An Examination of "The Sirens of Tians"

This life began as all lives begin: with doubt. Doubt became the narrative. This was a quest for a new story, one’s own. One grasps toward this new history driven by the suspicion that ordinary language couldn't tell it. The past appeared frozen in the distance, and every gesture and accent signified the negation of the old world and the reach for a new one. The way it was lived created a new situation, one of exuberance and friendship, that of a subversive micro-society, a sub-genre if you will, in the heart of a culture which ignored it. Art was not the goal but the occasion and the method for locating one’s specific rhythm and buried possibilities of our time. The discovery of a true communication was what it was about, or at least the pursuit for such a communication. The adventure of finding it and losing it. We the unappeased, the unaccepting continued looking, filling in the infertile and desolate silences with our own wishes, fears and fantasies. Driven forward by the fact that no matter how barren the world seemed, no matter how degraded and tarnished this world appeared to us, it was known that anything was still possible. And, given the right circumstances, a new world was just as likely as the old one.
In the tradition of Lewis Carol’s magnum opus, absurdity abounds in Sirens of Titan, and there are indeed a number of parallel motifs in the two books: the door through which Malachi enters Rumfoord's estate is explicitly referred to as an Alice-door, and Rumfoord dematerializes like the Cheshire cat into the spiral of his well-like infundibulum. But whereas Carroll subverts Victorian certainties with regard to logic and objectivity, Vonnegut tries to unsettle the 20th century's faith in science and progress. It has become apparent that Sirens of Titan is neither a straightforward science fiction novel nor a parody of science fiction, but that it rather uses the conventions of the genre as a vehicle for other ends which could be broadly described as satiric. In this interpretation, the exaggerated science fiction-clichés are deflated by the revelation that all human endeavors so far have had as their sole end, the delivery of a piece of metal to a broken-down spaceship, piloted by a robot on a fool's errand. There can hardly be a more negative commentary on the belief of mankind's being able to shape its own destiny. In fact, this interpretation turns The Sirens of Titan almost into a novel of the absurd, with similar implications as the works of Kafka or Beckett. Arguably, however, Vonnegut's outlook is not quite as bleak, because once Salo continues on his way, mankind is presumably free to pursue its own objectives. Furthermore, it can be argued that the novel does not claim that life is absurd, but rather that it does not make sense to look for its meaning in some external source; Malachi undergoes a complete mental change between the beginning and the end of the novel, a development which takes him from self-centered lust-fulfillment and the search for a "higher" meaning to acceptance of and contentment with life as it is. Malachi thus becomes another variant of the profligate who turns into a holy man, and his story follows the three stages of departure, initiation, and return of the basic mythic-adventure pattern.
In this way, Malachi's voyage through the solar system appears as an allegory on contemporary man's psychical condition and the steps he would have to take to change it. Most importantly, he would have to break through his egotistical isolation which is caused by his preoccupation with the self. Significantly, the name "Malachi Constant" translates as "faithful messenger", but it is not "a first-class message from God to someone equally distinguished" as Malachi hopes, that he is made to carry, but rather a message that "Unk" sends to himself on Mars in a desperate bid to maintain his identity. Ironically, he is not able to recognize it for what it is. The most he or anyone can aspire to achieve in the way of personal communication is apparently on the level of the harmoniums' "Here I am " - "So glad you are" or Salo's "Greetings".
Malachi's voyage is thus also a quest for spiritual salvation. This quest has its literary antecedent in Dante's Divina Commedia with Beatrice, Rumfoord's wife, as the unlikely object of his love. Malachi goes through the hell of Mars, the limbo of Mercury, and the purgatory of Earth to the celestial regions of Titan, and dies with a glimpse of paradise. This paradise is an inner one which finds parallels in Milton's Paradise Lost: When Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, the Archangel Michael shows them the plight that awaits them, but they are also vouchsafed the discovery of a paradise within themselves.
Religion, however, is shown in this novel to be as unsatisfactory an explanation or solution as anything else. Malachi's father had acquired his huge fortune through his mechanical use of the Bible as a source of information for investing in the stock market, and Rumfoord becomes the founder of a religion which makes the denial of sense the center of its credo. Significantly, too, Malachi assumes the name of Jonah, another messenger, when he comes to see Rumfoord's materialization, and it is on a spaceship called The Whale that he is sent to Mars. Later he becomes the scapegoat of the new religion and is exiled to Titan, where he finds personal contentment, but no spiritual insight whatsoever.
The Sirens of Titan thus does not provide the reader with any of the comforting ideas that he may have come to expect from science fiction - or, indeed, from most other kinds of fiction: man is not only shown to be utterly devoid of control over his own destiny, but even devoid of any importance within a higher scheme of things. Vonnegut thereby insists that sense and meaning can only be the ineluctable responsibility of each individual. In using the format of science fiction, Vonnegut is making a wry comment on what he is writing about: the form supplies the comic perspective needed to dramatize the tragic-comic implications of modern thought and attitudes, and by employing the means of a genre which is often called escapist, but nevertheless adapts the mode of the realist novel, Vonnegut questions the nature of reality as it is commonly perceived and the conventions by which it has been described in literature. He therefore uses the science fiction framework in order to make certain points that would not have been possible in a realist novel. He does this by drawing attention to the textuality of his text, to the way it becomes a textual object. Like other postmodernist fiction, The Sirens of Titan foregrounds the process of "world-building" that is the constituent of all fiction, and which is here shown to be an artifact - as are all other constructions that purport to explain reality. Form is indeed inseparable from function here.
Searching for the meaning of one’s life outwardly may be a danger, may put in jeopardy everything we value about human existence, but it is still nonetheless a seductive project. Who really wishes to look within themselves for the purpose of their life? Such a thought would imply that one is ultimately responsible for one’s own life. It would seem to be more comfortable if one could blame someone or something outside themselves. This is why this kind of thinking survives today. This desire to deny oneself as a free being, and to lose oneself within a larger reality, Sartre calls, “bad faith,” and Deleuze, among others, a giving-in to the “fascist within.” Here is also the meaning of Vonnegut’s title: the “sirens” are those who call us away from ourselves, outwardly, and who put us as free beings in danger (as they put Odysseus in danger in The Odyssey). It is telling; the Vonnegut’s sirens are objects, statues.

There are many examples in Sirens where, due to searching outwardly, it is discovered that one is only a part of something else. A first case would be that of the Tralfamadoreans who have used all of human history for the sole end of getting a spare part to a broken- down spaceship to one of their fellows, Salo. But the more interesting case is that of Rumfoord. Rumfoord, it could be said, has a mystical vision of oneness. When he enters the chronosynclastic infundibulum, during a space flight, he experiences the unity of time: “it came to me in a flash that everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.” This is only the beginning of an almost endless irony, as Rumfoord must already know all of the events which will occur in the novel (including, most importantly, that his own actions are all dictated by the Tralfamadoreans, and that one day everyone will know how to search for the meaning of their lives within themselves. But then mysticism is “beyond” or “other than” thinking). If such a mystic vision is correct, then there is no need for an outward searching (or there is no need for “only” an outward searching): if oneness is everything and everything is one, then within myself is everything there is. Rumfoord, one is led to believe, understands this, and decides that he will free humanity from such outward seeking (but what Rumfoord has perhaps failed to understand is that oneness also includes outward searching). The way he will go about this will be to use outwardness, making others merely a tool of his will, in order to cure humanity of outward searching. Irony again. The result is, again, the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. If God is unconcerned with His creation, why should His creation search out his will? Or be concerned with what the creator was thinking when he brought the world into existence? As the Reverend Redwine expresses it when Malachi Constant exclaims, “Thank God!” “Why thank God… ? He doesn’t care what happens to you. He didn’t go to any trouble to get you here safe and sound, any more than He would go to the trouble to kill you.” With the search for God removed from desire, the only place left to search, thinks Rumfoord, is within oneself. But even with the overt belief in God eliminated, there persist subtle expressions of the belief that one, in some way, is favored by the universe. One example of this is the belief in fate, the Medieval “wheel of fortune.” In order to exclude this temptation the followers of Rumfoord’s church carry around with them weights in “handicap bags.” While supporting such a “moveable burden,” any advantage that could come one’s way would never be mistaken for the favor of the Fates. As Redwine tells Constant: “You should be glad, not sorry, to carry such a handicap… No one could then reproach you for taking advantage of the spontaneous ways of luck.”

But what are the possibilities of an inward search for meaning, especially since, as the \Tralfamadoreans and Rumfoord demonstrate, the course of time is already laid-out? To what degree is there freedom and choice in a fatalistic world? Here we are reminded of Spinoza’s Ethics. For as Spinoza has it: “I say a thing is free, which exists and acts solely by the necessity of its own nature.” The answer, for Vonnegut, is given near the end of the novel, and is realized by both Malachi and Beatrice Rumfoord: “‘Only an Earthing year ago,’ said Constant. ‘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.’” Or as Beatrice says previously: “The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody… would be to not be used for anything by anybody.” So freedom sits alongside fate. Such is a mystic (non)concept. Perhaps the character who has understood this all along is Malachi and Beatrice’s son, Chrono. As Vonnegut tells us: “Chrono did not have a sense of futility and disorder. Everything seemed in apple-pie order to him. And the boy himself participated fitly in that perfect order.” What Rumfoord sees as being “used” is actually order. What Spinoza calls, “Nature” (or “God”). Thus Chrono thinks: “It was all so sad. But it was all so beautiful, too.” Another mystic sentiment.

So freedom is necessity and necessity is freedom. And from this we are again led to the mystic assertion that outward searching is inwardness and inwardness is searching outward. Given this one would propose that what Sirens is declaring is that it is the order, and therefore the intention, of one’s search for meaning that is important. If one begins by looking outwardly, then one risks missing oneself as a free being (and, as in the case of Rumfoord, others as well). One runs the risk here of constituting one’s religion as a kind of fascism. Here may also be implied, as we can see from Rumfoord’s character, the importance of humility. For whenever religion is turned into a “knowledge,” a situation which is implied when one must search outwardly, which also implies that there are some who “know” and some who do not, then arrogance or egoism may arise. And as such turn any religion into a poison. Perhaps here is Vonnegut’s corrective for fundamentalisms of all kinds. But if one begins one’s search by looking within oneself, then one discovers the dignity of oneself, and others as well; and it is from this position that the ego opens out to realize its relationship to the rest of existence. This kind of outwardness is affirmed at the end of the novel when Constant, just before his death, is told that he will enter paradise and that “ …somebody up there likes you.”