Microworlds

by Stanisław Lem

  It cannot be maintained that Dick has evaded all the traps set for him: he has more defeats than victories in his work, but the latter determine his rank as an author. His successes are due to his intuition. Average science-fiction authors form their hells of existence, their flaming grounds to head for, in social institutions, especially police-tyrannies-plus-brainwashing, as from Orwell’s school, but Dick makes his out of ontological categories. The primary ontological elements — space and time — are Dick’s instruments of torture, which he uses with great versatility. In his novels he constructs hypotheses that are prima facie wholly nonsensical (because of the contradictions they contain) — worlds that are at the same time determinist and indeterminist, worlds where past, present, and future “devour” each other, a world in which one can be dead and alive at the same time, and so on.

  But in the first world even the “precogs” prove to be powerless to evade their own cruel end, which they foresaw themselves. Their wonderful gift only makes their torture harder to bear. In the second world time becomes a Laocoon’s snake that strangles its inhabitants. The third world embodies the saving of Chiang Tsi, who, upon waking, posed the famous question of whether he is Chiang Tsi who has just dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreams that he is Chiang Tsi. Dick writes about a technological realization of an ontological problem that has always occupied philosophers (i.e., the controversy between subjectivists and objectivists) so that it may be considered as an earnest problem of the (far) future, and not just a speculative question.

  The common opinion that philosophical problems can never change directly into technological feats is an illusion caused by the relatively brief period of the technological era. In the year 1963 I discussed this problem in my Summa Technologiae, in the chapter entitled “Phantomatics.” One possible way to build a synthetic reality is to “encapsulate” the consciousness by connecting the brain of the person in question to a computerlike apparatus in the same way as it is connected normally to real environments through the senses and nerves — i.e., with feedback. The most interesting puzzle is whether a “phantomatically imprisoned” man can divine the real state of things, whether he can distinguish the machine-simulated environment from the real one, by means of any one experiment. From either a logical or an empirical standpoint, it seems that the person could not make a correct diagnosis if the program of the machine was insufficiently developed. In a civilization which has such phantomatic techniques, there may be much mind-napping. But also there may be many legal uses of such methods, so that a person could witness while awake as many happenings as could be programmed, and since in principle there are no obstacles, the phantomated person would realize the counter-empirical (he could, subjectively, live through many metamorphoses of his body).

  In Dick’s book Ubik, we find a literary variant of a similar project. He deals with a biotechnological method that is complicated by the fact that it allows dying people to remain in a specific state between life and death — i.e., “half-life.” Dick develops a quite horrible game, so that it is not clear at the end which of the main characters lie in half-life and which live in normal reality. The action zigzags. With different ideas of what the reader is led to believe to be true. Also there are such macabre effects as the dissolution of earth and jumping back in time. You can find similar things in science fiction, but this masterly, gripping guidance of the play, in particular the behavior of all the characters, is psychologically depicted without fault. The border that separates the adventure novel from mainstream literature is transgressed in Ubik, something I want to prove later in this essay.

  Now I want to review the “message” that several of Dick’s novels communicate to us in an unequivocal way, embedded in the action. He seems to want to prove an equation, in the form of “We exist, therefore we are damned,” and this equation is supposed to be valid for all worlds, even for impossible ones. His novels are the results of pessimistic ontological speculations about how the face of men would change if total revolutions in the basic categories of existence occurred (e.g., revolutions in the space-time system, in the relationship between dreaming and waking, etc). The result is the same, since insofar as these changes are induced by biotechnologies or drugs (as in Palmer Eldritch) they can only worsen the fatality of earthly existence. The greater a technological innovation is, says Dick, the more horrible its consequences.

  In his first “major” novel, Solar Lottery, Dick has not yet tried to destroy the fundamentals of existence completely. He “shyly” introduces a new sociotechnology in which all men are supposed to have an equal chance to gain political power, because the allocation of power depends upon a comprehensive lottery. As can be expected, the result is a new kind of misery and inequality. Thus Dick has good reasons to sacrifice logic and causality; he shows that even the variants of existence that violate causality and logic are inherent in the invariance of texture and doom. One could call Dick an inverted apologist for “progress,” because he connects unlimited progress in the field of the instrumentally realizable with bottomless pessimism in the field of human consequences of such progress in civilization. His novels are pieces of fantastic belles-lettres, but his underlying philosophy of life is not fantasy. Dick seems to foresee a future in which abstract and highbrow dilemmas of academic philosophy will descend into the street so that every pedestrian will be forced to solve for himself such contradictory problems as “objectivity” or “subjectivity,” because his life will depend upon the result. With all his “precogs,” “cold-packs,” and “Pen-fields,” he tells us, “And if you could achieve the impossible, it would not alleviate your misery one bit.”

  Dick’s main characters are engaged in a battle not only for their lives, but also to save the basic categories of existence. They are doomed to failure in advance. Some exhibit the patience of Job, who gazed quietly into the face of what was coming, since everything that can happen to a man had already happened to him. Others are valiant wrestlers, striving after power, while still others are small and petty people, officials, and employees. Dick mans all his misleading worlds with contemporary Americans. Probably this is the reason why they seem so living and authentic — because there is a feedback between them and the world surrounding them. The authenticity of these people corroborates the fantastic background, and, vice versa, the background makes the normal people seem especially noteworthy and true to life. Dick’s main characters do not become greater during the apocalyptically terrifying action of his novels; they only seem greater — or more human — because the world around them gets ever more inhuman (that is, more incomprehensible to the mind of man).

  There are moments when they have a tragic effect. In the Greek sense tragedy is inescapable defeat, with several ways of being defeated. Some of these ways, if a man chooses one of them, give the opportunity symbolically to save an inestimable value. For one of Dick’s heroes, the love of a woman or a similar human feeling is the kind of value that is worth saving, a value to be guarded even if the world goes to pieces. They are the last islands of spiritual sanity in a world gone mad, a world that heaps on them objects used in ways other than originally intended and that thus become instruments of torture and objects that spring from the sphere of the most trivial consumer goods and behave like things obsessed (e.g., a tape recorder or a spray can). Dick’s main characters engage in conferences with monsters, which, however, are not little BEMs (“bug-eyed monsters,” the embodiment of trash), because an aura of grotesque and dramatic worth clings to them, and they have the dignity of misshapen, tortured creatures. With the example of such monsters — one of which is Palmer Eldritch — we can see how Dick vanquishes truth; in the shape of a mutilation, he makes simple the macabre and the primitive by giving them a trace of fragile humanity.

  In Ubik, the twitching world reminds us of the “will” of Schopenhauer, will gone mad; spurned into everlasting time explosion and implosion, devouring itself. As an aside, measured by the yardstick of Dick’s black pessimism,
Schopenhauer’s philosophy of life seems to be real joie de vivre. Dick sees our world as the best of the worst, and there are no other worlds. According to him, we are everywhere damned, even where we cannot go. Dick once said that he does not consider himself a limitless pessimist. Possibly, though conscious of reason in the cosmos, he does not draw the nihilistic conclusion because he does not ascribe an exclusively negative value to the agony of man. But this is my private speculation.[6]

  Dick’s planets, galaxies, men, children, monsters, elevators, and refrigerators are all symbols of a language that, mix it as you please, always crystallizes into the same form of a mene tekel.

  With that I don’t want to say that Dick’s novels — even his best, like Ubik — are faultless masterpieces. The surfaces of his books seem quite coarse and raw to me, connected with an omnipresence of trash. I like what he has to say in one chapter more than what a page shows, and that is why his work forces me into fast reading. Upon looking his details in the face, one beholds several inconsistencies, as in looking at an Impressionist’s painting from too close. Dick cannot tame trash; rather, he lets loose a pandemonium and lets it calm down on its way. His metaphysics often slips in the direction of cheap circus tricks. His prose is threatened by uncontrolled outgrowths, especially when it boils over into long series of fantastic freaks, and therefore loses all its function of message. Also, he is prone to penetrate so deeply into the monstrosities he has invented that an inversion of effect results: that which was intended to strike us with horror appears merely ridiculous, or even stupid.

  With that I’ll stop this immanent review of Dick’s work and pass over to its sociological aspect. The science-fiction environment is unable to separate and make distinct the types of works that are being born into it. This environment is incapable of distinguishing clearly between the work of Dick, which is artistically bunched together into sense, from that of van Vogt, which collapses into nonsense. On a higher plane a title like The World of Null-A belongs to Dick, not to van Vogt, although it was the latter who actually wrote it; but only with Dick can we talk about a “non-Aristotelian” logic, whereas this title is merely tacked onto van Vogt’s book without any justification. In its actions the science-fiction environment is by no means chaotic; obeying its own laws and regulations, it extols the stupid and denigrates the valuable until both meet “halfway” -on the level of insignificant trifles. In science fiction, Dick has not been honored according to his merits. Some people acknowledged the entertainment values of his novels, and one of the best living science-fiction critics, Damon Knight, also spoke about Dick’s distorted pictures of contemporary reality (in In Search of Wonder) when he reviewed Solar Lottery and some other early books by Dick.

  But that was all the praise this author came to hear. Nobody saw that his “unchecked growth” is quite strikingly similar in content and form to what goes on in the Upper Realm. Judged according to the problems he deals with, Dick’s novels belong to that stream of literature that explores the no man’s land between being and nothing — in the double sense.

  (a)

  We can count Dick’s novels as part of the prose that is today called “Literature of Ideas” or “Literature of Possibilities.” This type of experimental prose tries to probe the neglected, latent, untouched, as-yet-unrealized potentialities of human existence, mainly in the psychological sphere. Probably one can find fountains of such prose in, among others, the works of Musil (Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften — The Man Without Qualities) in which the outer world, randomly manifesting itself, affixes to the individual, so that he remains a soul “without qualities.” In such books as his Le Voyeur, Robbe-Grillet tries other tactics; this prose seems to fit the motto Quod autem potest esse totaliter aliter — “that which, however, can be something wholly different” (which in Poland is represented by J. Andrzejewski in his Miazga, a work that is written partly in the future subjunctive mood and therefore describes what could possibly happen, and not what has unconditionally happened), which has its parallels with Dick’s work. Robbe-Grillet proceeds from the typical science-fiction blueprint of “parallel worlds,” but whereas most science-fiction writers flatten this motif into unbearable trash, running over it like a steamroller, Dick knows how to raise the problems that grow from this inspiration to a fitting level of complexity. Therefore he is an original representative of the Literature of Ideas in science fiction — a wide field, but one with which I cannot deal here exhaustively.

  (b)

  In connection with Dick, we can think of authors like Beckett, because of the “unhealthy curiosity” that both have for death, or, more exactly, for the flow of life as it approaches its end. Beckett “is content” with natural processes that will devour man from the inside, slowly and continually (as when growing old, or becoming a cripple). Dick devotes himself to grander speculations, in the true spirit of the genre he is working in.

  We could say many interesting things about his “theory” of half-life (not as a sensible empirical hypothesis, but as a variety of fantastic-ontological speculation) but, once again, I cannot dig too deep into an exegesis of a desacralized eschatology.

  We draw these two parallels to show how an area of creation, closed into a ghetto, suffers from the situation of its own isolation. For such parallel courses of evolution are not accidental coincidences. It is the spirit of time that mirrors itself in them, but science fiction knows only short-lived fashions.

  The peculiarity of Dick’s work throws a glaring light upon relationships within the science-fiction milieu. All science-fiction works have to give the reader the impression of being easy to read, as has all fiction. Science-fiction works before which two hundred Nobel Prize winners in the department of physics kneel down are worthless for the science-fiction market if, in fact, the precondition of being able to evaluate a work of science fiction is a minimum of knowledge. Therefore it is best for science-fiction books not to contain any deep meaning — either physical or metaphysical. But if the author smuggles any sense into his work, it must not stir the phlegmatic and indolent reader, or else this invaluable man will stop reading because of a headache.[7] The deeper meaning is admitted only if it is “harmless,” if we can neglect it entirely while reading. The following anecdote may explain this problem: If many colored flags are put upon the masts of a ship in the harbor, a child on the shore will think that this is a merry game and perhaps will have a lot of fun watching, although at the same time an adult will recognize the flags as a language of signals, and know that it stands for a report on a plague that has broken out on board the ship. The science-fiction readership equals the child, not the adult, in the story.

  Their trashy surface helps Dick’s novels to survive in the milieu of science fiction. I do not maintain that Dick is a Machiavelli of science fiction who, under the cover of science-fiction trash, intentionally carries out a perfidiously thought-out camouflage in order to deceive his readers (i.e., in giving them gold disguised as iron trinkets).

  Rather, I believe that Dick works intuitively, without knowing himself that he plays hide-and-seek with his readers. Please note the difference between an artist and an artisan: the artist grows in his environment, deriving from it the elements that serve him as a medium of expression — of those differences of tensions to which his personality is subject. The artisan is a producer of things for which there is a demand and which he has learned to produce — after the models that enjoy the highest popularity. Ninety-eight percent of science fiction is a craft, and its authors are day laborers who must obey to demand payment. Almost any artist can become an artisan when he strangles his inner voice — or he has no such voice at all.

  For a long time Philip K. Dick has been only an artisan, and a skillful one, too, since he knew how to produce the things that were bought immediately. Gradually he began — and I must continue to speak in metaphors — to listen to his inner voice, and, though he still made use of those elements that science fiction put at his disposal, he began to put together patte
rns of his own.

  But this is not an infallible explanation. As is always the case, it arises from a land of cross-breeding between what is in the books I read and what I can do with this material as a reader. Therefore I can imagine other explanations for Dick’s novels, explanations that differ from mine, though naturally the role of such an explanation cannot be played by just any idea. There is no doubt about the fact that with trashy elements Dick tries to express a metaphysics of an extremely “black” nature, mirroring authentically the state of his mind. A logical, one-hundred-percent unequivocal reconstruction of the deep semantic structures of a complex work is impossible because there are no discursive series of phrases to which a work of art may be reduced without leaving something remaining.