It's been a few decades since I first read Player Piano. I'm re-reading it—as well as all of Vonnegut's other novels, in order—because I've gotten older and I've forgotten everything from when I was younger. It's like, why even read books if you're going to forget so much about those books when you're older and then have to re-read them again just to remember if you liked them or not? The main thing I remember about Vonnegut's early novels like Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, and Cat's Cradle is how different in style they are compared to Vonnegut's later books. They seem more like pulp science fiction than his informal stories that are also kind of chats with his readers while also sort of being essays at the same time. Reading a Vonnegut book is sometimes like watching a movie for the first time with the director's audio commentary playing. Was he the forerunner of audiences enjoying watching other people watch things? I wouldn't know because I don't know about everything. But it seems like Vonnegut definitely is a voice within a lot of his own books commenting on his books as he's writing them.
Or maybe I'm just remembering things poorly. Remember how I don't remember anything?!
Player Piano begins, ostensibly, with the protagonist, Paul Proteus, making sure a cat is comfortable. I don't know if I'm supposed to root for this man or if he'll become a monster or what the story will be but I can say that, from the beginning, Vonnegut manages to get me to love him, at least just a little bit, because he is caring for a cat, even when he, himself, is nervous and anxious. He must be a good person, right?
Right from the start, the cat seems an odd and unlikely part of Paul Proteus's world. He's brought it to the Ilium Works to hunt mice and rats who sometimes chew through wires. Since just about everything is run by machines, seen over by managers and engineers, keeping them up and running is crucial. The world has been at peace for over a decade and the know-how of engineers and their machines have made it possible. But Paul, like farmers across thousands of years, still needs a few cats. Machines allow everybody to live a work-free life of luxury in a world where war has been extinguished and yet it can all fall apart from a few stupid rats. Machines do the work while sensors alert managers to problems and managers send engineers to fix the issues. But cats? Cats prevent any of that from happening in the first place.
What the novel supposes is an automated world created by man that can't completely divorce itself from nature and natural cycles. Man has come up with a machine for everything but he still hasn't invented a better mousetrap.
One side effect to having a world run so efficiently is ennui. Paul knows the people who risked their lives in the war to give the engineers time to make the world more efficient are absolutely certain the world is a far better place, but he, having not seen the horrors of war firsthand, can only take their word for it. All he sees is that the world is improved, it has become more efficient, and he's got less to do with it now than a stray cat.
At one point, the cat is terrified by a sweeping machine that passes through the office just after Paul looks at an old photograph from after Edison had the first building built many decades previous and notes that even the sweeper beams with pride. I think there's a lot of thematic stuff going on there that I'd discuss if they were more subtle!
In contemplating a piece of tape that houses the machine code for lathing shafts, he remembers the man whose movements the tape's commands were recorded from. A man who was proud to be chosen for the assignment with little understanding that he was destroying the source of his pride. A man who, though he had been close to retiring, almost certainly wasn't ready for the skills he had learned to never again be needed by another man. A man who loved The Bible and loved a dog and never had any children. A man who probably no longer existed. At any rate, a man who was definitely no longer needed.
And then the cat is killed. I don't want it to be. I want it to live forever, even if it's fictional. But it is both literally and figuratively chewed up and spit out by this modern technology. These machines grind up anything natural and dispose of it as useless, organic garbage. Like Rudy the lathe operator before it. A cat might be able to help with the mice but it simply can't exist among these machines. There is no room for it. There is only machines and codes and the occasional blinking red light to call forth a single human to tweak some loose bolt or lost nut. The cat survives the garbage chute but is killed trying to escape over an electrified fence and found by a guard in a armored and machine-gun-laden car. The fence and armored car has been put there to keep disgruntled Luddites from sabotaging the machinery. Laws have also been enacted to enforce the safety of the Ilium Works. And so with the death of the cat, we get a first glimpse at how this perfect, efficient world might be simply an expensive mirage to keep the status quo. So what if people, maybe, aren't completely happy or fulfilled? So what if the occasional cat is killed by the system? Things are running smoothly. And besides, it was just a cat. And, you know, people.
Paul doesn't want to leave the cat but doesn't know what to do with it. There's feelings of guilt and responsibility; something in Paul feels the need to do right by the cat. But by the end of the chapter, he's been overwhelmed with his upcoming speech, a possible job promotion, an old friend coming in to see him, and his wife's rote and shallow conversation full of agenda and manipulations. He has Katharine, his secretary, just get rid of it.
The chapter ends discussing the machine whose blinking red light had sent Paul out of his office but, in reality, is talking about Paul.
"'Beyond help,' he said. Lathe group three, Building 58, had been good in its day, but was showing wear and becoming a misfit in the slick, streamlined setup, where there was no place for erratic behavior. 'Basically, it wasn't built for the job it's doing anyway. I look for the buzzer to go off any day now, and that'll be the end.'
