So it goes. Kurt Vonnegut in memoriam

Two books which I happened to read at about the same time changed my view of literature. The first was Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, which revealed to me the possibility of writing beautifully about the banal. The second was Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, which revealed to me the possibility, and at times necessity, of writing banally about utterly serious matters. After the world war (for was there not really only one in two acts?) the literati argued about the death, or at least disintegration, of expression. How does one write after Hiroshima, the Holocaust, Gulag? The list goes on and on, but we must not forget Dresden, a city Kurt Vonnegut was in as it was bombed beyond recognition (the oxygen was used up as fire storms ravaged the city). Miraculously he survived. How does one write about this? The dramatic writing styles of times past could not suffice. There were no heroes in Dresden, only victims. Tens of thousands of them. As one left the shelters (the few of which were not turned into ovens) the lucky survivors gazed out onto a moonlike landscape filled with charcoaled corpses. Should one write an elegy for each and every single person? It would not have been possible. Kurt Vonnegut captured the banality of evil like no other … so it goes. These three words are repeated over and over throughout the book as the only reaction to everything that happens. Three simple words. Each one drenched in an irony so black that they captured the whole essence of the disasters of the twentieth century. “So it goes” must have been the only method of thinking left for the witnesses, for the perpetrators, for the victims. So it goes. Without these three words everybody involved would have gone insane. But, and here lies yet another layer of irony, the mere fact that humanity was left viewing these disasters with a flinch of an eye, a flick of the wrist, and a nonchalant “so it goes”, proved, like the acts themselves, that mankind was (and is perhaps still) insane.
Another favoured literary trick used to perfection by Kurt (I use his first name, for I feel almost like his friend) was to reveal how things would unfold almost before starting the story. The ending, or unfolding, that he would reveal always seemed so unlikely that no matter how many of his books you read, you were never quite able to believe that things would take such an insane (unlikely) twist, but they always did. This gave his books an almost magical quality – I will tell you what will happen, but you won’t believe me. Time and again I was fooled by this trick. Time and again it worked. So it went. This was also, in a sense, a reflection of his acute understanding of modern reality. If in 1930 you were told that mankind would develop (and use!) bombs that could eliminate whole cities, you would have had to be insane (or evil) to believe it. If told in 1945 that more bombs would be dropped on Cambodia than was dropped on all of Europe during WWII you would have only been able to laugh at the sick joke. But so it went. Both predictions came true.
In The Sirens of Titan, the most science fiction inspired of his novels, the whole world, and human history, is reduced to a tool for supplying a stranded alien with a spare part. Everything is made into a practical joke of sorts. This was Kurt’s gift. Wittgenstein once said: “That which we cannot talk about, we must keep silent about.” I sometimes got a feeling that Kurt’s method was a direct response. No, we must not keep quite. That which is too horrid to talk seriously about, we must joke about. The world is a dark place and if we lose our sense of humour (however dark it might be) we will lose it all.
Kurt was not one of those authors that buried himself in literature and left the world alone. He was always present. Always there with his dark humour, always catching the sentiment of the times. In one essay written shortly before his death he warned that he wanted to sue the tobacco companies because they promised him an early death. In another, written as a dialogue between President George Bush and God, God tells Bush that he didn’t ask for Bush to go to war in Iraq. Bush insists that God gave him the instructions to invade, an accusation God denies, but Bush keeps insisting that his mandate came from God and the whole dialogue ends by God saying: “Yes God”.
I will miss Kurt, I already do. So it goes.