Gonzalo Barr

I first read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle in 1974.  The story is told in the past tense by the narrator who is writing a book with the working title, The Day The World Ended.  The book is going to be about the late Dr. Felix Hoenikker, a fictitious creator of the atom bomb.  The narrator describes it as a human interest story about life in the Hoenikker household on August 6, 1945, the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.  

The narrator visits Hoenikker’s old lab and interviews the director, Dr. Asa Breed.  The director tells him about Hoenikker and the work he did.  He tells him that a Marine general once hounded Hoenikker to invent a substance that would do something about mud.  “‘The Marines, after almost two hundred years of wallowing in the mud, were sick of it,’ said Dr. Breed.”   The general wanted a substance that a Marine could drop into the mud to harden it and make marching easier.  No more quagmires. 

Dr. Breed told him about ice-nine.

“He raised a finger and winked at me.  ‘But suppose, young man, that one Marine had with him a tiny capsule containing a seed of ice-nine.  If that Marine threw that seed into the nearest puddle…?’

‘The puddle would freeze,’ I guessed.

‘And all the muck around the puddle?’

‘It would freeze?’

‘And all the puddles in the frozen muck?’

‘They would freeze?’

‘And the pools and the streams in the frozen muck?’

‘They would freeze?’

‘You bet they would!’ he cried.  ‘And the United States Marines would rise from the swamp and march on!’

‘There is such a stuff’ I asked.

‘No, no, no, no’ said Dr. Breed, losing patience with me again.  ‘I only told you all this in order to give you some insight into the extraordinary novelty of the ways in which Felix was likely to approach an old problem.  What I’ve just told you is what he told the Marine general who was hounding him about mud.’

‘There — there really isn’t such a thing?’

‘I just told you there wasn’t!’ cried Dr. Breed hotly.’  […]

‘I keep thinking about that swamp….’

‘You can stop thinking about it!  I’ve made the only point I wanted to make with the swamp.’

‘If the streams flowing through the swamp froze as ice-nine, what about the rivers and lakes the streams fed?’

‘They’d freeze.  But there is no such thing as ice-nine.’

‘And the oceans the frozen rivers fed?’

‘They’d freeze, of course,’ he snapped.  ‘I suppose you’re going to rush to market with a sensational story about ice-nine now.  I tell you again, it does not exist!’

‘And the springs feeding the frozen lakes and streams, and all the water underground feeding the springs?’

‘They’d freeze, damn it!’ he cried.  ‘But if I had known that you were a member of the yellow press,’ he said grandly, rising to his feet, ‘I wouldn’t have wasted a minute with you!’

‘And the rain?’

‘When it fell, it would freeze into hard little hobnails of ice-nine — and that would be the end of the world!  And the end of the interview too!  Good-bye!’”

You can re-read a novel on many levels.  You notice the short paragraphs and shorter sentences.  You pay more attention to where the author inserts the plot twists.  Leejay Kline taught me to look in the middle of a novel for the “plot point of no return,” that something which makes the ending irrevocable.  About half way through Cat’s Cradle, the narrator discovers not only that ice-nine exists, but that the Hoenikker children each have a chip in plain thermos bottles.

Sometimes re-reading an especially strong passage reminds you of where you were when you first read it.  The last sentence of Vonnegut’s novel is like that.  So is the last paragraph of Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and the first sentence, the loopy, seemingly interminable beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).  

There’s been a lot of hype over the fortieth anniversary of the publication of García Márquez’s masterpiece.  A new, corrected edition is out.  Many people are buying it, maybe even re-reading it.  El nuevo Herald (Miami) this morning listed the eight best-selling books in seven hispanophone countries.  In Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, Cien años de soledad was first.  In Spain and Venezuela, it was second.  

Which makes it conceivable that thousands of people re-reading that novel right now may also be remembering where they were the first time they read about Remedios La Bella ascending into heaven and taking the bed sheets with her.   

Source:  The link to the cited article in El nuevo Herald was removed as it no longer works. 

I think it was one of the characters in Jay McInerney’s Brightness Falls who says, “I’m an Ecclesiastes kind of guy,” as a shorthand way of relating how he looks at the world.  The line was meant to be smart.  I thought it was.  Otherwise, I would not remember it almost fourteen years after I read the novel.  Like all really good lines, it left me thinking.  Then I got up from the sofa where I had been reading and I found my copy of the King James Bible and, once again, read Ecclesiastes.

You can mine several messages from that book of the Hebrew bible – “There is a time for everything” is one.  A musical group in the sixties recorded an especially saccharine tune to accompany the words.  The tune earned a spot in the hit parade.  When the Catholic clergy tried to gain favor with the youth of the day by substituting a proper pipe organ and choir with a semi-circle of folksy guitars, the hit enjoyed an afterlife of sorts.  This was about the same time that the term “nominal Catholic” appeared, though I am not at all suggesting that there was a cause-and-effect.

Another meaning you can mine from this book is that everything comes to an end.  “All is vanity” is how it appears in the King James Bible.  I’m curious to know the meaning and tenor of the original Hebrew word.  I am also curious to know why the translators chose “vanity” to translate it, even as I appreciate that it was a sublime choice.  The word still carries a sense of “futility” and “ostentatious display.”

Maybe it is too severe a judgment to say that all writing that aspires to publication is to some degree vain.  The justification for most published writing is that, good or bad, someone eventually reads it.  That is not the case with a blog.

My website launched in August 2006 to accompany the publication of my first book, The Last Flight of Jose Luis Balboa.  Since then, I have been thinking about keeping a blog.  Don’t ask me why I want to add one more blog to the 60 million other blogs already in existence.  I have no idea why.  I could plea insanity, but it would be more honest of me to admit that the driving force behind this experiment is plain vanity — the inkling that someone out there will take a few minutes to read a post, the hope that they will return to read another.

So here goes:  I have no agenda, no topics that I want to discuss specifically, except literature.  I have no idea what I am doing either.   But I hope that by doing it I will entertain the occasional reader who, brought here by chance or by the digital currents of search engines, will visit with me.