The Sirens of Titan

It’s a bit of a shame to use a star system in evaluating literature. Such a system makes perfect sense when judging kitchen appliances, electronics, or furniture—where the customer can judge the product based on how well it performs its obvious function. But the purpose of a book is not obvious. In fact, the onus lies almost entirely upon readers to figure out how a book best fits into their lives. It can be anything from filler for conversation to a roadmap to happiness, from a table-decoration to a guilty pleasure.
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Plus, how does one go about really judging a work of fiction? Those who have read much probably get to the point where they can confidently place a book into the totality of books they’ve experienced, and judge its worth by how it measures up within that totality. But that method relies upon the hazards of one’s autobiography—and even the most voracious reader can get through a mere fraction of the books that are out there. The hoary field of literary criticism is also there to help, offering the reflections, ideas, and frameworks of brilliant readers from the past to bounce your own opinions off. But can opinions—even extraordinarily thoughtful, erudite opinions—eventually add up to fact?
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The easy way out of this mess is to resign yourself totally and completely to the subjectivism of the task, and to rate a book solely on how well it pleased you. I suspect this is what many do. But this option, however elegant and straightforward, denies the potential for one to strip away one’s own opinions and to judge something based on more abstract criteria. I believe that, with hard work, this is possible, but most mere mortals aren’t up to it.
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To bring the matter round to this particular work, Kurt Vonnegut adds but another layer to the already thorny matter of judging literature. This is because he has established his own entirely and completely original aesthetic. As one blurb in the front of this book puts it, Vonnegut is “unimitative and inimitable.” As a result, even when I place him within my own reading experience, he occupies his own very special corner on the outskirts, and the added context hardly helps.
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So, to fall back on the handy old measure of enjoyability, I give Vonnegut five stars. Reading this book was a blast.
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First, his writing-style is excellent. The prose is so taut, so compressed, and so expressive, that it often approaches poetry.
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Second, his ideas are (pardon the pun) out of this world. The meaning of life, the question of human history, the existence of free will—all are grist for his mill, and the resulting bread is delectable.
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He demands to be read on his own terms, and the demand is irresistible. From the first sentence, you are pulled into his peculiar world, a world where nothing seems to make sense to anybody but Vonnegut, until he generously explains. Fortunately for us, Vonnegut’s explanations usually took the form of novels.

4.5 Stars

What Reading Sirens of Titan is Like: A Short Fable

You are in a room with a great puzzle maker (Vonnegut). You stand before the puzzle maker's newest creation, a ten million piece mega-puzzle. It is in a disassembled mountain of pieces laying on the floor.

"Behold!", says the puzzle maker.

You crouch down and take your time examining a piece (analogy for reading a chapter of Sirens). The artwork is beautifully drawn (analogy for well-written, which Sirens is), and depicts part of a building. Is it a small building? A large one? Is it significant, or maybe just one of many of its kind? Curious, you ask the puzzle maker. He does not seem amused.

"What does it mean? What a preposterous question. Just admire its beauty. You'll figure out what it means when the time is right."

"When will the time be right?"

"When it is..."

Frustrated, you look at another piece and see a ball of fire. You examine this piece, and several others, and return to the puzzle maker to demand some kind of meaning. He still refuses to explain, and then suddenly snaps his fingers and cries out:

"Tada!"

You look down. The puzzle is no longer a mountain of pieces on the floor, it is fully assembled. It is a masterpiece. The obscure building fragment you examined turned out to be part of a magnificent castle. The castle is under siege, and is being advanced on by thousands of armoured soldiers, some on horseback.

In the distance, soldiers fire flaming projectiles toward the castle with wooden trebuchets. You can stand back now, looking at the whole, the meaning of which has, only in the end, and quite suddenly and unceremoniously, been revealed to you. Now you can see how brilliantly all the pieces you so thoroughly and tediously examined fit into it.

This is what reading Sirens of Titan is like. A masterpiece, without question, but confusing and esoteric until very near the end, when all is revealed and where everything you've read over the previous 150+ pages finally has meaning. I've never read a book like this before, and have undecided feelings about the long and tedious parts of this book that seem totally pointless but then have meaning in the end, but overall the whole is a masterpiece and I'd highly recommend it.

Malachi Constant's quest for meaning in an absurd universe. . . .

This entertaining, thought-provoking novel chronicles a fascinating journey from familiar places like Newport, Rhode Island, Fall River, New Bedford, and West Barnstable, Massachusetts, to other worlds, including Mars, Mercury, and Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

For one thing, according to Epicurean philosophy, the gods are in a state of perfect ataraxia and mind their own business. They have no needs and, although they are omniscient and can observe all points in the space-time continuum, nor do they bother themselves much about us, insignificant human beings. Perhaps the same could be said of the Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. In Slaughterhouse-Five, they abduct poor Billy Pilgrim to their intergalactic zoo and observe with mild interest how he breeds with a porn-star mate. So it goes.

