SCIENTIFIC SUICIDE
SCIENCE, MACHINERY AND WARS IN VONNEGUT'
NOVELS
PRIMOŽ TROBEVŠEK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR…………..……………………………….……………………..1
INTRODUCTION……………………..………………………………………………….4
I. PLAYER PIANO…….…………………….………….………………………………..5
II. THE SIRENS OF
TITAN…………….………………….……………………………9
III. MOTHER
NIGHT………………………….…………….……….…………..…….13
IV. CAT'S
CRADLE………………………………………………….….………………14
V. SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE…………………...…………………..……………….20
VI. BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS………………...………………...………………24
VII. DEADEYE
DICK…………………………………..………………………….……26
VIII. BLUEBEARD………………………………………..…………………………….27
IX. HOCUS
POCUS………………………………………..……………………………29
X. SLAPSTICK…………………………………………….………………………..……32
XI. GOD BLESS YOU, MR.
ROSEWATER…………………………………………….35
XII. JAILBIRD…………………………………………………………………………36
XII. GALAPAGOS……………………………………………………………………..39
BIBLIOGRAPHY……….……...…….……………………………………………44
Player Piano, Grafton Books,
The Sirens of Titan, Dell
Publishing,
Mother Night, Triad/Panther,
Cat's Cradle, Dell
publishing,
God Bless You, Mr,
Rosewater, Dell Publishing,
Welcome to the Monkey House,
Triad/Panther,
Slauhterhouse-Five, Grafton books,
Breakfast of Chammpions, Vintage,
Wampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons, Dell Publishing,
Slapstick, Dell Publishing,
Jailbird, Vintage,
Palm Sunday, Grafton Books,
Deadeye Dick, Grabada Publishing Limited,
Galapagos, Grafton Books,
Bluebeard, Dell Publishing,
Hocus Pocus, Vintage,
Fates Worse Than Death,
Vintage,
Between Time and
William Rodney Allen,
Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, University Press of Mississipi,
1988
Jerome Klinkowitz,
Kurt Vonnegut, Methuem & CO,
Max F. Schulz, Black Humor of the Sixties,
Norman f.
Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body,
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Penguin Books/Arkana,
Swami Sivananda,
Concentration and Meditation, Divine Life, Shivanandanagar,
1994
Steven Hassan,
Combatting Cult Mind Control,
“You understand, of course, that
everything I say is horseshit.” (Allen 1988: 76)
“I am a vain person, or I would
not be up here, going “Blah, blah, blah...” (FWTD,
p. 35)
“The older I get, the less willing I am to
stand behind anything I say or do.”
(FTWD, p. 130)
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Kurt
Vonnegut was born in
“German-Americans had become (in
self-defence and in embarrassment over Kaiser Wilhelm and then Hitler) the
least tribal and most acculturated segment of our white population.” (FWTD, p.
199)
The
Great Depression reduced the family’s wealth to a trickle. Young Kurt was
pulled from the private school after the third grade and enrolled at Public
School No. 43 near his home, where he was taught “...to be proud that we have a standing army of just over a hundred
thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in
Washington. ...and to pity
Vonnegut returned to the
Vonnegut began to write stories for
magazines and was soon able to quit the “goddamn
nightmare job”. In 1950 he moved
to
He himself
considered the novel a failure, but many Americans disagreed. It was published
during the Vietnam War, and, together with the film based on it in 1972 (“Everything of mine which has been filmed
so far has been one character short, and the character is me.” Between Time and
Timbuktu, A Delta Book, NY, 1972, p. xv), made Vonnegut a celebrity. Slaughterhouse Five has been since then discussed in the classrooms
all over the country, also banned by school boards, and even burned in 1979, in
Drake, North Dakota.
At the moment he is writing what is
supposed to be his last novel. It is called Timequake. It
is causing him a lot of trouble, he keeps rewriting some parts because he
doesn’t want it to be a “flop”, he wants to end his
career with a “bang”.
I
use the following abbreviations:
PP
- Player Piano, 1952
ST
- The Sirens of Titan, 1959
MN
- Mother Night, 1961
CC
- Cat’s Cradle, 1963
GBY
- God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, 1965
WMH
- Welcome to the Monkey House
SF
- Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969
BC
- Breakfast of Champions, 1973
WFG
- Wampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons, 1965 - 1974
SL
- Slapstick, 1976
JB
- Jailbird, 1979
PS
- Palm Sunday, 1981
DD
- Deadeye Dick, 1982
GL
- Galapagos, 1985
BB
- Bluebeard, 1987
HP
- Hocus Pocus, 1990
FWTD
- Fates Worse Than Death, 1991
INTRODUCTION
I tried to view Vonnegut’s work as a whole and
find reappearing motifs, the message unfolding in more or less chronological
order throughout his work. It may seem far fetched, because such story can be
perhaps “made up” after reading only one of his novels. It is possible that I
have read more than it is written, e.g. a critic has perceived the profession
of Vonnegut’s hero Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist, as a metaphor, whereas the
author admits in an interview that he didn’t want his character to be a car
dealer since this profession is too interesting and may distract readers’
attention from more important issues. “...I
realized the automobile business was so damn interesting, especially in a
car-crazy country like
After the first reading, war appears as the
predominant motif, its absurdity the main message, sporadically accompanied by
the longing for a stable and cosy artificial family, distrust for scientific
progress... But after the second or
third reading, I could make the following summary: There are more tasks
inherently human than meets the eye. More and more of these are being turned
over to machines, which bereft us of many human qualities (Player Piano). The progress is thus turned outward instead of
inward (The Sirens of Titan). If we
pretend to be someone else instead of searching for our identity, the least we
can do is to pretend to be good, though this kind of virtue may in the long run
prove as destructive as depravity (Mother
Night). But if we do search, we must know our “ends and means”, because
“pure research” is likely to be self-destructive (Cat’s Cradle). It serves not only as a means of absurd devastation
(Slaughterhouse-Five), it directly produces the
civilisation termed by the author as “compulsive war-preparer” (Breakfast of Champions, Deadeye Dick,
Bluebeard, Hocus Pocus,), the society that lacks functional coherence (Slapstick) and fails to provide its
members with minimal self-respect (God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Jailbird). Whether we are able to survive as a
species depends largely on our ability to adjust ourselves to the environment,
not the other way around (Galapagos).
The literary criticism I’ve been fortunate
enough to come across often ignores or at least fails to notice as important
the simple message I perceive as the author’s focal concern. One wonders how it
can be “...shunned as distastefully
lowbrow” (Klinkowitz 1982: 16), or how come it “...tended for years to put readers off as
not worth one’s serious attention” (Schulz 1973: 45). It is true that
Vonnegut is somehow terse when writing about broken hearts, self-imposed
loneliness, Weltschmerz or any other kind of self-centred (and self-imposed)
“noble distance” which is often trendy in our culture, but so much more
concerned about humanity as a whole and especially “its more fallible specimens”. I mostly avoided what the author of Sanity Plea calls “...the more personal and intensely psychological nature of his art.” (Broer 1989: 5) No art can be denied this aspect, but I
lack the knowledge needed for such analysis.
Vonnegut hasn’t written a book that
doesn’t in some way deal with a fictious or a real war. Yet the novels whose
predominant motif is war (SF, MN)
are somehow reluctant to “pass the judgement”, “...because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” (SF, p. 20)
Orwell’s
Nineteen eighty-four was once
humorously criticized from a futuristic standpoint - the social order depicted
in the novel could never work because it is too oppressive, it lacks even the
minimal freedom required to provide any society, no matter how totalitarian,
with a steady influx of energy. If viewed as a futuristic novel, Player Piano displays similar
inconsistencies (“...a machine shuffling
through cards...”, p. 130). These are, of course, of little consequence since the novel
is based on Vonnegut’s experience as a public relations man at General
Electric. “I was classified as a
science-fiction writer because I’d include machinery, and all I’d done was write about
The book deals with the tragic fallacy
that “...scientists were going to find
out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better.” (WFG, p. 161). There are things inherently human that
can never be performed by a machine without turning man into a machine, without
self-destruction as a consequence. And to name these things is all but an easy
task, because “…where there are
machines, there will be the problems of machines, and these problems will
produce people with hearts like machines.” (Schipper 1993: 197). This was said by Chuang
Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, who lived in the fourth century B.C., some time
before “ the second Tralfamadorian message in the
form of the Great Wall of China reached Salo on
Titan” (ST, p. 271); Not many machines were known back then,
though civilizations usually bury some of their knowledge as they perish.
Vonnegut states in Player Piano that
“Anybody that competes with slaves
becomes a slave.” (p. 237)
Player
Piano depicts the world where machines “create” men. Almost all manual work
is done by machinery, more and more intellectual work is being turned over to
it as well. There is even a man who invents a machine which does his job and so
he himself becomes superfluous. “Thet’s
it”, said Bud with an eerie mixture of pride and remorse. “Works.
Does a fine job.” He smiled sheepishly. “Does it a whole lot better than Ah did it.” (p. 69) The
Second Industrial Revolution has eliminated human work in industry. The story
is happening in
In one of his later novels Vonnegut
questions competition: “A moderately
gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has
to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications
put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.” (BB, p. 75). And in an interview: “In games the object is to win, but in life the object is not to win.
The object of the whole world is to preserve the game board and the pieces, and
there is no such game.” (Allen 1988: 22)
Soldiers in Player Piano are not given weapons, except when sent overseas.
Serving overseas with a real rifle or participating in wars, however, is still
considered by ordinary people as a means of easy social promotion - “...it’d be a relief to get the hell out of
the States for a while and occupy someplace else and maybe be somebody in some
of those countries instead of a bum with no money... ...and he’d like a little
glory by God and there might be laying and glory overseas...“
(p. 64); “These kids in the Army now, that’s just a place to keep ’em off the
streets and out of trouble, because there isn’t anything else to do with them.
