Joe Shasta Literature 301 09/19/00 Into the Secret Chamber: Art and the Artist in Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard. In one of the great W. C. Fields's most forgettable films, a low-budget pastiche called lt's a Gift, he plays a character named Harold Bissonnette, a small-time operator who buys an orange plantation in California by correspondence and sets off with his nagging wife on a cross-country journey to take possession of his new property. Harold, an erratic driver, swerves off the road at one point and ends up hurtling across the lush gardens of a private country estate. A marble statue of a woman looms up out of nowhere and is promptly knocked over and decapitated. "Harold, look what you've done!" his wife shouts at her luckless husband. "She ran right in front of the car," he replies and continues on his way without even pausing to survey the damage. The movie's madcap plot leaves both statue and stately grounds behind, but the joke stays in the mind because it creates that special shock of surprise occasioned when the inanimate comes alive, when stone becomes flesh, when art becomes reality. Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard, which features W. C. Fields in a cameo role, is a novel about another work of art that is destroyed by carelessness and myopia: 512 square feet of abstract painting quickly peels and disintegrates because the Sateen Dura-Luxe used for it turns out to be just another postwar miracle that self-destracts. Unlike Harold Bissonnette, Rabo Karabekian, the painter and the narrator of this fictional autobiography, stops to survey the damage. In his survey, reversing Fields's strategy, he muses on some of the different ways in which life becomes art. Those who recall all the self-reflexive or metafictional devices in earlier Vonnegut novels may feel that in having his narrator do this the author is merely going over some fairly well-trodden ground here. But in this respect Bluebeard is only superficially similar to those novels. In this article, I shall argue that Vonnegut succeeds in his attempt to be innovative at an age when most writers have either long since retired or made even their most fervent admirers wish they had--Tennessee Williams, Styron, and Ginsberg come to mind. I shall also suggest that Bluebeard is neither a self-contained artefact nor a polemical tract, that Vonnegut uses the aesthetic discussion to illuminate larger concerns, and that he has eschewed the "barndoor-sized moral target"1 that mars a novel like Slapstick, in favor of a more modest and yet more resonant meditation on the morality of representational art itself. Finally, I shall speculate about the lack of critical auention given Bluebeard and about Vonnegut's notorious "special status" in academia, where literary merit is so often assumed to be inversely proportionate to popularity. The critical neglect of Vonnegut's work has affected both the way his books are read and the way they are written: Bluebeard suggests just how fervently he wants to be taken seriously and how much he deserves to be.2 The claim that Bluebeard is innovative because of its use of foregrounding devices may seem odd to those who recall the autobiographical framing device in Slaughterhouse-Five, the authorial intrusions in Breakfast of Champions, and the raise en abyme effects orchestrated by all the discussion of Kilgore Trout's fiction. But Vonnegut, in this novel, focuses the reader's attention on the nature of creative representation in a new way by including a series of intriguing references to art and art theory. The first is introduced near the beginning of the novel. Having contemptuously mocked a masterpiece by Jackson Pollock that is part of Rabo's abstract expressionist collection, Circe Berman, who has all the power to charm possessed by her namesake, pleads for representational, didactic art, for a canvas that would depict the corpses of the massacred Armenians that Rabo has just been telling her about: "You could build a whole new religion, and a much needed one," she says, "on a picture like that" (Bluebeard 24). Vonnegut has always been fascinated by aggressive philistinism, but here he provides a new angle on it by allying it with a plea for committed art. The notion of building a new religion organized around the depiction of human suffering in art, however naively conceived, duly becomes a central idea in Bluebeard. Not since Cat's Cradle has Vonnegut mused as memorably about a "new religion" or the shared moral code that would make one possible. In his earlier work, he often implies that the mysterious, noncognitive dimension of art, that aspect of it that resembles myth, could make its appeal to what he calls "the more primitive lobes of our brains, where knowledge counts for nothing" (Palm Sunday 215). In Bluebeard's extended debate on aesthetic theory, he allows his character to articulate a function for a work of art in a world where knowledge still counts for something. The picture that Circe Berman