Textbook Kurt Vonnegut and The American Novel Robert T Tally JR Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook Kurt Vonnegut and The American Novel Robert T Tally JR Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook Kurt Vonnegut and The American Novel Robert T Tally JR Ebook All Chapter PDF
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Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel
Continuum Literary Studies Series
www.continuumbooks.com
Robert T. Tally Jr. has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
EISBN: 978–1-441–13034–1
So it goes.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface: And so on . . . xii
Notes 160
Bibliography 176
Index 183
Acknowledgments
In my view, the single most important concept that Kurt Vonnegut intro-
duced to the world is that of the granfalloon. A granfalloon, as explained in
Cat’s Cradle, is a Bokononist term for an artificial karass. Whereas a karass is
a team of humans, established by God for a particular purpose which
remains unknown (as does the makeup of one’s team) in this life, a gran-
falloon is formed by humans themselves in an attempt to create bonds
among one another, bonds which are not random, mysterious, or ordained
by God, but may seem so to its members. Vonnegut mentions “Hoosiers”
(i.e., people from Indiana) as one example: “Other examples of granfalloons
are the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the
General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and
any nation, anytime, anywhere.” Many readers, picking up on the mildly
derisive tone here, embrace the concept of the karass (as real) and dismiss
the granfalloon (as false), and hence manage to make one of the most
famous secular humanists in America into an apologist for “real” religion—
even though the religion in question is based on foma or lies; Bokonon
himself encourages us to give only ironic credence to the notion of karasses.
I think that they have missed the point. The granfalloon is a marvelous con-
cept because it is not real, precisely because it is an artificial, manmade
grouping, with all the failings that things of such construction inevitably
have. God may have established, once and forever, before time began, who
we are and who is in our karass (or whatever non-Bokononists call it), but we
humans create these artificial communities, for better or, quite often, for
worse. As Vonnegut’s own critique, as well as his affirmation, of the concept
suggests, the granfalloon is no less meaningful to its members for being man-
made. (Just attend a Hoosiers’ basketball game, for instance, to see for
yourself.)
The acknowledgments section of a book seems a perfect spot for some
harmless granfalloonery, for everyone—named or unnamed here—who has
helped make this book possible is part of a special granfalloon of our own
x Acknowledgments
often inadvertent making. And, as with any granfalloon, some of the connec-
tions seem natural, some less so, but all are happily established through the
human, all-too-human relations that make life so dreadfully messy and
painful and wonderful and worthwhile all at once.
I was privileged to take part a few years ago in the founding of the Kurt
Vonnegut Society, surely the most ironic yet entirely appropriate granfalloon
out there, and I have been pleased to serve as its vice president. In organiz-
ing the Society’s panels for the American Literature Association’s annual
convention, I have been able to meet a host of scholars and critics of Kurt
Vonnegut’s writings, and I am delighted to report that their ranks are grow-
ing daily, it seems. I have benefited enormously from working with a num-
ber of eminent Vonnegut scholars (including Rodney Allen, Kevin Boon,
Lawrence Broer, Susan Farrell, Marc Leeds, Donald Morse, Loree Rack-
straw, Charles Shields, and Dennis Williams), and I have also enjoyed meet-
ing the many graduate students and emerging scholars who are enlivening
the field of Vonnegut studies. I am grateful to Donald C. Farber for his
unwavering support for the Society. I have also received support from my
colleagues at Texas State University, among whom I mention only two
here—Michael Hennessy and Ann Marie Ellis—whose indefatigable hard
work makes my work easier, and whose consistent encouragement has
helped me through any temporary spells of professional doubt. My students
have also contributed mightily to my thinking and my own learning.
I would like to thank my parents, who engendered a love of reading and
thinking that brought me to Kurt Vonnegut’s work early on. My mother
instilled in me a desire to know more and better, and encouraged me to
read, especially when video games and baseball seemed preferable. My
father also insisted on book learning, especially with respect to philosophy
and to the classics; moreover, his collection of Vonnegut novels got me
started down this road. I recall how the cover art depicting a little Howard
W. Campbell, Jr. riding a Dachshund on my father’s paperback copy of
Mother Night piqued an interest in Vonnegut’s work that continues even
now. My brothers, Richey and Jay, are also big Vonnegut fans, in addition to
being accomplished musicians, and their conversations with me have cer-
tainly affected my views over the years. The healthy recognition of the ran-
dom absurdity of all things has been underscored on a daily basis by Dusty
and Windy Britches. And, above all, I owe the most to my wife, Reiko, whose
intelligence, engagement, and love make these attempts at understanding
possible.
