Weeks 4–5: Cat's Cradle

After jumping forward almost a decade between Player Piano and Mother Night our next book comes just two years later. Cat's Cradle was the first novel to bring Kurt Vonnegut to the attention of wider audiences (even though it would take several years to achieve that popularity). Graham Greene would hail the book as "one of the three best novels of the year by one of the most able living writers," and Vonnegut himself, in a 2000 interview with the Harvard Crimson, named the book as his "flagship."

I've already discussed Vonnegut's disdain for his work being labeled as science fiction (note the prominently placed label on the book cover to the right), and as was the case with Player Piano, this is by no means a tired exercise in that genre, but rather a book that's firmly rooted in the realm of science, which it uses as a satirical weapon against contemporary society. Likewise, it was largely inspired by the author's time as a GE public relations agent in Schenectady, NY (which again returns as the fictional city of Ilium), where scientists were hired to do "pure research" — i.e. to work on whatever pet projects might interest them — and Vonnegut's job was to interview them in search of human interest stories. One scientist in particular, Nobel Prize-winner Irving Langmuir, who worked alongside Bernard Vonnegut on a groundbreaking cloud-seeding project and would serve as the foundation of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, who sets the novel's action in motion. In fact, ice-nine, the dangerous substance at the heart of the novel, was a fabulation of Langmuir's, devised to entertain visiting science fiction author H.G. Wells in the early 30s.  Charles Shields gives us the details:

Cat's Cradle appeared in 1963, after a long gestation, but the idea for it had occurred to Kurt as far back as his days at General Electric. A story often repeated at the Schenectady plant concerned H. G. Wells's visit in the 1930s. The head scientist, Irving Langmuir, had proposed an idea to Wells for a story about a form of water that solidified at room temperature. Wells, the most famous science fiction writer of the day, expressed interest, but his novels, at their core, were parables about humanity — a scientific conundrum didn’t interest him. 

Kurt, on the other hand, was intrigued by Langmuir's suggestion. Taking the concept a step further, he asked: what if water, the most common liquid on the planet, could be weaponized, the way that matter torn apart by nuclear fission had created the atomic bomb? At a party of mostly General Electric scientists and their wives one evening, Vonnegut described his idea to a crystallographer, explaining that humanity, in his story, would be threatened by water becoming stable like ice at room temperature. The scientist nodded and went over to a chair. He sat there, ignoring the talk and laughter, just thinking. Finally, as things were winding down, he returned and said, "No. There could be no such ice." 

Vonnegut might have put the idea aside except that his brother Bernard's cloud seeding experiments at General Electric convinced him that weather modification raised ethical issues more important than how water actually crystallizes. In 1952, the Cape Cod Standard-Times had interviewed Kurt about his next novel after Player Piano. "'Actually,' Mr. Vonnegut said in a worried tone, 'the atmosphere can be fouled up by anybody with an oil burner pointing at the right kind of cloud.' The situation is so explosive that he believes restrictive legislation is needed everywhere right now.'"

Again, much like Player Piano, we see faith as a driving force in Cat's Cradle, here taking the form of Bokononism, through which Vonnegut is able to trace the role of religion in society and the balance between church and state. However, while Vonnegut was an avowed atheist / humanist / freethinker, his views towards religion — as well as towards other folk social groups (cf. the various lodges [the Moose, the Parmesans, etc.] as well as the Meadows teams and the Ghosts Shirt Society in Player Piano; the concept of nationalism and particularly Nazi ideology in Mother Night) were quite sympathetic, honed by his (incomplete) graduate studies in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. While his first thesis (on the correlation between Cubist painting and Native American uprisings) was turned down Vonnegut eventually convinced (or publicly shamed) the University to accept Cat's Cradle in lieu of a formal thesis and granted him his degree. In particular, the interplay between faith and technology (especially the apocalyptic power of technology in the atomic era) — along with its influence on questions of predestination and free will — are worth keeping an eye on here.

