Reconstruction 5.2 (Spring 2005)
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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Player Piano . New York: Dell, 1992. 352 pp. Softcover. $5.99. ISBN: 5553863074
The President, with an endearing, adolescent combination of brashness and shyness, and with the barest trace of a Western drawl, was now reading aloud a speech someone had written about EPICAC XIV. He made it clear that he wasn’t any scientist, but just plain folks, standing here, humble before this great new wonder of the world, and that he was there because American plain folks had chosen him to represent them at occasions like this, and that, looking at this modern miracle, he was overcome with a feeling of deep reverence and gratitude. (Vonnegut 118)
I always get suspicious when a book I’m looking for is hard to find. If I’m feeling paranoid in a post-Patriot Act sort of way, I imagine vast memory holes being stuffed with the writings of people like George Orwell and Philip K. Dick by legions of aspiring yuppies—fit, good-looking, and totally uninterested in anything that requires reading. A gaggle Cheneyesque men do a walkthrough, to make sure that they are destroying our intellectual heritage efficiently, and to remind them all that if they destroy enough knowledge, they might get promoted (even as the suits make preparations to send the jobs South). In my most recent paranoid nightmare, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Player Piano has been tagged for destruction. Agents, who look like a Hollywood version of me, comb the shelves of used book stores, and send any copies they find into the great abyss. A crystallized summary of the interaction is planted in my dreams through some kind of microwave ray or orbital mind control laser, along with the impulse to write it down. The whole transaction, the destruction of the American mind, can then be written off as the paranoid fantasies of someone like me—“proof” that reading leads only to insanity. But since few used bookstores track inventory electronically, the process of eradication is slow and imperfect, and in this case, I managed to get a copy that slipped through the cracks.
But I know that there is a more rational reason that Player Piano is the best book that I never knew about. A small group of devoted readers love the novel and are unwilling to part with it. Yet, there is a catch to loving the novel: to really connect with it requires that one evaluate one’s relationship to the security offered by a society managed for the maximization of corporate function. Originally published in 1952, Player Piano is too uncanny in its critique of the current America that was then under construction to be read as mere literary entertainment. Unlike Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World, Vonnegut’s work cannot be neutralized by misreading it as an anti-socialist polemic because it squarely critiques an America split into a highly-educated class of privileged white collar workers (“engineers”) and a class of underemployed workers (“reeks and wrecks”) who fight the wars and dig the ditches. In other words, it is subversive.
Detached from nature, labor, and a democratic vision, the characters of Vonnegut’s America participate in the sorts of fetishistic activities that could have been lifted out of an organizational team-building manual. The engineers pack off to “the Meadows” to participate in a week of ritualized competition kicked off by a nostalgically contrived Indian who says things like, “the spirit of my people lives on, the Spirit of the Meadows” (213) and “The Meadows belong to these stout-hearted braves” (214). The President in Vonnegut’s future America nothing more than a pretty puppet, selected for his folksy ability to legitimate the contrivances of the Engineering class and model a correct reverence for the notion of progress.
Complete with epidemic rates of suicide and depression and a sickening allegiance to the idea of progress and prosperity as measured by access to cheap consumer goods, the world of the novel blurs too easily with daily life—take it too the mall and read it and you might get ill. I don’t say this as an elitist assault of lowbrow culture—if the mall were a lake, I would be the catfish—I mean to say that it is a novel that will make you uncomfortable in your own skin. In an era where WalMart can sell cheap goods made by exploited hands for rock-bottom prices to low-wage service workers that were once well-paid producers, we often hear such questions: “when you had [a] large income… did you by any chance have a twenty-eight inch television set?” (206-7). Or, “do you suppose that Caesar, with all his power and wealth, with the world at his feet, do you suppose that he had what you, Mr. Averageman, have today?” (207). But instead of resting smugly on the obvious materialistic answers that such questions seek, Vonnegut’s novel shifts the focus to fundamental human questions of human dignity that are infinitely more important than the things we can own.
Vonnegut’s critique of a soulless America hits notes that American conservatives miss in their contempt for “worker’s rights,” “living wages,” and “the social safety net,” in spite of all their sanctimonious rhetoric about the need to guard against the stark materialism of Godless Communism. The only areas where Player Piano seems to fail in its prophetic vision is that, even in his most cynical vision of a dystopian America, the workers still get healthcare. And it is machines that provide cheap consumer goods, not Third World workers. Perhaps during the 1950s, the thought of treating human beings as utterly expendable was unrealistic. But technical progress rarely fails to think the unthinkable.
Davin Heckman
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