* * *
Acknowledgments xi
And so on . . .
felt was best suited for his project. Indeed, I would argue that the novel is
the only real form available for the project Vonnegut attempts, and that his
work must therefore be seen in the context of the aims and scope of the
American novel in the twentieth century.
Similarly, but for another reason also, I take little interest in the posthu-
mous collections, Armageddon in Retrospect (2008), Look at the Birdie (2009),
and the forthcoming (as I write) While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction
(2011). As every biographical account—including the forthcoming biogra-
phy by Charles J. Shields, which I have not seen as of this writing, but which
I believe will immediately become the standard against which all other biog-
raphies of the author will be measured—points out, Vonnegut took his role
as a professional writer quite seriously, and was rather savvy when it came to
the business of writing, right down to contract law and marketing. In fact,
Look at the Birdie unaccountably includes a letter from 1951 in which
Vonnegut expressly states his preference for the type of writing he wishes to
do: rather than forego “fat checks” in pursuit of a lofty reputation, Vonnegut
writes, “I’ll stick with money.” (In a brief notice available on the Kurt
Vonnegut Society’s website [www.vonnegutsociety.net], Shields explains
that this letter is erroneously listed as a letter to Walter J. Miller, when it was
in fact written to Vonnegut’s Cornell University friend S. Miller Harris—the
“Dear Harris” greeting might have been a clue—and regrets that this misat-
tribution by the editors of Look at the Birdie will undoubtedly “bedevil
Vonnegut scholars for years to come.”) If, after a few years, much less 40 or
50 years, Vonnegut continued to leave notes, drafts, and even complete
manuscripts unpublished, presumably they were not meant to be published.
That does not, of course, mean that they do not have any value and cannot
become resources for scholars, as well as becoming valuable additions to
the personal bookshelves of Vonnegut’s many fans, entertaining and
delighting them as they will. But it does mean that they are more likely to
be anomalies in the Vonnegut canon. And, regardless of the intentions of
the publishers, these posthumous collections inevitably have the whiff of
the graverobber about them.
As for my own study of Vonnegut and the American novel, the overarch-
ing argument about Vonnegut’s postmodern iconography addresses all
14 novels; however, I do not want to lose touch with any of them. As such, I
have organized my study of the novels, with one exception, around the
standard chronological order of publication—not very Tralfamadorian of
me, I know—while also speaking of Vonnegut’s overall project more gener-
ally throughout. Each novel, as I see it, makes a similar attempt to map
postmodern American culture, yet each novel also executes the project
Preface xv
of one’s humanity, but with humanity itself. This is what it means to be, in
Friedrich Nietzsche’s elegant phrasing, human, all-too-human.
Similarly, in The Sirens of Titan (1959), Vonnegut presents a failed revolu-
tion in what seems to be an all the more fantastic genre. The Sirens of Titan is
perhaps Vonnegut’s most ostensibly science-fictional work, what with its
futuristic setting, its chrono-synclastic infundibula, and its space travel to Mars,
Venus, and the moon of Saturn indicated in the title. Yet Vonnegut always
maintained his opposition to the label science fiction, arguing that it was mis-
applied to writers who took technology seriously and that it tended falsely to
distance writers and literary works from the world of their readers. In fact,
Vonnegut’s second novel uses such science-fictional motifs as space- and
time-travel to shine the light directly on 1950s Americanism, with its critique
of class hierarchy, work and play, war, and relations between the sexes. In this
work Vonnegut undermines the very conventions he employs to broaden
his critique of everyday life, and reveals his sympathy for the human, all-
too-human condition, which is also shown to be utterly absurd. Bookending
that curious decade, Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan present the struggles
of middle-class America in its attempt to deal with the profound changes that
a postmodern society in formation is experiencing. Both novels deal with the
failures of utopia, and the uncertainties of human communication; as such,
both resonate with the hopes and the anxieties of a prosperous society in
transition. These works conclude with a theme sounded in all of Vonnegut’s
subsequent work, but here with a sort of bitterness associated with the failed
promise of modernism, that the liberation of humanity is thwarted by human-
ity itself. Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism offers a model for understand-
ing this condition, while also forcing the writer and the reader to look for
other avenues leading to one’s sense of purpose in the world.
