¿Por qué deberías leer a Kurt Vonnegut? - Mia Nacamulli

0:06 Billy Pilgrim can’t sleep because he knows aliens

0:10 will arrive to abduct him in one hour.

0:13 He knows the aliens are coming because he has become “unstuck” in time,

0:18 causing him to experience events out of chronological order.

0:23 Over the course of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five,

0:27 he hops back and forth between a childhood trip to the Grand Canyon,

0:31 his life as a middle-aged optometrist, his captivity in an intergalactic zoo,

0:37 the humiliations he endured as a war prisoner, and more.

0:42 The title of Slaughterhouse-five and much of its source

0:45 material came from Vonnegut’s own experiences in World War II.

0:49 As a prisoner of war, he lived in a former slaughterhouse in Dresden,

0:54 where he took refuge in an underground

0:56 meat locker while Allied forces bombed the city.

1:00 When he and the other prisoners finally emerged,

1:03 they found Dresden utterly demolished.

1:07 After the war, Vonnegut tried to make sense

1:09 of human behavior by studying an unusual aspect of anthropology:

1:14 the shapes of stories,

1:15 which he insisted were just as interesting as the shapes of pots or spearheads.

1:21 To find the shape, he graphed the main character’s

1:24 fortune from the beginning to the end of a story.

1:27 The zany curves he generated revealed common types

1:30 of fairy tales and myths that echo through many cultures.

1:34 But this shape can be the most interesting of all.

1:38 In a story like this, it’s impossible

1:40 to distinguish the character’s good fortune from the bad.

1:44 Vonnegut thought this kind of story was the truest to real life,

1:48 in which we are all the victims of a series of accidents,

1:51 unable to predict how events will impact us long term.

1:55 He found the tidy, satisfying arcs of many stories at odds with this reality,

2:01 and he set out to explore the ambiguity

2:03 between good and bad fortune in his own work.

2:06 When Vonnegut ditched clear-cut fortunes,

2:09 he also abandoned straightforward chronology.

2:12 Instead of proceeding tidily from beginning to end,

2:15 in his stories “All moments, past, present and future always have existed,

2:21 always will exist.” Tralfamadorians,

2:23 the aliens who crop up in many of his books, see all moments at once.

2:30 They “can see where each star has been and where it is going,

2:33 so that the heavens are filled with rarefied,

2:37 luminous spaghetti.” But although they can see all of time,

2:40 they don’t try to change the course of events.

2:43 While the Trafalmadorians may be at peace with their lack of agency,

2:47 Vonnegut’s human characters are still getting used to it.

2:51 In The Sirens of Titan,

2:53 when they seek the meaning of life in the vastness of the universe,

2:57 they find nothing but “empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.” Then,

3:02 from their vantage point within a “chrono-synclastic infundibulum,” a man

3:08 and his dog see devastating futures for their earthly counterparts,

3:12 but can’t change the course of events.

3:15 Though there aren’t easy answers available,

3:17 they eventually conclude that the purpose of life is

3:21 “to love whoever is around to be loved.” In Cat’s Cradle,

3:25 Vonnegut’s characters turn to a different source of meaning: Bokonism,

3:29 a religion based on harmless lies that all its adherents recognize as lies.

3:35 Though they’re aware of Bokonism’s lies,

3:38 they live their lives by these tenets anyway,

3:40 and in so doing develop some genuine hope.

3:44 They join together in groups called Karasses,

3:46 which consist of people we “find by accident but[…] stick

3:50 with by choice”— cosmically linked around a shared purpose.

3:54 These are not to be confused with Granfalloons,

3:57 groups of people who appoint significance to actually meaningless associations,

4:02 like where you grew up, political parties, and even entire nations.

4:08 Though he held a bleak view of the human condition,

4:11 Vonnegut believed strongly that “we are all here

4:13 to help each other get through this thing,

4:16 whatever it is." We might get pooped and demoralized,

4:19 but Vonnegut interspersed his grim assessments

4:22 with more than a few morsels of hope.

4:25 His fictional alter ego, Kilgore Trout, supplied this parable:

4:30 two yeast sat “discussing the possible purposes of life

4:34 as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement.

4:39 Because of their limited intelligence,

4:41 they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”

4:46 In spite of his insistence that we’re all here to fart around,

4:49 in spite of his deep concerns about the course of human existence,

4:53 Vonnegut also advanced the possibility, however slim,

4:57 that we might end up making something good.

5:00 And if that isn’t nice, what is?