SOURCE: Kaufman, Will. “Kurt Vonnegut: ‘I Had to Laugh Like Hell.’” In The Comedian as Confidence Man: Studies in Irony Fatigue, pp. 147-86. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1997.

Who can have failed to notice a pattern emerging among those confronting the ethical problems of their own ironic practices—especially those for whom the practice becomes the identity? We have seen Herman Melville troubling over the more sinister implications of the mendacity with which Franklin was so comfortable, and which he himself sought to master. We have seen Garrison Keillor tire of his own ironic obligations, expressing the wish that as he approaches old age he could “quit writing humor and just write irritation for awhile.” We have seen how Lenny Bruce ultimately opted for the “truth truth,” dismissing the comic mask outright and publicly banishing the confidence man in himself before he turned forty. And we have seen Bill Hicks, only thirty-two, washing his hands in disgust for almost all that mainstream American comedy had become. “How can I be me in the context of doing this material?” he asked aloud, given that, to him, American comedy had been “totally gutted” by comedians willingly succumbing to the self-censorship demanded by commercial television producers and their sponsors. “Do I even want to be part of it anymore? Show business or art—these are the choices.”¹

These questions and demonstrations are more or less indicative of the tendency identified by Kurt Vonnegut when he had himself reached the age of sixty-eight: once more, the tendency for American comedians to effectively stop being comedians—that is, to “become intolerably unfunny pessimists.”² In his latest novel, Hocus Pocus, he offers a narrator who, like Lenny Bruce, is by his own admission “not a comedian,” and who faces similar persecution for betraying his unmasked, critical pessimism. Fired from his academic post, Eugene Debs Hartke wonders how his colleague, a history professor, had managed to escape persecution, given that he too had spoken just “as badly of his own country.” He is willing to hazard a guess: “My guess is that he was a comedian, and I was not. He wanted students to leave his presence feeling good, not bad, so the atrocities and stupidities he described were in the distant past. There was nothing a student could do about them but laugh, laugh, laugh.”³ As Hartke ruefully acknowledges, this colleague had saved his own skin by doing what he himself could not: deflect the force of his criticism by hiding behind the masks of allegory and play. In Fates Worse than Death, Vonnegut describes what had happened to himself at the age of sixty-three when he briefly decided to refrain from public speaking. Having lost confidence in his comic masquerade on the lecture platform, he had carried on with it halfheartedly in print: “Since I knew how jokes worked, hooking and releasing, I could still make them, even though I no longer felt like making them.”⁴ This is a startling admission for a comedian to make—but in Vonnegut's case it is not surprising, since he had for decades implied the strain that threatened to enervate him, as it had threatened not only Mark Twain before him, but—as Keillor, Bruce, and Hicks demonstrate—his younger contemporaries as well. Twain, Vonnegut said, was “Quixotic … in his wish to please crowds without lying to them,” forced into hiding his “pessimism and religious skepticism and anti-patriotism” behind his own unique disguise, that of “an utterly winsome sort of teddy bear, in need of all the love he could get.” Vonnegut admitted that he, like all American comedians, had been left with the legacy of Mark Twain's curse: “Every present day comedian who says after mocking something supposedly sacred, ‘But I'm only kidding, folks,’ is following in the footsteps of Samuel Clemens … who became a world citizen while necessarily disguised as Mark Twain.”⁵

Vonnegut has ostentatiously advertised his kinship with Twain, citing him and his influence in enough places to arouse suspicion as well as recognition. He has not convinced everybody of his having successfully appropriated the mind of Mark Twain, given the calculated soft focus, the reluctance to pronounce judgment, and the air of failure that characterize his work—devices that liken him more to Keillor, possibly, than to Twain, especially given the latter's savagery as he approached old age. Failed comedians and rueful confidence men populate Vonnegut's work, many of them sharing the doomed task of convincing either themselves or others that laughter and its kindred forms of play are desirable in a world where not only earnest criticism but serious action is needed. What sets Vonnegut apart from Twain is that, like Keillor, he begins from the standpoint of admitting the impotence of comedy. If he indeed shares anything with Twain, it is neither the faith in, nor the savagery of, his satire; it is rather the maintenance of a highly self-conscious public facade that, in Vonnegut's case, relies on the outright admission of powerlessness. Through this facade, he avows his own defeat as a comedian, part of a contradictory stance he has taken for decades, in which he simultaneously damns and celebrates artistic confidence games of all sorts. And in this, it is actually Melville whom he echoes, rather than Twain.

As he has done with so many of his characters, Vonnegut has called outright attention to his own public masquerade as the necessary fabrication of a tightrope walker: “I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.”⁶ But to which self is this admission to be applied—to the comic persona, or to the despairing cultural critic who makes such a show of dismissing that very persona? The public Vonnegut is a multiple personality, in some ways more complex than the dual personality of Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain, or Keillor's multifarious Prairie Home Companion. He once admitted the autobiographical nature of Kilgore Trout, himself a composite of multiple personalities appearing in a number of Vonnegut's novels; but it may be equally helpful to consider Vonnegut's public image in the light of a number of his other fabrications. Robert Scholes sees a parallel in two of Vonnegut's characters, “the lovely false prophet Bokonon” from Cat's Cradle and “the kindly, untrustworthy, honest, quadruple turncoat Howard Campbell of Mother Night.”⁷ To these I would add the twin masqueraders, Wilbur and Eliza Swain of Slapstick. As these three novels in particular demonstrate, the comedian as confidence man is Vonnegut's public, self-conscious obsession, the focus of his highly visible anxiety about the questionable morality and efficacy of a comedian's success. In terms of this obsession, Vonnegut is once again more akin to Melville than to Twain, and Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, and Slapstick lie closer (mark the word lie) to Melville's The Confidence-Man than to any of Twain's works.

Few American comic writers, if any, have been so deliberately public as Vonnegut in his wrestling with the paradox of the critic at warning and the comedian at play. Cat's Cradle focuses explicitly on what its narrator calls this “cruel paradox” of comic deception in an already dangerously benighted world—“the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it.”⁸ In an equally stark paradox, the preface to Mother Night contains what Vonnegut says is his only sure moral: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” As the example behind this one certain moral, Howard Campbell refers to the duplicitous voice characterizing any comedian who seeks to divert attention from his critical observations, the voice of “that simple and widespread boon to modern mankind—schizophrenia.” Just as Melville's focus on the schizophrenia of the generic Confidence-Man revealed a capacity for a sinister ludic duplicity, so does Vonnegut describe in the preface the vile potential that Campbell both playfully and fatally unleashes in the novel: “If I'd been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides.”⁹ There is, of course, little that is risible in the implications of this particular statement; but what is needed is the comedian's outrageous willingness to pretend that it is risible. One can debate, after Richard Todd, over whether Vonnegut is merely “pretending to pretend,” but one then risks the mental short-circuiting that befalls any potential dupe at the mercy of the Confidence-Man.¹⁰ If social criticism begins with the premise that “truth” is the paragon and “falsehood” is base, then the tension between goodness and evil that the comedian Bokonon seeks in Cat's Cradle is inherent in the comedic paradox itself: “It was the belief of Bokonon that good societies could be built only by pitting good against evil, and by keeping the tension between the two high at all times” (67). This, Bokonon proclaims, comes through living by the “harmless untruths” that make one, among other things, “happy” (6). Yet it is precisely the “harmless untruth” of ironic play that threatens to compromise the object of criticism, to the great peril of the society that willfully ignores the truth and instead solicits for its gratification an “untruth” that may not be so harmless after all. This is the debate that Vonnegut enacts most explicitly in Slapstick, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, and in the construction of a public persona that purports to be comfortable with the implications of such an impasse while at the same time quixotically challenging them. There is little wonder that the strain of maintaining the facade should have taken its toll and that Vonnegut should have gone through such pains to document the process.

THE STRAIN OF SLAPSTICK

On the one hand there is Vonnegut's claim that his critical observations don't matter: “I am as full of baloney as anybody, and … anybody who says for sure what life is all about might as well lecture on Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.”¹¹ Thus will he adopt the role of a mentor to a new generation, only to proclaim to a university graduating class, as though he were Bokonon himself, “Only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash.”¹² Amongst such “balderdash” may be the crucial, critical observations of Vonnegut and any comedian who is “only kidding.” The strategy is to deflate the impact of the observations—but then, what are the consequences? Vonnegut implied them with reference to Cat's Cradle: “I myself once staged the end of the world on two pieces of paper—at a cost of less than a penny, including wear and tear on my typewriter ribbon and the seat of my pants. Compare that with the budgets of Cecil B. DeMille.”¹³ The combination of the throw-away voice and the import of the subject matter in comic, though critical, observations such as this exemplifies the “schizophrenia” which has become such a potent metaphor for Vonnegut with regard to the ironic identity.

Vonnegut has been most articulate about the adoption of roles, or poses, in his discussions over the conflict between the critic at warning and the comedian at play. On the one hand, his task is to awaken and to alarm: “Writers are specialized cells doing whatever we do, and we're expressions of the entire society—just as the sensory cells on the surface of your body are in the service of your body as a whole. And when a society is in great danger, we're likely to sound the alarms.” In this, he likens the critic to a canary in a coal mine, aware of self-destructive possibilities that accompany the role: “You know, coal miners used to take birds down into the mines with them to detect gas before the men got sick. The artists certainly did that in the case of Vietnam. They chirped and keeled over.”¹⁴ Vonnegut has himself come close to this fate, given such bitter reactions to his work as William F. Buckley's claim that he “had made a career of despising America” and the decision by certain school boards across America not only to ban his books but publicly to burn them as well.¹⁵

What Vonnegut here offers with one hand, however, he ostentatiously retracts with the other. The social alarm device—the canary in the coal mine—has its opposite in the comic anesthetist who sets out to desensitize rather than to awaken. Vonnegut has seen comedy as “an analgesic for the temporary relief of existential pain,” and more often than not his public statements on the role of comedy have centered on the notion of providing comfort and diversion for both comedian and audience. Hence his eulogies of the great radio comedians of the Depression, among his earliest comic influences. The 1930s were, he said, “a great time for comedians,” with people all across America gathering around their radios for their “little dose of humor every day. … It got everybody through three more days of Depression.”¹⁶ That comic desensitization is a valuable defensive strategy he readily admits. Given his German name at the end of World War II, and in spite of his Purple Heart and imprisonment at Dresden, he admits to having stumbled on the “good idea … to tell a joke as soon as possible.” This tactic he shared with many Germans in America after the war: “They, too, became screamingly funny as soon as possible.” And, here as elsewhere, Vonnegut emphasizes his fellowship with Mark Twain, who, he recalls, “had served in the Confederacy briefly, after all, in the bloodiest war in American history, and later faced paying audiences of, among others, Union veterans and their wives.”¹⁷ Having highlighted the defensive nature of a comic strategy, Vonnegut will take pains to camouflage any offensive capacity—he will dismiss it, diminish it, and emphasize the modesty of his intentions. For him, laughter is merely “a response to frustration, just as tears are, and it solves nothing, just as tears solve nothing. Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there's nothing else he can do.”¹⁸ With such deprecating admissions, Vonnegut sets out to divert attention from precisely what the critic in him wants people to heed. By submitting to the demands of comic license, with the implicit assurance that he is at play, he, like all comedians, must do great violence to that which motivates him. This has serious repercussions for both the comedian and the society he serves by providing it with the comic anesthesia it craves and that threatens to blind it. The implications for both sides in the masquerade are the subject of Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, and particular points in all his successive books.

