Camus as husband, Vonnegut as lover ——).(——- Against condescending to our younger profligate whoring selves
in the great modernist project that has not ended - where to be disoriented and rent asunder is to have gone back to where home once was - we were once told that some writers are husbands and some were lovers. Later we learned of other amorphous categories that reworked the categorical so it was neither box nor a sieve but a 3d printer of identity run on open source code that did not contain, but amassed. But that “later” is for another day.
Camus we were told treated his fiction as scaffolding for his ideas, and his “ideas essays” were alleged to be somehow less than the sum of their cognitive parts. We were told wrong things, then as now.
But - we are coming to a sharper point, even if it not sharp enough (yet) to make a clean cut - what of Vonnegut and his yellow fingers, pecking away, hunting and finding? What of his Midwestern groundedness and his Midwestern suicidal tendencies? His terse witticism and the goofy earnestness of his plenary bleakness?
I could not think of a more bizarre pairing culled from that genus of Don Juans whose works boil the blood of the intemperate young, are set down for two decades or more, and turn out, on being picked up for purposes of re-acquainting brace, to have sustained a destabilizing not-to-be-fucked-with brainworm for the fat, median-voter theory worshippers we’ve all become. Not in the realm of prosody, obv - not sculptors of polymorphous linguistic perversity, on the jagged ruins of which so much modernist righteousness productively shores itself - but just in the sense of mapping the coordinates of the raw meat on the floor.
Call it appreciation but don’t tie a ribbon on it. The way in which they (each so different as to risk embarrassment at invoking the yoke of a “they”) shamelessly exposed how putting a name to forces of fraudulence and penury and paradoxically rich banality could be a salve on, but not a cure for, some basic, dumb emptiness that befriends whatever you want to call whatever it is that is rattling around on the inside, still.
