Vonnegut in Fact by Klinkowitz Jerome;

Author:Klinkowitz, Jerome;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

PALM SUNDAY

If Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons follows the progress of public spokesmanship in the making, Palm Sunday1 displays the presentational talents of a spokesmanship fully formed. Nearly half the materials of the earlier book were written in virtual anonymity, certainly with no thought of their ultimate collection in book form. “I keep no records of my work,” Kurt Vonnegut had noted in that volume’s preface, “and had been delighted to forget a lot of it” (p. xviii); retrieved by other hands, those essays, addresses, and reviews were arranged by the expedience of chronology and published in the same wave as other Vonnegut miscellanies—a play, a television special, a book of critical essays on the author and his works—by Seymour Lawrence in the wake of Slaughterhouse-Five’s great popular success. The contents of Palm Sunday, however, fall entirely within the period of their author’s greatest fame and most consistent production as a writer. Therefore Vonnegut takes special care in fashioning the volume, adding an extra step to bring it in line with his more considered books:

It began with my wish to collect in one volume most of the reviews and speeches and essays I had written since the publication of a similar collection, Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, in 1974. But as I arranged those fragments in this order and then that one, I saw that they formed a sort of autobiography, especially if I felt free to include some pieces not written by me. To give life to such a golem, however, I would have to write much new connective tissue. This I have done. (p. xvii)

That Vonnegut is serious about producing not just a random collection but a “collage,” as he puts it in the volume’s subtitle, is evident from the way he starts his preface. One recalls his manner in opening his speeches and prefacing his collection of short stories, that of systematically breaking every rule involved as a way of not just getting attention but redirecting it from an audience’s presuppositions to his more exceptional designs. In Palm Sunday’s opening comments Vonnegut forsakes the customary authorial humility to claim that “This is a very great book by an American genius” involving years of hard work and great personal suffering. “I have walked through every hotel lobby in New York,” he rues, “thinking about this book and weeping, and driving my fist into the guts of grandfather clocks” (p. xv). All this effort, he advises, has been in pursuit of a new literary form—a form that turns out to be the autobiographical collage described two pages later. In truth, collage demands just such effort, for two unlikes must be forced together in order to form a radical yet integral new, third entity—yet one that retains the clear identities of the composite two. The work of successful collagists such as Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell speaks for an energetically physical artistic manner as images are wrestled from their customary context and hauled bodily into another where they meet to form a strikingly new entity.

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