, which was luminous when bare”) are indications of his unpleasantness—Mushari is cast as the enemy throughout the book. He is an acolyte of a law professor named (no, seriously) Leech, who taught Mushari about “a magic moment” in any large transaction where “an alert lawyer” can “take a little” of the treasure being passed from one person to another.41 Mushari’s machinations are what generate the drama and crisis of the novel, as he attempts to create a “magic moment” when The Rosewater Foundation’s assets will be transferred from Eliot to another. Considering that, as the reader soon learns, Eliot himself would be perfectly happy to transfer his wealth to someone else, like his Rhode Island cousin, the real role for Mushari in the narrative is to function as a person so loathsome that the reader must thwart his desires, no matter the desires of the saintly Eliot. Reed McAllister, in a cameo appearance and speaking to a secondary character, functions as the voice of reason, confusing Vonnegut’s or Eliot’s ideal message with a sober reflection on the facts. Speaking so frankly as to be almost rude, McAllister tells an idealistic young millionaire that “one of the principal activities of this firm is the prevention of saintliness on the part of our clients.” Explaining that a large personal fortune “is a miracle,

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thrilling and rare,” and that one’s “fortune is the most important single determinant of what you think of yourself and what others think of you.” The truth of this is not really questioned, only the value of it, since Eliot Rosewater may very well have heard the same speech, from the same law firm, before becoming a saint himself. Thus, this scene, in which an idealistic young Stewart Buntline is talked out of becoming an Eliot Rosewater, is a key turning point in the novel. McAllister also gets the best line in the book, a line that easily combines the conflicting versions of the “American Dream” while retaining a somewhat cynical view of the dream: “Money is dehydrated Utopia.”42 This inversion of utopia, reveling in the fact (if not the justice) of a world in which being fabulously well-to-do means the ability to lead a utopian existence, is of course belied in the same chapter. There we do see “the muffled beauty of Pisquontuit’s Utopian lanes. Every house . . . a very expensive dream come true. The owners of the houses did not have to work at all. Neither would their children have to work, nor want for a thing, unless somebody revolted. Nobody seemed about to.”43 Yet the utopian life of Stewart Buntline involved alcoholism, a sleepy interest in Civil War history, and little else. Vonnegut introduces the character of an eighteen-year-old maid, Selena Deal, in order to show how vapid and lazy these rich were, but also to show how fundamentally unhappy they were. It is she, in fact, who gets to deliver the line that serves as the novel’s sub- or alternative title. Complaining that “What gets me about these people . . . is the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to poor people from them” (she has had to “thank” Mrs. Buntline for sunsets, as well as “the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution”), she concludes: “Maybe this is a case of pearls before swine, but I don’t see how.”44 If the poorest representatives of American society either see through this faux-utopian façade (as Selena does) or are oblivious to it (as Diana Moon Glampers is), the real class that suffers from the pain of knowing that money is “dehydrated Utopia” is the middle class represented in the novel by Fred and Caroline Rosewater. These Rhode Island Rosewaters, as the Hoosier Senator Rosewater dismissively refers to them, feel a pain all the more acute by living in such close proximity to the idle rich, a constant reminder of their inferior state. Caroline, a friend of Mrs. Buntline, has her nose rubbed in her petit-bourgeois life, forced to go shopping at stores whose goods she could never afford and to wear Mrs. Buntline’s cast-off clothing and jewelry. Fred, an insurance salesman with dreams of grandeur (usually amounting to little more than sexual fantasies), “worked like hell for the few dollars he brought home once in a while”—although we see him sleeping away a

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workday afternoon on his small sailboat, in what is his tiny version of paradise—but his work is a constant reminder of his lower caste.45 Fred only sells life insurance policies to the poor, not because he’s preying on their ignorance exactly, but because only the poor would ever buy such things. Fred needs his customers to think that life insurance is an intelligent investment strategy, the sort of thing that reasonable millionaires would purchase. “It impressed the poor to think that Fred sold insurance to the canny rich, too, but it was not true. The estate plans of the rich were made in banks and law offices far, far away.”46 Yet, “the workmen had an uneasy respect for Fred. They tried to be cynical about what he sold, but they knew in their hearts that he was offering the only get-rich-quick that was open to them: to insure themselves and die soon.” The morbid actuarial equivalents of life and money then plays out, as we learn that Fred is “worth forty thousand dollars dead” and the carpenter he’s speaking with is “worth twenty thousand dollars dead.”47 And this, of course, is the tragedy made real to them, that they are in fact worth more dead than alive, that their loved ones would be a step closer to the miracle of utopia if they would only have the good manners to die soon. But, of course, money does not buy happiness, right? Indeed, the desire for wealth is always couched as a desire for respectability, and more so as a desire for meaning. Fred does not so much long to be rich, as he longs to be significant. When he discovers that his family history, written in a book that was in his father’s lap at the moment of his suicide, includes royal and famous ancestors, he immediate absorbs the pride and self-esteem that the ultra-rich must possess in those moments when they ask poor servant-girls to be thankful for sunsets. Exulting in his newfound meaningfulness, demanding that his wife understand just how important they must be (because of how important their ancestors were), Fred endeavors to read the rest of his family’s history. Peeling back the next page of his book, he finds: “The manuscript was hollow. Termites had eaten the heart out of the history. They were there still, maggoty blue-grey, eating away.”48 Fred’s family history, like a toy balloon without its skin, is another hollow, meaningless nothingness. It was so, even before the termites had eaten it, of course. The main point, for Fred and for most people, is the narrative itself. This is, after all, the vocation of the novel, or of storytelling more generally. To rearrange the chaos of our lives and put it into some meaningful order, if only temporarily and provisionally. As Senator Rosewater suggests, the same might be said for lawyers. Lawyers get a pretty bad rap in Rosewater, but in the final pages they are likened to writers (albeit subordinate ones), “figuring out wonderful explanations for hopeless messes.” Senator Rosewater is praising

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Kilgore Trout for coming up with a fascinating narrative to show how valuable the “hopeless mess” of Eliot’s recent efforts was. Of course, Trout is telling the truth as he sees it, whereas Senator Rosewater sees an elaborate public relations “spin” on things. No matter, since either way shows that the importance lies not in the acts themselves but in the narratives. Trout, using almost the same formulation that Claire Mindon (half of the duprass in Cat’s Cradle) had used about the “vanished frontier,”49 suggests that Americans hate themselves for being useless, and modernity (or postmodernity) seems bent on making more and more Americans, or humans, useless. Earlier the narrator had suggested that Trout’s science fiction, like pornography, was ultimately utopian in that both produce “fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world.”50 Here, and in contrast to McAllister’s more cynical, “dehydrated Utopia,” Trout points out that money is not really the issue. While incredibly comfortable and free, a man like Stewart Buntline was no more useful (and hence, not more happy) than Diana Moon Glampers. As Trout perceptively explains, “Poverty is a relatively mild disease for even a very flimsy American soul, but uselessness will kill strong and weak alike, and kill every time. We must find a cure.”51 Hence, in the end, having the riches and even spending the riches is not meaningful; it cannot create the Utopia that Eliot longs to see people enjoy. (This is partly why, in his saintly deeds, the most important ones involved little money at all, whether simply participating in volunteer fire departments or dispensing simple advice like “take an aspirin tablet, and wash it down with a glass of wine.”)52 Instead, what these people need is purpose, use-value in addition to the exchange-value as calculated by life insurance actuaries. Eliot’s final act, in naming as his legal children all those who wished to claim him as a father, gave them not only the family history that Fred Rosewater craved, but actually gave them a purpose in life: to administer or to be heirs to The Rosewater Foundation. It is not necessarily the case that Eliot’s plan will work; the legatees of the Rosewater money may well be or become swine before whom these pearls lose all value. But in being treasured, even for a time, their own lives gain value. And so the first character named in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is also the real villain, Norman Mushari’s luminous ass notwithstanding. And in his final pronouncement, with the wave of his “magic wand” tennis racket, Eliot overpowers this villain—Saint George slaying the Dragon—by dispersing its power throughout what may now be generations of the poor inhabitants of Rosewater County. The “sum of money” that was the real antagonist, the primum mobile of Mushari’s vile actions and the cursed legacy of Noah Rosewater’s Civil War – era crimes, is finally dispatched. Like Malachi Constant’s view that

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“the purpose of human life . . . is to love whoever is around to be loved,”53 Eliot provides a father’s love to the masses of Rosewaters that, being fruitful and multiplying, may come along. Some critics have, perhaps rightly, noticed “a detectable strain of sentimental sententiousness which recurs in Vonnegut’s work,”54 and the messages of Cat’s Cradle and Rosewater do raise profound philosophical and social questions only to revert to what may seem like palliative clichés. Vonnegut, like “Jonah,” is tempted to believe in “the meaninglessness of all,” but he seems to find, again and again, that “nihilism was not for me.”55 With his still misanthropic humanism, he cannot quite always look on the bright side of life (as Monty Python’s crucified optimists do), but neither can he decide to lump it entirely. For example, shortly after the saint-like (or Albert Schweitzer – like) Julian Castle affirms “the meaninglessness of it all” and intones that “Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing,” he praises two manmade things—boko-maru and aspirin—for their effectiveness in making life more bearable, if not more meaningful. “It [boko-maru] works, you know,” Castle says. “People who do that really do feel better about each other and the world. . . . It works. I’m grateful for things that work. Not many things do work, you know.”56 Similarly, Eliot Rosewater has little conviction that his generous distribution of pearls will transform swine into men, reversing the baleful enchantments of money. Yet he remains convinced that the trite platitude of feeling useful—or of seeming to work—will make lives, including his own, better. Vonnegut’s dialectic of American enlightenment reveals the dual enchantments and disenchantments of science, religion, wealth, and labor, and comes down on the side of neither myth nor enlightenment, the American Dream nor an unrealizable utopia. Vonnegut no longer seeks the meaning of life. For Vonnegut, this would not be the answer. It is not even the right question. Faced with this apparently meaningless existence in a bizarrely fragmented and unpredictable world, Vonnegut adopts the position that Deleuze and Guattari take with respect to the Freudian notion of the unconscious, which is that it is not really a question of exegesis or interpretation, but a question of practice. “The question . . . is not ‘What does it mean?’ but rather ‘How does it work?’ How do these machines, these desiring-machines, work—yours and mine?”57 Vonnegut’s explorations of the meaninglessness of existence and the unpleasantness of life in postmodern America lead him to adopt, perhaps ironically given where he started, a more mechanical view. Humans are machines, machines in need of maintenance; some of these machines might be permanently unable to function properly, as with

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“the classic totalitarian mind” with its gears missing a few teeth, described in Mother Night as a “cuckoo clock in Hell—keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.”58 Vonnegut’s dialectic of American enlightenment, in which the quest for knowledge and prosperity leads to disaster triumphant and the tragedy of the commonplace, thus returns him to his earlier ruminations on the nexus between man and machine. Always a moralist, even when there appeared to be little foundation for morality, Vonnegut finds that the pragmatics of his project—of seeing what works in postmodern American life—must entail an ethics.

Chapter 5

Eternal Returns, or, Tralfamadorian Ethics: Slaughterhouse-Five

In the astonishing and unexpected opening chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five,1 Vonnegut—in his own voice as author and narrator—announces that the novel “is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.” The reference, of course, is to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis, during which Lot’s wife, who had been told not to look back upon the cities of the plain, nevertheless did so, and was turned into a pillar of salt. In Vonnegut’s reflections on that scene, his sympathies lie with Lot’s wife: “Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world is better off without them. And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.”2 The message is clear from the outset, that Slaughterhouse-Five is a book of retrospection, of “looking backward,” not merely in the sense that Kurt Vonnegut looks back upon his own wartime experiences and the Sodom-and-Gomorrah-like destruction of Dresden in 1945, but also insofar as looking back, or returning, is a fundamental aspect of what Vonnegut sees as human nature, or the human condition, in postmodernity. With Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut combines form and content to figure forth an ethics based on the principle of the eternal return. By eternal return, I am referring to the concept developed by Friedrich Nietzsche, which he took to be the cornerstone of his entire philosophy, both in his own name and in that of his “conceptual persona” Zarathustra.3 Also translated as the “eternal recurrence,” the eternal return is imagined as a cosmological principle, rooted in pre-Socratic atomism and inspired by Heraclitus, among others. However, as a number of scholars have pointed out, Nietzsche in the end failed, or refused, to elaborate the eternal return in its cosmological sense, preferring rather to emphasize that the concept formed the basis for an overall ethics or ethos, a comportment toward the world in which the individual subject affirms his or her own existence and

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all existence. This, then, is the foundation of Nietzsche’s amor fati, “love of fate,” the underlying principle of his ethics and his philosophy in general. In this chapter I argue that Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, in its formal or stylistic organization and in its content or philosophy, functions as an extended meditation upon the eternal return. It is a novel of the eternal return, which sets forth a Tralfamadorian ethics suited to Vonnegut’s modernist approach to the postmodern condition. This does not necessarily mean that Vonnegut himself studied Nietzsche or self-consciously attempts to put Nietzschean ideas into literary practice,4 only that Vonnegut’s great novel of return projects an ethics akin to that promulgated by Nietzsche via the principle of the eternal return. Slaughterhouse-Five, in a sense, enacts the eternal return and gives form to Vonnegut’s own moral philosophy.

Nietzsche’s Tralfamadorian “Thought” Nietzsche frequently refers to the eternal return as his “thought,” derived from ancient sources and related to notions put forth by Heinrich Heine and Arthur Schopenhauer, but established as something utterly new by Nietzsche. Although he grants that his inspiration for the notion of the eternal return may be found in ancient, cosmological thought, Nietzsche immediately makes the connection to psychology and ethics, broadly conceived. That is, the cosmological principle necessarily invokes the practical philosophy of “how to live a good life.” Of course, the ancient Greeks saw no schism between the scientific knowledge gained through physics and the practical codes of conduct to be found in ethics. But, as Vonnegut himself decries in Cat’s Cradle among other texts, the split between knowledge and morality seems almost inevitable for the moderns, as is especially visible in the fable of ice-nine. After all, Felix Hoenikker was not a bad man—far from it—but he was unable to distinguish between the knowledge for knowledge’s sake of his own “pure” research, and the ethical behavior required in order to lead a happy life (hence, his obliviousness toward his wife and children, for example). Nietzsche’s elaboration of the eternal return draws from scientific principles (such as “the law of conservation of energy”)5 and from the cosmological inferences of pre-Socratic philosophy. As Nietzsche explains in a passage that outlines this philosophy, showing its opposition to both the Hegelian teleology and the mechanistic theories of some rationalists: “If the world could in any way become rigid, dry, dead, nothing, or if it could reach a state of equilibrium, or if it had any goal that involved duration,

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immutability, the once-and-for-all (in short, speaking metaphysically, if becoming could resolve itself into being or into nothingness), then this state must have been reached. But it has not been reached.”6 Then, using his famous metaphor to illustrate the point, Nietzsche explains the basis for the eternal return. If the world may be thought of as a certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of centers of forces—and every other representation remains indefinite and therefore useless—it follows that, in the great dice game of existence, it must pass through a calculable number of combinations. In infinite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times. And since between every combination and its next recurrence all possible combinations would have to take place, and each of these combinations conditions the entire sequence in the same series, a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated: the world as a circular movement that has already repeated itself infinitely often and plays its game ad infinitum.7 The term “circular” is a bit misleading, since Nietzsche is not endorsing the idea of a strictly cyclical process, like Giambattista Vico’s cyclical philosophy of history. As Gilles Deleuze notes, Nietzsche himself criticizes the “cyclical hypothesis” on the very grounds that such a mechanistic view could not lead to the eternal return, but “a final state.”8 The idea of the eternal return is actually more Tralfamadorian than that. The Tralfamadorian view of time, as well as of space, offers a glimpse of how history can be imagined according to the theory of the eternal return. “All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the 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.”9 This sort of spatial history, with all moments present at once and, in a sense, simultaneous, might be a logical consequence of the cosmological version of the eternal return. For, with infinite time, the eternal return of all incidents would inevitably become a static field of sorts, a stretch of the Rocky Mountains perhaps, in all its grandeur and stability. As Deleuze explains, “The present must coexist with itself as past and yet to come. The synthetic relation of the moment to itself as

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present, past and future grounds it in relation to other moments.”10 In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorian theory of space-time allows each action to become part of a larger schema, such that, for instance, when someone does something a certain way, she or he “had to do so” simply “because the moment was so structured.”11 Hence, time becomes space in a way. The perpetual coexistence of all moments of time gives a scientific, or science-fictional, rationale for the ethical argument that follows. The physical or cosmological argument for the eternal return laid out above comes from notes, unpublished during Nietzsche’s career and later collected in The Will to Power. As Alexander Nehamas has convincingly argued, “Nietzsche may have suspected at times that this cosmology was useless to him. If this is true, it would explain why he never tried to publish any of his ‘proofs’ of the recurrence.”12 However dubious the eternal return is as a cosmological principle, it is nevertheless crucial for Nietzsche’s psychological and philosophical arguments about how a person should live, which is after all the same field of inquiry—much more so than is physics or cosmology—that Vonnegut explores. As Nehamas puts it, “the most serious and valuable aspects of Nietzsche’s writing about these issues” are “the psychological consequences he draws from the recurrence and his applications of these consequences to his own life. The eternal recurrence is not a theory of the world but a view of the self.”13 Among Nietzsche’s first clear statements on the subject of the eternal return in his own published work, a section from The Gay Science, highlights the ethical component of this broader physical or cosmological concept. Labeling the section “The greatest weight,” which emphasizes the ethical and philosophical burden that this places upon us, Nietzsche presents the following scenario: What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live 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—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never

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have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become toward yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?14 The burden, and the ethical principle, is the same. Who is strong enough to affirm that everything one has ever done, everything that has ever happened to oneself, and even everything that has ever occurred should stand unchanged, should be repeated over and over again without correction or modification, eternally? The contrast to this is guilt, remorse, and eventually resentment—or, as Nietzsche would have it, ressentiment. The one who says, “If I had it to do over again, I’d do things differently,” is expressing a life-denying principle. In Nietzsche’s terminology, this is “bad conscience,” and it leads to the most unwholesome of repressive religious and political positions. In Vonnegut’s more prosaic versions, the constant anxiety in American life derives mainly from the unhappiness of trying to change that which cannot be changed, of feeling guilty for one’s bad luck, or succumbing to depression in thinking about how one should have done things differently. The abject horror of the quintessentially American ideology of freedom and opportunity, in Vonnegut’s view, is that it blames people—or, rather, causes people to blame themselves—for situations largely beyond their control. This is the logic behind such all-American expressions as “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”, and it explains why so many “poor Americans” (poor in spirit, as well as cash-poor) “are urged to hate themselves.”15 Billy Pilgrim’s salvation, and by extension our own, comes with the recognition of fate, the love of fate, and thus the affirmation of the demon’s challenge: the affirmation of life that is the eternal return. As with Nietzsche’s conception, Billy Pilgrim immediately links the Tralfamadorian view of time and history with a practical and ethical approach to life itself. In his letter to the Ilium News Leader in which he explains that “all moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist,” Billy mentions this only as a way of prefacing and laying the groundwork for the further good news that, once this is understood, no one should ever fear or even mourn death. The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past,

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so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. . . . When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.”16 Billy, like Nietzsche, understands that this theory (Tralfamadorian spacetime or the eternal return), properly understood, is liberatory inasmuch as it frees one from the fear and loathing of life itself. “So it goes” becomes the appropriate response to death, as well as an affirmation of life. “The justification of a life, then,” writes Nehamas, “lies for Nietzsche in those moments when, in accepting the present, one also accepts all that is past; for though perhaps one did not will something in the past, one would not now have it any other way.”17 The ethos that necessarily follows from one’s embrace of the theory of the eternal return requires the affirmation of life, not just the good parts of it—a “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is”18—but all of it. This is Nietzsche’s great revelation, his amor fati, that enables one to overcome the bad conscience and bad faith of the man of ressentiment, the one who refuses to look back or to return with joyful wisdom (die fröhlich Wissenschaft), but insists on a “metaphysics of the hangman” that would “pollute the innocence of becoming with guilt and punishment.”19 Such an affirmation of life, and rejection of the deathly philosophy of regret and recrimination, finds its counterpart in Vonnegut’s own narrative style, in which the elements of everyday life find their sublime value in their very everyday-ness. Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorian style in Slaughterhouse-Five emphasizes the relationship between the ironic cosmology and the serious ethics of the eternal return.

Tralfamadorian Style Vonnegut dramatizes the philosophy of the eternal return in the very form or style of Slaughterhouse-Five. If all moments of time coexist simultaneously, then why should a novel proceed as if “one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever”? As Jerome Klinkowitz points out, Vonnegut had already played with what might be considered unconventional narrative techniques in his earlier books, but the situation of literature in the 1960s—particularly the controversies over the “death of the novel,” which Billy Pilgrim will humorously

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and accidentally weigh in on at one point—made him a much more a “modern experimentalist,” who “faces peculiar modern problems with idiosyncratic responses, so helping him reinvent the novel for our time.”20 Moreover, Klinkowitz notes that the transformative and vibrant university culture of the mid-1960s affected Vonnegut’s work: “from his post as an instructor in the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, innovation was more of an option, surrounded as he was by novelists much more radical in their pursuit of new techniques.”21 The title page alone registers this sense of novelty and revision, with its multiple titles (Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade and A Duty-Dance with Death), its lengthy exposition of who the author is (“a fourth-generation German-American”), a key plot element (“the fire-bombing of Dresden”), a bizarre style (“somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of the tales of Tralfamadore”), and the monosyllabic sign-off (“Peace”), pregnant with additional meanings during one of the deadliest periods of the Vietnam War and of the civil unrest within the United States. The opening chapter, in establishing what will become a trademark characteristic of Vonnegut’s novels, further shatters expectations. It also underscores the degree to which the novel will be “about” eternal returns. Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegut’s first novel, but not his first book, to have a preface or introductory chapter written apparently in his “own voice,” and this convention becomes a feature of all of his subsequent books.22 The first book to include such a preface is Vonnegut’s 1968 collection of short stories, Welcome to the Monkey House, which incorporates all but one of the early tales previously collected in 1961’s Canary in a Cathouse, as well as including several stories written in the 1960s, notably the eponymous tale and “Harrison Bergeron,” perhaps Vonnegut’s most anthologized work. Vonnegut had toyed with inserting himself (as “real” author) into the fictional text as early as Cat’s Cradle, when “Jonah” discovers his family name on the stone angel in the tombstone salesroom,23 but, according to Klinkowitz, “editors talked Vonnegut out of the idea as being too radical.”24 In Slaughterhouse-Five, the first chapter emphasizes the novel’s status as an object or artifact, asserting its very written-ness in a way that has come to be associated with the reflexivity of postmodernist fiction.25 But it also allows Vonnegut to situate himself along that spatio-temporal “stretch of the Rocky Mountains” where all moments coexist. Chapter One, in which Vonnegut—like Lot’s wife—looks back upon the firestorm, offers his personal perspective of the eternal return to go with his narrative of Billy Pilgrim’s adventures. The much-discussed style or form of the novel, written “somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore,”

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thus conforms to the content of the novel. Vonnegut’s famous blurring of the lines between author and work, between autobiography and fiction, operates in Slaughterhouse-Five largely as a framing device, with an autobiographical or personal preface complemented by a final chapter in which Vonnegut’s more personal reflections (on the near-current events of Robert Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassinations, for example) intertwine with the Billy Pilgrim narrative once more. In another feature that disturbs or delights readers who encounter it in the main narrative of the novel, Vonnegut—the author who is also Billy’s fellow soldier experiencing the events of the Dresden bombing—three or four times ejaculates something like “That was me!” or “I was there” in the otherwise staid third-person narration. (The most humorous and pathetic such moment, surely, is the scene in which the American soldiers, after days of privation and starvation, suddenly become sick from the shock of the feast thrown by their English hosts in the German prisoner-of-war camp. “Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from in there. . . . An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, ‘There they go, there they go.’ He meant his brains. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.”)26 The commingling of the personal narrative of the author with the fictional narrative of Billy Pilgrim is not, as so many critics attest, what is most distinctive about Vonnegut’s style. Indeed, it is a rather small step from using a fictionalized version of one’s self (like Ernest Hemingway’s early novels do) and using one’s own “real” name, and world literature has a rather long history of combining the fictional forms with the trappings of nonfiction—whether ironically acknowledged, as in Gulliver’s Travels or Don Quixote, or stated plainly as factual reportage, like Herman Melville’s Typee. What does make Vonnegut’s position different and significant here is the fact that his own development as the writer of the novel dramatizes the eternal returns of his characters and of the narrative form itself. Vonnegut is not merely an author of this novel of returning who is also a character in it, that is, but he embodies the return itself, as discussed in relation to Marcel Proust’s own novelistic return to “things past” discussed later in this chapter. Vonnegut’s narrative mode also fits seamlessly into the plan of his Tralfamadorian ethics and view of space-time. For Vonnegut, the novel must involve a recognition of the fate of its characters, and this involves the sort of amor fati that allows one to embrace the eternal return. In his critique of the national iconography made popular, even sacred, in American literature, Vonnegut again disputes its own fictionalized version of the

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ideological point of view that is embodied in the cruel phrase, “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” As Vonnegut points out in his well known 1973 interview in Playboy, “It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. . . . And it strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that a man can always solve his problems. There is that implication that if you just have a little more energy, a little more fight, the problem can be solved. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry—or laugh.”27 For Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse-Five as elsewhere, the spirit of “realism” requires that such convenient plot devices be abandoned, and that those who are stuck in a given scenario can be stuck, and that’s okay. The writer need not impose a fabulous narrative that would give a false meaning to one’s existence (e.g., the Horatio Alger fiction that Vonnegut despises), but may organize the elements of life in such a way as to present “an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep,” as Tralfamadorian novels do. This is also characteristic of Vonnegut’s modernism: the need for experimental narrative techniques (such as stream-of-consciousness, collage, timewarps) to do justice to what is really real, something that the older modes of realism were seemingly unable to accomplish. This marks Vonnegut’s wholly modernist view of reality, or of reality’s “unreality,” as Gerald Graff has put it. Once we have discovered “that reality itself is a fiction, we reassert that, in illustrating fictions, literary fictions reveal truth. . . . Literature holds a mirror up to unreality,” Graff notes, and “its conventions of reflexivity and antirealism are themselves mimetic of the kind of unreal reality that modern reality has become. But ‘unreality’ in this sense is not a fiction but the element in which we live.”28 Were Vonnegut a true postmodernist, he might be more apt to revel in the absurdity of one’s situation, but Vonnegut always endeavors to make sense of it, even where he may doubt whether there is any meaning to be found. Vonnegut is not a naive believer in what Brian McHale finds the quintessentially modernist view of the world, “an ontologically unproblematic backdrop against which the movements of the characters’ minds may be displayed,” but neither does Vonnegut embrace the postmodernist view that “there is no stable world behind this consciousness, but only a flux of discourse in which fragments of different, incompatible realities flicker into existence and out of existence again, overwhelmed by the competing reality of language.”29 For Vonnegut, again, the model of modern art obtains. The world and ourselves in it may be fractured and fragmentary, but patterns can be created (by the writer or by the individual consciousness) that give the world and our lives meaning and form, however

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provisional or strategic those meanings and forms may turn out to be. The world is “reconstructible,”30 and the mode of reconstructing this unreal reality is novelistic and literary. These concepts also form the basis for the theory of the novel that Vonnegut wants to imagine, a theory that is on display throughout Slaughterhouse-Five—theory realized in practice, one might say—and that is introduced within the narrative in terms of the Tralfamadorian version of the genre. While traveling to Tralfamadore, and tiring of reading the only available, physical “Earthling book” (Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls), with its characters who “certainly had their ups and downs, ups and downs,” Billy asks to read a Tralfamadorian novel. “Billy couldn’t read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out—in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars.” His host explains how Tralfamadorian novels work: “each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message— describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments all at one time.’31 This, of course, is what Vonnegut attempts to approximate in the somewhat “telegraphic schizophrenic manner” of Slaughterhouse-Five. It is also a narrative theory that approximates the spatial history of the Tralfamadorian view of time and the ironic cosmology of the eternal return. Jerome Klinkowitz has suggested that the “spatial turn” in literature is fiction’s response to a world in which “subject matter is said to exist, not in itself but only as the absence postulated by a system, of differences and exclusions.” In the novel, whose temporality is postulated in its very form as narrative, insofar as one reads in a certain order and the story unfolds for the reader over time, this spatial form risks undermining the work’s very substance. “Yet in today’s deconstructionist climate of difference and absence the spatial concept of various states existing in simultaneity rather than sequence is an attractive one, for it allows one to envision all those differences not as separate takes but as a coherent and instantaneous whole.”32 This spatial history becomes a way to understand the chaos of the world, to “structure the void” as Klinkowitz would have it, that still acknowledges its inherently vicissitudinous nature. Although Klinkowitz has in mind a particularly postmodernist (and deconstructionist) moment, the key touchstone for his discussion of “spatial

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form” is Joseph Frank’s analysis of it in modernist works, starting with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and moving into writings by T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Djuna Barnes, among others. In his famous essay, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” Frank argues that the temporal compression or simultaneity on display in many modernist literary productions amounts to a “spatial form” that holds temporality in temporary (ahem) abeyance.33 Referring to Joyce’s Ulysses, Frank notes that the spatial form of the novel requires the reader to reconstruct the plot “from fragments, sometimes hundreds of pages apart, scattered throughout the book . . . by fitting fragments together and keeping allusions in mind until, by reflexive reference, he can link them to their complements.”34 The temporal and psychological model here is actually a bit more like Henri Bergson’s metaphor of the cone, in Matter and Memory,35 in which the discrete elements of one’s memory are ever-present, and therefore synchronous and simultaneous, although they may be organized in more or less recognizable ways. As Deleuze explains, “The past is ‘contemporaneous’ with the present that it has been. . . . The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements that coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be, but through which all presents pass.”36 In this model, visible in the style of SlaughterhouseFive’s narrative, the spatial form of the novel replicates the experience of time in the Bergsonian, or Tralfamadorian, sense, in which all moments are present at once. That is, as with Tralfamadorian time or with Nietzsche’s cosmology of the eternal return, all matter in memory is present at the same time; it is all there now, but it is scattered throughout one’s memory in differing configurations, some of which seem more salient (or present) than others at any given instant. Similarly, when Billy becomes “unstuck” in time, he is not so much time-traveling, although time-travel seems a convenient metaphor for the process, as he is visiting different sites along that “stretch of the Rocky Mountains” in his own memory. This is closer to Vonnegut’s earlier device, the chrono-synclastic infundibulum of The Sirens of Titan, than it is to traditional time-traveling fictions, since Billy is really not leaving one present for another moment in time, but is actually present in all moments at once. This is also the case within a narrative, since Billy obviously exists simultaneously on page 75 and page 206 (or wherever). As readers, we follow Vonnegut down the rabbit hole in a certain sequence, but we also are free to flip back to an earlier page, to reread a passage or even skip ahead, and the Tralfamadorian style of Slaughterhouse-Five, while not actually encouraging

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us to do so, nevertheless enables us to think about the novel in this way. That is to say, the novel’s narrative itself proceeds through jumps forward and returns to previously covered terrain, pauses where the clock seems to stop, fast-forwards and reversals of narrative time, and so on. The famous scene37 in which Billy watches an old war movie in reverse—with airplanes flying backward while retracting bullets and bombs back into themselves, and the long, steel tubes of the Germans miraculously sucking shrapnel out of American and Allied soldiers, who became whole and good as new, and meanwhile back home, American workers (“Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work”) dismantled dangerous cylinders in factories, shipped their mineral contents off to scientists and technicians, who then return the materials to deep recesses in the earth where they could not harm anyone—this fantasy of narrative in reverse stages the ways in which Vonnegut can manipulate space-time in fiction, and serves as a model for how one may view one’s life and human history more generally. It is an ethics in which the novel as form or genre operates as the means of and the method for a good life. When Billy Pilgrim stumbles upon a group of literary critics who were gathered for a radio show “to discuss whether the novel was dead or not,”38 he inadvertently discovers more metaphysicians of the hangman, those whose views run counter to Nietzsche’s joyful wisdom crystallized in the formulation, amor fati. (Delightfully, Vonnegut appends his usual “So it goes” to the mention that “the novel” might be dead.) The cynicism of Vonnegut’s unnamed critics, referring obliquely to William Styron and Norman Mailer, discloses that their view (a postmodern view, perhaps) lacks Billy’s wide-eyed understanding of Tralfamadorian ethics. The critics provide glib answers to the question of “the function of the novel . . . in modern society,” but Billy then launches out on his story—his own novel, as it were— about Tralfamadore, and Montana Wildhack, “and so on.” And therein lies the answer, the spectacle of the novel’s function in modern society. In an astonishing turn of events, the ethical affirmation of life is thus tied to the ethos of writing, of the novel as form itself. Indeed, the eternal return finds its most suitable figure in the novel. One’s life becomes a story, one that may be told and retold in numerous ways, over and over. This insight is what Nehamas explicates in his conclusions about Nietzsche’s at once foundational and yet perplexing “thought” that is the eternal return or recurrence. The eternal return is best viewed as literary, as a work of narrative art. Not surprisingly, the exemplary novelist is a monument of high modernism, but the Proustian writer in search of lost time is

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an apt companion for the Vonnegutian who finds him- or herself “unstuck in time.” Nehamas’s remarkable synthesis is worth quoting at length: The model for the eternal recurrence is therefore not to be found in Nietzsche’s superficial reflections on thermodynamics but in his deep immersion in writing. In thinking of his ideal life on the model of a story, we would do well to think of it in the specific terms supplied by Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past. In this fictional autobiography the narrator relates in enormous, painstaking detail all the silly, insignificant, pointless, accidental, sometimes horrible things he did in his rambling efforts to become an author. He writes about the time he wasted, the acquaintances he made, the views and values he accepted at different times, his changes of heart and mind, his friendships, the ways in which he treated his family, his lovers, and his servants, his attempts to enter society, the disjointed and often base motives out of which he acted, and much else besides. Yet it is just these unconnected, chance events that somehow finally enable him to become an author, to see them after all as parts of a unified pattern, the result of which is his determination to begin at last his first book. This book, he tells us, will relate in detail all the silly, insignificant, pointless, accidental, sometimes horrible things he did in his rambling efforts to become an author. It will concern the time he wasted, the acquaintances he made, the views and values he accepted at different times, his changes of heart and mind, his friendships, the ways in which he treated his family, his lovers, and his servants, his attempts to enter society, the disjointed and often base motives out of which he acted, and much else besides. It will also show how these unconnected, chance events somehow finally enabled him to become an author, to see them after all as parts of a unified pattern, the result of which is his determination to begin at last his first book, which will relate all the pointless, accidental . . . —a book he has not yet begun to write but which his readers have just finished reading. The life of Proust’s narrator need not have been, and never was, Nietzsche’s own specific ideal. But the framework supplied by this perfect novel which relates what, despite and even through its very imperfections, becomes and is seen to be a perfect life, and which keeps turning endlessly back upon itself, is the best possible model of the eternal recurrence.39 In his blending of life and literature, Vonnegut, like Proust and perhaps Nietzsche, offers his own valuation of the eternal return as a work of fiction,

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the endless turning back and revisions of pillars of salt, who somehow find their humanity justified thereby.

Tralfamadorian Ethics In his preface to Welcome to the Monkey House, Vonnegut discusses his own writing style in terms that are unmistakably, if perhaps still only coincidentally, Nietzschean: “When I write I become what I seemingly must become.”40 Nietzsche’s subtitle for his own somewhat autobiographical Ecce Homo is “How to become what one is,” and the philosopher intends this as the proper existential project of one’s life. For both, this is accomplished through writing, and Slaughterhouse-Five presents a dramatization of this philosophy of life. In its eternal returns, its revisions of the past and its quantum leaps across space and time, the novel embodies an ethos that allows Vonnegut to cope with postmodern American life while also encouraging one to become what one is. As in The Sirens of Titan and other works, Vonnegut’s conclusion is simple and sweet. Vonnegut’s use of Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous “serenity prayer”—made all the more famous through its adoption as a sort of mantra for Alcoholics Anonymous—offers a characteristically practical, though sentimental, reading of the human condition in general. It first appears as a means of coping that Billy and his customers use to get them through whatever malaise currently troubles them, but Vonnegut’s final line in the passage underscores the degree to which the logic of something like the eternal return makes possible the ethical dimension of his own philosophy in Slaughterhouse-Five. Placed conspicuously between paragraphs referring to then-current events in the Vietnam War, Vonnegut describes the following instant: Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy’s wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE, COURAGE TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN, AND WISDOM ALWAYS TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE.

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Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.41 Vonnegut’s juxtaposition of this prayer and the fact that the past, present, and future cannot be changed offers his variation of Nietzsche’s eternal return, now embraced as a way of understanding and affirming life. Vonnegut’s second iteration of the mantra heightens the affirmation by bringing it into accord with his typically Edenic scene of love and peace. Inscribed on a heart-shaped locket, depending from Montana Wildhack’s neck and framed by Vonnegut’s crudely beautiful drawing of her round breasts and areolae, the serenity prayer thus situated gives SlaughterhouseFive its penultimate iconic image, before the final chapter’s conclusive birdsong, “Poo-tee-weet?” Perhaps Vonnegut does not go quite as far as Nietzsche would, since the Alcoholics Anonymous version of the Niebuhr prayer is not exactly as bold as Nietzsche’s Dionysian extravagance or the will to power, but the Tralfamadorian ethics that Billy Pilgrim learns and shares with the world seems to fit neatly into a practical and ethical scheme in line with Vonnegut’s earlier existentialism and his generalized critique of postmodern American civilization. With Nietzsche’s version of things, of course, this love of fate can be the only appropriate response to the question of one’s own function in the world. Encapsulating his view elegantly in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”42

Chapter 6

Anti-Oedipus of the Heartland: Breakfast of Champions

The humane fatalism of Slaughterhouse-Five suggests one way of looking at the disjointed, often painful, experience of social life in the United States in the twentieth century. The affirmation of both necessity and chance in the Nietzschean (or Tralfamadorian) view of things—that is, that the moment is structured such that it has to be this way, always was, always will be (necessity), and that there is no higher purpose or transcendent meaning to it (chance)—liberates Billy Pilgrim and the reader, making possible a pragmatic ethics of everyday life that enables one to navigate the chaos successfully. In Breakfast of Champions, however, Vonnegut presents the flipside of this affirmation, in which necessity and chance are no longer affirmed in the reassuring expression “So it goes,” but in the aleatory uncertainties of “And so on” or “etc.” Vonnegut has said that, in his original plan, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast were one book, “but they separated completely. It was like a pousse-café, like oil-and-water—they simply were not mixable. So I was able to decant Slaughterhouse-Five, and what was left was Breakfast of Champions.”1 In this latter work, what had been the “telegraphic schizophrenic manner” of storytelling gives way to a more extensive, and more bizarre, novel of schizophrenia. As such, it is not surprising that Breakfast of Champions is a turn ing point in Vonnegut’s career, and in his approach to his postmodern iconography. Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut’s clearest investigation of schizophrenia as a cultural, as well as psychological and physiological, condition. As Lawrence Broer has argued in his thorough psychoanalytic study of Vonnegut’s novels, Sanity Plea, Vonnegut’s entire career may be said to be an exploration of the problems of schizophrenia, especially of the figure of the “divided self.” The dichotomies repeatedly formulated in Vonnegut’s work— good versus evil, life versus death, yes versus no—represent his efforts to

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grapple with the schizzes of life in postmodern American civilization (or barbarism, to recall another binary form).2 “Thus it is that the dynamic psychic drama of Vonnegut’s fiction takes form—the struggle for possession of the protagonist’s agonizingly divided soul by the opposing forces of optimism and pessimism. In one novel after another, we witness the sometimes despairing, sometimes hopeful efforts of Vonnegut’s fragmented protagonists to put their disintegrated selves together again—to resist the various forms of moral escapism that paralyze their creative will and to achieve a wholeness of spirit.”3 In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut not only depicts the psychotic breakdown of its protagonist, Dwayne Hoover, but also explores the writer’s schizoanalysis of the present condition of life in the United States, complete with his own self-assessment as a novelist. My use of “Anti-Oedipus” in the title of this chapter only partly relates to the poststructuralist tour de force that is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s first volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. Deleuze and Guattari’s proposal for a schizoanalysis more suited to understanding the ways in which desire and power work in modern (or postmodern) societies bears little resemblance to the “schizoanalysis” performed in Vonnegut’s eccentric novel. Yet Breakfast of Champions presents and enacts the principle, only half-jokingly referred to in the opening pages of Anti-Oedipus, that “a schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch.”4 By bringing the reader along on the “stroll of a schizo” (Dwayne Hoover), as well as on the peregrinations of Kilgore Trout, of Vonnegut himself (as the Creator of this “Universe”), and of many other characters, Vonnegut is able to explore the chaos of the social and spiritual fields without recourse to models or patterns or systems designed to create an artificial sense of order—no karasses here, for instance. The result is a bizarre and thrilling performance, in which the presentation and the representation of Vonnegut’s postmodern iconography come across as almost immediate experiences. As a formal experiment, Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut’s boldest and most ambitious novel, as well as the one most likely to be considered postmodern. The schizophrenic narrative, far more so than in Slaughterhouse-Five with its more modernist sense of cosmic overview, embraces the Heraclitean flux and establishes, if only for a moment, the supremacy of the endlessly conjunctive over the inevitable forces of limitation and closure.5 That is, over the forces of making sense. However, this proves to be a ruse, as the collagelike narrative style and the deliberate openendedness are themselves elements of a more complete effort at form-giving or sense-making. By the end of Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut establishes his own autobiographical and political authority, thereby concluding his

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work of schizoanalytic “ethics,” and venturing forth with inquiries into national politics in subsequent novels.

Breakdowns in the Signifying Chain In the middle of Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut—as the author of and as a character within the novel—is sitting in the cocktail lounge in Midland City, peering out “at a world of my own invention,” and he mouths the word schizophrenia. “The sound and appearance of the word had fascinated me for years. It sounded and looked to me like a human being sneezing in a blizzard of soap flakes.”6 This description of the word, divorced from any particular meaning it might denote or connote, nevertheless relates to an aspect of the word’s meaning after all. Schizophrenia involves a dissociation between words and their meanings; for example, in confusing the meaning of one word for another, or in taking the sound or image (like “sneezing in a blizzard of soap flakes”) for its meaning. This characterization of schizophrenia, the gap between signs and their meanings, is established as the theme of the novel. More than the actual mental breakdown of Dwayne Hoover or any diagnosable psychological conditions depicted within the novel, this meditation is what makes Breakfast of Champions so schizophrenic. In Jacques Lacan’s famous formulation, schizophrenia can be understood as a breakdown in the signifying chain. That is, to use the terminology of Lacan’s patented blend of Freudian psychoanalysis with Saussurean linguistics, the schizophrenic can no longer process signs in the way that normal “readers” of those signs could. The chain of signification, whereby we “naturally” (it seems) process the easy slippage of the signified beneath a signifier, and thus understand clearly things that are essentially metaphors or metonyms, is disrupted in the mind of the schizophrenic. In Breakfast of Champions, the breakdown in the signifying chain—in particular the unmooring of meanings from words or from the association of ideas—is highlighted throughout. In “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan discusses how, for a “normal” person encountering signs in the world, there is “an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier” (un glissment incessant du signifie sous le signifiant).7 What this means, in simple terms, is that in communicating, we normally and easily allow for metaphorical slippages between any given signifier and what it signifies. In Lacan’s own humorous example, two children hop off a train, each viewing otherwise identical doors on the platform, and one thinks they’ve arrived in the town of

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“Ladies,” while the other corrects him: “Idiot! . . . Can’t you see we’re at Gentlemen.”8 The fact is, in order to interpret the signifier “Ladies” attached to a door, the mind needs to have allowed for the “natural” slippage of signified under the signifier to know that “Ladies” does not signify a town or a door or even a sex, but a more complicated idea of what someone (limited to a particular class of female someones) is permitted or expected to do behind this door so labeled. Nothing in the word “Ladies” inherently suggests this supplemental meaning, and yet we all—almost all, perhaps, with only rare and embarrassing exceptions—know what these “signs” mean. Over the course of the events presented in Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut suggests that it is not merely the schizophrenic Dwayne Hoover who misunderstands the signs, but an entire culture. The problem of postmodern American society seems to be not so much the pervasive meaninglessness of so much of it but the misplaced and overemphasized meanings attributed to it. Vonnegut imagines the United States in the early 1970s as a nation of schizophrenics. Fredric Jameson, in “The Ideology of the Text,” explains how Lacan’s notion of “slippage” affects the concept of schizophrenia, which Lacan describes as “a disease of language in which connections have broken down”: continuity in speech, for Lacan, is a function of what he calls “the slippage of signified” (le glissement des signifies), in other words, that relative semantic flux that allows us to disconnect a meaning from one word, or signifier, and attach it to its synonym. For Lacan, indeed, the world of the schizophrenic is quite the opposite of meaningless: if anything, it is too meaningful; each instant, like each signifier, is a closed and full meaning in itself, from which it becomes increasingly difficult to lay a bridge to the subsequent moment of time. So the schizophrenic’s reality gradually comes to approximate . . . a formal and syntactical succession through time that does not correspond to any real progression or perspective at the level of its meanings or signifieds. As Jameson notes, this leads to a situation where “there are no longer any names! and the old conventional words and unities have been swept away in a flux of experience in which everything is by definition already new.”9 Examples abound throughout Breakfast of Champions. Kilgore Trout, in particular, as the “sanest” person in this schizo-America, never fails to notice the ways in which signifiers and signifieds have become stuck, slipping and then catching awkwardly, like a faulty gear in some semantic

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clockwork. For instance, hitching a ride with a truck driver, whose truck bears the company name, “PYRAMID,” in large capital letters on the trailer, “Trout wondered what a child who was just learning to read would make of a message like that. The child would suppose that the message was terrifically important, since somebody had gone to the trouble of writing it in letters so big.”10 Later Trout asks the driver why the company’s owner had named it “Pyramid”: “Why would anybody in the business of high-speed transportation name his business and his trucks after buildings which haven’t moved an eighth of an inch since Christ was born?” The driver’s peevish answer is “He liked the sound of it.” Trout then imagines a sciencefictional world in which words are appreciated for their sounds alone, and “were useless as conveyers of information, because nobody knew or cared what the meanings of words were anymore.”11 Later Trout discovers the same problem with a fire extinguisher named “Excelsior!” (the Latin for “higher”), while riding in a Ford Galaxie. (“ ‘Why would anybody name a fire extinguisher Excelsior?’ Trout asked the driver. The driver shrugged, ‘Somebody must have liked the sound of it, he said.”)12 As Jameson says, when the system of signification breaks down, “we have a schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers.”13 Vonnegut seems to delight in those disconnections between words and meanings, between signifiers and whatever are signified by them, not only in Breakfast of Champions, but throughout his work. (This perhaps accounts for his persistent returns to fanciful origins of, especially, dirty words, like jerk, geek, twerp, and so on.) In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut’s playfulness is abetted by his crude illustrations, such that he can provide visual aids in showing the vastly different meanings associated with the linguistic signifier “beaver,” for example. Given the types of publications (e.g., Black Garterbelt) in which so many of his short stories and novels have appeared, Kilgore Trout mourns when the last beaver dies and wonders whether Marshall McLuhan has any theories as to “the relationship between wide-open beavers and the sales of books.”14 Vonnegut’s deliberate crudeness underscores the breakdowns in the signifying chain that he finds endemic in postmodern American culture more generally. Over and again, the tragedies of human existence are the result of failures to communicate, as illustrated humorously (and crudely, again) with a Kilgore Trout story about a peaceful alien who brings to the planet Earth the vital knowledge to end all war and to cure cancer, but is brained with a golf club as he tries to communicate, in the only language used on his home planet—“a planet where natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing.”15 In Breakfast of Champions, nearly all the pain and anxiety felt by

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the cast of dozens derives from miscommunications, from reading the signs incorrectly or from missing the signs entirely. We see it in Dwayne’s interactions with Francine Pefko (misunderstanding her motives for wanting to open a “Kentucky Fried Chicken” franchise), Harry LeSabre (fearful that his transvestitism has been discovered), Patty Keene (longing to marry Dwayne), and on and on. The title of the book itself, repeated as the little joke told by Bonnie MacMahon whenever she delivers a martini to a customer, is a play on the essentially miscommunicative nature of language itself. The supplemental meanings given to seemingly meaningless things— the nonsense of the “Goodbye, Blue Monday” slogan, for instance—merely confound things further. Other seemingly meaningless expressions take on real meanings, as when Trout’s offhand remark that whoever had attacked him might well have come from Pluto. The newspapers run with this, declaring that a “Pluto Gang” is terrorizing the city, and some young Puerto Ricans adopt the title as a sufficiently fearsome name for their group, thus making the “Pluto Gang” really real after all.16 The ways in which the chaos of daily life can be ordered themselves are chaotic, in flux, and slippery. Dwayne Hoover’s bout of echolalia also offers an example that comports well with Deleuze’s sense that the stammerer renders language more schizophrenic and, hence, creates “a minor language within our own language.”17 Deleuze finds the constant repetitions and conjunctions, the “AND . . . AND . . . AND, stammering,” to be the basis for schizophrenic creativity, as well as the basis for an empiricist apprehension of reality itself.18 This, of course, is what makes Vonnegut’s postmodern iconography a fundamentally novelistic or literary project. Despite his frequent recourse to a language of medicine, psychology, or anthropology, Vonnegut’s much vaunted anti-literary writing is still very much grounded in literature proper. Similarly, it is worth noting that Deleuze and Guattari’s theories in Anti-Oedipus really derive from literary, rather than scientific or philosophical, models. Although Guattari certainly had experience with schizophrenic patients in his clinical work, Deleuze and Guattari clearly state their affinities for literary “diagnoses” and explanations, rather than scientific ones. Their examples come from Samuel Beckett, D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, writers who replace, and are set against, psychologists like Sigmund Freud (above all), R.D. Laing, Wilhelm Reich, and others. “We think that Lawrence and Miller have a more accurate evaluation of sexuality than Freud.”19 What the literary writer does in exploring the flux of schizophrenic experience is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s view, superior to what the scientist does in trying to understand it, to give it a fixed identity.

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In Vonnegut’s terminology, this may be the difference between imposing order on chaos and adapting to chaos, which is how he describes his own personal project in Breakfast of Champions. This seems an appropriate ethical position, in the strong sense of “how to lead a good life.” In his preface to the English-language edition of Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault provocatively declares it to be “a book of ethics,” a guide to living which he calls (with a tongue-in-cheek reference to a seventeenth-century priest’s work on leading a devout life) “an Introduction to a Non-Fascist Life.” By fascism, Foucault does not merely mean the historical regimes of Mussolini and Hitler, “but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”20 This is Vonnegut’s aim as well, and in his formal elaboration of Breakfast of Champions, he attempts to embrace the flux in a particularly novelistic way.

Adapting to Chaos Vonnegut attempts to establish Breakfast of Champions as a kind of anti-novel. This is not meant to be a technical term, although Vonnegut shares something of the vision Jean-Paul Sartre had in mind when he wrote that “antinovels maintain the outward appearance and outline of the novel. . . . But this is only the better to deceive us; the aim is to pit the novel against itself, to destroy it under our very eyes (at the same time as it would seem to be erected), to write the novel of a novel that does not, that can not develop.”21 Vonnegut is critical of what he understands to be the traditional novel, of “old-fashioned storytellers,” and in his most formally eccentric novel, he specifically indicts that older form while displaying what he takes to be his example of how his new novel (his nouveau roman?) will better address readers and their world. As he sits in the bar, mouthing the word schizophrenia and regarding the roomful of his own characters, Vonnegut comments on a particularly despised one, a famous novelist named “Beatrice Keedler,” who (Vonnegut says) “had joined hands with other traditional storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.”22 This, Vonnegut concludes, is why so many people behave like madmen, dangerous and unhappy and out of touch with “real” life: “They were doing their best to behave like people invented in story books.” Then, essentially describing the novel that he is both writing and participating in, Vonnegut explains how he now views his own role as a

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novelist: “I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.”23 Vonnegut expresses his opposition to “traditional” storytelling, and diagnoses storytelling as the cause of so much mental illness. Indeed, he dramatizes it by having Dwayne Hoover’s final push-over-the-cliff of sanity come from his reading a story by Kilgore Trout, a fanciful piece of science fiction—not unlike much of Vonnegut’s own writings—but which was “mind poison to Dwayne.”24 In reading a book that seemed to describe the overarching system that could explain how the world works, Hoover, in his madness, suddenly finds that he now understands everything. Now his life makes sense because he can imagine himself as a character (the character, in fact) of a novel, just as Vonnegut suggests so many Americans already do. “This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: it was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.”25 The nontraditional storytelling, or non-storytelling, in Breakfast of Champions is displayed most vividly in its formal composition. Vonnegut’s direct presence—more than in Cat’s Cradle (of course, we know who “Jonah” really was all along) and Slaughterhouse-Five—is the metafictional element that stands out, especially once he confronts his own character and alter ego in the final pages. Also significant are the many drawings and casual observations, which operate like a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, a defamiliarization or estrangement effect, reminding the reader in no uncertain terms that this is an artificial production, not a story to get swept up in.26 The fundamental organizational model for Breakfast of Champions is thus the collage, which is a self-consciously arranged amalgamation of diverse fragments, distributed in space (or time) in a manner that creates another whole image, however provisional or transitory. Collage may be said to substitute for both the older narrative realism of what Vonnegut calls “traditional” storytelling and the mythic organization of pre-modern works (and the loss of whose sense of wholeness and integrity is mourned in modernist productions like those of Joyce and Yeats). With the collage’s mash-up of different genres and forms, a new genre might emerge, or at least a new way for the reader to imagine the work presented. As Jameson has noted, “At its worst, collage results in a kind of desperate pasting together of whatever is at hand; at its best, however, it operates as a kind of foregrounding of the older generic models themselves, a kind of estrangement effect practiced on our own generic receptivity.”27 With Vonnegut’s odd collage and “shunning” of storytelling, Breakfast of Champions would be a new type of writing altogether, a kind of anti-novel.28

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Or would it? Vonnegut’s critique of the traditional storytelling of most novels is rooted quite strongly in his belief that those novels misrepresent the truth. That is, these novels deliver a false image of an orderly world that simply does not exist. In misleading readers, traditional novelists are guilty of the same sort of sin that Kilgore Trout had inadvertently committed when he allowed his own “bad ideas” to infect Dwayne Hoover. Trout’s novel, Now It Can Be Told, which had made the reader (here, Hoover) believe that there was a distinct order to everything in the universe, and that the reader alone had the free will to make any difference in the universe, is thus related to the view that “real life” has beginnings, middles, and ends, with key characters or role players, and so on. Although Dwayne’s “bad chemicals” combined to make the situation spectacularly explosive in Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut’s message is that all of us are misreading the signs by trying to graft them onto a larger narrative structure that does not exist. Storytelling facilitates breakdowns in our signifying chain. As Vonnegut would have it, novels make us schizophrenic. Vonnegut’s critique hardly seems new at all, given the circumstances. After all, another madman who suffers from a fairly extreme breakdown in the signifying chain stands at the threshold of the modern world and of the modern novel. Don Quixote (another fifty-year-old like Vonnegut, incidentally) suffered from reading books that made him believe in all sorts of unrealistic things and inappropriate ideas. After his first sally, we recall, the priest and the barber of La Mancha try to help their old friend, by gathering and burning the offensive books of chivalry that have poisoned Quixote’s mind, so that they will inflict no further damage on him or others. Among those books spared is one that, “as far as its style is concerned . . . is the best book in the world. In it knights eat and sleep and die in their beds and make wills before they die, and many other such things that are usually omitted from books of this sort.”29 Vonnegut’s disrespect for Beatrice Keedler’s creative work stems from the same dismissal of unrealistic plotting of everyday life, versus the realistic chaos, or tedium, of a life in which one might just die in one’s sleep or need to make a will. Vonnegut, like the pragmatic priest and barber in Don Quixote, wishes “all writers would do” as he intends to do, so citizens will no longer harbor illusions about the world, mistaking windmills for giants, as it were.30 However, Vonnegut’s plan to “bring chaos to order” essentially replicates the traditional, as well as modernist, novelistic attempts to present a more accurate or aesthetically useful picture of reality.31 This is a goal of the mimetic arts in general. In other words, contrary to his condemnation of the inauthenticity and artifice of traditional novels—which attempt to bring

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order to the chaos of everyday life—Vonnegut’s solution is simply to improve upon Beatrice Keedler’s technique. By writing novels that are truer to life, “adapting to chaos” rather than attempting to render it orderly, Vonnegut is proposing not an anti-novel, but a perfected novel, a “truer” realism of the sort “traditional” novelists had been attempting all along. “If all writers would do that [i.e., ‘bring chaos to order’], then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done.”32 Breakfast of Champions, for all its formal weirdness, is rather traditional after all. Its goal is verisimilitude, and it attempts to capture a social reality precisely as did eighteenth-century English novelists, nineteenth-century French realists, or twentieth-century modernists. Vonnegut’s goals are thus directly in line with the “old-fashioned storytellers” who use the novel form. Indeed, one could easily contrast Vonnegut’s project in Breakfast of Champions with, say, Georges Perec’s nearly contemporaneous project in Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien (or An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris),33 which contains the writer’s observations of everything he sees (buses, passersby, colors, etc.) on a particular street corner (Place Saint-Sulpice) over two days; such a comparison would certainly demonstrate just how much more traditional and also “emplotted” Vonnegut’s narrative is. Although it is misleadingly open-ended, Breakfast of Champions presents a narrative trajectory in which several characters are clearly shown to be more significant than others, in which at least two much anticipated meetings between them are delivered, and at least one climax is achieved. Yes, Aristotle might object to the many odd “secondary” characters (like Elgin Washington or Khashdrahr Miasma), the loose threads (e.g., will Wayne Hoobler make it on the outside?), and numerous asides (e.g., did we really need to know the measurements of every male character’s penis?). But as chaos goes, Vonnegut’s narrative seems quite orderly. Perhaps “adapting to chaos” is not all that different from “life as literature,” after all, once one realizes the extent to which both life and stories continue on and on.

