Cat’s Cradle—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tiger got to hunt / Bird got to fly / Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?”
I’ve read a few stories about the extinction of all life on earth, but not very many narrated in first person. And they tend not to have a lot of humor (Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, notwithstanding). And usually someone, like the narrator, survives to tell the tale. Not so with Cat’s Cradle. Everyone dies; sort of like an upbeat King Lear. Cat’s Cradle has 127 short chapters, most of which revolve around a joke of some sort. A bunch of oddball Americans, a crazy dictator, and a made-up religion provide plenty of targets for humor, while the strange Dr. Hoenikker and his apocalyptic ice-nine crystals should make us reflect on the danger of science untethered from ethics.
The narrator, John (but he wants us to call him “Jonah”), explains how he originally set out to write a book that collected the accounts of various people’s activities on the day the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. That momentous event had taken place only a few years (or, as the narrator says, two wives and 250,000 cigarettes) before the novel takes place. His research leads him to the late Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the bomb’s fictional creator, and then to Dr. Hoenikker’s three children, Frank, Angela, and Newt. A seemingly unrelated journalistic assignment takes Jonah to the Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, also fictional, a wretchedly poor country ruled by a dictator. There he encounters the phony baloney religion of Bokononism to which he eventually converts. I say “phony baloney” on good authority. Verse 1 from the Books of Bokonon states clearly, “All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”
Jonah learns that Dr. Hoenikker had, before he died, created a substance called ice-nine, an amusing little item that also happens to pose an existential threat to all life on Earth. At temperatures below 0°C, normal ice crystalizes into a sold block, but Hoenikker wondered whether ice molecules, if stacked differently, could result in ice forming from water at higher temperatures. All life on earth depends on water, so if water froze at room temperature, almost nothing would survive. He called this hypothetical form of ice “ice-nine.” If someone could synthesize a sample of ice-nine, one little crystal of it dropped into the ocean would end all life on earth. The crystalizing process would rapidly spread to all contiguous water and soon everything containing water would freeze solid.
In the real world, the team responsible for the atomic bomb did worry that a nuclear fusion might start an uncontrolled chain reaction and destroy the world. They pushed forward anyway. After the war, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, and, more recently, the Center for the Study of Existential Risk regularly bring together scientists from around the world to assess the potentially cataclysmic dangers posed by new weapons and other sorts of research. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists continually monitors nuclear risk, climate change, and disruptive technologies. In Cat’s Cradle, however, Dr. Hoenikker comes up with ice-nine from tinkering around in his spare time, prompted merely by curiosity. As it happens, all three of his kids have a little crystal of it they carry around with them in small thermos bottles. And they share it around with a few others like sourdough starter. What could possibly go wrong?
I haven’t read enough about Vonnegut yet to understand his purpose in writing this book. I can say that I found it extraordinarily funny all the way through. Everyone categorizes it as dark humor (or gallows humour, as they say on the other side of the latent ice-nine reservoir). But I disagree. I think the book’s humor focuses on our need for meaning, not some innate death wish. If you want truly dark humor, try Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Almost every absurdity in Kubrick’s film drives the plot forward. But in Cat’s Cradle the craziness emerges from the characters and their situations, and plays no obvious role in the catastrophe that destroys earth. A married couple whom Jonah meets, an entrepreneur looking to set up a bicycle factory, a dictator and his beautiful daughter, a totally worthless island. Each of these elements provide Vonnegut great human material to poke fun at, but the fun doesn’t come across as particularly bitter.
I found Vonnegut’s descriptions of the ways we hope to discover or create meaning in an absurd world not just funny but also truthful and endearing. He achieves this trick of sympathetic mockery by having the narrator respond to someone else’s whacko remarks with encouraging affirmation. I’ll give a couple of examples. While trying to track down Frank Hoenikker, the eldest son of the scientist, Jonah talks to Jack, the owner of a model shop where Frank had once worked. Jack takes him into the basement of the shop and shows him a miniature town built on plywood.
The details were so exquisitely in scale, so cunningly textured and tinted, that it was unnecessary for me to squint in order to believe that the nation was real—the hills, the lakes, the rivers, the forests, and all else that good natives everywhere hold so dear.
And everywhere ran a spaghetti pattern of railroad tracks.
“Look at the doors of the houses,” said Jack reverently.
“Neat. Keen.”
“They’ve got real knobs on ‘em, and the knockers really work.”
“God.”
“You ask what kind of a boy Franklin Hoenikker was; he built this.” Jack choked up.
“All by himself?”
“Oh, I helped him out some, but anything I did was according to his plans. That kid was a genius.”
“How could anybody argue with you?”
“His kid brother was a midget, you know.”
“I know.”
“He did some of the soldering underneath.”
“It sure looks real.”
“It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t done overnight, either.”
“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
In this conversation, and many others like it, the narrator comes across as a non-judgmental observer of the absurd. Everyone he meets opens up and spreads their neuroses out for him to see. He just nods and makes encouraging noises, sometimes asking for more information, sometimes gasping in appreciation. But his willingness to uncritically accept and play along with what anyone told him got to be so funny after a while that I found myself laughing at things that wouldn’t have seemed funny twenty pages earlier.
