Posthumanism in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut

Matter That Complains So

Andrew Hicks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000092820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Posthumanism in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Matter That Complains So re-examines the prevailing critical consensus that Kurt Vonnegut was a humanist writer. While more difficult elements of his work have often been the subject of scholarly attention, the tendency amongst critics writing on Vonnegut is to disavow them, or to subsume them within a liberal humanist framework. When Vonnegut's work is read from a posthumanist perspective, however, the productive paradoxes of his work are more fully realised. Drawing on New Materialist, Eco-Critical and Systems Theory methodologies, this book highlights posthumanist themes in six of Vonnegut's most famous novels, and emphasises the ways in which Vonnegut troubles human/non-human, natural/artificial, and material/discursive hierarchical binaries

Section Three
Space and Time

5
The Sirens of Titan

Matter That Complains So

Andrew John Hicks

Seven years separate Vonnegut’s debut novel, Player Piano (1952), and his sophomore work, The Sirens of Titan (1959), a period of frustration and toil for Vonnegut.¹ The former novel was not a success. Despite its relatively large print run, Player Piano sold only 3,600 copies, and reviews were limited and cursory; as Charles Shields notes, the lack of mainstream interest was likely in part due to its status as science fiction (the ‘Science Fiction Book Club ran a full-page ad in Popular Science listing it as a choice to its members’ [126]). Vonnegut would later lament the classification on several occasions, noting in 1974 that he had been so designated simply because he had ‘included machinery’ in the novel (Conversations, 157) and that its public reception had left him a ‘sore-headed occupant of a file drawer named “science fiction” … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal’ (Wampeters, 25). Ironically enough, science fiction is almost the only point of contact between Vonnegut’s first novel and The Sirens of Titan. In every other respect, Sirens represents a definitive leap forward in Vonnegut’s artistry and style. As William Deresiewicz notes, where Player Piano is ‘apprentice work – clunky, clumsy, overstuffed’, by the time Vonnegut wrote Sirens, ‘it’s all there, all at once’:

Kurt Vonnegut has become Kurt Vonnegut. The spareness hits you first. The first page contains fourteen paragraphs, none of them longer than two sentences, some of them as short as five words. It’s like he’s placing pieces on a game board – so, and so, and so. The story moves from one intensely spotlit moment to the next, one idea to the next, without delay or filler. The prose is equally efficient, with a scalding syncopated wit.

(2012)

Vonnegut would certainly agree with this assessment. He would claim (truthfully or not) that he extemporised the entirety of the novel’s plot at a New York cocktail party, and the novel represented a break in a multiyear period of writer’s block; Vonnegut was able to finish it within a few months (Shields, 159), and he would later remark that ‘Every mother’s favorite child is the one that’s delivered by natural birth. Sirens of Titan was that kind of book’ (Conversations, 35). Nor is this contrast between Sirens and its predecessor limited to the sudden development of Vonnegut’s signature technique. Player Piano is not only steadfastly conventional in form and generally workmanlike in prose style. As Vonnegut would later cheerfully admit, the novel was also relatively derivative. Though certainly much informed by Vonnegut’s own employment at General Electric, its futurist-dystopic theme – the effects of ever-encroaching automation in industry on the fortunes and self-worth of the working class – was ‘ripped off [from] the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Eugene Zamatin’s We’ (93). While elements of the novel, such as the provocative image of the titular piano, the chess-playing ‘Checker Charley’, and the fully sentient and near omniscient governing computer EPICAC, hint at a preoccupation with non-human agency, ultimately these features are subordinate to the novel’s distinctly liberal humanist bent. Player Piano is concerned, despite some interesting ambiguities, with the preservation of autonomous individualism.² Men require the dignity of work to foster character and self-esteem; the state, which provides citizens with all their material needs, prevents them from striving to better their lot in life; and, as the protagonist Paul Proteus rather sentimentally opines on authenticity and belonging, whether in ‘a patch of desert, a red clay field … a city street … every man had his roots down deep – in home’ (PP 222). Indeed, Proteus, a young factory manager and the son of one of the system’s architects, summarises the novel’s message when he argues that ‘we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them – the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect’ (166). Interestingly enough, something like this last formulation – the importance of personal usefulness, indeed, the importance of being used – reoccurs in The Sirens of Titan but in a context so different to Player Piano’s sensibilities that it becomes almost unrecognisable. Where Player Piano is relatively conventional in style and derivative in plot, Sirens is idiosyncratically ‘Vonnegutian’ and kaleidoscopically, bizarrely original. While the former novel is largely provincial in setting, Sirens is vast in scope. And while Player Piano is ultimately preoccupied with a somewhat reactionary concern for ‘what happens to the soul of man in the world of machines’ (Tally, 2011, 21), The Sirens of Titan is uncompromising in its immanent materialism. No longer must man regain his lost authenticity and human dignity from a world of treacherous, soulless machines. In the solar system of Sirens, the role of the matter called ‘man’ is to come to terms with its integration in wider, material systems of being. As Peter Reed notes, ‘again, the future provides the setting, but this time the actions, like the questions probed, are cosmic’:

In this, the most science fictional of all Vonnegut’s novels, travel in space and time serves to explore the existential ‘whys’ only touched on in Player Piano. But the new dimensions of space and time do more than shift Vonnegut’s emphasis beyond the immediate social issues – they provide an appropriate context for his assertions that the answers to man’s questions exist not in the outer realms that science may help him explore, but within man himself.

(58)

While I agree, for the most part, with Reed’s assessment, the explicit distinction between the ‘outer’ and ‘inner’, between science and what might perhaps be termed philosophy, is, as I will argue, misleading. Further, were the dimensions of space and time merely contextual in the novel, a background of raw material for the inner conflicts and resolutions of the rational and autonomous human to be projected upon, then Sirens could be relatively easily classified as a straightforwardly humanist novel, for all its science fiction trappings. Vonnegut himself noted at around the time of the novel’s composition that he was no longer content with writing about ‘a man, a love affair, or a trial’ but instead wanted to write about ‘the whole damned planet’ (Shields, 162), about systems as a whole. In Sirens, this approach is widened even further. It is the solar system itself that provides Vonnegut with his setting and subject. It is this sense of spatial scale, combined with the emergence of now familiar materialist/determinist tropes, and the novel’s position as the first truly formative work in Vonnegut’s career, that makes Sirens a kind of ‘stage-setting’ or ‘road map’ for the rest of his oeuvre and one of the richest seams of post-humanist tendencies in his work.

The Sirens of Titan

The Sirens of Titan is a difficult novel to summarise. Douglas Adams, who counted Vonnegut (and Sirens in particular) as an influence on his popular science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979–1992), noted that the novel is

just one of those books – you read it through the first time and you think that it’s very loosely, casually written. You think the fact that suddenly everything suddenly makes such good sense at the end is almost accidental. And then you read it a few more times … and you realise what an absolute tour de force it was, making something as beautifully honed as that appear so casual.

(Adams)

