God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut
SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
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Remembering the anti-establishment and outspoken Kurt Vonnegut.
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ALMOST every obituary printed after the demise of Kurt Vonnegut has found it necessary to overwork one famed Vonnegut phrase: “So it goes.” It is the verbal equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders, a resigned acceptance of the inviolabilit
y of fate, of man’s helplessness in shaping his destiny.
In Slaughterhouse Five, it is the fatalistic credo of Billy Pilgrim, a man who counts the past, the present, and the future as among the things he cannot change. “So it goes” was supposed to be emblematic of what made Vo
nnegut Vonnegut, but it wasn’t; it was only emblematic of what made Vonnegut’s fiction Vonnegut’s fiction.
Constant theme
Vonnegut’s characters, and perhaps his readers, seemed to find a certain comfort in their fatalism. Pilgrim, tossed back and forth by the currents of time, learns over the course of Slaughterhouse Five to just go with the flow
. “Only on Earth,” we are told, “is there any talk of free will.” The rest of the universe, most notably the planet Tralfamadore, has long given up on such a concept, but Vonnegut refuses to tell us whether life is much the better for it.
A surprising number of Vonnegut’s books are shot through with that theme. Malachi Constant sees his existence diverted by the all-seeing space traveller Winston Niles Rumfoord in The Sirens of Titan; he is whisked away into th
e Martian army, robbed of his memory, given a wife and son, stranded on Mercury, returned briefly to Earth, and finally settled on Titan. Constant’s lot is inconstancy. His is not to reason why.
Neither is it that of the adherents of Bokononism, Vonnegut’s invented religion in Cat’s Cradle. The novel’s narrator is sucked into a series of interconnected events that tumble towards the destruction of the worl
d but since Bokononism teaches us that everything is God’s will, there’s no blame to be apportioned and no guilt to be suffered.
As with the best Greek tragedies, inevitability is spelled out in detailed fine print in the contract of life. In Player Piano, Vonnegut’s first novel, America runs on, and is run by, advanced machines; people, to the extent t
hat they matter, merely need to live out their days.
In Breakfast of Champions, a self-referential novelist steers his characters Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover on their assured paths of mutual encounter. In the short story “Harrison Bergeron”, people live with imposed ha
ndicaps to make everybody horrifically equal in a predictable vanilla society. And so it goes.
Unsparing
Except that it doesn’t. Vonnegut’s satire of fatalists is as unsparing as it is subtle. Bowing to perceived inevitability is only a strategy to evade responsibility, for events like Hiroshima and the Allied firebombing of Dresden that form backdrops for Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five. It is part of a Faustian bargain, where the comfort and predictability of Player Piano and “Harrison Bergeron” come at the cos
t of one’s soul and individuality. Most tellingly, the determinism of the novelist in Breakfast of Champions is of farcical proportions, the narrative fractured so beyond repair that it lies in gleaming, jagged shards across its
pages, meaningful only in its meaninglessness.
This is the Vonnegut that will live on –— the anti-establishment, fiercely outspoken man who was adopted by the peace movement during the Vietnam War, who publicly wished that Richard Nixon were president instead of George W. Bush, and who dared to express admiration for suicide bombers, calling them “brave people”.
Vonnegut was the least likely person to succumb to the inevitable and desire the predictable, the least likely to ask of the counterculture to sit on its hands and sigh “So it goes.” One of the many morals in Mother Night reads: “When you’re dead, you’re dead.” Fortunately, that isn’t quite true of Kurt Vonnegut.
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