Book Review

Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut

     I hate to say anything bad about a Kurt Vonnegut novel but Hocus Pocus was not one of his best. The narrative is written in the non-linear style that has become a Vonnegut trademark. The main character, Eugene Debs Hartke, is a typical Vonnegut protagonist too. The story also fits in neatly with the kind of satirical poke at modern society that you would expect. Overall though, the novel suffers because the actual theme of the book is unclear.

Eugene Debs Hartke, like so many other characters created by this author, is a mediocrity with some ironic eccentricities. As a teenager, he gets humiliated when his father, employed as an engineer, does his science fair project and tries to trick everybody into thinking it was the work of young Eugene. The boy later goes on to a military academy and gets shipped off to duty as a mid-level commanding officer in the Vietnam War. When he returns he becomes a professor of physics and music appreciation at a college that caters to children with learning disabilities who come from wealthy families. Located on one of the Finger Lakes south of Rochester, New York (my hometown), the college sits on the shore opposite a prison. As the story goes, Hartke gets fired from his job and goes to work as a teacher in the prison. But one night there is a jailbreak, and a gang of prisoners escape and take over the college during the winter break between semesters. Hartke, sympathetic to the prisoners who he teaches, joins them and tries to act as a negotiator between them and the authorities. But the result is that Hartke gets arrested for assisting them instead.

As a character study, the portrayal of Eugene Debs Hartke has some strengths and weaknesses. He is written about with irony and humor, some of which really delivers, while he tries to navigate a world where circumstances are never in his favor and mostly beyond his control, the quintessential existentialist non-hero. He is halfway in between a bumbling mediocrity and a man destined for greatness. On one hand, he becomes famous in Vietnam for giving powerful pep talks while on the other hand he realizes the pointlessness of the whole war. His speeches are nonsense but they fool people into not giving up. He appears to be destined for an important role in activism and reform, hence his name being that of the historical socialist labor union leader, but his attempts at being a Vietnam War critic and being an effective leader in the prison only bring him failure and humiliation. He later gets fired by the conservative, right wing board of directors at the university for his comments which get recorded by a student with a hidden tape recorder. Hartke is also a chronic womanizer, keeping a list of all the women he has slept with along side a list of all the people he killed, directly or indirectly, as a member of the US military. This contrasts with his benevolent role as a husband who takes care of his wife and her mother, both of them living in his house and both of them suffering from mental illness.

Some of the novel suffers from lack of detail. We learn that his wife and her mother are mentally ill but we never learn what their mental illness is. Hartke also never reconciles the conflicting thoughts he has about the prisoners; he sympathizes with them, trying to be their educator and mentor, but he also points out that they are guilty of terrible crimes like murder and rape. He never does any authentic soul searching to reconcile this conflict. He feels sorry for them simply because they are prisoners and mostly non-white. The motivation behind his thinking never gets clarified.

The theme of parallels is also not fully examined. One parallel is the two worlds of the university and the prison. This contrasts a world of freedom with a world of restraint, but the purpose of the contrast is not explicitly spelled out. You might deduce that the university is more like a prison since Hartke is not able to express his freedom to critique America there, and the prison is more like a university since that is where he finds the most success and personal satisfaction as a teacher. Another parallel is the list of people Hartke killed and the women he has slept with. Neither accomplishment is anything admirable. He feels ashamed for having killed people in Vietnam and, even worse, American society hated him for it when he returned. Then he loses his job for speaking out against the war. As a chronic womanizer, he also sees how he has become more well-known on campus for his promiscuity and his reputation has suffered because of the women he has hurt with his insensitivity. Having seduced the university president’s wife, he also suffers because this is used as another reason for him to be fired. But none of this is directly stated and it may not have even been the author’s intended purpose in writing about them.

Then there is all the other “stuff” in the book. I put the word “stuff” in quotation marks because a lot of it just seems like extra, arbitrary, generic add-ons that don’t contribute anything useful or necessary to the overall narrative. There are things like a Mercedes that Hartke received as a gift from a student and one he rarely drives because it keeps getting vandalized, a woman’s disastrous art show in Buffalo, a computer that can predict the course of people’s lives based on their current circumstances, a skull found buried on campus, and even the Tralfamadorians put in an appearance. They show up in a science-fiction story published in a porn magazine which explains that they have chosen humans as vectors to spread germs throughout the universe. As usual, Vonnegut reminds us that, if there is any purpose to human existence, it is something so mundane, so not obvious, and so meaningless to us that we can never comprehend it. But why are these things even in the story? They seem like extraneous information and it even appears that Vonnegut himself could never be satisfied with his own work unless he mentions the Tralfamadorians whether doing so made sense or not.

Even more to the author’s discredit is the complete lack of emotional affect that characterizes Eugene Debs Hartke. Despite everything that happens to him, he proceeds throughout most of the novel without showing any signs of pain, frustration, anger, joy, confusion, pride, or anything thing else that an ordinary person might feel throughout the course of their lives. Then again, writing characters that had emotional depth was never a strong point of Vonnegut’s to begin with, despite any other legitimate claims to genius he might otherwise have.

