-
2 - Vonnegut’s 1960s: Apocalypse Redone
- University of South Carolina Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
2 VONNEGUT’S 1960s Apocalypse Redone In the 1950s, a period of relative stability in America culture, Kurt Vonnegut had faced challenges by shoring up older values. Not sociopolitical ones, as conservative thinkers would have them, but anthropological foundations such as the family structure and benefits of a folk society where everyone had purposeful work and a sense of value. The 1960s, of course, were anything but stable . “Family values” would become a politically loaded term, while patriotism, for some, would lose its civic quality and take on prowar shadings. Obviously an old fashioned Collier’s or Saturday Evening Post story could not answer to these problems. But that was hardly the issue, as the magazines themselves would not survive, casualties of the same forces that threatened to undo the old order. Something new was needed. Still tasked with supporting his family, the author adapted to the professional requirements of these new times. He diversified, using his ingenuity to land contracts for paperback originals, refining his art to follow editors from the paperback houses into hardcover publication, and devising material that would qualify as feature journalism for the more contemporary style of magazine , such as Esquire and Harper’s, that could handle all this cultural change with comfort and even relish. In each of these undertakings, though, Vonnegut was less willing to promote cultural change than to question it. Indeed his interrogations anticipate the style subsequently established as postmodernism. Here previously unquestioned assumptions were submitted to rigorous examination , their supposedly natural underpinnings revealed to be utter fabrications . For more than half a century, anthropologists had been doing much the same, showing how cultures are human inventions, their realities being persuasive accounts but no more. Now writers and thinkers were doing it too. Some called these literary demolitions deconstruction. In Kurt Vonnegut’s hands, Apocalypse Redone 41 they became this plus something more, a demonstration of how things can be not only built up and broken down, but ultimately refashioned in a useful way. Mother Night (1961), Cat’s Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) are the author’s novels of this decade. Only the last received much attention—but so much that the others, plus Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan from the 1950s, were rushed back into print to satisfy readers’ sudden hunger for anything by this newly popular writer. Some critics have argued that Kurt Vonnegut toiled in obscurity for twenty years because it took him that long to devise a way of writing about the destruction of Dresden, the ostensible subject of Slaughterhouse-Five.The truth is that America was not ready for a novel such as Slaughterhouse-Five any earlier than when it finally did appear. Not in the 1940s, the 1950s, or even most of the 1960s. The radical transitions of this last decade had to be accomplished and widely recognized before the story of Billy Pilgrim’s experience—of Dresden and of so much more—could be appreciated. In other words the 1960s had to happen. One sees them happening, evolving slowly but steadily, in the author’s work of that decade. Mother Night, for example, is ostensibly about World War II as well. But, more important, it is about certain aspects of that war being remembered, remembered at the dawn of the 1960s, when so much would change. This is the era not of the Holocaust but of coming to terms with it—in some cases aggressively, as in the Israeli kidnaping of the Nazi killer Adolf Eichmann and putting him on trial for crimes against humanity. This was a highly publicized trial, the center of world attention as Vonnegut concocted his tale for a paperback originals market, where books could appear in a matter of weeks. Another novelist, Leon Uris, was responding to the same developments. Not just political developments, but cultural ones, such as Jews being presented not as victims but as fighters in novels such as Exodus and Mila 18. In his own remaking of perception, Vonnegut goes a step farther. After a quarter century of seeing Nazis as grotesque, horrifying, despicable monsters, he has them appear quite differently in Mother Night: as human beings, whose day at the office in the Ministry of Propaganda can just as easily involve an intramural Ping-Pong tournament as promoting mass murder. This is indeed risky, and in some quarters Kurt paid the price for it. Instead of solemnly intoning the well-known numbers of Nazi...