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Being in the Early Novels of Kurt Vonnegut

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Being in the Early Novels of Kurt Vonnegut A MORAL BEING IN AN AESTHETIC WORLD: BEING IN THE EARLY NOVELS OF KURT VONNEGUT BY JAMES HUBBARD A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS English May 2015 Winston-Salem, North Carolina Approved By: James Hans, Ph.D., Advisor Barry Maine, Ph.D., Chair Jefferson Holdridge, Ph.D. Table of Contents Table of Contents ii Abstract iii Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Being Thrown 7 Chapter 3: Being as a Happening of Truth 27 Chapter 4: Projecting the Poetry of Being 47 References 53 Curriculum Vitae 54 ii Abstract In this this paper I will address notions of being in four of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels using Martin Heidegger’s aesthetic phenomenology. The four novels that this paper will address are Player Piano, Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions. Player Piano and Sirens of Titan are Vonnegut’s first two novels, and they approach being in terms of what Heidegger referred to as “throwness.” These initial inquiries into aspects of existence give way to a fully developed notion of being in Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. These novels are full aware of themselves has happenings of truth containing something of their author’s own being. Through these happenings, Vonnegut is able to poetically project himself in a way that not only reveals his own being, but also serves as a mirror that can reveal the being of those reflected in it. iii Chapter 1: Introduction Kurt Vonnegut’s literary significance is due, at least in part, to the place that he has carved out for himself in popular culture. And I would like to begin this paper by bringing up one of his more notable cultural appearances outside of his own fiction: his cameo appearance in the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School (1986). For those who are not familiar with the film, it is a comedy in which Dangerfield plays a wealthy businessman who decides to go get his college degree alongside his son. Vonnegut appears in the film as himself when Dangerfield’s character hires Vonnegut to write a paper on his own fiction. Vonnegut’s paper on himself earns Dangerfield’s character, Thorton Melon, an F. As someone writing on Vonnegut, I am comforted by the thought that even Vonnegut himself might have had no idea what his writing was all about. Although I may not know what Vonnegut’s fiction is about, in this paper I will analyze four of his novels. The novels that I will look at are Player Piano, Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions. I will use Martin Heidegger’s aesthetic phenomenology to examine how Vonnegut represents notions of “being” in his novels and how those representations change over the course of his career from his first (Player Piano) to his seventh novel (Breakfast of Champions). To that end, I would like to quote a second film to introduce the vision of Vonnegut that I am about to present in this paper. The quote is from Wes 1 Anderson’s 2014 film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. Through layers of narrative one character, Mr. Moustafa, says of another, Gustave H.: “To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it. But I will say: he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” (The Grand Budapest Hotel). This is the significance that Kurt Vonnegut has come to possess for me as one of his readers. In his fiction, Vonnegut allows humanity with all its beauty and meaning to persist for his characters despite the insanity and inhumanity that seems to pervade the world. How is it that being, which had lost much of its meaning and coherence to modernity, is able to persist as both a fully moral and aesthetic phenomenon in Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction? It persists simply because Vonnegut chooses to approach being that way. And in existing this way, Vonnegut opens up himself and the world produced by his existence through his fiction. Over the course of his career, Vonnegut accumulates knowledge of his own being through his fiction, and he shares this knowledge with his readers. In his first two novels, Player Piano and Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut struggles against the constraints and impositions that accompany existence. Heidegger refers to this position as the “throwness” of being. Because being occurs prior to any willing on behalf of that being, existence is necessarily an imposition on the individual consciousness that the individual cannot shake off. These first two novels struggle against, retreat from, and deconstruct the constraints imposed on beings by existence. In his later novels, like Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut embraces the “throwness” of being, and his fiction becomes aware of itself 2 as a happening of truth, to use Martin Heidegger’s terminology. These novels instead become temples disclosing a part or aspect of Vonnegut own being. The struggle to apprehend the essential character of being in Vonnegut’s fiction is precipitated by the collapse of normative moral philosophy in the preceding century. Morality prior to Nietzsche had been the means by which humanity justified and oriented itself within existence. It was a self-justifying enterprise both in its capacity to apprehend formal truth about “the good” as well as in its ability to prescribe moral action to all individuals. The two most significant projects in normative moral philosophy prior to its collapse were the Kantian deontological notion of morality and the Utilitarianism of philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Kant claimed to understand the “good will” which was the source of moral obligation. And the Utilitarians like John Stuart Mill claimed to understand the nature of “the good” through the consequences of individual actions. But both of these notions of morality collapsed under the weight of post-modernism. Kant’s deontological morality was undone by Nietzsche’s observation that existence, including morality, amounts to a series of aesthetic choices on behalf of the individual rather than actions based on moral truth. And Utilitarian project suffered a similar structural failure because it failed to sufficiently quantify various goods in comparing courses of action. In the absence of these normative projects, morality as a discipline saw the ground crumble beneath it. This began a decades long retreat into subjectivity that profoundly limited the individual’s ability to make moral utterances. Morality couldn’t be vindicated in theory or in practice. 3 It is in this context that Kurt Vonnegut finds himself groping for a coherent notion of human existence as both a moral and aesthetic phenomenon. He is a profoundly moral man living in a post-moral time, and he embraces a Heideggerian aesthetic that allows him to remake the world according to his own vision of it as a moral and aesthetic phenomenon. According to Martin Heidegger, “He who truly knows what is, knows what he wills to do in the midst of what is.“ (Hofstadter 65). Kurt Vonnegut begins his career as a man who is searching to know what is so that he can know what he wills in the context of what is. Vonnegut expresses the fundamental shift in the moral character of existence in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five when his serial character Eliot Rosewater says, “everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky. ‘But that isn’t enough any more.’” (Slaughterhouse-Five 412). Vonnegut is referring to the profound humanity of Dostoevsky’s novel, which ultimately embraces existence for the sake of human relationships. In the past many literary critics have addressed Kurt Vonnegut and his fiction as a largely deconstructionist project. This is a selection for The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. E characterizing Vonnegut’s work by saying: “To a generation of young people who felt their country had forsaken them, he offered examples of common decency and cultural idealism as basic as a grade-school civics lesson. For a broader readership who felt conventional fiction was inadequate to express the way their lives had been disrupted by the era’s radical social 4 changes, he wrote novels structured in more pertinently contemporary terms, bereft of such unifying devices as conclusive characterization and chronologically organized plots.” (Baym 372- 373). While many of his novels deconstruct culture and society, interpreting Vonnegut in this way ignores the larger and more significant constructive project that he develops across his novels. His unconventional plots and themes deconstruct the familiar in order to arrive at a new awareness of things as they are, but they fall short of setting up a unique mode of being. However, as an author, Vonnegut accumulates his own knowledge and awareness of being, and from Player Piano to Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut strives to articulate his own notion of being as he comes to understand it. He apprehends, understands and articulates his own notion of being as both a moral and aesthetic phenomenon fully in Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. The final product of this enterprise is a blending of fact and fiction within the figure of Vonnegut himself. He becomes fully a character in his own work while remaining fully the author of it. While many authors have used meta-fiction in order to evacuate their authorial presence from the work (Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita), Vonnegut uses meta-fictional devices to the opposite end. His meta-fiction makes him an essential and unavoidable element of his own fiction. His work depends on his internal articulation of his own being to himself.
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