Of every author that has ever existed, one of the few essential voices that I think you should at least dabble with in high school is Kurt Vonnegut. The satirist has this ability to write in such a way that he made complicated ideas like war into these fantastical stories, painting post-traumatic stress disorder through the guise of time travel. He understood real-world conflict through the abstract, and he did it in such a way with clean and simplified language that got to the point. Sure, you can argue that his tendency for chauvinism and underlying racism may be problematic by today’s standards, but I can’t think of another genre writer who feels as accessible to general readers.
This is why I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t read a single Vonnegut novel in high school. He had passed away when I was in junior year, and the most that I recognized was the launch of his endless pull quotes about writing (I hope you don’t like semicolons) and life, finding these whimsical ways to make us see the world in a different way. These quotes are so endearing and insightful, and yet the most that I could say about Vonnegut is that I had seen his cameo in the excellent Back to School (1986) where he tutors Rodney Dangerfield and writes his paper on Vonnegut… only for Dangerfield’s paper to be graded poorly. It’s a great joke. Also, Oingo Boingo’s the house band. This movie’s a masterpiece, and I won’t hear otherwise.
He’s the kind of figure that permeated in my life off in the corner. I knew what “Slaughterhouse-Five” was, but it was nothing more than a novel. With that said, it was largely because I have discovered the greats largely through rooting around in used bookstores. I could go on at length about why I find solace in these places, but I can spend an hour just going down a row, pulling off books, and making that 50/50 decision as to whether I will add it to the pile. Vonnegut books were always on the pricier side of my budget to the point that I may as well have bought a new copy. It’s why it took so long to buy a single one of his books, and why I’ve only read two as of this date.
My first experience with Vonnegut was a story that I misinterpreted as being his masterpiece: “Breakfast of Champions.” Somewhere in my mind, I had mistaken it for “The Sirens of Titan” and began to run the positive word of mouth through my head, thinking that this would embody everything that was great about the author. I had listened to a few episodes of the solid Kurt Vonneguys podcast and felt like I was confident enough to finally dive into his work.
This is why it’s comical to know that, in my research, I discovered that Vonnegut had rated it a ‘C’. For whatever reason, he decided to form an act of transparency and rated his own books based on how he felt about them. As you can guess, “Slaughterhouse-Five” was an A+. It’s the work that he’s likely to be remembered with even if you never read his work. Still, by that point I was 50 or so pages into “Breakfast of Champions” and I had to commit to this foolish endeavor to see it as his masterpiece.
This isn’t to say that the book lacks a popularity. From what I’ve heard, readers in 1973 were more forgiving of its edgy style, how its satire was flippant and embraced a world where consumerism replaced authentic thought. It was a counterculture novel if there ever was one, reflecting this anger at reason and order that made you feel like Vonnegut had a finger up his nose and dancing around in a grotesque fashion. The comedy was that this world was falling apart, and we’re just forced to watch and make sense of this surreal cosmos.
Before I get into my own personal feelings on the book, I want to share a detail that feels particularly striking. When discussing why he wrote this book, he suggested that he was reaching the age of 50 and needed to “clear his head of all the junk in there.” Well, this isn’t just that he had a million ideas colliding at once, it was that he had drawings and meta-commentary all lashing out in a manner that didn’t need to make sense. It just needed to exit his brain in some legible fashion. The worst that can be said is that it at least got to the page.
Regardless of whether “Breakfast of Champions” is considered a masterpiece, the approach to his writing is something that I relate to on a personal level. Our styles may be completely different and clearing our heads may produce very different bile, but this mentality is what ultimately motivated me to write “Apples & Chainsaws,” which I bill as a moratorium on my 20s. Of course, I was at a different place in my career than Vonnegut. I didn’t have a novel to my name, just a bunch of short stories (some good).
You just need to give in to your impulses sometimes and get the ideas out, because you’ll never think this way again. To have a time capsule of where you were in life at 29 or in Vonnegut’s case 50, you are creating something personal even if it’s not autobiographical. I love “Apples & Chainsaws” as this collage, even if I’m going forward joking that my next book will be “a real novel.” It is dull to write what is conventionally accepted as brilliant because inspiration cannot move forward that way.
You need to follow your muse, and that’s what I think you get reading Vonnegut as a teenager. Whereas the schools teach you “The Great Gatsby” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” there is a hindrance to seeing writing in only one way. I argue that we need to have more accessible texts, reflecting writers who weren’t writing for the school curriculum. To see World War II through “Slaughterhouse-Five” is to see worlds that teenagers just don’t know. It isn’t just wartime footage. It was personal, and it’s reflective in every flippant remark and deconstruction of the novel. Without authors like Vonnegut, I guarantee that English as a course never catches on because it’s seen as stuffy, reflective of something we can’t relate to.