In Chapter 3, “Anxiety and the Jargon of Authenticity: Mother Night,” I
examine Vonnegut’s existentialism, which is offered not as a solution to the
problem of misanthropic humanism, but as a framework for understanding
it and the world it confronts. The moral of Vonnegut’s third novel, as he
puts it in his introduction, is “We are what we pretend to be.” Vonnegut’s
most overtly existentialist novel, Mother Night (1961) explores the related
themes of alienation, identity, and authenticity in order to analyze carefully
the illusions and self-delusions of a man (and, by extension, of others) who
believes himself to be good while involved in the most hideous of crimes.
Vonnegut’s critique of identity thus undergirds his exploration of morality.
But, following Theodor Adorno’s critique of contemporary German phi-
losophy at almost exactly the same time in the early 1960s, I argue that the
“jargon of authenticity” in Mother Night is used to make Vonnegut’s more
Preface xvii
profound point that authentic existence is largely impossible, and the desire
for such amounts to a delusional, even dangerous, condition. In setting
himself up as the genuine article in a world of caricatures and phonies,
Howard W. Campbell, Jr. assumes the role of the false martyr, and betrays
his own hollow sense of being. By undermining and reevaluating the
concept of authenticity, Vonnegut’s existentialism unfolds into a critique of
modernity itself.
Vonnegut’s critical assessment of everyday life in contemporary American
society moves subtly from a devastating exposure of middle-class morality
and personal self-regard to a broader critique of the modern and postmod-
ern condition itself. In Chapter 4, “The Dialectic of American Enlighten-
ment: Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” I take up Vonnegut’s
own version of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s famous critique,
in which they note that—contrary to one’s expectations or to its promise—
while “the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear
and establishing their sovereignty,” yet “the fully enlightened earth radi-
ates disaster triumphant.” Drawing on anthropological and sociological
observation, Vonnegut’s farcical critique of science and religion in Cat’s
Cradle (1963) presents a sort of dueling dialectics, with various figures in
motion to point out the absurdity, but also necessity, of the human condi-
tion at the end of the world. This end-of-the-world masterpiece is supple-
mented by what might be termed “the tragedy of the commonplace” in God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965). Eliot Rosewater dramatizes the utopian
impulse of American society, while also serving as an ambiguous avatar of
Americanism. Partially under the influence of Kilgore Trout, who makes
his first appearance in this novel, Rosewater attempts to transform a com-
monplace, seemingly realistic, or even banal life, into one of extraordinary
import. Vonnegut here shows his own development since Player Piano, as
the tragedy and comedy merge seamlessly into a fastidiously real world of
science, religion, money, and power. The ambiguities of Cat’s Cradle’s dia-
lectic of Enlightenment and Rosewater’s “pearls before swine” open up the
terrain of the fundamentally ethical philosophy unveiled in Vonnegut’s
most celebrated work.
Chapter 5, “Eternal Returns, or, Tralfamadorian Ethics: Slaughterhouse-
Five,” examines that novel’s conception of a spatial history, which enables
the text to function as a “time-travel” narrative while not actually involving
time at all. In establishing both the narrative form and the Tralfamadorian
content, that is, by presenting the novel as a mode of alien storytelling,
Vonnegut lays the groundwork for a moral project, gaining its force from
something much like Nietzsche’s theory of the eternal return. As Nietzsche
xviii Preface
notes, the idea of the eternal return derives from a cosmological principle
of pre-Socratic atomism, but it functions as basis for ethical action. And, as
Gilles Deleuze has elaborated it, what returns is difference itself, as the infi-
nite variation and proliferation of difference makes possible Vonnegut’s
weirdly comprehensive vision of postmodern American life. Indeed, by vir-
tue of its Tralfamadorian narrative structure, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), the
book that might appear to be Vonnegut’s most postmodern novel to that date,
actually comes closest to fulfilling the modernist project of representing
and reintegrating the fragmentary, perhaps chaotic, pieces of a culture than
no longer appear to fit together in any natural pattern. The schizoid nature
of this experience is reintegrated into a meaningful image by virtue of the
Tralfamadorian point of view and an ethical program rooted in the abso-
lute affirmation of life.
