04/12/07
Kurt Vonnegut Is Dead, Alas -
Categories: Literature, Comic Irony as a Philosophical Literary Mode -
twv
@ 02:18:11 pm
If you really want to disappoint your parents, and don't have the nerve to be gay, go into the arts.
Thus spake Kurt Vonnegut, as of today, dead . . . this latter concept captured brilliantly by a Vonnegut drawing on today's front page of vonnegut.com:
Flown the cage, eh?
My drawing for my event would add a hand reaching into the cage and daintily pulling out, by one claw, an inverted bird.
It's not only my parents who probably are glad I didn't go into the visual arts.
But back to Vonnegut's advice. The greatest sorrow for parents, is when one of their children dies. The real sorrow, for the child, is when parents die.
Readers? Their sorrow at the passing of an author is not usually so great. Being at several removes of distance, we can take to heart the usual advice at death: As long as we remember him [or her], there's still life.
Still life.
Amazing, after all these years. Life still goes on, going it just so. That Vonnegut himself died of irreparable trauma to the head, that seems, oddly, fitting. He saw so much in civilization that he took at repeated blows to the head, to the sensibility of the humane man. Humans are such frail creatures. And yet, we endure. Vonnegut himself endured for quite a long time, no matter how many cigarettes he smoked, no matter how many pills he took. He even tried to kill himself once.
He found reason to laugh at in his survival. Even as we are saddened, can we find reason to laugh at his death? That, I bet, would be carrying laughter too far.
And yet we'll laugh again. Perhaps at a Vonnegut quip. His words will be remembered for a long time.
Vonnegut's novels, in my order of preference:
The latter is, I believe, one of his books that most people never read. It is not sf. It is not considered major. But I'm very fond of it. It is Vonnegut's satire on modern art (abstract expressionism in particular) and on art-as-investment, and a whole lot more. And once again he brings up the matter of genocide.
Vonnegut was obviously obsessed with the subject. It was his touchstone concept. Man's inhumanity to man? Genocide is the ultimate form of this inhumanity.
The thing about Galapagos, the book of his that disappointed so many readers (including Jesse Walker), the chilling thing about it? In that book Vonnegut contemplates post-human evolution, and in a sense seems to be wishing for genocide. It has the same problem that Vidal's Kalki had: is this satire or is this wish fulfillment?
It's easy to be "against genocide." Vonnegut explored the idea, and tried to make some sense out of human senseless slaughter.
A human death, on the other hand, is just one natural death among so many . . . there's no use trying to make too much sense of that. Death is just the final burst of the glorious bubble of an individual life, and, though one hates to burst a bubble, every bubble will indeed burst. That Vonnegut's bubble lasted as long as it did is amazing in its way. And, iridescent as the bubble was, its longevity was something for which we could be grateful.
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