wants Rabo to paint will speak both powerfully and clearly enough to combat the messages of what Vonnegut calls, at another point in the novel, "our principal art forms": movies, television, and newspaper columns. She acts on her own advice by removing some of Rabo's abstract art collection and replacing it with pictures of little girls on swings. These pictures, she hopes, could move a responsive public to become responsible: that is, to work to prevent the innocent lives depicted there from being blighted by disease and poverty. Unlike the abstract expressionist paintings that Circe detests, a canvas depicting the Armenian massacre will signify something, even as its horrors point toward a world in which the very notion of significance no longer applies.3 The novel suggests at least three potential problems with this view of art. First, television can be found communicating similar messages on any given evening. Appropriated, packaged, and sold to a mass audience, such "truths" become just another collection of sound bites, issues of the day or even of the hour. Vonnegut has pointed out that the 1980s may well have been a second Great Depression that the media simply chose not to cover. The new art forms are powerful precisely because, by dealing in the graphic images that Circe Berman favors, they stupefy our sensibilities and prevent us from building on past knowledge, tracing the unfolding of complex issues, or synthesizing different arguments. The crowd of inert youth who hang around Rabo's pool are a product of this culture. A second problem with the view that confronting horrors in art have a salutary effect is that history suggests that the opposite may be true. Rabo's other woman friend, Marilee Kemp, points out that paintings of atrocities might simply feed man's desire to do the worst thing. Like Hitler's gaining weird psychic strength by listening to Siegfried's funeral music, we stand mesmerized before Goya's "Disasters of War" or Picasso's "Chamel House" thinking, as Marilee Kemp puts it, "There has never been anything to stop us from doing even the most frightful things, if even the most frightful things are what we choose to do" (229-30). When Vonnegut says in an essay on Swift (Palm Sunday 257-58) that disgust is "not the guardian of civilization but the chief damager of our reason," he makes the same point even more provocatively, by inviting us to rethink our attitudes toward satire itself. Far from inculcating any desire to improve the species, Swift's portrayal of the loathsome Yahoos may actually encourage a resigned acceptance of our own repulsiveness. A third problem is that the history of twentieth-century art suggests that whatever shared moral impulse artists collectively come up with may have little if anything to do with the morality the Circe Bermans of the world take to be selfevident. To make this point, Vonnegut includes a number of references to the unhappy lives of some of the abstract expressionists and some disquisitions on art by Dan Gregory, the brilliant but heartless representational artist who sympathizes with and eventually dies for Mussolini. Pollock's and Rothko's lives and deaths argue against the notion that the possession of special imaginative gifts necessarily entails the capacity for moral insight. And when Dan Gregory insists that painters and storytellers are "the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil" (134), he actually espouses a more radical version of the Berman argument. Shelley says poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world; Auden opts for the secret police. Vonnegut neatly conrates the two ideas in the pronouncements of his crypto-fascistic artist and thereby shows us how dangerous such a view can be. The nourepresentational artist refuses even to countenance the bourgeois notion of moral impulse in a work that celebrates nothing but itself; the representational artist's views on morality have nothing to do with his aesthetics.4 Finally, Vonnegut's fascination with war and cruelty in the twentieth century is bound up with his awareness that such horrors inevitably present themselves as stories; as events defined, arranged conceptually, and supplied with plots; as actions turned into history. Hence his conration of the imaginary--Dan Gregory's hyperrealism, Rabo's self-destructive painting--and the real--the attractiveness of Mussolini for certain creative artists and Pollock's death in a car accident. Thus the novel that results becomes at one level the inscription of different texts. As Linda Hutcheon has argued, such "specific and general recollections of the forms and contents of history writing work to familiarize the unfamiliar through (very familiar) narrative structures" even while the "metafictional self-reflexivity works to render problematic any such familiarization." 