Vonnegut and the American Small

Cults of the small:

Jean Paul Richter’s small is humorous. More specifically it is picaresque. In his Vorschule für Ästhetik he assembles a vocabulary that examines how the picaresque works.

Wit and Acumen:

Witz discovers the disguised priest marrying couples nobody expected to see paired; Scharfsinn is the opposite operation, distinguishing what looks alike.

Jean Paul’s Applied finitude, summarized:

It’s the technique underlying his account of humor — an abstraction becomes comic material only once it’s been individuated into the smallest, most exact concrete particular, rather than stated as the general case. Not the knee, but the kneepans. Not “he was unhappy,” but a diving bell fitted with a lengthened air-pipe. The abstraction has to be found inside the particular, not merely illustrated by it — the particularity is where the comic force actually lives, not a decoration added afterward.

The mechanism works by giving an otherwise limitless, freely circulating idea something exact to stop at. Left general, a feeling or a notion can be paraphrased and re-paraphrased forever, drifting without end. Individuated to one small, definite, sensuous fact, it has nowhere further to go — the specificity itself closes the question of how far to keep unpacking it. That’s the same operation, at bottom, as rhyme and meter arresting an otherwise limitless resonance in lyric, and as convention freezing a symbol into shared, stable meaning across a community — three different backstops on the identical threat: content that means everything until form gives it a place to mean one exact thing and hold there.

This is Jean Paul’s route to the small. Notice that it is anti-essentializing. Today’s push against essentializing is generally felt to be new. It is not.

Adalbert Stifter’s route is not ironic, but very straight. Schumann and Brahms both loved Jean Paul Richter, but Brahms’ mood is more like Stifter’s.

Stifter’s response to Hebbel in the introduction to Bunte Steine

Bunte Steine (1853) — six novellas, published in two volumes, framed by Stifter’s famous preface on the sanftes Gesetz, the gentle law. His claim: what’s commonly called great — storms, earthquakes, violent upheaval, the great man and his great deed — is really the smaller thing, a mere effect; the true greatness is the constant, sustaining ordinary: grain growing, water flowing, light falling. Written in the long shadow of the Napoleonic Wars and the disillusioning collapse of 1848, the preface reads as a direct philosophical rejection of the “great man” mode of history those decades had made dominant — and the collection’s closing story, set during the Napoleonic Wars themselves, puts that rejection in a real historical frame rather than leaving it abstract. Not every story is purely gentle — Turmalin stays genuinely dark — but the governing wager throughout is the same one Schiller’s whole apparatus denies: dignity doesn’t require resistance to an overwhelming force. It survives in what quietly continues.

The Brahmsian tone is not ironic, not Richterian like Schumann. Let’s ask if we do not see his big moments pouring into small moments – the second theme of the first piano concerto, the 2nd theme in the woodwinds of the Tragic Overture is intimate. Stifter does not deny that earthquakes exist and there’s a beautiful depiction of an ice storm in the Bohemian forest wherein a doctor ventures his rounds, attending to the matters *at hand*.

And let’s remember his Intermezzi.

The American small

Emerson, William James, Walt Whitman, each in their own way. The James student Gertrude Stein carries James’ radical empiricism and the Jamesian small to Paris and it takes takes root. It found itself aligned with the compsoers who rebelled against Wagnerian grandiosity.

Is there any evidence that the American small attained a place in the hearts of Americans outside of those educated in Emerson, Whitman, James, Dewey and Gertrude Stein?

Distinguishing real transmission from mere thematic coincidence.

Real evidence exists, but it sorts into three genuinely different categories, and keeping them apart matters — otherwise this becomes exactly the kind of essentializing move the whole conversation has been guarding against, reading “the small” into popular culture wherever it’s convenient rather than tracing an actual mechanism.

Category one: documented, causal transmission — the strongest case, and it’s Dewey’s. Progressive education became actual American public-school pedagogy for much of the twentieth century — “learning by doing,” the child’s immediate concrete experience prioritized over abstract rote instruction. That’s not influence on educated readers; it’s institutional transmission reaching millions of schoolchildren and teachers who never opened a page of Dewey, shaped by his ideas as built structure rather than as text. This is the one clean case of the philosophy of the small becoming policy.

