The excerpt below was posted by atrios this morning. It’s from Slaughterhouse Five, or the Children’s Crusade and is one of my favorites. The image is a detail from Edith Vonnegut’s (Kurt’s daughter) illustration for The Idea Killers. Full image.
Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the conversation, asked him what he was reading this time.
So Rosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.
The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:
Oh boy – they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.
The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!
Billy’s fiancee had finished her Three Musketeers candy bar. Now she was eating a Milky Way.
“Forget books,” said Rosewater, throwing that particular book under his bed. “The hell with ’em.”
“That sounded like an interesting one,” said Valencia.
“Jesus-if Kilgore Trout could only write!” Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout’s unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.
Update: Jon Stewart interviews Vonnegut on The Daily Show via Crooks and Liars.
aaaahhhhh yes.
many many many hours of my life have been happily spent with old Kurt (his books).
what a story teller!
” … the time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be.” — VERLYN KLINKENBORG in the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/13/opinion/13fri4.html?th&emc=th
I was a little young even when Slaughterhouse-Five came out. Now I’m thinking I should go back and reread as per Verlyn’s advice. (Back in my ag editor days, I loved his book, Making Hay. I think we ran an excerpt in our magazine.)
At the risk of violating fair use, here’s his tribute:
If you read Kurt Vonnegut when you were young — read all there was of him, book after book as fast as you could the way so many of us did — you probably set him aside long ago. That’s the way it goes with writers we love when we’re young. It’s almost as though their books absorbed some part of our DNA while we were reading them, and rereading them means revisiting a version of ourselves we may no longer remember or trust.
Not that Vonnegut is mainly for the young. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think he is entirely unsuitable for readers under the age of disillusionment. But the time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is the indispensable footnote to everything everyone is trying to teach you, the footnote that pulls the rug out from under the established truths being so firmly avowed in the body of the text.
He is not only entertaining, he is electrocuting. You read him with enormous pleasure because he makes your hair stand on end. He says not only what no one is saying, but also what — as a mild young person — you know it is forbidden to say. No one nourishes the skepticism of the young like Vonnegut. In his world, decency is likelier to be rooted in skepticism than it is in the ardor of faith.
So you get older, and it’s been 20 or 30 years since you last read “Player Piano†or “Cat’s Cradle†or “Slaughterhouse-Five.†Vonnegut is not, now, somehow serious enough. You’ve entered that time of life when every hard truth has to be qualified by the sense of what you stand to lose. “It’s not that simple,†you find yourself saying a lot, and the train of thought that unfolds in your mind as you speak those words reeks of desperation.
And yet, somehow, the world seems more and more to have been written by Vonnegut and your life is now the footnote. Perhaps it is time to go back and revisit that earlier self, the one who seemed, for a while, so interwoven in the pages of those old paperbacks.