Apocalypse -- what now? Cat's Cradle and The Road

I read Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel, Cat's Cradle, shortly after finishing another post-apocalyptic novel, The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This post is mostly about Vonnegut's book, but I'll say a little about The Road near the end.

I agree with John Self that Cat's Cradle is 'a masterpiece of Vonnegut's seductive, clear-eyed whimsy.' In part, the book is a hilarious send-up of irresponsible scientists. Especially funny were the early descriptions of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, inventor of the A-bomb and ice-nine. Vonnegut there launches a masterful satire of the supposedly innocent and harmless scientist who, full of child-like curiosity, tries to evade the adult burden of moral responsibility by not inquiring into the potential applications of his inventions. In the case of Dr. Hoenikker, the evasion appears to have been complete -- the narrator finds Hoenikker's old lab to be full of childish, dime-store toys.

The figure of the irresponsible tinkerer is later skewered in the form of Dr. Hoenikker's older son, Franklin Hoenikker. Though not really a scientist, Frank is adept at technical work. He declines an offer of political power in San Lorenzo (an impoverished island republic) in order to oversee the island's technical operations. This prompts the narrator to muse about the ‘abrupt abdication of Frank from all human affairs’ (ch. 100). Later, a character says, ‘My agreeing to be boss had freed Frank to do what he wanted to do more than anything else, to do what his father had done: to receive honors and creature comforts while escaping human responsibilities.’ (ch. 100) Like his father before him (and like the island's ex-Nazi physician), Frank aspires to be an amoral tool at the disposal of the powers that be -- whatever those powers may be.

Vonnegut extends his critique beyond scientists to science itself. His message seems to be that while science is indeed the only road to knowledge, it cannot yield truths of a moral or spiritual nature. Indeed, one might add that it is in the very nature of science not even to address such matters, for its empirical methods require dispassionate, value-neutral inquiry, and it is hard to see how moral or spiritual questions can even be broached, let alone resolved, in this manner.

This interpretation of Vonnegut is borne out by at least a couple of passages in Cat's Cradle.

First, in a bar-room exchange early in the story, a prominent scientist is reported to have said that science can end our troubles and 'discover the basic secret of life.' (ch. 11) The bartender adds that according to the local newspaper, scientists have now discovered this secret. But the discovery is not the grand revelation that we were led to expect. After some effort in trying to recall the details of the news report, the bartender recalls that the secret is 'protein'.

Second, near the end of the book, Frank's entomological inquiries prompt the narrator's recollection of a passage from The Books of Bokonon (a religious text), which runs as follows:

‘Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. … He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.’ (ch. 124)

The suggestion is that while Frank may indeed 'learn something', his inquiries won't yield any real wisdom (or moral-spiritual knowledge).

Science is thus limited, Vonnegut implies, but remains the only road to knowledge. Nothing else fills the epistemic void that it leaves; for nothing, religion included, can answer truthfully the questions from which science shies away. Bokononism, the religion outlined in the novel, acknowledges this with its paradoxical claim that Bokononism itself is 'shameless lies.' (ch. 4; cf. ch. 78 and ch. 98)

Nevertheless, Vonnegut apparently sees religion as performing a valuable function as long as it is humble enough to acknowledge the paradoxical and distorting nature of its own proclamations (which leads to some vexing questions about the status of the above Bokononist quotation). It's all well and good to say with Wittgenstein, 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,' but (Vonnegut seems to say) whereof one cannot but speak, thereof one may hold forth even if only in a self-consciously paradoxical fashion.

In support of this last interpretation of Vonnegut, he once pointed out that back when Marx dubbed religion the opiate of the masses, opium was generally the only available pain-killer; so Marx's idea might today be better expressed by calling religion the Aspirin of the masses. And what's wrong with Aspirin? Here’s another video, this one of Vonnegut talking specifically about Cat’s Cradle.

I admire Cormac McCarthy's The Road for the slow, cumulative power of its melancholy refrain, its litany of desolation. Its bleak and depressing tone is poles apart from the light-hearted humour of Cat's Cradle. What is odd about this is that Cat's Cradle is easily the more pessimistic work. Its message is that, stuck in its own depravity, the human race has no long-term prospects. By contrast, hope hangs on with astonishing tenacity right to the end of The Road. Its conclusion is ambiguous. Certainly there's no guarantee that things will go well, but at least that's a possibility.

