• 1 Tate, Andrew, Apocalyptic Fiction (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 1.

1Fall, failure, breakdown, collapse all come into play in apocalyptic fiction, and apocalyptic fiction has become a prevalent trend in science fiction over the past 20 years. As “Western civilization, according to such novels, appears to have abandoned its faith in a promised world of progress and continuing prosperity,”¹ the apocalypse has taken on many different forms of collapse, triggered either by a sudden change in our environment or a slow deterioration. Cat’s Cradle, a novel written by Kurt Vonnegut in 1963 in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, sets itself apart in that it articulates an instant disaster (the freezing of the whole world because of a substance called ice-nine) represented as the unavoidable conclusion of a set of apparently unrelated events, with a history of such events. The latest of those was the bombing of Hiroshima and the subsequent fear of a nuclear war. It thus outlines a trend in human history for self-destruction that it invites us to both laugh at and lament over.

• 2 Vonnegut, Kurt, Cat’s Cradle (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 9.

2The first-person narrator, Jonah, a journalist, is trying to collect information about what important people were doing the day the first atomic bomb hit Japan. This book he intends to entitle The Day the World Ended. He gets a letter from Newton Hoenikker, the youngest son of Felix Hoenikker, who participated in the creation of the bomb. In his letter, Newt tells him how on that day, his father uncharacteristically tried to play with him by dangling a cat’s cradle in front of his eyes and singing “when the wind blows, the cray-dull will rock. If the bow breaks, the cray-dull will fall. Down will come cray-dull, catsy, and all,”² a moment that will haunt him for the rest of his life, a metaphor of what has just happened as well as a premonition.

• 3 A fictitious or “mythical central New York community […] modeled after Schenectady, New York, where (...)

3Jonah will then interview Asa Breed, the head of a research laboratory in Ilium³ and one of the scientists supervising the creation of the bomb, who will add some information about Felix Hoenikker and will describe ice-nine, the aforementioned substance capable of freezing water at 130 °F.

• 4 Zins, Daniel, L., “Rescuing Science from Technocracy: Cat’s Cradle and the Play of Apocalypse,” Sci (...)

7The story is dotted with all kinds of falls and failures, either physical, ethical, or political. They are described in grotesque fashion, opposing and combining tragedy and slapstick, heroism and ridicule, utopia and dystopia, world-destroying power and petty interests. Each failure or fall foreshadows the final fall of ice-nine into the sea and the subsequent end of the world. Each element in the story of ice-nine participates in this dynamics of collapse showing, as Daniel L. Zins points out, that it is through our “deification of science and technology”⁴ that we will destroy the world. The apocalypse is caused by a chain of events that all derive from men’s blind faith in science and technology and their thoughtless use of them, something we can still witness today in our immoderate technological development. In Cat’s Cradle, Papa Monzano hires Franklin to have access to ice-nine, the supreme weapon and war deterrent that he will eventually use to end his pain. The plane that crashes into the castle was given to San Lorenzo by the American government as military assistance (to whom? one may wonder), but cannot be kept in working condition because San Lorenzo is too poor to even feed its population. This ironic treatment of great achievements or far-reaching goals, great men and overarching concepts appears most strikingly with Asa Breed, during his interview.

• 5 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 175.

8The first thing Dr. Breed tells the narrator about what he was doing the day of the Bomb was that “he had a W. C. Fields’ swang and a nose like a prize strawberry,” which turns a high-rank scientist into a clown and sets the tone to how science will be depicted thereafter. It reminds the reader of our simple human condition, that science seems unable to improve in that instance. End the world it can, but cure the common cold it is incapable of. The representation of science as a ridiculous human endeavor continues with Breed’s description of the Cape Cod Center as the Pompeii Room before it was called an Indian hut until “real Navajo Indians [...] told me that Navajos didn’t live in tepees.” It is of course quite telling that both similes refer to places and civilizations that were wiped out or closely so. History is one field of knowledge that, in Cat’s Cradle, provides no enlightenment: “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years? [...] Nothing.”⁵ The apocalypse towards which the story is inching is set against a background of repeated catastrophes that taught mankind nothing (no more fear of Nature than fear of our self-destructive streak).

• 6 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 19.

9The dangers of science are consistently downplayed by Dr. Breed. The anecdote of a bum demanding to be served a drink “on account of the world was coming to an end”⁶ the day Hiroshima was bombed gives Dr. Breed the inspiration for a cocktail he names “End of the World Delight.” Thus is the death of millions of people turned into a pleasurable experience. A few lines down, Breed is quoted mentioning a murderer who was hanged in Ilium and exclaiming: “Think of it! [...] twenty-six people he had on his conscience” after insisting that the criminal had expressed no regrets and had even written a song for the day of his execution.

