The Vonnegut Effect

Jerome Klinkowitz

Description

A defining analysis of the entire span of Kurt Vonnegut's fiction

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the few American writers since Mark Twain to have won and sustained a great popular acceptance while boldly introducing new themes and forms on the literary cutting edge. This is the "Vonnegut effect" that Jerome Klinkowitz finds unique among postmodernist authors.

In this innovative study of the author's fiction, Klinkowitz examines the forces in American life that have made Vonnegut's works possible. Vonnegut shared with readers a world that includes the expansive timeline from the Great Depression, during which his family lost their economic support, through the countercultural revolt of the 1960s, during which his fiction first gained prominence. Vonnegut also explored the growth in recent decades of America's sway in art, which his fiction celebrates, and geopolitics, which his novels question.

A pioneer in Vonnegut studies, Jerome Klinkowitz offers The Vonnegut Effect as a thorough treatment of the author's fiction—a canon covering more than a half century and comprising twenty books. Considering both Vonnegut's methods and the cultural needs they have served, Klinkowitz explains how those works came to be written and concludes with an assessment of the author's place in American fiction.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Yon Yonson
• The Eden Express
• Mark Vonnegut
• Bernard Vonnegut
• Timequake
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• General officer
• Stanley Elkin
• Inception
• John Barth
• Thornton Wilder
• General
• E. L. Doctorow
• V.
• John Updike
• Donald Barthelme
• Theodore Dreiser
• Joseph Heller
• Mark Twain
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Henry David Thoreau

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 05 juin 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611171143
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE
VONNEGUT EFFECT
JEROME KLINKOWITZ

The University of South Carolina Press
© 2004 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2004 Paperback edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010 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.
    The Vonnegut effect / Jerome Klinkowitz.         p. cm.
    Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
    ISBN 1-57003-520-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
    1. Vonnegut, Kurt—Criticism and interpretation. 2 . Postmodernism (Literature)—United States. I. Title.
    PS3572.O5 Z746 2004
    813'.54—dc22                                                              2003017061
ISBN 978-1-61117-114-3 (ebook)
For Peter Reed, master plane spotter and critic
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
A Key to Abbreviations
Introduction
Vonnegut in America
Chapter One
Coming to Terms with Theme: Early Stories and Player Piano
Chapter Two
Coming to Terms with Technique: The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle , and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Chapter Three
Speaking Personally: Slaughterhouse-Five and the Essays
Chapter Four
Speaking Famously: Happy Birthday, Wanda June; Breakfast of Champions; Slapstick; Jailbird; and Deadeye Dick
Chapter Five
Speaking Cosmically: Galápagos, Bluebeard , and Hocus Pocus
Chapter Six
The Autobiography of a Novel: Timequake
Conclusion
Vonnegut in Fiction
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
 
