(with drawings by Kurt Vonnegut)
- Friedrich
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense,” 1873
“Trout sat back and thought about the
conversation. He shaped it into a story, which he never got around to writing
until he was an old, old man. It was about a planet where the language kept
turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by
sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless
as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cared what the meanings of
words were anymore.”
- Kurt Vonnegut,
Breakfast of Champions, 1973
The Voice of God
At the start of Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut’s seventh novel,
coming on the heels of the peerless Slaughterhouse-five
– the author makes a careful and prudent announcement to clear himself of
any legal charges that might be leveled at him from taking the slogan of a
cereal brand as the title of his book:
“The expression ‘Breakfast of Champions’
is a registered trademark of General Mills, Inc., for use on a breakfast cereal
product. The use of the identical expression as the title for this book is not
intended to indicate an association with or sponsorship by General Mills, nor
is it intended to disparage their fine products.”
That expression “intended to disparage
their fine products,” could not possibly be laced with any more irony and
intentional mockery. Vonnegut has every intention of disparaging products.
Somewhat paradoxically, Vonnegut couldn’t care less about General Mills, or any
other particular brands or corporations. Vonnegut does not set out to demean
any particular product but rather his goal is to deconstruct the very notion of
“products” and lampoon the role of commercials and commodities in society.
General Mills is not the only brand name that finds its ways between the covers
of Vonnegut’s novel. Dozens of brand names – many of which are fictional
– appear as the butt-end of Vonnegut’s bleak satire that illustrates the
inanity of warping language for the sole purpose of selling products.
At the outset, the plot of Breakfast of Champions is remarkably
simple. Vonnegut himself states the plot in the first sentence of the first
chapter: “This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white
men on a planet which was dying fast.” The first man is Dwayne Hoover, resident
of Midland City – an all-American suburban wasteland – and
successful local businessman whose main trade is selling Pontiacs. The second
man is Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut’s alter ego who has appeared in a number of
previous Vonnegut novels. Trout’s main business is writing hundreds of pulp
science fiction stories and novels, installing storm windows, and predicting
the impending apocalypse to his parakeet Bill. Dwayne Hoover represents all
that is respectable and business-like in modern America, but he secretly
harbors “bad chemicals” that are about to drive him to insanity –
particularly after reading Trout’s writings. Trout represents everything that
is unrespectable and despised in America: creative drive, poverty, ugliness,
and a healthy skepticism of the powerful elite that boast of progress. Kilgore
Trout is heading to Midland City where is to be the keynote speaker at the
Midland City Festival of the Arts Festival. By the time he gets there, Dwayne
Hoover, whose Pontiac dealership is in Midland City, will be ripe for his
complete meltdown, which comes when he reads the outrageous things in Kiglore Trout’s pulp fiction.
Dwayne Hoover is a respectable businessman,
but secretly insane. Kilgore Trout is a raving doomsayer whose only friend is a
parakeet, but he is actually completely sane. This reversal of sanity and
respectability can be found in a number of Vonnegut’s works –
particularly God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
– but it is in this novel that Vonnegut explicates the curious linguistic
basis of contemporary world-historical insanity. At the heart of Vonnegut’s
linguistic analysis of culture and madness is his criticism of advertising,
hence the sloganistic title of the novel.
At its most basic level, the novel
constitutes an ironic appropriation of corporate ideology in order to explode
the fetid waters of capitalist stultification. It constitutes an emptying-out
of the containers of ideology – including an emptying-out of Vonnegut’s
own literary imagination – in order to cast aside that which has been
profaned so as to cling to that which is sacred. Vonnegut laments in the
preface to the book that Armistice Day, one of his favorite holidays has been
abolished to make room for Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was a day of
remembrance for when the end of World War I, when “millions upon millions of
human beings stopped butchering one another.” Vonnegut says that he talked to
veterans who lived through that moment in World War I. They told him, “in one
way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God.” Because of this,
Vonnegut insists, “Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.”
Kurt Vonnegut was an avowed secular
humanist and had no patience for the dull ideologies of religion. Nevertheless,
he believe in a sacred kind of humanism, and still respects the Voice of God,
even if it is just the sound of peace settling in the corners of the earth. Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut’s effort
to throw away all that is not sacred and to keep all that he. “So I will throw
Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to
throw away any sacred things.” This assertion comes at the end of the preface.
