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4 - Vonnegut’s 1980s: Arts and Crafts
- University of South Carolina Press
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4 VONNEGUT’S 1980s Arts and Crafts The 1980s were easier for Kurt Vonnegut, and—in a material sense—for most Americans as well. The cultural conservativism of the Ronald Reagan years was an antidote to the turmoil of the 1960s and the political mess of the 1970s. Certain 1950s issues were also put to rest, including cold-war terrors, plus— incorrectly, it would turn out—worries about militant Islamic terrorism (the American Embassy hostages in Iran were set free simultaneously with President Reagan’s inauguration). The Reagan years’ answers were not, of course, Kurt Vonnegut’s. Yet his own comfort ironically paralleled that of society’s. His personal economy was good, his self-image strong. He had overcome doubts about his fame and the leadership it entailed. Compared to the anger he’d express over one future president ’s military actions in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf, and his absolute fury at another’s in Iraq, Reagan administration policies were only an irritation. Vonnegut’s essays of the period were rarely political, and by no means as social as they’d been in the preceding decades. Instead they addressed cultural matters; even his autobiographical pieces stressed his and his family’s association with the arts. And the four novels he wrote in the 1980s emphasize that life of art as well. Consider the line-up of protagonists. For Deadeye-Dick (1982), it’s Rudy Waltz, raised in a family once well-to-do (thanks to ownership of a drug company that marketed quack remedies) and steeped in the arts (again, of a disreputable sort—the father’s art-school buddy in Vienna had been Adolf Hitler). In Galápagos (1985) nature itself is the protagonist, directing a devolution of humanity into a species less dangerous to the world and to itself—but the narrator is Leon Trout, Kilgore’s estranged son, who as a storyteller can work with the most fantastic, fabulous literary canvas of all. Bluebeard (1987) is given Arts and Crafts 87 wholly to the arts and their impact on society, as described by Rabo Karabekian , the abstract expressionist whose theory of painting helps resolve issues in Breakfast of Champions. Then, in Hocus Pocus (1990), Vietnam veteran Eugene Debs Hartke narrates a slightly futuristic (by eleven years) story of a reshaped America—reshaped by economic and political pressures to be sure, but able to have its cultural history redefined in a more helpfully corrective way, as Hartke accomplishes by his teaching. These are protagonists quite different from Billy Pilgrim, Walter Starbuck, and the like from Vonnegut’s previous novels. Unlike those characters these are figures of authority—creators, as it were, of the new world being presented. All have self-doubts, of course. But so did the author. Like him they direct such interrogations to productive answers about life. And those questions involve central issues in Kurt Vonnegut’s own beliefs. From the start the author’s treatment of issues regarding the human condition has always interpolated art and family. These two interests had been virtually divorced in the standard modernist approach. But, beginning with Player Piano and his short stories, Vonnegut drew on both his anthropological training and experience as a journalist to show how problems in family life could be resolved by a bit of imaginative creativity, while art itself could be helpful in clarifying the ways husbands, wives, and their children shaped more satisfying lives. This approach prompted him to write autobiographically of his own family and their experiences in art. Although not part of the customary prefatory material to Deadeye-Dick, Kurt Vonnegut’s family story certainly stands fresh in the minds of readers, having been reminded of it as recently as the prologue to Jailbird, where Kurt’s father is presented as innocently yet destructively distracted by aesthetics—by having an expensive saw blade wrecked by milling a beautiful but nail-ridden piece of old wood and, even worse, not appreciating the cost of his irresponsibility. Therefore when narrator Rudy Waltz begins his tale with detailed descriptions of his own aesthete of a father at work and play, questions about the author’s core beliefs come up front and center. Otto Waltz comes from a prominent family, is a painter and devotee of the arts, and a gun collector—three traits shared by Kurt Vonnegut’s father. For the Waltz family, all three activities cause problems. Otto’s art is not good, his aesthetic behavior is embarrassing (especially to an adolescent...