The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.My rating: 4 of 5 stars
New review:
I am very much in my Vonnegut phase as I prepare for a senior seminar all about him.
I should say more accurately, that it’s all about only five of his novels – Slaughterhouse Five and the four novels that precede it. I’ve said it more carefully elsewhere (and often), but I see Vonnegut as essentially writing one novel, a novel centrally concerned with the trauma of his war-time experiences at Dresden. That is, each of these novels bleed together into what I call a ‘meta-novel.’ Or, in my more creative moments, I call it Slaughterhouses One through Five.
In any event, as I return to this from a few years away and look for evidence to support my thesis, I want to say: this is the same novel as Slaughterhouse, just not as well written and not as concentrated in its recognition that it’s dealing with trauma.
In other words, this is a novel about a man – Malachi Constant, aka Unk, aka the Space Wanderer – who’s supposed to be part of an invasion but who spends the battle sheltered from disaster underground. (view spoiler) Like Vonnegut at Dresden, he is both part of the attacking army and part of the people who are being attacked.
What’s more, just as Billy Pilgrim is ‘unstuck in time’ – by the creatures of Trafalmadore, who are central to this novel – Winston Niles Rumfoord is similarly caught up in a loop that has him experience everything in his life as if it’s part of the same moment.
In my reading of this, we see the outline of the novel that will become Slaughterhouse Five. The same questions are here – a victim doesn’t know how to tell the story of his trauma and that trauma expresses itself in part by a perpetual present, a perpetual inability to move beyond the moment of that trauma.
All of that squares with the lens of trauma theory in literary studies that I am working with, so it’s all very reassuring of my central thesis.
Maybe I won’t persuade people to read Vonnegut in the way I propose, but I do hope I can persuade at least some to keep reading his stuff. The later novels tend to bore me – worse, they disappoint me so much that they make me question how good these early novels are. Starting with this, though, and moving through the next four, I think Vonnegut accomplished something powerful, something worth preserving.
If you believe me, start here. Keep going because it gets even better – next to the others, this is cluttered and unsure of its way – but this is funny and humane in ways that only Vonnegut could be.
---------------Original review, Sept. 27, 2017--------------
I had a Vonnegut phase in high school and into my early college years, and I remain grateful to him for showing me that literature can make you think even as it makes you laugh. I loved him for four or five years, then I felt I’d outgrown him. It’s only in the last four or five years (leaving a good 25 in between) that I’ve come back to him in a more measured way.
I think the best Vonnegut really is as good as his partisans say, as good as I thought it was when I first encountered it in the Reagan years. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse Five, and, of course, Cat’s Cradle are all substantial works that hold up. They take elements of science fiction, combine them with a cynicism that can only be the product of an even deeper idealism, and give us some of the most memorable critiques of American life from the last 50 years.
Sirens of Titan isn’t quite up to that level. It’s Vonnegut feeling his way toward his more successful work. He senses there’s an intellectual freedom in a science fiction mode, but he gets mildly trapped in it here. The idea, for instance, of Rumfoord as a cosmic intelligence capable of seeing past and future is an intriguing spin on the idea of a god, but it also becomes a bit self-defeating. Rumfoord moves the events of Constant’s life forward, but it isn’t clear why. He seems to want to teach humanity a lesson – and Constant’s conclusion that our purpose is to love another isn’t a bad distillation, even if it sounds trite in my paraphrase. In the end, though, he himself is confused and moving on. It’s solid and intriguing, moving in some ways, but it also implies an anxiety from the still-learning Vonnegut.
Much of what is striking in the novel gets refined in later ones. We have, for instance, the rudiments of a religion that comes across more impressively in Cat’s Cradle. We also have a riff on the use of impediments to arrive at true equality; an idea he does a lot more with in “Harrison Bergeron” and that feels tacked on here. And we have disaffected rich men, unsure how to account for their great fortune, who get crystallized in Eliot Rosewater.
The one great contribution here, I think, is the Tralfamadorans. Yes, they come back in Slaughterhouse Five, but they’re here in fully realized form. It’s a brilliant idea: life forms so different from ours who direct humans toward great accomplishments that serve as trivial ‘text messages’ from across the universe. What is the Great Wall of China but, in effect, a post it note from the inter-stellar UPS driver saying he’ll be back soon with the package.
Definitely read this one. It’s not a bad place to start with Vonnegut if you know you’ll go on, and it’s a great way to echo the pleasures of the more mature novels if you’ve read them. Either way, commit to reading other Vonnegut as well. As striking as this is, it’s only a glimpse at what was to come.
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