• 7 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 29.

10The common points between these two passages (a song for a cocktail but the same indifference to the lives of others) remain invisible to Dr. Breed. His refusal to take into account the evil that can be done with science is so persistent as to become comical and the two trivial anecdotes participate in the grotesque that underlies the novel. During that same interview he adds that “new knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.”⁷ The metaphor arouses suspicion about the good of science as it becomes an article of commerce. And later events will show that scientific discoveries (namely ice-nine) have been used as a commodity, an interchangeable good used by the Hoenikker children to improve their personal lives, and by Papa Monzano to end his.

• 8 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 28.

11This puts into ironic perspective what Dr. Breed says about scientists being “men paid to increase knowledge, to work to no end but that.” Indeed, when Dr. Breed changes the subject to Felix Hoenikker, hoping to convince the narrator that scientists are not “heartless, conscienceless, narrow boobies, indifferent to the fate of the rest of the human race,”⁸ he clearly contradicts himself.

• 9 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 21.

14Like children, scientists play with atoms, with no sense of ethics or responsibility, and no memory of past disasters. Innocence here equals criminal indifference and when science is considered as mere play, when scientists focus on the immediate satisfaction of their own interests or curiosity, we have cause for worry. The tension that is here created between several levels and moments of the text can only be neutralized through laughter, at the character’s blindness to his own contradictions, at the narrator’s bland comments, at the description of Ilium’s killer by one of the fathers of the atomic bomb (“some people are like that”⁹), at the author’s creation of absurd situations in the realistic setting of a research lab. The grotesque here causes the collapse of commonly-shared representations of the world of science as its inconsistencies are brought forward.

• 10 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 19.

15Only Breed’s son, it seems, rejects the amorality of science and resigns because “anything a scientist worked on was sure to wind up as a weapon.”¹⁰ His father’s refusal to look at what might be done with this knowledge, in effect washing his hands of the consequences, is exactly the kind of attitude that will end the world. It is this dangerous unawareness that leads Hoenikker to accidentally kill himself with ice-nine, thus allowing his children to share the chip between them, bring it to San Lorenzo, and freeze the world.

• 11 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 41.
• 12 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 42.
• 13 Blamont, Jacques, Introduction au siècle des menaces (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004), 8.

16The author’s denunciation of “pure research” is made even more manifest when Jonah meets Mr. Knowles. Mr. Knowles is the elevator operator in Dr. Breed’s lab who grabs his buttocks “whenever he felt he’s made a point.”¹¹ He provides us with a new way to look at science and scientists, as he reflects on the word “research” while getting the elevator up when Miss Faust (a Christian girl working in Breed’s research lab) and Jonah want to go down (another instance of the author’s irony): “This here is a re-search laboratory. Re-search means look again, don’t it? Means they’re looking for something they found once and it got away somehow, and now they got to re-search for it! [...] What is it they’re trying to find again? Who lost what?”¹² And a few lines later, he adds in answer to a request by Miss Faust: “Only way we can go is down,” an ominous comment on research and its outcome. For Mr. Knowles, scientific research is not about improving human knowledge, i.e. moving forward, but about looking for something lost, moving back. The multiple inversions in this passage (up for down; references to the low body to highlight intellectual discussions) undermine science as a sense-making system and provide a new direction for research, one more ontological than technical. It is humankind, not science, which should be at the center (but not the top) of people’s preoccupations. Jacques Blamont, in Introduction au siècle des menaces, comes to a similar conclusion when he writes: “Et nous [les scientifiques] étions comme des prêtres, non pas occupés par le culte d’un dieu, mais séparés des vicissitudes et des angoisses d’en bas pour suivre un but ésotérique au regard de l’immense majorité des hommes.”13 This shows how relevant Vonnegut’s satire still is today.

• 14 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 38.
• 15 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 18.

17The limits of science are repeatedly pinpointed, once by Miss Faust who protests that science caring only about the truth could not “be enough for a person,”¹⁴ then by a prostitute, Sandra, as she quotes Dr. Breed saying that “if everybody would study science more, there wouldn’t be all the trouble there was [...].”¹⁵ Again, the irony prevalent in the novel plays on the reader’s knowledge of past scientific catastrophes as they clash with Dr. Breed’s belief that science could bring about some kind of utopian world. Reality and a form of idealism confront each other and outline the author’s moral judgment of science and scientists, by abolishing in the text the distance between what they could do and what they have done.