And the only chance they’ll ever get to be anybody is if there’s a war. That’s
the only chance in the world they got of showing anybody they lived and died,
and for something, by God.” (p. 177). Even this has become questionable
since machines have proved better soldiers than men: “The poor bastards fryin’ on the electric fence, the proximity mines
poppin’ under ’em, the microwave sentinels openin’ up with the remote-control
machine-gun nests, and the fire-control system swivelling the guns and
flamethrowers around as long as anything was quiverin’ within a mile of the
place. And that’s how I got the Silver Star.” (p. 216) Player
Piano suggests that even warfare
is done by machines. People are
butchered like animals in meat-packing plants. Its hideous effects can be
perhaps best illustrated by the difference between strangling someone with bare
hands or a meter of piano wire (standard military equipment), cutting someone
with a sword, and shooting with a rifle someone a mile away, let alone
push-bottom warfare from underground bunkers. When there are no machines to
facilitate killing one has to “kill what one eats” - one is forced to face his
opponent as a living human being. He is no longer just a number from body
count. Paradoxically, the true nature of fighting can be thus more
comprehensible to a foot soldier doing the actual fighting than to his
higher-ups and pacifists viewing the killing from the distorting distances of
bunkers and media - “That’s one of the
interesting things that came out of the Vietnam War. One, since only the lower
classes had to go and fight that one we didn’t expect a literature to come out
of it, but a very impressive literature has come out of it; and, two, we didn’t
think there was anything to learn from it, but the Vietnam vets seem to have
learned a whole lot, including a respect for more gentleness, reason, and
nurturance. (Allen 1988: 271) The “arbitrary” difference between a battle
and a massacre is described in one of Vonnegut’s later novels, Slapstick. Somewhere in the future
heavy weaponry is no longer available and Americans are no longer a nation,
they are all given artificial family membership to overcome loneliness and
other social evils: “Thank God, at
least, that the machines have decided not to fight any more. It’s just people
now. And thank God that there’s no such thing as a battle between strangers any
more. I don’t care who fights who - everybody will have relatives on the other
side.” (SL, p 219) Because they are just families,
and not a nation anymore, “...it’s much
easier for us to give and receive mercy in war. I have just come from observing
a battle... It was horses and spears and rifles and knives and pistols, and a cannon or two. I saw several people killed. I also saw
many people embracing, and there seemed to be a great deal of deserting and
surrendering going on. ...It is no massacre.” (SL, p. 220) The dehumanizing
effect of modern warfare is also mentioned in Mother Night: “If Helga had
survived the Russian attack on the
Player
Piano is, however, set in a peaceful period, ten years after the World War
III (Vonnegut was apparently much more optimistic while writing his first
book). An average citizen gets some
pocket money and has nothing to do but go out for a drink or sit in front of
his TV-set amidst household appliances that do all kinds of housework quickly
and efficiently. After the distinguished visitor from abroad, the Shah of
Bratpuhr, is shown such a household and told about its time-saving properties,
he asks his host about the housewife: “What
is it she is in such a hurry to get at? What is it she has to do, that she mustn’t
waste any time on these things?” (p.
144). There is, of course, no answer to this question. Time is to be used
not saved, and machinery could be wasting time, not saving it.
The main character Paul Proteus is trapped
between the world of machines and the world of man. He himself was in charge of
recording the movements of skilled workers and transplanting them to machines.
His father was the main promoter of the Second Industrial Revolution. Paul “...is the most important, brilliant person
in
Lasher’s revolution turns out to be purely
symbolical, he knows
that nothing that matters could be changed: “A lifelong trafficker in symbols, he had created the revolution as a
symbol, and was now welcoming the opportunity to die as one.” (p. 285)
It is too late from the very beginning for
Paul to act freely and productively. When he becomes fully aware of the
inhumanity his work is supporting, he reacts like Billy Pilgrim who “...tried hard to care.” (SF, p. 44),
who says to his fellow-soldiers during their ordeal behind the enemy lines in
He is needed by both sides - by the
Company, together with all it stands for, which needs him as a spy to infiltrate the Ghost Shirt Society, and by this
subversive organization, formed by Lasher, which needs Paul as a symbol. Paul
is given no time to decide - he is kidnapped by the rebels. When he asks them
if they want him to sign the letter to media written on his behalf, he learns
it has been already signed and mailed. The letter says, among other things: “You, the engineers and managers and
bureaucrats, almost alone among men of higher intelligence, have continued to
believe that the condition of man improves in direct ratio to the energy and
devices for using energy put at his disposal. You believed this through the
three most horrible wars in history, a monumental demonstration of faith.” (p.
253) Soon after he is arrested
by the police. In prison he finally decides to side with the revolutionaries.
During his trial he is freed by the rebels.
The story ends with the revolution, which,
like all revolutions, lacks dignity and common sense - “Who set the museum on fire?” (p. 274). People destroy machines but can’t help repeating the old
pattern - they search amidst the ruins for spare parts so they can reconstruct
machines and thus the order they were fighting against and which was imposed on
them by the machinery in the first place.
Yet the resigned notion that “men are
machines” from Vonnegut’s later work Breakfast
of Champions does not appear, though the suspicion can be traced in the
conversations between the main character and his wife. He always ends their
dialogues by saying: “And I love you , Anita.” He
happens to sleep with another woman who “...mumbled
in her sleep. As Paul dropped off once more, he murmured an automatic reply.
“And I love you, Anita.”” (p. 219).
II. “THE BOUNTIES OF SPACE, OF
INFINITE OUTWARDNESS, WERE THREE: EMPTY HEROICS, LOW COMEDY, AND POINTLESS
DEATH.” (ST, p. 8)
The
story is set in the future. The main character Malachi Constant is filthy rich,
but doesn’t seem to be satisfied. He has done practically nothing to deserve
his wealth. His fortune is lost in the same manner. He meets Winston Niles
Rumfoord who foretells Malachi’s future. Winston is able to do this because he
has flown with his space ship into “chrono-synclastic
infundibulum” where time and contradictions vanish. He exists simultaneously
throughout space and time within this infundibulum. Malachi is not able to
change his foretold destiny, though he fights it desperately. Rumfoord sees the
future, but his ability later proves useless - he, too, is “...A VICTIM OF A SERIES OF ACCIDENTS, AS ARE WE ALL.” (p. 229)
He
prepares the war between Earth and Mars: “It
was Rumfoord’s intention that Mars should lose the war - that
Mars should lose it foolishly and horribly. … He wished to change the World for
the better by means of the great and unforgettable suicide of Mars.
As he says in his Pocket History of Mars: “Any man who would change the
World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed
other people’s blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the
brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.” (p. 174)
He
carries out his plan: “In the next
twenty-four hours, Earth fired 617 thermo-nuclear devices at the Martian
bridgehead on the moon. Of these 276 were hits. These hits not only vaporized
the bridgehead - they rendered the moon unfit for human occupation for at least
ten million years.” (p. 168)
His religion, which imposes equality upon
people by means of “handicaps” and at the expense of individuality, comes into
being: “National borders will disappear.
The lust for war will die. All envy, all fear, all hate will die. The name of
the new religion is The
Vonnegut says in an interview (Allen 1988: 159) that Rumfoord’s image
was modelled to some extent after Franklin Roosevelt. Yet what Rumfoord does
with Earth is closer to what the more infamous national leaders of that time
did, though with different aims in view and less success, with Western
civilisation – Hitler and Stalin, who had “...showmanship,
a genial willingness to shed other people’s blood...” (p. 174) Have such
leaders proved that the world without killing can be brought about by just a
little more killing, or at least made people detest killing? They were, if we allow ourselves some cynicism, great revolutionaries who
gave the planet shock treatment whose effect is nil - “...we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is
to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time
they’re ten.” (BB, p. 91) The ends are usually determined by the means: ...“the Japanese were as responsible as
the Germans for turning Americans into a bunch of bankrupt militaristic
fuckups… ” (BB, p. 273)
Malachi’s tragic story is only a “tiny”
bit of suffering which facilitates Tralfamadorian purposeless expedition. His
fortune disappears soon after he is told his future. He is kidnapped and taken
to Mars to serve in the army. During the trip he is drunk and rapes Rumfoord’s
wife. Their son Chrono is born on Mars. Their memories are wiped out. Malachi
got a new name - Unk. All soldiers have antennas installed in their heads and
are controlled by radio signals causing severe pains to any insubordinate
soldier. Malachi is thus forced to kill his best friend Stony. Later he finds
the letter he himself has written to preserve his memory. From the letter he
learns among other things: “The more pain I
train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of the pain now, Unk,
but you won’t learn anything if you don’t invite the pain. And the more you
learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.” (p. 125) Malachi
doesn’t participate in the invasion of Earth, he is sent, together with a
soldier named Boaz, to Mercury for three years. According to Rumfoord’s plan he
is to return to Earth as both - the powerless Messiah and the devil of the new
religion. On his return, he announces what its followers believe to be the
fulfilment of a prophecy: “I WAS A
VICTIM IN A SERIES OF ACCIDENTS, AS ARE WE ALL.” (p. 229) The life of a rich man he lead before he was kidnapped by
Martian agents provides the religion with a symbol of the injustice caused by
undeserved advantages - a doll named Malachi.
In The
Sirens of Titan we meet the inexhaustible source of energy - “...UWTB,
or the Universal Will to Become. UWTB is what makes universes out of
nothingness - that makes nothingness insist on becoming somethingness. Many
Earthlings are glad that Earth does not have UWTB.” (p. 138). They are
probably glad because even the “tiny” amount of energy that has been used by
Earthlings till now has proved to be applied in disregard of even the most
obvious negative side-effects, and our planet seems to have been regarded only
as a station on our way to the ultimate rim of the Universe. “Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie
within every human being, looked outward - pushed ever outward.” (ST, p.7).
In an interview Vonnegut says that “...it is dangerous to believe that there
are enormous new truths, dangerous to imagine that we can stand outside the
universe. So I argue for the ordinariness of life, the familiarity of love...
Both in terms of mental health and morally I resent 2001 to a certain extent,
as I resent a lot of science fiction. This promising of great secrets which are
just beyond our grasp - I don’t think they exist. ...the mysteries which remain
to be solved have to do with relating to each other.” (Allen 1988: 74)
At this
point Vonnegut’s individual characters and humanity as a whole meet. Paul
Proteus, Malachi Constant, Billy Pilgrim, Eliot Rosewater, and Howard Campbell
are all more or less pushing “ever
outward”, toward some cosy womb, toward death; they would pay any price to
avoid the painful but life-giving confrontation with their real selves. They
refuse to notice that the energy they get derives from their split
personalities, that such energy is as dangerous as that from splitting atoms.