But they are raised most immediately in Slapstick, wherein Vonnegut is hardly coy in attempting to describe what life as a comedian “feels like” for him, being under the implicit and potentially intolerable injunction to speak as a buffoon, however prescient and incisive his observations might be from behind the mask. Slapstick is, he says, “the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography.”¹⁹ It is a grim book, depicting its comedic protagonists as seeming idiots with a hidden capacity for critical genius that, once revealed, destroys them both. Wilbur and Eliza Swain are a pair of freakish, dizygotic twins—“neanderthaloids” banished by their parents to an isolated family mansion. They cultivate idiocy, Wilbur explains, because “all the information we received about the planet we were on indicated that idiots were lovely things to be” (29). Their intelligence and critical awareness is known only to themselves: on the outside, they are harmless, babbling, amusing clowns. In private, they put their extraordinary minds to work, criticizing Darwin's evolutionary theory and, implicitly, social Darwinism “on the grounds the creatures would become terribly vulnerable while attempting to improve themselves.” They compose “a precocious critique” of the American Constitution: “We argued that it was as good a scheme for misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves—and yet it described no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong” (37). However, mindful of their protected status as idiots in their own ludic “Paradise,” they keep their criticism to themselves: “We did not itch to display our intelligence in public. We did not think of intelligence as being useful or attractive in any way” (30). But when their mother pleads for “the faintest sign of intelligence” on their part, they dispense with their masquerade and announce, “WE CAN NEVER BE PRETTY BUT WE CAN BE AS SMART OR AS DUMB AS THE WORLD REALLY WANTS US TO BE” (49, 50). In thus switching from “false players” to effective “spoil-sports,” Wilber and Eliza find themselves in a situation of “intolerable tragedy”—culpable for their observations and offensive to others in “asking for respect” (53). In the face of contempt from those around them, they attempt in their naïveté to make a “return to the consolations of idiocy”; but it is too late (61). For revealing the workings of their confidence game and dismissing it outright, they are both banished, ejected from what had been a Fool's Paradise. The question in Slapstick—as in The Confidence-Man—remains as to who precisely the fools are: the comedians who play the game, the earnest critics who presume to do without it, or the dupes who are oblivious to the dangers ameliorated through the mask of ironic play.

The first of Vonnegut's works, however, to continue explicitly the explorations about comic mendacity initiated by Melville in The Confidence-Man are Mother Night and Cat's Cradle. The earlier of these focuses on the telling of ostensibly playful lies in the service of social evil, and the latter upon lies told in the service of social good; but in each respect it is the comedian as confidence man who bears Vonnegut's scrutiny. At one point in Mother Night, Howard W. Campbell faces the same challenge as any comedian who hovers on the border of acceptance or resentment. “‘I don't know if you're kidding me or not,’” a policeman tells him, in the midst of this story of a comedian whose life, and that of many others, is destroyed by his failure to convince the public that he is kidding (153). Mother Night and its immediate successor, Cat's Cradle, are Vonnegut's earliest cost-benefit analyses of comic deception for both the comedian and his audience. They both present play as deadly, although in different respects: in Mother Night the comedian is damned because his confidence game is too convincing, without the accompanying acknowledgment of play, while in Cat's Cradle the comedian's game is deadly in spite of the open admission of play. Together, these two novels seem to cast Vonnegut into at least one unsought association with Mark Twain, whose Huck Finn concludes that in doing a social good and a social evil, “the wages is just the same.”²⁰ In the cases of Howard Campbell, Bokonon, and the willing subjects of their deceptions, the wages are culpability and death for all players—in spite of Campbell's apparent fabrication of evil, and Bokonon's of good.

MOTHER NIGHT: SOMETHING SATANIC ABOUT IRONY

We might begin with Howard Campbell's early Jewish jokes, World War II vintage, the ones that have made him famous: “‘There are No Atheists in Foxholes.’ I should like to expand this theme a little and tell you that, even through this is a war inspired by the Jews, a war that only the Jews can win, there are no Jews in foxholes, either” (115). There is his cartoon, “a caricature of a cigar-smoking Jew” to be used as a target for rifle practice: “The Jew was standing on broken crosses and little naked women. In one hand the Jew held a bag of money labeled ‘International Banking.’ In the other hand he held a Russian flag” (99). And there is his idea for bringing comic theater to life, his blue-and-gold uniformed, Nazi-loving, Free American Corps: “It was to be a volunteer organization. … Only three American P.O.W.s joined” (61-62). They may not be funny, but we know these are jokes because Campbell says so, long after the fact. Of his wartime Jew-baiting radio broadcasts: “All I can say is that I didn't believe them, that I knew full well what ignorant, destructive, obscenely jocular things I was saying” (116). Of his cartoon target he says, “I overdrew it, with an effect that would have been ludicrous anywhere but in Germany” (99); and his Free American Corps he dismisses as a mere “Nazi day-dream” (61). In all his Nazi posing, he says, he had hoped “to be merely ludicrous” (102).

The other factor establishing Campbell as a comedian at deadly play—in addition to his belated admissions of jokery—is the fact of his role as an American agent throughout the war, broadcasting coded messages to the Allies in the guise of Nazi radio propaganda. The English-speaking world knows him as a traitor as well as “a shrewd and loathsome anti-Semite” (8). Only three people know that he is a radio comedian broadcasting “truth” under the cover of untruths: an American intelligence officer, an American general, and the president—as Campbell is told, “‘The man you called Franklin Delano Rosenfeld. … He used to listen to you gleefully every night’” (124). In Campbell, Vonnegut offers a comedian who must live and—if he is to be believed—die by the consequences of his jokes. In accepting the terms of play, he must accept the fate of the “false player” whose falsehood is never discovered and is, ultimately, unverifiable. Campbell is told when he is recruited as an agent that, for national security reasons, he must be prepared to play the game forever—that the truth will never come out, and the end of the game never signaled: “‘There will be no magic time when you will be cleared, when America will call you out of hiding with a cheerful: Olly-olly-ox-in-free’” (31).

That it is the pure love of the confidence game that motivates Campbell's comedy, there is no doubt (if, indeed, this book offers any certainties); and this emphasizes the connections Vonnegut has always made between creativity (comic or otherwise), manipulations of confidence, social inaction, and the potentially dire consequences of all. “Everybody is supposed to play games for mental health,” Campbell admits, especially under the disagreeable circumstances of rising Fascism in a world on the brink of madness (30). His prewar life is devoted to creative games: he is a playwright, churning out “medieval romances, about as political as chocolate éclairs” (23). He is not at all a part of the real world, neither a fighter nor a political activist. Like the laughter and tears he arouses in his plays, he himself is about as effectual as a chocolate éclair. “‘I am an artist,’” he tells the American intelligence officer who wants to recruit him; “‘If war comes, I won't do anything to help it along. If war comes, it'll find me still working at my peaceful trade’” (26). Confronted with the fact of “‘things going on in Germany … Hitler and the Jews and all that,’” Campbell replies, “‘It isn't anything I can control … so I don't think about it’” (24). Instead, his thoughts revolve around his fantasy-in-progress, a comic romance: “It was going to be about the love my wife and I had for each other. I was going to show how a pair of lovers in a world gone mad could survive by being loyal only to a nation composed of themselves—a nation of two” (23). It is only fitting, then, that the American intelligence officer, with his eye on the coming war as well as on Campbell's fatal weakness for a masquerade, finally hooks him by presenting a seductive plot of his own, “‘a pretty good spy story’” about “‘this young American, see, who's been in Germany so long he's practically a German himself’” (25). This, Campbell admits, is his downfall, as the “ham” in him rises to the bait: “As a spy of the sort he described, I would have an opportunity for some pretty grand acting. I would fool everyone with my brilliant interpretation of a Nazi, inside and out” (27). As he is forced to conclude, his private joke is too convincing: “I did fool everybody. I began to strut like Hitler's right-hand man, and nobody saw the honest me I hid so deep inside” (27).

Campbell justifies his acting in the role of Nazi propagandist with a view to the same “uncritical love” solicited by any comedian out to please an audience. Whether from his wife, the actress for whom he writes, or from the high-ranking Nazi officials who flock around them both, this is what motivates Campbell along with the love of the masquerade itself: “People used to tell us that we cheered them up, made them want to go on. … My Helga believed I meant the things I said about the races of man and the machines of history—and I was grateful. No matter what I was really, no matter what I really meant, uncritical love was what I needed” (29). Eventually, Campbell admits that such love had been a “narcotic” strong enough to blind him to the evil of the people whose approval he had courted. The Nazis, he says, were “a big enthusiastic part” of his audience: “I knew them too well as people, worked too hard in my time for their trust and applause” (25).

But Campbell's convincing comic play throws him into an inescapable double-bind. He cannot admit to the Nazis that he is only joking, for fear of death, nor can he admit it after the war to the American public, who are out for his blood because, as far as they know, he had been serious. Neither side accepts the license to laugh at him or dismiss his play, because they are not offered the convention, even implicitly. This does not diminish the playful nature of Campbell's masquerade; it only makes it more dangerous for both the comedian and his audiences. Campbell reaps the rewards of his ostentatious performance when he is flushed from hiding after the war: “I was high on the list of war criminals, largely because my offenses were so obscenely public” (18). The effectiveness of his masquerade strikes him in all its varied force: war veterans vilify him because they think he believed the lies he told, so to them he is “‘absolutely pure evil … the pure thing … the Devil,’” deserving public scourging and death (163). On the other hand, American Nazis and neo-Nazis crawl out from under their rocks to praise him “‘for having the courage to tell the truth during the war … when everybody else was telling lies’” (55). But, most chillingly, there are those who are even willing to surmise that Campbell was playing and that the play didn't matter. One Nazi accepts that he was probably a spy but dismisses it because he was such a good actor—“‘Because you could never have served the enemy as well as you served us. … Almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler—but from you’” (65). Altogether, these three audiences partially demonstrate the truth of Campbell's rueful conclusion that “this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate” (102-3). But for Campbell, the problem is not so much that laughter is beyond people in general but that he is unable to establish what precisely should be laughed at. With only three people admitted to the convention, his knowing audience is too select.

