All entries in this blog are freely submitted by members of the Kurt Vonnegut Book Club and are uncensored. Opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, its staff, or its management.

Eight of us met at the stupendous new Vonnegut Library to talk about KV’s 1990 novel “Hocus Pocus.”    Joining our discussion leader, Max Goller, were Bill Briscoe, John Sturman, Karen Lystra, Kathleen Angelone, Dave Young, John Hawn, and Mack Hudson.

What is, we wondered, the etymology of ”hocus locus?”   Apparently the source is lost in antiquity but it may have come from the sham Latin phrase used in the ultimate magic show, the RCC mass “Hoc est corpus Meum.”

The structure of this novel is significant.   As KV explains in the set-up,  the protagonist has written the entire novel on scraps of paper,  bubble-gum wrappers and what have you.  These are then assembled into the novel as separate paragraphs.  Writing in bursts seems to suit KV’s style and  he often characterizes such short passages as “jokes” used to help make some point.  He never seems to take himself all that seriously.  We were impressed by the way that KV would plant a seed early in the novel and, to our surprise, develop it later, going full circle.  The scrappy motif seemed to facilitate such riffs.

The naming of characters always occupies KV.   The anti-hero here is Eugene Debs Hartke.  Hoosiers will recognize Eugene Debs as the Terre Hautean socialist who ran for US President several times in the early 20th Century.  Vance Hartke was the hapless mid-century US Senator from Evansville whose conflict with his fellow Democrat LBJ turned him into a strong opponent of the War in Viet Nam which ended fifteen years before the novel and which KV also strongly opposed.  Unlike WWII, it was not a good war.     The man who wanted to be the prison’s shop teacher, John Donner,  brought to mind the phrase “People who eat people, are the luckiest people in the world.”     Although KV’s favorite writer, Kilgore Trout, did not make an appearance by name,  he was surely the author of “The Protocols of the Elders of Trafalmadore” which appeared serially in the porno mag “Black Garter Belt.”

Strangely enough, in 1990, the Japanese were buying up all the high-priced real estate in the US and there was speculation that they would own us.  Thirty years later, the Japanese seem to have receded and the Chinese are temporarily taking their place.  Maybe Trump will stop them.     Although KV would surely have detested Donald J. Trump,  he voiced the displeasure with the ruling class that led half the country to elect that outsider.   The Japanese are running the now-segregated prison where Hartke works after he was fired by the joke junior college for  his politically incorrect behavior.   Like our soldiers in the middle-east,  the Japanese prison guards are rotated through for six month periods.  It is seen as a plus that there is a language barrier between them and the Afro-American convicts they guard.

There are no heroes or villains in KV’s world.  The anti-hero, Eugene Debs Hartke,  has no set values and is pushed around by fate.  He seems to be consumed later in his life with thoughts about the  number Vietnamese he has killed and the number  of women he has laid.  He ends the novel with a relatively long, but simple, arithmetic problem.  If the reader bothers to solve it, he or she will arrive at the number 82 which, quite coincidentally,  satisfies his quest.  That number will be the epitaph on his tombstone.

We gave this novel a rousing 8.4 on the fabulous ten-point KV scale. 

We adjourned for lunch at St Joseph’s Brewery and Public House,  540 N. College, Indianapolis, IN.  Our next convergence will be at 11AM on December 12, 2019 when Phill Watts will help us get through KV’s “Slapstick” (1976).    Please join us next month at the KV Memorial Library, 543 Indiana Avenue for another engaging discussion and conversation. 

 

Dave Young

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Hocus Pocus (novel)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Like many of Vonnegut’s novels, Hocus Pocus uses a non-linear narrative and has a plot centered on a major event heavily alluded to until the final chapters.

The main character is Eugene Debs Hartke, a Vietnam War veteran, college professor, and carillonneur who realizes that he has killed exactly as many people as the number of women he has had sex with. The character’s name is a homage to American labor and political leader Eugene V. Debs and anti-war senator Vance Hartke, both from Vonnegut’s home state, Indiana.[1]

The main character’s name-sharing with Eugene V. Debs, five-time Socialist Party of America candidate for President of the United States (one of his candidacies occurred while he was in prison), is explicitly discussed in the book. The following quote from Eugene V. Debs appears several times: “…while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

In an editor’s note at the beginning of the book, Vonnegut claims to have found hundreds of scraps of paper of varying sizes, from wrapping paper to business cards, sequentially numbered by their author (Hartke) in order to form a narrative of some kind.[2] The breaks between pieces of paper often signal a sort of ironic “punchline”. This theme of an episodic narrative and scraps of information is echoed in one recurring feature of the novel, a computer program called GRIOT. By entering the details of a person’s life, the user can be given an approximation of what sort of life that person might have had based on the database of lives the program can access. The main pieces of information required for GRIOT to work are: age, race, degree of education, and drug use.

Hartke mentions early on that he is suffering from tuberculosis at the time of his writings, and writes the word “cough” in the text every now and again as well as other descriptors to represent times when he coughed aloud while writing.

One of Hartke’s quirks is to use numerals rather than words to represent numbers (e.g. “1” instead of “one” or “1,000,000” instead of “one million”). In the Editor’s Note at the beginning of the book, Vonnegut speculates that Hartke thought “…that numbers lost much of their potency when diluted by an alphabet”.

Throughout the novel, Hartke wants to write a list of all the women he has made love to and another list consisting of all those he had killed during the Vietnam War. He becomes fascinated with how large each number will be. At the end of the novel, Eugene says that these numbers are the same and gives a method for calculating the number using other numbers mentioned in the book (e.g., “… the greatest number of children known to have come from the womb of just 1 woman”). The number is 82.

The entire narrative is laced with Eugene’s thoughts and observations about the Vietnam war, history, and social conditions, especially class and prejudice.

Like almost all of Vonnegut’s books, this is an account told in the past tense by a character who shares his background with Vonnegut.

Plot summary:

Eugene is fired from his job as a college professor after having several of his witticisms surreptitiously recorded by the daughter of a popular conservative commentator. Eugene then becomes a teacher at a nearby overcrowded prison run by a Japanese corporation. His employer, and occasional acquaintance, is the prison’s warden, Hiroshi Matsumoto. After a massive prison break, Eugene’s former college is occupied by escapees from the prison, who take the staff hostage. Eventually the college is turned into a prison, since the old prison was destroyed in the breakout. Eugene is ordered to be the warden of the prison, but then becomes an inmate, presumably via the same type of “hocus pocus” that led to his dismissal from his professorship.