The obsessive exploration of space can be
thus also understood as a metaphor for the individual’s escape from himself. He
or she can’t “...name even one of the
fifty-three portals to the soul.” (p. 7) Yet the
literal meaning is far more frightening - our planet is at stake, not just
individual’s sanity. Probably the best and certainly the most complex
description of such a vainglorious enterprise is found in The Sirens of Titan. The Tralfamadorian explorer Salo is eleven
million Earthling years old. He is “...punctual
- that is, he lived one moment at a timme...” (p. 267). We meet him on Titan
where he has lived since his ship broke down two hundred thousand years ago. In
the Earthling year 483,441 B.C., on the occasion of the hundred-millionth anniversary
of the government of his planet, he was chosen to represent his “nation” by
carrying a sealed message from “One rim of the Universe to the Other”. Nobody actually believed he would accomplish his
mission, he “...would simply take the
message and go as fast and as far as the technology of Tralfamadore could send
him.” He didn’t know the message and was not, under any circumstances, to
open it before he reached his destination in a galaxy that began eighteen
million light-years beyond Titan. Nobody knew what awaited him there. He was to
find creatures there, master their language, open the message and translate it
to them. “Salo did not question the good
sense of his errand, since he was, like all Tralfamadorians, a machine.” (p.
270). His ship was “...powered by
UWTB, the Universal Will to Become, its power plant was nothing for a
mechanical dilettante to tinker with.” When he landed on Titan, his ship
wasn’t completely out of order - it could still run but at only about
sixty-eight thousand miles an hour which was “...adequate for short hops around the Solar System... He sent the
message home with the speed of light, which meant that it would take one
hundred and fifty thousand Earthling years to get to Tralfamadore.” He
needed a missing part for his ship. While he waited, he developed several
hobbies, among them was “Earthwatching” - his equipment enabled him to watch
ants on Earth if he felt like it. In this way he also received his first reply
from his home planet: “Replacement part
being rushed with all possible speed.” This was written in huge stones, now
known as Stonehenge. “The Great Wall of
China means in Tralfamadorian, when viewed from above: Be patient. We haven’t forgotten about you.”
The Golden House of the Roman Emperor Nero meant: “We are doing the best we can.”
The meaning of the Moscow Kremlin
when it was first walled was: “You will be on
your way before you know it.”
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.” (p. 271). These messages were sent
with great speed, they needed less than fifty thousand years to reach Salo.
So this is the purpose of life on Earth -
entire civilizations are meant to facilitate the communication between machines
exploring Universe, or better - sending greetings to the other end of it. Many
civilizations failed to do it, they “...would poop out without having finished
the messages. (p. 273)
The search for purpose goes on elsewhere,
on Tralfamadore. The legend tells us that long time ago there were creatures who weren’t machines. They weren’t efficient, predictable,
and durable. They were frantically searching for purposes because they were
sure everything had some purpose. Whenever they found what seemed to be their
own purpose, it seemed so low they became ashamed. Not willing to serve it,
they made a machine to serve it. Thus they could serve higher purposes, which
always turned out to be somehow low, not high enough. So new machines were made
to serve it, and they did it well - at the end the machines were looking for
the highest purpose of creatures’ existence and found out “...that the creatures couldn’t really be
said to have any purpose at all.” (p. 275) The
news came as a shock to the creatures, they went berserk and began killing each
other. But they weren’t even very good at this, so they turned the job over to
the machines, which did it in no time. In Jailbird
Vonnegut reminds us that it is urgent “…
that mankind and womankind be defined. Otherwise, … ,
they were doomed forever to be defined by the needs of institutions.” (p. 165)
Exploring space is reappearing motif in Vonneguts work. Inhabitants
of distant galaxies are travelling through space and time beyond our
imagination. “It was about intelligent
threads of energy trillions of light-years long. They wanted mortal,
self-reproducing life forms to spread out through the Universe. So several of
them, the Elders in the title, held a meeting by intersecting near a planet
called Tralfamadore. The author never said why the Elders thought the spread of
life was such a hot idea.” (HP, p. 165);
the Elders told people that their duty is to abuse the planet as much as
possible, thus giving germs, who were meant to explore the Universe, a really
rough time - an opportunity to prepare for their mission. People received this
instruction in a form of religion, they believed
everything as long as it was flattering. After some time almost all life on the
planet perished, except some germs which “…hibernated as virtually indestructible spores, capable of waiting as
long as necessary for the next lucky hit by a meteor. Thus, at last, did space travel become
truly feasible.” “Just because some of us can read and write
and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.”
(HP, p. 268); “In short, on the
basis of horse sense and the best scientific information, there was nothing
good to be said for the exploration of space.” (ST, p. 30).
Things of little or no use are being discovered, and explorers disappear in a
split second due to some stupid mistake or accident. (“What’s died, my boy, is the Milky Way.” GBY, p. 174, “We blow it up,
experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test
pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.” SF, p. 80). So the Universe is explored, is too vast to be explored,
or after all isn’t worth exploring at all. What remains unexplored must lay under our feet. In the end Malachi says: “It took us that long to realize that a
purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is
around to be loved.” (ST, p. 313)
III. “REFLECTIONS ON NOT
PARTICIPATING IN CURRENT EVENTS” (MN, p. 78)
In
the Introduction to Mother Night
Vonnegut says: “This is the only story
of mine whose moral I know… : We are what we pretend
to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” A similar moral
can be found in God Bless You, Mr.
Rosewater: “Pretend to be good
always, and even God will be fooled.” These words are cut into the fountain
rim of the private mental hospital
to which the main character Eliot is sent. Or in Jailbird: “You couldn’t help it that you were born without a heart. At
least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed - so you were a
good man just the same.” (p. 220)
Howard W. Campbell, the protagonist of the
story (told in the first person) fails to live up to this standard - he doesn’t
fool God, he fools himself by pretending to be bad and thus becomes “bad”. He
believes he can work for Hitler and remain a free-thinking poet and playwright.
He searches for his identity, yet refuses to recognize its dark side - the
“mask” he believes has nothing to do with his real self. In the “Editor’s Note”
Vonnegut says: “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.” (p. ix) This could be “explained” by “...the heartbreaking necessity of lying
about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it.” (CC, p.
189)
Campbell is an American spy during the
World War II working under the cover of spreading Nazi propaganda. His
propagandist broadcast contains coded information. He sends messages he doesn’t
understand to people he doesn’t know and does an excellent job for Americans
and Germans alike. “I had hoped, as a
broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous
in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought,
so eager to believe and snarl and
hate. So many people wanted to believe me!” (p. 102)
While serving both sides, he believes to
belong to the third - “Das Reich der Zwei, the nation of two my Helga and I
had - its territory, the territory we defended so jealously, didn’t go much
beyond the bounds of our great double bed.” (p. 30) His
moral inertia easily falls prey to others’ purposes. But he is
able to live with it through Orwell’s doublethinking;
through “...totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears
where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or
even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness
of a cuckoo clock in Hell. ...The missing teeth, of course, are simple,
obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-years-olds, in
most cases.” (p. 145), through “...simple and widespread boon to modern
mankind - schizophrenia.” (p. 116) Howard Campbell is not a perfect example
of such totalitarian mind, yet he is a bit late to realize how he fits into the
systems of gears. He perceives almost his whole existence through pain-killing
illusions. Before he kills himself awaiting the trial in Israel, where he hopes
he will clean his name, he feels “...like
a pig that’s been taken apart, who’s had experts find a use for every part. By
God - I think they even found a use for my squeal! The part of me that wanted
to tell the truth got turned into an expert liar! The lover in me turned into a
pornographer! The artist in me got turned into ugliness such as the world has
rarely seen before.” (p. 133)
IV. “NO DAMN CAT,
AND NO DAMN CRADLE.” (CC. p. 114)
Cat’s Cradle focuses
on the short-sightedness of mankind when it comes to fatal side-effects of
scientific progress. Science can be “a playful kid” who fires a rifle over the
roofs of his town (“If I aimed at
nothing, then nothing is what I would hit.” DD, p. 67), and shoots a
pregnant woman eight blocks away right between the eyes. Science can be a ship
in the Martian invasion fleet, the only controls available to people aboard are
two push-buttons, “The on
button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button was connected with
nothing. It was installed at the insistence of Martian mental-health experts,
who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they
could turn off.” (ST, p. 167).
What did scientists aim at and what “off buttons” did they provide when they
were splitting an atom? (“At first
glance, the laboratory-gowned scientist seemed to be a perfect servant of
nothing but truth. ...one accepted at its face value the title Salo had
engraved on the statue, Discovery of
Atomic Power.
And then one perceived that the young truth-seeker had a shocking erection.” ST,
p. 288)
In the beginning of Cat’s Cradle a man says he is “...quitting
his job at the Research Laboratory; said anything a scientist worked on was
sure to wind up as a weapon, one way or another.” (p. 27) His father, the
boss of the Laboratory Dr. Breed, wails how “...most people don’t even understand what pure research is.” (p. 35),
and explains that “Here, and shockingly
few other places in this country, men are paid to increase knowledge, to work
toward no end but that.” (p. 36) This idea was already
put on trial together with Paul Proteus in Player
Piano. He was asked in the courtroom to test the lie-detector he was
connected to by telling what he
considers a lie. He said: “Every new
piece of scientific knowledge is a good thing for humanity.” (PP, p. 265)
Then he is asked to say something he believes to be a truth: “The main business of humanity is to do a
good job of being human beings,... ...not to serve as
appendages to machines, institutions and systems.” The machine confirmed
only his sincerity, it wasn’t asked to judge the statements itself.
Norman F. Dixon wonders in his book why
such a clever creature as man “...failed
so abjectly in the task of trying to prevent his own imminent demise?
Part of the answer is to be found in a recent
book by the British philosopher Nicholas Maxwell. Maxwell’s
thesis is that the evident failure of science to free society from poverty,
hunger and the threat of extinction results from “fatal flaw in the accepted
aim of scientific endeavour”, - the pursuit of knowledge purely for its own
sake. It is precisely because of “the accepted aim” that acquisition of
knowledge, which presumably originated as an essential strategy for survival,
has given rise to the relentless pursuit of new and better ways of achieving
the exact opposite
This situation is analogous to that which
plagues another field of human endeavour - fighting. Just as the professionalising of violence could not occur without
taking on board the hindering rules and regulations of militarism, so science,
the systematic acquisition of knowledge, has to adopt rules of procedure which
negate its own original purpose - survival.
In accordance with the philosophy of
knowledge, science has to be single-minded in its search for truth, objective
and impartial, but only achieves these ends by ignoring the distraction of
moral issues and value judgments. In the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake,
the philosophy of wisdom, that is to say organised inquiry towards developing
“A moral, just, humane, co-operative - and even loving world”, had to take a
back seat.” (Dixon 1988: 274)
The main character in Cat’s Cradle, Jonah, wants
to write the book The Day the World Ended, “...an
account of what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.” (p. 11) Among collected material for the book is the letter from Dr.
