Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano

“Don't you see, Doctor?" said Lasher. "The machines are to practically everbody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don't apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.” 

I finally finished Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano. It is far more conventional than Vonnegut's later works, and lacking some of his characteristic writing. It does, however, have an influence on his later novels through the fictional city of Ilium, New York. Vonnegut also explores similar themes regarding technology, war, religion, and human nature through satire and absurdity in this fully automated society, dominated by engineers and managers. 

While the premise of the plot is quite common in dystopic science fiction (Player Piano reminds me of Brave New World), Vonnegut's future America is still relevant to our present and stands out because of some of his nascent penchant for subplots and dark humor. The chapters about the visiting Shah and Halyward were particularly amusing, since readers are allowed to see the horrors of American society automated and ruled by engineers. Indeed, these chapters were the most reminiscent of Vonnegut's future novels.

Those expecting some of the out there Vonnegut might be disappointed, but Player Piano features many of the same ideas, places, and themes pervasive in his work. Where it was weaker, in my opinion, is in the length of the story, which I think could be whittled down. Nevertheless, once halfway through the novel, things pick up and I could not help but think of his later novels, The Sirens of Titan, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Cat's Cradle, which explore similar themes regarding technology, war, religion, and America's class system. 

Player Piano is a complex, nuanced novel, one cannot help but think Vonnegut's ultimate aim here is to defend a 'middle way' between being fully dependent on machines and ensuring human life has purpose, or work to provide meaning to life. Also reflecting on the meaning of human existence, Vonnegut pursues this theme more impressively in Sirens of Titan.

The Sirens of Titan

"If the questions don't make sense, neither will the answers."

Vonneget's The Sirens of Titan is the first Vonnegut novel I ever read. I read it for a high school science fiction course several years ago and, at the time, did not care for Vonnegut. I was perhaps too young and put off by the dense, philosophical debates contained in the novel. All I recall from the high school period was the plot and how confused this novel left me. It was also my first and only Vonnegut novel until last month, so I was unaccustomed and unfamiliar with Vonnegut's style, humor, and themes.

Now, after returning to The Sirens of Titan multiple years later, I have a greater appreciation for this novel, which is far more entrenched in the genre of science fiction than other works of Vonnegut. Vonnegut manages to comment on human existence, the purpose of said existence, religion, science, free will, family, and war. These aforementioned themes appear in several of Vonnegut's works. War, for example, in the inevitably doomed Martian invasion plotted by Rumfoord, was ultimately planned at great profits and sacrifice to bring about a "Brotherhood of Man." Organized religion, military conflict, exploitation of others, our favorite aliens (Tralfamadorians, machines from another galaxy), and just about anything you might expect Vonnegut to satirize humorously happens here.

Ultimately, my take on the novel is one of a compatibilist understanding of human existence and the purpose of life. There is more than one purpose of life hinted at by the text, and even when one accepts the proposition that all of human history on Earth has been orchestrated by Tralfamadorians and, more recently, Winston Niles Rumfoord (himself also a 'tool' being used by somebody), there is still highly personalized ways in which humans carry out their 'fate.' There seems to be a willingness on the part of Vonnegut to allow for more than one meaning of life, and even the Tralfamadorian machines were created by someone else, and, in the case of Salo, achieve human-like qualities of a highly personalized way of completing their destiny. Perhaps that is the arguably the main thrust of the work, that there may be some sort of God or Creator, someone who likes us above, but we still have agency in this world, regardless of the various religions we create to explain the why of our existence.

Below are some of my favorite quotations from the text, particularly those pertaining to the purpose of life.

"The moral: Money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent aren't everything."

"All persons, places, and events in this book are real. Certain speeches and thoughts are necessarily constructions by the author. No names have been changed to protect the innocent, since God Almighty protects the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine."

"These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth--a nightmare of meaningless without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death."