Following the successful integration of time and space in Slaughterhouse-
Five, Vonnegut’s seventh novel, Breakfast of Champions (1973), shatters the
tenuous and ephemeral Tralfamadorian unity by extrapolating a thoroughly
schizophrenic narrative. In Chapter 6, “Anti-Oedipus of the Heartland,” I
analyze this marvelous and eccentric novel in connection to Deleuze and
Guattari’s “schizoanalysis” in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. The
protagonist of Vonnegut’s novel, Dwayne Hoover, cuts the perfect figure of
the “schizo out for a stroll,” and the multiple cast members—among them
such recurrent or iterated characters as Francine Pefko, Rabo Karabekian,
Kazak (the dog), Kilgore Trout, and the author (“The Creator of the Uni-
verse”) himself—form a mobile army of perplexed “schizoanalysts.” Break-
fast of Champions marks the turning point in Vonnegut’s career, with his own
admission that the novel is an attempt “to clear my head of all the junk in
there—the assholes, the flags, the underpants.” The novel also represents
Vonnegut’s most powerful engagement with madness, with schizophrenia
in a psychological and cultural sense. In his schizoanalysis, Vonnegut mobi-
lizes nearly his entire iconography and leaves the text with an open-ended
cri de coeur, and an unambiguously salient “ETC.” In its ultimate refusal to
incorporate the profusion of fragmentary icons into an imaginary whole,
Breakfast of Champions goes furthest down the road toward the typically post-
modern novel, yet in its persistently elegiac tone, the novel attempts to
establish an almost premodern or Renaissance unity, figured forth in a new
humanism that places the author’s own biography and politics front and
center.
In the scholarship on Vonnegut’s career, a line is often drawn between
early and late, with either Slaughterhouse-Five or Breakfast of Champions as the
definitive turning point. Vonnegut himself acknowledges that his work, or
Preface xix
he himself, became more optimistic, though his optimism is often odd, and
only achieves its apotheosis later in Galápagos. With the aftermath of his
fame and the success of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut became—like it or
not—a public spokesman, and his post–Breakfast of Champions works are
much more explicitly political. Yet, as with his critique of religion, Vonnegut’s
critique of politics employs a bittersweet recognition of the need for, but
inevitable failures of, a sense of purpose and of community.
Chapter 7, “Imaginary Communities, or, the Ends of the Political,” exam-
ines Vonnegut’s Slapstick and Jailbird. In Slapstick (1976), Vonnegut posits
the value of what he had in Cat’s Cradle called a “granfalloon,” an arbitrary
organization that provides a false sense of collectivity or belonging. The
novel depicts the familial breakdown, symbolized in the splitting of the her-
maphroditic unity of the “single mind” of Wilbur and Eliza Swain, along-
side a national breakdown as Wilbur serves as the very last President of the
United States in an apocalyptic postnational condition. But envisioning
“imaginary communities,” Benedict Anderson’s evocative term used to
describe the conceptual basis of nationalism, Vonnegut re-imagines the
roles of both families and nations in American life. The “family romance”
as a political strategy is, of course, problematic, and Wilbur’s utopia does
not really fare better than Vonnegut’s earlier utopian schemes. Indeed, in
his post-Watergate exploration of the political in Jailbird (1979), Vonnegut
offers a bleak assessment of the postmodern American scene, specifically
introducing the correlations between geopolitical forces and multinational
capitalism. Jailbird is Vonnegut’s most overtly political novel, with a refugee
of the Nixon White House as a narrator and the labor history of the United
States for its ancillary subject matter. However, the political vision of the
postmodern condition—and Vonnegut’s epigonic modernist response—is
revealed in Walter Starbuck’s grumbling quiescence. Here what had seemed
a somewhat hopeful embrace of political granfalloonery in Slapstick becomes
a wholesale dismissal of politics as a transformative force.
