Kurt Vonnegut's HOCUS POCUS: Logic Vs. Disorder

The "hocus pocus" of the title refers to what we know as "spin", erroneous interpretation or presentation of fact. According to the protagonist, there is hocus pocus used to tell troops arriving in Vietnam that the war is winnable and honorable. And again hocus pocus is invoked in the accusation that the protagonist has orchestrated a prison break in upstate New York.

Hocus Pocus hinges on this dissonance between what is posed as truth and what is actually true.

There are two kinds of people in this book - those with honest humility and those without. The humble ones are sane, but damaged continually as a result of living in close proximity to the other cruel and proud humans.

As one might expect, this distinction between types of people is achieved by looking at humans and human activity from the point of view of someone who is utterly baffled by the decisions people make. There is a nearly perfect innocence to the narrator, which is odd because at the beginning of the book he relates certain parts of his personal history that describe experience - not innocence: killing in the war, ordering bomb runs, marrying a woman who turns out to be insane, learning the bitterness of being lied to, sexual trysts at home and abroad.

These experiences should naturally draw a person out of his innocence. And in a way, they do. But regarding the strangeness of people, experience only serves to deepen the narrator's sense that people cannot be explained rationally.

If people were to be rational, then they would not be so proud. If people were to be rational, they would not believe in the cosmic mysteries they choose to believe in. If people were rational, they would not revise history so fiercely. They would not insist on forgetting so much and turning away from so much that is obvious. If people were rational, they would not be so cruel and so blind.

Vonnegut seems to see humans as unreflective animals. Several instances in Hocus Pocus show people following leaders for no reason except that the person claims to be a leader. People follow by instinct, like cows. The result of such bovine behavior is always cowardly acts of either injustice or violence or both. One can almost get the impression that Vonnegut sees people as mechanistic creatures who eschew any notion of themselves as decision makers or as individuals.

The hero of this story is an individual, of course. This is the case in nearly all of Vonnegut's work. In fact the basic structure here is classic Vonnegut. The man who cannot help but look on at his situation with the strictest calm of logic and rationality is confronted with a group of humans who are completely incapable to employing logic and rationality in their attempts to live. And, again, with the retrospective narrative, Vonnegut is able to set up easy and amusing contrasts with successive episodes. These contrasts often show the complexity of human life, which partially justify the magical thinking of many of the characters while reifying the absurdity of the confidence that people express through their moral and religious convictions.

Logic is trumped by a need to live in an ordered world. But Vonnegut puts people in disarray, strands them on islands, plops them into horrible wars, sets them in post-apocalyptic scenarios, and, here, has them deal with a prison break in the dead of a winter night.

Hocus Pocus does not travel into the realm of science-fiction as so many Vonnegut novels do. Instead, the story is very terrestrial; grounded in irony.

Used as literal and figurative fodder, the Vietnam War is shown as the ultimate example of futility and dishonesty. Through repeated references, the War is invoked as a place where people stop being human. There are limits, this war metaphor suggests, limits to how human humans can be.

The protagonist fought and killed in the war and did terrible things which he does not regret because he was under orders. He thinks that the war was terrible, a terrible mistake, yet he praises World War II and feels that the people who fought in such a meaningful war were lucky. His war, he says, was meaningless. The people he kills are less real than they are numerical.

In an ultimate irony, the protagonist tallies the number of women he has slept with in his life and tallies the number of people he killed in Vietnam with plans to compare the results. On the novel's last page the number is revealed, demonstrating an equation or equalizing of carnal experience, both amorous and violent, which reduces all the other hijinks and human activity of the novel to absurdity.

In typical Vonnegut fashion, the novel is relayed to us in retrospect. The protagonist has been falsely accused of leading a prison break and jots the notes that constitute the book we are reading on loose scraps of paper and note-cards he finds in the library serves as his jail as he awaits trial.

Juxtapositions of recalled episodes are a strength of this style of narrative. Scenes from the narrator's love affairs are set down next to his exploits in the war then followed by episodes from his recent past as a college professor. As Vonnegut steers his ideas toward implications of absurdity, this method works very well. The story hangs together, just like life, in ways unexpected, bizarre, coincidental, and magical.