Kurt Vonnegut's Role in American Cultural History

Vonnegut as a Cultural Bridge

As a purveyor of American culture, Kurt Vonnegut stands in an interesting position: camped on the ground of his socially progressive descendants, he hails from the conservative, nostalgic America of the Great Depression, World War II, and the 1950s. As such, he represents a bridge between the two worlds of American idealism and human idealism, of modernism and postmodernism, of faith and cynicism. Yet he remains solidly camped on one side, though a generation removed from the contemporaries of that side. A hero of the baby-boomer generation, Vonnegut was already in his late forties when his seminal anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five — drawn from his own experience in World War II — was hailed as visionary by Vietnam War protesters as well as the counterculture at large.

Vonnegut is a convert: one whose socio-psychological experience helped ease the passage of America from the early twentieth century into the later half, and one who taught America how to reflect on itself and cope with what it found therein, primarily through the vehicles of satire and black humor. The influence of Vonnegut on American culture must therefore be regarded as transitional — a bridge between modern America and postmodern America. "As an adolescent, he made my life bearable," reflects Jon Stewart (Sullivan, MSNBC), a modern-day ideological descendant of the 1960s liberals who, like Vonnegut, has placed himself in the position of bridging the gap between two generations.

The strength of Vonnegut lies in his unwavering compassion for humanity despite a deep cynicism about that humanity's worthiness. His cynicism and compassion are always couched in the blackest humor and a fragmentary postmodern approach — devices Vonnegut used to cope with that tension, and through which he influenced later generations of literature. The central tenets of the author appear to be in mutual exclusion, creating great tension: he does not believe in humanity, but he has certainly loved it. This paper analyzes the influence of that tension, in light of Vonnegut's black humor and postmodernism, and the influence which the author's devices, motivations, and style have had on the body of literature and media that postdated him.

Modernism, Postmodernism, and Vonnegut's Place Between Them

Postmodernism is usefully distinguished from modernism by Peter Barry in Beginning Theory: "In a word, the modernist laments fragmentation while the postmodernist celebrates it" (Barry, p. 84). Essential to modernism, for Barry, is a nostalgia for the forms and faith of the past — of the pre-modern era — which the modernists look back to wishfully. Modernism is strongly ascetic, both for moral and material reasons, and prefers the courage and goodness of a Charles Dickens character even though it can itself only produce the moral ambiguity of James Joyce. The postmodernist, by contrast, looks not back but ahead, having embraced the loss of faith, the materialism, the fragmentation and pastiche, and the cynicism of the new era. One is invariably reminded of Warhol's Campbell's Soup images — as vivid a celebration of material, postmodern forms as visually exists.

Barry further asserts that "postmodernism rejects the distinction between 'high' and 'popular' art which was important in modernism" (Barry, p. 84), and here a clear connection to Vonnegut and contemporaries such as his close friend Joseph Heller becomes visible. In Vonnegut, slapstick science fiction and black humor are mixed with intelligent social commentary, just as Heller mixed black humor with social commentary in his own work. A more recent example, descendant of this rejection of the distinction between art forms, is the graphic novel Watchmen, published in the mid-1980s and later adapted into a major motion picture. That graphic novel presents deep and often disturbing ideas and commentary on the nature of humanity and free will, but does so in the form of a comic book complete with superheroes, kitschy masks, and bat-mobiles. It is high art for the masses — precisely what Vonnegut's work aimed to be and, in doing so, taught literature to be.

There has always been some debate about whether Vonnegut is strictly a postmodern author, or whether modernist overtones can be found lacing his work. Slaughterhouse-Five certainly preserves an element of lamentation; one has the distinct feeling that the author — as well as the novel's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim — would wish not to have seen all that he has seen. For Vonnegut, what he might wish to un-see would be the firebombing of Dresden, while Billy Pilgrim seems more tortured by his visions of the past and future. Time-travel has destroyed Billy's faith in human free will and thus in humanity at large, and Dresden has done the same for Vonnegut. The loss of faith is a modernist condition; however, the author's compassion seems stronger in this novel than in his later works — compare Galápagos, in which he writes, "This was a very innocent planet, except for those great big [human] brains" (Galápagos, p. 9). Though that compassion wanes in his later years, its very existence requires that an attitude of lamentation be acknowledged.

Vonnegut's Postmodern Credentials

David Cowart believes that Vonnegut represents a bridge between the modern and postmodern eras (Tally, 2008), and that is the position this paper takes. Robert Tally adds, however, that "it is also clear that Vonnegut's work embodies a kind of postmodern sensibility, a fellow-feeling for its place and time, that marks it as postmodern in a recognizable way" (Tally, 2008). Tally offers three pieces of evidence for Vonnegut's position within the postmodern camp, even granting his role as a bridge: first, Vonnegut's disconnection with the past; second, the subversion of time by space in Vonnegut's fiction; and third, the fragmentary and pastiche nature of much of his work (Tally, 2008).

It can further be noted that, as Barry might frame it, Vonnegut's characters are not usually concerned with morality so much as practicality — marking him as a postmodern celebrator of the loss of faith rather than a modernist lamenter of it. Faith is gone, Vonnegut seems to shout, yet the world turns on. There are no Stephen Dedaluses here worrying about moral ambiguity, no Robert Jordans concerned with doing the right thing. Vonnegut's characters commonly seem to be trying to save their own skins. Vonnegut is a transitional element from modernism to postmodernism, yet by camping firmly with the postmodernists he became an agent of change — a hero of the revolution rather than a pillar of the past.