Hocus Pocus (novel)

Hocus Pocus is a 1990 novel by Kurt Vonnegut which deals with themes of class, race, crime, suicide, and globalization.

Introduction

Like many of Vonnegut's novels, Hocus Pocus is not organized in a traditional linear fashion, and has a plot centered around a major event which is alluded to early, and heavily foreshadowed until the final chapters. In the case of Hocus Pocus the major plot event concerns a prison break in a small New York village, located directly across from a prominent university. The protagonist's life revolves heavily around both the prison and the university, and the community that must accommodate both.

The main character is Eugene Debs Hartke, a Vietnam War veteran and college professor, who realizes that he has killed exactly as many people as the number of women he has had sex with. The character's name is a homage to American labor and political leader Eugene V. Debs and anti-war senator Vance Hartke, both from Vonnegut's home state, Indiana.

The main character's name-sharing with Eugene V. Debs, five-time Socialist Party of America candidate for President of the United States (one of his candidacies occurred while he was in prison), is explicitly discussed in the book. The following quote from Eugene V. Debs appears several times: "...while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

In an editor's note at the beginning of the book, Vonnegut claims to have found hundreds of scraps of paper of varying sizes, from wrapping paper to business cards, sequentially numbered by their author (Hartke) in order to form a narrative of some kind. The breaks between pieces of paper often signal a sort of ironic "punchline". This theme of an episodic narrative and scraps of information is echoed in one recurring feature of the novel, a computer program called GRIOT. By inputting certain characteristics of a person's life and current situation, the program can give an approximation of what sort of life that person might have had based on the database of lives the program can access. The main pieces of information required for GRIOT to work are: age, race, degree of education, and drug use.

Hartke mentions early on that he is suffering from tuberculosis at the time of his writings, and writes the word "cough" in the text every now and again as well as other descriptors to represent times when he coughed aloud while writing.

Another unusual element of style Vonnegut uses in Hocus Pocus is to consistently use numerals rather than words to represent numbers (e.g. "1" instead of "one" or "1,000,000" instead of "one million"). He explains this in an Editor's Note at the beginning of the book saying "...that numbers lost much of their potency when diluted by an alphabet".

The entire narrative is laced with Eugene's thoughts and observations about the Vietnam war, history, and social conditions- especially class and prejudice.

Like almost all of Vonnegut's books, this is an account told in the past tense by a character who shares his background with Vonnegut. It is also suggested that it mirrors some parts of the Attica Prison riots.

Plot

Eugene is fired from his job as a college professor after having several of his witticisms surreptitiously recorded by the daughter of a popular conservative commentator. Eugene then becomes a teacher at a nearby overcrowded prison run by a Japanese corporation. His employer, and occasional acquaintance, is the prison's warden, Hiroshi Matsumoto. After a massive prison break, Eugene's former college is occupied by escapees from the prison, who take the staff hostage. Eventually the college is turned into a prison, since the old prison was destroyed in the breakout. Ironically, Eugene is ordered to be the warden of the prison, but then becomes an inmate, presumably via the same type of "hocus pocus" that led to his dismissal from his professorship.

External links

• "Still Asking the Embarrassing Questions" in the New York Times