Breakfast of Champions: This Novel Contains More Than Twice Your Minimum Daily Requirement of Irony
by Richard Todd
For the students of the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a useful book recently appeared, The Vonnegut Statement. The essays in this collection are plainly celebratory, but some of them turn out to be quite informative, too (Glenn Meeter. for instance, on religious themes in the novels), and the editors provide a thoroughgoing bibliography. I was struck by a part of an essay called “Kurt Vonnegut for President,” whose author remarks that Vonnegut has engaged his readers in a way that recalls “the days of Ernest Hemingway.”
What a strange comparison this seems to be. Among twentieth-century American writers, the two men seem as nearly a perfect pair of opposites as you could find. Hemingway’s warrior virtues, love of reality, his taut quest for order; Vonnegut’s pacifism, his excursions in fantasy, his rather affectionate contemplation of chaos. But it is a resonant notion, Vonnegut as Hemingway. It is true enough that Vonnegut has dramatized in his prose and in his personality a system of values that expresses the dominant faiths of a generation: antimaterialism, the existence of multiple realities, disbelief in history and religion, a disposition to see oneself as victim, despair about the human condition laced with uplifting moral injunctions. And what other writer of the moment has done so? (Whatever his exquisite other success, Mailer has more often redeemed his public life in print than he has enacted his literary vision in public.) The values he represents may be, for the most part, antiheroic, but Vonnegut has become a hero.
It is only in 1969 that Vonnegut can be said to have entered his ascendancy, with the widespread ecstatic reception of SlaughterhouseFive, his surreal re-creation of the bombing of Dresden. Among the elements of the Vonnegut legend is the long time he served in obscurity, his vision too far ahead of the time. This is somewhat overstated. Although the first novel. Player Piano, was published in 1952, it was not the sort of book of which cults are made. A satire of a company town of the future, its moral was painfully obvious, and it lacked the playfulness of the later books. Vonnegut didn’t write another for seven years.
The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Mother Night (1961) were for a time the “undiscovered” books, both first published in paperback. But soon after Cat’s Cradle (1963), his reputation began to build on campus, and there were critical essays, Guggenheim money, and a teaching spot at the University of Iowa, one of whose faculty, Robert Scholes, had become one of Vonnegut’s most important advocates. By 1970 his play. Happy Birthday, Wanda June, had opened off-, then on-Broadway, he was a lecturer at Harvard, sales of his books went over a million copies, and there were profiles and television appearances. Vonnegut was always disarming, soft-voiced, seemingly bewildered about all the good fortune.
It is curious that even now those who praise him so often speak in maternal tones, as if he were a cause to be promoted. Doris Lessing, writing just a few weeks ago in the New York Times Book Review, told of the early neglect of Mother Night and remarked that a few academics still try to patronize him “. . . because he has made nonsense of the little categories . . . because he is comic and sad at once, because his painful seriousness is never solemn. . . .” An odd assertion in itself: hasn’t this always been the effort of comedy? Far from victimized, in any case, Vonnegut by now is the only American writer this side of Faith Baldwin to whom the word “beloved” might be applied.
Vonnegut’s response to his national prominence was the announcement that his life as a novelist was over. He promised more plays, but said, “I’m through with novels.” In a lecture, he would read a section of an unfinished manuscript called Breakfast of Champions and break off saying, “It’s never coming out. It bores me stiff.”
Now we have Breakfast of Champions (Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, $7.95). And was he trifling with us? It is a possibility. But it should be said that Vonnegut’s unease with his career became the subject of the book. The various themes and mannerisms that have animated the earlier novels are seen here in a grotesque, cartoon version of themselves. A kind of minimalism has always characterized Vonnegut’s prose, and it is the first thing you notice in Breakfast of Champions. The stuff of the books is often phantasmagoric: time-warps, intergalactic travel, not to mention earthbound atrocities and follies. But the style is offhand, aphoristic, intimate, spare. It always works to say: things are simpler than people want to let on. Breakfast of Champions advances this mode to the extent that Vonnegut is writing much of the time in the sensibility of an autistic grown-up.
“An apple was a popular fruit which looked like this: . . .” (Scores of illustrations, apparently done by Vonnegut’s own hand, are provided to end the many sentences that begin in that way.) Further down the page_ “A hamburger was made out of an animal which looked like this: . . . The animal was killed and ground up into little bits. . . .”
In the last sentence you begin to hear one of the purposes of this style: to see life in all its mundane brutality. This is autism with a conscience, often a quite specific social conscience. And truly it is hard to be for what Vonnegut is against, including, as it does, slavery, jingoism, racism, commercial greed, ecological disaster. He thinks that the names of American cars and corporations are foolish to the point of obscenity. Holiday Inns are droll places indeed. The American Indian has been given a bad deal. I’d agree. Vonnegut brings a remarkable air of discovery to these themes, the pretense that no one has quite seen before the stark outlines of our hypocrisy. It is a part of his appeal for his readers that I never understood: the banality, the nearly Kiwanian subtlety of his social criticisms—they are boosterism in reverse. Here is Vonnegut on the distance between reality and American ideals: “His high school was named after a slave owner who was one of the world’s greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty.”
