Review: Hocus Pocus

Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the parallels I see between Hemingway and Vonnegut. Each survived the trauma of his war, and each went on to find a new way to write literature. I have not, historically, thought of Vonnegut as anywhere near Hemingway’s level, but I’m slowly reconsidering that.

My basic insight into Vonnegut, courtesy of re-reading Slaughterhouse Five several months ago, is that we see his trauma expressed in narrative. For Hemingway, trauma showed itself at the level of the sentence. You could feel the effort it took to write each one, with the result that each was powerful and fragile; each made it clear how close it came to never having been written. That’s the Hemingway power: the stark beauty of each sentence implied an emotional violence that was below surface-level. (That’s a reference to his famous notion of a story, like an iceberg, being 6/7s underwater.)

In Vonnegut’s case, it’s not a matter of the sentence. He comes close to having logorrhea. Instead, it’s that he dances around his story. He lets us see that he thinks there’s something demeaning in turning his trauma into narrative. Once such an experience becomes a story, it gets cheapened. If it never becomes a story, though, it vanishes as if it never happened. So there’s that perpetual anguish in his best work. He fights the impulse to turn experience into linear narrative, and then he fights the impulse to see his stories resolve themselves in conventional ways.

Anyway, I just might try to develop that notion into an academic paper someday, but reading this late Vonnegut for the first time brings to mind another parallel with Hemingway. I have sometimes heard late Hemingway described as “Hemingway imitating Hemingway.” I’ve never known exactly what that was supposed to mean, but I felt – whatever it meant – it applied to things like “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and “Old Man and the Sea.”

I think now, at last, that I finally understand that notion: the best Hemingway gives evidence of the trauma behind its making. The work bears the evidence of the effort it took to carve out each sentence. It feels like a coin toss whether it’s author could have survived to write it.

By late Hemingway, though, that effort has worn smooth. Hemingway knows how his own work is supposed to feel. He knows he wants short, tight sentences, and he knows he wants a protagonist who can’t voice his deepest emotions. Those late stories get to how Hemingway is supposed to sound, but they give evidence of skipping the hardest part of the creative passage. They no longer have the residue of the deep emotional work it took for Hemingway to get himself to write sentences in the first place.

Here, for Vonnegut in Hocus Pocus, I think the same thing is happening. This is Vonnegut imitating Vonnegut. He does it reasonably well, but his material coheres too quickly into a focused narrative. We get strands that start to shape themselves – our protagonist, Eugene Debs Hartke, lets us know right away the nature of his being held in jail on charges he helped lead a prison revolt – and then they fall apart. SPOILER: For instance, we never learn the outcome of his trial, even though it’s the original structure around which the narrative is built. Instead, this ends on what feels a lot like a digression, on his meditations around the death of a relatively minor character who has almost nothing to do with the revolt. Our narrator even tips his hand, clumsily, a few chapters before the end, telling us he’s learned of a death that marks the end of his story, but withholding whose it was until another 20 pages.

This isn’t an awful book, but it’s certainly not top tier Vonnegut. Like Hemingway, he produced his best work in a concentrated period – 1963-1969, with Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse Five. Before that, he was finding his voice. After, with stretches of exception, he was imitating that best work, giving us the form that his trauma took, but unable again to work through the second-level trauma of writing into the unknown of his deepest personal hurt.

I suspect I’ll keep re-reading Vonnegut. I thought I knew him when I was a teenager – in some ways he was the first adult novelist I ever really wrestled with – and now I find I’m meeting him in a whole new way today. Even a book like this makes me admire something like Cat’s Cradle or Slaughterhouse Five all the more.


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