5 In Bluebeard, Vonnegut's mad artist is an appropriate counterpart for the mad scientists that have figured in his earlier work, but Dan Gregory also enables him to muse yet again about what conclusions we can draw from the appeal of fascism in our century. It is a commonplace that a profound and corrosive scepticism about the liberal view of man has lead many twentieth-century writers to probe the irrational and to extrapolate ideas about other aspects of human life from the results of their investigations. Vonnegut's fiction is clearly an assault on the notion that "man knows his own long-term good, that he seeks to harmonize this with the good of others, that he can judge all issues calmly--in short that man is rational" (Lerner 235). What differentiates Vonnegut from so many writers who have come to the same conclusion is his refusal to accept that this recognition of the blackness at the center of our natures can be translated into social terms. If the capacity to commit atrocities is not the most revealing or significant trait of our species and if the depiction of our own horrific cruelty will not necessarily make us better, then what is a plausible alternative view of our nature and how should art reflect it? Some tentative answers to these questions and to Circe Berman's challenge regarding the artist's moral obligations to society are implicit in the ending of the novel itself. Before discussing the revealing of Rabo's repainted canvas in the potato barn-- the event that concludes the narrative--I should mention two other allusions that function, to a painter and to a theoretician, as foregrounding devices and illuminate Vonnegut's central concern in Bluebeard. For the concluding scenes of his "love conquers nothing" plot, the story of the romance between Rabo and Merilee that somehow misfires, as such things so often do in Vonnegut, Vonnegut invents an elaborate palazzo commissioned by a Medici and designed by Alberti, in which a painting by Uccello figures prominently. Although Vonnegut documents them elaborately, neither palazzo nor painting exists, but the figures from the Horentine Renaissance have been chosen with care. Uccello was the painter who developed Alberti's theory of the "legitimate construction," articulated in Della Pittura, his seminal treatise on the use of perspective in painting. The theory involves a "method of depicting space that did not proceed from the thing seen," "an abstract intellectual discipline" that provided "a means of equating the imaginary world within the painting with the real world in front of the spectator's eyes." According to Alberti, the work of art should be a "copious composition," in which "in their appropriate places, are combined old men and young, youths, women, girls and children ... portrayed in their natural variety." He also advocates that there be "some figures clothed, some naked, some seated, some kneeling, some lying down." And he calls for living bodies, "alive in all the smallest parts," to be juxtaposed with the dead.6 Uccello, the painter who moved Florentine naturalism beyond the representations of the human form by including flora and fauna, never painted "God Almighty and Jesus and the Virgin Mary and angels looking down through the clouds," the painting Vonnegut credits him with in Bluebeard. But he did paint a famous fresco called "The Flood," which dramatically recreates the terror of men and women exposed to the fury of elements unleashed by God as punishment for their sins. The God who irascibly intervenes in human affairs has dropped out of Vonnegut's world. Thus Rabo Karabekian, Uccello's modern counterpart, does not paint a Flood or a Resurrection; he paints the survivors of a human disaster, a group representing all humanity, menaced by the cataclysmic events of World War II. His work, like Uccello's, is made up of an extraordinary number of scrupulously observed figures: old men and young, women and children, some clothed, some naked, most living, some dead, portrayed against a natural background. The self-destructive properties of Uccello's materials have left "The Flood" in a very poor state of repair. The decay of Rabo's materials leaves him with what is quite literally a tabula rasa, a canvas on which he can achieve in mimetic art what he could not as an abstract expressionist. There are even some biographical links between the two painters. Ruskin remarks in a letter that Uccello "went off his head with his love of perspective,"7 and Vasari notes that the Florentine artist's wife used to say that "he would sit studying perspective all night, and when she called him to come to bed he would answer, "Oh, what a sweet thing this perspective is,"8 Rabo, too, spends a good part of his adult life explaining to women why he is neglecting what they think is most important--his first wife, Circe, and Merilee are all impatient with him in this regard--and his meditations on aesthetic questions threaten to cut him off from almost everyone in his life. Perhaps the most important thing to note about Rabo's painting is that it subscribes in almost every detail to Alberti's criteria for a "copious composition." When Rabo leads Circe Berman in to look at