Felix Hoenikker’s son. Dr. Hoenikerr
is one of the so-called “Fathers” of the bomb. We learn from the letter that
Dr. Hoenikker once during his work on the bomb became
obsessed with turtles, he wanted to find out how
exactly they pull in their head - by buckling or contracting their spines? He
was no longer interested in making the bomb, so some people from the Manhattan
Project (the government enterprise supervising the construction of the bomb)
came and asked his daughter ( who was the head of the family since father was
too absent-minded to look after himself) what to do. She told them to take away
his turtles which they did. When her father came to work next day, he “...looked for things to
play with and think about, and everything there was to play with and think
about had something to do with the bomb.” (p. 20) After
the bomb actually went off, a scientist said to Dr. Hoenikker:
“Science has now known sin.” To
which he replied: “What is sin?” (p. 21)
But in Cat’s Cradle the World isn’t destroyed by atomic bombs. This is
done by the product of almost “pure research”, by ice-nine,
an ice with a very high melting point, which would “enable the Marines to avoid
fighting in mud, just by dropping a seed into the nearest puddle”. In the end
this puddle turns out to be our planet, it freezes. Ice-nine
was the
last gift Felix Hoenikker created for mankind before
going to his just reward. (p. 41)
The questions that science can’t answer
are answered by religion which doesn’t bother to prove anything, and even
science now admits that believing is a prerequisite for any knowing. Yet the
thin line between “knowing” and “believing” has already disappeared in Player Piano where science is accused
of “...a monumental demonstration of
faith.” (p. 253) The religion of the
imaginary island San Lorenzo, Bokonism, even warns
its followers not to take its tenets seriously (Religions which warn us against
taking them seriously, or better - rationally, exist. The well-known example is
Zen Buddhism with its koans - questions that can’t be
answered rationally because they make no sense,
and are only used to bring a student to the point when he or she realizes there
are truths that can’t be grasped by intellect alone: “What was your face like
before you were born? What is the sound of one hand clapping?...”).
Bokonism is thus
so beyond our grasp and universally applicable that it seems indestructible,
nor can it loose its virginity by being institutionalized since it is outlawed,
though the president
of San Lorenzo, “Papa” Monzano, in the end proves to
be its ardent follower (“Pay no
attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s really going on.” p. 73)
“Oh, ours is a land
Where the living is grand,
And the men are as fearless as
sharks;
The women are pure,
And we always are sure
That our children will all toe
their marks.
San, San Lo-ren-zo!
What a rich, lucky island are
we!
Our enemies quail,
For they know they will fail
Against people
so reverend and free.” (p. 97)
Bokonon describes the island, as he first
stepped ashore, in a “Calypso” - a poem from the holy scriptures The Books of Bokonon :
“Oh,
a very sorry people, yes,
Did I find here.
Oh, they had no music,
And they had no beer.
And, oh, everywhere
Where they tried to perch
Belonged to Castle Sugar,
Incorporated,
Or the
Catholic church.” (P. 89)
The
religion teaches the universal unity and interdependence:
Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen--
All fit together
In the same
machine. (p. 12)
Bokononism, like the
Bokonon
says that he is a fool, “...and so is
anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing.” He warns his followers: “All of the true things I am about to tell
you are shameless lies.” (p. 13) Lao Tzu warns in a similar manner: “He who knows does not speak. He who speaks
does not know.” (Lao Tzu 1985: 52); “When
cleverness and knowledge arise great lies will flourish.” (p. 34) Bokonon’s god is the one beyond our reach because “...around and around we spin, with feet of lead and wings of tin...”
(p. 42) All that which we do perceive is, according to Bokonon,
the product of “Dynamic Tension”, ...a priceless equilibrium between good and evil.” (p.
74) A “Calypso” explains:
““Papa” Monzano, he’s so very bad,
But without bad “Papa” I would be
so sad;
Because without “Papa’s” badness,
Tell me, if you would,
How could wicked old Bokonon
Ever, ever look good?” (p. 74)
Or
Lao Tzu: “If all on earth acknowledge
the good as good then thereby is the non-good already posited. ... Heavy and
light complete each other. Long and Short shape each
other. High and deep convert each other. Before and after follow each other.
(Lao Tzu 1985: 27)
Originally
Bokonon designs a new religion because:
“I wanted all things
To
seem to make some sense
So we all could be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And
I made up lies
So that they all fit nice
And I made this sad world
A par-adise.”
(p. 90)
“The cruel paradox of Bokononist thought,...” is
“...the heartbreaking necessity of lying
about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it.” (p. 189)
“Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, “Why,
why, why?”
Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he
understands.” (p. 124)
The
Bokonon’s creation myth contains a notion already
familiar from The Sirens of Titan: “What
is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.
“Everything must have a purpose?” asked
God.
“Certainly,” said man.
“Then I leave it to you to think
of one for all this,” said God. (ST, p. 177)
When
Jonah becomes the president of San Lorenzo, he is thinking of asking Bokonon to join his government, but finally realizes that “...a millennium would have to offer
something more than a holy man in a position of power, that there would have to
be plenty of good things for all to eat, too, and nice places to live for all,
and good schools and good health and good times for all, and work for all who
wanted it -- things Bokonon and I were in no position
to provide. So good and evil had to remain separate; good in the jungle, and
evil in the palace.” (p. 152)
Apart from this the main idea of the
religion seems to be love. Bokononists pray in pairs
by laying on their backs and touching with their
soles: “...it is impossible to be
sole-to-sole with another person without loving the person, provided the feet
of both persons are clean and nicely tended.” (p. 109) A “Calypso”
describes their ritual of boko-maru:
We will touch our feet, yes,
Yes, for all we’re worth,
And we will love each other,
yes,
Yes, like we love our Mother
Earth. (p. 109)
Another
warns the seekers of truth:
A lover’s a liar,
To himself he lies.
The truthful are loveless,
Like oysters
their eyes. (p. 157)
The
religion, however, distinguishes between universal love and selfish love. When
the protagonist demands from his wife all of her love
for himself, she is shocked: “A sin-wat!” she cried. “A
man who wants all of somebody’s love. That’s very bad.” (p. 141)
At first sight Bokononism
appears to be satirizing religion, diverting people from God to themselves. But that is what Jesus did when he spoke of the
reconciliation among men coming before the reconciliation with God. And
Bokononism is apparently successful in reconciling people though through not
necessarily accurate assumptions. In the end, when “pure research” has provided
and put to use the means of ending the life on our planet, it proves to be
right:
“Someday, someday, this crazy
world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to
us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our
God,
Why go right ahead and scold Him. He’ll just
smile and nod.”
(p. 180)
Science
is the villain of the story. Or at least its “playful”,
indiscriminate part, which refuses to acknowledge things that “...exceeds the power of humans to comment.” (p. 163) It is science that usurps
“the divine right” and steps beyond good and evil, not giving much thought to
its consequences (“Any man can call time
out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.” p. 166; “Beware of the man who works hard to learn
something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of
murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their
ignorance the hard way.” p. 187)
In one of his speeches given at MIT
Vonnegut talks about the need for scientists to take an oath based on the
Hippocratic Oath: “The regimen I adopt
shall be for the benefit of all life on this planet, according to my own
ability and judgment, and not for its hurt or for any wrong. I will create no
deadly substance or device, though it be asked of me,
nor will I counsel such.” (FWTD, p.
120)
V. “POO-TEE-WEET?” (SF, p. 20)
Slaughterhouse-Five
is “autobiographical fiction”. In Fates
Worse Than Death Vonnegut writes:
“The fellow ex-Dresden PW at my National Air and Space Museum lecture was Tom
Jones, who had paired off (as ordered) in his 106th Division platoon with Joe
Crone, the model for Billy Pilgrim, the leading character in Slaughterhouse-Five. Jones said, in a letter I got only yesterday, “I remember
Crone in
I bunked with him when he died.
One morning he woke up and his head was swollen like a watermelon and I talked
him into going on sick call. By
The main character Billy Pilgrim still
appears autobiographical, even though “the author” is given a tiny role in the
book - Billy and Kurt meet in the fifth chapter where the author “...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.” (p. 86). A similar “alienating effect” is also used at
the end of Breakfast of Champions where
Vonnegut frees his character Kilgore Trout: “...I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have
served me so loyally during my writing career. You are the only one I am telling.”
(BC, p. 293) Vonnegut wanted to end his writing career at that point, but
changed his mind and once more “enslaved” his characters by “taking their free
will”. Klinkowitz says that “Billy
Pilgrim’s story is not Kurt Vonnegut’s, but rather the story of his
imagination” (Klinkowitz 1982: 64) This
separation could be too rigid - we can be pretty sure Vonnegut didn’t become
unstuck in time and meet Tralfamadorians etc. but all that somehow forcibly
convinces us that “...one American foot
soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he’s given a regular
trial, and then he’s shot by a firing squad.” (p. 11). The execution was meant to be the climax of
the novel at first, because “The irony
is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands people
are killed.” (p. 11). As we reach the end of the book the edge of this
climax is taken off by “the corpses piling higher”; every now and then “the
climax” reappears - “...the poor old
high school teacher, Edgar Derby, mournfully pregnant with patriotism and
middle age and imaginary wisdom.” (p. 101), reminding us that each of
135,000 people killed in
In Slaughterhouse-Five
there is no place for heroes and glory. The author does not depict the war as
an opportunity for doing something meaningful except staying alive, though this
sometimes also appears futile. The wife of his war buddy warned him when she
realized he had been writing about the war: “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in
the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous,
war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a
lot more of them.” (p. 17). Her worries are understandable, since nobody “…needs Joseph Goebbels
to make us think killing is as quotidian an activity as tying one’s shoes? All
that is needed is a TV industry which is self-supporting, which can’t make
enough money to survive unless it gets a great big audience.” (FWTD, p.149) She could have as well saved her breath -
“war-loving, dirty old men” can’t get a part in any of Vonnegut’s books when it
comes to war or the army. It is hard to imagine Frank Sinatra accepting the
role of a man “...who had suffered a
nervous breakdown ten minutes after being sworn into the Army at Fort Benjamin
Harrison. He had a one hundred disability pension. His breakdown came when he
was ordered to take a shower with one hundred other men. ... Roland could not
speak above a whisper.” (GBY, p. 169); or John Wayne playing Sergeant Elm
Wheeler who “...got a letter from his
wife saying she’d had a baby, and he hadn’t seen her for two years. Why, he
read that and ran up to a machine-gun nest and shot and hand granaded everybody
in it …, then he ran up to another one and mashed up all the people there with
his rifle butt, and then, after he’d busted that, he started after a mortar
emplacement with a rock in each hand, and they got him with a shell fragment. (PP, p 177).