Chapter 8, “Abstract Idealism: Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard,” explores
Vonnegut’s aesthetic turn in two surprisingly powerful novels from the
1980s, Deadeye Dick (1982) and Bluebeard (1987). Each deals specifically with
the roles of art and of the artist in the context of modern or postmodern
American civilization, which is why I have chosen to make a temporary
break from the chronological examination, allowing Bluebeard to leapfrog
Galápagos (1985) for the moment. Possibly Vonnegut’s most underrated
work, Deadeye Dick attempts a kind of phenomenology of spirit, complete
with a philosophy of history, the dramatization of historical forces, and a
meditation on the dialectic. The central theme of the neutral (from the
xx Preface
Latin, ne-uter, “neither one nor the other”), plays out in Rudy Waltz’s self-
imposed neutering, as well as in the neutron bombing of his home town. In
a sense, this commitment to the neutral offers its own kind of utopian vision,
even as it paints a picture of a world still in formation and in need of better
illumination. In Deadeye Dick, Vonnegut most fully realizes his own vision of
history—both the substance of history and the formal aspects of storytell-
ing—concluding, as in Cat’s Cradle’s “read it and weep” punch line, that the
Dark Ages continue. Yet, in Bluebeard, Vonnegut’s long-time interest in
abstract expressionist art forms a backdrop to the story of Rabo Karabekian,
a character who made his debut in Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut is inter-
ested in the struggles of an artist in a world where art no longer seems to
matter. The cosmic irony in Karabekian’s career, that his most famous paint-
ings disintegrate thanks to the Sateen Dura-Luxe paint of inferior quality,
presents an iconic vision of the conflicts between art and life, between
abstract idealism or expressionism and the real. Vonnegut’s meditation on
abstract art leads him to cautiously embrace a representational or highly
mimetic art that glories in a kind of idealism grounded in realism, a utopian
image of art and the artist. Bluebeard has Vonnegut’s happiest ending yet,
with an almost Bokononist hymn to Vonnegut’s humanism. Yet it also reveals
the degree to which, in order to find this harmony, Vonnegut first needed
to retreat into the neutralized and ideal space of the aesthetic, in order to
emerge in the salubrious ambiance of the human, all-too-human.
In Chapter 9, “Apocalypse in the Optative Mood,” I examine what I take
to be Vonnegut’s most optimistic novel, Galápagos. The epigraph to Galápa-
gos also reveals the novel’s overall theme: “In spite of everything, I still
believe people are really good at heart.” That the line comes from Anne
Frank’s diary makes it all the more powerful, since we know exactly to what
the “everything” refers. Galápagos shares with Vonnegut’s other works a poi-
gnant critique of the follies of man, a sense of the absurdity of life, but
emphasizes an element previously much more understated: hope. Here
Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism resolves itself by removing the anthro-
pos, and his apocalypse finds salvation in a not-quite-Deleuzian “becoming-
animal,” whereby humanity sheds its all-too-human nature and, in so doing,
becomes vastly more humane. By inaugurating an “era of hopeful mon-
sters,” Vonnegut completes his modernist, utopian vision for a happily
resolved post-postmodernity.
One almost wishes that Galápagos and Bluebeard had been Vonnegut’s final
novels, ending as they do with such hopeful and forgiving images of post-
human humanity and post-abstract-expressionist affirmation of an embod-
ied realism. In Chapter 10, “Twilight of the Icons,” I look at Vonnegut’s final
Preface xxi
two “novels,” Hocus Pocus and Timequake; I place the word in “scare quotes”
because the latter is not quite a novel at all, and arguably represents a peter-
ing out of, rather than a conclusion to, Vonnegut’s postmodern iconogra-
phy. Hocus Pocus (1990), whose very title betrays its philosophical argument,
offers a Mother Night–like confession, with an ostensible Vonnegut-as-editor
collecting fragments of Eugene Debs Hartke’s reflections. These fragments
provide a formal counterpart to the fragmentarity of postmodern America,
also serving as a jeremiad without hope. In the blink of an eye—hocus
pocus!—all that functioned as the image-repertoire of America becomes a
nightmare of fractured archetypes. This is an aesthetic of disintegration
whereby the modernist celebration of loss (à la William Butler Yeats’s “things
fall apart, the center cannot hold”) reaches its height in Vonnegut’s project.
