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Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut (1985)

There is no denying that I would enter a vapid land of infertile thought and mundane repetitiveness, were I to elaborate on a well-known fact that out of a countless plethora of books, some are considered rare because of their bewildering exactitude and profundity, while some others, also

Gal%C3%A1pagos+by+Kurt+Vonnegut+%28Book+Cover%29 - Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut (1985)

profundity, while some others, also being an infrequent treat, are like kids playing
hopscotch – flawlessly carefree and genuinely unpretentious. However, this
obviousness ends rather abruptly when the profundity breeds cement shoes of
repulsion and the unpretentiousness gets lost in a distorted mirror image of itself –
naivety. Nevertheless, we should not feel abused by these truly disheartening
phenomena whatsoever simply because a third, very intermediate type of book might
always come in handy as a ‘savior’, who casts off a whiff of disappointment reeking
from the previous two. The transitional state of such ‘redeeming’ novels comes from a
specific quality which makes them invulnerable to the aforesaid corrosion. Galápagos
is surely one of them. But how did it acquire its exceptional ‘stainlessness’ and what
are its traits – answering these questions is a quest which awaits the following text.

Galápagos can be regarded, with a slight overuse of oxymora, as a stoic outcry of calm
exasperation, how typical of Vonnegut and other authors being thoroughly disillusioned
yet somehow still deeply stirred up by a questionable moral constitution of humanity
and its probable as well as unforeseeable transformation in the near or far future. Being
a twisted blend of dystopian fiction and a clear-cut satire, the book presents a story of
an impending end of human race as we know it. Narrated from an incredibly amusing,
subjectively omnipresent point of view, which provides another delivery of paradoxical
expressions to our humble collection, it follows the retrospective vivisection of
accidental events, which resulted in stranding a totally mismatched menagerie of
characters on a fictional, northernmost island of the titular Galápagos archipelago –
Santa Rosalia. We find among them: an admiral in the Ecuadorian Naval Reserve, who
is an all-fingers-and-thumbs socialite of German descent and a sheer figurehead as
regards even basic sailing skills, a recently widowed, middle-aged, high school teacher
of biology, a blind daughter of a well-off financier – a genuine cross-breed between
Gordon Gekko and Steve Fossett, a pregnant wife of a Japanese IT genius and six
girls of a cannibalistic Kanka-bono tribe from the Ecuadorian rainforest. By the utterly
contingent chain of events, the above motley crew sets sail from Guayaquil’s waterfront
amidst the freshly erupted mayhem of the imminent apocalypse.

I am having this dubious sensation right now that Vonnegut – one of the most effortless
evokers of the severely depleted supply of common sense ‘stored’ inside the homo
sapiens species – might have actually written a perfectly distorted parable. As we are
being amused by author’s bitter-sweet, fact-like prose loaded with some gallows humor
of the most exquisite quality, we suddenly realize that the funky bunch of our modern
Robinsons-to-be, gathered on the “Bahía de Darwin” passenger ship, cannot be
actually treated as, in this particular case, the aggregate protagonist at all. It simply
could not be one, due to the overbearing power of fatalism sticking out its impish head
from behind the text itself. Its influence on the reader seems to be irrevocable to such
a great extent, that we are barely able to see the embodiment of the ‘antagonist’ too,
namely “the big brains of humans”, ‘whose’ destructive force, an unfortunate result of
a superfluous intellectual flexibility homo sapiens has been cursed with, has the
earmarks of something absolutely detached from the humans themselves, a thing
exterior, almost alien and, what is even more puzzling, completely marginal. This
perplexing impression of the ultimate fatalism (maybe the term “catastrophism” would
do even better here), emerging as an eerie toss-up between blind chance and fate, is
the only element of parable left in the strictly ‘anti-parable-ish’ microcosm of
Galápagos. Or is it?

As a matter of fact, it is not. There is another factor, which could be deemed not only
an ‘elongated’ moral, appearing gradually as an antithesis of the mischievously
predetermined ‘fabric’ of the book, but also something which calls into question my
sudden supposition (maybe the novel hasn’t been soaking in a marinade of antiparable
for that long after all?…). Sprouting probably straight from Vonnegut’s bona
fide steadfastness against mindlessness and hopelessness the earthlings have been
following and causing throughout their career as the Rulers of the World, it may have
something in common with an… optimism! Yes, indeed, the optimism – however
ridiculous it may sound, for the prose of our Pall Mall-loving author does not necessarily
leave you grinning from ear to ear in a straightforward manner; it’s more like a laughter
through tears – which is being hinted along the tale and quite often reassures us that
a certain type of redemption always awaits the human race. And it doesn’t matter,
whether it turns out to be a result of tossing a coin called “Fate” (another oxymoron to
our catalog!) or if it comes from the law of natural selection, which finally does justice
and straightens things out a little for the remainder of humanity or, better yet,
streamlines it here and there. I cannot restrain myself from listening to the promptings
of my oversized brain, which keeps telling me to give my own proposition of the moral.
So I say: thank goodness for a devolution! Wait a minute!? Do I hear a squawk of a
great frigate bird resembling a laughter?…

In the first paragraph I stated that Galápagos belongs to the intermediate group of
novels, which are immune to ‘genetic’ deformations and mutations of those overly
thorough(bred) as well as mongrel-ishly happy-go-lucky. I suppose the secret of
Vonnegut’s ‘stainlessness’ lies in the qualities of the crooked parable pinned down on
an ad hoc basis: the anti-exemplary protagonist, the distilled, almost nominal
antagonist, the overgrown, highly imperative fatalism and the moral, which is definitely
present, although mercilessly elusive. After all what can one possibly say or write when
there has already been said and written almost everything about the self-destructive
force of human stupidity? Quoth Beckett: The fact is, it seems, that the most you can
middle. That’s probably why Vonnegut, I presume, is e.g. dropping sloppy hints of what
will the typical specimen of homo (still?) sapiens look like in one million years.
Nonetheless, all of this can always be proven wrong (another caprice of the oversized
human brain – doubts). Therefore I am leaving the task of dotting the i’s and crossing
the ‘t’s up to you and your much less misleading gut instinct. Just remember not to
trust your oversized brains too much! They tend to get rusty and, after all, little do we
know about how they really work, don’t we?

Amonne Purity


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