Aside from being a flawed character study of Eugene Debs Hartke, I think Vonnegut’s intentions in this novel are to, first, write a zeitgeist piece about the apocalyptic end of the 20^th century, and second, to show how language can be deceptive. In the former case, the novel is fairly successful. Japanese businessmen have bought out most American corporations including the for-profit prison across from the university. The economy is in ruins. The fuel supply is dwindling. The environment is destroyed. Racism and social injustice have become predominant to the point where nothing really matters anymore. This theme is not entirely successful though because the author tries to comment on too much. It reads like he had a checklist of things rhat have gone wrong and he was sure to check every box as he wrote regardless of how well the criticisms fit into the narrative. But at least the book has a left wing political bent as it should while simultaneously showing the ineffectiveness of liberal politics in a society full of stupid conservative people. The latter theme of language was not given enough attention to fully work. The title specifically refers to the meeting that Hartke has with the college board in which they give reasons for his dismissal. The reasons they give are nothing more than a smokescreen, just some hocus pocus to distract him from the real reasons they have for terminating his professorship. Also the speeches Hartke gives in Vietnam are nothing but hocus pocus, sleight if mind designed to distract the soldiers from thinking about the absurdity of the war. Hartke also uses lies and deception to seduce women, promising the president’s wife a trip to Venice to get her into bed. Vonnegut is telling us that society is nothing but bullshit since truth and honesty get nothing accomplished while deceit leads to results every time. He doesn’t develop this theme to completion, though, so it winds up being an obscure point.

It is easy for the main ideas to become obscure in Hocus Pocus. Kurt Vonnegut bombards us with so much information it is hard to pick out what he intends to say or at least what he is prioritizing. This approach works well with maximalist novelists like Joyce and Pynchon, but in this case Vonnegut’s end of-career novel comes off as bloated, overbearing, and without any definite direction. There are just too many threads and most of them are loose. Or is that the intention? This is a work of postmodernism so all I can say is maybe. In any case, it is far from Kurt Vonnegut’s best work. It isn’t a terrible book either; I just don’t think it is worth reading more than once. By the time he wrote this, he had already earned his stature as one of America’s greatest writers so it probably doesn’t matter much anyways. 

 

Book Review

Rack, Rope and Red Hot Pincers

by Geoffrey Abbott

     What an amazing thing human ingenuity is. Well, maybe not. For every amazing accomplishment our species makes, there seems to be something awful that happens in its shadow. We’ve built skyscrapers, computers, airplanes, and cured diseases. But we’ve also created the nuclear bomb and the American government. And our penal codes have a long-standing tradition of using torture as a means of punishment or for the use of extracting confessions from suspects. Rack, Rope and Red Hot Pincers by Geoffrey Abbott is a cute little book that catalogs and details the devices and methods of torture, most of which were employed in the Middle Ages, yet the narrative does extend into the twentieth century at times. You may want to ask yourself why you would want to read this when there are so many other books to choose from.

Geoffrey Abbott writes popular history books, most of which are related to medieval England and the Tower of London. As a historian, he appears to be a hobbyist more than an academic. He lays out the scheme of the book according to categories like use of straps, weights, racks, water torture, amputations and mutilations, and there is even an entire chapter, my personal favorite, dedicated to whips and flogging. The final chapter is about the ultimate punishment, the death penalty, and the variety of sadistic ways that it has been carried out. If you haven’t read this, you can imagine what kinds of details are used to fill in each chapter. It’s all written with minimal commentary, presenting the bare facts alone, with occasional puns and jokes, none of which are funny.

While the myriad ways in which pain is inflicted can be somewhat interesting for the morbidly minded, it is the context of the torture that interested me the most. Everything in this book is something done by law enforcement either to punish criminals or force them to admit to crimes. Often the crimes they confessed to were not committed by them and sometimes they were forced to implicate innocent people while under conditions of extreme distress. It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that a person being pierced with needles, crushed by stones, skinned with hot pincers, or having their limbs dislocated while being stretched on a rack will say anything the interrogator wants to hear in order to get the pain to stop. And yet these things are still going on in our supposedly more enlightened times; the Bush administration allowed for “enhanced interrogation techniques” to be used in the War on Terror including sleep deprivation, physically exhausting postures, solitary confinement, exposure to dangerous animals, and water boarding, the latter being a torture technique that was invented and frequently used in the dungeons of medieval Europe. So despite what they say on Fox News, it really is a form of torture. Of course, this book was written before the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the author would certainly have said something about that if he had written this at a later time or revised this edition. He does mention the use of torture in American prisons like Leavenworth, where the idiomatic phrase “being put on the spot” comes from, as well as methods of administering corporal punishment in America.

