Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favourite novelists. Alas, I have read all his novels. As much as I would like to read them again, it is time to turn to his works of non-fiction.
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons is a collection of Vonnegut's essays, lectures and other non-fiction writing from the period 1966 to 1974. This is also the period in which he produced his masterpiece novel Slaughterhouse-Five. The title refers to three concepts invented by the prophet Bokonon in Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle. Each concept, in the final analysis, is an illusion masquerading as a truth. So it is one of Vonnegut's tongue-in-cheek, po-mo jokes to apply this title to his non-fiction.
Vonnegut often has a bleak view of human beings. He acknowledges that humans are capable of love and kindness and other positive behaviours, but he does not allow this to blind him to the darker side of our nature. He describes himself as a black humourist, and he says this about his ouevre:
Black humourists' holy wanderers find nothing but junk and lies and idiocy wherever they go. A chewing-gum wrapper or a used condom is often the best they can do for a Holy Grail.
And he draws our attention to a lot of this kind of thing in this volume. His essay about his humanitarian visit to Biafra in the closing days of the war with Nigeria is particularly harrowing. Other essays dealing with science are more hopeful, and others are neutral in tone.
In the preface, Vonnegut says:
If a person with a demonstrably ordinary mind, like mine, will devote himself to giving birth to a work of the imagination, that work will in tempt and tease that ordinary mind into cleverness ... I am not especially satisfied with my own imaginative works, my fiction. I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.
It may well be the case that Vonnegut is a better novelist than he is a non-fiction writer. Even so, this collection is thought-provoking, informative and (sometimes) amusing. Worth reading for the insights it offers of the man and his work.