"If Rumfoord accused the Martians of breeding people as though people were no better than farm animals, he was accusing the Martians of doing no more than his own class had done. The strength of his class depended to some extent on sound money management--but depended to a much larger extent on marriages based cynically on the sorts of children likely to be produced."

"At the hospital they had said the most important rule of all was this one: Always obey a direct order without a moment's hesitation."

"When I ran my space ship into the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, it came to me in a flash that everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been."

"It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free. It had made him his own hero in very trying times."

"His ship was powered, and the Martian war effort was powered, by a phenomenon known as UWTB, or the Universal Will to Become. UWTB is what makes universes out of nothingness,--that makes nothingness insist on becoming somethingness."

"But Boaz had decided that he needed a buddy far more than he needed a means of making people do exactly what he wanted them to do. During the night, he had become very unsure of what he wanted people to do, anyway."

"I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all."

"The concessionaires knew all to well about Rumfoord's penchant for realism. When Rumfoord staged a passion play,  he used nothing but real people in real hells.

"As a machine, he had to do what he was supposed to do."

"The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody," she said, "would be to not be used for anything by anybody."

 "It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

Breakfast of Champions

"I am going to make a wild guess now: I think that the end of the Civil War in my country frustrated the white people in the North, who won it, in a way which has never been acknowledged before. Their descendants inherited that frustration, I think, without ever knowing what it was. The victors in that war were cheated out of the most desirable spoils of that war, which were human slaves."

Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions is a postmodern metafictional narrative in which Vonnegut becomes a character, breaking the fourth wall. Again, intertextuality within the world he constructs in his novels continues here, as Midland City, Ohio is also the setting of Deadeye Dick and characters from other novels appear in this book, such as Kilgore Trout, the science fiction writer. Besides connections with his other novels, all of the characters in Breakfast of Champions are connected in interesting ways by name, family history, past sins (which cast long shadows), race, and the horrific society surrounding the robots. In addition to satirizing just about everything and writing in a characteristically succinct, humorous, and brief style with excessive symbols and non sequiturs. Like in his many other novels, his anti-war stance, disdain for racism and the class system, and interest in science fiction motivate much of the work. His own mother's suicide, his childhood with a black domestic who raised him, as well as his experiences in WWII shape this novel in many ways. 

Although not science fiction, by using the fictional science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut is able to explore other worlds, human existence, and the senselessness of the world through those lens. He alludes to Trout's numerous writings, writes against conventional notions of the novel, breathes life into everyday objects and people, and manages to somehow capture the absurd state of race relations in the novel as it relates to technology, history, gender, and class relations. Vonnegut satirizes war, capitalism, greed, corporate responsibility, white supremacy, sexism, the notion of free will, religion, slavery, and even colonialism. Indeed, one can see where his interest in Haiti could arise from his anti-racist, anti-colonial sentiments as expressed in this work.

Below are some of my favorite quotations from the text. Enjoy!

"The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them."

'Kilgore Trout became a pioneer in the field of mental health. He advanced his theories disguised as science-fiction. He died in 1981, almost twenty years after he made Dwayne Hoover so sick."

"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane."

"Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind."

"Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express enmity."

"His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of the world's greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty."

"The black people would not put up with this. They went on talking English every which way. They refused to read books they couldn't understand--on the grounds they couldn't understand them. They would ask such impudent questions as, "Whuffo I want to read no "Tale of Two Cities? Whuffo?"

"It didn't matter much what Dwayne said. It hadn't mattered much for years. It didn't matter much what most people in Midland City said out loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or travel or machinery--or other measurable things. Every person had a clearly defined part to play--as a black person, a female high school drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway."

"He was a graduate of West Point, a military academy which turned young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war."

"The reindeer problem was essentially this: Nobody white had much use for black people anymore--except for the gangsters who sold the black people used cars and dope and furniture. Still, the reindeer went on reproducing. There were these useless, big black animals everywhere, and a lot of them had very bad dispositions. They were given small amounts of money every month, so they wouldn't have to steal. There was talk of giving them very cheap dope, too--to keep them listless and cheerful, and uninterested in reproduction."

