Rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.
Pre-Modern Moralist as Post-Modern Cynic.
Resolving the Liar’s Paradox.
Burton Weltman
Summary: Rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.
This is an essay about rereading the novel Cat’s Cradle and trying to get it right this time.
I first read Cat’s Cradle almost sixty years ago, shortly after it was published in 1963. It is a satire of science, religion and social relations that largely takes place on the fictitious Caribbean Island of San Lorenzo. The book created a sensation in the United States and was widely considered a bible to the countercultural youth movement at that time. It remains popular today, especially among high school and college students. And there have been at least a half-dozen dramatizations of the book for movies, television and the stage, including a calypso musical.
The book focuses on four main characters: John, the book’s hapless narrator; Dr. Felix Hoenikker, an unrepentant inventor of the atomic bomb; Bokonon, a fanatical religious leader on San Lorenzo; and, Papa Monzano, the vicious dictator of the Island. The book has generally been read as a diatribe against the soullessness of science, the oppressiveness of government, and the boorishness of the bourgeoisie. It has also been seen as an invitation to postmodern nihilism.
The narrator is a lost soul seeking an answer to the question of whether there is meaning to life and the universe. He seemingly finds his answer – which is “No” – in the metaphor of a cat’s cradle. A cat’s cradle is a string sculpture made up of loops of string and the empty spaces in between. In describing a cat’s cradle, the narrator focuses on the empty spaces between the loops of string and concludes that the universe is similarly empty of meaning.
Conventional readings of the book follow the narrator’s conclusion and see universal meaningless as the book’s main message. Hoenikker’s complete indifference to human life and the horrible consequences of his scientific discoveries reinforce this conclusion. Bokonon, in turn, preaches a fatalistic nihilism that is also generally taken as a message of the book. The inhumane brutality of Monzano and the cruel dysfunction of his country are conventionally seen as Vonnegut’s dystopian description of the real world and his prediction for the future. This is the way that I read the book back in the 1960’s.
Upon recently rereading the book, I have, however, come to the conclusion that this conventional interpretation is a mistake. And it is a misreading that contributed, or at least reinforced, anti-science, anti-intellectual and anti-social attitudes among counter-culturalists, including me, that I now believe were wrongheaded during the 1960’s and have had harmful consequences to the present. This essay is an attempt to read the book in a way that I think makes better sense.
The essay makes three main points about the book.
First, I think that the metaphor of a cat’s cradle is best understood by focusing on the connections made by the strands and loops of string instead of the empty space between them. The metaphor speaks to the connections between people and their mutual aid, not the emptiness around them.
Second, I think that the book is best read as an example of the liar’s paradox. The narrator openly says that everything in the book is a pack of lies. Readers must not take literally what the narrator and characters say but should instead focus on what they do. That is the way to resolve the liar’s paradox.
Third, I think the book should be seen as a warning from the narrator, who is a self-described Jonah, and not as a dystopian description of reality or prediction for the future.
If you accept these three points, I think you come to a very different conclusion about the book’s attitudes toward science and society than the conventional reading, and it makes a difference.
What does it matter? It’s only a book.
A basic assumption of this essay is that it matters how people read and interpret books, including novels such as Cat’s Cradle. I believe that reading a book is an exercise in understanding the world. Understanding a novel such as Cat’s Cradle, for example, requires readers to get out of their own heads and their own lives, and to empathize with the book’s author and characters in order to see the world as they do. It requires readers to get past their prejudices and consider alternative views of things. And it requires them to get beyond the superficial surface of things in the book and look for potential underlying meanings.
If readers fail to do these things, and read merely to reinforce their prejudices, they are likely to get nothing from a book or, even worse, get reinforcement for misguided ideas and attitudes. In turn, I think people who misread books are more likely to misunderstand the world. I believe that is what happened to me and others who misread Cat’s Cradle.
Mea Culpa: Words have consequences.
Rejection of science. Scorn for intellectual elites. Distrust of government. Skepticism toward electoral politics. Support for tactics of social and political disruption, including violence. Advocacy of social and political divisions and divisiveness. Cynicism as a way of life.
