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Bluebeard is the twelfth novel by Kurt Vonnegut. It is an autobiography written by a fictional abstract expressionist painter by the name of Rabo Karabekian. Rabo is the son of Armenian refugees who wound up in San Ignacio, California. Rabo has a gift for drawing and painting, and pursues an apprenticeship in New York with the world's greatest living illustrator, Dan Gregory, who is also an Armenian immigrant. The book chronicles the roller-coaster life of Rabo as he reflects upon it in his old age, and describes the drama that ensues through the interactions among he and his acquaintances and house guests while he attempts to write his autobiography.
Rabo lives in a Victorian mansion in The Hamptons, which houses a renowned collection of abstract expressionist paintings he earned as payment for bankrolling the lifestyles of Pollack, Kitchen, Rothko, and others. On his property is a large potato barn which is rumoured to contain the most important piece of his collection. The title of the book, Bluebeard, pertains to this mysterious barn and its contents; alluding to the story of the pirate Bluebeard, whose fabled treasure was revealed to be the murdered corpses of his seven ex-wives.
In spite of his financial success and natural talent as a realist painter and draughtsman, Rabo's contribution to the arts, particularly to abstract expressionism, was relatively minor. He himself confesses that his work never quite had what Kitchen's and Pollack's had: soul. The main culprit for his poor reputation, however, was one of many so-called "postwar miracles"---in this case, a shoddy brand of paint called Sateen Dura-Luxe, promised to "outlive the smile of the Mona Lisa," yet which crumbled and flaked off after only several years, reducing much of Rabo's portfolio to blank canvases. Through Rabo's struggles as an artist---with postwar miracle paints and with expression generally---Vonnegut suggests some intriguing intersections among art, meaning, time, and humanity, such as in the following passage where Rabo morosely ruminates on why he and his master Dan Gregory were technically but not artistically great:
What kept him from coming anywhere near greatness, although no more marvelous technician ever lived? I have thought hard about this, and any answer I give refers to me, too. I was the best technician by far among the Abstract Expressionists, but I never amounted to a hill of beans, either, and couldn't have---and I am not talking about my fiascoes with Sateen Dura-Luxe. I had painted plenty of pictures before Sateen Dura-Luxe, and quite a few afterwards, but they were no damned good.
But let's forget me for the moment, and focus on the works of Gregory. They were truthful about material things, but they lied about time. He celebrated moments, anything from a child's first meeting with a department store Santa Claus to the victory of a gladiator at the Circus Maximus, from the driving of the golden spike which completed a transcontinental railroad to a man's going on his knees to ask a woman to marry him. But he lacked the guts or the wisdom, or maybe just the talent, to indicate somehow that time was liquid, that one moment was no more important than any other, and that all moments quickly run away.
Let me put it another way: Dan Gregory was a taxidermist. He stuffed and mounted and varnished and mothproofed supposedly great moments, all of which turn out to be depressing dust-catchers, like a moosehead bought at a country auction or a sailfish on the wall of a dentist's waiting room.
Clear?
Let me put it yet another way: life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way. Even a picture of a bowl of pears on a checkered tablecloth is liquid, if laid on canvas by the brush of a master. Yes, and by some miracle I was surely never able to achieve as a painter, nor was Dan Gregory, but which was achieved by the best of the Abstract Expressionists, in the paintings which have greatness birth and death are always there.
Birth and death were even on that old piece of beaverboard Terry Kitchen sprayed at seeming random so long ago. I don't know how he got them in there, and neither did he.
I sigh. "Ah, me," says old Rabo Karabekian.
The aesthetic integrity Rabo describes here has no preeminent form. It is not the attainment or representation of Goodness or Truth, and it cannot be achieved by mere technique. It is rather a kind of candid appreciation and embodiment of the uncertainty, precariousness, and ambiguity inherent to nature and existence thereof. In Rabo's account, art has soul when it appreciates time, and analogously, this is also a condition for life to have meaning---otherwise it just happens and you find yourself an embittered and unloved recluse in the Hamptons.
This profound vulnerability of human existence is expressed further through a characteristically Vonnegut anti-war theme. I don't intend to spoil this book for anyone reading this, but like many Vonnegut novels, Bluebeard teases out a deep empathy for human beings at our best and our worst---and a gratitude for life generally. Our existence is a precarious opportunity, and we are able to take it for granted and squander it for petty, short-sighted reasons---reasons which, like Dan Gregory's taxidermy of "great" moments, ultimately become dust-collecting lifeless things. Rabo's retelling of his life's story and his interpretations of art are, among other things, a kind of lament about how ironic and easy it is for life to become the victim of its own vivisection.
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