"The nickname for Bunny's neighborhood was Skid Row. Every American town of any size had a neighborhood with the same nickname: Skid Row. It was a place where people who didn't have any friends or relatives or property or usefulness or ambition were supposed to go."

"I put the most decorated veteran in Midland City on the other end. He had a penis eight hundred miles long and two hundred and ten miles in diameter, but practically all of it was in the fourth dimension. He got his medals in the war in Viet Nam. He had also fought yellow robots who ran on rice."

"Like everybody else in the cocktail lounge, he was softening his brain with alcohol. This was a substance produced by a tiny creature called yeast. Yeast organisms ate sugar and excreted alcohol. They killed themselves by destroying their own environment with yeast shit."

"It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done."

"And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books."

"As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badley, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe."

"Barrytron would be absolutely sick when it learned what a polluter it had become. Throughout its history, it had attempted to be a perfect model of corporate good citizenship, no matter what it cost."

"Dwayne Hoover's stepmother wasn't the only white woman who was a terrible sport about doing work like that. My own mother was that way, too, and so was my sister, may she rest in peace. They both flatly refused to do Nigger work.

The white men wouldn't do it either, of course. They called it women's work, and women called it Nigger work."

"It seems to me that really truthful American novels would have the heroes and heroines alike looking for mothers instead. This needn't be embarrassing. It's simply true. A mother is much more useful. I wouldn't feel particularly good if I found another father. Neither would Dwayne Hoover. Neither Would Kilgore Trout."

"Here was why there were so many foreign doctors on the hospital staff, incidentally: The country didn't produce nearly enough doctors for all the sick people it had, but it had an awful lot of money. So it bought doctors from other countries which didn't have much money."

"Both men, incidentally, were descendants of the Emperor Charlemagne. Anybody with any European blood in him was a descendant of the Emperor Charlemagne."

Slaughterhouse Five

"So it goes."

After meeting a German a few years ago whose family survived Dresden, Slaughterhouse Five has been on my list of novels to read for quite some time. This person's great-grandfather and grandparent witnessed the firebombing of Dresden, experienced the senselessness, and destruction as an entire city was reduced to ashes. They had lost family like so many. In addition, the metafictional aspects of the story remind me of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, one of my favorite books.

Vonnegut inserting himself into the story, the intertextuality with specific characters, books, alien races, photographs, and themes in his body of work is an impressive example of his ability to weave together people and themes in elaborate worlds. This is certainly one of the most interesting and creative works to tackle WWII, really all wars, in its grotesque, brutality. If any story merits the use of science fiction, certainly a bit of fantasy and freedom are required. Undoubtedly, the comparison to the Children's Crusade was warranted.

Like Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Deadeye Dick, there are similar themes about human existence and war. But Slaughterhouse Five, like Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, takes it up a notch: Vonnegut uses pictures within the text as well as an overarching metanarrative with himself as narrator. Anyway, below are some of my favorite quotes that highlight the novel's themes, its black humor, and general darkness.

"Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn't a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn't know that, either. There hadn't been much publicity."

"The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought."

"So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thoughts wars were partly encouraged by books and movies."

"People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore."

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."

"He had a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony. He had made Billy Pilgrim admire that picture several times." 

"The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State."

"Rosewater was twice as smart as BIlly, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes."

"So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help."

"That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book."

"Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. Once this is understood, the disagreeable behavior of American enlisted men in German prisons ceases to be a mystery."

"Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease."

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

"Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun."

Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater remains as relevant today on the question of class relations. Through his satirical look at the American elite, such as the Rosewaters and their ilk in Rhoe Island, one is reminded of the class war rhetoric and anti-poor beliefs of the Mitt Romneys of the world. Or even the way conservatives and even some moderate Democrats disparage the less fortunate, espouse the 'free enterprise,' or defend corporations. Taking it to absurd levels for the purpose of satire, Vonnegut even has the poor thanking the wealthy for the ocean, the moon. 

