A Few Notes on The Sirens of Titan

(When I say “notes,” I mean it literally; these are brief impressions, not an essay, and each paragraph may be a separate fragment.)

Thinking about Kurt Vonnegut on the occasion of his death a few weeks ago prompted me to read this novel for the first time. I picked this one because it seems to be one of his more highly regarded works.

Vonnegut’s whimsically cynical humor is hard to resist:

Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so.

The fact that the humor is deployed against convention is presumably an important reason why Vonnegut’s work was so popular in the ‘60s and remains so with many shaped by those times. I wonder, though, how many of his fans really face his message. Any warmth in the humor is superficial; this is actually a work of very cold nihilism.

In a comment on another blog recently someone urged Christians to abandon their preposterous religion and join the unbelievers in a pastoral paradise where the sun shines, the birds sing, and you can visit with Kurt Vonnegut. If there is one thing Vonnegut’s work does not encourage, it’s the vision of life as a pleasant period of lounging between two nothings. He probably thought that the best we can hope for, but in this book at least he certainly didn’t let many of his characters attain it.

When I first read Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, I tried to sell an acquaintance on it by describing it as the work of a Christian Vonnegut. On further acquaintance with Percy I decided that any similarity is superficial and resides mainly in some of Percy’s humor. Still, it was interesting to learn that both men had to live with the suicide of a parent. In Vonnegut’s case it was the mother, and Vonnegut was a grown man when it happened, whereas Percy was a child, and the culprit/victim was his father. Their opposing conclusions about the problems of meaning and suffering are a neat picture of what I’ve maintained for a long time, that Christianity and nihilism are in the end the only very satisfactory answers.

Neither Vonnegut nor his admirers would, I’m sure, admit that he is a moral nihilist, even if he denies absolute meaning. But his morality seems to stop with the admonition that since life is fundamentally a pretty horrible business we ought at least to be kind to one another. Which is fine, but I don’t see how you can insist that other people accept it as an ethical obligation. If someone decides to respond to meaningless suffering by seeing to it as far as possible that he himself does not suffer, regardless of any cost to others, to what authority would you appeal to convince him that he had any other duty? Only, it seems to me, to sentiments which, however admirable, have no objective value or intrinsic connection to any reality but the psychological.

A writer in a religious tradition, especially a Christian writer, is often preoccupied with the question of whether there is a benevolent order in the universe or an indifferent disorder. Vonnegut seems to regard the former idea as preposterous. For him, the question is of an indifferent disorder versus a malicious order, and he prefers the former. Any purpose discernible in events is likely to be dark. The revelation that much of human history is the accidental side effect of purposes pursued by agents hardly interested at all in human beings is the climax of the book (Douglas Adams surely was influenced by it), and it’s marginally more tolerable to suppose that these agents are indifferent rather than malicious. Still, there are many combinations of events in the book that have to be seen as what Frost described (in the poem “Design”) as “design of darkness to appall:”

The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves—that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, but one of outrageous fortune’s cruelest agents as well.

Vonnegut’s style can become tiresome: the short, flat declarative sentences, the understatement of appalling events and revelations. I’m in no hurry to read more of his work, although I would like to revisit Cat’s Cradle, which I read in college and barely remember. Even if the result is not in the end very satisfying, there’s a marvelous imagination at work here.

The fact that this book was published in 1959 serves as another bit of argument against the idea that the cultural revolution of the late ‘60s came out of nowhere.

I thought this sentence, which occupies an important place in the narrative, seemed familiar:

I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

But I couldn’t place it at first. That’s because I haven’t listened to Al Stewart’s Modern Times for a while. Great album.