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Kurt Vonnegut: I want to share with you something I’ve learned.
- david927 17y agoBrilliant. Thank you.
- andrewljohnson 17y agoFollow the ghost of @kurt_vonnegut on twitter...
- anatoly 17y agoSo it goes.
- __bjoernd 17y agoIt's the old Socratean thing: "I know that I don't know".
- samh 17y agoenjoyed it
- andrewcooke 17y agoi get the general story, but why does he say that hamlet is like cinderella ("I don’t have to draw a new line, because Hamlet’s situation is the same as Cinderella’s, except that the sexes are reversed.") and then later say hamlet is a flat line?
- CodeMage 17y agoHe's referring to Hamlet's starting situation, which is same as Cinderella's (despondent girl, mother dead) except that the sexes are reversed (despondent boy, father dead). From there on, the story is different.
- run4yourlives 17y agoActually, what he is saying is that the the stories are exactly the same, but Hamlet has a realistic outcome (truth) whereas Cinderella is all about the story graph. Hamlet makes the mistake of killing Polonius, and getting killed himself, because there really is no shoe fitting happily ever after in life, and that's why the story works.
- andrewcooke 17y agothanks; that makes more sense. i need to go back + read it again, i think. [edit: hmm; that's not completely right either. need to get back to work.]
- TeHCrAzY 17y agoCuriously, I wonder if Hamlet is reliant on this effect to actually be a good story, and if so, are we hardwired to have it, or is it learnt.
- CodeMage 17y agoWait, I don't get it. How are they "exactly the same" if Hamlet's is realistic and there's no magic "shoe fitting happily ever after" and the "graph" is completely different? I mean, I've read both Cinderella and Hamlet and the only thing they really have in common is the starting situation. What's the difference between a crocodile and a camel? One ends with "rocodile" and other with "amel"...
- trevelyan 17y agoHamlet makes the mistake of killing the king. Of course, so does his uncle.
- BearOfNH 17y agoHamlet makes the mistake of killing Polonius I'm not sure I agree that was a mistake. Unexpected, maybe. Only real problem is that Shakespeare, master of pithy phrases, missed a golden opportunity to coin the term "You dirty rat!".
- ars 17y agoIsn't this the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_journey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_journey described with a graph? I guess he's famous (I looked him up) but I found the writing style hard to read.
- bmelton 17y agoThat's interesting -- not that you don't know who Vonnegut is (though that IS interesting) but that you thought it was hard to read. I mean, to each his own of course, but at least to me, Vonnegut has always been one of the authors whose works were easiest for me to consume.
- ars 17y agoWould you like a line by line analysis? "Not every story has that very simple, very pretty shape that even a computer can understand" What very simple shape? He hasn't said a shape, he laid out the graph, but that doesn't change per story. I had no idea what he was talking about here. "so start your story up here" I'm writing a story? Oh, didn't realize that, maybe you should have said something. I backtracked two paragraphs and re-read it, now that I know this. "Now, I don’t mean to intimidate you, but after being a chemist as an undergraduate at Cornell, after the war I went to the University of Chicago and studied anthropology, and eventually I took a masters degree in that field." I guess this is informal, but the grammar connecting the two "afters" is strange. Was this transcribed from someone speaking? It make a bit more sense if it was, because as writing it's kinda bad. BTW, just because this was hard to read doesn't mean his books are. I probably never read his stuff because I'm not a big fan of satire.
- Semiapies 17y agoIt's an informal style of another era. That's one of the harder things to read if you're unfamiliar with the style.
- olavk 17y agoNo, this have nothing to do with The Heros Journey.
- ankeshk 17y agoWhy chart the emotions of the protagonist to evaluate the story? The value of a story is not in how happy or sad the protagonist was - but how it makes you feel. If I had to evaluate stories, my vertical axis would have 4 parts. From top to bottom: * Unpredictable and irrational * Surprisingly Unpredictable * Tolerantly Predictable * Predictable and stale The closer the story is to "Surprisingly unpredictable" the better it is. Cinderella, Kafka, Hamlet - all reach that point. (But to be fair - Cinderella reaches that point only because its amongst the first few stories you ever hear.) Titanic reached that stage for many teenage girls by killing the hero. The best book I've read - Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov reaches that "surprisingly unpredictable" point too.
- CodeMage 17y agoWhy chart the emotions of the protagonist to evaluate the story? The value of a story is not in how happy or sad the protagonist was - but how it makes you feel. It's a rather good starting point for analyzing stories. Most of the stories he mentioned (with Kafka being a notable exception) aimed to make the reader identify with the protagonist. Therefore, it's the protagonist's situation that matters the most. Also, bear in mind that he wasn't charting the emotions of the protagonist, but the protagonist's fortune.
