Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

[axordil]

I was listening to the obit on NPR and realized that Slaughterhouse-5 was the first novel I ever read voluntarily that could be classified as literature. Of course, I was tricked into thinking it was SF (shakes fist at ghost of B. Dalton) but I didn't stop once I figured out it was Something New.

So it goes.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

He was a great man and a worthy artist.

Rest in peace, my friend.

[Faramond]

Why can't something be both SF and literature?

[Primula Baggins]

<rolls up sleeves and moves up to stand behind Faramond>

Yeah! Why not?

[axordil]

When I was young, the divide was quite clear: SF was in one aisle, Literature in another.

*ponders*

That really hasn't changed, has it?

More than a few SF writers have had (at best) mixed feelings about Vonnegut--witness Larry Niven's slam on him in his Inferno. There was a certain jealousy that someone who didn't consider himself an SF writer, i.e., didn't participate in fan culture, had made the Big Time, i.e., gotten out of the self-imposed ghetto. The essential contradiction and yet connection between those facts was lost on that crowd.

Now, if you want to discuss why it is that so little genre fiction makes it into the canon of literature, that's a different thread. This one is a memorial and discussion thread.

[Primula Baggins]

And Vonnegut certainly made that transition. I remember that people used to say he couldn't be an SF writer because his books were worth reading. Vonnegut went along with that, a perfectly intelligent choice that helped his work be taken seriously despite two major strikes—its popularity and the fact that his books are fun to read. The SF label would have been the third strike.

That choice did rather burn his bridges with the SF community, hence Inferno.

[Faramond]

I read the one about ice-9 and other stuff, and one about the dresden bombings and other stuff, and one about a German propagandist/double agent ... I think that was Mother Night. I don't remember any titles for sure, though!

I liked what I read, though.

I guess at one time he was identified with a "counter-culture"; some of the articles on his death and life mention this. I'm too young and ignorant of that context ... to me his work is just good stories, though I can understand how he would become associated with a "counter-culture". Does such a thing even exist anymore?

[axordil]

Prim--
He wrote an essay on the topic that showed up in his collection Wampeters, Foma, and Granfaloons. I should dig it up. As I recall the essay, he struck me as being rather more conflicted on the subject, at once reluctant to end up in a genre which was the target of so much critical scorn AND annoyed at the critics.

[axordil]

Faramond--

In 1969, he published a novel about (among other things) the horror and stupidity of even a "good" war in 1969 (Slaughterhouse-5, which drew on his own experiences of being a POW in Dresden when it was obliterated in 1945). That alone would have made him a countercultural icon.

[Faramond]

Okay, so the Dresden bombing one is Slaughterhouse-5.

Is Vonnegut's primary characterization still as a counter-cultural icon? I rather think not, if his work is being still read and appreciated 100 years from now, as I believe it will be.

I think there are counter-cultural works that lose their meaning when taken out of that context, and others that are universal. Some works depend upon being there and experiencing the culture to appreciate, and other things don't depend on any particular perspective. Wasn't Tolkien's work considered by some counter-cultural?

I guess it bothers me to see Vonnegut described as counter-cultural, not because I have a problem with counter-culture, because it seems to me he's clearly transcended that.

I ought to read the stuff I read along time ago again, and also read the other stuff I never got to.

[axordil]

I would say that he both encapsulated much of the counterculture and (like JRRT) transcended it. Things like Cat's Cradle (the Ice-9 story) or Slaughterhouse-Five read as well now as they did in the 60s. What seemed timely then feels timeless now.

I love his eight rules for short story writing:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

My favorite Vonnegut book is Bluebeard. I highly recommend it.

[axordil]

PS--Faramond, you need this with that title:

[baby tuckoo]

You'll also need to find the short story "Harrison Bergeron." I use it in my mod lit classes every year, and the kids always love it.

[axordil]

There was a bad movie adaptation made of that with Sean Astin, you know...

[Inanna]

Ding-A-Ling.

The only novel I have read of Kurt Vonnegut is Time Machine. Strangely enough I read the same novel a few years earlier and again last year.

I had problems getting used to the style, but grew to enjoy his ironic sense of humor and insights into humanity.

[baby tuckoo]

My favorite of them all (read when I was 20-ish) was "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater." I can't recall, or explain, why, buy I'll re-read it in the summer to come (the first summer I'll have off since I started teaching) and explain later.

Vonnegut's stuff was almost good enough to make me start reading SF.


But not quite.


I've had that extra "a" in "Laphroaig" at the moment. And we won at trivia tonight, with only three people against teams of six. But I babble.


So it goes.

[Teremia]

I believe what Baby Tuckoo meant to say at the end of his post was

Poo-tee-weet.

[Jnyusa]

Vonnegut, one of the truly greats.

I would be uncomfortable calling him a sci-fi writer ... except perhaps in the radical sense that Asimov seems to have intended, where the fantastic setting is merely a prop for revelations that are universal and would be at home in the most serious literature. Some things are too uncomfortable to confront when they appear on familiar turf, and the fantasy allows the reader to distance him/herself long enough to endure hearing them. Vonnegut is, I think, the closest a North American author has ever come to magic realism.

He was also a master at revealing our worst fears: alienation and loneliness. And he did it in such a charming, empathetic way.

Jn

[axordil]

Vonnegut is, I think, the closest a North American author has ever come to magic realism.

Hmmm. Interesting way of looking at it.