Vonnegut Week Continues at The World's Fair

Ode to "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" (1950).

The "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" was Vonnegut's first published story, appearing in Collier's. That was while he was working at GE in public relations, and after he was a chemistry major, an anthropology grad, a Dresden fire-bombing survivor, and a Cat's Cradle writer (though not publisher, yet).

Now, about the Barnhouse story. I first read it in the very best short story collection I've ever had, First Fiction, which is an "anthology of the first published stories by famous writers." (Apparently you can get it for a dollar at ABE. Graham Green's "The End of the Party" and Flannery O'Connor's "The Geranium" stand out for me in particular. Let's be real: I can't say enough about Green's story.)

(The backstory aside: There was a time when I bought every used short story compilation I found, at every used bookstore I visited, in every town I lived in or traveled to. As part of my "overcome your inferiority complex since you never read one single piece of fiction until you got to college and found out everyone else knew a whole lot more than you, you idot, what's wrong with you" complex, I ended up doing a lot of catch up work. Which I'm still doing. This means we had in our house several dozen short story compilations, with ten to fifty stories each, so that there were hundreds of these stories, maybe thousands, on the shelf. I like stories. Did you ever get David Sedaris's edited thing, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, where he collected all the stories he loves? Those are good too. He likes stories more than me. And he's a real-deal writer, so that makes sense. I could go on. I'm already going on. This keeps happening.)

Back on message: This is a representative quote from Professor Arthur Barnhouse, who had developed a new form of power-knowledge, called dynamopsychism ("force of the mind"), though everyone called it The Barnhouse Effect. He could make things move, he could cause change and action, by following a specific train of thought, a skill that only he had. The disgruntled narrator, Barnhouse's new graduate student, says, "As if the pointlessness of my work were bad enough, the professor annoyed me further with irrelevant questions," such as:

"Think every new piece of scientific information is a good thing for humanity?"

The feds wanted to get a hold of his power, for military purposes, though Barnhouse wanted to use it to prevent the need for war in the first place.

Looking back on early stories of famous writers always gives me that stomach-quivering in-context feeling, like trying to get a feel for what it was like when the person wrote the story. If you get into that feeling too much it'll give you the willies; like after a particularly effective documentary, to make perhaps a bad analogy. Like living in another era. (e.g.,when I taught the US History survey, we read Hemingway's In Our Time, because it does a far better job of representing the feel of World War I and after than other books I'd used or seen.) Getting this feeling is pretty easy to do in Vonnegut's case, since he's so very steeped in the post-War context of atomic fear, nuclear annihilation, you know, all that Hiroshima post-script ethos. You get Cat's Cradle, about the same theme as this Barnhouse story, for the most part -- except there it's Ice Nine instead of The Barnhouse Effect. It's a straight up Vonnegutian (Vonn-ih-goo-shen) theme, is what I mean.

Plus, the story is written at the high point of technocratic trust and the positivist image of science - so that is Vonnegut ahead of his time, with his more ponderous take, asking about what that science is for, about what we are doing with it, about why we are pursuing it? Because that unfettered trust in the technical expert - you know, you win wars, cure diseases, save the free world...it's not a bad thing, I'm thinking - is from another era, one that is clearer now because it is in the rearview mirror. And Vonnegut was onto it, without being brash or ignorant or disrespectful of what science *can do* in the world. That is, I don't read him as offering an either/or situation, either science or no science. Plus, he's funny.

This then is a question from another era, "Think every new piece of scientific information is a good thing for humanity?" But how do we answer it now, in a different world, given the strange reversal of respect for reasoned and evidence-based knowledge that gets us I.D. in the headlines and Bush lackeys censoring experimental findings?