Rabo the champion

Rabo the champion (18th of May 2011)

portrait of Raba Karabekian, the champion - graphite pencil

Even before I finished reading "Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut, I remembered that I've seen movies with a similar sweet-sour view of the American society and the whole world (with a good deal of bitter, arranged in a sudden fashion). I thought of the movie "American Beauty". After a quick inspection of my DVD collection I found out that I own several more movies that belong to this loosely defined category that I just invented. Here they are: "The Chumscrubber", "Imaginary heroes", "Little Miss Sunshine", "Donnie Darko", "The Weather Man", "Far from Heaven".

If you've seen some of these movies, then perhaps you can get an idea of the atmosphere of "Breakfast of Champions", which is mostly dark. Perhaps the darkest of all that I've seen thus far in Vonnegut's works. It is really strange that Vonnegut's weird humor can survive even in such a darkly colored background. It could be one of the important qualities of Vonnegut's works: they provoke a sudden and strong urge to laugh, even when they speak about things and contexts which we never laughed about before, and we also though that it was perhaps not appropriate to laugh about them. For example:

'I realized', said Trout, 'that God wasn't any conservationist, so for anybody else to be one was sacrilegious and a waste of time. You ever see one of His volcanoes or tornadoes or tidal waves? Anybody ever tell you about the Ice Ages he arranges for every half-million years? How about Dutch Elm disease? There's a nice conservation measure for you. That's God, not man.'

or:

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purpose of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came to guessing that they were making champagne.

I have also written in my book >> Problem of the observer about microorganisms (bacteria in my case) that wonder about meaning of life and similar things, so that is a weird connection between me and Vonnegut, typical for weird connections between characters in his novels. Sufficiently weird, I'd say.

That is not the last of the connections between me and what Vonnegut wrote in "Breakfast of Champions". After I wrote >> Problem of the observer, I heard different opinions about what I exactly wrote, but one of the more interesting was that the "book is good, but it lacks stylistic finish". I couldn't completely comprehend what kind of "style" was expected by the reader in question, but I started thinking about some of our Croatian writers who can really write a lot of sentences that sound great, but they mean almost nothing, or they always mean more or less the same, no matter how beautifully they sound. I also heard about Vonnegut, from experienced and demanding readers, that he is "raw". Here is what "Vonnegut" says about that in "Breakfast of Champions", to his own defense, and to mine also, in a certain way:

She was used to apologizing for her use of language. She had been encouraged to do a lot of that in school. Most white people in Midland City were insecure when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum. Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.
This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe.

In "Breakfast of Champions", Vonnegut decided to be completely brutal in his directness and the way he uses the language. This mission of his is helped by his (very good) illustrations, about hundred of them in the book (what a good idea...). To show you how it looks like when Vonnegut wants you to be completely clear about what he is speaking about, I quote, but I also draw according to his template:

Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings. It looked like this:

I already said a lot about the book, yet I didn't say the main thing. What is "Breakfast of Champions" really about? Well, it is not that easy to explain. As in all Vonnegut's books, there are many themes, for example the theme of capitalism that has an awfully negative influence on Americans and the whole world. Here is the example:

Almost all the messages which were sent and received in his country, even the telepahtic ones, had to do with buying or selling some damn thing. They were like lullabies to Dwayne.

The book is a fine web of themes that Vonnegut carried with him throughout all of whis works, but one idea stands out: the idea that people often behave as machines, as devices without consciousness, as slaves, and as robots. Vonnegut works on this idea with mixed feelings. Although Vonnegut, of course, does not like the worlds where the people behave as machines, the whole story of his novel revolves around Dwayne, who drowns in some loony state of consciousness, caused by "chemicals", in which he gets convinced that he has finally found his self-awareness, his intention, his way to stop being a machine that he was throughout his life. Of course, Dwayne flipped out, but the idea of self-awareness and refusing the machine way of living is exposed by another character in the novel that is relatively sane - an expressionist painter Rabo Karabekian (!).

The idea of machine-like (machinal?, mechanical), semi-aware existence is, of course, the idea that led also existentialist philosophy - all until the end of Camus' "Stranger" Meursault behaves almost like a machine and only in several pages before the end he finds a way to formulate his consciousness, his understanding of life. Here is what Camus said about that in "The Myth of Sisyphus":

It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm — this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. “Begins” — this is important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness.

And here is what Rabo Karabekian said about that:

Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

Perhaps I should better stop here with my analysis of Vonnegut. Perhaps I already got over the number of words that Vonnegut would find decent and appropriate regarding the interpretation of his works. Read Vonnegut...

In the image that opened this post, I made a portrait of Rabo Karabekian, while he was working on his most famous work "Temptation of Saint Anthony", the piece that is 20 feet wide and 16 feet tall. It has a single vertical, almost fluorescently orange line on a completely monotonous background colored in hawaiian avocado green. According to Rabo Karabekian, the line represented a sacred, unwavering band of light in everyone of us.

I opted for a more conservative approach to art, which was quite funny to Rabo, as he thought that I had no talent whatsoever. Whatever... At least it was done in a completely self-aware manner.

UPDATE: I just uploaded the new post on the web, with tomorrow's date (18th of May 2011) and I am watching a documentary on Bob Dylan "The other side of the mirror". Dylan is howling "Mr. Tambourine Man" and I remembered that I somewhere have an old book with the words of Dylan's songs. And, really, I just dug it. The book is called "Bob Dylan: Writings & Drawings". But listen to this: It is illustrated by Dylan's drawings which are quite similar to Vonnegut's, and the book publisher is called Panther Books. The same company (Panther) published also "Breakfast of Champions". What a weird connection...

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Last updated on 18th of May 2011.