Heroes are as scarce as real villains, there are no evil nazis the free world
is fighting against; there are more likely to be firemen mistaken for soldiers
and killed, like in God Bless You, Mr.
Rosewater: “He took a step forward, stumbled over one body, fell on another. They
were Germans who had been killed by his granade. He stood up,
found himself face-to-face with a helmeted German in a gas mask. Eliot, like
the good soldier he was, jammed his knee into the man’s groin, drove his
bayonet into his throat, withdrew the bayonet, smashed the man’s jaw with his
rifle butt... When the medics got the masks off the three Eliot had killed,
they proved to be two old men and a boy. The boy was the one Eliot had
bayoneted. He didn’t look more than fourteen.” (GBY, p. 64)
Most of Vonnegut’s characters appear as leaves driven by
winds (“There are almost no characters
in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the
people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous
forces.” SF, p. 110),
civilians and warlords, foot soldiers and high-ranking officers alike.
Their deaths are often juxtaposed with the death of lice, bacteria, fleas (p. 60). Vonnegut needed some more
distant perspective (or “close”, when it comes to micro-organisms) to “say
something intelligent about a massacre”, to say something about the value of
life: “Truth be told, the planet’s most
victorious organisms have always been microscopic.” (G, p. 150) “He dabbed at his tuxedo with a
damp rag, and the fungi came away easily. “Hate to do this, Bill,” he said of
the fungi he was murdering. “Fungi have as much right to life as I do. They
know what they want, Bill. Damned if I do anymore.” (BC, p. 35) “Albert
Schweitzer, a physician as well as musician and a philosopher, hoped to teach
us reverence for life. He felt that we should not kill even the tiniest, most
contemptible organism if we could possibly avoid doing that. On the face of it,
this ideal is preposterous, since so many diseases are caused by germs.” (FWTD, p.104) So he
invented Tralfamadorians (In his first novel Player Piano a similar perspective is provided by the Shah of
Bratpuhr who visits the United States, in Slapstick by the microscopic Chinese)
and other intelligent extraterrestrial creatures who help us transcendent our
limited dimensions, not by going outward, of course, but by going inward, “Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie
within every human being, looked outward - pushed ever outward.” (ST, p. 7).
Zog
landed at night in
However, the role of Tralfamadorians is
not uniformly applied throughout Vonnegut’s novels. In The Sirens of Titan they are undoubtedly soulless machines whereas
in Hocus Pocus they become
humanoids: “The Tralfamadorians had
senses of humor and so knew themselves for the severely limited lunkers, not to
say crazy lunkers, they really were. They were immune to the kilovolts of pride
the Elders jazzed their brains with. They laughed right away when the idea
popped up in their heads that they were the glory of the Universe, and that
they were supposed to colonize other planets with their incomparable
magnificence. They knew exactly how clumsy and dumb they were, even though they
could talk and some of them could read and write and do math.” (HP, p. 167) Their
role in Slaughterhouse-Five is
described by the author of Sanity Plea:
“Disputing the usual interpretation that the Tralfamadorians speak for the
author, Wymer shows that Vonnegut warns against the perils of fatalism rather
than affirms such a philosophy. Those who confuse Vonnegut with Billy Pilgrim
or mistake the author as a defeatist, believing that the insidiously addictive
ideas that come to invade Billy’s mind are Vonnegut’s miss the predominantly
affirmative thrust of Slaughterhouse-Five
and
Vonnegut’s career as a whole. Billy Pilgrim’s conversion to Tralfamadorian
fatalism, OR FATAL DREAM, which is Tralfamadore by anagram, assures his
schizophrenic descent into madness.” (p. 86) If we assume that Vonnegut’s protagonists represent certain
stages in author’s personal development, then Billy Pilgrim can certainly be
understood as such, but outgrown by the time the book was written, and his
philosophy mustn’t be taken for granted. “Caged
in a zoo, turned into a puppet for the entertainment of mechanical creatures
whose own world is both physically and morally sterile, seduced into renouncing
whatever vestige of free will he has left, Billy Pilgrim becomes the very
embodiment of what Vonnegut has warned against for years. Insulated from pain,
Billy has simply abdicated his humanity, trading his dignity and integrity for
an illusion of comfort and security, and becoming himself a machine.” (Allen
1988: 8)
VI. “TAKES ALL KINDS OF PEOPLE TO
MAKE UP A WORLD.”(BC, p. 120)
Breakfast of Champions offers
a panoramic view of problems modern world is facing. While searching their
roots the author even rewrites American history in more easily comprehensible
terms - 1492 becomes the year when cheating, robbing, killing and enslavement
began. Humans are hard to come by - the pirates from
The devastating effects of machines
dominating men become more transparent than in Player Piano - they not only disintegrate a society and ruin our
environment, they are also disastrous to human spirit, no matter how hard or
impossible it may be to render its essence into something comprehensible to
science. When it comes to human soul, the author doesn’t hesitate to announce “…the spiritual climax of this book,...” (BC, p. 218). It
happens at the art festival. One of the invited artists, Rabo Karabekian, has
just sold his painting of questionable artistic value - it is twenty feet wide
and sixteen feet high, it is all green except for one vertical orange stripe on
the left side. It is called The Temptation of Saint Anthony.
The painter’s modern approach has thus little to do with how Dali or some other
artist of the past dealt with the motif. The picture is the first purchase for
the permanent collection of the city’s Center for the Arts. Rabo Karabekian has
got fifty thousand dollars for it. People are outraged. So is the waitress with
whom Rabo is chatting in the cocktail lounge. She doesn’t know who Saint Antony
was. The painter asks her to tell him about the teen-age girl who appears on
the cover of the program for the Festival of the Arts. “…the only internationally famous human being in
“The
clear intent of all sorts of nonteatrical artists is that their devices, be
they books or paintings or serious pieces of music or whatever, become mantras,
means for individuals to enter isolated states of meditation.” (FWTD, p. 213)
Rabo has reached the level of awareness which enables him to see this very
awareness as the essence of any life. His negative counterpart is Dwayne Hoover
who reads Kilgore Trout’s science fiction novel Now It Can Be Told and
“learns” from it that he is the only creature in the Universe who has free
will, who knows what to do next and what for; all people around him are robots
who can’t feel anything and whose only purpose is to provoke his reactions, so
the Creator of the Universe can watch them. Dwayne’s already disturbed mind
takes this for granted and he starts to treat his fellowmen accordingly. “The Creator of the Universe would now like
to apologize not only for the capricious, jostling companionship he provided
during the test, but for the trashy, stinking condition of the planet itself.
The Creator programmed robots to abuse it for millions of years, so it would be
a poisonous, festering cheese when you got here. Also, He made sure it would be
desperately crowded by programming robots, regardless of their living
conditions, to crave sexual intercourse and adore infants more than almost
anything.” (BC, p. 254) One
cannot blame “the robots” for what they are - “And I have just named villains in my books, which are never
individuals. The villains again: culture, society, and history - none of them
strikingly housebroken by lithium, Thorazine, Prozac, or Tofranil.” (FWTD, p.
31)
VII. “I WANTED TO GET INTO MY BED
AND PULL THE COVERS OVER MY HEAD. THAT WAS MY PLAN. THAT IS STILL PRETTY MUCH
MY PLAN.” (DD, p. 93)
Deadeye Dick
deals with the American (human) love for firearms. Death becomes more palpable
and down-to-earth. Whole planets and galaxies don’t disappear in a moment, and
the dead are not brought back to life by some new concept of time and space. In
this respect the characters are more of flesh and blood, with violent and
unnatural deaths of their own device closing in. All Vonnegut’s
extraterrestrial metaphors remain in their imperceptible dimensions, yet the
book is teeming with “Earthlings’ lethal tools”, from the collection of
firearms to radioactive cement and in the long run equally deadly medicines.
The main character Rudy Waltz, like all Vonnegut's heroes, grows in a family
where children lack love and parental support because their parents lost
interest in life, found it not worth living, divorce, drink, commit suicide...
His father has a “...collection of more
than three hundred guns, which encompassed almost the entire history of
firearms up until 1914 or so... ...Father taught me how to fire them and handle
their violent kicks, and to clean them, and to take them apart and put them
back together again while blindfolded, when I was only ten years old. God bless
him.” (p. 32) On Mother’s day in 1944 the family expects a very
distinguished guest for lunch - the wife of the President of the United States.
After the lunch she makes some polite inquiry about Rudy’s familiarity with
firearms. “So father told them both that
Felix and I knew more about small arms than most professional soldiers, and he
said most of the things the National Rifle Associations still says about how
natural and beautiful it is for Americans to have love affairs with guns... “My
boys will never have a shooting accident””... (p. 64). Researches have proved quite opposite: “…the mere presence (let alone ownership)
of weapons makes people behave more rather than less belligerently, and this
even when the individuals concerned were neither angry nor afraid. A weapon is,
it seems, a stimulus to violence.” (Dixon 1988: 267) It
took some time to prove what had been established long ago: “Weapons are instruments of bad omen: all
beings, I believe, loathe them.” (Lao Tzu 1989: 40) Vonnegut confesses that
he “… was maybe the best shot in my
company when I was a PFC. But I wouldn’t have one of
the motherfuckers in my house for anything.” (FWTD, p. 81)
By that time Rudy has been already
entrusted with the key to the gun room, out of which his father “...made such an honour and fetish...
...because he was too lazy to ever clean a gun.” (p. 63). After Mrs
Roosevelt leaves, father sends Rudy up to the gun room to clean a rifle. Rudy
takes the Springfield with him when he climbs the ladder up into the cupola of
their house. There is some ammunition in his pocket. He loads the gun. “I could let down the hammer gently,
without firing the cartridge. And then I could withdraw the bolt, which would
extract the live cartridge and throw it away. But I squeezed the trigger
instead.” (p. 65). Later he learns “...that
Eloise Metzger, the pregnant wife of the city editor of the Bugle-Observer, George Metzger, had just been shot dead while running a
vacuum cleaner in the guest room on the second floor of her home over on
Harrison Avenue, about eight blocks away.” (p. 68). She felt
no pain because the bullet went straight between her eyes.
