VONNEGUT'S MASKS
Vonnegut, Kurt
VONNEGUT'S MASKS PALM SUNDAY by Kurt Vonnegut Delacorte Press. 330 pp. $13.95. Like his fellow humorist Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut attains his main strength as a writer in his grasp of persona....
...On housing, the economy, the fragmentation of the cities by slapdash development, the sputtering of mass transit in many areas—in short, on all the knotted problems which prevent extended families from being more than a podium dream, the Mandarin Simplifier is silent...
...We thought we could do without tribes and clans...
...Blivit" is Vonnegutter for "two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag...
...Some of the jokes are funny, even the dumb ones, and, as Vonnegut must know, it's hard to dislike a funny man...
...Chris Tucker (Chris Tucker teaches literature at Brookhaven College in Texas and is a frequent reviewer for the Dallas Morning News...
...Mencken, and of KV's humanist great grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut...
...Vonnegut's answer—a simple answer, of course—is much like theirs...
...We all want to get ourselves back to the Garden, but which is the right road...
...We should return to extended families as quickly as we can, and be lonesome no more, lonesome no more...
...There is the problem...
...This would have been crude back in study hall, of course, but KV-2, Freedom Fighter, is whisked in quicker than you can say Bill of Rights to explain away such bourgeois aversions...
...They no longer exist...
...As KV-2, Freedom Fighter, Vonnegut returns frequently to a lament over the decline of the Freethinker tradition of Bertrand Russell and Ralph In-gersoll and Clarence Darrow and H.L...
...In the quasi-scientific language he seems to love, they are KV-1, KV-2, and KV-3, or the Risque Buffoon, the Freedom Fighter, and the Mandarin Simplifier...
...Like his literary forebear Mark Twain, he is horrified by the headlines, and as puzzled by our faltering civilization as another clown prince of modern times, Charles Chaplin (a Vonnegut idol...
...Hear him describe, for the Hobart and William Smith graduating class, the central problem of our society: "And what we will be seeking...
...KV-1, Risque Buffoon, cracks jokes both dismal and hilarious, advises graduating classes to get plenty of bran in their diets, and wonders about Queen Victoria's reaction to the drawing of his anus featured as part of the official KV signature...
...Thus, the typical Vonnegut book is endearing, puzzling, and infuriating, as is Palm Sunday, a book which should make Vonnecultists of the four or five Americans who still are not...
...He laughs...
...The reader may wonder, "How...
...Critics are disarmed by this approach, not knowing BOOKS which voice is that of the "real" Vonnegut and which only an illusion...
...He also tells us that this mixed bag of speeches, letters, songs, musings, a play, and a short story should be eligible for "a mega-grand-slam" in the Pulitzers, "sweeping fiction, drama, history, biography, and journalism...
...No one-liners can hide Vonnegut's pain as he discusses his wife's and daughters' conversions to "born-again" Christianity ("working white magic through rituals and prayers," Vonnegut writes of the faith that destroyed his marriage...
...But it's no use...
...Try, but it's hard to dislike Palm Sunday...
...Sounds pretty complex, all wrapped up with the industrial revolution and the end of agrarian America and the population explosion and inflation...
...Not one, but three Kurt Vonneguts inhabit the pages of Palm Sunday...
...Let your critical guard down for a minute, and you're converted...
...Taboos against mentioning and drawing no-no body parts are really devices for keeping the workers in their places and squelching dissent...
...will be large, stable communities of like-minded people, which is to say relatives...
...Well, we can't...
...If that sounds oversimplified, blame it on the presence throughout Palm Sunday of KV-3, the Mandarin Simplifier...
...The lack of them is not only the main cause, but probably the only cause of our shapeless discontent in the midst of such prosperity...
...More importantly, parts of Palm Sunday are especially timely...
...Behind the veils of ironist and jester, we sense that at some distant point the multiple KVs merge into a laughing, suffering man very much of his time...
...Vonnegut has a penchant for reducing complex problems of art or morality to simple a-b-c solutions...
...But Vonnegut, as the Mandarin Simplifier, blithely invokes the current version of the Golden Age-Garden of Eden myth, the extended family...
...Members of the Vonnecult, however, are free to pick and choose among Vonnegut's repertoire of selves, accepting some Vonnegut dicta as canonical and conveniently sloughing off others as mere foolery...
...In his introduction, Vonnegut calls Palm Sunday an "autobiographical collage" and a "blivit...
...In his personal anguish, perhaps Vonnegut pinpoints the reasons for the revival of fundamentalism and the current attacks, from rostrum and Rose Garden, on humanism: "I would be a fool to say that the Freethinker ideas of Clems Vonnegut remain as enchanting and encouraging as ever—not after the mortal poisoning of the planet, not after two world wars, with more to come...
...Wear the right mask, he knows, and you can say anything...
Vol. 45 • August 1981 • No. 8