On the one hand, its plot is quite straightforward, and in a typically Vonnegutian move, the events of the entire novel are detailed in the very first chapter. As Winston Niles Rumfoord, the near omniscient antagonist (of sorts), urbanely explains to the protagonist, Malachi Constant, the latter will leave Earth and visit Mars, Mercury, and Earth again, before coming to his final destination on Titan. Along the way, he will marry Rumfoord’s wife, Beatrice, and sire a child, named Chrono, with her (Sirens 20–29). Needless to say, as in the later Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), this unambiguously deterministic prediction, issued at the beginning of the novel, is completely accurate. Yet the manner in which these events come to pass – and the manner in which they are embedded within each other and within multiple differing, often contradictory systems – is ambiguous and intricate. As such, for all the novel’s burlesque takes on contemporary science fiction genre conventions and tropes (interplanetary travel, rocket ships and flying saucers, kitsch mechanical robots, the titular sirens), The Sirens of Titan is a more complex, serious, and original work than some critics have suggested. Certainly, reviewers on release were unsure what to make of the novel. As Charles Shields notes, one likened it to an opera – a kind of outer space version of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann – while others considered it simply as ‘hokey’ or a ‘leg-pull’, a parodic but ultimately pointless take-off of the minor and fundamentally inconsequential genre of science fiction (2011, 161). Later critics, while more sympathetic to Vonnegut as a novelist, have nevertheless sometimes appeared squeamish about the novel’s unabashedly generic features. Perhaps the most notable example of this is Lawrence Broer. In line with the general thesis of his monograph Sanity Plea (1994), Broer explicitly dismisses the science fiction elements of the novel as a diegetic fantasy on the part of Malachi Constant, in favour of a purely psychologising reading, premised on the character’s supposed insanity. Comparing Sirens to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (a not in itself unsound reading), he argues that the novel ‘is more the story of Malachi’s growth, of his adoption of awareness and courage and his quest for psychic wholeness, than the story of his madness’ (30) – madness meaning here essentially the entirety of the novel’s events, since ‘Malachi is the only verifiable character in the novel’ (31). This is a highly original – some may say counterintuitive – reading of the novel’s action. Nevertheless, its explicit disavowal of most of the novel’s actual features leaves much of interest on the table. A similar approach from Kathryn Hume generalises this diagnostic bent to all of Vonnegut’s novels, Sirens included, and shifts the subject of analysis from protagonist to author, arguing that ‘Vonnegut’s main characters are usually straightforward projections of some part of his psyche, and they let him work out his inner conflicts’ (‘Vonnegut’s Self Projections’, 177). Jerome Klinkowitz, meanwhile, takes a different and oddly contradictory tack. Echoing Reed’s comments presented earlier, he notes that ‘no longer must the premise of [Vonnegut’s] writing be a variation of some social concern. In The Sirens of Titan the tinkerings are with time and space themselves’ (48), and that Vonnegut’s central science fiction device, the ‘chrono-synclastic infundibulum’, enables ‘narrative coverage of exceptionally vast range, with an almost entirely fluid point of view’ encompassing the entire solar system (47). Yet, despite the ontological and epistemological musings that are a central element (in my argument, the central element) of the novel, he nevertheless gnomically asserts that the novel is ‘anything but philosophical, though plenty of philosophies course their way through its complex action’ (47). I will argue, conversely, that neither approach quite captures the essence of Sirens. The humorously pulpy elements of the novel certainly represent a knowing pastiche of contemporary science fiction, but they do not undercut or subsume the novel’s serious and sustained philosophical meditations. Nor can the novel’s science fiction elements be jettisoned as irrelevant or somehow embarrassing, in favour of a more ‘serious’ reading that emphasises the importance of autonomy, free will and individualism in the face of the novel’s ‘chaos’ or determinism – which are all too easily considered, from a traditionally humanistic perspective, faintly pathological. For all its humour and freewheeling, picaresque action, The Sirens of Titan remains a science fiction novel, in the sense that it is responding, philosophically, to quite complex scientific and materialist theories. Mass, measurements, particles, and systems are recurring motifs, and the use of the quantum mechanical term ‘waveform phenomena’ to describe the character of Winston Niles Rumfoord demonstrates Vonnegut was aware of alternatives to his more commonly used Newtonian terminology.³ The questions that inform Sirens – what is the relationship between the particular and the whole? What can one ever truly know about an object, and what might it forever conceal? What possible action might one take, if action is even possible, when one is aware of one’s own status as an object with a pre-ordained trajectory? What are the ethical consequences of these concerns? – are questions that were also at the forefront of the contemporary debate between classical and quantum physicists.⁴ While these scientific debates are obviously beyond the purview of this work (not to mention beyond the competency of its author), many of these questions have come to the forefront in the work of several recent cultural theorists, critics, and philosophers. The relative youth of this trend is reflected in the heterogeneity of its varying approaches and terminology, a bewildering array of theories, schools, and approaches that include terms such as ‘speculative realism’, ‘new materialism’, ‘vital materialism’, ‘object-oriented ontology’, and ‘onticology’. Despite multifarious differences in methodology, approach, and tenets, all share a commitment to a marked anti-anthropocentrism and a reaffirmation of the significance of material objects and processes for criticism and philosophy, in reaction to the long ‘linguistic turn’ of the 20th century. As such, I argue that their work provides a new and fruitful perspective from which to reread Vonnegut’s work and Sirens – that novel of objects in space – in particular.

‘The Universe of Things’ – New Materialism, Speculative Realism

The difficulty of succinctly describing or summarising the trend towards a reassessment of matter and its importance is not due to the movement’s heterogeneity alone; the arguments and theories presented can also appear complex or even counterintuitive, and they often become exponentially so when they are brought into dialogue with one another. One particular point of contention in these continuing debates – one particular dichotomy – will inform my analysis of Sirens, but it may be helpful to begin by first detailing what unites these disparate critics. Statements from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010) and Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects (2011), quoted in the following, could fairly safely and un-controversially be considered representative of the underlying assumptions of both the new materialist and speculative realist movements:

The quarantines of matter and life encourage us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations. … I will turn the figures of ‘life’ and ‘matter’ around and around, worrying them until they start to seem strange, in something like the way a common word when repeated can become a foreign, nonsense sound. In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• SECTION ONE Comic Material
• SECTION TWO Environment and Evolution
• SECTION THREE Space and Time
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index