In the meantime, an academic sort of musing about a work that is familiar to most.
Is this Love?
“They don’t make memories like that anymore,” so ends the first section of Book Two in Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Galapagos. Set in a post-modern world, where human beings have evolved from having hands and feet to flippers and fins, Vonnegut’s work makes the claim that the collective consciousness of humanity is one that is ultimately instilled with love. Through the careful craftsmanship of memorable characters such as Mary “Kaplan” Hepburn, James Waite, and Selena MacIntosh among others, all denoted by impending death through the use of a star next to their names, Vonnegut has been able to create a plausible world of post land evolution. The claim could be made that the underlying theme of love is prevalent throughout the book, even in the darkest passages.
Narrated by a United Stated Marine Corps ghost as he lives out his forced million year exile, Galapagos examines the ways in which human fallacy can be wrought with pain and love. Much like the discovery of the Galapagos Archipelago by Charles Darwin, Vonnegut’s work begins with an examination into the naturally occurring experiences that are shared by all humans, most notably fear and hunger. The narrative opens with the notion that human beings had much bigger brains “back then … and so could be beguiled by mysteries” (Vonnegut, 1985,p3). These mysteries included the ways in which life formed on the Archipelago, and Vonnegut offers a variety of popular culture ideas, including the notion that a god placed animals on the chain of islands, that they sailed there on naturally made rafts, and that the islands had once been a part of the mainland. The correlation Vonnegut is making between these ideas and the eventual fate of humanity is there, even ‘back then’ as he calls the year 1986, the same questions surrounding intelligent life were being asked. To that, the claim can be made that Vonnegut’s proclamations on how the intelligent creates ended up on the Galapagos Archipelago were simply expansions on how it became (one million years in the future) the cradle for humanity.
Like all fables that discuss the beginning and end of human eras, Vonnegut provides the reader with a villain through the presentation of James Waite, a con-artist who has happened upon Guayaquil, described by the author as being so successful at what he did “that he had become a millionaire, with interest-bearing savings accounts under various aliases in banks” (Vonnegut, 1985, p8). Drifting from one unsuspecting woman to the next, Waite would swindle the women out of all of the money and jewelry they had available and then leave town. In a surprising twist of evolutionary fate, Vonnegut allows Waite to be the father for the human race via artificial insemination while the first ten settlers are marooned on the Galapagos Archipelago. Perhaps the point that Vonnegut is trying to make is that even though the reader knows Waite to be inherently ill-willed and quite possibly evil, it is through him that the human race is able to continue, suggesting that maybe in each of us, there is something both a little good and a little bad.
Known to her as Williard Flemming and not James Waite, Mary “Kaplan” Hepburn falls in love with the persona Waite presents and marries him after he suffers a heart attack, assuming that he is true in his approach to life and the presentation of his personality to her. The two live together for ten years while beached on the islands, and it is during that time that Mary begins to artificially inseminate the women of child-bearing age who are a part of their group. However, she doesn’t tell Waite what she is doing. This subterfuge could be seen as marking a correlation between the inherent need for humanity to continue. Perhaps because of his incestuous beginnings, having been born to a father-daughter couple, conjoined with his homosexual prostituting past, Waite was simply trying to get even in with the world. This could be said of Mary as well, in that she and her dead-husband Roy lived out almost fifty years of marriage without fulfilling her one true wish – to be a mother. As it were, the grandparents, then, of humanity as Vonnegut presents it on the Galapagos Archipelago were both selfish individuals hell-bent on getting what they want, no matter the cost.
Though this viewpoint may be considered somewhat extreme, the possibility that Vonnegut’s intention to push the reader so far away in order to bring him/her back is there as well. Just as one is ready to give up on the idea that James Waite has a shred of dignity or humanity available to him, he feeds starving girls of a long-forgotten tribe. In the same vain, after the reader learns of Mary’s genetic tinkering, Vonnegut presents the love scene between Roy and Mary, thereby illustrating that even in the multi-faceted whirlwind of the human psyche, duality certainly exists.
Perhaps the most concrete example of love presented in Vonnegut’s Galapagos is in the final pages where the ghost Marine narrator, Leon, flashes back to his exchange with a Swedish doctor. Leon has sought medical attention because he’s contracted syphilis in Vietnam. He contracted the veneral disease because he was chasing away the demons of reliving killing a toothless grandmother in a remote village after she had killed his best friend and worst enemy. Leon has been treated in the field hospital for his flesh wounds, but no one has addressed the mental anguish with which he was living. Chasing hookers and doing drugs was clearly his escape route, though it came at a cost. The Swedish doctor asks him about the experience, and Leon remains mum, not offering many details. Leon explained that after the murder, he did not cry, but the physician manages to ask him something that illicit emotion. Vonnegut writes, “But that that Swede found something to say which made me cry like a baby – at last, at last” (Vonnegut, 1985, pg323). The physician asks Leon if he is related to the science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout, Leon’s father. Throughout the narrative, Leon lamented over and over again the reasons for which his father was a failure, and likely why he was a failure as well. Therefore, the circularity in the Swedish doctor having heard of and read Kilgore’s work is not lost on Leon. Perhaps the summation of humanity is best left to Vonnegut as he writes, “I had come all the way to Bangkok, Thailand, to learn that in the eyes of one person, anyway, my desperately scribbling father had not lived in vain” (Vonnegut, 1985, pg323). In a way, it seems that all any human wants to do – Mary Helpurn wanting children or to help the evolutionary process, James Waite wanting to get back at the world for a cruel beginning, or Leon Trout wanting to find reason in his father’s journey, we are all seeking validation.
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