For this reason, Campbell must conclude that, as an unacknowledged comedian, he is—dangerously—all things to all people. He is an American patriot, a spy who in spite of his patriotism has managed to give aid and comfort to his enemies, and—as even the American intelligence officer admits—a de facto Nazi, “‘one of the most vicious sons of bitches who ever lived’” (121). The fact that he was “only kidding” does not prevent the government of Israel from considering him “as much a murderer as Heydrick, Eichmann, Himmler, or any of the gruesome rest” (102). The fact that Campbell considers his Nazi superiors “ignorant and insane” and himself “neither ignorant nor insane” does not alter what his play ultimately makes him: a Nazi (47). “‘How else could a responsible historian classify you?’” he is asked (121). Eventually this knowledge forces Campbell to accept his culpability in playing into the hands of his several audiences, who in their unwitting participation in his jokery are made all the more vile, whether as Nazis, as self-righteous American nationalists, or as hypocrites who blandly encourage his duality for their own purposes.

As a comedian and player of creative games, Campbell finds himself thrust into the company of “‘confidence men, prostitutes, and other disturbers of the peace’” (71). As both a comic artist and an American spy, he associates himself with Mata Hari, to whom he initially dedicates his memoirs: “She whored in the interest of espionage, and so did I” (xi). Although Campbell's particular brand of prostitution is avowedly comedic (if only to himself and three others), it is enough to cast him into the vilest fellowship, that of other artists and game players, some comic and some not. Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, proposes a collaboration with him; Adolph Eichmann sees him as a colleague, in terms of not only writing but comedy and Nazism as well: “Eichmann made a joke. ‘Listen—’ he said, ‘about those six million. … I can spare you a few for your book. … I don't think I really need them all’” (107). Perhaps the most damning association is with the character who is the most bonded to Campbell through the combination of artistry, deceit, and play, the painter George Kraft: “Kraft and I played at least three games a day, every day for a year. And we built up between ourselves a pathetic sort of domesticity that we both felt need of” (37). In this new ludic and creative nation of two, Kraft impresses upon Campbell the extent to which his playful artistry—however appalling—must define him: “‘Howard’—he said to me, ‘future civilizations … are going to judge all men by the extent to which they've been artists. You and I … will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about us will matter’” (38). What Kraft does not know is that the great creation by which Campbell is to be judged is not his dramatic oeuvre but his playful, convincing image as a Nazi.

Eventually, Campbell concludes that his comedic deception has made him a dupe as well as a guilty confidence man: “I committed high treason, crimes against humanity, and crimes against my own conscience” (20). He has allowed himself to be manipulated just as he has manipulated others, and both crimes are equal in his estimation. He is the victim of an entire school of confidence tricksters—Kraft, his best friend, who turns out to be a Russian agent out to expose Campbell as an example of American softness toward war criminals; Resi Noth, also a Russian agent, so effective as to convince Campbell that she is his dead wife, Helga; and the entire American intelligence apparatus, who allowed him to broadcast without his knowledge the disappearance of his wife: “It represented … a wider separation of my several selves than even I can bear to think about.” With this last scam, Campbell's duality comes back to him as anything but playful, however the result of an initially comic premise: “I would have liked to mourn as an agonized soul, indivisible. But no. One part of me told the world of the tragedy in code. The rest of me did not even know that the announcement was being made” (119). The play of other manipulators thus becomes Campbell's nemesis, dissolving the hubris with which he had initially set out to charm the entire world with his own comic expertise. He finds himself “‘like a pig that's been taken apart, who's had experts find a use for every part. By God—I think they even found a use for my squeal! The part of me that wanted to tell the truth got turned into an expert liar! … The artist in me got turned into ugliness such as the world has rarely seen before” (133).

Ultimately, Campbell damns himself for his own willing participation in a monstrous comedy spawned of his own willingness to do to others what—in the end—he finds done to himself. Even as a victim, he is in his own estimation more guilty than Eichmann, deserving brutal “punishments by fair, just men” instead of the psychiatric treatment he feels Eichmann deserves: “My case is different. I always know when I tell a lie, am capable of imagining the cruel consequences of anybody's believing my lies, know cruelty is wrong. I could no more lie without noticing it than I could unknowingly pass a kidney stone” (106). Thus when the American intelligence officer who had recruited him finally admits to the world that Campbell had been in fact “‘one of the most effective agents of the Second World War,’” the comedian's guilt cannot be expiated, and Campbell resolves to “hang Howard W. Campbell, Jr., for crimes against himself” (175). But whether or not Campbell intends this self-inflicted fate, it may be the book's closing joke, not only by virtue of the ham acting with which he bids farewell—“Goodbye, cruel world!”—but also the fact that he has already cried wolf (176). As the rescuing American spymaster asks him, “‘How could I ever trust a man who's been as good a spy as you have?’” (135). Campbell has been too effective a spy; too convincing an actor; and in his mastery of the role, a doomed comedian because of the crucial code he has failed to broadcast until it is too late—the admission of play.

CAT'S CRADLE: DANGEROUS, NOT SERIOUS

There is one other noteworthy comic deception at work in Mother Night: the ostensible editor, signed “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,” whose duties, it is claimed, “are in no sense polemic. They are simply to pass on, in the most satisfactory style, the confessions of Campbell” (ix). It is an old literary device; what counts is precisely the “polemic” the editorial note purports to hide. Campbell—like all critically minded comedians—is guilty of both “informing” and “deceiving,” with the conventional demands upon him “enough to make him lie, and to lie without seeing any harm in it” (ix). On the one hand, Campbell's crime—“the crime of his times”—is to have “served evil too openly and good too secretly” (xi). I believe that Vonnegut is not satisfied with so stark a division as his “editor” and namesake here describes—the clear-cut division between good and evil. After all, he has put into the mouth of Campbell, his comedian, the observation that “virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will” (86). He also suggests this in the fate of his next comedians—Bokonon in Cat's Cradle, and his lesser auxiliaries—most of whom, in contrast with Campbell, set out to serve good openly but who end up serving evil either secretly or indirectly. Like Campbell, they are doomed and damned by their play, that is, for their part in hiding or ameliorating the awful truth that any good comic anesthetist wishes to transform into the stuff of comedy.

Cat's Cradle demonstrates what Howard Campbell both justifies and expresses in Mother Night: “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile” (103). In Cat's Cradle, however, rather than putting their faith in what turns out to be an undiscovered lie, the dupes of the Bokononist confidence game put their faith in what is openly admitted as a lie. “Nothing in this book is true,” the epigraph proclaims, above the injunction to “Live by the foma [harmless untruths] that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy” (6). The narrator warns us at the outset that his book will be a Bokononist book, that—just as in The Books of Bokonon—the “true things” he relates will all be “shameless lies” (9). On one hand, this is a mere repetition of the ancient argument about comedy holding up a mirror to truth, that—in the words of Mother Night's “Editor”—“lies told for the sake of artistic effect … can be, in a higher sense, the most beguiling forms of truth” (ix). But on the other hand, it is the comedian's dare to accept the promise of play for what it ostensibly is, that is, harmless—a dare that the book itself shows to be fatal. Thus, while Mother Night warns against a “terrifying and absolutely vile” capacity for “unquestioning faith” in what is offered as true, Cat's Cradle warns against faith in what is openly offered as playful falsehood—even as it offers no alternative.

In the world of Cat's Cradle, it is pranksters and game players who determine the entire course of events, from the narrator relating the tale, to the actors he describes, to the grinning You Know Who presiding over the joke of Creation. The narrator is a player: “Call me Jonah,” he urges, even though his name is John. He is an artist and a liar, a writer who has given up writing “factual” books for “the bittersweet lies” he has learned to tell, and admits telling in an opening gambit (7). His story is about how games, and their appeal, destroy the world, just as they had destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. The end of the world is set in motion by the apparent playfulness of a “seeming Christmas elf,” Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the Father of the Atom Bomb (75). As his son, Newt, describes him, “‘He was one of the best-protected human beings who ever lived,’” his protection being that “‘he just wasn't interested in people’”—only in games (14). While Hoenikker's superiors eulogize him for his relentless pursuit of “truth” and “pure knowledge,” they fail to appreciate the extent to which it is the charms of play that blind him to the truth of what he wreaks upon the world. As Newt relates, during the days before the successful nuclear test at Alamogordo, Hoenikker “‘just came to work … and looked for things to play with and think about, and everything there was to play with and think about had something to do with the bomb’” (16). The end of the world is spawned in a laboratory that looks like a cheap toy shop: “There was a paper kite with a broken spine. There was a toy gyroscope, wound with string, ready to whirr and balance itself. There was a top. … There were numerous pieces of conventional laboratory equipment, too, of course, but they seemed drab accessories to the cheap, gay toys” (39). Given that his pursuit of knowledge is actually the pursuit of play, after the test at Alamogordo, Hoenikker can remain at once as merry as one of Santa's elves and as questionably guiltless as Pilate washing his hands. “‘Science has now known sin,’” he is told; “‘What is sin?’” he asks in reply (17). To Hoenikker, there can be nothing sinful in games.

Thus, with the innocent puzzle of nuclear destruction solved, Hoenikker turns to another game. As his supervisor, Asa Breed, recalls: “‘In his playful way, and all his ways were playful, Felix suggested that there might be a single grain of something—even a microscopic grain …’” (32). This is the birth of ice-nine, the seemingly innocent compound that ultimately freezes and destroys the earth; but it is still only a puzzle with which Hoenikker playfully teases his children: “‘Come on now, stretch your minds a little. I've told you that its melting point is a hundred and fourteen point four degrees Fahrenheit …’” (154). Finally, it is through careless fun that the compound gets into the hands of the children and, through them, into the earth's ecosystem: “Before he sat down in his wicker chair and died, the old man played puddly games in the kitchen with water and pots and pans and ice-nine” (155). But play in Cat's Cradle is a source of evil, and deadly in its appeal. As Dr. Breed says of Hoenikker and his relentless refusal to see the universe as anything but a playground, “‘The man was a force of nature no mortal could possibly control’” (19). And as Breed's disaffected brother asks of such a game player, “‘How the hell innocent is a man who helps make a thing like an atomic bomb?’”—let alone ice-nine (47).

