There’s a long literary tradition of dream-tales. Well before fantasy became a respectable genre, a writer could explain away unreal geography, talking animals, or anything bizarre by saying the story was a dream. Chaucer and Bunyan used this framing device, as did Lewis Carroll and James Joyce, and, with his eighth novel Slapstick, so did Kurt Vonnegut.
Published in 1976, and dedicated to Laurel and Hardy, the book opens with Vonnegut reflecting on his life and describing a plane trip with his brother to the funeral of his uncle. The rest of the short novel’s an extended description of a daydream he has on the plane. The opening, grounding us in Vonnegut’s life, prepares us for the madness of the daydream but also sets up themes that’ll echo through the book.
Vonnegut reflects on slapstick as situational poetry, like marriage. And on how one faces tests, and bargains in good faith with destiny. He highlights love as something absent in Laurel and Hardy films and in his own writing. He reflects on family, and his dead sister, and his brother Bernard; and on minds as gadgets, on minds as disorderly, and on the brotherhoods of writers and of scientists around the world. All these themes recur in the main story of the book.
In particular, brotherhood and community are important to Slapstick, echoing Vonnegut’s earlier book Cat’s Cradle (with its fictional religion that imagined webs of people fated to be important to each other without knowing it). It plays a little differently here, with a main character who creates an extended family for himself after a childhood unity with his sister is shattered.
That main character is named Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, who recounts his life from the perspective as an old man in a post-apocalyptic future. At first the world he describes appears ludicrous, with gravity misbehaving, America depopulated by a plague, and what remains of society unrecognizable. But as he unfolds his tale we see how all this came about, and how nonsense became the central principle of life in Swain’s America.
Swain and his sister Eliza were born into a normal if wealthy family. Apart, they were of average or below-average intelligence; together, they formed a single superintelligence. They created plans for the better organization of society, which Wilbur eventually grew up to put into practice.
Vonnegut’s memories of his sister are echoed in this fantasy, but no utopia lasts forever, at least in fiction. When the twins choose to reveal their secret disaster looms. In the broader world oil is running out, while Chinese science advances apace; unusually for Vonnegut, there’s some stereotyping in the depiction of a collectivist Chinese society. At any rate, Wilbur becomes president, implements his plans, and sires an illegitimate daughter, leading to a dramatic climax.
As daydreams go, the novel’s coherent. It’s structured like many of Vonnegut’s books, in chunks of a few paragraphs or less which together build chapters. Vonnegut’s conscious that those short chunks of prose have the structure of a joke, and that’s never been more appropriate than here. The book’s slapstick in its structure as well as title and theme.
But it’s different from many of Vonnegut’s previous books in that there isn’t an overwhelming sense of inevitable destiny. Strong foreshadowing, and also a strong contrast between the older Swain and the younger. But you never feel that there was only one way things could go, one fixed timeline binding past and future. Things are more contingent, more random. It might be that there’s a fixed destiny, but as Vonnegut reflects, it’s possible to bargain with it in good faith.
Slapstick’s also unlike Vonnegut’s earlier novels in that the absurdity doesn’t become linked to its complexity of structure. The short fragments out of which Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions are built to bring in aliens and fictional religions and semi-scientific digressions, and they all link together. The apparent weirdness resolves into one fixed timeline. Even Mother Night used the contrast of different eras in its narrator’s life to show how things really had to turn out.
Slapstick is different because the absurdity’s so extreme. There’s a coherent series of enjoyably story-shaped events in the book, but those events aren’t locked into a tight pattern. Swain makes choices, and the choices define his character precisely because he could’ve chosen otherwise.
He’s shaped by his history but not bound by it. Because his family was a certain way, he thinks a certain way about family and loneliness, and so when he has the power he creates a certain kind of social organization that arbitrarily assigns people into extended families. It’s a different way for Vonnegut to express his frequent theme of loneliness, a science-fictional what-if as though Vonnegut were writing in the vein of Kilgore Trout.
In the end, the novel’s like a fantasy. The very end is about Swain’s granddaughter, a young woman who has to take a long quest through the absurd future of the book, and you wonder why that wasn’t the main body of the novel; and then you realize that earlier Swain mused about teaching his granddaughter and her lover the song “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” and you realize that all along you’ve been reading a funhouse-mirror take on The Wizard of Oz told from the wizard’s point of view. And you realize that there are a lot of stories in the world and a lot of ways to tell them; and that Vonnegut knows how to pick his stories and tell them right.