In the “twilight of the icons,” Vonnegut’s ambiguous Timequake, not quite a
novel and not quite a memoir and not quite a collection of curmudgeonly
aphorisms, marks a suitably incomplete final intervention in a lifelong proj-
ect to understand “America” by means of iconography. Kilgore Trout, scrib-
bling “novels” on scraps of paper, which are immediately tossed in the
garbage, finds himself soothing a confused and terrified humanity, and is
once again confronted by the “creator of the universe,” to whom he delivers
a final sermon, with its unifying theme of a heavenly soul. The “postmodern
harlequin” (as Todd Davis names him) turns out to be a late-twentieth-cen-
tury Descartes. Timequake indeed!
Vonnegut is an untimely figure, this poetic modernist in a most prosaic
postmodernity, a misanthropic humanist, secular and even atheistic reli-
gious nut, a technophilic Luddite and technophobic technologist. Vonnegut’s
postmodern iconography, developed through and on display in his novels,
represents a bizarre, almost quixotic, attempt at the sort of comprehensive-
ness and unity assayed by the most wide-eyed utopians of the early modernist
period, yet Vonnegut’s world remains more fragmentary and unfixed than
the elegiac modernists imagined. Hence, Vonnegut makes a botch of things,
but, as Herman Melville had once put it while writing Moby-Dick and refer-
ring to his own failed attempts at meaningful representation, “all my books
are botches.” The “America” Vonnegut depicts cannot be easily pinned
down. Vonnegut’s failure to achieve his iconography is largely based on the
ungraspable ideality of the thing itself, the “America” he hoped to compre-
hend. The iconography cannot really represent it, and its very unrepresent-
ability points to a different project for the post-American century: no longer
relying on icons, iconography, and iconoclasts, but perhaps projecting a pro-
visional, mobile constellation better suited to making sense of the human
condition of the twenty-first century. And so on.
Chapter 1
A Postmodern Iconography
“Call me Jonah.” The opening line of Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut’s end-
of-the-world masterpiece, unmistakably echoes that of Moby-Dick, Herman
Melville’s end-of-the-world masterpiece. Indeed, such echoes are audible
elsewhere in Cat’s Cradle, from the “cetacean” Mount McCabe, which looks
like a whale with a snapped harpoon protruding from it, to the great Ahab-
like quarrel with God, humorously figured in Bokonon’s thumb-nosing ges-
ture at the novel’s end. In pointing to Moby-Dick, as likely a candidate as ever
was for the “great American novel,” Vonnegut registers his own entry into
the contest, but here it is also bound up in the laughable impossibility of
the project.
The novels of Kurt Vonnegut are not generally the first to come to mind
when one thinks of the great American novel. Indeed, this elusive object—
impossible and, perhaps, not even desirable—has long been a bit of a joke,
the sort of thing an aspiring writer claims to be working on, or (even more
likely) something a writer’s parents, friends, and others say he or she is
working on. The great American novel is always a dream deferred; it cannot
really exist, it seems, for that very reality would probably undermine any
novel’s greatness. The notion of the “great American novel” really belongs
to the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. It existed there as a dream of
writers and critics, desperate to carve a distinct national culture from the
variously influential European traditions. By midcentury, many writers
claimed that the great American literary tradition, one that would surpass
its European forebears, was already beginning to emerge. Melville himself
wrote, in 1850, that “men not very much inferior to Shakespeare, are this
day being born on the banks of the Ohio.”1 The closing years of that cen-
tury are filled with lamentations that the messianic promise of an earlier
generation had not come to pass.2 The ideal great American novel would
express an “American spirit,” which is not the same as expressing a particu-
lar patriotic or nationalistic theme. It did not need to be set in America or
even to feature Americans as its principal characters. It had, in a sense, to
2 Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel
capture the essence of “America” in its totality. In the language of the nar-
rator of Moby-Dick, the range must include “the whole circle of the sciences,
and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present,
and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and
throughout the universe, not excluding its suburbs.”3
Few writers have attempted the task as set forth in Moby-Dick, but many
writers have tried to evoke its intent in partial renderings. Although the
“great American novel” is by now a joke, the underlying project seems to
animate the works of many twentieth-century writers, from John Dos Passos
to Thomas Pynchon to Don DeLillo and so on. Each age writes its own his-
tories, of course. In the postmodern era, an epoch defined in large part by
the perceived impossibility of comprehensive representation, a fragmented
version of that vision seems the only feasible way to go. Vonnegut’s entire
career might be characterized as an attempt to produce something like “the
great American novel,” but of its own time. Rather than depicting a repre-
sentative American symbolic narrative, comprehensively bound in a single,
emblematically American work, Vonnegut’s novels as a whole offer a post-
modern iconography, a sustained though fractured narrative of characters
and themes that underlie that older project. Like Moby-Dick, Vonnegut’s
novels present a sprawling image of the complexity of American life,
expressing the human, all-too-human, condition of its varied inhabitants.
