It's Not A Rerun, It's A Tradition: Fine Here Is Your Bloody Kurt Vonnegut

Nov 11, 2013

When November 11 rolls around, this quote from Breakfast of Champions gets dragged out of storage and put on display for the occasion of Kurt Vonnegut's birthday and Armistice/Veterans' Day. God knows we've done it ourselves, too. But that's what remembrance and ceremony are for, after all, as mile markers on our half-blind flatcar ride through time. And since it remains an awesome quote, and since Vonnegut never feared flirting with cliché, neither will we. Let's have another nice rummage through the mental attic with Uncle Kurt:

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.
-- Breakfast of Champions (1973)

It's just such a wonderfully Vonnegut-y quote, for all the terrific reasons there are to love and maybe be a little embarrassed by Vonnegut: The short, clipped sentences. The backwards time travel. The affectation of spelling out the year. The "men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind" -- Jesus, what a lovely line! The definitive declarations that sound like pure Truth, but on reflection are, OK, kind of simplistic. The self-aware nostalgia and sentimentality, even as he cautions against nostalgia and sentimentality. And Romeo and Juliet, for chrissakes? Not King Lear, at least? In some ways, loving Vonnegut is such an adolescent thing to do, and sometimes it feels like Vonnegut is a writer that you ought to have grown out of. It's a problem that Vonnegut was himself quite aware of, of course, as he noted in his interview with Playboy, also from 1973:

I deal with sophomoric questions that full adults regard as settled. I talk about what is God like, what could He want, is there a heaven, and, if there is, what would it be like? This is what college sophomores are into; these are the questions they enjoy having discussed. And more mature people find these subjects very tiresome, as though they’re settled.

By the time you're in grad school, you know better than to talk about Vonnegut as if he were quite as deep as you were sure he was at seventeen. Grownup Serious Lit Students are allowed to quote Vonnegut as much as they want, as long as they treat him as an affectionate artifact they've outgrown, like model airplanes hanging from the ceiling or stuffed animals on a dorm bed. And then after you're comfortably past the one-upmanship of a graduate seminar, you can go back to just enjoying Kurt Vonnegut all over again, even if you no longer zoom a plastic B-25 Mitchell bomber around your room (though maybe that's more of a Joseph Heller thing, anyway).

The other Vonnegut quote about Armistice Day turning into Veteran's Day comes from Mother Night (1961), and doesn't get quoted nearly as often, but we like it for its explicit grumping about the motivation for the holiday's metamorphosis:

"Oh, it's just so damn cheap, so damn typical." I said, "This used to be a day in honor of the dead of World War One, but the living couldn't keep their grubby hands off of it, wanted the glory of the dead for themselves. So typical, so typical. Any time anything of real dignity appears in this country, it's torn to shreds and thrown to the mob."

We'll agree that the quote from Breakfast of Champions, as worked out over a decade later, is a grander, more quotable passage, but there's something awfully nice about the raw bitchiness of the earlier version. It's sort of surprising to us that we haven't seen any online pairings of the two, either -- after all, yet another of the fun things about reading Vonnegut is seeing him turn over ideas again and again in his novels, taking them through their permutations like a Tralfamadorian looking through time.

And so we'll go on quoting Kurt Vonnegut as much as we damn well please. We’re also rather happy that two summers ago, we bought Kid Zoom his own copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, which we were relieved to learn he loved.

There are some things it might be a mistake to grow out of.

So happy Kurt Vonnegut's birthday, and a peaceful Armistice / Veterans Day. Since there's few things more fun than quoting Uncle Kurt, here are a couple of collections of Vonnegut quotes. Let's add one for Armistice Day 2013 that wasn't in this column last year:

“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.”

-- Cat's Cradle

And since the man liked music, here's a song for Armistice-Remembrance-Veterans Day, Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda":