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The Postmodern Elements in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano

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The Postmodern Elements in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano INFOKARA RESEARCH ISSN NO: 1021-9056 The Postmodern Elements in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano Author G.Sucithra, Ph. D Research Scholar, PG & Research Department of English, A.V.V.M Sri Pushpam College, (Autonomous), Poondi, Thanjavur-613503, Affiliated to Bharathidasan University, Tamil Nadu, India. E-mail: [email protected] Co-author Dr. R. Shanthi, Head & Associate Professor of English, PG & Research Department of English, A.V.V.M Sri Pushpam College, (Autonomous), Poondi, Thanjavur-613503, Affiliated to Bharathidasan University, Tamil Nadu, India. E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Postmodernism is a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, and technology. It can be associated with the power shifts and dehumanization of the post-Second World War era and the onslaught of consumer capitalism. It considers fragmentation and decent redness as the only possible way of existence, and does not try to escape from these conditions. Having deconstructed the possibility of an unwavering, eternal reality, Postmodernism revolutionized and revitalized the concept of language. In fact, it won’t be exaggeration to say that it has revolutionized all realms of intellectual inquiry in varying degrees. Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007) is one of the finest exponents of the weirdly disjointed Postmodern American experience. A master at using humour to confront and diffuse the fundamental questions concerning human predicament, Vonnegut compressed without compromising, and made subtle use of history to aid and abet his literary ventures, without ever letting it to stifle his narrative. Vonnegut's Player Piano censures 1950s American culture of motorization and commercialization that controlled human personality through promoting industry and data and correspondence advances that developed after WWII. This paper is mainly focuses on how the postmodern features articulated in select novel of Vonnegut. Key Words: Postmodernism, Fragmentation, Exaggeration, Motorization, Capitalism. Volume 8 Issue 11 2019 1232 http://infokara.com/ INFOKARA RESEARCH ISSN NO: 1021-9056 The Postmodern Elements in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano -G. Sucithra & Dr. R. Shanthi Kurt Vonnegut never shied away from scoffing at received knowledge. As Lev Grossman observes, “reading his work for the first time gives one the sense that everything else is rank hypocrisy… even at his most despairing he had an endless willingness to entertain his readers: with drawings, jokes, sex, bizarre plot twists, science fiction, whatever it took” (Time). He portrays himself as opposed to the melodic excellence of some of the more topographically esteemed authors. He reminiscences in his typical sardonically straight-forward style: “I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin and employs a vocabulary as unornamented as a monkey wrench”. Vonnegut focuses a lot of his work around three general ideas: Pacifism, social uniformity and the requirement for basic goodness. Moreover, Kurt Vonnegut is recognized as a noteworthy voice in American writing and hailed for his bold reactions and sharp depiction of present day society. Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952) delineates individuals who move towards becoming dominated to a controlling arrangement of artificial intelligence that improves its capacity through PC, buyer culture, and promoting industry in after war America. Player Piano through the possibility of artificial intelligence decreases people into keen machines and careless bodies. It establishes a push to understand ground-breaking frameworks through the illustrations of the machine. It is a battle to outline a deterministic behavior of the universe that leaves human with no decision. It investigates the robotic condition of 1950s America that controls individuals through joblessness, publicizing industry, and purchaser culture. In his enlightening article “Sensational Implications”, Donald Morse succinctly expresses this precise fact. He says, “In Player Piano … this issue of the right role of machines and their right relation to people illustrates the difficulty American society has often shown in identifying clearly right means to achieve good ends” (Bloom, 36). Truly, when people quit questioning the conditions, and overlooked the criticalness of reasoning, they have opened themselves up for outside control. Paul Proteus, the protagonist, legitimizes the condition for himself: “Objectively, Paul tried to tell himself, things really were Volume 8 Issue 11 2019 1233 http://infokara.com/ INFOKARA RESEARCH ISSN NO: 1021-9056 better than ever. For once, after the great bloodbath of the war, the world really was cleared of unnatural terrors - mass starvation, mass imprisonment, mass torture, mass murder” (6-7). Paul thinks, “Objectively, know-how and world law were getting their awaited- long chance to turn earth into an altogether pleasant and convenient place in which to sweat out Judgment Day” (7). Human's innovation of machine made a mechanized world very bereft of any significant life. Paul himself, the most essential architect in Ilium, invested his energy in the workplace perusing experience fiction and here and there checking the switchboard to make sure that the manufacturing plant was functioning admirably. Any indication of genuine work was eliminated from the general public, and the human was doomed to live in a robotized society that endeavors to induce the out of date bodies to buy increasingly mass-items. Vonnegut's Player Piano outlines a post-war America where machines have supplanted practically all human work and a focal Personal Computer settles on every one of the choices. As indicated by Donald Morse, “in Player Piano, the world, having passed through the First Revolution where machines took over manual labor, and the Second Revolution where machines took over all human routine work, is now about to undergo a Third Revolution where machines will do all the thinking” (304). Morse says, “Player Piano as a mid-century anti-utopia, illustrates, albeit negatively, the right role of technology and machinery within the goals and values of human civilisation while at the same time arguing passionately for the sacredness of human beings” (Bloom, 36-37). As, Paul Proteus, states “the First Industrial revolution devalued muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental work” (14). He proceeds further: In a way, I guess the third one’s been going on for some time, if you mean thinking machines. That would be the third revolution, I guess - machines that devaluate human thinking. Some of the big computers like EPICAC do that all right, in specialized fields (14). By the third upheaval, Vonnegut alludes to and cautions about artificial intelligence as an arrangement of mind control. Player Piano makes an immediate reference to Norbert Wiener, the dad of robotics. Paul Proteus, asserts thus: “Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, said all that way back in the nineteen-forties. It’s fresh to you because you’re too young to know anything Volume 8 Issue 11 2019 1234 http://infokara.com/ INFOKARA RESEARCH ISSN NO: 1021-9056 but the way things are now” (14). Vonnegut thus clearly shows that the United States of America of the 1950s is too youthful even to think of understanding the innovative changes. Robotics influences human brain to control his/her conduct. Vonnegut disapproves of a computerized situation in which “people stuck in one place all day, just using their senses, then a reflex, suing their senses, then a reflex, and not really thinking at all” (14). He sees that in the third revolution people will be replaced by “thinking machines” that “devaluate human thinking” (15). Indeed, Vonnegut cautions us about a third upheaval wherein machines will think, choose and control all parts of our life. Player Piano revolves around a planned society where “production, consumption and profit” are the watchwords (Morse 304). In this general public everything is chosen by Personal Computers, accordingly proficiency and creation are amplified, in any case with the impacts this procedure may have on mankind and individual satisfaction. For Peter Freese, “Player Piano is the first prophetic depiction of tyranny by computer in American literature, which in 1952 was a highly speculative anticipation of coming developments but assumes a surprising topicality in our computer-governed times” (90). After war, American culture of Player Piano accepts people to appreciate the merchandise offered by machine generation. At that point they can satisfy their idealistic wants of bliss and success. However, actually, individuals are disappointed, disillusioned, and uprooted with sentiments of datedness out. Individuals have overlooked the dynamic capacity of their bodies and lost their mind limits, since they turn out to be much uninvolved personalities noteworthy for the buyer culture and mechanized society that needs them for more utilization. Vonnegut censures the computerized society which provisions “the methods for arranging social presence as indicated by conceptual rules that can be spoken to as information and converted into unmistakable items for open utilization" (Cavallaro 19). After war society of Player Piano is extremely youthful to recollect life before the machines. The general population “couldn’t remember when things had been different, could hardly make sense of what had been, though
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