You Were Sick but Now You re Well Again and There s Work to Do Kilgore Trout

"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people capeesh beingness alive at least a little chip."

- Kurt Vonnegut,Timequake, 1997

"Beingness live is a crock of shit."

- Kilgore Trout inTimequake

Vonnegut'southward Erstwhile Man and the Sea

In an extended analogy to Ernest Hemingway'southThe Sometime Man and the Sea, Kurt Vonnegut identifiesTimequake, his fourteenth and final novel, as a "stew." Vonnegut "fillets the fish" of a failed novel (which he compares to Santiago'south destroyed marlin in Hemingway's novella) with ostensible "thoughts and experiences" from his life. The novel every bit a "stew" resonates with Vonnegut's "telegraphic schizophrenic" literary mode, which, in its fragmentation, sharpens a critical edge and cultivates redemptive narratives. The resulting gallimaufry is Vonnegut's last attempt to deconstruct the novel as aesthetic and literary class, and simultaneously reconstruct the human and inaugurate new histories.

Timequakeoscillates between Vonnegut's literary meditations and a messianic narrative of Kilgore Trout. This narrative, the fundamental plot line of the discardedTimequake One, considers a "sudden glitch in the space-fourth dimension continuum," or what Trout refers to every bit a "cosmic charley horse in the sinews of Destiny." The Universe, Vonnegut explains, "suffered a crisis in self confidence" and "suddenly shrunk ten years." This result, what Vonnegut refers to as a timequake, "zaps everybody and everything in an instant" from 2001 to 1991. "So we all to go back to 2001 the hard mode, minute by minute, hr by hr, year by yr, betting on the wrong equus caballus again, marrying the wrong person again, getting the clap again."

This tedious aggregating of previously recorded time impels for Vonnegut a deep existential crunch. This realization of the eternal return distills the absurd tragedy of history in which the human is reduced to a "robot of the past." While many of Vonnegut'southward novels experiment with ontologies of time,Timequakeoffers his bleakest vision of human chains to the inscrutable mechanics of temporality. To dramatize the crippling angst of this timequake, Vonnegut refers to Thoreau'sWalden — "The mass of men lead lives of placidity desperation" — and Shakespeare'southwardAs You lot Like It— "All the world'due south a stage, and all the men and women only players."

In response to these desperate theatrics of an inhuman history, Vonnegut attempts to sow redemption. Vonnegut rejects the nihilism of Macbeth, who claims, in another meta-theatrical mediation, that life is "a tale / told by an idiot, total of audio and fury / signifying nothing." Vonnegut refuses these resignations to tedious and meaninglessness performance. Vonnegut instead re-ignites the flame of being, illuminating an undiscovered history and redeemed humanity. If the eternal return posits the death of narrative, and postmodernism its irrevocable fragmentation, Vonnegut invests his humanism in the redemptive power of narrative and literature in re-imagining the self and the world. Imagination and art, he claims inTimequake, are essential for the tillage of meaning.

Timequake and the American Automaton

Vonnegut'southward timequake, a premise conceived past Kilgore Trout (whom Vonnegut identifies equally his "alter-ego"), is a dramatization of Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence. "What is time?" asks Vonnegut inBreakfast of Champions equally he sketches an Ouroboros, a serpent eating its ain tail. The characters ofTimequakeare thus condemned to a decade of recurrence, begetting what Nietzsche identifies as "the greatest weight." Nietzsche, speculating on eternal recurrence every bit a philosophic and existential question inThe Gay Scientific discipline, imagines a demon condemning the human being to living life "once more and innumerable times more; and there volition be null new in information technology, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably pocket-size or smashing in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence." He responds — "Would you not throw yourself downwards and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?"

Vonnegut'south timequake reduces his characters to the irksome repetition of a decade'south minutia. Eternal recurrence renders life absurd, and this strict determinism reduces the human, equally Nietzsche describes, to a "speck of grit." Vonnegut's automatons sleepwalk through their lives as "tedious theater," to quote Tony Webster's Duchess of Malfi. Their lives are emptied through repetition of unimaginative rituals, pursued past Emerson'southward "hobgoblins" of meaningless repetition. These selves flounder in what Walter Benjamin refers to as "homogeneous and empty time" of a history stripped of narrative meaning. Vonnegut considers the absurdity of this fate in the terrible abyss between thought and action, where actions are bonded to the intricacies of recurrence but devoid of imaginative or ontological investment. They have been violently submerged into the inescapable Other of historical time — these alienated selves embody Heidegger's notion of "fallen-ness." The divided cocky cannot cultivate inwardness, nor live with deliberation or meaning. This cocky-alienation, where the existential scream of the tortured self is silenced by its bondage to inhuman time, represents the noon of absurdity. "Being alive," laments Kilgore Trout, "is a crock of shit."

The absurdity and alienation engendered through the timequake satirizes the cultural logic of late capitalism. Vonnegut repeatedly critiques the pervasive loneliness and banality of American culture and guild. The victims of the timequake, frantically wandering through the wastelands of the profane present, represent the alienated victims of late commercialism itself. Much ofTimequakecontains Vonnegut's irreverent critiques of a commodified and corporatized American culture, rendered homogeneous and rootless through the inhuman machinations of late capitalism — the truthful bailiwick of Trout's timequake is Vonnegut'due south American nowadays. Neither context preserves imagination; neither phenomenon cultivates the self. Trout's timequake forces an eternal return. Vonnegut'south concern is that fractured communities and culture industry of contemporary America will enforce an eternal present, with the human resigned to alienation, aloofness, and applesauce. The human, Trout suggests, "feels like something the true cat drug in." Vonnegut employs the absurd scientific discipline-fiction of a timequake to dribble his satire of contemporary America. Selves, propose Vonnegut, sacrifice bureau and imagination for the anesthetizing pleasures of political complacency and the culture industry. The nihilism of the timequake parallels the nihilism Vonnegut reads in gimmicky civilization. Through the fantastic mechanics of a timequake, Vonnegut presents a tragic reduction of the man to an cool automaton and a tedious Sisyphus.

Every bit Vonnegut laments inBreakfast of Champions, "I cannot live without a culture anymore." His heartbroken paeans repeat throughoutTimequake, but Vonnegut is less hopeful for transformation. Instead, Vonnegut imagines himself chirapsia against a cultural current of fragmentation and self-approbation, a lone vocalization in the darkness of despair. "If I hadn't learned how to live without a culture and a society," he suggests inTimequake, "acculturation would have broken my heart a thousand times."Timequake, and the redeemed humanity information technology dares to imagine, presents both the broken-heartedness of wasteland of the contemporary, merely likewise an earnest attempt to weave a new culture and new guild out of the ruins.

"You Were Ill, merely Now You're Well, and In that location'southward Work to Do"

Vonnegut'south timequake lasts for x years, after which the wills of its victims are suddenly restored. Vonnegut'south paradoxical humanism rests upon this two-fold movement — a deconstruction before a reconstruction. But when the timequake ends in 2001, at the dawn of a new millennium, Vonnegut'southward automata are crippled by angst and a deep ennui. Termed "Postal service-Timequake Apathy," the subjects ofTimequake struggle to regain deliberate command over themselves. Subsequently a decade of tragic resignation to fate, Vonnegut's fictional humans lack selves and lack volition. This sudden restoration of will results in disasters spreading throughout New York City — planes fall to globe, vehicles collide, fires consume flesh and scorch rock. Only Kilgore Trout — who appears inTimequakeequally an absurd messiah adorned in a babushka with a teddy conduct print — is able to awaken from the timequake and restore himself. And he begins to rebuild the earth.

Trout, awake in a burning city, heals through incanting "Kilgore'due south Creed" — "You lot were sick, only now y'all're well, and there'south work to do." Trout's transformative vision spreads to a growing community of disciples who resurrect the apathetic automata of American self-approbation. Vonnegut explicitly frames Trout equally a Christ effigy attempting to build the Kingdom of God on Earth. Trout's jostling complacent humans into a new consciousness mirrors Vonnegut's own literary ambitions, equally he hopes to impel the reader into a new relationship with the cocky and the earth. Kilgore'south Creed, Vonnegut suggests, could inaugurate a new homo history of justice and prosperity (which Vonnegut mourns every bit forgotten political ideals). Vonnegut's invitation to heal the self, the community, and the planet underscores the moral obligation to exercise and so. Reformulating the nightmare of history as a disease, from which humanity can recover, presents a messianic arc of history through the awakening of a sublime humanism. Humanity must realize itself as a healer and redeemer in order to inaugurate a sacred counter-history, a new history that has all the same to be realized or written. And a writer of fiction shall atomic number 82 them.

Though the timequake had silenced the interior cocky, Trout (and Vonnegut) attempts to cultivate the transformative and creative potential of imagination. In another passage that echoes Breakfast of Champions (Timequakeoft recalls Vonnegut'south 1973 gem), Trout expounds on the radical presence of "sensation," which he unequivocally renames "soul." The timequake, in both the crude determinism it represents and the cultural complacency it suggests, is a factor of "merely energy and matter and time." Trout presents the "soul," then, every bit "something very new and beautiful," a presence which escapes the reductivism of the contemporary and which can re-create the world. The inauguration of new histories depends on this capacity to imagine. Against the profanity of a diseased and fallen globe, ruptured through poverty, oppression, and state of war, Vonnegut posits the transcendent soul as a sacred redeemer. Vonnegut "fillets the fish" of a fallen humanity in order to resurrect information technology every bit something "very new and beautiful." And this soul, Vonnegut suggests, must be nourished through imaginative literature.

Counter-Histories and Counter-Hegemonies in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Novel

A cardinal component of the inauguration of counter-histories is the weaving of new narratives to sustain them. Literature, Vonnegut suggests, must realize itself equally a counter-hegemonic electric current of redemption in order to redeem the man. Anesthetizing pleasures, such as television, recapitulates the banality of capitalism into the consciousness of its viewers. Aesthetic pleasures, such as literature, instead cultivate the interiority of the human equally a counter-hegemonic and redeeming forcefulness. If imagination and sensation is the most intrinsic component of the human, aesthetics can try to re-imagine the human and the world. The counter-hegemonic potential of literature exists in its cultivation of new narratives and new consciousnesses. Through his fictional narratives, Vonnegut weaves eschatologies and ontologies of freedom.

Literature must realize itself equally a transgressive and subversive force of imagination. Vonnegut has always battled political conservatism and censorship, equally his transformative vision for the American self and club offering radical revisions of the status quo. Vonnegut is an author continually banned in schools, and he critiques this unimaginative and reactionary posture in Timequake. "In the slavering search for subversive literature on the shelves of our public schools...the two most subversive tales of all remain untouched, wholly unsuspected," he writes with passion. "I is the story of Robin Hood... And another as disrespectful of established authority as the story of Robin Hood...is the life of Jesus Christ every bit described in the New Testament." Vonnegut celebrates the historical and counter-hegemonic Christ inTimequake, and the radically transformative dream of the Gospels inspire Vonnegut's own fictions. Vonnegut's messianic narratives are potent enough to blast out of Benjamin's continuum of "homogenous and empty time" and inaugurate a new history and a new humanity. History is showtime absurd, only besides offers, again to quote Benjamin, "gates through which the Messiah might enter." And Vonnegut's telegraphic schizophrenic literary fashion, replete with fissures and cracks, offers innumerable messianic gates.

Timequake's narrative fragmentation reflects Vonnegut's hermeneutics of suspicion — his weary skepticism toward the accepted and anesthetizing narratives of contemporary quietism, toward tired myths of progress or false myths of prosperity, toward the voracity of consumerism, toward the banality of American culture and consciousness. Vonnegut marries his postmodern critique with a transcendent humanism, and his suspicion gives way to sacrality. Vonnegut deconstructs the world in society to construct the homo anew.Timequakeis both anti-novel and self-conscious memoir — Vonnegut stitches meditative scraps and aborted stories into a bizarre collage redolent of the gimmicky American consciousness and culture. But through these fragments is it possible to present a truly critical vision of unrealized time to come, which, every bit Marx suggests through Hegel, tin only exist imagined as a "negation of a negation." Vonnegut's shattered fictions represent a shattered earth, and, more importantly, suggests that the globe can again be made whole through imaginative and ontological appointment. In this way, Vonnegut's "telegraphic schizophrenic" literary manner is actually a mysticism of sorts, yearning for unity after fracture, for redemption subsequently the autumn.

Through Trout, Vonnegut articulates a defense of his "telegraphic schizophrenic" literary fashion as a grounds for transformation. Trout rejects the assumption that an artist must act as a mirror, and that literary realism is the most sophisticated form of literature. The only "character" Trout has created, he argues, is his living son. "If I'd wasted my time creating characters, I would have never gotten around to calling attending to things that really matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that brand heroes and heroines alike feel like something the cat drug in." Literature, Vonnegut argues, must realize itself equally a subversive strength, deconstructing systems of oppression. The highest ideal of literature is for the reader to "realize life" and attain a higher consciousness. Literature not only makes people appreciate existence alive, as Vonnegut writes, but too helps explain what that means. "Do man beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every infinitesimal?" The deliberation and true realization of humanity is both the procedure and platonic of literature. And Vonnegut's fragmented narratives serve to defamiliarize the earth, in a Brechtian sense, in order to jostle readers into a higher consciousness.

Function of the cultivation of counter-hegemonic narratives lies in the forging of communal bonds and is itself transformative. Vonnegut understood loneliness to be the most crippling illness of contemporary America, and the construction of a truthful community, of what Martin Luther Male monarch, Jr. referred to as a "dear community," is subversive. Once more, imaginative literature can aid cultivate these counter-hegemonic bonds. Literature, Vonnegut suggests, is the most intimate and engaging aesthetic form, one that can transform the world from the inside out. In his celebration of literature, Vonnegut writes, "Many people desperately need to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you lot do, intendance virtually many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.'" This acme of fiction as a bulwark against loneliness and absurdity, and equally a fertile ground for the cultivation of new selves and new histories, echoes a commemoration of fiction by David Foster Wallace. The two authors, despite writing in a postmodern manner, sustain and center their narratives on a transcendent beloved for the man beingness. Wallace writes that "Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved...where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated."

Aesthetics can heal the wounds of the alienated soul and help the world be pieced together again. Timequake , however, attests to Vonnegut's recurring anxiety that even literature, to quote Eliot Rosewater in Slaughterhouse-Five , "isn't enough anymore," that imaginative literature is too abstract for the very real wounds of the world, that literature is too transgressive, difficult, or strange to garner sufficient attending, that literature has lost its place in an increasingly bland culture and consciousness. Even so despite this narrative frustration, the transcendent humanism that sustains Vonnegut's literary vocalisation beckons — "Y'all were sick, merely now you're well, and in that location'due south work to exercise." Literature may exist the nigh stiff weapon in the struggle against absurdity. Vonnegut imagines redemption however in theundiscovered futures of the fallen human being.

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Source: http://www.vonnegutreview.com/2013/09/timequake.html

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