Microworlds

by Stanisław Lem

  2. Now then, what is the relationship between cosmology and science fiction? The facts are clear: both universes, that of the writers and that of the scientists, grow ever more apart. The estimations of the “density of cosmic civilization” show this most evidently. The scientists, even the founders of CETI (Contact with Extraterrestrial Intelligences), feel compelled to attribute ever smaller figures to the psychozoic density in the cosmos, because the accumulating negative results of the “sky listening” (for signals) force them to do so. Science fiction takes not the slightest notice of such changes. Therefore for science fiction one of the biggest riddles of contemporary cosmology, the silentium universi, doesn’t exist at all. But it would be totally wrong to reduce the divergence of the two universes to only one parameter, the one mentioned. Science fiction started its escape from the real cosmos even before the question was formulated why the universe remains silent so stubbornly. This flight has by now evolved into a “steady state”; science fiction has encapsuled itself so much against the space of cosmology that it is unwilling to receive any signals; that is to say, any news from the field of science, with the exception of what manages to make the front pages of the newspapers (such as the tale of the black holes). This encapsulement took place when the authors got hold of two fantastic, very convenient inventions: unlimited travel in time, and unlimited travel in space. Thanks to time travel and faster than light the cosmos has acquired such qualities as domesticate it in an exemplary manner for storytelling purposes; but at the same time it has lost its strange, icy sovereignty. Science fiction doesn’t know of the cosmos of colliding galaxies, the invisible stars sucked in by the curvature of space, the pulsating magnetic fields. Nevertheless, there is in science fiction not a single one of the civilizations of the “third stage” postulated by CETI, the civilizations that are, thanks to their applied science of astral engineering, able to control stellar energies. As far as their content is concerned, most of the civilizations in science fiction correspond to the state predicted for earth in 2000 or 2300, although structurally they have remained arrested instead in the nineteenth century, with their colonizatory tactics of conquest and their strategies of war, whose magnification is due only to the principle of “Big Bertha,” the German supergun that shelled Paris during the First World War. Science fiction has not the slightest idea what could be done with a power of the magnitude of a sun, if it isn’t used exclusively for the destruction of inhabited planets. And in science fiction, cosmic civilizations have no intellectual culture at all, because a future-oriented movement that claims to probe into the farthest future, and makes its home in a realm of naïvely contaminated, amateurish ideas on “primitive slave societies,” must be held totally lacking in credibility. Science-fiction criticism often talks of a “sense of wonder” that the field is supposed to generate, but upon close examination that “wonder” divulges its close relationship to the tricks of a stage magician. As popular fiction, science fiction must pose artificial problems and offer their easy solution. The astonishing results of contemporary cosmology, which border on paradox, are of no use to science-fiction writers, because they cannot be tucked into the narrow fixed frame of the artificial cosmos. Any comparison, including that with the stage magician, isn’t quite exact; the magician doesn’t aim at anything beyond the production of some tricks, whereas the self-imprisonment that is characteristic of science fiction has made it unable to describe real space any more.

  To do justice to science fiction, which looks so shabby when compared to the background of cosmology, it is necessary to explain its dilemma further. The sins of individual authors have always been relatively small. The development of the totally false, domesticated universe was a gradual process of self-organization, and therefore all together are responsible for the final deformation — and nobody. Thanks to the first science-fiction invention, all occurrences in space have become easily reversible, but the authors who “just” want to shine with a new version of time travel have forgotten the larger context. It is particularly due to these unnoticed relationships that nature was softened in the cruelty of the irreversible flow of time that is its hallmark. In order that space might not be used as another cruelty to man, it was “short-circuited” by another invention, i.e., annihilated. The fact that a domestication of the cosmos has taken place, a diminution that whisked away those eternally silent abysses of which Pascal spoke with horror, is masked in science fiction by the blood that is so liberally spilled in its pages. But there we already have a humanized cruelty, for it is a cruelty that can be understood by man, and a cruelty that could finally even be judged from the viewpoint of ethics -granted that one could take this blood seriously at all. By looking at it this way, we come to understand what science fiction has done to the cosmos; for it makes no sense at all to look at the universe from the viewpoint of ethics. Therefore, the universe of science fiction is not only minuscule, simplified, and lukewarm, but also has been turned toward its inhabitants, and in this way it can be subjugated by them, losing thereby that indifference which causes man to project continually new enigmas to be solved and secrets to be lifted, in the vain hope to get there the answer to the question of his own meaning. In the universe of science fiction there is not the slightest chance that genuine myths and theologies might arise, because the thing itself is a bastard of myths gone to the dogs. The science fiction of today resembles a “graveyard of gravity,” in which that subgenre of literature that promised the cosmos to mankind dreams away its defeat in onanistic delusions and chimeras — onanistic because they are anthropocentric. The task of the science-fiction author of today is as easy as that of the pornographer, and in the same way. Now that all the real stops to the satisfaction of their impulses have been pulled, they can have their fling. But with the stops has disappeared the indescribable richness that can be conveyed only by real life. Where anything comes easy, nothing can be of value. The most inflamed desire must finally end in miserable dullness. Once the credible, the real barriers have been blown up, the process of falsification must go on; artificial barriers must be erected, and in this manner the stuffed waxworks come about, the miserable ersatz that is supposed to be cosmic civilizations.

  3. Why is it impossible to regain the universe that has been lost to science fiction? One could claim that the laws of the market do not permit it — that today no authors and publishers would dare to subject the readers to a cure of giving up that would equal the renunciation of easy solutions to fictitious problems. True, it must be admitted that not everything in science fiction is rotten in the same degree. After all, there was once the cosmogonic fantasy of a Stapledon. But Stapledon, as an isolated writer, was still able to view the universe of cosmology, and not the humanized universe of science fiction. It should be kept in mind here that “humanize” in this context doesn’t mean to “make more humane”; we know that among the animals there are no sexual murderers, and a sexual murderer can hardly be called a humane being.

  It must be admitted that the universe presents the “peak of indigestibility” for fiction writing in the whole field of our experience. For what can you do as an author with the central subjects of cosmology — with the singularities? A singularity is a place that exists in the continuum just as a stone exists here; but there our whole physics goes to pieces. The desperate struggles of the theoreticians, going on for several years now, have only the purpose of postponing this end of physics, its collapse, by yet one more theory. In fiction, however, things like that cannot be domesticated. What heroic characters, what plot can there be where no body, however strong or hard, could exist longer than a few fractions of a second? The space surrounding a neutron star cannot be passed closely in a spaceship even at parabolic velocity, because the gravity gradients in the human body increase without a chance that they might be stopped or screened, and human beings explode until only a red puddle is left, just like a heavenly body that is torn apart from tidal forces when passing through the Roche limit. Is there therefore no way out
of this fatal dilemma: that one must be either silent about the cosmos or forced to distort it? Cosmology shows us a way out.

  Just as one may look at the knowledge of yesterday as a fantastic speculation — as I said about the famous work of Eddington — so one may imagine a cosmogony of tomorrow, dissimilar to the current one, but nevertheless understandable, since cosmic processes are accessible to us to the degree that they can be focused by reason. But nothing is today so much held in contempt in science fiction as reason. In this regard a total harmony unites the authors with the readers. Obscenity is no longer indecent — the intellectual has taken its place in the pillory. Science-fiction fans should be discouraged from perusing Cosmology Now, unless they are willing to free their imagination from its imprisonment to discover in the brightness of real suns the true face of nature.

  Translated from the German by Franz Rottensteiner

  TODOROV’S FANTASTIC THEORY OF LITERATURE

  Since structuralism in literary studies is largely of French origin, let this attempt to ruin its reputation have as its motto the words of a Frenchman, Pierre Bertaux:

  At one time it was hoped that the beginnings of a formalization of the humanities analogous [to that of the “diagonal” or “formalistic” sciences] could be expected from structuralism. Unfortunately it appears today that precisely the loudest advocates of structuralism have let it degenerate into a mythology —and not even a useful one. This chatter that is now called structuralism has apparently dealt a mortal blow to that rudimentary scientific beginning.[11]

  I fully agree with this verdict. However, inasmuch as it is difficult to expose in a single article the barrenness of a whole school of thought — one moreover that has spawned divergent tendencies, since here every author has his own “vision” of the subject — I will limit myself to dissecting Tzvetan Todorov’s book The Fantastic.[12]

  The history of the degeneration of a conceptual apparatus that originated in mathematical linguistics, after it was mechanically transplanted into the domain of metaliterature, has yet to be written. It will show how defenseless logical concepts become when they are torn out of contexts in which they were operationally justified, how easy it is, by parasitizing on science properly speaking, to bemuse humanists with pretentious claptrap, disguising one’s actual powerlessness in a foreign field beneath a putatively unassailable logical precision. This will be a rather grim, but instructive, history of how unambiguous concepts turn into foggy ones, formal necessity into arbitrariness, syllogisms into paralogisms. It will, in short, deal with a retrograde trend in French critical thought, which, aiming at nothing less than logical infallibility in theory-building, transformed itself into an incorrigible dogmatism.

  Structuralism was to be a remedy for the immaturity of the humanities as manifested in their lack of sovereign criteria for deciding the truth or falsehood of theoretical generalizations. The formal structures of linguistics are mathematical in origin, and are, indeed, numerous and diverse, corresponding to branches of both pure and classical mathematics ranging from probability and set theories to the theory of algorithms. The inadequacy of all these leads linguists to employ new models, e.g., from the theory of games, since this furnishes models of conflicts, and language is, at its higher, semantic levels, entangled in irreducible contradictions. These important tidings have, however, not yet reached those literary scholars who have taken over a small fraction of the arsenal of linguistics and endeavor to model literary works using conflict-free deductive structures of an uncommonly primitive type — as we shall demonstrate with the example of the Todorov book.