Here's the reading schedule for the novel:

• Thurs. February 4: Ch. 1, "The Day the World Ended," to Ch. 37, "A Modern Major General"
• Tues. February 9: Ch. 38, "Barracuda Capital of the World" to Ch. 101, "Like My Predecessors, I Outlaw Bokononism"
• Thurs. February 11: Ch. 102, "Enemies of Freedom" to Ch. 127, "The End"

And here are a few supplemental links for this week:

• Wikipedia page on Bokononism (includes a glossary): [link]
• The Books of Bokonon: [link]
• author and screenwriter Terry Southern reviews Cat's Cradle in The New York Times: [link] 
• Benjamin Kunkel's 2008 appreciation of the novel in The Guardian: [link]
• Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (Opinions) (1974), Vonnegut's first volume of collected nonfiction pieces, takes its name from three Bokononist key terms: [link]

Weeks 3–4: Mother Night

Vonnegut's third novel, Mother Night, first published in 1961, is an orphaned work of sorts. As Doris Lessing notes in her 1973 New York Times review of the book, noting that it's "the Vonnegut book that has not been reviewed anywhere, ever, because it was sold first into paperback for a handy sum: he needed the money for his large family. And paperbacks don't get reviewed, so it has been ordained." Beyond that, as The Nation points out, "The book is anomalous in Vonnegut's oeuvre, his only novel not to feature elements of the fantastic, and in that sense and others — its sober tone, its attempt to depict mature love — his most adult."

Charles Shields gives us the basic setup for the novel: 

The protagonist is Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American imprisoned in Tel Aviv, accused of having aided the Nazis. Vonnegut imagined him as someone like William Joyce, the Irishman nicknamed "Lord Haw Haw" who broadcast during the war from Berlin. Kurt had listened to him while stationed in England, wondering what could motivate a turncoat. The other inspiration was the phony Red Cross worker in Dresden who tried to recruit POWs for combat on the Russian front by promising better food and clothing. Perhaps, Vonnegut imagined, he wasn't a German actor with an impeccable English accent, but an American engaged in a complicated double cross.

The book is framed as Campbell's autobiography, for which Vonnegut has served as editor. A latter edition, which contains a separate introductory note penned in 1966, offers some new insights to frame the book's contents: "This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Recall these lines when we get to Slaughterhouse-Five, where they'll be echoed in his discussion of the long and arduous process of coming to terms with his experiences in WWII (n.b. Campbell makes an appearance as well). Still, it would take Vonnegut another eight years to reach that point. In Mother Night, we see his first book-length effort to work through his personal history and the nation's as well.

Here's our reading schedule for Mother Night:

• Tues. January 26: introduction, editor's note, chapters 1–19
• Thurs. January 28: chapters 20–29
• Tues. February 2: chapters 30–45

And here are a few supplemental resources:

• "The Guest Word" — Doris Lessing's NYT review of Mother Night: [link]
• a brief essay on the novel at Alphabet Rain: [link]
• Wikipedia entry on Lord Haw-Haw: [link]
• the trailer for a 1996 film adaptation of the book: [link]

Weeks 1–2: Player Piano

Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, was first published by Charles Scribners and Sons in 1952, only two years after he first started placing stories in "slicks" — popular weekly magazines that catered to large audiences and provided writers with ample and lucrative opportunities to see their stories in print. This early financial success provided the motivation Vonnegut needed to quit his public relations job at General Electric in Schenectady, NY and move to Cape Cod to pursue writing full-time, however the periodical market dried up not long thereafter. Here's Vonnegut's own description of that time period, from the preface to Bagombo Snuff Box:

There was a crazy seller’s market for short stories in 1950. There were four weekly magazines that published three or more things in every issue. Six monthlies did the same.

I got me an agent. If I sent him a story that didn’t quite work, wouldn’t quite satisfy a reader, he would tell me how to fix it. Agents and editors back then could tell a writer how to fine-tune a story as though they were pit mechanics and the story were a race car. With help like that, I sold one, and then two, and then three stories, and banked more money than a year’s salary at GE.

I quit GE and started my first novel, Player Piano. It is a lampoon on GE. I bit the hand that used to feed me. The book predicted what has indeed come to pass, a day when machines, because they are so dependable and efficient and tireless, and getting cheaper all the time, are taking the halfway decent jobs from human beings. [...]

But three years after I left Schenectady, advertisers started withdrawing their money from magazines. [...] One monthly that had brought several of my stories, Cosmopolitan, now survives as a harrowingly explicit sex manual.

