The Vonnegut Effect

Preface

ix 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. preface x 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 dayto -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...