Kurt Vonnegut Archives - James E Hartley

Vonnegut Hits Rock Bottom

As I have noted in this space before, one of the (many) great things about the Library of America is that owning their volumes enables one to easily read an author’s work in the order of publication.

Read that way, Kurt Vonnegut has been an amazing surprise.

Many authors have written books that are all part of a longer storyline. Vonnegut’s books seem like they are all on different topics, but they are surprisingly the parts of a longer argument. Every book reads like a reaction to the previous book. It is uncanny. Each book stands on its own and you would never know that the book is the logical extension of the book Vonnegut finished before starting the one you are reading. But the linkage is there.

The installment of this ongoing saga which I just read was Slapstick. Not good. Not good at all. Indeed, it was a mess, rescued only by the fact that Vonnegut’s style of short chapters and brief paragraphs kept the book moving along at a brisk pace. The biggest question raised by Slapstick: Why is this book so awful?

The answer comes in Vonnegut’s previous book, Breakfast of Champions. Here is what I wrote about that book when I read it not too long ago: “What comes next is Breakfast of Champions, which is a broken Vonnegut just hurling what remains of his psyche onto the page….Breakfast of Champions is really just some sort of uber-nihilism. Don’t ask me what “uber-nihilism” means—I just made up the phrase and I have no idea what it means either, but it is the perfect description of this novel. To try to make sense of the book is exactly the sort of thing the book is mocking you for trying to do.”

Now imagine that summary of Breakfast of Champions is correct. What comes next? If you have just hurled what remains of your broken self onto the page in a supreme act of nihilism, what do you have left to use for material for your next novel? Absolutely nothing.

And interestingly, starting with absolutely nothing is exactly what Slapstick does. The plot is beyond idiotic, neither believable as reality nor as an alternate reality or as an imaginary reality; it is just an incoherent mash-up of bits of flotsam.

Wilbur is born and he is really ugly and he has a twin sister who is also really ugly and they are both not intelligent at all but when they are physically close together they form a telepathic link and are geniuses so they spend lots of time in super-close and super-uncomfortable-for-the-reader-who-doesn’t-like-incest physical contact until they are separated permanently and Wilbur goes to Harvard and then becomes President of the United States but then the Chinese, who have made themselves superminiature people, start messing around with the gravitational force of the planet by making it variable on a day-to-day basis which destroys just about everything in the world except New York City which was instead depopulated by a plague which has an antidote contained in fish guts and, after communicating with his sister who died a few years previously when she was on Mars after having been taken there by the a miniature Chinese emissary who traded transport to Mars for the ability to read some of the works that Wilbur and his sister wrote when they were very young, Wilbur goes there (the largely uninhabited New York City) and lives in the Empire State Building with his granddaughter who for reasons unexplained just showed up one day and does absolutely nothing afterwards to explain why she is even in this novel.

If that sounds like a book you might like to read I have done a terrible job relating the plot. Maybe I should have included the pointless stuff about the King of Michigan and his wars against the great lakes pirates and the Duke of Oklahoma.

The plot (to use the word loosely), however, is totally irrelevant to the message of the book. I suppose this is one of the things that happens when you are a novelist. You have a message that could be summarized in a four word sentence, but instead of just publishing the sentence, you write a whole novel to say what could have been said in four words, but even the novel version of the four word sentence would have only been about 5 (or maybe 10 if you use a lot of adjectives) pages long, so you add another 150 pages of filler.

The Message: We all need friends.

The 10 page story written to say ‘We all need friends”: When Wilbur ran for President of the United States, his campaign slogan was “Lonesome No More.” The plan: everyone in the country will be assigned a new middle name which is a word followed by a number between 1 and 20. Wilbur ended up Daffodil-11, for example. Then, by law, everyone with the same middle name as yours is your brother or sister. Everyone with the same word, but a different number is your cousin. After the plan goes into effect, you suddenly have 10,000 siblings and 190,000 cousins. Presto! You are Lonely No More! You have Friends! You may not like all 10,000 of your new siblings, but surely you will like some of them and since they are your siblings, they will have to interact with you whether they like you or not.

That, let me be clear, is the most philosophically deep part of this whole novel and, yes, it sounds like something a lonely 8 year old would dream up.