Etc., or, the Sense of an Ending Vonnegut’s critique of “old-fashioned storytellers” is really a critique of the mistaken view that life has “a beginning, a middle, and an end.” That is, Vonnegut objects to the emplotment of reality by writers, who ought rather to acknowledge that life just happens. In its form, Breakfast of Champions seems to embrace this Heraclitean flux in a social, almost personal sense,

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inasmuch as Vonnegut wants the reader to understand how un-plot-like our lives really are. This is why, Vonnegut says, “I begin so many sentences with ‘And’ and ‘So,’ and I end so many paragraphs with ‘ . . . and so on.’ And so on.” In Vonnegut’s view, “an abbreviation which means sameness without end” is “the proper ending for a story about people”: ETC.34 True to his word, Vonnegut does allow the large, hand-drawn “ETC.” to be the final word in Breakfast of Champions.35 The open-endedness of et cetera as an ending, while making its philosophical point succinctly, is also a ruse, a game played by an author who wishes to make a point but who also is a master craftsman of narratives or plots, that is, of beginnings, middles, and ends. The fact is that, even though our lives may just keep going without any transcendental plot to guarantee their ultimate meaning or direction, a novelist is still (as Aristotle designated the poet) a “maker of plots.”36 This is something Vonnegut would agree with, knowing that we are all “makers of plots,” whether or not we want to be, since our stories are ultimately means of making sense of our lives in the most rudimentary, day-to-day, street-level ways. Indeed, Vonnegut’s “ETC.” ending reminds me of a line from Edward Said, complaining about “the tyranny of starting a work in media res” in literature. Said remarked that the famous epic starting point, in medias res, is “a convention that burdens the beginning with the pretense that it is not one.”37 Vonnegut’s ending “burdens the ending” in a similar way. In what is one of the most elegant and striking examinations of the phenomenon of “the ending” in fiction, a study to which Said’s book is a respectful counterpart, Frank Kermode points out that “Men, like poets, rush ‘into the middest,’ in medias res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to life and to poems.”38 Emplotment is not merely the function of a poet or novelist, but something we do anyhow, from which we might be inclined to agree with Jameson that narrative is “the central function or instance of the human mind.”39 Kermode takes the seemingly simplistic example of the clock’s imaginary tick-tock as a fitting symbol for the ways that humans impose order upon the chaos—or better, perhaps, from Vonnegut’s perspective, the ways that humans adapt themselves to the chaos—of life. As Kermode says, when we think of the ticking of a clock, We ask what it says: and we agree that it says tick-tock. By this fiction, we humanize it, make it talk our language. Of course, it is we who provide the fictional different between the two sounds; tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock is our word for an end. We say that they differ. . . . The

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fact that we call the second of the two related sounds tock is evidence that we use fictions to enable the end to confer organization and form on the temporal structure. The interval between the two sounds, between tick and tock is now charged with significant duration. The clock’s tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organization that humanizes time by giving it form; and the interval between the tock and the tick represents purely successive, disorganized time that we need to humanize.40 In this sense, then, Vonnegut’s view of our lives as merely continuing is partly true, but the human response to such a life inevitably entails creating or adopting stories that help make sense of these endless et cetera. Indeed, this must be a large part of what it is to live: imagining beginnings, middles, and ends, which can help us make sense of the tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-etc. of our existence. But, then, we already knew this from Bokonon and Cat’s Cradle. Such fictions—Foma!—are what gives meaning to our lives, and hence it is proper that writers, even those such as the loathsome Beatrice Keedler in Breakfast of Champions, continue to create stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Vonnegut, too, does that, notwithstanding his “ETC.” at the end. When he (the character within the novel) destroys Kilgore Trout’s mind, before making him whole once more, the old science fiction writer cries out “Make me young, make me young, make me young!” This is an acknowledgment of the bittersweet realities of what lies between timid and Timbuktu, and it highlights the ways in which Breakfast of Champions is itself about the dangerous slippages (Lacan’s glissements) of sense-making in our lives.41 Which is to say, also, that Breakfast is a book about the dangers of storytelling. Taking open-endedness, and open-beginningness, as simple facts of the human condition, Vonnegut then attempts to replicate the aims of realism in the most modernist manner, by using innovative compositional techniques to create a novel that can capture the experience of human existence in narrative form. The blending of fact and fiction, inner dialogues and external actions, words and images, and so on (not to mention the philosophical position Vonnegut implies in the phrase “and so on”), Vonnegut reinforces the author’s own role in arranging and rearranging the elements of the book, and in manipulating or—to use a term less freighted with untoward intentions—guiding his readers to adopt particular beliefs and conclusions. Ironically, then, the bizarre form of Breakfast of Champions—with its schizophrenic blending of signifiers and signified, pictures and words, fictional characters and “real” ones like Vonnegut himself, and so on—places an

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ever greater emphasis on the author himself (or itself). The very artificiality of the form highlights the involvement of the God-like author, “the Creator of the Universe,” who then impresses his image upon everything that follows. This is ironic because it was to have been the case that, with such postmodern narrative techniques, the author—who had been so neurotically and subjectively present in the great modernist productions, like Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past—was to have evanesced or dissipated amid the chaotic flux of pure language. On the contrary, it seems, Vonnegut’s most overtly “postmodern” novel reinforces his individual subjectivity as author all the more, precisely because of this collagelike narrative. As Jameson, referring to the “estrangement” effect in science fiction, points out, “the arbitrariness of collage as a form has the further result of intensifying, and indeed transforming, the social function of the author himself, who is now felt to be the supreme source and origin of whatever unity can be maintained in the work. The reader then submits to the authority of the author in a rather different way than in the conventions of realistic narrative: it is, if you will, the difference between asking to be manipulated and agreeing to pretend that no human agency is present in the first place.”42 That is, rather than willingly suspending disbelief in order to receive the story “naturally,” the reader is made all-too-aware of the author’s control and artifice, hence the Brechtian “estrangement effect” of such narrative form. For Vonnegut, this also signals his deliberate and calculated efforts to engage more directly with the world, to openly embrace his autobiographical and political role. With the only seemingly inconclusive ending of Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut inaugurates another phase of his career, one in which autobiography and politics move from the wings onto center stage. The “schizo out for a stroll” in Midland City, Ohio, has opened up a path for Vonnegut’s more mature reflections on the relations among these sad, storytelling humans, which leads him to further reflections on the imagined and imaginary communities—granfalloons—formed by and among these ticktick-ticking people.

Chapter 7

Imaginary Communities, or, the Ends of the Political: Slapstick and Jailbird

“Make me young, make me young, make me young!”—the (almost) final line, but not the final image or word, of Breakfast of Champions—may well be an apt sentiment for a midlife crisis, full of noisy desperation, like a half-court buzzer-beating heave just before halftime. It also punctuates the emotional turning point in Vonnegut’s career as a novelist. Appearing at the midmost point in Vonnegut’s career as a novelist, on the final page of his seventh novel, halfway to his total of 14 (although he certainly did not intend things to play out in this way), Kilgore Trout’s thrice-uttered cri-de-coeur speaks to the impossible dream of a wise but weary old man. While it is not frequently commented upon, Vonnegut was really an old writer, someone whose great productivity came after what is typically considered “middle age.” Of his 14 novels, 8 were published after he was 50 years old, and 11 appeared after he had turned 40. By that age, Edgar Allan Poe was dead. Herman Melville had pretty much given up on writing (but for some self-published poetry); The Confidence-Man, his last novel, not counting the posthumously published novella “Billy Budd,” was published when Melville was 37 years old. And Vonnegut’s predecessor, Ernest Hemingway, published nearly all of his major work, except for The Old Man and the Sea, by about age 40. Vonnegut himself acknowledged as much in a speech he gave in 1969: “You have summoned me here in my sunset years as a writer. I am forty-six. F. Scott Fitzgerald was dead when he was my age. So was Anton Chekhov. So was D.H. Lawrence. So was George Orwell, a man I admire almost more than any other man.”1 Including the novel that appeared that same year, Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut published 9 of his 14 novels after this “sunset,” and the last almost 40 years later! So it makes sense that, notwithstanding Vonnegut’s great appeal to a younger audience, his work is typically characterized by an older man’s perspective, with its cautiousness or cynicism, its bittersweet recognition of where paths paved by good intentions inevitably lead, and its patient indulgence of what it knows

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are likely bad ideas. Also, there is Vonnegut’s canny certainty of where bad ideas come from, the familiar territory of the artist. Breakfast of Champions, as noted in the previous chapter, is a transitional work. Written “as a fiftieth birthday present” to himself, the novel is a midlife crisis in its own right, where Vonnegut announces his intent to “clear my head of all the junk in there.” Acknowledging that this is the sort of thing that “white Americans” should do, he declares his intent for that novel: “I think that I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.”2 To the extent that Vonnegut, or “Philboyd Studge” as he signs off in the preface, succeeds in this endeavor to return to an almost uterine new beginning, a tabula rasa, or pristine, uncluttered attic, his subsequent novels must bear witness. The first thing one notices about the works of the reborn novelist in Slapstick and Jailbird is that these novels are more overtly and directly political than any of Vonnegut’s earlier writings. Vonnegut had always been somewhat political, of course, but these two post-Watergate novels—each of which mentions President Nixon by name—may be said to be about politics in a way that none of his previous novels were. None of his subsequent novels would devote such attention to politics as a means of social change or social justice in the way that these do. Indeed, Slapstick is narrated by the President of the United States (the last one), a man who ran for that office with the sole aim of instituting a utopian scheme, suggesting that the lives of an entire country could be changed for the better through a process set in motion by a successful politician. Jailbird is narrated by a devoted public servant who has just served his prison sentence for his Watergate-related crimes committed while serving in Nixon’s administration, and despite his embittered world-weariness, Walter Starbuck maintains a fervent, if now waning, belief in the power of the political process and of organized corporate and governmental entities to do good in the world. Starbuck also becomes involved in a kind of utopian project, one rooted in economic and political bases, in which Americans are to be spared the indignities of the postmodern condition thanks to another imagined community. In Slapstick and Jailbird, Vonnegut meditates upon the role and ends of the political in postmodern American life. It is all the more striking, then, that these may be Vonnegut’s least optimistic and saddest novels. In Slapstick, Wilbur Swain’s efforts to save the imagined community of the nation-state descends into the horrors of ethnic conflict in and among these new imaginary communities based on the fantasy of family romance. In the end, mind-numbing slavery is considered the greatest hope for Americans who wish to lead a happy life. In Jailbird,

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the astonishing naiveté of the megacorporate utopia underscores the degree to which nothing is to be done. Vonnegut, through the memories of Starbuck, finds that politics—the great hope of his youth and still the noble work of his middle age—becomes an absolute dead end. As in other novels, but here with the political sphere especially illuminated, Vonnegut ultimately finds that the ways to truly make sense of the world is to escape from it, retreating into an aesthetic dimension. My use of the expression imaginary communities, of course, derives especially from Benedict Anderson’s influential study of the rise and spread of nationalism, as nations come into being and reinforce themselves as “imagined communities,” often with no other, more tangible links connecting the various “national” peoples to one another.3 The fact that nations are largely imaginary is what underlies Vonnegut’s view that “any nation, anytime, anywhere” is merely a granfalloon. But I also want to register the sense, elaborated brilliantly by Phillip Wegner in his remarkable Imaginary Communities,4 that the political force of utopian discourse partakes of the same substance as nationalism. Vonnegut’s most ostensibly political novels function as reflections on, and critiques of, utopia. The “national fantasy” that is America is supplemented by a utopian model that Vonnegut simultaneously employs and deconstructs, offering possible solutions to real problems only to show that these imaginary solutions are no better than the contradictions they had been intended to resolve. Once the granfalloonery of Slapstick’s artificial families and Jailbird’s corporate socialism are revealed to be somewhat less than harmless, Vonnegut and the reader retreat from the political altogether.

The Family Romance as Political Strategy Slapstick, like Mother Night and later Jailbird, Bluebeard, and Hocus Pocus, among others, is presented as a first-person memoir. As with those others, this novel has a somewhat isolated protagonist-and-narrator, but one who longs for a sense of community or belonging; in this case, this impulse—a kind of national impulse, notwithstanding the “man without a country” images so frequently invoked—is extended to a national level as a widespread political program. In Slapstick, Vonnegut rediscovers the power of the granfalloon, which had been lampooned (or, at least, unfavorably contrasted to the more significant karass) in Cat’s Cradle. The novel’s subtitle, or alternative title, which is also its protagonist’s campaign slogan when he runs for President of the United States, is “Lonesome No More!” When

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Wilbur Swain rediscovers the plan that he and his sister had developed as idiot savant children years earlier, he is moved to make it the basis for his solution to the national political and economic malaise. Swain sums up the plan for the reader neatly, for—although many of Wilbur and Eliza’s brilliant ideas had been complicated and difficult to understand—he declares this great social experiment to be perfectly simple: Our Utopian scheme for reorganizing America into thousands of artificial extended families, however, was clear. . . . I found it absorbing. It said that there was nothing new about artificial extended families in America. Physicians felt themselves related to other physicians, lawyers to lawyers, writers to writers, athletes to athletes, politicians to politicians, and so on. Eliza and I said these were bad sorts of extended families, however. They excluded children and old people and housewives, and losers of every description. Also: Their interests were usually so specialized as to seem nearly insane to outsiders. “An ideal extended family,” Eliza and I had written so long ago, “should give proportional representation to all sorts of Americans, according to their numbers. The creation of ten thousand such families, say, would provide America with ten thousand parliaments, which would discuss sincerely and expertly what only a few hypocrites now discuss with passion, which is the welfare of all mankind.”5 One hesitates to consider most intrafamilial discourse to be parliamentary in nature, but Vonnegut does provide an example later to prove his point. What interests me is that Vonnegut puts forward granfalloonery, in the form of artificial extended families, as the solution to society’s ills. In effect, this involves its own type of nationalism—we recall that a good example of a granfalloon is “any nation, anytime, anywhere”—here reinforced with a sort of arbitrarily formed kinship or ethnicity. Although I have characterized this plan, charitably, as creating granfalloons that people can become a part of and can use to help in organizing their lives, Vonnegut’s insistence that these new ways of linking formerly unrelated people be familial in nature is somewhat problematic. In Cat’s Cradle, for instance, the karass had been understood, not as a mystical or supernatural “family,” but as a “team.” A group of people, connected in God-only-knows what way for God-only-knows what purpose, is understood to be doing God’s work. The granfalloon (or “false karass”) is the same thing,

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a team, not a family, but one which does not actually do God’s work, although its members (Hoosiers, the Communist Party, the General Electric Company, or, again, “any nation, anytime, anywhere”) may think otherwise. To use the young Swains’ own examples, it hardly seems likely that physicians, lawyers, athletes, and so on, see other physicians (et cetera) as “family” members, although metaphors of kinship or brotherhood may be used in strictly metaphorical ways. Indeed, what ties these professionals to their fellow professionals, as the comment about “specialization” suggests, is quite the opposite of a familial connection, as it requires education, training, the learning of vocabularies and skills, and other such activities that remove one from the sphere one had been simply born into (the family, in other words), and that launch one into other areas of granfalloonery. In other words, Slapstick’s utopian program draws on something more visceral, and—as it happens—more dangerous, than harmless granfalloonery of even the national variety. By insisting on using the family romance (as Sigmund Freud called it) as the basis for the utopian project, Vonnegut or Wilbur Swain project an entire libidinal framework that, in many ways, actively undermines the goals of political utopias, including the simple one of leading a happy life, free from anxiety and want. By the term, “family romance,” I do not really mean to invoke Freud’s specific theory or usage; however, some of the content of Freud’s notion does overlap with the design the President Wilbur Swain and with his hopes for success. In the traditional definition of family romance,6 Freud talks about a child’s desire to imagine that he or she is not the child of his or her particular parents, but the long-lost child of other parents, especially powerful or famous ones, like royalty. That is, in order to avoid the pain and banality of their own lives, children might fantasize that they are merely misplaced, that they really belong to other, better families. If only they had access to their real family elsewhere, they could escape from the randomly assigned (though, ironically, biological) family they find themselves in. In Freud’s use of the term, the “family romance” had to do with the aetiology of neurosis, somewhat related to the Oedipal complex, whereby a child dreams of a different paternity, or perhaps even different familial lineage altogether, in order to displace himself—as with so many of Freud’s theories, the child is male, but then “a little girl is a little man”7—from his own father and mother, which of course also frees him to pursue the mother as a sexual object of desire. Notably, perhaps especially, for Slapstick in which something like an incestuous sexual bond seems to be at the heart of the twins’ hermaphroditic unity, the family romance also frees the child to

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pursue his sexual interest in his sister, since the romance removes the presence of the incest taboo. As Freud points out, and this is also fodder for so many other “romances” and fairy tales, the family romance frequently involves the fantasy of exalted or grandiose paternity, of belonging to a family much greater than one’s own, related to royalty, for instance, or to some famous personages. This too is a theme throughout much of Vonnegut’s fiction: the shame felt at being a “loser” or Nobody, the desire to attach oneself to a noble past, as when Fred Rosewater, suddenly proud of the Argyll socks he is wearing, delights in the discovery that he might be related to the seventeenth-century eighth Earl of Argyll.8 And, as we quickly learn, the family romance as a political strategy leads to something akin to neurotic behavior in Wilbur Swain’s post-national America, replicating, extending, and fortifying the prejudices and violence of the older model. Elaborating his plan on the campaign trail, Wilbur explains to an interested but skeptical voter just how the artificial families will make his life better, partly by giving him brothers and sisters and cousins whom he may importune as he will, but also partly by freeing him from giving a “flying fuck” about anyone in any other artificial family. Having just explained that the man’s middle name might be “Uranium-3” under the new system, Swain assures him that he will now have “family” everywhere, even in Wyoming. Then he offers another benefit: “And consider how much better off you will be, if the reforms go into effect, when a beggar comes up to you and asks for money,” I went on. “I don’t understand,” said the man. “Why,” I said, ”you say to that beggar, ‘What’s your middle name?’ And he’ll say ‘Oyster-19’ or ‘Chicadee-1’ or ‘Hollyhock-13,’ or some such thing. “And you can say to him, ‘Buster—I happen to be a Uranium-3. You have one hundred and ninety thousand cousins and ten thousand brothers and sisters. You’re not exactly alone in this world. I have relatives of my own to look after. So why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooon?’ ”9 Vonnegut, and Swain, seem to believe that, now that you have a large and extended “family,” you have the right—and are in fact in the right—to turn your back on any fellow man not personally “related” to you, not part of your carefully circumscribed clan. Some Utopia! Certainly, the “Lonesome No More” campaign is not meant to deny or deprive anyone of the biological relatives that they already had, but neither

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is the campaign is simply set up for those without families, small or large. In fact, by creating these artificial families, President Swain has encouraged the infantile, and neurotic, fantasy that Freud had identified, since the name-and-number “families” established by Swain’s program almost immediately (and predictably, because necessarily) form themselves into a hierarchy. Just look at how pleased the lowly dishwasher, Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio is to learn that he is in the same “family” as the President; but then again, as we learn, “Carlos was a really stupid man.”10 The introduction of the fabled Hatfields-and-McCoys feud underscores just how ideal this utopian “Lonesome No More” campaign is. Byron Hatfield—who “never was big for them newfangled names,” knowing full well that they did not offer anything “new” at all—shoots an innocent and faithful messenger, by accident, because he “thought he was Newton McCoy.” Hence, the great utopia of Swain’s America effectively consigns all Americans to the fate of a family “which had been at perpetual war with another such family since 1882.”11 Again, I say, some Utopia! One is inclined to agree with the assessment of the Chinese ambassador, referred to in the novel as “Fu Manchu” (per Vonnegut’s usual irreverence and level of sensitivity to non-European ethnicities or races). “Fu Manchu had found it ridiculous, incidentally. ‘This is truly the work of children,’ he said.”12 Of course, Swain (and perhaps Vonnegut himself) seems to include this remark as a way of showing how the coldly pragmatic Chinese agent would not value so simple and sweet a plan. However, the reader may suspect that Fu Manchu was correct, as we find the worst aspects of badold-nationalism, now elevated to the level of blood-feuds, in the activities and prejudices of the new family members. For example, although Swain is delighted to discover that, owing to “some statistical freak,” “There was an extraordinary concentration of Daffodils in and around Indianapolis”— Vonnegut’s own hometown, no less—Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa and her husband found the inevitable tribalism or prejudice too much to overcome: “It was a Daffodil town. You weren’t anything if you weren’t a Daffodil.”13 More disturbing still, such Daffodil-nationalism must certainly degenerate into a kind of genocidal feud (again, perhaps ironically prefigured in the Hatfields-and-McCoys), since there is not only elitism but apparent bloodlust when it comes to other families. As one volunteer for the army announces proudly, “There’s nothing I’d rather do than kill me some ‘Sooners,’ long as they ain’t Daffodils.”14 “Sooners” is the name of a granfalloon, designating people from Oklahoma, but the logic of this man’s comment has little to do with state-based or geographical identities. Presumably, the Indianan might have been just as eager to kill “Hoosiers,” so

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“long as they ain’t Daffodils.” Swain notes that he is rebuked for such a thought, but his own premise that the wars between Michigan and Oklahoma could not turn into wars between Daffodils and Chipmunks is belied by Vera’s earlier comment, as well as by a great deal of human history. If Swain truly believes that wars will become more humane, since “everyone will have relatives on the other side,”15 then Fu Manchu was right about this being “the work of children.” After all, the only reason Swain is present for this Daffodil-only meeting is that he is helping to unite a “displaced” Daffodil with his geographically convenient extended family members. If Indianapolis really is “Daffodil City, U.S.A.,” then how long before they raise a Daffodil army to wage war with some other newly formed “ethnic” groups.16 Swain, or Vonnegut, is thus incorrect when he reports that “that was the end of the Nation. It became families, and nothing more.”17 This is not the end of the nation, but the reconstitution of a new and more virulent form of hypernationalism. Here Vonnegut has seemingly removed the form of American politics, only to uphold a barer version of its effects, many of which are baleful in the extreme. The upshot of this apolitical politics is a paradoxical condition in which one’s most cherished freedoms are impediments to happiness, and true happiness can be found only in a condition of slavery. Not metaphorical, but actual slavery. Vonnegut finds that human contentment can be found where the hideous freedom of human thoughts is extinguished, as Wilbur notes in visiting Vera, the affable holder of willing, even enthusiastic, slaves. “I encountered Vera herself on the steps of the townhouse. Her slaves were all over in what used to be United Nations Park, planting watermelons and corn and sunflowers. I could hear them singing ‘Ol’ Man River.’ They were so happy all the time. They considered themselves very lucky to be slaves.”18 Neither Vonnegut nor Swain can be insensible to the cultural significance of, and controversy over, the Oscar Hammerstein lyrics to “Ol’ Man River,” which include overtly racist caricatures (even by 1927 standards), and specifically employ what we have come to call the “N-word.” Paul Robeson’s alterations to the lyrics, by which he attempted to restore some dignity to the minstrel-show bigotry of the original, merely underscore the point. But Vonnegut’s (or Swain’s) racial insensitivity is not the point here.19 Rather, the point is that Vonnegut presents slavery as the desirable choice of free people—although people who would have to cede both their freedom and their identity to become so happy. “They were all Chipmunk-5’s, and about two-thirds of them were former Raspberries. People who wished to become slaves of Vera had to change their middle names to Chipmunk-5.”20 Yes, and formerly enslaved humans at an earlier stage of

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American history also had to give up their names, but in Slapstick’s postapocalyptic New York, they do so willingly and enthusiastically. Elsewhere in Slapstick, Vonnegut presents a reason why slavery is preferable to freedom, and why Wilbur Swain should think that the voluntary capitulation to a familial superstructure would become the utopian solution to man’s sorry fate. “Eliza and I believed then what I believe even now: That life can be painless, provided that there is sufficient peacefulness for a dozen or so rituals to be repeated simply endlessly. Life, ideally, I think, should be like the Minuet, the Virginia Reel or the Turkey Trot, something easily mastered in a dancing school.”21 This view of life precludes anything like solving problems, promoting justice, ending the sufferings of people, other than perhaps alleviating the pain of having to think and act for oneself. Oh, to be a slave with nothing to do but what you are told, and only that, forever! Swain’s philosophy is shockingly similar to that espoused by the factions Vonnegut presumably opposes: corporations and governments that would assign everyone identifiable roles and categories (“ethnic” groups, even) and have them march in time according to a prewritten tune that plays in an endless loop. Of course, what is valued here, as in other novels, is not slavery but rather easy fit, to become a cog in the machine—or, as Beatrice said in The Sirens of Titan, to be “used” by someone, for something.22 The ironic conclusion of Vonnegut’s reflections of postmodern American Realpolitik is that the condition initially decried in Player Piano is in fact utopian (and eu-topian), if only each person would settle neatly into a somewhat fixed sociopolitical role, with almost automatic functioning, and no hope (and hence, no dread) of change: a nation of happy “Reeks and Wrecks” and self-satisfied engineers. Of course, Swain’s utopia, more like Eliot Rosewater’s, aimed at making the wretched of the earth feel a bit less wretched, less “lonesome.” It was not intended to reshape social relations and the polis entirely, as in the visions of Plato’s Republic or More’s Utopia, but to mitigate the suffering of actually existing American life without doing much to transform the mode of production or cultural formations that have gone into creating and sustaining that condition. In this, as in Vonnegut’s other works, the sentimentalized, even clichéd iconography—the Edenic quasimarital bond, the family, the small-town (because limited strictly to one “family”) town meeting, the simple, almost agrarian life—comes to stand in for the political. Pastiche, in other words, takes precedence over politics as the wholly imaginary community of Swain’s family romances supersedes any practical or collective action. The actively political participation of someone like

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Jailbird’s Walter Starbuck—whether as an idealistic young socialist, a crisply efficient New Deal internationalist executing his duties as part of the Marshall Plan, or the dutiful public servant in Nixon’s White House—has little place in the America of those Daffodil-11s.

