Ultra-Vonnegut

By Otto Friedrich

This is the story of Dwayne Hoover, a Pontiac dealer in Midland City, U.S.A. As Kurt Vonnegut explains on the opening page, Hoover is "on the brink of going insane." He has many reasons of the traditional kind: his wife went mad and killed herself by swallowing Drano; his hostile son is a homosexual who plays piano in a cocktail lounge; and his mistress, of whom he wants to know "what life is all about," suggests that the site across from their motel room would be a good place for him to buy her a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. More important than any of this, though, is the fact that Dwayne's own body has been "manufacturing certain chemicals which unbalanced his mind."

One night he saw eleven moons over the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts. Then he saw a huge duck directing traffic at an intersection. Not long after that, Dwayne was walking across his asphalt parking lot when his bad chemicals made the asphalt give way beneath him. He thought he was sinking into a kind of "shallow, rubbery dimple." He climbed from dimple to dimple toward the office in his Pontiac showroom. The ground was steady there, but he could not understand why the place was full of plastic palm trees. His bad chemicals had made him forget that this was Hawaiian Week. Then he saw his sales manager approaching in a grass skirt and a pink T shirt that said "Make Love Not War." The sales manager greeted Dwayne by saying "Aloha." And so on.

Why a Pontiac showroom for the scene of such collisions? "Pontiac is the leading middle-class car," Vonnegut told an interviewer some time ago. "But Pontiac is also the name of an Indian chief. The name is like a survey of American history."

With such unorthodox symbols and signposts, Vonnegut himself has been surveying America for nearly a quarter of a century. In the course of that time, he has created a closed system all his own. Indeed, it is Vonnegut's strange and captivating system, not his conventionally liberal ideas or his stolidly workmanlike prose, that has made him one of the most popular ornaments of contemporary fiction; for his devices have allowed him to comment with sadness, affection and humor about absurdities that drive lesser men to mere frothing at the mouth and black rage.

Kilgore Trout. The geography of Vonnegut's universe extends from the inferno of Dresden, where he underwent the fire-raids of World War II (Slaughterhouse-Five), to the purgatory of Ilium, alias Schenectady, N.Y., where he labored unhappily as a public relations man for General Electric (Player Piano). It also includes the mysterious paradise of Tralfamadore, a planet where little green men explain to earthlings that time is not a flowing river but a range of mountains, all eternally coexistent. Many of Vonnegut's characters, too, coexist from book to book. Kilgore Trout, the science-fiction writer who eventually becomes the catalyst of disaster in Breakfast of Champions (Delacorte; $7.95), first appeared in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

Vonnegut's universe, which may or may not resemble our own, is largely governed by the laws of madness. These are, first, that life in this technological time and place is increasingly meaningless. Thus in Player Piano, the world is ruled by computer engineers, and a whole doomed revolution arises from the premise that "there must be virtue in inefficiency." Second, that the entire universe is a sequence of absurd accidents. Thus in The Sirens of Titan, we learn that both Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China are simply messages from outer space to a stranded Tralfamadorean spaceship. Third, that despite the universal yearning for freedom of choice, every sequence of meaningless accidents leads to preordained disaster. Cat's Cradle ends, most simply of all, with the end of the world: a scientific discovery called ice-nine has resulted, more or less accidentally, in all water turning solid. (To all true Vonnegutians, therefore, it was no surprise at all to read a sketchy news story of a few years ago which asserted that the Russians had discovered how to change the molecular structure of water and turn it into a clear liquid with the consistency of molasses.) Shaggy. In none of these twistings of conventional reality did Vonnegut ever address himself directly to the question of madness. It is not easy to make madness coherent--and Breakfast of Champions, which has been under construction for years, was apparently not an easy book to write. "It was originally part of Slaughterhouse-Five, but that didn't work," explains Vonnegut, a tall, shaggy and rather mournful man of 50, as he sits in the spring sunlight in the small concrete garden outside his Manhattan apartment. As long ago as 1969, he continues, he hoped to turn it into a separate novel about "robots who take over the Middle West (except for one flesh-and-blood Pontiac dealer)." He read sections aloud to his students at Harvard, adding "It bores me stiff." In 1971 he reported that he had given up the whole novel. Last summer he started again. "There was a Chapter 1 here and a Chapter 1 there, and I said to myself, 'Okay, we've got to get through this.' " Now that it is done, however, he writes in the preface: "What do I myself think of this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but I always feel lousy about my books ... I write what I am seemingly programmed to write."

Dwayne Hoover, similarly, is programmed to go mad. But, as Vonnegut observes, smiling benignly, "people who go crazy need someone to give them their ideas, somebody to write their words for them." This donor is Kilgore Trout, the bedraggled science-fiction writer who, on encountering Dwayne's question ("What is the purpose of life?") as a graffito in a New York movie-theater men's room, finds that he has no pen or pencil with which to write his answer: "To be/the eyes/and ears/and conscience/of the Creator of the Universe/you fool." Trout has been invited to give a speech at the Midland City Festival of the Arts, and he hitchhikes to Midland City. He arrives on the wrong side of town and wades through a polluted creek that leaves his feet sealed in a coating of liquid plastic. Defiantly nacreous-footed, he wanders on into the motel cocktail lounge where Dwayne Hoover, after several drinks, staggers up to him and cries: "Give me the message! The message, please." Kilgore Trout thrusts forth one of his 117 unsuccessful novels, whose message is, "You are the only creature in the entire universe who has a free will ... Everybody else is a robot, a machine."

A connection is made. Dwayne Hoover goes on a rampage against all the people whom he once thought to be the inviolable guardians of his worldly prison. He attacks his son at the piano, he attacks his mistress and breaks her ribs, he attacks a woman novelist newly arrived for the arts festival, he attacks two black kitchen workers, he attacks random acquaintances and random strangers, and we last see him being carted away, along with several of his victims, in an ambulance called the Martha Simmons Memorial Mobile Disaster Unit, and talking vaguely about the prospects of investing in health clubs. "The Midland City Festival of the Arts," Vonnegut concludes in one grand sentence, "was postponed because of madness."

Yet Vonnegut, who is more and more becoming a central character in his own novels, seems to conclude on an even grander destructive note, namely the destruction of his own fictional universe. "I am cleansing and renewing myself for the very different sorts of years to come," he tells his creation, Kilgore Trout, when they meet at Midland City. "Under similar spiritual conditions, Count Tolstoy freed his serfs. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career." It is, perhaps, the ultimate goal of every creator to prove his creation by destroying it (thus the Great Flood). Trollope finally became fairly sick of Barsetshire. A. Conan Doyle did his best to throw Sherlock Holmes off an alpine cliff. Frankenstein's monster always ends in the swamp. Dracula is staked through the heart.

Never another visit to Tralfamadore? "No!" says Kurt Vonnegut, squinting into the sun. "Never again." Breakfast of Champions is ultra-Vonnegut--marked by melancholy and self-indulgence, most visible in the graffiti-style drawings he has scattered through it. But it is a true creation, and true creations do not die -- thus Noah and his Ark, the Adventure of the Norwood Builder and Son of Frankenstein. And soon.

sbOtto Friedrich

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