VIII. “WE’RE DOOMED TO REPEAT THE
PAST NO MATTER WHAT.” (BB, p. 91)
In Bluebeard or The Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, whom we met in Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut
questions the position and role of an artist. He calls himself a “canary bird in the coal mine” (Broer 1998: 4). His duty is to warn against the dehumanized future our rampant
technology is creating. By no means an easy task - towards the end of the book
Rabo wonders what will be written about him in the Big Book on Judgment Day: “Soldier: Excellent. Husband and Father:
Floparro. Serious artist: Floparro.” (p. 232). And he was able to be an
excellent soldier only because of his artistic skills - “The unit was composed of artists, since it was the theory of someone
in the Army that we would be especially good at camouflage.” (p. 2). His
job during the war is “covering the truth”. He is joking “...that half the things we hid from the enemy have to this very day
never been seen again!” (p. 251). He undergoes, on a smaller scale, an
absurd metamorphosis of Howard Campbell from Mother Night - “The part of me that wanted to tell the truth got turned
into an expert liar! The lover in me got turned into a pornographer! The artist
in me got turned into ugliness such as the world has rarely seen before. (MN, p. 133). During the war Rabo loses one eye, but
that doesn’t cripple his perception of dangerous lies hidden behind the
verisimilitude of his teacher’s paintings and American popular culture.
His parents are Armenians, survivors of “...this century’s first genocide, a word
which did not exist in any language then.” (p. 3). How does American
culture respond to such atrocities? By camouflaging her own
genocide with the film industry. An Armenian refugee could have got a
job because “...just about any big-nosed
person whose ancestors came from the shores of the Mediterranean or the Near
East, if he could act a little, could play a rampaging Sioux or whatever. The
audiences were more than satisfied.” (p. 67). “In the movies you seldom saw the babies who had done most of the heavy
fighting on the ground in the war.” (p. 245). Means of communication become
means of “camouflage” - “...thanks to
television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be
hiding a Third World War.” (p. 84). “As long as they did not use nuclear
weapons, it appeared, nobody was going to give the right name to all the
killing that had been going since the end of the Second World War, which was
surely “World War Three” ”. (GL, p. 119). Children
haven’t heard of “...anything that
wasn’t on TV less than a week ago.” (p. 85), and most of them “...can’t afford to go to Harvard to be
misinformed.” (p. 92). “...knowledge
was so much junk to be processed one way or another at
great universities.” (p. 175).
Rabo’s teacher, Dan Gregory, is able to
reproduce anything, his pictures are “...truthful
about material things, but they lied about time. ...he lacked the guts or the
wisdom, or maybe just the talent, to indicate somehow that time was liquid,
that one moment was no more important than any other, and that all moments
quickly run away. ...life, by definition, is never still.” (p. 82). He has
everything “...a painter could ever wish
for, save for the ingredient he himself would have to supply: soul, soul,
soul.” (p. 265). Art also is a place where necrophilism,
destructive instincts, search after “cosy wombs”, and Thanatos on one
side, meet joy of living, acceptance of life as a value beyond any pain,
“Universal Will to Become”, and Eros on the other side. Vonnegut’s heroes, like
any individual or society in modern world, are all becoming painfully aware of
their schizophrenic duality, they hide behind “...a “mask”, a deliberately cultivated strategy of maintaining
personal freedom by withdrawing behind some sort of protective shield, and
putting another, false self forward. ...the mask may become compulsive, and
hence more a threat than a safeguard to the sanity it is meant to preserve.” (Broer 1989: 7). Rabo fights his “insanity” with painting which is “...pure essence
of human wonder,
and wholly apart from food, from sex, from clothes, from houses, from drugs,
from cars, from news, from money, from crime, from punishment, from games, from
war, from peace - and surely apart from the universal human impulse among
painters and plumbers alike toward inexplicable despair and self-destruction.”
(p. 281).
Rabo’s
paintings, “...thanks to unforeseen
chemical reactions between the sizing of my canvases and the acrylic wall-paint
and colored tapes I had applied to them, all destroyed themselves.” (p. 18). This
is what Vonnegut says about “outliving the smile of Mona Lisa”: “When I think of my own death, I don’t
console myself with the idea that my descendants and my books and all that will
live on. Anybody with any sense knows that the whole Solar System will go up
like a celluloid collar by-and-by. I honestly believe, though, that we are
wrong to think that moments go away, never to be seen again.” (Allen 1988: 63) In
Galapagos: “...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...” (p. 233)
People who bought Rabo’s paintings for a lot of money “...found themselves gazing at a blank canvas...” This blankness or
void may symbolize “the essence of human wonder”, its hidden and imperceptible
nature. One can think that Rabo “...failed
to paint pictures of nothing after all...”, because one “...easily identifies chaos on every
canvas.” Rabo answers that “...not
even chaos is supposed to be there.” (p. 231). In this way he seems to
fight the culture which does not only hide the truth, it produces “truths” - “...the message of our principal art forms,
movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the
sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all
right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in shoot-out of some
kind,...” (p. 65). “I can remember thinking that war was so
horrible that... ...nobody could ever be fooled by romantic pictures and
fiction and history into marching to war again. Nowadays, of course, you can
buy a machine gun with a plastic bayonet for your little kid at the nearest toy
boutique.” (p. 140).
IX. “…FAILURE IS THE NORM.” (HP,
p. 27)
Eugene
Debs Hartke, the protagonist and narrator of the novel, is born in 1940. His
story is told from the year 2001, “the world hasn’t ended yet nor has Jesus
returned”. Eugene’s grandfather makes him learn by heart the most famous words
uttered by Eugene Debs, a socialist candidate for the Presidency of the United
States who “...got more votes than has
any other candidate nominated by a third party in the history of this country.”
(p. 1) The words are: “While there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal
element I am of it. While there is a soul in prison I am not free.” (ibid.) Near the end of Eugene’s senior year in high
school his father forces him to go to West Point because he needs something to boast
about in front of his neighbours. Eugene likes jazz and wants to become a
journalist, but he is forced to spend fourteen years as a soldier. At the end
of Vietnam war, when he is thirty-five, he is a
Lieutenant Colonel. During the war he sees things like “…the severed head of a bearded old man resting on the guts of an
eviscerated water buffalo…”, and hears of killing a fifteen years old boy, “…they put his little testicles and penis
in his mouth as a warning to anybody else who might choose to be a sniper.” (p.
38) He himself throws a man out of a helicopter,
kills with bare hands or a meter of piano wire, and “…pitched a grenade into the mouth of a tunnel…, and killed a woman,
her mother, and her baby hiding from helicopter gunships…
(p. 209) Eugene would gladly die in the World War II, which appears
meaningful from Vietnam, where he is only “…trying
to get a big audience for the Government on TV by killing real people with live
ammunition, something the other advertisers were not free to do.” (p. 48) During
and after the war soldiers become an object of ridicule in academic
communities, “…even though a major part
of Harvard’s and MITs income came from research and
development having to do with new weaponry.” (p. 131)
His more alert inferiors are amazed that
he never uses profanity. He follows his grandfather’s advice - “...profanity and obscenity entitle people
who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.” (p.
3). Neither does the book contain any dirty words, “...except for “hell” and “God”, in case someone is
fearing that an innocent child might see 1.” So the end of Vietnam
War is referred to as the time “when the
excrement hit the air-conditioning” (p. 3), and his father, who sends him
to West Point, is “...as full of
excrement as a Christmas turkey...” (p. 2) This time Vonnegut takes no
chances - he wants to be taken seriously when measuring damage done by a
four-letter word and that by “...a
white-phosphorus barrage or a napalm air strike on a returning Jesus Christ.”
(p. 2) “…the most important message of a crucifix, …,
was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders
from a superior authority. (p. 157) His books were once banned and even
burned as obscene, because he wrote things as “Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker.” (SF, p. 29) Although the word perfectly fits the occasion, because it “...was still a novelty in the speech of
white people in 1944. It was
fresh and astonishing to Billy, who had never fucked anybody - and it did its
job. It woke him up and got him off the road.” Four-letter words have since
then penetrated almost all discourses and thus lost their original power, so
one can easily shock people by avoiding them -
in Vietnam Eugene gets the nickname Preacher. Yet their function of
being dirty in olden times remains indisputable. Vonnegut suspected, when he
was in grammar school, that “...warnings
about words that nice people never used were in fact lessons in how to keep our
mouths shut not just about our bodies, but about many, many things - perhaps
too many things.” (PS, p. 210) And of what possible use could be shutting
our mouths about our bodies, since
“...the inclusion of once-taboo words into ordinary conversation is a good
thing, since women and children are now free to discuss their bodies without
shame, and so to take care of themselves more intelligently.” (BB, p. 159) In
one of his essays Vonnegut wonders why Queen Victoria should
have been so offended and pained by any mention of bodily functions, and
concludes that hearing such words made her feel that “...her power to intimidate was being attacked ever so slightly, far,
far from its centre, ...way out on the edge. She created arbitrary rules for
that outermost edge to warn her of the approach of anyone so crude, so rash as
to bring to her attention the suffering of the Irish, or the cruelties of the
factory system, or the privileges of the nobility, or the approach of a world
war,... If she would not even acknowledge that human beings sometimes farted,
how could she be expected to hear without swooning of these other things? (PS,
p. 214)
After the
war Eugene meets his former commanding officer who is now President of Tarkington College. He offers him a teaching job which he
accepted. The students at Tarkington are
learning-disabled or have some other problems. Eugene starts to teach Physics.
He lives with his wife and mother-in-law, both will eventually lose their
sanity. Not far from the College with 300 students is a prison with 10,000
inmates. In 1991 After fifteen years of service Tarkington College fires Eugene who is fifty-one at the
time. He believes they themselves don’t know why, but he knows it is because he
has “…ugly, personal knowledge of the
disgrace that was the Vietnam War.” (p. 82) He has “…wobbled the student’s faith in the intelligence and decency of their
country’s leadership…” (p. 203) He
gets a new job at the prison across the lake where he even starts a literacy
program. The prison has been bought by the Japanese,
they are able to cut down the costs of “the punishing industry”. All prisoners
cut loose during the escape organized from the outside. They call themselves
“Freedom Fighters”, attack the people in the valley, and take some hostages.