Vonnegut in 1952.

Player Piano revisits themes that should be familiar after today's readings, namely, as the cover copy reads, "America in the Coming Age of Electronics," and just as importantly, the place of humans within this technocratic society, and aside from general nuclear anxieties, much of Vonnegut's interest in rapidly-advancing technology was born of his experience at GE, as filtered through a mild sibling rivalry with his pragmatic brother, Bernard, a star scientist for the organization who, among other achievements, discovered a process for cloud seeding. The humanist vs. scientist dynamic was an active one in the Vonnegut family — for example, influenced by Bernard's analytic nature, Vonnegut's father would force him to major in chemistry at Cornell, turning down a dream job in journalism. Likewise, there's an interesting analogue in Vonnegut's longtime association with the science-fiction genre — something he disdained as an attempt to marginalize his writing and diminish the sharpness of his social commentary.  Writing on the topic in The New York Times in 1965, he observes:

Years ago I was working in Schenectady for General Electric, completely surrounded by machines and ideas for machines, so I wrote a novel about people and machines, and machines frequently got the best of it, as machines will. (It was called Player Piano, and it's coming out in hard covers again next spring.) And I learned from the reviewers that I was a science-fiction writer.

I didn't know that. I supposed that I was writing a novel about life, about things I could not avoid seeing and hearing in Schenectady, a very real town, awkwardly set in the gruesome now. I have been a sore-headed occupant of a file-drawer labeled ''science- fiction'' ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a tall white fixture in a comfort station. 

The way a person gets into this drawer, apparently, is to notice technology. The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city.

If you're wondering what Utopia 14 is, by the way, it was Bantam's 1954 attempt to cash in on the popularity of science fiction pulp novels, rebranding Player Piano to appeal to that market (note the futuristic city/machine/spaceship thingy[?], the alien-like creatures, the unforgiving landscape, the enigmatic hero). Vonnegut was justifiably angered by this, however the book wasn't republished under its original title until 1966, after the success of Cat's Cradle.

General Electric would also greatly influence Cat's Cradle, in which Dr. Felix Hoenikker was based on Nobel Prize-winner Irving Langmuir (one of Bernard's colleagues), and while GE is proud to acknowledge that (scroll down), they aren't as eager to own up to the more critical depiction in Player Piano.

Here's our reading schedule for the week:

• Thurs. January 14: chapters 1–7
• Tues. January 19: chapters 8–24
• Thurs. January 21: chapters 25–35

and here are a few supplemental links:

• Granville Hicks' New York Times review of Player Piano: [link]
• "The Invention of Kurt Vonnegut" — a discussion of the author's time at GE: [link]
• Vonnegut on science fiction, GE and Player Piano (from a 1973 Playboy interview): [link]
• Vonnegut on Player Piano, "technology and cheesy little religions" (from a 1973 interview with Robert Scholes): [link]
• Wikipedia entry on ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose computer, developed at the University of Pennsylvania in 1947 (and most likely a real-world analogue for EPICAC): [link]

Getting Started

In anticipation for our next class I'd like you to acquaint yourself with a few resources in our right-hand sidebar: the Vonnegut's Rules for Writing page and the Characteristics of Postmodern Literature page. We'll also make good use of our time today by watching the start of So It Goes, a 1983 episode of the British documentary series Arena focusing on Vonnegut. Please feel free to watch the remaining segments we won't have time for in class when you have the time.

(note: the last two videos in the playlist aren't part of the documentary)

Welcome to Our Class

We'll spend ten weeks exploring the life and works of Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) — one of postwar America's most unique literary talents — from his early years writing for sci-fi and popular magazine audiences through his postmodern masterpieces, to a late career marked by hybrid humanistic forms. Our readings will include classic novels (Slaughterhouse-Five, Mother Night, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Cat's Cradle) along with lesser-known treasures (Jailbird, Galapagos, Deadeye Dick).

Most of the information you'll need for this course is contained in the toolbar to the right, including our reading schedule, book list, class policies and some useful information on postmodern literature, constructing effective arguments and a crash course in MLA style. You'll also want to join our Facebook group as soon as possible — announcements and supplemental materials will be shared through there as well, and it will hopefully be a nexus of fruitful discourse outside of class.