Why? Why did this novel happen? As a stand alone book, it is perfectly reasonable to wonder that. The book was savagely criticized everywhere when it came out, so you don’t have to take my word about the quality of this book.

However as a follow up to what has come before, the book makes perfect sense. Vonnegut has nothing left. The increasing nihilism of all his previous books has left him with nothing. In the midst of that nothingness, a small lonely voice cries out. The small voice wants to be lonesome no more; that small voice wants to find community again, someone to love. Vonnegut hears that small voice and tries desperately to construct a structure which might allow that small voice to climb out of the abyss. That structure, shaky and horribly put together (how could it be otherwise?) is this novel. The novel fails as a novel, but does it work in giving Vonnegut a path forward? I have no idea yet. The next novel is entitled Jailbird.

Drinking Deeply from The Breakfast of Champions

On the cover of a book sitting on my desk right now there is a picture of St Augustine painted by Justus van Gent in the 15^th century. On a book cover on the other side of my desk there is a pentagon, with a smaller pentagon in it, which has an image that I think is two people reading books, but it is hard to tell. A third book has a copy of a Claude Lorrain (17^th century) painting, Imaginary View of Delphi with a Procession. I haven’t read this third book yet. And so on.

Nothing in that first paragraph matters in the least. It’s just a story about my desk right now.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions has lots of stories like that. They also don’t matter. That’s the point.

Let’s start over. Tracing the development of Vonnegut’s thought through his novels is fascinating. Consider the slice included in the Library of America’s Kurt Vonnegut, Novels and Stories 1963-1973. It begins with Cat’s Cradle, which argues that life is pointless and meaningless and just one thing after another. Then comes God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which argues that since life is pointless and meaningless, we might as well love our neighbors. Then Slaughterhouse-Five, a devastating description of the fire-bombing of Dresden in which Vonnegut enters the pit of despair. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

What comes next is Breakfast of Champions, which is a broken Vonnegut just hurling what remains of his psyche onto the page. Since it is Vonnegut, there are some amusing bits. But, the nature of the book is found it its title: The Breakfast of Champions is not Wheaties; it’s a martini.

You think that is a harsh assessment? It’s more generous than Vonnegut’s later self-assessment. He graded his own novels. Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five were A+. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was an A. Breakfast of Champions? C.

You want a plot summary? Good luck. Kilgore Trout, a science fiction author who shows up in Vonnegut’s earlier novels, gets invited to a convention in Midland. Dwayne Hoover owns a car dealership and a bunch of other retail establishments in Midland. In chapter 1, we are told they will meet. Eventually they do. The only reason to pick that out of all the stories in this book as the plot is that it is the one story that is actually mentioned a few times. Turn to a random page, and you’ll almost certainly get a totally unrelated story.

The stories seem to overlap, but that is only because they are all taking place in the same novel and Kilgore and Dwayne are in multiple stories. We get, for example, a lot of summaries of Kilgore Trout’s stories, which is a funny in a way. Vonnegut has a bunch of ideas for stories, but rather than write up the stories, he pretends that Kilgore Trout wrote the stories, and then Vonnegut provides a sketch of the Kilgore Trout story which Vonnegut could have just written. The whole novel is like that; people drop in for a page or two and you get their back story and then they vanish and are never heard from again.

If you are looking for a nice linear novel, just move along. The mess of a plot is enhanced by the frequent insertion of a bunch of crudely drawn pictures. If you are imagining the pictures are an important key to the story, you haven’t been paying attention. Opening the book at random, we get a picture of a Holiday Inn sign and on the next page a picture of a lamb and a few pages later two pictures: one of a blazer a monkey wore in a Trout story and the other a sign in front of a diner that says “Eat.” Two pages later, two pictures of trucks, one of which says “Pyramid” on the side and the other says “Ajax” on the side and then…do you want me to go on listing pictures?

What is this mess of stories all pretending to be a single novel? Vonnegut gives us a hint late in the novel in an authorial interlude:

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: it was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

Vonnegut is talking about You, Dear Reader, and Me. We really do think of our lives like we are a part of a story. Stories have plots that cohere and themes that mean something. They also have to end somehow and you really want to think your life has a progression toward that end, don’t you?