The Joint-Stock Company as Political Strategy Vonnegut’s most visibly and thoroughly political character, the one who so ardently embraces the ideals of revolutionary politics and who holds the heartfelt belief in the ability of persons of goodwill to use the machinery of government for the commonweal, is also the most pathetic and listless of Vonnegut’s many protagonists and fictionalized alter egos. Walter Starbuck is, in this sense, the very avatar of Vonnegut’s skepticism about and general disavowal of the political process as a means for establishing a better life. Although Vonnegut frequently refers to himself as a socialist, and undoubtedly supports many of those socialist policies and ideas that Starbuck also holds dear, the dramatization of Jailbird’s narrative indicates the degree to which the ideals of revolutionary socialism, the best hope of a modernist response to the terrors of the modern world, appear to be incompatible with the postmodern condition of the United States at the end of the twentieth century. Jailbird offers a political-economic solution to the miseries of postmodern American life, just as Slapstick offered its utopian family romance as an imaginary solution to the real problems of excessive individualization and fragmentation for a society in need of community. Jailbird’s fascinating solution, however, is not revealed until very near the end of the novel, and by that point it is revealed to be a failed idea even as it is explained. The “solution” is Mary Kathleen O’Looney’s marvelous, but flawed, idea to overcome capitalism by creating the largest multinational conglomerate corporation in the world, then leaving all of its stock to “the American people” in her will. By drawing our attention to the absurdity of the solution, and doing so only after the relentless reckoning of good intentions gone wrong and the pointless martyrdom of sainted socialists, Vonnegut marks his complete fictional break with the political. Jailbird does have its saints, after all, most notably, the martyred Sacco and Vanzetti, immigrant workers and activists militating for the working class, later executed on dubious grounds and under shameful circumstances. Throughout Jailbird, the ghosts of the heavenly Sacco and Vanzetti remind us of what Abraham Lincoln famously called “the better angels of our

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nature.” Yet, like angels, they remain abstract and mysterious. Another martyred saint, Jesus of Nazareth, is also invoked, as his Sermon on the Mount—in which he assures his audience that the meek will inherit the earth and that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the poor, or poor in spirit—is cited as the justification for the socialist dream and as the denouement for narrative as a whole. The message seems to be that such views are otherworldly, better suited for an afterlife than this our own. As if to reinforce the view, Walter Starbuck presents the example of a “genuine saint,”23 Kenneth Whistler, the union organizer and communist hero of Starbuck’s youth. Real-world saints, the ones who live, do not always remain so sanctified as those, like Sacco, Vanzetti, and Jesus Christ, who have the advantages of tragic, untimely deaths. For, however noble in the abstract, Whistler becomes an abusive drunk, driving Mary Kathleen away; his union becomes a corrupt outfit run from prison by a “lifetime president” and his daughter “from her villa in the Bahamas.”24 The real-world socialists, as distinct from the martyrs, are revealed to be lovably or pitiably foolish, if not much worse. In Jailbird, the great utopian plan unfolds without the narrator’s direct knowledge at the time, although—again, as usual in Vonnegut’s narrative technique—Starbuck’s narration, in retrospect, necessarily involves keeping his readers in the dark about what is actually going on. That is, Starbuck (the character) does not know until nearly the very end of the novel that the entire RAMJAC Corporation was established as a large-scale socialist project, on a “workers of the world unite” scale, even though it had seemed to be the epitome of cold-hearted, hypercapitalist accumulation and production. Starbuck (the narrator) already knows all about this, since he is now a well-placed cog in that grand machinery, President of the Down Home Records subsidiary of RAMJAC. But, of course, despite the fact that the “workers” now own most of a conglomerate that owns most of everything, Vonnegut (or Starbuck) grimly acknowledges that ownership by the working class in no way liberates that class. In his dismissive critique of O’Looney’s communist “business plan” that left around 19 percent of all businesses in the United States to the American people, Starbuck says: “Most of those businesses, rigged only to make profits, were as indifferent to the needs of people as, say, thunderstorms. Mary Kathleen might as well have left one-fifth of the weather to the people.”25 Starbuck’s, O’Looney’s, and perhaps even Vonnegut’s naiveté are also on display in Jailbird’s description of the government’s sale of assets once it becomes apparent that “the American people” (hence, the United States government) own RAMJAC, but are in no position to operate RAMJAC’s

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businesses. With an almost ancient or medieval vision of how the world economy works, Vonnegut describes a cargo ship carrying “about an acre of bales that looked like cotton,” but were actually “bales of American currency from Saudi Arabia, cash on the barrelhead, so to speak, for the McDonald’s Hamburgers Division of RAMJAC.”26 The absurdity of a ship’s cargo full of paper money arriving as cash payment for a major corporation undermines any seriousness that the critique of American society in the era of multinational capitalism could hope to have. Although the sell-off of state assets, the denationalization of formerly socialized or nationalized operations, was a timely topic in the late 1970s, the dismissal of the significance of these real economic issues in Vonnegut’s work is palpable. Notwithstanding the hypothesis of some versions of nineteenth-century Marxism, ownership of the means of production does not equal control of those means, and certainly does not amount to socialism. As the business analyst Peter F. Drucker acerbically noted, in a technical sense, workers in the United States already owned the “means of production” by the 1980s: “Instead of the old-line capitalist, in developed countries pension funds increasingly control the supply and allocation of money. In the United States, these funds in 1992 owned half of the share capital of the country’s largest businesses and held almost as much of these companies’ fixed debts. The beneficiary owners of the pension funds are, of course, the country’s employees. If Socialism is defined, as Marx defined it, as ownership of the means of production by the employees, then the United States has become the most ‘socialist’ country around—while still remaining the most ‘capitalist’ one as well.”27 Of course, it is rather unlikely that the American workers in the recessions of 1979 (the year of Jailbird’s publication), 1992, or 2010 can take much pride of ownership in the nation’s collective assets, and this is not the socialism of Marx, of Eugene Debs, of Sacco and Vanzetti, or of a young Walter Starbuck or Mary Kathleen O’Looney. Rather, the triumph of multinational capitalism is the concluding image of Jailbird, and its ineluctable perseverance is the coda. As Starbuck concludes, “The economy is a thoughtless weather system—and nothing more. Some joke on the people, to give them such a thing.”28 Thus does Vonnegut’s most overtly radical character and narrator become an apologist for a political and cultural quietism. With Slapstick and Jailbird, both dealing more directly with the political economy than his other novels, Vonnegut seems to conclude that the political, whether understood in terms of governmental organization or economic structures of power, is largely irrelevant and more likely an impediment to general welfare. Both novels present imaginary communities, artificial

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families, or shared stakeholders in a grand enterprise, but these utopian schemes ultimately offer little comfort, before disintegrating into either postapocalyptic horrors or an even more pervasive and abject sense of resigned indifference. In Slapstick, the massive, nationwide psychotherapy of Wilbur Swain’s “imaginary communities” remedy, which of course was intended to alleviate the alienating effects of life in modern or postmodern America—with its petty rivalries and indecent behavior toward one’s fellow human beings— only results in greater splintering of man from fellow man, with even greater petty rivalries (like the war between the King of Michigan and the “families” who oppose his reign) and even less healthy relations. The United States is completely destroyed, indirectly by the Chinese (another example of the mildly distasteful xenophobic undercurrent in much of Vonnegut’s work) and more directly by the establishment of artificial communities based on randomly established ties of kinship. The fellowship of man becomes a disgraceful, large-scale Hatfield-and-McCoy–like bellum omnium contra omnes. Similarly, in Jailbird, the powerful and inspiring ideals of Walter Starbuck are reduced to unworkable but well-intended banalities, and the grand socialist experiment is disclosed as a fool’s errand, one that leaves no one happy or better off, with the exception perhaps of “Foreigners and criminals and other endlessly greedy conglomerates,”29 as well as lawyers and bureaucrats and other government-types (of the same ilk as the young and idealistic Harvard graduate Walter Starbuck, presumably). The homiletic invocation of the Sermon on the Mount, in this context, serves to remind the audience that the hopes for those poor, or poor in spirit, do not lie in the political engagement in the kingdoms of this world, but in the hereafter.30 Vonnegut’s post-Watergate novels explore the political sphere, and find its promises empty, unfulfilled, and unable to be fulfilled. Vonnegut’s rejection of politics here might be termed “postmodern,” in the sense that the principles of such politics are undergirded by the Enlightenment doctrines he calls into question.31 But what is really at stake is the problem of politics as an activity, as a plan or scheme. It is a critique of utopia that harkens back to Vonnegut’s earliest work. The failure of the revolutionaries in Player Piano, we recall, failed not because the army came in to slaughter them (though one certainly could have) or because of internal corruption of their ideals, but as a result of the human, all-too-human condition. Utopia, for Vonnegut, has to fail, because of the flawed human beings that create and dwell within it. Vonnegut’s deep-seated humanism—still misanthropic, but more patient and accepting of (the perhaps inevitable) failure than

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before—is on display in the “political” novels as well. It is not that politics cannot achieve its ends, but that any politics is necessarily human, and thus doomed to thwart itself. At this point, Vonnegut’s novelistic iconography of postmodern American experience abandons the political.

After the Political I certainly do not mean to suggest that, after Slapstick and Jailbird, Vonnegut is no longer political. There is plenty of political commentary and satire in the novels that follow, as well as in the “autobiographical collages,” Palm Sunday and Fates Worse than Death, and, of course, in the pieces he published for the political magazine, In These Times (and republished in A Man Without a Country). I do mean to suggest, however, that Vonnegut’s approach to politics takes a different form, particularly in the novels. Vonnegut is no longer willing to countenance a utopian project without disdain, and his political energies are redirected from the public sphere of civil service and economics into the much more private or subjective domain of art or into the relatively impersonal realm of evolutionary biology, the subject of his novels in the 1980s. As the post-Watergate hangover gives way to the Reagan era, Vonnegut turns away from the political and seeks ways of understanding postmodern American life in other domains. As a matter of Vonnegut’s own literary history, writ small on the scale of a single late-twentieth-century novelist, this is something like the process that Fredric Jameson describes in his consideration of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, where the attempt to represent a history (or, as Jameson would have it, “History” with a capital “H”) falters in the face of the artist’s autoreferentiality, in the writer’s reflections on writing, which necessarily get in the way of the writing itself. The effect, as one moves from the literary historical epoch of realism to that of modernism, is a turning inward of the political: But unlike in much of later modernism, this movement of autoreferentiality is in Conrad neither gratuitous nor complacent. The resonance of this book springs from a kind of unplanned harmony between this textual dynamic and its specific historical content: the emergence of capitalism as just such an always-already-begun dynamic, as the supreme and privileged mystery of a synchronic system which, once in place, discredits the attempts of “linear” history or the habits of the diachronic mind to conceive of its beginnings. Nostromo is thus ultimately, if you like, no longer a political or historical novel, no longer a realistic representation

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of history; yet in the very movement in which it represses such content and seeks to demonstrate the impossibility of such representation, by a wondrous dialectical transfer the historical “object” itself becomes inscribed in its very form. After the peculiar heterogeneity of the moment of Conrad, a high modernism is set in place. . . . The perfected poetic apparatus of high modernism represses History just as successfully as the perfected narrative apparatus of high realism did the random heterogeneity of the as yet uncentered subject. At this point, however, the political, no longer visible in the high modernist texts, any more than in the everyday world of appearance of bourgeois life, and relentlessly driven underground by accumulated reification, has at last become a genuine Unconscious.32 Of course, in Vonnegut’s case, the modernist or postmodernist narrative techniques underscore the degree to which politics had already been rendered a matter for the unconscious. That is, in Slapstick and Jailbird, the reader sees only the retrospective, yet powerfully poker-faced, narratives of those who already know the score, but who delay in reporting it; these narrators know, therefore, the results of any political activity described in the books, but refuse to raise or answer the question that is absolutely essential to a political program (i.e., “Will it work?”) until it is too late. The “pokerfaced” narrative is not really a bluff, but it does require the reader to consistently reflect upon the artificiality of the novel, and on the ways that the writer—whether seen as Vonnegut or one of the fictional narrators of these final seven books (Wilbur Swain, Walter Starbuck, Rudy Waltz, Rabo Karabekian, Leon Trout, Eugene Debs Hartke, and, in Timequake, a fictionalized Vonnegut himself)—explicitly arranges the plot just so, presumably in order to achieve intended effects upon the audience itself. Thus, the political is driven, not merely into the unconscious, as Jameson would have it, but into a separate sphere of activity and thought altogether. Like the post-Conrad modernists, the end of the political in Vonnegut involves an inward-turning movement, but it participates in a social order that allows Vonnegut to explore his idealism, while also avoiding the utopianism he now denigrates. As his “imaginary communities” falter, Vonnegut has recourse to another sphere of the imagination. The evacuation of the content of the political becomes all the more apparent in the sublimation of political energies into aesthetic ones. This will have, in Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard, predictable consequences. In presenting first a failed, even fraudulent, painter who redeems himself (somewhat), along with a playwright whose works are both a sham and an unexpected triumph and then

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a disaster, and then in presenting a successful, even celebrated artist who succumbs to the vicissitudes of history before revealing his own hidden secret pertaining to that history, Vonnegut indicates that art may succeed where politics has failed. From the political realism of the 1970s, and its dead ends, then, Vonnegut turns to an aesthetic, abstract idealism in his first novels of the next decade.

Chapter 8

Abstract Idealism: Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard

That was yet another instance, though, of putting into words what could not be put into words. . . . 1

Throughout his career as a novelist, Vonnegut meditates upon the role and value of art in postmodern American society. A devotee of the arts, Vonnegut nevertheless finds art, like science, to be a dangerous thing, something that frequently leads to disaster and despair when employed injudiciously. The fine arts often have unintended consequences even when produced with the most benign intents. Thus does Howard Campbell’s skills as a dramatist reinforce the most brutally racist ideologies of the Second World War in Mother Night; thus does Kilgore Trout’s science fiction lead to the violent abuses of Dwayne Hoover’s rampage in Breakfast of Champions. In Deadeye Dick, Vonnegut offers an extreme view of this in a remarkable ruse of history whereby one artist saves another from starvation, thus making possible his eventual rise to power some 20 years later and, as the presumable consequence, the horrors of war, genocide, and so on. As a counterpart to the world historical disasters of World War II or the neutron bombing of an American city, Vonnegut offers the deeply personal vision of the damaging, and potentially healing, powers of art in the “hoax autobiography” of Rabo Karabekian. In Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard, the abstract idealism of the arts becomes the guiding thread, as well as the object of criticism, for Vonnegut’s postmodern iconography. For this reason, I am departing briefly from my chronological examination of Vonnegut’s novels. Between Deadeye Dick (1982) and Bluebeard (1987), Galápagos (1985) presents a different treatment of these issues, with its Darwinian model and hopeful overcoming of Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism, as I will discuss in the next chapter. In Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard, Vonnegut explores most directly the role of the artist in American

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society and the ambiguous effects of art, particularly modern art, on people’s lives in the postmodern condition. The utopian aspect of the arts, in which a neutral space for the imagination is supposedly established outside of the “real world” spaces of politics and history, is called into question, and Vonnegut’s celebration of abstract expressionism in visual art is countered by a rather old-fashioned vision of a profoundly mimetic and strictly communicative art. In presenting several variously failed or successful artists— Otto and Rudy Waltz, Rabo Karabekian, and Circe Berman, among a few others—these novels offer examples of the function of aesthetics in our lives and in society, and provide warnings against the lure of the arts as a means of achieving happiness. Just as Vonnegut forecloses on the hopes for politics and economics in the post-Watergate novels, here Vonnegut concludes that art cannot save us. In the end, Vonnegut establishes that the abstract idealism inherent in these artistic visions falters in the face of more concrete and quotidian realities, often finding expression in the literary arts, but particularly in realistic writing. With Rudy Waltz’s dreadful play, Vonnegut dramatically reveals the extent to which the aesthetic quest for Shangri-La is doomed to failure, and rightly so, just as Rabo Karabekian’s unveiling of “Now It’s the Women’s Turn,” his hyperrealistic and soul-cleansing masterpiece, delivers him from his abstracted and hermetic isolation from his fellow humans. In their endings, the two novels diverge dramatically, however, insofar as Deadeye Dick attempts at last to raise the dead, while Bluebeard is able to bury them completely in order better to get on with the business of living.

Neutrality In his preface to Deadeye Dick, which—like all such prefaces since the reissue of Mother Night in 1966—is written in his own voice, Vonnegut offers the reader clues to understanding the symbolism of the novel, a “legend” to help one read the map that he will unfold. Chief among the figures is “an unappreciated, empty arts center in the shape of a sphere,” which symbolizes “my head as my sixtieth birthday beckons to me.”2 With so much of the fictional Midland City, Ohio, including many of its buildings and residents, still in place after the ten-year interim, Vonnegut appears to be making a self-conscious allusion to Breakfast of Champions, in which that literal arts center (the “Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts”) would have its disastrous grand opening, and in which Vonnegut’s symbolic “arts center” is emptied of all of its excess junk, “the assholes, the flags, the underpants”

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removed in time for Vonnegut’s fiftieth birthday.3 In Deadeye Dick, the emptiness of the arts “center” has another, more bathetic sense, which is the utter inconsequentiality of the arts, even as a mere lifter of spirits. According to a noble tradition within American literature, art is itself utopian, offering a neutral space between the real world and the ideal. This is what Nathaniel Hawthorne had in mind when he described the space available to the “romance-writer”: “a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary, may meet and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us.”4 As Jonathan Arac has pointed out, this desire for a neutral space, apart from the direct concerns of daily life in the United States, was a key aspect of what was to become literary narrative, a precursor to modernism and the basis for considerations of the novel as a form of art (rather than of mere entertainment or a pastime).5 With the 1970s and its oppressively unhopeful political and economic situations behind him, Vonnegut may well have desired to explore this neutral space of the arts, and to do so with a neutral participant-observer. In Deadeye Dick, “neutrality” is the constant theme. “Neuter,” from the Latin ne-uter, means “neither one nor the other,” and this sense of rejection of alternatives is present in Vonnegut’s depiction of the artist in Deadeye Dick. Rudy Waltz, the novel’s narrator, describes himself as a neuter, by which he at first seems to mean a separate sexual type, neither homosexual nor heterosexual. Vonnegut, in his “Preface,” interprets this “neutered pharmacist” as a symbol of his “declining sexuality.”6 But it becomes apparent that Rudy’s status as a neuter, as a neutralized figure, has more to do with his overall comportment toward life itself than with his love life in particular. After his terrible tragedy with the misfiring rifle, Rudy absents himself (almost!) from “the herd” of mankind, to become “a perfectly uninvolved person, to become a perfect neuter.”7 Rudy further makes his point by mentioning the sexless Fred T. Barry, who would have been “the grandest neuter I ever saw,” but for the fact of the immense pleasure he took in attending events with his mother and for his general joie de vivre: “If he liked any part of life that much, he couldn’t march in the great parade of neuters in the sweet by-and-by.”8 Rudy’s parade comment is based on his “funny idea” that all the neuters should one day “come out of the closet” and have their own grand parade, at which he would unfurl his banner, as wide as Fifth Avenue and bearing a single word: EGREGIOUS. “Most people think that word means terrible or unheard of or unforgiveable. It has a much more interesting story than that to tell. It means “outside the herd.” Imagine that—thousands of people,

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outside the herd.”9 One also thinks of the parade of neutrals that Dante describes in Canto III of Inferno, where those who would not choose sides, choosing neither good nor evil—as Rudy Waltz says, “Neuters don’t love anybody. They don’t hate anybody either”—are forced to chase after blank banners while stung by wasps and gadflies, outside the gates of Hell.10 Having no place in the world or even in Dante’s tripartite otherworld, the Neutrals are forever outside the herd of humanity. Outside the herd, the artist is seemingly neutral as well. Deadeye Dick presents several artists, but most notable are the narrator Rudy, who defies his own expectations and seeming neutrality to become a playwright, and his father, Otto, who is the exemplar of not only a failed artist but of the failure of art itself. The story of the young Otto, who spends time as an artist in fin de siècle Vienna (where he befriends a young, starving artist named Adolf Hitler), offers a world-historical backdrop against which to judge his own ludicrous personal life. Indeed, it gives Vonnegut an occasion once more to speculate about the ruses of history and the phenomenology of spirit writ large, as Otto Waltz probably saves Hitler’s life by purchasing a painting from him at an unreasonably generous price. “So there is a chance that, if it weren’t for my father, Hitler might have died of pneumonia or malnutrition in 1910. . . . Think of that: My father could have strangled the worst monster of the century, or simply let him starve or freeze to death. But he became his bosom buddy instead. That is my principle objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.”11 As Vonnegut points out, those working in the arts, as in the sciences (à la Cat’s Cradle), may well make the most egregious mistakes. Otto Waltz was not only a bad artist, but gave all artists a bad name, apparently. Late in the novel, Rudy learns of a comment about his father made by a fellow artist from Ohio, which is all the more ironic given the circumstances: “Otto Waltz should be shot. He should be shot for seeming to prove the last thing that needs to be proved in this part of the world: that an artist is a person of no consequence.”12 Of course, Otto’s life and art have severe consequences for all in Deadeye Dick. The most horrible mistakes involve the aestheticization and fetishization of firearms, the terrible parenting in allowing a 12-year-old Rudy access to a roomful of weapons, and his unexpected and boisterous assumption of the blame for the largely foreseeable consequences of these errors. This spectacle, more pathetic but just as dramatic as his earlier embarrassing scene that drives off the lovely Celia, seals his and Rudy’s fate. As Rudy’s brother, Felix, points out, their father’s misguided attempt at a noble gesture, taking responsibility for Rudy’s accidental killing, was “the first truly consequential adventure that life had ever offered him.”13

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The consequences of the failed artist’s actions are felt most acutely by Rudy, who settles into the nonlife of a neuter. He, too, discovers himself to be an artist when he writes a play for a contest which, much to his own surprise, wins. The prize is to have that play produced in New York City, Rudy’s great moment as a “successful artist.” At first, delighted at the opportunity to be a real artist—a storyteller—he almost shrugs off his neutrality and engages in something like living. Finding his voice as a storyteller draws Rudy out of his neutrality, but only briefly, and for all of his subsequent views on the importance of stories, he himself finds their artificiality as useless, ultimately, as his father’s unsuccessful career in the visual arts. Just before his locally celebrated play is about to open, and close, to spectacular failure in Manhattan, Rudy draws the parallel himself: “Father had had his studio, with its dusty skylight and nude model in Vienna, where he had found out he couldn’t paint. Now I had my name up on a theater marquee in New York City, where I found out I couldn’t write.”14 The play, to be sure, is dreadful. The story is about a simple Midwestern farmer who, enamored by James Hilton’s tale of Shangri-La in Lost Horizon, sets off for Katmandu in search of it. The fact that Rudy’s favorite local hero (appropriately named John Fortune) went on this quest, suggests another form of utopian escapism, as his own teacher points out, referring to his dream of being a writer as “your own Katmandu.”15 Rudy concedes that the entire reason he kept working on this play was to reach the final lines, words that actually came from the final letter sent by John Fortune back home, words that Rudy says “so much deserved to be spoken in a theater”: “To all my friends and enemies in the buckeye state. Come on over. There’s room for everybody in Shangri-La.”16 During the rehearsal for his play, called Katmandu, Rudy discovers that even he knows nothing about what he meant in writing it, and that he knows nothing about what John Fortune could have meant by actually embarking upon the quest. When the actors or director ask Rudy about this or that line, he responds with phrases like “My Goodness—I wonder what I meant by that.” The lead actor reminds him that his character says the line, “I’m looking for Shangri-La,” 34 times, and that he practically says nothing else. This actor then points out the terrific contradiction in the play’s climax, where John Fortune knows he is dying but also fervently believes he is in Shangri-La. It will make no sense for him to utter the final line Rudy so wanted to be said on stage, since, throughout the play, Fortune has been saying “that nobody dies in Shangri-La.” “Seventeen times,” in fact.17 Rudy acknowledges that the play really was, as his teacher had suggested, his own quixotic quest for Shangri-La, his own attempt to escape the reality of being

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“Deadeye Dick” and leaving the neutered nonlife of Ohio behind him. “I no longer cared about the play. It was Deadeye Dick, tormented by guilt in Midland City, who had found old John Fortune’s quite pointless death in Katmandu, as far away from his hometown as possible, somehow magnificent. He himself yearned for distance and death.”18 Writing plays, like setting out for the ends of the earth, is merely an escape from life. In Rudy, we are reminded of another, far more successful—but, again, ultimately deluded and defeated—playwright in Vonnegut’s corpus, Howard W. Campbell, Jr. In Mother Night, Campbell’s role as a writer makes his narrative suspect, and the more so when one learns that he is willing to dramatize and stage those lies. As the “editor” of his memoirs (“Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.”) puts it in a memorable caveat lector, “To say that he was a writer is to say that the demands of art alone were enough to make him lie, and to lie without seeing any harm in it. To say that he was a playwright is to offer an even harsher warning to the reader, for no one is a better liar than a man who has warped lives and passions onto something as grotesquely artificial as a stage.”19 To the credit of Rudy Waltz, at least he is a bad playwright, a failed artist, who is perhaps incapable of lying well, no matter how hard he tries. The mini-dramas he stages in the novel, each presenting a scene that would have caused Rudy some trauma or embarrassment, are means of turning unpleasant realities into something “grotesquely artificial.” These little dramas—like the one in which he witnesses the fight between Felix and his wife, before definitively causing their break-up once he comes onto the stage itself—are aesthetic means of distancing himself from the real, emotionally fraught world. They are in fact ways of rendering himself neutral once more. Rudy does provide another type of narrative, a nontraditional form of storytelling based in a practical art far removed from the overwrought aesthetics of Viennese studios or Broadway stages. I am thinking of his many recipes, the detailed instructions for creating manmade works of art whose principal function is to nourish . . . and not in some artsy-fartsy, metaphorical way, but simply to be tasted, ingested, enjoyed, and, in the end, excreted. They are sort of like Kilgore Trout’s brief, disposable stories that he writes and throws into garbage cans in Timequake, those ephemeral writings which testify to the lasting power of artistic force or human creativity (poesis, perhaps) while acknowledging the evanescence of the artwork itself. These recipes may also offer the comforting image of reliable, straightforward directions that will lead to an intended result—quite the opposite, in other words, of the condition of life itself, which so often can lead such egregious mistakes (saving a young Hitler’s life, for instance). One may also recall

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Wilbur and Eliza Swain’s theory, in Slapstick, that the key to human happiness lies in being able to endlessly repeat simple rituals, like dance moves. For Rudy, when faced with the ghastly unpredictability of real life and the unpleasantness so often experienced in it, these recipes offer a counternarrative to life, a practical escape from it (as when he imaginatively “cooks” almond macaroons while visiting his parents’ graves). Rudy thus takes some comfort in storytelling, but not in any real meaningfulness associated with it. Along with the recipes, Rudy takes the most pleasure in scat singing, in uttering meaningless syllables—“Foodly yah, foodly yah. Zang reepa dop. Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”—as another means of escape, “a good way to shoo the blues away. . . . And the miles went by, and the years went by.”20 In fact, Vonnegut suggests that the recipes themselves may function as space-time-skipping scat songs, when he refers to them as “musical interludes.”21 This vision of meaningless storytelling as an appropriate escape from life will be subverted in Bluebeard, and it is profoundly antithetical to the affirmation of life in Slaughterhouse-Five, as the stories written by the Tralfamadorian novelist “produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.”22 But the antipathy toward meaningful storytelling of the erstwhile playwright and storyteller, Rudy Waltz, goes further still, as he suspects that the unhappiness of most people lies in the fact that their “story has ended,” but their life continues on. Suicides like Ernest Hemingway or Celia Hoover simply could not bear “inhabiting the epilogue,” and others, like Otto Waltz, whose “story” ended the day he took responsibility for his son’s inadvertent double-homicide, simply carry on a ghostly existence—living on after their story should have ended. Rudy, or Vonnegut, even suggests that the story of the United States of America should have ended in 1945, “when it was the most powerful nation on earth, when it was going to ensure peace and justice everywhere, since it alone had the atom bomb.”23 A neutron bomb, an appropriately neutral atomic bomb, eliminates all of the living things from Midland City, leaving the inanimate or dead undisturbed. In the vocabulary Rudy uses, those whose “peepholes” had not yet opened and those who had yet to become “undifferentiated wisps of nothingness” once more, are presumably undisturbed. One possible exception may be found in ghosts, those who are not living to be sure, but not allowed to be “undifferentiated wisps of nothingness” either. They are the true neuters, neither living nor quite dead. The depopulation of a city ought to leave many ghosts, but only one is actually mentioned, and he has to be raised from the dead by another artist who—like a writer or storyteller—can dredge up the past in order to bring it into a sort of life, a half-life of existence in

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death. This is not a pretty final image for Deadeye Dick, this spectral zombie brought into uncertain existence by the voodoo magic of narrative, forced to continue on in an epilogue, long after the story should have been over, muddling through in the never-ending Dark Ages. Unlike the resurrected corpse of Rabo Karabekian in Bluebeard and the friendly spirit of Leon Trout who presides over Galápagos, the ghosts in Deadeye Dick do not create art, lasting or ephemeral, that attests to the value of living, but keep searching for a Shangri-La. The two ghosts identified, one by Vonnegut in his preface and the other by Rudy in the final pages of the novel, each search for something lost. Each seems to need it to live, and each fails to find it, over and over again. Vonnegut mentions a ghost in his favorite Haitian hotel, “a young white man in a white jacket, possibly a medical orderly of some kind,” who “is said to follow the same route every time it appears. It comes in through the back door, searches for something in a piece of furniture which isn’t there anymore, and then goes out the front door.” Meanwhile, Rudy’s Haitian friend raises the ghost of Will Fairchild, barnstorming aviator who died because he did not have a parachute, and Rudy invents the legend that this ghost must be roaming around the vacant town in search of his parachute.24 In each case, the revenant engages in a fruitless search, a quest for an impossible Shangri-La, which is also the neutral space promised by an escapist view of the aesthetic. It is a powerful abstraction, one that essentially extracts the spiritual from the human. In Bluebeard, Vonnegut abandons this neutrality as he attempt to exorcise these ghosts and restore art to its most human, all-too-human place in the real world.

