Kid Rabo plays (25th of January 2011)

Novel Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut could be placed in the SF genre. That is how it was categorized and publicized in year 1952 when it was published. The publisher thought that the novel would sell better since SF themes in movies and literature were quite common in those days. The SF tag/categorization of the novel is one of the issues that I was thinking about after I read it. Namely, I had the opportunity to meet some so-called "fans" of the SF genre. Those guys have a "clear" view regarding what belongs to the genre and what doesn't. Furthermore, all that they "exclude" from the genre is, according to their standpoint, not worth the attention. It is interesting that this upside-down and narrow-minded attitude got rooted in the "base" of SF fans and they tend to, in the so-called "expert" manner, categorize a certain work. One of the "categorization schemes" regards the "thematic of the plot", i.e. whether the plot is about "the problem of communicating with alien life", or "emergence of consciousness in the machines", or "the dead evolution, the self-evolution of the technology", or "the problem of travelling with speeds larger than light speed", and so on, they have a whole array of the thus categorized moments and they assign the work according to that. As the people write for quite some time now and as the history was full of clever and innovative writers, it is difficult to bring something new in such categorization. Those who "manage to do it" are usually the same SF freaks as their fans so they forcibly "bend" the thematics and plot in order to gain some extra pluses in the categorization and separate, according by the same "categorization" from the earlier literature. Pretty sick and short-sighted way to view someone's work, I'd say. Besides, I think that Vonnegut's "Player Piano" would score poorly according to their "categorization", I wonder whether it would "deserve" the SF attribute at all. I also wonder how would, according to their categorization, the best writer of SF ever, Stanislaw Lem, be evaluated.

"Player Piano" is a pretty good novel, regardless of how somebody would call it: utopia, distopia, science fiction, social study, critique of capitalism, critique of socialism, essay on automatization, a story about technology that nullifies human personality, a story of the rebellion of the individual against the system that suffocates him... All that the "Player Piano" is, but is more than that, because putting pluses in all of those categorization boxes is only a beginning of the story of Vonnegut's novel, not the end. In the contrary, somebody may got confused and start thinking that this is a novel that was written earlier by H.G. Wells or G. Orwell. And it wasn't.

One can see that it was written clearly by Vonnegut from a fresh humor that soaks the novel. Vonnegut knows the people excellently, especially their weaknesses, so the gallery of characters in the novel is so convincing that I found at least 6-7 parallels between the people the Vonnegut describes and those from "the real world", those that I know, even superficially. I have in mind here Kroner, the most influential man in the "state" and the boss of the main protagonist, shallowly authoritative person who spent all his life practicing ways to manipulate people and leaving the false impression of self-confidence, dumb wife of the main protagonist, Anita, Ed Finnerty, extremely talented and psychotic guy always in a search for reasons and meaning and always half-intoxicated, and Shepherd, systemic louse who sees the advancing through the steps and the "ranks" in the system as the only reason for its parasitic existence. There are also "small" characters that were really familiar to me. There is the guy who lives the whole year for the town carnival, for the one day when he is "in charge", and the waiter who, in the last third of the book, knocks out the main protagonist, Paul Proteus, but I unfortunately forgot their names as I returned the book to the library. One of the characters that I do not recognize from "real life" and who is very important for the novel is the Reverend Lasher.

Some in the Vonnegut's novel see only the "technological aspects", they see a critique of the automatized society and the danger of machines slowly overtaking the control in the aspects of human lives where we should have nevel let them. "Player piano" is a novel about that also. But, the reasons for which the "Player Piano" is a good novel are not related to its SF aspects. Besides, I bet that those "SF fans" and "experts" from the introduction would laugh at Vonnegut's description of all mighty machines that get their data from punched tapes and the basic elements of their construction are vacuum tubes. That, of course, is not at all important for the novel. The issues that are important are much more lasting. And the rebellion is such an issue. The man, raising against the role that was meant for him by the others, against the idea of fitting in the system he never made, against the predictability of his being that is already starting to be disgusting. When I read "Player Piano", I realized that we will never make a good system, the system that I, as an individual, could totally support.

Once we make the systems that will be the best that we can make, that will enable well-being to all, that will make all citizens equal (although the system in "Player Piano" is not that way), against such systems, the best ones, the most creative ones will start to rebel. And not because they know what sort of system would be better (the rebellious characters of Vonnegut's novel also know nothing about that), but because they do not want their lives to be a predictable positioning within the structure, even if that structure were the best of all possible structures. That is how it is in Vonnegut's novel also - the rebels Proteus and Finnerty, as young engineers fifteen years earlier, made the automatization of certain industrial procedures possible, but with that came the fixation of certain sociology that they rebel against. When I read "Player Piano", I thought that the true revolutionaries can only vaguely understand the reasons for their rebellion. Because, although the most obvious reasons that invalidate a certain social system can be easily counted and written down, they are not the main motive for the rebellion of the most sincere revolutionaries. The most sincere revolutionaries rebel individually, their revolution is not collective so it isn't what could be called a "revolution", and their rebellion is something so deeply human that it, in the final instance, has nothing to do with the system they stand up against. The true revolutionary is a tragic figure. That is how it is in the Vonnegut's novel also.

The Croatian speaking readers of "Construction of Reality" can at this point read some quotes from the novel, but I cannot offer the same for you, English speaking readers.

The image that opened this post is a portrait Rabo Karabekian when he was a kid, going to the music school where he was learning to play piano. At that time, it was pretty boring to him, yet when he got older, he realized that it may not have been lost time after all. Regardless of the fact that humans can make machines that play; player pianos.

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Last updated on 25th of January 2011.