If only the Millenium had been so simple...

Kurt Vonnegut – Timequake

One of the many covers for Timequake, this one featuring a mixed bag of sci-fi pulp artwork (whether ironically or not, I wasn’t inclined to research).

THIS is now the second Vonnegut novel I’ve read, the first one being Slaughterhouse 5, which I read earlier this year. Overall, I’d say that Timequake was probably the funnier novel, but frustratingly structured. The titular timequake occurs just after the millennium and flings the universe back ten years so that everybody has to relive the ten years between 1991 and 2001 all over again. The idea behind the plot is an imaginative one, and Vonnegut certainly injects a lot of very humorous ideas using this device.

As well as being about the timequake, Timequake is also about Vonnegut’s life and his struggle with writing Timequake. Vonnegut tells us that originally there was a novel which he refers to as Timequake I, which had a more or less linear plot and action etc., however, the novel we get is deliberately interwoven with extracts of the author’s life, ‘extracts’ from the first Timequake (presented in the form of “in the first timequake…”), and little snippets of information/disinformation. The effect is that the reader slowly realises that the novel is basically about Vonnegut’s life over the years from 91 to 96 (when the novel was written), which then becomes a meta-fiction after the first five years of the timequake decade. Vonnegut ceases to describe his life through the novel (where often he’ll posit that something the first time was traumatic and the second time had a sorrowful inevitability to it), and posits that because it is his narrative and fiction that he can put in it what he wants. The novel’s chronology ends with a clambake where the author goes so far as to state that he is including elements just because he wants to. If this sounds complicated, it is certainly not – the novel is certainly very digressive, the narrative jumps from nostalgia to metafiction and everywhere between very often, but at no point does the reader become lost. Much like the experiences of the people affected by the timequake itself, there isn’t any suspense or tension built up through the novel, many of Vonnegut’s more traumatic experiences are told offhandedly early in the novel and then reiterated in greater detail later.

The novel doesn’t so much have a resolution, as a suggestion to the reader. At this clambake Kilgore Trout speaks to the author-as-character in front of a congregation of people, encouraging him to look first at one star and then to the other, suggesting that the light between the two stars takes millions of years to travel to Earth:

“…it is certain that the Universe had become so rarified that for light to go from one to the other [star] would take thousands or millions of years… look precisely at one, and then precisely at the other… “It took a second… “Even if you’d taken an hour… something would have passed between where those heavenly bodies used to be, at, conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light.” “What was it?” I said. “Your awareness…” Timequake

Throughout the novel Vonnegut systematically dissects time and makes it essentially a nonlinear, relativistic phenomenon. This short section at the end, dissects the notion of time-space as a whole, suggesting basically that the cosmological rules that we have come to understand as governing the Universe, are less essential, and important than that of human awareness. The prologue of the novel is a touching, down-to-earth, and funny anecdote regarding Vonnegut’s brother who died some time in 1997 – presumably some time between finishing the writing of the novel-proper and publication. The implication of this, or, more correctly, what this drives-home, is the fact that it is not just the effect of the human awareness (soul, in Trout’s words) that we should look to, but humanity itself – each other, friends and family and experience that we share with them. Whether this is a convincing argument or not remains to be seen. Rather than a timequake, in 2001 a much darker event occurred to put the 90s in context, one that pitted people against one another rather than for one another. Since then people, I think, have come to realise how meaningless conflict is, without having a simple resolution and Vonnegut’s Timequake seems a bit of a hollow refutation of the variously defined nihilism that must follow such meaninglessness.