Another re-read, sooner than I promised. And not the last; there are two more, at least, before the end of the month. I tend not to be the sort of person who adjusts his reading list to outside factors (the big exception being that when I am loaned a book, I nearly always read it right away, as it seems strange for me to hang on to property that’s not my own until I “feel like” using it), but Kurt Vonnegut’s death, though I was never a very dedicated fan, made me strangely sad, and I want to remember him by revisiting the three books of his that I read back in the late ’90s. Slaughterhouse-Five was my first foray into the trio, mostly because it was the only one whose plot I remembered. What I had forgotten was how poignant and emotionally charged the seemingly dead-simple prose was.
Vonnegut’s work is always very obviously the work of some guy sitting behind a typewriter. That’s a strange thing to say, so let me explain. Nearly every author of fiction has his own rhythms, and though it’s not always clear how they work (not to mention re-writes, correcting proofs, editorial aid or interference), every so often you can infer from the rhythms the smooth stroke of the pen, the cut and paste of the word processor, or in Vonnegut’s case, the steady locomotive clack of a good old-fashioned typewriter. It’s impossible to imagine him writing any other way. His prose is rooted in the IBM Selectric (insert your own Platonic ideal of the typewriter here).
It’s easy to dismiss the science fiction elements of this book as mere metaphor. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time, journeyed to a faraway world and fathered a child with an actress whose picture he saw in a dirty bookstore in Times Square, all of it existing only in his head, a symptom of a cracked consciousness whose bits can no longer cohere, and are slowly falling away. Like the Kilgore Trout book Pilgrim finds in the bookstore, about the aliens who misinterpret (or do they?) the message of Christianity, looking on the science fiction elements in this way would be an error of scale. If we are to look at this as Billy Pilgrim (and because of some interesting narrative devices, Vonnegut himself, who is not only the narrator but also a character) simply falling apart because of post-traumatic stress brought on by living through the Dresden fire bombing, then we are left only with the singular; a human experience rather than human experience. If we accept the Tralfamadorians as real, then we have to accept Billy Pilgrim acceptance of the world, of humanity in all its glory and horror as real, and we have to face the facts that we, as a society and as a species, are equally as deplorable as we are noble, and that we always will be, no matter how much we put labels like “inhuman” on certain things we do. What we can do, is look at the good things, the good times, and hope there are more of them than the bad, and do our best to stay where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.
Next, Kurt Vonnegut’s Deadeye Dick.