If you say that this wit is easy sophomoric cynicism, though, you have to allow that now Vonnegut says so too. “I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly—to insult ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ to scrawl pictures of a Nazi flag and an asshole and lots of other things with a felt-tipped pen. To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole: . . .”
Programmed. There is a theme in Vonnegut’s work that goes further toward explaining his success than does his ritualized debunking of American life. It has to do with human longings for a coherent universe and Vonnegut’s insistence on the futility of this desire. The philosophical comedy in Breakfast of Champions hinges on the question— or as Vonnegut would say, the Earthling notion—of free will.
The novel recounts the disintegrating life of Dwayne Hoover, Pontiac dealer, well-to-do resident of “Midland City,” widower of a woman who has committed suicide by swallowing Drano, father of a homosexual son. Hoover is going mad from “bad chemicals” in his brain, suffers from echolalia, and the occasional feeling that the ground beneath him is a trampoline.
Dwayne may be seen as Job. The book’s epigraph (“When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold”) urges you to think so, as does the moment when Dwayne recalls a visit to the Pontiac factory where he sees a lab called “Destructive Testing” and says, “I couldn’t help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for—to find out how much a man could take without breaking.” This is a parodic version of the Job story: Dwayne’s reward for his long suffering is violent lunacy.
The occasion for Dwayne’s rampage, which begins in the Holiday Inn cocktail lounge, is somewhat complex. It involves the appearance of Kilgore Trout, who will be remembered from earlier novels as the obscure, visionary sci-fi writer, Vonnegut’s lampoon version of himself. It is Trout who introduces Dwayne to the idea that human beings are programmed, can’t help doing what they do, and he adds the notion that only Dwayne has free will, he’s “an experiment by the Creator of the Universe.” Dwayne’s reaction to this knowledge (which I guess we can take as a metaphor for human history) is destruction.
In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut’s theology takes on a somewhat deeper note of despair than it has shown before, though for some time it has been one of his devices to make sport of conventional religions. We are all both helpless and absurd. There is no Angry God or Loving God; God is indifferent, or perhaps confused. Things happen, in the famous line from Slaughterhouse-five, ‘if the accident will.” In Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut creates the antireligion Bokononism. Bokonon points out that God made man and that man asked what was the purpose of life, and God replied, “Everything must have a purpose?” On Vonnegut’s imaginary planet Tralfamadore, a truth obscured from men is visible, time is an illusion, everything that will happen has happened.
And yet, for all their flirtations with meaninglessness, Vonnegut’s novels are never without a moment of affirmation. In his bleak universe, men, like orphans, are to huddle together valuing each other’s warmth. Only one thing is sacred to the Bokononist: “Man. . . . That’s all. Just man.” I have always found that line very hard going. There is so much piety in this godlessness. Vonnegut’s morality is vague, so undemanding, a dreamily humanist nihilism.
A similar moment occurs in Breakfast of Champions. Near the close of the book, Rabo Karabekian, artist, explains his painting, The Temptation of St. Anthony, to a hostile crowd. The painting is a strip of day-glo orange against a “Hawaiian Avocado” backdrop. Karabekian says that the picture “shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. ... It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us.” And Vonnegut later says: “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.
“At the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light.
“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.”
It is best to tread lightly here. Surely Vonnegut means us to take this moment with some seriousness— that is the function of the arch and self-mocking wit that surrounds it— and no perception of the soul is to be dismissed. But it seems to me one of those revelations that only calls to mind the spiritual constriction that gave it birth. The eye that sees through to the unwavering band of light misses the commonplace divinity in the light around us—in the particular and the ephemeral.
Vonnegut has always disdained daily life. You will find no explication of emotional nuance in the novels, no renderings of social detail. For that sort of art he has felt contempt: realistic novels “teach wives of junior executives what to buy next and how to act in a French restaurant,” a character says in Slaughterhouse-Five. In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut deplores books that “make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
There is, though, the character called Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. As a contributor to The Vonnegut Statement notes, he is “the most ‘realized’ character” in Slaughterhouse-Five. In retrospect, it seems that the Vonnegut figure was struggling from the start to escape from behind the sketchily rendered characters that populated the early books. It is only in the 1966 introduction to Mother Night, however, that Vonnegut begins to appear in his own voice, a voice that dominates Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. Its distinctive note, of course, is candor.
Vonnegut’s elaborately wrought simplicity has a tradition behind it, the vernacular tradition. Mark Twain, whose spirit Vonnegut would honor, is his ancestor in form, too. The vernacular form, as Henry Nash Smith and others have described it, depends on a tension between the voice of the storyteller and the intelligence of the author. The narrator (Huck Finn, for instance) provides a rich colloquial language and a naive but wise pair of eyes, which allow the author to see and to say things that don’t yield themselves to “literary” expression. This may be a convention near the end of its life; perhaps the last unembarrassed vernacular novel was The Catcher in the Rye. In any case, Vonnegut has had a large hand in altering the form.