 
THE VONNEGUT EFFECT is a chronological investigation of Kurt Vonnegut's writing as reflected by the social and critical contexts in which it has developed. The “effect” of his work has been unique in that he is the single American author to have won and sustained a great popular acceptance while embracing the more radical forms and themes of postmodern literature. Postmodernism, with its challenge to narrative authority, exposure of previously unquestioned assumptions, and rejection of traditional fiction's conventions (including the reader's willing suspension of disbelief), has certainly expressed the tenor of recent times. But novelists in the postmodern mode, such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Ishmael Reed, and Ronald Sukenick, have for the most part found their most loyal audiences among academics, theorists, and critics. Kurt Vonnegut's fiction is highly regarded in these quarters as well but is especially noteworthy because of its popularity with general readers. Studying its effect, then, involves watching his innovations emerge from the very heart of his era's culture and noting how that culture has in turn accepted such work as a reliable index of its social and aesthetic values.
How Kurt Vonnegut's writing achieves its effect can be measured by examining how his themes and techniques stay a close but crucial step ahead of issues developing in American culture during the half century in which he has been publishing. At a time when highbrow tastes were favoring a harshly satiric acidity and lowbrow inclinations tended toward sentimentality, Vonnegut's work found ways to include both, one feature not so much balancing the other as showing how both attitudes were just that: perspectives that could be adjusted at will. Overriding the variable matters of taste were more enduring qualities of simple human decency, understanding, and compassion. As human traits, they attracted readers; but as tested against the challenges of modern life and shown to be ultimately bankable in a world where so much else had been devalued, these characteristics helped make Kurt Vonnegut the type of writer to which readers returned again and again, attracting new generations along the way.
In finding a way to develop such attitudes into a form for postmodern fiction, Vonnegut benefited from his three areas of professional training: biochemistry, anthropology, and journalism. In an age when many serious writers learned their art at universities, Kurt Vonnegut escaped the English department almost entirely. His two and one-half years of undergraduate work in the sciences (before military service intervened) gave him a solidly mechanical sense of how things function, and his postwar graduate studies in anthropology reenforced his personal beliefs in the flip side of science: that when it comes to human beings, cultural relativism (rather than scientific absolutism) is the most useful key to understanding why things are as they are. How these notions get expressed in writing was something to be learned the hard way but also a way grounded in day-to-day living: as a journalist. Both Shortridge High School in Indianapolis and Cornell University let student reporters and editors work in professional circumstances, turning out products that addressed in a serious manner the serious issues of the day, including the approach of World War II. Yet college humor was also part of the job, and in his work on the Shortridge Echo and the Cornell Sun , Vonnegut got solid experience in reporting hard news from the freshness of a young person's viewpoint.
The world Kurt Vonnegut inherited in the years following World War II was remarkably different from the one into which he had been born. Because it was different for almost everyone else in his generation, making sense of it would be not just an artistic fancy but also a great public service. Throughout the next half century this writer would confront increasingly daunting challenges by judging them in the context of his own experience. That experience—as a midwesterner whose family took a big financial hit in the Great Depression but kept their heads above water in the economic middle class, as a young man who studied science and then saw what such wizardry could accomplish in destroying the treasures of civilization during World War II, as an American starting a family and his career within the new corporate structure of the 1940s and 1950s, and as a person cutting free of that structure not so much to become a literary artist as to set up and run his own short-story business—was shared by a great number of his fellow citizens. As such it was the lifestyle of an age. And in using it to sort out the new conditions of existence the author was speaking in commonly accessible terms. The difference was that he wanted to question things, doing so in a thoroughly open-minded manner.
Hence readers, beginning with his first stories for Collier's magazine in 1950, were exposed to a style of writing whose effect was not at all in the manner of what they had learned at school. Wonders of modern science were in this man's work no longer received with reverence; instead they were tested against the most common terms of simple living. These same middle-class values, empowered by means of a convincingly vernacular voice and attitude, were put up against both historical outrages and seemingly supernatural threats—and in Vonnegut's work they came out of it not only still standing but also with a new sense of worthfulness. He could make jokes against logic, using logic's own terms to break the bonds of its confinement. What appeared in his texts was new but no more threatening than the spectacle of its author, as familiar as the guy next door, fooling around with some new contraption (and vowing that he, and not it, would be the master).
Kurt Vonnegut's own heroes, during a childhood that had seen the conditions of his family's life turned upside down by financial abstractions transpiring half a continent away on Wall Street, were the film comedians Laurel and Hardy. In dedicating his novel Slapstick to their memory he recalled how they “never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies, and were screamingly adorable and funny on that account.” The author, typical American that he is, has made the same bargain, negotiating his destiny with the materials available. That so many of them are common property of his age makes the effect of his work successful.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 
 
WORKING ON KURT VONNEGUT has been an especially pleasurable task, thanks to all the good company. In an era when the subject contemporary studies too often involves battles of the books, the mood surrounding Vonnegut has been consistently cheerful. Chiefly responsible for this is the author himself, whose life and writings serve as good examples of how community support is essential for anyone getting anything done. From John Somer, with whom I began working on Vonnegut more than a third of a century ago, to Kevin Boon and David Andrews, Vonnegut scholars younger than my children with whom I have cooperated, studying fiction by the “Grand Old Man” (as we have come to call him) has brought me in contact with some of the nicest people in the business. Loree Rackstraw, Asa Pieratt, Bob Weide, André Eckenrode&