Perhaps recognizing, as did Melville, that comprehensiveness is not really
possible, Vonnegut presents a collage of figures, icons whose meanings are
gently elicited by the plots rather than being clearly drawn on their faces.
Vonnegut’s collage is also indicative of the characteristically postmodern
pastiche, in which the various styles of older art forms reappear in surprising
places.
Such pastiche extends also to Vonnegut’s use of genres. Although his
existential themes and heartbreakingly poignant sense of everyday life have
won him critical praise, Vonnegut has often couched his observations in
literature that seems marginal, featuring such B-list genres as science fic-
tion, dime-store magazine writing, slapstick comedy, and even soft-core por-
nography (or, in the case of Breakfast of Champions, all of the above).
Vonnegut employs these genres, but his work cannot be contained by any of
them. That is, it is not really viable to describe Vonnegut as a “science fic-
tion” or “comic” author. Indeed, Vonnegut is not a typical novelist, and there
is no type of novel that fits neatly with his sensibilities. Hence, Vonnegut’s
career may be seen as generically uncategorizable; it too seems like a col-
lage, with bits of science fiction, pop psychology, personal memoir, and so
on, all pasted together in artful ways to present an overall image.
A Postmodern Iconography 3
Untimely Meditations
Fig. 27.
The preceding diagram is, for the purpose of illustration, drawn in
a sort of perspective, and therefore does not give the true positions
and lengths of the united images. This defect, however, is remedied
in Fig. 27, where e, e′, e″, e‴ is the middle point between the two
eyes, the plane gmn being, as before, perpendicular to the plane
passing through acb. Now, as the distance of the eye from g is
supposed to be the same, and as ab is invariable as well as the
distance between the eyes, the distance of the binocular centres oO,
d, d′, d″, d‴, p from g, will also be invariable, and lie in a circle odp,
whose centre is g, and whose radius is go, the point o being
determined by the formula
gm × ab
go = gd = .
ab + rl
Hence, in order to find the binocular centres d, d′, d″, d‴, &c., at
any altitude, e, e′, &c., we have only to join eg, e′g, &c., and the
points of intersection d, d′, &c., will be the binocular centres, and the
lines dc, d′c, &c., drawn to c, will be the real lengths and inclinations
of the united images of the lines ac, bc.
When go is greater than gc there is obviously some angle a, or
e″gm, at which d″c is perpendicular to gc.
This takes place when
gc
Cos. a = .
go
When o coincides with c, the images cd, cd′, &c., will have the
same positions and magnitudes as the chords of the altitudes a of
the eyes above the plane gc. In this case the raised or united
images will just reach the perpendicular when the eye is in the plane
gcm, for since
Fig. 35.
If we wish to make a microscopic stereoscope of this form, or to
magnify the drawings, we have only to cement plano-convex lenses,
of the requisite focal length, upon the faces ab, ac of the prism, or,
what is simpler still, to use a section of a deeply convex lens abc,
Fig. 35, and apply the other half of the lens to the right eye, the face
bc having been previously ground flat and polished for the prismatic
lens. By using a lens of larger focus for the right eye, we may
correct, if required, the imperfection arising from the difference of
paths in the reflected and direct pencils. This difference, though
trivial, might be corrected, if thought necessary, by applying to the
right eye the central portion of the same lens whose margin is used
for the prism.