Stifter and Dewey had shared interests, but different positions. They converge in their distrust the dramatic, abstract, or imposed in favor of what a person can actually encounter concretely. Dewey’s child learns through direct experience rather than rote abstraction — “learning by doing.” Stifter’s gentle law finds truth in the small, sustained, and observable rather than the violent or spectacular. Both are, at bottom, making the same wager against grand systems imposed from outside: meaning is built from immediate, particular engagement with what’s actually in front of you, not handed down as doctrine.

Category two: independent convergence — evidence Americans valued smallness broadly, without needing the literary tradition to teach them so. Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers reached a genuinely mass audience with exactly this aesthetic — the ordinary domestic moment rendered as worth attention — with no evidence he was reading Emerson to get there. FDR’s fireside chats deployed intimate, small-scale, domestic address as a deliberate broadcasting strategy, arrived at for purely pragmatic persuasive reasons. American folk and roots music’s whole investment in the particular, local, small story runs the same current. This is evidence of convergence, not evidence that Emerson-through-Stein’s specific tradition caused it. Treating shared resemblance as proof of transmission is the mistake I avoided with Busch (of Max und Moritz) and Jean Paul.

Category three, perhaps the most interesting: James as theorist of something already popular, not inventor of it. Varieties of Religious Experience documents ordinary American revivalist conversion — personal testimony, concrete particular witness over doctrinal abstraction — that was already a live popular religious practice before James wrote a word about it. That’s not elite idea trickling down; it’s elite articulation of a pattern the folk already had. The direction of influence runs backward from what the question assumes.

Remember Emerson, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde and such spoke on a camp meeting circuit. Salman Rushdie was almost killed at one of the most lovely of these camp meeting places, Chattauqua.

Gertrude Stein had launched a mass-popular moment — The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was a real bestseller, her American lecture tour in the 1930s made her a newsreel celebrity, and “a rose is a rose is a rose” entered popular speech as a catchphrase independent of anyone reading the difficult work it came from. That’s worth naming as its own fourth category: a fragment of the small-attentive aesthetic reaching mass consciousness as slogan, stripped of its theoretical content, while the actual substance stayed with the readership that could parse Tender Buttons.

Through mass media and creeping nihilsim, the small disappeared. Notable studies and criticisms – see the movie Champaigne for Ceasar. Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock was made into a movie. Milton Babbitt told me he met Keneth Fearing through Noam Chomsky’s uncle, who, due to a disability, was granted a newstand in New York where he held court. And I believe there are many more candidates form the 20s – Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Didn’t Hemmingway rebel without evoking the spectacle?

On to Vonnegut: I mentioned to Robert Levin in his early 80s undergrad music analysis class that Vonnegut was dismissive of Hesse, making light of Goldmund going around having sex. How easy it is to appeal to young people with such a facile strategy? I’m paraphrasing from a Vonnegut essay. Levin pushed back hard, defending Hesse and offering little good to say of Vonnegut. For the last forty years I’ve read practically nothing but German literature and Vonnegut fell off of my radar. Only now that Vonnegut’s perspective has come to life so much more visibly do I come back to him. His pathology of our culture was keen and it’s now impossible to dismiss. And what strikes me now, as a partisan of the small, is that an invigorated small can be found hiding in what Vonnegut called his “bitter coated sugar pills”. It’s not a good thing that to sell Vonnegut had to engage the specacle. But Vonnegut was a humanist. I find the sugar, if not in his novels, in that high school speech, and the advice: create, do art, if only for what it does for us.

In the US the small has to be squirrelled away in weird places. I’ll repeat here what I’ve been saying elsewhere: Karl Kraus didn’t register with me…..until recently. It takes one to know one and if you’re not one now, you’re not paying proper attention.

And somewhere I read that in many LA vestibules could be found hanging a photo of Karl Kraus. We are a country inhabited by refugees of pathological grandeur, vain, empty hubris grounded on nothing.

In these great times

which I knew when they were this small; which will become small again, provided they have time left for it; and which, because in the realm of organic growth no such transformation is possible, we had better call fat times and, truly, hard times as well; in these times in which things are happening that could not be imagined and in which what can no longer be imagined must happen, for if one could imagine it, it would not happen; in these serious times which have died laughing at the thought that they might become serious; which, surprised by their own tragedy, are reaching for diversion and, catching themselves red-handed, are groping for words; in these loud times which boom with the horrible symphony of actions which produce reports and of reports which cause actions: in these times you should not expect any words of my own from me – none but these words which barely manage to prevent silence from being misinterpreted.