Vonnegut in Fact

Jerome Klinkowitz

Description

Insights into Vonnegut's extensive nonfiction as a key to understanding innovation in his novels

Vonnegut in Fact offers a thorough assessment of the artistry of Kurt Vonnegut, known not only as the best-selling author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Timequake, and a dozen other novels, but also as the most widely recognized public spokesperson among writers since Mark Twain. Jerome Klinkowitz traces the emergence of Vonnegut's nonfiction since the 1960s, when commentary and feature journalism replaced the rapidly dying short story market.

Offering close readings and insightful criticism of Vonnegut's three major works of nonfiction, his many uncollected pieces, and his unique manner of public speaking, Klinkowitz explains how Vonnegut's personal visions developed into a style of great public responsibility that mirrored the growth of his fiction. Klinkowitz views his subject as a gentle manipulator of popular forms and an extremely personable figure; what might seem radically innovative and even iconoclastic in his fiction becomes comfortably avuncular and familiarly American when followed to its roots in his public spokesmanship.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• América
• Bernard Vonnegut
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• General officer
• E. M. Forster
• Charles M. Schulz
• Ray Bradbury
• James Thurber
• General
• American
• V.
• Mort Sahl
• P. T. Barnum
• Donald Barthelme
• William Styron
• Joseph Heller
• Irwin Shaw
• Abbie Hoffman
• Edward Morgan Forster
• Harry Houdini
• Tom Wolfe
• Mark Twain
• Charles Monroe Schulz
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Hermann Hesse
• Carl Sagan

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 05 juin 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611171273
• Langue: English