Bartleby

I hadn't read Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener until just recently. My Yankee wife tells me it's a standard in American high-school English classes. I can see why. Melville's tale is puzzling in a provocative way and rich in the kind of symbolism that my high-school English teachers loved. It cries out for interpretation.

A Wall Street lawyer hires the eponymous character to work as a scrivener. Poor Bartleby seems trapped in the soul-killing monotony of his job, a job that leads a co-worker to get soused every day at lunch. After a while, Bartleby starts refusing his assigned work, but in turning away from these tasks he doesn’t turn to doing anything else. His rebellion is passive – staring at the brick walls that enclose him and the others on Wall Street, he becomes a standing rebuke of superficial ‘busy-ness’, a rebuke from which his employer eventually flees.

I appreciated this story more after reading Mordecai Marcus’ interpretation of it (‘Melville’s Bartleby as a Psychological Double’, College English 23 [1962]: 365-8). Marcus sees Bartleby as his employer’s ‘double’. That is, this recalcitrant worker is a part of the lawyer’s own psyche, one that suffers neglect in the urban office. Something essential to its sustenance is missing. Obdurate in the face of monetary enticements, this increasingly spectral other won't fit its assigned slot in the urban workplace. It belongs to nature, the lawyer’s own nature, and is marooned in 'unnature' (Wall Street). Naturally, it withers in this world of material plenty (as Bartleby starves in a place where food is abundant).

The story reminds me of Theodore Roethke's poem 'Dolor', with its lines about 'the inexorable sadness of pencils' and 'desolation in immaculate public places'.

Quotation Collage -- Agency

Ian McEwan: "She bent her finger and then straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending... . And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind." (Atonement, pp. 35-6)

Schopenhauer: "I say that between the act of will and the bodily action there is no causal connection whatever; on the contrary, the two are directly one and the same thing perceived in a double way, namely in self-consciousness or the inner sense as an act of will, and simultaneously in external brain-perception as bodily action." (The Fourfold Root, pp. 114-15)

Spinoza: "So also a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways." (Ethics, Book II, proposition 7, scholium)

Ludwig Wittgenstein: "My expression came from my thinking of willing as a sort of producing -- not, however, as a case of causation, but -- I should like to say -- as a direct, non-causal producing. And the basis of this idea is our imagining that the causal nexus is the connexion of two machine parts by means of a mechanism, say a train of cog-wheels." (Zettel sect. 580; cf. 613 of the Investigations)

Justice Deferred

Heinrich von Kleist wrote Michael Kohlhaas in 1811. I read the translation published in Melville House's 'Art of the Novella' series.

In sixteenth-century Brandenburg, a horse dealer named Michael Kohlhaas sets out for business in neighboring Saxony (where he maintains a second home). At the border, a crooked knight seizes two of his horses. It later turns out that the horses were worked almost to death and that one of Kohlhaas's servants was harassed and abused by the knight's men.

The rest of the story is about Kohlhaas's quest for justice from the local potentate, the Elector of Saxony. Justice is repeatedly denied since the crooked knight has friends in high places. Kohlhaas rebels against the state by forming his own army, which attacks several Saxon towns.*

One interesting idea in the story concerns the role of the state. The state exists to provide justice to its inhabitants, from which it follows (according to one of the Elector's counselors) that by denying justice to Kohlhaas they have expelled him from the state, so that he is no longer subject to its laws; as a result, he's not so much a criminal as a foreign power making war against their state.

The tale at times comes across as a simple revenge story with Kohlhaas refusing to accept the legal outcome and forgive his enemies (as his wife and Martin Luther urged him to do). At other times, though, the story seems to present a clash between two laws: the human law that derives from the ruler and a higher, natural law that rulers ignore at their peril. This is the law that Kohlhaas, cast into the state of nature, aims to uphold.

In the end, it is Kohlhaas' willingness to die for this law that gives him more power than the Saxon prince, who fears for his own fate.

*Kleist thoroughly vilifies the Saxons, who in his own day were allied with Napoleon against his beloved Prussia.

Update (Sept. 26, 2009): Here's a stimulating reflection on Kohlhaas, the Grimms, etc. by Waggish.