In each meter box, in addition to the instrument, the jewel, and the warning lamp, was a buzzer. The buzzer was the signal for a unit's complete breakdown."
I don't want to read a whole lot of novels that deal with the death of a cat but if Vonnegut is going to use it as the impetus to knock his protagonist out of complacency with the status quo, I suppose I'll allow it.
Or maybe I'm just remembering things poorly. Remember how I don't remember anything?!
Player Piano begins, ostensibly, with the protagonist, Paul Proteus, making sure a cat is comfortable. I don't know if I'm supposed to root for this man or if he'll become a monster or what the story will be but I can say that, from the beginning, Vonnegut manages to get me to love him, at least just a little bit, because he is caring for a cat, even when he, himself, is nervous and anxious. He must be a good person, right?
Right from the start, the cat seems an odd and unlikely part of Paul Proteus's world. He's brought it to the Ilium Works to hunt mice and rats who sometimes chew through wires. Since just about everything is run by machines, seen over by managers and engineers, keeping them up and running is crucial. The world has been at peace for over a decade and the know-how of engineers and their machines have made it possible. But Paul, like farmers across thousands of years, still needs a few cats. Machines allow everybody to live a work-free life of luxury in a world where war has been extinguished and yet it can all fall apart from a few stupid rats. Machines do the work while sensors alert managers to problems and managers send engineers to fix the issues. But cats? Cats prevent any of that from happening in the first place.
What the novel supposes is an automated world created by man that can't completely divorce itself from nature and natural cycles. Man has come up with a machine for everything but he still hasn't invented a better mousetrap.
One side effect to having a world run so efficiently is ennui. Paul knows the people who risked their lives in the war to give the engineers time to make the world more efficient are absolutely certain the world is a far better place, but he, having not seen the horrors of war firsthand, can only take their word for it. All he sees is that the world is improved, it has become more efficient, and he's got less to do with it now than a stray cat.
At one point, the cat is terrified by a sweeping machine that passes through the office just after Paul looks at an old photograph from after Edison had the first building built many decades previous and notes that even the sweeper beams with pride. I think there's a lot of thematic stuff going on there that I'd discuss if they were more subtle!
In contemplating a piece of tape that houses the machine code for lathing shafts, he remembers the man whose movements the tape's commands were recorded from. A man who was proud to be chosen for the assignment with little understanding that he was destroying the source of his pride. A man who, though he had been close to retiring, almost certainly wasn't ready for the skills he had learned to never again be needed by another man. A man who loved The Bible and loved a dog and never had any children. A man who probably no longer existed. At any rate, a man who was definitely no longer needed.
And then the cat is killed. I don't want it to be. I want it to live forever, even if it's fictional. But it is both literally and figuratively chewed up and spit out by this modern technology. These machines grind up anything natural and dispose of it as useless, organic garbage. Like Rudy the lathe operator before it. A cat might be able to help with the mice but it simply can't exist among these machines. There is no room for it. There is only machines and codes and the occasional blinking red light to call forth a single human to tweak some loose bolt or lost nut. The cat survives the garbage chute but is killed trying to escape over an electrified fence and found by a guard in a armored and machine-gun-laden car. The fence and armored car has been put there to keep disgruntled Luddites from sabotaging the machinery. Laws have also been enacted to enforce the safety of the Ilium Works. And so with the death of the cat, we get a first glimpse at how this perfect, efficient world might be simply an expensive mirage to keep the status quo. So what if people, maybe, aren't completely happy or fulfilled? So what if the occasional cat is killed by the system? Things are running smoothly. And besides, it was just a cat. And, you know, people.
Paul doesn't want to leave the cat but doesn't know what to do with it. There's feelings of guilt and responsibility; something in Paul feels the need to do right by the cat. But by the end of the chapter, he's been overwhelmed with his upcoming speech, a possible job promotion, an old friend coming in to see him, and his wife's rote and shallow conversation full of agenda and manipulations. He has Katharine, his secretary, just get rid of it.
The chapter ends discussing the machine whose blinking red light had sent Paul out of his office but, in reality, is talking about Paul.
"'Beyond help,' he said. Lathe group three, Building 58, had been good in its day, but was showing wear and becoming a misfit in the slick, streamlined setup, where there was no place for erratic behavior. 'Basically, it wasn't built for the job it's doing anyway. I look for the buzzer to go off any day now, and that'll be the end.'
In each meter box, in addition to the instrument, the jewel, and the warning lamp, was a buzzer. The buzzer was the signal for a unit's complete breakdown."
I don't want to read a whole lot of novels that deal with the death of a cat but if Vonnegut is going to use it as the impetus to knock his protagonist out of complacency with the status quo, I suppose I'll allow it.
No comments:
Post a Comment