If this book was relevant to the changing times of the 1960s, an age of civil rights activism, sexual liberation, Cold War fears, cultural and ideological warfare, not much has changed in US discourse regarding poverty. We still blame the poor for their condition, while praising the 1 percent, defending capitalism, and refusing to dismantle the ways in which we have created 'excess' or 'useless' people trapped in poverty. Perhaps we can learn something from Eliot Rosewater after all on uncritical love and kindness toward others? 

More amazingly, Vonnegut's world is full of intertextuality. He alludes to characters, themes, pictures (the woman and the Shetland pony), and similar themes throughout his oeuvre, particularly on human nature, the meaning of existence, and man's inhumanity to man. Though not science fiction, this novel valiantly defends both the literary merit and universal message of science fiction as a concern for the future of humanity. In this case, it seems like a socialist message, but one that can be construed as Christian or religious too, though Vonnegut warns us not to construe any coincidental parallels. Like Deadeye Dick, the question of identity and roots is omnipresent here. Several characters, whether Rosewaters or not, are influenced by their roots or family tree in interesting ways that intersect with ironic or humorous consequences. 

Ultimately, both liberals, or leftists, and conservatives misunderstand the wretched of the earth, who, in this novel, are centered on the poor of Rosewater County, Indiana, who are romanticized by Eliot and criminalized by Eliot's father, Senator Rosewater. Nonetheless, here are some favorited quotations from the text highlighting the main themes:

"And he was witless enough, too, to imagine that Trout's books were very dirty books, since they were sold for such high prices to such queer people in such a place. He didn't understand that what Trout had in common with pornography wasn't sex but fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world."

 "I'm going to love these discarded Americans, even though they're useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art.

"The therapist, after a deeply upsetting investigation of normality at this time and place, was bound to conclude that a normal person, functioning well on the upper levels of a prosperous, industrialized society, can hardly hear his conscience at all."

"He would argue that the people he was trying to help were the same sorts of people who, in generations past, had cleared the forests, drained the swamps, built the bridges, people whose sons formed the backbone of the infantry in time of war--and so on. The people who leaned on Eliot regularly were a lot weaker than that--and dumber, too. When it came time for their sons to go into the Armed Forces, for instance, the sons were generally rejected as being mentally, morally, and physically undesirable."

"God damn it, you've got to be kind."

"Lila Buntline pedalled her bicycle through the muffled beauty of Pisquontuit's Utopian lanes. Every house she passed was a very expensive dream come true. The owners of the houses did not have to work at all. Neither would their children have to work, nor want for a thing, unless somebody revolted. Nobody seemed about to."

"I have since thanked her for the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution."

Haiti in Cat's Cradle

"Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea of what's really going on."

Kurt Vonnegut's Cat Cradle is one of his satirical novels partly influenced by Haiti. Set in the fictional Caribbean republic of San Lorenzo, the island's dictator is "Papa" Monzano (named after Papa Doc Duvalier). "Papa" Monzano lives in castle built by an ex-slave emperor, Tum-bumwa, and the castle has never been attacked, much like Haiti's illustrious Citadel. In addition, the impoverished island where natives speak an English dialect has been the target of various Western powers. Vonnegut even satirizes the US businessmen Crosby whose reason for visiting San Lorenzo is to start a bike manufacturing factory, similar to foreign corporations who go to Haiti as a source of cheap labor. "Papa" Monzano is staunchly anti-Communist, and San Lorenzo even declared war against the Axis powers during WWII, again, like Haiti. Of course, San Lorenzo is perhaps better understood as a conglomeration of the entire Caribbean, but the Haitian influence is perhaps strongest.

"Papa" Monzano, the sickly dictator who, despite publicly criminalizing Bokononism, practices it, has adopted the daughter of a Finnish architect, Mona, the beautiful mulatto. Mona, revered by the people of the island and renowned for her alluring looks, can be seen as an Erzulie symbol of feminine spirituality's highest form who, as she tells the narrator, John, loves everyone in the Bokononist sense of boka-maru. Though Bokonon's religion is, according to himself, lies, one sees in how Mona relates to nearly everyone a genuine sense of love, perhaps inculcated during her youth when Bokonon tutored her and Castle's son.