it for the first time, he is careful to remind us that the painting looks different from different angles and to recall all the intricate business in Alberti about the "optimum distance of the eye from the projection plane." Rabo makes Circe stand in two different places to view the painting. From just inside the door of the barn, off to one side, she sees what she describes as "A very big fence... every square inch of it encrnsted with the most gorgeous jewelry" (268). That is, from this position the two are looking at mere materials, seeing the painting compressed by foreshortening. As Rabo remarks "There was no telling from that vantage point what the painting really was--what the painting was all about" (267). (The reader is invited to infer that the same could not be said about the painting that self-destmcted, in which "material" was the only thing.) The second view, front and center, reveals the scene that re-creates Rabo's experience "'when the sun came up the day the Second World War ended in Europe" (268); they are arranged in the classical perspective of Alberti ("The largest person was the size of a cigarette, and the smallest a flyspeck"), a perspective that enables the observer to experience most fully the photographic realism of the painting. By choosing to work in this particular mode, Vonnegut's artist implicitly turns his back on the entire movement in modernist art criticism, from Clive Bell to Herbert Read to Mark Rothko, which systematically and inexorably rejected both the narrative and representational dimensions of visual art as irrelevant. Yet Rabo, like his creator, shows how aware he is of that history and of its implications by making the potato barn a museum that serves as a commentary on the art history that the novel explores. The barn contains not only the painting of V-E Day, but also, as the first two elements in a series, "the doomed little girls on swings in the foyer, and then the earliest works of the first Abstract Expressionists" (269). The Victorian story pictures Circe smuggled into his house now have pride of place because Rabo has been convened to her viewer response-human relevance theory of art: "Try thinking what the Victorians thought when they looked at them, which was how sick or unhappy so many of these happy innocent girls would be in just a little while" (124). Although she has not convened him to her aesthetic (Raho creates his painting long before she appears), Circe has convinced him that in any son of art communicating a vision to a viewer is everything. The abstract expressionist paintings are there because Rabo sees, and wants his visitors to see, human reference--the stamp of individual genius, shapes that denote surreal visions of human figures--in the work of his friends and colleagues as well. Formally the three types of work in question could not be more different; but, for Vonnegut, their purely formal characteristics constitute the least important thing about them. By linking Rabo's painting to the rebirth of Western art, Vonnegut suggests a number of things. First he reminds us of an essential continuity that signals our indebtedness to and our links with the past. Second, he implies that even if reason cannot make sense of what humanity has done to itself, it is at least essential for understanding and building upon the formal tenets of aesthetic representation. There may be nothing to say about things as monstrous as wars and massacres, but if the creative artist is to say anything, he must adapt whatever rules are available and use what talent he has to make something happen on the canvas. Third, Vonnegut implies that the isolated artist who muses too long about his human subjects can become skeptical about all the traditional values, about heroism, fidelity, kindness, altmism. Twentieth-century writers have taught us to be suspicious about these words and the ease with which they can be manipulated by the unscrupulous, but the moderate success of the good and the talented in Bluebeard reminds us that even those whose work depicts a failure to communicate work at communicating that failure. We should be skeptical about the attractions of skepticism itself.9 The revelation of Rabo's painting, the mysterious secret hidden away in the locked room for most of the story, is anticipated by another foregrounding device, the reference to the Bluebeard fairy tale that turns out to be as suggestive as the allusions to Renaissance art. Brnno Bettelheim notes that as a fairytale Bluebeard belongs in a special category. Except for the non-soluble blood in the key to the chamber, the blood that proves to Bluebeard that his wife has disobeyed him, there is nothing magical or supernatural about the story, although the violence, the suggestive symbolism, and the conservative moralizing all mark it as a recognizable member of the genre (366-71). A psychoanalytic reading of Perreault's tale would emphasize sexual temptation and sexual jealousy, the terrible and destructive secrets of the adult world. But