BOOK REPORT: PLAYER PIANO BY KURT VONNEGUT

In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 satirical novel, Player Piano, there is a strong resonance between the issues and topics he raises there and those found in today’s technology-obsessed society. The parallels between his fictionalized mid-1950s America and today’s twenty-first century America are surprising. (And, as Vonnegut would probably say, not so surprising.)

The novel opens with the following description:

“Illium, New York, is divided into three parts.

     In the northwest are the managers and engineers and civil servants and a few professional people; in the northeast are the machines; and in the south, across the Iroquois River, is the area known locally as Homestead, where almost all of the people live. (7)

The America Vonnegut describes seems—initially—like the historical one we know: In the decades following World War II, industry and commerce, rebuilding society and expanding the economy are priorities. But in his story, Vonnegut skews reality by imagining an America emerged from the war victorious, but reconstituted along lines similar to the state corporatism developed in Italy by Mussolini’s fascist regime during the1920s. In Vonnegut’s tale, the system of war boards, quotas, price controls and government control over industry and finance that was put in place to supply America’s military during wartime, is not disbanded when peace comes but continues and grows and, like the city of Illium, evolves into a tripartite system of authority and control. And Doctor Paul Proteus, manager of the giant, “Illium Works”, a member of the elite in the top rung of society, is somehow not completely happy with his lot in life.

Paul, as the son of one of the founders of the system he now manages, is on the fast-track for a directorship with one of the regional Boards that control the various sectors of industry. These boards have the responsibility for the production and distribution of consumer products and the regulation of all commercial enterprises, again, along the state corporatism model.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Similarly, on the political side of things, bureaucracies utilizing giant, “punch-card” technologies control and manage the citizenry, keeping detailed records on each person, assigning them jobs and providing social services. There is a parallel storyline of a State Department diplomat tasked with the role of tour guide to a visiting Shah, whose country the US hopes to export new American tech and know-how. Through an interpreter, Doctor Halyard tries to explain the American Way of Life to the bemused foreign ruler who looks at American workers and assumes they are all slaves, even as Halyard tries, and repeatedly fails, to dissuade him otherwise. (In the Shah of Bratpuhr’s oil-rich country there are just rulers and slaves. Isn’t that obvious?) The Shah is not far off in his assessment—someone once said that if you make machines your slaves you, in turn, become their slave. In Vonnegut’s hands, this elites-dominated America is a comic dystopia, a humorous Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Here, America has developed a system of economic production and efficiency that relies not on the skills of its workers, but on machinery. Thus, the country is divided into three parts: 1. Managers and Engineers (who develop and maintain the automated factories) as well as civil servants, whose decisions are based on the computations of the giant EPICAC computer.  2. Machines that make everything and run everything. 3. Workers whose jobs have been displaced by the machines, and who are automatically assigned (based on IQ) to the “Reeks and Wrecks” (Reconstruction and Reclamation) corps or else to the Army.

Be careful what you dream for.

Paul’s growing ennui and dissatisfaction with his current status stems from the fact he has been schooled all his life to be a manager, with all the protocols and duties the office requires, but having achieved this status, he comes to realize he no longer believes his work has any value. The story follows Paul over a period of months as he tries to discover a self he can be proud and way of life he can believe in, not merely one assigned to him because of his birth and IQ. In comic fashion he stumbles upon an insurgency of disaffected Engineers and citizens who launch a rebellion against the machine order. Soon, machines and factories across the country are destroyed in a frenzy of Luddite fury. Paul, because of his famous father, is recruited as the titular leader of the so called “Ghost Shirt” movement whose members wear long white shirts as a uniform. After fighting government forces for a time, the novel ends with the movement’s ringleaders surrounded by government robot-tanks and the success of their rebellion in question.

ACME CARDIO-TOFFEE DISPENSER PAT. #00345.789ASO.

So what was it all for? Lasher, the brains behind the revolt, said it was so they would be able to say “[f]or the record, we tried!” (300)

Earlier, Lasher is asked why he named the rebellion after the Piaute Indian tribe’s “Ghost Dance” religion of the 1890s, whose leaders believed that by wearing special “Ghost Shirts” they would be impervious to the white men’s bullets.

     “They found out the shirts weren’t bulletproof, and that magic didn’t bother the U.S. Cavalry at all.”

     “So—“

     “So they were killed or gave up trying to be good Indians and started being second-rate white men.”

     “And the ghost Dance movement proved what?” said Paul.

