Slapstick, or Lonesome No More, by Kurt Vonnegut

It seems appropriate nowadays, what with recent events at the height of American politics, to read a tale about a crackpot American president who aims to change the world. Kurt Vonnegut’s usual sardonic wit and taste for the vulgar finds its home in this story about loneliness and genius, set amidst the backdrop of a fairly weird apocalypse – and as usual with Kurt Vonnegut, I love every word of it. Slapstick, or Lonesome No More, is a strange and beautiful little novel.

          The premise of the story is just as bonkers as they always are from this author. A one hundred year old man in a desolate near unpopulated future Manhattan is writing his memoirs,
revealing that he was once President of the United States, and that his name is Dr Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain. Born with a twin sister, Eliza, to immensely wealthy philanthropic parents, the two infants were grotesquely deformed and given poor odds for survival past childhood. The parents decide to have their twin children kept detained in a renovated ancestral manor, denied all contact with the outside world, where they could be looked after by a dedicated staff until the children eventually succumbed to whatever mortality the doctors had predicted. Unbeknownst to the parents, Wilbur and Eliza Swain are in fact incredibly intelligent, and whilst pretending to be intellectually disabled around the staff of their private care home and their parents, by night the twins explore the mansion, digest the vast library they have access to, and concoct brilliant theories about how to improve the world. Once their true nature is revealed to their parents, Wilbur is permitted to go into the outside world for the first time, but at a serious cost. Separation from his sister. Eliza, being unable to read or write, despite her vast intellect, is deemed to be unfit for society and is kept locked away while her brother - who admits that he is far less intelligent, but is able to read and write - is allowed to go to school and then university. Eventually he becomes a doctor of medicine, while Eliza is confined to a mental institution.

          After Eliza’s death many years later, Wilbur doses himself up on medical drugs and decides to run for president, with one campaign promise: to give everybody in the country a new middle name, selected at random from a predesigned list. The outcome would be that anybody who

shared your new middle name would become an artificial relative, and therefore a vast new network of random extended families would be set up, and nobody would need to be lonely again. Unfortunately, despite the project’s apparent success, during Wilbur’s second term in office most of humanity is wiped out by disease, and he is left to travel the desolate nation he once tried to improve. 

          The story is as madcap as you can expect anything from Vonnegut to be. Whatever allegories or deeper messages you may wish to draw from the narrative require very little work. It’s written in black and white. The usual Vonnegutian writing-style of broad story-book level prose conveying the bleakest humour possible is here at its best example, to the extent that I’m certain a child could read it and understand what it was on about. As usual there are no science-fiction elements that actually have a great bearing on the story; unless you count the tangential side-story that China has closed its borders and is focusing on breeding their people to miniscule size and pushing technological progress beyond anything the rest of the world could imagine. The story is about a bizarre social experiment brought about by a unique individual, not science as such.

          The humour is bleak and dark, as you would expect. Much of this really won’t have you

laughing, and there’s not really what you would call wit underpinning the writing. The very name, Slapstick, could be a description of the type of comedy Vonnegut aims to emulate – yet it seems as though he’s being a tad more satirical than this, implying that life itself is slapstick comedy. Vonnegut’s humour is more along the vein of ‘hey, look at how horribly wrong things have ended up. We might as well laugh or we’ll end up just wanting to die.’ Christ, why would anybody want to read that? Why do I enjoy it so much? Sometimes it is quite funny, such as when Wilbur becomes hooked on ‘tri-benzo-Doportamil’, a drug actually intended to treat victims of Tourette’s syndrome. After never considering going into politics before, he baldly states:

          ‘And time flew. Time was a blurry bird now – made indistinct by ever-increasing dosages of tri-benzo-Deportamil.

***

Somewhere in there, I closed my hospital, gave up medicine entirely, and was elected United States Senator from Vermont.

          And time flew.

          I found myself running for President one day.’    

                                                [Vonnegut, Vintage, pg. 111. (2008)]

          Most of the time it’s just dark and depressing. Vonnegut’s stories are inevitably about all the ways in which broken humans can be horrible to one-another, boiled down to its leanest, simplest language. Slapstick is a damned short novel, and can be read in a weekend or less. As a story it’s morbid, but not in the way that makes you feel sick to be alive such as some of Vonnegut’s other works. It’s just a dark little tale about how a damaged person tried out a new idea for running the world and ended up destroying America.

          But it’s time to mention the best part of this work. As with Slaughterhouse Five, Slapstick begins with a fairly substantial little prologue from the mouth of the writer himself, explaining in a very roundabout way how and why he came to write this novel. Unlike Slaughterhouse Five, which Vonnegut tried over and over to write and couldn’t get it right, but still needing it to be written, this one is just an idea he had on a plane whilst travelling to attend his uncle’s funeral, of a story about his strange interpretation of relationships and his dead sister, Alice. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read, and I sincerely wish that the entire novel had just been like this; with Kurt Vonnegut just talking to us about whatever happens to be in his head. It makes the subsequent story feel like a weird little afterthought. Vonnegut’s writing is so clear, so cutting, so poignant, that it feels almost mocking that he wrote the actual book the way he did. I felt this way about Slaughterhouse Five as well. When discussing the death of his uncle, he says:
        'I received the news of his death over a white, push-button telephone in my house in that part of Manhattan known as 'Turtle Bay'. There was a philodendron nearby.
        I am still not clear how I got here. There are no turtles. There is no bay.
        Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.'

                          [Vonnegut, Vintage, pg. 7. (2008)]
           His writing is so measured, light as air, and tangential. You could read his stuff for hours.

So this is a fairly all right piece of Vonnegut. It’s a slightly more coherent story than some of his other novels – which admittedly isn’t saying much – and the humour is as bleak as ever. It made me laugh, and it made me question life, which is what you can hope for from this writer. It’s not one of my favourites from Vonnegut, but I’m sure it’ll stick with me for some time to come, as all his works inevitably do. Whatever you do, if you’re actually reading this, I can only say that of all the people who have ever put words on paper for any reason, Kurt Vonnegut is one to single out and experience for yourself.

Bibliosome

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slapstick or Lonesome No More. Vintage. (2008 [First Published 1976])

ByzReview: The Alexiad of Anna Komnene

Alexios I Komnenos, on a nice coin

It’s time to examine the work of the world’s very first female historian, and it’s a cracker to be sure. Anna Komnene (alternatively Comnena) was the first born child of the emperor Alexios I Komnenos (alternatively Comnenus), one of the most important rulers in the entire span of Byzantine history, and it is thanks to Anna that we have such a rich and detailed understanding of this emperor’s history and legacy. Anna Komene’s Alexiad is a monumental work dedicated solely to this one emperor, her father, whom she seeks to record, glorify and mourn in equal measures. It is long and vivid, and a real battle to get through.

                The Byzantine-Roman empire had undergone a worrying 11^th century, suffering economic

The empire at Alexios' accession. It would get smaller during the first years of his reign.

upheaval, dynastic instability and a serious Turkish invasion. In the aftermath of the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 the empire found its hold over its all important Anatolian provinces crumbling rapidly, and after years of unsuccessful attempts to halt the invasion, the throne fell prey to a series of military aristocrats. A certain Nikephoros III Botaneiates held power from 1078 to 1081, but was ousted by a younger and stronger challenger, Alexios Komenos. This new emperor had already had a prominent career, being the nephew of a previous emperor (Isaac I Komnenos, r.1057-1059), he had served as a commander for Michael VII Doukas (r.1071-1078) and then Nikephoros III, helping to put down several rebellions for the latter of these rulers. He could not be kept in the sidelines for long, however, and when the Doukas family wanted to oust the ineffectual usurper Nikephoros, it was to Alexios and his brother that they turned. 