Fig. 36.
If we take the drawing of a six-sided pyramid as seen by the right
eye, as shewn in Fig. 36, and place it in the total-reflexion
stereoscope at d, Fig. 33, so that the line mn coincides with mn, and
is parallel to the line joining the eyes of the observer, we shall
perceive a perfect raised pyramid of a given height, the reflected
image of cd, Fig. 36, being combined with af, seen directly. If we
now turn the figure round 30°, cd will come into the position ab, and
unite with ab, and we shall still perceive a raised pyramid, with less
height and less symmetry. If we turn it round 30° more, cd will be
combined with bc, and we shall still perceive a raised pyramid with
still less height and still less symmetry. When the figure is turned
round other 30°, or 90° degrees from its first position, cd will
coincide with cd seen directly, and the combined figures will be
perfectly flat. If we continue the rotation through other 30°, cd will
coincide with de, and a slightly hollow, but not very symmetrical
figure, will be seen. A rotation of other 30° will bring cd into
coalesence with ef, and we shall see a still more hollow and more
symmetrical pyramid. A further rotation of other 30°, making 180°
from the commencement, will bring cd into union with af; and we
shall have a perfectly symmetrical hollow pyramid of still greater
depth, and the exact counterpart of the raised pyramid which was
seen before the rotation of the figure commenced. If the pyramid had
been square, the raised would have passed into the hollow pyramid
by rotations of 45° each. If it had been rectangular, the change would
have been effected by rotations of 90°. If the space between the two
circular sections of the cone in Fig. 31 had been uniformly shaded,
or if lines had been drawn from every degree of the one circle to
every corresponding degree in the other, in place of from every 90th
degree, as in the Figure, the raised cone would have gradually
diminished in height, by the rotation of the figure, till it became flat,
after a rotation of 90°; and by continuing the rotation it would have
become hollow, and gradually reached its maximum depth after a
revolution of 180°.
Fig. 40.
In Fig. 39, mn is a small inverting telescope, consisting of two
convex lenses m, n, placed at the sum of their focal distances, and
op another of the same kind. When the two eyes, r, l, look through
the two telescopes directly at the dissimilar pictures a, b, they will
see them with perfect distinctness; but, by the slightest inclination of
the axes of the telescopes, the two images can be combined, and
the stereoscopic effect immediately produced. With the dissimilar
pictures in the diagram a hollow cone is produced; but if we look at b
with the telescope m′n′, as in Fig. 40, and at a′ with o′p′, a raised
cone will be seen. With the usual binocular slides containing portraits
or landscapes, the pictures are seen in relief by combining the right-
eye one with the left-eye one.
The instrument now described is nothing more than a double
opera-glass, which itself forms a good stereoscope. Owing, however,
to the use of a concave eye-glass, the field of view is very small, and
therefore a convex glass, which gives a larger field, is greatly to be
preferred.
The little telescopes, mn, op, may be made one and a half or
even one inch long, and fitted up, either at a fixed or with a variable
inclination, in a pyramidal box, like the lenticular stereoscope, and
made equally portable. One of these instruments was made for me
some years ago by Messrs. Horne and Thornthwaite, and I have
described it in the North British Review[42] as having the properties
of a Binocular Cameoscope, and of what has been absurdly called a
Pseudoscope, seeing that every inverting eye-piece and every
stereoscope is entitled to the very same name.
The little telescope may be made of one piece of glass, convex at
each end, or concave at the eye-end if a small field is not
objectionable,—the length of the piece of glass, in the first case,
being equal to the sum, and, in the second case, to the difference of
the focal lengths of the virtual lenses at each end.[43]
Fig. 41.
By employing two of these variable prisms, we have an Universal
Stereoscope for uniting pictures of various sizes and at various
distances from each other, and the prisms may be placed in a
pyramidal box, like the lenticular stereoscope.
Fig. 42.
Let us suppose the rays to be red and violet, those which differ
most in refrangibility. If the red rays radiate from the anterior focus r,
or red rays of the lens ll, they will emerge parallel, and enter the eye