Reading Kurt Vonnegut: Introduction to a Series

After a long hiatus, I’m returning to work on Kurt Vonnegut in earnest.

For context, my first academic publication was on Kurt Vonnegut’s political literature. It grew out of a directed research and writing project in undergrad, where I had the option of doing three 30-page research projects instead of one larger thesis. For one of my projects, I decided to try to argue Vonnegut was worth treating as a political thinker on war, technology, and community. The paper I eventually polished out of that flawed stone was published at the journal of American Political Thought in 2019 (if you don’t have access and are interested in boring academic papers, I’m happy to help).

Since then, I’ve dreamed of starting a book project on Vonnegut expanding on those themes, drawing out some more of his influences, particularly the influence of his anthropology professor Robert Redfield, and working somewhat systematically through his writing and his thought.

I’m also on the hook to contribute an essay to a forthcoming Bloomsbury “Handbook” on Kurt Vonnegut. My proposed paper will focus on Vonnegut’s interactions with the 20^th and early 21^st century American conservative movement. Vonnegut was never restrained in his criticism of various Republican figures (see: Jailbird if you want to get a glimpse of his Watergate novel, or grab his non-fiction essay collection Fates Worse Than Death if you want to see some savage GOP-targeted wit), and I’m interested in fleshing out both Vonnegut’s understanding of conservatism and conservatism’s responses to Vonnegut. Most of his novels, it turns out, were reviewed in National Review at one point or another, with reactions ranging from utter dismissal and disdain to polite admiration.

As part of building out the pieces of that long-running book project and collecting all references in Vonnegut’s works to contemporary conservative political figures and movements, I’ve decided to work through Vonnegut’s published works largely in publication order, starting with his fiction and then moving to his various essay collections, speeches, recorded interviews and so on.

So, here I’ll introduce the series, give a bit of background/bio about Vonnegut, tell you what I find interesting about him, and prepare you for the first proper entry in the series to come, which will focus on Vonnegut’s first published novel Player Piano.

My supervisor for the above-mentioned directed research project had never read Vonnegut. Probably not the best choice of topic for that advisor, in hindsight, but I had made it my mission to convince him that Vonnegut was worth reading. He told me at the outset that he had always placed Vonnegut in a box of grumpy 20^th century men complaining about life, moaning about war, and so on (I don’t want to misrepresent him, but I believe he mentioned Joseph Heller and J.D. Salinger in that conversation). Not that I’m agreeing on his assessment of those other authors, but I think by submission of the project I successfully convinced him that Vonnegut has merit.

I hope that you, like many others, have some exposure to Vonnegut, perhaps through Slaughterhouse-Five. This semi-autobiographical science fiction novel is Vonnegut’s most well-known work, a high school English staple for many decades, and a popular favorite among protestors of the Vietnam era. From this book and elsewhere we learn that Vonnegut was an Indianapolis native of German descent, a Private in World War II, deployed to the front lines, almost immediately captured, and carted by train in horrific conditions to Dresden, Germany, where (Vonnegut and others have suggested) his captors thought he and his fellow prisoners would be safe.

And, as you may be aware, the Allies firebombed the city of Dresden, previously left mostly unscathed from the war as more of a cultural center than a tactical target. Vonnegut survived the firebombing and lived to tell the tale, making him relatively unique in the sense that very few people have escaped from cataclysmic events and gone on to write novels about them.

It should be noted that Vonnegut throughout his life accepted the higher civilian death toll proffered by German propaganda rather than the more traditionally accepted, lower death toll. One can hardly fault him. Put to work as a POW after the bombing, Vonnegut spent harsh days helping with excavating and incinerating bodies of German civilians and soldiers alike, and it’s not hard to imagine that such traumatizing work could lead one to inflate the raw numbers of casualties in their memories. Not that numbers matter much here; what happened at Dresden is, for Vonnegut, inexcusable, regardless of the death toll. It certainly served to show him, just a young man at the time, that simplistic narratives in war are rarely correct.

Vonnegut went on to have an eclectic life and career. He never earned a Bachelor’s degree, despite taking classes at multiple universities while in the Army (including the University of Tennessee, go Vols), but was eventually accepted into a Master’s program in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. There, he took classes from Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought co-founder Robert Redfield, where he learned certain things about the “folk society” and community that will become relevant later in this series. After a couple rejected theses, Vonnegut was eventually awarded a Master’s from Chicago, treating his book Cat’s Cradle as his thesis material.

Vonnegut’s career ups and downs and personal and familial drama are chronicled in many biographical works, including the controversial biography by Charles J. Shields titled And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life.” I need not rehash them here, except to say that Vonnegut, like many other 20^th century writers, directly experienced the vicissitudes of fortune as American interests turned from the literary magazine to the television. Placing some early short stories in prominent publications alongside some heavyweights like Flannery O’Connor and Hemingway, Vonnegut found a steady source of income that dwindled as more people brought the boob tube into their homes. This would undoubtedly influence his later criticisms of technology, but we’ll get there when we get there. His path to published novelist, popular author, counter-culture figure, and grumpy old fart is an interesting one, and I’ll do my best to bring relevant biographical notes into the story as I work through his writings.

As I set out on this series, I don’t intend to present Vonnegut as a sage, an infallible thinker, or a moral exemplar. Instead, I think of him as a quintessential American, of immigrant descent, a veteran of war, observing, living through, and writing about some of the most dramatic cultural and technological changes imaginable, and producing some of America’s greatest literature through it all. I welcome correction where I misstate anything about Vonnegut’s bio or writings, and I look forward to walking through some of my favorite books with you all over the coming months.

If you’d like to follow along, grab a copy of Player Piano, a novel about what human beings get up to in a world where machines do all the tasks unskilled human beings are used to doing. What happens when we have a “post-scarcity” world, but nothing for an average man to do? What happens when machines only listen to those with advanced degrees, but neglect the input of the average person? Vonnegut would later say his failure in writing Player Piano was his failure as a futurist, for he failed to see that computers would be far smaller and far more efficient than what existed in 1952. It’s always interesting to compare the speculation of yesteryear with the travesties of today. I look forward to reading Vonnegut with you.