For another thing, here too, in The Sirens of Titans, we’ll meet the creatures from Tralfamadore and see if they can or even wish to do us, humans, any good. The unfortunate Malachi Constant (the protagonist) will travel across the whole solar system, from Earth to Mars, from Mars to Mercury and from there back to Earth and on to Titan, in the periphery of Saturn and the chrono-synclastic infundibulum. Meanwhile, he will suffer all sorts of hardships and strokes of bad luck — “a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all...” (LoA, vol. 1, p. 485). Still, despite it all, he will maintain to the very end that “somebody up there likes me” (p. 313). Malachi Constant is, in many ways, like Candide in Voltaire’s short novel, a die-hard optimist who, in the end, comes back from the dead, and gains a modicum of wisdom along the way. While Candide concluded that “one must cultivate one’s own garden” (an Epicurean motto, if ever there was one), Malachi declares that “it took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” (p. 528)

For another thing, The Sirens of Titan was published in 1959, the same year as Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint and Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The former was already touching on the nature of reality, and the latter already preaching about America’s moral standards. In The Sirens, Vonnegut, like PKD, plays with memory manipulation and all sorts of mindfuck; like Heinlein, he touches on the topic of war and the military but doesn’t linger on it for very long.

For another thing, what Vonnegut does here, though, is lay out one of his first “mosaic of jokes”, as he liked to call his books. Indeed, The Sirens of Titan is primarily a parody of trashy pulp science fiction novels, a boisterous, chucklesome book, written in syncopated, eclectic, dense textures, high energy, tangled threads, plot twists aplenty, extended techniques and unorthodox uses of language, and finally landing on its feet at the end. In this sense, The Sirens of Titan, twenty years early, precedes and foreshadows (and, I would say, is superior to) Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Salo is a foreign emissary from a risibly-remote planet. He's travelled trillions of light years to deliver a loony-toons message.

He's a likeable little gnome.

And if you said that's a ridiculous satire on the gee-whiz Boys from NASA spending umpteen gadzilions of Taxpayers' Dollars for a (whoops) Intimately Freudian rocket ship thrusting into deep space, bearing greetings from us poor humanoids - yes, complete with kiddy-like line drawings of two healthy, well-adjusted WASPS (male and female, of course) - well, then, I guess you read ole Kurt's mind.

Well.

And what if you belong to a dirt-poor part of the populace, and don't much care for Rich Folks' Gentrification Projects for Deep Space?

Kurt Vonnegut can read your lips!

So it goes.

That and a buck fifty may buy you a nice coffee.

It drove the poor man down the path of despair, right into the Monkey House, in fact. If you think the zany situations from Welcome to the Monkey House's collection of fictional gems were made up by an average normal American male, think again.

Vonnegut was as real as they get.

Warts and Blooming All.

Back in the early sixties, there was a little song - I think Bobby Goldsboro sang it - about a Funny Little Clown:

See the funny little clown -
I'm laughing on the outside
But I'm crying on the inside...

Don't let anyone tell you Kurt Vonnegut wasn't that clown -

For though his satire may SCALD -

His Endless Compassion could HEAL this poor old world, when it sees dear old Salo got it right.

So so long, Space-X!!

From Earth (earthly desires) to Mars (mid-life crisis) to Mercury (looking inward) to Titan (enlightenment), ‘The Sirens of Titan’ is laced with Vonnegut’s view of the human condition.


['Harmoniums' which live deep underground] have weak powers of telepathy. The messages they are capable of transmitting and receiving are almost as monotonous as the song of Mercury. They have only two possible messages…The first is, “Here I am, here I am, here I am.” The second is, “So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are.”

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“The ship was being controlled skillfully by its pilot-navigator. The equipment was talking nervously to itself—cycling, whirring, clicking, buzzing. It was sensing and avoiding hazards to the sides, seeking an ideal landing place below.
The designers of the pilot-navigator had purposely obsessed the equipment with one idea—and that idea was to seek shelter for the precious troops and materiel it was supposed to be carrying…Twenty minutes later, the pilot-navigator was still talking to itself—finding as much to talk about as ever.”

The existential pendulum swings from inner harmony to a paranoid scanning of the environment. One produces agreement and gratitude, the other produces self-chatter and fear.


On personal growth: “almost everything I know for sure has come from fighting the pain from my antenna.”


On how to read: “He accepted it all hungrily, uncritically. And, in accepting it, Unk gained an understanding of life that was identical with the writer’s understanding of life. Unk wolfed down a philosophy.”