Another issue of note regarding the context of torture is how many people were imprisoned and tortured for the crime of heresy. About half of the methods described in this short book were inflicted for the purpose of disagreeing with church doctrine, practicing witchcraft, or simply being suspected of saying or doing something that ran counter to the religious principles of the day. The prosecution of religious heresies were largely in the hands of law enforcement. You have to wonder what is wrong with a society that allows the police to amputate a man’s tongue, cut off his nose, and gouge out his eye because he prefers to pray silently rather than aloud. In modern times, this would be considered a thought crime and it looks as though the worst criminals were employed by the police to punish such harmless transgressions and victimless crimes with the most sadistic cruelty imaginable. When the church could not control people’s minds, they turned them over to the government to control their bodies through extreme acts of cruelty.

Most of the other crimes that could get you tortured in the past were petty crimes like theft or public drunkenness. You could also be publicly disemboweled for insulting a member of the nobility. Of course, torture was a special punishment reserved for use against the lower classes, although admittedly there were some cases in which monarchs were beheaded due to political power struggles. Friedrich Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morals, explained that the powerful classes need to express their power through acts of cruelty and violence, sometimes as a public spectacle, so the weaker members of society will receive a visual reminder of who has the most control. The practice of governing is inherently violent to its subjects and such cruelty needs to be displayed so we know what side of the fence we are on. Punishment is the right and the domain of the ruling class and those who take violence into their own hands are punished for crossing that line, not because of the pain and suffering they caused to others.

But Abbott didn’t intend this book to be a commentary on political theory, criminal justice, class conflict, or the irrationality of the human race. It is simply a book that describes torture in all its glorious forms. As such, for scholars, it works as a good source book, giving details of things that are often glossed over by historians covering more conventional themes in historical tomes. There might be times when reading medieval history where you wonder what is meant by thumbscrews or the strappado and the author doesn’t bother to explain because they are more concerned with the narrative at a macro level. I myself had never know what it means to be drawn and quartered until I read this book, despite having come across the term in dozens of other history books I have read.

As for why I read this book, I’ll simply have to say it was a matter of morbid curiosity. Aside from a handful of kinks that turn me on in the boudoir, and possibly the geeky delight I get from teaching syntax classes, I’m not especially inclined to inflicting pain on my fellow human beings, even when their stupidity disgusts me. But I remember going to a carnival funhouse when I was a kid. They had one room labeled the torture chamber with racks, whips, chains on the wall, and a swinging pendulum, made out of cardboard no less, right out of Edgar Allan Poe. A strobe light was flickering while they played a vinyl sound effects record of people moaning while iron chains clinked, wind blew, doors creaked, and cats screeched. The record was stuck and the carnies weren’t paying any attention so I laughed it all off and moved on. And here I am, decades later reading Rack, Rope and Red Hot Pincers.

 

Forensic Psychology & True Crime Book Signed by Author

Let Me Take You Down: 

Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman,

the Man Who Killed John Lennon

by Jack Jones

Villard Books, 1992, 1st edition/2nd printing

hardcover with dust jacket

SIGNED BY AUTHOR ON TITLE PAGE

In Let Me Take You Down, Jack Jones Penetrates the borderline world of dangerous fantasy, in which Mark David Chapman stalked and killed Lennon:

Mark David Chapman rose early on the morning of December 8 to make final preparations... Chapman had neatley arranged and left behind a curious assortment of personal items on top of the hotel dresser. In an orderly semicircle, he had laid out his passport, an eight track tape of the music of Todd Rundgren, his little Bible, open to the The Gospel According to John (Lennon). He left a letter from a former YMCA supervisor at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where five years earlier, he had worked with refugees from the Vietnam War. Beside the letter were two photographs of himself surrounded by laughing Vietnamese children. At the center of the arrangement of personal effects, he had placed the small Wizard of Oz poster of Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion.

"I woke up knowing, somehow, that when I left that room, that was the last time I would see the room again," Chapman recalled. "I truly felt it in my bones. I don't know how. I had never seen John Lennon up to that point. I only knew that he was in the Dakota. But I somehow knew that this was it, this was the day. So I laid out on the dresser at the hotel room...just a tableau of everything that was important in my life. So it would say, 'Look, this is me. Probably, this is the real me. This is my past and I am going, gone to another place.'

"I practiced what it was going to look like when police officers came into the room. It was like I was going through a door and I knew I was going to go through a door, the poet's door, William Blake's door, Jim Morrison's door...I was leaving what I was, going into a future of uncertainty."

"Jack Jones has written a beautiful book, rare in its attention to the social context, giving rise to stalkers and assassins of celebrities...celebrity worship is ambivalent - admiration shares the altar with envy. When the worshipped celebrity disappoints, a 'nobody' can become a 'somebody' by killing the pop culture idol...Let Me Take You Down is both fascinating and brilliant."

(copied from the back cover)

Available for purchase on Ebay here