One more example. Jonah goes to the town of Ilium to interview Dr. Hoenikker’s supervisor, Dr. Breed. When Breed learns that Jonah is doing research for a book, he starts to talk about the history of the town—like everyone does, believe me, who lives in a small town.
“There was a man they hanged here in 1782 who had murdered twenty-six people, I’ve often thought somebody ought to do a book about him sometime. George Minor Moakely. He sang a song on the scaffold He sang a song he’d compose for the occasion.”
“What was the song about?”
“You can find the words over at the Historical Society, if you’re really interested.”
“I just wondered about the general tone.”
“He wasn’t sorry about anything.”
“Some people are like that.”
“Think of it!” said Dr. Breed. “Twenty-six people he had on his conscience!”
“The mind reels,” I said.
I love the way Vonnegut chooses to ridicule institutions instead of people. He attacks organized religions, for instance, without scoffing at the deep need that gives rise to them. References to the fictional religion of Bokononism run through the book from the first page to the last. Two men had invented this religion as part of a plan to actually make the island of San Lorenzo into a Utopia, despite its total lack of useful resources. One of the men adopted the name of Bokonon and started to offer spiritual comfort in the midst of hopelessness. Religions gain power when forbidden, of course, so the other man ruled as a dictator and banned the practice of Bokononism under penalty of death. Thanks to this charade, Bokononism flourished underground, becoming sacred and subversive. Such a dynamic worked exceptionally well. The religion needed the illusion of persecution; the government needed the illusion of control. This stable fiction gave meaning to everyone’s otherwise dull and pointless lives.
Who can blame the believers? Any organized religion, even an obvious fabrication, helps to make sense out of randomness, as long as it comes complete with rituals and scriptures. Bokononists could accept anything that happened as somehow “meant to happen.” One of the poems contained in the Books of Bokonon puts the connection between human nature and religion succinctly.
Tiger got to hunt
Bird got to fly
Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?”
Tiger got to rest
Bird got to land
Man got to tell himself he understand.
Cat’s Cradle came out in 1963. In it, Vonnegut introduced certain new words into the language, words that I often heard from my counterculture friends in high school. I think I most often heard the terms karass and false karass.
We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass.
Some of my friends thought they knew all about their own karasses. But they missed the point of the concept. A karass involves unwittingly interacting with others to carry out God’s secret plan. But most people, in their lust for meaning, jump the gun and latch onto a false karass. Here we see the concept in full bloom.
Crosby asked me what my name was and what my business was. I told him, and his wife Hazel recognized my name as an Indiana name. She was from Indiana, too.
“My God,” she said, “are you a Hoosier?”
I admitted I was.
“I’m a Hoosier, too,” she crowed. “Nobody has to be ashamed of being a Hoosier.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I never knew anybody who was.”
“Hoosiers do all right. Lowe and I have been around the world twice, and everywhere we went we found Hoosiers in charge of everything.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“You know the manager of that new hotel in Istanbul?”
“No.”
“He’s a Hoosier. And the military-whatever-he-is in Tokyo …”
“Attaché,” said her husband.
“He’s a Hoosier,” said Hazel. “And the new Ambassador to Yugoslavia...”
“A Hoosier?” I asked.
Then, after rattling off a few more random examples, she concludes,
“I don’t know what it is about Hoosiers,” said Hazel, “but they’ve sure got something. If somebody was to make a list, they’d be amazed.”
“That’s true,” I said.
She grasped me firmly by the arm. “We Hoosiers got to stick together.”
“Right.”
“You call me Mom.”
“What?”
“Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, ‘You call me Mom.’”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let me hear you say it, “she urged.
“Mom?”
She smiled and let go of my arm. Some piece of clockwork had completed its cycle. My calling Hazel “Mom” had shut it off, and now Hazel was rewinding it for the next Hoosier to come along.
Hazel’s obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the way God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.
Maybe all the examples I’ve included just go to prove that Cat’s Cradle really does belong in the category of dark humor. I admit it makes us think about serious things we might rather not think about; but it does that and also it makes us laugh—at other things, like hobbies and small-town life and patriotism. That doesn’t relegate it to some dark-comedy box. Just because everyone dies all at once. It makes us laugh with Kurt Vonnegut humor, not with Douglas Adams humor or Stanley Kubrick humor.
I really don’t like labels anymore. I used to feel like fitting a book into a category would give me a better grip on it. But the more of these canonical works I read in the Decade Project, the more I realize they belong in the canon partly because they defy our efforts to limit them. They create their own rules, which they force us to grasp if we wish to appreciate them. They surprise us just when we think we have their number.
I’ll end with one of my favorite passages. This comes from a prayer in the Books of Bokonon
God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
§ § §
Speaking about absurdity and the human condition, next week I plan to take some Dramamine and read Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre. I read it in high school, and it played a huge role in the decision to dedicate my life to the study of philosophy. But I haven’t read it since then. I look forward to seeing how it affects me now.
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Works mentioned in this reflection
Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, directed by Stanley Kubrick
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an online and print magazine
King Lear, by William Shakespeare
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
This made my day.
Thank you- always