Slaughterhouse//BtZ

[Mark Kohut]

Two aspects. The writer of a--the?--recent Vonnegut biography, Charles
Shields, found this listserve and came on it for awhile
asking about Vonnegut and Pynchon. I recognized his name (since I had
recently read his Harper Lee bio and talked to him off list) He assumed
unquestioningly that P read him and wondered from us or others in what ways
KV influenced Pynchon.

Seems Pynchon musta started writing GR when he finished V, if not before,
Took a break to 'dash off' [joke] The Crying of Lot 49
then went back to GR until it was finished in 1972. SlaughterHouse-5 was
pubbed in 1969, don't remember the month but think it was not too early in
the year, so if he got to read it early, TRP might have read it by late
1968.

For GR, reminding me of the line that 'people are discouraged from being
characters' is my Pynchonian surprise, so to speak, although his way with
characters, that is that he does not attempt much 'roundness' per Forster,
 must have long been underway.

Hey, you think Slothrop's roundness is a hidden P joke on characterization
in fiction, esp as he "grows' (as traditional fictional characters are to
do) into dissolution? Sorta P saying, I once created a round character but
then the war discouraged him from existing.

On Sat, Mar 26, 2016 at 1:20 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Is anything concrete known about Pynchon having read or enjoyed Vonnegut's
> book? He must've read it before *GR. *
>
> A few weeks ago I recommended reading it alongside *BtZ* and I repeat
> that. It's very fast.
>
> Sharing a few passages I marked that seemed relevant.
>
> p. 208
>
> "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic
> confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much
> the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war,
> after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters."
>
> 227
>
> "There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one
> flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn."
>
> 213
>
> "Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had
> twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its
> fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around
> the roots and made very good fertilizer."
>
> 213-214
>
> (about a different story of Trout's)
>
> "But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was
> that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human
> beings.
>
> "It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had
> no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was
> happening to the people on the ground."
>
> 215
>
> "Trout told him that he had never seen a book of his advertised, reviewed,
> or on sale. 'All these years,' he said, 'I've been opening the window and
> making love to the world.'"
>
>
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