With Alexios now married into the Doukas family and sitting comfortably on the throne, it was time to deal with the precarious border situation that the empire faced. The Turks had overrun the

Alexios in a manuscript, with a manuscript

eastern provinces, and in the west an equally serious problem had emerged with the arrival of the Normans – commanded by the new ruler of Southern Italy Robert Guiscard, and his bastard son Bohemond. For the first few years of his reign, Alexios struggled against these invaders in the Balkan provinces, only making headway after Robert Guiscard finally died four years later. Though the Normans were repelled, more invasions took place in the form of the Pechenegs (Patzinaks), Cumans, and Turks, but after a couple of decades of fighting, the Byzantines made headway in the west. In 1095 things were to change forever, for at this point the First Crusade occurred.

Now, the Crusades are of course an important and controversial era of history. Armies of Western Christians descending on the so-called Holy Land to win control away from the Islamic empires that held sway over Jerusalem – define them how you will, but I’ll leave it at that. Byzantium’s place and role in these ‘Crusades’ is one thing that histories and documentaries of the Crusades often don’t really address, and it wasn’t until I myself started learning about Byzantium that I first heard about its involvement in this most important era of world history. Which is odd, considering that this was the empire which had first lost the Holy Land and Jerusalem to the rising Muslim powers, it was continually one of the closest Christian empires to this fabled area and, most importantly, at the end of the 11^th century it sat right on the main invasion route from Christian West to Islamic East. Oh yes, and there’s also the fact that our friend Alexios Komnenos had asked the Pope for military aid against the Muslim Turks. He had been hoping for mercenaries to help bolster his efforts to re-conquer Anatolia – rather than the massive hordes of newly zealotized crusaders who wanted to use his domain as a highway for Jerusalem.

The First Crusade, in French. Notice how conspicuous Byzantium is in this major event.

                Anna Komnene’s Alexiad is then something of a major source on the first Crusade, and brings Byzantium fully into the High Middle Ages of wider Medieval European history. Admittedly she doesn’t go into that much detail about the Crusade itself, but she does give a good account of Alexios’ talks with the Crusade leaders, of their journey through the Byzantine Empire, and gives a good account as far as the siege of Antioch. But overall, after the immense detail about Alexios’ Balkan wars, it rather gives the impression that securing the western portion of the empire was a far greater effort and of far more importance to the emperor than the Crusades ever were.  

At this point it might be helpful to give a bit more of an idea about what the book actually contains in terms of information. It is quite a substantial book, being divided into fifteen long sections, each one devoted to a different little period of Alexios’ reign. Here is a breakdown of what happens in each one:

1.       Alexios, whilst still a general, deals with the revolts of Roussel the Frank, Nikephoros Bryennios the Elder, and Basiliskos – Robert Guiscard and the Normans begin their invasion.

2.       Infiltration of the Komnenoi into the palace – Conspiracy and rebellion against Nikephoros III Botaneiates – Deposition of Botaneiates and accession of Alexios Komnenos (1081).

3.       Alexios’ marriage and dynastic matters with the Doukas family – Alexios’ atonement – the government of Anna Dalassena – Catching up with Robert Guiscard and the Normans.

4.       Battle of Dyrrhachion (1081) – Byzantine defeat by the Normans.

5.       Bohemond takes charge of the Norman forces in Balkans – the affair of Italos.

6.       Fight back against the Normans – death of Robert Guiscard (1085) – the children of Alexios and Maria – war against the Turks – The Skythian (Pecheneg) Invasion.

7.       Skythian (Pecheneg) War – Tsachas causes trouble

8.       Skythian (Pecheneg) War continues – Cumans involved – Battle of Lebounion (1091) – Plots against Alexios.

9.       War against Tsachas – Tsachas’ assassination (1093) – Conspiracy of Nikephoros Diogenes.

10.   Cuman War – The First Crusade (1095) – Alexios negotiates with the Crusaders.

11.   Bohemond captures Antioch (1098-1099) – Establishment of the Crusader States (1099) – Byzantium’s conflict with Bohemond.

