And So It Goes...
The fine people of Google will be pleased to note that, being fully aware of the eventual loss of my Princeton e-mail address (well, not entirely, but remembering that it's alumni.princeton.edu is just a pain in the ass) and the similarly ephemeral nature of my forthcoming Penn State e-mail address, I have begun the process of making my Gmail account my primary e-mail address. The system I've devised suits me well: academic stuff to the academic e-mails, important stuff to my Gmail, and random you-must-sign-up-to-receive-crap e-mails to my aging Yahoo! account. Every now and again, I sign up for offers and give my Gmail, as I feel it might be important enough to warrant clogging the "important" inbox.
I used this tack when signing up for the Borders "shortlist" e-mails of nifty online offers. This became maddening during the grad school search because all too often the (1) in the new inbox entries list referred to the weekly Borders missive. Now that that's said and done, there's much less stress at finding the shortlist every week, but I was rather surprised to find that, less than a day after the weekly shortlist hit my inbox, there was yet another edition of the shortlist waiting. I was so surprised by the multiple mailings that it took me a few seconds to read the subject line, which provided the answer for why there was such a sudden new mailing -- which brings me, roundaboutly as always, to the punchline of this little story.
It was in that subject line that I, most unceremoniously, was presented with the news that Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. had passed away.
Those of you who know me well -- or know me well enough to have looked with any reasonable care at my Facebook profile -- know that I am a big Vonnegut fan. I was introduced to him by my English teacher near the end of my freshman year in high school (thanks, Ms. Vara), who suggested that for my term paper, I should read Slaugherhouse-Five. I was absolutely blown away. It was unlike anything I'd ever read before: a novel that took liberties with time and space, with the line between the viciously real and the absurdly fictional, with the very concept of genre. It was a war novel, a romance novel, a science-fiction novel, and a thinly veiled memoir all at once. It fucked with linear storytelling years before Quentin Tarantino made that kind of shit cool and modern. It was the first novel I read that used the word "fuck," the first novel I read that described the female body in erotic detail, the first novel I read that had a sex scene that didn't cut away at the good parts.
It was a novel that changed my life. For the first time, I realized that writing didn't need to be flowery and lyrical to be beautiful. It didn't need to made complete sense at any given time, and it didn't need to keep me in suspense in order to keep my interest. I realized too that what I valued from reading Slaughterhouse-Five was the experience, the humanity, the fact that I was being swept through a whirlwind of emotions. One page, I might be laughing my ass off, and on the next, I might be cringing. But no matter what I was feeling, I could take my eyes from the page. And when it was over, I knew I needed to read more of what this man had to offer.
Since then, I'm ashamed to say I've not read all of Vonnegut's novels yet, but I've been through the heavy hitters. I read Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions, the generally accepted masterpiece works. I read The Sirens of Titan, the book that made him unbelievably popular in the late 1950s. I read Player Piano, his first novel, the one that preceded The Sirens of Titan, and marveled that the same man could have possibly written those two books, and back-to-back, no less. I read Mother Night and Deadeye Dick and discovered some of the funniest and darkest novels ever written. I read them all and I loved them all.
And along the way, I discovered that Kurt Vonnegut wrote the way I wished I wrote. One look back through any of these entries, as well as through most of my academic papers, shows that I'm quite the fan of lengthy, meandering sentences with the occasional smattering of scholarly erudition and heightened vocabulary. Vonnegut wrote short sentences. He got right to the point. He wasted not a single word. Despite some of my most successful pieces being satires or more comic pieces, the ideas I tend to get on paper are usually more horrific or serious, with barely any room for levity. Vonnegut, on the other hand, laughed at everything, whether it was murder, Nazism, automation, war, religion, or even the apocalypse. He even laughed at himself, all the time, whenever he could self-referentially do so. But beneath the jocular veneer was a sense of despair, of subdued anger, the anger of a man who knows what he wishes he could see the world be like, but who has resigned himself to the understanding that he will only see it in his imagination.
To that end, Vonnegut was always focused on the big picture in a most astute way. Most of my writing has focused extensively on small details of life, of little sketches and their impact on my world. Most of the time, I overthink those small bits, trying to make something out of them that perhaps they were never destined to be. I spend my writing time reflecting on the state of my life and the place of that life in the world, and the fact that the big picture eludes me is a scary proposition to me. Vonnegut, somewhat similarly, focused on the small details. But he always had a keen eye for the big picture, and it made his heroes even more unique than they would be merely by virtue of his amazing sense of characterization. Vonnegut's characters are but cogs in a larger machine, but that larger machine is always the focus of his works. As a recurring trope, the machine tends to win; the little cog that stays in line stays there tragically, and the cog that tries to escape the machine gets destroyed or rendered useless. Through this strategy, Vonnegut made his commentaries: his characters were pitied not because the author wanted us to pity them, but because his vision and foresight, his ability to recognize the big picture and the dangerous path we were taking towards that picture, rendered us incapable of not feeling for their plights.
