Listen:
Kurt Vonnegut has come
unstuck in time.
Vonnegut
travels through a career spanning five decades and announces to the world,
in 1997, that his latest book, Timequake, will be his last. He tells
the world he is too old and cranky to put out any more novels.
And Timequake
is his final book even though he loathes it. Critics loathe it. Fans strain
face muscles pretending to be enthusiastic about it. Timequake is
an okay novel from anyone else but from Vonnegut it is, by his own admission,
“not fit for shark chum.” Few things are!
A foul capstone to such
a soaring career! To write a book not worth its weight in fish innards
and seaweed and filleted starfish! And so, with Timequake, Vonnegut,
along with his Pall-Malls, his alter-ego Kilgore Trout, and his Tralfamadorians,
leaves his audience behind, in 1997, and comes back to the beginning of
his career, in 1999, with a new book called Bagombo Snuff Box, collecting
stories that were dead and gone a long time ago. Not even the author remembers
them. They are 23 Lazaruses raised from the dead. So it goes.
My intention was to review
the new book but no one who has written about it has really written
about it at all. I see no reason to buck the trend. Critics have given
up on telling audiences what is wrong with Vonnegut’s work--all they can
do now is praise his past work or ignore him completely. Criticism can
take a flying leap as far as Vonnegut’s reviewers are concerned.
The same with Paul McCartney.
After a brain-boggling couple of decades creating one masterpiece after
another, who cares if, in the last few decades, he has produced music not
fit for shark chum?
Mel Brooks once said
something like: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when someone
else falls down a manhole and dies.” Vonnegut has spent his life falling
down manholes. He was a prisoner of war during World War II. He witnessed
the useless firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in which an estimated 135,000
civilians were incinerated. His mother committed suicide. His sister died
of cancer 24 hours after her husband died in a train wreck. Vonnegut was
diagnosed with schizophrenia, attempted suicide, spent a month in a booby
hatch. His son Mark was diagnosed with schizophrenia and found himself
in a booby hatch too. And Vonnegut’s daughter was married, for a time,
to Geraldo Rivera. And so on.
Falling through manholes
to certain death has made Vonnegut a scream.
According to Vonnegut,
“The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody... would be to not
be used for anything by anybody.” According to Vonnegut, the First Amendment
might be repealed at any moment “for the sake of the children.” According
to Vonnegut, the purpose of existence is “to be the eyes and ears and conscience
of the Creator of the Universe.” According to Vonnegut, “We are what we
pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
This past summer I pretended
to be an actor pretending to be a character named Rosencrantz in a play
called Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern are Dead. The audience pretended to laugh like
hell. In my column two weeks ago I pretended to be a critic
of Holocaust films and in this one I am pretending to be a writer who
wants to review a book by Kurt Vonnegut. I am no writer and certainly no
critic! I am a reader pretending to write in the style of Kurt Vonnegut,
who is pretending not to be a writer anymore. And critics pretend they
never pretended to like his work. So it goes.
This column reminds me
of a passage from Vonnegut’s Cat’s
Cradle. A “cat’s cradle”, incidentally, is a loop of string running
around both hands, zigzagging between hands and fingers to form a series
of X’s. If you have not done this with a piece of string perhaps you have
done it with a rubber band.
Why does this column remind me of Cat’s
Cradle?
Listen:
Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat’s cradle were strung between them. “No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s...”
“And?”
“No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”
Yes, and the headline for today’s column
is: Vonnegut has new book. Another headline might be No damn
cat, no damn cradle: Mitchell’s column not fit for shark chum. “Few things
are!” author defends.
I liked Timequake.
I like what I’ve read of Bagombo Snuff Box. Besides Timequake,
Vonnegut had a few other critical firebombs, such as Galapagos,
which is one of my favorite Vonnegut novels. If I continue pretending to
be a writer perhaps I will eventually publish a book as critically immolated
as Galapagos.
If there is, by accident,
a point to today’s column, it is this: Art is a very personal experience.
You like or hate a work because it attracts or repulses Something inside
of you. The art affecting the Something inside you can be complex or simple
or even prurient, but it is appealing or repulsive to your personal inside
Something. It is the job of your Something to keep an eye on who you are
and what you wish to be. If you wish only to be an audience, you will pretend
to understand your Something’s reasons for liking or hating things, even
though you actually don’t understand at all (for instance, I have no clue
what Dylan’s “Visions
of Johanna” is about but it knocks me on my butt every time I listen
to it). If you wish to be a critic, you will feel compelled to share your
Something’s reaction with an audience who will pretend to read what you
pretended to think.
This is called “constructive”
by real artists and real critics. It is called “red herring” by audiences
and real readers pretending to be writers.
And, while true, this
is not the point of this column: In 500 years, nothing in our century will
be fit for shark chum. Today’s column will be lining the bottoms of birdcages
within the week--forget about 500 years! So it goes.