But, Vonnegut isn’t done with you yet. He wants to tear apart your ability to imagine you are a character living in a story. He doesn’t even want you to have the dignity of thinking that highly of yourself.

When Kilgore Trout meets Dwayne Hoskins in a hotel cocktail lounge, there is suddenly a third important character in the bar. Vonnegut himself, sitting in a corner. Now Vonnegut doesn’t call himself Vonnegut. He gave himself a penname in the Preface, but when he shows up in the cocktail lounge, he repeatedly lets us know that the characters are doing exactly what the author of the novel decides they should do. This isn’t just breaking the fourth wall, having the author address the audience. It is shattering the fourth wall into a bajillion fragments. To what end?

In the cocktail lounge, when the promised meeting occurs and Kilgore Trout finally does meet Dwayne Hooper (and remember, we have been waiting for this scene since the first chapter of the novel), the entire interaction between them is this: Dwayne, who had been slowly going insane, walks up to Kilgore and asks for the message, then grabs a novel that Kilgore wrote and happens to be holding, asking “Is this it?” A bewildered Kilgore says “Yes.” Dwayne wanders off and reads Kilgore’s novel, which takes remarkably little time because conveniently enough the author of the book had sent Dwayne through a speed reading course.

The novel Dwayne read was a message to the reader that the reader was the only person in the world with free will. Everyone else is a robot. Dwayne goes on a rampage attacking the people he now knows are robots. Ambulances come. And so on.

That undoubtedly does not make you want to read this story. But, here is where Vonnegut is being really meta. Breakfast of Champions is itself a novel in which there is only one character with free will—the author. Everyone else is a robot, doing exactly what the author wants the characters to do. To rub it in, the novel ends with the author talking with Kilgore Trout, revealing himself as Kilgore’s Creator and telling Kilgore that he will henceforth be free. But of course there is no possible way Kilgore Trout can be free. He has no ability to have free will, no matter what the Creator says.

And you, Dear Reader? Remember that story in which you think you were living? Who is the author? You? A Different Creator? Are you the only person with free will in a world of robots? Or are you one of the robots? Or is your story really not a story at all, but just a bunch of people with free will crashing into one another and whatever happens, happens? Vonnegut won’t let you have any of those answers. He won’t let you have an answer at all.

Breakfast of Champions is really just some sort of uber-nihilism. Don’t ask me what “uber-nihilism” means—I just made up the phrase and I have no idea what it means either, but it is the perfect description of this novel. To try to make sense of the book is exactly the sort of thing the book is mocking you for trying to do.

Related Posts

Vonnegut, Kurt Slapstick “Vonnegut Hits Rock Bottom”
Kundera, Milan The Unbearable Lightness of Being “Bearing Life”

How to Love Your Neighbor

In Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut demonstrated the absolute absurdity of everything, that the world is just one meaningless act after another. (A review of Cat’s Cradle is here.)

What then? His next novel presented a challenge. Does he simply double down on the meaninglessness of everything or is there some way out of this trap?

That novel was God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Vonnegut’s universe is still meaningless. But, a meaningless universe creates a new problem.

There are still people living in that meaningless universe. What do you do about all the people living meaningless lives in a meaningless universe but who do not know the universe is meaningless and so don’t know they are just supposed to laugh at how meaningless everything is?

The temptation is just to ignore them. After all, if you are faced with a meaningless universe, why not just enjoy yourself? And if you have wealth and live in a meaningless universe, then why not just hang out with all the Beautiful people, and you and the other wealthy Beautiful people can enjoy a beautiful life in a meaningless universe?

Should you worry about all those other people? Why bother? They are all sort of…repulsive and low-class, anyway…right?

Eliot Rosewater, the Mr. Rosewater of the title of the book, has more inherited wealth than he can spend. And he makes a discovery.

“I look at these people, these Americans,” Eliot went on, “and I realize that they can’t even care about themselves any more—because they have no use. The factory, the farms, the mines across the river—they’re almost completely automatic now. And America doesn’t even need these people for war—not any more, Sylvia—I’m going to be an artist.”
“An artist?”
“I’m going to love these discarded Americans, even though they’re useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art.”