Extrait

V ONNEGUT IN F ACT
V ONNEGUT IN F ACT
T HE P UBLIC S POKESMANSHIP OF P ERSONAL F ICTION
Jerome Klinkowitz

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
1998 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 1998 Paperback edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2009 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Klinkowitz, Jerome.
Vonnegut in fact : the public spokesmanship of personal fiction / Jerome Klinkowitz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57003-237-8
1. Vonnegut, Kurt-Political and social views. 2. Politics and literature-United States-History-20th century. 3. Literature and society-United States-History-20th century. 4. Social problems in literatures. 5. Vonnegut, Kurt-Ethics. 6. Ethics in literature. I. Title.
PS3572.05Z748 1998
813 .54-dc21
97-49182
ISBN 978-1-61117-127-3 (ebook)
For Bob Weide, Kurt s Whyaduck
C ONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction The Private Person as Public Figure
Chapter One Emerging from Anonymity
Chapter Two Short-Story Salesmanship
Chapter Three The Road to Wampeters
Chapter Four Wampeters, Foma Granfalloons
Chapter Five Palm Sunday
Chapter Six Fates Worse than Death
Chapter Seven A Public Preface for Personal Fiction
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Kurt Vonnegut has helped me locate copies of his speeches and some of his harder-to-find essays and reviews, for which I am grateful. I also appreciate his willingness to let me quote his work as I have done in this study. Such quotations come from publications of first appearance except where, as in the cases of Palm Sunday and Fates Worse than Death , the original materials have been employed in the making of a newly coherent work. All of his writing has been ascribed to Kurt Vonnegut, a recognition that he dropped Jr. from his name in 1976.
As always, the University of Northern Iowa, through a series of research grants, has been my sole support. Special gratitude is due to Robert Weide, the producer of television documentaries who revived my interest in Vonnegut and redirected it to his public spokesmanship. Julie Huffman-klinkowitz s archaeological skills were employed in organizing what has become a vast midden of Vonnegut artifacts, for which I am ever in her debt.
Introduction
T HE P RIVATE PERSON AS P UBLIC F IGURE
When on November 1, 1993, Kurt Vonnegut spoke to an overflow crowd at Heritage Hall in the Civic Center of Lexington, Kentucky, he was almost certainly motivated by a principle drawn from Cat s Cradle , his novel published thirty years before.
At the beginning of Cat s Cradle the narrator describes how life has become less nonsensical to him after learning about an honestly bogus Caribbean religion called Bokononism, the central belief of which concerns the notion of karass. Humanity, it is said, is organized into teams who fulfill God s Will without ever knowing what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass -and having any intimation of who else may be in one s karass gives a sense of deep purpose to the otherwise chaotic nature of life.
The comic nature of this novel derives from how unlikely and apparently disparate the membership of a karass can be, stretching across generations, geographies, and cultures to form surprising but ultimately necessary connections. As a thematic device, it allows Vonnegut to introduce and synthesize themes as dichotomous as war and peace, hate and love, absurdity and meaning. Philosophically, his prototypical religion lets him explore how people can derive benefit from a belief system based on its own self-evident fabrication. The greatest benefit, however, is to his novel s structure. Modeled as it is on the notion of karass, Cat s Cradle ranges as far and wide as a jazz musician s solo, dipping and weaving through apparent impossibilities to form what in the end is as coherent as a harmonic pattern s resolution. The method can be found not just here but anywhere in Kurt Vonnegut s fiction. And shortly after the publication of Cat s Cradle in 1963, it became apparent in his essays and public addresses as well.
In connection with his 1993 appearance in Lexington knowledgeable journalists made reference to this notion of karass. It was a seeming contradiction, after all, that an acknowledged atheist should appear on behalf of Midway College, supported as it was by the Disciples of Christ. And how odd that this religiously affiliated school, raising funds for its new college library, should seek the help of our era s most frequently banned author, his Slaughterhouse-Five having been the target of Christian militancy since its publication in 1969. Yet here he was, this figure of postmodern innovations and sophistications, entertaining and instructing an audience of fourteen hundred in the heartland and advising them that their library would encourage a subversion of dogmatism more effective than eastern mysticism.
What brought Kurt Vonnegut to Lexington was his perception, at age seventy, of the workings of his karass. Not that one needs a technique of innovative fiction to explain the track of one s footprints in the sands of life. But having one had given this author a handle on otherwise perplexing ideas, on the whole notion of a latter twentieth century in which conventions and values themselves had been eclipsed by as yet inexplicable forces. As a survivor of one of these catastrophies, the World War II firebombing of Dresden, Germany, Vonnegut would have asked the question anyone beating such 1-in-100,000 odds would ask: why me? As a novelist, he had come relatively late to such ponderings, not beginning his career until 1952, at age thirty, with Player Piano . It would take another decade and a half before the matter of Dresden was first addressed, about the same time as his personal fictions began expressing themselves in public spokesmanship. Now, as a man in his seventies, Vonnegut would respond enthusiastically to elements in his past, delighting in fortuitous connections and marveling at ironies of correspondence still apparent from distances of fifty years and more.
For Lexington, the first connection was Ollie Lyon. As chair of Midway College s Development Council, Lyon found himself reaching back to the late 1940s for a resource in raising funds. As a publicist for General Electric in Schenectady, New York, Lyon had worked side-by-side with another young World War II veteran who d begun responding to the brave new world of technology around him with sardonically satirical short stories. When on February 11, 1950, Collier s magazine published this fellow s Report on the Barnhouse Effect, Lyon helped celebrate his friend s good fortune, for Kurt Vonnegut was the first among them to break out of the corporate tedium into something hopefully bigger. So many years later that success would have a happy payback in helping Lyon s work with Midway s fund drive.
Yet for Vonnegut the benefits would be even greater. Reuniting with Ollie Lyon was both a joy for reminiscences and a helpful benchmark for measuring just what purposes had been served in the interim, just what sense life may have made in that half century since these two men had returned from the war and gone to work rebuilding a bombed-out world. They did this work at General Electric, a company so taken with the idealism of such effort that its motto became Where Progress Is Our Most Important Product. Lyon and Vonnegut were at the forefront of this idealism, publicizing the achievements of GE s Research Laboratory, itself a scientist s dream where investigators could follow their every whim. From civilization s most devastating war, these two young men had returned to embark on not just massive reconstruction but, in technological terms, a virtual reinvention of what humankind could make.
Does the novelist reveal himself when he sits down over morning coffee at a dining room table in Lexington, Kentucky, to talk about the past with a friend of fifty years? In Kurt Vonnegut s case, the answer would be yes, because his artistic talent all these years had been to draw on autobiographical elements in constructing a fictive approach to a world evolving well beyond the old conventions. For the first one-third of his writer s career, these novels had seemed so radically innovative as to defy comfortable explanation; in despair, critics had dismissed them as science fiction, even though their few science-fiction elements existed only as devastating satires of the subgenre. Then, beginning in the late 1960s and corresponding with his first serious recognition, Vonnegut had introduced more discursive elements in his work, references to a history he had shared and which the reader could reliably recognize. From here the author s work would include more and more autobiographical elements, his fiction being supplemented by a growing body of discourse which in the forms of essays and public addresses made instructive use of specific components in that vision. Finally, in what Vonnegut would self-consciously describe as the conclusion of his effort, he could be seen clarifying the importance of these elements-revisiting them, as it were, before taking leave of his spokesman s duty. At Lexington, beginning with Ollie Lyon, one can see much of that clarification taking place.
The novelist as public figure involves himself in much more than speech making. The nature of his booking, as has been seen, is an important part-not just an anonymous inv