• 16 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 18.

18Dr. Breed has some intuition of the shortcomings of science, though, but at once reaffirms science’s omnipotence when he claims that “science was going to discover the basic secret of life some day.”¹⁶ The latter turns out to be a protein, as heard on the radio by the barman, a statement that starkly contrasts with the mythical meaning usually given to the phrase. And when science does have an impact on people’s lives, the author makes a point of putting it into ironic perspective. At the end of the novel, Mrs. Crosby, one of the American citizens who flew to San Lorenzo with Jonah, will make a list of the ways science (medical science) saved her life and that of her husband. But that happens minutes before the plane crashes and sends ice-nine into the sea. Irony consistently belittles all the great achievements of science.

• 17 Tally, Robert, Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography (New York: Bloomsbury (...)
• 18 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 26.

21If science fiction is said to try and build meaning out of crisis, to make sense of the world, such efforts become laughable in Cat’s Cradle, as “Vonnegut takes aim at those grand sense-making systems, particularly science and religion,” and shows that “their efforts to impose meaning in the world are misguided, even dangerous.”¹⁷ Two episodes clearly draw a parallel between the two systems of meaning. One is when Miss Faust is putting up decorations for Christmas. Dr. Breed warns her not to fall off the desk on which she had to climb because: “we’ve gone six months without a fatal accident! Don’t spoil it by falling off the desk.”¹⁸ Miss Faust replies: “[...] even if I did fall, Christmas angels would catch me.” Dr. Breed trivializes death in the research lab that saw the creation of ice-nine, leaving the reader to wonder what fatal accident that might have been. And Miss Faust displays a faith in angels that could prove mortal, or at least leg-breaking, displaying a similar disregard for reality in favor of ideology.

• 19 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 33.
• 20 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 89.

22The second episode is when Asa Breed explains to Jonah how ice-nine works as the girls from Dr. Breed’s laboratory rehearse their Christmas song: “The hopes and fears of all the years are here with us tonight,”¹⁹ giving the conversation a historical background as well as a religious one. This line from a Christmas carol originally said “are met in thee” and referred to the birth of Jesus, the Messiah, and humankind’s final judge. That the carol sung by the girls actually says “are here with us,” draws our attention to the place (the lab, not Bethlehem) where science could indeed bring on the apocalypse and also to humankind’s long fascination with global destruction as a necessary step towards a better world, the “clean slate” syndrome that can be found in so many science fiction works. In the book that Jonah reads about the history of San Lorenzo, the Catholic Church is pictured as the accomplice of the Sugar Company in exploiting the population: “the spiritual needs of the people were taken care of by a handful of butterball priests.”²⁰

• 21 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 118.
• 22 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 130.

23Science is no more than religion a grand concept with which to make sense of life. When Newt described how his father had dangled a cat’s cradle before his eyes, this event (the cat’s cradle, not the bombing) came to define his relation to representation: “No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands [...]. No damn cat and no damn cradle.”²¹ It comes as no surprise that when he hears the word “religion,” he says: “Religion? [...] See the cat? […] See the cradle?”²² Religion is a “bunch” of lies that keeps believers in dejected submission, passively waiting for a better life after death, while science brings mankind no comfort. Both have us live in delusion, which would be all right if it did not make us unhappy.

• 23 Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, on the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, ed. (...)
• 24 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 95.

26When McCabe and Johnson try to master destiny by implementing their utopia, they realize that reality cannot be bent to their will. On this island lost in the ocean mostly covered by mountains and circled with “cruel and useless stone needles,” “it was announced that the country’s total income would be divided among all adult persons in equal shares [...],” an echo of More’s Utopia, imagined as an inversion of 16^th century England.²³ But it appeared that “each share came to between six to seven dollars.”²⁴ Therefore they decided that “truth was the enemy of the people” and “Bokonon (Johnson) made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies” and Bokononism was outlawed. As the San Lorenzans’ lives could not be improved, McCabe and Johnson created “the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy saint in the jungle,” the former forever hunting down the latter without ever catching him.

• 25 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 73.
• 26 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 112.