The rest of the novel consists in Vonnegut attempting to throw away all that is
not sacred. “This book,” writes Vonnegut, “is a sidewalk strewn with junk,
trash which I throw over my shoulders.” Conversely, this book is also quite
obviously an attempt to redeem that which is in need
of it, that which has been written out of history or obscured by those who
desire the unsacred. In Vonnegut’s paradoxical, humanist, and re-sacralizing eschatology two things stand out as
particularly in need of redemption: language and humanity.
Value’s Last Tango
Vonnegut’s novel traffics in the jargon
of corporatism – the title of the novel is itself a corporate slogan and
the brand names and logos come in spades. Vonnegut deals in slogans, logos,
clichés, and other pithy trappings of profiteers. The goal of this co-opting
is, through ironic humor, to illustrate the utter sacrilege such use of phrases
and logos commits on the sacredness of language and the innocence of the human
imagination. As communicative beings, language becomes a sacred bond between
humans, and slogans and other corporatized media-speech threatens the trustworthiness
of language. At on point in Breakfast of
Champions Vonnegut expounds a just-so story about the origins of ideas.
Ideas, he explains, were never very important to humans because they were so
hard to make a reality. As such, it used to be easy to agree with someone just
because you were friends with them. Camaraderie came
cheaply, and ideas became “badges of friendship or enmity.” But then something
changed: “Earthlings discovered tools.” With the capabilities of an
industrialized society, “agreeing with friends could be a form of suicide or
worse.” But did that stop the cheap – and even crazy – ideas from
flowing or from people quickly adopting their friends
ideas for friendship’s sake? Not at all. “Earthlings
when on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.” Thus
ideas because lethal forces, resulting in the madness of genocides, wars,
holocausts, slavery, and exploitation. Trafficking in lunatic ideas, humanity
paid its price in blood. And to make matters worse, there was nothing humanity
could do: “There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth.”
The cuckoo ideas Vonnegut speaks of
aren’t always apocalyptic though. Sometimes they are plainly ridiculously and
highly amenable to his satiric appropriation. The most notable silly misuse of
language comes from advertising, which will warp language so out of shape just
to sell a product. Advertising bookends the novel, which Vonnegut dedicating the
book to a woman he knew during the Great Depression who wrote ads for a department
story. Vonnegut wrote copy for her as a teenager, and, according to Vonnegut,
she taught him a thing or two about how to write and think critically. Those
familiar with Vonnegut’s biography will know that this wasn’t his last foray
into the marketing world. After he returned from World War II he worked in
public relations for General Electric in Schenectady, New York – which
explains his abiding interest in science and robotics, as well as setting
stories in upstate New York. General Electric forms the concluding bookend of
the novel’s sloganeering. Vonnegut rips a line from GE itself – “Progress
is our most important product” – and ironically puts it on a sign in a
run-down and corrupt section of Breakfast
of Champions’ urban setting. Vonnegut didn’t write that particular piece of
copy, but he could have, had he been assigned to, and his ironic appropriation
of it makes clear his desire to discard his public relations past for being
insufficiently sacred.
 |
| Vonnegut's drawing of the PYRAMID truck |
 |
| A sacred miracle is a tourist trap |
This instability of language and truth is
exacerbated by the commodification of language. Words themselves no longer
function to communicate something so quaint as truths. Truth, Vonnegut writes
via Rabo Karebekian, is
“some crazy thing my neighbor believes.” Language nowadays almost exclusive
serves to deceive, particularly in the service of selling some product.
Language has become an advertising media-speech and a marketing ploy. This is
how a pyramid can be a truck, or, to draw on other examples from Breakfast of Champions, a sacred miracle
is a cheap tourist attraction, a galaxy is a car, Excelsior is a fire
extinguisher, and so on. The potential of truth has been positively stripped
away from any of these words, never mind the myriad products that offer
“happiness” or “comfort” or “ease” or “satisfaction” or “fulfillment.” None of
these words mean anything anymore, at least not what they used to mean. They
now only mean what they could be meant to be selling. They are bound to their
commodity and cannot mean anything outside of that. Progress is a product,
according to GE, and nothing more. In some strange admixture of Marxism and
post-structuralism, it is not unreasonable to say that there is no longer
anything outside the text of the commodity.
Though Nietzsche wrote a century before
Vonnegut, his concerns for language, truth, and human understanding were
remarkably similar, as his quote in the epigraph to this essay demonstrates. In
his essay “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense,” Nietzsche
thought that language evolved simply as a way of convenience in communicating,
as a tool, and that words are more like metaphors attempting to communicate
rather than proclamations of absolute truth. Nietzsche’s main concern was not
in advertising or capitalism ideology, but rather people mistaking metaphors
for dogmatic truths, such as those expounded by science, religion, or social
convention. His concern can be adapted to the actions of sloganeers though,
whose goal is to essentially take advantage of this metaphoric condition of
language to their advantage. General Electric faces no repercussions for claim
that progress is a product that must be acquired through their corporation
because the concept of “progress” has no genuine meaning beyond itself. This,
not coincidentally, is why Nietzsche has such appeal to post-structuralist thinking. Vonnegut, however, does not accept
this state of language, and resist the idea that nothing is truly sacred. As a
fundamentally existentialist and humanist thinker, Vonnegut continually insists
that meaning can be constructed from the void, and that this itself is the
meaning outside the text. Vonnegut rejects the dogmatic values of social
convention and religious tradition, but he does not forsake values altogether,
and through his ironic appropriation of slogans, mottos, and logos, he laments
the de-sacralizing of language and the puncturing of
value wreaked by marketers and publicists.
Advertising seeks to take advantage of
this slipperiness and convention-driven notion of truth. Their goal is to
misuse language as much as possible in the effort to promote their product
while minimizing the risk of what Nietzsche calls the “unpleasant, hated
consequences” that could result in their lying. In a bureaucratized world, this
means making as many outrageous claims and drawing upon the most improbable
imagery to sell a product while attempting to ward off the potential lawsuits
from violating peoples’ expectations. According to Nietzsche, humanity exchanges
“truths for illusions,” and words are simply “the boldest metaphors.” When
applied to marketing strategies, the results are a totally deceptive language
with little connection to that which is genuinely human. A truck is a pyramid, a sacred miracle is a tourist attraction, and so on
and so forth.
The concern for misused language, and the
reason that Vonnegut insists that we no longer live in a “sacred” world where
people can “hear the Voice of God,” comes from his genuine apprehension that
language has become entirely dehumanizing and put to the uses of exploitation
rather than expanding the understandings of human experience. In his seminal
text Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard explores many of the same themes as Nietzsche
with regard to language and truth. Due to what Baudrillard
– as well as most post-structuralists –
saw as the preeminence of text, he developed his theory of simulations, which
he likens to the process of drawing a map. The map not only informs the user
about the territory, but in a strange sense, creates
the territory – or at least the viable ways in which the user can make
sense of the territory. In the current era, says Baudrillard,
“it is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory.” The map not only
guides the user, but stakes out all possible interpretations of the territory
such that what is real is limited to what the map claims is real and
comprehensible. “It is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent
of the map.” When this logic is extended further, the result is a compounding
of what Nietzsche recognized over a century ago: namely, that language no
longer refers to anything in actuality, but rather is a metaphor, or to use Baudrillard’s term, a simulation, of reality.” It is no
longer anything but operational,” Baudrillard argues,
and no longer relates to reality as such. “It is a question of substituting the
signs of the real for the real.”
The contemporary era is thus the “era of
simulation,” which entails not an abnegation of the real, but rather a “hyperreal,” which masks “any distinction between the real
and the imaginary.” It is hard to imagine a linguistic state less amenable to
the twisted lies of advertising and capitalist ideology. “Simulation,” says Baudrillard, “threatens the difference between the ‘true’
and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary.’” As such, it is impossible to
“unmask” the simulation, because it merely masks the fact that underneath it there
is nothing to begin with. There is no truth behind the simulation, because “it
is truth that hides the fact that there is none.” With the void of reality,
there can only be power and exploitation. “Behind the baroqueness
of images hides the éminence grise
of politics,” and this is the point at which political ideology masks the
genuine suffering with its onslaught of information and denigration of meaning.
By desiring a sacred – or re-sacralized – language, Vonnegut does not imagine a
pristine language that is buffered against actual human usage. It is quite the
opposite, as Vonnegut praises impoliteness and consistently pokes fun at
manners and the stuffy formality of corporate culture. Sacredness for Vonnegut
constitutes a re-humanizing of language and a decommodification
of linguistic culture. By culling together corporate cultural mores into this
novel, he locates the absurdity of capitalized language and profit-driven
semiotics. Vonnegut’s semiotic parody is simultaneously a search for what lies
behind the text and behind the fetishization of commodity.
Mauvaise Foi
Vonnegut’s previous novel, Slaughterhouse-five, represents his
greatest turn away from narrative as a paradigm for fiction writing.
Nevertheless, in Breakfast of Champions
Vonnegut makes his aversion to narrative explicit in an unprecedented way. He
opens the book with a meditation on his own role as an author, claiming that he
feels “programmed to write,” in an attempt to minimize the authority of the
writer and the notion of artistic genius – two mainstays of modernist
though. In Slaughterhouse-five Vonnegut
demeans his own work as “this lousy little book” and
described his authorial role as “an old fart with his memories and his Pall
Malls.” In Breakfast of Champions his
furthers this skepticism by suggestively asking, “What do I myself think of
this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but I always feel lousy about my
books.” Vonnegut endeavors to set himself up as the anti-prophet, explicitly
remarking that the guidance of the muses or any other modernist versions
thereof do not run through him. He is programmed to write, so his writes,
nothing more and nothing less.
Fiction,
Vonnegut speculates, is an inherently solipsistic activity, and it is a wonder
that readers can get something out of a writers work at all. Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut thinks,
is an attempt “to clear my head of all the junk in there.” This explains the
numerous childish drawings dispersed throughout the text. All the flags, the
assholes, the slogans, logos, animals, and so on are nothing more than clutter,
weighing Vonnegut down, waiting to be cathartically expelled. He describes the
book as a project of “cleansing and renewing.” This extends not only to
symbols, but characters too. Characters such as Eliot Rosewater and Kilgore
Trout have been cropping up in Vonnegut’s previous novels and it is now time
for him to set them free. At the end of Breakfast
of Champions Vonnegut really does set Kilgore Trout free. Engaging in
high-level meta-fiction, Vonnegut writes about himself, the author, approaching
Trout on a back road in Midland City and telling him, much to Trout’s chagrin,
and telling him, “you are free, you are free.”
Though
Vonnegut often maintains that his reasons for liberating his characters, jettisoning
oft-used symbols, and eschewing narrative is a personal endeavor for the sole
benefit of lifting psychological burdens from the author himself, he also,
somewhat contradictorily, infuses his efforts with world historical importance.
For example, when, at the end of the novel, he inserts himself into the
narrative in order to approach Kilgore Trout and inform him of his freedom, he
likens himself to Tolstoy, who freed his serfs, and Jefferson, who freed his
slaves. He quite ironically compares himself to these Great Men Of History (my
term) to demonstrate the importance of his project to “set at liberty all the
literary characters who have served me so loyally during my career.”
Of
course, it is inherently ironic to juxtapose literary characters with actually
living slaves and serfs – something the highly historically and socially
conscious Vonnegut is well aware of. Nevertheless, Vonnegut’s depiction of
fiction elevates it beyond lousy little books or authors that are old farts with their memories and Pall Malls. Vonnegut genuinely
believes fiction – particularly narrative fiction – to be a
world-historical force, capable of shaping ideology and historical events
alike. Narrative, Vonnegut suggests, accounts for the way people lead their
lives: “they were doing their best to live like people invented in story
books.” Narrative surely tells people mundane and harmless ways to lead their
life, but it also has disastrous effects. Vonnegut supposes that so many
Americans find it acceptable to shoot each other because “it was a convenient
literary device for ending short stories and books.” So many people find it
acceptable that the government treats them “as though their lives were as
disposable as paper facial tissues,” because that is how authors treat “bit-part
players in their made-up tales.” It is a miserable idea that people can imagine
themselves as bit-part players in their own made-up world.
Vonnegut
solution to this depressing scenario is the rejecting narrative altogether,
something he makes explicit in Breakfast
of Champions but tacitly demonstrates in many of his novels. “Once I
understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people
who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling.”
Vonnegut departs from those who wish to draw simplistically on conventional
narratives depicting humans as sane and society as reasonable. The world has
gone mad – mad with nuclear ambition, imperialistic urges, violent
tendencies, glorifications of inequality and material excess – and
Vonnegut endeavors to depict it as such. “Let others bring order to chaos. I
would bring chaos to order.”
Part
of this enterprise is Vonnegut’s curious way of treating human beings, which he
insists cannot be reduced to mere characters. Humans are complex beings, part
crude machines lumbering around and interacting with each other and part
transcendent beings striving to make sense of their world. Vonnegut treats
derisively those who embody the role of a character for the sake of ease or simplicity.
In a deeply Sartrean move, Vonnegut describes his own
character Bonnie MacMahon, a waitress in Midland
City. Bonnie, Vonnegut writes, adapts to the chaos of the world by dressing in
a thoroughly predictable way, saying predictable things, and generally adopting
a predictable attitude that people will find endlessly inoffensive. She dresses
with a glittery uniform with just enough sex-appeal and delivers drinks to
patrons with the exact same unfunny quip: “Breakfast of Champions.” Vonnegut is
not unsympathetic, explaining that Bonnie acts this was as to please customers
and thereby accrue as much in tips as possible. She’s had a hard life and needs
as much financial security as possible. Nevertheless, Vonnegut awards more
humanity to Rabo Karabekian,
a minimalist painter attending the bar where Bonnie works. “Doesn’t that get
tiresome?” Karabekian asks Bonnie after witnessing
her elaborate act.
Vonnegut
roundly criticizes people who act as if they are characters as well as authors
who portray humanity as a collection of characters. This is precisely the
notion of mauvaise foi
[bad faith] that Sartre outlines in his text Being and Nothingness. Sartre too uses a waiter to illustrate his
point that someone occupying or playing a role is avoiding their
genuine humanity. Those who play the role of a character established by social
convention or mores is thus rejecting their own humanity. As Sartre explains in
Being and Nothingness, the waiter in
café’s movement is “a little too precise” for the role of a waiter. “All his
behavior seems to us a game… He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not
watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in
a café.” Vonnegut thus criticizes Bonnie MacMahon in
similar terms, describing her behavior has too waitress-line. She has imagined
a stock character “waitress” from the annals of social convention and seeks to be that when, in good faith she can be nothing of the sort since she can
only ever be a human.
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
 |
| Rabo Karabekian, The Temptation of Saint Anthony |
Vonnegut
has little sympathy for so much money being spent on something
which took such little effort to make. Karabekian,
he writes, “knew he was surrounded by people who hated him for getting so much
money for so little work.” He remarks bluntly: “Midland City was outraged. So
was I.” After Karabekian patronizingly criticizes
Bonnie MacMahon for being a too-perfect waitressing
machine (though Vonnegut thinks she deserves it), Bonnie finally snaps. She
“blew up,” making the stinging accusation that she’s “seen better pictures done
by a five-year old.” At this point Vonnegut’s aesthetic allegiances become
clear – he doesn’t support art being sold for such outrageous sums of money,
but besides its hideous commodification, art serves as a truly redemptive and
positive social force. Vonnegut, engaging in meta-fiction, muses about his
innate nihilistic tendencies and generally hopeless outlook on life. “I did not
expect Rabo Karabekian to
rescue me,” but when Karabekian stood to respond to
Bonnie, “he was majestic up there.”
When
forced to explain the importance of his minimalist painting, consisting of a
solid green field and a single strip of orange tape, Vonnegut – via Karabekian – delivers an astounding defense of modern
and contemporary art. He claims the painting “shows everything about life which
truly matters, with nothing left out.” The single band of fluorescent tape
represents “the immaterial core of every animal – the ‘I am’ to which all
messages are sent.” It is integral to every human, every animal, anything that
lives with an awareness. This “vertical, unwavering band of light” signifies
the fact that “our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of
us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.” In Vonnegut’s conception of
humanity, everyone is just as equal as anyone else, because if you strip away
all the layers of sociality, history, circumstances, and so on, you are left
with a perfect and transcendent band of luminous awareness standing out from
the chaos of the world. Thus Vonnegut reverses his earlier claim of bringing
chaos to the world. He brings chaos to his literature, because the world is
chaotic, but his destructive technique serves the transcendent end of illuminating the incontrovertible (secular) sanctity of being. All humans
live in a world that Vonnegut describes as “complex, tragic, and laughable.”
But through it all the “sacred part” of our humanity, our “awareness,” remains
“an unwavering band of light.”