Abstract Expressionism and the Real Vonnegut had frequently depicted artists of various types in his earlier novels, of course, but not until Bluebeard does he specifically employ a professional, visual artist as his protagonist and narrator. Established as the autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, written as he approaches his eighty-first birthday and on the recommendation of his vivacious new friend, Circe Berman, the novel deals more directly than any other with the role of modern art in modern, or postmodern, American life. As a leading figure in the most influential and specifically American aesthetic movement known as “abstract expressionism,” Karabekian disparages the “kitsch” of so much of American culture, and longs to strip away the unpleasantness of human beings to find a core essence, abstracted and removed from the messy world

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of human interactions. His art is not about words, since, as he puts it, real, “serious” art, “why and how a painting came to be,” “could not be put into words.” In Bluebeard, Vonnegut reveals this sentiment to be “bushwa,”25 and shows that putting things into words, communicating about them with one’s fellow man, is an art far exceeding the grandest dreams of abstract expressionism. Like a number of Vonnegut’s protagonists, secondary characters, or alter egos, Rabo Karabekian appears in more than one work. Before Bluebeard’s autobiographical account of his life, Karabekian had a small, but rather significant, role in Breakfast of Champions. And, in this case, Karabekian appears as himself, as it were, not just as a repeated name, like “Francine Pefko” (Dwayne Hoover’s secretary and lover, but a typist from the “girl pool” who worries about “magic” in Cat’s Cradle), “Khashdrahr Miasma” (the inept young doctor from Bangladesh, and the interpreter for the Shah of Bratphur in Player Piano), and “Kazak” (a vicious Doberman pinscher guard dog, and Winston Niles Rumfoord’s space-and-time-traveling canine companion in The Sirens of Titan, as well as Selene Macintosh’s seeing-eye dog, “Kazakh,” in Galápagos). That is, the Rabo Karabekian who so irritates, then enchants, the Ohioans in the Midland City Holiday Inn in Breakfast of Champions, appears to be the same abstract expressionist artist and the same person as Bluebeard’s autobiographer. The scene from the earlier novel discloses a key aspect of Bluebeard’s overall argument about the role of art and the artist in America, as well as the value of abstract expressionism itself. In Breakfast of Champions, Karabekian is one of the honored guests scheduled to appear at the grand opening of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts in Midland City—the same now empty arts center symbolizing Vonnegut’s own head in Deadeye Dick—and his abstract expressionist painting is the featured work of art. In Deadeye Dick, the painting is described dismissively as “green . . . about the size of a barn door. It has one vertical orange stripe.”26 Titled The Temptation of Saint Anthony, the painting is made up of a single vertical line formed with “day-glo” orange tape on the left side of a huge blank, green field, and nothing else. Fred Barry had paid fifty thousand dollars for it, and Vonnegut (speaking as himself) says that “It was a scandal what the painting cost.”27 The outrage of paying that large a sum for “something my kid could draw” is acutely felt by the middle-class and middle-brow crowd in the Holiday Inn bar; even Vonnegut, sitting in that bar, says that the price made him mad as well. “Midland City was outraged. So was I.” Vonnegut elaborates his outrage, and that of the others, by essentially calling such artistic nonsense as Karabekian’s paintings or Beatrice Keedler’s novels nothing more than confidence games, designed to sucker

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in the unwitting but sensible masses. “I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid.”28 But Karabekian manages to change not only Vonnegut’s mind, but change and “renew” his life as well. At a key moment in the novel—indeed, it is “the spiritual climax”— Karabekian is confronted by an angry mob in the hotel bar, people jealous or fearful and livid about the apparent insults of this rude out-of-towner, who Vonnegut himself thinks is “a vain and weak and trashy man, no artist at all.”29 Karabekian defends his painting, which pacifies the crowd, changes their perception of modern art, and “rescues” Vonnegut from his own cynicism and spiritual malaise, allowing him to be “born again” through a new humanism. Responding to the charge that “I’ve seen better pictures done by a five-year-old,” Karabekian launches a narrative description of his work that transforms it entirely, at least in the minds of the audience. “The painting did not exist until I made it,” Karabekian went on. “Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find. “I now give you my word of honor,” he went on, “that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal—the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us—in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else is dead machinery.” . . . Ecstasy bloomed on the barbaric face of Rabo Karabekian. “Citizens of Midland City, I salute you,” he said. “You have given a home to a masterpiece.”30 With these words, Vonnegut says, “my life was being renewed.”31 These words from Breakfast of Champions also touch upon a key aesthetic dilemma underlying the project of Bluebeard and the ambiguities of art in general. The particular question that Vonnegut allows to remain unasked, is whether the value of modernist art can only be assessed once it has been

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forced to pay tribute to the greater power of narrative. That is, in Vonnegut’s dramatization of the scene, Karabekian explains or describes the “meaning” of the artwork in such a way that now all in the room can “see” it, can even “see” that it is a masterpiece. “Everyone agreed now that Midland City had one of the greatest paintings in the world. ‘All you had to do was explain,’ said Bonnie MacMahon. ‘I understand now.’ ”32 However, if the artwork had to be explained—if its meaning had to be generated in narrative form—in order to be perceived, then Vonnegut is suggesting that it is really storytelling, rather than—and even opposed to—visual art that is meaningful. It may be that Vonnegut, in a book illustrated throughout with his own sketches, is suggesting that the writer is the superior artist, but it is clear that the value of abstract expressionist art can only be registered in the minds of the viewers once it has been rendered into a narrative. That is, Karabekian’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony is only meaningful when a story can be told in which that meaning or moral is given. Then, and only then, does the painting take on meaning. This gets at the entire justification of the (fictional) project of Bluebeard, which is after all the rather representational, or even realistic, narrative depiction of the inner self of an abstract expressionist. The autobiography itself, along with the revelation of his (almost) final work of art, is Karabekian’s therapeutic means of making sense of the abstract expression that substituted for his life, when that life was given wholly over to the arts. Both of his last works—the painting Now It’s the Women’s Turn and the autobiography itself—present absolutely realistic representations of life, along with narratives that generate the meaning of the works of art. It is as though Vonnegut, the writer, is expressing the superiority of his chosen medium over that of Karabekian and the other makers of “the mudpies of art,” as he calls them in his “Author’s Note” to Bluebeard.33 In that note, Vonnegut decries the “grotesque prices paid for works of art,” which are merely “forms of human playfulness,” like “children’s games” such as “running, jumping, catching, throwing. Or dancing. Or singing songs.” (Noticeably, he does not mention “telling stories” or “writing books.”) Meaningful art, it seems, comes from communication, and the abstract expressionism of other forms of aesthetic works—not merely the “school” of abstract expressionist art (Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, and so on), but also othermore “abstract” forms like athletics, dance, and music—becomes a life-denying escape from “the universal throb” of humanity, as Nathaniel Hawthorne called it.34 Vonnegut was not always so sure about the role of the writer. In a 1969 speech, Vonnegut says that he had been “perplexed as to what the usefulness

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of any of the arts might be, with the possible exception of interior decoration. The most positive notion I could come up with was what I call the canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts. This theory argues that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.”35 But, as he goes on to acknowledge, this practical use seems lost on the society itself: “artists are keeling over by the thousands every day and nobody seems to pay the least attention.”36 So we are back to mere interior decoration. As it happens—as it is supposed to happen, Bokonon would say—Bluebeard includes a character who is both an interior decorator and a writer, Circe Berman, who successfully proves the immense value of literary art in the life of an artist who is just about to keel over, and whose keeling over would have likely attracted little attention. Named for a sorceress best known for turning men into swine, but also known for guiding a hero successfully through a journey to the Kingdom of the Dead so that he may return home to a life worth living, this Circe restores Karabekian’s humanity and brings him safely back from the dead.37 After redecorating his beloved foyer, which had been featured in an issue of Architect & Decorator magazine for its brilliant presentation of modernist art, with garishly cheerful wallpaper (“red roses the size of cabbages”) and “six chromos of little girls on swings,”38 Berman gets an earful of Karabekian’s outrage—outrage not too unlike that of the cocktail waitress in Breakfast of Champions, who was wounded by Karabekian’s insensitivity and disdain for her aesthetic values. Much as one might disparage abstract expressionist art as worse than something a child could paint, Karabekian calls the paintings of girls-on-a-swing “kitsch,” and rages: “You know what these pictures are to anybody with half a grain of sense about art? They are a negation of art. They aren’t just neutral. They are black holes from which no intelligence or skill can ever escape. Worse than that, they suck up the dignity, the self-respect, of anybody unfortunate enough to have to look at them.”39 Circe then waves her magic wand, the power of narrative to neutralize and reform visual art into some much more meaningful, which shames Karabekian and jerks him back out of the graveyard and onto the path of the living once more. “You don’t call these pictures of little girls on swings serious art? . . . Try thinking what the Victorians thought when they looked at them, which was how sick or unhappy so many of these happy, innocent little girls would be in just a little while—diphtheria, pneumonia, smallpox, miscarriages, violent husbands, poverty, widowhood, prostitution—death and burial in a potter’s field. . . . Maybe you can’t stand truly serious art.”40

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Thus, much like Vonnegut’s own “rebirth” at hearing Karabekian’s explanation of his own work in the earlier novel, when Karabekian recoils in horror at Circe Berman’s mawkish, sentimental, serenely sweet, and thoroughly representational paintings of Victorian girls on swings, Berman’s narrative imbues the paintings with such meaningfulness that Karabekian is forced to assent. Now that he knows the story behind the paintings, as with the audience in Midland City, he recognizes that the “little girls on the swings” represent “serious” art. Notably, Berman is a writer, not a painter (although we find that she was a professional “paper hanger” at one point, which also explains how she could so easily redecorate Karabekian’s foyer by herself), and she is the one who urges Karabekian to become one. By becoming a writer, writing Bluebeard itself, Karabekian (like Vonnegut, perhaps) is restored to the land of the living. Berman’s commitment to storytelling, to engaging in communicative acts with her fellow human beings, is what distinguishes her from the death cult of abstract expressionism, an art form disengaged from both man and reality. In her “Polly Madison” books and her cheery, sentimental, “rosy” pictures, Berman is in fact much closer to the real-world social critique than the world-weary poseurs of modernist art. She turns out to be a “committed artist” in a way that Jean-Paul Sartre imagines in What is Literature? There Sartre disdains the noncommunicative art of poetry, which simply uses words to form “images,” in favor of a prosaic and communicative art that engages both reader and writer. What Berman, and Vonnegut, make clear is that the value or meaning of the images of visual art is utterly dependent upon the communicable narratives behind them. Everything comes together with the Bluebeard-like revelation of what lies in the bloody chamber, the potato barn that housed Karabekian’s final painting. It is fitting that the painting is itself painted over the bare, pristine, and recycled canvases of what had been his penultimate work of art. The canvases had once held another Karabekian masterpiece, “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen.” The title refers to the trademarked shade of Sateen Dura-Luxe paint, which was a brand of paint that lost its integrity with time, so that all of Karabekian’s famous works of art peeled away from their canvases, leaving works no more durable or deluxe than words written with a finger upon the air. Circe Berman, noting the meaninglessness of the titles of so many such modernist masterpieces, suggests that artists should hire writers to name their works for them. Karabekian protests, “The titles are meant to be uncommunicative,” but Berman answers—and this seems to be Vonnegut’s ultimate view in this novel—“What’s the point of being alive . . . if you’re not going to communicate?”41 What the reader

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learns, when Karabekian-as-Bluebeard finally reveals what has been locked away in his potato barn, is the apotheosis of this vision, and, in revealing it, he comes alive again. The enormous painting, “eight feet tall and sixty-four feet long,” is painted “over” “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen”; that is, it is painted upon the same canvas, but completely stripped and cleaned of its Sateeen Dura-Luxe. When he stripped these canvases clean, he gave that tabula rasa a “communicative” title: “I Tried and Failed and Cleaned Up Afterward, so It’s Your Turn Now.”42 Now that 512 square feet of canvas is covered, every inch, by thousands of persons (“five thousand, two hundred, and nineteen,” to be exact) in a broad, green valley in springtime; the largest person was “the size of a cigarette, and the smallest a flyspeck.” When observed with a magnifying glass, however, each individual’s distinct face could be made out clearly. “The picture was so realistic that it might have been a photograph.”43 The absolutely mimetic portrait of what Karabekian had seen on the morning that World War II ended in Europe is christened with a most “communicative” title, one that rejects the intentionally uncommunicative names of his abstract expressionist artworks and the cynical capitulation of the canvas’s previous inhabitant. At war’s end—Karabekian’s own personal war with himself, as well as the Second World War—he dubs the scene, “Now It’s the Women’s Turn.”44 The return to photographic realism is not the most important aspect of his unveiled painting; rather, it is Karabekian’s embrace of human communication through the vehicle of storytelling or narrative. For each of the 5,219 miniscule portraits, Karabekian has a “war story.” “I made up a story, then painted the person that it happened to,” he notes, and at first he gladly tells viewers the story of anyone depicted; later he wearies of this, and opens up the communicative powers of his artwork to everyone: “Make up your own war stories as you look at the whatchamacallit.”45 Indeed, this had been what made the realism of Dan Gregory’s painting so valuable for Karabekian’s cook, Allison White, who thought “it was the only picture that was really about something. . . . I used to look at it and try to guess what would happen next.”46 In other words, the realistic presentation of real human drama made her want to know the stories—beginnings, middles, and possible ends—that made the picture meaningful. Karabekian’s narrative detail extends to fictional characters as well, which allows for further speculation. The authenticity of each uniform is an homage to the hyperrealism of his mentor Dan Gregory, but the utterly human biographies of all, with their pain, fear, hopes, and so on, are what makes the painting so redemptive . . . for Karabekian and for Vonnegut.

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Earlier, in Cat’s Cradle, “Jonah” and Philip Castle speculate upon the role of the writer in society. “Jonah” and Philip decide that a writer’s strike would be deadly; if “all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems,” then people would “start dropping like flies” or die “like mad dogs,” “snarling and snapping at each other and biting their own tails.” Then Dr. Julian Castle explains that a man, “when he’s deprived of the consolations of literature,” dies in one of two ways: “petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system. . . . For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing!”47 Here, toward the end of his career as a novelist, Vonnegut again reflects on the therapeutic value of literature, and finds that it still offers a potent tincture against the heart-hardening processes of abstraction and despair, if only for one person at a time.

“Strange and Clever Little Animals” As Klinkowitz has noted, Bluebeard is the first (and only) book written by Vonnegut after 1966 that does not include a personal preface or introduction, the first “simple, flat-out novel.”48 But this is not entirely true. Although it contains nothing so elaborate as the sorts of prefaces one finds in Breakfast of Champions or Slapstick or even the brief preface to Deadeye Dick, Bluebeard still includes a one-page “Author’s Note,” signed “K.V.,” which offers a personal message about the book and about Vonnegut’s own feelings about some of its subject matter. That is, it still conditions the work and underscores its artificial status. Indeed, this little author’s note goes much further than Mother Night’s original “Editor’s Note,” insofar as this “K.V.” is clearly meant to be understood as representing the “real” Kurt Vonnegut, whereas the “editor” of Howard W. Campbell, Jr.’s confessions—although named “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.”—was an entirely fictional persona, an editor of another person’s writing rather than the author of “a novel, and a hoax autobiography at that.” Bluebeard is a tale of someone who had eschewed mimetic representation in his career, in order to capture a “truer” essence, an image stripped of all the contingent and worldly elements, of the “unruly” flesh that interfered with the purity of the soul. Yet in the act of producing a work—this autobiography—that is mimetic, straightforwardly meaningful, and representative of a “real” life, its author (Karabekian) is transformed. Indeed, by allowing in the “Author’s Note” that he is the author of this “hoax,” Vonnegut impresses upon the reader the artistic use to which he has put this narrative of transformation, and he suggests the changes in his own views. Moreover, he introduces as the

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novel’s epigraph a quotation from Mark Vonnegut that could serve as the motto, in nuce, of Vonnegut’s entire philosophy of life, visible in all of his writings and speeches: “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” Rabo Karabekian’s retreat from the principles of abstract expressionism into the formerly despised but newly rediscovered or “reborn” ideals of a hyper-realistic humanism leads him to his own personal renaissance. In Breakfast of Champions, Karabekian’s words had served as midwife to the rebirth of the author and narrator, Kurt Vonnegut. In Karabekian’s own rebirth, he too becomes author and narrator, and the highest aim and most useful effects of his art are to communicate stories to others. This means abandoning the expressionist desire to produce “magic” works of pure feeling, detached from history and politics and human interactions. Karabekian must liberate himself from the quest for the disembodied and immaterial “unwavering bands of light,” in favor of the human, alltoo-human conditions in which people like artists and plumbers do care about the banal, the everyday, the finely detailed, little aspects of existence in the world. In his “longing for more balanced and nurturing human relationships,” as Susan E. Farrell puts it, Karabekian produces “art that is neither morally repressive nor elitist, an art that is socially engaged and emotionally meaningful.”49 The final image of Bluebeard shows how far beyond the abstract idealism of “unwavering bands of light” Karabekian has come, and how much more rooted in a more animal, material, embodied existence his reborn self now is. Karabekian had severed his “soul” from his “meat,” in his mind and in his art, as he explained to the roomful of Midland City amateur art critics, and as he explains his flensing method to Terry Kitchen in Bluebeard: “It’s what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board. . . . They would strip off their skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people—get rid of all the meat so that I can see nothing but their souls.”50 But this method of abstraction dehumanizes both mankind and the artist trying to make sense of the human condition. As Circe Berman—the enchantress who restores men to their true conditions— reminds Karabekian in the novel’s final pages, one’s meat is actually just as responsible for who “we” are and what “we” do as our souls, perhaps much more so: She cleared her throat. “Well, then,” she said, “isn’t it time for your soul, which has been ashamed of your meat for so long, to thank your meat for finally doing something wonderful?” . . .

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“Hold your hand in front of your eyes,” she said, “and look at those strange and clever little animals with love and gratitude, and tell them out loud: ‘Thank you, Meat.’ ” Now purged of his earlier sensibility, no longer enamored with the lifedenying theory of flexible neon tubes or unwavering bands of light, but recognizing the animal substance of physical reality in a moment of affirmation, Karabekian “out loud and with all [his] heart” is thankful. Bluebeard’s final line: “Oh, happy Meat. Oh, happy Soul. Oh, happy Rabo Karabekian.”51 In the novels following the bizarrely rich and joyful wisdom of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut cleans out his attic in a schizoanalytic embrace of chaos, explores the political as an avenue toward satisfaction and general welfare but finds it a dead end, then retreats into the aesthetic dimension to escape the real world of flesh and blood, preferring neutrality and ghosts. In Galápagos, Vonnegut discovers the solution to his misanthropic humanism on a species-wide scale, but in Bluebeard, Vonnegut dramatizes the evolution from misanthropy and abstraction toward human communication and understanding in a single person. Storytelling, even if so transitory and evanescent as writing with one’s finger upon the air, is preferable to abstract expression, and the more straightforward or prosaic, the better. In this turning away from the rarefied ether of the aesthetic, Vonnegut turns toward the visceral experience of so many strange and clever little animals making a life for themselves, simply by living it.

Chapter 9

Apocalypse in the Optative Mood: Galápagos

The epigraph to Vonnegut’s Galápagos also reveals the novel’s overall theme, and it marks a subtle shift in the career of one of America’s greatest cynics. “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” (That the line comes from Anne Frank’s diary makes it all the more powerful, since we know exactly what the “everything” refers to.) Galápagos shares with Vonnegut’s other works a poignant critique of the follies of man, a sense of the absurdity of life, but he emphasizes an element only hinted at or understated before: hope. In earlier works, undoubtedly, Vonnegut had made gestures in this direction, such as the example of Eliot Rosewater’s volunteer firemen, but, more often than not, his faith in humanity was overcome by a form of pessimism that might best be described as hopelessness.1 Galápagos, however, embraces a process both random and superior to any human intelligence, the ultimate laissez-faire philosophy applied to the suprahuman process of natural selection itself. Vonnegut’s postmodern iconography of American life is generally suffused with what I have called his misanthropic humanism. Vonnegut sees most people as fundamentally flawed, petty, avaricious, and prone to acts of almost incredible cruelty. Yet, for all that, Vonnegut also cannot abandon humanity; he marvels at man’s folly, noting sadly or just curiously man’s absurd perseverance, as in the bittersweet image of the triumphant Luddites who, at the end of Player Piano, proudly put back together the very machines they had broken. In Galápagos, Vonnegut takes further pity on people, arguing that it was never their fault that they were silly, arrogant, and cruel. It was all due to their grotesquely oversized brains. A mental disease more powerful than Dwayne Hoover’s schizophrenia in Breakfast of Champions, the curse of the big brain has doomed humans to a life of quiet, and sometimes noisy, desperation. In Galápagos, as in Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut manages to wipe out most of humanity, but here it is not their fault. Rather than the manmade ice-nine, an anonymous virus renders all but a small colony of the

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human race unable to reproduce. Reproduction, it turns out, is all that really matters, as the small colony on the northern tip of the Galápagos Islands evolves over millions of years into seal-like creatures, whose only troubles involve matters of fishing. The hope for humanity lies in that heroic perseverance witnessed in other novels, but here salvation comes from “becoming-animal” (as Deleuze might say), in losing the human, alltoo-human characteristics that had defined humanity. By my reading, Vonnegut at last overcomes his misanthropic humanism, not by abandoning the mis in “misanthropy,” but by abandoning the anthropos. The result is a new humanism without the human. And, unlike Vonnegut’s other apocalyptic novels, Galápagos embraces the posthuman world with a sense of hope and futurity that one normally associates with a utopian promise. Utopia, notably, does not emerge from revolutionary action (as in Player Piano), libidinal investments turned outward toward the community (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater), or grand political schemes (Slapstick), but from natural selection and the passage of time. In Galápagos, Vonnegut releases himself from both the political and the aesthetic realms, going au naturale, as it were, to allow the living to just live. All thanks to what amounts to the end of the world! With Galápagos, Vonnegut offers another apocalypse in his oeuvre, but here it is an apocalypse in the optative mood.

The Thing Was . . . In its opening lines, Galápagos establishes the bizarre premise that the story is being told in the year 1,001,986 A.D. “The thing was: One million years ago, in 1986 A.D., Guayaquil was the chief seaport of the little South American democracy called Ecuador.”2 The mix of the utterly fantastic with the utterly commonplace is striking. There is a tremendous cognitive leap between the phrase “one million years ago” and “Guayaquil was the chief seaport.” The reader is put on notice, right on the opening page, that the tale will involve an outrageous temporality. We must bear in mind that we are reading about things in the distant, perhaps prehistoric, past while at the same time experiencing them almost as they are happening, in what is the reader’s present, late twentieth-century world. Hence, we have an almost God’s-eye view of our present world, a view which comports well with Vonnegut’s sense of the writer as “the Creator of the Universe,” as he put it in Breakfast of Champions.3 This is crucial for the novel’s paradoxical apocalypse in the optative mood. Since we—through the narrator—know that everything works out for the best, we can watch the sometimes horrific scenes of destruction without losing hope.

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Contrast this to the apocalypse presented in Cat’s Cradle. There, although the narrator also recounted past events he had witnessed and participated in, the events were so new and so recent that one had little sense of how everything would turn out. Indeed, that novel ends with only the most minute glimmer of hope, as the ragtag band of survivors living on the fictional Caribbean island of San Lorenzo struggles to make sense of their postapocalyptic condition. The final scene of Cat’s Cradle, when Bokonon himself at last appears, suggests that the final, meaningful act of one who truly understands the cosmos into which humanity has been thrown is an act of playful and defiant suicide: killing oneself while thumbing one’s nose at the Creator.4 In Galápagos, the destruction of most of humanity is hailed as the great hope for a posthumanoid humanity on the remote island of Santa Rosalia. Thanks to the natural equivalent of ice-nine, the unassuming little germ that first appears at the 1986 Frankfurt Book Fair, the fur-covered humanity on that remote knoll of the Galápagos archipelago flourishes. Rather than ossify in an attitude of playful defiance, humanity finally finds itself in vibrant harmony with the natural world. The bulk of the narrative recounts events taking place in Guayaquil on November 28, 1986, although Vonnegut’s “schizophrenic telegraphic” style allows him to shift between flashbacks, flash-forwards, and lateral storytelling in order to create a nonlinear history. For readers familiar with such narrative techniques in, especially, Slaughterhouse-Five, this is not odd, but Galápagos provides a slightly different rationale. In Slaughterhouse-Five, all of history could be viewed at once, as if time were really space, such that the various moments of history could be viewed just as one views a stretch of mountain range.5 Hence, “time travel” became as simple as space travel, so the narrative, like the protagonist Billy Pilgrim, could “become unstuck” in time, moving with ease among past, present, and future. Here, it is not that time is transformed into space, but that the narrator is capable of witnessing a million years of history. To do this, Vonnegut created a new type of narrator, one especially apt for presenting an apocalypse in the optative mood. Charles Berryman has noted that “Vonnegut’s boldest experiments in fiction have always been with narrative strategy,”6 and Vonnegut employs a novel strategy here. Galápagos is narrated by the headless ghost of Leon Trout, the son of longtime Vonnegut alter ego Kilgore Trout, who first appeared in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, played key roles in SlaughterhouseFive and Breakfast of Champions, and makes an appearance (in a rather different persona) in Jailbird. The father appears in this story as well, but in Galápagos, Leon gets to be the storyteller, and his own version of science fiction—specifically the science of Darwinian evolutionary biology—supplies the guiding thread of the novel’s moral dimension. Vonnegut needed to

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create a narrator who could witness the events but also survive a million years of natural history. He could have created a god, an immortal alien (like Salo in The Sirens of Titan), or the like, but with Leon Trout he is able to combine the fantastic with the familiar in interesting ways. Obviously, a ghostnarrator is a far-fetched conceit, one that makes a mockery of the realism of the story taking place in Ecuador. (Indeed, Oliver W. Ferguson makes the even bolder argument that the “story” of Galapagos is really the hallucinatory fiction of a perhaps mad Leon Trout, who admittedly contracted syphilis and had psychological problems arising from his traumatic family life and military service. In other words, the entire drama of the tourists on the “Nature Cruise of the Century” and the million years of evolution is just a fantasy, whether deliberately composed or a hallucinatory side-effect of trauma and disease, of a living Leon Trout.)7 But the ghostly or disembodied narrator makes possible the greater pathos and, in particular, empathy that illuminates the characters struggling with the horrors of the day. Leon, by being a ghost, is thus able to become part of the story itself, a participantnarrator who is also a passive observer, one who sees into the minds of his characters and also reveals his own thoughts and feelings. And, as I will argue, Leon—like his father, Kilgore—becomes a figure for the writer in general, and perhaps for Kurt Vonnegut himself. Leon Trout as narrator is thus a remarkable addition to the repertoire of storytelling styles employed by Vonnegut. The cast of Galápagos is another colorful ensemble of oddballs, similar to those of his earlier novels. With characters that are thoroughly flawed yet sympathetically presented, Galápagos is populated with the lovably motley assemblage that Vonnegut’s fans have become accustomed to in other novels. Here we find Andrew MacIntosh, a captain of industry, with his blind daughter, Selena, and her seeing-eye dog, Kazakh;8 Mary Hepburn, a recent widow from Ilium, New York (the site of Paul Proteus’s and Felix Hoenikker’s General Forge and Foundry Company), a town that regularly and generously provides Vonnegut with characters; James Wait, a sleazy confidence man looking to seduce, fleece, and abandon wealthy widows; Zengi Hiroguchi, a Japanese scientist and inventor hoping to become a businessman, and his depressed and pregnant wife, Hisako; Adolf von Kleist, a pompous, aging sea captain; and six illiterate girls from a lost tribe of rainforest dwellers, utterly bewildered and oblivious to most of the goings-on. Additionally, key roles are played by Jesús Ortiz, the good-natured hotel employee who is pushed too far; Giraldo Delgado, a paranoid schizophrenic who is armed and extremely dangerous; Roy Hepburn, Mary’s late and also schizophrenic husband; Guillermo Reyes, a perfectly sane fighter pilot; Hernando Cruz, a