27This balance between “good” and “evil” manages to keep the population busy and happy as it soon appears to the narrator that everyone on the island is a secret follower of Bokonon. From the collaboration of opposites that defines Bokononism contradictions emerge, that are not resolved as much as they are acknowledged. Inversions abound that reveal the impossible synthesis of opposites. Truth becomes evil and lies are holy and the body, not the soul, becomes the vector of faith. For one thing, Johnson found his inspiration for a necessary equilibrium between two opposing forces in Charles Atlas, who claimed that “muscles could be built [...] by simply pitting one set of muscles against another.”²⁵ It then only makes sense that one Bokononist ritual consists in pressing one’s feet’s soles against those of another person. When Jonah asks for an explanation, he is told that: “We Bokononists believe that it is impossible to be sole-to-sole with another person without loving the person, provided the feet of both persons are clean and nicely tended.”²⁶

• 27 Blamont, Introduction, 9.

28Resolution is not desirable (as it is impossible not to continue the lie), combining opposites is what keeps life going. So McCabe and Johnson organize the silent opposition between the people and the tyrant, making it so that the terror induced by the hook on which all supporters of Bokonon are to be hanged and the transgressions that take place every night as the San Lorenzans bring food and protection to Bokonon can together preserve the equilibrium without which life on San Lorenzo would be one of endless despair. Blamont describes something close in his Introduction when he mentions closed loops: “ce mécanisme […] aboutit à un équilibre où les paramètres qui décrivent l’état des choses s’écartent peu des valeurs moyennes.”27 Here, the balance between the powers-that-be and the population is maintained because the dictator is not really trying to capture the rebel saint and the population is not really that frightened of the hook.

• 28 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 162.

29This “dynamic tension” makes all notion of progress irrelevant as anything threatening the balance would put the whole state in danger of collapsing. When the tyrant dies, Jonah first intends to ask Bokonon to join his government, but then realizes that “a millennium would have to offer [...] things Bokonon and I were in no position to offer.”²⁸ By accepting to be the next president and coming to the conclusion that the hook has to be kept in place, Jonah preserves the order of things as it has been built on the island. Utopia turns out to be a dystopia that is in fact a utopia of sorts. There is no millennium because no utopian horizon can be reached. That inversion of the inversion that Utopia originally was does not so much cause a collapse in our cognitive system, as it subverts it and allows us to see beyond it, that is to see ourselves as nothing but mud with a conscience.

• 29 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 190.
• 30 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 170.
• 31 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 191.

31For Bokononists, God is an indifferent entity from whom no reason for creation is to be obtained. When He is asked about the purpose of His creation, God answers: “I leave it to you to think of one for all this.”²⁹ When Bokononists kill themselves they say “Now I will destroy the whole world,”³⁰ inverting the reality of death and substituting it for a self-centered perception of the world. But then man is just the mud which God gave life to and whose purpose is mainly to live and be grateful it does. It is also central to this religion that its Book describes itself as nothing but lies, that there is no meaning to life since “We do, doodley do [...] what we must, muddily must [...] until we bust, bodily bust.”³¹

• 32 Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 2.
• 33 Blamont, Introduction, 10-11.
• 34 Britten, “Alex, Beckett, Barthelme, and Vonnegut: Finding Hope in Meaninglessness” (MA thesis, Oreg (...)

35The only sense that can be made of one’s life is when we identify our karass, a team that does “God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing.”³² Connecting to others is essential to the novel as it is essential to Bokononism. The figure of the cat’s cradle signifies the importance of connection just as it reveals the arbitrariness of representation. There may be no cat and no cradle, but the string definitely holds things together, no matter how arbitrarily. The lies that constitute Bokononism are the string that holds Bokonon’s followers together in their belief in a religion that tells them not to believe. The San Lorenzans’ collective suicide occurs when they forget this for a fateful moment. Lies become truth, and the world ends. The core message of Bokononism fails and the utopia/dystopia Bokonon helped build collapses. The reasons that might end the world may be mostly identified with either all-out war, epidemics or the depletion of natural resources today,³³ but Vonnegut in his novel has found the root cause of all future collapse: mankind. But mankind can also save itself if they would only see “meaninglessness as an opportunity to take responsibility for [their] own existence.”³⁴

• 35 Moylan, Tom, Raffaella Baccolini, “Dystopia and Histories,” Dark Horizons (New York: Routledge, 200 (...)

36Like most dystopian authors, Vonnegut is “the canary in the coal mine.” His fiction is “a corrosive solvent to apply to the slick surface of reality.”³⁵ Here the construction of a paradoxical situation highlights the absurdity of life, doubled as it is by the use of grotesque figures.