what does all this have to do with Vonnegut's story in which sexual love is, as usual, more or less absent?10 Perreault's Bluebeard is a typical fairy tale because it is structured around an "if" clause, what Chesterton, one of the genre's most perceptive and engaging commentators, calls "the Doctrine of Conditional Joy." He writes: "The note of the fairy utterance always is 'You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word "cow," or "You may live happily with the King's daughter, if you do not show her an onion." "In other words, "the true citizen of fairyland is obeying something he does not understand at all" (261-62). The tale in question contains its own version of this doctrine: "You will enjoy a life of great luxury and the freedom of the castle, if you do not enter my locked closet." In Bluebeard's secret chamber is death; in Rabo's, a painting that depicts life and death, the survivors of a six-year nightmare of bloodletting caused by people who make Bluebeard look like Mr. Rogers. Bluebeard's wife is rescued by the highly improbable arrival of her brothers, and her trial is over. Nothing so melodramatic will happen to those who visit Rabo's potato barn, but they will see there, not in a fairyland exactly but in what Rabo calls a "gruesome Disneyland" (270), something that they too "cannot understand at all." Perhaps the "Doctrine of Conditional Joy" for both the creator of the painting and the spectator (who acts as co-creator by making up stories about the depicted figure) is: "You may live a moderately happy and productive life, if you can reconcile yourself to human limitations and to the nature of your particular gifts, including the gift of being a survivor." And the parallel extends further. Chesterton says that for him, the fairy tale injunction is a symbol of the human condition. Our happiness depends, he claims, "on not doing something which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it [is] not obvious why you should not do." He goes on to point out that he could accept such a condition without in any way feeling it was unjust: "If the Miller's third son said to the fairy, "Explain why I must not stand on my head in the fairy palace," the other might fairly reply, "Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace." "In other words, says Chesterton, "existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I could not understand the vision they limited" (262). Although Vonnegut pursues its logical implications less rigorously, this bemused acceptance of the paradox of existence catches his tone exactly. His secular version of Chesterton would run something like: Once you have come face to face with the most horrific truths about humanity's potential for cruelty, accept that you have looked into the heart of something that is quintessentially meaningless. The impact of such a vision will be profound, but to attempt to build a series of conceptual arguments on it or to countenance explanations of it would be like trying to get light from a black hole. At such moments, the storyteller or painter can only fall back on the formal devices that enable him to communicate what he can, and on the fact that such communication is possible. Chesterton's lack of understanding makes him exult in the quintessential eccentricity of our existence; Vonnegut's makes him insist that if we must live with illusions, we might as well recognize them for what they are. Vonnegut's novel adds something substantial to our musings on these large questions because it gives new fictional shape to a metaphor that, as George Steiner has argued, informs the whole course of Western culture since the Renaissance. Our certainty, says Steiner, that "mental inquiry must move forward, that such motion is natural and meritorious in itself, that man's proper relation to the truth is one of pursuer," has led us to open "the successive doors in Bluebeard's castle because 'they are there,' because each leads to the next by a logic of intensification which is that of the mind's own awareness of being" (136). In his fiction, Vonnegut has systematically worked at exposing the risks of such hubristic assumptions. Now that it is once again becoming fashionable to pay attention to wistful, vaguely anarchic critiques of science and of its macho assertions about its power to control human destiny, Bluebeard can be recommended as a compelling vision of what one artist sees when he opens the door to the secret chamber of the human spirit and as his meditation on the significance of his discovery. Vonnegut's use of the Bluebeard tale links him to writers like Margaret Atwood (Lady Oracle) and John Fowles (The Collector). Whereas their use of such a device has received extended critical attention, Vonnegut's has not. It is interesting to speculate about the reasons for this. Asked about the allusions in their work to Bluebeard and to related myths, both Atwood and Fowles have been forthcoming: the former told an interviewer that she was influenced by Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle; the latter said that on first seeing the same opera based on Perreault's tale, he was struck by "the symbolism of the man imprisoning women underground."11 In interviews generally Atwood and Fowles tend to comment seriously, helpfully about matters relating to critical issues raised by their work. Contrast their approach to Vonnegut's comments on Bluebeard in a recent interview (Allen 267-89, passim). After speaking at respectable length about Jackson Pollock, he denies that he worked out a structure for the novel, answers questions about sex in it by discussing the fact that "we split off from the orangutans five million years ago," ducks at least four other questions on the novel, refuses to talk about the ending, and gives a number of other highly uninfonnative answers ("Yeah," "I guess," "I don't know"). He eventually gets around to why he chose Bluebeard as a title, only to dismiss his reasons as "very superficial" (" 'You can go into any room but one' "), and concludes his remarks with the casual and enigmatic: "Whatever I say is not necessarily all that true." Vonnegut's interviews are, of course, delightful and unhelpful precisely because he so often refuses to take himself seriously, and too many critics have dutifully followed suit. His selfdeprecating irony questions the appropriateness of invoking any authority--the author, a sources---and usually militates against solemn activities like source hunting and related speculations. A complex mix of factors are involved when popular writers such as Atwood and Fowles acquire secure reputations in academia, but their attitudes to their own work help explain the frequency with which their names began to appear in respectable journals after they had written best-sellers. Since the mid- 1970s, as the enormous public interest in his work has gradually diminished, Vonnegut's name has seldom appeared in such places; Slapstick confirmed for many that the critics had been right all along. Thus a novel like Bluebeard, which is certainly worthy of comparison to works like Lady Oracle and The Collector, has not been and probably will not be read as attentively as those novels have been. John Barth suggests that the ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates his twentieth-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century pre-modemist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt but not on his back. Without leaping into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naivete, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-modernist marvels ... as Beckett's Texts for Nothing or Nabokov's Pale Fire. (213) With Bluebeard, Vonnegut reminds us of why he should be considered, if not the "ideal postmodernist author," at least a distinctive, enduring, and entertaining one. The thicket of details denoting the specificity of time and place, the adherence to the laws of causality, the interweaving of narrative and history--all these show how indebted Vonnegut is to his "pre-modernist grandparents." The preoccupation with aesthetic ordering, the attempt to leave endings open and problematic, the play with multiple viewpoints show what he has learned from his modemist forebears. But Barth's warning about moral simplism and naivete reminds us of what has always been an area of contention insofar as Vonnegut is concerned, of what has prevented him from being accepted by many of the critics most interested in the postmodernist novel in America. Anyone who has surveyed responses to Vonnegut's fiction has been struck by the number of times he and his work have been dismissed as "hippyish and nugatory... cute, coy, tricksy, mawkish, gee-whiz writing, comic-book stuff."12 Who will be convinced if we say that the dystopia in Player Piano looks much more ominous to us in the 1990s than the ones in Huxley and Orwell, that from Mother Night to Deadeye Dick, no American writer has written more clear-eyed accounts of World War II and its consequences for America, that Cat's Cradle is still an extraordinary book, despite the fact that it gave readers in the 1960s the comforting notion of belonging to a karass composed of all their coevals reading R. D. Laing, Charles Reich, and Theodore Roszak, that the treatment of moral and aesthetic questions in Bluebeard is anything but simplistic or naive? Academics for whom such claims seem either hopelessly exaggerated or simply Wrong will probably go on ignoring Vonnegut, and he will continue to provide them with grist for their respective mills by being so self-deprecating. He confesses in one of his collections of non-fiction: "I am not especially satisfied with my own imaginative work, my fiction. I am simply impressed by the insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth,"13 The paradigm suggests not only two ways of writing but also, by implication, two ways of knowing: that which makes its appeal with varying degrees of severity to some form of logic, and that which relies on what