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capable ship’s mate; and Siegfried von Kleist, brother to the incompetent captain and the good-natured sufferer of the early stages of Huntington’s disease. Leon Trout, the narrator and guardian angel or friendly ghost, rounds out this fine ensemble for an end-of-the-world farce. The plot may be briefly summarized. Several of the aforementioned cast arrive in Guayaquil in order to participate in “The Nature Cruise of the Century,” a globally marketed event that was supposed to feature such celebrity guests as Jacqueline Onassis, Mick Jagger, and Walter Cronkite. A severe financial crisis has put the cruise in jeopardy, as the celebrities have all dropped out, but the other guests, for reasons of their own, remain. Mary Hepburn had promised her late husband that she would attend, and she is suicidal with loneliness and despair when we first see her. James Wait, posing as a Canadian widower, had hoped to meet wealthy women to take advantage of. Andrew MacIntosh was planning to seal a lucrative business deal, first with the government of Ecuador, then with Zengi Hiroguchi, the inventor of a new handheld device (the Mandarax) that, among its other useful features, operates as a nearly universal translator. MacIntosh is accompanied by his blind daughter, Selena, and Hiroguchi by his wife, Hisako, so the business arrangements may be discussed in the relatively informal surroundings of a family vacation. Later, in their postapocalyptic life on Santa Rosalia, Selena MacIntosh and Hisako Hiroguchi will live as spouses until they commit suicide together. Captain von Kleist, the captain of the cruise ship, Bahia de Darwin (or “Bay of Darwin”), and his brother, Siegfried, the manager of the hotel, make possible the escape of the survivors from Guayaquil to the Galápagos island. Thanks to a series of accidents, this ensemble will also include six young girls from the lost tribe of Kanka-bono Indians. These girls will become the new Eves to all of humanity. The worldwide economic crisis leads to the financial and social collapse of Ecuador, and poverty there is now compounded by starvation. Additionally, war between Ecuador and Peru is on the verge of breaking out. The new hotel has been cordoned off by the army, as mobs of hungry citizens become a growing danger. Giraldo Delgado, a paranoid schizophrenic soldier, will actually be responsible for breaking the cordon sanitaire, and he will also wind up killing Andrew MacIntosh and Zengi Hiroguchi as they are pacing the grounds. Realizing that the only hope for survival lies in escaping by sea, Siegfried von Kleist loads the survivors into a bus and drives them to the seaport, where he finds his brother thoroughly drunk and the ship completely stripped of all provisions and valuables. An explosion, which kills Siegfried, unmoors the craft, and, although the captain is not

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really qualified to operate the ship—his capable first mate having abandoned the vessel earlier—he sets sail to the west. A “Second Noah’s Ark,” as our narrator calls it, sets out for Mount Ararat. James Wait, who has suffered a heart attack, dies shortly after “marrying” Mary Hepburn (the captain performed the ceremony), and Selena’s seeing-eye dog goes missing (we soon learn that the Kanka-bonos have killed, cooked, and eaten it). Due to the captain’s faulty and erratic navigating, the ship is far off course, and after five days eventually lands on the unpopulated northern Galápagos island of Santa Rosalia, best known for its indigenous species of vampire finches, as the former high school biology teacher Mary Hepburn recognizes. They stop there for provisions, but the Bahia de Darwin’s engines will not start again, so they are stranded. Thus, they are spared the ravages of a disease that first breaks out at the annual book fair in Frankfurt, Germany, a disease that destroys the reproductive capabilities of humans. Watching over all of this is Leon Trout, who worked and then died in the Swedish shipyard building the Bahia de Darwin, thus making both the craft and the story of the “Second Noah’s Ark” possible. What remains of humanity, a million years later, descends from this initial colony of ten survivors— Captain von Kleist, Mary Hepburn, Selena MacIntosh, Hisako Hiroguchi, and the six Kanka-bono girls. Hisako soon gives birth to Akiko, who is covered in a light fur owing to a genetic defect in Hisako’s family initially caused by exposure to radiation from the bombing of Hiroshima. This is a nice Vonnegutian touch, by the way: to have the tragedy of Hiroshima indirectly provide the genetic flaw or trait that, when passed down through the generations, will eventually allow mankind, it its new, seal-like form, to survive and thrive and be, at long last, at peace with nature—this is surely a great cosmic joke, the Hegelian ruse of history writ large across a thousand millennia. Here is the absolute and humane “good” that results from, what the “Jonah” narrator of Cat’s Cradle had called “the Day the World Ended.”

Apocalypse Revisited In some ways, Galápagos is the apotheosis of Vonnegut’s earlier work, an exemplary and perfected form of the narratives and arguments he had been laying out throughout his writing career, in what Peter Freese describes as “a baker’s dozen of successful novels with apocalyptic themes and symbols.”9 Certain themes audible in all of his writings reappear here as well. For example, the concern that human activities are increasingly performed by machines is the fundamental premise of Vonnegut’s earliest

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novel, Player Piano, which depicts a dystopian near-future, and the apocalypse of a manmade end to the world is the key plot element in Cat’s Cradle, as well as in more local versions in Slapstick and Deadeye Dick. Schizophrenia and depression, crucial aspects of the narratives in Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, make their timely reappearance here as well. In Galápagos, the narrator notes, almost in passing, how humans with their big brains almost maniacally insisted on “having machines do everything that human beings did—and I mean everything.”10 With this acknowledgment, Vonnegut gestures in the direction of his earliest work, the world presented in Player Piano, in which computers and efficient machinery have eliminated the need for the vast majority of workers; with machines fulfilling all of society’s material needs while denying the satisfaction of the less well-known “need” to perform meaningful work, the abject working class of the novel is forced to choose between absolutely menial nonwork or unemployment. A white-collar middle class, represented by the allegorically named Paul Proteus, is perhaps equally dejected, recognizing that the corporate identity and pseudo-family is destroying the individual and community identities so longed for. As discussed in Chapter 2, in what serves as the climax of that novel, a band of neo-Luddites gleefully destroy the very machines that had taken not only their jobs but their meaning in life. Vonnegut here could have chosen to end the novel with the scenes of glorious destruction, depicting a victorious revolutionary working class rising up to demand a dignified life worth living. Vonnegut also could have chosen to show the brutal crackdown by a cold, heartless regime, thus turning the revolutionaries into martyrs. Both images are present in the book. But the lasting image, the one that haunts the reader, is slightly different. As the delirious rioters gloat over the smashed machines, several begin to take pleasure and, indeed, pride in repairing the recently broken devices. At first, fixing the machine is just a puzzle to be solved, but then the satisfaction of solving the problem leads to the desire to create new, better machines. Vonnegut’s message is clear: the dystopian world is entirely of human creation, and there is no human solution to the problem, since the same people suffering from the life without meaning are the ones who will create the conditions for that meaningless life. I have been referring to Vonnegut’s attitude as a misanthropic humanism. Vonnegut’s notion that the human, all-too-human (to once more use Nietzsche’s ironic but telling phrase) condition is absurd, that human behavior inevitably leads to ruin, is complemented by the thoroughly humanist belief that striving for a better life, however meaningless in the end, has meaning in itself. The human spirit of perseverance is, for Vonnegut, the lovable quality

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that overcomes the absurdity of existence, if only for a while. Cat’s Cradle is narrated by a wandering Ishmael—or, worse, the bad-luck Jonah—who sets out to write a book about the events that took place on August 6, 1945, the day that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan (and on the fictional Hisako Hiroguchi). He plans to call the book The Day the World Ended. Cat’s Cradle’s opening line (“Call me Jonah”) invokes another great American novel, Moby-Dick, which also tells the tale of a fatal destruction of a figurative world. In each book, the seed of the world’s destruction lies in human ingenuity coupled with the human (all-too-human) desire for power, love, and understanding. Felix Hoenikker, the father of the atomic bomb and the inventor of ice-nine (the substance that will eventually bring about Armageddon in Cat’s Cradle), is presented as an absentminded genius, someone who would not harm a fly but whose reckless and heedless knowledgefor-the-sake-of-knowledge is more destructive than the ill will of a bloodthirsty tyrant. Ahab, driven to distraction by “that inscrutable thing” of which the White Whale may be the agent or the principal, is willing to risk all to conquer it. In both cases, whether elicited by monomaniacal fury or innocent curiosity, the apocalyptic force is unleashed. The Faustian bargain is at the heart of Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism. Leon Trout introduces and repeats a phrase throughout Galápagos, used to refer to the recently departed. “Well, he wasn’t going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anyway.” Similar to the “So it goes,” which accompanies each mention of death in Slaughterhouse-Five, the line sums up what all of us, excluding Ludwig van Beethoven himself, presumably, amount to at death. A callous dismissal, perhaps, but Vonnegut also makes clear that the same brainpower that could write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony also makes possible the bombing of Hiroshima, the famine spreading throughout Ecuador, and so on. The most ingenious device in Galápagos is surely the Mandarax, likened to the Apple of Knowledge in what will be humankind’s New Eden on Santa Rosalia. When Hisako Hiroguchi lashes out at her inventor husband for creating the Mandarax, she discloses the frustration of someone whose life is measured by such outrageous standards as whether one might write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The Mandarax, a device initially designed to supplant the Gobuki (which could translate among ten different languages), could translate among a thousand languages, but it could also make medical diagnoses, provide thousands of quotations from world literature, and—apparently—teach ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, also the area of Hisako’s expertise. Although the Mandarax is clearly an extraordinarily useful thing, Hisako, in her anger and depression, recognizes a more baleful aspect of its creation:

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“You, *Doctor Hiroguchi,” she went on, “think that everybody but yourself is just taking up space on this planet, and we make too much noise and waste valuable natural resources and have too many children and leave garbage around. So it would be a much nicer place if the few stupid services we are able to perform for the likes of you were taken over by machinery. That wonderful Mandarax you’re scratching your ear with now: what is that but an excuse for a mean-spirited egomaniac never to pay or even thank a human being with a knowledge of languages or mathematics or history or medicine or ikebana or anything?”11 The asterisk, of course, is Vonnegut’s way of letting the reader know that Zengi Hiroguchi will die quite soon, and certainly long before he will ever get the chance to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Even the Mandarax, imminently useful and ingeniously devised, can cause as much anguish as the machines in Player Piano. The ice-nine that winds up destroying the world in Cat’s Cradle is, like labor-saving machinery or nuclear weapons, another grand achievement in the human, all-too-human quest for knowledge. In his early writings, Vonnegut might have looked at such behavior with a slightly more cynical detachment, but Vonnegut does not blame his characters personally for building or restoring the machines that had made them miserable, for creating and using weapons of almost unimaginable destructive power, or for using words and images to make each other unhappy. It is not their fault, and Galápagos reveals the actual source of human misery.

Big Brains In Galápagos, Vonnegut finally identifies the problem and proposes a solution. The problem with humans is that they have a terrible birth defect, passed down to their progeny throughout human existence. The defect is their big brains.12 Such big brains cause all the trouble, and if only humans could evolve to have smaller brains, they would be so much happier and more well adjusted to the world in which they live. As the narrator puts it, looking back over a million years and with specific reference to the devious con man just introduced, It is hard to believe nowadays that people could ever have been as brilliantly duplicitous as James Wait—until I remind myself that just about

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every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilograms! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn’t imagine and execute. So I raise this question, although there is nobody around to answer it: Can it be doubted that three-kilogram brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race? A second query: What source was there back then, save for our overelaborate nervous circuitry, for the evils we were seeing or hearing about simply everywhere? My answer: There was no other source. This was a very innocent planet, except for those great big brains.13 Throughout the novel, Vonnegut blames those big brains for all of the problems facing humanity. Such enormous brains could not help but produce monsters, giving what the narrator describes as bad advice on crucial matters of survival. Thus Mary Hepburn’s brain tries to convince her that suicide is the right course of action; this is the same brain that will later have her perform experiments in artificial insemination with an unwilling sperm donor and with consenting teenage virgins. Such big brains could create outlandish scenarios, as with the big brain of the trusting, hard-working hotel employee, Jesús Ortiz. “Ortiz’s brain was so big that it could show movies in his head which starred him and his dependents as millionaires. And this man, little more than a boy, was so innocent that he believed his dream could come true.”14 Such big brains caused the Hiroguchis, and other married couples, to fluctuate between hating or resenting each other to wanting to do whatever possible to make each other happy, often changing whimsically from second to second. “Of what possible use was such emotional volatility, not to say craziness, in the heads of animals who were supposed to stay together long enough, at least, to raise a human child, which took about fourteen years or so?”15 And, as Leon Trout himself confesses, “When I was alive, I often received advice from my own big brain which, in terms of my own survival, or the survival of the human race, for that matter, can be charitably described as questionable. Example: It had me join the United States Marines and go fight in Vietnam. Thanks a lot, big brain.”16 Not only were such big brains untrustworthy, but, regardless of the naiveté or mendacity or goodwill of the person involved in the era of big brains, mere opinions themselves—that is, notions formed in those brains and having no real substance exterior to them—often had life-or-death consequences. Vonnegut uses the word magical to describe the process by

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which mere opinions, when agreed upon by a substantial number of people, could transform the value of things in human minds. The worldwide financial crisis which had disrupted the plans for the “Nature Cruise of the Century,” which was causing famine in much of South America, and which would lead to war between Ecuador and Peru, was a simple result of the changing opinion of the value of paper representations of wealth exchanged in those places. “It was all in people’s heads. People had simply changed their opinions of paper wealth, but, for all practical purposes, the planet may as well have been knocked out of orbit.”17 Vonnegut emphasizes that the problem with big brains is not that they are defective. Leon Trout takes pains to explain this, especially since there are many dangerous characters in the story whose brains, in addition to being big, were actually malfunctioning. Not wanting to give the impression that “everybody a million years ago was insane,” the narrator proclaims: “That was not the case. I repeat: that was not the case. Almost everybody was sane back then. . . . The big problem, again, wasn’t insanity, but that people’s brains were much too big and untruthful to be practical.”18 In the novel, we see Roy Hepburn’s dementia, and Giraldo Delgado’s paranoia, and Siegfried von Kleist’s nascent problems with Huntington’s disease, but the real tragedy for mankind, Vonnegut insists, is not the brain that malfunctions, but the brain that functions properly and continues to cause misery in its owners and those surrounding them. The solution, then, lies not in better mental health care or in learning to use our mental faculties more scrupulously or more effectively. The solution lies in ridding ourselves of those big brains. In Galápagos, Vonnegut turns to real “science fiction,” perhaps for the first time in his career; the science, of course, is evolutionary biology, specifically Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Despite his aversion to being classified as a science fiction writer, Vonnegut has acknowledged his widespread use of “science fiction of an obvious kidding sort.”19 But Galápagos uses actual science to organize the fiction. As Freese argues, Vonnegut uses “natural selection with a vengeance” to undermine the perceived superiority of humans in the biosphere, and specifically to debunk the arrogant notion that the thing that makes humans superior is their big brains. Far from providing humankind with a superior weapon in the struggle for survival, the big brain is actually an evolutionary flaw, a congenital birth defect like Huntington’s chorea. In Freese’s summary of Vonnegut’s theory, “man is an evolutionary mistake, and the only chance to prevent the imminent destruction of the world is not to think ever better thoughts but to give up thinking altogether.”20

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Vonnegut dramatizes a million-year experiment in creating a form of humankind best adapted to life on the planet. A million years ago, in 1986, there was a reasonable suspicion that the world was ending, and that humankind and the world were not very good for each other. Leon Trout, from his God’s-eye vantage over this span of a thousand millennia, can view everything and everyone as parts of an overall experiment, a research program conducted by Nature herself and using the law of natural selection as its method.21 Individual characters within the tale are themselves subjects in the experiment: “If Selena was Nature’s experiment with blindness, then her father was Nature’s experiment with heartlessness, and Jesús Ortiz was Nature’s experiment with admiration for the rich, and I was Nature’s experiment with insatiable voyeurism, and my father was Nature’s experiment with cynicism, and my mother was Nature’s experiment with optimism, and the Captain of the Bahia de Darwin was Nature’s experiment with ill-founded self-confidence, and James Wait was Nature’s experiment with purposeless greed, and Hisako Hiroguchi was Nature’s experiment with depression, and Akiko Nature’s experiment with furriness, and so on.”22 Whether any of these personality traits are beneficial for survival is unlikely to be seen during the lifetimes of the persons who have them. That Nature has use for such things is doubtful, as the narrator concludes that “there are no such experiments, either with bodies or personalities, going on at the present time.”23 At the end of history, or at least at the end of Trout’s story, the seal-like humans thrive in large part strictly because they have evolved in such a way as to lose the very capacity to have personalities. Nature’s experiment with having a personality is forced to yield to beings that could no longer form opinions or see pictures in their heads that caused them to hope or to feel envy or to inflict cruelty. Nature, not some supernatural force, had “brought humanity into harmony with the rest of Nature” via the law of natural selection: “It was the best fisherfolk who survived in the greatest numbers in the watery environment of the Galápagos Archipelago. Those with hands and feet most like flippers were the best swimmers. Prognathous jaws were better at catching and holding fish than hands could ever be. And any fisherperson, spending more and more time underwater, could surely catch more fish if he or she were more streamlined, more bulletlike—had a smaller head.”24 Hence, no more big brains.

The Era of Hopeful Monsters Is it surprising that the virus that wipes out all of humanity—all, that is, except for the little colony on Santa Rosalia—first appears at the Frankfurt

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Book Fair? This annual event, though the largest of its kind, would not necessarily seem to be ground zero for the end of the world. But by using the world’s largest book fair as the site from which the doom of mankind ultimately issues, Vonnegut links the profession of writing to his apocalypse in the optative mood. What is perhaps most striking about the apocalypse presented in Galápagos is its utterly quotidian nature. Contrary to the belief of some readers,25 the destruction of the human race in Galápagos is not caused by World War III, by nuclear holocaust, or a substance like ice-nine; rather, what destroys all of humanity is a little virus or bacterium that destroys a woman’s ova, thus making reproduction impossible. Those humans who initially survive, presumably, will lead long, healthy, and perhaps happy lives, only without having any more children. (Presumably, although the text does not specifically invite the inquiry, those alive in 1986 could go on living for another hundred years or so; Vonnegut, or Leon Trout, does not tell what might have been happening outside of the isle of Santa Rosalia.) The absolute end of nearly all humankind is anything but spectacular. Far from the image of a meteor knocking the planet out of orbit or a biblical Armageddon, Vonnegut buries the root of humanity’s ultimate annihilation midway through the novel, mentioned as “another David-and-Goliath” story that is actually a simple, and natural, process. While Mary Hepburn contemplates suicide in her hotel room in Guayaquil, she thinks of the lesson she taught her students about the great land tortoises. Once they could be found “lumbering over every temperate land mass of any size,” but then tiny rodents evolved to feed on tortoise eggs, and the great reptiles were wiped out everywhere but for those few remote places (like the Galápagos Islands) that remained free of the rodents. This incidental piece of natural history provides a figure for the fall of man as well. As Vonnegut writes, It was prophetic that Mary should imagine herself to be a land tortoise as she suffocated, since something very much like what had happened to most of the land tortoises so long ago was then beginning to happen to most of humankind. Some new creature, invisible to the naked eye, was eating up all the eggs in human ovaries, starting at the annual Book Fair at Frankfurt, Germany. Woman at the fair were experiencing a slight fever, which came and went in a day or two, and sometimes blurry vision. After that, they would be just like Mary Hepburn. They couldn’t have babies anymore. Nor would any way be discovered for stopping the disease. It would spread practically everywhere.

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The near extinction of the mighty land tortoises by little rodents was certainly a David-and-Goliath story. Now here was another one.26 The cause is as natural and unremarkable a thing as catching a cold. That this is the only mention of the cause of humanity’s destruction in Galápagos is itself significant. Unlike ice-nine, for example, which is the subject of pages upon pages in Cat’s Cradle, the wampeter around which so many lives revolve in that novel, Vonnegut here only casually mentions, en passant, the root cause of the end of mankind as we know it. Of course, this germ that wipes out most of humanity winds up making possible the new, post-human humanity that will evolve on the seemingly barren island of Santa Rosalia. This is, after all, the great hope for mankind. The pervasive optative mood of Galápagos is even given a label at one point. The Era of Hopeful Monsters, a Kilgore Trout novel about creatures hoping to succeed, biologically and otherwise, might be a good label for the novel as a whole. In that imagined book, a humanoid race ignored the most serious problems with survival until, with forests dead and lakes poisoned with acid rain and groundwater made non-potable, they began having children with monstrous birth defects. Some had “wings or antlers or fins, with a hundred eyes, with no eyes, with huge brains, with no brains, and on and on. These were Nature’s experiments with creatures which might be better planetary citizens than the humanoids.”27 Most died or had to be shot, but a few survived, intermarried, and had young themselves. Such monsters had hopes for survival and, accordingly, embodied the hope for human (or humanoid) survival. Vonnegut, through the narrative voice of the disembodied Leon Trout, notes that his time—which is to say, our own time—might be dubbed “the Era of Hopeful Monsters.” Specifically he refers to Nature’s experiments with personalities, but Vonnegut’s overall point is that we are the very monsters of the allegory. And hope is the intrinsic trait that gets passed on to each subsequent generation, along with all the other genetic material. The persistence of hope in the face of a seemingly hopeless situation is, perhaps, its own kind of madness. Leon Trout suggests as much in describing his mother’s irrational belief that his father would become a great and popular writer, that the family would move into a nice house, and have friends, and dinner parties, and all that the American upper-middle-class can promise of the good life. Such a belief might be termed “hopeless optimism.” A paradox? Indeed, hopefulness is itself a hopelessly tragic condition, for those of us who ought to know better. But, in Galápagos, Vonnegut enables and even encourages us to embrace such an optative mood, to look upon the destruction of the human world we have known as part of the

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beautiful (and beautifully irrational) process of overcoming our human, all-too-human condition. There is an element of Nietzsche’s fröhlich Wissenschaft, or “joyful wisdom,” in Vonnegut’s formulation. Vonnegut even allows for the horrors of his own time to be incorporated into the more hopeful natural history he creates in Galápagos. The human race that thrives in the future descends from Akiko Hiroguchi, a child born with a beneficial mutation: she “was covered in a fine, silky pelt like a fur seal’s.”28 Exposed to the harsh equatorial sun on an island without trees or swimming in the cold waters of the Pacific, such protective insulation could only benefit the new kinds of humans to come. The narrator makes clear that this birth defect is an indirect result of the U.S. military’s bombing of Hiroshima 41 years earlier, as Akiko’s grandmother had been exposed to nuclear radiation. Thus the tragedy that sent “Jonah,” Cat’s Cradle’s narrator, off to write a book which led to his own apocalyptic tale, becomes a source for the happily-ever-after post-apocalypse of Galápagos. Thus too does the Japanese analogue of Vonnegut’s own terrifying firestorm in Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five make possible this tale written in the optative mood. The epigraph to Galápagos, which Leon Trout asserts was his mother’s favorite quote, expresses both the hope and the monstrosity well: Anne Frank’s poignant line, “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” At the beginning of the novel, the “everything” is on full display: greed, egoism, cruelty, bitterness, and so on. And, by the end of Galápagos, the goodness at heart is unquestioned. Vonnegut shows how humanity might be saved, and its salvation lies in ridding itself of its human, all-too-human qualities. The humans of 1,001,986 A.D. are happy and healthy planetary citizens. The broken machinery is repaired, not by some external force, but by nature. As the narrator concludes, When my tale began, it appeared that the earthling part of the clockwork of the universe was in terrible danger, since many of its parts, which is to say people, no longer fit in anywhere, and were damaging all the parts around them as well as themselves. I would have said back then that the damage was beyond repair. Not so! Thanks to certain modifications in the design of human beings, I see no reason why the earthling part of the clockwork cannot go on ticking forever the way it is ticking now.29 Thus, Vonnegut’s post-utopian fiction—after he has been “reborn” in Breakfast of Champions, abandoned hope for politics and economics in Slapstick

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and Jailbird, and reemerged from the abstractions and artifice of the aesthetic realm in Deadeye Dick (an emergence reinforced again in the thoroughly redemptive and, in the end, optative Bluebeard)—finds utopia after all. Utopia is established upon this posthuman humanity. The New Eden or the Second Noah’s Ark experiment allows all of humanity, including Vonnegut himself and his longtime readers, to start over. Finally, in Galápagos Vonnegut makes peace with the monster he is as a writer. For Vonnegut, the role of the writer, perhaps best embodied by Kilgore Trout, is that of a social anomaly, and outsider who cannot help but fill the big brains of others with the distorted images of his own oversized thinking machine. A writer is a monster, perhaps a hopeful monster, who does not fit in well with the world. Indeed, in Galápagos, we are given a suitably monstrous figure for the writer’s horror-movie role in human affairs: a ghost. Leon Trout explains that the reason he chose to become a ghost, rather than stepping into the blue tunnel into the Afterlife, was “because the job carried with it, as a fringe benefit, license to read minds, to learn the truth of people’s pasts, to see through walls, to be many places at once, to learn in depth how this or that situation had come to be structured as it was, and to have access to all human knowledge.”30 Is it even necessary to add, in summation, to become a writer? The ghost of Leon Trout does become a writer. In the final chapter, he famously explains that “I have written these words in air—with the tip of the index finger of my left hand, which is also air.”31 A million years in our future, where what remains of humankind is a race of seal-like fisherfolk, there are no more readers. “Nobody, surely, is going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—or tell a lie, or start a Third World War. Mother was right: Even in the darkest times, there really was still hope for humankind.”32 The rendering of writers as spectral entities, floating above, within, or amid human society without being wholly a part of it, renders literature itself a ghostly presence. But this is not viewed as a bad thing. Not at all. “Does it bother me to write so insubstantially, with air on air? Well—my words will be as enduring as anything my father wrote, or Shakespeare wrote, or Beethoven wrote, or Darwin wrote. It turns out that they all wrote with air on air.”33 What Galápagos offers is a Lebensphilosphie, a way of living, and “living better,” as Jacques Derrida says, that imaginatively restores humanity’s place in the universe. In this, it operates somewhat like Slaughterhouse-Five did, inasmuch as that novel established a peace with the world at the individual level; in Galápagos, such peace extends species-wide. It seems appropriate that the tale is told by a ghost, for this philosophy of life is best understood, as in Slaughterhouse-Five, as a way of dealing with the dialectic of life and death, of “living” in the middle of all of this. As Derrida puts it, “If it—learning to live—remains to be done, it can happen only between life

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and death. Neither in life nor in death alone. What happens between the two, and between all the ‘two’s’ one likes, such as life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost. So it would be necessary to learn spirits . . . to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better.”34 The ghostly narrative, written with one’s finger on the air, is as good a place as any to start learning to live better. This is actually a very hopeful sentiment. Vonnegut’s existential humanism had conceded that life was ultimately meaningless, but here that sort of meaninglessness is embraced. What had caused so much pain and anxiety—for instance, Leon’s dismay that his father had no readers—becomes a healthy acknowledgment of the transcendent power to make meaning in our own lives. In a famous 1973 interview in Playboy magazine, Vonnegut explicitly stated the role of the writer in the overall scheme of things, precisely in language resonant with the message of Galápagos: “Writers are specialized cells in the social organism. They are evolutionary cells. Mankind is trying to become something else; it’s experimenting with new ideas all the time. And writers are a means of introducing new ideas into the society, and also a means of responding symbolically to life. I don’t think we’re in control of what we do.”35 In the end, Galápagos affirms our own era of hopeful monsters. It is the apocalypse in the optative mood that signals a new beginning, a starting over from scratch that cleanses the mind of the horrors instanced in Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, and Slapstick, among others. Vonnegut’s Galápagos is thus a gift from the writer to his devoted fans. Its message, from Anne Frank, that “in spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart,” also calls to mind that of another great writer from the middle of that troubled century, William Faulkner, who famously suggested in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech “that man will not merely endure, he will prevail.” In his earlier apocalypse, Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut had explicitly referred to the hopelessness that comes from considering the human condition over a million years—the Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, titled “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?”, contains only one word: “Nothing.” But three decades later, and a million years later, Vonnegut finds some hope for mankind after all. With Galápagos, Vonnegut imagines a potential end for mankind, but produces a hopeful end-of-the-world romance that puts to rest the misanthropic humanism that typified his earlier works. Here, Vonnegut allows humanity to start over . . . happy, healthy, and covered in a light fur.

