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5 - Vonnegut’s 1990s: Autobiography and the Novel
- University of South Carolina Press
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5 VONNEGUT’S 1990s Autobiography and the Novel As a major American author still happy and healthy and writing for an appreciative readership in his seventies, Kurt Vonnegut spent the 1990s enjoying himself. There were still a few periods of depression, and even more of exhaustion ; he’d often complain that he’d done a lifetime’s worth of work and was ready to go home. But he’d always bounce back, engaging as ever. His autobiographical collage, Fates Worse Than Death (1991), is at once a deeper and more coherently written volume than is Palm Sunday. Bookending the decade are two other pleasurably self-attentive works, his collection of previously overlooked short fiction from the 1950s, Bagombo Snuff Box (1999), and the playfully outrageous accounts on postdeath experiences filed as a “reporter on the afterlife” for WNYC radio in New York, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999). Yet, if these three works can be considered self-indulgences, the term does not yet exist to describe Timequake, except the one Kurt Vonnegut used to convince his editor that it was something legitimate if radically sui generis. With only the slightest bit of critical help, he called this new book the autobiography of a novel. Fates Worse Than Death presents an author confident of his art and comfortable with his stature. Several of its component essays had been drafted in the 1980s, when he’d been celebrating the power of art in his novels. For the new decade, however, he weaves these pieces into an integral whole, not just adding filler (as Vonnegut had described his method for Palm Sunday) but actively thinking about how each element fits into his life. Readers can make connections too, noting that, by answering an interviewer’s question that he’d like to die “In an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro” (15), the writer associates himself with Ernest Hemingway with regard to going out honorably, famously, and fittingly. Thus when an analysis of Hemingway and his work appears a few chapters later, the parallels Vonnegut draws with his Vonnegut’s 1990s 106 own life take on deeper meaning. Was Kurt putting himself in the company of a master such as Ernest Hemingway? You bet he was, just as in the volume’s preface he not only associates himself with Heinrich Böll but mentions the latter ’s Nobel Prize and compared their respective ages. Proud of his membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he nevertheless regrets its gatekeeping function and ability to shame nonmembers by their exclusion. Elsewhere he notes how Nobel prizes carry a cash stipend that history and economics have rendered far less grand than intended. Did he yearn for the prize? Perhaps. But as George Bernard Shaw informed the prize-givers when being notified, late in life, of his selection for a major award, he had already bestowed this honor on himself some fifty years before. Kurt Vonnegut’s writing of the 1990s does the work of an awards committee , so to speak: examining his contribution, measuring its range and depth, and then submitting a report for judgment—for the reader’s judgment, the ultimate criterion for any award. Fates Worse Than Death does this, sorting through the materials of his professional life—not so much reprinting essays as reconsidering, reframing, and reintegrating them as an exhibit for the reader, who is spoken to in the process. Timequake is much the same, taking its own sweet time to become a narrative while Vonnegut, in the manner used for his autobiographical collage, picks up, examines, and comments on the materials of its making. Many of those materials are the same that he’s dealt with in Fates Worse Than Death: not just Ernest Hemingway, but how the sharks in The Old Man and the Sea could be seen as critics (and how a neighbor of Kurt’s at the time, a commercial fisherman on Cape Cod, explained how the old man should have filleted the best parts and stored them safely in the bottom of his boat); not just the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but how it becomes even more obsolete and irrelevant (and how Kilgore Trout, by discarding a manuscript in a trash can outside, inadvertently makes a contribution there). These are items of a collage for the reader to consider. Such items work by juxtaposition. Unlike conventional narrative, collage relieves the author of having to say everything. Instead readers can study the selection...