Poo-tee-weet
Three people: Malachi Constant, Felix Hoenikker and Billy Pilgrim came alive in my reading list this past week and met their dignified literary deaths in the last pages of the books they inhabited. So it goes.
From San Lorenzo to Titan
This is the first time I have read three books back to back by the same author. But you don’t just talk about one book when you are talking about Kurt Vonnegut. His brand of writing, his class of humour and the general mastery over metafiction demands that you talk about at least a savoury slice of his body of work, transcending the acclaim for his most renowned piece: Slaughterhouse Five. Arguably, you don’t really understand who Billy Pilgrim is unless you see Malachi Constant’s journey as a wandering leaf in the meaninglessness of infinite space. The Tralfamadorians and Bokononists would agree on some basic tenets of life, one would think.
The Vonnegut-verse
Before the late Stan Lee was popping up in Marvel Comics cameos, Vonnegut though it be prudent enough to insert himself in his work as an American soldier in a latrine, excreting everything including his brains. The latrine incidentally had a sobering message:
PLEASE LEAVE THIS LATRINE AS TIDY AS YOU FOUND IT!
Can it be said to be the precursor to the current tsunami of shared universes in all of cinema? I would respectfully disagree. Just on the face of it, Vonnegut violates even the most basic rules of shared character arcs that we see in most of modern works. Characters pop up in separate books but it is always unclear whether they are living the same lives across all the books. Does Kilgore Trout whose hand gets bitten off by Dwayne Hoover live to see the balkanisation of United States as seen by Billy Pilgrim? I think not. This does not mean Vonnegut does not care about his characters enough and uses them as throwaway references across his works. I would argue in the opposite that very few writers could emulate the empathy with which he treats someone like Billy Pilgrim, whose pain and gradual enlightenment is hammered home by the end of the book.
The Space Time Kurtinuum
So what is it about Vonnegut that endures? His sensibilities, though rooted in American culture are inclusive enough to resonate even with a non American like me. Labelling him merely an anti war author does a disservice to the universality of his themes. His humour, like his friend Joseph Haller of Catch 22 fame, certainly has a timeless allure.
“It’s a small world,” I observed. “When you put it in a cemetery, it is.” — Cat’s Cradle
The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing. — The Sirens of Titan
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops. — Slaughterhouse-Five
Tasty Vonnuggets
Beneath all the silliness and humour, there is a lot of profundity to go around as well.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. — Mother Night
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved. — The Sirens of Titan
A Case for Vonnegut
So if you want to read an author who according to JG Ballard, looked the world straight in the eye and never flinched, read Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Pick up anything, in any order as you don’t need a structured coursework to understand what Vonnegut wants to say. Maybe you will fall in love, like I did and binge on something not on a screen. Or you won’t, only the Tralfamadorians know but even they don’t care either way.
But if this just a bunch of gibberish to you, peppered with references you don’t care about, I have just this to say: Poo-tee-weet.