It is through Felix Hoenniker that Vonnegut extends the paradox of deadly play from science into other realms with the metaphor of the cat's cradle—art, religion, country, comedy: all are damned as deception while simultaneously offered as a saving placebo. The cat's cradle that Newt Hoenikker first describes is the game his father plays before the backdrop of Hiroshima's destruction. Normally, his father has no use for games as other people know them—“‘Why should I bother with made-up games when there are so many real ones going on?’”—but on August 6, 1945, he plays his first made-up game with Newt: “‘He went down on his knees on the carpet next to me, and he showed me his teeth, and he waved that tangle of string in my face. “See? See? See?” he asked. Cat's cradle. See the cat's cradle? See where the nice pussycat sleeps?’” (13). To Newt, this harmless game comes to stand for everything that is deceitful and sinister: “‘For maybe a hundred thousand years or more, grownups have been waving tangles of string in their children's faces. … No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's.’” But it is a sick joke—a despicable confidence game: “‘No damn cat, and no damn cradle’” (105). For every lie that Newt hears afterwards, his cynical response is, “‘See the cat? See the cradle?’” (113, 115). Newt's obsession with the lies of the cat's cradle transform him, at once, into an artist and a ghoulish clown in the effort of painting on canvas the sinister allure of the confidence game: “He put his black, painty hands to his mouth and chin, leaving black smears there. He rubbed his eyes and made black smears around them, too”; and what he offers in the “small and black and warty” painting is equally chilling to Jonah: “It consisted of scratches made in a black, gummy impasto. The scratches formed a sort of spider's web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry” (105). But it is the embittered doctor, Julian Castle, who interprets the painting of the game most confidently and directly: to him, it is simply “hell” (106).

Julian Castle is perhaps the most complex character participating in the book's comic exchanges, precisely for what he reflects about the incompatibility between social activism and comic pleasure. On the one hand he illustrates Vonnegut's contention that comedy is “merely a response to frustration” intended to divert attention away from an unbearable reality; it is Castle, if anybody, who demonstrates Bokonon's claim that “‘Maturity … is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything’” (125). Castle is at once “saintly” in his deeds and “satanic” in his jokery, giggling at the sight of the “stacks of dead” he had valiantly tried to save in a plague epidemic. Yet in spite of his appeal to the saving lies of comedy—as if there could be anything funny in a hospital that “looked like Auschwitz or Buchenwald”—the lies of art mean nothing to him (102). “‘Garbage—like everything else,’” he declares, before throwing Newt's painting into a waterfall (107). In Castle one most sees the paradox of the critic at work and the comedian at play; he considers Newt's painting worthless inasmuch as it is art but valuable in another form, drying in the sun along a squalid riverbank: “‘This is a poor country—in case you haven't noticed. … Four square feet of gummy canvas, the four milled and mitered sticks of the stretcher, some tacks, too. … All in all, a pretty nice catch for some poor, poor man’” (112). Yet at the same time, it is the mirage of comedy that enables Castle to cope with his failures in the face of overwhelming odds, just as he recognizes the saving graces of Bokononist fiction: “‘I'm grateful for things that work. Not many things do work, you know’” (108).

It is fitting that Castle is the man through whom Jonah learns most about the comic duplicity of Bokonon, sensitive as Castle is to the simultaneous combination of play with both cynicism and philanthropy. He describes how Bokonon, upon taking over the “miserable country” in which the book is set, had “cynically and playfully” invented a desensitizing religion intended to divert attention from insurmountable social and economic ills. “‘Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies’” (109). Bokonon's appeal to diversion has its intended effect. In setting himself up as an outlawed holy man, and with his co-conspirator, McCabe, playing the role of the country's dictator, Bokonon ensures that life in San Lorenzo becomes “‘a work of art.’” Castle notes the “truth”—that life for the people is “‘as short and brutish and mean as ever’”—but, doctor that he is, he can also see the placebo effect of the Bokonon/McCabe masquerade: “‘As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud’” (110).

But the people of San Lorenzo are aware that they are participating in a confidence game. Unlike the victims of Howard Campbell's masquerade, they know that they are involved in an elaborate joke at the hands of a pair of sophisticated manipulators—their bible tells them so. One of the “Calypsos” in The Books of Bokonon establishes the comic convention outright: “I wanted all things / To seem to make some sense, / So we all could be happy, yes, / Instead of tense. / And I made up lies / So that they all fit nice, / and I made this sad world / A par-a-dise” (82-83). Their bible itself is a joke, and admits itself as such, warning each reader on the first page, “Don't be a fool! Close this book at once! It is nothing but foma!” (165). As Castle tells Jonah, the pressures of maintaining the comic deception take their toll on the “‘two main actors, McCabe and Bokonon. … [who] paid a terrible price in agony for the happiness of the people—McCabe knowing the agony of the tyrant and Bokonon knowing the agony of the saint. They both became, for practical purposes, insane’” (110-11).

What Castle never learns before his death is that the people of San Lorenzo also pay—with their lives—for the pleasures of succumbing to Bokonon's deceptions. The comedian as saint becomes the comedian as Satan, with Bokonon transformed into an evil manipulator along the lines of Jim Jones, compelling the mass suicide of his surviving followers after the freezing of the earth through the legacy of Hoenikker's play, ice-nine. Even in this act, the comedian acknowledges himself as such, leaving a note at the death site: “These people made a captive of the spurious holy man named Bokonon. … The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did” (170). Thus, in taking the joke to its fullest possible extent, all the willing players in Bokonon's comedy are destroyed.

There is one other comedian at play in Cat's Cradle, the cynical Prankster who seems to preside over life and death as though they are part of a joke with which he has long ago grown tired. The creation of man appears the listless diversion of an all-powerful entity with an eternity on his hands, at least in The Books of Bokonon: “In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.” This lonely deity needs both playthings and an adoring audience: “And God said, ‘Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” Bokonon's God gets bored easily, declining to play long enough to confer any purpose upon his creation; it all appears an idle game: “And He went away” (165-66). Bokonon himself plans to get the last laugh, as he writes in the final sentence of his holy book, wherein he follows his flock into ingesting ice-nine: “I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who” (179). But it is the Great Comedian who remains, serenely acknowledging his practical joke and, apparently, quite pleased with his comic mastery, as the Bokononist “Calypso” has it: “Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end, / And our God will take things back that He to us did lend. / And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God, / Why, go right ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod” (168).

Thus, Cat's Cradle and Mother Night together depict two sides of the ironic coin: the risks of taking ironic play at face value and the risks of not doing so. It is a recipe for crisis, not only with regard to the negativity or “nothingness” left in irony's wake (as described by Kierkegaard) but also to the insoluble plurality—the schizophrenia—that Vonnegut went on to demonstrate in his successive writings. Nothingness and schizophrenia seem to have posed the most extreme threats to the longevity of the comic masquerade as Vonnegut has explored it and are the preoccupation of many characters following on the heels of Howard Campbell and Bokonon—including one variously named “I,” “me,” and “the author of this book.”

TOWARD BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS: A CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE

When Joseph Heller published Closing Time, his sequel to Catch-22, in October 1994, the reviewer for the New Yorker noted the absence of one particular comic voice from the World War II generation: “Kurt Vonnegut seems to have had his say,” he wrote.²¹ Vonnegut had already signaled this playfully in the American edition of Bluebeard (1987) when, having listed all his fifteen published titles on the opening page, he exclaimed, “Enough, enough!” As he explained elsewhere, this game of being continually funny was “tiring”; but then he went on to offer his next novel, Hocus Pocus (1990), and his third “autobiographical collage,” Fates Worse than Death (1991).²² It may have been too early to propose in late 1994 that Vonnegut had finally given up the game; but one could be forgiven, since so much of Vonnegut's writing had already documented the struggles of an American comic voice to survive the premise that ironic play can be a substitute for earnest criticism. About the time he published Breakfast of Champions (1973), Vonnegut lied in a Playboy interview, “As I get older, I get more didactic. I say what I really think. I don't hide ideas like Easter eggs for people to find. Now, if I have an idea, when something becomes clear to me, I don't embed it in a novel; I simply write it out in an essay as clearly as I can.”²³ Perhaps “lie” is too strong an accusation; it might be more fair to say that Vonnegut was indulging in wishful thinking, expressing at a particularly difficult time in his life his exasperation with the demands of comic deceit. He was fifty years old, having reached what he calls in Breakfast of Champions his “spiritual crossroads.” But many critics, as well as Vonnegut himself, have seen that point more as a nadir than as “the spine of a roof” from which Vonnegut describes his descent into old age.²⁴

Lawrence Broer divides his chronological study, Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, into two telling sections: the first part, entitled “The Struggle,” begins with the first novel, Player Piano (1952), and culminates in Breakfast of Champions. Thenceforth comes “Resolution: The Second Fifty Years”—as though from Breakfast of Champions there was no direction Vonnegut could go except up. The importance of this novel cannot be overemphasized, showing as it does the comedian on the edge, stretching the limits of his confidence game to a breaking point at which both he and the game itself are ravaged. The comedian may be Kilgore Trout, or he may be the fictive Vonnegut who steps into the action as a duplicitous, ironic deus ex machina; in either case he is on the brink of madness, tormented by the relentless demands of play. Broer reports that in a personal letter on the subject of his book—Vonnegut's renderings of schizophrenia—Vonnegut expressed the hope that no one would think he was crazy. “‘I haven't ever hallucinated, or been hospitalized or incapacitated for mental illness of any sort. I have been profoundly depressed, but have always been able to keep working somehow.’”²⁵ It would be truly irresponsible to confuse the living Vonnegut with any of his characters, including the paradoxical, highly self-conscious public persona that he has constructed for himself over the decades. While leaving the historical Vonnegut in the peace he deserves, it is possible to suggest that the public persona does in itself suggest a “schizophrenic episode,” artistic rather than clinical, encapsulated in the two-faced identity of a literary comedian, a serious critic apparently at play.

As Broer notes, pretense is “the main schizophrenic game,” one that Vonnegut has repeatedly illustrated as taking its toll upon the players.²⁶ In spite of admitting the artful construction of his own “theatrical stances,” he warned early in his career about the capacity for games to divert attention from social realities, in places other than the pages of Mother Night and Cat's Cradle. Of games, he has said, “Parker Bros. has one for every gathering … and there's a game for every season—ice hockey, basketball, baseball, football. Life soon appears to be a game, and it isn't.”²⁷ The ironic paradox of warning against play through a playful stance signifies the artistic schizophrenia to which I refer above: creativity is a game in the world of affairs, but it is nonetheless potentially deadly, whether in the hands of scientists, politicians, artists, or the public who subscribe to their diversions (as both Mother Night and Cat's Cradle show). But the psychic toll on the artist of perpetuating the game against his own will or inclination, and the consequences of being trapped in an ironic double-bind, extend beyond the “crimes against himself” described by Howard Campbell.