     “That being a good Indian was as important as being a good white man—important enough to fight and die for, no matter what the odds. They fought against the same odds we fought against; a thousand to one, maybe, or a little more.” (300)

   

"Maybe they need an eighth day?"

Lasher had always assumed the movement would fail like the 19^th century Native American revolt. Paul, on the other hand, wanted to believe in a large, stable organization, one with “seeming answers to the problems that had made him sorry to be alive.” (300) He reflects on how each of his co-conspirators believed in the movement for different reasons. Finnerty, for example, wanted revenge against the elites that never accepted him. Von Newmann, another conspirator, saw the revolution as an interesting experiment he wished to observe. Paul, who had believed in the movement’s longevity and success, remained disillusioned. As the authorities close in, Lasher attempts to cheer him up. “Smile Doctor Proteus—you’re somebody now, like your old man was.” (306) And as the government robots surround their headquarters, Paul and the rest of the rebel leaders share a final toast, “To the record.” 

     And that left Paul. “To a better world,” he started to say, but he cut the toast short, thinking of the people of Ilium, already eager to recreate the same old nightmare. He shrugged. “To the record,” he said, and smashed the empty bottle on a rock

     Von Neumann considered Paul and then the broken glass. “This isn’t the end, you know,” he said. “Nothing ever is, nothing ever will be—not even Judgment Day.”

     “Hands up,” said Lasher almost gaily. “Forward March.” (306-7)

    

The revolution seems doomed and its leaders will be captured or killed in a final blaze of gunfire that rips through their non-magical shirts. Their revolution seemed such a futile effort: even as machines were being destroyed, new ones were being made or repaired. Earlier, Paul had come across a crowd gathered around an automatic juice-vending machine.

But around one machine a group had gathered. The people were crowding one another excitedly, as though a great wonder were in their midst…

     “O.K., now let’s try anotha’ nickel in her an’ see how she does,” said a familiar voice from behind the machine—the voice of Bud Calhoun.

     “Clunkle” went the coin, and then a whir, and a gurgle

     The crowd was overjoyed.

Taking a break.

Vonnegut, beyond the comedy of his satire, is saying that life is unpredictable and to try and make elaborate plans to affect change is futile. But, what we can do is to see life as it is and live our lives accordingly. There is much in his writing that suggests the need for a stoic acceptance and endurance when the unpredictable winds of change blow our way.

And does Paul find such acceptance in the end? This period of change for him has been rapid, scarcely giving him any time to think or process all that’s happened to him. Every passing moment brings change for him. And it’s up to him, and to us, to realize how we, too, are changing and how our actions change us.

Paul and his co-conspirator Finnerty, were both Engineers together before becoming Managers. In one scene, they reminisce about how they had designed automated machinery to take over the work of people. And there is no denying there is beauty to be found in their passion and desires, their hard work and craft, just as there is for Rudy Hertz, the retired factory worker who Paul meets early in the novel. Rudy had been forced from his job by the machines Paul designed. But what gave Rudy a sense of pride was how his movements, timing and skill performing the tasks at his work station were placed onto a template used by Paul as a guide for the automated machinery—something like a pattern set into a lathe to direct the cutting tool as it grinds and etches. Both Paul and Rudy had a sense of purpose and pride in their work, things they lack now. 

I doubt if Vonnegut is saying that all work is productive, but the effort to create, restore, repair, design or whatever, using the tools and know-how and the technical knowledge we've acquired in a complementary, and respectful, manner allows our personhood, our identity, our selves to emerge and be recognized. 

"Artificial Intelligence?

I don’t even have natural intelligence!"

Today, with millions of people unemployed and not working, and with the prospects for substantial job losses to exist for some time, maybe indefinitely, many will be deprived of this necessary, human venue for growth and selfhood. Ultimately, Vonnegut is saying that we cannot separate ourselves from that which we create, from our technology or our machines. If we do, then they will slip away from us and begin to act in a manner that's undirected, independent, and that's dangerous, Vonnegut says. Today's Artificial Intelligence developements should give us pause.

Will the America Vonnegut envisions in Player Piano, simply keep building its machines in a never-ending cycle of creation and destruction? Perhaps. As James Howard Kunstler says, “Things happen because they seemed like a good idea at the time.” Were the machines Paul’s generation of Engineers and Managers created a good idea? Perhaps some of them. Are our machines? Time will tell.

The boons touted by many concening today's computer revolution, the internet, AI, etc., have sofar been a mixed bag. Most, IMHO, have brought unnecessary disruptions* to society, including massive job losses.  Purposeful work as a necessary component for a life well-lived is an important theme Vonnegut wrote about sixty years ago in Player Piano,** and it's a important one for today, as well. 

Cheers, Jake.

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*I thought of the book by Chris Ryan, Civilized to Death, that I reviewed here last month. He mentions how prehistorical hunter-gatherer societies--according to the archaeological record--changed very little over thousands of years. Today we view such a record as signs of stasis and stagnation. Ryan, on the other hand, views it as a record of steadiness and sustainability. My point is that rapid change isn't necesarily good change. Just sayin'.  

** In an early chapter, Paul visits a bar which has a player piano. It operates, playing old time, hokey-pokey tunes of cheer, that are too loud for Paul to hear the person he’s talking to. At one point, Paul does not want to be recognized as the rich manager of the Illium Works by the people in the bar, so he tries to back out of the room--only to be blocked by the piano. 

On Satire

“Satire can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire…uses laughter as a weapon.” (166, Glossary)

When I think of satire, I imagine the speaker sitting beside me as we look upon the world he’s created. He holds up things to show me and makes wry asides from time to time. He parades people, some swelled-up to near-bursting, others lithe and nimble, who run past on quick, small feet. Places, things are painted with broad strokes of his brush; details, sometimes down to the number of nose hairs and warts, are painted on a canvas that is at once inviting and dangerous.

I've noticed that the speaker has a very mobile face, having gotten that way presumably from centuries of expression-making—surprise, chagrin, embarrassment, laughter, incredulity, skepticism and so on. And there’s always the faintest smile on his lips, along with a crooked eyebrow and a twinkle of whimsy in his gaze. But as we watch together the world the speaker displays, I notice he looks slightly to one side of the scenes, a bit askance at the whole business, perhaps with the tiniest shiver of panic.

He does not look directly at his world—there is a distance, some space he maintains between himself and his vision, an indifference to it all or to most or some of it, perhaps. And I think this must be a difficult act to maintain (if it is an act). Satire's greatest gift is in how it tells us there are many things we should care about in life, and many more we should not. Or to put it another way: We need to have different cares at different times in our life.

It would be much easier to say: “Here is what I think about the world. There!” and be done with it. To bring all this along is a bit like pulling on a giant piece of toffee, stretching it out longer and longer, being ever so careful it doesn’t dip and touch the ground. Well, that must be quite a chore! Such a balancing act—keeping all those plates spinning on all those poles. 

What if during this satirical presentation the speaker turns and says: “He is a very ugly and stupid person and you shouldn’t listen to a bloody word he says.” That would be a moment, for sure! though it wouldn’t be satire at that point.

I can remember reading Evelyn Waugh’s great satire, A Handful of Dust, some time ago, and I just wasn’t getting it. I couldn’t understand or relate to the speaker—the narrative speaking voice of the novel—with its detached, ironic indifference to the people and events he described. That is, until I read the section about how the young son of  the main character had been so “silly” as to fall off his horse and break his neck. I stopped and thought that the speaker’s ridicule of what was a genuine tragedy was too much. This moment forced me to go back and reread the novel to better understand the purpose of that detached, ironic narrative voice. Last year, I posted the essay I wrote some time ago on Handful:

As an aside, John Andrew’s death is, in one sense, the most real event of the novel. As an act of fate it lies beyond the scope of the rules that Brenda, Tony and the rest Waugh’s characters live by. Waugh underscores the event and draws out its significance by stating: “Then this happened:” (104) as a preface to his description of the accidental death of John Andrew during the fox hunt. He emphasizes the event in his narrative in such a way that suggests it is of a different order than the other events of the novel. (“The Absent King”)

In a way, Waugh the author leans forward from the page and gently taps the reader on the cheek reminding them that what he writes is fiction, but what he writes about is very real. In Player Piano, Vonnegut maintains the satirical guise throughout, especially with the additional elements of science-fiction, farce, word play and puns he incorporates into the text. He keeps a distance from the world he creates, while letting the reader see the world they're in.  

Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1950-1962. Sidney Offit, Ed. Penguin Random House Canada Ltd. Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y., 2012.

A Glossary of Literary Terms 5^th Edition, M.H. Abrams, Ed. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Toronto,1988.

“The Absent King: Problems of Ambiguity of Motivation and Its Effect on Narration in A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh”. Essay, 350 Modern Fiction, Professor Harris, University of Toronto, January, 1995.