The Sirens of Titan
Its often that we are perplexed by the basic questions of life like free will, purpose and meaning of life. We tend to delve deeper to find answers and sometimes instead of getting answers, the pile of questions gets heavy. Fiction is a beautiful way to present speculations about these aspects in a way that we know the fabrication but when we remove the layers, we find the tangible assumptions lying there. Have you ever wondered that what we consider Free Will might be someone’s predefined structure to satisfy a petty purpose? The book ‘The sirens of Titan’ reflects on this question along with the wonderful imagination and deep satire that is prevalent throughout the book.
The story outlines the purpose of human history and free will by the help of imagination. It includes themes like Martian invasion, the travel between Mars, Mercury, Earth, Titan(Saturn’s biggest moon) and Tralfadamore (imagined by author), chrono-synclastic infundibulum, the church of God the utterly different (a new religion), materialization, luck, etc. An essence of the novel can be understood from here https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-sirens-of-titan/summary
It can be a common thinking that fiction doesn’t serve much in terms of adding knowledge. Despite that, the biggest takeaway from fiction is a way of perception about things. Some of the new fascinating concepts that I have encountered in this book are:
1. Chrono-synclastic Infundibulum: This is an imaginative place in space where everything and everyone is right. Never have I imagined that one can think of a place where a space explorer would come in contact and become a wave phenomenon, continuing as a spiral in the galaxy and then come to human form only on planets that intersect with the spiral. Though Vonnegut is genius, but I can not resist thinking what made him think about this concept. Did he observe how we human beings have so concrete beliefs and how two distinct opinions at 180 degrees can curve to intersect at one point or cancel each other completely? Did he co-related humans with photons to present a wave and particle phenomenon?
2. Tralfamadore : It is a fictional planet in a distant galaxy where the species are robots unlike humans. Salo, a robot is stuck on Titan from millenium because of a missing part of his spaceship. That replacement part is the good-luck piece of a boy on Earth and the complete purpose of human history is controlled and deliberately laid for getting this replacement part back by Salo eventually. This fictional concept intrigues questions about the purpose of human history, whether what we consider free will is just an illusion shown to us. As quoted in this line in the book “Everything that has ever been will always be, and that which ever will be has always been”.
3. The church of God the utterly indifferent : This is a new religion formed by Winston Niles Rumfoord(one of the central characters of the story) by the time Malachi Constant returned on Earth. Could you read this religion’s name without sensing the satire Vonnegut wanted to convey? This theology of the Weakness of God rejects the idea of God as the all-powerful fixer of the universe. Its ethical import is that all of us are engaged in a search for God, and that the only help we have in this search comes from our fellow human beings. This is essentially Vonnegut’s Titanic Theology. “The two chief teachings of this religion are these: Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.” God does not interfere in human affairs; he is what in traditional theology is called ‘apathetic’. He is not affected one iota by human action. In short “God Does Not Care.” Whatever morality there is in human life comes not from His interests or the possible benefits from pleasing Him, but from the necessity for the community life of human beings.
4. The Martian war : When we think about wars, images of the times of world war I , II , The Great Depression comes in mind. But this imaginative war is perhaps the only one that has united all the Earthlings together. As it is a war fabricated between the people of Mars and Earth, that is an interplanetary war. Vonnegut has carefully presented the invasion of Mars, who survives, eventually to give us a sense of how everything is scripted and the last thing to be left with us is to consider What is to be done just to know that everything has already been done. One funny thing on Mars was the training of soldiers, their march “Rented a tent, rented a tent ”, the hospital there set for erasing their memory repetitively. This is hostile and funny at the same time.
5. The turn of fate : Its actually funny how the central character Malachi Constant’s father builds up his fortune. Sitting on the verge of broke state, in a room that has nothing but The Bible, he reads the first sentence of Bible and decides to invest in the organizations with the first two initials of every word of that sentence. He keeps getting richer just by this absurd luck. To my mind, it seems a teasing of money making it look so small. Constant inherits the built up fortune from his father and he is the richest man of America. But his fate eventually takes back his luck and he becomes a victim of a series of accidents as he defines it. He is meant to travel from Earth to Mars to Mercury to Earth to Titan and finally to Earth so that he gets married somewhere in his journey and their son will return the good luck piece to the tralfamadorian.
6. The quotes : There are some books that make you feel even if it was not for the story, you would have settled just for the beautiful quotes. Some of my favourites are :
“The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.”
“. . . but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.”
“That is the first thing I know for sure: (1.) If the questions don’t make sense, neither will the answers.”
“The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the center post of the cabin — one labeled on and one labeled off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of the Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.”
“Take care of the people, and god almighty will take care of himself.”
