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In 1971, Kurt Vonnegut took a break from working on Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973) so that he could serve as a consultant on National Education Television Playhouse's production of Between Time and Timbuktu, or Promethus-5 (1972). In the preface to the published script, Vonnegut stated that while he supported NET Playhouse's adaptation of his work, he had become dissatisfied with the medium of film. The experience forced him to declare, "I have become an enthusiast for the printed word again" (xv). Although films like those aired on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) made avant-garde and high culture widely available, their expense concentrated the means of production. Vonnegut confessed, "As a stingy child of the Great Depression, I am bound to complain that [film] is . . . too fucking expensive to be fun" (xv). Furthermore, film produced a "bullying form of reality" that made viewers passive, giving them only the opportunity to "gawk." While Vonnegut continued to work in print and liked that it produced greater reader interaction, he demurred that it was, unfortunately, "an elitist art form" because "most people can't read very well" (xvi). Writing at the crossroads between visual and print cultures, Vonnegut found himself trapped between a structural and a skill-based elitism. Film and television could widely disseminate culture, but the cost of these media limited production and concentrated power in the hands of the few. Print was relatively inexpensive and allowed for greater creative control and reader participation, but class-based discrepancies in educational outcomes restricted print culture's reception. The problem, as Vonnegut presented it to himself and to his readers, was how to bridge the gap between affluence and affordability, between passivity and activity, and between access and elitism.
Vonnegut's consultancy invites a reading of Breakfast of Champions that assesses the novel's relationship to PBS. The tensions highlighted in the preface to Between Time and Timbuktu in terms of media were analogous to the general cultural contradictions of PBS. Laurie Ouellette, the foremost cultural historian of public television, argues that PBS reflected a general ethos of social engineering (100). Its goal was to produce model citizens by providing access to high culture and educational opportunities. In order to do so, the network attempted to rescue television...