That was published in…1965. Imagine a large swath of Americans who have become largely irrelevant. As the Vonnegut surrogate in the novel explains:

“In time almost all men and women will become worthless as producers of goods, food, services, and more machines, as sources of practical ideas in the areas of economics, engineering, and probably medicine too….Americans have long been taught to hate all people who will not or cannot work, to hate even themselves for that. We can thank the vanished frontier for that piece of common-sense cruelty. The time is coming, if it isn’t here now, when it will no longer be common sense. It will simply be cruel.”

So, imagine a society divided with the Good, Beautiful People on the one side and Pointless, Pedestrian, Boring, Low-class people on the other side. Imagine a person from the Good, Beautiful side of the tracks decided to love the latter set of people—and love them not from afar, but actually move into the neighborhood and help them out whenever they had a need, a real immediate need, like needing someone to talk with at 3 AM or someone to help out on the volunteer fire department.

If you knew someone who did that, who walked away from an Ivy League Education to move to a small town in the middle of nowhere, just to live there and be with those people, what would you call someone like that? Insane, perhaps?

And therein is the plot of this Vonnegut novel. Is Eliot Rosewater insane?

It is an eerie book to read these days, by the way. This idea of a whole set of Americans who are angry because they feel useless and ignored and don’t like feeling useless and ignored, well…what would happen if they actually existed and then 50 years later they still actually existed and they were still angry that they felt useless and ignored? Not a rhetorical question, obviously.

So, Vonnegut is providing an interesting answer to his problem from Cat’s Cradle. It is all well and good to say that we live in a pointless world, where there are no higher goals or causes which can give our lives meaning; in fact if you are one of the wealthy, beautiful people, the type of people who have nice college educations and buy books by Kurt Vonnegut, then it is even fun to think about a world like that and imagine we live in a world like that, and even live as if we live a world like that.

But, if you are one of those people out there living in a small town like Rosewater, Indiana, well, you might not be enjoying your life as much as those people reading Cat’s Cradle and laughing at the pointlessness of it all.

And, maybe, just maybe, those people reading Cat’s Cradle should think about what it must be like for those other people and do something crazy like, you know, love them. Not love them from afar in some abstract, “I love humanity” way. But, love them enough to set aside all their privileges and become like one of them.

A radical idea that. Imagine the Social Justice Warrior who instead of joining a non-profit in Downtown Manhattan or a nice College Town and working to solve the world’s problems from a nice one-bedroom apartment near cute vegetarian restaurants, imagine that person just deciding to move to Rosewater, Indiana or the equivalent town in Nowhere America and get a job at Wal-Mart and just live with people and love them. That would be a radical act.

Of course this is all just silly talk. What kind of person would voluntarily set aside all the trappings of a very nice life and endure such humbling as to actually live with, among, and like the lowly, unworthy beings?

Empty yourself and become a servant? Yeah, that would be insane.

I Am Who You Perceive

“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.”

That is Kurt Vonnegut in the introduction to Mother Night.

The story is about an American spy in Nazi Germany, who pretends to be a Nazi because, he is, after all, a spy, but the American government can’t acknowledge that he is working for the government because he is, after all, a spy, so everyone thinks he really is a Nazi.

His cover story is really good; you would never know he wasn’t a Nazi.

So, is he a Nazi or not?

Vonnegut is claiming that if it walks like a Nazi and talks like a Nazi and acts like a Nazi, then it is, in fact, a Nazi.

In other words, Perception is Reality.

Another way of putting this: Vonnegut seems to be some sort of modern day Berkeley in which the thing which exists actually exists only in a mind—there is no reality outside of perception—but Vonnegut is adding that there also is no individual outside others’ perception of that individual.

I exist in your mind. The “me” perceived by you is “me.” I am under a delusion if I think that there is some entity called “me” separate from your perception of “me.” “Know thyself” is simply a command to “find out what others think about you.”

At first glance, it is hard to think Vonnegut is serious here. Surely I exist separate from your perception of me. Really, I do. [Insert foot stomping.]

But, then I imagine: suppose we have a person who knows himself to be really kind and generous. Truly kind and generous; the most kind and generous person ever to exist. This person never has a thought which isn’t kind and generous.

But everyone thinks the person is mean and nasty and completely self-absorbed. Is that person kind and generous? It is hard to imagine an argument that self-perception trumps external perception in a case like that.

