Without Literature, We’d Die Like Mad Dogs

Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut

I have heard people sing the praises of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle for years so I used the occasion of one of our snow days to read it. Vonnegut once had a cult following and perhaps does so still.  I’d love to hear an update from a Vonnegut fan.

While I wasn’t blown away by Cat’s Cradle—I suspect I would have liked it better when I was younger—I appreciated Vonnegut’s dry wit, his pithy observations about human nature and human institutions, and his narrator who isn’t always smarter or more moral than the people he is describing.

Above all I liked the following passage about the value of reading:

“I’m thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until mankind finally comes to its senses. Would you support it?”
“Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out.”
“Or the college professors.”
“Or the college professors,” I agreed. I shook my head. “No, I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”
“I just can’t help thinking what a real shaking up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems . . .”
“And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies?” I demanded.
“They’d die more like mad dogs, I think—snarling and snapping at each other and biting their own tails.”
I turned to Castle the elder. “Sir, how does a man die when he’s deprived of the consolations of literature?
“In one of two ways,” he said, “Petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system.”
“Neither one very pleasant, I expect,” I suggested.
“No,” said Castle the elder. “For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing!”

“Petrescence,” I assume, is a portmanteau word (Lewis Carroll’s term for words that are jammed together to make new words) combining “petre” (rock) and “putrescence” (state of rotting). As such, it wonderfully combines images of a hardening and of a rotting heart. The other malady contains a similar contradiction: nervous systems can’t atrophy, can they?  But the imagined condition captures how we can become insensitive.

The joke of the passage, of course, is that too many think that they can get away with not reading. (Check out yesterday’s post on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.)  They do not subscribe to this website’s declaration, posted in the right-hand column, that “literature is as vital to our lives as food and shelter.” We might be demoralized to discover how far below police and firemen people would rank writers. (I’m not even going to imagine where they would put college professors.) I suspect that Vonnegut here may be riffing off of the following William Carlos Williams passage, from Asphodel:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there

If so, he might derive a sardonic pleasure from the following question sent to Parade Magazine by a “Jeff Kawabata from Omaha” (who sounds like a Vonnegut character):

Q: Why are my tax dollars going to pay a poet laureate when nobody reads poetry?

Kawabata’s query led editor Walter Scott to quote the Williams lines in response. Last August I wrote about the interchange here.

When I defend the worth of literature, I sometimes worry that I do so in an overly earnest way. Vonnegut’s light comic touch may be a more effective defense. Humor: recommended cure for petrescence of the heart.

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