Vonnegut has in fact explored this artistic entrapment to some degree in all his works and has gone far to demonstrate why a confidence man may ultimately want to escape from the identifying role he has created. Referring in one instance to Jackson Pollock, he lamented that “people are doomed to be the sorts of artists they are.” Pollock, he said, “lacked maneuverability, because he was in fact trapped both by society and by his own particular talent into doing what he did. … Pollock killed himself—because he thought, Christ, I'm going to have to keep doing this for the rest of my life.”²⁸ The longing for the release from an entrapping role that has in fact become an identity, and which Vonnegut ascribes to Pollock, is akin to that which motivates Howard Campbell toward his own “death worshipping.” As Campbell admits: “I, hiding from many people who might want to hurt or kill me, often longed for someone to give that cry for me, to end my endless game of hide-and-seek with a sweet and mournful—‘Olly-olly-ox-in-free’” (16). Campbell promises to escape from the psychic consequences of his play with the aid of a hangman's noose; but Vonnegut does not offer that route for all his other characters who likewise find themselves entrapped in play worlds of their own making. For most of them, there are two possibilities: madness or withdrawal from the game. A comedian, through his play, wishes like Campbell to “hide from many people who might want to hurt” him (if not kill him) for the implications behind his jokes. In this respect, Vonnegut's many tormented characters are allegorical renderings of comedians who are trapped in a similarly intolerable game of hide-and-seek.

What Leonard Mustazza says about Cat's Cradle applies to all such renderings, which explore “the problematical relationship between human creativity and destructiveness”; in these cases, the creativity is comic, and the destructiveness just as likely to be the threat of self-destruction.²⁹ Tony Tanner's observations about Cat's Cradle may also be expanded to include all of Vonnegut's comedians who are threatened by “the ambiguities of man's disposition to play and invent”; and the threat shows itself in the many novels following Mother Night and Cat's Cradle.³⁰ It shows itself in the story of Eliot Rosewater, the protagonist in a comedy he tries to bring to the lives of the dispossessed and neglected in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965). “‘I'm going to be an artist,’” he declares, “‘I'm going to love these discarded Americans, even though they're useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art’”—and for his pains in attempting to bestow “uncritical love” upon them, he is made to fight for his sanity amidst “the straightjacket, the shock treatments, the suicide attempts” that are the price of his impossible play.³¹ When Rosewater steps from his own novel into Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), it is as a mental patient sharing a room with a fellow would-be comedian, Billy Pilgrim. Both of them, having “found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war,” attempt “to re-invent themselves and their universe” through the mendacious consolations of comic science-fiction. As Rosewater tells a psychiatrist, “‘I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.’” For Billy, the lie through which he tries to divert his attention from the genocide he has witnessed is the construction of a comic fantasy set on the planet Tralfamadore, populated by outlandish creatures, “two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber's friends.”³² In Billy's fantasy there is neither chronological time nor death; thus genocide is an impossibility. But not only are his comedic self-deceptions powerless to protect him from recurrent mental collapse, hysteria, and death-wish; they may in fact be the actual cause if not the symptoms. Both Rosewater and Billy Pilgrim demonstrate the strain of maintaining a comic outlook in the face of tragic reality.

Two more threatened comedians flounder in the wake of Mother Night and Cat's Cradle. The first is Kilgore Trout, the neglected writer whose bizarre stories are fittingly reduced to pornographic pulp, given that—as comedy—they share with pornography “fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world.” In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Trout is likened to “a frightened, ageing Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life”—and who, although he “had never tried to tell anything but the truth,” is at the same time “an ultimately dishonest man.”³³ Although Trout does not appear in Slaughterhouse-Five, his stories do, poisoning the minds of Rosewater and Billy Pilgrim with the sort of comic inspiration that turns them into inept liars about their own “impossibly hospitable world.” Slaughterhouse-Five also introduces the last of the comedians sentenced to “imprisonment for life” in a mendacious role: this is the “I,” the “me,” the “author of this book”—the “old fart with his memories and Pall Malls” who dares to affect with Billy Pilgrim a serenity in the face of assassinations and massacres: “So it goes.”³⁴ These latter two comedians—Kilgore Trout and the fictive “I”—are, of all Vonnegut's characters, the two who threaten to come closest to the Jackson Pollock described above: literally “doomed” in being the kinds of artists they are, overwhelmingly depressed, and seemingly without the maneuverability to escape from their ironic identities, short of their own extinction. Their perilous encounter constitutes the nadir of Vonnegut's career-long disquisition on the comedian as confidence man: they meet in Breakfast of Champions, in the company of one other noteworthy confidence man, Rabo Karabekian, the artist-trickster figure important enough to return as the subject of Bluebeard. Together, these three comedians demonstrate the crisis point to which Vonnegut had apparently brought himself in the struggle to negotiate the conflicting demands of the critic at warning and the comedian at play.

In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut is most explicit in confronting the possibility of suicide as a means of escaping from the entrapping irony, and the finished book is offered as his promise that he is beyond such a solution. Before his having written it, he suggested, suicide had come to seem “a perfectly reasonable way” of avoiding any number of confrontations, including the delivery of comic lectures and books to deadlines; “I think I'll blow my brains out” might have been the answer to the simplest of problems.³⁵ One indication of this crisis point is the startling narrative interruption in Breakfast of Champions, wherein the fictive Vonnegut tells himself, “‘This is a very bad book you're writing. … You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did’” (193). The threat appears always to hang in the background until the action is completed, by which time the renderings of Trout, Karabekian, and the duplicitous “Vonnegut” himself are shown as the exorcisms—however temporary—of contempt for the practice of comic deceit.

Vonnegut's handling of these three characters deserves close attention, for it resonates with his ambivalence and disgust over the implications of their mendacity, and that of all artists, comic or otherwise. The device that brings these three together is an arts festival in the imaginary Midland City, Ohio. It is an occasion that allows Vonnegut to explore the dangers of creative charm—its manipulation, mystification, and downright vileness—through the impact it has on both its practitioners and its victims. Vonnegut's warning is clear: “I can have oodles of charm when I want to.” He echoes what Melville implies in both Israel Potter and The Confidence-Man, that the more charming an artist is, the more dangerous: “Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind” (20). Although Kilgore Trout may have no personal charm, his comic stories do—enough to secure his invitation to the arts festival, and to work too well upon the mind of at least one reader credulous enough to take him seriously. Dwayne Hoover, on the brink of madness, craves comedy, wanting “to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which [is] for lunatics.” He is ripe for exploitation by any artistic trickster, “so open to new suggestions about the meaning of life that he [is] easily hypnotized” (195-96). The comic premise of one of Trout's stories—the ironic suggestion that the reader is the only organism of value in the universe—sends the unstable Dwayne into a violent rampage that leaves a score of injured in his wake. Given his realization that there is “no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth” (27), Trout is forced to accept his own guilt as the source of the “mind poison” that triggers the carnage. It does not matter that, like all comedians, he is only kidding: “Trout did not expect to be believed. … It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world—in the form of bad ideas” (15). In this, Trout stands as the comedian condemned.

Moreover, as a purveyor of “evil nonsense,” Trout is obliged to admit his kinship with any number of playful deceivers, whose “nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes” (10). One of these, it is clear, is the second artistic confidence man to bear Vonnegut's scorn in Breakfast of Champions, the minimalist painter, Rabo Karabekian. Having sold his painting, “The Temptation of Saint Anthony,” to the arts festival, Karabekian is forced to defend himself against irate citizens who are astounded to have been tricked into paying him “fifty thousand dollars for sticking a piece of yellow tape to a green piece of canvas” (214). He defends his work, and the price, with a spiel of rhetoric that, however eloquent, is invalid and a swindle. He gives his “‘word of honor’” that this painting—already described as “meaningless”—depicts “‘everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal’” (221). But how reliable is the “word of honor” of a man who admits to having “‘no use for truth’”? As he says, “‘You know what truth is? … It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, “Yeah, yeah—ain't it the truth?”’” (209). Given his characterization as a shyster who “with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid,” it is clear that Karabekian's artistic “nonsense” is no less evil than Trout's (209). His painting is a joke, as is his pompous defense, neither of which earns Vonnegut's respect. With no little sarcasm, Vonnegut calls Karabekian's mumbo jumbo “the spiritual climax of this book, for it is at this point that I, the author, am suddenly transformed by what I have done so far” (218). He goes on to ridicule Karabekian's self-eulogy with more mock suggestions of his having been transformed by the avowed meaning of a “meaningless” painting. He assigns Karabekian's “unwavering band of light”—the vertical strip which is supposed to depict awareness—to the cores of so many characters that it becomes ridiculous. Of Kilgore Trout: “His situation, insofar as he was a machine, was complex, tragic, and laughable. But the sacred part of him, his awareness, remained an unwavering band of light.” Of himself: “And this book is being written by a meat machine in cooperation with a machine made of metal and plastic. … And at the core of the writing meat machine is something sacred, which is an unwavering band of light.” Of the reader: “At the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light” (225). Even Einstein's Theory of Relativity, E=MC², needs the revelations of the indispensable Karabekian to complete it: “It was a flawed equation, as far as I was concerned. There should have been an ‘A’ in there somewhere for Awareness” (241). He stops the action to carry the point home: “My doorbell has just rung in my New York apartment. And I know what I will find when I open my front door: an unwavering band of light.” He concludes with a heavy dose of mock praise: “God bless Rabo Karabekian!” (225).

Given the narrator's own duplicitous voice and character, a perceptive reader like Leonard Mustazza may well take such praise at face value and conclude that this painting—this practical joke—could actually “rescue [the narrator] from doubt and give him the serenity he has long sought.” But in accepting Karabekian's explanation that “the only ennobling feature of life is awareness, sacred consciousness, the unwavering band of light that animates the dead machinery of the body,” Mustazza may also have been taken in—especially given the importance Vonnegut has always placed on activity as the means of social improvement, beyond mere “awareness.”³⁶ Certainly, the citizens themselves are duped: prepared, only moments before, to lynch Karabekian for his swindle, they congratulate him for his explanation, saying, “‘If artists would explain more, people would like art more’” (235-36). In obliging them with a mystifying explanation, Karabekian doubly swindles them. They are still fifty-thousand dollars poorer, however mollified, and however more “aware” they may be about what the painting is supposed to represent. And in accepting at face value the narrator's assertion that “it is Rabo Karabekian who made me the serene Earthling which I am this day,” the reader, too, is swindled (220).

