Vonnegut

I have of late been reading, for the first time in my life, Kurt Vonnegut. I began with Cat's Cradle, followed by Slaughterhouse-Five; today, having been driven from Volunteer Park by fat white Christian rappers (about which more anon), I settled down at Victrola and consumed Deadeye Dick in the space of about three and a half hours or so.

I like Vonnegut. His style is very punchy...With punchlines, even. Odd, Tom Lehrer-esque punchlines, it's true, but still. Lengthy paragraphs describing something horrible, followed by a tiny, compact, dry, intensely cynical punchline. He's compelling; as a friend put it, his books want to be read.

At the same time, his books make you want to stop living. Not die, just...Not be alive any longer.

It's like there's this clown.

He's a good clown. He wears a baggy diamond-quilted suit of red and blue and yellow, and a big red fright wig; his face is painted white, with a big red rubber nose that honks when he squeezes it. He can fart on command, and when he does so a little flag pops out of his butt reading 'Poot!'

And someone loads this clown up into an airplane. Perhaps it's a Cessna; perhaps it's a Beechcraft. Perhaps it may even be a Learjet. It doesn't matter. And this someone takes off, and soars to a healthy attitude, and then, for reasons of their own, this someone pushes the clown out of the airplane.

Peradventure, you happen to be walking along right beneath that airplane, strolling through the balmy summer air, when that clown is shoved out. The clown lands two feet to your left, on top of your best girl (or guy), who is strolling through the balmy summer air by your side. Both of them are killed instantly, although, being on the bottom, your sweetheart is killed a little more thoroughly. There is a hiss of escaping gases from the clown's corpse, and a little flag pops up from its butt reading 'Poot!'

You then die eleven years later of cancer. Because it turns out the clown was actually radioactive, with a chunk of sentient plutonium from the planet Quazon living in its left lung. The Quazonites soon after declare war on mankind, and wipe the species out to the last gamete.

What fun.

There is a wonderful example of Vonnegut's funny-yet-not prose in Slaughterhouse-Five I'd like to quote for you:

Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for every action there is a reaction which is equal and opposite in direction.

This can be useful in rocketry.^[1]

Incidentally, in the same book Vonnegut endears himself to me forever by using the term 'wang,' which, as you all should know, is slang for 'schlong'^[2].

Possibly the most depressing thing about Vonnegut's work is not that senselessly terrible things keep happening and that life is basically shit across the board. It's that the terribleness he describes is often so accurate. Towards the end of Deadeye Dick there's a passage that describes what it's like to live in the America of today with frightening precision:

But that didn't weaken the argument of their leaflet, to wit: that the United States of America was now ruled, evidently, by a small clique of power brokers who believed that most Americans were so boring and ungifted and small time that they could be slain by the tens of thousands without inspiring any long-term regrets on the part of anyone.^[3]

Vonnegut writes like an acerbic old man who has seen far too many people die, and knows that he's going to die, and that I'm going to die, and everyone's going to die, and the whole human race is going to die for that matter too, because he's seen it firsthand. He wrote like an acerbic old man even when he was a young man, or at most a middle-aged one. And he makes the idea lighthearted, whimsical even, but sucks the life out of you all the same as you laugh.

I enjoy that. He's an artist.

All three of his novels I've read so far seem to have a fixation on the immutability of the future, too. It's most obvious in Slaughterhouse-Five where Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time, and visits bits of his life at random throughout the novel, and meets aliens from Tralfamadore who have nothing to do with this unstuck-ness of his, who can see in four dimensions and to whom past, present, and future are all equally real at all times. He knows how his life is going to turn out because he's seen it. But it's there in Cat's Cradle and Deadeye Dick too, if for no other reason than that both novels are being narrated by characters after the events have all taken place. They know how it'll all turn out, too, because they've already lived it. There are echoes all through both of things that will happen eventually in the narrative, but haven't yet. Mass destruction, mainly.

We do remember the future, all of us. After it's happened.

***

1. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell, 1991. Page 80.
2. Op. cit. page 132.
3. Vonnegut, Kurt. Deadeye Dick. New York: Dell, 1985. Page 231-232.

Posted by aloysius at June 14, 2003 09:09 PM | TrackBack |