Looks like a list of present-day rightwing attitudes and ideas. And it is. But it is also a list of attitudes and ideas that were common among members of the leftwing countercultural movement during the 1960’s and 1970’s. What goes around comes around, as the saying goes. Seeds that leftists sowed during those years have grown to threaten many, including me, who supported the countercultural movement then and who are now, in the name of sanity, in the position of opposing things we once espoused. It’s ironic.
And Kurt Vonnegut, himself a master of irony, looms ironically large in the origins of this mess. Vonnegut was a guru to the countercultural movement and his novel Cat’s Cradle was widely considered a bible to the movement. Alas, as happens with many gurus, he was, I have come to believe, misunderstood by many of his acolytes. As was Cat’s Cradle. And these misunderstandings have come home to plague us.
This essay is an attempt to correct those misunderstandings. In particular, I think that many readers of Cat’s Cradle misunderstood the symbolism of the cat’s cradle in the book. I think, also, that many readers failed to penetrate the liar’s paradox that lies at the heart of the novel. And I think that many readers took the book as a description of the real world and/or a prediction of the future, instead of a warning about what could occur if people didn’t change their ways. These were mistakes.
As a result, these readers, including me in my younger days, may ironically have fostered some of the idiotic ideas and attitudes we are opposing today. Because the rightwing idiocy of today seems in part to be an offshoot of the skepticism turned cynicism that was promoted by the countercultural movement and that we in the movement attributed to Vonnegut. Mea Culpa.
Background: The Times were Changing.
Much has been written about the decade of the 1960’s, perhaps overmuch. For purposes of this essay, the 1960’s was a particularly tumultuous time in American history. While it is true that every time is the best of times and the worst of times, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, the 1960’s were a time of unparalleled prosperity for Americans, and especially middle-class young people, and a time of disastrous social and political turmoil. Young people, especially white young people, enjoyed material lives better than the kings of old, but were also disheartened and even endangered by social turmoil and political dysfunction.
They were confronted with the hypocrisy of a government that was destroying Vietnam in the name of saving it and that supported dictators around the world in the name of freedom; mortified by a scientific community that produced atom bombs in the name of peace, and scientists who swore that cigarettes and asbestos were safe to inhale and that napalm was a benign defoliant; assaulted on all sides by advertising in which famous people proclaimed the virtues of useless and even harmful products; affronted by professors who worked for government agencies and corporations rationalizing all of these horrors.
To many young people, the contrasts and contradictions between material prosperity and social bankruptcy were stark. Facing a seemingly endless Vietnam War for which young men were being drafted and sent off to die as cannon fodder, recurring racial riots in American cities in which young black people were the main victims, multiple assassinations of liberal political leaders, and the ever-present danger of a nuclear holocaust, many young people despaired at the state of American society. A combination of guilt at being prosperous in the midst of poverty and fear of being killed in war drove many young people into political causes.
Many of them supported the counterculture and the political New Left in hopes of disestablishing what they called the Establishment – the politicians, professors and businessmen who they claimed were running and ruining the country. Full of the impatience characteristic of young people, and aiming but failing to make a quick difference in the world, the skeptics among them often turned into cynics, and dissent became defiance. Epater le bourgeoisie (stick it to the middle class), a mantra of the late nineteenth-century French countercultural movement, was adopted as a slogan of the mid twentieth-century American countercultural movement.
The question of authority loomed large in the movement and “Question authority” became another one of the movement’s mantras. But questioning authority and demanding that those in authority justify their right to power slid into rejecting authority whole cloth. Rejecting illegitimate authority and wrongheaded supposedly authoritative expertise turned into skepticism and then cynicism toward all authority and expertise. Authority was frequently conflated with authoritarianism. And as is so often the case, those who went to unreasonable extremes in disdaining authority and the authority of expertise got most of the media attention. And they cited Kurt Vonnegut in support of their position.