Pastiche, or, The Narrative of the End of
Narratives
It is easy to label Vonnegut’s rejection of narrative-form
as deeply postmodern. After all, Jean-François Lyotard’s
proclamation of postmodernism as the rejection towards meta-narratives (or
grand narratives) is practically the standard
definition of postmodern. Even when not explicitly discussing the evils of
narrative, Vonnegut’s anti-narrative style itself speaks to his undeniably
postmodern themes. Slaughterhouse-five’s
reformulation of the experience of time (Billy Pilgrim’s being “unstuck in
time”) very closely matches concepts of montage – particular the
theoretical application of montage by the likes of Vertov,
Eisenstein, or even Godard. There are times, however, when Vonnegut’s technique
seems almost closer to pastiche than montage, such as his ironic appropriation
of slogans and logos and other trappings of corporate media-speech found in Breakfast of Champions.
The potential use of pastiche is problematic, because it
ultimately undermines Vonnegut’s political project, which is to represent the
interest of those who have been deemed unworthy or unrespectable in society.
Pastiche, as formulated by the Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson, represents
an ironic appropriate lacking in the satiric force needed to provoke real
sociopolitical change. Pastiche, Jameson argues, is “free-floating and impersonal.” It is
similar to parody, in that it ironically wears the
linguistic mask of power, but it a “neutral practice” rather than a political
practice. It is ultimately ”devoid of laughter and of any conviction.” These
characteristics seem thoroughly unlike Vonnegut’s writing, which is steeped in
conviction and filled with laughter. Nevertheless, Vonnegut’s appropriation of
the linguistic dialects of late capitalism threaten to undermine conviction
itself, particularly as Vonnegut’s project involves the herculean creative
effort of re-sacralizing the world and redeeming
humanity in the face of senseless commodification.
As Vonnegut’s most postmodern novel, Breakfast of Champions runs up against
the limits of postmodernism, in which the deconstructive and pastiche
tendencies of this paradigm inevitably fall into resigned disrepair once their
ironic goal has been accomplished. Vonnegut himself was well aware of this
novel’s pitfalls. In his 1981 books Palm
Sunday, Vonnegut assesed his own novels by giving
them a grade. Breakfast of Champions
earns a meager C in this assessment, in stark contrast to his previous novel, Slaughterhouse-five, which earns him an
A+ and is generally regarded as one of the greatest American novels ever
written. Vonnegut’s pressing up against the limits of postmodernism is a lesson
in the inexorable failure of postmodernism as an analytical framework,
demonstrating its irrevocably collapsing in on itself. Ultimately postmodernism
reveals itself to be nothing new, but just an expression of the existing
contradictions inherent in society itself. As such, postmodernism is, at best,
nothing but the self-aware manifestation of contradictory mainstream liberal
though. At worst, postmodernism reveals itself to be a cloak for thoroughly
conservative thinking, owing to the fact that the concept of genuine
sociopolitical and cultural change is anathema to the postmodern movement. The
resignation of postmodern and deconstructivist
techniques too often lapses into a genuine support of the status quo over
imaginative transformation of society. This resignation is surely what Vonnegut
himself finds so flawed in Breakfast of
Champions.
Despite the pressing the limits of
postmodernism, Vonnegut is frankly aloof towards many of the main tenets of
that theoretical paradigm. As I detailed above, Vonnegut rejects the resigned
assumption that we are irrevocably bound to a text-based and inherently
meaningless world. Vonnegut searches for meaning behind the text itself, which,
to be sure, does not mean that he uncritically accepts traditional grand
narratives. Furthermore, despite his pastiche tendencies and desire to discard
all the unsacred ephemera trapped in his literary imagination, Breakfast of Champion is still a
narrative, even if Vonnegut resists narrative. In fact, since Vonnegut is so
explicit about his mistrust of narrative in this novel (whereas in previous
novels he demonstrates, rather than explains his mistrust in narrative), it is
possible to deem Breakfast of Champions,
in the words of Fredric Jameson, a “narrative of the end of narratives.”
Jameson describes many of quasi-postmodernist tendencies as deeply
hypocritical, in that they employ narrative when attacking narrative. In
Vonnegut’s case, however, this isn’t so much hypocritical as much as it is a
brilliantly subtle defense of the concerns of modernism itself. That Vonnegut
employs narrative, but still remains skeptical of it, is precisely why
Vonnegut’s allegiances are ultimately not to postmodernism but to the
extra-textual concerns of modernism and existential humanism. He certainly traffics
in certain postmodern devices, but his desire is not the end of grand narratives,
as Lyotard suggested, but rather the desire for a
redemptive narrative.