12.   Bohemond and Alexios prepare for war – Conspiracy of Michael Anemas – Bohemond’s second invasion of the Balkans.

13.   Bohemond besieges Dyrrhachion – Treaty of Diabolis (Devol) (1108).

14.   Alexios negotiates with Franks and new Crusader States – War with the Turks – Another Cuman invasion (1114)

15.   Campaigns against the Turks – Alexios deals with Bogomil heresy – The illness and death of Alexios (1118).

After a quick read through of this list, one name in particular may stand out: that of Bohemond, son of Robert Guiscard. The Alexiad is something of an epic dedicated to that greatest hero of the empire, Anna Komnene’s dad, and like every good story what it really needs is a great villain. Thus Alexios finds his main antagonist in the Norman ruler of southern Italy, Robert Guiscard, who defeats the new emperor at the Battle of Dyrrhachion and proves a terrible menace until his death a few years later. The role of Alexios’ arch-enemy is then taken over by Bohemond, who waits in the wings for some time before turning up as one of the leaders of the Crusades. Bohemond forms an uneasy truce with Alexios which lasts as far as the walls of Antioch, and after he takes control of that city he really makes an effort to get on the emperor’s nerves, hiding in a coffin and pretending to be dead while he sailed back to Italy, and then raising a new invasion force and once again going for Dyrrhachion. 

Bohemond, by a 19th C. French painter

Finally, after decades of having to deal with this chap, Alexios succeeds in bringing Bohemond to the negotiating table, the emperor getting the better part of the deal out of it. Bohemond is such an important character in this narrative, even getting a relatively long and painstakingly detailed description of his appearance, that some people – scholars I might say – have suggested Anna had a bit of a thing for him. I may not want to get embroiled in this particular discussion, but that sounds like nonsense to me. It’s not unusual for a Byzantine writer to give a physical description of a character in their histories, and Anna Komnene has the ability to go into too much detail on most subjects – and considering that Bohemond was a pain in her father’s backside for most of his reign, it’s unsurprising that she assigns special importance to this man. The long and not unkind description of him is just as likely to be a rhetorical device, to make this man seem like a worthy match for her father in order to make Alexios seem even more magnificent. If anything, I rather get the impression that theories like this have been advanced by certain historians simply because Anna is, so they can’t help but notice, a woman – and of course a woman is bound to be emotional and continuously subject to her passions, isn’t she!? But anyway, that’s beside the point. I am of the opinion that Anna Komnene had no especial interest in Bohemond other than that he was a significant threat to her father, and anything more than that has been read into the text by excitable historians.

                So, an interesting thing about Anna’s history is that she wrote it with a little impetus from her husband, a certain Nikephoros Bryennios. Not the Nikephoros Bryennios whom Alexios defeated during the reign of Botaneiates, but rather his son, who was married to Anna to cement an alliance between the two families. This younger Nikephoros Bryennios was then a highly placed member of the imperial family, with a good chance to succeed to the throne himself, and honoured with the fairly high title of kaisar (or caesar). Anna makes no secret of the fact that Bryennios began writing a history of Alexios, of the aftermath of Manzikert and the rise of the Komnenoi, but that he unfortunately never got round to finishing it. Another common theory about Anna Komnene is that she had very little impetus in writing the Alexiad, but that it was mostly written by her husband – and this too, like the Bohemond thing, is codswallop dreamt up by modern historians who have it in for Anna. I have no doubt accepting that Anna took over the project of writing this narrative after Bryennios’ death, but nearly all of the Alexiad is her original work. 

So then, moving on, Bryennios’ Materials for History is a separate work which forms something of a prologue to Anna’s subsequent continuation. It covers the history of the time from Isaac I Komnenos’ seizure of power in 1057, through the turbulent years that followed, the Doukas family, the Battle of Manzikert and the reign of Nikephoros III Botaneiates, down to Alexios’ accession. It forms a parallel history to that of Michael Attaleiates, albeit with less flag-waving for Botaneiates and a damn-sight more for the Komenoi clan for obvious reasons. In many ways Bryennios is just one more political historian of the 11^th century, like Psellos, Attaleiates and Skylitzes, but I mention him here in this review rather than my one for those others due to his personal closeness to Anna Komnene. As a writer who examines the rise of the Komnenoi, Bryennios is very important and well worth a read.*