Eugene has nothing to do with it, but he enjoys certain privileges because the
prisoners need his advice, he is treated as “…a harmless old fool with wisdom” (p. 224), and can move freely among them, yet cannot
leave them. Meantime his insane wife and mother-in-law are taken to “laughing
academy”. After the order is restored, he is accused of masterminding the
prison break.
At the
beginning of Hocus Pocus we learn
about a man who spent his last three years trying to invent a perpetual-motion
machine. He made nineteen machines and after a hundred years ten most beguiling
were put on permanent exhibit in a school to demonstrate “...not only how quickly anything on Earth runs down without steady
infusions of energy. They reminded us, too, of the craftsmanship no longer
practised...” They were put “...underneath
a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays:
THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.” (p. 11).
Hocus Pocus seems to
be Vonnegut’s blackest novel, especially if we fail to understand “...the role of pessimism in the
psychological plot central to this novel and to Vonnegut’s career as a whole.” (Broer 1989: 179). The
protagonist, Eugene Debs Hartke, differs considerably from his predecessors
such as Billy Pilgrim, who “...tried
hard to care” (SF, p. 44) and says in the middle of the battle: “You guys go on without me. I’m all right.”
(SF, p. 38); or Rudy Waltz, who thinks he is “a defective human being, and... ...shouldn’t even be on this planet
anymore.” (DD, p. 80), and that he is homosexual, but he can’t be sure
since he hasn’t made love to anyone (DD,
p. 99), so he concludes that the
best thing for him and those around him is “...to
want nothing, to be enthusiastic about nothing, to be as unmotivated as
possible...” so that he would never again hurt anyone. (DD, p. 110). Eugene’s
environment has undergone some dramatic changes for worse, “the enormous
forces” that play with Billy Pilgrim multiply and lose no strength - wars
become more cruel, the protagonist confesses he has killed with bare hands,
prisons are crowded, AIDS spreads, water supplies are full of atomic wastes,
people, who are “…1,000 times dumber and
meaner than they think they are.” (p. 40) are “…killing the planet with the by-products of their own ingenuity.” (p.
7), calves raised for veal “…scarcely
out of the womb, were put in cages so cramped that they could hardly move, to
make their muscles nice and tender. …their throats were cut, and they had never
run or jumped or made friends, or done anything that might have made life a
worthwhile experience.” (p. 257) and “…the two principal currencies of the
planet were the Yen and fellatio.” (p. 93), yet he doesn’t give in to “Tralfamadorian
philosophy” in order to avoid pain.
“The biggest character in Hocus Pocus (excluding myself, of course) is imperialism, the capture
of others societies’ land and people and treasure by means of state-of-the-art
wounding and killing machines, which is to say armies and navies.” (FWTD p.
129)
X. “WE WERE INTERCHANGEABLE PARTS
IN THE AMERICAN MACHINE.” (SL, p. 7)
For
his novel Slapstick or Lonesome no more!
Vonnegut says that it is the closest he will ever come to writing an
autobiography. “It is about what life feels
like to me.” (p. 1) It feels like the slapstick film
comedies of Laurel and Hardy where people “...never
failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies... Love was never at
issue. And, perhaps because I was so perpetually intoxicated and instructed by
Laurel and Hardy during my childhood in the Great Depression, I find it natural
to discuss life without ever mentioning love. It does not seem important to
me.” (p. 2) Does one speak this way after a divorce, or after seeing through
the vanity of so-called romantic love? Is it embitterment or a search for love
on a new level? “I cannot distinguish
between the love I have for people and the love I have for dogs.” (p. 2)
Vonnegut also believes a romance is likely
to obscure the more important issues of a novel. The main “character” in Slapstick is loneliness which can be in
no way cured by falling in love, on contrary, it can even be counterproductive:
“Love is where you find it. I think it
is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous. I wish
that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to
each other, when they fight, “Please - a little less love, and a little more
common decency.” (p. 3)
The cure for loneliness could be found
only within a large family, but since the extended family of the past fell
apart and the nuclear family can’t provide its members with enough relatives,
the new artificial extended family must be devised. Vonnegut’s family tradition
was “...permanently crippled, ... , by the sudden American hatred for all things German
which unsheathed itself when this country entered the First World War... (p. 6)
“This is a lonesome society that’s been fragmented by the factory system.
People have to move from here to there as jobs move, as prosperity leaves one
area and appears somewhere else.” (Allen 1988: 79) Only a few communities
were able to retain their distinctive characters, their “soul”, Vonnegut’s
hometown wasn’t among them: “...Indianapolis,
which had once had a way of speaking English all its own, and jokes and legends
and poets and villains and heroes all its own, and galleries for its own
artists, had itself become an interchangeable part in the American machine. It
was just another someplace where automobiles lived, with a symphony orchestra
and all.” (p. 7)
More than 2000 years before the progress
took its rapid course and
machines started to standardize our planet, Lao Tzu wrote:
“A
country shall be small
an its populace
small in number.
Implements that multiply men’s strength
shall not be used.
People are to take death seriously
and shall not
travel far away.
Even though there be ships and carriages
no-one shall
travel in them.
…
Neighbouring countries may be within
eyesight
so that one can
hear the cocks crow and the dogs bark
on either side.
And yet shall people die at great age
without
travelled hither and thither.”
(Lao Tzu 1989: 64)
Could it be that things worth knowing have
always been known and forgotten? Could it be that the search after great new
truths is not only unproductive but downright destructive? Vonnegut often
admits ironically that history teaches nothing: “If our descendants don’t study our times closely, they will find that
they have again exhausted the planet’s fossil fuels, that they have again died
by the millions of influenza and the Green Death, that the sky has again been
turned yellow by the propellants for underarm deodorants, that they have again
elected a senile President two meters tall, and that they are yet again the
intellectual and spiritual inferiors of teeny-weeny Chinese.” (p. 226)
Lao Tzu’s compatriots in Slapstick fight overpopulation by
miniaturizing their children. They create millions of geniuses “...by teaching pairs or small groups of
congenial, telepathically compatible specialists to think as single minds. ...The Chinese got the idea from the American
and European scientists who put their heads together... ...to create an atomic
bomb.” (p. 95) They send “...an expedition to
The novel’s main characters are dizygotic
twins Wilbur and Eliza,
they are so ugly that their parents are ashamed of them. They are
believed to be idiots, and die before they are fourteen. Their parents are rich
but in no other way exceptional. They get rid of their children by providing a
separate, well-furnished home and servants for them. Their “...response is humane.” (p. 29)
The twins are in fact geniuses when working
together, but their environment makes them cultivate idiocy: “...all the information we received about
the planet we were on indicated that idiots were lovely things to be.” (p. 40) The house they live in has a hidden mansion crammed with
books. The twins discover it, and learn French, German, Italian, Latin and
ancient Greek by the time they are seven. They never display their intelligence
in public: “We thought of it as being
simply one more example of our freakishness, like our extra nipples and fingers
and toes. And we may have been right at that. You know?” (p. 42)
On their fifteenth birthday they are, as
usually, visited by their parents, who want them to hurry up and die. While the
twins are eavesdropping, mother confesses in an outburst that she hates her
children. She says she would give anything “...for
the faintest sign of intelligence, the merest flicker of humanness in the eyes
of either twin.” (p. 69) The twins are glad to
comply not knowing this will end their happy childhood. They inspire no respect nor love. They are given “quickie education” by “...a human being who is tremendously
respected by the adult world, …that person is actually
a malicious lunatic.” (p. 90) This lunatic is a
Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner who is to decide their destiny. After testing the
twins separately, she concludes that “...Eliza
would probably never learn to read or write...” and that if Wilbur “...were separated from his sister,... he could become a fillingstation attendant or a janitor
in a village school.” (p. 95) Wilbur is sent to a school for severely
disturbed children, and Eliza to an institution for
the feeble-minded. She manages to come out at the time when her brother is in
his first year in medical school. They are reunited but can never fully recover.
Eliza dies embittered while Wilbur is to become President of the
During this revolution the electronic
device is invented which enables communicating with the dead. Afterlife offers
little consolation. The voices from “Paradise” sound “...as the other end of a telephone call on a rainy autumn day - to a
badly run turkey farm.” (p. 231) Wilbur speaks to his deceased sister, who
urges him to join her: “...we are bored
stiff. Whoever designed this place knew nothing about human beings. ...This is forever! Where you are now is just nothing in terms of time! It’s a
joke! Blow your brains out as quick as you can.” (p.
234) So once
again Vonnegut’s exaggerated concepts of space, time and other dimensions lose
significance and boil down to seemingly smaller yet more pressing problems
humanity is facing. And no matter how clumsy people may be, it is still better
for people to solve these problems themselves than to turn the task over to
machines. “Yes, and I found the
hospitality of my mind to fantasy pleasantly increased as machinery died and
communications from the outside world became more and more vague.” (p. 145)
XI. “HOW TO LOVE PEOPLE WHO HAVE
NO USE?” (GBY, p. 183)
“A SUM OF MONEY is a leading character in this
tale about people,...” (p. 7),
says the author in the beginning of the book. Human existence narrows down to
“have or not to have”. The sum of money is the Rosewater charitable and cultural foundation,
formed to avoid taxes and other predators outside the family. It is a sort of
dead and utterly indifferent deity around which the lives of the characters
revolve. It reminds me of the money tree from Trout’s book: “It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its
flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human
beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.”
(SF, p. 112) This fortune was formed during the Civil War by Noah Rosewater
who “...hired a village idiot to fight
in his place, converted the saw factory to the manufacture of swords and
bayonets, converted the farm to the raising of hogs.
Abraham Lincoln declared that no amount of money was too much to pay for the
restoration of the Union, so Noah priced his merchandise in scale with the
national tragedy. And he made this discovery: Government objections to the
price or quality of his wares could be vaporized with bribes that were
pitifully small.” (p. 11) Thus was “...humorless American class system
created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers,
if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved
henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for commiting
crimes against which no laws had been passed. (p. 12)
The president of the Foundation is
forty-six years old Eliot, the son of Senator Rosewater. He is extravagant (too rich
too be crazy), and Norman Mushari, the lawyer working for the Foundation, tries
to declare Eliot legally insane and thus profit from the transaction of the
money to Eliot’s cousins, in which “...there
is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during
which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer
will make that moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic
microsecond...” (p. 9)
Eliot deserved the label of insanity by
his uncritical love for everybody. He doesn’t dissipate the fortune - his gifts
are very small. His charity consists of listening to others’ problems and
giving them friendly advice. His clients are the people tormented by the stigma of
uselessness, their county has been ruined because of the foundation’s profits -
they have been “raped and accused of prostitution”. Yet Eliot’s behaviour
saddens his father, who is a senator, and drives his wife crazy. Her disease is
called “Samaritrophia” - “hysterical indifference to the troubles of those
less fortunate than oneself.” (p. 41), “...a disease, and a violent one, too, when it attacks those exceedingly rare individuals who reach biological
maturity still loving and wanting to help their fellow men.” (p. 43) So the doctor treating her has to
decide “...how much guilt and pity Mrs.