By the 1980’s, the countercultural movement had pretty much died, but many of its attitudes lived on, sometimes in unwanted ways. Echoes of the science skepticism, defiance of middle-class social norms, and rejection of pragmatic politics that counter-culturalists promoted can be heard in the science denial and political vigilantism of the rightwing today. It is an unfortunate irony that in the name of sanity and reasonableness we are having to fight back today against attitudes and positions promoted by the right-wing that we on the left originated back in the 1960’s. And irony of ironies, I think we even got Vonnegut wrong.
Cat’s Cradle: The Plot?
Kurt Vonnegut is commonly called a postmodernist writer, based largely on the seemingly random flips and flops of the plots of his novels and the seemingly cynical and dystopian views expressed by narrators and characters in his books. Finding a plot in his peripatetic works is often impossible and, in any case, often irrelevant. Cat’s Cradle was published a year before Marshall McLuhan proclaimed in his widely influential book Understanding Media (1964) that “the medium is the message.” Consistent with McLuhan’s thesis, Vonnegut’s disjointed method has generally been taken as conveying a sardonically anarchistic message. And the sardonically cynical views of his narrator have also been widely taken as Vonnegut’s message. I don’t agree.
Vonnegut has, in turn, often been accused of contributing to the dumbing down of American culture. Cat’s Cradle, like his other books, is made up of short chapters, vignettes full of easy witticisms, a few pages each, with people coming and going in circles for a couple of hundred pages. Based on this narrative method, Vonnegut has been accused of promoting the shortening of people’s attention spans. Critics compare and conflate his short chapters with the ten-minute segments of the typical television program, and with the instant and abbreviated messaging on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. I don’t agree.
Cat’s Cradle is, in fact, mildly amusing, easy to read, and it is easy to get taken in by its cynical surface. But I think that the book was actually a challenge to the notion that the medium is the message, and that reality is at bottom a hodgepodge of postmodern nihilism. I think Vonnegut adopted a postmodern form to deliver a premodern moral message. His chapters are epigrammatic and his characters hop-skip all over the world, but he challenged the reader to find the themes and messages that underlay the chaotic surface and to connect them in meaningful ways. Underneath the new-fangled postmodern form is some old-fashioned premodern moralism, a humanist message lurking in cynic’s garb.
What can be called the plot of Cat’s Cradle consists of the meanderings of the narrator whose name is John but who calls himself Jonah. He is a journalist in search of a story about the founders of the atom bomb and he has ostensibly written the book we are reading. John is initially focused on the life and times of a scientist named Felix Hoenikker, who was supposedly one of the inventors of the bomb.
Hoenikker is portrayed as a total nerd, completely wrapped up in his scientific work, divorced from humanity, and indifferent to the inhumane uses of his discoveries. His last invention is a chemical concoction called ice-nine which completely freezes anything into which it comes in contact. Released into the world, it would freeze everyone and everything. Hoenikker carelessly leaves some ice-nine to his three very weird children. Not a pretty picture of science and scientists.
After Hoenikker dies, the narrator wanders to the fictional Caribbean Island of San Lorenzo in search of Hoenikker’s kids. San Lorenzo is ruled by a vicious dictator named Papa Monzano, whose mortal enemy is a spiritual leader by the name of Bokonon. Bokonon teaches a philosophy of passivity in the face of inevitability and detachment from humanity. “As it was supposed to happen”is his response to anything that happens, especially things that most people would regret or mourn.[1] And “Nothing” is his answer to the question of the meaning of life.[2] Monzano is ostensibly dedicated to wiping out Bokononism, hoping to find and kill Bokonon, and to execute anyone who is found professing Bokonon’s religion.
This hostility of Monzano to Bokonon is seemingly a strange contradiction. You would think that Bokonon’s philosophy of passivity would be the perfect doctrine for sustaining a brutal dictatorship. And in the end, we find out that Monzono and Bokonon are secretly in cahoots and that Monzano has secretly been a supporter of Bokonon’s philosophy.[3] The supposed feud between Monzano and Bokonon had been manufactured by the two of them to stimulate public interest in Bokonon’s banned religion while also justifying Monzano’s brutal regime.