Vonnegut collapses the distance between author and narrator. When he remarks at the start of Slaughterhouse-Five that “I would hate to tell you how much this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time,” the tone is Holden Caulfield’s. But that’s Vonnegut talking. And, so far as we can know, it’s “the real Vonnegut.” I don’t mean that the remark is to be taken literally. Much of the book dwells on the difficulty Vonnegut had in writing it. But the person is to be taken literally.
In the vernacular, the writer trades a breadth of verbal resources for a limited, defined language: he trades possibilities of expressiveness and complication for authenticity. In the new vernacular, this bargain grows more exacting. The commodity the author is dealing with is not a fictive character but himself. “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book,” Vonnegut explains in Slaughterhouse-Five. The writer lops off certain kinds of intelligence to speak in this way, trades the fullest use of his mind for the achievement of a conversational immediacy, and hopes that intricate ideas can be compressed successfully into lean speech.
There are rare moments in Vonnegut when it is all worthwhile. They almost without exception have to do with the event he pretends not to have been able to confront, the Dresden bombing: the introduction to Mother Night, and those sections of Slaughterhouse-Five where the writer (in the novelist Harold Brodkey’s recent phrase) is full of “the authority of being on one’s knees in front of the event.” But when Vonnegut applies this same mode elsewhere, to, say, a generalized sense of the human condition, his voice abruptly becomes inadequate, narcissistic, coy.
I am talking about Vonnegut as if he lived on a frontier, advancing a new and perilous form, and so in a way he does. But it ought to be said quickly that the avant-garde in which he is so prominent by now incorporates countless numbers of practitioners.
In the Harvard Crimson, in Rolling Stone and scores of other countercultural papers, in The Village Voice, New York magazine, and even (in a rarefied way) in The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, you can find the new vernacular: writer after writer shuffling or buttonholing, offering himself as someone very open, very loose, very involved with the reader, who is presumed always to be a like spirit.
It may be this mode of self-presentation that is the most important source of Vonnegut’s considerable charm over his readers. His example is an uncertain gift. There are troubles with this form of expression. It confuses candor with honesty. It tempts the writer to use stylized simplicity to disguise genuine simplemindedness. Kurt Vonnegut would seem to have explored the limits of the form and to have discovered the price it exacts in selflaceration, the amputation of parts of the mind. Breakfast of Champions is finally not so much about human despair in the face of cosmic indifference as it is about Vonnegut’s despair in the face of himself, a subject for which Vonnegut proves to have an impoverished vocabulary.
You believe in the discontent, believe, in fact, that it goes deeper than he can say. “I feel lousy about [this book].” “I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it.” This sort of self-indictment is contrived, with a seeming inevitability, to redound to the writer’s credit. Too often the prose is acting in the manner of a cocktail party lecher. Amidst all this phoniness, it says, only you and I, reader, are real.
In its frivolousness and pretension, the novel becomes an insult to Vonnegut’s loyal readers; perhaps, in some buried way, a calculated insult. The dislike that he appears to feel for himself and for so much of the substance of life must surely extend to the audience that has overpraised him and that has such a bottomless appetite for his gratuitous, tic-like irony. Consider a small moment, the inevitable turn taken by Vonnegut’s disclaimer about the book’s title, which “is not intended to indicate an association with or sponsorship by General Mills, nor is it intended to disparage their fine products.” Well, that “fine.” This is the irony of the puton; its meaning lies only in its ambiguity. You either find it mirthful or you don’t. If you don’t, it seems to wear the face of an adolescent smirk.
Given the pervasiveness of this irony, it might seem wise to hear everything Vonnegut says as skewed with indirection. But, to repeat, I listen literally to his gestures of selflament. Odd scattered facts occur throughout the book, and l believe them: that Vonnegut takes antidepressants, that his psychiatrist is named Martha, that his mother was a suicide, that his father as an old man had blue-veined legs; and this information sadly seems to be just a bid for our sympathy.
The boldest, most bathetic such bid occurs at the end of the novel, when Vonnegut seems to be enacting the good-bye to fiction that he announced in public three years ago. Vonnegut, appearing as Creator of his universe, “frees” his characters. To signify his presumably ineffable feeling, he offers one of his sketches, which depicts an eye with a tear falling from it.
I began with an unlikely comparison between Vonnegut and Hemingway. Another similarity suggests itself: the adherence of both writers to a strict code of selfhood that gives over all too easily to selfparody. In his work now, Vonnegut seems not the universal victim but a quite particular victim, prisoner of his own style. It’s a difficulty that he has described himself, in his wellknown line from Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut’s fully persuasive pose is that of a man who has come to hate the sound of his own voice and continues to talk.