Kilgore Trout was here by Stefan Beck

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In the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil sang of "arms and a man" (Arma virumque cano). Month in and month out, The New Criterion expounds with great clarity and wit on the art, culture, and political controversies of our times. With postings of reviews, essays, links, recs, and news, Armavirumque seeks to continue this mission in accordance with the timetable of the digital age.

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Apr 12, 2007 09:52 AM

Kilgore Trout was here

by Stefan Beck

Surely I’m not alone in having spent much of middle and high school reading Kurt Vonnegut and then much of college sneering at anyone gullible enough to read him. If Vonnegut’s novels are anything, they’re easily outgrown, but what is easily outgrown is very often a perfect place to start. I owe a lot to those books, for one thing the ability to see their influence on some of today’s worst writing. Take this passage from Vonnegut’s famous Slaughterhouse-Five:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

Now let’s have that again, in instant replay:

When I flipped through them [pictures of a man falling from the World Trade Center —ed.], it looked like the man was floating up through the sky.

And if I’d had more pictures, he would’ve flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would’ve poured into a hole that the plane was about to come out of . . . .

We would have been safe.

That spectacularly bad second bit isn’t from some late-career Vonnegut but rather from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Is it homage or theft? Does it even matter? The side-by-side sums up the sad fact about Vonnegut’s work: For all its seemingly biting satire, it was cocked at pretty safe targets and in the end was firing rubber bullets at them, anyway.

That’s the sad fact, but it isn’t the only fact. Another is that, for better or worse, Vonnegut knew and meant the simple things he wrote. He knew that war is hell because he’d witnessed it firsthand; he told his readers that war is hell because it’s worth repeating. He used humor (though it was sometimes merely cheek or non sequitur) because he grasped absurdity. He wrote a lot, over a dozen novels, because he enjoyed it—that much couldn’t possibly be clearer. His novels may not have been great literature, but they were the work of an original talent.

But how many young authors today seem to write not because they want to, not because they have much to say, but because they want to be seen as a Kurt Vonnegut, an elder statesman of zany profundity? Of course, left with wide-eyed naÃ¯fs like Foer and Friends, we’ll probably start to miss Vonnegut’s fatalism, if nothing else.

Mr. Vonnegut is dead at 84. Read his obituary here.