Kurt Vonnegut: Close encounters of the ironic kind

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Marikar C. Narra took up Communication Arts major in Journalism at Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila. She wrote for her school newspaper in grade school and joined various essay writing contests in high school. She has written an unpublished collection of poetry and essays and is working on her personal website. She likes to spend hours browsing e-zines and blogging.

In the 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. writes, "There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am a living proof of that: It can be done."

Chaos, for the biochemistry-student-turned-POW-turned-sci-fi writer with satirically strange ideas of the universe and now a cult anti-war icon of 83 years, is what life is all about. People recognize him by his intentional gallows humor. I personally know him by his collection of bizarre one-liners: "Organized religion is anti-Christian," "Fudge is a love symbol," or "Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease," and countless droll coinages like chrono-synclastic infundibula. tralfamadore, Bokonism, as well as the famous character Kilgore Trout. How he may have come up with such ludicrous terms most people don’t know. The man behind the smash novel Slaughterhouse Five is someone you can call a Shakespeare of Doomsday–he can make you laugh, but the undercurrent of his fiction is really all about just the opposite of laughter. In fact, there’s too much irony to label the ground where he stands on.

Vonnegut is a contradiction, a random Billy Pilgrim hurled to the Earth, bringing with him blobs of sardonic wit that ordinary mortals find difficult to decipher. Literalists gloat over his writing, only to end up being duped, since his novels are science fiction of the "obviously kidding sort." How strange it is to realize that he has mastered the art of black comedy as a means to mask his own sad life. He admits that laughter is a response to frustration, but, like tears, it doesn’t solve anything. His mother committed suicide on Mother’s Day; his father holed up like a hermit and turned his back on the world. It was the era of the Great Depression. It foreboded of the traumatic Dresden experience, where he was captured by the German troops while World War II raged on and was stacked in the underground slaughterhouse along with six guards, perhaps a hundred more captives, and rows and rows of butchered pig and cattle. The dearth of rations ate his stomach raw and he lost 41 pounds. Seven years later, his first novel, Player Piano was published. The critics considered it hogwash. In 1959 his sister Alice died of cancer; two days later the train where Alice’s husband rode crashed, leaving four orphans in his custody. He got divorced later in life. Then his son suffered a schizophrenic breakdown.

The gloominess of real life finds a place between the pages of his potboilers. Stranger still, is that the novels didn’t pass without an echoing guffaw. In fact, his Slaughterhouse Five was a sellout and Mother Night became an inspiration for the 1996 film that starred Nick Nolte, Sheryl Lee, Kirsten Dunst and Alan Arkin. You can take the science-fiction appeal and toss it to the trash bin, and if you burn it the way you do with dead, fallen leaves, black soot will inevitably remain. This is what Vonnegut used in order to delineate the ironies of his existence. He scrapes the walls with his ideas like bold graffiti, until anyone who passes by is forced to read, contemplate and question his own stable life, (if there really is such a thing).

I am obliged to welcome the contradiction that is Kurt Vonnegut like a breath of fresh air. Who would’ve thought, that in the face of such an "everyday-is-Black-Saturday" life, an author can actually transform people, if he failed to make them laugh, anyway? And who would’ve believed, that underneath the deepest convictions the greatest German-American satirist has wrought on print, lays a bearded schmuck wrapped in colorful papier mache?

People practically raved over his Dresden experience, saying it was the spirit of Slaughterhouse Five, that it changed his life. He actually thought the idea was cliché and hyped. He was a pacifist, and his family adored the American ideology of freedom and respect for humanity, but the tables have been turned because the Allies bombed the open, unassuming city of Dresden, because America also fostered the ideals of war, because George W. Bush relished the idea of cruise missiles dropping like cow dung in Iraq. Vonnegut’s writing concerned itself often with metaphysical musings, too: questions about God, what God wants, is there a heaven, where does Man stand, and what is his purpose here on earth. Then he effaces the philosophy and thinks he’d rather be an alligator. He believes thinking too much doesn’t help, and it can be awfully exhausting, because the world is not enough to satisfy the glorious capabilities of the human brain. He even tackles his own depression. Amazingly, when he starts to take anti-depressant pills, his mood changes and sadness becomes a meaningless emotion; after all, Ritalin can alter your feelings. Misery, it turns out, is just a state of the brain, a physiological thing, a working of the internal body chemistry. And damn, why hadn’t his suicidal parents known it before?

In the end Kurt Vonnegut’s message is straightforward: "Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones." Maybe people didn’t learn the lessons of World War II, and the cynic and atheist in him would declare, "We are doomed to repeat the past no matter what." Another irony. If he is so wary of the future of mankind in the hands of self-destructive individuals, why is he giving us the hint that everything is going to be all right? Beneath the cloak of nihilism, apparently, there exists a pulsation of light. Eighty-three years of Orwellian fiction and tragicomedic existence have come down to uncover a philosophy, not unlike the Golden Rule, that the entire human race could use is it still wants to survive. I am tempted to believe that Mr. Vonnegut is just an ordinary folk that has seen too many grisly movies and heard too many scary punk songs and merely admonishes the world he leaves behind to be vigilant, lest we take the violent drama of human affairs too seriously and be wiped out by a grim Third World War. He says writers are like alarm systems. He talks of the "canary bird-in-the-coalmine" theory. Canary birds detect gas in a coalmine to warn miners before they get poisoned. He sees all artists in the same metaphor. See, Kurt Vonnegut has been a canary bird all his life–he has smelled and told of death, forceful and unwarranted, the massacre of innocent civilians, the sickness in the soul, and the evils of social ignorance. Now, I think, it is our turn to listen.