The narrator is, after all, neither serene nor trustworthy, the third of the book's comedians to draw Vonnegut's rebuke. The narrator is both wounded and wounding, as he sits mouthing the word schizophrenia, “fascinated” by its appearance, its sound, and the slapstick image it conjures up of “a human being sneezing in a blizzard of soapflakes” (193). He admits his unsureness as to whether or not he has “that disease,” and in one precarious moment appears to abdicate from all critical observation, worn down by the consequences: “I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed” (194). It is, of course, incredible that Vonnegut could advocate the setting aside of the critical perspective in exchange for the willful adoption of blinders, in order to fit in with one's neighbors. Thus, as in Slaughterhouse-Five, his affectation of serenity here is not wholly convincing, especially given the scornful manner in which he depicts himself as a devious confidence man. The “I” of the book is a tyrannical user, inscrutable in his mirrored sunglasses, appearing in Midland City to gloat over his creative powers and to affirm his Godlike status: “I was on a par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter. I had it explode. I had it disperse itself again.” But he is really a petty trickster, a cheap vaudeville magician with cheap tricks, taking advantage of powerless characters and a credulous, willing audience: “Ask me a question, any question. How old is the Universe? It is one half-second old, but that half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far” (201). He reserves his greatest duplicity for poor old Kilgore Trout, the one character to whom he reveals himself at the end of the book, vilely playing with him like a cat with a mouse. Confronting the embittered, broken comedian as his omnipotent Creator, “Vonnegut” boasts: “‘I don't need a gun to control you, Mr. Trout. All I have to do is write something down about you, and that's it.” And, as the Superior Manipulator, he proves it: “I transported him to the Taj Mahal and then to Venice and then to Dar es Salaam and then to the surface of the Sun, where the flames could not consume him” (292). As the old man crashes to his knees and cowers before him, the Creator teases him with the promise of comfort and release from literary servitude: “‘Mr. Trout, I love you. … I have broken your mind to pieces. I want you to feel a wholeness and inner harmony such as I have never allowed you to feel before.’” But he is setting up Trout for a mean trick, casting him in the same vulnerable position as any dupe seeking the comforting delusions of comedy and art. He makes Trout think he is offering a mouth-watering, perfect apple, describing it with the saccharine eloquence of a veritable Karabekian: “‘I hold in my hand a symbol of wholeness and harmony and nourishment.’” However, it is all a con; having made Trout see this tempting symbol, the narrator complacently admits to sheer sleight-of-hand in a smug aside to the reader: “‘I had nothing in my hand, but such was my power over Trout that he would see in it whatever I wished him to see’” (292-93). As an artist and a jokester, this “Vonnegut” is as oily, devious, and sinister as any Confidence-Man—and cruelly playful as well. Tiring of his practical joke at Trout's expense, the narrator disappears, leaving his character an abandoned old man, crying after him into the void, “‘Make me young, make me young, make me young!’” (295). If this is a depiction of a “serene” narrator, it must be the serenity of a man without a conscience—and this cannot be the case, given the book's final page: a self-portrait of a weeping Kurt Vonnegut.

With his depictions of these three comedians, Vonnegut condemns in Breakfast of Champions not only those who allow their attention to be diverted by comedic or artistic seduction, but also himself and all artists who, through their creativity and misplaced self-importance, are embarked on a truly monstrous deception. By calling attention to his own confidence game as an artist and comedian, he warns that escapism into art and comedy may well assist in the process of adaptation, but that it may also amount to self-blinding with dangerous consequences. By the end of the book, Vonnegut has pitted the comedian against himself in an apparent effort to somehow accept or adapt to the notion of, on the one hand, the comedian's questionable social usefulness, and on the other, his wickedly seductive power. As a confrontation with the comic self, Breakfast of Champions appears to have been an exorcism of profound bitterness and contempt for the requirements of playful deceit; and in reviewing Vonnegut's oeuvre, one can indeed see that there was no way he could go but up. But in his ascent, as it appears, the comedian was also and ever on the way out.

LAUGHING LIKE HELL

I would like to admit, after Lawrence Broer, that the period following Breakfast of Champions has been one of “resolution,” at least in the sense that none of Vonnegut's succeeding comedians evince the same depth of bitterness that Kilgore Trout and the “I” of that novel do. But I would not go so far as to say that the paradox of the critic at warning and the comedian at play is ever comfortably resolved in Vonnegut's later writings. If anything, there is only a resigned preparedness to be recurrently foiled by the paradox rather than utterly destroyed by it; either that or there is the decision to dispense with the masquerade altogether, as Wilbur and Eliza Swain do in Slapstick. What comes after Breakfast of Champions—or, arguably, not until the demons of Slapstick are exorcised—is, I would admit, “Vonnegut's softer focus” as described by Michael Wood.³⁷ But this period, ushered in by Jailbird (1979), is not free of Vonnegut's rebellion against the constraints of the comic straitjacket, signaled in other places besides the avowed renunciations in Slapstick, Hocus Pocus, and Fates Worse than Death mentioned earlier. Such rebellion is flagged in the various failures or inabilities of all Vonnegut's narrators—from the recidivist jailbird Walter Starbuck on—to convince themselves of either the efficacy or the righteousness of their play. Perhaps the only exception to this rule would be Leon Trotsky Trout, the ghostly narrator of Galapagos (1985), who can offer Vonnegut's most joyful narrative only after his father Kilgore's misanthropic solution to the problem of deceitful mankind has come to pass. Kilgore Trout, it will be recalled, suggests the biblical Flood as the ideal conservation measure in Breakfast of Champions. Thus, his son can be an unbridled optimist only in the context of “A Second Noah's Ark”—that is, after humans and their oversized brains have been wiped out en masse through the combination of their economic and military madness and a natural virus, leaving only a handful to evolve into the harmless, furry pranksters and fisherfolk of Santa Rosalia, the fictive Galapagos island.³⁸ While I readily agree with Leonard Mustazza that, in Galapagos, Vonnegut is not “advocating a return to the Stone Age” and that “he likes and admires people too much to wish that they would turn into laughing animals,” it is significant that he must go to such lengths to depict a genuine optimist.³⁹

In the year 1,001,986, with no capacity for dangerous opinions, suggestions, or evil tool-making, humans—with their puny brains and flipperlike hands—are like the trained sea lions and seals that Leon Trout recalls in his childhood circuses of over a million years before. They are pranksters who can “balance balls on their noses and blow horns and clap their flippers on cue” but who can “never have loaded and cocked a machine gun, or pulled the pin on a hand grenade and thrown it any distance with any accuracy” (123). Thus, there are only innocent, harmless things to inspire comedy: “And people still laugh about as much as they ever did, despite their shrunken brains. If a bunch of them are lying around on a beach, and one of them farts, everybody else laughs and laughs, just as people would have done a million years ago” (165). Most important, the association between play and mendacity is finally broken, although the memory of the “distracting and irrelevant and destructive … great big brains of a million years ago” still enrages Trout: “If they had told the truth, then I could see some point in everybody's having one. But these things lied all the time!” (141). There are still the dangers of complacent distractions on Galapagos, but they have nothing to do with laughter; only full bellies in the company of sharks. There can be no belly full of lies, comic or otherwise, as in the tenth previous millennium, since lies no longer exist. Thus, in this ideal setting, where there is “still hope for mankind,” the consolations of art are needless, given that there is no longer anything to inspire them: “Nobody, surely, is going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony—or tell a lie, or start a Third World War” (208). The loss of music and comedy is a small price to pay for a world that can be genuinely optimistic.

But back in the twentieth century, Vonnegut's latter narrators can only attempt to affect optimism in the lackluster efforts of sad and wounded old men who are only too aware of the agonies they wish to ameliorate with their comic self-deceptions. Thus, the narrators of Jailbird and Deadeye Dick (1982) both betray their lack of faith in the artistic or otherwise imaginative games to which they resort. In both novels, comedy is signaled as an unsuccessful evasion. In Jailbird, Starbuck, the aged namesake (ironically) of the truth teller in Moby-Dick, actually attempts to adopt the “free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy” that sustains Ishmael through the nightmare voyage under Ahab. This second Starbuck tries, like Ishmael, to see the vicissitudes of his life as a “vast practical joke,” or, as he variously describes it, as “this dream,” “theater,” or “musical comedy.”⁴⁰ Other than in his references to the diversions of comedy as “narcotic,” Starbuck is a failed comedian only implicitly, if importantly. He resorts to comic songs like “Sally in the Garden” for the purposes of “mental vacancy”—to clear his mind of his mistakes, his bereavements, his son's contempt, his betrayals of friends to the inquisitors of the HUAC, and his terror of the future on the outside after his Watergate imprisonment (8). He indulges in comic escapism through the benefits of mental time travel and the unlikely dream of modest bartending with his “Doctor of Mixology” degree, enjoying fragile illusions of his own self-respect with the repeated comic punchline, “At least I don't smoke anymore.” But his escapist time travel forces him to confront bitter memories as well as the imminent future of an old derelict; and his dreams become nightmares of self-betrayal and the betrayals of others. Ultimately, Starbuck's songs, fantasies, and jokes keep him from neither the padded cell nor the prison, and his comic illusions are the half-hearted graspings at fragile straws by a man who has lost faith in the saving power of his own lies. More than anything else, what presides over Jailbird is Starbuck's outright shame in his indelible buffoonery, from the opening of his narrative—“Life goes on, yes—and a fool and his self-respect are soon parted, perhaps never to be reunited even on Judgement Day” (1)—to his closing complaints about the culture of levity. “‘You know what is finally going to kill this planet?’” he asks. “‘A total lack of seriousness,’” he answers—and proceeds, in his failure, to give up “on saying anything serious,” tells one last joke, and sits down (238-39).

In the context of this discussion, greater attention is owed to Rudy Waltz, the narrator of Deadeye Dick, given that, unlike in Jailbird, the association with comedy as a deliberate practice is much more explicit. Like Starbuck, Rudy is forced to admit the failure of a comic outlook in shielding him from criminal recollections, but in his case the admission is that of a self-acknowledged comedian. Moreover, in allegorical terms, the associations between crime, quackery, art, and comedy are as strong as in Mother Night; comedy and art are in fact complicit with crime. In this respect, Deadeye Dick refers not only backwards but forwards as well, to the artistic confidence games of Rabo Karabekian in Bluebeard (with its explicit renunciation of comedy) and beyond, to the deliberate comic vacuum of Hocus Pocus. The criminal associations in Deadeye Dick begin with the childhood game that sets the action in motion, recollected—significantly enough, after Breakfast of Champions—by a depressed fifty-year-old narrator. Rudy reconstructs through “a leaky old memory” a history of unsuccessful evasion of the consequences of an imaginative, though deadly, game.⁴¹ Through his criminal play—which, in the preface, Vonnegut calls a symbol of “all the bad things I have done”—Rudy causes the shotgun death of a pregnant mother of two (9). It happens, Rudy recalls, through the seductive power of playful creativity, and the potency of symbolism. On Mother's Day in 1944, with his brother gone to war, Rudy is a twelve-year-old playing with a rifle in his father's gun room, in a childish daydream: “I wanted to sit up there for a while, and look out over the roofs of the town, supposing that my brother might be going to his death, and hearing and feeling the tanks in the street below. Ah, sweet mystery of life” (55). As an artist at creative play, he elects to use a real bullet on justifiable artistic grounds: “The bullet was a symbol, and nobody was ever hurt by a symbol. It was a farewell to my childhood and a confirmation of my manhood. Why didn't I use a blank cartridge? What kind of symbol would that have been?” (56). Now as an artist with blood on his hands, he joins company with other creative reprobates: his father, a Nazi sympathizer with no talent and an easel like a “guillotine”; Adolf Hitler, the budding young painter whom his father saves from starvation; Rabo Karabekian, about to sell his “Temptation of Saint Anthony” to the Midland City Arts Center for an unbelievable sum; and, as the preface asserts, Vonnegut as the guilty “I.” Rudy looks back to his estrangement from innocent fellowship, imagining a bell hung around his neck as in the Dark Ages, himself a “leper” who, through play, has “shaken hands with Death” (83). He documents his attempts to utilize other creative palliatives as a means of escaping what his play has done: “I wanted to get into bed and pull the covers over my head. That was my plan. That is still pretty much my plan” (70).

