Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel

A Postmodern Iconography

Robert T. Tally Jr.

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781472507006
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441124852
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The novels of Kurt Vonnegut depict a profoundly absurd and distinctly postmodern world. But in this critical study, Robert Tally argues that Vonnegut himself is actually a modernist, who is less interested in indulging in the free play of signifiers than in attempting to construct a model that could encompass the American experience at the end of the twentieth century. As a modernist wrestling with a postmodern condition, Vonnegut makes use of diverse and sometimes eccentric narrative techniques (such as metafiction, collage, and temporal slippages) to project a comprehensive vision of life in the United States. Vonnegut's novels thus become experiments in making sense of the radical transformations of self and society during that curious, unstable period called, perhaps ironically, the 'American Century.' An untimely figure, Vonnegut develops a postmodern iconography of American civilization while simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of a truly comprehensive representation.

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 gesture 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 century 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 particular 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 capture the essence of “America” in its totality. In the language of the narrator 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 histories, 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 representative American symbolic narrative, comprehensively bound in a single, emblematically American work, Vonnegut’s novels as a whole offer a postmodern 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 fiction, dime-store magazine writing, slapstick comedy, and even soft-core pornography (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 fiction” 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 collage, with bits of science fiction, pop psychology, personal memoir, and so on, all pasted together in artful ways to present an overall image.

This uncategorizable oeuvre thus functions as a postmodern iconography, a scattered and critical portrait of American life at the very moment of its seeming transcendence, the postwar period which began America’s reign as a leading world power, with all the absurdity and horror that accompanies such a position. Throughout his career, Vonnegut’s iconography advances a literary project—far too highfalutin a term, perhaps—to produce what Melville and others imagined the American novel could accomplish: an expression of the multitude and diversity of American life in its time. This is the goal of the ever-elusive great American novel, and although Vonnegut has not captured this legendary creature, he has reasserted the value of attempting such a project in the postmodern world.

Untimely Meditations

Vonnegut’s work is frequently labeled postmodern, and the postwar America that provides the content for all of his novels is a primary social and cultural terrain of postmodernity. It is far from certain that Vonnegut would characterize his own work as postmodern, although legions of sympathetic critics, from Jerome Klinkowitz to Todd Davis, have been happy to embrace the adjective in characterizing his writings. Certainly Vonnegut’s oeuvre does manifest many elements that are associated with postmodern fiction, such as metafictional techniques, use of collage or pastiche, disruptions in the narrative timeline, genre-blending, and so on; however, Vonnegut has eschewed certain aspects of the postmodern and embraced many others that we tend to view as modern or modernist. David Cowart has suggested that Vonnegut’s work be viewed as a bridge between modernism and postmodernism.⁴ This seems to me much more plausible, inasmuch as Vonnegut’s apparently formal postmodernity is thoroughly infused with a modernist content. Nevertheless, it is also clear that Vonnegut’s work embodies a kind of postmodern sensibility, a feeling for its place and time, that marks it as postmodern in a recognizable way. Understood historically, Vonnegut’s work cannot function in the same way as that of the modernists. Of course, historical understanding may already be a modernist concept.

In my view, Vonnegut’s novels are not exactly modernist or postmodernist. They do not so much represent a bridge between the two aesthetic or cultural forms as they do an unresolved tension between them. Assiduously of his time, Vonnegut cannot escape his own postmodernity, with its pervasive fragmentarity and stubborn resistance to comprehensive meaning, but he remains a modernist who desires a form of completeness and semic stability that remains elusive. Indeed, Vonnegut is untimely insofar as he insists on a modernist aesthetic while trying (perhaps often failing) to make sense of a postmodern condition in which all of his work is situated. His postmodern iconography is therefore a powerfully modernist project.

The term “postmodern” has a notoriously slippery meaning, owing in part to the variety of uses to which it is put and the contexts in which it is asserted. In literature, the term began to be used by critics to identify post–World War II writers who were quite distinct from the modernists of a previous generation, modernists whose work was beginning to dominate academic literary criticism. Thus could the Beats, for instance, be distinguished from James Joyce and William Faulkner. In France, especially following Jean-François Lyotard but drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, among others, postmodernism became a label with which to describe the cultural and philosophical condition of a world in which “le grand récits” of modern societies (here understood in terms of those ideological and rational theories from the Enlightenment) no longer held true. And, perhaps most famously, in architecture the term carried a polemical meaning, also hinted at in these other usages, directly attacking the conventions and pretensions of modernism.⁵ In all cases, the label was meant to register a break with the modern, not merely to indicate posteriority. The point was not merely that these postmodernist ways of thinking, writing, building, or what have you, appear after the modernist ways of doing things, but also that they are somehow self-consciously aware of their differentiation from modernism.

With its comprehensive attempt at a synthetic and synoptic overview of the various phenomena gathered together under the rubric of the postmodern, Fredric Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism as the “cultural dominant” of the era of late capitalism offers one of the most useful theories of the postmodern. By grounding the aesthetic and cultural dimensions in the socioeconomic bases of modes of production and distribution, Jameson does a better job than most of historicizing postmodernism while also disclosing its connections to globalization.

Jameson specifically understands postmodern art as being fully integrated into commodity production. Whereas the modernists struggled with the problem of the work of art in the machine age, inventing forms that, in some cases, were meant to fully resist commodification, the postmodern condition is one in which the artistic and the commercial have become inextricably intertwined. (Here one almost inevitably thinks of Andy Warhol and Campbell’s soup.) Architecture, of course, lends itself most effectively to this condition, since architecture always requires a mixture of aesthetics and economics; the great postmodern buildings are monuments—in more ways than one—to the economic system in which they are produced. It is no wonder that finance capital and bank buildings come together in such gaudy skyscrapers, or that the flow of global capital can be articulated so forcefully in lavish hotels designed for the collective wish-fulfillment of international travelers.

In addition to labeling a historical period, postmodernism has several aspects that distinguish it from its predecessors, in literature and other mimetic arts, modernism and realism especially. Any enumeration of such aspects is doomed to remain incomplete, since the very nature of the postmodern involves seemingly endless proliferations, like the monotonous lists found in DeLillo’s novels or the almost numberless brands of colas found in supermarkets. However, a few salient features are worth observing here. For one thing, as Jameson notes frequently, postmodernity is characterized by a certain lack of historical sense. As Jameson says of his own analysis, “It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.”⁶ The domination of the “now” and the inability to think historically have a haunting, almost elegiac sense, at least from the modernist perspective; there is a disconnection with the past, a loss of shared history, that inevitably involves a break with a perceived community. Vonnegut touches upon this aspect of the postmodern condition again and again.⁷

This lack of historicity leads to a second characteristic of postmodernism: the subversion of time by space. Postmodernism is often characterized by a profound sense of spatiality. Whereas modernism is the era of time, of temporal flux, memory, and historical possibility, the postmodern is all about space, juxtaposition, extension, and positions, as Foucault famously described it.⁸ In the postmodern, space has usurped time’s constitutive role in human experience; one must then figure out one’s place in an ever-more-complex network of interrelations.⁹ In Vonnegut’s novels, one discerns a profound sense of homelessness, of being out of place. Much of the bewilderment encountered by characters in the novels has to do with their sense of being lost, of not knowing where to go. To be sure, that homelessness existed before; it can be seen in Don Quixote and in the novels of Thomas Wolfe. But in the postmodern, there is an even more alarming realization: there may not be any underlying referent. That is, not only can you not go home again, but there was never a home to begin with.

Hence, a possibly crucial distinction between the modernist and postmodernist sensibilities: whereas the modernist eulogizes a lost home, community, or prelapsarian stasis, bemoaning the fragmentation of what was once whole, the postmodernist recognizes—in some cases, celebrates—fragmentarity as the state of being, denying the existence of a prior, Edenic, pure, and wholly circumscribed state in the first place. If both modernists and postmodernists highlight the disintegration of contemporary social life, then the difference lies primarily in one’s attitude toward this condition. In most modernisms, the integrated whole is a thing of the past, an idealized community, that has been torn asunder by the forces of modernization, such that the world is now no longer whole, no longer intrinsically meaningful, and is—in Georg Lukács’s wonderful phrase—a “world abandoned by God.”¹⁰ For the postmodernist, whether engaging in a celebration of the fragmentary or a condemnation of it, the “lost” wholeness is a chimera. Vonnegut, in some ways, seems to straddle the two. In his persistent longing for a perceived, former unity, in “forever pursuing Eden” (which Leonard Mustazza has somewhat convincingly argued characterizes Vonnegut’s entire corpus),¹¹ Vonnegut betrays his thoroughgoing, elegiac modernism; however, his formal techniques and his more philosophical content suggest an insinuation of the more postmodern vision in Vonnegut, where the author seems to admit that such comforting ideas of past glory are nothing but what Bokonon dubbed foma, useful lies.

A third characteristic of the postmodern condition, what might be thought of as the psychology of the age, is visible in the seeming fragmentation of the individual subject. The age of realism might be characterized by the process of individuation, by the birth of the modern, bourgeois individual. The modernist era is marked by the intensification of that individuality, most visible in the form of interiority—expressed through such formal literary techniques as stream-of-consciousness—which, at its extreme, is associated with a kind of madness. If neurosis, or paranoia, is emblematic of the modernist condition, then schizophrenia is surely the model of postmodernism. The idea, most fully developed and even celebrated in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, but also articulated in any number of postmodernist literary productions (e.g., those of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Vonnegut himself), seems most fitting in the present era, an era characterized in part by its being so very “in the present.” Without history and without home, the subject breaks up into so many little fragments, lacking coherence.

A final point about the postmodern condition, one perhaps with special relevance to Vonnegut, has to do with the notion of pastiche. Pastiche, or the imitation of past styles or genres, has come to characterize the postmodern (especially in architecture, but by extension, the other arts as well); in postmodernism, older concepts like originality and authenticity are suspect, if n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Editor
• Title
• Chapter 1: A Postmodern Iconography
• Chapter 2: Misanthropic Humanism: Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan
• Chapter 3: Anxiety and the Jargon of Authenticity: Mother Night
• Chapter 4: The Dialectic of American Enlightenment: Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
• Chapter 5: Eternal Returns, or, Tralfamadorian Ethics: Slaughterhouse-Five
• Chapter 6: Anti-Oedipus of the Heartland: Breakfast of Champions
• Chapter 7: Imaginary Communities, or, the Ends of the Political: Slapstick and Jailbird
• Chapter 8: Abstract Idealism: Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard
• Chapter 9: Apocalypse in the Optative Mood: Galápagos
• Chapter 10: Twilight of the Icons: Hocus Pocus and Timequake
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright