SEMIOPUNK (13)

By: Joshua Glenn
February 17, 2024

An irregular, ongoing series of posts dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.”

CAT’S CRADLE

In the 1974 essay collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfallons (the title of which is composed of invented words from his 1963 sf novel Cat’s Cradle), Kurt Vonnegut writes admiringly about “the mysterious Madame Blavatsky,” the founder and leading theoretician of Theosophy. Was she a bit of a charlatan? That’s OK! Vonnegut insists.

Blavatsky’s genius, Vonnegut would have us understand, lies in her radical criticism of both the shortcomings of organized religion and the cold empiricism of science. For the benefit of those wide-awake few who find themselves unhappy with religious orthodoxies (but not necessarily atheistic) and who approve of science’s quest for knowledge (but disapprove of science’s materialist orthodoxies), Blavatsky offered an imaginative, engaging alternative. If she “garbled or invented” some of the ancient wisdom she claimed to have surfaced in her studies, that’s fine — “she was doing no worse than other teachers have done.” He declares himself “charmed and amused” by Blavatsky’s entire project.

This more or less sums up the project of Cat’s Cradle, a satirical work of speculative fiction targeting scientific and religious orthodoxies alike.

The story is narrated by John, a journalist interviewing the children of Felix Hoenikker, a (fictional) physicist who’d helped develop the atomic bomb. Driven by scientific zeal, and without any ethical consideration for possible consequences, it seems that Hoenikker invented for the US military a miraculous substance known as “ice-nine,” which upon contact with liquid water transforms it into ice. If ice-nine should come into contact with one of the world’s oceans, apocalyptic climate change will result. Although the formula for “ice-nine” was perfected, supposedly no material samples of this insanely deadly substance were ever produced…. The Hoenikker children, however, each inherited a sample of ice-nine.

John accompanies Hoenikker’s son Franklin to a (fictional) Caribbean island, San Lorenzo. En route there, he also meets Hoenikker’s children Angela and Newt. And he discovers Bokononism, a utopian religious movement combining irreverent observations about life and God’s will with eccentric, harmless rituals. Bokonon, born Lionel Boyd Johnson, is a utopia-minded former soldier who years earlier had washed up on San Lorenzo — and decided to offer its hopeless, helpless, poverty- and disease-ridden inhabitants the comfort of an invented religion. (Bokonon is a harmless version of L. Ron Hubbard; he also makes us think of Vonnegut himself — a gentle, absurdist trickster.) The precepts of Bokononism are scattered throughout the story; John becomes a convert.

Religion’s untruths offer comfort and hope — that’s harmless! But if you actually believe in them — that’s harmful. Vonnegut’s Blavatskyan alternative is the concept of foma — harmless untruths. Bokonon’s absurdist, cynical-yet-kindly commandment to Bokononists: “Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”

A semiotic schema — not to mention the signs and codes that make up it various nodes — is a useful untruth. As any semiotician will tell you. We surface and dimensionalize foma; the tricky part is persuading clients not to mistake the project output that we’ve delivered for nonsense, on the one hand, or for objective data on the other. Unfortunately, all too often they’ve internalized this unhelpful dichotomy. It seems to be what’s taught in business school.

Am I saying that commercial semioticians are Blavatskyan frauds? By no means — though some of the more guru-like marketing consultants may be. I’m looking at you, Clotaire Rapaille. But we are Bokononists, in a way.

Speaking of the semiotic schema, a “cat’s cradle” is a string figure, supposedly depicting various real-world phenomena, created via an ancient children’s folk game. Vonnegut uses this figure as a homely metaphor for humankind’s semiotic proclivity to discover meaning in the unlikeliest of places (including in places where there is, in fact, no meaning). Humans are remarkably ingenious, creative, imaginative — that’s a good thing! Playful experimentation — Felix Hoenikker’s specialty — is a good thing. But when the religious or scientific myths (in Barthes’ usage) that we’ve cleverly invented come to seem natural, and when our child-like playfulness complements childish obtuseness / naïveté… that’s when we get into trouble.

Newt Hoenikker, a person with dwarfism, reminds one of Tyrion Lannister — he seems more intelligent and cynical than his siblings. Vonnegut gives him one of the best lines in the book:

Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his dainty hands as though a cat’s cradle were strung between them. “No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s…”

“And?”

“No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

As it turns out, Franklin Hoenikker is in possession of ice-nine… and as a result, the planet may be doomed. As with Beckett’s Endgame, in Cat’s Cradle we discover that our social and cultural norms and forms — which seem so tangible and necessary, during the ordinary course of our lives — offer no real help when we’re faced with the end of everything.

A poem of Bokonon’s addresses humankind’s drive to find meaning in our existence: “Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; / Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’ / Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; / Man got to tell himself that he understand.”

Unlike tigers and birds, humans will never succeed in our mission. The best we can come up with will always be a cat’s cradle-like tissue of ideas and values that we’ve strung together — and in the patterns of which we seem to perceive meaning. Such foma may be useful in many situations, but anyone who thinks as clearly as Vonnegut has about humankind’s propensity to cruelty, violence, and self-destruction is forced to recognize that our creations are just that… creations. A frankly mythopoetic movement like Bokononism (or, less frankly, Blavatskyism) seeks to leverage foma to offer humankind a sense of understanding and purpose — without lying to them.

Which is charming and amusing.

Fun fact: After having turned down his Anthropology thesis in 1947, in 1971 the University of Chicago awarded Vonnegut a master’s degree in Anthropology — for Cat’s Cradle.

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SEMIOPUNK (13)

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