So it goes…

HUM 2052: Civilization IISummer 2010Dr. Perdigao

June 29, 2010

Fiction/RealityNovember 11, 1922: Birthday—anniversary of Armistice Day,

end of world’s most destructive war-born to Kurt Vonnegut and Edith Lieber Vonnegut (mother from prominent family) in Indianapolis, IN; brother Bernard and sister Alice

1929: With stock market crash, family’s standard of living lowered, from mansion to smaller home; KV unable to attend private schools like siblings

1940-1943: Attends Cornell University in Ithaca, NY; father tells him to “study something useful” (he himself is out of work after war); majors in Chemistry and Biology, preparation for career as Biochemist but became involved in university paper Cornell Sun; hospitalized for pneumonia, can’t enter war, enlists in Army

1943-1944: Attends Carnegie Institute of Technology and University of Tennessee as military training, studying mechanical engineering-Before shipping out to England, returns home to find (a day later) that his mother committed suicide (overdose of sleeping pills); reasons are the family’s economic failure, her own inability to sell fiction to popular magazines (as KV later will)

Revisionist History?1943-1944: Further training in artillery and advance infantry scout;

joins 106th infantry division oversees; meets Bernard O’Hare in 106th infantry; -Battle of the Bulge—captured December 19, 1944—interned by Germans as POW, sent to Dresden, southeast Germany, architectural and artistic treasure, “open city” like Paris, free from attack-Works in factory, making vitamin supplements for pregnant women

1945: February 13-14: Dresden is destroyed in air raid by Royal Air Force and US Army Air Force-German casualties between 135,000-250,000 (more than those killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined)-KV survives because quartered in meat locker-corpse miner, cleaning the city-Russian army scares away guards (April)-May 22—KV repatriated to American forces-awarded purple heart-rehabilitation in France, at home—marries childhood sweetheart, moves to Chicago, does graduate work in anthropology at U of Chicago

Back to the beginning1946-1947: Studies anthropology, works part time as reporter for

City News Bureau-leaves Chicago with masters, coursework completed but thesis rejected (study of American Plains Indians’ Ghost Dance Society and Cubist painters [divide between primitive and civilized models: “Fluctuations between Good and Evil in Simple Tales”])-moves to Schenectady, NY—works as publicist for GE’s Research Laboratory (brother Bernard is atmospheric physicist)

1950: First published story in magazine1952: First novel published Player Piano, sells short stories to

popular family magazines1958: brother-in-law dies in train accident, sister Alice (his wife) dies

of cancer less than 48 hours later; KV and wife adopt their three children

1965-1967: 2 year residency at University of Iowa Writers Workshop1967-1968: Guggenheim fellowship allows him to return to Dresden1969: Slaughterhouse-Five; best-seller, #1 on NY Times List

-depression after novel (he vows at one point to never write another novel, concentrates on lecturing, teaching, finishing his play)

1970-1971: Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, awarded MA from University of Chicago for novel Cat’s Cradle for contribution to field of anthropology

Endings1972: film version of Slaughterhouse-Five1973: Breakfast of Champions—Kilgore Trout as famous writer2007: April 11—dies. And so it goes.

Adapting Vonnegut

Revisions• Slaughterhouse-Five

• The Children’s Crusade (15) (said by colonel, 106)

• A Duty-Dance with Death (21): Céline

Framing, Breaking the Frame• World War II contexts• 1967—back to Dresden• “So it goes”• “mustard gas and roses”• “trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization

and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations” (5)

• 1922• Ilium, NY• U Chicago professor—The Committee on Social

Thought (10)• New York World’s Fair (18)• Lot’s wife (24)• Tralfamadore, four dimensions (26)• Derby teaching “Contemporary Problems in Western

Civilization”

Fourth dimensions?• “All moments, past, present, and future, always

have existed, always will exist. . . It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.” (27)

• “All time is all time. It does not change.” (86)• Free will• Movie backwards—being unstuck in time (73-74)

PlayersBernard V. O’HareGerhard MüllerYon Yonson from WisconsinHarrison StarrSandyNannyMaryBilly PilgrimBarbaraRobertValenciaMontana WildhackEdgar DerbyPaul Lazzaro

Resignifying• Three Musketeers candy• Dispatch: candy bar: Roland Weary: Valencia’s

candy• Dog• Sandy: dog: Germans: Princess: phone• Mustard gas and roses• Orange and black stripes• boxcar: wedding tent• Blue and white feet• Cold house: boxcar

Intertextuality• Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions

and the Madness of Crowds (1841) (15) on crusades• Mary Endell’s Dresden, History, Stage, and Gallery

(1908)• Roethke poem (20)• Dance with death (21)• William Bradford Huie’s Execution of Private Slovik

(45)

Listen• Plane crash (25)

• “true war story” (42)

• First unstuck—death (43)

• First time unstuck (43)—war: pool, 1944, first unstuck as chaplain’s assistant (30); 1965, visiting mother (44); 1945 (24); 1967, kidnapped (25)

Intertextuality• Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (87)• Pirates of Penzance (93)• Cinderella (96)• Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (99)• Eliot Rosewater’s books (100)• Kilgore Trout: Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension

(104); The Gospel from Outer Space (108)• Trout’s life, stories (167-• Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov—but it “isn’t

enough anymore” (101)• Howard W. Campbell, Jr.’s book (128, 162)

Required Texts.

Keep Listening• “So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their

universe. Science fiction was a big help” (101).

• Fourth dimension (104)—William Blake

• “Jesus—if Kilgore Trout could only write!” “He had a point: Kilgore Trout’s unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.” (110)

• “Science fiction had led him to expect that” (116).

• “He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way” (117).

• Professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord of Harvard, official Historian of the United States Air Force (120)

• “EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL, AND NOTHING HURT” (122).

Narratology“I was there” (67); “That was I. That was me. That was the

author of this book” (125)

“There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time” (88).

“They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun” (84).