- almost 17y agoWhy do you mention Kafka as an exception? I've always felt his characters were very easy to identify with. They're the confused part of you, constantly buffeted by processes you don't understand. Surely everyone feels a little like that at times?
- CodeMage 17y agoHonestly, I find it impossible for myself to identify with the young man who found himself transformed into a bug ;) I know it's supposed to be a metaphor, but it kind of kills my personal identification with the poor sod.
- 17y ago
- Tichy 17y ago"and she becomes off-scale happy"
- hubb 17y agoi didn't know that vonnegut went to grad school with saul bellow. i'm always pleased to hear about when favourite authors of mine knew each other before they were famous. edit: who downmodded the comments of everyone who enjoyed the article? sheesh, if vonnegut's not your bag, then just abstain
- binarymax 17y ago"Saul Bellow was in that same department, and neither one of us ever made a field trip." Thats strange, I am almost certain that he had an extended trip to Africa ;)
- jcl 17y agoI didn't mod the comments myself, but it is common here to mod down a comment that doesn't add anything to the discussion -- that is, both "Great article!" and "Terrible article!" comments that lack further content or commentary would be modded down.
- jrockway 17y agoI downmod commentary explaining when it's right to downmod.
- tome 17y agoThis reminds me of a story I once read. Good news, bad news? Who knows? http://www.spinwwweaver.net/goodnews.html http://www.spinwwweaver.net/goodnews.html
- kmak 17y agoThis was also in "A Man Without a Country", his last book. So it goes.
- jokull 17y agoGreat essays with a great tone.
- jballanc 17y agoIndeed, a great finale for a great man. My favorite line from that is still: "I never thought I'd be alive when the three most powerful men in the world were named Bush, Dick, and Colon." Vonnegut always had an immaculate sense of humor!
- kmak 17y agoI read this thread again, saw the * next to my comment, and got instantly reminded of an KV art..
- charliesome 17y agowhat the fuck was he going on about there
- Herring 17y agoI think you're supposed to pretend there's some subtle & insightful comment that he couldn't just say, eg "people like happy endings".
- binarymax 17y agoI wonder what Kilgore Trout has to say about all this?
- george_morgan 17y agoRelated, Vonnegut on drama: http://sivers.org/drama http://sivers.org/drama (more graph sketches!)
- BoppreH 17y agoIt's the same graphs, just with the "real life" one being new. But it does include an important piece of wisdom: people want their lives to have greater ups and downs, just like in the stories, and that's why some make drama for nothing.
- amohr 17y agoSingle page version: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/kurt-vonnegut-at-the-blackboard.php?page=all http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/kurt-vonnegut...
- ddelony 17y agoHmm, I think my life would be a sine wave or a saw-tooth wave pattern.
- jpwagner 17y agoDostoevsky once said that there are two stories: (1) man goes on a journey and (2) stranger comes to town.
- gruseom 17y agoAre you sure? That doesn't sound like Dostoevsky to me. Do you know where he said it? Crime and Punishment doesn't fit that rule (except perhaps as a moral journey). Notes From Underground doesn't fit it, and so on. The Double, on the other hand, which was the second thing he wrote and one of the best comic novels ever, is a classic #2. I highly recommend The Double! Edit: I suppose you could say the Odyssey is a prototype of #1 and the Iliad of #2. It's an amusing principle. But I'd bet money (well, five bucks) that it isn't Dostoevsky's. Dostoevsky is more the kind of writer who, if you gave him a list of all possible types of stories, would immediately set out to write one that didn't fit the list. Just to spite list-makers.
- biotech 17y agoAfter doing some light google research, I was not able to find the origin of the phrase "there's only two stories in the world: man goes on a journey, and stranger comes to town." It is generally attributed to peoples' literature or film professors. The quote is prefaced with "They say that...." very often, suggesting that the origin of the quote is largely unknown even by those who study stories professionally.
- jpwagner 17y agoI heard it from a person. This is far from proof, but the first result in the only search I did (total time-9 seconds) yielded this ...http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Fyodor_Dostoevsky http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Fyodor_Dostoevsky
- Semiapies 17y agoThat's from the Unsourced section, as clearly described. It's roughly the opposite of proof.
- Semiapies 17y agoNit: I've never come across the idea that Claudius didn't react to the play in Hamlet. He jumps up and freaks out a bit (something staged with varying degrees of subtlety, but not really ambiguously), then later sends Hamlet overseas to get beheaded. I always viewed Hamlet as a staircase-like figure going quite definitely down. The king's not merely dead, he's a tormented ghost. Hamlet must kill his uncle, but he's stymied the first time he tries. Hamlet outmaneuvers Claudius, but in the process kills Polonious, drives Ophelia mad and to suicide, which turns her brother into a deadly enemy...and then damn near everyone dies at the end. I'm trying to wrap my mind around the idea that any of this is ambivalent. :)