Chapter 10

Twilight of the Icons: Hocus Pocus and Timequake

One almost wishes that Vonnegut had stopped writing novels after Galápagos and Bluebeard. In Galápagos, Vonnegut liberates himself from his misanthropic humanism by allowing the “all-too-human” aspects of humanity to disappear through the necessity and chance of natural selection. With its “hopeful monsters” living out lives far more satisfying and happy now that they have evolved beyond their big-brained ancestors, Galápagos offers Vonnegut’s seemingly final vision of the human condition in a post-postmodern world. Similarly, but enacted within the heart and soul of a single, Vonnegut-like artist, Bluebeard restores the humanity of one human being, Rabo Karabekian, and offers personal salvation through the exorcism of abstract expression by the ideals of mimetic realism combined with narrative force. In these two novels, Vonnegut seems to achieve that peaceful resolution, at the level of the species and of the individual, to his lifelong novelistic project of bringing sense to the nonsense of postmodern American life. With Hocus Pocus and Timequake,1 which also continue this modernist project, Vonnegut indulges in a process of negation, reversing the personal peace of a Karabekian with a weary and cynical escapism of Eugene Debs Hartke, and abandoning his postmodern iconography altogether in the non-novel that is Timequake, in which the amor fati of Slaughterhouse-Five is reduced to the linguistic absurdity of a punch line from a dirty joke. With their twinned themes of death and resurrection, Vonnegut’s last two novels represent an open-ended coda, if not a conclusion, to his postmodern iconography. Yet, in the gloaming of Vonnegut’s twilight of the icons, his overall project comes to its fitful, and necessary, end.

Epitaphs and Enumeration Hocus Pocus, the fragmentary but linear reminiscences of a dying man, is a novel very much about death. This is not merely owing to the omnipresence

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of actual deaths in the book, from Viet Cong and civilians killed in the Vietnam War to other, variously lurid or banal deaths in the United States. There is also the deathly aura surrounding the novel, as the narrator seems to be a deadening presence, draining the life out of his subject—himself—as the proceeds with the story. As if to emphasize the dehumanized or inhuman aspects of the novel, Hartke employs an odd numerology, insisting on using Arabic numerals to represent numbers and insisting on viewing numbers as almost mystic forms for understanding our lives. Bookended by pages full of rather troubling stick-figures, male on the one hand and female on the other, who appear to represent the number of persons Eugene Debs Hartke has killed and the number of persons (not counting wives and prostitutes) he has slept with, the death-and-sex narrative concludes with a fitting symbol, a tombstone with a question mark. Whether the epitaph is the definite number or the inconclusive question mark, Hartke’s necrography appropriately fades to black with an image of the dead letter, the sign that cannot communicate. The final image of a tombstone is merely the last of several traced grave markers scattered throughout the novel, and it is the only one that does not have a verbal epitaph. In place of one, it has only a large question mark, and in the context of Hocus Pocus’s overall questioning, this punctuation seems as suitable an ending as one might imagine. Of course, according to the narrator’s little mathematical story problem, this question mark is supposed to be filled with a number, the number of women (excluding wives and prostitutes) with whom he has “gone all the way,” a number which would be “as good a thing as any to put on my tombstone as an enigmatic epigraph.”2 The project of listing all of these women leads him to begin counting “how many human beings I actually killed.”3 The number will actually be the same, and thus also will be the number that will constitute Hartke’s “enigmatic epigraph.” The powerful abstraction of such numerology represents a key theme of Hocus Pocus—including the “hocus pocus” of numbers as a means of distracting one from the stories of narrative experience—and this is partly why it represents such a noteworthy reversal of direction from Vonnegut’s previous two novels, Bluebeard and Galápagos. With the embittered voice of Eugene Debs Hartke narrating another postapocalyptic tale of human frailty, Hocus Pocus returns to a somewhat bleaker and less pleasant future-that-is-also-the-present. Whereas Galápagos had solved the problem of misanthropic humanism by allowing its anthropos to evolve into something inhuman, Hocus Pocus jarringly asserts its thoroughgoing misanthropy as well as its bleak humanism. The title alone reveals the joke, which is that everything can change in the blink of an eye

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and for no good reason. It also indicates, as Hartke himself notes in the novel at several points, the deliberate deceptiveness on the part of the conjurer, the way in which he used “hocus pocus” to destroy the lives of others. Yet the fundamental arbitrariness of life in postmodern America is not more pronounced in Hocus Pocus than in Vonnegut’s earlier novels. Here again the chronicler of the chaos is deeply nostalgic for a mythic (non- and never-existent) American coherence and simplicity, much like Paul Proteus’s pastoral ideals. Hartke’s nostalgia is for the era of his namesake, Eugene Debs, to whom the book—complete with a hand-drawn tombstone and epitaph—is dedicated. Hartke is not exactly nostalgic because that terrible time of greed and want is Edenic, but because persons like Debs were willing to struggle. Hartke, the man and his era, already seems dead. In his bitter recognition of this living death, Hartke stands as an extreme version of Vonnegut’s sadly wise (or wisely sad) spokespersons, like Wilbur Swain, Walter Starbuck, and Rudy Waltz (but not like Rabo Karabekian or Leon Trout, who manage to escape from this trap). In Hocus Pocus, the entire narrative builds up to a sophomoric word problem, with some reading and writing and a little math helping the reader figure out what the most appropriate epitaph for Hartke’s life, and death, ought to be. But, delivering the message he’s learned from “The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore,” Hartke reminds us in the final line, “Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the universe.”4 The narrative form of Hocus Pocus also plays on the joke. Presented as Hartke’s memoirs, written while facing trial, the narrative calls to mind Vonnegut’s other first-person, autobiographical accounts, perhaps especially that of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., in Mother Night. A key difference in this one is the decision to write the novel on scraps of paper, each of varying size, such that the entire manuscript is made up of snippets, sometimes a few paragraphs in length, and sometimes limited to a single line or word. An artier narrator might have taken the further step of leaving these scraps of narrative in their collagelike format, allowing a clever editor or industrious reader to piece them together as one will. How’s that for postmodern? Yet, as the editor “K.V.” explains, these fragments are consecutively numbered, and this numbering clearly indicates the resolve of the author to have the bits and pieces read in a particular, unwavering order, in a strictly linear fashion that admits to no reshuffling or retelling. Quite unlike Kilgore Trout’s mini-stories, hastily composed and more hastily composted in city rubbish bins, Hartke’s narrative is rigorously directive. The fragmentarity of the manuscript is a ruse; its numerical ordering commands a form

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of order that must be followed. This, perhaps, owing to Hartke’s military background. In a number of Vonnegut novels, one finds unexpected irregularities, typographic idiosyncrasies, or other textual surprises, such as the “So it goes” or “Hi Ho” repetitions in Slaughterhouse-Five and Slapstick, respectively, the crude drawings of Breakfast of Champions, or the asterisks attached to the names of dead characters in Galápagos. In Hocus Pocus, Vonnegut or Hartke employs Arabic numerals each time he mentions a number, writing “8 weeks” instead of “eight weeks,” for example. The use of the Arabic numerals is somewhat jarring, and the editor (“K.V.”) suggests that the reason Hartke may have chosen to use numerals is that “He may have felt that numbers lost much of their potency when diluted by an alphabet.”5 Whatever the mystic properties of numerals, they are symbols, abstractions, which inevitably draw one away from the human and communicative force of language. So Giambattista Vico thought, at least, as he surmised that the adoption of Arabic numerals and the use of algebra serve to distance scholars from the crucial elements of their education, and ultimately from their ability to become good citizens. Vico blames “the Arabs” for introducing the abstractions of numerals and algebra into human communication, thus depriving it of those more poetic elements that allow it to approach the divine. As Vico explains, this algebra seems to be an Arabic device for reducing the natural signs of magnitudes to certain ciphers at will. Thus the signs for numbers, which among the Greeks and the Latins had been the letters [of their alphabets], which in both (at least the capitals) are regular geometric lines,—were reduced by the Arabs to ten minute ciphers. So perception is stricken by algebra, for algebra sees only what is right under its eyes; memory is confounded, since when the second sign is found algebra pays no further attention to the first; imagination goes blind because algebra has no need of images; understanding is destroyed because algebra professes to divine. For Vico—who frames the problem in language well suited, I think, to the despairing abstraction of Hartke’s narrative—this algebraic method “numbs all that is most exuberant in youthful natures: it obscures their imagination, enfeebles their memory, renders their perception sluggish, and slackens their understanding. And these four things are all most necessary for the culture of the best humanity.”6 In using abstract “ciphers” rather than living words, Hartke might be said to exemplify his own quasi-algebraic reduction

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of life to a matter of numeric symbols. This, if nothing else, might explain his decision to use a number—the number of women slept with or the number of persons killed—as the fitting epitaph, or final word, for his own life. Whether Hartke believes in the mystique of numbers expressed as symbols, the novel continues to play with numerology throughout. Hartke even makes a joke of it, lampooning the notion that the year 2000 was to have marked the date of some millenarian apocalypse: “At least the World will end, an event anticipated with great joy by many. It will end very soon, but not in the year 2000, which has come and gone. From that I conclude that God Almighty is not heavily into Numerology.”7 Hartke himself, however, suspects (half-jokingly) that God and numerology might be up to something after all, when he begins to realize that his two lists, “1 of the women I’ve made love to, and 1 of the men, women, and children I’ve killed,” may end up being the same length. “What a coincidence! . . . How much longer can I go on being an Atheist? ‘There are more things in heaven and earth. . . . ’ ”8 And, doing a little math (and counting stick figures), the reader finds that the numbers are indeed identical: 82. As Hartke acknowledges, these dual lists should not be construed as alternatives, love versus death. He points out to his lawyer that both are lists of “my worst sins.”9 Presumably there is little question about the “sinfulness” of the list of killings, but the list of sexual conquests (probably not the best term for it) is analogous and, in the end, basically the same. Each list leaves off some that might have been included; the list of women slept with omits his wife, all prostitutes, and any from before he turned 20 years old, while the list of killed persons excludes those killed by artillery, air strikes, or “all those, many of them Americans, who died as an indirect result of all my hocus pocus, all my blah blah blah.”10 A former lover on that list draws the parallel unmistakably, and she does so while leaning against a tombstone and to a Hartke who concedes he was hoping she’d invite him to have sex with her as she says it: “You know what you ought to say to any woman dumb enough to fall in love with you? . . . Welcome to Vietnam.”11 Hartke’s would-be epitaph is the cipher, the symbol of his life removed entirely from its living being. This abstract 82, it seems, offers nothing more to say. Moreover, the question mark on the novel’s final tombstone underscores the meaninglessness of all these necrographies, these death writings that take the place of life. Tombstones bearing numbers generally refer to the dates during which one lived, and the words of the epitaph are supposed to sum up the life lived by that person in the time allotted. Or perhaps that now-dead person can speak once more, as in Eugene Debs’s epitaph (which is also the novel’s epigraph), his own words, about the “lower class,” the

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“criminal element,” and the “soul in prison.” Other tombstones in Hocus Pocus offer personal labels (“Freethinkers”) or confessions (“Okay, I admit it. It really was a whorehouse”), but Hartke’s number or question mark leaves the reader with a different sense altogether. Hartke’s slogan, credo, or concession remains uncertain or abstract. In other words, a matter of hocus pocus.

Waking the Dead Hartke’s entire memoir seems an elaborate epitaph, the inscription intended to represent a life already lived, even as it is written by the living corpse. Timequake moves in the opposite direction. Whereas Hocus Pocus offered a living dead man’s premature burial and grave-marking, Vonnegut’s final “novel” attempts to wake the dead, in both senses of the expression. As its fictional hero, Kilgore Trout once more, tries to wake (as in to awaken) those who have been deadened by the long rerun of their last ten years, its other hero, Kurt Vonnegut once more (who may also be fictional, of course), tries to wake (as in to watch over or host a vigil) that which is worth remembering of his own postmodern iconography. Considering this novel in the context of Vonnegut’s other 13 experiments in the form, Timequake is an anomaly. If anything, Timequake is not so much another attempt, as a full-blown semi-novelistic admission of defeat. As many have noted, the blurring of autobiography and fiction had long been a staple of Vonnegut’s novels (as well as of his occasional writings and speeches), and ever since the 1966 re-publication of Mother Night, Vonnegut had included in his novels a preface that specifically identified Vonnegut himself as the narrative voice, regardless of who might be understood to be the narrator of the rest of the book. Slapstick, Vonnegut asserted in the “Prologue,” is as close as he ever came to writing an autobiography,12 but nearly all of Vonnegut’s work seems to stem from autobiographical sources, and almost all from 1966 onward make direct reference to “Kurt Vonnegut” himself as author in their own pages. However, with Timequake, Vonnegut takes the additional step of utterly blurring the fictional narrative with his own, somewhat as he did in Breakfast of Champions, but much more inelegantly. Indeed, can one refer to it as “blurring” when Vonnegut names the process so bald-facedly? In Timequake Vonnegut describes his failure to complete his intended novel, “which did not work, which had no point, and which had never wanted to be written in the first place.” This work he dubs “Timequake One,” and the book that we are now reading is actually

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“Timequake Two,” a stew made from the earlier work’s “best parts mixed with thoughts and experiences during the past seven months [of 1996].”13 Hence, much more so than in Breakfast of Champions, this is an “autobiographical collage” mingled with an aborted novel. A postmodern novel? Perhaps, but I do not think so. What Timequake may be is a post-Vonnegutian novel, since with it Vonnegut abandons his own project and novel-writing entirely. The result is an odd book, which I shall continue to call a novel, but only because that designation is elastic and capacious enough to cover many textual productions that never worked, that have no point, and that never asked to be written in the first place. The return in the flesh of Kilgore Trout—so often retired, altered, or forgotten—is worth the price of admission alone. Trout had appeared, though without being named, as the author of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in Hocus Pocus (“the omission of the author’s name may have been intentional. What sort of writer, after all, would submit a work of fiction for possible publication in Black Garterbelt?”).14 The “timequake” conceit, a mysterious glitch in the timespace continuum that causes everyone to relive, moment by moment, act by act, bad decision by bad decision, the last ten years of their lives, is complemented by a smorgasbord of Vonnegut’s Midwestern homespun wisdom, antipolitical political commentary, dirty jokes, mawkish sentimentality, and so on—the stuff and nonsense that is Vonnegut’s delightful and entertaining and maddening nonfiction, almost all of which (collected or published in such works as Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons [1974], Palm Sunday [1981], Fates Worse than Death [1990], and later A Man Without a Country [2005]) receive their authority exclusively from the personal observations of the author. The timequake is a limited inversion of that joyful wisdom found in Slaughterhouse-Five’s Tralfamadorian ethics, the eternal return as an affirmation of existence. Vonnegut does not see the robotic repetitions of the last ten years of everyone’s lives to be affirming at all, but once the “rerun” is over, the most healthy attitude is clearly to embrace the Tralfamadorian condition. With Tralfamadorian ethics (as with Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s, by the way), there is no free will to worry about directly, and the love of fate—Nietzsche’s amor fati is really the same as Spinoza’s amor dei intellectualis—is the best way to approach one’s future. While this is not exactly Vonnegut’s or Trout’s message, it does seem that the happy ending to Timequake is largely a matter of appreciating things the first time they come around. Although the robotic “loss of free will” is frequently remarked upon as a theme in Vonnegut’s novels, the loss of free will during the rerun following

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the timequake is not the troubling aspect for so many affected by it. The return of a sense of “free will” is horrifying, and when Trout tries to revive the “dead” by shouting “Wake up! Wake up! You’ve got free will again, and there’s work to do!” he is met with stony silence. “Trout had an inspiration! Instead of trying to sell the concept of free will, which he himself didn’t believe in, he said this: ‘You’ve been very sick! Now you’re well again. . . . ’ That mantra worked!”15 The return of “free will” is not an incentive to act; it is merely the name of the chimera that haunts the dreams of Vonnegut’s cast of thousands. “You know what you can do with free will?” asks one such cast member, “You can stuff it up your ass.”16 At the joyous ending, after Trout has been duly honored (a living wake!) for his effort to wake us all up after our many hardships, and Vonnegut has invited friends, admirers, colleagues, and all of us along to his clambake, Trout and Vonnegut perform the experiment with the starry skies above. Trout avers that “human awareness” or the “soul” is a new quality in the Universe. This image allows Vonnegut’s aesthetics and his humanism to fold back into each other. This new quasi-Cartesianism of Trout, where the soul becomes the simple substance and first principle of the entire universe, allows for a return to a much older notion, Protagoras’s, in fact: that “man is the measure of all things.” Hocus Pocus and Timequake do not represent either a capitulation to the postmodern condition or an embrace of postmodernism’s literary liberties. Both continue Vonnegut’s attempts to capture, and counter, the multifarious conditions of life on the United States during the epoch of postmodernity. In all cases, the project adheres to a profoundly modern and modernist sensibility, a belief in powers of integration and communication to make sense of, and give meaning to, our lives in the almost unrepresentable world system. The modernist strategy, emblematic in modern art, architecture, and literature, involves a persistent recognition of the fragmentarity of existence, of the interiority of the individual subject, and the crisis of representation, but it inevitably holds that the artist can make sense of human experience through art. This is a tenet Vonnegut never abandons, and is the guiding thread—a modernist thread, leading through a postmodern labyrinth—of his entire iconography. The modernist impulse remains, but the power of the imagination so crucial to the modernist sense-making project evanesces. Hocus Pocus! In Timequake, the pop-psych pablum masquerading as ethics, along with his panegyric to the physical and metaphysical properties of “human awareness,” evades the earlier enquiry by allowing us to merely cope with the postmodern condition. Perhaps learning to cope with it is a modernist strategy in the end. Ting-a-ling? And yet, Vonnegut

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does not entirely abandon the quest, but he emphasizes that it will be, perhaps necessarily, a failed quest. Vonnegut’s failure in Timequake might actually entail a far greater success, inasmuch as his modernist hopes to imaginatively recapture the lost plenum of an earlier age are fulfilled in the also modernist vision the pure work of art, the work that can deliver the truth—a real truth, one to believe in—through these artistic means. In this sense, Timequake’s message of endless continuation in the face of the unknown and impossible to know, befits Vonnegut’s overall belief system. As he points out in his “creative writing” lesson, complete with the imaginary blackboard, in A Man Without a Country, while fairy tales and adventure stories have their ups-and-downs, upand-downs, the greatest work of literary art can be entirely truthful by demonstrating that, in life, we cannot know whether anything we do is ultimately for good or for ill, but that we just have to keep going regardless. Hamlet, the same guy quoted by Eugene Debs Hartke, demonstrates that “The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”17 Thus is it also appropriate that Timequake gives the last word, not to Trout’s “soul” or even his “Ting-a-ling,” but to Vonnegut’s own sense of wonder at the medium through which he has communicated his messages throughout his long career. Referring, as he has so often, to the almost incredible plasticity of the very element in which human communications—uncertain messages—are conveyed, Vonnegut marvels at last: “What a language.”18 The impossible task of giving form to the American experience in the mid- to late-twentieth century, of producing patterns that render it entirely legible and comprehensible, is essayed in good faith. With Timequake, Vonnegut grapples once more with the postmodern condition in the United States and the world, and projects once more a sort of constellation by which to navigate it, even if the celestial map is provisional, artificial, and, in the end, unreliable. The effort alone is worth something. Just as “we are here,” to put it in the words of Mark Vonnegut, “to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is,” so the American novel functions as a means of making sense of this thing, this life in the United States at a given time and in a given position within an ever more unrepresentable world system of which all American experience was ever a part, no matter what the dreams or nightmares of an ideology of American exceptionalism averred. The novel itself is here to help us understand this thing, whatever it is. At the end of Vonnegut’s nearly 50-year project, with his final experiments in distilling this American essence, Vonnegut may be no closer to any clear and distinct answers, no nearer the goal, but we the readers—all of us gathered at the

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Timequake clambake—can still appreciate the noble botches in all their irregular glory. Fittingly, the postmodern iconography produced through Vonnegut’s experiments in the American novel does not yield a meaningful, complete picture. It just goes on. Having probed the social body of middle-class America in search of a robust soul hidden within or underneath, Vonnegut finds that the soul is as fragile and insubstantial as a passing moment, an artificial and metafictional device, designed to bring our imaginations and our real lives into closer proximity. This is the final message of that most faithful messenger, Kilgore Trout, whose final word—utterly meaningless and laden with potential for meaning—is as absurdly sweet as the single dot, the Tralfamadorian word for “greetings,” that Salo is to carry across the universe in The Sirens of Titan. Trout’s “soul,” the human awareness that moves at an almost limitless speed among the stars, offers Vonnegut a final image of that wholesome space-time travel of Slaughterhouse-Five. There, the final word was not the Niebuhr “prayer” dangling between a starlet’s breasts, but another ting-a-ling sound, a final query for Billy Pilgrim and for the reader: “Poo-tee-weet?”

And So On . . . Nietzsche’s alternative title to The Twilight of the Idols is “How One Philosophizes with a Hammer.” Some readers might wish to imagine Nietzsche, wielding his philosophical hammer like a weapon, smashing the idols of nineteenth-century bourgeois life and thought. Although he would undoubtedly enjoy the irony in confusing his use of the hammer with that of a Wagnerian Donner (or Thor, God of Thunder), Nietzsche plainly states that philosophizing with a hammer has nothing to do with breaking “idols.” Contrary to that iconoclastic vision, Nietzsche’s “hammer” is used like a tuning fork, lightly tapped upon the idols, sounding them for their intrinsic hollowness.19 Ting-a-ling. Vonnegut’s project, it seems to me, is similar. Rather than tearing down and destroying the icons of twentieth-century, middle-class American life, Vonnegut gently reveals their basic flimsiness. Vonnegut’s novels disclose the iconic images of American civilization and renders their paint-and-pasteboard construction all the more visible. The gentle touch might seem an inappropriate way to describe Vonnegut’s approach. After all, not unlike Nietzsche, Vonnegut’s most transparent mode is polemical. He rarely asks readers to read between the lines or seek allegorical signs in

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his imagery; most often he seems to be hitting us over the head with his views. But that too is part of Vonnegut’s style, as much as his collages or time-travels. Vonnegut’s postmodern iconography is a critique, a critical intervention into the foma and granfalloonery—or, worse, the pool-pah that so often seems to be our zah-mah-ki-bo—of life in the United States at millennium’s end.20 Vonnegut’s 14 novels, while each does its own thing, together are nevertheless experiments in the same overall project. Experimenting with the form of the American novel itself, Vonnegut engages in a broadly modernist attempt to apprehend and depict the fragmented, unstable, and distressing bizarreries of postmodern American experience. From the utopian and dystopian exercises in sense-making of Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, the existentialism and critique of authenticity in Mother Night, the dialectic of enlightenment and the bittersweet tragedies of the commonplace in Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the bewilderingly poignant affirmation of life in Slaughterhouse-Five and the schizophrenic unraveling of Breakfast of Champions, followed by the almost dour mediations upon American psycho-political structures in Slapstick and Jailbird, the retreats into art and the liberation from the aesthetic in Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard, the ultimate dissipation of Vonnegut’s misanthropy in the inhuman humanism of Galápagos, and the sleight-of-hand bathos of Hocus Pocus rescued somewhat by the narrative surrender and release of Timequake— from all of this, Vonnegut attempts to produce a postmodern iconography of American life. That he does not actually succeed in representing the shifting multiplicities of that social experience is beside the point. What matters is the attempt, and the recognition that, regardless of whatever else confronts us in the meantime, the attempt is necessary, that we must try to map this unstable and perilous terrain, even if we know in advance that our efforts are doomed. Vonnegut’s sentimentalism, his palliative clichés, his pop psychologizing, and his banal witticisms are therefore not wasted efforts, but constitute alternative means of addressing the unrepresentable Leviathan before him. Thus, with Paul Proteus, Vonnegut proposes a toast, “To the record,” and the record registers a series of meaning-laden but directionless verbal ticks, hiccups as Wilbur Swain calls them, like “so it goes,” “and so on,” “hi ho!,” and “ting-a-ling.” In the last line of the “Editor’s Note” (signed “K.V.”) to Hocus Pocus, Vonnegut offers another word, which might be useful to readers of all of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels and for the legacy of the American novel in the postnational era: “To virtually all of his idiosyncrasies I, after much thought, have applied what another author

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once told me was the most sacred word in a great editor’s vocabulary. That word is ‘stet.’ ”21 Let it stand. But Vonnegut, like his admired precursor, also recognizes the demeanor and comportment best suited for engaging in such a project such as he faces, and we face at the end of the American Century, and moving into another, as yet unknown, era. As Nietzsche put it, “Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy affair, fraught with immeasurable responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds without high spirits having a part in it.”22

Notes

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Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (New York: Norton, 1967), 543. For a recapitulation of the nineteenth-century debates, see Herbert R. Brown, “The Great American Novel,” American Literature 7.1 (March 1935), 1–14. Melville, Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (New York: Norton, 1967), 379. See David Cowart, “Culture and Anarchy: Vonnegut’s Later Career,” in Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut, ed. Robert Merrill (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), 186. See, for example, Colin MacCabe, “Preface” to Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), ix. In Jailbird, for instance, the narrator feels that any reference to his, and America’s, past will seem like prehistoric references to today’s (that is, 1977’s) youth, who are as likely to think that dinosaurs roamed the Earth as they are that Sacco and Vanzetti mattered to so many people in the 1930s. See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (1986), 22. See, for example, Bertrand Westphal’s La Géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace (Paris: Minuit, 2007). See Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971). See Leonard Mustazza, Forever Pursuing Genesis: The Myth of Eden in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990). Jameson, Postmodernism, 17. For other characterizations of that era, but with the distinctly humane and marketable ethos of popular magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, one may look at Vonnegut’s short stories of the 1950s, collected in (and, in the case of three stories, partially rewritten for) Bagombo Snuff Box (New York: Putnam, 1999). See Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons (New York: Delacorte, 1974), 1–5. In his extraordinary analysis of utopia, in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions ( London: Verso, 2005), Jameson makes the credible argument that, even in their pervasively dystopian variants, utopias perform the critical function of presenting radical alternatives to the contemporary status quo. But see the revolutionary spirit playfully employed in the short story, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” in Welcome to the Monkey House (New York: Dell, 1968).

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This theme appears often in Vonnegut’s later works; see, e.g., Jailbird (New York: Dell, 1979) or Hocus Pocus (New York: Berkley, 1990). Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dell, 1969), 165. See Vonnegut, Bluebeard (New York: Dell, 1987), 91; Slapstick (New York: Dell, 1976) 226. Slaughterhouse-Five, 27. Ibid., 22. See, for example, the well-known metaphor of the cone, in Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone, 1988), 152; for an analysis of the concept, see Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991), 59. See Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 179–225. Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (New York: Delacorte, 1973), 5. Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (New York: Dell, 1963), 168. Cat’s Cradle was later accepted by the University of Chicago in lieu of a Master’s thesis in anthropology in 1971, which is especially ironic, since Vonnegut, studying at that institution after the war, had been denied the degree on the grounds that his thesis lacked academic rigor. See Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, xv. Cat’s Cradle, 67. Ibid., 68. See Cowart, “Culture and Anarchy,” 171.

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Vonnegut, Player Piano [1952] (New York: Dell, 1974), 313. It is worth noting, perhaps, that Player Piano was reissued in 1954 with the title Utopia-14. Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World [1693] (London: John Russell Smith, 1862), 12. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance [1852] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 2. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World, 12. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Constructions of America (London: Routledge, 1993), 29. I have argued that this quasi-religious “belief” in America extends to, and is constitutive of, the project of American Studies as a disciplinary field and as a cultural phenomenon. See my “ ‘Believing in America’: The Politics of American Studies in a Postnational Era,” The Americanist XXIII (2006), 69–81. See Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 279–96. Peter J. Reed, The Short Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut (Westport: Greenwood, 1997), 145. Player Piano, 316–17. Ibid., 318.