The story flips and flops around San Lorenzo and the narrator encounters there a disparate cast of discontented, disoriented and dismal people from many walks of life. Toward the end, the narrator is slated to become the President of the island and marry the most beautiful woman in the country, but then things fall completely apart when some ice-nine is unleashed and everything starts to freeze. In the midst of the mess, Monzano dies and Bokonon tells his followers to commit suicide, which almost all of them do[4]. It’s a Jonestown tragedy written some fifteen years before that event. The perils of passivity.
Except for Bokonon. He doesn’t commit suicide and merrily meanders away. In the end, the narrator and a few other foreigners in San Lorenzo are hanging on for dear life. Having previously acknowledged that he, too, is a Bokononist, the narrator apparently intends us to see his book as a Bokononist tract. But I don’t think we can. A true Boknonist would not write this book.
Cat’s Cradle and a Karass.
To a Bokononist, life is worthless, the universe is meaningless, and society is one big fraud. All is empty and emptiness is all. Focusing on the empty space in a cat’s cradle is a Bokononist point of view. The emptiness is a commentary on life, the universe and everything. But it isn’t the only way to see a cat’s cradle.
Cat’s cradle is a child’s game played with a piece of string. You wind the string around the fingers of your hands to form various shapes that could be considered a string sculpture and that looks like a cradle. Although it is a game played with little children, it is actually an exercise in a field of mathematics called topology. Topology is the study of the geometric properties and spatial relations which can be derived from a continuous and interconnected network, such as the shapes you can make with a piece of string.
Contriving a cat’s cradle requires a dexterous bit of handiwork and a lot of complicated twisting and turning of the string. The result is string and space forming a geometric configuration which is wide open to interpretation. What you make of it depends on how you look at it. It is like a gestalt in which you decide what is the figure and what is the ground. And what you make of a cat’s cradle depends in large part on whether you focus on the empty space formed between the segments of the string or on the connections made by the various turns of the string. Most people, including the characters in Cat’s Cradle, focus on the empty space. And they are unhappy with the result.
One of the characters in the book, Newt Hoenikker repeatedly complains that his father, the renowned nuclear physicist, insisted on playing the game with him and chortling when Newt was dumfounded at the emptiness of the result. A lot of twiddling with a piece of string, Newt complains, and, in the end, there was “No damn cat, no damn cradle.”[5] Newt grumbled that the game was a just nasty way for spiteful adults to make derisory fun of innocent children.
But I think Newt got it wrong, as do most readers of the book. I think Vonnegut intended us to focus on the connections made by the string, not on the empty space. The connections are a metaphor for social relations, a message that we are all connected and the connections are what counts. “Only connect,” famously opined E.M. Forster, and I think that is the point of the book. It is a premodern moral in postmodern garb. But it is visible only to those who have eyes to see it. Like most readers, I did not see it when I first read the book, but I think I do now.
It is a message that is easily missed since Bokonon, whose philosophy runs through the book, disparages making connections among people. In speaking about social relations, Bokonon distinguishes between what he calls a karass and a granfalloon.[6] A karass is a group of people who, unknown to themselves, are linked together in some obscure way to fulfill some obscure purpose of God. The people have no idea who is in their group and what the purpose of the group is. It is a mystery, and it is a waste of time and effort to try to figure it out.
As such, Bokonon says, people should just go through their lives as separate individuals without consciously linking up with or caring about anyone else. If people somehow become part of a karass and do God’s work, so be it, even though they don’t know it. In turn, if they don’t become part of a karass, so be it, because they won’t know it anyway, and they should just get on with their meaningless lives. “Whatever…,” as young people today might say.
A granfalloon is a network of people who think they are a karass but they aren’t, and who consciously try to do God’s good work, but don’t. According to Bokonon, if you try to make connections with others and make your life meaningful, it will inevitably be foolish, fraudulent and a failure. So, don’t try. The moral of Bokonon’s philosophy is that if you try to do good work, you won’t. If you don’t try to do good work, you might do it anyway, albeit incidentally. In any case, there is no sense in trying. It is a fool’s world and we are all fools in one way or another. All will be as it will be, so just let it be.
