Mariannecdotes

I first read The Sirens of Titan when I was in high school. As I told my friend today, I will probably return to it for the rest of my life. Or maybe I won’t, given that I can’t actually predict anything. But I can say that Kurt Vonnegut remains one of my favorite writers- and The Sirens of Titans, to me, is one of the most important novels of the 20th century in its assessment of guilt, free will, and the enduring role of religiosity in an age of modern technoscience.

Malachi Constant is a man whose good luck has graced him with “money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent.” More importantly though is that Constant , along with other characters, fancies himself a messenger of sorts. Yet as each person discovers, to be a messenger is to be a means to someone or something else’s end- be it science or religion, Martians or Tralfamadorians, Rumfoord or the human beings serving in the Martian military.

The only message that seems to harbor any real meaning is the one sent to Constant by himself. “Unk” (the name given to Constant after he’s been brainwashed by the army) writes a letter to himself, encouraging him to continue to ask the right questions even if it brings him an enormous amount of pain. At first, Unk feels humbled by the idea that someone would suffer so much for the sake of knowledge. Upon seeing his own signature at the end of the letter, Unk realizes that he was the one who values truth enough to withstand suffering.

In a deterministic universe, we do not know ourselves- but for that reason, we also don’t know our own possibilities either.

Vonnegut is straightforward in what this story will be about: Malachi Constant will “find out what it was like to exist in any other way,” but not in the way he imagines, or is able to comprehend at first. He becomes a means to Rumfoord’s end: a new World-changing religion, which will unite Earth.

This is a very Nietzschean critique of religion. The members of the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent have replaced the moral God with another God of cause- scientific determinism. Followers of the Church rejoice in Unk’s remark that he is a “victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.” Yet the values of weakness and futility in the face of a powerful outside force are the same, so much that the Church’s followers purposefully and proudly handicap themselves.

Even Beatrice resigns herself to the “fact” that to allow herself to be used was probably for the best. “Could we have done any better if he’d left us in charge of our own lives?” she asks.  ”Would we have become any more- or any less?”

Yet neither Unk nor Beatrice are merely victims of a series of accidents, but victims of other people’s actions. Although he’s clearly being used, Unk innocently and mistakenly views the followers’ ecstatic celebration of his arrival to be one based on charity and compassion. Rumfoord, who is quite the mastermind, chooses to reveal Stony’s death to Constant because only a sense of guilt, worthlessness and shame will get him to comply with his plans. It works. Constant, who has failed to be born weak (or is at least judged so by the masses), leaves Earth.

This, I believe, is where the moral lies. Although we may be subject to a cold universe, we are still entities in that very universe. Whether or not we are machines,  just like Salo the Tralfamadorian, we are still capable of making choices based on values of love and friendship, which have no reference to the sinister commands of a higher power.

I think I could write more about this book, just like I could with all of Vonnegut’s novels. Instead, I’ll end with a Youtube video of a guy rattling on (in an entertaining way, of course) about why Kurt Vonnegut is an existentialist: