Kurt Vonnegut was a writer engaged in the business of time. He was fascinated with humans’ harnessing of the natural world and their resulting alienation. He wrote stories entrenched in waves of political consciousness, telling tales of world destruction by an incidental afterthought as simple, at times, as the pushing of a button that could unleash the atom bomb.
Now he is dead. But as he writes in the preface to Welcome to the Monkey House, “Vonnegut is still very much with us.”
The book that brought him mainstream recognition, Slaughterhouse Five, tells the story of war. The short story Welcome To The Monkey House depicts a dreary world order buckling under the pressure of over-population. Cat’s Cradle chronicles the self-inflicted doom of humans by environmental devastation. Apparently not much has changed.
If Vonnegut’s big claim to fame had been that he wrote a book about World War II, and maybe a few about the way humans are destroying the world, he probably would have vanished long ago. There is no war more glorified, commodified and recounted in twentieth century mass media consciousness than World War II.
But he did not just tell the story of war, or of the bombing of Dresden. It is the time travel and alternate universes interspersed with the stories of his own time in Germany that makes the book different. In a short story, to respond to chronic over-population, he invents federally sanctioned suicide parlors, where every visitor is entitled to a last meal from Howard Johnson. In another, there is a handicap general that enforces mandatory physical and mental handicaps to ensure absolute equality. But these fantastical, though gloomy, science fictions cannot be simply laughed at and written off.
Humans birthed the atom bomb, set off numerous successful test explosions and then dropped two on many, many people. This is the ultimate science fiction scenario brought to life and lived in history. Humans used fire. And Vonnegut used ice. When scientists set off that first bomb, no one knew what the effects would be exactly, or if it would launch some irreversible chain reaction that would herald our judgment day. It did not. The world went on.
Vonnegut holds up a cracked mirror for humanity to look at itself. In this contorted reflection, we are not so lucky: the irreversible chain reaction has in fact been set off. That’s it, we close the book and the world is over. But no matter how big the explosion or the casualty count, the chaos he creates, or rather reflects, never evoke more than a simple “so it goes.”
Some may read this as nihilism. It might be. But it could also be Vonnegut cultivating the art of detached resignation with a Zen-like acceptance of the fictional world he creates, in all its warped forms.
It could also be a call to action. He has already shown us the worst-case scenario. It is up to the world to ensure it doesn’t happen outside the pages of a book.
