ArtiFact #21: Kurt Vonnegut‘s ”Galapagos” | Keith Jackewicz, Alex Sheremet

Taking up Mark Twain’s mantle, then expanding upon it, Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007) was one of the greatest comic writers to have ever lived. His best-known work, Slaughterhouse-Five, features everything from sci-fi to timeless political comment, thus overshadowing his other great works.

One of these is 1986’s Galapagos, a novel which uses Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, as well as Kurt Vonnegut’s spin on “the oversized brain”, as a controlling metaphor to explore human behavior and self-destructiveness. Featuring one of Vonnegut’s more convoluted plots, it follows a handful of characters on a cruise to the Galapagos islands, which is suddenly canceled due to an unnamed financial meltdown, world war, and an infection which leaves most of humanity sterile. Only the women who make it to a remote island are able to conceive, repopulating the world as natural selection slowly makes these human beings less human.

You can also watch ArtiFact #21 on the automachination YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/CRQwn3ZW8Lc

Timestamps:

0:24 – introduction: Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos in context; plot machinations- do they work?; Galapagos relies more heavily on description, less on dialogue than other texts; synopsis of the text; how Kurt Vonnegut withholds certain details to reinforce the text’s themes; the “financial crisis” and what this entails; human intervention & financial pronouncements as self-fulfilling prophecy

21:22 – Chapter 1: more descriptive than typical Kurt Vonnegut; small details take on significance later; Vonnegut’s use of the Bible; debating the meaning of “A Second Noah’s Ark”; banter on spiders, bugs, Keith’s move to NYC, & whether he will be sleeping on Alex’s bed or on the cat couch in the basement

43:48 – James Wait, a well-sketched swindler in Galapagos; ironies of character; where (some) of the book’s convolution goes awry in its repetitiveness; lessons for modern writers who wish to improve on some of its deficiencies; did Kurt Vonnegut’s humor start to leave him in the 1980s?

01:03:55 – what is the function of Mandarax? is it effective? what can we make of all the quotes, and are all of them used well?

01:12:40 – Looking more deeply into Kurt Vonnegut’s interpretation of Charles Darwin & Social Darwinism; dissecting the society before & after the transformation(s); Kurt Vonnegut’s use of the “oversized brain” as a controlling metaphor throughout; are the characters in Galapagos “real”? What makes them relatable?; characters as fulfilling niches, more comments on biological determinism

02:00:32 – Why aren’t people interested in sculpture? – using one of Kurt Vonnegut’s best lines for fresh applications; people’s lack of interest in art, save to serve their own ideological biases; why is there ANY interest in art from the Red Pill / Pick Up Artist (PUA) community?; the Wall Street bull sculpture vs. the “little girl” virtue-signal; the Wall Street ape statue as a cultural comment without teeth; why Kurt Vonnegut’s alleged misanthropy is over-stated

02:12:12 – the ending of “Galapagos”: as a collection of odds-and-ends and character/idea arcs searching for some resolution, is the ending a cop-out, or something more?

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Read Alex’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com

Tags: #Galapagos, #KurtVonnegut, #ArtiFact