Aug

18

Book ‘Em: School Daze.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

August 18, 2008 |

”As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” This statement, made by Eugene V. Debs, a Socialist and Presidential candidate who ran for the last time in 1920, appear at the beginning of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Hocus Pocus. They serve as a counterpoint to the hopelessness of its narrator, Eugene Debs Hartke, a Vietnam veteran, former college professor, and, as the book opens, an inmate dying of tuberculosis in the library at the same college where he taught and which has been turned into a prison. First published in 1990 but set in 2001, Hocus Pocus seems like Vonnegut’s swan song, as though he didn’t expect to live to see the end of the decade. There are elements of Slaughterhouse Five’s Billy Pilgrim, as well as Deadeye Dick, Bluebeard, Mother Night, and even Slapstick. Kilgore Trout makes a cameo appearance, albeit anonymously, as the author of the short story The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore. The college campus where most of the book takes place has a Vonnegut Memorial Fountain. Perhaps expecting it to be his last, this may be Vonnegut’s most acerbic work, only mellowed by its flat, deadpan tone that treats everything as equally ludicrous and nothing as particularly important. As Hartke says early on,

I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them. 

Futility is a theme that runs throughout the book. Early on Hartke finds a collection of antique machines designed to be perpetual motion machines. He and some of his students clean up some of the machines and put them on display in the library under a sign that says, “The complicated futility of ignorance.” This is the book’s theme, although it could just as easily be, “Don’t stick your neck out if you don’t want to lose your head.” As he recounts how he ended up where he is, he relates the stories of several other people, how they had dreams and ambitions that inevitably failed.

Like any complex satire we can’t assume that Vonnegut is always speaking through Hartke, though. While Vonnegut may have shared his narrator’s sense of futility and impending doom, he didn’t necessarily see things as completely hopeless. Nine years after publishing Hocus Pocus he gave a commencement speech at Agnes Scott College and quoted Eugene V. Debs again. For Vonnegut the pursuit of joy and beauty, as well as even the smallest efforts to make the world a better place, may have been futile, but he never considered that a good enough reason to give up.


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