But even if his characters were often clustered into similar patterns and traits, the plots of his novels were nothing short of sheer brilliance. As a writer who struggles to figure out how to piece the plots of his stories and papers together, and has trouble trying to conceive the way his projected long work will eventually turn out, it is both frustrating and illuminating to see a writer like Vonnegut, whose imagination seems limitless. His plots are so absurd and far-fetched, but within the contexts of the book and within the scope of his career's work as a whole, they make complete sense. Rather than try to wrap all the loose ends up neatly, he more often than not appends an extremely simple plot device that renders most of those storylines moot. Instead of having everything fine and dandy at the end of his works, sometimes the good guy loses. Sometimes the world comes to an end.
Through it all, there was a simplicity and joy in his writing, a passion that has gone unmatched in most any novelist to come on to the scene in the last 50 years. Perhaps that is most clearly seen in the ending of Breakfast of Champions, in which Vonnegut inexplicably places himself in the middle of the action, as both the narrator and as a character in the story he's narrating. He has a brief and devastatingly sad conversation with himself, he acknowledges to himself that he's crossing the line, he admits in an appropriately post-modern way that he wishes he could do something for his characters to make everything better for them because, damn it, he kinda likes 'em. And in the end, he addresses a character in the end as a god-like figure, the lord and master of the world he has written, and performs an incredible literary move: he both acknowledges control over the world on the page, but almost immediately undercuts it in recognizing that that world he controls does not exist beyond the edge of the page. It's a sly but scathing commentary on his own profession, on the very inability of the writer to have a larger impact on the world outside the story.
At the end of the Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut seems to assert that the writer's impact can only be limited to the page, that all he can manipulate is the splatter of the ink on the paper. But to his many devoted and appreciative readers, those words have meant so much more. They have been amusing, inspiring, and portentious. Some of us have owed much of our love of literature to those words, and those people in turn have used whatever power they can muster to spread the word to others. Like the slow spread of Ice-nine, Vonnegut's words are destined to be among those that will ultimately change the world, even if that world at first is but the world of literature. But words can be a powerful and unassuming weapon, and Vonnegut's words, even the simplest of them, are so masterfully layered and delivered in such an unquestionably unique voice that there is much more than a good laugh to be taken from them.
Vonnegut said throughout his life that our purpose on Earth is to "fart around," and that no one should tell us any different. Even in his anger, his frustration, his depression, his dissatisfaction, there was at the core of the man a passion and vigor for life that most of us would be jealous for. He loved to live and he loved to write, and now, one of the great voices of our time has been silenced forever. The world of literature, and the many cogs in its machine, cogs like me, owe him a debt of gratitude for having spoken at all. And I'm prety sure we all hope he's still farting around in some better place, and making everyone else there with him real happy he's arrived, because things are going to be just a bit less happy around here in his absence.
The Tralfamadorians would say, "So it goes." Somehow, that doesn't quite seem sufficient. But I don't know what else to say except this:
Thank you, Kurt. You will be missed.
I used this tack when signing up for the Borders "shortlist" e-mails of nifty online offers. This became maddening during the grad school search because all too often the (1) in the new inbox entries list referred to the weekly Borders missive. Now that that's said and done, there's much less stress at finding the shortlist every week, but I was rather surprised to find that, less than a day after the weekly shortlist hit my inbox, there was yet another edition of the shortlist waiting. I was so surprised by the multiple mailings that it took me a few seconds to read the subject line, which provided the answer for why there was such a sudden new mailing -- which brings me, roundaboutly as always, to the punchline of this little story.
It was in that subject line that I, most unceremoniously, was presented with the news that Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. had passed away.
Those of you who know me well -- or know me well enough to have looked with any reasonable care at my Facebook profile -- know that I am a big Vonnegut fan. I was introduced to him by my English teacher near the end of my freshman year in high school (thanks, Ms. Vara), who suggested that for my term paper, I should read Slaugherhouse-Five. I was absolutely blown away. It was unlike anything I'd ever read before: a novel that took liberties with time and space, with the line between the viciously real and the absurdly fictional, with the very concept of genre. It was a war novel, a romance novel, a science-fiction novel, and a thinly veiled memoir all at once. It fucked with linear storytelling years before Quentin Tarantino made that kind of shit cool and modern. It was the first novel I read that used the word "fuck," the first novel I read that described the female body in erotic detail, the first novel I read that had a sex scene that didn't cut away at the good parts.
It was a novel that changed my life. For the first time, I realized that writing didn't need to be flowery and lyrical to be beautiful. It didn't need to made complete sense at any given time, and it didn't need to keep me in suspense in order to keep my interest. I realized too that what I valued from reading Slaughterhouse-Five was the experience, the humanity, the fact that I was being swept through a whirlwind of emotions. One page, I might be laughing my ass off, and on the next, I might be cringing. But no matter what I was feeling, I could take my eyes from the page. And when it was over, I knew I needed to read more of what this man had to offer.
Since then, I'm ashamed to say I've not read all of Vonnegut's novels yet, but I've been through the heavy hitters. I read Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions, the generally accepted masterpiece works. I read The Sirens of Titan, the book that made him unbelievably popular in the late 1950s. I read Player Piano, his first novel, the one that preceded The Sirens of Titan, and marveled that the same man could have possibly written those two books, and back-to-back, no less. I read Mother Night and Deadeye Dick and discovered some of the funniest and darkest novels ever written. I read them all and I loved them all.
And along the way, I discovered that Kurt Vonnegut wrote the way I wished I wrote. One look back through any of these entries, as well as through most of my academic papers, shows that I'm quite the fan of lengthy, meandering sentences with the occasional smattering of scholarly erudition and heightened vocabulary. Vonnegut wrote short sentences. He got right to the point. He wasted not a single word. Despite some of my most successful pieces being satires or more comic pieces, the ideas I tend to get on paper are usually more horrific or serious, with barely any room for levity. Vonnegut, on the other hand, laughed at everything, whether it was murder, Nazism, automation, war, religion, or even the apocalypse. He even laughed at himself, all the time, whenever he could self-referentially do so. But beneath the jocular veneer was a sense of despair, of subdued anger, the anger of a man who knows what he wishes he could see the world be like, but who has resigned himself to the understanding that he will only see it in his imagination.
To that end, Vonnegut was always focused on the big picture in a most astute way. Most of my writing has focused extensively on small details of life, of little sketches and their impact on my world. Most of the time, I overthink those small bits, trying to make something out of them that perhaps they were never destined to be. I spend my writing time reflecting on the state of my life and the place of that life in the world, and the fact that the big picture eludes me is a scary proposition to me. Vonnegut, somewhat similarly, focused on the small details. But he always had a keen eye for the big picture, and it made his heroes even more unique than they would be merely by virtue of his amazing sense of characterization. Vonnegut's characters are but cogs in a larger machine, but that larger machine is always the focus of his works. As a recurring trope, the machine tends to win; the little cog that stays in line stays there tragically, and the cog that tries to escape the machine gets destroyed or rendered useless. Through this strategy, Vonnegut made his commentaries: his characters were pitied not because the author wanted us to pity them, but because his vision and foresight, his ability to recognize the big picture and the dangerous path we were taking towards that picture, rendered us incapable of not feeling for their plights.
But even if his characters were often clustered into similar patterns and traits, the plots of his novels were nothing short of sheer brilliance. As a writer who struggles to figure out how to piece the plots of his stories and papers together, and has trouble trying to conceive the way his projected long work will eventually turn out, it is both frustrating and illuminating to see a writer like Vonnegut, whose imagination seems limitless. His plots are so absurd and far-fetched, but within the contexts of the book and within the scope of his career's work as a whole, they make complete sense. Rather than try to wrap all the loose ends up neatly, he more often than not appends an extremely simple plot device that renders most of those storylines moot. Instead of having everything fine and dandy at the end of his works, sometimes the good guy loses. Sometimes the world comes to an end.
Through it all, there was a simplicity and joy in his writing, a passion that has gone unmatched in most any novelist to come on to the scene in the last 50 years. Perhaps that is most clearly seen in the ending of Breakfast of Champions, in which Vonnegut inexplicably places himself in the middle of the action, as both the narrator and as a character in the story he's narrating. He has a brief and devastatingly sad conversation with himself, he acknowledges to himself that he's crossing the line, he admits in an appropriately post-modern way that he wishes he could do something for his characters to make everything better for them because, damn it, he kinda likes 'em. And in the end, he addresses a character in the end as a god-like figure, the lord and master of the world he has written, and performs an incredible literary move: he both acknowledges control over the world on the page, but almost immediately undercuts it in recognizing that that world he controls does not exist beyond the edge of the page. It's a sly but scathing commentary on his own profession, on the very inability of the writer to have a larger impact on the world outside the story.
At the end of the Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut seems to assert that the writer's impact can only be limited to the page, that all he can manipulate is the splatter of the ink on the paper. But to his many devoted and appreciative readers, those words have meant so much more. They have been amusing, inspiring, and portentious. Some of us have owed much of our love of literature to those words, and those people in turn have used whatever power they can muster to spread the word to others. Like the slow spread of Ice-nine, Vonnegut's words are destined to be among those that will ultimately change the world, even if that world at first is but the world of literature. But words can be a powerful and unassuming weapon, and Vonnegut's words, even the simplest of them, are so masterfully layered and delivered in such an unquestionably unique voice that there is much more than a good laugh to be taken from them.
Vonnegut said throughout his life that our purpose on Earth is to "fart around," and that no one should tell us any different. Even in his anger, his frustration, his depression, his dissatisfaction, there was at the core of the man a passion and vigor for life that most of us would be jealous for. He loved to live and he loved to write, and now, one of the great voices of our time has been silenced forever. The world of literature, and the many cogs in its machine, cogs like me, owe him a debt of gratitude for having spoken at all. And I'm prety sure we all hope he's still farting around in some better place, and making everyone else there with him real happy he's arrived, because things are going to be just a bit less happy around here in his absence.
The Tralfamadorians would say, "So it goes." Somehow, that doesn't quite seem sufficient. But I don't know what else to say except this:
Thank you, Kurt. You will be missed.
posted by Dave at 4/15/2007 11:12:00 PM
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