Enemy of Pretension

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE VONNEGUT STATEMENT Edited by JEROME KLINKOWITZ and JOHN SOMER 286 pages. Delacorte. $7.95.

Jess Ritter, a mod.-lit. man out at San Francisco State, is sitting down to a greasy cheeseburger when into his office walk two students, Space Daisy and Victor. "You see," says Space Daisy, offering Ritter a cream cheese and chopped nut on pumpkin bread, "Victor also makes puppets, and his friend Street Eddie snoots Super-8 movies. Now what we want to do is make a puppet movie about Slaughterhouse-Five, showing Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack on Tralfamadore instead of my writing this term paper on Vonnegut."

Ritter's contribution is one of a very few lively and enlightening pieces in The Vonnegut Statement. But good grief! A term paper on Vonnegut? Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the author of Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rose-water and Slaughterhouse-Five? Vonnegut, that enemy of pretension who writes about the cosmos and fate as if God were a tricky garage mechanic? Since the late '60s, following the republication of some of the early novels, students have indeed been assigned Vonnegut term papers.

If The Vonnegut Statement is any indication of the trend, the assistant professors who are making the assignments are busy petrifying the work of this folksy fatalist into critical stepping-stones to tenure. The book's lengthy bibliography--which should prove finally that Vonnegut is no longer a neglected writer--lists scores of articles, reviews and scholarly probings about him. There are even five doctoral dissertations, including something called "Quick-Stasis: The Rite of Initiation in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut."

With few exceptions, the critical essays that make up most of The Vonnegut Statement are founded on the rustiest claptrap in literary exegesis. Moby Dick whale imagery, phrases like "an inversion of the objective correlative" and "eschatological imperatives" constantly threaten everyone with intellectual lockjaw. For one assistant professor, the idea of Dynamic Tension in Cat's Cradle evokes Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, although Charles Atlas' muscle-building method is more in keeping with Vonnegut's unpretentious style and sources.

It is precisely Vonnegut's back-of-the-comic-book approach to serious matters that led to his enormous popularity, especially with young readers. His novels are clear, simple, funny, humane and need hardly any explaining at all. His Dynamic Tension draws the beach bully and the runt who is getting sand kicked in his face toward the same bitter fate. Both will grow old, die and vanish in a universe that is 99.9% indifferent vacuum. There are no immortal souls in Vonnegut, only the soles of the feet which his Bokononists in Cat's Cradle warm by ritually flattening against other friendly soles.

So enough of turning Vonnegut into literary scholarship. Space Daisy would do great service to a deserving writer if she filmed The Vonnegut Statement. She could borrow the Slaughterhouse-Five technique of running the film backward (the bombers suck up their bombs which regress to factory parts and finally harmless ores) and so rebury the "objective correlatives" and "eschatological imperatives" in the uncomplicated plea sures and meanings of the original novels.

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