In conclusion, so that this – for want of a better term – review doesn’t run on forever, I will say a few last words. The Alexiad, in its Sewter translation, is one of the heftiest historical texts I’ve had to deal with for quite some time, and that includes a lot of Byzantine chronicles and histories. As a thing to read, it’s one of the more accessible historical texts – but be warned that it just goes on and on, and on, and on. There are good moments to be found within, and Anna Komnene herself is a very human writer who makes sure to insert herself and her character into the narrative whenever she feels necessary. I won’t lie; I found much of the text a real battle to get through, and its seeming lack of end did not help matters. Yet if you want to read one of the great histories of the world, and if you want to experience first-hand the rare words of a medieval Byzantine woman, then this is probably a good place to go – and despite all difficulties that arise from reading it, the Alexiad proves to be a most rewarding experience.

* I say this with the full knowledge that there is not yet an English translation of this most crucial text. A French translation is included in the CFHB edition of the text, which is most helpful, but my French is not good enough to read the thing in its entirety yet.

Bibliozantium 15

Anna Comnena. Alexiadis. L. Schopen and A. Reifferscheid (eds). Bonn.  [Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae], 2/3, (1839/1878). In two volumes.

Annae Comnenae. Alexias. D. R. Rinsch and A. Kambylis (eds). Berlin: de Gruyter. [Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae], 40/1-2, (2001). In two volumes.

Anna Comnena. The Alexiad of the Princess Anna Comnena. Translated by E.A.S. Dawes. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (1028). Available online at: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/AnnaComnena-Alexiad.asp  

Anna Komnene. The Alexiad. Translated by E.R.A. Sewter. London: Penguin. (2009 [First published 1969]). Revised edition.

Nikephoros Bryennios. Nicephori Bryennii Historiarum Libri Quattuor. P. Gautier (ed). Brussels. [Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae], 9, (1975).

Zonarae, Iohannis. Annales. M. Pinder (ed). Bonn. [Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae], 47/48/49, (1841/1844/1897). In three volumes.

Zonaras. The History of Zonaras – From Alexander Severus to the Death of Theodosius the Great. Translated by T.M. Banchich and E.N. Lane. Abingdon: Routledge. (2009)

                [Addendum: I wished to include the following in this review, but it doesn’t really fit in the main body of the text. Hence I’ve stuck it down here, under the bibliography. So along with Anna Komnene and Nikephoros Bryennios, there is one other main historian for the reign of Alexios I Komnenos – and unlike Anna, it is a rather different piece. The Chronicle, or Epitome of Histories, of Ioannes Zonaras is a monumental work which like every good chronicle attempts to provide a solid historical account from the beginning of Creation down to the writer’s own day. The day of Zonaras being in the 12^th century. For vast portions of Zonaras’ history, which fills three massive volumes in the CSHB Bonn corpus, he simply reuses information or text he could find in other histories, thereby limiting the point of reading him. This can be useful, however, as certain information from histories of the Classical and Late Antique Roman empires would have been lost were it not for Zonaras’ unintentional preservation efforts – see the Banchich and Lane translation for more information. Yet it is from the years closer to the Chronicler’s own days that their history is at its most useful, and Zonaras proves this by giving us an alternative voice to Anna’s on the reign of Alexios I. Unlike the glowing report given by the Alexiad, Zonaras’ history is briefer and more critical of this establisher of the Komnenian dynasty, significantly less praising of him and offering doubt on whether Alexios’ favouring of his own family was really such a good idea. I say apparently, because so far most of the text has remained stuck in the original Greek, and any translation of any portion of the English has not been made available to a wider audience. The one exception is for books 12 and 13, which deal with the Roman 3^rd century and have been translated and published by a certain Thomas Banchich and Eugene Lane. If you’re interested in Roman Late Antiquity, then you may get something from this translated extract. If you want Zonaras’ more Byzantine sections, then you're probably going to have to rely on luck, for no such translation is in print]