Comedy, as we shall see, is both implicitly and explicitly a tool of Rudy's attempted evasion; and given Vonnegut's consistent references to comedy as a sugar-coated pill, a “narcotic,” and other such pharmaceutical deceivers, it is significant that Rudy, like his failed artist of a father, is a pharmacist—a role that Vonnegut also uses as a symbol for himself in the preface. The connection between comic deceit, evasion, and harmful drugs is quite clear: Rudy's family fortune is based on the legacy of “a quack medicine known as ‘Saint Elmo's Remedy’” (13). Even in trying to escape this legacy through an attempt at writing comic plays, Rudy is thrown into the role of a drug salesman, repeating the association of writing with drug-selling established by Philip Castle in Cat's Cradle. Rudy recalls, “The night I told Father I wanted to be a writer … he ordered me to become a pharmacist instead, which I did.” His father had ordered him, “Be a pharmacist! Go with the grain of your heritage!”—a heritage, of course, based on pharmaceutical quackery (96). There is a more sinister presence than “Saint Elmo's Remedy,” however, in what Rudy calls the “era of pharmaceutical buffoonery.” The Waltz Brothers' Drugstore trades on “barbiturates and amphetamines and methaqualones and so on” (39); Celia Hoover's suicide is attributed to “psychosis, often indistinguishable from schizophrenia” brought on by her amphetamine abuse; and Rudy's brother ends up “bombed on Darvon and Ritalin and methaqualone and Valium, and God knows what else” (151). The contempt Rudy feels for the local doctor who sells his soul even as he sells his painkillers, cannot be disassociated from Vonnegut's references to the drugs of comic evasion. If a buffoon can be a pharmacist or a prescribing doctor, then a comedian, too, can build up “a big practice on the principle that nobody in modern times should ever be the least uncomfortable or dissatisfied, since there were now pills for everything” (131). When Rudy finally does write a play, and the New York critics pan it, they find it “hilarious” that the playwright should hold a pharmacy degree: but it is not so odd given that comedy is, as Vonnegut says, a drug.

As a budding playwright, Rudy's first inspiration is a comedian: “James Thurber, who had grown up right there in Columbus, and then gone on to New York City to write comically about the same sorts of people I had known in Midland City” (97). Even as he earns his pharmacy degree, Rudy studies play writing, hoping to follow in Thurber's footsteps. This merely continues an association with comedy into which he has already been cast through his crime of homicide. He has already starred in what he calls “The Rudy Waltz Show,” produced by the policemen who fingerprint him and roll his face in ink until he looks like a blackface minstrel, caged and put on display behind bars: “I was a geek. I was a wild man from Borneo. … I was regional theater.” Moreover, this demeaning exhibition is not distinct from the writing career he is to adopt later, thanks to the mention of Alexander Woollcott: “He coined that wonderful epithet for writers, ‘ink-stained wretches.’ He should have seen me in my cage” (67).

The comic plays that Rudy creates in his adulthood are failures, and acknowledged as such. As he says, “The consequences of my having shot a pregnant woman were bound to be complicated beyond belief”; and so he attempts comic renderings of such consequences anytime he is brought face to face with the guilt and agony of them: “I have this trick for dealing with all my worst memories. I insist that they are plays. The characters are actors. Their speeches and movements are stylized, arch. I am in the presence of art” (71). Art has got him into this and art—notably comic art—will get him out, or so he thinks. He imagines a number of comic “playlets” designed to ameliorate the pain of a “confrontation scene” with Dwayne Hoover (159); or the deterioration of his beautiful muse, Celia, into an addled drug abuser—his “crazy-old-lady play” (144); or “Duplex, A New Comedy by Rudy Waltz,” through which he attempts to cope with his family's contempt for him and his own self-contempt. As the character description reads: “On the balcony sits RUDY WALTZ. … He considers himself a big mistake. He considers life a big mistake. It probably shouldn't be going on. It is all he can do to give life the benefit of the doubt” (110). Finally, there is his flop, Katmandu, about Shangri-La, where nobody—including a pregnant mother of two—ever dies, “where no one ever tried to hurt anybody else, and where everybody was happy and nobody grew old” (93). As if to confirm the failure of these comic visions to mask the unbearable—and even the criminality of the attempt to mask it—Rudy's ironic code name for the rubble of Midland City, neutron-bombed by a duplicitous American government, is “Shangri-La” (94).

There is one other significant indication of Vonnegut's censure of the comic practice in Deadeye Dick, again a reference to Breakfast of Champions. At Celia Hoover's funeral, Rudy writes a veritable Kilgore Trout story in his head: “There was no reason to take us seriously as individuals. Celia in her casket there, all shot through with Drāno and amphetamine, might have been a dead cell sloughed off by a pancreas the size of the Milky Way.” Rudy finds himself “smiling at a funeral,” in spite of himself: “How comical that I, a single cell, should take my life so seriously.” But the would-be comedian is upbraided smartly: “I stopped smiling. I glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. One person had. He was at the other end of our pew, and he did not look away when I caught him gazing at me. … He was wearing large sunglasses with mirrored lenses” (156-57). Thus, with his Creator having come from the pages of Breakfast of Champions to give him the evil eye, Rudy concludes in his epilogue, “It may be a bad thing that so many people try to make good stories out of their lives. A story, after all, is as artificial as a mechanical bucking bronco in a drinking establishment” (165). It can also be as comical and, as a ludic device, just as inappropriate to its surrounding circumstances—or so Deadeye Dick implies.

Like Jailbird before it, Deadeye Dick is hardly resolute in its scourging of comic deceit, however more explicit it may be. But it still must represent a significant stage in the evolution of Vonnegut's long debate with himself over the value and morality of the comic practice. From the nadir of Breakfast of Champions and, I would suggest, Slapstick, through the resignation of Jailbird over the ineffectual chimeras of comic self-deception, Vonnegut brings to Deadeye Dick a noticeably more direct evaluation of comedy as an art form, given the narrator's avowed attempt at becoming a professional comedian, and his application of professional “tricks” to his private view of life. But even through the writing of Deadeye Dick, there was an exorcism that Vonnegut had yet to make. He began it in Breakfast of Champions, with the flaying of the painter and confidence man, Rabo Karabekian. He ignored it through Slapstick and Jailbird, and returned to it in Deadeye Dick, in which Rudy's mother begins “‘raising hell’” about “‘a painting by somebody named Rabo Karabekian.’” As Rudy notes, “‘It's green. It's about the size of a barn door. It has one vertical orange stripe, and it's called “The Temptation of Saint Anthony.”’” According to his mother, it is “‘an insult … to the memory of every serious artist who ever lived’” (149). Vonnegut ignored the implications of Karabekian's painting long enough to kill off all deceitful tricksters in Galapagos; but the painting and its creator remained to taunt him until the final exorcism of Bluebeard. In this book, Vonnegut explicitly says goodbye to art as a joke and to jokery as any kind of useful art. If, in Hocus Pocus, the narrator refuses to see himself as a comedian, it may be because comedy had already been banished in the previous novel.

Bluebeard is, among other things, about the repentance of a guilty “false player” for a life of joking. In this book it is not all artists who are condemned; only comic ones (although the preface does lament the tendency “to endow certain sorts of human playfulness with inappropriate and hence distressing seriousness” through “the grotesque prices paid for works of art” and “children's games” such as sports, dance, and music making).⁴² In Bluebeard, Rabo Karabekian is finally made to own up to “having disgraced [himself] in the visual arts” by demeaning them with his outrageous trickery (21). As a “serious artist” he has been, by his own admission, a “Floparroo” (208) and ostracized by his peers for good reason: “Painters shun me, since the ridicule my own paintings attracted and deserved encouraged Philistines to argue that most painters were charlatans or fools” (20). He looks back and concludes: “I have done no useful work for decades” (18). Instead, he has been an abstract expressionist painter.

It is difficult not to conclude that in Bluebeard abstract expressionism is a metaphor for comedy, just as drugs were in Deadeye Dick. The associations are manifold and plain, not only in the repeated contrasts between abstract expressionism and “serious art.” As Karabekian recalls, the whole premise for the school was “a kind of a joke” played by the founding members—Jackson Pollock, Terry Kitchen, and Karabekian himself. Even at the outset, Karabekian is told, “‘I can't get over how passionate you guys are, and yet so absolutely unserious.’” He replies, “‘Everything about life is a joke. … Don't you know that?’” (213). But it is a dangerous joke that plays itself out for the players: trapped in their defining roles, Pollock and Kitchen escape through suicide, leaving Karabekian to marvel at “how things got so gruesomely serious” (212). He ruefully concludes that their dalliance with this comic art form was like playing with a dangerous drug, “a master seducer against whose blandishments we were defenseless” (134). Rabo admits to having “discovered something as powerful and irresponsible as shooting up with heroin: if I started laying on just one color of paint to a huge canvas, I could make the whole world drop away” (128-29). This admission is especially guilt-ridden, given that before succumbing to the playful charms of abstract expressionism he had worked so painstakingly to satisfy the injunction of his mentor, the illustrator Dan Gregory: “‘Draw everything the way it really is’” (124).

In his hysterical condemnations of abstract expressionism, Gregory, too, reinforces its association with a comic form to be vilified. He demands that the young Rabo loyally despise the school as “‘the work of swindlers and lunatics and degenerates’” who cannot be taken seriously (123). When Rabo disobeys him by patronizing the Museum of Modern Art, Gregory's greatest outrage is reserved for the obvious comic pleasure that Rabo betrays when he is caught leaving the exhibition: “‘It's how happy you were when you were coming out! What could that happiness be but a mockery of me and of every person who ever tried to keep control of a paintbrush?’” (147). Although, as an illustrator, Gregory is himself a formidable counterfeiter, it is the degrading playfulness of abstract expressionism that he hates and its open admission of itself as play rather than as the attempted reflection of “what really is.” It is not surprising, then, that of all the people Gregory alienates in his “humorlessness and rage,” the most noteworthy two should be comedians: “When I said to Gregory that first night that I had heard the famous voice of W. C. Fields from the top of the spiral staircase, he replied that Fields would never be welcome in his house again, and neither would Al Jolson” (126).