That is what Bokonon says. But it is not what he does. Bokonon is neither passive nor private. He is personally and publicly very active, even as he supposedly tries to hide from the dictator Monzano. Bokonon fervently writes books and goes around preaching. And he courts converts who are linked to him and to each other, and who consciously form a group of Bokononists, a grouping that should be considered a granfalloon, a false grouping, according to his philosophy.
The contradiction between what is said and what is done in the book includes the narrator. Even as John claims to be a Bokononist, he is writing a book that he expects people to read and, thereby, become linked to him and to each other as readers of his book. And despite his professions of Bokononist misanthropy, he goes around helping everyone he meets. This contradiction between what is being said and what is being done is at the core of the liar’s paradox that is, in turn, at the core of the novel.
Bokononism and the Liar’s Paradox.
No sooner do we open Cat’s Cradle than we see on the dedication page the warning that “Nothing in this book is true.”[7] It is commonplace in works of fiction for the author or the publisher to insert a liability disclaimer to the effect that nothing in the book is intended to reflect on any real person. The disclaimer is a protection against suits for libel. Since Cat’s Cradle is a work of fiction, and a satirical work at that, we might expect a disclaimer of this sort in the book.
But in Cat’s Cradle, this statement is no mere liability disclaimer. The idea that everything is a lie is like a mantra that is repeated by characters throughout the book. The narrator tells us, for example, that “The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this: ‘All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.’”[8] And these statements by the narrator and his mentor Bokonon place readers squarely in the middle of the liar’s paradox/ What are we to believe?
The liar’s paradox is an ancient Greek conundrum. A man says that he always lies and that everything he says is a lie. So, are we to believe him? If we do, then we are, in effect, contradicting him and saying that not everything he says is a lie. If we don’t believe him, then we are saying that he is, in fact, a liar but we can’t believe him when he says he is a liar. We are trapped in a contradiction and foiled at every turn. What are we to do? The solution, I suggest, is not to rely on what the man says but on what he does. And this is, I think, a key to understanding Cat’s Cradle: Look at what the author, the narrator and the characters do.
While ostensibly adhering to Bokonon’s misanthropic philosophy of isolationism, the narrator is continually trying to make connections with people. He makes friends and helps people wherever he goes. His prosocial actions are a complete contradiction of his supposed antisocial beliefs. And they save his life.
At the end of the book, the narrator bands together with a group of unlikely allies, all of them very different from each other and himself, to save themselves and try to make their way in a world devastated by ice-nine. Based on these characters’ actions, the message of the book seems, therefore, to be proactive and prosocial rather than passive and antisocial. The book seems to be telling us to make connections with people, trust people, and cooperate with others. Very different from the Bokononist cynicism and nihilism that most readers take from the book.
But maybe not. Given that the book is supposedly a pack of lies, can we believe that the narrator’s description of these actions is true? Are we still caught in the liar’s paradox? I think not. And I think that the metaphor of the cat’s cradle shows the way.
The story is structured like a cat’s cradle with the deeds as the strings and the ideas as the empty spaces. The disclaimers that everything in the book is lies refers to the words being spoken and the ideas being promulgated, not the deeds being described. The deeds provide the context and the framework for the characters’ words. The narrator provides the doings in the story as merely a set-up for the speeches. What the narrator and the other characters say is essentially empty of truth. But we readers can rely on the accuracy of the things the characters did as background to what they said.
A cat’s cradle can be seen as a metaphor of mutual aid. Each twist of a cat’s cradle depends on the others. If one connection fails, all of them fail. During the course of the book, the narrator hooks up with a disparate and often desperate group of people, some of them quite obnoxious and unappealing, but who end up supporting each other in the ice-nine crisis that ends the book. It is this cooperation, rather than the cynical sayings of Bokonon, that I think is the underlying message of the book. The book is an overlay of cynicism with compassion underneath. I think this overlay/underlay aspect of the book may account for much of its popularity. The book gives readers a chance to sneer at the world and feel superior to the dummkopfs around them, but it still leaves readers with a feeling that help is at hand.