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Ibid., 316. See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). Player Piano, 7, 9. Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater [1965] (New York: Dell, 1991), 21. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–51. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 220. Benjamin also points out that, in the case of manual copying, one could argue that there is still a sense of authenticity in the form of the copyist’s or forger’s own authenticity and skill; thus, mechanical reproduction is different from merely copying an original. Ibid., 224. Ibid., 220–1. Ibid., 224. Player Piano, 18. Ibid. Ibid., 37–8. Ibid., 273, 274. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 237. Leonard Mustazza, Forever Pursuing Genesis: The Myth of Eden in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990), 43–44. The quotation from Mary Sue Schreiber is from her “You’ve Come a Long Way, Babbitt! From Zenith to Ilium,” Twentieth-Century Literature 17 (1971), 106. Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan (New York: Dell, 1959), 7–8. Ibid., 271–2. Ibid., 273. This last phrase, of course, refers to Douglas Adams’s own retelling of the joke in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy” (actually, five volumes), in which the entire history of the planet earth is a vast experiment to find the question to the known answer of the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything”—the answer is “42,” so then the question itself becomes the real mystery. Player Piano, 274. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 35, 17. Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser with William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 6. Player Piano, 310. Ibid., 299. Ibid., 313. Ibid., 313, my emphasis. See Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction, 1950–1970 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Chapter 8, “The Uncertain Messenger,” is devoted to Vonnegut’s six novels to (that) date. Tanner, City of Words, 184–5. Mustazza, Forever Pursuing Genesis, 43.

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See, e.g., Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian, 1956), esp. 40–8. Vonnegut, Mother Night [1961] (New York: Dell, 1966), xii. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 67. Ibid., 233. See Lukács, Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971). Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays, trans. S. Gilbert (New York: Vintage, 1955), 46–7. Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3, line 85. Of course, as Vonnegut points out in A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories, 2005), Polonius is a stupid “windbag,” who dispenses “the dumbest possible advice” (35). Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 27. Mother Night, x. Ibid., ix. Ibid., ix–x. Ibid., ix. Ibid., ix, 100. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, Part I, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 161, lines 1349–58. Ibid., xi–xii. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17. See Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country. Mother Night, 69. Ibid., 147–8. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 18. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. anon. (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 15. Mother Night, 95. Ibid., 21, 187. Ibid., 22, 23. Ibid., 25. See Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus” in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1955). Mother Night, x. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 192.

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See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1987). Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” trans. James Schmidt, in James Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 38, translation modified. Adorno and Horkheimer, 43, 88, xvi. Adorno and Horkheimer’s elaboration of these themes come in their two “excursuses” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 43–119. Adorno and Horkheimer, 3. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 256. Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (New York: Dell, 1963), 168. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 88. Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 128. Cat’s Cradle, 114. Ibid., 11. Adorno and Horkheimer, xvi. Cat’s Cradle, 33. Ibid., 36. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien, 2nd ed. (New York: Ballentine Books, 1977), xvi. Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 390. Cat’s Cradle, 44. Ibid., 11, 42, 150. Ibid., 11, 53, 59, 64, 109. See Mustazza, Forever Pursuing Genesis: The Myth of Eden in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990). Cat’s Cradle, 139–40. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 90, my emphasis. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 190, 191. Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” 38. Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (New York: Dell, 1965), 56. Ibid., 7. Donald E. Morse, The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Imagine Being an American (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 64. Ibid. Rosewater, 12.

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Ibid., 13, 14. See Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, 162, no. 3859 (December 13, 1968), 1243–8. Ibid., 1243. Ibid., 1244. Rosewater, 190. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dell, 1969), 8. Rosewater, 9. Ibid., 120, 121. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 97, 132. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 97, 103. Ibid., 145. Cat’s Cradle, 71; Rosewater, 184. Rosewater, 20. Ibid., 184. Ibid., 78. Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan (New York: Dell, 1959), 313. Tony Tanner, City of Words, 184. Cat’s Cradle, 59. Ibid., 116, 117. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 109. Vonnegut, Mother Night, 162.

Chapter 5 1

2 3

4

Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dell, 1969). Slaughterhouse-Five is the first of Vonnegut’s novels to include a very personal, autobiographical preface written in Vonnegut’s own voice; such prefaces become trademarks of Vonnegut’s subsequent writings. But see note 22 below. Slaughterhouse-Five, 21–2. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche refers to himself as “the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus—I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence,” and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra is named “the teacher of the eternal recurrence.” See The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1982), 563, 332. On the idea of “conceptual personae,” see Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), especially 61–83. That is, it is not essential that Vonnegut be familiar with Nietzsche while writing Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut clearly read Nietzsche at some point, and in a 1992 interview mentions that he has been reading Nietzsche, whom he quotes there and later again in Timequake (84). Given his interests in existentialism and philosophy more generally, given that Slaughterhouse-Five was largely written while he

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was on and around college campuses, and given the near ubiquity of the little purple paperback edition of The Portable Nietzsche on college campuses in the late1960s, it seems likely that Vonnegut may have had some acquaintance with Nietzschean thought. (The Portable Nietzsche was so popular that, according to its copyright page, the paperback edition, first published in 1959, went through twenty-three reprintings between 1959 and 1969.) This circumstantial evidence notwithstanding, my argument is based not on biographical data or even literary influence, but on what I take to be an affinity between Nietzsche’s theory and Vonnegut’s own Tralfamadorian ethics. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 547. Ibid., 548–9. Ibid., 549. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 49; Nietzsche, Will to Power, 549. (Kaufmann translates ewige Wiederkunft as “eternal recurrence.”) Slaughterhouse-Five, 27. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 48. Slaughterhouse-Five, 207. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 142–3. Ibid., 150. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 273–4. Slaughterhouse-Five, 129, 128. Ibid., 26–7. Nehamas, Nietzsche, 162. See, e.g., Vonnegut, Timequake (New York: Berkley, 1997), 14. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, 500, translation modified. Jerome Klinkowitz, Kurt Vonnegut (London and New York: Methune, 1982), 11. Klinkowitz, Vonnegut in Fact: The Public Spokesmanship of Personal Fiction (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 111. I view the preface to Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) as the first such preface in Vonnegut’s oeuvre, but other candidates are available. Vonnegut’s “first” preface might be said to be the “Introduction” added to the first hardcover edition of Mother Night in 1966, in which he writes that the “moral” of the novel is “We are what we pretend to be, so be careful what you pretend to be” (v). I do not count the brief “Foreword” to Player Piano, for instance, as it offers nothing of the author’s autobiographical (or even authorial) presence of these later prefaces. The “Editor’s Note” to the original 1961 paperback edition of Mother Night could also arguably be thought of as a “first” personal preface, insofar as he signs it as “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.” and speaks somewhat as himself, but in establishing his fictional persona as the “editor” of a fictional character’s memoirs, this preface differs markedly from those that become typical in Vonnegut’s post-1968 writings. For one thing, the “Editor’s Note” does not get very personal, whereas the 1966 “Introduction” to the new edition of Mother Night uses the “voice” and personal biography (notably, Vonnegut’s reference to his experiences in Dresden in 1945) with which readers will become more familiar in the works to come.

Notes 23 24 25

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See Cat’s Cradle, 53–6. Klinkowitz, Vonnegut in Fact, 111. See, e.g., Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 43–5, and passim. Slaughterhouse-Five, 125. Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons (New York: Delacorte Press, 1974), 258. Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 179–80. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1987), 234. Ibid., 234. Slaughterhouse-Five, 87, 88. Jerome Klinkowitz, Structuring the Void: The Struggle for Subject in Contemporary American Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 159. See Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), especially 5–66. Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form, 20. See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone, 1988), 152. Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 58–9. Slaughterhouse-Five, 74–5. Ibid., 205. Nehamas, Nietzsche, 167–8. Welcome to the Monkey House, xiii. Slaughterhouse-Five, 60. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 258.

Chapter 6 1 2

3

4 5

6 7

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Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons (New York: Delacorte, 1974), 284. The term schiz, in this context, derives from Deleuze and Guattari’s usage; see Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 243–4. Lawrence R. Broer, Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, rev. ed. (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 10–11. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 2. See Kathryn Hume, “The Heraclitean Cosmos of Kurt Vonnegut,” in Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut, ed. Robert Merrill (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990), 216–30. Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (New York: Delacorte, 1973), 198. Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 154. Ibid., 152. Jameson, “The Ideology of the Text,” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, vol. 1, Situations of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 70. Breakfast, 92–3. Ibid., 112–13.

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Ibid., 176–7. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 26. Breakfast, 25, 56. Ibid., 58–9. Ibid., 77–8. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 5. Ibid., 59. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 292. Foucault, “Preface,” in Anti-Oedipus, xiii. Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Anti-Novel of Nathalie Sarraute,” trans. Beth Brombert, Yale French Studies 16 (1955), 40. Breakfast, 214. Ibid., 214, 215. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 214–15. The locus classicus for this term may be found in Bertolt Brecht, “Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which Produces an Alienation Effect,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. and ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 136–47. The term “alienation effect” is misleading, as Fredric Jameson points out, since the Marxian term is distinct (Marx had used the word Entfremdung) and “estrangement” is more in keeping with the conceptual predecessor in Russian Formalism, “ostranenia” or “making strange”; see Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998), 85–6, n. 13. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (London: Verso, 2005), 263. Kathryn Hume also discusses the Verfremdungseffekt in Vonnegut’s work; see her “Heraclitean Cosmos,” 217–18. Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. John Rutherford (New York: Penguin, 2000), 56. Foucault also locates Don Quixote at the threshold of modernity, “where words wander off on their own, without content”; see Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. anon (New York: Vintage: 1973), 48. See, e.g., Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel [1957] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 7–34. Vonnegut, Breakfast, 215. See Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris [1975], trans. Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge: Wakefield Press, 2010). Breakfast, 234. Ibid., 303. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S.H. Butcher (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 69. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 43. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 7. Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), xiii. Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 44–5.

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Vonnegut, Breakfast, 303; the phrase, “Between Timid and Timbuktu,” refers to the fact that all the words between these in a very small dictionary relate to time, and it is the title of Beatrice Rumfoord’s book of poetry in The Sirens of Titan (New York: Dell, 1959), 12. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (London: Verso, 2005), 263.

Chapter 7 1 2 3

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Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons (New York: Delacorte, 1974), 94. Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (New York: Delacorte Press, 1973), 5. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). See Phillip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Vonnegut, Slapstick (New York: Dell, 1976), 156–7. See Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances” [1908], trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 9, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1959), 235–41. Freud, “Femininity” [1931], New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 146. Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (New York: Dell, 1965), 142. Slapstick, 163–4. Ibid., 170–1, 193. Ibid., 196–7. Ibid., 156. Ibid., 181, 210. Ibid., 213. Ibid., 220. Indeed, this must be sarcastic or at least ironic on Vonnegut’s part, since—both as a German-American and as a “Vonnegut”—he fought in a war that had family members on both sides, and Vonnegut is unlikely to see World War II as a model of humane warfare. Disturbingly, Wilbur Swain’s comment also seems to indicate the degree to which he (or Vonnegut) finds wars between different ethnic groups or races to be somehow more worthy of inhumane treatment. In Fates Worse than Death (New York: Berkley, 1992), whose discourse, in fairness, seems to be delivered almost entirely with tongue in cheek, Vonnegut goes so far as to predict that different races—“the Blacks, the Hispanics, the Irish, the Italians, the Asiatics, and the Nothings (which would include those of German descent)”—will unite to become “tribes” at war with each other in America (133), a conceit only the most marginal of race-based fear-mongers have ever really taken seriously. Indeed, the “volunteers” among the Indianapolis Daffodils who are to fight in the King of Michigan’s army against the Duke of Oklahoma are “selected,” perhaps even drafted, on the basis that they “were all people who could be most easily spared.” See Slapstick, 216. Ibid., 187.

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Ibid., 204. In this study discussion of Kurt Vonnegut and the American novel, it might be worth mentioning a monumental narrative, though not a novel, in the literary history of the United States, one that helped to define the relationship between personal narrative and political discourse in the mid-nineteenth century. One of the most famous personal narratives in American literature addresses the terrible misunderstandings over the “happiness” of singing slaves. Frederick Douglass, in his 1844 Narrative, notes that “those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.” But he is “utterly astonished” to find Northerners (like Vonnegut or Swain, I suppose) who cite the slaves’ singing “as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.” Consider this an early lesson in understanding the Blues. See Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: Signet Classics, 2005), 29–30. Vonnegut’s nostalgia for a time in which the familial and communitarian bonds were much stronger, as in his ironic comment about “the good old days” (see note 24 below), is often troublingly linked to less than salutary considerations of racial and ethnic identity. In general, Vonnegut decries the racism of American society, as he imagines it, but as with much of his political commentary, he seems more resigned to the fact than interested in its potential overcoming. Moreover, with few exceptions—a notable one appears in Jailbird, in the character of the chauffeur Cleveland Lawes—Vonnegut’s United States has little meaningful room for African Americans, who appear largely as almost minstrel show stereotypes, such as Lyman Enders Knowles (insane elevator operator), Wayne Hoobler (illiterate convict) or Elgin Washington (maimed pimp). And, although due respect is paid to the contributions of Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti, and Vonnegut himself acknowledges his own family’s history of being “foreigners” who bought American businesses rather than building them up from scratch, he has no trouble allowing his narrators to complain, as Walter Starbuck and Eugene Debs Hartke do, of “foreigners” like Saudi Arabians and Japanese buying U.S. assets, and so on. Vonnegut’s ambiguous position with respect to race, ethnicity, and national origins deserves more nuanced and serious study. This is not really the place to discuss in detail Vonnegut’s rather problematic or confused positions with respect to race, which I will address in another piece currently in progress, tentatively titled “Shadows Cast by a Magic Lamp: Vonnegut, Censorship, and Race.” Slapstick, 204. Ibid., 44. Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan (New York: Dell, 1959), 310. Vonnegut, Jailbird (New York: Dell, 1979), 203. Ibid., 225, 203. Vonnegut also notes, with characteristic ambiguity, that the now-fallen union’s “membership is almost entirely black or Hispanic now. It was lily-white back in the Thirties—Scandinavians mostly. I don’t think a black or Hispanic would have been allowed to join back in the good old days” (Jailbird 203). Jailbird, 273.

Notes 26 27 28 29 30

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Ibid., 271–2. Peter F. Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 6. Jailbird, 272. Ibid., 280. Of course, Slapstick and Jailbird do not exactly present a lot of hope for the afterlife either. In Slapstick, we learn from the long-dead spirit of Eliza Swain that, in the hereafter, the spirits of the dead “are being bored stiff. Whoever designed this place knew nothing about human beings” (234); meanwhile the other spirits egg on and second the inadvertent and obscene sentiments of a young man with Tourette’s Syndrome (233). In Jailbird, a Kilgore Trout (in this iteration, as the nom de plume of a Robert Fender) offers a tale in which God demands that every soul in heaven first admit that he or she could have succeeded wildly in life if only each had not been “asleep at the switch” when money-making opportunities arose, thus absolving God of any responsibility for their earthly unhappiness (225–8). But the ghosts, especially those of the Americans, are now miserable in heaven, for they realize just how many opportunities to be rich and happy they had missed while on earth. This is partly Todd F. Davis’s contention, when he asserts that Vonnegut is a postmodernist because he rejects the “grand narratives” of modernity, as discussed by Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition; see Davis, Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006), 17. Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 279–80.

Chapter 8 1 2 3 4

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Vonnegut, Bluebeard (New York: Dell, 1987), 263. Vonnegut, Deadeye Dick (New York: Dell, 1982), xii. Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (New York: Delacorte, 1973), 5. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter [1850] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 36. See Jonathan Arac, The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820–1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), especially Chapter 4. Deadeye Dick, xiii. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 134. This etymology is correct. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in its original Latin variant, it carried the positive connotation of “exceptional,” as in “rising above the rest of the herd,” but in seventeenth-century England, the same meaning began to denote an undesirable quality, of being unable or unwilling to abide by social norms. Dante, Inferno, trans. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1984), 89–93; Deadeye Dick, 146. Deadeye Dick, 5–6. Ibid., 212.

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

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Notes

Ibid., 69. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 118, 120. Ibid., 131, 133. Ibid., 130. Vonnegut, Mother Night (New York: Dell, 1966), ix. Deadeye Dick, 110. Ibid., ix. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dell, 1969), 88. Deadeye Dick, 208, 209. Ibid., xi, 239–40. Vonnegut, Bluebeard (New York: Dell, 1987), 263, 121. Deadeye Dick, 188. Breakfast of Champions, 213. Ibid., 213, 214. Ibid., 224, 225. Ibid., 226. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 241. Bluebeard, Author’s Note, n.p. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Ethan Brand,” Selected Tales and Sketches (New York: Penguin, 1987), 436. Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons (New York: Delacorte, 1974), 92. Ibid., 92–3. The reference, of course, is to Homer’s Odyssey, Books X–XI. Bluebeard, 112, 113. Ibid., 124, 122. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 264. Ibid., 268. Ibid., 273. Ibid., 270. Ibid., 129. Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (New York: Dell, 1963), 156. Klinkowitz, Vonnegut in Fact: The Public Spokesmanship of Personal Fiction (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 112. Susan E. Farrell, “Art, Domesticity, and Vonnegut’s Women,” in New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut, ed. David Simmons (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 103. Bluebeard, 246. Ibid., 287.

Chapter 9 1

In his autobiographical “collage,” Palm Sunday (New York: Delacorte, 1981), Vonnegut admits that after spending “two-thirds” of his life as a pessimist, “I am

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astonished to find myself an optimist now” (209). It seems to me that a sign of Vonnegut’s newly acquired optimism is Galápagos itself. Vonnegut, Galápagos (New York: Dell, 1985), 3. Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (New York: Delacorte, 1973), 205. The last lines of Cat’s Cradle (New York: Dell, 1963), present the final paragraph of the Books of Bokonon: “If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who” (191). “All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the 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.” See Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dell, 1969), 27. Charles Berryman, “Vonnegut and Evolution: Galápagos,” in Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut, ed. Robert Merrill (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990), 195. See Oliver W. Ferguson, “History and Story: Leon Trout’s Double Narrative in Galápagos,” Critique 40, no. 3 (Spring 1999), 230–8. Longtime Vonnegut fans will recognize the dog’s name, which (with an additional “h”) is the same as that of Winston Niles Rumfoord’s beloved dog and fellow traveler on the chrono-synclastic infundibulum in The Sirens of Titan (New York: Dell, 1959), as well as the name of the vicious attack dog that frightens Vonnegut himself in Breakfast of Champions (New York: Delacorte, 1973). Peter Freese, “Natural Selection with a Vengeance: Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 36, no. 3 (January 1991), 337. Galápagos, 70. Ibid., 70. In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut mentions a Kilgore Trout novel, The Smart Bunny, about a rabbit born with a brain the size of a human’s; all that extra brainpower avails her little, when she is shot and killed by a hunter, whose wife decides against eating the rabbit on the grounds that its oversized head clearly reveals some form of disease or birth defect (see Breakfast, 238). Galápagos, 8–9. Ibid., 75–6. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 18, 24. Ibid., 189. Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons (New York: Delacorte, 1974), 262. Freese, “Natural Selection with a Vengeance,” 339. This, too, is similar to Vonnegut’s cosmic joke in The Sirens of Titan, where all human civilization is discovered to be merely in the service, and based on the elaborate machinations, of Tralfamadorians trying to send messages to a stranded traveler. But here, Nature herself is the guiding force behind everything.

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Galápagos, 82. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 291. See, e.g., Jerome Klinkowitz, The Vonnegut Effect (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 129. Galápagos, 162–3. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 291. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 290. Ibid., 259. Ibid., 290. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), xviii. Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, 237.

Chapter 10 1

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See Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus (New York: Dell, 1990); Timequake (New York: Berkley, 1997). Hocus Pocus, 30. Ibid., 154. Hocus Pocus, 324. Ibid., viii. Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1944), 124–5. Hocus Pocus, 2. Ibid., 206, 207; Hartke’s quotation is of Hamlet’s famous words to Horatio (“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”) in Hamlet, I.V. Ibid., 155–6. Ibid., 30, 154. The baleful consequences of Hartke’s “blah blah blah” may well explain his aversion to communication, and his embrace of an ironic numerology. Ibid., 188. Vonnegut, Slapstick (New York: Dell, 1976), 1. Vonnegut, Timequake (New York: Berkley, 1997), xiv. Hocus Pocus, 205. Timequake, 179. Ibid., 194. Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories, 2005), 37. Timequake, 250. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1982), 467.

Notes 20

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See Kevin A. Boon, “Introduction: What to Do When Your Pool-Pah Is Your Zah-mah-ki-bo,” in At Millennium’s End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut, ed. Kevin A. Boon (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001). These are, of course, Bokononist terms from Cat’s Cradle, where zah-mah-ki-bo means “fate—inevitable destiny” (125–6), and pool-pah is variously translated “shit storm” or “wrath of God” (163). Hocus Pocus, vii. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 466, translation modified.

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Index

Adams, Douglas 162n.31 Adorno, Theodor xvi, xvii, 42, 53–5, 56, 164n.3 Anderson, Benedict xix, 100 Aristotle 94, 95 Barnes, Djuna 80 Beckett, Samuel 90 Benjamin, Walter 24–5, 54, 63, 162n. 17 Bercovitch, Sacvan 19–20 Bergson, Henri 13, 80, 161n. 22 Berryman, Charles 133 Boon, Kevin A. 175n. 30 Brecht, Bertolt 92, 97, 168n. 26 Broer, Lawrence R. 85 Brown, Herbert K. 160n 2 Camus, Albert 38, 49, 51, 163n. 28 Cervantes, Miguel de 5, 77, 93, 168n. 30 Chekhov, Anton 98 Clarke, Susanna 58 Cowart, David 3, 17 Dante 117 Darwin, Charles 114, 133, 141, 146 Davis, Todd xxi, 3, 171n. 31 Deleuze, Gilles xviii, 4, 6, 68, 72–3, 80, 86–7, 90–1, 132, 161n. 22, 165n. 3, 167n. 36 Derrida, Jacques 4, 146–7 Descartes, René xxi, 53, 155 Douglass, Frederick 170n. 18 Drucker, Peter F. 109 Farrell, Susan 129 Faulkner, William 4, 147

Ferguson, Oliver 134 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 98 Flaubert, Gustave 80 Foucault, Michel 4, 5, 91, 168n. 30 Frank, Joseph 79–80 Freese, Peter 136, 141 Freud, Sigmund 68, 87, 90, 102–4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 23, 45, 58 Graff, Gerald 78 Guattari, Félix xviii, 6, 68, 86–7, 90–1, 165n. 3, 167n. 2 Hardin, Garrett 63 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 19, 116, 124 Heidegger, Martin 25, 39–42 Hemingway, Ernest xii, 77, 98, 120 Hilton, James 118 Horkheimer, Max xvii, 53–5, 56, 164n. 3 Hume, David 16 Hume, Kathryn 167n. 5, 168n. 28 Hutcheon, Linda 167n. 25 Huxley, Aldous xv, 21, 36 Jameson, Fredric 4–5, 7, 20–1, 88–9, 92, 95, 97, 111–2, 160n. 15, 168n. 26 Jarry, Alfred 15 Joyce, James 4, 80, 92, 97 Kant, Immanuel 53–4, 61 Kaufmann, Walter 163n. 1, 166n. 8 Kermode, Frank 95–6 Klinkowitz, Jerome 3, 75–6, 128 Lacan, Jacques 14, 87–8, 96 Laing, R.D. 90

184

Index

Lodge, David xi Lukács, Georg 6, 40, 55 Lyotard, Jean-François 4, 171n. 31 MacCabe, Colin 160n. 5 McHale, Brian 78 Marx, Karl 47, 109, 168n. 26 Marx, Leo 23 Mather, Cotton 18–19 Melville, Herman xii, xxi, 1–2, 3, 7, 16, 17, 77, 98 Miller, Henry 90 More, Thomas 18, 62, 106 Morse, Donald E. 62 Mustazza, Leonard 6, 27, 28–9, 36, 59 Nehamas, Alexander 73, 75, 81–2 Nietzsche, Friedrich xii, xvi, xvii–xviii, 70–5, 80, 81–4, 85, 137, 145, 154, 157, 165n. 3, 165n. 4 Orwell, George xv, 21, 36, 98 Perec, Georges 94 Poe, Edgar Allan 98 Pollack, Jackson 124 Proust, Marcel 77, 81–2, 97 Reed, Peter J. 21 Reich, Wilhelm 90 Rothko, Mark 124 Said, Edward 95 Sartre, Jean-Paul 38, 39–42, 51, 91, 126 Schreiber, Mary Sue 29, 162n. 27 Serres, Michel 32–3 Shakespeare, William 1, 146, 156, 163n. 7, 174n. 8 Shelley, Mary 23 Shields, Charles xiv Spinoza, Baruch 154 Swift, Jonathan 77 Tally, Robert T. 161n. 7, 170n. 19 Tanner, Tony 34, 162n. 40 Tolkien, J.R.R. 11, 58

Vico, Giambattista 72, 151 Vonnegut, Kurt Armageddon in Retrospect xiv Bagombo Snuff Box xiii, 160n. 13 Bluebeard xix–xx, 11, 12, 100, 112, 114–15, 120, 121–30, 146, 148, 149, 158 Breakfast of Champions xviii–xix, xx, 2, 9, 11, 14–15, 57, 85–97, 98, 99, 114, 115–16, 122–3, 125, 128, 129, 131, 133, 136, 137, 145, 151, 153–4, 158, 169n. 41, 173n. 8, 173n. 12 Canary in a Cat House xiii, 76 Cat’s Cradle ix, xvii, xix, xx, 1, 10, 11, 14, 15–16, 53–61, 62, 67, 68, 70, 76, 92, 96, 100, 101–2, 117, 122, 128, 131, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 144–5, 147, 158, 161n. 26, 173n. 4, 175n. 20 Deadeye Dick xix–xx, 14, 15, 112, 114–21, 122, 128, 137, 146, 158 Fates Worse Than Death xiii, 111, 154, 169n. 15 Galápagos xix–xx, 11, 15, 114, 121, 122, 130, 131–47, 148, 149, 151, 158, 172n. 1 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater xvii, 9, 11, 12, 14, 24, 53–4, 61–8, 103, 106, 131, 132, 133, 158 Hocus Pocus xxi, 100, 148–53, 154, 155, 158–9, 161n. 17, 174n. 8 Jailbird xix, 10, 61, 98, 99–100, 107–11, 112, 133, 146, 158, 160n. 7, 161n. 17, 170n. 19, 170n. 24, 171n. 30 Look at the Birdie xiv A Man Without a Country 9, 46, 55–6, 111, 154, 156, 163n. 7 Mother Night xvi–xvii, xxi, 11–12, 24, 25, 27, 36, 37–52, 53, 62, 68–9, 100, 114, 115, 119, 128, 150, 153, 158, 166n. 22 Palm Sunday xiii, 111, 154, 174n. 1 Player Piano xv–xvi, xvii, 8, 11, 16, 18, 21–9, 31–2, 33, 34–6, 37, 55, 57, 62, 106, 110, 122, 131, 132, 136–7, 139, 147, 158, 161n. 2, 166n. 22 The Sirens of Titan xv–xvi, xix, 9, 11, 13, 18, 21, 25, 29–35, 36, 37, 62, 80,

Index 83, 106, 122, 134, 157, 158, 169n. 41, 173n. 8, 173n. 21 Slapstick xix, 9, 12, 16–17, 60, 98, 100, 101–7, 109–12, 120, 128, 132, 137, 145, 147, 151, 153, 158, 169n. 16, 171n. 30 Slaughterhouse-Five xvii–xix, 10, 11, 12–14, 20, 34, 49, 51, 70–84, 85, 86, 92, 98, 120, 130, 133, 137, 138, 145, 146, 148, 151, 154, 157, 158, 165n. 1, 165n. 4, 173n. 5 Timequake xxi, 11, 16, 112, 119, 148, 153–7, 158, 165n. 4

185

Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons 154 Welcome to the Monkey House xiii, 76, 83, 160n. 16, 166n. 22 While Mortals Sleep xiv Watt, Ian 168n. 31 Wegner, Phillip 100, 169n. 4 Westphal, Bertrand 160n. 9 Wilson, Sloan xv, 8, 21 Wolfe, Thomas 5 Yeats, William Butler xxi, 92