Vonnegut calls "enthusiastic intimacy." He will go on being important to those for whom enthusiastic intimacy remains a plausible response to literature; he will continue to be denigrated by those for whom such a response is irrelevant. If his desire to please critics in the second group makes him produce more novels like Bluebeard, we in the first shall continue to be grateful for their unbending austerity. NOTES: 1. Amis, 134. Back to text. 2. The most detailed and useful commentary on the novel is to be found in Broer, 167-75. Bluebeard was widely reviewed when it appeared, and some of the response was quite enthusiastic. Of particular interest are Clute, Rackstraw, and Moynahan. Back to text. 3. Charles Berryman has discussed the fascination with violent death in Vonnegut's recent work. Back to text. 4. Arthur M. Saltzman makes a similar point in comparing the treatment of the war in Tolstoy's War and Peace with a scene from Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Back to text. 5. "Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History," 9-10. Vonnegut wrily notes in a recent interview that Slaughterhouse-Five did not please the Germans because they feel World War II is "more or less their copyrighted war, and how dare I comment on it" (Allen 235). Back to text. 6. Pope-Hennessy, 12-13, 16. Back to text. 7. Ruskin, v. 37, 585. Back to text. 8. Seeley, 44. Back to text. 9. Broer has pointed out the parallels between the abstract expressionists and Vonnegut: "Characterized by very bold uses of color and mass to convey such basic human emotions as joy and sorrow, [Abstract Expressionism] claims as its most significant element the always tentative interrelationship between subject and viewer. Given its intensely psychological nature, its subjective epistemology, and its existential ethic, Abstract Expressionism proves to be a powerfully instructive analogue to Vonnegut's own literary construction" (201, n. 4). Back to text. 10. Vonnegut said in a 1971 interview: "There's a mechanical reason for avoiding adult sexual love in a book. The minute you introduce that element the reader's not going to want to hear anything more about the factory system or about what it's like to be a parachutist. He's going to want to hear about the guy getting the girl and this is a terrible distraction unless you're really going to deal flat out with the sexual theme" (Conversations, 53). Back to text. 11. Quoted in Grace. Broer remarks that "By contrast to the obscenely destructive male of the seventeenth-century tale by Charles Perreault, Rabo notes that it is the female of the species who plants the seeds of something beautiful and edible" (168). Back to text. 12. Amis, 133. For a brief survey of similar responses to Vonnegut's recent work see Broer, 195 n. 4 and 197 n. 7. Back to text. 13. Warnpeters, Forna, and Granfalloons 9. Robert A. Hipkiss argues that this blend of truth and imagination in Vonnegut is a form of organic writing and he discusses its characteristics in a number of Vonnegut novels. Back to text. WORKS CITED: Allen, William Rodney, ed. Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut. Jackson and London: UP of Mississippi, 1988. Amis, Martin. The Moronic Inferno. London: Cape, 1986. Barth, John. The Friday Book. New York: Putnam's, 1984. Berryman, Charles. "After the Fall: Kurt Vonnegut," Critique 26, 2 (Winter 1985): 96-102. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Knopf, 1976. Broer, Lawrence R. Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Chesterton, G. K. The Bodley Head G. K. Chesterton. London: Bodley, 1985. Clute, John. Times Literary Supplement (April 29-May 5, 1988): 470. Grace, Sherrill E. "Courting Bluebeard with Bartok, Atwood, and Fowles: Modern Treatment of the Bluebeard Theme," Journal of Modern Literature, 11, 2 (July 1984):245-62. Hipkiss, Robert A. The American Absurd: Pynchon, Vonnegut, and Barth. Port Washington, NY: National U Association Faculty P, 1984. Hutcheon, Linda. "Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History," in Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis, eds. lntertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. Leruer, Lawrence. The Truthtellers. New York: Schocken, 1967. Moynahan, Julian. New York Times Book Review (Oct. 18, 1987): 12. Pope-Hennessy, John. Paolo Uccello. London: Phaidon, 1969. Rackstraw, Loree. North American Review (1988), 273, l :65-67. Ruskin, John. The Complete Works of John Ruskin. Vol. 37. London: Allen, 1909. 37 vol. Saltzman, Arthur. "The Aesthetic of Doubt in Recent Fiction," Denver Quarterly, 20, 1 (Summer 1985): 95-98. Seeley, E. L., trans. Lives of the Artists. New York: Noonday, 1957. Steiner, George. In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Toward the Redefinition of Culture. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1971. Vonnegut, Kurt. Bluebeard. New York: Dell, 1987. _____. Palm Sunday. New York: Delacorte, 1981. _____. Warnpeters, Foma, and Granfalloons. New York: Delacorte, 1974.