Vonnegut postmodern tendencies can be
seen as almost Brechtian then, and thus not truly
postmodern in the way that many other authors so clearly are. Brecth, argues literary theorist Walter Benjamin, is a
proponent of a “didactic” drama, in which the author rejects simplistic
narratives and traditional emotional catharses in order to displace the
reader/viewer and maker her complicit in her own self-education –
specifically political education for Brecht and Vonnegut, as well as
linguistic. In such a literary device, the task is, according to Benjamin “not
so much the development of actions as the representation of conditions.” The
idea is to uncover the underlying conditions of human existence. This can occur
through “the interruption of happenings,” which serves to draw attention to the
conditions, rather than the characters or the plot. The didactic play, Benjamin
argues, creates a space in which the audience is not instructed or coerced into
drawing conclusions or feelings dictated emotions, but instead one in which
“every spectator is enabled to become a participant.” And what the
participation entails is playing the role of a “teacher.” The author of the
text does not authoritatively demand the audience learn, but rather create the
conditions for the audience to teach themselves. In this sense didactic fiction
is inherently autodidactic as well. By refraining from such things as
traditional narrative device, coercive emotions, blunt characterization, and so
on, Vonnegut (and Brecht) create the opportunity for readers to formulate their
own particular compassionate understandings of the world itself. Such
techniques share much in common with postmodernism, but have a fundamental distinction
which must not get lost in the effort to classify a writer as so unclassifiable
as Vonnegut.
In
the beginning…
Perhaps the most striking moment of
distinction between postmodernism’s skepticism of narrative and
post-structuralism’s distrust of extra-textual meaning comes near the very end
of Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut,
after lampooning corporate slogans and logos and drawing maps of evil
countries, decides it is time to redeem semiotics and employ them for
humanistic and emancipatory purposes. In the last scene of the book Vonnegut
writes himself into the plot, so that he can approach Kilgore Trout and notify
him that he has been liberated from fiction, and is free to live his life as he
pleases. In this act of profound compassion and anti-authoritarianism, Vonnegut
speaks of the need for a symbol that can communicate all these joyous concepts
to Trout all at once. Vonnegut wants to make Trout feel “a wholeness and inner
harmony” because as a benevolent creator, Vonnegut loves his characters –
as well as his readers. Vonnegut seeks to distinguish him from that other
creator – The Creator – who saw fit to rain destruction on Sodom
and Gomorrah, and populate his moral teachings with the constant threat of
destruction. Trout is the modern Job, and Vonnegut could not help but break him
down and take from him all potential happiness and success. But the time for
redemption of humanity is nigh, so Vonnegut writes himself reaching out to
Trout with a symbol in his hand, because the time for redemption of language and
symbols is night as well. He creates a symbol that has “not been poisoned by
great sins our nation has committed, such as slavery and genocide and criminal
neglect, or by tinhorn commercial greed and cunning.” And what does Vonnegut
hold out in his hand to demonstrate his inauguration of a redemptive era in
human history? Trout looks up, and “he saw that I held an apple in my hand.”
An apple, the modern incarnation of that infamous forbidden fruit which set
humanity careening on a course of non-redemptive history. Vonnegut questions
what type of a creator would so badly tempt Adam and Eve, so he now reaches out
with compassion, and bestows the fruit willingly.
“Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe,” Vonnegut muses earlier
in the text after considering how much suffering and meaningless he seems to
let enter into the world he has created. Vonnegut this constructs an
alternative eschatology based on a redemptive history, rather than a history of
the fall of humanity. He works through the fall therapeutically, and this time
he prevents a fall from grace and allows humanity to retain its prelapsarian innocence for all time. Vonnegut has started
history over again, and redeemed those symbols that previously represented sin.
He is aware of humanity’s great sins, but he does not condemn humanity but
instead he it. Go, Vonnegut seems to be saying, and from henceforth sin no
more.
 |
| The once forbidden fruit has now become redemptive |
Read Matthew Gannon's opening essay, "Kurt Vonnegut Has Come Unstuck in Time"
Read Matthew Gannon's previous reviews:
Read Matthew Gannon's previous reviews:
Player Piano, the One-Dimensional Society, and the Emergency Brake of History
Vonnegut in Jerusalem: A Report on the Absurdity of Language and Media
The Tragedy of Eliot Rosewater, Prince of Indiana
Vonnegut in Jerusalem: A Report on the Absurdity of Language and Media
The Tragedy of Eliot Rosewater, Prince of Indiana