Z might safely be allowed to feel!” (ibid.) Before
doing this, he investigates normality and “...was
bound to conclude that a normal person, functioning well on the upper levels of
a prosperous, industrialized society, can hardly hear his conscience at all.”
(p. 43)
Eliot shares some traits with Rudy Waltz,
the protagonist of Deadeye Dick.
They have both killed by mistake and are conscience-stricken, yet Rudy remains
completely paralysed, whereas Eliot is still able to act, though only through
offering uncritical love. His environment considers this as insane, since the
society based on materialism isn’t able to recognize an individual as such. His
or her position, role and relationships are necessarily determined to a large
extend by his wealth, often amassed by everything but honest and hard work. The
minor character, the fisherman Harry Pena, protrudes from this system
enslavement. His profession is an ancient one and appears noble amidst poor
people without work, underpaid workers, rich people doing nothing and those
doing useless work (senators and insurance agents). Yet he represents a species
soon to be extinct.
As it can be understood from the
satirizing description of the world where everybody is made equal by
impediments in The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut considers the idea
futile. The problem is the guilt and shame imposed on the underprivileged. The
problem is “..How to love people who have no use?”
(p.183) According to Vonnegut this problem is solved only by volunteer fire
departments, “...the only examples of
enthusiastic unselfishness to be seen in this land.” “There we have people
treasuring people as people.” (p. 184)
XII. “UNSPECIFIED REPAIRS WERE TO
BE MADE AT SOME FUTURE TIME” (JB, p. 140)
Jailbird is
another piece of Vonnegut’s “characterless autobiographical fiction” - “We were, if I may be forgiven, farts in a
windstorm... (p. 131) It deals, among other
things, with the protagonist’s “juvenile” conviction “...that a rich man should have some understanding of the place from
which his riches came.” (p. xxiii) Walter’s
socialist beliefs are derived from the Sermon on the Mount. Innocent and naive,
they undergo some slight modifications to reach the conclusion that jail is one
of quite acceptable places for an honest person to be in,
or even comfortable and secure - when he leaves prison he says that he “...was going out into the Free Enterprise
System again. Here I was cut loose from the protection and nurture of the
federal government again.” (p. 68) So
The Free Enterprise System is not necessarily as
free as its name may suggest. Almost every part of it that we encounter in the
book is “a subsidiary of The RAMJAC Corporation”. Amidst the big business it is
impossible to establish who pulls the strings. When Walter leaves prison and
gets a lift from a driver of a limousine he notices a toy steering wheel in
front of him. It was there because the driver’s little son enjoys pretending to
be steering the limousine with it. The driver says that “...the President of the
“The poor
in spirit, all who mourned, the meek, those who hungered for righteousness, the
merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who were persecuted for
righteousness’ sake” have to wait patiently or become like Walter’s fellow
inmate Larkin who “...had so opened
himself to the consolations of religion that he had become an imbecile.” (p.
35) He quotes the Bible to Walter: “Depart
from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his
angels.” Walter replies “That Jesus
may have said that,... but it is so unlike most of
what else He said that I have to conclude that He was slightly crazy that day.”
(p. 38)
The story suggests that ideology can’t be
followed strictly without negating its very fundamental principles, that this
need not necessarily be an anomaly but its inherent element - “The most important thing they teach at
Harvard, ... , is that a man can obey every law and
still be the worst criminal of his time.” (p. 75) The
paradise may lay just around the corner but it is a sin or crime to do anything
in order to get any closer: “Yes -
Kilgore Trout is back again. He could not make it on the outside. That is no
disgrace. A lot of good people can’t make it on the outside.” (JB, the very
beginning) The novel “naively” juxtaposes communism and the Sermon on the
Mount. “What could be so repulsive after
all, during the Great Depression, especially, and with yet another war for
natural wealth and markets coming, in a young man’s belief that each person
could work as well as he or she was able, and should be rewarded, sick or well,
young or old, brave or frightened, talented or imbecilic, according to his or
her simple needs?” (p. 13) Since Marx admits he
can’t categorize “simple needs” and luxury (or greed), Jesus didn’t bother to
do it scientifically.
The novel starts with “a 10 percent cut in
pay” which led to the Cuyahoga Massacre. The workers on strike were shot at - “...honor had been served and justice had
been done.” (p. xxxvii) Two leaders of the
workers, Sacco and Vanzetti, were framed and died “...in the same electric chair, the invention of a dentist.” (p. xxxix)
The protagonist, Walter F. Starbuck, is
the only son of an immigrant couple - his mother is a Lithuanian cook, his
father a Polish chauffeur. The kind of people that are probably mentioned in
the Sermon on the Mount, yet
XIII. “WHAT THE TELEPHONE COMPANY
HATH JOINED TOGETHER, LET NO MAN PUT ASUNDER.” (GL, p. 75)
Galapagos begins
with “the Nature Cruise of the Century” in 1986. The Cruise starts in
The book
deals with the question whether “...the
human brain was the most admirable survival device yet produced by evolution.”
(p. 29) At the first stop of the
cruise, Galapagos, we meet a “flightless cormorant”, the bird which has very
small wings, because “...along the line
of evolution, the ancestors of such a bird must have begun to doubt the value
of their wings, just as, in 1986, human beings were beginning to question
seriously the desirability of big brains.” (p. 35) The
galloping technology acquires new significance: “About that mystifying enthusiasm a million years ago for turning over
as many human activities as possible to machinery: What could that have been
but yet another acknowledgement by people that their brains were no damn good?”
(p. 38) The main villain of the story is human
brain. Science has found out that
our brains made a disproportional jump in evolution so “...every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three
kilogrammes! 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-kilogramme
brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race?” (p.
16) “The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this
particular universe, in my opinion. I’d like to live with alligators, think
like an alligator.” (Allen 1988: 81) “Why so many of us a million years ago
purposely knocked out major chunks of our brains with alcohol from time to time
remains an interesting mystery. It may be that we were trying to give evolution
a shove in the right direction - in the direction of smaller brains.” (p. 168)
Galapagos suggests
that while we believed that only the fittest of the fittest will survive “we
had our chance but we blew it”. Our disrespect for life has been certainly
backed up by the unwritten law: “Monster
fuck-ups engineered by your own government are not to be treated with
disrespect until the damage done is absolutely unforgivable, incomprehensible,
and beyond repair.” (FWTD, p. 189)
In
Fates Worse than Death Vonnegut
enumerates seemingly simple precepts required for our survival:
“1. Reduce and stabilize your
population.
2. Stop poisoning the air,
the water, and the topsoil.
3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing
with your real problems.
4. Teach your kids, and
yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if
you give it a trillion dollars.
6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK
no matter how wasteful or destructive
you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean and stupid.
7. And so on. Or else.”
(FWTD, p.112)
Nature has taken less predictable course.
In Slapstick we can witness a nation
disintegrating (or maybe better - re-integrating) into families. Nations have
proved dysfunctional and destructive, so humanity, unadjusted to the artificial
environment of its own device, has had to step back on the ladder of cultural
evolution. It had to try a “new” pattern, knowing that “...culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of
other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on
faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own
society.” (WFG, p. 276)
Vonnegut’s villains “...are never individuals. The Villains again: culture, society, and
history - none of them strikingly housebroken by lithium, Thorazine, Prozac, or
Tofranil.” (FWTD, p. 31) But a mere
cultural adjustment to the increasingly artificial environment is no longer
enough for our survival. “...as a
consequence of cultural evolution achieving greater changes in a hundred years
than genetic evolution had in millions of years we have created an environment
with which our biological make-up is inadequate to deal.” (Dixon 1988: 11) In
Galapagos humanity as a species
biologically adjust to the effects of our cultural evolution by stepping all
the way back to “
The
narrator is a ghost and thus able to view the world from a distant future - “One million years ago, back in A.D. 1986,... Nature has in a million years taken care of
our survival and our “...arms have
become flippers in which the hand bones are almost entirely imprisoned and
immobilized. Each flipper is studded with five purely ornamental nubbins,
attractive to members of the opposite sex at mating time. These are in fact the
tips of four suppressed fingers and a thumb. Those parts of people’s brains
which used to control their hands, moreover, simply don’t exist any more, and
human skulls are now much more streamlined on that account. The more
streamlined the skull, the more successful the fisher person.” (p. 150) Maladjustments due to oversized brains are numerous:
“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?” (p. 59) “Those
who did reproduce a lot, ... , commonly made
psychological cripples of their own children.” (p. 67)
After
human brain has in a million years of evolution shrunk to a functional size,
human males reach sexual prime at the age of six. “Nobody nowadays, I must say, expects to be rescued from anything,
once he or she is more than nine months old. That’s how long human childhood
lasts nowadays. (p. 101) “Thanks to sharks and killer whales, problems
connected with ageing are unimaginable in the present day.” (p. 229) We have traded our questionable humanity for survival. “Nobody, surely, is going to write
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony - or tell a lie, or start a Third World War.” (p.
208) Natural selection has given priority to “the most efficient fisherfolk” instead to “the most ferocious strugglers.” (p. 149) It has favoured a
creature who is “...content to pass its
time on earth as a food gatherer, to shun the experiments with unlimited greed
and ambition performed by humankind.” (p. 150) “The loose end” of the book
(or our evolution) doesn’t say much about the remaining qualities which could
set us apart from animals. If it is a soul then we have retained “...the part of you that knows when your
brain isn’t working right.” (p. 43) We are no
longer “...an unstoppable glacier made
of hot meat, which ate up everything in sight then made love, and then doubled
in size again.” (FWTD, p.185); no longer in a position to decree “...that no plant or animal would be
tolerated which was not tamed and edible by humankind.” (p. 179) But we
preserved a rudimentary sense of humour:
“If a bunch of them are lying around on a beach, and one of them farts,
everybody else laughs and laughs, just as people would have done a million
years ago.” (p. 165)