An action speaks louder than a thousand words, as the saying might go. The book is like a gestalt and the reader has to decide whether to focus on the words as the foreground with the deeds as background or the deeds as the foreground with the words as background. Like the strings and spaces of a cat’s cradle. And, I think that the underlying message spoken by the actions of the narrator and his colleagues in Cat’s Cradle is that caring, connecting and cooperating with others is the means and meaning of life. The book seems, thereby, to be a warning against the passivity, misanthropy, and nihilism that seem to be spreading like ice-nine in our society, freezing the very sources of our humanity.
Jonah and the Warning.
The conventional reading of Cat’s Cradle is that the book is a dystopian description and prediction of the future. We are like the horrible people in the book, and we are heading toward some facsimile of the book’s horrible events. “We have met the enemy and they are us,” concluded the cartoon character Pogo after searching near and far for the source of the world’s problems. There is a fatalism in this reading of the book that parallels Bokonon’s nihilistic philosophy. I don’t agree. I think the book was intended as a warning, not a prediction. We are called upon to change our ways. And there is room for hope.
In the first words of the book, the narrator admonishes us to “Call me Jonah.”[9] His actual name is John, but his admonition is a parody of the opening lines of Moby Dick, in which the narrator says to “Call me Ishmael.” Ishmael in the Bible was the spurned first son of Abraham. He was known as a messenger and a prophet in his own right, that is, as someone who brings warnings from God to shape up or be shipped out. In telling us to call him Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick is seemingly alerting us that he is bringing us a warning in the form of the story in the book.
Jonah in the Bible plays a similar role to Ishmael. He was a messenger from God who had been sent to warn the people of Nineveh to change their evil ways or face destruction. Afraid that the citizens of Nineveh would attack him for bringing such ill tidings, Jonah tried to run away. He disguised himself and sailed as a passenger on a ship. But you can’t run or hide from God, and the ship was hit with a terrible storm. Unable to escape the storm, the sailors decided that Jonah was to blame, that he was a magnet for misfortune, so they threw him overboard. At which point, he was swallowed by a big fish.
Jonah eventually repented of his disobedience, escaped from the fish, went back to Nineveh, and delivered God’s warning to the people. Hearing the word of God, the citizens of Nineveh almost immediately repented of their evil ways and became righteous. There are many potential morals to the story of Jonah, but one of them is that if you warn people of impending doom, they might actually change their damned ways. There is hope.
Hope is not the moral that the narrator of Cat’s Cradle derives from the Jonah story. To the contrary. In claiming to be a Jonah, the narrator focuses on how he has throughout his life been a magnet for misfortune. He does not seem to get the point that Jonah’s misfortunes were the result of his failing to deliver God’s warning to Nineveh and to care for the fate of Nineveh’s citizens. And he similarly does not seem to get the point of his role in Cat’s Cradle, the book he is writing. But we can see the point, if we look.
The key to the story of Jonah was that he was supposed to give a warning. I think that is also the key to the story of the narrator in Cat’s Cradle. It is not merely that Jonah and John were magnets for misfortune. It is that they were sent to warn people to change their ways, in John’s case to infuse their lives with humane caring. In this view, science need not be soulless and society need not be oppressive, if they are based on caring.
The story in Cat’s Cradle is not intended to mirror reality, either past, present or future. That is evident in the fantastic nature and science-fiction aspects of much of the story. But it is also evident in the admission, even repeated insistence, that the story is a pack of lies. As a pack of lies, the story is a metaphorical warning against the sorts of horrors that could be in store for us if we don’t change our ways.
In disguising his warning in satire and science fiction, the author/narrator perhaps hoped he might be spared the wrath of his readers (Jonah should have thought of that strategy). But maybe he also hoped that readers might be induced or seduced into thinking about what is being said, and might conclude that the book is not about sneering but about caring.
In the last lines of the book, after ice-nine has killed off most of the people and other living things, the narrator runs across Bokonon wandering around the countryside. Bokonon says that if he were younger, he would climb the highest mountain and commit suicide while giving the finger to God. It is an adolescent gesture of defiance, the sort of sneering bravado that is likely to appeal to adolescent readers of Cat’s Cradle. But the key word in Bokonon’s statement is “if.” If he were younger, he would die and defy God. But he is not younger and so he has no intention of actually killing himself and making his meaningless gesture. It is just the last of Bokonon’s cynical lies. And it is the last piece of evidence that we readers should not take him or his sneering philosophy seriously.
