Kurt Vonnegut
The Sirens of Titan
Seven years ago I first introduced myself to Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut, how do you do? I read Slaughterhouse-Five then Breakfast of Champions then I stopped, until now. “I’m fine thanks, and what about you?” The Sirens of Titan proved a brilliant reintroduction. Vonnegut’s voice has a way of sticking like harmoniums stick to the life-vibrations of the slow song of Mercury. He is curt, ironic, to-the-point, which makes his points so much sharper, so much more able to aptly penetrate.
It is the tension between the hot hemisphere of day-without-end and the cold hemisphere of night-without-end that makes Mercury sing.
Mercury has no atmosphere, so the song it sings is for the sense of touch.
The song is a slow one. Mercury will hold a single note in the song for as long as an Earthling millennium. There are those who think that the song was quick, wild and brilliant once — excruciatingly various. Possibly so.
The poetics of Vonnegut’s thoughts and the smashing deliverance of his thoughts are scattered through The Sirens of Titan like Titanic bluebird feathers must be scattered on Saturn’s largest moon. Verse leaps out, surprisingly, then retreats. Insight jumps up, then fades into the story’s greater whole.
The Sirens of Titan comes wrapped in the genre Science Fiction. Stars sparkle and crepitate upon opening, it’s our Solar System that has been so lovingly tucked inside. Why not? With such a vast setting what breadth of fiction is not possible? With a universe, where is a writer’s mind not allowed to go? . . . Into the chrono-synclastic infundibulum where “in a flash” comes the knowledge that “everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.”
If Rumfoord knows that “in a flash,” why does he have to mess with Malachi Constant’s “someone up there must like me?” Why couldn’t he leave Malachi Constant’s luck alone?
Luck or John Cowper Powys’s “bitch queen of the dice, the great goddess Chance!” or our fortitude of being born into money or rank or power or our misfortune of being born into poverty or to be stricken with a handicap or our parent’s handicap. How determinative is luck? Shouldn’t there be something else?
Rumfoord’s invented religion, The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, takes Malachi Constant or the Space Wanderer or Unk, once the luckiest man on Earth, as their martyr. But when he scaled the longest free-standing ladder to a waiting spaceship, my stomach dropped: Malachi Constant was no longer the luckiest man on Earth by their terms of money and rank and power, but the unluckiest man on Earth, in the Solar System, in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Malachi Constant was stricken to the core by bad luck ever since Rumfoord spilled his future. The future spilled, the cup broke and the liquid ran off the table, mixed with dirt and became mud. For the greater part of the book I blamed Rumfoord for the poor man’s misfortune. I blamed Rumfoord because he was always seated on the high-throne; he was always taking the high-road; he was the indifferent. Like on Mars, where he collected and manipulated seemingly good people. “He wished to change the World for the better by means of the great and unforgettable suicide of Mars.” He sent innocents to their death.
Who was Winston Niles Rumfoord anyway? I don’t think he was omnipresent enough to be a god, though he knew the unchangable-changeful nature of everything; I don’t think he loved enough to be a god. He was a man whose courage, style and gallantry ran him into the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, causing him to materialize whenever the spiral allowed; he was a man who never had sex with his wife; he was a man who did everything according to what his overarching view of past, present and future determined. Did he ever act outside of it—maybe he never saw the point—but still. . . c’mon, for your wife’s sake. Needless to say, I didn’t like Winston Niles Rumfoord that much.
My main glitch with Rumfoord, the tear that broke the lining: Why did he get so upset when he found out that “Everything that every Earthling has ever done has been warped by creatures on a planet one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand light years away. . . in such a way as to make us deliver a replacement part. . .” If Rumfoord was using people the whole time how could he get so upset that he himself was being used? Isn’t that part of the game? He must have had some faintness of heart left. . . he must have worked out for himself some purpose, some point, he must not have been completely convinced of the staunch determinism in future-telling.
All things deterministic came to a head on Mars. On Mars antennas were installed—an eery similarity to how everyone exclaimed during my recent trip, “This a photo for “Facebook”:/on-why-im-not-on-facebook!“—into brains with memories erased. On Mars shocks were received when behaving or thinking “out of line.” A spooky picture indeed: mindless society run by a controlling few. Much of Mars’ blind war-machine must have stemmed from Vonnegut’s own experiences in WWII. Individual fluctuations of luck have flown out the door, just senseless marching—??Rented a tent, a tent, a tent. Rented a tent, a tent, a tent.—to an equally senseless fate: ??Rented a, rented a tent.
Despite good luck or bad luck, at the end of his life, Malachi Constant on Titan is a changed man. Though the antenna is still fixed in his head, it’s dormant. Constant has become a simple man, in need of nothing but love.
“Only an Earthling year ago,” said Constant. “It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
Simple enough?
Bracciano Italia
August 2008
Sticking to “space fiction,” I’m reading Shikasta by Doris Lessing next:
If this book [Shikasta] has any recent precursor, it is Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Lessing has praised him elsewhere: “Vonnegut is moral in an old-fashioned way…he has made nonsense of the little categories, the unnatural divisions into ‘real’ literature and the rest, because he is comic and sad at once, because his painful seriousness is never solemn. Vonnegut is unique among us; and these same qualities account for the way a few academics still try to patronize him….” — From Gore Vidal on Shikasta (1979)
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