  This author begins by disposing of some objections which arise in connection with constructing a theory of literary genres. Deriding the investigator who would, before proceeding to description of a genre, engage in endless reading of actual works, he asserts — appealing to the authority of Karl Popper — that for the maker of generalizations it suffices to be acquainted with a representative sample from the set of objects to be studied. Popper, wrongly invoked, is in no wise to blame, since representativeness of a sample in the natural sciences and in the arts are two quite different matters. Every normal tiger is representative for that species of cats, but there is no such thing as a “normal story.” The “normalization” of tigers is effected by natural selection, so the taxonomist need not (indeed should not) evaluate these cats critically. But a student of literature who is in like fashion axiologically neutral is a blind man confronting a rainbow, for, whereas there do not exist any good organisms as distinguished from bad ones, there do exist good and worthless books. And in the event, Todorov’s “sample,” as displayed in his bibliography, is astonishing. Among its twenty-seven titles we find no Borges, no Verne, no Wells, nothing from modern fantasy, and all of science fiction is represented by two short stories; we get, instead, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Potocki, Balzac, Poe, Gogol, Kafka — and that is about all. In addition, there are two crime-story authors.

  Todorov declares, further, that he will pass over problems of aesthetics altogether in silence, since these are beyond the present reach of his method.

  Thirdly, he debates the relationship of the Species and its Specimen. In nature, he says, the occurrence of a mutation does not modify the species: knowing the species tiger, we can deduce from it the properties of each individual tiger. The feedback effect of mutations upon the species is so slow that it can be ignored. In art it is different: here every new work alters the species as it existed heretofore, and is a work of art just insofar as it departs from a specific model. Works which do not satisfy this condition belong to popular or mass literature, such as detective stories, slushy love stories, science fiction, etc. Agreeing thus far with Todorov, I see what is in store for his method as a result of this state of affairs: the more inferior and paradigmatically petrified the texts which it undertakes to anatomize, the more readily it will reveal structures. Todorov, not surprisingly, omits to draw this conclusion.

  Further, he discusses the question of whether one should investigate genres that have arisen historically or those that are theoretically possible. The latter strike me as coming to the same thing as a history of mankind a priori, but since it is easier to formulate a foolish idea concisely than it is to refute it concisely, I will let this pass. I will however remark here that there is a difference between taxonomy in nature and in culture which structuralism overlooks. The naturalist’s acts of classification, say of insects or of vertebrates, evoke no reaction on the part of that which is classified. A futurologist might say that Linnaean taxonomy is not subject to the Oedipus effect (Oedipus got into trouble by reacting to a diagnosis of his fate). On the other hand, the literary scholar’s acts of classification are feedback-linked to that which is classified, i.e., the Oedipus effect manifests itself in literature. Not straightforwardly, to be sure. It is not the case that writers, upon reading a new theory of genres, run straight to their studios to refute it by means of their next books. The linkage is more roundabout. Sclerosis of paradigms, as a stiffening of intergeneric barriers, arouses authors to a reaction that expresses itself, among other ways, in the hybridization of genres and the attack on traditional norms. Theoreticians’ labors are a catalyst that accelerates this process, since their generalizations make it easier for writers to grasp the entire space of creative activity, with its inherent limitations. Thus the student of genres who establishes their boundaries causes writers to rebel against them — he produces a feedback loop by the very act of classification. To describe limitations on creativity thus amounts to drawing up a self-defeating prognosis. What could be more tempting than to write what theory prohibits?

  The constriction of the imagination that is inherent in a dogmatic mentality, such as is represented by the structuralist, manifests itself in the belief that what he has found to be barriers to creativity can never be transgressed by anyone. Perhaps there exist intransgressible structures of creativity, but structuralism has not come within reach of any such. Rather, what it proclaims to
us as bounds of creativity is really quite an antique piece of furniture — to wit, the bed of Procrustes, as we shall show.

  Coming to matters of substance, Todorov first of all demolishes past attempts at defining the fantastic. After crossing off the efforts of Northrop Frye, he lights into Roger Caillois, who had the bad luck to write that a “touchstone of the fantastic” is “the impression of irreducible strangeness” (p. 35). According to Caillois, jeers Todorov, a work’s genre depends on the sang-froid of its reader: if he is frightened, then we have to do with the (uncanny) fantastic, but if he keeps his presence of mind, then the work must needs be reclassified from the standpoint of the theory of genres. We will speak in the proper place of how the scoffer has here left his own method exposed to attack.