On life’s value: “It was in the nature of truly effective good-luck pieces that human beings never really owned them. They simply took care of them, had the benefit of them, until the real owners, the superior owners, came along.”


On our purpose: “It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

Să zicem: o satiră a condiției umane.

Senzația rămîne permanent că Vonnegut mobilizează un bombardier nuclear plus o divizie de tancuri în scopul de a captura un iepure șchiop. Înzestrările lui Vonnegut sînt la apogeu (ironie, inventivitate, voie bună etc., era tînăr, avea 37 de ani), dar romanul nu poate fi mai mult decît o glumă pe seama cititorilor naivi. Intriga amuză și cam atît. Fiind la rîndu-mi extrem de naiv, nu pot scăpa de senzația asta (a glumei).

Repet, nu este un SF propriu-zis, este o parodie. Deși criticii pretind că romanul în cauză propune (și) o meditație despre liberul arbitru și fatalitate, n-am găsit nici o pagină care să corespundă caracterizării.

„Ако въпросите не ти говорят нищо, такива ще бъдат и отговорите.“


„Сирените от Титан“ е забележителен роман! Кърт Вонегът съчетава по своя неповторим начин различни жанрове, поставяйки важни житейски въпроси, над които си струва читателите да се замислят.

Историята несъмнено е сатирична, тъй като авторът чудесно осмива отрицателните черти на човечеството, подобно на Станислав Лем в „Звездни дневници“. Освен това, усетих в нея силни антиутопични елементи, но четенето ми беше страшно приятно, заради превъзходното чувство за хумор! В дадена част от действието Вонегът критикува най-вече войната и начина на живот в армията, а пък в други моменти - религията, бизнеса, Холивуд... За мен, „Сирените от Титан“ представлява изключително качествена фантастика, към която със сигурност ще се завръщам!

Главният герой Малахия Констант е разглезен богаташ, който има необичайно голям късмет и си живее безгрижно на Земята. Обаче, след време неговият бизнес тотално се срива, а той по тайнствен начин е принуден да си тръгне от планетата и живее в различни части на галактиката. Впоследствие му предстоят доста любопитни и опасни космически приключения, по време на които израства като личност...





„Казано е, че Аристотел е бил последният човек, запознат както трябва с културата на собствената си цивилизация. Рансъм К. Фърн бе положил впечатляващи усилия да постигне неговите успехи. До известна степен не бе сполучил така добре, както Аристотел, да види закономерност в нещата, които знаеше.“


„Да си спомняш миналото — заяви Бракман. — Зат’ва те изпратиха в болницата, в края на краищата. Щото помнеше много. — Той сви грубите си длани като купички и показа на Вуйчо какъв сърцераздирателен проблем е представлявал. — Дявол да го вземе, помнеше толкоз много, че като войник не струваше пукната пара.“


„Вооз бе достатъчно мил, за да му спести истината, независимо колко силно Вуйчо го предизвикваше да го цапардоса с нея между очите.“


„Младите лъвове, които първи проповядваха вярата, сега можеха да се превърнат в агнета и да съзерцават такива ориенталски тайнства, като например спускането на капки вода по въже на камбана. Дисциплиниращата ръка на Църквата навсякъде се намираше у тълпите.“


„Радостните изненади през този ден бяха докарали Космическия скиталец до детинско състояние — състояние, в което иронията и сарказмът бяха недоловими за него. През тежкия си живот той бе ставал пленник на много неща. Сега бе пленник на една тълпа, която го смяташе за чудо.“


„Горката му душа се разтопи от удоволствие, когато си даде сметка, че един-единствен приятел е напълно достатъчен, за да бъде удовлетворена човешката нужда от приятелство.“


„— Аз съм последната, която ще отрече — четеше Беатрис собствения си ръкопис на глас, — че силите на Тралфамадор наистина са играли важна роля в земните дела. Въпреки всичко онези, които са обслужвали интересите на Тралфамадор, са го правили по толкова удивително специфични за себе си начини, че спокойно може да се твърди, че тази планета няма нищо общо със случая.“


„Беатрис изведнъж обърна гръб на картината и отново излезе на двора. Идеята, която искаше да включи в книгата си, вече и се бе изяснила напълно.
— Най-лошото, което изобщо може да се случи на някого — каза тя, — е никой да не го използва за нищо.“


„— Виждам, че най-накрая си я заобичал — отбеляза Сало.
— Едва преди една земна година — отвърна Констант. — Твърде много време трябваше да мине, за да разберем, че смисълът на човешкия живот, без значение кой го контролира, е да се обича някой, който може да бъде обичан.“