For Rabo, the joke takes its revenge in a particularly cruel way, not only on him but also on those he has made a career of swindling. His abstract paintings—the vertical stripes of “awareness” on the solid fields of color—become “notorious for falling apart everywhere” (320) because of chemical reactions in a paint supposed to “outlive the smile on the ‘Mona Lisa.’” Thus, the last laugh is not only on whoever pays tens of thousands of dollars for an overpriced bad joke but on Rabo himself, a bested comedian: “The name of the paint was Sateen Dura-Luxe. Mona Lisa is still smiling. And your local paint dealer, if he has been in the business any length of time, will laugh in your face if you ask for Sateen Dura-Luxe” (29). Rabo's work has been poisoned by buffoonery, so much so that he offers the world a new dictionary definition, “karabekian”: “Fiasco in which a person causes total destruction of own work and reputation through stupidity, carelessness or both” (231). Rabo attempts to undo the consequences of his misapplied comedy, resolving to paint a serious illustration over what had been an admitted joke: in effect, he sets out to take back the joke in “an exorcism of an unhappy past, a symbolic repairing of all the damage I had done to myself and the others during my brief career as a painter” (236). Again, for “painter” we can read “jokester,” given Rabo's declaration: “‘I have had all I can stand of not taking myself seriously’” (139).

Rabo is aided in his conversion to a “serious artist” by the writer, Circe Berman, who soon after moving in with him throws down the gauntlet: “‘Maybe you can't stand truly serious art. Maybe you'd better use the back door from now on’” (117). It is Circe who pushes Rabo back into stark illustration and away from artistic camouflage, taunting him: “‘I need information the way I need vitamins and minerals. … Judging from your pictures, you hate facts like poison’” (31). Circe wants to be informed, not deceived into valuing paintings that are “‘about absolutely nothing’” except themselves and the humor in which they are conceived (42). By the end of the book, she has succeeded in convincing Rabo to paint a canvas “so realistic that it might have been a photograph” (240). To Circe it is as real, if as humorless, as “‘a display in a museum of natural history’” (243). For Rabo, the transition from cynical comedian to serious artist marks his “Renaissance” (237), as he judges his new creation: “This is no shaggy dog story. … And there is no lame joke in there” (45). On the contrary, his giant painting is an intricate illustration of particular people in a particular place and time, “‘when the sun came up the day the Second World War ended in Europe’” (240). Containing representations of so much horror and brutality that lay in the war's wake, the painting is a confrontation and reckoning with reality, rather than a comic evasion of it. Moreover, it is both an elegy for, and exorcism of, a comic spirit signaled by the rendering of various comedians as slaves and criminals, as Rabo points out to Circe: “‘These two Estonians in German uniforms are Laurel and Hardy. This French collaborator here is Charlie Chaplin. These two Polish slave laborers … are Jackson Pollock and Terry Kitchen’” (250).

Given what Rabo calls the “melancholy roll-call of real-life suicides among the Abstract Expressionists,” this final, realistic illustration suggests that his ultimate withdrawal from jokery is, for Rabo, very much a happy escape (251). The sheer relief with which he closes his narrative following this momentous conversion; the renunciation of the legacy of the awful confidence game introduced and scorned in Breakfast of Champions and Deadeye Dick; and his sense of being a “Lazarus” brought back to life by Circe, the writer who teaches him to confront the unbearable and illustrate with sincerity—all of these point to Bluebeard as a significant critique of the comic practice. No longer imprisoned in the comedian's role, Rabo can exult in closure, “Oh, happy Rabo Karabekian,” with a career of deceit and degradation behind him, and a reprieve in the offing (256).

From here it is only a small step to what is at the time of writing Vonnegut's latest novel, and the outright declaration by its narrator that he is no comedian. Eugene Debs Hartke is sick of lying, given that he had been such a consummate performer as a public information officer during the Vietnam War. The war is characterized as a “dirty joke” (9), a “loony” enterprise (39), a “big hallucination,” “nonsense” (67), and an unbelievable fable that, like a sophomoric joke to which it is compared, demands the credulity of the public who had been “watched to see how long they went on believing it, just as they had been watched when they were little, no doubt, to see how long they would go on believing in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus” (51). As an unwilling comedian who had been under orders to perpetuate the joke “that we were clearly winning, and that the folks back home should be proud and happy about all the good things we were doing there” (22), Hartke recalls with shame, “I was a genius of lethal hocus pocus!” (126). It is as if he is signaling Melville's fears about the potential of evil witchery from the mouth of an accomplished, smiling liar; for Hartke sees himself as a confidence man wearing on his hands the blood of “all those, many of them Americans, who died as an indirect result of all my hocus pocus, all by blah blah blah” (127). Resolved afterwards to live up to the precept that “honesty is the best policy” (33), Hartke, like the reformed Karabekian before him, sets out to tell the truth henceforth, becoming a teacher whose aim is to “overthrow … ignorance and self-serving fantasies” (74). For Hartke, it is “a teacher's duty to speak frankly” to his students (120); and he has only contempt for diversionary uses of knowledge, comic or otherwise: “The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them” (55). Ultimately, in spite of a wistful predilection for jokery, he becomes a martyr to the truth when he effectively takes back all the dirty jokes he had told in Vietnam, and is fired for “having wobbled the students' faith in the intelligence and decency of their country's leadership by telling them the truth about the Vietnam War” (203).

Hartke's opinions of three other comedian figures also point to the high price that must be paid by any would-be truth teller who chooses instead to don the comic mask, either as a means of deceiving others or in order to protect himself. First there is Damon Stern, the aforementioned history professor who, to Hartke's astonishment, keeps his job in spite of the witch hunt: again, as Hartke reasons, “My guess is that he was a comedian, and I was not.” As far as Hartke is concerned, through his comedic evasions Stern had taken the coward's way out: “Stern never told the awful truth about supposedly noble human actions in recent times. Everything he debunked had to have transpired before 1950, say” (106). In contrast, Hartke and another condemned teacher had “talked about the last half of the 20th Century, in which we had both been seriously wounded physically and psychologically, which was nothing anybody but a sociopath could laugh about” (95). It is in fact a sociopath who is the second comedian figure upon whom Hartke pronounces his damning judgment: Alton Darwin is a mass murderer with a deadpan comic's viewpoint and delivery, who speaks “of trivial and serious matters in the same tone of voice, with the same gestures and facial expressions” (61). In this he is likened explicitly to the third of the comedian figures, Jack Patton, Hartke's dead brother-in-law who, even when alive, is “a dead man” by virtue of his pathetic attempt to counterfeit a comic vision: “Everything, and I mean everything, was a joke to him, or so he said. His favorite expression right up to the end was, ‘I had to laugh like hell.’” Patton threatens to so laugh at a number of propositions: the torturing of animals; marriage; the atomic destruction of New York; the body count in Saigon; his own death. And, in the end, Patton's failure even to crack a smile is perhaps the most eloquent testimony to a comedian who promises, tries, and fails to deliver: “Patton would tell about some supposedly serious or beautiful or dangerous or holy event during which he had had to laugh like hell, but he hadn't really laughed. He kept a straight face, too, when he told about it afterward. In all his life, I don't think anybody ever heard him do what he said he had to do all the time, which was laugh like hell” (38-39).

For Vonnegut to have arrived at this stable of characters thirty years after beginning, in Mother Night, his exploration of what it means and what it takes to be a critically-minded comedian, indeed suggests a grim trajectory. But as Vonnegut has stated, it is not a particularly unique one, being rather indicative of a pattern. As we have seen, Vonnegut shares this trajectory with a host of other American satirists. This includes his avowed mentor, Mark Twain, to whom we now—finally—turn.

Notes

1. John Lahr, “The Goat-Boy Rises,” New Yorker, November 1, 1993, 113, 121.

2. Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse than Death (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 183.

3. Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus (London: Vintage, 1991), 95.

4. Vonnegut, Fates Worse than Death, 183.

5. Kurt Vonnegut, “Opening Remarks,” The Unabridged Mark Twain, ed. Lawrence Teacher (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1976), 1: xv.

6. Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons (New York: Dell, 1979), xxi.

7. Robert Scholes, “Chasing a Lone Eagle,” in The Vonnegut Statement, ed. Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer (St. Albans: Panther, 1975), 53.

8. Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle (London: Penguin, 1965), 177. All further quotations are from this edition.

9. Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night (London: Vintage, 1992), vii-viii, 116. All further quotations are from this edition.

10. Richard Todd, “The Masks of Kurt Vonnegut,” New York Times Magazine, January 24, 1971, 26.

11. Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 198.

12. Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, 163.

13. Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 163.

14. Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, 238.

15. Ibid., 218.

16. Scholes, “A Talk with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,” in Vonnegut Statement, 110-11.

17. Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 182.

18. Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, 256.

19. Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick (London: Vintage, 1991), 1. All further quotations are from this edition.

20. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (London: Penguin, 1985), 149.

21. Christopher Buckley, “Gotterdammerung-22,” New Yorker, October 10, 1994, 105.

22. William Rodney Allen and Paul Smith, “An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut,” in William Rodney Allen, ed., Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 288.

23. Reprinted in Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, 281.

24. Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (London: Vintage, 1992), 4. All further quotations are from this edition.

25. Lawrence R. Broer, Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (London: UMI Research Press, 1989), 12-13.

26. Ibid., 189.

27. Israel Shenker, “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Lights Comic Paths of Despair,” in Allen, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, 22.

28. William Rodney Allen and Paul Smith, “An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut,” in Allen, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, 265, 285.

29. Leonard Mustazza, Forever Pursuing Genesis: The Myth of Eden in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1990), 77.

30. Tony Tanner, City of Words (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 189.

31. Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (London: Vintage, 1992), 27, 165-66.

32. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (London: Paladin, 1989), 27, 80.

33. Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, 13, 163.

34. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 13, 97, 157.

35. Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, 283; and Palm Sunday, 304.

36. Mustazza, Forever Pursuing Genesis, 129.

37. Michael Wood, “Vonnegut's Softer Focus,” New York Times Book Review, September 9, 1979, 1, 22-24.

38. Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos (London: Flamingo, 1994), 13. All further quotations are from this edition.

39. Mustazza, Forever Pursuing Genesis, 170, 178.

40. Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird (London: Vintage, 1992), 129, 140, 191. All further quotations are from this edition.

41. Kurt Vonnegut, Deadeye Dick (London: Flamingo, 1992), 77. All further quotations are from this edition.

42. Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard (London: Flamingo, 1992), 5. All further quotations are from this edition.