Ask the question another way: if I am kind in my heart and cruel in my actions, am I a kind or a cruel person? It works the other way too. I am a very cruel and mean person at heart, but everyone thinks I am really nice and wonderful and kind. What is the right way to describe me?

Identity is a tricky thing. If Vonnegut is right, I don’t get to define my own identity. Others define my identity.

But, if I think I am a Giant Squid, if I truly believe that I am a Giant Squid, am I a Giant Squid? I feel safe in assuming that we would all agree that any person who claims to be a Giant Squid is crazy. Crazy people don’t get to define their own identity. We, Enlightened Society, get to decide the identity of Crazy People. I am not Napoleon even if I think I am Napoleon.

But, am I Jim Hartley if I think I am Jim Hartley? Or am I only Jim Hartley if others think I am Jim Hartley? And before you hasten to say that my identity exists independent of your evaluation of my identity, remember as soon as you say that I am the one who determines my identity, then I am going to insist that I am a Giant Purple Squid named Qxxwzk. Will you then henceforth address me and think about me in terms appropriate to my true identity?

Here is where it gets troubling. Two weeks ago, in this space, I ruminated about Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. That novel has a person whose interior life is evil and his exterior life is boring and nice. Reading that novel, there is no doubt that the character is really the evil person inside and not the nice person others perceive. Reading Vonnegut’s novel, however, the obvious conclusion is that the character is really the evil person others perceive and not the nice person inside.

Is there a way to reconcile these two novels? If not, which is right? They are both rather persuasive.

One possible reconciliation: in both cases, the conclusion is that the evil side is the real person and the nice side is the act. Is that true? Does evil trump goodness? You can’t be truly good unless there is no evil in you either externally or internally?

The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent

The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut’s second novel, is marvelously fun.

Quirky beyond belief—a seemingly wild random ride that ends up all linking together in the end.

The basic plot is perfectly circular. It is the type of story that my wife, who hates looping time travel stories, would hate.

(By the way, the recent Doctor Who invention of “Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey” was a hysterical dodge to avoid the inherent problem of maintaining continuity in a 50 year long science fiction series in which time travel is the whole point.)

In the midst of that circular plot, there are all sorts of crazy subplots having nothing to do with anything, but amusing in their own right. (There is even a proto-“Harrison Bergeron” which was much better done in the short story than in the novel.)

There is one subplot which truly intrigued me. In the middle of the novel, a character creates a new religion: The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.

The theology of the church is perfectly explained in the name of the church. In fact, once you have a theology that says
a) God Exists, and
b) He is Utterly Indifferent,
well, there really isn’t much more theology to work out.

A fascinating thought experiment, this new religion.

Compare The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent to the conclusion of Sartre’s Nausea. In both the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and in a state of total existential nihilism, there is no point to anything.

But, is it more comforting to think that world is meaningless because there is Nothing or because the God who created everything is totally and completely indifferent to the creation?

Oddly, those two worlds would be observationally equivalent—if you live in one, surely someone would think the world was actually the other. So, while at one level it would make no difference which was right, I suspect most people would rather live in one universe than the other. But, I am not sure which is more attractive.

There is no point in denying the attractiveness of a universe in which God the Utterly Indifferent exists.

If God is Indifferent, then why should any of the rest of us be otherwise? That would be comforting. I can stop caring about all the problems in this world.

But, then we’d have that problem of wondering why God was so Utterly Indifferent and that would be rather insulting. After all, I care about Me, so shouldn’t God care about Me?

So, maybe the existential crisis of Nausea is better. Though, it is hard to fathom how Nausea could be a preferred state to any other state.

It’s almost like the more you think about it, the more you realize that maybe it is better if there is God the Not So Utterly Indifferent.

All of which gets me wondering why there are people who seem to hope it is a godless universe. I understand doubting the existence of God, but I am genuinely baffled by people who seem passionate about the desirability of such a thing.

Vonnegut’s human history is senseless from our standpoint. That is the whole point of The Sirens of Titan. Yet, there is a merriness in the senselessness. I do understand that. If there is no point to any of this, then why not take joy in it?

Happiness is underrated in modern philosophical circles.

Related Posts

Vonnegut, Kurt Cat’s Cradle “Does Life Have Meaning?”
Nietzsche, Friedrich Twilight of the Idols “Philosophizing With a Hammer”