| Player Piano | |
|---|---|
First edition, hardcover |
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| Author(s) | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science Fiction |
| Publisher | Charles Scribner's Sons |
| Publication date | 1952 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| ISBN | NA |
Player Piano, author Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, was published in 1952. It is a dystopia of automation[1] and capitalism, describing the dereliction they cause in the quality of life.[1] The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. This widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class—the engineers and managers who keep society running—and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines. The book uses irony and sentimentality, which were to become a hallmark developed further in later works.[1]
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In a 1973 interview Vonnegut discussed his inspiration to write the book:[2]
I was working for General Electric at the time, right after World War II , and I saw a milling machine for cutting the rotors on jet engines, gas turbines. This was a very expensive thing for a machinist to do, to cut what is essentially one of those Brancusi forms. So they had a computer-operated milling machine built to cut the blades, and I was fascinated by that. This was in 1949 and the guys who were working on it were foreseeing all sorts of machines being run by little boxes and punched cards. Player Piano was my response to the implications of having everything run by little boxes. The idea of doing that, you know, made sense, perfect sense. To have a little clicking box make all the decisions wasn't a vicious thing to do. But it was too bad for the human beings who got their dignity from their jobs.
In the same interview he acknowledges that he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We."[2]
| Cover of Utopia 14, as the novel was titled for a 1954 release. |
A player piano is a modified piano that "plays itself". The piano keys move according to a pattern of holes punched in an unwinding scroll. Unlike a music synthesizer, the instrument actually produces the sound itself, with the keys moving up and down, driving hammers that strike the strings. Like its counterpart, a player piano can be played by hand as well. When a scroll is run through the ghost-operated instrument, the movement of its keys produce the illusion that an invisible performer is playing the instrument.
Vonnegut uses the player piano as a metaphor to represent how the novel's imaginary society is run by machines instead of people. Early in the book, Paul's friend and future member of the Ghost Shirt Society, Ed Finnerty, is shown playing a player piano, suggesting the idea of humans regaining control from the machines.
This satirical take on industrialization and the rhetoric of General Electric[3] and the big corporations, which discussed arguments very topical in the post-war capitalist United States, was instead advertised by the publisher with the more innocuous and marketable label of "science fiction", a genre that was booming in mass popular culture in the 1950s.
Player Piano was later released by Bantam Books in 1954 under the title Utopia 14[1] in an effort to drive sales with readers of Science Fiction.
Player Piano is set in the future after a fictional third world war. During the war, while most Americans were fighting overseas, the nation's managers and engineers developed ingenious automated systems that allowed the factories to operate with only a few workers. The novel begins ten years after the war, when most factory workers have been replaced by machines.
Player Piano develops two parallel plot lines that converge only briefly, at the beginning and the end of the novel. The more important plot line tells of Dr. Paul Proteus, an intelligent, thirty-five-year-old factory manager. The other plot line describes the American tour of the Shah of Barpuhr, the spiritual leader of six million residents of a distant, underdeveloped nation. Proteus lives and works within the system, but the Shah is a visitor from a very different culture. Despite Paul's good fortune in society, he is vaguely dissatisfied with the industrial system and his place in it
Throughout the novel, he considers alternatives, but the system is so large and complex that there are few opportunities to live outside of it. Ed Finnerty, an old friend, shows up at Paul's door and informs him he has quit his important engineer job in Washington D.C., and he intends to live outside the system, just as Paul had dreamed of doing. Paul and Finnerty visit a bar in the "Homestead" section of town, where workers who have been displaced by machines live out their meaningless lives in shoddy, mass-produced houses. There, they meet an Episcopal minister with an M.A. in anthropology named Lasher who puts into words the unfairness of the system that the two engineers have only vaguely sensed. They soon learn that Lasher is the leader of a rebel group known as the "Ghost Shirt Society", and Finnerty instantly takes up with him. Paul is not bold enough to make a clean break, as Finnerty has done, until his superiors ask him to betray Finnerty and Lasher.
He quits his job and is captured by the "Ghost Shirt Society;" he is forced to join as their leader but only in name. Paul's father was the first "National, Industrial, Commercial Communications, Foodstuffs, and Resources Director"” As his lengthy title suggests, Dr. George Proetus has almost complete control over the nation’s economy and was more powerful than the President of the United States. Through his father's success, Paul's name is famous among the citizens, so the organization intends to use his name to their advantage by making him the false 'leader' to gain publicity.[4]
| “ | Without regard for the wishes of men, any machines or techniques or forms of organization that can economically replace men do replace men. Replacement is not necessarily bad, but to do it without regard for the wishes of men is lawlessness. Without regard for the changes in human life patterns that may result, new machines, new forms of organization, new ways of increasing efficiency, are constantly being introduced. To do this without regard for the effects on life patterns is lawlessness. (Chap. XXX) |
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| “ | Without rank, without guest privileges, he lived on a primitive level of social justice. (Chap. XXIII) | ” |
| “ | 'This is your living?' said Paul. He hadn't succeeded in keeping the sense of whimsy out of his voice, and quick resentment was all about him. (Chap. IX) | ” |
| “ | 'Things are certainly set up for a class war based on conveniently established lines of demarcation. And I must say that the basic assumption of the present set-up is a grade-A incitement to violence: the smarter you are, the better you are. Used to be that the richer you were, the better you were. Either one is, you'll have to admit, pretty tough for the have-nots' to take. The criterion of brain is better than the one of money, but'—he held his thumb and forefinger about a sixteenth of an inch apart—'about that much better.' 'It's about as rigid a hierarchy as you can get,' said Finnerty. 'How's somebody going to up his I.Q.?' |
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The book discusses how the increases in worker's productivity, by way of more advanced machinery or organizational changes, impact the lives of workers themselves. The increase in the number of vacuum tubes was a crucial technological breakthrough in the post-war 1950s. In that period:
| “ | the tubes increased like rabbits." "And dope addiction, alcoholism, and suicide went up proportionately", said Finnerty. |
” |
Reviewing the novel for a genre science fiction audience, Groff Conklin declared it "a biting, vividly alive and very effectively understated anti-Utopia."[7] Boucher and McComas named it to their "year's best" list, describing it as "Human, satirical, and excisting; . . . by far the most successful of the recent attempts to graft science fiction onto the serious 'straight' novel."[8] They praised Vonnegut for "blending skilfully a psychological study of the persistent human problems in a mechanistically 'ideal' society, a vigorous melodramatic story-line, and a sharp Voltairean satire.[9]
In 2009, Audible.com produced an audio version of Player Piano, narrated by Christian Rummel, as part of its Modern Vanguard line of audiobooks.
1. Marvin, Thomas F.. Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. 2002. Print.
2. Seed, David. "Mankind vs. Machines: The Technological Dystopia in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano". Impossibility Fiction: Alternativity, Extrapolation, Speculation. Ed. Littlewood, Derek, Stockwell, Peter. Atalanta, Georgia: Editions Rodopi B.V.. 1996. Print.