So anyways, how does Vonnegut want to say goodbye to everything in his brain? I disposed of memories I had carried with me since high school, of experiences that helped shape me into who I am. What exactly does he have to say that’s relevant to readers?
It’s a picture of a butthole.
Not a butt, but just the little hole, drawn out in a series of lines. Everything in this book is surreal because an average page is broken up between description and artwork that ranges from a quick comedic gag to something sensuous in nature. Whereas I’ve been able to read the darkest of Stephen King novels in public without concern for somebody looking over my shoulder, I can’t tell you how many times I grew nervous reading “Breakfast of Champions.” If a small family passed by, I did my best to use the bookmark to cover up the picture. It didn’t even have to be an offensive picture. I just didn’t want to deal with people asking why more than half of a page was a cartoon.
It was often that the text was just as off-putting for a stranger to walk in on. Seeing as the novel encapsulated everything, it wasn’t uncommon for the story’s abstract approach to linear storytelling (if you can call it that) to break out into a line like:
“She was a defective child-bearing machine. She destroyed herself automatically while giving birth to Dwayne.”
I am aware that this is satire, and Vonnegut’s approach was often to go for a broad sense of self, reveling in the comedic cluelessness of his characters. The story focuses on the only human who has the ability to think for himself, and the subject ranges from consumerism to the very concept of free will.
The only issue is that “Breakfast of Champions” is both an overtly political book as well as one that has a Mad Magazine-level of affection for juvenilia. He isn’t afraid to break down the Vietnam War by suggesting that Americans “dropped things on them” because they disagreed. There’s no long tirade, just a simplified and petty description that captures the war without any pretension.
Similarly, there was a passage early on that especially stuck with me. Maybe it’s because the conflict surrounding Colin Kapernick kneeling at a football game was fresh in my mind, but his discussion of the national anthem was especially stark. He first criticizes the aesthetic of the flag, then tears apart the pageantry that goes along with the procedure, believing that it’s all a bit silly. By breaking it down into few words, he’s able to say so much more than I can in quadruple that. Similarly, his attacks on consumerism and the growing presence of corporations relevant to the 1970s culture is wonderfully absurd.
Though if I’m being honest, I would give this book a solid C grade just like Vonnegut. I don’t know if this is the best entry point because it gives off the impression that he’s slumming it as an author. He’s by no means a bad author. You will get a lot of great ideas out of this book that reflects what his comedic perspective brings to commentary. It’s just that there’s little in the ways of clear form that kept me interested. After 100 pages, I became confused and wondered what the plot even was. Maybe the whole point was this underlying nihilism, that humanity was going to crush under its own arrogance.
With that said, I can’t deny that the technique eventually creates one of the most fascinating conclusions that I’ve ever read in a novel. Mind you, it’s not the best. In fact, I wonder how this would read if I had several other books under my belt, capable of picking up on any unseen subtext. I knew that Kilgore Trout was one of his great recurring characters, but I couldn’t tell you why I had to care about him in this sense. He was just there, wasting away with the rest of this text.
Then it gets to the point where the characters confront Vonnegut and have this bizarre sequence where basically man meets maker. It’s a moment as discombobulated as the remaining text, not really fitting properly into a convenient space. Still, it finds an author grappling with their work in such a way that it finds pain and regret, setting aside the slapstick that he’s built up in favor of something more honest and dark. You are compelled because the narrative style already makes every paragraph stand out as its own artistic form. By the end, it’s an expressionistic painting.
I suppose what I ultimately love about Vonnegut is that he is a transparent author, who feels just as much like he’s writing a book to entertain you, but to make you see the world in a different way. He’s also not afraid to be open about how he felt about his career, which I find more admirable than any writer who claims they’re perfect. By acknowledging faults, you’re capable of seeing the work as something clearer, more reflective of the human experience. I think there’s value in knowing both that it’s reflective of Vonnegut at 50, rooted deeply in Nixon-era America, as well as his eventual disapproval for the book. It adds context.
In that way, I think that starting with “Breakfast of Champions” was the best call because it forced me to ask so much about what his deal was. Why was he so obsessed with mixing highbrow with the juvenilia so frequently that it was usually messy? Was his childish view of nature reflective across all of his work, or am I reading a very specific kind of satire in his larger career? If you can’t handle an author at their most flawed, then I don’t think you can appreciate it when they overcome their personal limitations.
Seeing as I consider Vonnegut an author so entertaining that I will always buy his books blindly for look road trips now (if those ever happen again), I am relieved to know that he’s written much better work. He is exciting and unpredictable, even in his dated white male view of the world. Sometimes it’s worth rummaging through the nonsense to find a deeper meaning, and it’s why this book (even if I don’t love it) felt pivotal in my experience of discovering his work. It makes me a better reader but, more importantly, it makes me a better writer.
Comments
Post a Comment