Despite having supposedly adopted Bokonon’s fatalistic philosophy, the narrator chose to compose this book and offer it as a warning to us. If he believed that everything was predetermined as Bokonon says, and that everything points to the inevitable doom of humankind, the narrator wouldn’t have written the book and left it for us to read. It’s only if he cared for us, and because he cared for us, his readers, and had hope that we might heed his warning and change our ways, that he would bother and did bother.
Beyond Cynicism: Seeing through a glass half-full.
The conventional interpretation of Cat’s Cradle is that it is a darkly cynical book. Semi science fiction, semi fantasy, semi magic realism, and thoroughly dystopian. Support for the typical adolescent’s discovery that adults are fallible, and that people are not what they seem to be, or try to seem to be. Easy to conclude that the adult world is a fraud, the game is fixed, everything is predetermined, and we are powerless to make things better. Cynicism logically follows.
But cynicism is an elitest attitude. The cynical think of themselves as superior to the masses of people who accept the stupidities of society and conventionality. Cynicism is also pathetic. Cynics wallow in self-pity, and think of themselves as especially put upon. Woe is me to be stuck in such a stupid world with such stupid people. Not a very democratic attitude. And a contradiction of the equal rights, participatory democracy and “power to the people” that many young progressives promoted during the 1960’s.
I think that Cat’s Cradle is a test for those who think of themselves as politically and socially enlightened. The cynical surface of the book is a trap for self-styled progressives who say they are for the people but who really think of themselves as above the people. Those who see the book in solely cynical terms, and don’t see the underlying moralism, are falling into the trap. I think Vonnegut is subtly mocking them as much as he is overtly mocking the bigoted, ignorant yahoos who promote racism, sexism, and all the other evils he excoriates.
I think that Vonnegut uses cynicism as a pose that we readers are expected to identify with but then see through. Cat’s Cradle is postmodernist cynical and hopeless on the surface but pre-modernist moralistic and hopeful underneath. The hopefulness is something you have to look for, and you have to be hopeful yourself in order to find it. Like faith, which is a sentiment that can overcome doubt, hope is a feeling that can overcome pessimism. Just as you cannot really have faith without first having doubts – there is no need for faith if you don’t have any doubts – you cannot have hope without first feeling pessimistic.
And I think that the underlying sentimentality in Cat’s Cradle is one of the reasons the book was so popular among young people when it was first published and continues to be popular today. Young people can identify with the cynical surface while, at the same time, be comforted by the underlying moralism, even if they don’t realize it. Like Mark Twain, with whom Vonnegut is often compared, Vonnegut’s work got darker as he got older. But in Cat’s Cradle, which is one of his earliest books, light shines through if you open your eyes to see it.
Vladimir Nabokov supposedly claimed that there is no such thing as reading, only rereading. Reading mainly glides along the surface of a book. Rereading is a way of getting beneath the surface. I think that rereading can take at least two different forms. The first is to actually read through the book a second time. A second is to take notes, make annotations, raise issues, ask questions, propose counter arguments, and generally think thoroughly about the book while you are reading it and after you have finished it. The point is to get beneath the surface of the book.
I think that in Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut was challenging readers to get beneath the surface of his glib narrative, to see that caring and not cynicism was the core message of the book. Like a lot of other people, I failed to recognize, let alone meet, that challenge when I first read the book. That’s too bad. It made a difference. I think that I recognize it this time. Better late than never.
BW 11/22
[1] Kurt Vonnegut. Cat’s Cradle. New York: Dial Press Paperbacks, 1963. P. 100.
[2] P. 256
[3] Pp. 186, 229-230
[4] P.283.
[5] Pp.21, 178.
[6] Pp. 13, 106.
[7] Dedication page.
[8] P. 16.
[9] P.11
historyaschoice 