This Caribbean island's propagator of myth, Bokonon, an old Negro from Tobago, who lives in the jungle, gave meaning to the people of San Lorenzo through religious lies while his friend, McCabe, ruled as a despot organizing the people against Bokonon. Oddly, everyone in the island is a Bokononist, driving the conflict in the novel and the absurdity of religion and science. Instead of finding a way to preach the 'truth' and uplift the impoverished people of San Lorenzo, preaching lies (fomas) through Bokononism has given an epic meaning to the lives of the people. Similarly, science also plays a similar role as "magic" that can also mislead and destroy, as one can see in Felix Hoenikker and his children's use of ice-nine (or the atomic bomb, which Felix helped develop). Human nature, faith, and science are all at fault here in this apolcalyptic world created during the height of the Cold War.

To a certain extent, the religion founded by Bokonon is loosely based on Vodou in Haiti (a stigmatized religion that, at times, was illegal). Of course, Haiti under Duvalier did not penalize practicing Vodou nor did it adopt the anti-Vodou rhetoric employed by "Papa" Monzano. This is about where comparisons between Vodou and Bokononism should end, unless one wishes to comment on religion generally. The Christian priest, Humana, also offers an interesting creolized take on Christianity that is reminiscent of Haitian Vodou, but rejected during the death rites of "Papa" Monzano.

Besides appearing as an important influence in Vonnegut's idea of the apocalypse and end of humanity (which makes sense, for what other region of the world has witnessed so much tragedy and terror as the Caribbean, the first site of genocide in the Americas?), Haiti and the Caribbean as a whole are forerunners in the creation of modernity, where the excesses of capitalism, religion, and science have fueled human suffering on a grand scale.

Deadeye Dick

"Bernard Ketchum, our resident shyster here at the Grand Hotel Oloffson, says that Haitian refugees should follow the precedent set by white people, and simply discover Florida or Virginia or Massachusetts or whatever. They could come ashore, and start converting people to voodooism."

Kurt Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick is an enjoyable satire in which Rudy Waltz and his world in Midland City, Ohio  also includes numerous references to the Cold War, social norms, gender, family, art, and Haiti. In fact, there is a great book review by a Haitianist here. Haitian Vodou, the Hotel Oloffson, and the use of Haiti as a symbol for New York but also as an alternative to Europe and the US figures prominently here. Similarly, the influence of African-Americans is omnipresent in this small Ohio city (segregated, racist, and all the Waltz family servants are black), as well as the source of the 'peephole' analogy for existence Rudy picks up from an African-American woman incarcerated for attacking a racist white man. 

I think Haiti's significance and deeper symbolic meaning beyond standing for New York City is also present in what, at times, read as a critique against American civilization. So, although the novel certainly takes up the notion that life is meaningless, the novel's use of Haiti and the present tense in the Creole (Vonnegut bends truth and fiction in various ways for this novel, and one case involved a claim that Haitian Creole only uses the present tense) suggests that very point, that past and future are tied to the present in the sense of a meaningless existence, but also critical of US hegemony and the violence of whites. Thus, on the issue of race, Vonnegut's progressive views satirize Nazi racial theories, white supremacy, and even play on the farmers's conspiracy theory regarding the neutron bomb as being a plot by the Ku Klux Klan to restore slavery!

All in all, a very interesting and engaging read. Haitian 'voodooism,' conjuring up the ghost of Fairchild, wealthy heiresses, the death of small towns in America, etc. are all part of this exceedingly strange novel that, though haunting at times, is humorous. I intend to read Cat's Cradle tomorrow, which also contains clear evidence of Haitian influences in the Caribbean San Lorenzo headed by a President named "Papa" and the Bokonism which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Haitian boko.