When I first read, Sirens of Titan by Vonnegut, I was teaching High School English in the inner city and less than a year out of Seminary and a job as a minister for the Baptist Church. No one recommended the book to me, (that is to say that I had no guidance as I read, which someone with the aforementioned, and shockingly unsatisfactory education could have greatly benefited from,) rather, I had simply found a copy on a coworker’s bookshelf while sitting in for her while she was away. At the time I was also bartending at a local bar in Orange County so although I’ll admit to being entirely unprepared for the work, believe me, I was well on my way.
On my first reading the book seemed altogether like an absurdity. The religious commentary, the social theory, the extremely childish science fiction felt completely ridiculous and all together, well… foolish. Although I confess, it was, an extremely enjoyable sort of foolishness.
Over the twelve or so years between then and now, much has changed. Maybe it was the free love or all the psychotropics. Or possibly it was the German higher critics or Schroedinger’s cat and his quantum physics, or maybe it was Hegel’s dialectics, fuck, I don’t know, maybe it was the Rage Against the Machine show in the Staples center parking lot at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. Whatever it was, somehow, miraculously, I grew up. And this time, the novel seemed simple and obvious. Athough again, it was a wonderful sort of simplicity. And not at all a contrived simplicity either but rather a honest simplicity, like a fairy tale. Anyway, I tell this story to say that I wish I would have read it in the middle years of then and now. I think it would have been a fantastic short cut through what were for me, some painfully difficult truths to come to. But oh well, when the student is ready… right?
The novel begins by imagining Malachi Constant, the world’s wealthiest man. Right off the bat, Malachi meets Winston Niles Rumfoord, a scientist who flew his personal spacecraft into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum (don’t ask) and thus, has become trapped throughout the universe and therefore throughout all time. He exists not at a point but rather on a spectrum. Not like a particle but more like a wave and every fifty-nine days, the scientists trajectory lines back up with earth and he materializes in his study, where outside the entire human race waits for him to share all the secrets of the universe with them. Unfortunately, the man has no interest in this and instead decides to share one man’s entire future with him. This man, is of course, Malachi Constant.
Constant convinced that he can evade this prophecy does everything he can to change the trajectory of his life but like any Shakespearian tragedy, his efforts not only don’t succeed in altering the prophecy but even worse they actually bring them to fruition. So within the first twenty-five pages, Vonnegut essentially lays out the entire contents of the novel and then allows the reader the joy of spending the rest of the book seeing how they play out. And the finding out the way the events come about really is a rare pleasure. For example, the scientist tells the wealthy man who happens to be a true bachelor at heart, that eventually he (Malachi) will marry his (Winston’s) wife, who presently happens to despise him (Malachi.) Now, you might think that this foretelling would ruin the surprise but Vonnegut is an artist and in that fact, the foreknowledge only serves to heighten the tension and in the end he wraps it up just as he said he would and yet, nothing plays in any way that you could have possibly assumed. And that is just one example of Vonnegut’s brilliant device of foreseen events of which there must be ten.
Anyway, as we learn how all these events happen to Malachi, Vonnegut manages to put the reader through an intergalactic war (seriously), envisions four or five original species that put the more peculiar human character traits totally in perspective, presides over a stinging indictment of modern culture and weaves a narrative with as many twists and turns as the best of Chuck Palahniuk (only with about ten times the intelligence). Oh yeah, and along the way, Vonnegut also finds the time to offer a brief explanation of the Quantum world, imagines an alternate creation story and world religion, proposes an alternate world history, and finally, he answers the small question of, the fucking “Meaning of Life.” All this within a novel that will probably take no more than a few hours to read. (Seriously)
In the end, the book is a combination of my two readings, ten years apart. It is an absolutely, absurd fairy tale. And yet, like every good fairy tale, within Vonnegut’s few words, simple plot devices and sly social judgments, there lies an overabundance of truth. Many people do find their prince. Things are often not what they seem. And the answers that seem to be a world away and far too complex to fathom are often much closer and much, much simpler then we might like to believe.
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