Students who wanted to avoid studying for a night and enjoy a lecture from famed author Kurt Vonnegut did not go without an additional assignment.
The aging author ordered the audience to pick up three pieces in order to be somewhat fulfilled in American literature — a short story written by Ambrose Pierce, “Democracy in America,” by Alexis De Tocqueville and “A Mask of Sanity” by Hervey Cleckley, which describes people who have no conscience and therefore cannot feel. Vonnegut clarified that the audience must read the latter in order to understand the people who are currently running this country.
The writer who wrote American classics like “Slaughterhouse Five” and “Hocus Pocus” among 15 other novels spoke to a packed Wisconsin Union Theater Monday night. Politics was an underlying theme among the myriad of topics he covered. His range of discourse covered childhood stories, the humanist ideology and what makes good stories.
Vonnegut showed his sharp sense of black humor throughout the course of the lecture, making the audience laugh at near tragic things, a device he employs in his books.
The war in Iraq was one item burning in Vonnegut’s political ideology. Although he could tell the audience “many reasons” why the war in Iraq is wrong, he would only disclose one –“common sense.”
Vonnegut explained that good stories are ones that start out happy and end up happy, or at least have dramatic changes from good fortune (“happiness, wealth, etc.”) to bad fortune, or from bad to worse or any combination of the above.
But Vonnegut said the best story, “Hamlet,” did not have great dramatic change of any kind; Hamlet basically had a melancholy life from the beginning to the end of the play. Vonnegut said he proved Shakespeare was a “poor story teller,” only to contradict himself in the same breath to say he just showed the audience why Hamlet is a masterpiece.
The point of his tangent, and one of the main points of his lecture, was that people could not tell between the good and the bad in real life.
“We do not know what the good news and what the bad news is, we can only pretend,” he said.
In response to a letter asking Vonnegut if it would be right to bring a child into such an evil and corrupt world, he responded that it is worth it because of all the “saints” he has met, all the people he has seen that are good-mannered in the world, and also for music.
University of Wisconsin medical student Andy Tyser enjoyed the lecture.
“I really enjoyed his points of view,” Tyser said. “His humanist point of view was the most important message. He made a big point to support your fellow man and worldwide community.”
Vonnegut, the self-proclaimed humanist and Luddite (a person who does not like technology) danced off the stage to the Blue Danube Waltz, cutting out a question and answer section and disappointing some who gathered around the stage after his exit.
